Headline of the day
Dr. Kevorkian says that "everyone should refuse to vote" (The Obscure Store)
So, how does a golden retriever say “I think Tarantino’s overrated”?
Scientists develop computer that can 'translate' a dog's bark
What would a dog say if it could talk? "Stranger", "fight", "walk", "alone", "ball" and "play", according to scientists who have developed a computer programme to translate dog barks.
The special programme analysed more than 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheepdogs in six different situations.
In a series of tests the team of scientists, from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary led by Csaba Molnár, discovered that a computer could recognise whether a dog was in a stranger, fight, walk, alone, ball or play scenario.
The barks were tape recorded and then digitized on a computer, which used software to study their differences.
The computer correctly identified the different situations 43 per cent of the time. Although it was not a high success rate it was far better than human recognition, the researchers said.
The computer was most accurate in identifying the "fight" and "stranger" contexts, and was least effective at matching the "play" bark.
The results appear in the journal Animal Cognition, and suggest that dogs have acoustically different barks depending on their emotional state.
The researchers also performed a second test, in which the computer identified individual dogs by their bark.
The software correctly identified the dogs 52 per cent of the time, again much better than the human result, suggesting there are individual differences in barks even though humans are not able to recognize them.
The team also plans to compare the barks of different breeds to discover what they have in common.
“Food Insecurity.” This is what you get when eggheads cannot pronounce the words “poor folks go hungry.”
Food Insecurity Associated With Developmental Risk In Children
ScienceDaily (Jan. 16, 2008) — Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Boston Medical Center (BMC), in collaboration with researchers from Arkansas, Maryland, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, have found that children living in households with food insecurity , are more likely to be at developmental risk during their first three years of life, compared to similar households that are not food insecure.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 16.7 percent of all U.S. households with children less than six years of age had food insecurity in 2005, reporting limited or uncertain availability of enough food for an active healthy life. In children aged less than three years, food insecurity has been associated with poor infant health, and the likelihood of hospitalization.
The Children's Sentinel Nutritional Assessment Program (C-SNAP) interviewed caregivers from low-income households with children aged four to 36 months at five pediatric clinic/emergency department sites in Boston, Little Rock, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Philadelphia. The target child from each household was weighed and weight-for-age score was calculated.
In the sample of 2,010 families, the researchers found 21 percent reported food insecurity. The results of the analyses revealed that children from food-insecure households, compared with those from food-secure households, were two thirds more likely to experience developmental risks. Household food insecurity, (with or without the report of family hunger), even in the presence of appropriate weight-for age, is an important risk factor for the health, development and behavior of children less than three years of age.
According to the researchers the clinical and public policy implications of this study are striking. "Providing nutritional and developmental interventions to young children and their families is a proactive step that might decrease the need for later, more extensive interventions for developmentally or behaviorally impaired children of school age," said lead author Ruth Rose-Jacobs, ScD, an assistant professor of pediatrics at BUSM and a research scientist at BMC.
"Interventions for food insecurity and developmental risk are available and overall have been successful. Linking families to the Food Stamp Program and/or the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children is an important intervention that should be recommended if indicated by risk surveillance or developmental screening," she adds.
This study appears in the January 2008 issue of the journal Pediatrics.
Adapted from materials provided by Boston University
A skull the size of a car? Subcompact or full size?
Giant rat that once roamed the earth
The fossilised skull of a rat the size of a car has been unearthed. The creature lived about four million years ago, weighed about a tonne and ate mostly soft vegetation. It was so big that it probably spent much of its life semi-submerged in water, like a hippo, to reduce the stresses caused by its size.
Palaeontologists found the skull in rock deposits in Uruguay. It is believed to date back two to four million years to a time when giant wildlife was commonplace in South America.
The rodent, Josephoartigasia monesi, was uncovered by Andrés Rinderknecht and Ernesto Blanco. It has been nicknamed Mighty Mouse and is thought to have been similar to the capybara and pacarana, much smaller creatures that are still found in South America. Capybaras are the biggest living rodents at just over 60kg fully grown, while pacaranas weigh 15kg. The common rat weighs about 300g.
J. monesi is thought to have weighed about a tonne and the biggest specimens could have been more than 2.5 tonnes — about the same as hippopotamuses, which range from 1.4 tonnes to 3.2 tonnes.
The rodent was estimated to be about 3m (10 feet) long and 1.5m tall. Its huge incisors were more than 30cm (12in) long, of which 10cm would have been exposed.
The incisors puzzled the researchers because they were much tougher than necessary for an animal that ate only soft plants. Dr Blanco suggested that they could have been used to fell trees like beavers do, or to fight off predators or courtship rivals.
“It probably ate aquatic plants and fruits, and the environment probably was a forest near fresh water,” Dr Blanco said. “But much work is needed to have a definitive picture. We are working on biomechanical determination of the bite force to better understand this point.”
It shared the Earth with sabre-tooth cats and giant predatory birds that did not fly but could run down prey at terrifying speeds. Its great bulk would have protected it from the killer birds, but its young would have been at risk.
The near-complete skull delighted palaeontologists studying giant South American rodents. Before, they had been limited to bone fragments.
Other teeth in the skull were too small to have allowed the animal to have chewed food well. Researchers concluded that it must have consumed soft vegetation, including fruit.
Rodents make up about 40 per cent of all mammals but the new South American species was still about twice the size of the next biggest, a South American species called Phoberomys.
The skull came from a type of rodent, known as dinomyids, that include today’s pacaranas and which during the Miocene and Pliocene periods, from about 2 to 23 million years ago, underwent an evolutionary explosion creating many species in modern-day Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Bolivia and Colombia.
Dr Rinderknecht, of the National Museum of Natural History and Anthropology in Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital, and Dr Blanco, of the Institute of Physics in Montevideo, reported their findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Because we can, that’s why. The benefit? Because we can.
Mice Given Bat-like Forelimbs Through Gene Switch
ScienceDaily (Jan. 16, 2008) — A research team led by Dr. Richard Behringer at MD Anderson Cancer Center reports that they have successfully switched the mouse Prx1 gene regulatory element with the Prx1 gene regulatory region from a bat -- and although these two species are separated by millions of years of evolution -- the resulting transgenic mice displayed abnormally long forelimbs.
While forelimb length is just one of several key morphological changes that occurred during the evolution of the bat wing, this unprecedented finding demonstrates that evolution can be driven by changes in the patterns of gene expression, rather than solely by changes in the genes, themselves.
Prx1 is a paired-box homeodomain transcription factor, with an established role in limb bone growth. Dr. Behringer and colleagues identified a conserved Prx1 enhancer domain, which regulates expression of Prx1 in the developing forelimb.
To study the evolutionary contribution of the Prx1 enhancer to the morphological differences between the bat and mouse forelimb, Dr. Behringer and colleagues replaced the endogenous mouse Prx1 enhancer with that of the bat. The transgenic mice showed higher expression levels of Prx1 in the perichondrium, increased chondrocyte proliferation, and ultimately, longer forelimbs.
Dr. Behringer describes the significance of his finding as such: "Darwin suggested that "successive slight modifications" would ultimately result in the evolution of diverse limb morphologies, like a hand, wing, or fin. The genetic change we engineered in mice may be one of those "slight modifications" to evolve a mammalian wing."
This research was published In the January 15th issue of Genes and Development.
Adapted from materials provided by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
By teasing these mice, we were able to show that humans get off on the thug tip.
Aggression As Rewarding As Sex, Food And Drugs, New Research Shows
ScienceDaily (Jan. 15, 2008) — New research from Vanderbilt University shows for the first time that the brain processes aggression as a reward - much like sex, food and drugs - offering insights into our propensity to fight and our fascination with violent sports like boxing and football.
“Aggression occurs among virtually all vertebrates and is necessary to get and keep important resources such as mates, territory and food,” Craig Kennedy, professor of special education and pediatrics, said. “We have found that the ‘reward pathway’ in the brain becomes engaged in response to an aggressive event and that dopamine is involved.”
“It is well known that dopamine is produced in response to rewarding stimuli such as food, sex and drugs of abuse,” Maria Couppis, who conducted the study as her doctoral thesis at Vanderbilt, said. “What we have now found is that it also serves as positive reinforcement for aggression.”
For the experiments, a pair of mice - one male, one female - was kept in one cage and five “intruder” mice were kept in a separate cage. The female mouse was temporarily removed, and an intruder mouse was introduced in its place, triggering an aggressive response by the “home” male mouse. Aggressive behavior included tail rattle, an aggressive sideways stance, boxing and biting.
The home mouse was then trained to poke a target with its nose to get the intruder to return, at which point it again behaved aggressively toward it. The home mouse consistently poked the trigger, which was presented once a day, indicating it experienced the aggressive encounter with the intruder as a reward.
The same home mice were then treated with a drug that suppressed their dopamine receptors. After this treatment, they decreased the frequency with which they instigated the intruder’s entry.
In a separate experiment, the mice were treated with the dopamine receptor suppressors again and their movements in an open cage were observed. They showed no significant changes in overall movement compared to times when they had not received the drugs. This was done to demonstrate that their decreased aggression in the previous experiment was not caused by overall lethargy in response to the drug, a problem that had confounded previous experiments.
The Vanderbilt experiments are the first to demonstrate a link between behavior and the activity of dopamine receptors in response to an aggressive event.
“We learned from these experiments that an individual will intentionally seek out an aggressive encounter solely because they experience a rewarding sensation from it,” Kennedy said. “This shows for the first time that aggression, on its own, is motivating, and that the well-known positive reinforcer dopamine plays a critical role.”
Kennedy is chair of Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development’s special education department, which is consistently ranked as the top special education program in the nation. He is also director of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research of Human Development’s Behavior Analysis Clinic.
Couppis conducted her research in affiliation with the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. She is also affiliated with the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development and the Vanderbilt Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience.
The research will be published online the week of Jan. 14 by the journal Psychopharmacology.
The research was supported by a Discovery Grant from Vanderbilt University.
Peeping tom checks out God’s cupboard. Find sugar, salt and lard.
Life's Ingredients Detected In Far Off Galaxy
ScienceDaily (Jan. 15, 2008) — Astronomers from Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, have detected for the first time the molecules methanimine and hydrogen cyanide -- two ingredients that build life-forming amino acids -- in a galaxy some 250 million light years away.
When combined with water, the molecules form glycene, the simplest amino acid and a building block of life on Earth.
The Arecibo astronomers focused on the distant galaxy Arp 220, an ultra-luminous starburst galaxy, because it forms new stars at a very high rate. They used the 305-meter, or 1,000-foot diameter, Arecibo radio telescope, the world's largest and most sensitive, to observe the galaxy at different frequencies. The observations, made in April 2007, were the first use of the 800 megahertz wide-band mode of the telescope's main spectrometer.
The molecules were found by searching for radio emission at specific frequencies. Each chemical substance has its own unique radio frequency, much like people have unique fingerprints.
"We weren't targeting any particular molecule, so we didn't know what we were going to find -- we just started searching, and what we found was incredibly exciting," said Tapasi Ghosh, an Arecibo astronomer.
"The fact that we can observe these substances at such a vast distance means that there are huge amounts of them in Arp 220," said Emmanuel Momjian, a former Arecibo astronomer, now at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, N.M. "It is indeed very intriguing to find that the ingredients of life appear in large quantities where new stars and planets are born."
The astronomy team, led by Arecibo astronomer Christopher Salter, announced the discovery Jan. 11 in a poster presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas. In addition to Salter, Momjian and Ghosh, the other researchers included Arecibo astronomers Robert Minchin and Mikael Lerner; Barbara Catinella, a former Arecibo astronomer now at the Max Plank Institute for Astrophysics in Germany; and Mayra Lebron, a former Arecibo astronomer now at the University of Puerto Rico.
The Arecibo Observatory is part of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, a national research center operated by Cornell for the National Science Foundation.
Adapted from materials provided by Cornell University.
Keeping mice regular
Probiotics in yogurt affect metabolism
LONDON, Jan. 16 (UPI) -- Probiotics, found in yogurt containing live bacteria, have a tangible effect on the metabolism, researchers in Britain and Switzerland found.
Researchers from Imperial College London and Nestle Research Center, in Lausanne, Switzerland, gave two different types of probiotic drink to mice that had been transplanted with human microbes found in the intestine.
The scientists compared the levels of different metabolites in the liver, blood, urine and feces, of mice who had received treatment with probiotics and those that had not.
The study, published in the journal Molecular Systems Biology, found treatment with probiotics had a whole range of biochemical effects, and that these effects differed markedly between the two probiotic strains -- Lactobacillus paracasei and Lactobacillus rhamnosus.
One of the many biochemical changes observed by the researchers was a change in how mice treated with probiotics metabolized bile acids that emulsify fats in the upper gut.
If probiotics can influence the way in which bile acids are metabolized they may change how much fat the body is able to absorb, the study said.
Study shows that just being in the world can make humans depressed. Pill companies cheer.
Nature And Nurture Are Both To Blame For Depression, Study Says
ScienceDaily (Jan. 16, 2008) — Depression is one of the most common forms of psychopathology. According to diathesis' stress theories of depression, genetic liability interacts with negative life experiences to cause depression.
Traditionally, most studies testing these theories have focused on only one component of the diathesis' stress model: either genetics or environment, but not their interaction. However, because of recent advances in genetics and genomics, researchers have begun using a new design that allows them to test the interaction of genetic and environmental liabilities -- the G x E design.
Studies suggest that the neurotransmitter dopamine may play a role in the risk for depression. Early negative interpersonal environments (i.e. rejecting parents) have also been implicated. So, University of Notre Dame psychologist, Gerald Haeffel, and colleagues investigated whether a gene associated with dopamine interacted with maternal parenting style to predict episodes of depression.
The researchers studied 177 male adolescents from a juvenile detention center in Russia. These participants were ideal candidates for the study because depression rates rise so dramatically during this period in life. The researchers used a structured diagnostic interview to diagnose depression and a questionnaire to assess aspects of maternal parental rearing (i.e. physical punishment, hostility, lack of respect for the child’s point of view, and unjustified criticism in front of others).
The results are fascinating. While neither factor alone predicted depression, the boys with especially rejecting mothers, and a specific form of the dopamine transporter gene were at higher risk for major depression and suicidal ideation. This study, which appears in the January issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, is among the first to support the role of a dopamine related gene in the onset of depression.
By the year 2020, depression is projected to be the 2nd leading cause of disability worldwide. Identifying factors that contribute to risk and resilience for depression is vital to our society. The results suggest that using psychosocial interventions to increase dopamine activity in the brain, helping patients focus on identifying and pursuing new goals and rewards could prove beneficial to lowering depression rates.
Adapted from materials provided by Association for Psychological Science.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 01/15/08
Headlines of the day
Court Won't Accept Chimp As Person (breitbart)
Hilton suspected in 3rd disappearance (CNN/WSOC)
No. Not that one. However, it is a fine example of how a name can sell a story.
Frat gets in trouble for hiring midget wrestling company (The obscure Store)
Precocious little devils. We wonder what prom night was like.
Dinosaurs 'grew fast, bred young'
By Helen Briggs
Science reporter, BBC News
Dinosaurs bred as early as age eight, long before they reached adult size, fossil evidence suggests.
Although they were descended from reptiles, and evolved into birds, dinosaurs grew fast and bred young, much like the mammals of today.
Researchers at the University of California found hallmark "egg-making" tissue in two juvenile females.
They say early sexual maturity was needed for survival, so females could lay eggs before becoming prey.
Calcium-rich medullary bone, which, in birds, is used to produce egg shells, was found inside the fossilised shin-bones of two specimens: the meat-eating Allosaurus and the plant-eater Tenontosaurus.
Sarah Werning and Andrew Lee of the University of California (UC), Berkeley, deduced from growth rings inside the bone that the two females were aged eight and 10, very young for dinosaurs, which lived to about 30.
Medullary bone has previously been found in a female Tyrannosaurus rex, and the scientists confirmed this finding, putting her age at 18.
"We were lucky to find these female fossils," said Sarah Werning. "Medullary bone is only around for three to four weeks in females who are reproductively mature, so you'd have to cut up a lot of dinosaur bones to have a good chance of finding this."
Growth clues
Studies of the tell-tale growth rings in dinosaur bones have revealed much about the way they grew.
Dinosaurs grew faster than present-day reptiles and had only a limited lifespan as adults before they fell victim to predator attack.
Like many groups, Tenontosaurus, which lived in North America during the Early Cretaceous period, 125 to 105 million years ago, would have had to reproduce young to ensure survival of the species.
Egg-laying tissue and growth rings were found in bone
More details
"These were prey dinosaurs, so they were probably taken out when really young and small, or when old," Sarah Werning explained. "So, if you don't reproduce early, you lose your chance."
The discovery adds weight to the idea that dinosaurs were more like birds than reptiles. It also suggests that the reproductive strategy of modern birds is an ancient one, dating back some 200 million years, to when dinosaurs first evolved.
"This shows us beyond any doubt how fast dinosaurs grow," said Kevin Padian, a professor at UC Berkeley's Museum of Palaeontology, who was the students' advisor.
"They're growing as fast as big birds and big mammals," he told the BBC.
"To do this you can't have the metabolism of a crocodile; you need to have the metabolism more of a bird or a mammal."
"This shows us beyond any doubt how fast dinosaurs grow," said Kevin Padian, a professor at UC Berkeley's Museum of Palaeontology, who was the students' advisor. Grow? Present tense? Is there something he’s not sharing with us? It’s like John Derek said in “Knock on Any Door,” “Grow fast, breed young and leave a nice pile of bones in a convenient location for a grad student to find.”
We think we can help you live longer. The bad news is that you are now yeast.
Life Expectancy Of Yeast Extended To 800 In Yeast Years, No Apparent Side Effects
ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2008) — Biologists have created baker's yeast capable of living to 800 in yeast years without apparent side effects.
The basic but important discovery, achieved through a combination of dietary and genetic changes, brings science closer to controlling the survival and health of the unit of all living systems: the cell.
"We're setting the foundation for reprogramming healthy life," said study leader Valter Longo of the University of Southern California.
The study is scheduled to appear in the Jan. 25 issue of the journal PLoS Genetics. A companion study, showing that the same genetic changes in yeast reverse the course of an accelerated aging syndrome, appears in the Jan. 14 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology.
Longo's group put baker's yeast on a calorie-restricted diet and knocked out two genes, RAS2 and SCH9, that promote aging in yeast and cancer in humans.
"We got a 10-fold life span extension that is, I think, the longest one that has ever been achieved in any organism," Longo said. In 2005, the same research group reported a five-fold life span extension in the journal Cell. Normal yeast organisms live about a week.
"I would say 10-fold is pretty significant," said Anna McCormick, chief of the genetics and cell biology branch at the National Institute on Aging and Longo's program officer.
The NIA funds such research in the hope of extending healthy life span in humans through the development of drugs that mimic the life-prolonging techniques used by Longo and others, McCormick added.
Baker's yeast is one of the most studied and best understood organisms at the molecular and genetic level. Remarkably in light of its simplicity, yeast has led to the discovery of some of the most important genes and pathways regulating aging and disease in mice and other mammals.
A study recently published in Cell (Issue 130, pages 247-258, 2007) reported that a mouse with a gene mutation first identified by Longo's group lived 30 percent longer than normal and also was protected against heart and bone diseases without apparent side effects.
Longo's group next plans to further investigate life span extension in mice, and also is studying a human population in Ecuador with mutations analogous to those described in yeast.
"People with two copies of the mutations have very small stature and other defects," he said. "We are now identifying the relatives with only one copy of the mutation, who are apparently normal. We hope that they will show a reduced incidence of diseases and an extended life span."
Longo cautioned that, as in the Ecuador case, longevity mutations tend to come with severe growth deficits and other health problems. Finding drugs to extend the human life span without side effects will not be easy, he said.
An easier goal, Longo added, would be to use the knowledge gained about life span "in a fairly limited way, to reprogram disease prevention."
In the study appearing in the Jan. 14 Journal of Cell Biology, Longo's group developed a yeast model for human Werner/Bloom syndromes, incurable diseases that prematurely age, increase cancer incidence and eventually kill their victims.
The same mutations that play a central role in the 10-fold life span extension reversed the premature aging process, the researchers found.
Longo suggested that although a very simple system was used in his studies, existing drugs targeting analogous anti-aging pathways in humans -- specifically the pathway involving Insulin Growth Factor, or IGF-1 -- should be considered for testing on Werner/Bloom patients.
"Maybe it will do nothing, but having nothing else, I think it's certainly a good thing to try," Longo said.
In the PLOS Genetics study, Longo's group identified a major overlap between the genes previously implicated in life span regulation for yeast and mammals and those involved in life span extension under calorie restriction.
"We identified three transcription factors ... that are very important for the effect of calorie restriction, but at the same time, we also showed that it's not enough because even without these transcription factors, calorie restriction can still extend life span a little bit," Longo said.
"So that means that we've identified a lot of the key players in the calorie restriction effect but not all of them."
Calorie restriction -- in practice, controlled starvation -- has long been shown to reduce disease and extend life span in species from yeast to mice.
Scientists believe that a nutrient shortage kicks organisms into a maintenance mode, enabling them to re-direct energy from growth and reproduction into anti-aging systems until the time they can feed and breed again.
Calorie restriction is now being tested by other researchers on primates and even humans, Longo said.
Longo has been studying aging at the cellular level for 15 years and has published articles in the nation's leading scientific journals. His laboratory developed a simple and inexpensive method for measuring the true chronological life span of yeast. Previously, scientists used the number of a yeast cell's offspring as a proxy for its age.
The so-called replicative life span technique remains in use, and the NIA's McCormick said that Longo's method was controversial at first. However, she said, the scientific community now appears to accept its usefulness. She said Longo's "stationary phase" method is particularly applicable to studies of cells that do not divide for most of their life, such as those in the brain or in muscle.
"Stationary phase I think of as normal cell survival," McCormick said. She added that NIA funds both stationary phase and replicative life span research.
The studies were funded by NIA (part of the National Institutes on Health) and the American Federation for Aging Research.
Yeast years? Does this have anything to do with the Mayan calender?
Does Vincent Price know about this?
Beating Heart Created In Laboratory: Method May Revolutionize How Organ Tissues Are Developed
ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2008) — University of Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory.
By using a process called whole organ decellularization, scientists from the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair grew functioning heart tissue by taking dead rat and pig hearts and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells.
"The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells," said Doris Taylor, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair, Medtronic Bakken professor of medicine and physiology, and principal investigator of the research.
Nearly 5 million people live with heart failure, and about 550,000 new cases are diagnosed each year in the United States. Approximately 50,000 United States patients die annually waiting for a donor heart.
While there have been advances in generating heart tissue in the lab, creating an entire 3-dimensional scaffold that mimics the complex cardiac architecture and intricacies, has always been a mystery, Taylor said.
It seems decellularization may be a solution -- essentially using nature's platform to create a bioartifical heart, she said.
Decellularization is the process of removing all of the cells from an organ -- in this case an animal cadaver heart -- leaving only the extracellular matrix, the framework between the cells, intact.
After successfully removing all of the cells from both rat and pig hearts, researchers injected them with a mixture of progenitor cells that came from neonatal or newborn rat hearts and placed the structure in a sterile setting in the lab to grow.
The results were very promising, Taylor said. Four days after seeding the decellularized heart scaffolds with the heart cells, contractions were observed. Eight days later, the hearts were pumping.
"Take a section of this 'new heart' and slice it, and cells are back in there," Taylor said. "The cells have many of the markers we associate with the heart and seem to know how to behave like heart tissue."
"We just took nature's own building blocks to build a new organ," said Harald C. Ott, M.D., co-investigator of the study and a former research associate in the center for cardiovascular repair, who now works at Massachusetts General Hospital. "When we saw the first contractions we were speechless."
Researchers are optimistic this discovery could help increase the donor organ pool.
In general, the supply of donor organs is limited and once a heart is transplanted, individuals face life-long immunosuppression, often trading heart failure for high blood pressure, diabetes, and kidney failure, Taylor said.
Researchers hope that the decellularization process could be used to make new donor organs. Because a new heart could be filled with the recipient's cells, researchers hypothesize it's much less likely to be rejected by the body. And once placed in the recipient, in theory the heart would be nourished, regulated, and regenerated similar to the heart that it replaced.
"We used immature heart cells in this version, as a proof of concept. We pretty much figured heart cells in a heart matrix had to work," Taylor said. "Going forward, our goal is to use a patient's stem cells to build a new heart."
Although heart repair was the first goal during research, decellularization shows promising potential to change how scientists think about engineering organs, Taylor said. "It opens a door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas -- you name it and we hope we can make it," she said.
Researchers of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair team were assisted in their study by researchers from the University of Minnesota Department of Biomedical Engineering, who helped analyze data.
The research will be published online in the January 13 issue of Nature Medicine. The study was funded by the Medtronic Foundation Endowment and a faculty research development grant from the University of Minnesota Academic Health Center.
We know when we’ve had enough. It’s when there’s nothing left.
Overweight People May Not Know When They've Had Enough
ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2008) — Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have found new clues to why some people overeat and gain weight while others don't. Examining how the human brain responds to "satiety" messages delivered when the stomach is in various stages of fullness, the scientists have identified brain circuits that motivate the desire to overeat. Treatments that target these circuits may prove useful in controlling chronic overeating, according to the authors.
"By simulating feelings of fullness with an expandable balloon we saw the activation of different areas of the brain in normal weight and overweight people," said lead author Gene-Jack Wang of Brookhaven Lab's Center for Translational Neuroimaging. The overweight subjects had less activation in parts of the brain that signal satiety in normal weight subjects. The overweight subjects were also less likely than normal weight subjects to report satiety when their stomachs were moderately full. "These findings provide new evidence for why some people will continue to eat despite having eaten a moderate-size meal," said Wang.
Wang and colleagues studied the brain metabolism of 18 individuals with body mass indices (BMI) ranging from 20 (low/normal weight) to 29 (extremely overweight/borderline obese). Each study participant swallowed a balloon, which was then filled with water, emptied, and refilled again at volumes that varied between 50 and 70 percent. During this process, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the subjects' brains. Subjects were also asked throughout the study to describe their feelings of fullness. The higher their BMI, the lower their likelihood of saying they felt "full" when the balloon was inflated 70 percent.
One notable region of the brain - the left posterior amygdala - was activated less in the high-BMI subjects, while it was activated more in their thinner counterparts. This activation was turned "on" when study subjects reported feeling full. Subjects who had the highest scores on self-reports of hunger had the least activation in the left posterior amygdala.
"This study provides the first evidence of the connection of the left amygdala and feelings of hunger during stomach fullness, demonstrating that activation of this brain region suppresses hunger," said Wang. "Our findings indicate a potential direction for treatment strategies - be they behavioral, medical or surgical -- targeting this brain region."
The scientists also looked at a range of hormones that regulate the digestive system, to see whether they played a role in responding to feelings of fullness. Ghrelin, a hormone known to stimulate the appetite and cause short-term satiety, showed the most relevance. Researchers found that individuals who had greater increases in ghrelin levels after their stomachs were moderately full also had greater activation of the left amygdala. "This indicates that ghrelin may control the reaction of the amygdala to satiety signals sent by the stomach," said Wang.
The study is published online and will appear in the February 15, 2008 issue of NeuroImage.
Replaced by the younger, thinner one. Sound familiar?
Older Arctic Sea Ice Replaced By Young, Thin Ice
ScienceDaily (Jan. 13, 2008) — A new study by University of Colorado at Boulder researchers indicates older, multi-year sea ice in the Arctic is giving way to younger, thinner ice, making it more susceptible to record summer sea-ice lows like the one that occurred in 2007.
The team used satellite data going back to 1982 to reconstruct past Arctic sea ice conditions, concluding there has been a nearly complete loss of the oldest, thickest ice and that 58 percent of the remaining perennial ice is thin and only 2-to-3 years old, said the lead study author, Research Professor James Maslanik of CU-Boulder's Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research. In the mid-1980s, only 35 percent of the sea ice was that young and that thin according to the study, the first to quantify the magnitude of the Arctic sea ice retreat using data on the age of the ice and its thickness, he said.
"This thinner, younger ice makes the Arctic much more susceptible to rapid melt," Maslanik said. "Our concern is that if the Arctic continues to get kicked hard enough toward one physical state, it becomes increasingly difficult to reestablish the sea ice conditions of 20 or 30 years ago."
A September 2007 study by CU-Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center indicated last year's average sea ice extent minimum was the lowest on record, shattering the previous September 2005 record by 23 percent. The minimum extent was lower than the previous record by about 1 million square miles -- an area about the size of Alaska and Texas combined.
The new study by Maslanik and his colleagues appears in the Jan. 10 issue of Geophysical Research Letters. Co-authors include CCAR's Charles Fowler, Sheldon Drobot and William Emery, as well as Julienne Stroeve from CU-Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and Jay Zwally and Donghui Yi from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The portion of ice more than five years old within the multi-year Arctic icepack decreased from 31 percent in 1988 to 10 percent in 2007, according to the study. Ice 7 years or older, which made up 21 percent of the multi-year Arctic ice cover in 1988, made up only 5 percent in 2007, the research team reported.
The researchers used passive microwave, visible infrared radar and laser altimeter satellite data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as ocean buoys to measure and track sections of sea ice.
The team developed "signatures" of individual ice sections roughly 15 miles square using their thickness, roughness, snow depth and ridge characteristics, tracking them over the seasons and years as they moved around the Arctic via winds and currents, Emery said. "We followed the ice in sequential images and track it back to where it had been previously, which allowed us to infer the relative ages of the ice sections."
The replacement of older, thicker Arctic ice by younger, thinner ice, combined with the effects of warming, unusual atmospheric circulation patterns and increased melting from solar radiation absorbed by open waters in 2007 all have contributed to the phenomenon, said Drobot. "These conditions are setting the Arctic up for additional, significant melting because of the positive feedback loop that plays back on itself."
"Taken together, these changes suggest that the Arctic Ocean is approaching a point where a return to pre-1990s ice conditions becomes increasingly difficult and where large, abrupt changes in summer ice cover as in 2007 may become the norm," the research team wrote in Geophysical Research Letters.
Court Won't Accept Chimp As Person (breitbart)
Hilton suspected in 3rd disappearance (CNN/WSOC)
No. Not that one. However, it is a fine example of how a name can sell a story.
Frat gets in trouble for hiring midget wrestling company (The obscure Store)
Precocious little devils. We wonder what prom night was like.
Dinosaurs 'grew fast, bred young'
By Helen Briggs
Science reporter, BBC News
Dinosaurs bred as early as age eight, long before they reached adult size, fossil evidence suggests.
Although they were descended from reptiles, and evolved into birds, dinosaurs grew fast and bred young, much like the mammals of today.
Researchers at the University of California found hallmark "egg-making" tissue in two juvenile females.
They say early sexual maturity was needed for survival, so females could lay eggs before becoming prey.
Calcium-rich medullary bone, which, in birds, is used to produce egg shells, was found inside the fossilised shin-bones of two specimens: the meat-eating Allosaurus and the plant-eater Tenontosaurus.
Sarah Werning and Andrew Lee of the University of California (UC), Berkeley, deduced from growth rings inside the bone that the two females were aged eight and 10, very young for dinosaurs, which lived to about 30.
Medullary bone has previously been found in a female Tyrannosaurus rex, and the scientists confirmed this finding, putting her age at 18.
"We were lucky to find these female fossils," said Sarah Werning. "Medullary bone is only around for three to four weeks in females who are reproductively mature, so you'd have to cut up a lot of dinosaur bones to have a good chance of finding this."
Growth clues
Studies of the tell-tale growth rings in dinosaur bones have revealed much about the way they grew.
Dinosaurs grew faster than present-day reptiles and had only a limited lifespan as adults before they fell victim to predator attack.
Like many groups, Tenontosaurus, which lived in North America during the Early Cretaceous period, 125 to 105 million years ago, would have had to reproduce young to ensure survival of the species.
Egg-laying tissue and growth rings were found in bone
More details
"These were prey dinosaurs, so they were probably taken out when really young and small, or when old," Sarah Werning explained. "So, if you don't reproduce early, you lose your chance."
The discovery adds weight to the idea that dinosaurs were more like birds than reptiles. It also suggests that the reproductive strategy of modern birds is an ancient one, dating back some 200 million years, to when dinosaurs first evolved.
"This shows us beyond any doubt how fast dinosaurs grow," said Kevin Padian, a professor at UC Berkeley's Museum of Palaeontology, who was the students' advisor.
"They're growing as fast as big birds and big mammals," he told the BBC.
"To do this you can't have the metabolism of a crocodile; you need to have the metabolism more of a bird or a mammal."
"This shows us beyond any doubt how fast dinosaurs grow," said Kevin Padian, a professor at UC Berkeley's Museum of Palaeontology, who was the students' advisor. Grow? Present tense? Is there something he’s not sharing with us? It’s like John Derek said in “Knock on Any Door,” “Grow fast, breed young and leave a nice pile of bones in a convenient location for a grad student to find.”
We think we can help you live longer. The bad news is that you are now yeast.
Life Expectancy Of Yeast Extended To 800 In Yeast Years, No Apparent Side Effects
ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2008) — Biologists have created baker's yeast capable of living to 800 in yeast years without apparent side effects.
The basic but important discovery, achieved through a combination of dietary and genetic changes, brings science closer to controlling the survival and health of the unit of all living systems: the cell.
"We're setting the foundation for reprogramming healthy life," said study leader Valter Longo of the University of Southern California.
The study is scheduled to appear in the Jan. 25 issue of the journal PLoS Genetics. A companion study, showing that the same genetic changes in yeast reverse the course of an accelerated aging syndrome, appears in the Jan. 14 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology.
Longo's group put baker's yeast on a calorie-restricted diet and knocked out two genes, RAS2 and SCH9, that promote aging in yeast and cancer in humans.
"We got a 10-fold life span extension that is, I think, the longest one that has ever been achieved in any organism," Longo said. In 2005, the same research group reported a five-fold life span extension in the journal Cell. Normal yeast organisms live about a week.
"I would say 10-fold is pretty significant," said Anna McCormick, chief of the genetics and cell biology branch at the National Institute on Aging and Longo's program officer.
The NIA funds such research in the hope of extending healthy life span in humans through the development of drugs that mimic the life-prolonging techniques used by Longo and others, McCormick added.
Baker's yeast is one of the most studied and best understood organisms at the molecular and genetic level. Remarkably in light of its simplicity, yeast has led to the discovery of some of the most important genes and pathways regulating aging and disease in mice and other mammals.
A study recently published in Cell (Issue 130, pages 247-258, 2007) reported that a mouse with a gene mutation first identified by Longo's group lived 30 percent longer than normal and also was protected against heart and bone diseases without apparent side effects.
Longo's group next plans to further investigate life span extension in mice, and also is studying a human population in Ecuador with mutations analogous to those described in yeast.
"People with two copies of the mutations have very small stature and other defects," he said. "We are now identifying the relatives with only one copy of the mutation, who are apparently normal. We hope that they will show a reduced incidence of diseases and an extended life span."
Longo cautioned that, as in the Ecuador case, longevity mutations tend to come with severe growth deficits and other health problems. Finding drugs to extend the human life span without side effects will not be easy, he said.
An easier goal, Longo added, would be to use the knowledge gained about life span "in a fairly limited way, to reprogram disease prevention."
In the study appearing in the Jan. 14 Journal of Cell Biology, Longo's group developed a yeast model for human Werner/Bloom syndromes, incurable diseases that prematurely age, increase cancer incidence and eventually kill their victims.
The same mutations that play a central role in the 10-fold life span extension reversed the premature aging process, the researchers found.
Longo suggested that although a very simple system was used in his studies, existing drugs targeting analogous anti-aging pathways in humans -- specifically the pathway involving Insulin Growth Factor, or IGF-1 -- should be considered for testing on Werner/Bloom patients.
"Maybe it will do nothing, but having nothing else, I think it's certainly a good thing to try," Longo said.
In the PLOS Genetics study, Longo's group identified a major overlap between the genes previously implicated in life span regulation for yeast and mammals and those involved in life span extension under calorie restriction.
"We identified three transcription factors ... that are very important for the effect of calorie restriction, but at the same time, we also showed that it's not enough because even without these transcription factors, calorie restriction can still extend life span a little bit," Longo said.
"So that means that we've identified a lot of the key players in the calorie restriction effect but not all of them."
Calorie restriction -- in practice, controlled starvation -- has long been shown to reduce disease and extend life span in species from yeast to mice.
Scientists believe that a nutrient shortage kicks organisms into a maintenance mode, enabling them to re-direct energy from growth and reproduction into anti-aging systems until the time they can feed and breed again.
Calorie restriction is now being tested by other researchers on primates and even humans, Longo said.
Longo has been studying aging at the cellular level for 15 years and has published articles in the nation's leading scientific journals. His laboratory developed a simple and inexpensive method for measuring the true chronological life span of yeast. Previously, scientists used the number of a yeast cell's offspring as a proxy for its age.
The so-called replicative life span technique remains in use, and the NIA's McCormick said that Longo's method was controversial at first. However, she said, the scientific community now appears to accept its usefulness. She said Longo's "stationary phase" method is particularly applicable to studies of cells that do not divide for most of their life, such as those in the brain or in muscle.
"Stationary phase I think of as normal cell survival," McCormick said. She added that NIA funds both stationary phase and replicative life span research.
The studies were funded by NIA (part of the National Institutes on Health) and the American Federation for Aging Research.
Yeast years? Does this have anything to do with the Mayan calender?
Does Vincent Price know about this?
Beating Heart Created In Laboratory: Method May Revolutionize How Organ Tissues Are Developed
ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2008) — University of Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory.
By using a process called whole organ decellularization, scientists from the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair grew functioning heart tissue by taking dead rat and pig hearts and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells.
"The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells," said Doris Taylor, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair, Medtronic Bakken professor of medicine and physiology, and principal investigator of the research.
Nearly 5 million people live with heart failure, and about 550,000 new cases are diagnosed each year in the United States. Approximately 50,000 United States patients die annually waiting for a donor heart.
While there have been advances in generating heart tissue in the lab, creating an entire 3-dimensional scaffold that mimics the complex cardiac architecture and intricacies, has always been a mystery, Taylor said.
It seems decellularization may be a solution -- essentially using nature's platform to create a bioartifical heart, she said.
Decellularization is the process of removing all of the cells from an organ -- in this case an animal cadaver heart -- leaving only the extracellular matrix, the framework between the cells, intact.
After successfully removing all of the cells from both rat and pig hearts, researchers injected them with a mixture of progenitor cells that came from neonatal or newborn rat hearts and placed the structure in a sterile setting in the lab to grow.
The results were very promising, Taylor said. Four days after seeding the decellularized heart scaffolds with the heart cells, contractions were observed. Eight days later, the hearts were pumping.
"Take a section of this 'new heart' and slice it, and cells are back in there," Taylor said. "The cells have many of the markers we associate with the heart and seem to know how to behave like heart tissue."
"We just took nature's own building blocks to build a new organ," said Harald C. Ott, M.D., co-investigator of the study and a former research associate in the center for cardiovascular repair, who now works at Massachusetts General Hospital. "When we saw the first contractions we were speechless."
Researchers are optimistic this discovery could help increase the donor organ pool.
In general, the supply of donor organs is limited and once a heart is transplanted, individuals face life-long immunosuppression, often trading heart failure for high blood pressure, diabetes, and kidney failure, Taylor said.
Researchers hope that the decellularization process could be used to make new donor organs. Because a new heart could be filled with the recipient's cells, researchers hypothesize it's much less likely to be rejected by the body. And once placed in the recipient, in theory the heart would be nourished, regulated, and regenerated similar to the heart that it replaced.
"We used immature heart cells in this version, as a proof of concept. We pretty much figured heart cells in a heart matrix had to work," Taylor said. "Going forward, our goal is to use a patient's stem cells to build a new heart."
Although heart repair was the first goal during research, decellularization shows promising potential to change how scientists think about engineering organs, Taylor said. "It opens a door to this notion that you can make any organ: kidney, liver, lung, pancreas -- you name it and we hope we can make it," she said.
Researchers of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair team were assisted in their study by researchers from the University of Minnesota Department of Biomedical Engineering, who helped analyze data.
The research will be published online in the January 13 issue of Nature Medicine. The study was funded by the Medtronic Foundation Endowment and a faculty research development grant from the University of Minnesota Academic Health Center.
We know when we’ve had enough. It’s when there’s nothing left.
Overweight People May Not Know When They've Had Enough
ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2008) — Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have found new clues to why some people overeat and gain weight while others don't. Examining how the human brain responds to "satiety" messages delivered when the stomach is in various stages of fullness, the scientists have identified brain circuits that motivate the desire to overeat. Treatments that target these circuits may prove useful in controlling chronic overeating, according to the authors.
"By simulating feelings of fullness with an expandable balloon we saw the activation of different areas of the brain in normal weight and overweight people," said lead author Gene-Jack Wang of Brookhaven Lab's Center for Translational Neuroimaging. The overweight subjects had less activation in parts of the brain that signal satiety in normal weight subjects. The overweight subjects were also less likely than normal weight subjects to report satiety when their stomachs were moderately full. "These findings provide new evidence for why some people will continue to eat despite having eaten a moderate-size meal," said Wang.
Wang and colleagues studied the brain metabolism of 18 individuals with body mass indices (BMI) ranging from 20 (low/normal weight) to 29 (extremely overweight/borderline obese). Each study participant swallowed a balloon, which was then filled with water, emptied, and refilled again at volumes that varied between 50 and 70 percent. During this process, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the subjects' brains. Subjects were also asked throughout the study to describe their feelings of fullness. The higher their BMI, the lower their likelihood of saying they felt "full" when the balloon was inflated 70 percent.
One notable region of the brain - the left posterior amygdala - was activated less in the high-BMI subjects, while it was activated more in their thinner counterparts. This activation was turned "on" when study subjects reported feeling full. Subjects who had the highest scores on self-reports of hunger had the least activation in the left posterior amygdala.
"This study provides the first evidence of the connection of the left amygdala and feelings of hunger during stomach fullness, demonstrating that activation of this brain region suppresses hunger," said Wang. "Our findings indicate a potential direction for treatment strategies - be they behavioral, medical or surgical -- targeting this brain region."
The scientists also looked at a range of hormones that regulate the digestive system, to see whether they played a role in responding to feelings of fullness. Ghrelin, a hormone known to stimulate the appetite and cause short-term satiety, showed the most relevance. Researchers found that individuals who had greater increases in ghrelin levels after their stomachs were moderately full also had greater activation of the left amygdala. "This indicates that ghrelin may control the reaction of the amygdala to satiety signals sent by the stomach," said Wang.
The study is published online and will appear in the February 15, 2008 issue of NeuroImage.
Replaced by the younger, thinner one. Sound familiar?
Older Arctic Sea Ice Replaced By Young, Thin Ice
ScienceDaily (Jan. 13, 2008) — A new study by University of Colorado at Boulder researchers indicates older, multi-year sea ice in the Arctic is giving way to younger, thinner ice, making it more susceptible to record summer sea-ice lows like the one that occurred in 2007.
The team used satellite data going back to 1982 to reconstruct past Arctic sea ice conditions, concluding there has been a nearly complete loss of the oldest, thickest ice and that 58 percent of the remaining perennial ice is thin and only 2-to-3 years old, said the lead study author, Research Professor James Maslanik of CU-Boulder's Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research. In the mid-1980s, only 35 percent of the sea ice was that young and that thin according to the study, the first to quantify the magnitude of the Arctic sea ice retreat using data on the age of the ice and its thickness, he said.
"This thinner, younger ice makes the Arctic much more susceptible to rapid melt," Maslanik said. "Our concern is that if the Arctic continues to get kicked hard enough toward one physical state, it becomes increasingly difficult to reestablish the sea ice conditions of 20 or 30 years ago."
A September 2007 study by CU-Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center indicated last year's average sea ice extent minimum was the lowest on record, shattering the previous September 2005 record by 23 percent. The minimum extent was lower than the previous record by about 1 million square miles -- an area about the size of Alaska and Texas combined.
The new study by Maslanik and his colleagues appears in the Jan. 10 issue of Geophysical Research Letters. Co-authors include CCAR's Charles Fowler, Sheldon Drobot and William Emery, as well as Julienne Stroeve from CU-Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and Jay Zwally and Donghui Yi from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The portion of ice more than five years old within the multi-year Arctic icepack decreased from 31 percent in 1988 to 10 percent in 2007, according to the study. Ice 7 years or older, which made up 21 percent of the multi-year Arctic ice cover in 1988, made up only 5 percent in 2007, the research team reported.
The researchers used passive microwave, visible infrared radar and laser altimeter satellite data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense, as well as ocean buoys to measure and track sections of sea ice.
The team developed "signatures" of individual ice sections roughly 15 miles square using their thickness, roughness, snow depth and ridge characteristics, tracking them over the seasons and years as they moved around the Arctic via winds and currents, Emery said. "We followed the ice in sequential images and track it back to where it had been previously, which allowed us to infer the relative ages of the ice sections."
The replacement of older, thicker Arctic ice by younger, thinner ice, combined with the effects of warming, unusual atmospheric circulation patterns and increased melting from solar radiation absorbed by open waters in 2007 all have contributed to the phenomenon, said Drobot. "These conditions are setting the Arctic up for additional, significant melting because of the positive feedback loop that plays back on itself."
"Taken together, these changes suggest that the Arctic Ocean is approaching a point where a return to pre-1990s ice conditions becomes increasingly difficult and where large, abrupt changes in summer ice cover as in 2007 may become the norm," the research team wrote in Geophysical Research Letters.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 01/14/08
Headlines of the day
Local Expert Explains Link Between People and Worms (KYW Newsradio)
Sounds fishy to us
NASCAR license plate on getaway car trips up robber (The Obscure Store)
Nothing like going incognito
Bald eagles recover from dive into fish guts (CNN)
Explosion Goes Off at Luxury Kabul Hotel; Taliban Claims Credit...
(Drudge)
Would someone care to explain just what would constitute a luxury hotel in Kabul? Walls? Hot and cold running?
Evidence that somewhere in the universe there’s a big heard of cows
Massive Gas Cloud Speeding Toward Collision With Milky Way
ScienceDaily (Jan. 13, 2008) — A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is speeding toward a collision with our Milky Way Galaxy, and when it hits -- in less than 40 million years -- it may set off a spectacular burst of stellar fireworks.
"The leading edge of this cloud is already interacting with gas from our Galaxy," said Felix J. Lockman, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), leader of a team of astronomers who used the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to study the object.
The cloud, called Smith's Cloud, after the astronomer who discovered it in 1963, contains enough hydrogen to make a million stars like the Sun. Eleven thousand light-years long and 2,500 light-years wide, it is only 8,000 light-years from our Galaxy's disk. It is careening toward our Galaxy at more than 150 miles per second, aimed to strike the Milky Way's disk at an angle of about 45 degrees.
"This is most likely a gas cloud left over from the formation of the Milky Way or gas stripped from a neighbor galaxy. When it hits, it could set off a tremendous burst of star formation. Many of those stars will be very massive, rushing through their lives quickly and exploding as supernovae. Over a few million years, it'll look like a celestial New Year's celebration, with huge firecrackers going off in that region of the Galaxy," Lockman said.
When Smith's Cloud was first discovered, and for decades after, the available images did not have enough detail to show whether the cloud was part of the Milky Way, something being blown out of the Milky Way, or something falling in.
Lockman and his colleagues used the GBT to make an extremely detailed study of hydrogen in Smith's Cloud. Their observations included nearly 40,000 individual pointings of the giant telescope to cover the cloud with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. Smith's Cloud is about 15 degrees long in the sky, 30 times the width of the full moon.
"If you could see this cloud with your eyes, it would be a very impressive sight in the night sky," Lockman said. "From tip to tail it would cover almost as much sky as the Orion constellation. But as far as we know it is made entirely of gas -- no one has found a single star in it."
The detailed GBT study dramatically changed the astronomers' understanding of the cloud. Its velocity shows that it is falling into the Milky Way, not leaving it, and the new data show that it is plowing up Milky Way gas before it as it falls.
"Its shape, somewhat similar to that of a comet, indicates that it's already hitting gas in our Galaxy's outskirts," Lockman said. "It is also feeling a tidal force from the gravity of the Milky Way and may be in the process of being torn apart. Our Galaxy will get a rain of gas from this cloud, then in about 20 to 40 million years, the cloud's core will smash into the Milky Way's plane," Lockman explained.
Some people use their brains differently? You mean as a hammer? A paper weight?
Culture Influences Brain Function, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (Jan. 13, 2008) — People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging
Psychological research has established that American culture, which values the individual, emphasizes the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian societies emphasize the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects. Behavioral studies have shown that these cultural differences can influence memory and even perception. But are they reflected in brain activity patterns?
To find out, a team led by John Gabrieli, a professor at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, asked 10 East Asians recently arrived in the United States and 10 Americans to make quick perceptual judgments while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner--a technology that maps blood flow changes in the brain that correspond to mental operations.
Subjects were shown a sequence of stimuli consisting of lines within squares and were asked to compare each stimulus with the previous one. In some trials, they judged whether the lines were the same length regardless of the surrounding squares (an absolute judgment of individual objects independent of context). In other trials, they decided whether the lines were in the same proportion to the squares, regardless of absolute size (a relative judgment of interdependent objects).
In previous behavioral studies of similar tasks, Americans were more accurate on absolute judgments, and East Asians on relative judgments. In the current study, the tasks were easy enough that there were no differences in performance between the two groups.
However, the two groups showed different patterns of brain activation when performing these tasks. Americans, when making relative judgments that are typically harder for them, activated brain regions involved in attention-demanding mental tasks. They showed much less activation of these regions when making the more culturally familiar absolute judgments. East Asians showed the opposite tendency, engaging the brain's attention system more for absolute judgments than for relative judgments.
The results are reported in the January issue of Psychological Science. Gabrieli's colleagues on the work were Trey Hedden, lead author of the paper and a research scientist at McGovern; Sarah Ketay and Arthur Aron of State University of New York at Stony Brook; and Hazel Rose Markus of Stanford University.
"We were surprised at the magnitude of the difference between the two cultural groups, and also at how widespread the engagement of the brain's attention system became when making judgments outside the cultural comfort zone," says Hedden.
The researchers went on to show that the effect was greater in those individuals who identified more closely with their culture. They used questionnaires of preferences and values in social relations, such as whether an individual is responsible for the failure of a family member, to gauge cultural identification. Within both groups, stronger identification with their respective cultures was associated with a stronger culture-specific pattern of brain-activation.
How do these differences come about? "Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it's the culture that does the training," Gabrieli says. "It's fascinating that the way in which the brain responds to these simple drawings reflects, in a predictable way, how the individual thinks about independent or interdependent social relationships."
This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and supported by the McGovern Institute.
Adapted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
What’s passing for science this week? Buying stuff makes people happy? You’re kidding.
Aroma Of Chocolate Chip Cookies Prompts Splurging On Expensive Sweaters
ScienceDaily (Jan. 12, 2008) — Exposure to something that whets the appetite, such as a picture of a mouthwatering dessert, can make a person more impulsive with unrelated purchases, finds a study from the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. For example, the researchers reveal in one experiment that the aroma of chocolate chip cookies can prompt women on a tight budget to splurge on a new item of clothing.
"We found that an appetitive stimulus not only affects behavior in a specific behavior domain, but also induces a shared state that propels a consumer to choose smaller--sooner options in unrelated domains," explains researcher Xiuping Li (National University of Singapore). "Similarly, the presence of an attractive woman in the trading room might propel an investor to choose the investment option providing smaller but sooner rewards."
In the first experiment, Li asked participants to act as "photo editors of a magazine" and choose among either appetite stimulating pictures of food or non-appetite stimulating pictures of nature. A control group was shown no pictures at all. All were then asked to participate in a lottery that would either pay them less money sooner or more money later.
Those who had been exposed to the photos of food were almost twenty percentage points more likely to choose the lottery with the chance of a smaller, more immediate payoff than those who were exposed to the photos of nature (61 percent vs. 41.5 percent) and eleven percentage points more likely to choose the short-term gain than those who had not been exposed to any stimulus (61 percent vs. 50 percent).
Similarly, another experiment used a cookie-scented candle to further gauge whether appetitive stimulus affects consumer behavior. Female study participants in a room with a hidden chocolate-chip cookie scented candle were much more likely to make an unplanned purchase of a new sweater -- even when told they were on a tight budget -- than those randomly assigned to a room with a hidden unscented candle (67 percent vs. 17 percent).
"The scent of the appetitive stimulus led to reduced happiness with remote gains, which implied that participants in a present-oriented state were less sensitive to future values," Li explains. "In addition, [this] experiment showed that participants were more likely to satisfy their current and spontaneous desire if they were exposed to the unrelated appetitive stimulus before they made the decision."
Li concludes: "If retailers want to push their customers to shop more rather than stay longer, they should not only maintain a pleasant environment but also an environment full of temptations and excitement."
Xiuping Li, "The Effects of Appetitive Stimuli on Out-of-Domain Consumption Impatience." Journal of Consumer Research: February 2008.
Do you have anything in brown suede?
Hopes of custom-built organs as scientists create beating heart
Sarah-Kate Templeton, Health Editor
SCIENTISTS have created a beating heart in the laboratory in a breakthrough that could allow doctors one day to make a range of organs for transplant almost from scratch.
The procedure involved stripping all the existing cells from a dead heart so that only the protein “skeleton” that created its shape was left.
Then the skeleton was seeded with live “progenitor” cells, which multiplied and grew back over it, eventually linking together into a new organ. Such cells are involved in the formative stages of specialised types of tissue such as those found in the heart.
The research, by scientists at the University of Minnesota, has so far been done only with rats and pigs and is highly experimental. It is unlikely to be applied to humans for years.
However, Professor Doris Taylor, director of the university’s centre for cardiovascular repair, believes it could be a significant step towards creating custom-built hearts, blood vessels and other organs for people with serious illness.
The big advantage of such an approach is that organs so built would use stem cells taken from the patient so the body’s immune system would not reject them.
“The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,” Taylor said. “It opens a door to the notion that you can make any organ - kidney, liver or pancreas. You name it and we hope we can make it.”
Taylor and her colleagues used a process called decellularisation, in which powerful chemicals strip the cells from a dead animal heart. The researchers then reseeded the remaining protein skeleton with progenitor cells taken from the hearts of newborn animals and let them grow. Taylor said that four days after seeding, the cells could be seen contracting, and after eight days the hearts started contracting.
“We took nature’s building blocks to build a new organ,” said Harald Ott, who worked with Taylor. “When we saw the first contractions we were speechless.”
The new technique was reported at the American Heart Association’s recent annual meeting in Orlando, Florida. “This is a proof of concept,” Taylor said. “Going forward, our goal is to use a patient’s stem cells to build a new heart.”
- A new system of teams of surgeons working round the clock to retrieve kidneys and hearts from dead patients will be announced by a government body this week in an attempt to increase organ transplantation by 50% within five years.
The government’s organ donation taskforce will also announce the appointment of 100 more organ transplant co-ordinators, who will persuade relatives to agree to the organs of their deceased loved ones being used for transplantation.
It is also considering whether the government should introduce laws to allow organs to be taken from patients after death unless they have specifically expressed a wish not to donate their tissues.
Imagine someone invoking eminent domain so they can take your liver.
Organs to be taken without consent
By Patrick Hennessy and Laura Donnelly
Last Updated: 11:14am GMT 14/01/2008
Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, the Prime Minister says that such a facility would save thousands of lives and that he hopes such a system can start this year.
The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of the national register or family members objected.
But patients' groups said that they were "totally opposed" to Mr Brown's plan, saying that it would take away patients' rights over their own bodies.
There are more than 8,000 patients waiting for an organ donation and more than 1,000 a year die without receiving the organ that could save their lives.
The Government will launch an overhaul of the system next week, which will put pressure on doctors and nurses to identify more "potential organ donors" from dying patients. Hospitals will be rated for the number of deceased patients they "convert" into donors and doctors will be expected to identify potential donors earlier and alert donor co-ordinators as patients approach death.
But Mr Brown, who carries a donor card, has made it clear he backs an even more radical revamp of the system, which would lead to donation by "presumed consent". The approach is modelled on that of Spain, which has the highest proportion of organ donors in the world.
"A system of this kind seems to have the potential to close the aching gap between the potential benefits of transplant surgery in the UK and the limits imposed by our current system of consent," Mr Brown writes.
He voted against such a system in 2004 - but sources close to the Prime Minister said last night that the measure proposed then was a much harder version of his latest plan, without families having the final say.
Patients' groups said that they were appalled by Mr Brown's intervention. "They call it presumed consent, but it is no consent at all," said Joyce Robin, from the watchdog Patient Concern. "They are relying on inertia and ignorance to get the results that they want." She said that the
Government had made little effort to get people to register to give up organs after death. "Where is the big media campaign, where are the leaflets? Why, when I go to see my GP, doesn't he ask me about organ donation? These are the things they should be doing - not taking away our right to decide what happens to our bodies."
Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association charity, agreed. "We don't think a private decision, which is a matter of individual conscience, should be taken by the state. If people want to give the gift of life, that is their right, but it must be something that is a voluntary matter. "
While polls show 90 per cent of Britons are in favour of organ donation, 40 per cent of relatives refuse consent for the organs of their relatives to be donated, a figure which rises to 75 per cent among black and ethnic minorities. To solve this, the organ taskforce plans measures to boost donation, including putting pressure on doctors to identify patients as potential donors before they have died.
The taskforce report - to be released on Tuesday - calls for a senior doctor to be appointed in every hospital as a "champion" of donation, along with a lay person to spread the message about the importance of donation locally.
The force, which is to publish a report on "presumed consent" this summer, hopes its 14 recommendations will lead to 50 per cent more donations in five years.
It admits to a possible "conflict of interest" between medical staff, trying to save lives and those keen to ensure every possible organ is harvested. Dr Kevin Gunning, an intensive care consultant at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, and a member of the UK Transplant's advisory group, said the measures could put doctors and relatives under pressure. "If, as a doctor you have turned your thoughts to your patient being a donor when they are still living, that is a real conflict."
Dr Bruce Taylor, of the Intensive Care Society warned that early indicators of death were not reliable. "The only way to be sure is to do all the tests which show brain stem death; anything in advance of that is only a prediction."
But Chris Rudge, of UK Transplant, the authority in charge of organ donation and transplant, insisted patients would not be considered as donors at any point where survival
Local Expert Explains Link Between People and Worms (KYW Newsradio)
Sounds fishy to us
NASCAR license plate on getaway car trips up robber (The Obscure Store)
Nothing like going incognito
Bald eagles recover from dive into fish guts (CNN)
Explosion Goes Off at Luxury Kabul Hotel; Taliban Claims Credit...
(Drudge)
Would someone care to explain just what would constitute a luxury hotel in Kabul? Walls? Hot and cold running?
Evidence that somewhere in the universe there’s a big heard of cows
Massive Gas Cloud Speeding Toward Collision With Milky Way
ScienceDaily (Jan. 13, 2008) — A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is speeding toward a collision with our Milky Way Galaxy, and when it hits -- in less than 40 million years -- it may set off a spectacular burst of stellar fireworks.
"The leading edge of this cloud is already interacting with gas from our Galaxy," said Felix J. Lockman, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), leader of a team of astronomers who used the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to study the object.
The cloud, called Smith's Cloud, after the astronomer who discovered it in 1963, contains enough hydrogen to make a million stars like the Sun. Eleven thousand light-years long and 2,500 light-years wide, it is only 8,000 light-years from our Galaxy's disk. It is careening toward our Galaxy at more than 150 miles per second, aimed to strike the Milky Way's disk at an angle of about 45 degrees.
"This is most likely a gas cloud left over from the formation of the Milky Way or gas stripped from a neighbor galaxy. When it hits, it could set off a tremendous burst of star formation. Many of those stars will be very massive, rushing through their lives quickly and exploding as supernovae. Over a few million years, it'll look like a celestial New Year's celebration, with huge firecrackers going off in that region of the Galaxy," Lockman said.
When Smith's Cloud was first discovered, and for decades after, the available images did not have enough detail to show whether the cloud was part of the Milky Way, something being blown out of the Milky Way, or something falling in.
Lockman and his colleagues used the GBT to make an extremely detailed study of hydrogen in Smith's Cloud. Their observations included nearly 40,000 individual pointings of the giant telescope to cover the cloud with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. Smith's Cloud is about 15 degrees long in the sky, 30 times the width of the full moon.
"If you could see this cloud with your eyes, it would be a very impressive sight in the night sky," Lockman said. "From tip to tail it would cover almost as much sky as the Orion constellation. But as far as we know it is made entirely of gas -- no one has found a single star in it."
The detailed GBT study dramatically changed the astronomers' understanding of the cloud. Its velocity shows that it is falling into the Milky Way, not leaving it, and the new data show that it is plowing up Milky Way gas before it as it falls.
"Its shape, somewhat similar to that of a comet, indicates that it's already hitting gas in our Galaxy's outskirts," Lockman said. "It is also feeling a tidal force from the gravity of the Milky Way and may be in the process of being torn apart. Our Galaxy will get a rain of gas from this cloud, then in about 20 to 40 million years, the cloud's core will smash into the Milky Way's plane," Lockman explained.
Some people use their brains differently? You mean as a hammer? A paper weight?
Culture Influences Brain Function, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (Jan. 13, 2008) — People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging
Psychological research has established that American culture, which values the individual, emphasizes the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian societies emphasize the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects. Behavioral studies have shown that these cultural differences can influence memory and even perception. But are they reflected in brain activity patterns?
To find out, a team led by John Gabrieli, a professor at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, asked 10 East Asians recently arrived in the United States and 10 Americans to make quick perceptual judgments while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner--a technology that maps blood flow changes in the brain that correspond to mental operations.
Subjects were shown a sequence of stimuli consisting of lines within squares and were asked to compare each stimulus with the previous one. In some trials, they judged whether the lines were the same length regardless of the surrounding squares (an absolute judgment of individual objects independent of context). In other trials, they decided whether the lines were in the same proportion to the squares, regardless of absolute size (a relative judgment of interdependent objects).
In previous behavioral studies of similar tasks, Americans were more accurate on absolute judgments, and East Asians on relative judgments. In the current study, the tasks were easy enough that there were no differences in performance between the two groups.
However, the two groups showed different patterns of brain activation when performing these tasks. Americans, when making relative judgments that are typically harder for them, activated brain regions involved in attention-demanding mental tasks. They showed much less activation of these regions when making the more culturally familiar absolute judgments. East Asians showed the opposite tendency, engaging the brain's attention system more for absolute judgments than for relative judgments.
The results are reported in the January issue of Psychological Science. Gabrieli's colleagues on the work were Trey Hedden, lead author of the paper and a research scientist at McGovern; Sarah Ketay and Arthur Aron of State University of New York at Stony Brook; and Hazel Rose Markus of Stanford University.
"We were surprised at the magnitude of the difference between the two cultural groups, and also at how widespread the engagement of the brain's attention system became when making judgments outside the cultural comfort zone," says Hedden.
The researchers went on to show that the effect was greater in those individuals who identified more closely with their culture. They used questionnaires of preferences and values in social relations, such as whether an individual is responsible for the failure of a family member, to gauge cultural identification. Within both groups, stronger identification with their respective cultures was associated with a stronger culture-specific pattern of brain-activation.
How do these differences come about? "Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it's the culture that does the training," Gabrieli says. "It's fascinating that the way in which the brain responds to these simple drawings reflects, in a predictable way, how the individual thinks about independent or interdependent social relationships."
This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and supported by the McGovern Institute.
Adapted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
What’s passing for science this week? Buying stuff makes people happy? You’re kidding.
Aroma Of Chocolate Chip Cookies Prompts Splurging On Expensive Sweaters
ScienceDaily (Jan. 12, 2008) — Exposure to something that whets the appetite, such as a picture of a mouthwatering dessert, can make a person more impulsive with unrelated purchases, finds a study from the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. For example, the researchers reveal in one experiment that the aroma of chocolate chip cookies can prompt women on a tight budget to splurge on a new item of clothing.
"We found that an appetitive stimulus not only affects behavior in a specific behavior domain, but also induces a shared state that propels a consumer to choose smaller--sooner options in unrelated domains," explains researcher Xiuping Li (National University of Singapore). "Similarly, the presence of an attractive woman in the trading room might propel an investor to choose the investment option providing smaller but sooner rewards."
In the first experiment, Li asked participants to act as "photo editors of a magazine" and choose among either appetite stimulating pictures of food or non-appetite stimulating pictures of nature. A control group was shown no pictures at all. All were then asked to participate in a lottery that would either pay them less money sooner or more money later.
Those who had been exposed to the photos of food were almost twenty percentage points more likely to choose the lottery with the chance of a smaller, more immediate payoff than those who were exposed to the photos of nature (61 percent vs. 41.5 percent) and eleven percentage points more likely to choose the short-term gain than those who had not been exposed to any stimulus (61 percent vs. 50 percent).
Similarly, another experiment used a cookie-scented candle to further gauge whether appetitive stimulus affects consumer behavior. Female study participants in a room with a hidden chocolate-chip cookie scented candle were much more likely to make an unplanned purchase of a new sweater -- even when told they were on a tight budget -- than those randomly assigned to a room with a hidden unscented candle (67 percent vs. 17 percent).
"The scent of the appetitive stimulus led to reduced happiness with remote gains, which implied that participants in a present-oriented state were less sensitive to future values," Li explains. "In addition, [this] experiment showed that participants were more likely to satisfy their current and spontaneous desire if they were exposed to the unrelated appetitive stimulus before they made the decision."
Li concludes: "If retailers want to push their customers to shop more rather than stay longer, they should not only maintain a pleasant environment but also an environment full of temptations and excitement."
Xiuping Li, "The Effects of Appetitive Stimuli on Out-of-Domain Consumption Impatience." Journal of Consumer Research: February 2008.
Do you have anything in brown suede?
Hopes of custom-built organs as scientists create beating heart
Sarah-Kate Templeton, Health Editor
SCIENTISTS have created a beating heart in the laboratory in a breakthrough that could allow doctors one day to make a range of organs for transplant almost from scratch.
The procedure involved stripping all the existing cells from a dead heart so that only the protein “skeleton” that created its shape was left.
Then the skeleton was seeded with live “progenitor” cells, which multiplied and grew back over it, eventually linking together into a new organ. Such cells are involved in the formative stages of specialised types of tissue such as those found in the heart.
The research, by scientists at the University of Minnesota, has so far been done only with rats and pigs and is highly experimental. It is unlikely to be applied to humans for years.
However, Professor Doris Taylor, director of the university’s centre for cardiovascular repair, believes it could be a significant step towards creating custom-built hearts, blood vessels and other organs for people with serious illness.
The big advantage of such an approach is that organs so built would use stem cells taken from the patient so the body’s immune system would not reject them.
“The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,” Taylor said. “It opens a door to the notion that you can make any organ - kidney, liver or pancreas. You name it and we hope we can make it.”
Taylor and her colleagues used a process called decellularisation, in which powerful chemicals strip the cells from a dead animal heart. The researchers then reseeded the remaining protein skeleton with progenitor cells taken from the hearts of newborn animals and let them grow. Taylor said that four days after seeding, the cells could be seen contracting, and after eight days the hearts started contracting.
“We took nature’s building blocks to build a new organ,” said Harald Ott, who worked with Taylor. “When we saw the first contractions we were speechless.”
The new technique was reported at the American Heart Association’s recent annual meeting in Orlando, Florida. “This is a proof of concept,” Taylor said. “Going forward, our goal is to use a patient’s stem cells to build a new heart.”
- A new system of teams of surgeons working round the clock to retrieve kidneys and hearts from dead patients will be announced by a government body this week in an attempt to increase organ transplantation by 50% within five years.
The government’s organ donation taskforce will also announce the appointment of 100 more organ transplant co-ordinators, who will persuade relatives to agree to the organs of their deceased loved ones being used for transplantation.
It is also considering whether the government should introduce laws to allow organs to be taken from patients after death unless they have specifically expressed a wish not to donate their tissues.
Imagine someone invoking eminent domain so they can take your liver.
Organs to be taken without consent
By Patrick Hennessy and Laura Donnelly
Last Updated: 11:14am GMT 14/01/2008
Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, the Prime Minister says that such a facility would save thousands of lives and that he hopes such a system can start this year.
The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of the national register or family members objected.
But patients' groups said that they were "totally opposed" to Mr Brown's plan, saying that it would take away patients' rights over their own bodies.
There are more than 8,000 patients waiting for an organ donation and more than 1,000 a year die without receiving the organ that could save their lives.
The Government will launch an overhaul of the system next week, which will put pressure on doctors and nurses to identify more "potential organ donors" from dying patients. Hospitals will be rated for the number of deceased patients they "convert" into donors and doctors will be expected to identify potential donors earlier and alert donor co-ordinators as patients approach death.
But Mr Brown, who carries a donor card, has made it clear he backs an even more radical revamp of the system, which would lead to donation by "presumed consent". The approach is modelled on that of Spain, which has the highest proportion of organ donors in the world.
"A system of this kind seems to have the potential to close the aching gap between the potential benefits of transplant surgery in the UK and the limits imposed by our current system of consent," Mr Brown writes.
He voted against such a system in 2004 - but sources close to the Prime Minister said last night that the measure proposed then was a much harder version of his latest plan, without families having the final say.
Patients' groups said that they were appalled by Mr Brown's intervention. "They call it presumed consent, but it is no consent at all," said Joyce Robin, from the watchdog Patient Concern. "They are relying on inertia and ignorance to get the results that they want." She said that the
Government had made little effort to get people to register to give up organs after death. "Where is the big media campaign, where are the leaflets? Why, when I go to see my GP, doesn't he ask me about organ donation? These are the things they should be doing - not taking away our right to decide what happens to our bodies."
Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association charity, agreed. "We don't think a private decision, which is a matter of individual conscience, should be taken by the state. If people want to give the gift of life, that is their right, but it must be something that is a voluntary matter. "
While polls show 90 per cent of Britons are in favour of organ donation, 40 per cent of relatives refuse consent for the organs of their relatives to be donated, a figure which rises to 75 per cent among black and ethnic minorities. To solve this, the organ taskforce plans measures to boost donation, including putting pressure on doctors to identify patients as potential donors before they have died.
The taskforce report - to be released on Tuesday - calls for a senior doctor to be appointed in every hospital as a "champion" of donation, along with a lay person to spread the message about the importance of donation locally.
The force, which is to publish a report on "presumed consent" this summer, hopes its 14 recommendations will lead to 50 per cent more donations in five years.
It admits to a possible "conflict of interest" between medical staff, trying to save lives and those keen to ensure every possible organ is harvested. Dr Kevin Gunning, an intensive care consultant at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, and a member of the UK Transplant's advisory group, said the measures could put doctors and relatives under pressure. "If, as a doctor you have turned your thoughts to your patient being a donor when they are still living, that is a real conflict."
Dr Bruce Taylor, of the Intensive Care Society warned that early indicators of death were not reliable. "The only way to be sure is to do all the tests which show brain stem death; anything in advance of that is only a prediction."
But Chris Rudge, of UK Transplant, the authority in charge of organ donation and transplant, insisted patients would not be considered as donors at any point where survival
Friday, January 11, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 01/11/08
Headlines of the day
China blogger beaten to death (CNN)
Unknowing twins marry each other (CNN)
Shotgun jailbreak led to love on the run (CNN)
Hannah Montana caught using body double (CNN)
At long last, have you no decency?
Fat, oil, Saudis—what, do we have to connect the dots for you?
Obesity now a 'lifestyle' choice for Americans, expert says
by Karin Zeitvogel Thu Jan 10, 12:34 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - As adult obesity balloons in the United States, being overweight has become less of a health hazard and more of a lifestyle choice, the author of a new book argues.
"Obesity is a natural extension of an advancing economy. As you become a First World economy and you get all these labor-saving devices and low-cost, easily accessible foods, people are going to eat more and exercise less," health economist Eric Finkelstein told AFP.
In "The Fattening of America", published this month, Finkelstein says that adult obesity more than doubled in the United States between 1960 and 2004, rising from 13 percent to around 33 percent.
Globally, only Saudi Arabia fares worse than the United States in terms of the percentage of adults with a severe weight problem -- 35 percent of people in the oil-rich desert kingdom are classified as obese, the book says, citing data from the World Health Organization and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
With the rising tide of obesity come health problems and an increased burden on the healthcare system and industry.
"But the nasty side-effects of obesity aren't as nasty as they used to be," Finkelstein said.
"When you have a first-rate medical system that can cure the diseases that obesity promotes, you no longer need to worry so much about being obese," he told AFP.
"With our ever-advancing modern medicine there helping to save the day (at least for many people), are government and the media blowing the magnitude of the 'obesity crisis' out of proportion?" his book says.
A study in which Finkelstein and colleagues at the RTI International, an independent research institute in North Carolina that works on social and scientific problems, asked overweight, obese and normal weight people to predict their life expectancy came up with a total difference of four years.
Normal weight respondents predicted they would live to 78, the obese to 74, and the overweight 75.5.
Other studies that looked at death data back the conclusion that people who carry excess weight tend to die slightly earlier, the book says, and draws the conclusion that "many individuals are making a conscious decision to engage in a lifestyle that is obesity-promoting."
"People make choices, and some people will choose a weight that the public health community might be unhappy about. Why should we try to make them thinner?" Finkelstein said.
Linda Gotthelf, a doctor who heads research at Health Management Resources, a private, nationwide firm that specializes in weight loss and management, agreed that Americans now live longer but stressed that quality of life declines with age.
"People are living longer but with more chronic diseases," Gotthelf told AFP.
"That brings a diminished quality of life, especially for the obese who have more functional limitations as they age and tend to be on multiple medications."
Obesity is not a choice for Alley English, a 28-year-old mother from Missouri who has struggled with a weight problem all her life.
"If you knew that you could be what society considers normal, why would you not choose to do that?" English told AFP.
"As we get older, life does get more rushed and we do tend to make the easier choices sometimes," English, who currently weighs 392 pounds (178 kilograms), told AFP.
"But you can't say if you quit going to the drive-through, exercise more and eat more vegetables, you'll lose weight. There are so many more factors involved."
Gotthelf also disagreed that people choose to be obese.
"There are studies in which people have said they would rather lose a limb or be blind than obese. Being obese is not a desire," she said.
"For many, this is a problem they have struggled with for many years... it gets discouraging after a while," she said.
"I would not doubt that if you asked obese people if they could push a button and not be obese, close to 100 percent would say they would push the button."
Finkelstein says he wrote "The Fattening of America" to "encourage discussion of what I understand is probably an uncomfortable position for a lot of people."
Even if private industry and government take steps to protect society against the costs of obesity, many Americans "will likely continue to choose a diet and exercise regimen that leads to excess weight," because losing weight requires too many lifestyle sacrifices, his book warns.
Meanwhile, frustrated by years of unsuccessful dieting and weight loss programs, English has opted to join a growing number of Americans who have gastric bypass surgery -- hailed in Finkelstein's book as "the best-known treatment for severe obesity."
"I have a higher risk of developing diabetes or hypertension if I don't have the surgery," English said.
"I don't care if I end up with a body like whoever-in-the-media thinks I should look like; I just want to be healthy and able to participate in my daughter's life," she said.
No, I said our small is called a grande and our medium is called the “Big Sumbich.”
All this talk about dark energy makes the universe sound so goth. Who knew?
Super-computer Could Throw Light On 'Mysterious' Dark Energy
ScienceDaily (Jan. 11, 2008) — Cosmologists have run a series of huge computer simulations of the Universe that could ultimately help solve the mystery of dark energy.
Results of the simulations, carried out by Durham University's world-leading Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC), tell researchers how to measure dark energy -- a repulsive force that counteracts gravity.
The findings will also provide vital input into the design of a proposed satellite mission called SPACE -- the SPectroscopic All-sky Cosmic Explorer - that could unveil the nature of dark energy.
The discovery of dark energy in 1998 was completely unexpected and understanding its nature is one of the biggest problems in physics.
Scientists believe dark energy, which makes up 70 per cent of the Universe, is driving its accelerating expansion. If this expansion continues to accelerate experts say it could eventually lead to a Big Freeze as the Universe is pulled apart and becomes a vast cold expanse of dying stars and black holes.
The simulations, which took 11 days to run on Durham's unique Cosmology Machine (COSMA) computer, looked at tiny ripples in the distribution of matter in the Universe made by sound waves a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.
The ripples are delicate and some have been destroyed over the subsequent 13 billion years of the Universe, but the simulations showed they survived in certain conditions.
By changing the nature of dark energy in the simulations, the researchers discovered that the ripples appeared to change in length and could act as a "standard ruler" in the measurement of dark energy.
ICC Director Professor Carlos Frenk said: "The ripples are a 'gold standard'. By comparing the size of the measured ripples to the gold standard we can work out how the Universe has expanded and from this figure out the properties of the dark energy.
"Astronomers are stuck with the one universe we live in. However, the simulations allow us to experiment with what might have happened if there had been more or less dark energy in the universe."
In the next five to 10 years a number of experiments are planned to explore dark energy. The Durham simulation has demonstrated the feasibility of the SPACE satellite mission proposed to the European Space Agency's (ESA) Cosmic Vision programme.
The project has been put forward by an international consortium of researchers including the Durham team.
SPACE, which is led by Bologna University, in Italy, is through to the next round of assessment by the ESA and if successful is planned to launch in 2017.
Co-principal investigator Professor Andrea Cimatti, of Bologna University, said: "Thanks to the ICC simulations it is possible to predict what SPACE would observe and to plan how to develop the mission parameters in order to obtain a three-dimensional map of the Universe and to compare it with the predictions of the simulations.
"Thanks to this comparison it will be possible to unveil the nature of dark energy and to understand how the structures in the Universe built up and evolved with cosmic time."
Findings are published January 11 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Durham research was funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the European Commission.
Stretching before you start is a key part of intergalactic yoga
An Inconvenient Galaxy: Arms Winding 'Backwards'
ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2008) — Discovery of two new components within a puzzling spiral galaxy confirm it must have a pair of arms winding in the opposite direction from most galaxies, according to new results.
“While the existence of a galaxy with a pair of ‘backward’ arms may seem like an inconvenient truth to many, our latest analysis indicates it is, nonetheless, a reality,” says Dr. Gene Byrd, professor of astronomy at The University of Alabama.
The galaxy, known as NGC4622, lies 200 million light years away in the constellation Centaurus.
Spiral arm pairs seen in galaxies are thought to trail, meaning they wind outward, opposite the direction of rotation of the disk material. Leading arms, such as the pair reported by the astronomers for NGC4622, do the opposite, opening outward in the same direction as the rotation of the galaxy’s disk.
Using a Fourier component image method to further analyze a 2001 Hubble Space Telescope image, the team discovered a previously hidden inner counter clockwise pair of spiral arms.
“Contrary to conventional wisdom, with both an inner counter-clockwise pair and an outer clockwise pair of spiral arms, NGC4622 must have a pair of leading arms,” Byrd said. “With two pairs of arms winding in opposite directions, one pair must lead and one pair must trail. Which way is which depends on the disk’s rotation. The outer clockwise pair must be the leading pair if the disk turns clockwise. Alternatively, the inner counter clockwise pair must be the leading pair if the disk turns counter clockwise.”
The team also discovered an outer clockwise single arm, previously hidden by the stronger outer clockwise arm pair. The galaxy also has a previously identified inner single counterclockwise arm. This confirms the galaxy must have a single leading arm. The outer clockwise arm must be the leading arm if the disk turns clockwise. The inner counter clockwise arm must be the leading single arm if the disk turns counter clockwise.
The researchers also performed a more complicated analysis of different color Fourier image components. This revealed the stronger outer clockwise pair of arms as the leading pair.
In 2002, team members first published, to great skepticism, results from a previous method that indicated the galaxy had a leading pair of spiral arms.
Other astronomers were skeptical of the 2002 announcement, in part, because the galaxy disk is only tilted about 19 degrees from face-on and because clumpy dust clouds might be concentrated on one side of the disk, creating misleading results. In response, the team’s new Fourier component method is actually assisted by the small tilt, and the effects of dust are not used in the latest analysis.
“Two independent methods now indicate that NGC4622’s arms do indeed behave in a very unusual fashion, with the outer arms winding outward in the same direction the galaxy turns,” said Byrd, a faculty member within UA’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Further studies of the origin of this behavior are needed, the researchers said. The Hubble Space Telescope image reveals a dark dust lane in the center which suggests the galaxy may have consumed a smaller companion galaxy, the researchers said.
This research is being presented to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas January 9, 2008. Presenting the results are Drs. Gene Byrd and Ron Buta, from The University of Alabama; Tarsh Freeman, Bevill Community College; and Dr. Sethanne Howard, retired from the U.S. Naval Observatory. Results are also scheduled for January publication in Astronomical Journal.
Cue the sad people. Cue the carbos…and action
Obese more depressed, depressed more obese
SEATTLE, Jan. 11 (UPI) -- Women with depression are more than twice as likely to be obese and obese women are more than twice as likely to be depressed, a U.S. study found.
Lead author Gregory Simon, a psychiatrist and researcher at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, said that depression and obesity likely fuel one another.
"When people gain weight, they're more likely to become depressed and when they get depressed, they have more trouble losing weight," Simon said in a statement.
Researchers interviewed 4,641 female health-plan enrollees, ages 40 to 65, by phone on their height, weight, exercise levels, dietary habits and body image. The women also completed the Patient Health Questionnaire, a measure of depression symptoms.
The study, published in General Hospital Psychiatry, found women with body mass index at or above 30 exercised the least, had the poorest body image and ingested 20 percent more calories than those with lower BMIs.
"The stigma of being overweight could hurt self-esteem, and thus, efforts to lose weight," Simon says. "It's not that these women are clueless, it's that they're hopeless."
Wonder if they did any field work at Chippendales?
So, the experts who proposed this—how many car radios do you think they’ve lost?
Should Heroin Be Prescribed To Addicts?
ScienceDaily (Jan. 11, 2008) — Experts debate whether heroin should be prescribed to addicts who are difficult to treat in a recent issue of the British Medical Journal.
Maintenance treatment with heroin is appropriate for heroin misusers under certain circumstances, argue Jürgen Rehm from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and Benedikt Fischer from the University of Victoria, British Columbia.
They point to trials in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany, which found heroin assisted maintenance treatment feasible and effective for those resistant to treatment. They also found it to be cost effective compared with methadone maintenance treatment.
In the UK, heroin has also been a treatment option for heroin misusers for several decades, but the practice remains controversial.
"So, if maintenance treatment is generally justifiable, why should heroin not be used as one such pharmacological agent?" they ask.
One reason that has been cited is safety, both for the patient and for the general public. Yet results from the Swiss studies show that mortality among patients in heroin assisted maintenance programmes is low, and lower than for patients in other maintenance programmes.
Overall, say the authors, we see no convincing reason why heroin assisted maintenance treatment should not be part of a comprehensive treatment system for opioid dependence.
But Neil McKeganey, Professor of Drug Misuse Research at the University of Glasgow argues that prescribing heroin to heroin addicts is treating the effects of misuse not the addiction.
The evidence in relation to heroin prescribing is far from conclusive, he says, while the cost of treating an addict with heroin is estimated to be three to four times that of treating an addict with methadone.
Prescribing heroin to heroin addicts is also a risky strategy, which could lead to massive pressure on doctors to prescribe increasing amounts of the drug.
Research has shown that with the right services in place it is possible to do more than simply stabilise addicts' continued drug use through the prescribing route, writes McKeganey. For example, a Scottish study found 29.4% of addicts who received residential rehabilitation were abstinent for at least 90 days compared with only 3.4% receiving methadone maintenance.
Other research has found that most addicts want services to help them become drug free. Health services therefore need to ensure that they are supporting addicts' attempts to become drug free, and they need to be extremely cautious about any extension of a policy that could be seen as a route to maintaining rather than reducing an individual's drug dependency
China blogger beaten to death (CNN)
Unknowing twins marry each other (CNN)
Shotgun jailbreak led to love on the run (CNN)
Hannah Montana caught using body double (CNN)
At long last, have you no decency?
Fat, oil, Saudis—what, do we have to connect the dots for you?
Obesity now a 'lifestyle' choice for Americans, expert says
by Karin Zeitvogel Thu Jan 10, 12:34 PM ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) - As adult obesity balloons in the United States, being overweight has become less of a health hazard and more of a lifestyle choice, the author of a new book argues.
"Obesity is a natural extension of an advancing economy. As you become a First World economy and you get all these labor-saving devices and low-cost, easily accessible foods, people are going to eat more and exercise less," health economist Eric Finkelstein told AFP.
In "The Fattening of America", published this month, Finkelstein says that adult obesity more than doubled in the United States between 1960 and 2004, rising from 13 percent to around 33 percent.
Globally, only Saudi Arabia fares worse than the United States in terms of the percentage of adults with a severe weight problem -- 35 percent of people in the oil-rich desert kingdom are classified as obese, the book says, citing data from the World Health Organization and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
With the rising tide of obesity come health problems and an increased burden on the healthcare system and industry.
"But the nasty side-effects of obesity aren't as nasty as they used to be," Finkelstein said.
"When you have a first-rate medical system that can cure the diseases that obesity promotes, you no longer need to worry so much about being obese," he told AFP.
"With our ever-advancing modern medicine there helping to save the day (at least for many people), are government and the media blowing the magnitude of the 'obesity crisis' out of proportion?" his book says.
A study in which Finkelstein and colleagues at the RTI International, an independent research institute in North Carolina that works on social and scientific problems, asked overweight, obese and normal weight people to predict their life expectancy came up with a total difference of four years.
Normal weight respondents predicted they would live to 78, the obese to 74, and the overweight 75.5.
Other studies that looked at death data back the conclusion that people who carry excess weight tend to die slightly earlier, the book says, and draws the conclusion that "many individuals are making a conscious decision to engage in a lifestyle that is obesity-promoting."
"People make choices, and some people will choose a weight that the public health community might be unhappy about. Why should we try to make them thinner?" Finkelstein said.
Linda Gotthelf, a doctor who heads research at Health Management Resources, a private, nationwide firm that specializes in weight loss and management, agreed that Americans now live longer but stressed that quality of life declines with age.
"People are living longer but with more chronic diseases," Gotthelf told AFP.
"That brings a diminished quality of life, especially for the obese who have more functional limitations as they age and tend to be on multiple medications."
Obesity is not a choice for Alley English, a 28-year-old mother from Missouri who has struggled with a weight problem all her life.
"If you knew that you could be what society considers normal, why would you not choose to do that?" English told AFP.
"As we get older, life does get more rushed and we do tend to make the easier choices sometimes," English, who currently weighs 392 pounds (178 kilograms), told AFP.
"But you can't say if you quit going to the drive-through, exercise more and eat more vegetables, you'll lose weight. There are so many more factors involved."
Gotthelf also disagreed that people choose to be obese.
"There are studies in which people have said they would rather lose a limb or be blind than obese. Being obese is not a desire," she said.
"For many, this is a problem they have struggled with for many years... it gets discouraging after a while," she said.
"I would not doubt that if you asked obese people if they could push a button and not be obese, close to 100 percent would say they would push the button."
Finkelstein says he wrote "The Fattening of America" to "encourage discussion of what I understand is probably an uncomfortable position for a lot of people."
Even if private industry and government take steps to protect society against the costs of obesity, many Americans "will likely continue to choose a diet and exercise regimen that leads to excess weight," because losing weight requires too many lifestyle sacrifices, his book warns.
Meanwhile, frustrated by years of unsuccessful dieting and weight loss programs, English has opted to join a growing number of Americans who have gastric bypass surgery -- hailed in Finkelstein's book as "the best-known treatment for severe obesity."
"I have a higher risk of developing diabetes or hypertension if I don't have the surgery," English said.
"I don't care if I end up with a body like whoever-in-the-media thinks I should look like; I just want to be healthy and able to participate in my daughter's life," she said.
No, I said our small is called a grande and our medium is called the “Big Sumbich.”
All this talk about dark energy makes the universe sound so goth. Who knew?
Super-computer Could Throw Light On 'Mysterious' Dark Energy
ScienceDaily (Jan. 11, 2008) — Cosmologists have run a series of huge computer simulations of the Universe that could ultimately help solve the mystery of dark energy.
Results of the simulations, carried out by Durham University's world-leading Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC), tell researchers how to measure dark energy -- a repulsive force that counteracts gravity.
The findings will also provide vital input into the design of a proposed satellite mission called SPACE -- the SPectroscopic All-sky Cosmic Explorer - that could unveil the nature of dark energy.
The discovery of dark energy in 1998 was completely unexpected and understanding its nature is one of the biggest problems in physics.
Scientists believe dark energy, which makes up 70 per cent of the Universe, is driving its accelerating expansion. If this expansion continues to accelerate experts say it could eventually lead to a Big Freeze as the Universe is pulled apart and becomes a vast cold expanse of dying stars and black holes.
The simulations, which took 11 days to run on Durham's unique Cosmology Machine (COSMA) computer, looked at tiny ripples in the distribution of matter in the Universe made by sound waves a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.
The ripples are delicate and some have been destroyed over the subsequent 13 billion years of the Universe, but the simulations showed they survived in certain conditions.
By changing the nature of dark energy in the simulations, the researchers discovered that the ripples appeared to change in length and could act as a "standard ruler" in the measurement of dark energy.
ICC Director Professor Carlos Frenk said: "The ripples are a 'gold standard'. By comparing the size of the measured ripples to the gold standard we can work out how the Universe has expanded and from this figure out the properties of the dark energy.
"Astronomers are stuck with the one universe we live in. However, the simulations allow us to experiment with what might have happened if there had been more or less dark energy in the universe."
In the next five to 10 years a number of experiments are planned to explore dark energy. The Durham simulation has demonstrated the feasibility of the SPACE satellite mission proposed to the European Space Agency's (ESA) Cosmic Vision programme.
The project has been put forward by an international consortium of researchers including the Durham team.
SPACE, which is led by Bologna University, in Italy, is through to the next round of assessment by the ESA and if successful is planned to launch in 2017.
Co-principal investigator Professor Andrea Cimatti, of Bologna University, said: "Thanks to the ICC simulations it is possible to predict what SPACE would observe and to plan how to develop the mission parameters in order to obtain a three-dimensional map of the Universe and to compare it with the predictions of the simulations.
"Thanks to this comparison it will be possible to unveil the nature of dark energy and to understand how the structures in the Universe built up and evolved with cosmic time."
Findings are published January 11 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Durham research was funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council and the European Commission.
Stretching before you start is a key part of intergalactic yoga
An Inconvenient Galaxy: Arms Winding 'Backwards'
ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2008) — Discovery of two new components within a puzzling spiral galaxy confirm it must have a pair of arms winding in the opposite direction from most galaxies, according to new results.
“While the existence of a galaxy with a pair of ‘backward’ arms may seem like an inconvenient truth to many, our latest analysis indicates it is, nonetheless, a reality,” says Dr. Gene Byrd, professor of astronomy at The University of Alabama.
The galaxy, known as NGC4622, lies 200 million light years away in the constellation Centaurus.
Spiral arm pairs seen in galaxies are thought to trail, meaning they wind outward, opposite the direction of rotation of the disk material. Leading arms, such as the pair reported by the astronomers for NGC4622, do the opposite, opening outward in the same direction as the rotation of the galaxy’s disk.
Using a Fourier component image method to further analyze a 2001 Hubble Space Telescope image, the team discovered a previously hidden inner counter clockwise pair of spiral arms.
“Contrary to conventional wisdom, with both an inner counter-clockwise pair and an outer clockwise pair of spiral arms, NGC4622 must have a pair of leading arms,” Byrd said. “With two pairs of arms winding in opposite directions, one pair must lead and one pair must trail. Which way is which depends on the disk’s rotation. The outer clockwise pair must be the leading pair if the disk turns clockwise. Alternatively, the inner counter clockwise pair must be the leading pair if the disk turns counter clockwise.”
The team also discovered an outer clockwise single arm, previously hidden by the stronger outer clockwise arm pair. The galaxy also has a previously identified inner single counterclockwise arm. This confirms the galaxy must have a single leading arm. The outer clockwise arm must be the leading arm if the disk turns clockwise. The inner counter clockwise arm must be the leading single arm if the disk turns counter clockwise.
The researchers also performed a more complicated analysis of different color Fourier image components. This revealed the stronger outer clockwise pair of arms as the leading pair.
In 2002, team members first published, to great skepticism, results from a previous method that indicated the galaxy had a leading pair of spiral arms.
Other astronomers were skeptical of the 2002 announcement, in part, because the galaxy disk is only tilted about 19 degrees from face-on and because clumpy dust clouds might be concentrated on one side of the disk, creating misleading results. In response, the team’s new Fourier component method is actually assisted by the small tilt, and the effects of dust are not used in the latest analysis.
“Two independent methods now indicate that NGC4622’s arms do indeed behave in a very unusual fashion, with the outer arms winding outward in the same direction the galaxy turns,” said Byrd, a faculty member within UA’s College of Arts and Sciences.
Further studies of the origin of this behavior are needed, the researchers said. The Hubble Space Telescope image reveals a dark dust lane in the center which suggests the galaxy may have consumed a smaller companion galaxy, the researchers said.
This research is being presented to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas January 9, 2008. Presenting the results are Drs. Gene Byrd and Ron Buta, from The University of Alabama; Tarsh Freeman, Bevill Community College; and Dr. Sethanne Howard, retired from the U.S. Naval Observatory. Results are also scheduled for January publication in Astronomical Journal.
Cue the sad people. Cue the carbos…and action
Obese more depressed, depressed more obese
SEATTLE, Jan. 11 (UPI) -- Women with depression are more than twice as likely to be obese and obese women are more than twice as likely to be depressed, a U.S. study found.
Lead author Gregory Simon, a psychiatrist and researcher at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, said that depression and obesity likely fuel one another.
"When people gain weight, they're more likely to become depressed and when they get depressed, they have more trouble losing weight," Simon said in a statement.
Researchers interviewed 4,641 female health-plan enrollees, ages 40 to 65, by phone on their height, weight, exercise levels, dietary habits and body image. The women also completed the Patient Health Questionnaire, a measure of depression symptoms.
The study, published in General Hospital Psychiatry, found women with body mass index at or above 30 exercised the least, had the poorest body image and ingested 20 percent more calories than those with lower BMIs.
"The stigma of being overweight could hurt self-esteem, and thus, efforts to lose weight," Simon says. "It's not that these women are clueless, it's that they're hopeless."
Wonder if they did any field work at Chippendales?
So, the experts who proposed this—how many car radios do you think they’ve lost?
Should Heroin Be Prescribed To Addicts?
ScienceDaily (Jan. 11, 2008) — Experts debate whether heroin should be prescribed to addicts who are difficult to treat in a recent issue of the British Medical Journal.
Maintenance treatment with heroin is appropriate for heroin misusers under certain circumstances, argue Jürgen Rehm from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and Benedikt Fischer from the University of Victoria, British Columbia.
They point to trials in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany, which found heroin assisted maintenance treatment feasible and effective for those resistant to treatment. They also found it to be cost effective compared with methadone maintenance treatment.
In the UK, heroin has also been a treatment option for heroin misusers for several decades, but the practice remains controversial.
"So, if maintenance treatment is generally justifiable, why should heroin not be used as one such pharmacological agent?" they ask.
One reason that has been cited is safety, both for the patient and for the general public. Yet results from the Swiss studies show that mortality among patients in heroin assisted maintenance programmes is low, and lower than for patients in other maintenance programmes.
Overall, say the authors, we see no convincing reason why heroin assisted maintenance treatment should not be part of a comprehensive treatment system for opioid dependence.
But Neil McKeganey, Professor of Drug Misuse Research at the University of Glasgow argues that prescribing heroin to heroin addicts is treating the effects of misuse not the addiction.
The evidence in relation to heroin prescribing is far from conclusive, he says, while the cost of treating an addict with heroin is estimated to be three to four times that of treating an addict with methadone.
Prescribing heroin to heroin addicts is also a risky strategy, which could lead to massive pressure on doctors to prescribe increasing amounts of the drug.
Research has shown that with the right services in place it is possible to do more than simply stabilise addicts' continued drug use through the prescribing route, writes McKeganey. For example, a Scottish study found 29.4% of addicts who received residential rehabilitation were abstinent for at least 90 days compared with only 3.4% receiving methadone maintenance.
Other research has found that most addicts want services to help them become drug free. Health services therefore need to ensure that they are supporting addicts' attempts to become drug free, and they need to be extremely cautious about any extension of a policy that could be seen as a route to maintaining rather than reducing an individual's drug dependency
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 01/10/08
Headlines of the day
Should zoo let polar bear eat her cubs? (cnn)
Wiretaps Cut Because FBI Didn't Pay Phone Bill (WCBS)
"What are you doing here?": man asks wife at brothel
You know, some like garlic and some like to dance
Chimpanzees May Build Their 'Cultures' In A Similar Way To Humans
ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2008) — Socially-learned cultural behaviour thought to be unique to humans is also found among chimpanzees colonies, scientists at the University of Liverpool have found.
See also:
Historically, scientists believed that behavioural differences between colonies of chimpanzees were due to variations in genetics. A team at Liverpool, however, has now discovered that variations in behaviour are down to chimpanzees migrating to other colonies, proving that they build their 'cultures' in a similar way to humans.
Primatologist, Dr Stephen Lycett, explains: "We knew there were behavioural differences between chimpanzee colonies, but nobody really knew why. It was assumed that young chimpanzees developed certain behavioural characteristics from the genes passed down from their parents, but there was no evidence to clearly support this. It was also thought that because behaviour was dictated by biology, chimpanzees did not have a 'culture' in the same way that humans do."
By looking at how chimpanzees prepare their food, the research team discovered that one colony used stone tools to crack nuts, whereas another colony used wooden tools as well as stone. They found these methods of preparing food have spread 4000km from East to West Africa over the more than 100,000 years. The team also found this true of other techniques, such as grooming. The research suggests that behavioural variety is due to how chimpanzees socialise rather than genetics as previously thought.
To investigate the theory further researchers built an evolutionary tree of chimpanzee behaviour in East and West Africa as well as a genetic family tree. They had expected to find that those with similar genetic patterns also shared behavioural similarities. Instead, they found that some chimpanzees shared behavioural similarities with those that were genetically different from them.
Dr Lycett, added: "This explains why some colonies, for example, use similar methods for finding food, adopting certain behaviour and adapting different methods to suit their own environment. In this sense we can see for the first time that culture exists in our closest relatives."
Sounds like a job for Dog the Bounty Hunter
Galaxy May Hold Hundreds Of Rogue Black Holes
ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2008) — If the latest simulation of what happens when black holes merge is correct, there could be hundreds of rogue black holes, each weighing several thousand times the mass of the sun, roaming around the Milky Way galaxy.
"Rogue black holes like this would be very difficult to spot," says Vanderbilt astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, who is presenting the results of the supercomputer simulation at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Jan. 9 in Austin, Texas. Much of the research was done at Penn State University in collaboration with Deirdre Shoemaker and Nicolas Yunes before Holley-Bockelmann moved to Vanderbilt. Kayhan Gultekin at the University of Michigan also participated in the study.
"Unless it's swallowing a lot of gas, about the only way to detect the approach of such a black hole would be to observe the way in which its super-strength gravitational field bends the light that passes nearby. This produces an effect called gravitational lensing that would make background stars appear to shift and brighten momentarily," she says.
The research focused on modeling "intermediate mass" black holes, whose very existence is controversial. Astronomers have ample evidence that small black holes less than 100 solar masses are produced when giant stars explode. There is similar evidence that "super-massive" black holes weighing the equivalent of millions to billions of solar masses sit at the heart of many galaxies, including the Milky Way. In addition, theoreticians have predicted that globular clusters -- ancient, gravitationally bound groups of 100,000 to a million stars -- should contain a third class of black holes, called intermediate mass black holes, that weigh a few thousand solar masses. But so far there have only been two tentative observations of objects of this sort.
In the past two years, scientists have succeeded in numerically simulating black hole mergers that incorporate Einstein's theory of relativity. One of the big surprises to come from this effort is the prediction that when two black holes that are rotating at different speeds or are different sizes combine, the newly merged black hole receives a big kick due to conservation of momentum, pushing it away in an arbitrary direction at velocities as high as 4,000 kilometers per second.
"This is much higher than anyone predicted. Even the average kick velocity of 200 kilometers per second is extremely high when compared to the escape velocities of typical astronomical objects," says Holley-Bockelmann. "We realized that basically any black hole merger would kick the new remnant out of a globular cluster, because the escape velocity is less than 100 kilometers per second."
Using the facilities of Vanderbilt's Advanced Center for Computation, Research and Education, Holley-Bockelmann's team ran a number of simulations of the growth of intermediate mass black holes as they combine with a number of stellar-sized black holes, which are plentiful in globular clusters, paying close attention to the kick they received after each merger.
"We used different assumptions for the initial black hole mass, for the range of stellar black hole masses within a globular cluster, and assumed that the spins and spin orientations were distributed randomly. With our most conservative assumptions, we found that, even if every globular cluster started out with an intermediate-sized black hole, only about 30 percent retain them through the merger epoch. With our least conservative assumptions, less than 2 percent of the globular clusters should contain intermediate mass black holes today," she says.
If the roughly 200 globular clusters in the Milky Way have indeed spawned intermediate-sized black holes, this means that hundreds of them are probably wandering invisibly around the Milky Way, waiting to engulf the nebulae, stars and planets that are unfortunate enough to cross their paths.
Fortunately, the existence of a few rogue black holes in the neighborhood does not present a major danger. "These rogue black holes are extremely unlikely to do any damage to us in the lifetime of the universe," Holley-Bockelmann stresses. "Their danger zone, the Schwarzschild radius, is really tiny, only a few hundred kilometers. There are far more dangerous things in our neighborhood!"
The other 40 percent feels the same way. They just don’t want to talk about it.
60 Percent Of Psychotherapy Clients Felt Therapy Didn't End On Time
ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2008) — Sixty percent of private practice dynamically oriented psychotherapy clients felt that their therapy either lasted too long or ended too soon, according to recent research conducted by Prof. David Roe, Head of the Department of Community Mental Health, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences at the University of Haifa. "While there is widespread agreement that an ideal termination of psychotherapy occurs naturally, with an agreement of the timing between therapist and client, our research reveals that more often than not -- this does not happen" said Prof. Roe.
In the study, which was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Rachel Dekel and Galit Harel from Bar Ilan University and Prof. Shmuel Fennig of Tel Aviv University Medical School, 82 people who were in private practice psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy for at least 6 months (and average of 2 years), which had recently ended, were assessed regarding the way they experienced the timing of, reasons for and feelings about their psychotherapy termination.
The findings, which were recently published in three psychotherapy journals: "Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic"; "The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis & Dynamic Psychiatry" and "Psychology and psychotherapy: Theory, research and practice", revealed that 84% of participants stated that they initiated the termination; the remaining 16% stated that termination was either by mutual agreement or initiated by the therapists.
The results of the study show that only 40% of the clients felt that the therapy ended at the appropriate time, 37% felt that it ended earlier than it should have and 23% felt that the therapy went on for too long.
The most frequent reasons for termination among those who experienced it as too early were financial constrains (34.5%) and mismatch with therapist (27.6%). Among those clients who experienced therapy as lasting too long, the most frequent reasons were: feeling uncomfortable toward the therapist (26.3%), hope that the treatment would improve (21.1%) and dependence on the therapist (21.1%).
In general, clients who reported that termination was on time were more satisfied with their therapy. Factors contributing to positive feelings about termination included perceiving the experience of termination as an expression of independence, reflection of positive aspects of the therapeutic relationship and a reflection of positive gains experienced in therapy.
"Whereas clinical lore has consistently suggested that therapists must help clients focus on the emotionally painful aspects of this period and the difficulty in separating, the emerging data suggest that it is equally important to relate to the clients' positive feelings" said Professor Roe, "Results suggest that clients find terminating psychotherapy at the right time important and yet difficult to achieve, and that clients experience a wide range of feelings, many positive, during the termination phase, which call for a reconceptualization of the role of the therapist during this important phase of psychotherapy."
If you keep flushing that stuff, it’s got to end up somewhere
Surprise found in Earth’s plumbing system (MSNBC)
Seismologists have used tiny earthquakes to make the first images of the inside of a deep sea vent — and it doesn’t look like anyone thought it would.
Sea floor vents (often called "black smokers" because of the cloud of chemicals they ooze) are the outflow channels of vast plumbing systems that exist under the Earth's mid-ocean ridges, which run across some 37,000 miles (60,000 kilometers) of the seafloor.
Hydrothermal vents are found all over the globe.
Story continues below ↓advertisement
The hypothetical image scientists had drawn of these vent systems had cold, deep-ocean water being forced down by overlying pressure through large faults along the ridges. The water was then thought to be superheated by shallow volcanism, eventually rising toward the middle of the ridges where the vents tend to be clustered.
But the new images, detailed in a study in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Nature, paint a different picture: Ocean water appears to descend through tiny cracks in the ridge, instead of large faults, then runs below the ridge along its axis in a tunnel-like zone just above a magma chamber for several kilometers. As the water gets heated, it rises back to the sea floor (like a pot of boiling water) and bubbles out through a series of vents.
"If you google on images of hydrothermal vents, you come up with cartoons that don't at all match what we see," said lead study author Maya Tolstoy of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a part of Columbia University.
The new images of the vent system, taken along the East Pacific Rise about 565 miles southwest of Acapulco, Mexico, were created using seismometers that recorded 7,000 tiny, shallow earthquakes over the course of seven months in 2003 and 2004.
The quakes are thought to be the result of cold water passing through the hot rocks below the surface and picking up their heat, causing the rocks to cool and shrink, and therefore crack and create small tremors.
The new model also suggests that the water moves a lot faster than previously thought — perhaps a billion gallons per year flows through the particular system studied.
The findings could help scientists determine how the thriving communities around these vents travel along seafloor currents and how the nutrients that feed them flow.
Should zoo let polar bear eat her cubs? (cnn)
Wiretaps Cut Because FBI Didn't Pay Phone Bill (WCBS)
"What are you doing here?": man asks wife at brothel
You know, some like garlic and some like to dance
Chimpanzees May Build Their 'Cultures' In A Similar Way To Humans
ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2008) — Socially-learned cultural behaviour thought to be unique to humans is also found among chimpanzees colonies, scientists at the University of Liverpool have found.
See also:
Historically, scientists believed that behavioural differences between colonies of chimpanzees were due to variations in genetics. A team at Liverpool, however, has now discovered that variations in behaviour are down to chimpanzees migrating to other colonies, proving that they build their 'cultures' in a similar way to humans.
Primatologist, Dr Stephen Lycett, explains: "We knew there were behavioural differences between chimpanzee colonies, but nobody really knew why. It was assumed that young chimpanzees developed certain behavioural characteristics from the genes passed down from their parents, but there was no evidence to clearly support this. It was also thought that because behaviour was dictated by biology, chimpanzees did not have a 'culture' in the same way that humans do."
By looking at how chimpanzees prepare their food, the research team discovered that one colony used stone tools to crack nuts, whereas another colony used wooden tools as well as stone. They found these methods of preparing food have spread 4000km from East to West Africa over the more than 100,000 years. The team also found this true of other techniques, such as grooming. The research suggests that behavioural variety is due to how chimpanzees socialise rather than genetics as previously thought.
To investigate the theory further researchers built an evolutionary tree of chimpanzee behaviour in East and West Africa as well as a genetic family tree. They had expected to find that those with similar genetic patterns also shared behavioural similarities. Instead, they found that some chimpanzees shared behavioural similarities with those that were genetically different from them.
Dr Lycett, added: "This explains why some colonies, for example, use similar methods for finding food, adopting certain behaviour and adapting different methods to suit their own environment. In this sense we can see for the first time that culture exists in our closest relatives."
Sounds like a job for Dog the Bounty Hunter
Galaxy May Hold Hundreds Of Rogue Black Holes
ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2008) — If the latest simulation of what happens when black holes merge is correct, there could be hundreds of rogue black holes, each weighing several thousand times the mass of the sun, roaming around the Milky Way galaxy.
"Rogue black holes like this would be very difficult to spot," says Vanderbilt astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, who is presenting the results of the supercomputer simulation at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Jan. 9 in Austin, Texas. Much of the research was done at Penn State University in collaboration with Deirdre Shoemaker and Nicolas Yunes before Holley-Bockelmann moved to Vanderbilt. Kayhan Gultekin at the University of Michigan also participated in the study.
"Unless it's swallowing a lot of gas, about the only way to detect the approach of such a black hole would be to observe the way in which its super-strength gravitational field bends the light that passes nearby. This produces an effect called gravitational lensing that would make background stars appear to shift and brighten momentarily," she says.
The research focused on modeling "intermediate mass" black holes, whose very existence is controversial. Astronomers have ample evidence that small black holes less than 100 solar masses are produced when giant stars explode. There is similar evidence that "super-massive" black holes weighing the equivalent of millions to billions of solar masses sit at the heart of many galaxies, including the Milky Way. In addition, theoreticians have predicted that globular clusters -- ancient, gravitationally bound groups of 100,000 to a million stars -- should contain a third class of black holes, called intermediate mass black holes, that weigh a few thousand solar masses. But so far there have only been two tentative observations of objects of this sort.
In the past two years, scientists have succeeded in numerically simulating black hole mergers that incorporate Einstein's theory of relativity. One of the big surprises to come from this effort is the prediction that when two black holes that are rotating at different speeds or are different sizes combine, the newly merged black hole receives a big kick due to conservation of momentum, pushing it away in an arbitrary direction at velocities as high as 4,000 kilometers per second.
"This is much higher than anyone predicted. Even the average kick velocity of 200 kilometers per second is extremely high when compared to the escape velocities of typical astronomical objects," says Holley-Bockelmann. "We realized that basically any black hole merger would kick the new remnant out of a globular cluster, because the escape velocity is less than 100 kilometers per second."
Using the facilities of Vanderbilt's Advanced Center for Computation, Research and Education, Holley-Bockelmann's team ran a number of simulations of the growth of intermediate mass black holes as they combine with a number of stellar-sized black holes, which are plentiful in globular clusters, paying close attention to the kick they received after each merger.
"We used different assumptions for the initial black hole mass, for the range of stellar black hole masses within a globular cluster, and assumed that the spins and spin orientations were distributed randomly. With our most conservative assumptions, we found that, even if every globular cluster started out with an intermediate-sized black hole, only about 30 percent retain them through the merger epoch. With our least conservative assumptions, less than 2 percent of the globular clusters should contain intermediate mass black holes today," she says.
If the roughly 200 globular clusters in the Milky Way have indeed spawned intermediate-sized black holes, this means that hundreds of them are probably wandering invisibly around the Milky Way, waiting to engulf the nebulae, stars and planets that are unfortunate enough to cross their paths.
Fortunately, the existence of a few rogue black holes in the neighborhood does not present a major danger. "These rogue black holes are extremely unlikely to do any damage to us in the lifetime of the universe," Holley-Bockelmann stresses. "Their danger zone, the Schwarzschild radius, is really tiny, only a few hundred kilometers. There are far more dangerous things in our neighborhood!"
The other 40 percent feels the same way. They just don’t want to talk about it.
60 Percent Of Psychotherapy Clients Felt Therapy Didn't End On Time
ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2008) — Sixty percent of private practice dynamically oriented psychotherapy clients felt that their therapy either lasted too long or ended too soon, according to recent research conducted by Prof. David Roe, Head of the Department of Community Mental Health, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences at the University of Haifa. "While there is widespread agreement that an ideal termination of psychotherapy occurs naturally, with an agreement of the timing between therapist and client, our research reveals that more often than not -- this does not happen" said Prof. Roe.
In the study, which was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Rachel Dekel and Galit Harel from Bar Ilan University and Prof. Shmuel Fennig of Tel Aviv University Medical School, 82 people who were in private practice psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy for at least 6 months (and average of 2 years), which had recently ended, were assessed regarding the way they experienced the timing of, reasons for and feelings about their psychotherapy termination.
The findings, which were recently published in three psychotherapy journals: "Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic"; "The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis & Dynamic Psychiatry" and "Psychology and psychotherapy: Theory, research and practice", revealed that 84% of participants stated that they initiated the termination; the remaining 16% stated that termination was either by mutual agreement or initiated by the therapists.
The results of the study show that only 40% of the clients felt that the therapy ended at the appropriate time, 37% felt that it ended earlier than it should have and 23% felt that the therapy went on for too long.
The most frequent reasons for termination among those who experienced it as too early were financial constrains (34.5%) and mismatch with therapist (27.6%). Among those clients who experienced therapy as lasting too long, the most frequent reasons were: feeling uncomfortable toward the therapist (26.3%), hope that the treatment would improve (21.1%) and dependence on the therapist (21.1%).
In general, clients who reported that termination was on time were more satisfied with their therapy. Factors contributing to positive feelings about termination included perceiving the experience of termination as an expression of independence, reflection of positive aspects of the therapeutic relationship and a reflection of positive gains experienced in therapy.
"Whereas clinical lore has consistently suggested that therapists must help clients focus on the emotionally painful aspects of this period and the difficulty in separating, the emerging data suggest that it is equally important to relate to the clients' positive feelings" said Professor Roe, "Results suggest that clients find terminating psychotherapy at the right time important and yet difficult to achieve, and that clients experience a wide range of feelings, many positive, during the termination phase, which call for a reconceptualization of the role of the therapist during this important phase of psychotherapy."
If you keep flushing that stuff, it’s got to end up somewhere
Surprise found in Earth’s plumbing system (MSNBC)
Seismologists have used tiny earthquakes to make the first images of the inside of a deep sea vent — and it doesn’t look like anyone thought it would.
Sea floor vents (often called "black smokers" because of the cloud of chemicals they ooze) are the outflow channels of vast plumbing systems that exist under the Earth's mid-ocean ridges, which run across some 37,000 miles (60,000 kilometers) of the seafloor.
Hydrothermal vents are found all over the globe.
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The hypothetical image scientists had drawn of these vent systems had cold, deep-ocean water being forced down by overlying pressure through large faults along the ridges. The water was then thought to be superheated by shallow volcanism, eventually rising toward the middle of the ridges where the vents tend to be clustered.
But the new images, detailed in a study in the Jan. 10 issue of the journal Nature, paint a different picture: Ocean water appears to descend through tiny cracks in the ridge, instead of large faults, then runs below the ridge along its axis in a tunnel-like zone just above a magma chamber for several kilometers. As the water gets heated, it rises back to the sea floor (like a pot of boiling water) and bubbles out through a series of vents.
"If you google on images of hydrothermal vents, you come up with cartoons that don't at all match what we see," said lead study author Maya Tolstoy of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a part of Columbia University.
The new images of the vent system, taken along the East Pacific Rise about 565 miles southwest of Acapulco, Mexico, were created using seismometers that recorded 7,000 tiny, shallow earthquakes over the course of seven months in 2003 and 2004.
The quakes are thought to be the result of cold water passing through the hot rocks below the surface and picking up their heat, causing the rocks to cool and shrink, and therefore crack and create small tremors.
The new model also suggests that the water moves a lot faster than previously thought — perhaps a billion gallons per year flows through the particular system studied.
The findings could help scientists determine how the thriving communities around these vents travel along seafloor currents and how the nutrients that feed them flow.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Making Science More Better For You on 01/09/08
Headlines of the day (an embarrassment of riches)
"My client went too far by mailing a bloody cow's head"
"Thief caught stuffing puppy under sweater"
"Dog Shoots and Kills Owner"
"Dead Man's Body Used in Attempt To Cash Check"
"Hayden man cuts off, microwaves hand"
"Police chief canned for stealing firefighters' beer"
And why should they be any different?
Do Monkeys Pay for Sex?
Monday, Jan. 07, 2008 By KRISTA MAHR (Time magazine)
It turns out that one of humanity's oldest professions may be even older than we thought: In a recent study of macaque monkeys in Indonesia, researchers found that male primates "paid" for sexual access to females — and that the going rate for such access dwindled as the number of available females went up.
Related Articles
According to the paper, "Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market," published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual. It worked. After the females were groomed by male partners, female sexual activity more than doubled, from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times. The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male's odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received. Though primates have been observed trading grooming for food sharing or infant care, this is the first time this kind of exchange has been observed between male and female primates in a sexual context, says lead researcher Michael Gumert of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, demonstrating that the amount of time a male macaque "will invest in [its] partner" depends largely on how many options it has around.
We, more evolved primates, may be tempted to take a cynical view of these findings, but the study's author suggests a more favorable interpretation: The macaques' exchange of services simply illustrates a nifty system of cooperation that allows for successful mating. The basic premise, says Gumert, is called biological market theory, which follows the elementary principles of supply versus demand. When applied to the voluntary sex life of long-tailed macaques, it means that the price that one group is willing to pay for a commodity that the other group has depends on the scarcity or abundance of that commodity on the market. Scientists think female macaques may use grooming, too, to try to maintain social relationships within the group to benefit their offspring, or as a way to distract or appease males from getting aggressive after a sexual encounter. In fact, when female macaques groomed males, their services decreased sexual activity in males.
It's easy to draw parallels between the monkeys' mating dance and our own, but Gumert warns against reading too much into primate studies like this one. The paper draws no conclusions about what these observations in monkeys mean for the human world. In fact, whether and how scientists should extrapolate from primate behavior is a fairly "big debate," says Gumert. Certainly, our biology underpins much of what we do, but so does our culture and environment. Gumert asks, "Where do we draw the line?"
• That inquiry is at the heart of primate studies like Gumert's. While science would do well to understand more about the long-tailed macaques' social world — especially as the animals are increasingly losing their natural habitat in Asia — Gumert says figuring out how this market concept can be applied to the social settings of other animals, including humans, will be its long-term value. In the meantime, it can at least make for some thought-provoking pillow talk.
One way or another, everybody pays…even monkeys.
The not so big bang? The big boom?
Mysterious Explosion Detected In The Distant Past, Halfway Back To Big Bang
ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2008) — Using the powerful one-two combo of NASA’s Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang.
"This discovery dramatically moves back the time at which we know short GRBs were exploding. The short burst is almost twice as far as the previous confirmed record holder," says John Graham of the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Md.
GRBs are among the most powerful explosions in the universe, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the form of X-rays and gamma rays. Most bursts fall in one of two categories: long bursts and short bursts, depending on whether they last longer or shorter than three seconds. Astronomers think that long GRBs are triggered by the collapse and explosion of massive stars. In contrast, a variety of mechanisms have been proposed for short bursts. The most popular model says that most short GRBs occur when two neutron stars smash into each other and collapse into a black hole, ejecting energy in two counterflowing beams.
The record-setting short burst is known as GRB 070714B, since it was the second GRB detected on July 14, 2007. Swift discovered the GRB in the constellation Taurus. The burst’s high energy and 3-second duration firmly place it in the short GRB category. Rapid follow-up observations with the 2-meter Liverpool Telescope and the 4-meter William Herschel Telescope found an optical afterglow in the same location as the burst, which allowed astronomers to identify the GRB’s host galaxy.
Next, Graham and his colleagues, Andrew Fruchter of the Space Telescope Science Institute, in Baltimore, and Andrew Levan of the University of Warwick, U.K., trained the 8-meter Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii on the galaxy. It revealed that the host galaxy has a spectral line from ionized oxygen. The amount that line was shifted toward the red end of the spectrum yields a redshift of 0.92. A redshift of 0.92 translates to a distance of 7.4 billion light-years, meaning the explosion occurred 7.4 billion years ago.
"The fact that this short burst is so far away means this subclass has a broad range of distances, although they still tend to be closer on average than long GRBs," says Swift lead scientist Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Gehrels adds that GRB 070714B’s energy is about 100 times higher than average for short bursts, and is more similar to the typical energy of a long GRB. "It is unclear whether another mechanism is needed to explain this explosion, such as a neutron star-black hole merger. Or it could be that there are a wide range of energies for neutron star-neutron star mergers, but that seems unlikely."
Another possibility is that GRB 070714B concentrated its energy in two very narrow beams, and one of the beams happened to be aimed directly at Earth. This would make the burst seem more powerful than it really was. Perhaps most short GRBs eject their energy in wider and less-concentrated beams.
"We now have a good idea of the type of star that produces the brighter long bursts. But how short bursts are formed remains a mystery," says Fruchter.
"Another possibility is that GRB 070714B concentrated its energy in two very narrow beams, and one of the beams happened to be aimed directly at Earth." If your not careful that thing can go off.
How about a car that runs on lard?
Some Biofuels Are Worse Environmentally Than Fossil Fuels, Analysis Shows
ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2008) — Biofuels reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in comparison to fossil fuels. Smithsonian researchers highlight a new study that factors in environmental costs of biofuel production. Corn, soy and sugarcane come up short. The authors urge governments to be far more selective about which biofuels they support, as not all are more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels.
Because fossil fuels contribute to global warming and supplies are dwindling, more eco-friendly alternatives are required. However, biofuels may not be superior if their production results in environmental destruction, pollution and damage to human health, argue postdoctoral fellow Jörn Scharlemann and William Laurance, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
A new study by Zah et al., commissioned by the Swiss government, calculates the relative merits of 26 biofuels based on relative reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions and an environmental-impact index, which includes damages to human health and ecosystems and natural resource depletion.
The Swiss study identifies striking differences in the environmental costs of different biofuels. Fuels made from U.S. corn, Brazilian soy and Malaysian palm oil may be worse overall than fossil fuels. The best alternatives include biofuels from residual products, such as recycled cooking oil and ethanol from grass or wood.
The Zah et al. study falls short in that it fails to consider secondary consequences of biofuels, such as rising food costs, but it is a big step forward in providing a way to compare the environmental benefits and costs of dozens of different biofuels.
"Different biofuels vary enormously in how eco-friendly they are," said Laurance. "We need to be smart and promote the right biofuels, or we won't be helping the environment much at all."
At last, a way to get some use out of that pound of ground beef that’s at the back of the fridge.
Efficient Biofuel Made From Genetically Modified E. Coli Bacteria
ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2008) — Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a new method for producing next-generation biofuels by genetically modifying Escherichia coli bacteria to be an efficient biofuel synthesizer. The method could lead to mass production of these biofuels.
Concerns about long-term fossil fuel availability, coupled with environmental problems resulting from their production and use, have spurred increased efforts to synthesize biofuels from renewable resources.
Biofuels, like commercially available ethanol, are produced from agricultural products such as corn, sugarcane or waste cellulose. Ethanol, however, has limitations — it is not as efficient as gasoline and must be mixed with gas for use as a transportation fuel. It also tends to absorb water from its surroundings, making it corrosive and preventing it from being stored or distributed in existing infrastructure without modification.
Higher-chain alcohols have energy densities close to gasoline, are not as volatile or corrosive as ethanol, and do not readily absorb water. Furthermore, branched-chain alcohols, such as isobutanol, have higher-octane numbers, resulting in less knocking in engines. Isobutanol or C5 alcohols have never been produced from a renewable source with yields high enough to make them viable as a gasoline substitute.
A new strategy has been developed by UCLA professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering James Liao, postdoctoral fellow Shota Atsumi and visiting professor Taizo Hanai.
"These alcohols are typically trace byproducts in fermentation," Liao said. "To modify an organism to produce these compounds usually results in toxicity in the cell. We bypassed this difficulty by leveraging the native metabolic networks in E. coli but altered its intracellular chemistry using genetic engineering to produce these alcohols."
The research team modified key pathways in E. coli to produce several higher-chain alcohols from glucose, a renewable carbon source, including isobutanol, 1-butanol, 2-methyl-1-butanol, 3-methyl-1-butanol and 2-phenylethanol.
This strategy leverages the E. coli host's highly active amino acid biosynthetic pathway by shifting part of it to alcohol production. In particular, the research team achieved high-yield, high-specificity production of isobutanol from glucose.
This new strategy opens an unexplored frontier for biofuels production, both in coli and in other microorganisms.
"The ability to make these branched-chain higher alcohols so efficiently is surprising," Liao said. "Unlike ethanol, organisms are not used to producing these unusual alcohols, and there is no advantage for them to do so. The fact that they can be made by E. coli is even more surprising, since E. coli is not a promising host to tolerate alcohols. These results mean that these unusual alcohols in fact can be manufactured as efficiently as what evolved in nature for ethanol. Therefore, we now can explore these unusual alcohols as biofuels and are not bound by what nature has given us."
UCLA has licensed the technology through an exclusive royalty-bearing license to Gevo Inc., a Pasadena, Calif.-based company founded in 2005 and dedicated to producing biofuels.
"Given that part of UCLA's mission is to transfer technologies to the commercial sector to benefit the public, we are excited at the prospect that this UCLA-developed technology may play a key role in addressing climate change and energy independence," said Earl Weinstein, assistant director of the UCLA Office of Intellectual Property. "It has been a pleasure to work with the team at Gevo on this deal, and we look forward to an ongoing relationship with them".
"This discovery leads to new opportunities for advanced biofuel development," said Patrick Gruber, Gevo's chief executive officer. "As the exclusive licensee of this technology, we can further our national interests in developing advanced renewable resource-based fuels that will help address the issues of climate change and future energy needs while creating a significant competitive advantage."
Liao has joined Gevo's scientific advisory board. In this role, he will continue to provide technical oversight and guidance during the commercial development of this technology.
"Dr. Liao's input will be invaluable as we scale up the commercial applications made possible by this breakthrough in technology and bring advanced biofuels to market," said Matthew Peters, chief scientific officer of Gevo.
"My client went too far by mailing a bloody cow's head"
"Thief caught stuffing puppy under sweater"
"Dog Shoots and Kills Owner"
"Dead Man's Body Used in Attempt To Cash Check"
"Hayden man cuts off, microwaves hand"
"Police chief canned for stealing firefighters' beer"
And why should they be any different?
Do Monkeys Pay for Sex?
Monday, Jan. 07, 2008 By KRISTA MAHR (Time magazine)
It turns out that one of humanity's oldest professions may be even older than we thought: In a recent study of macaque monkeys in Indonesia, researchers found that male primates "paid" for sexual access to females — and that the going rate for such access dwindled as the number of available females went up.
Related Articles
According to the paper, "Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market," published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual. It worked. After the females were groomed by male partners, female sexual activity more than doubled, from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times. The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male's odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received. Though primates have been observed trading grooming for food sharing or infant care, this is the first time this kind of exchange has been observed between male and female primates in a sexual context, says lead researcher Michael Gumert of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, demonstrating that the amount of time a male macaque "will invest in [its] partner" depends largely on how many options it has around.
We, more evolved primates, may be tempted to take a cynical view of these findings, but the study's author suggests a more favorable interpretation: The macaques' exchange of services simply illustrates a nifty system of cooperation that allows for successful mating. The basic premise, says Gumert, is called biological market theory, which follows the elementary principles of supply versus demand. When applied to the voluntary sex life of long-tailed macaques, it means that the price that one group is willing to pay for a commodity that the other group has depends on the scarcity or abundance of that commodity on the market. Scientists think female macaques may use grooming, too, to try to maintain social relationships within the group to benefit their offspring, or as a way to distract or appease males from getting aggressive after a sexual encounter. In fact, when female macaques groomed males, their services decreased sexual activity in males.
It's easy to draw parallels between the monkeys' mating dance and our own, but Gumert warns against reading too much into primate studies like this one. The paper draws no conclusions about what these observations in monkeys mean for the human world. In fact, whether and how scientists should extrapolate from primate behavior is a fairly "big debate," says Gumert. Certainly, our biology underpins much of what we do, but so does our culture and environment. Gumert asks, "Where do we draw the line?"
• That inquiry is at the heart of primate studies like Gumert's. While science would do well to understand more about the long-tailed macaques' social world — especially as the animals are increasingly losing their natural habitat in Asia — Gumert says figuring out how this market concept can be applied to the social settings of other animals, including humans, will be its long-term value. In the meantime, it can at least make for some thought-provoking pillow talk.
One way or another, everybody pays…even monkeys.
The not so big bang? The big boom?
Mysterious Explosion Detected In The Distant Past, Halfway Back To Big Bang
ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2008) — Using the powerful one-two combo of NASA’s Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang.
"This discovery dramatically moves back the time at which we know short GRBs were exploding. The short burst is almost twice as far as the previous confirmed record holder," says John Graham of the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Md.
GRBs are among the most powerful explosions in the universe, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the form of X-rays and gamma rays. Most bursts fall in one of two categories: long bursts and short bursts, depending on whether they last longer or shorter than three seconds. Astronomers think that long GRBs are triggered by the collapse and explosion of massive stars. In contrast, a variety of mechanisms have been proposed for short bursts. The most popular model says that most short GRBs occur when two neutron stars smash into each other and collapse into a black hole, ejecting energy in two counterflowing beams.
The record-setting short burst is known as GRB 070714B, since it was the second GRB detected on July 14, 2007. Swift discovered the GRB in the constellation Taurus. The burst’s high energy and 3-second duration firmly place it in the short GRB category. Rapid follow-up observations with the 2-meter Liverpool Telescope and the 4-meter William Herschel Telescope found an optical afterglow in the same location as the burst, which allowed astronomers to identify the GRB’s host galaxy.
Next, Graham and his colleagues, Andrew Fruchter of the Space Telescope Science Institute, in Baltimore, and Andrew Levan of the University of Warwick, U.K., trained the 8-meter Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii on the galaxy. It revealed that the host galaxy has a spectral line from ionized oxygen. The amount that line was shifted toward the red end of the spectrum yields a redshift of 0.92. A redshift of 0.92 translates to a distance of 7.4 billion light-years, meaning the explosion occurred 7.4 billion years ago.
"The fact that this short burst is so far away means this subclass has a broad range of distances, although they still tend to be closer on average than long GRBs," says Swift lead scientist Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Gehrels adds that GRB 070714B’s energy is about 100 times higher than average for short bursts, and is more similar to the typical energy of a long GRB. "It is unclear whether another mechanism is needed to explain this explosion, such as a neutron star-black hole merger. Or it could be that there are a wide range of energies for neutron star-neutron star mergers, but that seems unlikely."
Another possibility is that GRB 070714B concentrated its energy in two very narrow beams, and one of the beams happened to be aimed directly at Earth. This would make the burst seem more powerful than it really was. Perhaps most short GRBs eject their energy in wider and less-concentrated beams.
"We now have a good idea of the type of star that produces the brighter long bursts. But how short bursts are formed remains a mystery," says Fruchter.
"Another possibility is that GRB 070714B concentrated its energy in two very narrow beams, and one of the beams happened to be aimed directly at Earth." If your not careful that thing can go off.
How about a car that runs on lard?
Some Biofuels Are Worse Environmentally Than Fossil Fuels, Analysis Shows
ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2008) — Biofuels reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in comparison to fossil fuels. Smithsonian researchers highlight a new study that factors in environmental costs of biofuel production. Corn, soy and sugarcane come up short. The authors urge governments to be far more selective about which biofuels they support, as not all are more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels.
Because fossil fuels contribute to global warming and supplies are dwindling, more eco-friendly alternatives are required. However, biofuels may not be superior if their production results in environmental destruction, pollution and damage to human health, argue postdoctoral fellow Jörn Scharlemann and William Laurance, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
A new study by Zah et al., commissioned by the Swiss government, calculates the relative merits of 26 biofuels based on relative reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions and an environmental-impact index, which includes damages to human health and ecosystems and natural resource depletion.
The Swiss study identifies striking differences in the environmental costs of different biofuels. Fuels made from U.S. corn, Brazilian soy and Malaysian palm oil may be worse overall than fossil fuels. The best alternatives include biofuels from residual products, such as recycled cooking oil and ethanol from grass or wood.
The Zah et al. study falls short in that it fails to consider secondary consequences of biofuels, such as rising food costs, but it is a big step forward in providing a way to compare the environmental benefits and costs of dozens of different biofuels.
"Different biofuels vary enormously in how eco-friendly they are," said Laurance. "We need to be smart and promote the right biofuels, or we won't be helping the environment much at all."
At last, a way to get some use out of that pound of ground beef that’s at the back of the fridge.
Efficient Biofuel Made From Genetically Modified E. Coli Bacteria
ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2008) — Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a new method for producing next-generation biofuels by genetically modifying Escherichia coli bacteria to be an efficient biofuel synthesizer. The method could lead to mass production of these biofuels.
Concerns about long-term fossil fuel availability, coupled with environmental problems resulting from their production and use, have spurred increased efforts to synthesize biofuels from renewable resources.
Biofuels, like commercially available ethanol, are produced from agricultural products such as corn, sugarcane or waste cellulose. Ethanol, however, has limitations — it is not as efficient as gasoline and must be mixed with gas for use as a transportation fuel. It also tends to absorb water from its surroundings, making it corrosive and preventing it from being stored or distributed in existing infrastructure without modification.
Higher-chain alcohols have energy densities close to gasoline, are not as volatile or corrosive as ethanol, and do not readily absorb water. Furthermore, branched-chain alcohols, such as isobutanol, have higher-octane numbers, resulting in less knocking in engines. Isobutanol or C5 alcohols have never been produced from a renewable source with yields high enough to make them viable as a gasoline substitute.
A new strategy has been developed by UCLA professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering James Liao, postdoctoral fellow Shota Atsumi and visiting professor Taizo Hanai.
"These alcohols are typically trace byproducts in fermentation," Liao said. "To modify an organism to produce these compounds usually results in toxicity in the cell. We bypassed this difficulty by leveraging the native metabolic networks in E. coli but altered its intracellular chemistry using genetic engineering to produce these alcohols."
The research team modified key pathways in E. coli to produce several higher-chain alcohols from glucose, a renewable carbon source, including isobutanol, 1-butanol, 2-methyl-1-butanol, 3-methyl-1-butanol and 2-phenylethanol.
This strategy leverages the E. coli host's highly active amino acid biosynthetic pathway by shifting part of it to alcohol production. In particular, the research team achieved high-yield, high-specificity production of isobutanol from glucose.
This new strategy opens an unexplored frontier for biofuels production, both in coli and in other microorganisms.
"The ability to make these branched-chain higher alcohols so efficiently is surprising," Liao said. "Unlike ethanol, organisms are not used to producing these unusual alcohols, and there is no advantage for them to do so. The fact that they can be made by E. coli is even more surprising, since E. coli is not a promising host to tolerate alcohols. These results mean that these unusual alcohols in fact can be manufactured as efficiently as what evolved in nature for ethanol. Therefore, we now can explore these unusual alcohols as biofuels and are not bound by what nature has given us."
UCLA has licensed the technology through an exclusive royalty-bearing license to Gevo Inc., a Pasadena, Calif.-based company founded in 2005 and dedicated to producing biofuels.
"Given that part of UCLA's mission is to transfer technologies to the commercial sector to benefit the public, we are excited at the prospect that this UCLA-developed technology may play a key role in addressing climate change and energy independence," said Earl Weinstein, assistant director of the UCLA Office of Intellectual Property. "It has been a pleasure to work with the team at Gevo on this deal, and we look forward to an ongoing relationship with them".
"This discovery leads to new opportunities for advanced biofuel development," said Patrick Gruber, Gevo's chief executive officer. "As the exclusive licensee of this technology, we can further our national interests in developing advanced renewable resource-based fuels that will help address the issues of climate change and future energy needs while creating a significant competitive advantage."
Liao has joined Gevo's scientific advisory board. In this role, he will continue to provide technical oversight and guidance during the commercial development of this technology.
"Dr. Liao's input will be invaluable as we scale up the commercial applications made possible by this breakthrough in technology and bring advanced biofuels to market," said Matthew Peters, chief scientific officer of Gevo.
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