Friday, November 26, 2010
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
Hong Kong diagnoses first bird flu case in seven years
A woman in Hong Kong is seriously ill in hospital with bird flu - the first human case of the disease to be diagnosed in the territory since 2003. Officials said the 59-year-old fell ill shortly after returning from a visit to the Chinese mainland. It is not yet clear whether she contracted the potentially fatal disease there or in Hong Kong.The territory has raised its alert level to "serious", meaning there is a risk of contracting the disease.
The last outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu virus in Hong Kong killed six people in 2003.
Health chief York Chow said there was no sign yet that the virus has been spread between humans and that investigations were focusing on poultry as being the source of the infection."But we will be concentrating on people who were in contact with her when she showed symptoms and also when she was in Hong Kong," the AFP news agency quoted him as saying."The chances of her catching it is most likely on the mainland, but you cannot rule out Hong Kong," he said.The woman is reported to have travelled to the mainland with her husband and daughter, and to have visited Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing.
Mr Chow said officials would meet on Thursday to decide what further precautions are needed.The first time the virus crossed the species barrier between poultry and humans in 1997, every chicken in Hong Kong was culled.The World Health Organization says more than 500 cases of bird flu have been diagnosed worldwide since 2003. Of those, 302 cases were fatal.
The last outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu virus in Hong Kong killed six people in 2003.
Health chief York Chow said there was no sign yet that the virus has been spread between humans and that investigations were focusing on poultry as being the source of the infection."But we will be concentrating on people who were in contact with her when she showed symptoms and also when she was in Hong Kong," the AFP news agency quoted him as saying."The chances of her catching it is most likely on the mainland, but you cannot rule out Hong Kong," he said.The woman is reported to have travelled to the mainland with her husband and daughter, and to have visited Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing.
Mr Chow said officials would meet on Thursday to decide what further precautions are needed.The first time the virus crossed the species barrier between poultry and humans in 1997, every chicken in Hong Kong was culled.The World Health Organization says more than 500 cases of bird flu have been diagnosed worldwide since 2003. Of those, 302 cases were fatal.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
New treatment for high blood pressure
A short blast of radio waves to the kidneys can help control high blood pressure in patients who do not respond to medication, a study shows.The pioneering work, described in The Lancet medical journal, selectively severs nerves to the kidney that play a key role in regulating blood pressure.Although still in the testing phase, experts say the procedure could one day help hundreds of thousands of patients.Half of patients fail to achieve good blood pressure control with drugs.This is partly because it can be difficult to remember to take medication every day. But for up to a fifth of patients it is because the drugs simply have no effect.High blood pressure is an exceedingly common condition, affecting around one in three adults in England. This trial opens up a potentially exciting new avenue for the treatment of patients with high blood pressure who do not respond well to current medicines” Professor Jeremy Pearson
Experts believe the new procedure could help many of these better control their condition, thereby lowering their risk of future strokes and heart attacks.
Promising results
Doctors led by Professor Murray Esler at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, have been testing the safety and effectiveness of the therapy.To get to the kidneys, the doctors use a long, thin piece of tubing called a catheter that is threaded into an artery in the groin and guided up to the kidney.Once in place, the catheter is connected to a machine that generates radio waves, known as radiofrequency energy.
In this way, a short burst from the machine can knock out a number of tiny nerves that run in the lining of the arteries of the kidney.
By stopping these nerves from sending signals the treatment lowers blood pressure. The Australian team, working with 24 centres across the globe, have tested the treatment in trials involving more than 100 patients. They found the therapy lowered blood pressure by about 10mmHg or more - which although is not enough to return blood pressure to a 'normal' level is enough to reduce some of the associated health risks of very high blood pressure. And, importantly, there were few side effects if any.
High blood pressure
High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, is usually defined as having a sustained blood pressure of 140/90mmHg or above. High blood pressure often causes no symptoms, or immediate problems, but it is a major risk factor for heart attacks and stroke.Risk factors for high blood pressure include poor diet and lack of exercise. Six months after the treatment, 41 (84%) of 49 patients who underwent the procedure had a reduction in systolic blood pressure of 10mmHg or more, compared with 18 (35%) of 51 controls.
The first patient in the UK received the innovative procedure at Barts and The London NHS Trust a year ago. Commenting on the findings, Professor Jeremy Pearson of the British Heart Foundation said: "This trial opens up a potentially exciting new avenue for the treatment of patients with high blood pressure who do not respond well to current medicines. "Further studies are needed to see if this invasive procedure will be acceptable to patients and produce long-lasting effects that are safe and reduce future cardiovascular events." Professor Graham MacGregor, chairman of UK charity the Blood Pressure Association, said: "This is exciting research which could play a part in tackling the massive issue of high blood pressure, which affects 16 million UK adults and is a major killer through the strokes and heart attacks it causes."But he said most people would not need to undergo such invasive treatment as, for the majority, high blood pressure can be successfully controlled through prescribed medicines and a healthier lifestyle.
Experts believe the new procedure could help many of these better control their condition, thereby lowering their risk of future strokes and heart attacks.
Promising results
Doctors led by Professor Murray Esler at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, have been testing the safety and effectiveness of the therapy.To get to the kidneys, the doctors use a long, thin piece of tubing called a catheter that is threaded into an artery in the groin and guided up to the kidney.Once in place, the catheter is connected to a machine that generates radio waves, known as radiofrequency energy.
In this way, a short burst from the machine can knock out a number of tiny nerves that run in the lining of the arteries of the kidney.
By stopping these nerves from sending signals the treatment lowers blood pressure. The Australian team, working with 24 centres across the globe, have tested the treatment in trials involving more than 100 patients. They found the therapy lowered blood pressure by about 10mmHg or more - which although is not enough to return blood pressure to a 'normal' level is enough to reduce some of the associated health risks of very high blood pressure. And, importantly, there were few side effects if any.
High blood pressure
High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, is usually defined as having a sustained blood pressure of 140/90mmHg or above. High blood pressure often causes no symptoms, or immediate problems, but it is a major risk factor for heart attacks and stroke.Risk factors for high blood pressure include poor diet and lack of exercise. Six months after the treatment, 41 (84%) of 49 patients who underwent the procedure had a reduction in systolic blood pressure of 10mmHg or more, compared with 18 (35%) of 51 controls.
The first patient in the UK received the innovative procedure at Barts and The London NHS Trust a year ago. Commenting on the findings, Professor Jeremy Pearson of the British Heart Foundation said: "This trial opens up a potentially exciting new avenue for the treatment of patients with high blood pressure who do not respond well to current medicines. "Further studies are needed to see if this invasive procedure will be acceptable to patients and produce long-lasting effects that are safe and reduce future cardiovascular events." Professor Graham MacGregor, chairman of UK charity the Blood Pressure Association, said: "This is exciting research which could play a part in tackling the massive issue of high blood pressure, which affects 16 million UK adults and is a major killer through the strokes and heart attacks it causes."But he said most people would not need to undergo such invasive treatment as, for the majority, high blood pressure can be successfully controlled through prescribed medicines and a healthier lifestyle.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Friday, November 19, 2010
After effects of E. coli
Catching the most dangerous strain of E. coli could increase the risk of blood pressure and heart problems years later, say researchers. A Canadian study of almost 2,000 who fell ill during an outbreak of E. coli O157 found heart attack risk doubled. Writing in the British Medical Journal, the researchers recommended annual health checks, even for patients who had apparently fully recovered.
A microbiologist said basic food hygiene could prevent many cases.There are an estimated 1m cases of food poisoning in the UK each year, but the O157 strain of E. coli is regarded as one of the most dangerous.
It can cause severe gastroenteritis and contact with small numbers of the bacteria, carried in animal faeces, is enough to make you ill. There are approximately 1,000 confirmed cases each year in the UK, and while it is known to cause kidney problems in a small number of people, there has been little investigation into other possible longer-term complications. The research team, based in Victoria Hospital, London Ontario, followed up people affected when the municipal water system in Walkerton became contaminated in May 2000.
Seven people died, and thousands fell ill, and while some were only mildly affected, many had significant symptoms, including severe diarrhoea.Checking their medical history in the intervening years revealed that the rate of kidney problems tripled among those with gastroenteritis compared with those who were relatively unaffected.
"It is a rare strain, but the key thing is to stop yourself falling ill in the first place” Bob Martin ,food Standards Agency
The severely-hit patients were also slightly more likely to develop high blood pressure, and more than twice as likely to have a heart attack during this period.The researchers suggested that the powerful toxin released by E. coli O157 could trigger inflammation that could affect blood vessel linings, and making heart and blood pressure problems more likely. They recommended annual blood pressure checks for people who had been seriously affected by the strain.
The number of E. coli O157 cases in the UK has remained stable in recent years, ranging from approximately 800 to 1,200 annually. However, despite the low numbers, Bob Martin, a microbiologist at the Food Standards Agency, said that people still needed to follow basic hygiene rules when buying and cooking meat products, or after handling animals.
He said: "It is a rare strain, but the key thing is to stop yourself falling ill in the first place. "You can reduce the risk by keeping things clean in the domestic setting, and cooking food thoroughly, as this will kill off bugs, particularly things like sausages and burgers which are made from minced meat."Keeping food properly refrigerated is also important, as is preventing cross-contamination between raw meat and cooked food."
A microbiologist said basic food hygiene could prevent many cases.There are an estimated 1m cases of food poisoning in the UK each year, but the O157 strain of E. coli is regarded as one of the most dangerous.
It can cause severe gastroenteritis and contact with small numbers of the bacteria, carried in animal faeces, is enough to make you ill. There are approximately 1,000 confirmed cases each year in the UK, and while it is known to cause kidney problems in a small number of people, there has been little investigation into other possible longer-term complications. The research team, based in Victoria Hospital, London Ontario, followed up people affected when the municipal water system in Walkerton became contaminated in May 2000.
Seven people died, and thousands fell ill, and while some were only mildly affected, many had significant symptoms, including severe diarrhoea.Checking their medical history in the intervening years revealed that the rate of kidney problems tripled among those with gastroenteritis compared with those who were relatively unaffected.
"It is a rare strain, but the key thing is to stop yourself falling ill in the first place” Bob Martin ,food Standards Agency
The severely-hit patients were also slightly more likely to develop high blood pressure, and more than twice as likely to have a heart attack during this period.The researchers suggested that the powerful toxin released by E. coli O157 could trigger inflammation that could affect blood vessel linings, and making heart and blood pressure problems more likely. They recommended annual blood pressure checks for people who had been seriously affected by the strain.
The number of E. coli O157 cases in the UK has remained stable in recent years, ranging from approximately 800 to 1,200 annually. However, despite the low numbers, Bob Martin, a microbiologist at the Food Standards Agency, said that people still needed to follow basic hygiene rules when buying and cooking meat products, or after handling animals.
He said: "It is a rare strain, but the key thing is to stop yourself falling ill in the first place. "You can reduce the risk by keeping things clean in the domestic setting, and cooking food thoroughly, as this will kill off bugs, particularly things like sausages and burgers which are made from minced meat."Keeping food properly refrigerated is also important, as is preventing cross-contamination between raw meat and cooked food."
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Antimatter atoms held captive by physicists
By Emily Chung, CBC News
Thirteen of the 42 researchers involved in the discovery were from Canada, including, from left to right, Makoto Fujiwara from TRIUMF; Andrea Guitierrez and Walter Hardy from the University of British Columbia; Tim Friesen from the University of Calgary; and Michael Hayden and Mohammned Ashekezari from Simon Fraser University. They are shown with their experimental setup at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva. (ALPHA)For the first time, antimatter atoms have been caged and kept in existence long enough to be probed by scientific instruments.
"We're very excited about the fact that we can actually now trap antimatter atoms long enough to study their properties and see if they're very different from matter," said Makoto Fujiwara, who led the Canadian contribution to ALPHA, the international collaboration that made the discovery.
The results, published online Wednesday in Nature, mean scientists are closer to solving the mystery of what happened to most of the antimatter in the universe, Fujiwara said.
Antimatter is produced in equal quantities with matter when energy is converted into mass — this happens in particle colliders and is believed to have happened during the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe. That's why physicists are puzzled about why there is no longer any significant amount of antimatter in the universe.
The antihydrogen atoms were made by carefully mixing antiprotons and positrons in this container. (ALPHA)Scientists would like to be able to study antimatter to figure out how it is different from matter, as that might provide clues about the apparent disappearance of antimatter. But there's a problem — when antimatter and matter encounter each other, they both get annihilated, producing pure energy.
Because our world is made of matter, antimatter atoms produced artificially until now have lasted just millionths of a second before hitting the matter walls of their container and getting annihilated.The latest study, which took place at the CERN Laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, has found a way to trap atoms of antihydrogen away from the walls of their container to prevent them from getting annihilated for nearly a tenth of a second.Antihydrogen is made by mixing antiprotons (the antimatter counterpart of subatomic particles called protons) and positrons (the antimatter counterpart of electrons). Those particles are charged, so researchers have been able to trap them for up to days using electric fields.
'Tiny, tiny magnet'
Antihydrogen is neutral so it can't be trapped the same way.The Canadian team built the electronics for this annihilation detector, which was used to confirm that 38 atoms of antihydrogen had been trapped. (ALPHA)"But this neutral atom has a tiny, tiny magnet," said Fujiwara, a research scientist at TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics in Vancouver.
The magnet is so small that even using an extremely powerful magnetic field generated by a superconducting magnet, the researchers could only generate a small magnetic force on the antihydrogen atoms. But that was enough to create a magnetic trap that could hold some of them. You can only capture really the slowest ones," Fujiwara said.To improve their chances, the researchers mixed the antiprotons and positrons "very gently" in a very cold vacuum so that they were hardly moving at all. After trapping the antimatter atoms for some time, the researchers turned off the magnetic field, letting the atoms out of the trap. The atoms immediately hit matter and were annihilated, producing detectable signals. That is how the researchers knew they had successfully trapped 38 of the atoms.
How the magnetic trap works
The magnetic trap can be imagined as a shallow dish where spherical atoms of antimatter are rolling around like balls on a pool table, and the magnetic force is analogous to gravity. If the beads are moving too quickly, they will jump over the lip of the dish, escape, and hit the matter around them. But if they are moving very slowly, then they will roll back toward the centre of the dish whenever they get too close to the edge.When the magnetic field is turned off, the dish flattens suddenly. When that happens, there is nothing to keep them in the dish and even the slowest atoms of antimatter will roll right over the edge.This is a figurative description of the forces experienced by the antimatter atoms. It doesn't describe their physical environment, which is a metal container under vacuum.
The electronics for the annihilation detector were built by the Canadian members of ALPHA, Fujiwara said.
Richard Hydomako, a PhD student working with Prof. Rob Thompson at the University of Calgary and Prof. Scott Menary at York University played a crucial role in the data analysis, TRIUMF reported.Th e next step for the collaboration is to conduct experiments on the trapped antimatter atoms.University of British Columbia physicist Walter Hardy and Michael Hayden, a physicist at Simon Fraser University, are currently working on a method to find out what colour light the antihydrogen shines when it is hit with microwaves, Fujiwara said.The colours shone by hydrogen atoms are well known and researchers are interested in knowing how similar antihydrogen will be.
"It's going to be a long effort again. This is a very challenging goal," Fujiwara said. But researchers are "very excited" about the possibilities.Forty-two physicists from 15 institutions around the world contributed to the research, including 13 from Canada. Other participating countries were Brazil, Denmark, Israel, Japan, Sweden, the U.K., and the United States.
Canadian funding for the research included contributions from the federal government and the Alberta and Quebec governments, as well as the Killam Trusts.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/11/17/antimatter-antihydrogen-atoms-trap.html#ixzz15Z45Vgz2
Thirteen of the 42 researchers involved in the discovery were from Canada, including, from left to right, Makoto Fujiwara from TRIUMF; Andrea Guitierrez and Walter Hardy from the University of British Columbia; Tim Friesen from the University of Calgary; and Michael Hayden and Mohammned Ashekezari from Simon Fraser University. They are shown with their experimental setup at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva. (ALPHA)For the first time, antimatter atoms have been caged and kept in existence long enough to be probed by scientific instruments.
"We're very excited about the fact that we can actually now trap antimatter atoms long enough to study their properties and see if they're very different from matter," said Makoto Fujiwara, who led the Canadian contribution to ALPHA, the international collaboration that made the discovery.
The results, published online Wednesday in Nature, mean scientists are closer to solving the mystery of what happened to most of the antimatter in the universe, Fujiwara said.
Antimatter is produced in equal quantities with matter when energy is converted into mass — this happens in particle colliders and is believed to have happened during the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe. That's why physicists are puzzled about why there is no longer any significant amount of antimatter in the universe.
The antihydrogen atoms were made by carefully mixing antiprotons and positrons in this container. (ALPHA)Scientists would like to be able to study antimatter to figure out how it is different from matter, as that might provide clues about the apparent disappearance of antimatter. But there's a problem — when antimatter and matter encounter each other, they both get annihilated, producing pure energy.
Because our world is made of matter, antimatter atoms produced artificially until now have lasted just millionths of a second before hitting the matter walls of their container and getting annihilated.The latest study, which took place at the CERN Laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, has found a way to trap atoms of antihydrogen away from the walls of their container to prevent them from getting annihilated for nearly a tenth of a second.Antihydrogen is made by mixing antiprotons (the antimatter counterpart of subatomic particles called protons) and positrons (the antimatter counterpart of electrons). Those particles are charged, so researchers have been able to trap them for up to days using electric fields.
'Tiny, tiny magnet'
Antihydrogen is neutral so it can't be trapped the same way.The Canadian team built the electronics for this annihilation detector, which was used to confirm that 38 atoms of antihydrogen had been trapped. (ALPHA)"But this neutral atom has a tiny, tiny magnet," said Fujiwara, a research scientist at TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics in Vancouver.
The magnet is so small that even using an extremely powerful magnetic field generated by a superconducting magnet, the researchers could only generate a small magnetic force on the antihydrogen atoms. But that was enough to create a magnetic trap that could hold some of them. You can only capture really the slowest ones," Fujiwara said.To improve their chances, the researchers mixed the antiprotons and positrons "very gently" in a very cold vacuum so that they were hardly moving at all. After trapping the antimatter atoms for some time, the researchers turned off the magnetic field, letting the atoms out of the trap. The atoms immediately hit matter and were annihilated, producing detectable signals. That is how the researchers knew they had successfully trapped 38 of the atoms.
How the magnetic trap works
The magnetic trap can be imagined as a shallow dish where spherical atoms of antimatter are rolling around like balls on a pool table, and the magnetic force is analogous to gravity. If the beads are moving too quickly, they will jump over the lip of the dish, escape, and hit the matter around them. But if they are moving very slowly, then they will roll back toward the centre of the dish whenever they get too close to the edge.When the magnetic field is turned off, the dish flattens suddenly. When that happens, there is nothing to keep them in the dish and even the slowest atoms of antimatter will roll right over the edge.This is a figurative description of the forces experienced by the antimatter atoms. It doesn't describe their physical environment, which is a metal container under vacuum.
The electronics for the annihilation detector were built by the Canadian members of ALPHA, Fujiwara said.
Richard Hydomako, a PhD student working with Prof. Rob Thompson at the University of Calgary and Prof. Scott Menary at York University played a crucial role in the data analysis, TRIUMF reported.Th e next step for the collaboration is to conduct experiments on the trapped antimatter atoms.University of British Columbia physicist Walter Hardy and Michael Hayden, a physicist at Simon Fraser University, are currently working on a method to find out what colour light the antihydrogen shines when it is hit with microwaves, Fujiwara said.The colours shone by hydrogen atoms are well known and researchers are interested in knowing how similar antihydrogen will be.
"It's going to be a long effort again. This is a very challenging goal," Fujiwara said. But researchers are "very excited" about the possibilities.Forty-two physicists from 15 institutions around the world contributed to the research, including 13 from Canada. Other participating countries were Brazil, Denmark, Israel, Japan, Sweden, the U.K., and the United States.
Canadian funding for the research included contributions from the federal government and the Alberta and Quebec governments, as well as the Killam Trusts.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/11/17/antimatter-antihydrogen-atoms-trap.html#ixzz15Z45Vgz2
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Science still can't explain the colour red
Michael Posner
Has the Western world succumbed to the disease of scientism – a misguided belief in the infallibility of science?
So says philosopher Peter Hacker, emeritus research fellow at Oxford's St. John's College. In a recent interview with TPM Online, the website of The Philosophers' Magazine, Mr. Hacker – a leading authority on Ludwig Wittgenstein – says scientism “pervades our mentality and our culture. We are prone to think that, if there's a serious problem, science will find the answer. If science cannot find the answer, then it cannot be a serious problem at all.”
This prevailing scientism, he continues “is manifest in the infatuation of the mass media with cognitive neuroscience … people nattering on what their brains make them do and tell them to do. I think this is pretty pernicious – anything but trivial.”
Mr. Hacker's remarks form part of a larger critique of how neuroscience is grappling with human consciousness, the great divide for philosophers and scientists.
Consciousness, of course, is one of the great, unsolved conundrums of modern science. Where, if anywhere, does awareness reside? How, if at all, can it be explained? Is the mind separate from its body? Or does everything, ultimately, reduce to biochemistry and quantum physics, including our private, inner-most experiences of the world?
From the time of Aristotle and Plato, these questions have largely been the preserve of philosophy. But the past several decades have witnessed the steady rise of cognitive neuroscience, which maintains that all human faculties, including consciousness, can now (or one day will) be explained by neural oscillations in the cerebral cortex – accountable by simple measurements of neurons and synapses.
As the late Francis Crick put it in his 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
But the philosophers are refusing to go down without a good conceptual scrap. Mr. Hacker, for one, says it's nonsense to attribute consciousness, knowledge and perception to mere physical processes in the brain. “One sees with one's eyes and hears with one's ears,” he insists, “but one is not conscious with one's brain any more than one walks with one's brain. The brain is not an organ of consciousness. … The brain has no cognitive powers at all. There is no such thing as a brain's thinking, wanting, reasoning, believing or hypothesizing.”
Australian philosopher David Chalmers, now teaching in California, differentiates between what he calls the easy and hard problems of consciousness. Easy problems tend to be phenomena that can be explained by computational or neural mechanisms – recoiling from unpleasant odours, for example, or simply declaring “I am hungry” or some other mental state. The hard problem relates to the subjective qualities of human experience.
For instance, let's say you run into your old friend Jack. You register a moment of physical recognition: “Oh, there's old Jack.” But meeting old Jack also may trigger a series of “Jack” memories, emotions and ideas, all percolating more or less simultaneously. You may perceive that Jack has aged and remember how he once looked. You may recall beautiful music that Jack enjoyed, or the brilliant shade of red of the rose in Jack's lapel. The specific presence of Jack, in short, catalyzes the non-specific emergence of a holistic range of associations, drawn from some hidden well of private experience. You and you alone know what it is like to experience this moment of reconnection. It is literally incomparable.
“The hard problem is hard,” says Mr. Chalmers, “precisely because … the problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained.”
Science can document all the processes involved in vision – electromagnetic waveforms striking the retina and proceeding electrochemically along the optic nerve to the brain's occipital lobe. But where does the felt experience of what is seen – let's say the colour red – come from? Says Mr. Chalmers: “There is an explanatory gap between the functions and experience.”
And the problem is hard, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker adds, because no one knows what the answer might look like “or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place.”
Indeed, many cognitive scientists, including Tufts University professor Daniel Dennett, challenge the notion of the hard problem and deny the very existence of so-called “qualia,” or of any ineffable internal life. Prof. Dennett contends that our notion of Self is simply “a cobbled-together collection of specialist brain circuits … that conspire to produce a virtual machine.” Other scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman, accept the validity of qualia, but still regard consciousness as a biological phenomenon, emerging from the 100 billion neurons densely packed inside the brain. And some religious scientists, among them Nobelist Sir John Eccles, reject the brain-based view of consciousness as superstition; the spiritual, non-physical world we comprehend cannot be explained by dendrite or axonic activity alone.
Dozens of variations on these themes have been articulated, but the fundamental mystery of consciousness – and thus of human existence – remains.
Has the Western world succumbed to the disease of scientism – a misguided belief in the infallibility of science?
So says philosopher Peter Hacker, emeritus research fellow at Oxford's St. John's College. In a recent interview with TPM Online, the website of The Philosophers' Magazine, Mr. Hacker – a leading authority on Ludwig Wittgenstein – says scientism “pervades our mentality and our culture. We are prone to think that, if there's a serious problem, science will find the answer. If science cannot find the answer, then it cannot be a serious problem at all.”
This prevailing scientism, he continues “is manifest in the infatuation of the mass media with cognitive neuroscience … people nattering on what their brains make them do and tell them to do. I think this is pretty pernicious – anything but trivial.”
Mr. Hacker's remarks form part of a larger critique of how neuroscience is grappling with human consciousness, the great divide for philosophers and scientists.
Consciousness, of course, is one of the great, unsolved conundrums of modern science. Where, if anywhere, does awareness reside? How, if at all, can it be explained? Is the mind separate from its body? Or does everything, ultimately, reduce to biochemistry and quantum physics, including our private, inner-most experiences of the world?
From the time of Aristotle and Plato, these questions have largely been the preserve of philosophy. But the past several decades have witnessed the steady rise of cognitive neuroscience, which maintains that all human faculties, including consciousness, can now (or one day will) be explained by neural oscillations in the cerebral cortex – accountable by simple measurements of neurons and synapses.
As the late Francis Crick put it in his 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
But the philosophers are refusing to go down without a good conceptual scrap. Mr. Hacker, for one, says it's nonsense to attribute consciousness, knowledge and perception to mere physical processes in the brain. “One sees with one's eyes and hears with one's ears,” he insists, “but one is not conscious with one's brain any more than one walks with one's brain. The brain is not an organ of consciousness. … The brain has no cognitive powers at all. There is no such thing as a brain's thinking, wanting, reasoning, believing or hypothesizing.”
Australian philosopher David Chalmers, now teaching in California, differentiates between what he calls the easy and hard problems of consciousness. Easy problems tend to be phenomena that can be explained by computational or neural mechanisms – recoiling from unpleasant odours, for example, or simply declaring “I am hungry” or some other mental state. The hard problem relates to the subjective qualities of human experience.
For instance, let's say you run into your old friend Jack. You register a moment of physical recognition: “Oh, there's old Jack.” But meeting old Jack also may trigger a series of “Jack” memories, emotions and ideas, all percolating more or less simultaneously. You may perceive that Jack has aged and remember how he once looked. You may recall beautiful music that Jack enjoyed, or the brilliant shade of red of the rose in Jack's lapel. The specific presence of Jack, in short, catalyzes the non-specific emergence of a holistic range of associations, drawn from some hidden well of private experience. You and you alone know what it is like to experience this moment of reconnection. It is literally incomparable.
“The hard problem is hard,” says Mr. Chalmers, “precisely because … the problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained.”
Science can document all the processes involved in vision – electromagnetic waveforms striking the retina and proceeding electrochemically along the optic nerve to the brain's occipital lobe. But where does the felt experience of what is seen – let's say the colour red – come from? Says Mr. Chalmers: “There is an explanatory gap between the functions and experience.”
And the problem is hard, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker adds, because no one knows what the answer might look like “or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place.”
Indeed, many cognitive scientists, including Tufts University professor Daniel Dennett, challenge the notion of the hard problem and deny the very existence of so-called “qualia,” or of any ineffable internal life. Prof. Dennett contends that our notion of Self is simply “a cobbled-together collection of specialist brain circuits … that conspire to produce a virtual machine.” Other scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman, accept the validity of qualia, but still regard consciousness as a biological phenomenon, emerging from the 100 billion neurons densely packed inside the brain. And some religious scientists, among them Nobelist Sir John Eccles, reject the brain-based view of consciousness as superstition; the spiritual, non-physical world we comprehend cannot be explained by dendrite or axonic activity alone.
Dozens of variations on these themes have been articulated, but the fundamental mystery of consciousness – and thus of human existence – remains.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Fat cell hope for heart attacks
Helen Briggs -Health reporter, BBC News
Fat cells taken from the waistline could hold promise in treating heart attacks, say researchers. A pilot study on 14 patients in the Netherlands and Spain found that stem cells extracted from fat and delivered to the heart appeared to boost heart function after a heart attack. Doctors now plan to extend the study to over 300 heart attack patients at 35 clinics in Europe.A UK heart charity said the approach was "promising".
The research, which was presented at the American Heart Association's annual conference, followed 14 patients who had suffered a severe heart attack. Doctors used liposuction to take fat from the abdomen of each patient, extracted millions of stem cells, then delivered these to the heart within 24 hours. "There needs to be more research to understand what the stem cells actually do” Professor Jeremy Pearson
British Heart Foundation
Ten of the patients were given stem cells; while four had a "dummy" treatment.Six months on, the patients given stem cells had a lower amount of damaged muscle in their hearts - about 15% compared with 25% in the control group.
Lead author, Eric Duckers, of the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, Netherlands, said: "The study suggests that these cells can be safely obtained and infused inside the hearts of patients following an acute heart attack."Professor Jeremy Pearson of the British Heart Foundation, said small clinical trials in the last few years had tested whether stem cells from bone marrow could help the heart recover after a heart attack, "with some promising results".But he called for further research."This pilot study shows for the first time that stem cells from a patient's fat tissue may be similarly beneficial, indicating a potential new and more convenient source of stem cells," he said.
"However, since we still know very little about the way these cells could help to repair the damaged heart, there needs to be more research to understand what the stem cells actually do.
"That will help us to understand more about how they could be used for real patient benefit."The results of the study, known as Apollo, were not statistically significant, possibly because of its small size.
Researchers now plan a larger trial which will look at the treatment in more detail.
Fat cells taken from the waistline could hold promise in treating heart attacks, say researchers. A pilot study on 14 patients in the Netherlands and Spain found that stem cells extracted from fat and delivered to the heart appeared to boost heart function after a heart attack. Doctors now plan to extend the study to over 300 heart attack patients at 35 clinics in Europe.A UK heart charity said the approach was "promising".
The research, which was presented at the American Heart Association's annual conference, followed 14 patients who had suffered a severe heart attack. Doctors used liposuction to take fat from the abdomen of each patient, extracted millions of stem cells, then delivered these to the heart within 24 hours. "There needs to be more research to understand what the stem cells actually do” Professor Jeremy Pearson
British Heart Foundation
Ten of the patients were given stem cells; while four had a "dummy" treatment.Six months on, the patients given stem cells had a lower amount of damaged muscle in their hearts - about 15% compared with 25% in the control group.
Lead author, Eric Duckers, of the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, Netherlands, said: "The study suggests that these cells can be safely obtained and infused inside the hearts of patients following an acute heart attack."Professor Jeremy Pearson of the British Heart Foundation, said small clinical trials in the last few years had tested whether stem cells from bone marrow could help the heart recover after a heart attack, "with some promising results".But he called for further research."This pilot study shows for the first time that stem cells from a patient's fat tissue may be similarly beneficial, indicating a potential new and more convenient source of stem cells," he said.
"However, since we still know very little about the way these cells could help to repair the damaged heart, there needs to be more research to understand what the stem cells actually do.
"That will help us to understand more about how they could be used for real patient benefit."The results of the study, known as Apollo, were not statistically significant, possibly because of its small size.
Researchers now plan a larger trial which will look at the treatment in more detail.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Can brain scans tell us who makes a good chief executive?
By Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent, BBC News
Brain scans could reveal leadership ability
Sir John Madejski is about to find out what is going on inside his head. After final preparations by a team of scientists the leading British businessman lies down on a stretcher and is wheeled gently into an MRI scanner.
But Sir John is not ill. The 45-minute brain scan is part of a unique experiment to try to work out whether science can be applied to the study of leadership. Neuroscientists, psychologists and management experts at Reading University are collaborating on a study which aims to examine the brains of chief executives and leaders in other field like the military or voluntary organisations.
Decision makers
Dr Kevin Money of Henley Business School, now part of Reading University, explains the aims: "We hope to look at how leaders from different sectors make decisions, what actually leads people to move from making good to bad decisions, what goes on in people's minds and how they make those choices." Inside the scanner, Sir John is not just having a rest, he is completing a series of exercises.Professor Douglas Saddy of Reading's Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics looks on as the businessman presses a keypad to make various financial decisions by pressing buttons: "In this case," he explains, "what he is being asked to do is make a judgement about whether given a certain set of information a short-term reward would be better than a long-term reward."
While he presses the keypad his brain activity is being measured. The results of this and a number of other scans will be aggregated to try to draw out some lessons.'I think they found my brain'
Spot the business leader
"I think they found my brain," he jokes. The entrepreneur has made enough money from a string of businesses to buy a football club and endow a Centre for Reputation at Henley Business School. He is enthusiastic about the project and has promised to encourage fellow tycoons to submit their brains for scanning. Dr Money is cautious about promising instant results from this research: "It's way too early, we can't look at one person's brain and conclude too much. What we can do is look at different groups, say military and business leaders, and compare leadership education within those different groups."
Is psychometrics a science?
Peter Saville believes in the power of psychometric testing.
But using technology to examine what makes a good leader is nothing new. For many decades organisations around the world have used psychometric testing to help choose candidates for senior positions, and to try to understand what constitutes a good leader. But psychometrics is a controversial science, with some critics suggesting it makes claims that cannot be substantiated.Professor Peter Saville has run businesses supplying psychometric techniques for more than 30 years. He outlines for me a history of his science which he says stretches back to techniques used by Samuel Pepys to select naval officers, and insists that it makes a valuable contribution to the process of choosing job candidates: "You still find interviewers who judge people on the first minute of an interview," he says. "All we are doing is reducing the odds of choosing the wrong person. It's science versus sentiment."
Non-strategic me
Then Professor Saville sets me a psychometric test of my leadership skills. It involves some 36 quite complex questions, where I am asked to rank my own skills - from decisiveness to strategic thinking. Often, I am asked to decide between aspects of my personality that are not mutually exclusive - whether I seek to consult other members of the team, whether I am keen to promote my own work.After I complete the questionnaire, Professor Saville hands me a report on my leadership skills. It is not encouraging. "You come in the bottom 2% of the population for strategic vision," he tells me. He tactfully tries to reassure me that I have scored very highly as a networker and a communicator - important skills for a journalist - but makes it clear that I am not going to be asked to lead some major organisation any time soon.
A technology solution?
Headhunter Virginia Eastman does not believe brain scanners will force her to look for a new job. So is there a chance that a recruitment industry which already uses psychometrics will now look to other techniques, including perhaps bran scanning? One headhunter is sceptical. Virginia Eastman of Heidrick and Struggles hunts down candidates for senior roles in global media organisations. She says that new technology is helping to make the process of communicating with and assessing suitable leaders more rapid, but it only goes so far: "Our whole profession is built on one thing, the consensus that we all know what good looks like, and that we make that judgement. No machine can replace that."
Neuroscientists and psychologists believe they can make a real contribution to our understanding of what makes leaders tick. But for now, those whose job it is to select leaders still believe it is more of an art than a technology.
Brain scans could reveal leadership ability
Sir John Madejski is about to find out what is going on inside his head. After final preparations by a team of scientists the leading British businessman lies down on a stretcher and is wheeled gently into an MRI scanner.
But Sir John is not ill. The 45-minute brain scan is part of a unique experiment to try to work out whether science can be applied to the study of leadership. Neuroscientists, psychologists and management experts at Reading University are collaborating on a study which aims to examine the brains of chief executives and leaders in other field like the military or voluntary organisations.
Decision makers
Dr Kevin Money of Henley Business School, now part of Reading University, explains the aims: "We hope to look at how leaders from different sectors make decisions, what actually leads people to move from making good to bad decisions, what goes on in people's minds and how they make those choices." Inside the scanner, Sir John is not just having a rest, he is completing a series of exercises.Professor Douglas Saddy of Reading's Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics looks on as the businessman presses a keypad to make various financial decisions by pressing buttons: "In this case," he explains, "what he is being asked to do is make a judgement about whether given a certain set of information a short-term reward would be better than a long-term reward."
While he presses the keypad his brain activity is being measured. The results of this and a number of other scans will be aggregated to try to draw out some lessons.'I think they found my brain'
Spot the business leader
"I think they found my brain," he jokes. The entrepreneur has made enough money from a string of businesses to buy a football club and endow a Centre for Reputation at Henley Business School. He is enthusiastic about the project and has promised to encourage fellow tycoons to submit their brains for scanning. Dr Money is cautious about promising instant results from this research: "It's way too early, we can't look at one person's brain and conclude too much. What we can do is look at different groups, say military and business leaders, and compare leadership education within those different groups."
Is psychometrics a science?
Peter Saville believes in the power of psychometric testing.
But using technology to examine what makes a good leader is nothing new. For many decades organisations around the world have used psychometric testing to help choose candidates for senior positions, and to try to understand what constitutes a good leader. But psychometrics is a controversial science, with some critics suggesting it makes claims that cannot be substantiated.Professor Peter Saville has run businesses supplying psychometric techniques for more than 30 years. He outlines for me a history of his science which he says stretches back to techniques used by Samuel Pepys to select naval officers, and insists that it makes a valuable contribution to the process of choosing job candidates: "You still find interviewers who judge people on the first minute of an interview," he says. "All we are doing is reducing the odds of choosing the wrong person. It's science versus sentiment."
Non-strategic me
Then Professor Saville sets me a psychometric test of my leadership skills. It involves some 36 quite complex questions, where I am asked to rank my own skills - from decisiveness to strategic thinking. Often, I am asked to decide between aspects of my personality that are not mutually exclusive - whether I seek to consult other members of the team, whether I am keen to promote my own work.After I complete the questionnaire, Professor Saville hands me a report on my leadership skills. It is not encouraging. "You come in the bottom 2% of the population for strategic vision," he tells me. He tactfully tries to reassure me that I have scored very highly as a networker and a communicator - important skills for a journalist - but makes it clear that I am not going to be asked to lead some major organisation any time soon.
A technology solution?
Headhunter Virginia Eastman does not believe brain scanners will force her to look for a new job. So is there a chance that a recruitment industry which already uses psychometrics will now look to other techniques, including perhaps bran scanning? One headhunter is sceptical. Virginia Eastman of Heidrick and Struggles hunts down candidates for senior roles in global media organisations. She says that new technology is helping to make the process of communicating with and assessing suitable leaders more rapid, but it only goes so far: "Our whole profession is built on one thing, the consensus that we all know what good looks like, and that we make that judgement. No machine can replace that."
Neuroscientists and psychologists believe they can make a real contribution to our understanding of what makes leaders tick. But for now, those whose job it is to select leaders still believe it is more of an art than a technology.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
NHLBI launches body cooling treatment study for pediatric cardiac arrest
NHLBI launches body cooling treatment study for pediatric cardiac arrest
NIH funds first large-scale, multicenter study to explore the use of temperature regulation in infants and children after cardiac arrest
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health, has launched the first large-scale, multicenter study to investigate the effectiveness of body cooling treatment in infants and children who have had cardiac arrest. The Therapeutic Hypothermia after Pediatric Cardiac Arrest (THAPCA) trials total more than $21 million over six years.
Therapeutic hypothermia, or body cooling, has been successfully used in adults after cardiac arrest and in newborn infants after birth asphyxia, or lack of oxygen, to improve survival and outcomes, but it has not been studied in infants or children who have had cardiac arrest.
"Children who have experienced cardiac arrest can suffer long-term neurological damage or death," said NHLBI Acting Director Susan B. Shurin, M.D., a board-certified pediatrician. "There are abundant data demonstrating the benefits of hypothermia in adults with cardiac arrest, but very limited experience in children. This study begins to assess the effectiveness of therapeutic hypothermia in children, and should lead to evidence-based guidelines that will optimize both quality and rates of survival."
During body cooling treatment, THAPCA participants lie on mattresses and are covered with blankets. Machines circulate water through the blankets and mattresses to control the participants' body temperatures. Researchers do not yet know how body cooling will affect participants, since many factors can contribute to brain injury after cardiac arrest. However, they believe body cooling could provide several benefits, including less inflammation and cell death.
According to a 2008 review of pediatric cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the journal Pediatrics, about 16,000 children suffer cardiac arrest each year in the United States. Their hearts stop pumping effectively, and blood stops flowing to their brains and other vital organs. In many cases, the outcome is death or long-term disability.
Cardiac arrest in infants and children has many causes, such as strangulation, drowning, or trauma. It can also be a complication of many medical conditions. "Our goal is to minimize brain injury in infants and children who experience cardiac arrest and ultimately improve survival rates," said co-principal investigator J. Michael Dean, M.D., M.B.A., professor of pediatrics and chief of the Division of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City.
The THAPCA centers enroll participants in one of two randomized, controlled clinical trials. One evaluates participants who suffered cardiac arrest outside the hospital, while the other evaluates participants who suffered cardiac arrest in the hospital. Within each trial, there are two active treatment groups: therapeutic hypothermia (cooling the patient to 89.6-93.2 Fahrenheit) and therapeutic normothermia (maintaining the patient at 96.8-99.5 Fahrenheit). Both trials are trying to reduce fever, which commonly occurs after cardiac arrest and can lead to more severe outcomes.
"These trials are addressing the question: What is the optimal temperature for an infant or child after cardiac arrest?" said co-principal investigator Frank W. Moler, M.D., M.S., a professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He added that in previous studies exploring therapeutic hypothermia, the comparison or control groups did not receive therapeutic normothermia to prevent fever.
Blanketrol mattress and blanket used for therapeutic hypothermia.Participants in the THAPCA trials must be older than 48 hours and younger than 18 years and must be enrolled in the study within six hours of suffering cardiac arrest. Once a parent or guardian provides consent, the participant is randomly assigned to one of the two treatment groups. The therapeutic hypothermia group in each trial receives the hypothermia treatment for two days and then normothermia treatment for three days, which ensures that the body temperature is kept within a normal temperature range. The patients in the therapeutic normothermia groups receive normothermia treatment for all five days.
After the five-day period, the clinical care team will continue to provide study participants with optimal medical care. Participants will undergo neurological and behavioral testing a year after the cardiac arrest.
The THAPCA trials involve 34 clinical centers in the United States and Canada. The C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan serves as the lead clinical center, while the data coordinating center is based at the University of Utah School of Medicine.The THAPCA trials are being conducted in partnership with the Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network, established in 2004 by the NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network, established in 2001 by the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau.
The 34 participating clinical centers across North America are:
•Children's Hospital of Alabama, Birmingham
•Diamond Children's Medical Center, University of Arizona, Tucson
•Phoenix Children's Hospital
•Arkansas Children's Hospital, Little Rock
•Children's Hospital of Los Angeles
•Children's Hospital of Orange County, Orange, Calif.
•Loma Linda University Children's Hospital, Calif.
•Mattel Children's Hospital, University of California, Los Angeles
•UC Davis Children's Hospital, Sacramento, Calif.
•The Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Ontario
•Children's Hospital of Denver, Aurora, Colo.
•Children's National Medical Center, Washington, D.C.
•Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Pediatric Hospital
•Children's Memorial Hospital, Chicago
•Kosair Children's Hospital, Louisville, Ky.
•Johns Hopkins Children's Center, Baltimore
•Children's Hospital of Michigan, Detroit
•C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
•Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, Minneapolis
•St. Louis Children's Hospital, Washington University
•Children's Hospital of New York, Columbia University
•Golisano Children's Hospital, University of Rochester, N.Y.
•Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
•University Hospitals, Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital, Cleveland
•Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, Ohio
•Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
•Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital
•Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh
•Le Bonheur Children's Hospital/University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis
•Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, Nashville, Tenn.
•Children's Medical Center of Dallas
•Primary Children's Medical Center, University of Utah, Salt Lake City
•Seattle Children's Hospital
•Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, Wauwatosa
More information about the THAPCA trials (NCT00880087 and NCT00878644) can be found at http://clinicaltrials.gov/.
To interview an NHLBI spokesperson, contact the NHLBI Communications Office at 301-496-4236 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 301-496-4236 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or nhlbi_news@nhlbi.nih.gov. To interview Dr. Frank W. Moler, contact Margarita Bauza Wagerson, University of Michigan Health System at 734-764-2220 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 734-764-2220 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or mbauza@umich.edu. To interview Dr. J. Michael Dean, contact Phil Sahm, University of Utah Health Sciences Public Affairs Office at 801-581-2517 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 801-581-2517 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or phil.sahm@hsc.utah.edu.
The NHLBI plans, conducts, and supports research related to the causes, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of heart, blood vessel, lung, and blood diseases; and sleep disorders. The Institute also administers national health education campaigns on women and heart disease, healthy weight for children, and other topics. NHLBI press releases and other materials are available online at www.nhlbi.nih.gov.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — The Nation's Medical Research Agency — includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resources:
•Therapeutic Hypothermia after Pediatric Cardiac Arrest (THAPCA) trials website: http://www.thapca.org/
•ClinicalTrials.gov THAPCA trials resources: http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00880087?term=THAPCA&rank=1, and
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00878644?term=THAPCA&rank=2
•Cardiac Arrest: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/scda/scda_whatis.html
•Children and Clinical Studies: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/childrenandclinicalstudies/index.php
•Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network (CPCCRN): http://www.cpccrn.org/
•Pediatric Emergency
NIH funds first large-scale, multicenter study to explore the use of temperature regulation in infants and children after cardiac arrest
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health, has launched the first large-scale, multicenter study to investigate the effectiveness of body cooling treatment in infants and children who have had cardiac arrest. The Therapeutic Hypothermia after Pediatric Cardiac Arrest (THAPCA) trials total more than $21 million over six years.
Therapeutic hypothermia, or body cooling, has been successfully used in adults after cardiac arrest and in newborn infants after birth asphyxia, or lack of oxygen, to improve survival and outcomes, but it has not been studied in infants or children who have had cardiac arrest.
"Children who have experienced cardiac arrest can suffer long-term neurological damage or death," said NHLBI Acting Director Susan B. Shurin, M.D., a board-certified pediatrician. "There are abundant data demonstrating the benefits of hypothermia in adults with cardiac arrest, but very limited experience in children. This study begins to assess the effectiveness of therapeutic hypothermia in children, and should lead to evidence-based guidelines that will optimize both quality and rates of survival."
During body cooling treatment, THAPCA participants lie on mattresses and are covered with blankets. Machines circulate water through the blankets and mattresses to control the participants' body temperatures. Researchers do not yet know how body cooling will affect participants, since many factors can contribute to brain injury after cardiac arrest. However, they believe body cooling could provide several benefits, including less inflammation and cell death.
According to a 2008 review of pediatric cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the journal Pediatrics, about 16,000 children suffer cardiac arrest each year in the United States. Their hearts stop pumping effectively, and blood stops flowing to their brains and other vital organs. In many cases, the outcome is death or long-term disability.
Cardiac arrest in infants and children has many causes, such as strangulation, drowning, or trauma. It can also be a complication of many medical conditions. "Our goal is to minimize brain injury in infants and children who experience cardiac arrest and ultimately improve survival rates," said co-principal investigator J. Michael Dean, M.D., M.B.A., professor of pediatrics and chief of the Division of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City.
The THAPCA centers enroll participants in one of two randomized, controlled clinical trials. One evaluates participants who suffered cardiac arrest outside the hospital, while the other evaluates participants who suffered cardiac arrest in the hospital. Within each trial, there are two active treatment groups: therapeutic hypothermia (cooling the patient to 89.6-93.2 Fahrenheit) and therapeutic normothermia (maintaining the patient at 96.8-99.5 Fahrenheit). Both trials are trying to reduce fever, which commonly occurs after cardiac arrest and can lead to more severe outcomes.
"These trials are addressing the question: What is the optimal temperature for an infant or child after cardiac arrest?" said co-principal investigator Frank W. Moler, M.D., M.S., a professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He added that in previous studies exploring therapeutic hypothermia, the comparison or control groups did not receive therapeutic normothermia to prevent fever.
Blanketrol mattress and blanket used for therapeutic hypothermia.Participants in the THAPCA trials must be older than 48 hours and younger than 18 years and must be enrolled in the study within six hours of suffering cardiac arrest. Once a parent or guardian provides consent, the participant is randomly assigned to one of the two treatment groups. The therapeutic hypothermia group in each trial receives the hypothermia treatment for two days and then normothermia treatment for three days, which ensures that the body temperature is kept within a normal temperature range. The patients in the therapeutic normothermia groups receive normothermia treatment for all five days.
After the five-day period, the clinical care team will continue to provide study participants with optimal medical care. Participants will undergo neurological and behavioral testing a year after the cardiac arrest.
The THAPCA trials involve 34 clinical centers in the United States and Canada. The C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan serves as the lead clinical center, while the data coordinating center is based at the University of Utah School of Medicine.The THAPCA trials are being conducted in partnership with the Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network, established in 2004 by the NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network, established in 2001 by the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau.
The 34 participating clinical centers across North America are:
•Children's Hospital of Alabama, Birmingham
•Diamond Children's Medical Center, University of Arizona, Tucson
•Phoenix Children's Hospital
•Arkansas Children's Hospital, Little Rock
•Children's Hospital of Los Angeles
•Children's Hospital of Orange County, Orange, Calif.
•Loma Linda University Children's Hospital, Calif.
•Mattel Children's Hospital, University of California, Los Angeles
•UC Davis Children's Hospital, Sacramento, Calif.
•The Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Ontario
•Children's Hospital of Denver, Aurora, Colo.
•Children's National Medical Center, Washington, D.C.
•Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Pediatric Hospital
•Children's Memorial Hospital, Chicago
•Kosair Children's Hospital, Louisville, Ky.
•Johns Hopkins Children's Center, Baltimore
•Children's Hospital of Michigan, Detroit
•C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
•Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, Minneapolis
•St. Louis Children's Hospital, Washington University
•Children's Hospital of New York, Columbia University
•Golisano Children's Hospital, University of Rochester, N.Y.
•Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
•University Hospitals, Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital, Cleveland
•Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, Ohio
•Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
•Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital
•Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh
•Le Bonheur Children's Hospital/University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis
•Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt, Nashville, Tenn.
•Children's Medical Center of Dallas
•Primary Children's Medical Center, University of Utah, Salt Lake City
•Seattle Children's Hospital
•Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, Wauwatosa
More information about the THAPCA trials (NCT00880087 and NCT00878644) can be found at http://clinicaltrials.gov/.
To interview an NHLBI spokesperson, contact the NHLBI Communications Office at 301-496-4236 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 301-496-4236 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or nhlbi_news@nhlbi.nih.gov. To interview Dr. Frank W. Moler, contact Margarita Bauza Wagerson, University of Michigan Health System at 734-764-2220 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 734-764-2220 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or mbauza@umich.edu. To interview Dr. J. Michael Dean, contact Phil Sahm, University of Utah Health Sciences Public Affairs Office at 801-581-2517 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 801-581-2517 end_of_the_skype_highlighting or phil.sahm@hsc.utah.edu.
The NHLBI plans, conducts, and supports research related to the causes, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of heart, blood vessel, lung, and blood diseases; and sleep disorders. The Institute also administers national health education campaigns on women and heart disease, healthy weight for children, and other topics. NHLBI press releases and other materials are available online at www.nhlbi.nih.gov.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — The Nation's Medical Research Agency — includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resources:
•Therapeutic Hypothermia after Pediatric Cardiac Arrest (THAPCA) trials website: http://www.thapca.org/
•ClinicalTrials.gov THAPCA trials resources: http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00880087?term=THAPCA&rank=1, and
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00878644?term=THAPCA&rank=2
•Cardiac Arrest: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/scda/scda_whatis.html
•Children and Clinical Studies: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/childrenandclinicalstudies/index.php
•Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network (CPCCRN): http://www.cpccrn.org/
•Pediatric Emergency
Friday, November 12, 2010
Life possible 400 million years earlier
Evidence found in ancient rocks that once lay on a Scottish lake floor shows the Earth's atmosphere was able to sustain complex life 1.2 billion years ago — 400 million years earlier than previously accepted. According to the researchers, the findings published today in Nature could lead to new understandings of when complex life, from which humans and animals developed, evolved on Earth. Prof. John Parnell of the University of Aberdeen, the lead author, says that previously, it was believed a dramatic rise in oxygen levels in the Earth's atmosphere took place about 800 million years ago.
This increase in oxygen marked the beginning of a move from simple organisms to the development of complex multi-cellular organisms, which eventually led to higher life forms. However, chemical signatures of bacteria found in ancient rocks near Lochinver in the northwest Scottish Highlands, push this key event in evolution back in time by about 400 million years, Parnell says.
Analysis of the 1.2 billion-year-old rocks show the bacteria that use sulphur to generate energy to survive were also using oxygen in a more complex chemical reaction that formed part of a so-called sulphur cycle of oxidation and reduction. Parnell says evidence of this chemical reaction shows levels of oxygen in the atmosphere were, at this much earlier stage in Earth's history, already at this key point for evolution.
Time to rethink the time scale
"Our findings will give impetus to further investigations into the time scale of the development of complex life, which followed this event," Parnell says."The whole story indicates that when animal life was kicked off — probably after the Snowball Earth episode at about 600 million years ago — the atmospheric composition was already suitable and not a barrier to development." Previously ancient sediments have shown increases in atmospheric oxygen concentration about 2.3 billion years ago (the Palaeoproterozoic era) and 0.8 billion years ago (the Neoproterozoic era).
This latest rise in oxygen levels is thought to be connected to the subsequent evolutionary expansion of animal life.
Prof. Malcolm Walter, director of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at the University of New South Wales, says the paper "adds a significant new data point in the oxygenation of the atmosphere".
He says the research could change long-held views on animal evolution as it indicates the oxygen that was needed for animal life was now known to be present earlier.However, the earliest known animal fossils date back to about 600 million years.Walter says it is important other researchers follow up on these findings and add to this study."So far this relates to only one deposit," he said.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/11/11/earth-life-study.html#ixzz154mIACjk
This increase in oxygen marked the beginning of a move from simple organisms to the development of complex multi-cellular organisms, which eventually led to higher life forms. However, chemical signatures of bacteria found in ancient rocks near Lochinver in the northwest Scottish Highlands, push this key event in evolution back in time by about 400 million years, Parnell says.
Analysis of the 1.2 billion-year-old rocks show the bacteria that use sulphur to generate energy to survive were also using oxygen in a more complex chemical reaction that formed part of a so-called sulphur cycle of oxidation and reduction. Parnell says evidence of this chemical reaction shows levels of oxygen in the atmosphere were, at this much earlier stage in Earth's history, already at this key point for evolution.
Time to rethink the time scale
"Our findings will give impetus to further investigations into the time scale of the development of complex life, which followed this event," Parnell says."The whole story indicates that when animal life was kicked off — probably after the Snowball Earth episode at about 600 million years ago — the atmospheric composition was already suitable and not a barrier to development." Previously ancient sediments have shown increases in atmospheric oxygen concentration about 2.3 billion years ago (the Palaeoproterozoic era) and 0.8 billion years ago (the Neoproterozoic era).
This latest rise in oxygen levels is thought to be connected to the subsequent evolutionary expansion of animal life.
Prof. Malcolm Walter, director of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at the University of New South Wales, says the paper "adds a significant new data point in the oxygenation of the atmosphere".
He says the research could change long-held views on animal evolution as it indicates the oxygen that was needed for animal life was now known to be present earlier.However, the earliest known animal fossils date back to about 600 million years.Walter says it is important other researchers follow up on these findings and add to this study."So far this relates to only one deposit," he said.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/11/11/earth-life-study.html#ixzz154mIACjk
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Ants who enslave other ants
By Ella Davies
Slavemaker ants prefer to target the strong over the weak when seeking new servants, researchers have found. Ants were observed actively choosing to attack larger, better defended colonies over smaller, weaker ones. Scientists suggest that the intelligent ants identify strong defences as a sign of a strong population. By conducting fewer raids on strongly defended targets, the slave-making ants actually limit the risks and come away with the most pupae to enslave.
Slavemaker ants such as Protomognathus americanus are known to demonstrate unusual colony behaviour.
The queen produces offspring but crucially, they do not perform the everyday worker tasks of foraging or caring for broods. Instead, nominated scout workers identify nearby "host" ant colonies suitable for attack.
During the attack the slavemaker ants steal host pupae and take them back to their own colony. The pupae are imprinted on the odour of the slavemaker colony and grow up to perform all of the ordinary worker tasks. This exploitation of another species' workforce is called social parasitism.
In their study published in Animal Behaviour, researchers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany theorised that slavemaker ants chose "easy targets" over more strongly defended colonies as they offered the lowest risk. The ants in Sebastian Pohl's study acted in the opposite manner: raiding parties were more likely to attack stronger colonies. "At first, we were quite surprised, as we expected that attacking slavemaker colonies prefer host colonies that provide a better benefit to risk ratio," Mr Pohl explained.
Losing a single worker might very likely be synonymous with losing half of the colony members "We hence had to look at the slavemakers' decision in more detail and had to consider more aspects of the complete raiding behaviour." Mr Pohl and his colleagues identified that the "slave raids" presented considerable risk to P. americanus.In small slavemaker colonies consisting of one queen, two to five workers and 30 to 60 slaves, scout ants were very valuable. It was essential that scouts made the right decision about suitable raid targets or "host colonies" without being discovered and attacked. "Losing a single worker might very likely be synonymous with losing half of the colony members," Mr Pohl told the BBC.
Therefore, a smaller number of scouting events and subsequent raids presented the lowest risk to the slavemaker colony. However, the colony still needed new slaves to be able to survive to the next season. From their behaviour, researchers suggested that the scout ants associated strong colonies with high numbers of pupae and a high benefit. The tactic of fewer raids on stronger targets consequently offered the best risk to benefit ratio.
Slavemaker ants prefer to target the strong over the weak when seeking new servants, researchers have found. Ants were observed actively choosing to attack larger, better defended colonies over smaller, weaker ones. Scientists suggest that the intelligent ants identify strong defences as a sign of a strong population. By conducting fewer raids on strongly defended targets, the slave-making ants actually limit the risks and come away with the most pupae to enslave.
Slavemaker ants such as Protomognathus americanus are known to demonstrate unusual colony behaviour.
The queen produces offspring but crucially, they do not perform the everyday worker tasks of foraging or caring for broods. Instead, nominated scout workers identify nearby "host" ant colonies suitable for attack.
During the attack the slavemaker ants steal host pupae and take them back to their own colony. The pupae are imprinted on the odour of the slavemaker colony and grow up to perform all of the ordinary worker tasks. This exploitation of another species' workforce is called social parasitism.
In their study published in Animal Behaviour, researchers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany theorised that slavemaker ants chose "easy targets" over more strongly defended colonies as they offered the lowest risk. The ants in Sebastian Pohl's study acted in the opposite manner: raiding parties were more likely to attack stronger colonies. "At first, we were quite surprised, as we expected that attacking slavemaker colonies prefer host colonies that provide a better benefit to risk ratio," Mr Pohl explained.
Losing a single worker might very likely be synonymous with losing half of the colony members "We hence had to look at the slavemakers' decision in more detail and had to consider more aspects of the complete raiding behaviour." Mr Pohl and his colleagues identified that the "slave raids" presented considerable risk to P. americanus.In small slavemaker colonies consisting of one queen, two to five workers and 30 to 60 slaves, scout ants were very valuable. It was essential that scouts made the right decision about suitable raid targets or "host colonies" without being discovered and attacked. "Losing a single worker might very likely be synonymous with losing half of the colony members," Mr Pohl told the BBC.
Therefore, a smaller number of scouting events and subsequent raids presented the lowest risk to the slavemaker colony. However, the colony still needed new slaves to be able to survive to the next season. From their behaviour, researchers suggested that the scout ants associated strong colonies with high numbers of pupae and a high benefit. The tactic of fewer raids on stronger targets consequently offered the best risk to benefit ratio.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Saturday, November 6, 2010
'Immunized' bacteria may halt antibiotic resistance
Altering bacteria's immune systems could one day help prevent their resistance to antibiotics, a new study has found. Researchers at Laval University in Quebec City and food company Danisco say they've discovered how bacteria take "pieces" of foreign DNA and embed them within their genome. When the bacteria come in contact with that foreign DNA down the road, they fight it off in an immune-style attack.The scientists inserted plasmids — DNA molecules that bacteria routinely exchange — into the bacteria. These plasmids contained a gene for antibiotic resistance.Once the plasmids were placed, the bacteria integrated parts of the DNA from the antibiotic resistance gene into their genome. This meant that when researchers tried to reinsert the plasmids, the bacteria fought them off.
"These bacteria had simply been immunized against acquiring the resistance gene," Sylvain Moineau, a professor at Laval's department of biochemistry, microbiology and bioinformatics, said in a release. "This phenomenon could explain, among other things, why some bacteria develop antibiotic resistance while others don't."The finding could pave the way for the development of bacteria that are not immune to antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance develops when antibiotics fail to kill all bacteria, leaving some to grow into a new, resistant strain.
Bacteria that develop resistance to common antibiotics affect more than 250,000 Canadians a year, according to the Canadian Medical Association. About 8,000 people die from those infections.
The study also found that the immune response demonstrated by the bacteria also causes them to effectively fight off viruses known as bacteriophages. Future research could identify how food companies that sell food with bacterial cultures such as yogurt and cheese could prevent bacterial contamination.
The study is published in Thursday's issue of Nature.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/11/05/antibiotic-resistance-bacteria.html#ixzz14VoNaIKz
"These bacteria had simply been immunized against acquiring the resistance gene," Sylvain Moineau, a professor at Laval's department of biochemistry, microbiology and bioinformatics, said in a release. "This phenomenon could explain, among other things, why some bacteria develop antibiotic resistance while others don't."The finding could pave the way for the development of bacteria that are not immune to antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance develops when antibiotics fail to kill all bacteria, leaving some to grow into a new, resistant strain.
Bacteria that develop resistance to common antibiotics affect more than 250,000 Canadians a year, according to the Canadian Medical Association. About 8,000 people die from those infections.
The study also found that the immune response demonstrated by the bacteria also causes them to effectively fight off viruses known as bacteriophages. Future research could identify how food companies that sell food with bacterial cultures such as yogurt and cheese could prevent bacterial contamination.
The study is published in Thursday's issue of Nature.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/11/05/antibiotic-resistance-bacteria.html#ixzz14VoNaIKz
Friday, November 5, 2010
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Longest Running Carbon dioxide experiment
But in the world's longest running carbon dioxide experiment in Maryland, scientists have created a unique salt marsh that simulates the environment of the future.And they've discovered that while increased carbon dioxide (CO2) is the biggest cause of global warming, it also makes some plants grow faster which builds new soil and helps the land keep pace with rising sea levels.
"That's the silver lining," says Patrick Megonigal, a senior biogeochemist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. "CO2 acts as a fertiliser on some plants, and in a marsh like this, a faster growing plant has some good characteristics. "This marsh can actually build soil through root growth and more soil means this marsh can rise upwards and therefore keep pace with rising sea levels."The marsh is dotted with atmospherically controlled chambers that contain the same amount of CO2 that the planet may be exposed to by the year 2100 - roughly double what it is today. "They're like time capsules. We are simulating the future inside them," says Dr Megonigal. "We're trying to travel forward in time by subjecting these plants to the conditions the whole world will be subjected to a hundred years from now."
But there are other man-made factors that may counteract soil creation. Pollution - particularly from nitrogen - can have a major impact."We found that when you combine nitrogen with CO2, the positive effect on soil elevation is cut in half. So while increased CO2 helps the marsh keep pace with rising sea levels, increased nitrogen seems to work in the other direction. What you give with one hand you take with the other. It's a very complex situation."The conditions are tailored to those predicted for 100 years' time Coastal wetlands are the first defence against climate change and the 60-hectare (148-acre) salt marsh at the heart of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center has been home to some of the most important ecological studies of the past 40 years.
Scientists here were among the first to take seriously the effects of global warming and begin studying its impact. In another experiment at the centre, one part of the marsh has succumbed to Phragmites australis, a plant better known as the common reed. Although it is native to North America, another strain was introduced from Europe in the 1800s and is classed as an invasive species. It can grow to 20ft (6.1m) high and form an impenetrable wall of bamboo-like stalks."My research addresses how global climate change will affect the invasion process in natural eco-systems," says environmental scientist Thomas Mozdzer. "Preliminary experiments have shown that increases in CO2 and nitrogen could triple the plant's growth."
Such growth can critically harm native habitats, displacing native plants and the organisms and animals that need them to survive. By understanding the effects of rising CO2, scientists may be able to discover how to control species such as Phragmites australis."Knowing how these eco-systems behave in the future is useful for planning," says Dr Megonigal. "Certain invasive species may degrade the marshland in terms of habitat, but their accelerated growth may help offset the effect of rising sea levels. If we better understand that trade-off we can decide whether to allow the plant to invade."
Scientists look at the impact of invasive species on native habitats The ongoing carbon dioxode experiment began in 1987 when scientists started examining whether plants were able to extract and store CO2 as levels in the atmosphere continue to rise. "There's lots of interest in creating marshland to sequester CO2. The type of work carried out here will find out whether carbon stored today will still be there in a hundred years from now," says Dr Megonigal.The experiments at the Smithsonian's Environmental Research Center are unique because they've been conducted continuously over such a long period of time. The marsh also has an electricity supply and platforms that make it accessible to scientists and easy to install equipment. The latest results from this living laboratory were published internationally in the summer and the National Science Foundation has agreed to fund research for another decade.
"We've been doing this work for a quarter of a century," says Dr Megonigal. "That kind of long term data gives us something that short term experiments can't. "An experiment that lasts two or three years tells us very little. The long term responses are what we need to project beyond 10 years, to say 100 years, which is our goal here."
"That's the silver lining," says Patrick Megonigal, a senior biogeochemist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. "CO2 acts as a fertiliser on some plants, and in a marsh like this, a faster growing plant has some good characteristics. "This marsh can actually build soil through root growth and more soil means this marsh can rise upwards and therefore keep pace with rising sea levels."The marsh is dotted with atmospherically controlled chambers that contain the same amount of CO2 that the planet may be exposed to by the year 2100 - roughly double what it is today. "They're like time capsules. We are simulating the future inside them," says Dr Megonigal. "We're trying to travel forward in time by subjecting these plants to the conditions the whole world will be subjected to a hundred years from now."
But there are other man-made factors that may counteract soil creation. Pollution - particularly from nitrogen - can have a major impact."We found that when you combine nitrogen with CO2, the positive effect on soil elevation is cut in half. So while increased CO2 helps the marsh keep pace with rising sea levels, increased nitrogen seems to work in the other direction. What you give with one hand you take with the other. It's a very complex situation."The conditions are tailored to those predicted for 100 years' time Coastal wetlands are the first defence against climate change and the 60-hectare (148-acre) salt marsh at the heart of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center has been home to some of the most important ecological studies of the past 40 years.
Scientists here were among the first to take seriously the effects of global warming and begin studying its impact. In another experiment at the centre, one part of the marsh has succumbed to Phragmites australis, a plant better known as the common reed. Although it is native to North America, another strain was introduced from Europe in the 1800s and is classed as an invasive species. It can grow to 20ft (6.1m) high and form an impenetrable wall of bamboo-like stalks."My research addresses how global climate change will affect the invasion process in natural eco-systems," says environmental scientist Thomas Mozdzer. "Preliminary experiments have shown that increases in CO2 and nitrogen could triple the plant's growth."
Such growth can critically harm native habitats, displacing native plants and the organisms and animals that need them to survive. By understanding the effects of rising CO2, scientists may be able to discover how to control species such as Phragmites australis."Knowing how these eco-systems behave in the future is useful for planning," says Dr Megonigal. "Certain invasive species may degrade the marshland in terms of habitat, but their accelerated growth may help offset the effect of rising sea levels. If we better understand that trade-off we can decide whether to allow the plant to invade."
Scientists look at the impact of invasive species on native habitats The ongoing carbon dioxode experiment began in 1987 when scientists started examining whether plants were able to extract and store CO2 as levels in the atmosphere continue to rise. "There's lots of interest in creating marshland to sequester CO2. The type of work carried out here will find out whether carbon stored today will still be there in a hundred years from now," says Dr Megonigal.The experiments at the Smithsonian's Environmental Research Center are unique because they've been conducted continuously over such a long period of time. The marsh also has an electricity supply and platforms that make it accessible to scientists and easy to install equipment. The latest results from this living laboratory were published internationally in the summer and the National Science Foundation has agreed to fund research for another decade.
"We've been doing this work for a quarter of a century," says Dr Megonigal. "That kind of long term data gives us something that short term experiments can't. "An experiment that lasts two or three years tells us very little. The long term responses are what we need to project beyond 10 years, to say 100 years, which is our goal here."
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Clues to defeating viruses
Scientists say they have made a landmark discovery which could pave the way for new drugs to beat illnesses like the common cold. Until now experts had thought that antibodies could only tackle viral infections by blocking or attacking viruses outside cells. But work done by the Medical Research Council shows antibodies can pass into cells and fight viruses from within. PNAS jour nal said the finding held promise for a new antiviral drugs.
The Cambridge scientists stressed that it would take years of work and testing to find new therapies, and said that the pathway they had discovered would not work on all viruses.
Fighting viruses
Some antiviral drugs are already available to help treat certain conditions, like HIV.But viruses remain mankind's biggest killer, responsible for twice as many deaths each year as cancer, and are among the hardest of all diseases to treat.The new discovery by Dr Leo James and colleagues transforms the previous scientific understanding of our immunity to viral diseases like the common cold, 'winter vomiting' and gastroenteritis.It shows that antibodies can enter cells and that once inside, they then trigger a response, led by a protein called TRIM21.
"Doctors have plenty of antibiotics to fight bacterial infections but few antiviral drugs” Dr Leo James Lead researcher at the MRC in Cambridge
This protein pulls the virus into a disposal system used by the cell to get rid of unwanted material. The researchers found this process happens quickly, usually before most viruses have chance to harm the cell. And they discovered that increasing the amount of TRIM21 protein in cells makes this process even more effective, suggesting new ways of making better antiviral drugs. Dr James said: "Doctors have plenty of antibiotics to fight bacterial infections but few antiviral drugs. "Although these are early days, and we don't yet know whether all viruses are cleared by this mechanism, we are excited that our discoveries may open multiple avenues for developing new antiviral drugs." Sir Greg Winter, deputy director of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, said: "This research is not only a leap in our understanding of how and where antibodies work, but more generally in our understanding of immunity and infection."
The Cambridge scientists stressed that it would take years of work and testing to find new therapies, and said that the pathway they had discovered would not work on all viruses.
Fighting viruses
Some antiviral drugs are already available to help treat certain conditions, like HIV.But viruses remain mankind's biggest killer, responsible for twice as many deaths each year as cancer, and are among the hardest of all diseases to treat.The new discovery by Dr Leo James and colleagues transforms the previous scientific understanding of our immunity to viral diseases like the common cold, 'winter vomiting' and gastroenteritis.It shows that antibodies can enter cells and that once inside, they then trigger a response, led by a protein called TRIM21.
"Doctors have plenty of antibiotics to fight bacterial infections but few antiviral drugs” Dr Leo James Lead researcher at the MRC in Cambridge
This protein pulls the virus into a disposal system used by the cell to get rid of unwanted material. The researchers found this process happens quickly, usually before most viruses have chance to harm the cell. And they discovered that increasing the amount of TRIM21 protein in cells makes this process even more effective, suggesting new ways of making better antiviral drugs. Dr James said: "Doctors have plenty of antibiotics to fight bacterial infections but few antiviral drugs. "Although these are early days, and we don't yet know whether all viruses are cleared by this mechanism, we are excited that our discoveries may open multiple avenues for developing new antiviral drugs." Sir Greg Winter, deputy director of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, said: "This research is not only a leap in our understanding of how and where antibodies work, but more generally in our understanding of immunity and infection."
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
Iceland volcano hints at eruption
Before Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in April, spewing ash that grounded airline flights for days, magma began melting the thick ice covering the volcano's crater, sending water coursing down the glacier. Torrents of water are pouring from a glacier that sits atop Iceland's most active volcano, an indication that it is growing hotter and may be about to erupt, scientists said Monday.
The flood that began Thursday at the Grimsvotn volcano is similar to one in 2004 that lasted five days and ended with an eruption that disrupted European air traffic, University of Iceland geophysicist Pall Einarsson said. In April, millions of air travellers around the world were grounded when ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano caused most northern European countries to close their airspace for five days.
There are no signs yet of the underground tremors that would signal an eruption at Grimsvotn, Icelandic Meteorological Office geophysicist Gunnar Gudmundsson said. Grimsvotn lies under 200 metres of ice at the Vatnajokull glacier in southeast Iceland. In addition to 2004, it erupted in 1998 and 1996, causing flooding on a largely uninhabited plain around it.The flooding triggered by molten rock from the volcano has been expanding a lake underneath the glacier, building pressure strong enough to send water pouring from beneath the ice cap.Iceland, a rugged island in the North Atlantic, is one of the world's most volcanically active countries.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/11/01/iceland-volcano-flood-grimsvotn.html#ixzz142WOCyg2
The flood that began Thursday at the Grimsvotn volcano is similar to one in 2004 that lasted five days and ended with an eruption that disrupted European air traffic, University of Iceland geophysicist Pall Einarsson said. In April, millions of air travellers around the world were grounded when ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano caused most northern European countries to close their airspace for five days.
There are no signs yet of the underground tremors that would signal an eruption at Grimsvotn, Icelandic Meteorological Office geophysicist Gunnar Gudmundsson said. Grimsvotn lies under 200 metres of ice at the Vatnajokull glacier in southeast Iceland. In addition to 2004, it erupted in 1998 and 1996, causing flooding on a largely uninhabited plain around it.The flooding triggered by molten rock from the volcano has been expanding a lake underneath the glacier, building pressure strong enough to send water pouring from beneath the ice cap.Iceland, a rugged island in the North Atlantic, is one of the world's most volcanically active countries.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/11/01/iceland-volcano-flood-grimsvotn.html#ixzz142WOCyg2
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