Boise (Idaho) State University’s free podcasts on nano and more

I appreciate the self-deprecating humour in this Dec. 16, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

Boise State University (BSU) recently began a campaign, Beyond The Blue, to bring deserved awareness to their excellent academic programs, (as opposed to their better know football team and blue astroturf,) and is hosting a series of fascinating podcasts spotlighting some of the interesting work happening now.

The two podcasts mentioned in the Nanowerk news item were about bionanotechnology and nanomedicine, respectively.

Dr. [Will] Hughes is an assistant professor of Materials Science & Engineering at Boise State University, as well as an affiliate faculty and research council member of the Mountain States Tumor & Medical Research Institute at St Luke’s Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho.

From a biological perspective, DNA is the language for life. But what may be less widely known is DNA’s potential as a programmable building block at the nanoscale. In this podcast, Hughes discusses DNA’s potential as an engineering material for building structural scaffolds for nanoelectronic devices and biochemical tools for diagnosing disease.

The second featured podcast,

Dr. [Cheryl] Jorcyk is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. Her research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of cancer progression, including breast cancer and prostate cancer.

The statistics are sobering: 1 in 8 women will get breast cancer, a devastating disease that can metastasize to the liver, lungs, brain and bone. [emphasis mine] In this podcast, Jorcyk discusses how breast cancer develops and spreads, current therapies, the challenges involved in a finding a cure, and her research program.

That statistic is misleading. Your chances of contracting breast cancer increase significantly with age. In order to get a statistic of one in eight, they have to aggregate the statistics from a range of age groups. Your chances are much lower in your 20s than they are in your 50s or 80s, in short, your chances of contracting breast cancer depend on your age.

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