Jellyfish teaching us how to cure cancer

To think that I thought Jellyfish were always useless.  I get their role in the food chain and all, but besides that I just step on their tentacles and get horribly stung.  GameZone is based in Florida.  We got these sea pests known as Portuguese Man O’ Wars.  These jellyfish look like pink plastic bags with tentacles.  The thing is, they beach themselves and their tentacles can be up to 50 ft. long.  The moral of the story is you can step on a tentacle you didn’t know was there from VERY far away.  I hate them.

Anyways… scientists are imitating the way jellyfish feed to help cure cancer.  The whole dangle tentacles until they find want they want and then extract it, is exactly the technique these scientists are doing.  Through putting droplets of blood on microfluidic chips, researchers are using long strands of DNA to catch cancerous proteins which just happen to be floating on by.  These DNA strands can gather these proteins or even release them unharmed for later inspection. 

This chip was designed at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  Think of this research of a bodily filtering system to get out what’s bad.  This hasn’t been tested on humans yet but I assume it will be soon.

I guess I don’t hate jellyfish as much anymore.

[Gizmodo]

Historian, teacher, writer, gamer, cheat master, and tech guru: follow on Twitter @AndrewC_GZ