My latest science news updates on SpectroscopyNOW – covering heavy metal sardines, pain relief and sleep problems, oral insulin and a new male infertility test that could explain the issue problem.
- Canned heavy metal – Samples of tinned sardines, originating from six countries have been analyzed for total arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury content using spectroscopy. The analysis provides a useful baseline for a foodstuff – small pelagic fish – that could become increasingly important in a possible sustainable future and shows that arsenic rather than mercury could be the main concern in eating such small fish rather than predators.
- The near and FAAH of drug discovery – A new mathematical approach to drug discovery that can test a huge number of molecular structures using a computer only could uncover inhibitors for an important enzyme involved in sleep, pain and body movement.
- Oral insulin microspheres – A simple, inexpensive, and gentle process to make tiny spheres of therapeutic proteins, such as insulin, might allow these agents to be delivered by mouth without the need to encapsulate them in a nanotech coating or other Trojan horse type system to get them past the hazards of the gastrointestinal tract and into the bloodstream.
- Fertility testing issues circumvented by spectroscopic technique – Traditional clinical tests on seminal fluid for infertility and sub-fertility prediction do not provide many insights into the underlying medical problem. But, metabolic spectroscopic tests could offer a less time-consuming and less labour-intensive alternative to address this shortcoming and provide a non-invasive and more useful test for infertility that might hint at biological issues.