from CBS News
Patients with brain cancer may face devastating side effects from chemotherapy, but a new study offers a possible solution: stem cells.
The stem cells form a shield of sorts against the toxic side effects from chemo, according to the researchers behind the study. It was a small trial that involved only three patients with glioblastoma, the most aggressive and common form of a malignant brain tumor that's usually fatal.
Two of the patients survived longer than predicted with help from the stem cell treatment--an average of 22 months--and a third man from Alaska remains alive today with no disease progression almost three years following treatment.
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from USA Today
PORTLAND, Ore. (Associated Press) - Oregon investigators have traced an outbreak of norovirus to a reusable grocery bag that members of a Beaverton girls' soccer team passed around when they shared cookies. The soccer team of 13- and 14-year-olds traveled to Seattle for a weekend tournament in October 2010.
At the tournament, one girl got sick on Saturday and spent six hours in a chaperone's bathroom. Symptoms of the bug, often called "stomach flu," include vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps. The chaperone took the girl back to Oregon.
On Sunday, team members had lunch in a hotel room, passing around the bag and eating cookies it held. On Monday, six girls got sick. Oregon scientists determined they had picked up the norovirus from the grocery bag.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
WASHINGTON -- After more than 12 years and at least $100 billion in construction costs, NASA leaders say the International Space Station finally is ready to bloom into the robust orbiting laboratory that the agency envisioned more than two decades ago.
"The ISS has now entered its intensive research phase," said Bill Gerstenmaier, head of NASA operations and human exploration, in recent testimony to Congress in defense of the roughly $1.5 billion the agency spends annually on the outpost. But doubts linger.
More than a quarter of the area that NASA has designated for experiments sits empty. Much of the research done aboard the station deals with living and working in space--with marginal application back on Earth. And the nonprofit group that NASA chose to lure more research to the outpost has been plagued by internal strife and recently lost its director.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
For some 30 years, scientists have debated what sealed the fate of the dinosaurs. Was an asteroid impact more or less solely responsible for the catastrophic mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous geological period, 65 million years ago? Or were the dinosaurs already undergoing a long-term decline, and the asteroid was merely the coup de grâce?
So three young researchers, led by Stephen L. Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University who is affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History, decided to test this hypothesis with a close examination of the fossil record over the 12 million years leading up to the mass extinction.
For the study, the researchers departed from the practice of focusing almost exclusively on raw counts of the number of species over time. Instead, they analyzed changes in the anatomies and body plans of seven large groups of late Cretaceous dinosaurs for insights into their evolutionary trajectory.
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from BBC News Online
One of Europe's main contributions to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is built and ready to ship to the US. The Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri) will gather key data as the $9bn (L5.5bn) observatory seeks to identify the first starlight in the Universe.
The results of testing conducted at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK have just been signed off, clearing Miri to travel to America. James Webb--regarded as the successor to Hubble--is due to launch in 2018.
It will carry a 6.5m primary mirror (more than double the width of Hubble's main mirror), and a shield the size of a tennis court to guard its sensitive vision from the heat and strong light of our Sun. The observatory has been tasked with tracking down the very first luminous objects in the cosmos--groupings of the first generation of stars to burst into life.
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from Science News
A three-pronged strategy--to knock out renegade immune cells, replace them and revitalize other cells that make insulin--might reverse type 1 diabetes. Scientists report in the May 9 Science Translational Medicine that seven of 12 diabetic mice treated with this combination were cured even after having lost the ability to make insulin for several weeks, the equivalent of a human patient who has needed insulin injections for a couple of years.
Type 1 diabetes often strikes at an early age and relegates a person to a lifetime of blood sugar tests and insulin shots. The condition results when one's own immune cells kill insulin-making cells called beta cells housed in the pancreas. A few of these beta cells usually survive, but don't produce adequate insulin to process sugars.
In the new study, researchers used specially designed antibodies in the mice to first wipe out rogue beta-cell-killing T cells from the immune system.
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from Nature News
Map of Life--an interactive resource for global biodiversity analysis--launched Thursday, promising a new era in the visualization of species distributions.
On first glance, Map of Life may seem just one more in the dozens of biodiversity databases online, but it has a novel capability--a web-mapping tool that integrates disparate data types, from single-occurrence records in museum collections to expert-derived ranges found in field guides.
Funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Map of Life will soon allow users to add or update species data, thereby becoming the first two-way portal of biodiversity information.
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from ScienceInsider
U.S. eighth graders did slightly better last year on a national science test than did their counterparts in 2009. But what that result says about the state of science in U.S. schools is open to debate.
A 2-point rise to 152 (on a scale from 0 to 300) is part of what Jack Buckley, head of the National Center for Education Statistics, calls the "uniformly positive" results from the 2011 Science National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) at Grade 8. The pronounced racial gap in scores narrowed by a small but significant amount, says Buckley, from 36 points to 35 points for white students compared with black students, and from 30 to 27 for white students compared with Hispanic students. And all three groups did better. At the same time, he notes that the gap in scores between boys and girls grew from 4 to 5 points.
However, some science educators strongly disagree with Buckley's self-declared "optimism" that things are moving in the right direction. "It's pretty hard to get excited about these results," says Gerald Wheeler, interim executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. "It's like when a student who is flunking every subject finally comes home with a D."
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from Science News
The sun isn't quite the speed demon scientists once suspected. It chugs around the galactic center at a relatively pokey 83,500 kilometers per hour--or roughly 11,000 kilometers per hour slower than expected, says a report appearing online May 10 in Science.
While that might not sound like a big deal, the sun's slower pace clashes with theories describing the solar system's local environment--a protective, sun-blown bubble called the heliosphere. The sun's speed helps shape the size and boundary of this elastic bubble, along with the interstellar dust and gas clouds it moves through.
In particular, scientists thought a shock wave--called the bow shock--preceded the bubble's journey through space. "We've spent the last quarter-century assuming there was a bow shock," says study coauthor David McComas, a space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
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from Smithsonian Magazine
What Are Fermi Bubbles? No, this is not a rare digestive disorder. The bubbles are massive, mysterious structures that emanate from the Milky Ways center and extend roughly 20,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane. The strange phenomenon, first discovered in 2010, is made up of super-high-energy gamma-ray and X-ray emissions, invisible to the naked eye. Scientists have hypothesized that the gamma rays might be shock waves from stars being consumed by the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy.
Rectangular Galaxy. "Look, up in the sky! It's a...rectangle?" Earlier this year, astronomers spotted a celestial body, roughly 70 million light-years away, with an appearance that is unique in the visible universe: The galaxy LEDA 074886 is shaped more or less like a rectangle. While most galaxies are shaped like discs, three-dimensional ellipses or irregular blobs, this one seems to have a regular rectangle or diamond-shaped appearance. Some have speculated that the shape results from the collision of two spiral-shaped galaxies, but no one knows for now.
The Moon's Magnetic Field. One of the moon's greatest mysteries--why only some parts of the crust seem to have a magnetic field--has intrigued astronomers for decades, even inspiring the buried mythical "monolith" in the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But some scientists finally think they may have an explanation. After using a computer model to analyze the moon's crust, researchers believe the magnetism may be a relic of a 120-mile-wide asteroid that collided with the moon's southern pole about 4.5 billion years ago, scattering magnetic material. Others, though, believe the magnetic field may be related to other smaller, more recent impacts.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
In a rare step, doctors on a panel revising psychiatry's influential diagnostic manual have backed away from two controversial proposals that would have expanded the number of people identified as having psychotic or depressive disorders.
The doctors dropped two diagnoses that they ultimately concluded were not supported by the evidence: "attenuated psychosis syndrome," proposed to identify people at risk of developing psychosis, and "mixed anxiety depressive disorder," a hybrid of the two mood problems.
They also tweaked their proposed definition of depression to allay fears that the normal sadness people experience after the loss of a loved one, a job or a marriage would be mistaken for a mental disorder.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
The great Pacific garbage patch is giving sea striders a place to breed out on the open ocean, changing the natural environment there, new research suggests.
The great Pacific garbage patch, known to scientists as the North Pacific Subtropial Gyre, is a large patch of mulched up plastic and other garbage, often said to be the size of Texas, floating in the Pacific Ocean.
"This paper shows a dramatic increase in plastic over a relatively short time period and the effect it's having on a common North Pacific Gyre invertebrate," study researcher Miriam Goldstein, graduate student at the University of California San Diego, said in a statement. "We're seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic."
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from ABC News
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) - The government is taking steps to help ensure that children who need CT scans and other X-ray-based tests don't get an adult-sized dose of radiation. Too much radiation from medical testing is a growing concern, especially for children, because it may increase the risk of cancer later in life.
Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration proposed guidelines urging manufacturers to design new scanners to be safer for the youngest, smallest patients--and put new advice on its website to teach parents what to ask about these increasingly common tests.
"We are trying to ensure that patients get the right dose at the right time, and the right exam," FDA physicist Thalia Mills told The Associated Press. The use of CT scans, which show more detail than standard X-rays but entail far more radiation, and other medical imaging has soared in recent years. The tests can be lifesaving, and specialists say people who really need one shouldn't avoid it for fear of future risk from radiation.
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from BBC News Online
A simple drawing test may help predict the risk of older men dying after a first stroke, a study in the journal BMJ Open suggests. Taken while healthy, the test involves drawing lines between numbers in ascending order as fast as possible.
Men who scored in the bottom third were about three times as likely to die after a stroke compared with those who were in the highest third. The study looked at 1,000 men between the ages of 67 and 75 over 14 years.
Of the 155 men who had a stroke, 22 died within a month and more than half within an average of two-and-a-half years. The researchers think that tests are able to pick up hidden damage to brain blood vessels when there are no other obvious signs or symptoms.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Looming over the northern edge of the Amazon rain forest are some of the most remarkable mountains on earth. Known as tepuis, or tabletop mountains, they are typically ringed by sheer cliffs that rise thousands of feet from the surrounding lowland jungles. Instead of peaks, tepuis have enormous flat expanses at their tops. To reach the tops of many tepuis, the only choices are scaling the cliffs or flying in a helicopter.
For all their isolation, the tops of tepuis are not barren. They are like islands in the sky, covered with low forests and shrublands that support a diversity of animals likes frogs and lizards. Many of the species that live on top of the tepuis are found nowhere else on the planet.
In a paper to be published in the journal Evolution, a team of scientists report the first DNA-based study to address an age-old question about the tepuis: How did animals and plants end up in such an inaccessible place?
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
Dr. David Heimbach knows how to tell a story. Before California lawmakers last year, the noted burn surgeon drew gasps from the crowd as he described a 7-week-old baby girl who was burned in a fire started by a candle while she lay on a pillow that lacked flame retardant chemicals.
"Now this is a tiny little person, no bigger than my Italian greyhound at home," said Heimbach, gesturing to approximate the baby's size. "Half of her body was severely burned. She ultimately died after about three weeks of pain and misery in the hospital."
Heimbach's passionate testimony about the baby's death made the long-term health concerns about flame retardants voiced by doctors, environmentalists and even firefighters sound abstract and petty. But there was a problem with his testimony: It wasn't true.
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from BBC News Online
The smallest mammoth ever known to have existed roamed the island of Crete millions of years ago, researchers say. Adults were roughly the size of a modern baby elephant, standing over a metre tall at the shoulders.
Remains were discovered more than a century ago, but scientists had debated whether the animal was a mammoth or an ancient elephant. A new analysis of the animal's teeth suggests it falls closer to the mammoth lineage.
Palaeontologists Victoria Herridge and Adrian Lister, from London's Natural History Museum, report their findings in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B. "Dwarfism is a well-known evolutionary response of large mammals to island environments," said Dr Herridge. This evolutionary phenomenon is thought to be driven by the relative scarcity of food sources or by the absence of predators.
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from Nature News
Researchers have found a set of gene mutations that seem to play a part in some cases of skin cancer.
Cancer geneticist Michael Berger of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of 25 melanoma tumours that had been donated by patients and compared them to the patients' normal cells.
They found that one gene, PREX2, was mutated in 11 of the 25 tumour samples, and that genetic rearrangements occurred near this gene in nine patients. PREX2 produces a protein that curtails the action of another protein called PTEN, which is involved in preventing cancer development.
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from NPR
When pollsters ask Republicans and Democrats whether the president can do anything about high gas prices, the answers reflect the usual partisan divisions in the country. About two-thirds of Republicans say the president can do something about high gas prices, and about two-thirds of Democrats say he can't.
But six years ago, with a Republican president in the White House, the numbers were reversed: Three-fourths of Democrats said President Bush could do something about high gas prices, while the majority of Republicans said gas prices were clearly outside the president's control.
The flipped perceptions on gas prices isn't an aberration, said Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan. On a range of issues, partisans seem partial to their political loyalties over the facts. When those loyalties demand changing their views of the facts, he said, partisans seem willing to throw even consistency overboard.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Chemotherapy saves lives, but it can take a considerable toll on the body. Now, by inserting a mutated gene into cancer patients, researchers have found a way to protect them against the side effects of chemotherapy and boost their odds of surviving a particularly aggressive type of cancer.
Patients with glioblastoma, a fast-growing and usually fatal brain cancer, face overwhelming odds. Half die within 13 months of diagnosis, and very few survive long-term. Treatment is part of the problem. Many glioblastomas are resistant to chemotherapy because they harbor an overactive gene called MGMT, which repairs the cancer cells after chemotherapy damages them.
To counteract the gene, physicians sometimes add an MGMT-blocking drug, benzylguanine, to the chemotherapy regimen to make the cancer cells easier to kill. But benzylguanine also makes healthy blood and bone marrow cells easy to kill.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
HAVANA -- Yudelsy García O'Connor, the first baby known to have been born with H.I.V. in Cuba, is not merely still alive. She is vibrant, funny and, at age 25, recently divorced but hoping to remarry and have children.
Her father died of AIDS when she was 10, her mother when she was 23. She was near death herself in her youth. "I'm not afraid of death," she said. "I know it could knock on my door. It comes for everyone. But I take my medicine."
Ms. García is alive thanks partly to lucky genes, and partly to the intensity with which Cuba has attacked its AIDS epidemic. Whatever debate may linger about the government's harsh early tactics--until 1993, everyone who tested positive for H.I.V. was forced into quarantine--there is no question that they succeeded.
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from the Christian Science Monitor
Scientists have announced the discovery of a newfound crocodile species that may have been the largest to ever roam the Earth. The colossal reptiles trolled East African waters between 4 million and 2 million years ago, and may have snacked on human ancestors, researchers said.
The largest fossil specimens recovered belong to massive crocodiles some 25 feet (7.5 meters) in length; and the ancient giants may have grown larger than 27 feet (8 meters), according to Christopher Brochu, an associate professor of geosciences at the University of Iowa.
Brochu stumbled upon the new species three years ago, while examining enormous fossils housed at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi. It took four men to lift the skull of one of the specimens, which were originally excavated from the Turkana Basin, an area surrounding Lake Turkana in northern Kenya.
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from ABC News
(Associated Press) - The obesity epidemic may be slowing, but don't take in those pants yet. Today, just over a third of U.S. adults are obese. By 2030, 42 percent will be, says a forecast released Monday.
That's not nearly as many as experts had predicted before the once-rapid rises in obesity rates began leveling off. But the new forecast suggests even small continuing increases will add up.
"We still have a very serious problem," said obesity specialist Dr. William Dietz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Worse, the already obese are getting fatter. Severe obesity will double by 2030, when 11 percent of adults will be nearly 100 pounds overweight, or more, concluded the research led by Duke University.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
The mountains of the Sierra Nevada are still rising, and they're a lot younger than most scientists previously thought.
That's the conclusion of Earth scientists in Nevada who have used space-based radar and the most advanced GPS measurements to conclude that the entire range is now rising at a rate of one to two millimeters a year--less than an inch a decade--and in its modern form could be less than 3 million years old.
And scientists who have long held very different views about the age of the Sierra Nevada concede the mountains may have undergone a more recent pulse of upward growth, but still maintain they reached their present height many millions of years ago.
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from Nature News
A previously little-considered heating effect could shrink estimates of the habitable zone of the Milky Way's most numerous class of stars--'M' or red dwarfs--by up to one half, says Rory Barnes, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. That factor--gravitational heating via tides--suggests a menagerie of previously undreamt-of planets, on which tidal heating is a major source of internal heat. Barnes presented the work yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division on Dynamical Astronomy in Timberline Lodge, Oregon.
The habitable zone is the orbital region close enough to a star for a planet to have liquid water, but not so close that all of the water evaporates. For our Sun, the zone extends roughly from the inner edge of the orbit of Mars to the outer edge of that of Venus. For smaller, cooler stars, such as M-class dwarfs, the zone can be considerably closer to the star than Mercury is to the Sun. And because close-in planets are easier to spot than more distant ones, such stars have been a major target for planet hunters seeking Earth-like worlds.
There's just one problem with finding habitable planets around such stars, says Barnes. Because tidal forces vary dramatically with the distance between a planet and its star, closer orbits also result in massively larger tidal forces.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
COROLLA, N.C. -- Come summer, the beaches of this barrier island will be choked with cars and sunbathers, but in the off-season the land is left to wild horses. Smallish, tending toward chestnut and black, they wander past deserted vacation rentals in harems of five or six.
Thousands of them once roamed the length of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the likely descendants from mounts that belonged to Spanish explorers five centuries ago. Now their numbers have dwindled to a few hundred, the best known living on federal parkland at Shackleford Banks.
But the largest herd, which has recently grown to almost 140 strong, occupies more than 7,500 acres of narrow land that stretches from the end of Highway 12 in Corolla (pronounced cor-AH-la) to the Virginia border, 11 miles north. Lacking natural predators, and trapped by fences that jut into the choppy Atlantic, the herd is becoming so inbred that its advocates fear a genetic collapse in mere generations.
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from BBC News Online
The scientific maverick James Lovelock says climate catastrophe is not so certain as he previously suggested. Dr Lovelock, one of the world's leading environmental thinkers, once warned climate change would reduce mankind to a few breeding pairs in the Arctic.
On BBC Radio 4's The Life Scientific he gave credit to scientists who question the inevitability of conclusions from climate change computer models. But he maintained it was probably too late to stop climate change.
He warned: "We are moving in a direction which won't do humanity any good at all if we just go on doing it." His double-edged message was that the planet would "heal itself" from an overdose of greenhouse gases--but probably over millions or tens of millions of years.
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from the Seattle Times
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) -- Federal drug regulators on Tuesday affirmed landmark study results showing that a popular HIV-fighting pill can also help healthy people avoid contracting the virus that causes AIDS in the first place. While the pill appears safe and effective for prevention, scientists stressed that it only works when taken on a daily basis.
The Food and Drug Administration will hold a meeting Thursday to discuss whether Truvada should be approved for people who are at risks of contracting HIV through sexual intercourse. The agency's positive review posted Tuesday suggests the daily pill will become the first drug approved to prevent HIV infection in high-risk patients.
FDA reviewers conclude that taking Truvada pre-emptively could spare patients "infection with a serious and life-threatening illness that requires lifelong treatment."
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from Nature News
Since its launch in 2008, the Fermi space telescope has recorded hundreds of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), flashes of light that, for just a few seconds or minutes, are the brightest objects in the Universe. And now the telescope is yielding data that is starting to explain the mechanisms that unleash these beam-like jets of light, which are thought to emanate from the poles of a spinning star as it collapses to form a black hole and explode in a supernova.
On 7 May, at the 2012 meeting of the Fermi/Swift GRB conference in Munich, Germany, members of the Fermi team showed evidence that the gamma rays were not being generated through the commonly invoked process of synchrotron radiation, where electrons emit light as they are accelerated in shockwaves rippling out from the explosion.
Instead, most of the light is coming from a seemingly more obvious place: originating in thermal emissions at the surface of the fireball. Just as the Sun's yellow light emanates from its photosphere (the surface region from which the externally perceived light of a star originates), so too are the GRBs arising mostly as thermal emissions from the photosphere of a fireball expanding at the speed of light.
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