LEWISTON — For most people, mouse poop is a sign they had better get a cat or some traps. But for one class of Bates College students recently, mouse poop samples opened the door to gather DNA samples, sequence the order of their nucleotides and crunch a whole bunch of data to try to learn [...]
HERMON, Maine — Life gave Morgan LaRochelle lemons and boy has she made lemonade! The 13-year-old from Hermon, Maine was devastated when she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in the fall of 2018. She didn't let it get her down for long though. In recent months, in response to an assignment from her science [...]
Like some of its products, cultivated from the cells, strands and science of living organisms, Maine’s biotechnology industry has grown organically. It dates to the mid-1970s founding of Ventrex Laboratories Inc., a diagnostic testing company in Portland, and the now-defunct Foundation for Blood Research. Those two organizations led to the creation of more than 20 [...]
Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor received an award of nearly $18 million from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, an institute of the National Institutes of Health, for the renewal of a grant to strengthen biomedical research and research training in Maine. The grant will fund the renewal of the 18-year-old Maine INBRE (IDeA [...]
BRUNSWICK, Maine — The side effects of any new pharmaceutical drug can often be scarier than what they're meant to treat; but how can drug companies do better testing? They can start with a company called InSphero. Armand Wolf, the Chief Scientific Officer for the company, spent years working in drug development in the pharmaceutical [...]
Teachers and students alike were celebrating after a Maine high school was ranked the second best public high school in the United States on Tuesday by U.S. News and World Report. Maine School of Science and Mathematics came in at No. 2 in the publication’s assessment of more than 23,000 schools nationally, only behind Academic [...]
The strangest part of Activas Diagnostics’ office space located in the UpStart Center for Entrepreneurship in Orono is the twin bed in the middle of the room. Covered with a hypoallergenic white sheet, the bed itself looks nothing out of the ordinary. However, a look under the sheet reveals a thin layer of fabric with [...]
As a girl growing up in Caribou, Jessica Meir said her dream was to one day fly in space. As she got older, her vision never wavered. In her senior yearbook at Caribou High School, Meir wrote that her goal was “To go for a spacewalk.” On Wednesday, the 41-year-astronaut, whose mother now lives in [...]
ELLSWORTH — The Jackson Laboratory has increased its minimum wage to $15.75 an hour and will hire 300 new employees over the next year, according to a press release from Senior Public Relations Manager Sarah Laskowski on Tuesday. The move comes as the Bar Harbor-based organization, which made $400 million before expenses in 2017, continues to [...]
The MDI Biological Laboratory and the University of New England (UNE) are bringing Maine researchers together to discuss how they can collaborate to identify solutions to the opioid epidemic in Maine. In a first step toward this goal, the institution will hold a panel discussion on the opioid crisis at the upcoming 46th Maine Biological [...]
