from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Human genome sequencing is already helping researchers find new treatments for illness. Now an unusual case study suggests that the benefits of sequencing may be enhanced in combination with detailed blood tests.
The case involves Michael Snyder, a geneticist who was both the lead author and the subject of a study on genomics reported in the journal Cell. The study began with the sequencing of Dr. Snyder's genome, which showed that he was at high risk for Type 2 diabetes. Then the research team did extensive blood tests every two months or more, keeping track of 40,000 molecules in Dr. Snyder's cells. About midway into the 14-month study, analyses showed that Dr. Snyder had indeed developed diabetes.
"My genome did predict I was at risk," he said, "and because I was watching out, I detected the illness pretty early." The research team monitored the molecular changes closely as the disease developed. The illness was treated successfully while in its early stages, long before it might have been if Dr. Snyder had relied on a conventional visit to the doctor.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
As health authorities make increasing headway in treating infectious diseases in the developing world, they may be trading one problem for another. As people in those countries live longer, they become more likely to develop chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes. A new report by the World Health Organization's International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC) suggests that the incidence of cancer worldwide will grow by 75% by the year 2030, nearly doubling in some of the developing countries. Those increases will put a much larger burden on the poorly developed healthcare systems in such countries because care of cancer is much more expensive than care for infectious diseases.
Dr. Freddie Bray of the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, and his colleagues used data from IARC's GLOBOCAN database to compile estimates of cancer incidence and mortality in 2008 in 184 countries. They determined how various types of cancer relate to the standard of living in each country--as determined by the Human Development Index--then projected how the rates would change as living standards improved. The researchers reported their findings in the journal Lancet Oncology.
The team found that cancers typically associated with infections--such as cervical, stomach and liver cancer and Kaposi's sarcoma--are declining in the developing countries as infections become better controlled. But the cancers that are most common in the most developed countries--including lung, breast, prostate and colorectal cancer--are increasing at a faster rate. In 2008, almost 40% of the number of cancers worldwide occurred in countries with the highest standard of living, even though those regions account for just 15% of the world's population. As living standards increase elsewhere, the number of such cancers will continue to grow, the authors said. In countries with medium standards of living, such as South Africa, China and India, the cancer rate will grow by 78% by 2030, the team predicted. In countries that currently have the lowest standards of living, the rate will grow by 93%.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
As scientific puzzles go, the origin of dogs may not be as important as the origin of the universe. But it strikes closer to home, and it almost seems harder to answer.
Cosmologists seem to have settled on the idea that 13.7 billion years ago the universe appeared with a bang (the big one) from nothing--albeit a kind of nothing that included the laws of physics. They assure us that although we may not be able to comprehend the numbers, this is what happened.
With dogs, there is no such agreement. A consensus seems to have been reached on only one point, which is that the ancestors of dogs were wolves. Beyond that, there are varying claims, particularly about dates and places. Dogs were domesticated, various scientists argue, between 15,000 and 100,000 years ago, in Asia or Africa or multiple times in multiple places.
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from Scientific American
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Crumple it, drench it, lock it in a hot attic or a damp cellar but paper can come back to life.
It is doing so now, after taking a battering from environmentalists, the Internet and a glum economy. Paper partisans are pushing back, defending greenbacks as preferable to dollar coins, physical mail as hacker-proof and turning-page books as more permanent than digital formats.
Even some environmental objections to paper have turned around as companies work with green groups to foster recycling and grow sustainable forests.
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from Nature News
Brazil's vast forests lost some legal protections last week, but less than environmentalists had feared. On 28 May, President Dilma Rousseff vetoed a dozen sections of the revamped forest code passed a month earlier by the lower house of Brazil's National Congress.
Although Rousseff denied environmentalists' push for a full veto, she removed many of the bill's contentious provisions, including one that would have effectively granted an amnesty for any illegal deforestation conducted before July 2008. She also issued an executive order to fill in the gaps created by her veto. Rousseff and her ministers defended their decision as a realistic compromise that promotes agriculture but also protects the environment. Many expect further legislative wrangling as Congress reviews the new language in the coming months.
The revised code still requires that landowners maintain a proportion of their land as forest, ranging from 20% for those in coastal regions to 80% in the Amazon. Rousseff restored obligations for landowners to recover forests that were cut down illegally, although she created exemptions that could relieve numerous small properties of this obligation.
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from Nature News
In an advance that could transform our understanding of the complex cellular dynamics underlying development of animals, researchers have developed a method to track individual cells in a developing fly embryo in real time. Two papers published on the Nature Methods website today describe similar versions of the microscopic technique.
Understanding how an embryo develops from two parental germ cells into an organism with an organized, communicating and interactive group of systems is a difficult task. To date, most studies have only been able to track pieces of that development in animals such as the zebrafish Danio rerio or the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. A more comprehensive understanding of the whole process and what drives it could inform research on diseases such as cancer, and help in the development of regenerative stem-cell therapies.
Current light-sheet microscopy techniques involve illuminating one side of the sample. Either one side of a developing organism is imaged continuously, or two sides are viewed alternately, with the resultant data reconstructed to form a three-dimensional view. However, viewing from one side at a time means that the cells cannot be tracked as they migrate from top to bottom, and rotating the sample to view both sides takes so much time that when the next image is taken the cells have changed, so that they no longer line up.
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from Science News
A raindrop hitting a mosquito in flight is like a midair collision between a human and a bus. Except that the mosquito survives.
New experiments show how the insect's light weight works in its favor, says engineer David Hu of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. In essence, the (relatively) huge, fast drop doesn't transfer much of its momentum to a little wisp of an insect. Instead the falling droplet sweeps the insect along on the downward plunge. As Hu puts it, the mosquito "just rides the drop."
The trick is breaking away from that drop before it and the insect splash into the ground. Mosquitoes that separate themselves in time easily survive a raindrop strike, Hu and his colleagues report online the week of June 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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from ScienceInsider
BARCELONA, SPAIN -- British biochemist Gregory Winter and U.S. chemist Richard A. Lerner are this year's winners of Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research. The two researchers are jointly honored "for their decisive contributions to the field of immunology and, in particular, for obtaining antibodies of major therapeutic value," the Prince of Asturias Foundation announced yesterday.
Winter is former deputy director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, U.K., and founder of several biotechnology companies; he was appointed Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in December 2011.
Lerner is the Lita Annenberg Hazen Professor of Immunochemistry in the Department of Molecular Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, which he led for 25 years, and is a member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology. The two scientists have pioneered the treatment of degenerative diseases and tumors with specifically designed antibodies, according to the jury, which was unanimous.
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Men's offices have 10 to 20 percent more bacteria than women's offices, and offices in New York City house more bacteria than those in San Francisco. These are among the findings of a new study that looked at bacteria in more than 90 offices in three cities--San Francisco, New York and Tucson--on chairs, desktops, phones, computer mice and keyboards.
In other biomedical news, a technique for "washing" lungs before they are transplanted could increase the number of organs suitable for donation, according to medical researchers. A trial led by Newcastle University in England is trying to improve the quality of lungs by pumping nutrients and oxygen through them.
An overabundance of connective tissue devastates organs such as the liver, heart, and lungs. A new study suggests that fragments of a promising cancer drug can rein in fibrosis, which is currently untreatable.
Clinical trials for breast cancer drugs are focused on shrinking existing tumors, not preventing cancer spread. According to the National Cancer Institute, this emphasis is stifling the discovery of chemicals that could prevent metastasis--costing money and patient lives.
A federal task force cautioned last week that women who are past menopause and healthy should not take hormone replacement therapy in hopes of warding off dementia, bone fractures or heart disease.
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Zoos are having to make tough choices about which endangered animals to try to save. The reality is that they can't save them all.
In other environmental news, geologist Erik Klemetti says that the crystals in volcanic rocks hold the key to understanding the evolution of magma at volcanoes. Two new studies examine Mount St. Helens and Long Valley using these tools to unlock the unseen history of the volcanoes.
In North Carolina, a state-appointed science panel has reported that a 1-meter rise in sea level along the coast is likely by 2100. The calculation was intended to help the state plan for rising water that could threaten 2,000 square miles. Critics say the report could thwart economic development on just as large a scale.
Across the United States, the coal industry is under siege, threatened by new regulations from Washington, environmentalists fortified by money from Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York City, and natural gas companies intent on capturing much of the nation's energy market. Last year, when the operator of the Big Sandy plant announced that it would be switching from coal to cleaner, cheaper natural gas, local people took it as the worst betrayal imaginable.
Scientists have detected radioactivity in fish that have migrated into California waters from the ocean off Japan, where radiation contaminated the sea after explosions tore through the Fukushima nuclear reactors last year. Radioactive cesium was detected in samples of highly prized Pacific bluefin tuna, but it is well below levels considered unsafe for humans, the scientists say.
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from Nature News
Just over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found.
The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between AD 774 and AD 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings that formed during the AD 775 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. The increase in 14C levels is so clear that the scientists, led by Fusa Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist from Nagoya University in Japan, conclude that the atmospheric level of 14C must have jumped by 1.2% over the course of no longer than a year, about 20 times more than the normal rate of variation. Their study is published online in Nature today [June 3].
"The work looks pretty solid," says Daniel Baker, a space physicist at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Colorado. "Some very energetic event occurred in about ad 775."
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from the Guardian (UK)
Ptolemy thought they were the source of the Nile and called them the Mountains of the Moon because of the perpetual mists that covered them; Stanley claimed to be the first non-African to see their icecap; and the many thousands of subsistence farmers who today live on the slopes of the fabled Rwenzori mountains in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo fear that warming temperatures are devastating their harvests.
While 20,000 people a year scale Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, just a handful of trekkers tackle the lower, 5,100m Rwenzori summits and witness the spectacular plant forms that grow in some of the wettest conditions on Earth. The result is that little is known about the condition of the many tropical glaciers that descend off the three peaks of mounts Baker, Speke and Africa's third highest peak, Mount Stanley.
But last month, a micro-expedition led by London-based Danish photographer Klaus Thymann returned from Uganda with the best evidence yet that the 43 glaciers found and named in 1906 are still mostly there, but are in dire condition and can be expected to disappear in a decade or two.
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from BBC News Online
Hundreds of crown-of-thorns starfish found on a beach in southern Japan in January stranded themselves because they were starving, say researchers. More than 800 were discovered on a 300m stretch of sand on Ishigaki Island.
The starfish population "outbreak" was first identified in 2009, when masses of juveniles were seen feeding on the island's outer coral reef. The coral-eating starfish then took three years to move onto the beach where they perished.
The reason for the starfish population boom is not clear, but the strange behaviour has shown marine scientists what can happen when these slow-moving creatures completely deplete their food source. "The shortage of food, corals, is a probable cause of the stranding," said Go Suzuki from the Fisheries Research Agency, who witnessed the phenomenon from his research station. In a paper, published in the journal Coral Reefs, Mr. Suzuki and colleagues described how an area once covered with up to 60% coral was reduced to 1% by the voracious starfish.
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from Discovery News
Dozens of previously dismissed radio signals were actually credible transmissions from Amelia Earhart, according to a new study of the alleged post-loss signals from Earhart's plane. The transmissions started riding the air waves just hours after Earhart sent her last inflight message.
The study, presented on Friday at a three day conference by researchers of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), sheds new light on what may have happened to the legendary aviator 75 years ago. The researchers plan to start a high-tech underwater search for pieces of her aircraft next July.
"Amelia Earhart did not simply vanish on July 2, 1937. Radio distress calls believed to have been sent from the missing plane dominated the headlines and drove much of the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy search," Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, told Discovery News.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
Harvard biologists have brought new meaning to the term "fine print" by devising microscopic tiles made of DNA that self-assemble into letters, Chinese characters, emoticons and other shapes.
More than mere doodling, their advance, detailed this week in the journal Nature, could make it easier and cheaper to build tiny DNA devices capable of delivering drugs or aiding the study of biochemistry, scientists said.
"This technique will accelerate the research field of DNA nanotechnology," said Ebbe Sloth Andersen, a researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark who collaborated on an editorial that accompanied the report.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
The Milky Way is set to collide with its closest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope said Thursday. Galactic residents need not brace for impact just yet, however: The predicted collision would take place in 4 billion years.
Andromeda, officially known as Messier 31, or M31, is located about 2.5 million light-years away from the Milky Way--which would make it our closest fellow spiral galaxy. Spiral galaxies have flat, rotating, disc-shaped bodies with spiral arms anchored by a supermassive black hole at the center.
"Because Andromeda is getting closer to us, astronomers have speculated for a long time whether it might collide with our Milky Way and whether the galaxies might merge together," said Roeland van der Marel, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "However, to know if this will in fact happen, it's necessary to know not only how Andromeda is moving in our direction, but also what its sideways motion is. Because that will determine whether Andromeda will miss us at a distance--or whether it might be heading straight for us."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
CHICAGO -- Taking periodic breaks from a commonly used treatment for prostate cancer could shorten men's lives, researchers reported here [the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology] on Saturday.
In a large study, intermittent hormonal therapy proved to be less effective than continuous therapy for certain men with metastatic prostate cancer. The finding is "striking and surprising because it goes against the conventional belief," said Dr. Maha Hussain, professor of medicine and urology at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center and the lead investigator in the study.
Another study found that Johnson & Johnson's Zytiga, a pill now approved as a last-ditch treatment for prostate cancer, might help a broader group of patients if used somewhat earlier in the course of the disease. Use of Zytiga significantly delayed the worsening of cancer and also appeared to prolong lives, though more time is needed to determine that definitively.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
CHICAGO -- A drug that delivers a powerful poison to tumors without some of the side effects of traditional treatments can delay the worsening of breast cancer and also appears to substantially prolong lives, according to results of a study presented here [the American Society of Clinical Oncology] Saturday.
Besides representing an advance in treating breast cancer, the success in the clinical trial validates an idea that is now being pursued by numerous pharmaceutical companies to treat various types of cancer in a way that delivers drugs to cancerous cells while sparing healthy ones.
"We've envisioned a world where cancer treatment would kill the cancer and not hurt the patient," Dr. Kimberly L. Blackwell, a professor of medicine at the Duke Cancer Institute and the lead investigator in the trial, said in an interview. "And this drug does that."
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
Tuesday is Venus transit day--that hole-in-the-sun journey taken by our neighboring planet--and unlike the last time this occurred, the event will be visible to all of North America. Not that you should look at it. As NASA notes, Venus is too minuscule to block the blinding glare of the sun. You need a filter. NASA suggests No. 14 welder's glasses.
You might be better off contacting a local astronomy club, which probably will have solar telescopes for observing the transit. In Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory will have telescopes set up on the lawn for free viewing, as the [Los Angeles] Times reported Thursday.
But however you safely do it, get a glimpse if you can. NASA helpfully notes that the next time it occurs, we will all be dead. Thanks for that, NASA. Truly, these transits are a twice-in-a-lifetime experience. They come in pairs a few years apart. The first in this pair was in 2004. The next transit is December 2117.
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from Science News
Scientists have trained paralyzed rats to walk, run and even climb stairs. Weeks of rigorous practice coupled with an electrochemical spine-stimulating regimen allowed the animals to overcome devastating spinal cord injuries that immobilized their rear legs, Swiss scientists report in the June 1 Science.
Although preliminary, the results offer hope to people paralyzed by spinal cord injuries. "The really exciting thing, the take-home message for people living with spinal cord injuries, is that this represents yet another step towards real treatment," says neurologist John McDonald of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "The real beauty is that this is not something that would necessarily have to go through 10 years of FDA approval."
Recovery, the Swiss team found, relied on a combination of treatments, all readily adaptable to humans: Nerve cells in the spine below the damaged site were stimulated with a cocktail of drugs similar to some antidepressants. Electrical shocks, delivered via electrodes, also activated the spine. In this way, the researchers primed the rats for the next stage of treatment--learning to walk again.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Associated Press) -- The SpaceX Dragon supply ship returned to Earth on Thursday, ending its revolutionary nine-day voyage to the International Space Station with an old-fashioned splashdown in the Pacific.
The unmanned capsule parachuted into the ocean about 500 miles off Mexico's Baja California, bringing back more than a half-ton of old station equipment. It was the first time since the space shuttles stopped flying last summer that NASA got back a big load from the orbiting lab.
Thursday's dramatic arrival of the world's first commercial cargo carrier capped a test mission that was virtually flawless, beginning with the May 22 launch aboard the SpaceX company's Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral and continuing through the space station docking three days later and the departure a scant six hours before it hit the water.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
White dwarf stars are dying stars--burned-out cinders that have exhausted the hydrogen that sustains them. But scientists may soon count on these stellar flameouts to unravel the history of the Milky Way.
In a study published online Wednesday by the journal Nature, astronomer Jason Kalirai described a new technique for calculating the masses and ages of old stars based on the masses of the white dwarfs they have become.
The new information will help researchers better understand the formation of Earth's galaxy. "If we want to assess when components of the Milky Way formed, we need the ages of the stars," said Kalirai, who is based at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Men's offices have more bacteria than women's offices. Not only that: Offices in New York City house more bacteria than those in San Francisco.
These are among the findings of a new study in the journal PLoS One that looks at bacteria in more than 90 offices in three cities--San Francisco, New York and Tucson--and on five types of surfaces: chairs, desktops, phones, computer mice and keyboards.
The bacteria count in men's offices was 10 to 20 percent greater than in women's. "It could be men are just bigger--they have bigger mouths and more surface area--but it could also be that men are less hygienic," said an author of the study, Scott Kelley, a microbiologist at San Diego State University.
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from Wired
One of the major reasons I (Erik Klemetti) am a geologist is that I love history. I majored in both history and geology as an undergraduate because I am fascinated by unraveling what has happened in the past and what was the evidence that we can use to see those events. For me, it is the crystals in volcanic rocks that hold the key to understanding the evolution of magma at volcanoes--they record events in crystalline structure through crystal growth, changing compositions of the crystals or incorporation of radioactive elements that can be used as a stopwatch.
Even after the crystal forms, the elements are redistributed to show how time has passed. Two studies that came out this week examining St. Helens and Long Valley use these tools to unlock the unseen history of the volcanoes. These crystals hold the story of the volcano, in both the long and short term, and reading that history is what fascinates me.
To read the history in crystals, you need to know that "ages" in geology don't all come the same. There are two types of ages when we consider almost any geochronologic information--relative and absolute ages. The latter is straight forward--an absolute age is one where you can assign a specific date to the event in question.
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from BBC News Online
Great white egrets are breeding in the UK for the first time at a Somerset nature reserve. At least one chick has hatched at Shapwick Heath National Nature Reserve, it has been confirmed, setting a new UK breeding bird record.
To have the egrets, a species of heron and rare visitors to the UK, breeding in the country was "incredibly exciting", manager Simon Clarke said. There have also been unconfirmed sightings of a second chick.
"It was a great sense of relief when we confirmed we have got at least one chick on the nest," Mr. Clarke told BBC Nature.
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from Scientific American
Birds are the only dinosaurs that have survived into modern times. Why is that? Of all the dinosaur species, how did they manage to make it through the catastrophic events of 65 million years ago, whereas all their fellow dinos perished? A new study, published May 27 in Nature, hints at an evolutionary phenomenon that may have played to birds' advantage: They are, it seems, baby dinosaurs whose biology prevents them from ever growing up.
Bhart-Anjan Bhullar and his doctoral advisor, Arkhat Abzhanov, posit that birds may have evolved from dinosaurs by a process known as paedomorphosis, whereby an organism retains juvenile traits even after it becomes sexually mature. "They certainly look to have some paedomorphic characteristics," says Jack Horner, a Montana State University paleontologist who studies dinosaur growth and development and was not involved in the study. Paedomorphosis "is not uncommon in evolution and speciation," he adds.
Bhullar and Abzhanov reached this conclusion by comparing the skulls of birds and dinosaurs across phylogenies, or related groups, and at different developmental stages. To quantitatively compare cranial geometries, they scanned the skulls of theropod dinosaurs (which are thought to be birds' ancestors), crocodiles and alligators (dinosaurs' cousins), early transitional birds such as Archaeopteryx, and modern birds. Then they created digitized versions of each skull and mapped out cranial landmarks, such as nostril tips, eye socket dimensions and places where bones meet.
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