Within a vision-obsessed world, we sometimes forget the amount of information we can perceive, process and deduce via our other senses. This also goes for science. To investigate cells, for example, we often head straight for the microscope, yet scientists discovered that cells also sing a tune of their own, making them identifiable through sound.

Researchers at the University of California studying yeast cells discovered that cell walls vibrate at a certain frequency. When zapped with light, for example, cells also appear to ‘scream out’, Snook & Gardner, two biologists at the University of Manchester discovered:

“The difference between a healthy cell and a cancer cell is like listening to two very large orchestras playing their instruments all at the same time,” Gardner says. “But in the cancerous orchestra, the tuba is horribly out of tune.”

Gardner is fine-tuning the technique in hopes of replacing current, unreliable pre-biopsy prostate-cancer tests. His ultimate goal is to reduce the number of prostate biopsies performed, 75 percent of which come back negative.

Non-invasive ways to diagnose disease or health conditions are on the rise.

Via PopSci.com

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 19:25 and is filed under future, science, trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.