Jorge Piedrahita, professor of genomics at North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine, describes his research with cloned swine and how their abnormal growth provides insight into human placental defects, the ways transgenic pigs may help grow human tissue and how pigs could help advance stem cell therapies. (March 25, 2009)
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S. Stanley Young, director of bioinformatics at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences, critiques statistical analysis by some epidemiologists, especially their multiple testing of data sets obtained from observational studies. (April 22, 2009)
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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."
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
For decades, bypass surgery, in which surgeons improve blood flow to the heart by sewing new blood vessels to get around blocked ones, was done the same way. The heart was stopped while blood was pumped through a heart-lung machine to do the heart's work.
But doctors increasingly worried that the machine, the "pump," might sometimes lead to strokes or memory problems or personality changes. Some privately called patients with those difficulties "pumpheads."
And so, in the last seven years, many surgeons began offering and patients increasingly demanded an alternative: off-pump surgery in which the machine was not used and doctors operated on a still-beating heart.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Obesity appears to be a risk factor on a par with pregnancy for developing complications from an infection with pandemic H1N1 influenza, according to the most comprehensive look yet at swine flu hospitalizations.
About a quarter of those hospitalizations have been for people who were morbidly obese, even though such people make up less than 5% of the population. That fivefold increase in risk is close to the sixfold increase observed in pregnant women, according to the report published today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
When the merely obese are included with the morbidly obese, they make up 34% of the American population. Yet they accounted for 58% of the hospitalizations in the study.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
There aren't many things that look their best right before they die, but the leaf of the sugar maple is one of them.
Briefly at the end of each growing season, maple leaves seem to want to imitate the sun, whose energy they've been dutifully collecting all summer. As their green-pigmented chlorophyll breaks down, they glow red and orange in a display more suitable to the exhibitionist tropics than the sober temperate zone. It doesn't last long. In a few weeks they're brown, dry and on the ground.
Until about a decade ago, the autumnal turning of the leaves was viewed by biologists as a pointless if appealing feature in the life history of many deciduous trees. The standard teaching was that the bright colors were lurking in the leaves all along. Only when the chlorophyll disappeared did they become visible, the colorful undergarments in a deathbed striptease. It turns out, though, that's only half true.
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from the Guardian (UK)
The unseasonal snow that fell on Beijing for 11 hours on Sunday was the earliest and heaviest there has been for years. It was also, China claims, man-made. By the end of last month, farmland in the already dry north of China was suffering badly due to drought. So on Saturday night China's meteorologists fired 186 explosive rockets loaded with chemicals to "seed" clouds and encourage snow to fall.
"We won't miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from a lingering drought," Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, told state media.
The US has tinkered with such cloud seeding to increase water flow from the Sierra Nevada mountains in California since the 1950s, but there remains widespread scientific sniffiness in the west at such attempts at weather control. The chemicals fired into the sky, usually dry ice or silver iodide, are supposed to provide a surface for water vapour to form liquid rain. But there is little evidence that it works--after all, how do investigating scientists know it would not have rained anyway?
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from BBC News Online
Mercury is even more of an "iron planet" than scientists had previously supposed. Richer concentrations of iron and titanium have been seen on Mercury's surface by Nasa's Messenger probe. Previous Earth and spacecraft-based observations had detected only very low amounts of iron in the silicate minerals covering the innermost world.
Because of its immense density, scientists have already assumed much of Mercury's interior contains iron. Messenger sees the surface iron bound up in oxides with titanium.
The mission's principal investigator, Sean Solomon, said the new observations would keep theoreticians busy. "The iron is in a form that we don't normally encounter in other planetary situations and so it's going be a volley back to our geochemists and petrologists to come up with a scenario that's consistent with everything we are measuring now at Mercury," he told reporters.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Claude Levi-Strauss, the French philosopher widely considered the father of modern anthropology because of his then-revolutionary conclusion that so-called primitive societies did not differ greatly intellectually from modern ones, died Friday at his home in Paris from natural causes. He was 100.
Part philosopher, part sociologist and entirely humanist, he studied tribes in Brazil and North America, concluding that virtually all societies shared powerful commonalities of behavior and thought, often expressing them in myths.
Towering over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and 1970s, he founded the school of thought known as structuralism, which holds that common features exist within the enormous varieties of human experience. Those commonalities are rooted partly in nature and partly in the human brain itself.
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from the Philadelphia Inquirer
(Associated Press) -- Men may protect more than their hearts if they keep cholesterol in line: Their chances of getting aggressive prostate cancer may be lower, new research suggests.
One study found that men whose cholesterol was in a healthy range--below 200--had less than half the risk of developing high-grade prostate tumors compared with men with high cholesterol. A second study found that men with lots of HDL, or "good cholesterol," were a little less likely to develop any form of prostate cancer than men with very low HDL.
Both studies were published Tuesday in Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. The two studies are not definitive and have some weaknesses. Yet they fit with plenty of other science suggesting that limiting fats in the blood can lessen cancer risk.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
HELENA, Mont. (Associated Press) -- Scientists searching for Yellowstone National Park's lesser-known life forms--beyond its famed bison, bears and wolves--found more than 1,200 species, including several never known before to exist in the park.
A one-day study of the park in late August found microscopic worms, mushrooms, a bluish-green lichen, a slender grass and a colorful tiger beetle, among other creatures, in about two square miles of Yellowstone, according to initial results released this week.
Some 125 scientists and volunteers spent 24 hours canvassing an area in northern Yellowstone during the "bioblitz" -- a scientific mad dash to document as many species as possible over the course of a day.
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from Science News
Using the locations of moderate-sized quakes to estimate where "The Big One" will eventually strike may not work for all regions, a new study reveals.
Many researchers assume that small-scale seismic activity reveals where stress is building up in the Earth's crust--stress that can cause larger quakes in the future, says Mian Liu, a geophysicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia.
However, Liu and Seth Stein of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., report in the Nov. 5 Nature, many moderate-sized temblors that occur far from the edges of tectonic plates could be merely the aftershocks of larger quakes that occurred along the same faults decades or even centuries ago.
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from National Geographic News
Mutant hitchhikers may become a major hurdle in the quest to send humans deeper into the galaxy, scientists say.
That's because no matter how fit astronauts feel at liftoff, they're likely to be carrying disease-causing microbes such as toxic E. coli and Staphylococcus strains.
Charged particles zipping through space, known as cosmic rays, can mutate the otherwise manageable microbes, spurring the bugs to reproduce quicker and become more virulent, recent studies show.
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from USA Today
An analysis of more than 1,000 California patients hospitalized with H1N1 flu during the first four months of the pandemic found that infants were most likely to be admitted, and patients 50 and older were most likely to die once admitted.
In the first four months of the pandemic, H1N1, like the seasonal flu, was especially severe in older people, who are more likely to have underlying health conditions, says lead author Janice Louie, a public-health medical officer at the California Department of Public Health.
However, Louie says, unlike seasonal flu, older people are far less likely than children and young adults to contract the H1N1 flu in the first place. For that reason, the study won't lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to add healthy older people to the list of priority groups for H1N1 vaccine, director Thomas Frieden told reporters Tuesday.
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from the Scientist (Registration Required)
... At its most enthusiastic, science has always been prone to promise rather more, and sooner, than it has managed to deliver. It can sometimes feel as if cures for diseases are forever 10 years off, while nuclear fusion seems to have been 50 years away from practical reality for about half a century now.
... Meanwhile, in bleaker moments, scientific authorities have predicted the end of the world and civilization as we know them at the hand of pandemics or environmental catastrophe. And yet we are still here ...
Of course, scientists have a strong incentive to make bold predictions--namely, to obtain funding, influence, and high-profile publications. But while few will be disappointed when worst-case forecasts fail to materialize, unfulfilled predictions--of which we're seeing more and more--can be a blow for patients, policy makers, and for the reputation of science itself.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
The massive eruption of the Thera volcano in the Aegean Sea more than 3,000 years ago produced killer waves that raced across hundreds of miles of the Eastern Mediterranean to inundate the area that is now Israel and probably other coastal sites, a team of scientists has found.
The team, writing in the October issue of Geology, said the new evidence suggested that giant tsunamis from the catastrophic eruption hit "coastal sites across the Eastern Mediterranean littoral." Tsunamis are giant waves that can crash into shore, rearrange the seabed, inundate vast areas of land and carry terrestrial material out to sea.
The region at the time was home to rising civilizations in Crete, Cyprus, Egypt, Phoenicia and Turkey.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
America has seen its last Lost Generation. Thanks to an invisible armada of incessantly broadcasting satellites, collectively called the Global Positioning System, and to the explosive proliferation of GPS receivers in gadgets from dashboard map units to cellphones to dog collars, even the cartographically clueless are now good to go.
The same technology that allows the military to drop precision-targeted bombs on terrorists has become a $30 billion worldwide market, spawning devices that lead hikers through the trackless wild, recover itinerant tykes with GPS units sewn into their backpacks, let golfers see the distance to the next hole, stamp the location on digital photos and show the nearest pizza joint on a PDA screen.
Very soon it may be possible to find your lost keys as receivers shrink to the size of a dime and smaller. It has all happened deliriously fast. Modern GPS has been fully operational only since 1995.
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from Scientific American
The power to resist temptation has been extolled by philosophers, psychologists, teachers, coaches, and mothers. Anyone with advice on how you should live your life has surely spoken to you of its benefits.
... Of course, this assumes that our natural urges are a thing to be resisted--that there is a devil inside, luring you to cheat, offend, err, and annoy. New research has begun to question this assumption.
A new brain imaging study by Josh Greene and Joe Paxton at Harvard University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that what separates the well-behaved from the poorly-behaved might not be the ability to control your temptations but rather what kind of temptations you have.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
It is one of the most intriguing labels in psychiatry. Children with Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism, are socially awkward and often physically clumsy, but many are verbal prodigies, speaking in complex sentences at early ages, reading newspapers fluently by age 5 or 6 and acquiring expertise in some preferred topic--stegosaurs, clipper ships, Interstate highways--that will astonish adults and bore their playmates to tears.
In recent years, this once obscure diagnosis, given to more than four times as many boys as girls, has become increasingly common.
Much of the growing prevalence of autism, which now affects about 1 percent of American children, according to federal data, can be attributed to Asperger's and other mild forms of the disorder. And Asperger's has exploded into popular culture through books and films depicting it as the realm of brilliant nerds and savantlike geniuses.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
For 9 months in 1898, two lions terrorized the southern Kenyan region of Tsavo, killing as many as 135 people by one account. Although the almost mythic tale has spawned three movies, people still debate the final death toll. Now, hair and bone samples from the famed lions have shed light on how many people they devoured and why they did it.
The attacks began in March as the British were building a railway bridge across the Tsavo River, which provided the only water to the parched landscape. The two lions crept into the workers' camp at night, snatching people from their tents, according to some accounts.
... Anthropologist Nathaniel Dominy and ecologist Justin Yeakel of the University of California, Santa Cruz, wanted to pin down the death toll. The scientists knew they could piece together the lions' diet from isotopes found in their hair and bone.
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from the San Diego Union-Tribune (Registration Required)
CHICAGO (Associated Press) -- An international group of scientists has decoded the DNA of the domestic pig, research that may one day prove useful in finding new treatments for both pigs and people, and perhaps aid in efforts for a new swine flu vaccine for pigs.
Pigs and humans are similar in size and makeup, and swine are often used in human research. Scientists say they rely on pigs to study everything from obesity and heart disease to skin disorders.
"The pig is the ideal animal to look at lifestyle and health issues in the United States," said Larry Schook, a University of Illinois in Champaign biomedical science professor who led the DNA sequencing project.
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