Making Science More Better For You on 12/17/07

Orale ese, this looks like the work of Dr. Don Diego de la Vega

Z-shaped incisions enhance some surgeries

STATE COLLEGE, Pa., Dec. 17 (UPI) -- U.S. medical scientists have developed a technique using a flexible video endoscope that might replace certain types of conventional surgery.

laparoscopic surgeries, including kidney removal and four other ...
Penn State researchers said the technique, successfully demonstrated in pigs, must still be subjected to human trials. The approach involves inserting flexible video endoscope through the mouth and into the stomach. At that point surgeons currently make a small straight incision in the stomach to gain access to the abdominal cavity and the organs requiring attention.

"Theoretically, by eliminating body wall wounds … and allowing some procedures to be done without general anesthesia, this method could leave a truly minimal surgical footprint and may even allow certain procedures to be done outside a traditional operating room," said Dr. Matthew Moyer of Penn State's Hershey Medical Center.

Instead of cutting straight through the stomach wall, the researchers guide the endoscope under the stomach wall's mucous membrane before exiting near the targeted organ. The endoscope essentially charts a Z-shaped path.

Moyer said the technique, results in significantly less bleeding and the Z-shaped tract effectively seals itself due to pressure created on the abdominal wall by normal breathing.

The research appeared in a recent issue of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy.

Imagine, a surgeon “so cunning and free, who makes the sign of the Z.”



Well, here’s his big club and here’s his bigger club

Ancient hunter reveals bag of tricks
According to ABC.net, archaeologists have found a bag of tools left near the wall of a residence more than 14,000 years ago by a prehistoric hunter-gatherer.

The tool set, one of the most complete and well preserved of its kind, provides an intriguing glimpse of the daily life of a prehistoric hunter-gatherer.

Dr Phillip Edwards, a senior lecturer in the archaeology program at Melbourne's La Trobe University, says the contents show the bag's owner was well equipped for obtaining meat and edible plants in the wild.

The Australian researcher says the bag includes a sickle for harvesting wild wheat or barley, a cluster of flint spearheads and a flint core for making more spearheads.

There were also some smooth stones, which he says may be slingshots, and a large stone that might have been used for striking flint pieces off the flint core.

A cluster of gazelle toe bones, used to make beads, was also in the bag, along with part of a second bone tool.

Edwards outlines the finds, attributed to the Natufian culture from a site called Wadi Hammeh 27 in Jordan, in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity.

He believes the tools were enclosed in a hide or wickerwork bag with a strap that would have been worn over the shoulder.

Such bags rarely had compartments, so the owner probably protected valuable items by wrapping them in rolls of bark or leather before placing them at the bottom of the bag.

The sickle, constructed out of two carefully grooved horn pieces, was fitted with colour-matched tan and grey bladelets.

Marvel

It would have been a marvel of form and function for its day and is the only tool of its kind ever linked to the Natufian people.

The rest of the items were designed to immobilise and then kill game such as aurochs, the ancestor of modern cattle, red deer, hares, storks, partridges, owls, tortoises and the major source of meat, gazelles.

"A lone hunter or a group of hunters might wait for gazelles to cross their path while waiting behind a low hide made of twigs and brush," Edwards says.

"They might have worked on making bone beads to wile away the time.

"Then a hunter could get off a shot while the animals were off their guard. A first shot might wound, but not kill, and then a hunter or a group of them will track the wounded animal."

But he says it is not known whether Natufian hunters "had the bow and arrow, or just spears".

The mountain gazelles targeted by the Middle Eastern hunters probably weighed 18-25 kilograms, so a strong adult "could carry an entire carcass over his shoulders without much trouble".

But the bag's owner was not necessarily a man; women are thought to have been in charge of plant gathering.

The tools, therefore, either belonged to a woman hunter-gatherer, or work activities were more gender-blind than thought during prehistoric times, Edwards suggests.

Archaeologist Dr Francois Valla, director of the French Research Center in Jerusalem, says similar ancient clusters of tools have been excavated, but this latest one is "the most spectacular of them all".

"The clustering of these items is due to a decision made by some Natufian individual," Valla says.

"As such, it is a rare testimony of the behaviour of a person 14,000 years ago."

Headline of the day
French president visits Disney with ex-model (CNN)
An inspirational leader, mes amis.


The DNA might be synthetic, but you can bet the money will be real
Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 17, 2007; A01

It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life's most extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA -- an extra gene or two to be inserted into corn plants, for example, to help the plants ward off insects or tolerate drought.

Now researchers are poised to cross a dramatic barrier: the creation of life forms driven by completely artificial DNA.

Scientists in Maryland have already built the world's first entirely handcrafted chromosome -- a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to "boot itself up," like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial -- and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.

"This raises a range of big questions about what nature is and what it could be," said Paul Rabinow, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley who studies science's effects on society. "Evolutionary processes are no longer seen as sacred or inviolable. People in labs are figuring them out so they can improve upon them for different purposes."

That unprecedented degree of control over creation raises more than philosophical questions, however. What kinds of organisms will scientists, terrorists and other creative individuals make? How will these self-replicating entities be contained? And who might end up owning the patent rights to the basic tools for synthesizing life?

Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core "operating system" for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology. That could stifle competition, they say, and place enormous power in a few people's hands.

"We're heading into an era where people will be writing DNA programs like the early days of computer programming, but who will own these programs?" asked Drew Endy, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At the core of synthetic biology's new ascendance are high-speed DNA synthesizers that can produce very long strands of genetic material from basic chemical building blocks: sugars, nitrogen-based compounds and phosphates.

Today a scientist can write a long genetic program on a computer just as a maestro might compose a musical score, then use a synthesizer to convert that digital code into actual DNA. Experiments with "natural" DNA indicate that when a faux chromosome gets plopped into a cell, it will be able to direct the destruction of the cell's old DNA and become its new "brain" -- telling the cell to start making a valuable chemical, for example, or a medicine or a toxin, or a bio-based gasoline substitute.

Unlike conventional biotechnology, in which scientists induce modest genetic changes in cells to make them serve industrial purposes, synthetic biology involves the large-scale rewriting of genetic codes to create metabolic machines with singular purposes.

"I see a cell as a chassis and power supply for the artificial systems we are putting together," said Tom Knight of MIT, who likes to compare the state of cell biology today to that of mechanical engineering in 1864. That is when the United States began to adopt standardized thread sizes for nuts and bolts, an advance that allowed the construction of complex devices from simple, interchangeable parts.

If biology is to morph into an engineering discipline, it is going to need similarly standardized parts, Knight said. So he and colleagues have started a collection of hundreds of interchangeable genetic components they call BioBricks, which students and others are already popping into cells like Lego pieces.

So far, synthetic biology is still semi-synthetic, involving single-cell organisms such as bacteria and yeast that have a blend of natural and synthetic DNA. The cells can reproduce, a defining trait of life. But in many cases that urge has been genetically suppressed, along with other "distracting" biological functions, to maximize productivity.

"Most cells go about life like we do, with the intention to make more of themselves after eating," said John Pierce, a vice president at DuPont in Wilmington, Del., a leader in the field. "But what we want them to do is make stuff we want."

J. Craig Venter, chief executive of Synthetic Genomics in Rockville, knows what he wants his cells to make: ethanol, hydrogen and other exotic fuels for vehicles, to fill a market that has been estimated to be worth $1 trillion.

In a big step toward that goal, Venter has now built the first fully artificial chromosome, a strand of DNA many times longer than anything made by others and laden with all the genetic components a microbe needs to get by.

Details of the process are under wraps until the work is published, probably early next year. But Venter has already shown that he can insert a "natural" chromosome into a cell and bring it to life. If a synthetic chromosome works the same way, as expected, the first living cells with fully artificial genomes could be growing in dishes by the end of 2008.

The plan is to mass-produce a plain genetic platform able to direct the basic functions of life, then attach custom-designed DNA modules that can compel cells to make synthetic fuels or other products.

It will be a challenge to cultivate fuel-spewing microbes, Venter acknowledged. Among other problems, he said, is that unless the fuel is constantly removed, "the bugs will basically pickle themselves."

But the hurdles are not insurmountable. LS9 Inc., a company in San Carlos, Calif., is already using E. coli bacteria that have been reprogrammed with synthetic DNA to produce a fuel alternative from a diet of corn syrup and sugar cane. So efficient are the bugs' synthetic metabolisms that LS9 predicts it will be able to sell the fuel for just $1.25 a gallon.

At a DuPont plant in Tennessee, other semi-synthetic bacteria are living on cornstarch and making the chemical 1,3 propanediol, or PDO. Millions of pounds of the stuff are being spun and woven into high-tech fabrics (DuPont's chief executive wears a pinstripe suit made of it), putting the bug-begotten chemical on track to become the first $1 billion biotech product that is not a pharmaceutical.

Engineers at DuPont studied blueprints of E. coli's metabolism and used synthetic DNA to help the bacteria make PDO far more efficiently than could have been done with ordinary genetic engineering.

"If you want to sell it at a dollar a gallon . . . you need every bit of efficiency you can muster," said DuPont's Pierce. "So we're running these bugs to their limits."

Yet another application is in medicine, where synthetic DNA is allowing bacteria and yeast to produce the malaria drug artemisinin far more efficiently than it is made in plants, its natural source.

Bugs such as these will seem quaint, scientists say, once fully synthetic organisms are brought on line to work 24/7 on a range of tasks, from industrial production to chemical cleanups. But the prospect of a flourishing synbio economy has many wondering who will own the valuable rights to that life.

In the past year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been flooded with aggressive synthetic-biology claims. Some of Venter's applications, in particular, "are breathtaking in their scope," said Knight. And with Venter's company openly hoping to develop "an operating system for biologically-based software," some fear it is seeking synthetic hegemony.

"We've asked our patent lawyers to be reasonable and not to be overreaching," Venter said. But competitors such as DuPont, he said, "have just blanketed the field with patent applications."

Safety concerns also loom large. Already a few scientists have made viruses from scratch. The pending ability to make bacteria -- which, unlike viruses, can live and reproduce in the environment outside of a living body -- raises new concerns about contamination, contagion and the potential for mischief.

"Ultimately synthetic biology means cheaper and widely accessible tools to build bioweapons, virulent pathogens and artificial organisms that could pose grave threats to people and the planet," concluded a recent report by the Ottawa-based ETC Group, one of dozens of advocacy groups that want a ban on releasing synthetic organisms pending wider societal debate and regulation.

"The danger is not just bio-terror but bio-error," the report says.

Many scientists say the threat has been overblown. Venter notes that his synthetic genomes are spiked with special genes that make the microbes dependent on a rare nutrient not available in nature. And Pierce, of DuPont, says the company's bugs are too spoiled to survive outdoors.

"They are designed to grow in a cosseted environment with very high food levels," Pierce said. "You throw this guy out on the ground, he just can't compete. He's toast."

"We've heard that before," said Jim Thomas, ETC Group's program manager, noting that genes engineered into crops have often found their way into other plants despite assurances to the contrary. "The fact is, you can build viruses, and soon bacteria, from downloaded instructions on the Internet," Thomas said. "Where's the governance and oversight?"

In fact, government controls on trade in dangerous microbes do not apply to the bits of DNA that can be used to create them. And while some industry groups have talked about policing the field themselves, the technology is quickly becoming so simple, experts say, that it will not be long before "bio hackers" working in garages will be downloading genetic programs and making them into novel life forms.

"The cat is out of the bag," said Jay Keasling, chief of synthetic biology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Andrew Light, an environmental ethicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said synthetic biology poses a conundrum because of its double-edged ability to both wreak biological havoc and perhaps wean civilization from dirty 20th-century technologies and petroleum-based fuels.

"For the environmental community, I think this is going to be a really hard choice," Light said.

Depending on how people adjust to the idea of man-made life -- and on how useful the first products prove to be -- the field could go either way, Light said.

"It could be that synthetic biology is going to be like cellphones: so overwhelming and ubiquitous that no one notices it anymore. Or it could be like abortion -- the kind of deep disagreement that will not go away."

The question, if the abortion model holds, is which side of the synthetic biology debate will get to call itself "pro-life."


“The plan is to mass-produce a plain genetic platform able to direct the basic functions of life, then attach custom-designed DNA modules that can compel cells to make synthetic fuels or other products.” Yeah, and a chance to make Bhopal look like a day at the beach.

Public relations pros rejoice: Spin inherent in the universe

Milky Way double haloes spin both ways

Thursday, 13 December 2007 Anna Salleh
ABC


For decades scientists have wondered how the Milky Way formed. Now the discovery that our galaxy has a double halo sheds new light on the debate

The halo of stars surrounding the Milky Way is made up of two different parts that spin in opposite directions, according to an international team of astronomers.

The findings could help settle a long-standing debate about how our galaxy and its halo formed.

The research could also help astronomers pin down much sought-after astronomical evidence of conditions just after the Big Bang.

PhD student Daniela Carollo, based at Australia's Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, and colleagues, report their findings today in the journal Nature.

The Milky Way halo is a sphere of ancient stars, invisible to the naked eye, that surrounds the familiar flattened spiral disc of the galaxy.

"We believe there are two main parts to the halo. It's not one simple halo," says Carollo's co-author and PhD supervisor Professor John Norris.

For decades astronomers have debated how the Milky Way formed after the Big Bang 10 billion years ago.

Some argue the halo was left behind as the centre of a cloud of gas collapsed to form the flat spiral disc that is so characteristic of our galaxy.

Others say the halo was formed from smaller galaxies outside the collapsing gas cloud that were pulled in by gravity.

The problem, says Norris, is that these theories were derived from a relatively small sample of stars.

Carollo, Norris and colleagues instead studied over 25,000 stars from a recent large survey of the Milky Way called SEGUE.

This allowed them to analyse how stars move in the Milky Way halo, and their chemical composition.

Inner and outer haloes

The researchers found inner and outer haloes, which rotate in opposite directions.

They found the inner halo is a flattened sphere rotating in the same direction as our sun but more slowly.

The Milky Way's spiral disc takes 200 million years to rotate, at around 800,000 kilometres per hour, while the inner halo rotates at around 80,000 kilometres per hour.

The inner halo also contains 40 times fewer heavy elements than the sun because it is much older and heavy metals like iron took billions of years to accumulate in the universe.

These facts are consistent with the halo forming as a result of a collapsing cloud of gas, says Norris.

The outer halo is a sphere that rotates at around 160,000 kilometres per hour in the opposite direction to the sun.

It has even fewer heavy metals than the inner halo and is similar to the composition of the smaller galaxies that surround the Milky Way.

Norris says these facts are consistent with the other theory that suggests the halo was creating from smaller galaxies that were attracted by the forming Milky Way.

Both theories true

Such evidence suggests the two competing theories about how the Milky Way was formed may not be competing after all.

"Each of them is probably true," says Norris.

He says while only time will tell whether this is the case, the "hard fact" is that there are two components of the halo.

"Even if what I've told you about how it might have come about is all nonsense, it's an important fact that people have to explain [in future theories of how the Milky Way formed]."

Norris says the discovery could help astronomers find stars that are low in heavy elements.

These chemically primitive stars give insight into the conditions present just after the Big Bang, he says. They are fossils of the early universe but are extremely rare.

Finding them remains a classic "needle in a haystack problem", says Norris. But discovering a chemically distinct outer halo, "gives us a much better way to search the haystack."



Other headline of the day
Pastor takes leave of absence over his online porn addiction
(Tampabay.com)
Oh my god…….