Thursday, March 21, 2013

Emerging Technology, Part 1

Egg Stem Cells:
This technology helped increase older women's chances of having a baby. As a woman gets older her eggs become fewer and it becomes harder for the sperm to fertilize them to make a baby. This technology takes egg stem cells from the same woman or another woman's ovarian tissue to make the regular eggs more viable. These experiments first took place in mice and the eggs that received the egg stem cells ended up being fertilized. Additionally, 30 babies have been born using this medthod. However, it can be dangerous since the children receives DNA from the donor, the mother, and the father; this combination of DNA could possibly result in a genetic mutation. However, none the babies suffered any severe health consequences from this method of conception. I believe that in future technology advances will lead to women being able to have children at any age because they would always be able to make their poorer quality eggs viable again. This surprised technology surprised me because it how these scientists are able to take something so tiny from the ovarian wall to give a couple the opportunity to have a baby at almost any age. I bet that after this technology that these scientists will innovate on how to make the male's sperm more viable as well.

Technologies From 2009 in Use Today:
-Intelligent Software Assistant
-Liquid Battery
-$100 Genome
-Traveling Wave Reactor
-Racetrack Memory
-Nanopiezoelectronics
-Biological Machines
-HashCache
-Paper Diagnostics
-Software-Defined Networking