Rocky Mountain High

Even though I've never been on the campus, let alone attended classes there, the University of Colorado at Boulder sounds like my kind of school.

In a clinical trial that will launch early next month, a group of volunteers to bed for 10 days in the name of science in an effort to understand and treat muscle atrophy. The subjects -- who will be between the ages of 18 and 45 -- will spend their days reading, chatting, watching videos, and surfing the Internet. Hmmm, that sounds pretty much like my college career, from what I recall.

The BioServe Space Technologies Center in CU's aerospace engineering sciences department will be examining the effects of a new experimental drug to mitigate muscle degeneration in 15 healthy adult males, says BioServe Director Louis Stodieck. The trial builds on a 2005 BioServe study of 10 men who remained prone for 10 days -- even for showers and bathroom breaks -- so researchers could chart molecular changes in their muscle tissue and better understand cellular pathways associated with muscle disuse. The study is funded in part by NASA and the National Institutes of Health.

Founded in 1987, BioServe works with a number of industrial partnerships and is one of 11 NASA Research Partnership Centers in the United States promoting the commercial development of space. Faculty, staff and students at BioServe have designed, built and flown 35 life sciences and biomedical research payloads on 24 space shuttle flights and on International Space Station missions. BioServe is slated to fly payloads on three of the next four NASA space shuttle missions beginning in late August, he said. Stodieck said the center hopes to fly a space shuttle experiment in 2007 involving mice to investigate new pharmaceuticals to treat muscle-wasting conditions.

Students elsewhere on the Boulder campus are a bit more ambitious, however. A team Colorado team was selected as the winners in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) at The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for their approach to solving the Continuous Problem: "Positioning and Moving Sprinkler Systems for Irrigation." The students are Brian Camley, Pascal Getreuer, Bradley Klingenberg and their faculty advisor Professor Bengt Fornberg. Their solution was titled "Sprinkle, Sprinkle, Little Yard."

Posted by Jon Erickson at 08:31 AM  Permalink