I'm Gina Smith

Cool quantum biology post from The Scientist.

This is awesome. From The Scientist, partial story below:

Biologists have traditionally left quantum theory to physicists. But the complicated interactions between matter and energy predicted by quantum mechanics appears to play a role in photosynthesis, according to a study published this week in Nature -- affecting how energy from the sun makes its way to a cell's reaction centers before being converted to chemical energy that powers cellular functions.

Cryptophye algae from the ocean (species Rhodomonas) Image: Dr. Tihana Mirkovic, University of Toronto

"The main surprise was that you could actually see" these quantum effects influencing real world biology, said biophysicist Rienk van Grondelle of VU University in Amsterdam, who did not participate in the work, and "that you could observe this phenomenon underlying how [photosynthesis] was working."

Quantum mechanics is a theory that describes the behavior of subatomic particles such as photons and electrons. But scientists have long believed that predictions made by the theory would only be evident in an idealized world that lacks environmental noise of molecules moving around and bumping into one another. People thought that "at room temperature, the noisy environment would kill this kind of quantum interaction," said van Grondelle, who wrote an accompanying review in Nature.

But examining the light-harvesting systems of two species of photosynthetic algae, physical chemist Gregory Scholes of the University of Toronto and his colleagues observed that energy introduced to the system acted in a distinctly quantum manner, even at ambient temperatures.

In these algae, bilin pigments, like other light-harvesting antenna molecules, absorb solar photons, which excite their electrons. The resulting excitation energy then moves to complexes of proteins called reaction centers, where it is converted to chemical energy by a series of biochemical events. While classical energy transfer theory predicts that the energy "hops, hops, hops" from one molecule to the next in a kind of "random walk," Scholes explained, quantum theory predicts that energy flows through the system in a much more spread-out, directed fashion.

"Think about it as the energy moving [through the system] like a wave rather than like a ball bouncing from one molecule to another," said physical chemist Graham Fleming of the University of California, Berkeley. Instead of traveling a single pathway -- one molecule to the next -- the wave-like energy can actually take three different pathways simultaneously, Scholes said. This wave-like motion provides the energy with a "memory" of where it's been that eliminates some of the randomness of how it moves through the cell, explained van Grondelle. "[It] can still follow many paths," he said, "[but] it will be certainly more directed" than the random walk of classic energy transfer.

To examine whether quantum effects played a role in photosynthetic algae, the researchers excited the electrons in a pair of bilin molecules with two short laser pulses, mimicking the natural process normally initiated by the sun, albeit at a much higher intensity. Adding a third pulse just a fraction of a second after setting the energy flow in motion elicited a "photon echo" -- a beam of light emitted from the system that served as a snapshot of how the energy was distributed at that particular moment. Piecing together these snapshots, the researchers could see how the energy moved over time, and identified distinct oscillations in the echo, indicating that the principles of quantum mechanics were at play. "The fact that [the photon echo had] weaker and stronger parts to it periodically is a signature of the quantum effects," Fleming said. Otherwise, "it would just go down smoothly until it was zero."

Similar quantum effects have also been documented in a widely-studied light-harvesting organism, purple bacteria; this new study, though, is the first to document these effects in the normal function of photosynthetic eukaryotes that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen.

Exactly how these quantum interactions affect the process of photosynthesis remains to be seen, said Scholes. The fact that energy movement may not be completely random "doesn't necessarily mean the system is more efficient," he said. "It's more subtle than that." In fact, if different waves interfered with one another in a certain way, it "could [actually] make the system less efficient," he noted. But in some cases, such as when the sun is too bright, for example, a lower efficiency system may actually benefit the organism, he added. "What this means for moving the energy through the biological system is one of these deep questions we're still exploring."

Also in question is how widespread these quantum effects are in nature, Fleming said. The fact that photosynthesis is an extremely fast process might be "crucial" for quantum principles to have a noticeable effect, he explained. "In real terms, of course, these quantum effects don't last very long at all," but in these light-harvesting systems, where electrons are being excited and energy is transferred in just a fraction of a second, "something of physiological significance happens even faster," he said. "That's not true in most of the rest of biology."

Horse stem cell technique to be tried to fix tendons in Humans.

LONDON (Reuters) - A stem-cell repair technique that has already been used to fix hundreds of injured race horses is to be tested for the first time in people with damaged Achilles tendons.

Privately owned British biotech firm MedCell Bioscience Ltd said on Wednesday it would start clinical tests within 12 months and planned to run a larger confirmatory study at several European hospitals in 2011.

Patients will receive injections containing millions of their own stem cells, which have been extracted and multiplied up in a laboratory, and can regenerate new tissue to repair damaged regions.

More than 1,500 race horses have been treated using the same process and follow-up data suggests a 50 percent reduction in re-injury over a three year period, compared with conventional treatment.

"The move from clinical veterinary to human medicine is inspiring and unusual -- we normally see the translation happening the other way around," said Nicola Maffulli, an orthopedic surgeon and leading expert in sports medicine, who will help conduct the trial.

Stem cell therapy has become the odds-on favorite for tackling tendon damage in the world of horse racing, where tendon damage to animals which can be worth millions of dollars is all too common.

The repair technique was pioneered by surgeons at the Royal Veterinary College north of London, who helped set up MedCell as a spin-out company.

Autism-Schizophrenia: Two sides of same genomic coin? (The Scientist)

This from today's The Scientist blog:

Autism and schizophrenia may be two sides of the same genomic coin. Copy number variations in the exact same genes determine whether patients suffer from one condition or the other, according to data presented on Friday (Apr. 3) at the Sackler Colloquium on Evolution in Health and Medicine in Washington, DC.

Image: Laguna Design/ Science Photo Library

Both autism and schizophrenia involve disturbances in brain areas linked to social functions, but the two psychiatric disorders often display diametrically opposite traits. For instance, social cognition is underdeveloped in autism but hyper-developed in schizophrenia. Several recent studies have also implicated some of the same genes in the two types of conditions, which has led researchers to suggest a common underlying genetic basis for both brain disorders.

Last year, Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, and Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, proposed that autism and schizophrenia result from an evolutionary tug of war between the genes inherited from each parent. In their view, the development of these brain disorders is mediated in part by changes in genomic imprinting. Put simply, if the brain is controlled by father-dominated genes, you become autistic, whereas if the brain is molded by mother-dominated genes, you become paranoid schizophrenic, they argued.

Now, Crespi has another idea for how the two disorders might also be linked: In his talk, he suggested that structural changes in a specific set of brain-related genes lead to either autism or schizophrenia. To test his idea, Crespi examined 18 studies published over the past two years that quantified deletions and duplications in patients with either autism or schizophrenia. Combining these studies, he identified seven genomic regions that were linked to both disorders. Five of them were diametrically expressed in patients of the two conditions -- overwhelmingly deleted in one disease and duplicated in the other.

"I was astonished by just how strong [the effect] was," Crespi told The Scientist. "I didn't expect the results to come out so cleanly because it's not something you expect genetic data to do for you."

This newfound link is an "extremely powerful and conceptual hook" to understand both diseases, Crespi said. For example, schizophrenic patients are thought to produce more dopamine in the brain, so perhaps researchers should now look to test whether autistic brains produce a paucity of the hormone, he said.

Another implication of the study is that children with early symptoms of schizophrenia might be being misdiagnosed as autistic, and vice versa. For several of the loci showing differential expression in the two disorders, there were a small number of patients showing the opposite effect -- for example, an autistic patient with a deletion that is normally associated with schizophrenia. Crespi suspects that these are mostly "false positive" diagnoses, rather than results that run counter to his hypothesis. Such incorrect medical assessments "could make children worse," Crespi said, adding that understanding the genetic underpinnings of these diseases could help avoid the problem.

"I took Crespi's point very seriously that if a youngster is misdiagnosed and mistreated then all hell breaks loose," said Mary-Claire King, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in the study.

New cancer discovery. (BBC)

Poor cell memory is key to cancer

Changes to DNA govern gene expression A family of enzymes may trigger cancer by sabotaging cell memory, research suggests. Every time a cell divides, it has to remember which of its genes are switched on or off at the time. If that memory is impaired, this can disrupt the proper development of cells and trigger cancer. Scientists at Cancer Research UK and Cambridge's Babraham Institute have shown certain enzymes can alter this genetic memory. The mechanism of genetic alteration that this research has uncovered may underlie the molecular basis of a substantial proportion of cancers. Dr Lesley Walker Evidence of this interference was present in a large proportion of tumours - strongly implicating the enzymes in the development of cancer. Retaining the memory of which genes are switched on and which are switched off when a cell divides is called epigenetics. Often genes are switched off by a change to the structure of its component DNA - a process known as methylation. The researchers discovered that AID, an enzyme involved in the formation of the immune system, can also alter methylation in DNA. This could leave cells with inaccurate memories - and lead to cancer. Mutations Researcher Dr Svend Petersen-Mahrt said: "This is the first detailed study to show that the AID enzyme can act on methylated DNA. "AID chemically alters the methylated DNA by mutating it. Cells have ways to repair such mutations, but in this case, when the cell repairs the DNA, it is left unmethylated and the cell's memory of the gene's 'off' status is lost. "When AID acts in an uncontrolled fashion on a key gene, this gene will be switched on in the wrong place or at the wrong time. "This could interfere with the usual control of cells' behaviour, leading to the development of cancerous traits such as uncontrolled growth." The researchers looked for characteristic alterations in colon cancer genes, and found that in a substantial number of tumours, similar mutations to those caused by AID were present. Dr Wolf Reik, who also worked on the study, said: "If we can now show that these mutations were caused by AID or other members of that family, it will strongly suggest that these enzymes are a major contributor to the development of cancer." The study was also the first to find AID in stem cells, suggesting it plays a role in the early stages of development. It is hoped that work of this kind will eventually enable scientists to turn mature cells back into stem cells which have the ability to become any type tissue in the body. Dr Lesley Walker, director of cancer information at Cancer Research UK, said: "The mechanism of genetic alteration that this research has uncovered may underlie the molecular basis of a substantial proportion of cancers. "Every advance in our understanding of the causes of cancer puts us in a better position to improve ways of detecting and treating the disease."

Another gene mutation behind ALS identified. (Scientists calls discovery "momentous.")

This is a big deal. Genes (made of long stretches of DNA nucleotides A, T, C and G) are responsible for making the protein that builds us. As scientists nail specific genes, we are just a little bit closer to coming up with medicines that target mutated genes (so the mutated proteins don't express) or to eventual gene therapy to fix the actual "spelling" errors.

CNN) -- Researchers announced this week that they've found a new gene, ALS6, which is responsible for about 5 percent of hereditary Lou Gehrig's cases.

The discovery of a new gene mutation may allow those with ALS in their family to be tested.

It's being called a "momentous discovery" by the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association.

Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of Massachusetts and Kings College in London found the mutation by doing detailed sequencing of the genes in several families with an inherited form of ALS. The findings are published in the February 27 issue of the journal Science and were partially funded by the ALS Association.

ALS, a disease of the nervous system, impairs muscle movement and eventually results in total paralysis. It was brought to national attention in 1939, when famed Yankee baseball player Lou Gehrig's illness was diagnosed as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Today, the disease is most commonly known by his name.

ALS6 is a protein normally found inside a cell's nucleus, but in patients with Lou Gehrig's disease, it is found outside the nucleus and sometimes forms unusual clumps.

ALS researchers are unsure why this occurs but believe this finding, combined with a gene they discovered last year, TDP-43, may lead them to a firmer idea of what causes this deadly disease.

Both genes help in building and transporting proteins and making sure they're in the right place in cell structure -- a process called RNA processing.

Lucie Bruijn, senior vice president of research and development at the ALS Association, likens this process to building an engine: If there are parts missing or placed in the wrong place or in the wrong way, the engine doesn't work right.

"Everything has an exquisite role and has to be in the right place, and any imbalance ... can cause things to go awry," Bruijn said.

"It's exciting because what it's starting to tell us now is that we might be starting to get an underlying theme," Bruijn said. "We now have two genes with similar function strengthening the idea that alterations in RNA processing is important in ALS. A completely new direction and also involved in many other neurodegenerative diseases."

She believes this gives researchers "huge" potential to develop new therapies.

And new therapies are needed.

There is no cure and only one treatment for ALS, a neurodegenerative disease that seems to progressively attack the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. These attacks can cause symptoms such as muscle weakness, twitching, cramping and thick speech, eventually leading to paralysis. According to the ALS Association, the disease strikes a little more than 5,600 people every year, and about 10 percent of those cases are hereditary.

The discovery of this new gene mutation will also allow those with ALS in their family to be tested for another gene (this makes three genes). Bruijn says a test "will be possible; however, currently, it is not widely accessible" and "it would only be used in familial ALS patients."

Stem Cell bill reintroduced. (Reuters).

National Briefing | Washington

Stem-Cell Bill Is Reintroduced

By REUTERS

Two prominent supporters of stem-cell research said they had reintroduced a Senate bill that would allow federal financing for human embryonic stem-cell research, in anticipation of President Obama’s support for the work. The advocates, Senators Tom Harkin, left, Democrat of Iowa, and Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said their measure would allow federal financing for research using stem cells taken from human embryos left over from fertility treatments. “It is the same bill that both houses of Congress approved in 2007, but was vetoed by President Bush,” they said. Mr. Obama has promised to overturn Mr. Bush’s policy strictly limiting the use of federal money for such research.

Genzyme to pay $600M for personalized medicine products in 09 (boston.com)

NEW YORK - Genzyme Corp. may spend about $600 million this year to acquire products that treat chronic diseases, said chief executive Henri Termeer.

Genzyme, the world's largest maker of drugs for rare genetic disorders, will seek opportunities to purchase "personalized drugs, highly specialized medicines where you can easily explain their value," Termeer said yesterday.

Acquisitions made by the Cambridge-based biotechnology company will focus on individual products already tested in humans, Termeer said. He prefers buying products rather than entire companies because he wants to invest in "the value of maintaining the team" that got the new therapies started, he said.

"When you buy a program, the heart of the company is still there," Termeer said.

Roche Holding AG's $86.50-a-share hostile takeover bid for Genentech Inc. risks "losing very, very good individuals," Termeer said. Roche, the 56 percent owner of Genentech, has made a tender offer for the remaining 44 percent of the shares.

Genzyme isn't an acquisition target, Termeer said.

 

Random snowflake "design" recreated in computer software.

I've been waiting for someone to do this. From Reuters:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The random, symmetrical beauty of snowflakes has been recreated in a computer program, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

It took four years for two mathematicians from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of California, Davis, to develop the computer model's theory and perform the computations.

"Even though we've artfully stripped down the model over several years so that it's as simple and efficient as possible, it still takes us a day to grow one of these things," Wisconsin researcher David Griffeath said in a statement.

In nature, snowflakes form from water molecules crystallizing around a speck of dust or other material. The result is intricate fern-like stars, needles and prisms, often adorned by tiny ridges and circular markings.

The model may help meteorologists predict how snowflake types affect the amount of water that reaches the ground.

"Water is the most amazing molecule in the universe, pure and simple," Griffeath said. "It's just three little atoms, but its physics and chemistry are unbelievable."

Exciting news for anyone suffering from Crohn's Disease (Innovation Report, DE)

New therapy with stem cells to treat Crohn's disease

23.02.2009

When drugs don't work and surgery is not possible, transplanting stem cells from the patient's own bone marrow is an effective alternative for the treatment of this chronic disease.

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The procedure has been tested successfully in the US and Italy, where total remission of the disease has been shown in 80% of cases, and considerable improvement in quality of life in the remaining 20% of cases. Since August 2008, Hospital Clínic has used this therapy in a total of 6 patients.

In Spain, this disease affects 1% of the population between 18 and 40 years of age and each year approximately 2000 new cases are diagnosed. This regenerative therapy constitutes a new focus on the use of stem cells in intestinal diseases.

Barcelona, February 19, 2009. Cellular therapy with stem cells is revolutionizing the focus of treatment of many serious diseases. Replacing the cells of damaged tissue with other new cells from the same patient is already a reality. This is the basis of cellular therapy and regenerative medicine, the latest great advance in biomedicine. In this line, Hospital Clínic, Barcelona is leading the world in the application of an innovative cellular therapy that uses stem cells to treat Crohn's disease, a chronic genetic disease that affects 1% of the population in Spain and which has considerable impact on the quality of life of the patients. The procedure is based on an autologous bone-marrow transplant (when patients receive a transplant of their own stem cells) and now constitutes a treatment option to cure an intestinal disease that sometimes does not successfully respond to drugs and requires highly complex surgery that does not provide a cure.

Hospital Clínic, Barcelona is one of the few hospitals in the world to apply this new therapeutic option for patients with Crohn's disease, and it does so with the guarantee of success experienced in the US and Italy, where the technique has been tested with excellent results: in an average follow-up period of 6 years, 80% of transplant patients are in a phase of total remission of the disease and the remaining 20% have shown considerable improvement following the transplant, and are now responding favorably to drugs. Dr. Julián Panés and Dr. Elena Ricart over the Gastroenterology Department of Hospital Clínic, Barcelona are the driving force behind this therapy in Spain and began to implement regenerative cellular therapy in patients with Crohn's disease in August 2008. To date, a total of 6 patients are benefiting from this new treatment, of whom 3 I've already completed the process and are in the follow-up face, and a further 3 are at different stages of therapy. The transplant requires several weeks of admission to hospital before patients receive their own cells.

The success of autologous stem-cell transplants in Crohn's disease is possible thanks to the joint collaboration of the gastroenterology and hematology departments and of the hemotherapy and hemostasis department, as the procedure is the same as that carried out in bone-morrow transplants to cure leukemia or myeloma. Thus, when a case is detected, the professionals from the different departments of Hospital Clinic, Barcelona supervise each of the phases of the process to autologous Transplant. In this case, Dr. Panés and Dr. Ricart from the gastroenterology department work together with Dr. Montserrat Rovira from the hematology department of the Catalan hospital and with Dr. Enric Carreras, the head of this department, to provide joint monitoring of the patients. Dr. Pedro Marín of the hemotherapy and hemostasis department of Hospital Clínic, together with Dr. Miquel Lozano, are responsible for guiding the patients through the process of cryopreservation and collection of stem cells before the final transplant.

Cellular Therapy as a Strategy to Combat Crohn's Disease.

Crohn's disease, together with ulcerative colitis, is included in what is called irritable bowel disease. It is a chronic genetic disease that occurs when the immune system loses tolerance to the patient's own intestinal flora, leading to an abnormal inflammatory response that continues over time. The results are inflammation and ulceration in different areas of the digestive tract, leading to the symptoms. The disease progresses in the form of unpredictable and variable outbreaks throughout the patient's life and the severity of the symptoms varies according to the level of involvement of the intestines and the patient's response to the assigned treatment. It is a disease that usually affects young people between the ages of 18 and 40 years, and approximately 2000 new cases are diagnosed in Spain every year. Diagnosis is often difficult because it presents symptoms similar to those of other diseases of the digestive tract: abdominal pain, diarrhea, vomiting, nausea, fever, general malaise, etc. Patients' quality of life is conditioned by the severity of the disease and, in the most severe cases, prevents them from leading a normal life, with a very high level of suffering due to the acuteness and frequency of the intestinal symptoms.

Hospital Clínic de Barcelona is one of the few hospitals in the world to instate cellular therapy using autologous stem-cell transplantation. In the US, the treatment has been tested on 12 patients with severe Crohn's disease, of whom 11 have had very good results; in Italy, the treatment has been applied to 4 patients, 3 of whom are also showing excellent progress following the transplant. As Hospital Clínic, 6 patients with Crohn's disease are already included in the process and, following the international examples, increasing numbers of patients are expected to choose this option to treat the disease in a state that was, to date, practically untreatable.

In severe cases involving recurrent outbreaks (reactivation of the disease several times throughout the patient's life), Crohn's disease presents several treatment options. Firstly, doctors choose to use corticosteroids and immunosuppressant and biological drugs to control the inflammatory process and prevent complications of the disease such as stenosis (narrowing of the intestinal lumen) or fistulas (openings from the intestinal lumen to other organs, such as the intestine, bladder, vagina, or skin). However, over the course of the disease, as much as 70% of severe patients require surgery to remove segments affected by the disease, due to failure of the pharmacologic approach. The surgery is occasionally very aggressive for the patient, as it is sometimes necessary to remove the entire colon or large sections of the small intestine, thereby considerably affecting the absorption of food by the intestine, with a resulting deterioration in quality of life and body image (colostomy bag). For this reason, new treatments are being developed for patients in whom this solution has not been an option to date.

Autologous Stem-Cell Transplant: Phases of the Procedure.

When the case is detected (that does not respond to drugs or surgery), the patient undergoes an autologous stem-cell transplant, which is a bone-morrow transplant in which the immune system is reset to prevent it from attacking the intestinal flora. The process lasts approximately 2 months and consists of 6 phases:

Initial Chemotherapy (Cyclophosphamide + G-CSF). In this initial phase, leukopenia or reduction of the number of leukocytes (immune-system cells) in the blood is induced in the patient.

Migration of Stem-Cells to the Blood. Following the previous immunosuppression, the organism reacts by releasing stem cells from the bone marrow into the blood; these are the cells which will later be used for the transplant.

Collection of Stem Cells by means of Apheresis. Apheresis is a technique that separates components of the blood. Here, the stem cells that previously migrated from the bone marrow are separated.

Cryopreservation of Stem Cells. When the stem cells have been collected by apheresis, they are frozen and preserved until ready for transplant.

Second Chemotherapy. In this phase, total leukopenia is induced; that is, the immune system is left devoid of leukocytes, ready to be reset with the stem-cell transplant.

Autologous Stem-Cell Transplant. The patient receives the transplant by means of transfusion with his or her own stem cells. The immune system is reset, leading to remission or reduction of the abnormal inflammatory process of Crohn's disease.

Great new research on newly born brain cells (CNN wire)

CNN) -- What was the name of that guy with that stuff in that place with those things? Don't you remember?

Scientists have found mechanisms for how the brain creates short-term and long-term memories.

We all suffer occasional lapses in memory. Some people suffer severe neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer's, that rob them of their ability to form memories or remember recent events.

Three new studies shed light on the way the brain forms, stores and retrieves memories. Experts say they could have implications for people with certain mental disorders.

When did it happen?

Newly born brain cells, thousands of which are generated each day, help "time stamp" memories, according to a computer simulation by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and the University of Queensland in Australia. The research was published in the journal Neuron.

These cells do not record an exact, absolute date -- such as January 28, 2009 -- but instead encode memories that occur around the same time similarly. In this way, the mind knows whether a memory happened before, after or alongside something else.

Neuroscientists believe that if the same neurons are active during two events, a memory linking the two may be formed.

For example, you might remember that, on a day a few years ago, you went to a restaurant and then went to a baseball game. Researchers think the same neurons are active during both events, which results in an association with each other when you remember them.

In fact, the same young neurons respond to everything that happens for several weeks, said two of the study's co-authors, professor Fred Gage and graduate student Brad Aimone from the Salk Institute. While associations are known to form based on sight, smell, and other senses -- you may remember last year's baseball game through the taste of a hot dog today, for example -- their computer model shows that the young brain cells also link through time.

"Even though these young cells are only a small percentage of the overall circuit, we believe that their effect may be enough to give people the sense of "this happened around the same time as" something else, Gage and Aimone wrote in an e-mail.

The findings could have promising implications for diseases that involve a neurogenesis deficit -- in other words, a lack of new brain cells being born -- which happens in conditions such as depression, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the authors said.

A therapy that boosts the creation of neurons may alleviate some memory problems. Potential therapies include medications, a special diet or even running, since previous research has shown that running increases the creation of neurons, Aimone said.

The computer simulation showing the time-stamp effect in the study is novel and original, said Joe Manns, assistant professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. It also explains why, for example, you recognize your car both when it's very dirty and very clean, and why you can remember where you parked your car today even though you had a different space yesterday.

Storing in the short-term

You may remember reading this exact sentence in a few minutes, but not in a few days. That's because our brains handle both long-term memory, which enables us to recall events from the distant past, and short-term memory, also called working memory, which encompasses the most transient, fleeting memories.

Research in mice published in the February issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience found that an individual nerve cell in the front part of the brain can hold traces of memories on its own for as long as a minute, possibly even longer.

This idea, that an individual nerve cell can hold a trace memory, is also related to drug addiction, the study found. By giving cocaine to mice in the laboratory, the researchers explained why the drug impairs short term memory: Cocaine causes a buildup of dopamine, a brain chemical that decreases the individual nerve cells' ability to hold moment-to-moment information.

The study is an important contribution to the field of working memory because it shows the molecular mechanisms involved in the process, said Michael Kuhar, professor of neuropharmacology at Emory University, who was not involved with the research.

One distant but possible implication is that medication focusing on the neuron receptors investigated in this study would help someone who has serious problems with attention and executive decisions, he said.

Although the study was conducted on mice, when speaking about individual nerve cells, it's reasonable to say that an isolated mouse nerve cell is the same as a human one, Kuhar said. The two differ more markedly in complicated neural pathways and circuits, he said.

Holding for the long term

So, what about remembering things in the long run?

Research in the Journal of Neuroscience this week supports the idea that different brain structures are involved in forming short-term and long-term memories.

The authors took brain images of participants as they answered questions about events that happened in the last 30 years. The hippocampus, a brain region known to be involved in short-term memory, and related structures were most active when participants recalled recent events. Activity in these regions declined for events older than one year, and remained low for events 13 to 30 years old.

Meanwhile, as memories got older activity increased in the frontal, temporal, and parietal cortices, located on the surface of the brain, researchers found. That means these regions may serve as long-term memory storage.

This model of memory structures make sense in the context of Alzheimer's disease, said study co-author Larry Squire, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. Alzheimer's patients often have trouble forming short-term memories, but less difficulty recalling older memories.

"It helps us understand that Alzheimer's disease begins with memory problems because the very same structures we're talking about here [the hippocampus and related structures] are the ones affected in the disease," he said.

The Invisibility Cloak (AP)

I always say in speeches that scientists get their ideas from sci fi, but I never thought I'd read of something like this in my lifetime. Meet: The Invisibility Cloak. Today's AP.

  WASHINGTON (AP) -- Scientists say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people and objects invisible.

In this 2003 photo, Tokyo University students use space-age material to make this student appear invisible.

Researchers have demonstrated for the first time they were able to cloak three-dimensional objects using artificially engineered materials that redirect light around the objects.

Previously, they only have been able to cloak very thin two-dimensional objects.

The findings, by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are to be released later this week in the journals Nature and Science.

The new work moves scientists a step closer to hiding people and objects from visible light, which could have broad applications, including military ones.

People can see objects because they scatter the light that strikes them, reflecting some of it back to the eye.

Cloaking uses materials, known as metamaterials, to deflect radar, light or other waves around an object.

Metamaterials are mixtures of metal and circuit board materials such as ceramic, Teflon or fibre composite.

Cloned puppies -- too cute to be healthy? (CNN)

I actually interviewed the scientist in Seoul (when I was there for the Seoul Digital Forum) responsible for this. It is true that cloned animals usually die early from such diseases as cancer. (See, Dolly the Cloned Sheep, and her abbreviated life.) Scientists don't know why this is, but it seems cruel these pet owners are getting clones of their beloved pets, if they will only see them die even earlier than the original animal. Sad.

Article excerpted below.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- A U.S. woman received five puppies Tuesday that were cloned from her beloved late pitbull, becoming the inaugural customer of a South Korean company that says it is the world's first successful commercial canine cloning service.

Bernann McKinney with one of the Booger clones.

Seoul-based RNL Bio said the clones of Bernann McKinney's dog Booger were born last week after being cloned in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who created the world's first cloned dog in 2005.

"It's a miracle!" McKinney repeatedly shouted Tuesday when she saw the cloned Boogers for which she paid $50,000. "Yes, I know you! You know me, too!" McKinney said joyfully, hugging the puppies, which were sleeping with one of their two surrogate mothers, both Korean mixed breed dogs.

The team of scientists working for RNL Bio is headed by Lee Byeong-chun, a former colleague of disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who scandalized the international scientific community when his purported breakthroughs in cloned stem cells were revealed as fake in 2005.

Independent tests confirmed the 2005 dog cloning was genuine, and Lee's team has since cloned more than 20 canines.

But RNL Bio said that its cloning was the first successful commercial cloning of a canine.

"RNL Bio is commencing its worldwide services with Booger as its first successful clone," the company said in a statement.

McKinney contacted Lee after Booger died of cancer in April 2006. She said she had earlier asked U.S.-based Genetics Savings and Clone to clone her dog but the company shut down due to lack of demand in late 2006 after only producing a handful of cloned cats and failing to produce any dog clones.

The Korean scientists brought the dog's frozen cells to Seoul in March and nurtured them before launching formal cloning work in late May, according to RNL Bio.

Lee's team have identified the puppies as Booger's genuine clones, and his university's forensic medicine team is currently conducting reconfirmation tests.

McKinney said she was especially attached to Booger because he saved her life when she was attacked by another dog three times his size.

The incident resulted in her left hand being severely injured, and also damaged her leg nerves and stomach. Doctors later reconstructed her hand and she spent part of her recovery in a wheelchair.

McKinney said Booger acted as more than just a canine companion as she recuperated from the attack.

Her dog pulled her wheelchair when its battery ran out. He opened her house door with his teeth and helped her take off her shoes and socks, even though she never trained him to do so.

"The most unusual thing about Booger was that he has a unique ability to reason," she said. "He seems to understand I couldn't use my hands."

McKinney, a screenwriter who taught drama at U.S. universities, said she will take three of the cloned dogs to her home in California and donate the others to work as service dogs for the handicapped or elderly. She said she lives with five other dogs and three horses.

RNL Bio charges up to $150,000 for dog cloning but will receive just a third of that sum from McKinney because she is the first customer and helped with publicity, said company head Ra Jeong-chan.

Ra said his firm eventually aims to clone about 300 dogs per year and is also interested in duplicating camels for customers in the Middle East.

Salamander-inspired therapy helps cure injured vets (CNN)

This is a weird and interesting science story. Click here.

More on the Large Hadron Collider. Yikes!

More on the CERN collider that some physicists say will destroy the world ... from today's LA Times. You think they'll ever release the exact date they've set to turn on this thing? Definitely something to calendar.

GENEVA -- Michelangelo L. Mangano, a respected particle physicist who helped discover the top quark in 1995, now spends most days trying to convince people that his new machine won't destroy the world.

"If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away," the physicist said in an interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. "But some are real physicists."

What the critics are in such a lather about is the $8-billion Large Hadron Collider, a massive assemblage of iron, steel and superconducting wire 300 feet underground in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border.

The most complex piece of scientific equipment ever built, the collider will send particles crashing into each other at just a wink shy of the speed of light, generating energies more powerful than the sun.

Scientists like Mangano believe that this instrument, when it begins operating as early as this summer, will peer into a looking-glass world that could contain entrances to extra dimensions and super-massive partners of the familiar particles that make up our world. One creature that must be hiding there, the scientists say, is the Higgs particle, one of the most exotic undiscovered objects since the yeti.

Critics think the collider could also spawn a black hole that will swallow Earth.

That could be just an appetizer. Once the collider got going, according to the doomsday scenario, it could gobble up distant stars like a child popping Skittles.

Mangano, who is part of the CERN group studying the safety of the collider, doesn't deny the scant possibility that the collider could yield a mini-black hole.

By smashing protons and lead ions together at energies reaching 14 trillion electron volts, the Large Hadron Collider will dwarf the world's other atom-smashers, including the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's mighty Tevatron in Batavia, Ill.

But that energy, Mangano hastened to add, would be concentrated in a space thinner than a human hair. Any black hole would be so tiny that it wouldn't be able to get its teeth around a bit of local chevre cheese, let alone the world.

Still, if a black hole were produced at all, "that would be an extremely spectacular result," he said, a half-smile creeping across his face.

Particle physics

Deep in a dim cavern, UCLA physicist Bob Cousins scrambled onto a catwalk straddling the six-story detector known as the Compact Muon Solenoid, then darted up two flights of stairs to another catwalk, where the guts of the machine materialized out of the half-light.

It looked a little like the inside of a computer suffering from a severe case of gigantism. Plates, shields and pipes jutted everywhere. Thick knots of cable extended from the side like mounds of heavy rope on an 18th century whaling ship.

"This detector was assembled at the surface and lowered in 15 pieces," Cousins said, pointing to a wide opening above the detector that reached to the European sky high above.

The heaviest piece weighed 4 million pounds. It took 10 hours to lower the middle section. At the center of this section is a bulbous extension that makes the behemoth look like the world's biggest television picture tube. This single piece of the collider contains more iron than the Eiffel Tower.

It was all built to probe a beam of particles thinner than a blade of grass.

Decades ago, scientists figured out that atomic nuclei were made up of smaller things than protons and neutrons.

To find those pieces, 20th century physicists came up with an idea that would appeal to most 9-year-old boys with a new toy: "Let's smash it and see what happens."

Early colliders, like the 9-inch cyclotron created at UC Berkeley in 1931, sent particles down a circular drag strip and crashed them into a target to see what flew out.

Will a new particle accelerator destroy the world? (New York Times)

You couldn't pay me to make this stuff up. Abstract from the New York Times today below, full article at this link.

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

Attention amateur telescope owners!

Mark next Tuesday at 12:33 PST on your calendar for this one. And grab a telescope. I love this stuff.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A small asteroid will travel relatively near to Earth next week, giving astronomers a rare opportunity for a close-up look.

Asteroid 2007 TU24 was first seen in October and is on a trajectory to pass Earth outside the Moon's orbit at a distance of 334,000 miles on Tuesday at 3:33 a.m.

NASA said it will not be visible to the naked eye but amateur astronomers with modest-sized telescopes should be able to spot it.

NASA said the asteroid is anywhere between 500 feet and 2,000 feet long, and there is no chance it could hit the planet.

Astronomers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico will be taking as close a look as they can as the building-sized object hurtles past.

"We don't yet know anything about this asteroid," Mike Nolan, head of radar astronomy at the Puerto Rico observatory, said in a statement.

He said such objects frequently pass near Earth, perhaps one every five years or so, but such advance notice is rare.

TU24 is one of an estimated 7,000 so-called near-Earth objects.

"We have good images of a couple dozen objects like this, and for about one in 10, we see something we've never seen before," said Nolan. "We really haven't sampled the population enough to know what's out there."

You come from dust, black hole dust. Now you know. (AP Science)

This AP Science story ran in today's Chronicle today. Astronomers said they knew planets and everything and everyone came from dust -- star dust -- and now they say that star dust came from black holes. Damn, I love astronomy. Excerpt below.

Astronomers have taken a baby step in trying to answer the cosmic question of where we come from.

Planets and much on them, including humans, come from dust — mostly from dying stars. But where did the dust that helped form those early stars come from?

A NASA telescope may have spotted one of the answers. It's in the wind bursting out of super-massive black holes.

The Spitzer Space Telescope identified large quantities of freshly made space dust in a quasar about 8 billion light years from here.

Astronomers used the telescope to break down the wavelengths of light in the quasar to figure out what was in the space dust. They found signs of glass, sand, crystal, marble, rubies and sapphires, said Ciska Markwick-Kemper of the University of Manchester in England. She is the lead author of a study that will be published later this month in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Dust is important in the cooling process to make stars, which are predominantly gas. The leftover dust tends to clump together to make planets, comets and asteroids, said astronomer Sarah Gallagher, a study co-author at the University of California Los Angeles.

"In the end, everything comes from space dust," Markwick-Kemper said. "It's putting all the pieces of the puzzle together to figure out where we came from."

Astronomers figure that the planets that formed in the past several billion years — and those away from quasars — came from dust that was belched from dying stars. That's what happened with Earth.

That still leaves a question about where the dust from the first couple billion years of the universe came from, which helped form early generations of star systems.

"It's formed in the wind," of the black holes, Markwick-Kemper said. Gas molecules collide in the searing heat of the quasar, which is thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, and form clusters.

"These clusters grow bigger and bigger until you can call them dust grains," she said.

Scientists who weren't part of the study hailed the work.

Cornell University astronomer Dan Weedman, the former director of NASA's astrophysics division, said the study was an important step in answering a fundamental mystery of the early universe.

Throw out the Prozac. (Reuters)

And get moving! A feel-good story from Reuters today, excerpted below.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Regular exercise may work as well as medication in improving symptoms of major depression, researchers have found.

In a study of 202 depressed adults, investigators found that those who went through group-based exercise therapy did as well as those treated with an antidepressant drug. A third group that performed home-based exercise also improved, though to a lesser degree.

Importantly, the researchers found, all three groups did better than a fourth group given a placebo -- an inactive pill identical to the antidepressant.

While past studies have suggested that exercise can ease depression symptoms, a criticism has been that the research failed to compare exercise with a placebo. This leaves a question as to whether the therapy, per se, was responsible for the benefit.

The new findings bolster evidence that exercise does have a real effect on depression, according to the researchers.

Doctors may not start widely prescribing exercise as a depression treatment just yet. But for patients who are motivated to try exercise, it could be a reasonable option, the study authors say.

"If exercise were a drug, I'm not sure that it would receive FDA approval at this time," noted study author Dr. James A. Blumenthal, a professor of medical psychology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.

"But," he told Reuters Health, "there is certainly growing evidence that exercise may be a viable alternative to medication, at least among those patients who are receptive to exercise as a potential treatment for their depression."

DNA research traces Phoenician past in Middle East. (Reuters)

I love this story. DNA research is blurring religious boundaries in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East. Story excerpted below.

BYBLOS, Lebanon (Reuters) - A Lebanese scientist following the genetic footprint of the ancient Phoenicians says he has traced their modern-day descendants, but stumbled into an old controversy about identity in his country.

Geneticist Pierre Zalloua has charted the spread of the Phoenicians out of the eastern Mediterranean by identifying an ancient type of DNA which some Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians share with Maltese, Spaniards and Tunisians.

A seafaring civilization which reached its zenith between 1200 and 800 BC, the Phoenicians' earliest cities included Byblos, Tyre and Sidon on Lebanon's coast.

But their link to Lebanon, whose borders were drawn as recently as 1920, has long been a subject of controversy in a country split between an array of religious communities. "Negotiating these waters is a very delicate job," Zalloua said.

Seeking to set themselves apart from their Muslim compatriots, some Lebanese Christians have drawn on the Phoenician past to try to forge an identity separate from the prevailing Arab culture.

"Whenever I use the word 'Phoenician', people say 'this guy is trying to say we are not Arabs'," said Zalloua, himself a Christian. But after five years of research, the scientist says his work has shown what Lebanese have in common. "We had a great history -- let's look at it," he said.

The genetic marker which identifies descendants of the ancient Levantines is found among members of all of Lebanon's religious communities, he said. "It's a story that can actually unite Lebanon much more than anything else."

The marker, known as the J2 haplogroup, was found in an unusually high proportion among Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians tested by Zalloua during more than five years of research. He tested 1,000 people in the region.

The world's oldest human footprint! (reuters)

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian archaeologists have found what they said could be the oldest human footprint in history in the country's western desert, the Arab country's antiquities' chief said on Monday.

"This could go back about two million years," said Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. "It could be the most important discovery in Egypt," he told Reuters.

Archaeologists found the footprint, imprinted on mud and then hardened into rock, while exploring a prehistoric site in Siwa, a desert oasis.

Scientists are using carbon tests on plants found in the rock to determine its exact age, Hawass said.

Khaled Saad, the director of prehistory at the council, said that based on the age of the rock where the footprint was found, it could date back even further than the renowned 3-million year-old fossil Lucy, the partial skeleton of an ape-man, found in Ethiopia in 1974.

Most archaeological interest in Egypt is focused on the time of the pharaohs.

Previously, the earliest human archaeological evidence from Egypt dated back around 200,000 years, Saad said.

Ken Wilber's got a blog.

If you know his books or philosophy, you might not be surprised that Wilber has a blog.

Scientists discover a protein link between Alzheimers and blindness.

Interesting article about an Alzheimers-blindness link. I suspect that as scientists continue to unravel proteomics and genomics, we will find many such links. I recently read about a link between thyroid diseases and ovarian cancer. Finding a protein attached to a particular disease or diseases is exciting because it potentially allows drug companies to come up with a medication that interferes with that protein.

At any rate, an excerpt of the story is below.

LONDON (Reuters) - A protein that damages tissue in the brains of Alzheimer's patients is also the main cause of blindness worldwide, British researchers said in a new finding that may lead to better treatment for both diseases.

In a study published in the U.S. journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on Monday the scientists said the same protein, beta-amyloid, which plays a key role in the brain-wasting illness also causes nerve cell damage in the eye from blindness-inducing glaucoma.

Recent studies have suggested connections between Alzheimer's and glaucoma and the new finding bolsters that evidence, said Francesca Cordeiro, a glaucoma specialist at London's University College and leader of the study.

"This is the first time anybody has provided evidence that the same protein in Alzheimer's causes retinal nerve cell loss," she said in a telephone interview.

Scientists do not know what causes glaucoma which affects some 65 million people worldwide.

Most treatments seek to lower the build-up in pressure from fluids in the eye, but the treatment does not work for as many as 30 percent of glaucoma patients, Cordeiro said.

She hoped the study of laboratory rats would lead to an alternative treatment for humans one day.

After the team identified the protein link between the two diseases, they administered a combination of experimental Alzheimer's drugs to laboratory rats, Cordeiro said.

Can you preserve a beating heart in a box?

Yes, you can!

Check this out.

Box could convert exhaust fumes into water vapor (Reuters)

QUEENSFERRY (Reuters) - The world's richest corporations and finest minds spend billions trying to solve the problem of carbon emissions, but three fishing buddies in North Wales believe they have cracked it. They have developed a box which they say can be fixed underneath a car in place of the exhaust to trap the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming -- including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide -- and emit mostly water vapor.

The captured gases can be processed to create a biofuel using genetically modified algae.

Dubbed "Greenbox", the technology developed by organic chemist Derek Palmer and engineers Ian Houston and John Jones could, they say, be used for cars, buses, lorries and eventually buildings and heavy industry, including power plants.

"We've managed to develop a way to successfully capture a majority of the emissions from the dirtiest motor we could find," Palmer, who has consulted for organizations including the World Health Organisation and GlaxoSmithKline, told Reuters.

The three, who stumbled across the idea while experimenting with carbon dioxide to help boost algae growth for fish farming, have set up a company called Maes Anturio Limited, which translates from Welsh as Field Adventure.

With the backing of their local member of parliament they are now seeking extra risk capital either from government or industry: the only emissions they are not sure their box can handle are those from aviation.

Although the box the men currently use for demonstration is about the size of a bar stool, they say they can build one small enough to replace a car exhaust that will last for a full tank of petrol.

The search for the "god" particle is on! (NYT)

Cool article about the search for the Higgs Boson -- "fat electrons" -- in the NYT today. Excerpt below. Full article here.

In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call “ambulance chasing.

He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that collisions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were spitting out weird triplets of particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons. Dr. Weinberg canceled reservations at a lodge in Yosemite National Park to spend the weekend with his colleague Benjamin Lee, trying to concoct a theory to explain the trimuons.

But the only theory he and Dr. Lee could come up with was ugly. A few weeks later it turned out that the triplet effect wasn’t true.

“I’ve always been embarrassed that we managed to come up with a theory,” Dr. Weinberg, now at the University of Texas at Austin, said recently.

Dr. Weinberg said that 30 years later, he still has not gotten to Yosemite.

“And we never got trimuons either,” he added.

And therein lies a lesson — or not — for the world’s physicists.

Earlier this summer, the physics world was jolted by a rumor that a team of scientists from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill., had found a bump in their data that might be a legendary particle that has haunted physicists for a generation.

It is known colloquially as the Higgs boson and sometimes grandly as the “God particle.” According to the Standard Model that has ruled physics for 30 years, the Higgs endows elementary particles in the universe with mass.

P53 -- the gene of the year -- now might extend youth! (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) - One of the genes that protects us from cancer may also help delay ageing, according to a new study published on Wednesday.

The findings could also one day lead to new drugs that prevent or fight cancer while extending healthy youth and lifespan, said Manuel Serrano, a researcher at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, who worked on the study.

Serrano said researchers genetically engineered mice to have an extra copy of a key cancer-fighting gene called p53 and found it also played an important role in delaying ageing.

"Everyone agrees that the ageing is produced by the accumulation of faulty cells," Serrano said. "In other words, p53 delays ageing for exactly the same reason that it prevents cancer." The study was published in the journal Nature.

Previous cancer studies have shown that p53 can actually cause premature ageing symptoms by killing too many cells when it goes into overdrive, but Serrano said his research strictly regulated the gene so that it turned on only when needed.

The gene -- and another that regulates signals to p53 -- did their normal job of producing a protein that kills damaged cancer cells. But the researchers found that mice with an extra copy of the genes actually lived longer even when stripping out the impact of having less cancer.

"This is the first anti-cancer gene tested for its effect on ageing," Serrano said. "The mice lived 16 percent longer in their average lifespan."

The p53 gene, when working properly, makes sure that damaged cells destroy themselves and do not divide uncontrollably to cause tumors. If the gene is mutated or inactivated the control mechanism does not work.

Did you have a tough childhood?

Join the gang. But here's some good news from Reuters science reporters. Click here.

Did you realize whales actually rhyme when they sing? (NYT)

From today's oped in the NYT, excerpted.

Speak Whale to Me.

IT’S no surprise that the mother and calf humpback whales that wandered many miles up the Sacramento River, but that yesterday disappeared, presumably into the Pacific, did not respond as hoped to attempts to lure them downstream by playing recordings of whale noises. When it comes to sounds and songs, these animals behave in mysterious ways.

Consider the beautiful music that whales make, which became known to us 37 years ago when “Songs of the Humpback Whale” was released — and went on to become one of the best-selling nature recordings of all time. The whales’ long, drawn-out melodies thunder on, loudly enough to be heard underwater for a distance of at least 10 miles. Five- to 20-minute songs — marked by repeating phrases, rhythm and even rhyme — are sung over and over for hours on end.

Because only the males sing, scientists long assumed that their songs were mating calls directed at females — like bird song in spring. But observation of humpback whale behavior has revealed that females actually pay no attention to the males’ singing.

Other explanations have been proposed: that males sing to warn other males away, for example, or that the songs act as some kind of beacon to help migrating whales navigate.

The most recent theory on why whales sing comes from James Darling, a researcher who for many years has carefully observed the interactions of singing humpback whales near Maui, Hawaii. Mr. Darling has observed that males singing alone usually will join up with another male for a brief but almost always friendly, or at least conflict-free, interaction. And so he thinks it is likely that male whales sing to one another. During breeding, their songs somehow may help them to cooperate, and to recognize their closest male associates.

Whale song has another unexplained aspect that no bird song possesses. Across a single breeding ground, and in some cases across the reach of an ocean basin as large as the North Pacific, the whales all sing essentially the same tune. And as the season progresses, they collectively revise it, adding new melodies and taking others away. Over several mating seasons, songs are entirely changed. (Today’s humpbacks would not recognize the music on “Songs of the Humpback Whale” from 1970.)

The whales evolve their common songs simultaneously even though some of them are much too far apart from one another to hear the changes at the same time.

How do they know what new notes to choose? What guides the changes they make? Scientists don’t know, and hardly know how to find out.

Because the whales that were in the Sacramento River are females, whale songs probably would not have lured them downstream. So marine biologists tried playing feeding calls. This strategy worked 22 years ago when Humphrey, another humpback, was stuck in the same river. This time, it didn’t work.

It’s not easy to tell great whales what to do; it is even harder to figure out what drives them. But it is encouraging to see how many people have rallied round the cause of this stranded family.

There may be a reason whales have been drawn more than once to swim miles up this particular river. The more we observe them, the more we may learn.

David Rothenberg, a professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, is the author of “Why Birds Sing” and the forthcoming “Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound.”

World's first lung transplant on an HIV patient. (Reuters)

This is tremendous and hopeful news. The article is below in excerpt. Full article here.

MILAN (Reuters) - Doctors in Italy have performed the world's first lung transplant on an HIV patient, a medical institute in the southern city of Palermo said on Friday.

The man, whose age was not disclosed, had terminal respiratory problems and the transplant was his only chance of survival, doctors said. The patient was said to be in good condition after the operation.

"This is an important event in the progress of transplants," Alessandro Nanni Costa, director of Italy's National Transplant Centre, said in a statement.

Previously far only kidney, liver and pancreas transplants have been performed on HIV patients, according to the Mediterranean Transplant Institute, which is based in Sicily.

Aubrey de Grey in a video about singularity.

No matter where you stand on it, you've got to admit that AI and Singularity work is interesting.

Check out this link. Thanks to Bruce Klein for the heads up.

Going, Going, Almost Gone (NYT)

Today's NYT reports that arctic ice is melting faster than anyone predicted. You think it's about time to buy a hybrid and start paying attention?

Climate scientists may have significantly underestimated the power of global warming from human-generated heat-trapping gases to shrink the cap of sea ice floating on the Arctic Ocean, according to a new study of polar trends. The study, published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, concluded that an open-water Arctic in summers could be more likely in this century than had been estimated in the latest international review of climate research released in February by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change..

“There are huge changes going on,” said Julienne Stroeve, a lead author of the new study and a researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “Just with warm waters entering the Arctic, combined with warming air temperatures, this is wreaking havoc on the sea ice, really.”

The intergovernmental panel concluded that if emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide were not significantly reduced, the region could be end up bereft of floating ice in summers sometime between 2050 and the early decades of the next century.

For the new study, Dr. Stroeve and others at the ice center reviewed nearly six decades of measurements by ships, airplanes and satellites estimating the maximum and minimum area of Arctic sea ice, which typically expands most in March and shrinks most in September.

With an expert from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, also in Boulder, they then compared the observed trends with the projections made for the climate panel’s review using the world’s most advanced computer models of climate.

Dr. Stroeve’s team found that since 1953 the area of sea ice in September has declined at an average rate of 7.8 percent per decade. Computer climate simulations of the same period had an average rate of ice loss of 2.5 percent per decade.

The finding implies that the Arctic ice may be quicker to respond to warming as concentrations of heat-trapping gases rise in coming decades, said Marika Holland, an author of the new paper and a computer modeler at the Boulder climate center.

Scientists find a new "clock" gene -- big news from The Science.

Wow. This is big news for the anti-aging folks. Obviously, there are countless genes involved in aging -- many of them detailed in my book, The Genomics Age, but this news blew me away. (If you have trouble making through the jargon in this article, you might need my book. That's not a plug, not investor advice. And maybe a little plug.)

Excerpt below. Find the whole article at the Science website.

Researchers from three different labs have identified a new circadian gene in the mouse, according to two papers in Science and one paper in Cell published online this week. Mutagenesis screens revealed that mutations in a protein called FBXL3 lengthen the mouse circadian period by several hours, and biochemical analyses showed that FBXL3 is necessary for degradation of key circadian clock proteins.

"I think this is a tremendously exciting discovery," said Steve Kay of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in any of the work. "It shows that forward genetics is still a very powerful tool in identifying new clock genes."

Mammalian circadian rhythms are generated by feedback looks of gene transcription and translation. The transcription factors CLOCK and BMAL1 drive expression of clock genes Period (Per) and Cryptochrome (Cry), whose proteins interact with CLOCK and BMAL1 to inhibit their own transcription. When PER and CRY proteins degrade, this step releases the inhibition, and transcription begins again.

Delays are built into the circuit so that the entire cycle takes approximately 24 hours. One important delay consists of post-translational modifications of the PER and CRY proteins, which determine how long it takes for these proteins to degrade.

In the first Science paper, researchers led by Sofia Godinho of the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Harwell, UK, and Elizabeth Maywood of MRC in Cambridge, UK, mutagenized mice to search for new circadian clock genes. They associated one allele with a long circadian period -- about 27 hours in mice homozygous for the mutant allele, which they named "after hours" (Afh). The mutation lies in an F-box gene called Fbx13.

"They find a phenotype that's pretty remarkable in those mutant animals," said David Weaver of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, who was not involved in any of the work. "That suggests that [FBXL3] is a pretty important regulator."

In an accompanying paper in Science, researchers led by Luca Busino of New York University School of Medicine show that FBXL3 protein binds to CRY proteins and drives their degradation. Without functional FBXL3, CRY degradation slows, which prolongs reactivation of CLOCK:BMAL1. The result is a lengthened circadian cycle in mice.

"Our findings provide direct in vivo evidence that proteasomal degradation, via F-box proteins, is an important regulatory mechanism in maintaining mammalian circadian homeostasis," Patrick Nolan of MRC Harwell, senior author of the first paper, told The Scientist in an Email.

"The two stories very nicely complement each other," said Michele Pagano of NYU, senior author on the second paper. "They have in vivo evidence and we have the explanation for their phenotype."

In a paper in Cell, researchers led by Sandra Siepka and Seung-Hee Yoo of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., also report a lengthened circadian period in an FBXL3 mutant, which they name Overtime (Ovtm). This mouse has a mutation in a different amino acid from the mouse in the Science paper. The researchers also show that loss of FBXL3 function helps stabilize the CRY proteins, subsequently repressing the transcription of several clock genes.

"Because the CRY proteins are not degraded, they repress transcription driven by CLOCK and BMAL," explained senior author Joseph Takahashi, also of Northwestern.

Future studies will likely reveal more genes that influence the circadian clock by controlling degradation of clock proteins, Takahashi told The Scientist. "This example with CRY suggests that there are going to be additional examples of specific regulation of protein degradation," he said.

Found! Another Earthlike planet -- temperature between 34 and 104F! (Space.com)

Found this on the wires. An excellent story, excerpted below or click here.

An Earthlike planet spotted outside our solar system is the first found that could support liquid water and harbor life, scientists announced Tuesday.

Liquid water is a key ingredient for life as we know it. The newfound planet is located at the "Goldilocks" distance — not too close and not too far from its star to keep water on its surface from freezing or vaporizing away.

And while astronomers are not yet able to look for signs of biology on the planet, the discovery is a milestone in planet detection and the search for extraterrestrial life, one with the potential to profoundly change our outlook on the universe.

It probably has more polar ice than we do ...

Interesting news from the Red Planet.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A spacecraft orbiting Mars has scanned huge deposits of water ice at its south pole so plentiful they would blanket the planet in 36 feet of water if they were liquid, scientists said on Thursday.

The scientists used a joint NASA-Italian Space Agency radar instrument on the European Space Agency Mars Express spacecraft to gauge the thickness and volume of ice deposits at the Martian south pole covering an area larger than Texas.

The deposits, up to 2.3 miles thick, are under a polar cap of white frozen carbon dioxide and water, and appear to be composed of at least 90 percent frozen water, with dust mixed in, according to findings published in the journal Science. Scientists have known that water exists in frozen form at the Martian poles, but this research produced the most accurate measurements of just how much there is.

They are eager to learn about the history of water on Mars because water is fundamental to the question of whether the planet has ever harbored microbial or some other life. Liquid water is a necessity for life as we know it.

Characteristics like channels on the Martian surface strongly suggest the planet once was very wet, a contrast to its present arid, dusty condition.

Jeffrey Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who led the study, said the same techniques are being used to examine similar ice deposits at the Martian north pole.

Dark Energy (NY Times Magazine)

Did you catch the extraordinary article on dark energy (not to be confused with dark matter) in today's NYT Sunday Magazine?

It is right here. No subscription required.

More mutations involved in cancer than scientists thought. (Reuters)

This is a huge story. I excerpt it from Reuters below. The whole story is here.

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A painstaking scan of the DNA of tumor cells shows hundreds of previously unsuspected genes are involved in cancer, researchers said on Wednesday in a finding that offers new ways to fight the disease.

They found more than 1,000 different mutations in just one family of genes taken from 200 samples of breast, stomach, colorectal and other common tumors. Other groups of genes also are involved in cancer.

"We find evidence for approximately 100 new cancer genes," Dr. Mike Stratton, co-leader of the Cancer Genome Project at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge, Britain, told reporters. He said 120 of the mutations in these genes are believed to be "driver" mutations that directly contribute to the development of cancer.

"We call them drivers because they drive a cell to stop behaving normally and drive them to behave like cancer cells," Stratton told the telephone briefing.

"This is a lot larger number of cancer genes than we really expected to find," added the Sanger Institute's Dr. Andrew Futreal, who also worked on the study, published in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

"I would have guessed it would have been no more than 10, probably, given what we knew." 

What Music and String Theory Have in Common

Here's an excerpt from a fascinating article that's going to be in tomorrow's TIME.

When you first hear them, a Gregorian chant, a Debussy prelude and a John Coltrane improvisation might seem to have almost nothing in common--except that they all include chord progressions and something you could plausibly call a melody. But music theorists have long known that there's something else that ties these disparate musical forms together. The composers of these and virtually every other style of Western music over the past millennium tend to draw from a tiny fraction of the set of all possible chords. And their chord progressions tend to be efficient, changing as few notes, by as little as possible, from one chord to the next.

Exactly how one style relates to another, however, has remained a mystery--except over one brief stretch of musical history. That, says Princeton University composer Dmitri Tymoczko, "is why, no matter where you go to school, you learn almost exclusively about classical music from about 1700 to 1900. It's kind of ridiculous."

But Tymoczko may have changed all that. Borrowing some of the mathematics that string theorists invented to plumb the secrets of the physical universe, he has found a way to represent the universe of all possible musical chords in graphic form. "He's not the first to try," says Yale music theorist Richard Cohn. "But he's the first to come up with a compelling answer."

Tymoczko's answer, which led last summer to the first paper on music theory ever published in the journal Science, is that the cosmos of chords consists of weird, multidimensional spaces, known as orbifolds, that turn back on themselves with a twist, like the Möbius strips math teachers love to trot out to prove to students that a two-dimensional figure can have only one side. Indeed, the simplest chords, which consist of just two notes, live on an actual Möbius strip. Three-note chords reside in spaces that look like prisms--except that opposing faces connect to each other. And more complex chords inhabit spaces that are as hard to visualize as the multidimensional universes of string theory.

But if you go to Tymoczko's website you can see exactly what he's getting at by looking at movies he has created to represent tunes by Chopin and, of all things, Deep Purple. In both cases, as the music progresses, one chord after another lights up in patterns that occupy a surprisingly small stretch of musical real estate. According to Tymoczko, most pieces of chord-based music tend to do the same, although they may live in a different part of the orbifold space. Indeed, any conceivable chord lies somewhere in that space, although most of them would sound screechingly harsh to human ears.

Huge cancer news.

As you may know about me, I have lots of cancer in my family. So I watch this closely. I even wrote a book -- The Genomics Age -- to learn more about what DNA science can do for this disease that debilitates and kills so many. In writing that book, I learned a lot about gene therapy. At the time, there were only a few successes and one tragic death. So I was especially interested to find this on this medical newsletter today.

In what could be one of the biggest breakthroughs in cancer treatment, researchers from the National Cancer Institute have been able to genetically change a patient's cells to battle cancer cells.

This treatment is one that researchers have been working on for years. But, in a study published in the journal Science, researchers have documented that their genetically-engineered cells have cured two patients of a deadly form of skin cancer, melanoma, which had spread throughout their bodies.

The hope is that this treatment proves to be helpful in treating a vast array of cancers.

"These results represent the first time gene therapy has been used successfully to treat cancer," said Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health in a press release. "Moreover, we hope it will be applicable not only to melanoma, but also for a broad range of common cancers."

Previous research has found that in some patients with melanoma, there are a few white-blood cells that are especially aggressive in fighting off cancer cells. The problem is, they do not exist in high enough amounts to ever significantly slow the rapid growth of a tumor. So, researchers tried to isolate those few aggressive cells from a patient, multiply them in a lab and then replace them into the patient's body.

The treatment, when used, worked. But in most cases, a patient does not contain any of these cancer-killing cells, so this treatment is not an option.

Did you feel that earthquake?

Me, neither. But I found a site that tracks all the earthquakes we have daily in the Bay Area, along with their size, area and magnitude.

Ode to Pluto

Sad news today about the losing of Pluto's planetary status on several levels. You think it's because I'm adverse to change. Or just nostalgic. When I wrote The Genomics Age (after having a degree in chemistry), I was bummed to learn that there is not one gene for every protein, a cardinal rule then in genetics. Science is changing as fast I learn it.

And now, it's eight planets for you and me.

It made me think of a song someone taught me once after the nine planets and since is the last time its words are accurate, I paste it here. I rediscovered it on a great site of teaching songs

p.s. The book I wrote after The Genomics Age is iWOZ, a collaborated autobiography of Steve Wozniak. Due in stores in late September.

Look for my notices to when Steve will be traveling around signing copies. After doing his book, I am more certain than ever that he is among the greatest living inventors in the world. Even though he had no concern about my obsession today, the demoting of Pluto. Back to the song.

Nine Planets -

Nine planets, nine planets,
Nine planets can you name them all?
Nine planets, nine planets,
Spinning round the sun, shaped like a ball.

On planet number one
You'll be the closest to sun
Too hot for an atmosphere
Has only 88 days in a year
Can you name the planet?
It's almost 1000 degrees hot in the day
And 200 below zero at night
What's a guy supposed to wear on MERCURY?

When you hear of the "Evening star"
Our sister planet that's not that far
2nd from the sun reflecting light
That's why it's so bright
Can you name the planet?
Some people call it Earth's twin
because it's about the same size
You don't have to be a genius to know I'm talking about VENUS.

Third from the sun
Count the moons, there's only one
It's the home of living things
Fish, birds and human beings
Can you name the planet?
C'mon, now. Everybody's got to get this.
You've got to get this. You've just got to get this!
It's EARTH.

Nine planets, nine planets,
Nine planets can you name them all?
Nine planets, nine planets,
Spinning round the sun, shaped like a ball.

It's called the "Red Planet"
In 1976 two spacecraft landed on it
It might have supported life
When they found frozen water and dry ice
Can you name the planet?
Galileo first discovered it in 1610
Over 360 years later, Mariner landed on MARS.

It's the largest of them all
There's a Great Red Spot on this huge gas ball
12 years to orbit the Sun
More than 24 moons, why do we only have one?
Can you name the planet?
You know, a day only lasts 10 hours on our 5th planet
That means you could go to school twice a day, if you lived on JUPITER

It's the 2nd largest planet
It's known for the rings around it
They're made of rock and ice
It's much colder than earth, no chance for life
Can you name the planet?
Those rings look like a big hoola-hoop
It must be fun to be SATURN

Nine planets, nine planets,
Nine planets can you name them all?
Nine planets, nine planets,
Spinning round the sun, shaped like a ball.

There's a blue and green ball of gas
It also has rings, floating round it's mass
Moons both large and small
A rocky center in this ball
Can you name the planet?
It's named after the Greek god of the heavens
You're kidding me; it's really called URANUS?

Takes one hundred sixty four years
To orbit the sun... what a wait!
3 billion miles from the earth
From the sun it's number eight
Can you name the planet?
Well, it's so far away that we don't know much about it
But we do know that it has two moons
And the answer is NEPTUNE.

Planet nine is the smallest and farthest away
It's smaller than our moon
A rocky snowball in space
Can you name the planet?
Well, there's not much to say;
It's small and it's cold and it's far away
And Charon is its only moon... it's Pluto!

Nine planets, nine planets,
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto

Nine planets, nine planets,
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
The first 4 planets you need to know
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune
The farthest away is small PLUTO.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
The first 4 planets you need to know
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune
The farthest away is small PLUTO.

Why you're not a chimp. (Nature)

A USA Today story excerpts Nature's piece on a recent genetic discovery that finally explains the difference between us and chimps, who are practically our genetic twins.

WASHINGTON — Scientists believe they have found a key gene that helped the human brain evolve from our chimp-like ancestors.

In just a few million years, one area of the human genome seems to have evolved about 70 times faster than the rest of our genetic code. It appears to have a role in a rapid tripling of the size of the brain's crucial cerebral cortex, according to an article published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Study co-author David Haussler, director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said his team found strong but still circumstantial evidence that a certain gene, called HAR1F, may provide an important answer to the question: "What makes humans brainier than other primates?" Human brains are triple the size of chimp brains.

Looking at 49 areas that have changed the most between the human and chimpanzee genomes, Haussler zeroed in on an area with "a very dramatic change in a relatively short period of time."

That one gene didn't exist until 300 million years ago and is present only in mammals and birds, not fish or animals without backbones. But then it didn't change much at all. There are only two differences in that one gene between a chimp and a chicken, Haussler said.

But there are 18 differences in that one gene between human and chimp and they all seemed to occur in the development of man, he said.

Andrew Clark, a Cornell University professor molecular biology who was not part of Haussler's team, said that if true, the change in genes would be fastest and most dramatic in humans and would be "terrifically exciting."

However, the gene changed so fast that Clark said that he has a hard time believing it unless something unusual happened in a mutation. It's not part of normal evolution, he said. Haussler attributed the dramatic change to the stress of man getting out of trees and walking on two feet.

And it's not just that this gene changed a lot. There is also its involvement with the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for some of the more complex brain functions, including language and information processing.

"It looks like in fact it is important in the development of brain," said co-author Sofie Salama, a research biologist at Santa Cruz who led the efforts to identify where the gene is active in the body.

The scientists still don't know specifically what the gene does. But they know that this same gene turns on in human fetuses at seven weeks after conception and then shuts down at 19 weeks, Haussler said.

Mars the size of the moon?

Not in this lifetime. Scientists say Mars was even closer two years ago than it will be on August 27, the supposed day that Mars will be the size of the moon in the night sky.

Just another Internet hoax.

Where would we be without the Times of India? See story below.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1882800.cms

Excerpt here:

LUCKNOW: The close encounter of Planet Earth with the Mars is a big hoax after all. People have been waiting breathlessly for this so called celestial event, said to be taking place on August 27 after a recently-circulated mail made announcements to this effect.

But the revelations made by scientists at Indira Gandhi Planetarium here has poured cold water on the excitement. The e-mail claimed that the Mars would get bigger and bigger in the sky in August and look as big as the Moon on August 27.

The scientists, however, say that nothing of that sort is going to happen and, in fact, the Mars was far more closer to the Earth in August 2003.

"We ourselves were shocked to see these reports published in newspapers," says engineer, operations, Indira Gandhi Planetarium, Neena Chaudhary.

"Not being aware of the event ourselves we then tried all sources, including NASA website to get it confirmed. Ultimately, the information was proved a sham," she adds.

"I feel that some pranksters might have kept hold of an old e-mail and would have begun resending it. Many others must have passed it on innocently, not realising it was a fake," she explained.

Neena said, "In August 2003, the Mars and the Earth came within 56 million kilometres of each other, which is closer than at any time in the past 50,000 years.

At present, the Mars was 379 million kilometres away from the Earth on August 10 while the distance will increase to 382 million kilometres on August 17 and 385 million kilometres on August 27, the date on which the phenomenon is supposed to take place," said Neena.

Mars had been closer to earth than this distances of 385 million kilometres many a times, she said, adding: "It was all the more shocking to see that the e-mail being circulated by pranksters goes to the extent of claiming that the next time the Mars will come this close to the Earth again in 2287 only, making the 'August 27 event' a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

Another scientist at Indira Gandhi Planetarium, Anil Yadav, added: "If people still have doubts they can check it out on the internet just by typing 'Mars close to Earth' on any search engine."

Are you too fat for an x-ray? (Reuters)

This stuns me. Maybe it's living in San Francisco, but I don't notice that the majority of people are obese. Where are all these people who can't fit into x-ray machines?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More and more obese people are unable to get full medical care because they are either too big to fit into scanners, or their fat is too dense for X-rays or sound waves to penetrate, radiologists reported on Tuesday.

With 64 percent of the U.S. population either overweight or obese, the problem is worsening, but it represents a business opportunity for equipment makers and hospitals, said Dr. Raul Uppot, a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

"We noticed over the past couple of years that obesity was playing a role in our ability to see these images clearly," Uppot said in a telephone interview.

Radiologists have their own term for it when writing up reports: "These images are limited due to body habitus."

Uppot's team looked for this phrase in radiology reports from 1989 to 2003. These included standard X-rays, computer assisted X-rays known as CT scans, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET).

These scans are used to look for tumors, blood clots, broken limbs and other injuries and diseased organs.

"Overall, 7,778 or 0.15 percent of 5,253,014 reports were habitus limited," they wrote in the August issue of the journal Radiology.

"It essentially doubled over the last 15 years," Uppot said.

New blood test may detect lung cancers years before they materialize (Reuters)

An important story you shouldn't miss, on Reuters today.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A blood test that looks for the body's own immune response to tumors may provide an easy way to find lung cancer in patients long before an X-ray or CT scan could, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.

The test correctly predicted non-small-cell lung cancer in blood samples taken from patients years before they were actually diagnosed with lung cancer, the researchers reported.

If the test's reliability can be confirmed, it might become the first new blood screen for any cancer since the prostate specific antigen or PSA test. The test is licensed to privately held Rockville, Maryland-based 20/20 GeneSystems Inc.

"These data suggest antibody profiling could be a powerful tool for early detection when incorporated into a comprehensive screening strategy," the researchers wrote in their report, published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology.

Non-small-cell lung cancer is the most common type of lung cancer, and has an average five-year survival rate of only 40 percent.

Lung cancer is by far the biggest cancer killer globally. Each year 10 million people are diagnosed with it, according to the Global Lung Cancer Coalition, and half of all patients die within a year of diagnosis. It kills more than 160,000 people annually in the United States alone.

Special X-rays known as computed tomography or CT scans can find lung cancer tumors, but they have a high rate of false positives -- meaning many people have to undergo a painful biopsy to get a piece of a suspicious lump out of the lung, only to find out it was not cancerous after all.

By the time people have symptoms of lung cancer, it is usually too late to save them.

Li Zhong and colleagues at the University of Kentucky developed a test that looks for certain proteins the body makes in response to very early lung tumors.

Embryonic stem cells used to create sperm. (Xinhua)

They used sperm created from embryonic stem cells (cells that can be grown into any kind of specialized cell) and combined them with hollowed out mouse eggs.

LONDON, July 11 (Xinhua) -- Scientists have shown for the first time that sperm created from embryonic stem cells can be used to produce live offspring.

    The experiment, carried out by researchers in Britain and Germany using mice, culminated in the births of seven babies. Six of these, whose origins were owed to sperm derived from these "multipurpose" cells, lived to adulthood, according to a press release from the University of Newcastle on Tuesday.

    In the research, a team led by professor Karim Nayernia, who was formerly based at Georg-August University in Germany, succeeded in converting stem cells taken from early mouse embryos into "spermatogonial stem cells" (SSCs), and then into functioning sperm.

    Nayernia, who is now professor of Stem Cell Biology at Newcastle University, and his team were the first in the world to isolate spermatagonial stem cells. The scientists were also able to show that some of these stem cells, called multi-potent adult germline stem cells (maGSCs), turned into heart, muscle, brain and other cells.

    The breakthrough was reported in the academic journal Developmental Cell. The team described how they developed a new strategy for generating mature sperm cells in the laboratory using embryonic stem cells from mice. The researchers then went on to test whether this sperm would function in real life, the press release said.

    The researchers implanted the sperm artificially into eggs collected from mice, and showed that the sperm were capable of fertilizing the eggs, which produced living offspring when implanted into surrogate mothers.

    Of 210 eggs injected with the lab-reared sperm, 65 began to undergo cell division, resulting in seven live births, with only one of the offspring failing to reach adulthood, the researchers said.

    Stem cells have the potential to develop into any tissue type in the body and could therefore be used to develop a wide range of medical therapies.

    The breakthrough will help scientists to understand more about how animals produce sperm and the knowledge has potential implications for the treatment of male infertility.

    Nayernia was quoted as saying "spermatagonial stem cells are extremely promising and more research is needed to establish their full potential."

    From a scientific point of view, the breakthrough has been described as a milestone in understanding how cells produce functioning sperm.

62-year-old woman gives birth! (AP)

I think this is wonderful.

(AP) A 62-year-old child psychologist has given birth to a boy, becoming the oldest British woman to have a baby.

Patti Farrant — known professionally as Patricia Rashbrook — delivered her son, J.J., by Caesarean section on Wednesday, according to The Daily Mail newspaper. The baby was conceived after fertility treatments.

Farrant has three grown children from a previous marriage. It is the first child for her husband, John, 60, an education management consultant.

"He is adorable, and seeing him for the first time was beyond words," she told the newspaper. "Having been through so much to have him, we are overjoyed. His birth was absolutely wonderful and deeply moving for both of us."

Other older British mothers include Liz Buttle, from Wales, who was 60 when she gave birth to a son in 1997.

The oldest woman in the world to give birth is believed to be Romanian Adriana Iliescu, who was 66 when she had a daughter in Bucharest in January 2005.

Fruit for cancer-fighting (Reuters)

When I was researching my last book, The Genomics Age (the one before iWoz), I interviewed many Nobel Laureates about cancer research. Many thought the best hope lies in finding ways to encourage anti-angiogenesis. Angiogenesis is a fancy word for building blood vessels -- which is what tumors do to stay alive and grow. So anti-angiogenesis is a way to stop that.

I will post this on my science blog, too. And eat your fruit. For more reasons to be a veg, see my favorite site.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Scientists at an Israeli university have found a promising new way to stop the growth and spread of cancer cells while carrying out research to boost the size of peaches and nectarines, the university said on Sunday.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists found that a protein similar to one researched in their project had the effect of blocking blood supply to tumors.

"By blocking the blood supply to the tumors, actibind halted the ability of malignant cells to move through the blood stream," the university said.

"Their approach has been shown to inhibit the malignant cells without affecting normal cells and without the severe side effects of traditional treatments such as radiation and chemotherapy," it said.

Oded Shoseyov, who led the research, told Reuters his team had succeeded in using the protein to reduce the number of fruits on a tree, thereby increasing the size of each fruit. The technique worked by inhibiting the growth of pollen cells.

"We hypothesized that since the mechanism of growth is very similar -- between the pollen cell and the cancer cell -- that the protein would have the same effect," he said.

Shoseyov's team had used genetic engineering to produce a variant of the protein "that showed an impressive anti-cancer potential", the university said.

"These results have raised broad interest in international scientific meetings and in business circles," it said.

DNA test: Are you related to Confucius?

Bummer that this happened after I published my DNA book for non-scientists and investors, The Genomics Age. This would've been a great add.

And where did they get that Confucius DNA? Any ideas out there?

From Reuters.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Chinese claiming Confucius for an ancestor can now use a genetic test to prove a direct blood connection to the grandfather of Chinese social mores, a state newspaper said Friday.

The fifth-century BC social philosopher's ideas of filial piety and deference to elders influence Chinese society and politics even today.

Now his countrymen can establish a genetic link in a test that will cost more than 1,000 yuan ($125), according to the Shanghai Morning Post.

"We would like to help these unconfirmed claimants to test their DNA and to establish a Confucius-DNA database," it quoted Deng Yajun, a DNA expert from Beijing Institute of Genomics at the Chinese Academy of Science, as saying.

How the scientists had obtained a sample of Confucius's DNA was not explained.

"One of the most difficult things in the project is to confirm the blood connections of these numerous claimants," said Kong Dewei, one of the editors of the new family tree, who has the same Chinese surname of Confucius, "Kong" in Chinese.

Association with Confucianism was fatal during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, when "old China" and its traditions were condemned as reactionary by fervent Communist Red Guards.

But since the 1990s, Beijing has been encouraging Confucianism as part of celebrating traditional Chinese culture -- and of pushing a message of obedience to those in power.

I have been meaning to tell you this.

I have been meaning to share this with all you guys -- over 1000 of you now -- for a long time.

But it's Earth Day.

A while ago, I signed up to get a regular email from the Natural Resources Defense Fund. The idea was, they send me emails about ways the government or industry is destroying or trying to reverse government protections, and I get to email (with one click) my name onto a petition or an email to an official.

Their website is www.nrdfactionfund.org.

So finally, after years of wishing and doing nothing to help something I care about, this site finally did something. And succeeded! Check this out -- a letter I received from these folks after clicking on a button to stop Bush's reversal of the Clean Air Act. This would pollute the air further, rather than clean it up, the whole purpose of the act.

Quoted in full below. Now you will see why I highly recommend this. And I haven't (yet) given a cent, so don't worry it's a big money drainer. Your voice, I think, is what they need most.

Dear NRDC Action Fund Supporter,

Last year, you helped us win a critical victory when we blocked President Bush's Dirty Skies bill before it reached the Senate floor for a vote.

Now, I've got more good news to report on the clean air front. NRDC has turned back the Bush Administration's most aggressive attempt to dismantle the Clean Air Act for the sake of America's biggest polluters.

Four years ago, the Administration issued new rules that would have allowed 20,000 aging power plants, oil refineries and other big polluters to evade pollution controls required by law. These proposed changes, shaped directly by industry lobbyists, were little more than a payback to Big Oil and Big Coal for their lavish campaign contributions.

This devastating reversal of the Clean Air Act would have given ExxonMobil and other industry giants a free pass to clog our air with hundreds of thousands more tons of harmful pollution. And it could have led to a dramatic increase in asthma and heart attacks, hospitalizations and premature deaths. The most vulnerable -- children, seniors and those already struggling to breathe in our cities -- would have suffered the most.

In response, we mobilized thousands of our online activists to protest this unprecedented attack on our clean air safeguards. When the Bush Administration moved ahead anyway, NRDC raced to court and argued that the new rules would cause permanent injury to millions of Americans. In December 2003, the court took the unusual step of blocking the new rules from taking effect until the full case could be heard. Now, the U.S. Court of Appeals has issued a ruling that slams the door on the Administration's attempt to sabotage the Clean Air Act. The court rebuked the Bush plan for threatening the health of millions and undermining a law that was meant to limit pollution, not increase it! This victory proves once again that the courts are often our last line of defense against the Bush Administration's worst attacks. Thank you so much for helping to defend America's clean air law

Ask your doctor.

I was surprised to read this morning that there is now a vaccine for cervical cancer.

LONDON (Reuters) - A vaccine that protects women against a virus that causes cervical cancer is effective for more than four years, researchers said on Thursday.

They found that women given GlaxoSmithKline Plc's cervical cancer vaccine Cervarix had high levels of antibodies against two of types of the human papillomavirus (HPV) for up to 4.5 years after receiving their last dose.

"These findings set the stage for widescale adoption of HPV vaccination for prevention of cervical cancer," said Dr Diane Harper, of Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire, who conducted the trial.

Cervical is one of the most common cancers in women. Each year 470,000 women around the world are diagnosed with the disease and 230,000, mostly in the developing world, die, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France.

HPV is s sexually transmitted infection. Strains 16 and 18 of the virus are responsible for more than 70 percent of cervical cancers.

Results of a European survey released on Wednesday of more than 1,500 women in five EU countries showed that only 5 percent could identify HPV as the cause of cervical cancer.

Harper and her team followed up 800 women who took part in the original trial of the vaccine in which it was compared to a placebo. Their research is published online by The Lancet medical journal.

Women given the vaccine not only had high levels of antibodies against HPV-16 and HPV-18 but the levels did not decrease over time.

The vaccine also protected against new and persistent infections and was effective against HPV-45 and HPV-31, the third and fourth most prevalent cancer-causing types of the virus.

"The results show sustained immune response and long-term efficacy against HPV-16 and HPV-18 infection," Harper added.

Glaxo submitted the vaccine to the European Medicines Agency for approval in March. But Merck & Co. Inc's Gardasil vaccine was filed for marketing approval in Europe and the United States last December.

Merck is marketing the vaccine in partnership with Sanofi-Aventis in Europe.