2 . Very few people enjoy going to the dentist, especially for a filling. Often fillings need to be replaced during the patient’s lifetime. But is filling the cavity (蛀牙洞) with a foreign material really the best treatment? Is it possible that the tooth could repair itself with its own material — dentine (牙质)? Researchers at King’s College London have found a process that may replace the traditional method.

Paul Sharpe of King’s College London says the new treatment for cavities is simpler. It uses a drug that causes the tooth to fill in the hole naturally with dentine. “It involves putting a drug in the hole. It excites a natural process, which starts to occur anyway following the damage, so you can actually get the big hole repaired and the repair is the production of the natural material, the dentine.”

Usually a new drug requires repeated testing before it is approved for treatment. However, this drug that produces the regrowth material in teeth has already been approved. It is a drug used to treat Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders of the nervous system. Researchers explain that they use only a small amount and they use it locally. Usually that means the medicine is put directly on the affected area. It does not travel through the patient’s blood.

Nigel Carter heads Britain’s Oral Health Foundation. He describes the new treatment as an exciting possibility for dental care. But Carter also has a warning, “Actually regrowing the tooth that has been lost with a cavity would be really a huge step forward. But it's also important that we remember that filling the cavity is not the first place. It’s a preventable disease.”

4 . PRACTITIONERS

6 . Professors at the University of California San Diego have developed microrobots, which can be a potential treatment for life-threatening cases of bacterial pneumonia, a serious disease affecting lungs and making breathing difficult. In mice, the microrobots safely removed pneumonia-causing bacteria in the lungs and resulted in 100% survival while untreated mice all died within three days after infection.

The microrobots are made of algae (藻类) cells whose surfaces are covered with substances that are filled with antibiotics (抗生素). The algae provides movement, which allows the microrobots to swim around and make antibiotics go directly to more bacteria in the lungs, helping absorb bacteria and clear them of infected cells. This give the microrobots the ability to reduce bacterial infection, which in turn makes them more effective at fighting lung infection.

The work is a joint effort by engineering professors Joseph and Zhang Liangfang. Together, they have pioneered the development of tiny drug-delivering robots that can be safely used in live animals to treat bacterial infections in the stomach and blood. Treating bacterial lung infection is the latest in their line of work.

“In the traditional treatment, sometimes only a very small number of antibiotics will get into the lungs. That’s why many current antibiotic treatments for pneumonia don’t work as well as needed,” said Victor Nizet, a co-worker of Joseph and Zhang “Based on these mouse data, we see that the microrobots could potentially improve the use of antibiotics to kill bacteria and save more patients’ lives.”

The work is still at the proof-of-concept stage. The team plans to do more basic research to understand exactly how the microrobots interact with the immune system (免疫系统). Next steps also include studies to confirm the effectiveness of the microrobot treatment before testing it in larger animals and eventually, in humans. “We’re pushing the boundary further in the field of targeted drug delivery,” said Zhang.

7 . Jones Thando was a 16-year-old senior high school student, who had an idea for a new method of finding pancreatic cancer. When Jones was 15 years old, her aunt died of this kind of cancer, which_______her deeply. This disease is_______serious because there is no way to detect it as early as possible. By the time_______tests determine the patient has the possibility of cancer, it’s often too late to do anything!_______that it was often the case, Jones was determined to do whatever she can to develop a test that could_______problems as early as possible.

The way ahead seemed_______for Jones. She was_______a senior high school student, and what she_______to create was something no one else had tried. So Jones read_______about this kind of cancer, wrote a letter of advice about her idea, and sent it out to more than 500 medical ________. But only one expert, Dr. Amy Maitra ________to her timely and enthusiastically. Dr. Amy promised to cooperate with Jones and gave her some assistance as well as________to a lab.

Another great reward for Jone’s________was winning the big prize at the World Science and Technology Conference. This grand award is presented to young creators that have got a ________ idea. It’s bound to take many years to develop a new test way, ________Jones hopes the way will ________enhance people’ lives and maybe save them, so she insisted on trial and error. Luckily, Jones is not alone as a young creator.________, there were nearly 1500 other competitors for the International award, all of whom had ground-breaking________. For Jones, growing up in a family that is attracted to science and________innovative thinking offered him many advantages. But the key for Jones is that reading, experiment, survey and________are just for fun, and the possibility to enhance the world around her during the process makes it much better.

8 . About 600,000 people die of heart attacks at home each year. And the survival rate (存活率) of out-of-hospital heart attacks is much lower than those that happen at the in-hospital setting.

Pumpstart, a program created by students at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) which is meant to teach hands-only CPR (心脏复苏术) to the general public, is effective in both teaching high school students a life-saving skill and providing medical students with a chance to take part in public health and medical education after several surveys.

High school students in the Boston area who joined in the Pumpstart program completed pre-/post surveys. The pre-surveys were carried out before they watched a 60-minute training session (培训课程) on hands-only CPR. And the post surveys were done after the training session. Medical students also completed surveys judging their comfort in learning CPR both before and after they took part in the program. The high school students reported huge improvements in CPR skills following their training from Pumpstart. And it was reported that the medical students had higher confidence levels regarding their abilities to answer questions about CPR and helping new medical students to better understand the training sessions after they joined in Pumpstart.

“Getting the general public to feel comfortable performing CPR is important to overall improved survival from heart attacks,” explained Anita Knopov, a fourth-year medical student at BUSM. “Using educational resources provided by the city medical center and offering training to inner-city high school students allow medical students to serve as both educators and experienced people in CPR within the community, while making high school students interested in the healthcare field (医疗领域). That’s what Pumpstart does.”

Knopov believes Pumpstart can serve as a model for other organizations and can have a long-term (长期的) public health influence as the bystander CPR continues to be one of the most useful factors in out-of-hospital (医院之外) heart attack survival. “Although Pumpstart is offered only in Boston, we hope that our work may stimulate the development of similar programs in other areas. And in that case we can use lots of new ‘Pumpstarts’ in other regions.”