from the San Francisco Chronicle
First things first: The hyrax is not the Lorax. And it does not speak for the trees. It sings, on its own behalf. The hyrax is a bit Seussian, however. It looks something like a rabbit, something like a woodchuck. Its closest living relatives are elephants, manatees and dugongs. And male rock hyraxes have complex songs like those of birds, in the sense that males will go on for five or 10 minutes at a stretch, apparently advertising themselves.
One might have expected that the hyrax would have some unusual qualities--the animals' feet, if you know how to look at them, resemble elephants' toes, the experts say. And their visible front teeth are actually very small tusks. But Arik Kershenbaum and colleagues at the University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University have found something more surprising.
Hyraxes' songs have something rarely found in mammals: syntax that varies according to where the hyraxes live, geographical dialects in how they put their songs together. The research was published online Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
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 grace?
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 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 the New York Times (Registration Required)
The walls have come tumbling down in offices everywhere, but the cubicle dwellers keep putting up new ones. They barricade themselves behind file cabinets. They fortify their partitions with towers of books and papers. Or they follow an "evolving law of technology etiquette," as articulated by Raj Udeshi at the open office he shares with fellow software entrepreneurs in downtown Manhattan. "Headphones are the new wall," he said, pointing to the covered ears of his neighbors.
Cubicle culture is already something of a punch line--how many ways can we find to annoy one another all day?--but lately the complaints are being heard by the right people, including managers and social scientists. Companies are redesigning offices, piping in special background noise to improve the acoustics and bringing in engineers to solve volume issues. "Sound masking" has become a buzz phrase.
Scientists, for their part, are measuring the unhappiness and the lower productivity of distracted workers. After surveying 65,000 people over the past decade in North America, Europe, Africa and Australia, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, report that more than half of office workers are dissatisfied with the level of "speech privacy," making it the leading complaint in offices everywhere.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Nearly one in four American adolescents may be on the verge of developing Type 2 diabetes or could already be diabetic, representing a sharp increase in the disease's prevalence among children ages 12 to 19 since a decade ago, when it was estimated that fewer than one in 10 were at risk for or had diabetes, according to a new study.
This worsening of the problem is worrying in light of recently published findings that the disease progresses more rapidly in children than in adults and is harder to treat, experts said.
The study, published online on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, analyzes data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which has a nationally representative sample. While it confirmed that teenage obesity and overweight rates had leveled off in recent years and that teenage rates of high blood pressure and high cholesterol had not changed greatly, it found that the percentage of teenagers testing positive for diabetes and prediabetes had nearly tripled to 23 percent in 2007-8 from 9 percent in 1999-2000.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Carson C. Chow deploys mathematics to solve the everyday problems of real life. As an investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, he tries to figure out why 1 in 3 Americans are obese.
... In 2004, while on the faculty of the math department at the University of Pittsburgh, mathematician and physicist Carson Chow married. His wife, a Johns Hopkins ophthalmologist, would not move. So he began looking for work in the Beltway area. Through the grapevine, Chow heard that the N.I.D.D.K., a branch of the National Institutes of Health, was building up its mathematics laboratory to study obesity. At the time, I knew almost nothing of obesity. "I didn't even know what a calorie was. I quickly read every scientific paper I could get my hands on."
He could see the facts on the epidemic were quite astounding. Between 1975 and 2005, the average weight of Americans had increased by about 20 pounds. Since the 1970s, the national obesity rate had jumped from around 20 percent to over 30 percent. Why was this happening?
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from BBC News Online
About 13,000 moths have been captured and recorded by citizen scientists in southern England in a project described as the largest of its kind. Researchers hope the data will help them understand how species will migrate in response to climate change. During the month-long survey, 87 different species were recorded.
The survey is one of the Earthwatch projects being highlighted at the organisation's annual lecture on Thursday evening in central London. ...During the course of a month in the summer of 2009, volunteers from the charity helped a team of researchers from the University of Oxford mark the wings of more than 13,000 moths.
The survey, known as a mark-release-recapture (MRR) experiment, was conducted in a well-researched woodland habitat in Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire. More than 650 moths, from 41 species, were recaptured.
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from CBS News
We've heard it all before: There's "good" cholesterol, called high-density lipoprotein (HDL), that provides protective benefits against heart attacks and then there's "bad" LDL cholesterol, which raises risk for heart problems in high levels.
A new study finds that HDL cholesterol might not boost your heart health as doctors once thought.
The study looked at the genes of about 170,000 individuals, looking for variations in DNA that earlier research shows naturally raise HDL levels in those who possess them. After looking for these 15 genetic variations--called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)--in the participants, the researchers discovered none of these variations actually reduced their risks for having a heart attack, compared with people who didn't have the variations.
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from Nature News
Most humans would struggle to last for much more than a minute under water without coming up for air, whereas some seals can manage more than an hour--but a microbial community living tens of metres beneath the Pacific Ocean floor can do even better.
Using so little oxygen that they barely qualify as life, the microbes, discovered by Hans Røy and his colleagues of the Centre for Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University in Denmark, have exceptionally low metabolic rates. And biomass turnover--the replacement of the building blocks essential to life--occurs only once every few hundred or even every few thousand years.
Microbes require oxygen to generate the energy to maintain an electric potential across their membrane and to keep their enzymes and DNA ticking over, so the researchers think that the sea-floor critters may be living at the absolute minimum energy requirement needed to subsist. And they must be doing something right: the community of microbial couch potatoes, described today in Science, is 86 million years old.
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from BBC News Online
Nasa's Kepler space telescope has provided fresh insight on the colossal explosions that can afflict some stars. These enormous releases of magnetic energy--known as superflares--could damage the atmosphere of a nearby orbiting planet, putting at risk any lifeforms that might reside there.
Fortunately, Kepler shows superflares to be much less frequent on slow-rotating stars like our Sun. The new observations are reported in the journal Nature.
The biggest recorded flare on the Sun was probably the "Carrington event" of 1 September 1859. Described by the English astronomer Richard Carrington, this outburst sent a surge of electromagnetic radiation and charged particles towards the Earth.
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from Nature News
By sequencing more people more thoroughly than ever before, researchers have affirmed that rare genetic variants--those carried by fewer than five people in a thousand--are widespread and likely to have an important role in human health.
Two studies published today in Science find that most human genetic variants are rare, and that rare variants are more likely than common ones to affect the structure or function of proteins, and therefore to have biological or medical consequences. The papers, along with another study published last week in Science, all conclude that humans carry such a high load of rare variants because the species experienced a population growth spurt that began a few millenia after the adoption of agriculture, which occurred about 10,000 years ago.
The three studies add to a growing body of knowledge that has profound implications for researchers investigating the genetic roots of disease.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
Drug resistance is the bane of cancer researchers and patients. But early results from a new clinical trial suggest a way to get around a tumor's defenses. By combining high doses of two new drugs against advanced melanoma, scientists were able to delay for months the cancer's ability to evade the therapy aimed at a tumor's molecular weak spot.
The trial is testing a so-called BRAF inhibitor, a widely heralded new type of melanoma drug. It targets a growth-spurring protein, BRAF, encoded by a mutation in the BRAF gene that occurs in about half of melanoma patients. Although the drug extends patients' lives--on average they live 14 to 15 months, versus 8 months on conventional therapy--their tumors eventually develop resistance and begin growing again. Often the tumors restore the BRAF growth pathway by turning on a downstream protein called MEK, suggesting that combining a MEK inhibitor and a BRAF inhibitor could stave off cancer growth longer.
That strategy now shows signs of working, according to data released today in advance of the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago, Illinois, from 1-5 June. In 77 patients who took a BRAF inhibitor and a MEK inhibitor made by GlaxoSmithKline, the drugs shrank tumors or delayed growth by 7.4 months on average--no longer than has been reported for the BRAF inhibitor alone. But the results were more encouraging for 24 patients who received the highest doses of the two drugs. Their tumors became stable or shrank and did not resume growing for 10.8 months on average.
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from NPR
Here it is, in a nutshell: The logic of science boiled down to one, essential idea. It comes from Richard Feynman, one of the great scientists of the 20th century, who wrote it on the blackboard during a class at Cornell in 1964.
Think about what he's saying. Science is our way of describing--as best we can--how the world works. The world, it is presumed, works perfectly well without us. Our thinking about it makes no important difference. It is out there, being the world. We are locked in, busy in our minds. And when our minds make a guess about what's happening out there, if we put our guess to the test, and we don't get the results we expect, as Feynman says, there can be only one conclusion: we're wrong.
The world knows. Our minds guess. In any contest between the two, The World Out There wins. It doesn't matter, Feynman tells the class, "how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is, if it disagrees with the experiment, it is wrong."
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's board of trustees has elected Provost L. Rafael Reif as president of the top-tier research university. He will replace neuroscientist Susan Hockfield, who was the first life scientist to lead MIT, on 2 July.
Reif, who has been an MIT faculty member since 1980, became the institute's chief academic officer in 2005. During his tenure, Reif presided over the development of Web projects that offer MIT and Harvard University courses online for free and led faculty efforts to recruit and retain minorities and women.
Faculty, staff, and students got a chance to welcome the president-elect and his family at a campus reception.
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from Science News
Throw water into a hot pan, and it will sizzle so fast that the drops actually levitate across the surface. Physicists have now taken this phenomenon, called the Leidenfrost effect, a step further: Using magnets, the scientists directed droplets of liquid oxygen to speed up, slow down and change course as they scoot across a sheet of glass.
Magnetic fields force the tiny blobs to travel in a mesmerizing dance, says David Quéré, a physicist at ESPCI Paris Institute of Technology in France. He and his colleagues describe the work in an upcoming Physical Review E.
Leidenfrost drops form when a drop hits a surface much hotter than the liquid's boiling temperature. The liquid evaporates so quickly that the droplet starts to float on its own vapor, cushioned from below. This insulating layer also reduces friction between the droplet and the surface. Given a push, a droplet 1 millimeter across can slide for several meters before finally slowing down and stopping.
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from BBC News Online
The gas leak from the Elgin platform in the North Sea has been stopped, according to oil firm Total. The company's platform was evacuated when the gas began leaking on Sunday 25 March. An attempt to stop the leak by pumping heavy mud into the well got under way on Tuesday.
Total said the operation had stopped the well leak within 12 hours and described the development as a "major turning point."
Yves-Louis Darricarrère, Total's president of exploration and production, said: "Our absolute priority was to stop the gas leak safely and as quickly as possible. We shall now fully complete the ongoing task and take into account the lessons learnt from this incident."
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from Nature News
For many psychologists, the clearest sign that their field was in trouble came, ironically, from a study about premonition. Daryl Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, showed student volunteers 48 words and then abruptly asked them to write down as many as they could remember. Next came a practice session: students were given a random subset of the test words and were asked to type them out. Bem found that some students were more likely to remember words in the test if they had later practised them. Effect preceded cause.
Bem published his findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology along with eight other experiments providing evidence for what he refers to as "psi," or psychic effects. There is, needless to say, no shortage of scientists sceptical about his claims. Three research teams independently tried to replicate the effect Bem had reported and, when they could not, they faced serious obstacles to publishing their results.
The episode served as a wake-up call. "The realization that some proportion of the findings in the literature simply might not replicate was brought home by the fact that there are more and more of these counterintuitive findings in the literature," says Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, a mathematical psychologist from the University of Amsterdam.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Sharine and Brian Kretchmar of Yukon, Okla., tried a number of medical treatments to conceive a second child. After a depressing series of failures, a doctor finally advised them to find a sperm donor.
For more than a year, the Kretchmars carefully researched sperm banks and donors. The donor they chose was a family man, a Christian like them, they were told. Most important, he had a clean bill of health. His sperm was stored at the New England Cryogenic Center in Boston, and according to the laboratory's Web site, all donors there were tested for various genetic conditions.
So the Kretchmars took a deep breath and jumped in. After artificial insemination, Mrs. Kretchmar became pregnant, and in April 2010 she gave birth to a boy they named Jaxon. But the baby failed to have a bowel movement in the first day or so after birth, a sign to doctors that something was wrong. Eventually Jaxon was rushed to surgery. Doctors returned with terrible news for the Kretchmars: Their baby appeared to have cystic fibrosis.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
For the last half-century, space flight has been the domain of the world's superpowers. All that is set to change as soon as Saturday when SpaceX, the private rocket company in Hawthorne, will attempt to launch a spaceship with cargo into orbit and three days later dock it with the International Space Station.
If successful, the mission could mean a major shift in the way the U.S. government handles space exploration. Instead of keeping space travel a closely guarded government function, NASA has already begun hiring privately funded start-up companies for spacecraft development and is moving toward eventually outsourcing NASA space missions.
The upcoming launch is "the first step in the handoff" to private industry, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "Everybody realizes the importance of this mission," he said. "Nobody will be rooting against SpaceX."
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
A thought-powered robotic arm could put independence within reach for
disabled patients, researchers report. In a new study, two people with
almost-complete body paralysis were able to reach and grasp small foam
balls and a thermos of coffee with a robotic arm using only their
brain signals to direct the motion. The result, a first for human
subjects, brings scientists a step closer to restoring mobility for
people with spinal cord injuries, lost limbs, and other conditions
that limit movement.
Mind-melding between animals and machines isn't new; researchers have
been attempting it since the 1970s. Past studies in brain-machine
interfaces have enabled monkeys to control robotic arms and paralyzed
people to control cursors on a screen.
But researchers didn't know if humans could control robotic arms to
perform finer, more complex tasks, such as maneuvering in three
dimensions and grasping a small object without moving it or knocking
it over.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
It seems obvious that how different living things in a community or ecological system bump up against one another would affect how they evolve. That would include everything from the mix of fish in a lake to the bacteria, fungi and insects that coexist in rainwater that pools in the roots at the base of a beech tree.
But, says Diane Lawrence, a graduate student in biology at Imperial College London, what actually happens when a number of species grow together over generations has rarely been examined in the laboratory, since most studies of adaptation involve one species alone, or perhaps two species.
She and Timothy G. Barraclough, a professor of evolutionary biology at the college, and colleagues collected five species of bacteria from beech tree water pools. They ended up using only four species, because one didn't grow well in the lab. They grew each strain in isolation and all four strains together, feeding the bacteria tea made with autumn beech leaves.
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from USA Today
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) - American consumers may soon be able to test themselves for the virus that causes AIDS in the privacy of their own homes, after a panel of experts on Tuesday recommended approval of the first rapid, over-the-counter HIV test.
The 17 members of the federal Food and Drug Administration advisory panel voted unanimously that the benefits of the OraQuick HIV test outweigh its potential risks for consumers. While the test, which uses a mouth swab to return a result in 20 minutes, does not appear to be as accurate as professionally-administered diagnostics, panelists said it could provide an important way to expand HIV testing.
The FDA will make its final decision on whether to approve the product later this year, weighing the opinion of the panel. Government officials estimate one-fifth, or about 240,000 people, of the 1.2 million HIV carriers in the U.S. are not aware they are infected. Testing is one of the chief means of slowing new infections, which have held steady at about 50,000 per year for two decades.
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from BBC News Online
Researchers in Japan have smashed the record for wireless data transmission in the terahertz band, an uncharted part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. The data rate is 20 times higher than the best commonly used wi-fi standard.
As consumers become ever more hungry for high data rates, standard lower-frequency bands have become crowded. The research, published in Electronics Letters, adds to the idea that this "T-ray" band could offer huge swathes of bandwidth for data transmission.
The band lies between the microwave and far-infrared regions of the spectrum, and is currently completely unregulated by telecommunications agencies. Despite the name, the band informally makes use of frequencies from about 300 gigahertz (300GHz or about 60 times higher than the current highest wi-fi standard) to about 3THz, 10 times higher again.
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from NPR
In the Star Wars movies, moisture farmers on dry planets like Tattoine use droids to help with the repetitive, back-breaking labor, but that's in a galaxy far, far away. There's no doubt that robots are cool, but are robots on farms far off in our future?
Actually, the future is already here, with highly advanced milking machines on some dairy farms and a fully automated robot tractor set to hit the market this fall.
To be sure, today's farmers already rely on advanced technology, like GPS systems to help with planting and automatic milkers. That makes the jump to robotics pretty easy, says Jeremy Brown, president of Jaybridge Robotics. His Massachusetts-based company makes software that helps turn regular machinery into robotic machinery for commercial use.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
As a first step toward predicting earthquakes, geophysicists are using computers to simulate the behavior of the world's most studied 25 kilometers of fault, the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas fault in central California. This storied bit of fault ruptures every 20 years on average in quakes of magnitude 6.0, causing minor damage in California cattle country and fascinating seismologists.
Now, researchers report that a relatively sophisticated model of the Parkfield segment can produce quakes that bear a striking resemblance to real ones. The simulations even suggest why the only official U.S. quake forecast ever made failed to get the timing of the latest Parkfield temblor right.
The trick to getting a computer to correctly forecast the time, place, and magnitude of a coming earthquake is giving a computer model's fault enough of the real fault's physical properties. To make their simulations reasonably realistic, geophysicists Sylvain Barbot, Nadia Lapusta, and Jean-Philippe Avouac of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena constructed a fault model based on both a century's worth of seismological theory and decades of Parkfield observations.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
A bird's call rings endlessly inside the adobe walls at Mission San Juan Capistrano as tourists wander through the courtyard--ablaze with flowers in full bloom--and a handful of fourth-graders snap pictures and take notes for class projects.
Hardly the sweet song of the nightingale, the sound is more like the croak of a distressed frog--or, by an expert's own description, a "rusty, squeaky door."
It's a last-ditch effort to lure back the cliff swallow, which put San Juan Capistrano on the map but has snubbed the mission in recent years. The mission has tried drawing them back with food. It has tried shelter. Now, it's trying seduction.
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from the San Francisco Chronicle
The search for distant planets in the Milky Way is now so sophisticated that astronomers are searching for unseen moons around the planets that the Kepler mission's scientists have discovered.
A team of astronomers hunting for those moons reports that in their quest they have unexpectedly detected a hidden planet--and probably two--by using a technique that promises to aid the search for smaller planets much like Earth.
The technique is already in use by the Kepler team at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, and was being used by astronomers at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and Harvard when they detected a curious kink in the orbit of one planet they were tracking in search of a possible "exo-moon."
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from Nature News
NASA's Dawn spacecraft won't end its 13-month-long visit to Vesta, the Solar System's second-biggest asteroid, until August, but researchers have now solidified the rock's reputation as an archetype for understanding planetary evolution. In six reports in the 11 May edition of Science, Dawn mission scientists have confirmed several long-held assumptions about Vesta, and detailed some puzzles about the roughly 520-kilometre-diameter body.
Dawn, which began orbiting Vesta last July and lowered itself to within 200 kilometres of the asteroid over the following months, has gathered strong evidence that Vesta is indeed the source of the 'Vestoid' family of asteroids as well as the howardite-eucrite-diogenite meteorite family, which accounts for 6% of meteorites.
The craft's observations reveal that the surface composition of Vesta matches that of the Vestoids, and that a collision that gouged a large crater at the asteroid's south pole could have blasted enough chunks into space to account for the Vestoids and the meteorites.
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from BBC News Online
Scientists in the US have developed a way to generate electricity using viruses. The researchers built a generator with a postage stamp-sized electrode and based on a small film of specially engineered viruses. When a finger tapped the electrode, the viruses converted the mechanical energy into electricity.
The research by a team in California has been published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Materials that can convert mechanical energy into electricity are known as "piezoelectric."
"More research is needed, but our work is a promising first step toward the development of personal power generators, actuators for use in nano-devices, and other devices based on viral electronics," said Dr Seung-Wuk Lee at the University of California, Berkeley.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
In a clinical trial that could lead to treatments that prevent Alzheimer's disease, people who are genetically guaranteed to suffer from the disease years from now--but who do not yet have any symptoms--will for the first time be given a drug intended to stop them from developing it, federal officials announced Tuesday.
Experts say the study will be one of only a very few ever conducted to test prevention treatments for any genetically predestined disease. In Alzheimer's research, the trial is unprecedented, "the first to focus on people who are cognitively normal but at very high risk for Alzheimer's disease," said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. Most of the study's participants will be drawn from an extended family of 5,000 people who live in Medellín, Colombia, and remote mountain villages outside that city.
The family is believed to have more members who suffer from Alzheimer's than any other in the world. Those who possess a specific genetic mutation begin showing cognitive impairment around age 45, and full-blown dementia around age 51. The 300 family members who participate in the initial phase of the trial will be years away from developing symptoms. Some will be as young as 30.
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