from Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
Today's Headlines - November 6, 2009
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Not long ago, gene therapy seemed troubled by insurmountable difficulties. After decades of hype and dashed hopes, many who once embraced the idea of correcting genetic disorders by giving people new genes all but gave up the idea.
But scientists say gene therapy may be on the edge of a resurgence. There were three recent, though small, successes--one involving children with a fatal brain disease, one with an eye disease that causes blindness and one with children who have a disease that destroys the immune system.
... Dr. Kenneth Cornetta, a gene therapy researcher at Indiana University and president of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, said: "It's exciting. The science gets better every year."
http://snipr.com/t3id1
from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
In an attempt to reduce the deaths and serious health problems caused by misuse of medication, the Food and Drug Administration is trying to identify the most serious threats and find ways to avoid them.
About 1.5 million preventable "adverse drug events" occur in the United States every year, according to a 2007 study by the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences. Aside from the toll on health, the errors cost an estimated $4 billion a year, the study found.
"I was frankly stunned at the scope of the problem," FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said at a news conference Wednesday. The plan, dubbed the Safe Use Initiative, "is something that doesn't require a new scientific discovery or a budget appropriation."
http://snipurl.com/t3if7
from the San Francisco Chronicle
Stem cell researchers at the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco and Stanford Medical School have joined a new national consortium linking teams of scientists who normally work independently with other groups that seek to discover new therapies for varied human disorders.
The government-funded venture will encourage the scientists working toward varied goals to share their research and collaborate with others using different approaches. The Gladstone-Stanford team is seeking to develop pluripotent stem cells, which are artificially derived from ordinary human tissue specifically for the purpose of repairing cells in damaged heart muscle.
Other Stanford scientists have teamed up with researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to learn how to reprogram the genes of adult stem cells into lines of specialized cells that could treat disorders of the blood and blood vessels.
http://snipurl.com/t3igh
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, CALIF. (Associated Press) -- A robot powered by a ground-based laser beam climbed a long cable dangling from a helicopter Wednesday, qualifying for prize money in a $2 million competition to test the potential reality of the science fiction concept of space elevators.
The highly technical contest brought teams from Missouri, Alaska and Seattle to Rogers Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert, most familiar to the public as a space shuttle landing site.
The contest requires that the machines climb 2,953 feet up a cable slung beneath a helicopter hovering nearly a mile high. LaserMotive's vehicle zipped to the top in about four minutes and immediately repeated the feat, qualifying for at least a $900,000 second-place prize.
http://snipr.com/t3iha
from BBC News Online
Tiny metal particles have been shown to cause changes to DNA across a cellular barrier--without having to cross it. The nanometre and micrometre scale particles resulted in an increase of damage to DNA across the barrier via a never-before-seen cell signal process.
Reporting in Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers say the mechanism could be both a risk and an opportunity. They say the preliminary result is relevant as more medical therapies rely on small-scale particles.
For instance, nanoparticle-based approaches are being considered for use to improve MRI images or direct the delivery of cancer drugs. However, they concede their model system is far simpler than the human body, where the effects will be harder to unpick. As yet, the researchers are not even certain of the mechanism by which the signalling molecules cause damage to DNA.
http://snipr.com/t3ii6
from the Christian Science Monitor
Tom Reid likes his ride big--a 2000 Ford Explorer SUV with plenty of interior room and all the amenities. None of those prissy little hybrid vehicles will do for him. But after gas hit $4 a gallon last year, Mr. Reid had a big fuel bill, too--and an epiphany: convert his gas guzzler to an all-electric vehicle.
So he did. Now Reid's bright idea has become a sideline business for his shop, HTC Racing, which produces specialized protective coating for automotive and other metal parts in Whitman, Mass. He offers kits to convert any 1995-2004 gas-sucking Ford Explorer into a cheap-to-keep, no fuel, little maintenance all-electric SUV. Cost: $15,000.
He admits that the idea may be "ahead of its time." Reid has yet to sell a single kit. With gas at only $2.50 a gallon, the conversion cost is too much for even SUV-loving die-hards. But if gasoline prices soar again, Reid says he'll be ready--and he won't be alone either.
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from Science News
Only days after birth, babies have a bawl with language. Newborn babies cry in melodic patterns that they have heard in adults' conversations--even while in the womb, say medical anthropologist Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany, and her colleagues.
By 2 to 5 days of age, infants' cries bear the tuneful signature of their parents' native tongue, a sign that language learning has already commenced, the researchers report in a paper published online November 5 in Current Biology.
Fluent speakers use melodic patterns and pitch shifts to imbue words and phrases with emotional meaning. Changes in pitch and rhythm, for example, can indicate anger. During the last few months of fetal life, babies can hear what their mothers or other nearby adults are saying, providing exposure to melodies peculiar to a specific language, Wermke says. Newborns then re-create those familiar patterns in at least some of their cries, she proposes.
http://snipr.com/t3ilg
from National Geographic News
Supposedly the most robust of the world's rain forests, the Amazon jungle suffers from "chronic malnutrition" due to a lack of salt, according to the lead scientist behind a new study.
And that might not be a bad thing, because the carbon build-up spurred by lack of salt in some forests may be keeping our atmosphere cooler.
Decomposers--life-forms that munch on dead plants--don't get enough of the vital mineral, which deep in the rain forest comes primarily from mammal urine. That lack of salt keeps decomposer numbers in check, while plants, which don't need salt, flourish, piling up carbon on the forest floor when they die.
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from New Scientist
... About 80 years ago, the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson was pondering the shapes of clouds when a startling thought occurred to him: the laws that govern the atmosphere might actually be very simple.
Even at the time, with scientific meteorology still in its infancy, the idea seemed absurd: key equations governing the behaviour of the 5 million billion tonnes of air above us had already been identified--and they were anything but simple.
No one was more aware of this than Richardson, who is recognised as one of the founders of modern weather forecasting. ...Yet Richardson suspected that behind the mathematical complexity of the atmosphere lay a far simpler reality--if only we looked at it the right way.
http://snipr.com/t3inf
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
As many as 25 percent of the American farmers growing genetically engineered corn are no longer complying with federal rules intended to maintain the resistance of the crops to damage from insects, according to an advocacy group's report released Thursday.
The increase in farmers skirting the rules, from fewer than 10 percent a few years ago, raises the risk that insects will develop resistance to the toxins in the corn that are meant to kill them, the report says. And it raises questions about whether the Environmental Protection Agency and the agricultural biotechnology industry are adequately enforcing the rules.
The data "should be a wake-up call to E.P.A. that the regulatory system is not working," Gregory Jaffe, the report's author, wrote in a letter Thursday to Lisa P. Jackson, the administrator of the federal agency. Mr. Jaffe is the biotechnology project director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington advocacy group that does not oppose genetically engineered crops but favors stricter regulation.
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