Eating fish reduces risk of Alzheimer’s disease

People who eat baked or broiled fish on a weekly basis may be improving their brain health and reducing their risk of developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

“This is the first study to establish a direct relationship between fish consumption, brain structure and Alzheimer’s risk,” said Cyrus Raji, M.D., Ph.D., from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “The results showed that people who consumed baked or broiled fish at least one time per week had better preservation of gray matter volume on MRI in brain areas at risk for Alzheimer’s disease.”

Alzheimer’s disease is an incurable, progressive brain disease that slowly destroys memory and cognitive skills. According to the National Institute on Aging, as many as 5.1 million Americans may have Alzheimer’s disease. In MCI, memory loss is present but to a lesser extent than in Alzheimer’s disease. People with MCI often go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

For the study, 260 cognitively normal individuals were selected from the Cardiovascular Health Study. Information on fish consumption was gathered using the National Cancer Institute Food Frequency Questionnaire. There were 163 patients who consumed fish on a weekly basis, and the majority ate fish one to four times per week. Each patient underwent 3-D volumetric MRI of the brain. Voxel-based morphometry, a brain mapping technique that measures gray matter volume, was used to model the relationship between weekly fish consumption at baseline and brain structure 10 years later. The data were then analyzed to determine if gray matter volume preservation associated with fish consumption reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease. The study controlled for age, gender, education, race, obesity, physical activity, and the presence or absence of apolipoprotein E4 (ApoE4), a gene that increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

Gray matter volume is crucial to brain health. When it remains higher, brain health is being maintained. Decreases in gray matter volume indicate that brain cells are shrinking.
The findings showed that consumption of baked or broiled fish on a weekly basis was positively associated with gray matter volumes in several areas of the brain. Greater hippocampal, posterior cingulate and orbital frontal cortex volumes in relation to fish consumption reduced the risk for five-year decline to MCI or Alzheimer’s by almost five-fold.

“Consuming baked or broiled fish promotes stronger neurons in the brain’s gray matter by making them larger and healthier,” Dr. Raji said. “This simple lifestyle choice increases the brain’s resistance to Alzheimer’s disease and lowers risk for the disorder.”
The results also demonstrated increased levels of cognition in people who ate baked or broiled fish.
“Working memory, which allows people to focus on tasks and commit information to short-term memory, is one of the most important cognitive domains,” Dr. Raji said. “Working memory is destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease. We found higher levels of working memory in people who ate baked or broiled fish on a weekly basis, even when accounting for other factors, such as education, age, gender and physical activity.”
Eating fried fish, on the other hand, was not shown to increase brain volume or protect against cognitive decline.

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Stonehenge Reveals New Clues of Ancient Worship

Image: Stonehenge at sunset. (Credit: Jeffrey Pfau/Wikimedia Commons).

Stonehenge may have been a place for sun worship long before the iconic stones were erected more than 5,000 years ago, according to archaeologists who are carrying out the biggest-ever virtual excavation.
Using noninvasive technologies such as ground-penetrating radar and geophysical imaging, a team from the University of Birmingham's IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre, known as VISTA, and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna, discovered evidence of two huge pits positioned on a celestial alignment at Stonehenge.

Measuring more than 16 feet across and at least 3 feet deep, the pits lie within the Cursus, a large enclosure north of Stonehenge, which predates the prehistoric monument by up to 500 years.
"This is the first time we have seen anything quite like this at Stonehenge," said project leader Vince Gaffney, an archaeologist from the University of Birmingham.

"When viewed from the Heel Stone, a rather enigmatic stone which stands just outside the entrance to Stonehenge, the pits effectively mark the raising and setting of the sun at midsummer days," he explained.
According to the archaeologists, the pits may have contained tall stones, wooden posts or even fires to mark the sun rising and setting. Most likely, they defined a processional route used to celebrate the passage of the sun across the sky at the summer solstice.

"It is possible that processions within the Cursus moved from the eastern pit at sunrise, continuing eastwards along the Cursus and, following the path of the sun overhead, perhaps back to the west, reaching the western pit at sunset to mark the longest day of the year," said Gaffney.
The hypothesis gained more weight when the researchers measured the walking distance between the two pits.

They discovered that the procession would reach exactly halfway at midday, when the sun would be directly on top of Stonehenge.
"This is more than just a coincidence, indicating that the exact length of the Cursus and the positioning of the pits are of significance," said Henry Chapman, senior lecturer in archaeology and visualization at the University of Birmingham.

According to the researchers, the presence of the pits within the Cursus suggest that the Stonehenge area, which features England's densest complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, was already sacred before construction work began to build the enigmatic stone circle.
"Even though Stonehenge was ultimately the most important monument in the landscape, it may at times not have been the only, or most important, ritual focus," said Gaffney.

"The area of Stonehenge may have become significant as a sacred site at a much earlier date. Other activities were carried out at other ceremonial sites only a short distance away," he continued.
The researchers have already found a henge-like monument, several other small monuments, and a new horseshoe arrangement of large pits northeast of Stonehenge, which may have also contained posts.
They believe that these structures functioned as minor shrines, perhaps serving specific communities visiting the ceremonial center.

The team is confident that the project will produce new discoveries soon.
"Our knowledge of the ancient landscapes that once existed around Stonehenge is growing dramatically as we examine the new geophysical survey results," said Paul Garwood, a lecturer in prehistory at the University of Birmingham.

"We can see in rich detail not only new monuments but entire landscapes of past human activity, over thousands of years, preserved in subsurface features such as pits and ditches."

DISCOVERY NEWS

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Scientists question if wi-fi laptops can damage sperm/BBC News

Scientists are questioning if using wi-fi on a laptop to roam the internet could harm a man's fertility, after lab work suggested ejaculated sperm were significantly damaged after only four hours of exposure.
The benchside tests showed sperm were less able to swim and had changes in the genetic code that they carry.

Experts stress this does not mean the same would occur in a real-life setting and say men should not worry unduly.
But they are recommending more studies.
The preliminary research, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, looked at semen samples from 29 healthy donors.
Each donor sample was separated out into two pots. One of these pots was then stored for four hours next to a laptop that was wirelessly connected to the internet. The other was stored under identical conditions, minus the laptop.
The scientists, from Argentina and the US, suspect that the effect seen is unrelated to the heat kicked out by a laptop, although heat can damage sperm.
Under investigation

The UK's Health Protection Agency has been closely monitoring the safety of wi-fi.
It says people using wi-fi, or those in the proximity of wi-fi equipment, are exposed to the radio signals it emits - and some of the transmitted energy in the signals is absorbed in their bodies.
However, the signals are very low power.
The HPA says there is no consistent evidence to date that exposure to radio signals from wi-fi adversely affects the health of the general population.

UK fertility expert Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said: "The study is very well conducted, but we should be cautious about what it may infer about the fertility of men who regularly use laptops with wi-fi on their laps.
"Ejaculated sperm are particularly sensitive to many factors because outside the body they don't have the protection of the other cells, tissues and fluids of the body in which they are stored before ejaculation. Therefore, we cannot infer from this study that because a man might use a laptop with wi-fi on his lap for more than four hours then his sperm will necessarily be damaged and he will be less fertile.
"We need large epidemiological studies to determine this, and to my knowledge these have not yet been performed."

He said men should still be cautious about balancing a laptop on their thighs for hours on end.
"We know from other studies that the bottom of laptops can become incredibly hot and inadvertent testicular heating is a risk factor for poor sperm quality.
"There is a case report of a man who burnt his penis after using a laptop resting on his lap for a long time. Therefore, there are many reasons to try and use a laptop on a table where possible, and this may in itself ameliorate any theoretical concerns about wi-fi."

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Oldest Hairy Microbe Fossils Discovered (weird science)

This microscopic fossil closely resembles a modern tintinnid, a single-celled organism that is a type of plankton. Fossil ciliates including this one were recently identified in a deposit in Mongolia, and they are more than 100 million years older than the previously known fossils of this type. Image credit: Tanja Bosak

This microscopic fossil closely resembles a modern tintinnid, a single-celled organism that is a type of plankton. Fossil ciliates including this one were recently identified in a deposit in Mongolia, and they are more than 100 million years older than the previously known fossils of this type.

Ancient rock deposits, laid down between two massive ice ages, reveal the oldest known fossils for two types of single-celled creatures: Tube-shelled foraminifera and hairy, vase-shape ciliates.

Both closely resemble microbes living today. But the climate they lived in may have been quite different. The fossils appear in limestone deposited on the ocean floor between 635 million and 715 million years ago. This period was marked by two "Snowball Earth" events, when ice may have covered the entire planet.

These fossils date back more than 100 million years earlier than the oldest foraminifera and ciliates previously known. Even so, scientists think these organisms were around much longer, based on changes accumulated in their DNA since they split from close relatives. Some believe these types of single-celled creatures have been around for considerably more than 1 billion years, said Tanja Bosak, a study researcher and assistant professor of geobiology at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology.

"We can't claim we have seen something that is exactly like the modern species," Bosak said. "(But) here we have something that has looked very similar for 700 or more million years."

The fossils have evaded researchers not only because they are so tiny, but also because these deposits do not contain a type of rock that typically preserves fossils, particularly something this small and fragile, she said.

Fossils belonging to foraminifera were found in rocks from Namibia, while ciliates were found in rocks from Mongolia. Both types first appear in layers of rock called cap carbonates, laid down as the world was leaving the earlier snowball state, which occurred 716 million years ago.

Foraminifera, ancient and modern, build protective shells by picking up tiny grains of mineral that they stick to their exterior using a sugary compound. They aren't the only shelled organisms Bosak and her colleagues found. They also discovered amoebas that appeared to be building the same sort of shells.

While this wasn't the first fossil evidence for these amoebas, the nature of their resistant covering was ambiguous in the earlier fossils. The most recent fossils are the first amoebas to show evidence of primitive shell building, Bosak said.

Ciliates, meanwhile, are covered with tiny hairs called cilia. And the fossils found closely resemble modern, planktonic organisms called tintinnids.

Life at the time was quite simple, but it soon became more complex. For instance, the first animal embryos show up after the end of the latest Snowball Earth event, around 635 million years ago.

It's possible the arrival of abundant microbes, particularly the ciliates, may have had some hand in the change, by helping to bump up the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.

Even after free oxygen dramatically increased in the atmosphere, a change called the Great Oxidation Event, the oxygen level was much lower than it is today. The ciliates lived in the surface waters, then died and sank, taking organic carbon with them and tucking it away in sediments low in oxygen where the organisms would decompose only slowly. The burial of this carbon meant it could not be converted to carbon dioxide by respiration. As a result, oxygen produced by the photosynthesis of other microbes like algae would have built up.
The discovery of these organisms reveals a possible mechanism by which the oxygen levels in the atmosphere increased, allowing life to become more complex, she said.

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The research has been published in articles published online in October and November in the journal Geology, and online in June in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

| via LiveScience

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An Egg a Day Raises Risk of Diabetes -Researchers

People who eat eggs every day may substantially increase their risk of type 2 diabetes, researchers here said.

Men with the highest level of egg consumption -- at seven or more per week -- were 58% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who did not eat eggs, and women were 77% more likely to become diabetic if they ate at least an egg a day, Luc Djoussé, M.D., D.Sc., of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard, and colleagues reported online in Diabetes Care.

Levels of egg intake above one a week also incrementally increased diabetes risk in both men and women (both P<0.0001 for trend), the researchers said.

Eggs are a major source of dietary cholesterol (about 200 mg per egg) and add about 1.5 g of saturated fat each to the diet, both of which would be expected to increase diabetes risk, they said.
Action Points

    Explain to interested patients that the average one-egg-a-week consumption was not associated with increased diabetes risk.

    Note that eggs may influence glucose metabolism primarily through their effect on cholesterol, although the researchers noted that the observational study could not determine the mechanism.

But each egg also contributes about 0.7 g of polyunsaturated fat, which may confer a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, the researchers noted.

The limited, primarily animal model, evidence for an effect of eggs or dietary cholesterol on glucose metabolism has been inconsistent, they added.

To sort out the effects, the researchers analyzed two large prospective trials that included food frequency questionnaires.

Their analysis included 20,703 male physicians without baseline diabetes from the Physicians' Health Study I (1982-2007) and 36,295 similarly diabetes-free female health professionals from the Women's Health Study (1992-2007).

Both studies were originally designed as randomized trials of vitamin supplementation and aspirin for prevention of heart disease.

Over a mean follow-up of 20.0 years in men and 11.7 years in women, 1,921 men and 2,112 women developed type 2 diabetes.

Diabetes was more common in men and women who reported eating more than the average one egg a week.

After adjustment for traditional diabetes risk factors and compared with no egg consumption at the 95% confidence interval, the hazard ratios for type 2 diabetes in men were:

    9% for less than one egg a week (hazard ratio 1.09, 0.87 to 1.37)
    9% for one egg a week (HR 1.09, 0.88 to 1.34)
    18% for two to four eggs a week (HR 1.18, 0.95 to 1.45)
    46% for five to six eggs per week (HR 1.46, 1.14 to 1.86)
    58% for seven or more eggs each week (HR 1.58, 1.25 to 2.01)

Updating egg consumption with longer follow-up among men strengthened the associations to an almost twofold risk for those in the near daily or higher intake groups (HR 1.77, 95% CI 1.39 to 2.26, and HR 1.99, 95% CI 1.23 to 3.23, respectively).

For women, the multivariate-adjusted risks, also at the 95% confidence interval, compared with no egg intake were:

    6% for less than one egg per week (HR 1.06, 0.92 to 1.22)
    -3% for one egg a week (HR 0.97, 0.83 to 1.12)
    19% for two to four eggs per week (HR 1.19, 1.03 to 1.38)
    18% for five to six eggs a week (HR 1.18, 0.88 to 1.58)
    77% for seven or more per week (HR 1.77, 1.28 to 2.43)

Data on dietary cholesterol available in the female health professional study showed higher diabetes risk with rising dietary cholesterol with hazard ratios increasing to 1.28 (95% CI 1.10 to 1.50) in the highest quintile (P<0.0001 for trend).

Adjustment for dietary cholesterol attenuated the association between diabetes and egg consumption, whereas saturated fat was not associated with type 2 diabetes and did not alter the diabetes-egg link.

The effects did not appear to be limited to those with high carbohydrate diets, hypercholesterolemia, or high body mass index.

However, the researchers acknowledged that the data did not include repeat fasting glucose, fasting insulin, and other biomarkers of glucose metabolism to "comprehensively examine possible physiologic mechanisms."

The observational studies may also have been limited by self-reporting and residual confounding, they noted.

The generalizablity may have been limited as well by the homogeneous, primarily Caucasian health professional population, which may have different behaviors than the general population, Dr. Djoussé's group said.

"Given the societal burden of type 2 diabetes," they concluded, "confirmation of these findings in other populations and exploration of possible underlying biological mechanisms are warranted."

The study was supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Reviewed by Dori F. Zaleznik, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston.    

(MedPage Today)

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Water Doesn't Have to Freeze Until -55 F/ Study suggests

Regular ice crystals (red) are mixed with “intermediate ice” (green) near the end of the process of crystallizing from supercooled water. University of Utah chemists used computers to determine that water, which doesn’t necessarily become solid at its 32 degrees Fahrenheit freezing point, actually can get as cold as minus 55 F before it must freeze. (Credit: University of Utah)

University of Utah chemists may have solved one enigma by showing how cold water can get before it absolutely must freeze: 55 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
That's 87 degrees Fahrenheit colder than what most people consider the freezing point of water, namely, 32 F.
Supercooled liquid water must become ice at minus 55 F not just because of the extreme cold, but because the molecular structure of water changes physically to form tetrahedron shapes, with each water molecule loosely bonded to four others, according to the new study by chemists Valeria Molinero and Emily Moore.

The findings suggest this structural change from liquid to "intermediate ice" explains the mystery of "what determines the temperature at which water is going to freeze," says Molinero, an assistant professor at the University of Utah and senior author of the study, published in the Nov. 24 issue of the journal Nature.
"This intermediate ice has a structure between the full structure of ice and the structure of the liquid," she adds. "We're solving a very old puzzle of what is going on in deeply supercooled water."

However, in the strange and wacky world of water, tiny amounts of liquid water theoretically still might be present even as temperatures plunge below minus 55 F and almost all the water has turned solid -- either into crystalline ice or amorphous water "glass," Molinero says. But any remaining liquid water can survive only an incredibly short time -- too short for the liquid's properties to be detected or measured.

How and at what temperature water must freeze has more than just "gee-whiz" appeal. Atmospheric scientists studying global warming want to know at what temperatures and rates water freezes and crystallizes into ice.
"You need that to predict how much water in the atmosphere is in the liquid state or crystal state," which relates to how much solar radiation is absorbed by atmospheric water and ice, Molinero says. "This is important for predictions of global climate."

A Strange Substance
Liquid water is a network of water molecules (each with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom) held loosely together by what is called hydrogen bonding, which is somewhat like static cling. Molinero says that depending on its temperature and pressure, water ice has 16 different crystalline forms in which water molecules cling to each other with hydrogen bonds.

Molinero says that "what makes water so strange is that the way liquid water behaves is completely different from other liquids. For example, ice floats on water while most solids sink into their liquid forms because they are denser than the liquids."

Water's density changes with temperature, and it is most dense at 39 F. That's why fish survive under ice covering a pond by swimming in the warmer, denser water at the bottom of the pond.
But the property of water that "is most fascinating is that you can cool it down well below 32 degrees Fahrenheit and it still remains a liquid," says Molinero.

Liquid water as cold as minus 40 F has been found in clouds. Scientists have done experiments showing liquid water can exist at least down to minus 42 F.

Why doesn't water necessarily freeze at 32 F like we were taught in school?
"If you have liquid water and you want to form ice, then you have to first form a small nucleus or seed of ice from the liquid. The liquid has to give birth to ice," says Molinero. "For rain, you have to make liquid from vapor. Here, you have to make crystal [ice] from liquid."
Yet in very pure water, "the only way you can form a nucleus is by spontaneously changing the structure of the liquid," she adds.
Molinero says key questions include, "under which conditions do the nuclei form and are large enough to grow?" and "what is the size of this critical nucleus?"

Computing What Cannot Be Measured
Molinero says that "when you cool down water, its structure becomes closer to the structure of ice, which is why the density goes down, and this should be reflected in an increased crystallization rate."
Supercooled water has been measured down to about minus 42 F, which is its "homogenous nucleation temperature" -- the lowest temperature at which the ice crystallization rate can be measured as water is freezing. Below this temperature, ice is crystallizing too fast for any property of the remaining liquid to be measured.

To get around the problem, Molinero and chemistry doctoral student Moore used computers at the University of Utah's Center for High Performance Computing. The behavior of supercooled water was simulated and also modeled using real data.
Computers provide "a microscopic view through simulation that experiments cannot yet provide," Molinero says.

Previous computer simulations and modeling were too slow and had to last long enough for the freezing process to occur. And it was necessary to simulate thousands of nucleation events to make valid conclusions.
Molinero and Moore devised a new computer model that is 200 times faster than its predecessors. The model simplified the number crunching by considering each three-atom water molecule to be a single particle similar to a silicon atom and capable of sticking together with hydrogen bonding.

Even so, it took thousands of hours of computer time to simulate the behavior of 32,768 water molecules (much smaller than a tiny drop of water) to determine how the heat capacity, density and compressibility of water changes as it is supercooled, and to simulate how fast ice crystallized within a batch of 4,000 water molecules.

The Birth of Ice
The computers helped Molinero and Moore determine how cold water can get before it reaches its theoretical maximum crystallization rate and must freeze. The answer: minus 55 F (or minus 48 degrees Celsius).

The computers also showed that as water approaches minus 55 F, there is a sharp increase in the proportion of water molecules attached to four others to form tetrahedrons.
"The water is transforming to something else, and this something else is very close to ice," says Molinero. She calls it intermediate ice.

If a microscopic droplet of water is cooled very fast, it forms what is called a glass -- low-density amorphous ice -- in which all the tetrahedrons of water molecules are not lined up to form perfect crystals. Instead, low-density ice is amorphous like window glass. The study found that as many as one-quarter of the molecules in the amorphous "water glass" are organized either as intermediate ice or as tiny ice crystals.
When water approaches minus 55 F, there is an unusual decrease in density and unusual increases in heat capacity (which goes up instead of down) and compressibility (water gets easier to compress as it gets colder, unlike most liquids). These unusual thermodynamics coincide with liquid water changing to the tetrahedral structure.

"The change in structure of water controls the rate at which ice forms," Molinero says. "We show both the thermodynamics of water and the crystallization rate are controlled by the change in structure of liquid water that approaches the structure of ice."

(Via Science Daily)

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First Dogs Came from East Asia/Genetic Study

Researchers at KTH say they have found further proof that the wolf ancestors of today’s domesticated dogs can be traced to southern East Asia — findings that run counter to theories placing the cradle of the canine line in the Middle East.

Dr Peter Savolainen, KTH researcher in evolutionary genetics, says a new study released Nov. 23 confirms that an Asian region south of the Yangtze River was the principal and probably sole region where wolves were domesticated by humans.

Data on genetics, morphology and behaviour show clearly that dogs are descended from wolves, but there’s never been scientific consensus on where in the world the domestication process began. “Our analysis of Y-chromosomal DNA now confirms that wolves were first domesticated in Asia south of Yangtze River — we call it the ASY region — in southern China or Southeast Asia”, Savolainen says.

The Y data supports previous evidence from mitochondrial DNA. “Taken together, the two studies provide very strong evidence that dogs originated in the ASY region”, Savolainen says.

Archaeological data and a genetic study recently published in Nature suggest that dogs originate from the Middle East. But Savolainen rejects that view. “Because none of these studies included samples from the ASY region, evidence from ASY has been overlooked,” he says.

Peter Savolainen and PhD student Mattias Oskarsson worked with Chinese colleagues to analyse DNA from male dogs around the world. Their study was published in the scientific journal Heredity.

Approximately half of the gene pool was universally shared everywhere in the world, while only the ASY region had the entire range of genetic diversity. “This shows that gene pools in all other regions of the world most probably originate from the ASY region”, Savolainen says.

“Our results confirm that Asia south of the Yangtze River was the most important — and probably the only — region for wolf domestication, and that a large number of wolves were domesticated”, says Savolainen.

In separate research published recently in Ecology and Evolution, Savolainen, PhD student Arman Ardalan and Iranian and Turkish scientists conducted a comprehensive study of mitochondrial DNA , with a particular focus on the Middle East. Because mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother in most species, it is especially useful in studying evolutionary relationships.

“Since other studies have indicated that wolves were domesticated in the Middle East, we wanted to be sure nothing had been missed. We find no signs whatsoever that dogs originated there”, says Savolainen.

In their studies, the researchers also found minor genetic contributions from crossbreeding between dogs and wolves in other geographic regions, including the Middle East.

“This subsequent dog/wolf hybridisation contributed only modestly to the dog gene pool”, Savolainen explains.
 (SciLifeLab)

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Acupuncture Safe in Kids, Study Finds

Treating kids with acupuncture is a common practice and generally safe, according to a new study.

“Like adults, acupuncture is very safe when applied to the children’s population,” said Jamie Starkey, an acupuncturist from the Cleveland Clinic, who did not take part in the study. “And so it basically mimics exactly what is seen in the adult population.”

Researchers at the University of Alberta studied data from different countries spanning 60 years. They looked at the association between needle acupuncture and the different adverse events in children.

Out of 279 adverse effects, 253 were mild, according to the researchers.

The other 25 adverse effects were likely related to sub-standard techniques.

Adverse effects included bruising, bleeding and worsening of symptoms after treatment.

“Any of the serious side effects that they found were definitely due in part to the clinician’s malpractice,” Starkey said. “So, it was certainly somebody who was not necessarily the most trained. The take-home message is that it is absolutely safe in both the adult and pediatric world, but you have to go to somebody who is trained.”

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New evidence links virus to brain cancer

Tilting the scales in an ongoing debate, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have found new evidence that human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is associated with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the brain cancer that killed Sen. Edward Kennedy.

Tilting the scales in an ongoing debate, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have found new evidence that human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is associated with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the brain cancer that killed Sen. Edward Kennedy.

The findings confirm what only a handful of scientists have found, but in a manner that University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health researchers believe enhances the scientific rigor of earlier studies.

The study, published in the advanced online edition (Nov. 16, 2011) of the Journal of Virology, hints for the first time that HCMV may work differently than other cancer-related viruses - possibly by affecting only tumor stem cells, self-renewing cells that keep the tumor growing.

The new research may place HCMV in an expanding group of viruses associated with cancer.

"As many as 15 to 20 percent of all human cancers are caused by viruses, and the number is growing," says HCMV expert Dr. Robert Kalejta, associate professor of oncology at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH). "The viruses may not cause cancer on their own, but they play a critical role in the process."

Among others, human papilloma virus (HPV) causes cervical cancer, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) causes lymphoma and hepatitis C virus (HCV) causes liver cancer.

HCMV's role in GBM has been debated, with many scientists and clinicians remaining skeptical. Oncologist Dr. Charles Cobbs of California Pacific Medical Center has been the main proponent of the theory that HCMV contributes to GBM.

Dr. John Kuo, assistant professor of neurological surgery and human oncology and a cancer stem cell scientist at the School of Medicine and Public Health, was one of the skeptical ones, but he says he's now convinced that HCMV is associated with human GBM specimens.

Still, the association does not prove a causal relationship between HCMV and the development of GBM, he says.

HCMV-infected cell.

"This study may open up a new unexplored area of research for this incurable disease," says Kuo, who is director of the Comprehensive Brain Tumor Program at UW Hospital and Clinics. He also coordinates clinical trials as chair of the brain tumor group at the Carbone Cancer Center.

Kuo and colleagues on the UW brain tumor team currently treat GBM patients with the standard regimen of surgery, followed by radiation and chemotherapy. More research is needed before anti-viral drugs against HCMV could be considered for clinical trials, says Kuo, whose group contributed to the Journal of Virology paper.

Two years ago, Kalejta's team added support to Cobb's position when it showed that two HCMV proteins shut down a key protein that restricts tumor growth in general.

"HCMV can also do every one of the things that are generally considered the 10 hallmarks of cancer," says Kalejta, a member of the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, Carbone Cancer Center, Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center and Institute for Molecular Virology at UW-Madison.

The problem with studying HCMV is that the virus is present in a harmless way in almost everyone, so scientists can't ask if HCMV-positive people are more likely to get cancer than people without HCMV.

Kalejta's postdoctoral fellow Dr. Padhma Ranganatan used a standard laboratory test, rather than the ultra-sensitive test Cobb has used, to see if HCMV was present in 75 GBM samples. The UW-Madison researchers also looked to see if the entire virus genome - all of its DNA - rather than just a portion of it was present in the tissues. Finally, they wanted to learn if all cells within the tumor or just some of them were infected.

The analysis showed that HCMV is statistically more likely to be present in GBM sample tissues than in other brain tumor and epileptic brain tissues. The whole virus genome, not a portion of it, was present in GBM samples. And the data suggested that a minority of GBM cells were infected with HCMV.

"We hypothesize that HCMV may be infecting only tumor stem cells, unlike other viruses, which infect every single tumor cell," says Kalejta. "This leads us to predict that HCMV functions by a unique mechanism that no other virus uses."

Kalejta hopes to begin looking for the new mechanism soon. If there is such a mechanism, it could open a new door in cancer biology. It would also convert many more people to the idea that HCMV plays a key role in GBM.

"But I think the tide is now turning on the debate," Kalejta says.

(via Medical Xpress)

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Study rejects "faster than light" particle finding

An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.

The September announcement of the finding, backed up last week after new studies, caused a furor in the scientific world as it seemed to suggest Albert Einstein's ideas on relativity, and much of modern physics, were based on a mistaken premise.

The first team, members of the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome, said they recorded neutrinos beamed to them from the CERN research center in Switzerland as arriving 60 nanoseconds before light would have done.

But ICARUS, another experiment at Gran Sasso -- which is deep under mountains and run by Italy's National Institute of National Physics -- now argues that their measurements of the neutrinos energy on arrival contradict that reading.

In a paper posted Saturday on the same website as the OPERA results, arxiv.org/abs/1110.3763v2, the ICARUS team says their findings "refute a superluminal (faster than light) interpretation of the OPERA result."

They argue, on the basis of recently published studies by two top U.S. physicists, that the neutrinos pumped down from CERN, near Geneva, should have lost most of their energy if they had travelled at even a tiny fraction faster than light.

But in fact, the ICARUS scientists say, the neutrino beam as tested in their equipment registered an energy spectrum fully corresponding with what it should be for particles traveling at the speed of light and no more.

Physicist Tomasso Dorigo, who works at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and the U.S. Fermilab near Chicago, said in a post on the website Scientific Blogging that the ICARUS paper was "very simple and definitive."

It says, he wrote, "that the difference between the speed of neutrinos and the speed of light cannot be as large as that seen by OPERA, and is certainly smaller than that by three orders of magnitude, and compatible with zero."

Under Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. That idea lies at the heart of all current science of the cosmos and of how the vast variety of particles that make it up behave.

There was widespread skepticism when the OPERA findings were first revealed, and even the leaders of the experiment insisted that they were not announcing a discovery but simply recording measurements they had made and carefully checked.

However, last Friday they said a new experiment with shorter neutrino beams from CERN and much larger gaps between them had produced the same result. Independent scientists said however this was not conclusive.

Other experiments are being prepared -- at Fermilab and at the KEK laboratory in Japan -- to try to replicate OPERA's findings. Only confirmation from one of these would open the way for a full scientific discovery to be declared.

(Reuters)

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Underweight people at higher post-surgery risk: study

(Reuters) - People who are underweight have a 40 percent higher risk of dying in the first month after surgery than patients who are overweight, according to new research released on Monday.
The findings suggest that body mass index, or BMI, may be useful in predicting which patients are at the greatest risk while recovering from surgery, U.S. researchers reported in the Archives of Surgery.
Prior studies looking at the role of BMI in surgery have been mixed, said George Stukenborg of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who worked on the study.
"Patients with low BMI are at higher risk of death 30 days after surgery," Stukenborg said in a telephone interview.
The researchers used data on nearly 190,000 patients who underwent a variety of surgeries at 183 hospitals between 2005 and 2006.
BMI is calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by height in meters squared. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people with a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9 are normal weight, those with a BMI of 25 to 29.9 are overweight, and those with a BMI of 30 and above are obese.
To look for a link between body weight and the risk of death, they classified patients into five groups or quintiles: people with a BMI of less than 23.1; people with a BMI of 23.1 to less than 26.3; people with a BMI of 26.3 to less than 29.7; people with a BMI of 29.7 to less than 35.3; and people with a BMI of 35.3 or higher.
Overall, 2,245 or 1.7 percent of people in the study died within 30 days of surgery.
"We found patients in the lowest quintile had a 40 percent higher odds of death compared to the mid-range," said Stukenborg, referring to people in the overweight category with BMIs of 26.3 to 29.7.
Even when the researchers adjusted for type of surgery and other risk factors, those with a low BMI still had a greater risk of dying in the first month after surgery compared with plumper surgery patients.
Stukenborg said it is not clear why. The study did not track recent weight loss, so it could be that people who weighed less were sicker to begin with.
"That is a possibility," he said.
Either way, Stukenborg said doctors should consider BMI when they plan surgeries for their patients.
Being overweight or obese carries many other risk, raising chances of heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, arthritis and other conditions. Obesity-related diseases account for nearly 10 percent of medical spending in the United States or an estimated $147 billion a year.

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Study shows left side of brain more active in immoral thinking

Because the brain is so complex, researchers are forced to devise all manner of different types of tests in trying to understand not just how it works, but which parts of it do what. To that end, a diverse group of scientists from several universities across the U.S. got together to work on the problem of which parts of the brain, if any specifically, are involved in analyzing and making moral judgments. To find out, or at least learn more, they devised three experiments meant to test the busyness of the brain, measured by blood flow, to certain regions, when presented with immoral situations. They have published the results of what they found in the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience.
The idea behind all three experiments was to present volunteers with material that is generally believed to be immoral while watching blood flow patterns in their brains using fMRI, as compared to what happens when moral or neutral material is viewed.

In the first study, volunteers were told that they would be engaging in a memory test. They were then shown a series of statements, followed by another series of statements after that. During the second series they were asked to press a button to indicate if the statement they were being shown had been among those shown in the first series. The statements shown were divided into four classes: pathogen related (non-sexually gross stuff), incestuous acts, nonsexual immoral acts and neutral acts.
In the second study, volunteers were shown three types of statements in random order: 50 examples describing acts that most people think of as immoral, 50 statements that most think of as pro-moral (morally good) and 50 statements that most people think of as neutral.
And finally, in the third study, volunteers were shown three types of pictures in random order: immoral, non-moral (negative without morality), and neutral.

After analyzing and normalizing the data, the researchers found that the left hemisphere of the brain showed increased blood flow in response to immoral stimuli throughout all three studies, while the right did not. No such pattern was found for the neutral or pro-moral tests. They also found that while each of the three tests tended to light up specific areas of the left hemisphere in the scanned images, there was also quite a bit of overlap between those participating in the three different studies.
The research team isn’t making any declarations regarding their results other than suggesting that it appears the left side of the brain appears to be more involved in immoral processing than the right. They also suggest the brain might have evolved to work this way to avoid duplication in processing and to increase efficiency.
© 2011 Medical Xpress

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Study connects religious service attendance to less depression

A new study published in the Journal of Religion and Health has connected the regular attendance of religious services with an increased level of optimism and a decreased risk of depression.

As a follow-up to a 2008 report from the Women’s Health Initiative that showed regular attendance of religious services increased life expectancy, this new study looked at 92,539 post-menopausal women over the age of 50. The religious affiliations of all the participants, as well as their social and economic statuses, were diverse.

Led by Eliezer Schnall from the Yeshiva University in Manhattan, the results showed that out of the participants that attended services regularly, 56 percent were more likely to be optimistic about their lives. It also showed that 27 percent of the participants were less likely to be depressed than those who did not attend services regularly.

Of those that were included in the research, 34 percent of the women said they had not attended services within the last month. Of those that attended, 21 percent were less than once a week, 30 percent were weekly and 14 percent attended activities more than once a week.

After the 2008 study showed that regular attendance of religious services by women reduced their risk of death by 20 percent, the researchers wanted to see what factors may contribute to that risk reduction and believe they could be related to psychological factors. The Women’s Health Initiative study began in 1991 and is funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in an effort to track women’s health and habits.

Schnall cautions that these results and their study apply only to women, and older women at that. The benefit of regular religious service attendance by younger women or men has not been looked at in this study. Past research has shown that older women tend to take more of a social role in religious activities and may gain the most from it.

Abstract

Measures of religiosity are linked to health outcomes, possibly indicating mediating effects of associated psychological and social factors. We examined cross-sectional data from 92,539 postmenopausal participants of the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study who responded to questions on religious service attendance, psychological characteristics, and social support domains. 

We present odds ratios from multiple logistic regressions controlling for covariates. Women attending services weekly during the past month, compared with those not attending at all in the past month, were less likely to be depressed [OR = 0.78; CI = 0.74–0.83] or characterized by cynical hostility [OR = 0.94; CI = 0.90–0.98], and more likely to be optimistic [OR = 1.22; CI = 1.17–1.26]. 

They were also more likely to report overall positive social support [OR = 1.28; CI = 1.24–1.33], as well as social support of four subtypes (emotional/informational support, affection support, tangible support, and positive social interaction), and were less likely to report social strain [OR = 0.91; CI = 0.88–0.94]. However, those attending more or less than weekly were not less likely to be characterized by cynical hostility, nor were they less likely to report social strain, compared to those not attending during the past month.

© 2011 Medical Xpress
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Life-Bearing Lake discovered on Icy Jupiter Moon Europa

    A large lake discovered just below Europa's icy shell may provide a habitat for life.

As this Galileo probe image shows, Europa's icy surface is cracked and jumbled -- an indication of a sub-surface heat source. Click to enlarge this image. NASA

New research shows the jumbled ice blocks crowning the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa are signs of a large liquid lake the volume of the North American Great Lakes just below the surface, a key finding in the search for places where life might exist beyond Earth.
Drawing from studies of underground volcanoes in Iceland and Antarctica, scientists ran computer models to see if the chaotic formations on Europa's surface could be explained by the same geologic processes seen on Earth.
"We looked at melt underneath the ice and the fracture and collapse of ice shelves," Britney Schmidt, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics, told Discovery News.
"We come with these large pockets of water that form lakes. As they melt they actually break up the ice above it, like what you see on Earth," she said.
"This is certainly the best model so far," Paul Schenk, a staff scientist with the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, wrote in an email to Discovery News. "If we go back with penetrating radar instruments we should be able to see into the ice shell, determine the stratigraphy of the layers in the shell and verify which models works best."
Europa, which is slightly smaller than Earth's moon, is believed to have a large ocean of salty water deep beneath its frozen crust. These recently discovered lakes appear to be embedded closer to the surface.
"Europa has more water than all of Earth's oceans," planetary scientist Simon Kattenhorn, with the University of Idaho, exclaimed.
While the ocean itself is of interest to scientists searching for life beyond Earth, a mechanism to churn the surface ice and subsurface water makes Europa an even more compelling target.
The vigorous mixing of ice and water provides one mechanism for nutrients and energy to get from the frozen surface to the ocean below.
"It's exciting for biology," Schmidt said.
A mission to Europa is second on planetary scientists' wish list after a sample return mission from Mars.
"Europa is likely to have a deep ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust, making it an object of enormous interest as a possible abode for life," planetary scientist Steve Squyres, with Cornell University, testified at a Congressional hearing this week.
Schmidt's research will be published in a future issue of Nature and appears on the publication's website Wednesday.

© Discovery News
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Mystery of China's White Desert Lines Solved?

A space researcher has offered what he believes is the correct solution to a mystery that's been flying around cyberspace for the past week: A strange tangle of white lines in China's Gobi desert discovered in Google Map images. Military pundits, armchair investigators, and conspiracy theorists have had a field day with the strange set of lines.

• It's a UFO landing strip!
• It's a mockup of the streets of Washington, D.C., constructed for nefarious military purposes!
• It's a top-secret military installation doing experiments in controlling the weather!
• It's a nuclear testing range!
• It's a hoax: the Google Map images themselves are fakes, and the lines are not actually there!

A previous Discovery News piece concluded that it probably had some military connection (such as target practice range, based in part on the fact that other similar sites in the area had airplanes sitting in them), and now a NASA scientist thinks he’s got it figured out.
According to a story on Fox News the latest (and most plausible) theory is that “they are almost definitely used to calibrate China’s spy satellites. So says Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, which operates many of the cameras used during NASA’s Mars missions.”
The satellite calibration target solution seems as good an answer as any, and better than most. China, like many countries including the United States, is known to have spy satellites in orbit.
There's been no official explanation from the Chinese government—which is not surprising, since China doesn't need to "explain" some white lines in its desert to anyone, including NASA and President Obama. Of course even if Hu Jintao, the President of China, publicly offered a clear and complete explanation of the mysterious lines, conspiracy-minded folks wouldn’t believe him anyway.

Photo Credit: Google Maps/Story Credit: Discovery News

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Sweet Spot for Life's Chemistry Discovered

Astronomers home in on places ripe for formation of complex organic molecules.

Some young stars have been found to be cranking out the production of methanol, an chemical that could support life's chemistry. NASA

When scientists realized early Earth didn't have the right ingredients for life on its own, they started looking in space for the complex organic molecules needed to get things going.

Of particular interest is methanol, which can trigger the more complex chemistry that leads to amino acids, the building blocks for proteins and life.

"Methanol is the most complex molecule you can form at the really low temperatures in interstellar space," astronomer Douglas Whittet, with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, told Discovery News. "When you put methanol into a newly forming star system, you have some heat from a proto-sun and that's when methanol really takes off. It's the springboard for more exciting chemistry that follows."

In other words, find the methanol and scientists believe you find the chemical pathways to life.

"Searching for methanol in various regions in space will tell researchers where to look for other complex organic molecules, which will eventually lead to the formation of life," astronomer Sachindev Shenoy, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News.

But where to look?
A new analysis by Whittet and colleagues shows there is a "sweet spot" around a few young stars where methanol production is cranking. What seems to be key is how fast molecules can reach dust grains, which serve as a scaffolding of sorts for chemical reactions.

"The rate of molecule accumulation on the particles can result in an organic boom or a literal dead end," Whittet said.

Not all young stars are suited for organic chemistry. Whittet's team found a range of methanol concentrations in clouds from practically zero to about 30 percent.

If molecules build up too quickly on the surfaces of dust grains, there's not enough time for chemical reactions to occur before they are buried by other molecules. If the buildup is too slow, there are fewer chances for chemical reactions.

The research has implications for understanding where to look for life and suggests it may be more plentiful, from a chemistry point of view, than previously thought.

"The clouds we're observing appear to harbor more favorable conditions for life than the pre-solar cloud from which our solar system formed. And there is life in our solar system," Amanda Cook, a post-doctoral research fellow at NASA Ames, told Discovery News. "The implication is that life may have an even easier time taking root, so to speak, in other parts of the galaxy."
The research will be published Sunday in The Astrophysical Journal.

DISCOVERY NEWS

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Stem cells reverse heart damage

A new study says heart damage may be reversible with stem cell therapy without dangerous side effects.

On a June day in 2009, a 39-year-old man named Ken Milles lay on an exam table at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. A month earlier, he'd suffered a massive heart attack that destroyed nearly a third of his heart.

"The most difficult part was the uncertainty," he recalls. "Your heart is 30% damaged, and they tell you this could affect you the rest of your life." He was about to receive an infusion of stem cells, grown from cells taken from his own heart a few weeks earlier. No one had ever tried this before.

About three weeks later, in Kentucky, a patient named Mike Jones underwent a similar procedure at the University of Louisville's Jewish Hospital. Jones suffered from advanced heart failure, the result of a heart attack years earlier. Like Milles, he received an infusion of stem cells, grown from his own heart tissue.

"Once you reach this stage of heart disease, you don't get better," says Dr. Robert Bolli, who oversaw Jones' procedure, explaining what doctors have always believed and taught. "You can go down slowly, or go down quickly, but you're going to go down."

Conventional wisdom took a hit Monday, as Bolli's group and a team from Cedars-Sinai each reported that stem cell therapies were able to reverse heart damage, without dangerous side effects, at least in a small group of patients.

In Bolli's study, published in The Lancet, 16 patients with severe heart failure received a purified batch of cardiac stem cells. Within a year, their heart function markedly improved. The heart's pumping ability can be quantified through the "Left Ventricle Ejection Fraction," a measure of how much blood the heart pumps with each contraction. A patient with an LVEF of less than 40% is considered to suffer severe heart failure. When the study began, Bolli's patients had an average LVEF of 30.3%. Four months after receiving stem cells, it was 38.5%. Among seven patients who were followed for a full year, it improved to an astounding 42.5%. A control group of seven patients, given nothing but standard maintenance medications, showed no improvement at all.

"We were surprised by the magnitude of improvement," says Bolli, who says traditional therapies, such as placing a stent to physically widen the patient's artery, typically make a smaller difference. Prior to treatment, Mike Jones couldn't walk to the restroom without stopping for breath, says Bolli. "Now he can drive a tractor on his farm, even play basketball with his grandchildren. His life was transformed."

At Cedars-Sinai, 17 patients, including Milles, were given stem cells approximately six weeks after suffering a moderate to major heart attack. All had lost enough tissue to put them "at big risk" of future heart failure, according to Dr. Eduardo Marban, the director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, who developed the stem cell procedure used there.

The results were striking. Not only did scar tissue retreat -- shrinking 40% in Ken Milles, and between 30% and 47% in other test subjects -- but the patients actually generated new heart tissue. On average, the stem cell recipients grew the equivalent of 600 million new heart cells, according to Marban, who used MRI imaging to measure changes. By way of perspective, a major heart attack might kill off a billion cells.

"This is unprecedented, the first time anyone has grown living heart muscle," says Marban. "No one else has demonstrated that. It's very gratifying, especially when the conventional teaching has been that the damage is irreversible."

Perhaps even more important, no treated patient in either study suffered a significant health setback.

The twin findings are a boost to the notion that the heart contains the seeds of its own rebirth. For years, doctors believed that heart cells, once destroyed, were gone forever. But in a series of experiments, researchers including Bolli's collaborator, Dr. Piero Anversa, found that the heart contains a type of stem cell that can develop into either heart muscle or blood vessel components -- in essence, whatever the heart requires at a particular point in time. The problem for patients like Mike Jones or Ken Milles is that there simply aren't enough of these repair cells waiting around. The experimental treatments involve removing stem cells through a biopsy, and making millions of copies in a laboratory.

The Bolli/Anversa group and Marban's team both used cardiac stem cells, but Bolli and Anversa "purified" the CSCs, so that more than 90% of the infusion was actual stem cells. Marban, on the other hand, used a mixture of stem cells and other types of cells extracted from the patient's heart. "We've found that the mixture is more potent than any subtype we've been able to isolate," he says. He says the additional cells may help by providing a supportive environment for the stem cells to multiply.

Other scientists, including Dr. Douglas Losordo, have produced improvements in cardiac patients using stem cells derived from bone marrow. "The body contains cells that seem to be pre-programmed for repair," explains Losordo. "The consistent thing about all these approaches is that they're leveraging what seems to be the body's own repair mechanism."
This is unprecedented, the first time anyone has grown living heart muscle.
Dr. Eduardo Marban, Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute

Losordo praised the Lancet paper, and recalls the skepticism that met Anversa's initial claims, a decade ago, that there were stem cells in the adult heart. "Some scientists are always resistant to that type of novelty. You know the saying: First they ignore you, then they attack you and finally they imitate you."

Denis Buxton, who oversees stem cell research at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, calls the new studies "a paradigm shift, harnessing the heart's own regenerative processes." But he says he would like to see more head-to-head comparisons to determine which type of cells are most beneficial.

Questions also remain about timing. Patients who suffer large heart attacks are prone to future damage, in part because the weakened heart tries to compensate by dilating -- swelling -- and by changing shape. In a vicious circle, the changes make the heart a less efficient pump, which leads to more overcompensation, and so on, until the end result is heart failure. Marban's study aimed to treat patients before they could develop heart failure in the first place.

In a third study released Monday, researchers treated patients with severe heart failure with stem cells derived from bone marrow. In a group of 60 patients, those receiving the treatment had fewer heart problems over the course of a year, as well as improved heart function.

A fourth study also used cells derived from bone marrow, but injected them into patients two to three weeks after a heart attack. Previous studies, with the cells given just days afterward, found a modest improvement in heart function. But Monday, the lead researcher, Dr. Dan Simon of UH Case Medical Center, reported that with the three-week delay, patients did not see the same benefit.

With other methods, there may be a larger window of opportunity. At least in initial studies, Losordo's bone marrow treatments helped some patients with long-standing heart problems. Bolli's Lancet paper suggests that CSCs, too, might help patients with advanced disease. "These patients had had heart failure for several years. They were a wreck!" says Bolli. "But we found their stem cells were still very competent." By that, he means the cells were still capable of multiplying and of turning into useful muscle and blood vessel walls.

Marban has an open mind on the timing issue. In fact, one patient from his control group e-mailed after the study was complete, saying he felt terrible and pleading for an infusion of stem cells. At Marban's request, the FDA granted special approval to treat him. "He had a very nice response. That was 14 months after his heart attack. Of course that's just one person, and we need bigger studies," says Marban.

For Ken Milles, the procedure itself wasn't painful, but it was unsettling. The biopsy to harvest the stem cells felt "weird," he recalls, as he felt the doctor poking around inside his heart. The infusion, a few weeks later, was harder. The procedure -- basically the same as an angioplasty -- involved stopping blood flow through the damaged artery for three minutes, while the stem cells were infused. "It felt exacfly like I was having a heart attack again," Milles remembers.

Milles had spent the first weeks after his heart attack just lying in bed re-watching his "Sopranos" DVDs, but within a week of the stem cell infusion, he says, "I was reinvigorated." Today he's back at work full time, as an accounting manager at a construction company. He's cut out fast food and shed 50 pounds. His wife and two teenage sons are thrilled.

Denis Buxton says the new papers could prove a milestone. "We don't have anything else to actually regenerate the heart. These stem cell therapies have the possibility of actually reversing damage."

Bolli says he'll have to temper his enthusiasm until he can duplicate the results in larger studies, definitive enough to get stem cell therapy approved as a standard treatment. "If a phase 3 study confirmed this, it would be the biggest advance in cardiology in my lifetime. We would possibly be curing heart failure. It would be a revolution."
(CNN) 

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E. coli could convert sugar to biodiesel

Xingye Yu, a graduate student in chemical engineering, and Professor Chaitan Khosla examine a culture of e. coli bacteria.

When it comes to making biodiesel cheaply and efficiently enough to be commercially feasible, E. coli may prove to be "the little bacterial engine that could," say Stanford researchers.
Biodiesel can be made from plant oil or animal fat – usually the former. Used cooking oil from restaurants is common, but for biodiesel to contribute significantly to reducing fossil fuel use, there needs to be a way to mass produce it from plant-derived raw materials. The problem is that synthesizing biodiesel is complicated. That is where E. coli comes in.
The bacteria, often discussed in terms of the human digestive tract, also act as a catalyst in generating biodiesel by converting inexpensive sugars into fatty acid derivatives that are chemically similar to gasoline.
But E. coli's natural conversion capability is not up to snuff, commercially speaking, and researchers tinkering with its internal machinery have yet to boost its capability enough to cross the commercial threshold.
So Chaitan Khosla, a Stanford professor of chemistry and of chemical engineering, decided to investigate whether there might be a natural limit that holds back E. coli's conversion capabilities. In other words, does the basic catalytic engine in E. coli have enough horsepower to do the job at the needed scale?
A powerful engine
"The good news is that the engine that makes fatty acids in E. coli is incredibly powerful," Khosla said. "It is inherently capable of converting sugar into fuel-like substances at an extraordinary rate. The bad news is this engine is subject to some very tight controls by the cell."
It turns out that like any high performance engine, the catalytic process in E. coli can only attain peak efficiency when all the controls are tuned just right. The research is described in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Khosla is a coauthor of the paper, which is available online.
Scientists don't yet understand how all the cellular controls operate. It will require a deeper understanding of the biochemistry of E. coli than they have now to figure that out, Khosla said. But his research team is making progress homing in on the most promising part of the conversion process, thanks in part to a new approach they employed in their analysis.
The researchers managed to isolate all the enzymes and other molecular participants involved in the process that produces fatty acids in E. coli and assemble them in a test tube for study.
"We wanted to understand what limits the ability of E. coli to process sugar into oil. The question we were asking is analogous to asking what limits the speed of my Honda to 150 miles an hour and no faster?" Khosla said. "The most direct and powerful way to figure it out is to pull the biosynthetic engine out of the cell and put it through its paces in a test tube."
By doing so, the team was able to study how the enzymes involved in fatty acid biosynthesis performed when they were free from other cellular influences. That was critical to their analysis, because the products in question, fatty acids, are essentially soap, Khosla said, and too much of them would hurt the bacteria. That is why E. coli has developed some very elaborate and effective ways to contain the amount of fatty acid biosynthesis inside the cell.

Precursor to biodiesel

The fatty acids can't be pumped directly into your gas tank – cars and trucks won't run on soap, after all – but they are an excellent precursor to biodiesel.
Biodiesel has so far lagged behind ethanol as a means of cutting fossil fuel use in vehicles because ethanol is easier and cheaper to make. But biodiesel has a higher energy density and lower water solubility than ethanol, which offer significant advantages.
"It is closer in chemical properties to a barrel of oil from Saudi Arabia than any other biologically derived fuel," Khosla said. Thus it could easily be blended into diesel and gasoline, or used alone as a bona fide transportation fuel.
If researchers can figure out how to manipulate the cellular means of production in E. coli, biodiesel could be made cheaply enough that the little engine of E. coli could end up powering a lot of larger engines at far less cost to the environment than with fossil fuels.
Xingye Yu, graduate student in chemical engineering, and Tiangang Liu, postdoctoral scholar in chemistry, contributed equally to the research and are coauthors of the paper.

(PhysOrg.com)

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