'Pixie Dust' made from pig bladders regrows limbs of wounded soldiers

A powder nick-named "Pixie Dust" is being used to save the limbs of war heroes who have been wounded in Afghanistan.

Surgeons have already used the dust to save several soldiers so badly mutilated that they were at risk of amputation.

Made from pig bladders it has the ability to help the human body grow new tissue to replace large areas of a leg or arm destroyed by blast damage.

Many British and American soldiers have lost limbs to roadside bombs in the bitter battle for control of Afghanistan.

Now there is hope that limbs that would have been previously amputated can be saved.

Pig bladders contain a substance called extra cellular matrix, which is made up largely of collagen.

Scientists have already used powdered pig bladders help grow replacement human bladders.

But researchers working for the American military realised the substance might also help hundreds of wounded soldiers.

Professor Steve Wolf one the US's top plastic surgeons -is carrying out a trial in Houston, Texas on victims of the Afghan fighting and has already treated several young soldiers whose limbs were so badly damaged they were unable to walk or faced amputation.

He said: 'The word has got around about how this substance from pig bladders has got this magic ability to grow new tissue. Then one day one of the patients used the phrase 'pixie dust' to describe it and the name stuck

'We don't quite know how it works which adds to its magical qualities. We think that it attracts cells in the body that have the ability to multiply and gives them a chemical signal to make new tissue.'

Professor Wolf - chief of clinical trials at the American Army's Institute for Surgical Research is just about to start a formal trial using 'pixie dust' on bomb victims after the successful treatment of a handful of blast victims last year.

One of the first soldiers to receive the treatment was Corporal Isais Hernandez.

He was so severely wounded by a mortar round that amputation of his leg seemed likely.

Corporal Hernandez, a 25-year-old marine, was wounded in 2008, in an incident in which a colleague died.

He said: 'The surgery that Dr Wolf performed has been fantastic. Within a few weeks  of the operation last year I was doing things with the leg I hadn't done for months.

'It was so quick that you could almost see it growing and filling the hole where I was blasted.

'Before I had the sheets made from pigs bladder put into my leg I could barely use it. I had to crawl upstairs or take the elevator and I was either on sticks or in a wheelchair. It was pretty much useless.

'I had only 10 per cent strength in my injured leg compared to my good leg which was one reason why they'd wanted to amputate.

'After the operation it was up to 25 per cent. Now my leg is back to 35 per cent strength and I'm able to get out on my mountain bike and I can walk as far as I want.

'The Extra Cellular membrane had not only made muscle but also built nerves. I could feel my limb tingling as the new tissues grew.'

'Professor Wolfe has said there's a good chance I might be able to go back to active duty.'

He had a gaping, crater-like wound, in his thigh right down to the bone and doctors had no way of replacing the muscle and other tissue that had been blown away.

Professor Wolf operated and instead of using powered bladder he used it in sheet form putting layers of it into the large wound in leg Corporal Hernandez's leg.

Magically over a period of several weeks new tissue and muscle grew until the wound was filled.

Professor Wolf said: 'This was an amazing result. It was quite a sight to see the body regenerate in this way because in the past we have not been able to replace muscle and tissue once it has been lost.'

The Extra Cellular Matrix grew nerves, ordinary tissue and muscle where there had been none.

Corporal Hernandez is now able to walk on the limb - which he couldn't do before surgery -and is undergoing physiotherapy to restore as much strength as possible to his limb.

A large scar covers the area where the sheets of pig bladder worked their magic.

...

via 'Pixie Dust' made from pig bladders regrows limbs of wounded soldiers | Mail Online.

Real-Life Spider-Man Prevents Comic Robbery

Comic book shoppers in Australia could only marvel as Spider-Man swooped to prevent an in-store robbery.

The hero inside the suit was Adelaide Comic Centre owner Michael Baulderstone, who was dressed up to celebrate International Free Comic Day.

But justice was called for when one man took the offer of a free read a little too literally and attempted to lift an X-Men Omnibus worth £100.

As a packed crowd including Jedi Knights and the Flash stood by, Mr Baulderstone showed his 'spider-sense' to step in.

The 45-year-old spotted the man "behaving suspiciously" at the back of the shop and challenged him to hand over his bag.

Surrounded by a network of around 40 superheroes, the would-be thief surrendered, revealing the valuable comic.

"Everyone in the store thought it was a play, that it was street theatre of some sort," Mr Baulderstone said, recalling his amazing fantasy-turned-reality.

"It wasn't until I said 'Call the police' that people started to realise."

He added: "One of the funniest things about the incident was that I called for people to stand near the door.

"It just so happened we had people dressed as Jedi Knights there blocking the exit, the Flash was there at some point too.

"It was a bit serious at the time, but now we're looking back laughing at what greeted police when they arrived."

via World around us: Real-Life Spider-Man Prevents Comic Robbery.

Searching for Sasquatch here in South Texas

Texas - Last fall, after several people called police saying they saw something that looked like Bigfoot on the Northwest side of San Antonio, we were contacted by a group of men who call themselves Bigfoot investigators. They said they're convinced that Sasquatch is here and probably always has been. So, our Delaine Mathieu said -- prove it!

Last December, a homeless couple in San Antonio called 911 saying they saw something in the woods off Highway 151 and Culebra. "I would be a liar if I said I thought I knew what it was, but I don't know. I know it picked up that deer and walked," reported the caller. Police checked it out, but nothing was ever found.

Troy Hudson believes Bigfoot is here. He used to work for the Department of Homeland Security and now runs TBIG -- The Bigfoot Investigation group in Dallas. "I've been in the woods a lot as a child and I've seen things I can't explain to you," Hudson told us.

We set up camp with him and his colleague, Chase Robinson at Garner State Park in Uvalde County near Leakey -- where a man in a truck reportedly saw a Bigfoot on Highway 83 in 2006. "It was in December, early December around 10:30pm," Hudson said. "He was messing with something and he happens to look up and notices movement." He says the creature ran across the highway and disappeared.

"But that sounds crazy!" Delaine told Hudson. "That sounds almost ridiculous, right?" Hudson told her there are too many witnesses, too many reports across the country, too much documentation, too much data that suggests what are these people seeing?

Crazy is a word Troy and Chase say they hear a lot in their line of work, but there are several Bigfoot investigative groups in Texas like TBIG -- determined to find Bigfoot. "If people in Vermont are reporting a tree knock and a whoop as well as someone in California, Florida, Utah, Oklahoma, Texas -- it only leads you to believe that there's something out there."

And to the unbelievers out there who call these guys nuts? They say, just go on an expedition. "Try it. Before you condemn us, go out and try it," Chase told us. "See what they see and listen to the sounds of the night."

via Searching for Sasquatch here in South Texas | WOAI.COM: San Antonio News.

Was the USA founded on Christian values?

It Despite what many Christians would like to believe, Hitler was a Christian, and Thomas Jefferson was not.

"the common law existed while the Anglo Saxons were yet Pagans at a time when they had never heard the name of Christ pronounced or knew that such a character had ever existed."

"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

"History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose. " — Thomas Jefferson to Baron von Humboldt, 1813

"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites" –Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782.

... "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."

Revolution with a salad spinner

Lauren Theis and Lila Kerr, Rice University

A simple salad spinner will save lives this summer, if everything goes as planned by two Rice University undergraduates.

The spinner has been turned, so to speak, into a rudimentary centrifuge that medical clinics in developing countries can use to separate blood without electricity.

Rice sophomore Lila Kerr and freshman Lauren Theis will take their Sally Centrifuge abroad for nearly two months this summer as part of Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB), Rice's global health initiative that brings new ideas and technologies to underdeveloped countries. Kerr will take a spinner to Ecuador in late May, Theis will take one to Swaziland in early June and a third BTB team will take one to Malawi, also in June. Such field testing is important to Rice students as they develop a range of tools to enhance global health.

Kerr and Theis are minoring in global health technologies and took the Introduction to Bioengineering and World Health class taught by Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Rice's Stanley C. Moore Professor, chair of the Department of Bioengineering and director of Rice 360˚: Institute for Global Health Technologies.

"There was a whole range of projects to take on this year, and luckily we got one that wasn't terribly engineering-intensive," said Kerr, a sociology major from Dayton, Ohio.

"We were essentially told we need to find a way to diagnose anemia without power, without it being very costly and with a portable device," added Theis, a political science major and native of San Antonio, Texas.

They found that a salad spinner met those criteria. When tiny capillary tubes that contain about 15 microliters of blood are spun in the device for 10 minutes, the blood separates into heavier red blood cells and lighter plasma. The hematocrit, or ratio of red blood cells to the total volume, measured with a gauge held up to the tube, can tell clinicians if a patient is anemic. That detail is critical for diagnosing malnutrition, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria.

"The students really did an amazing job of taking very simple, low-cost materials and creating a device their research shows correlates nicely with hematocrit levels in the blood," said Maria Oden, professor in the practice of engineering education and director of Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK). She was the team's co-adviser with Richards-Kortum. "Many of the patients seen in developing world clinics are anemic, and it's a severe health problem. Being able to diagnose it with no power, with a device that's extremely lightweight, is very valuable," she said.

Kerr said the device spins tubes at up to 950 rpm. Results with the push-pump spinner compare favorably to those obtained with the ZIPocrit, a miniature, battery-powered centrifuge used as part of Rice's Lab-in-a-Backpack project. The ZIPocrit spins up to 10,000 rpm and completes its task in four to five minutes.

But the manual Sally Centrifuge, named in honor of a landmark known as the Sallyport on the Rice campus, has other advantages.

First, it requires no electricity -- just a bit of muscle. "We've pumped it for 20 minutes with no problem," Theis said. "Ten minutes is a breeze."

Second, it can spin up to 30 tubes at a time versus the ZIPocrit's maximum of four.

Third, it has proven to be fairly robust. "It's all plastic and pretty durable," Kerr said. "We haven't brought it overseas yet, of course, but we've trekked it back and forth across campus in our backpacks and grocery bags and it's held up fine."

The centrifuge, assembled using plastic lids, cut-up combs, yogurt containers and a hot-glue gun, costs about $30 in parts, including the spinner. The students expect to continue work on the device after their summer treks.  ...

via Revolution with a salad spinner.

Treating Battlefield Injuries with Light-Activated Technology

Airmen's traumatic battlefield injuries may be more effectively treated by using a new light-activated technology developed as a result of research managed by Air Force Office of Scientific Research and supported by funds from the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

This new treatment for war injuries includes using a process or technology called Photochemical Tissue Bonding, which can replace conventional sutures, staples and glues in repairing skin wounds, reconnecting severed peripheral nerves, blood vessels, tendons and incisions in the cornea.

Harvard Medical School professor and Massachusetts General Hospital Wellman Center researcher, Dr. Irene Kochevar and her colleague at Wellman, Associate Professor Robert Redmond are both pleased with the initial lab bench experiments that led to a pilot clinical study.

"We have demonstrated that this technology is very helpful in medicine for the Air Force because it produces better healing and functional outcomes than the same wounds that were treated with conventional materials," she said.

The process of creating the bonding or nanosutures is accomplished by applying a dye to the wound or damaged tissue and then exposing it briefly to green light. The dye absorbs the light and that helps it to molecularly bond proteins on the tissue surface.

"No glues, proteins or other materials are used that might stimulate an inflammatory response," said Kochevar. "An immediate, water-tight seal is formed between the tissue surfaces leading to reduced inflammation in the near term and better scar formation in the long term."

The researchers are planning to continue to evaluate the effectiveness of the new technology and how it can be even more effective in theater. Currently, they are seeking a shorter treatment time that yields an even stronger bond.

"We are approaching this challenge by identifying the basic molecular mechanisms responsible for light-activated crosslinking," she said. "We believe that this information will show us how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the nanosuturing technology on the battlefield."

via Treating Battlefield Injuries with Light-Activated Technology.

Jacques Vallee on Crop Circles

Jacques Vallee has posted the third instalment of his four-part series on crop circles over at Boing Boing. This time around, Jacques discusses the hoaxer theory, the weakness of 'New Age' explanations, and once again returns to the question of advanced technology being used:

I once met several of these artists at a conference in Switzerland, where they were presenting their techniques and the resulting data. When I asked them, "How dare you fool people this way?" they answered that art in general was about fooling people to create a sense of awe, beauty or simply a brief, healthy disconnect with ordinary reality.

One of them pointed out that "When you look at the Mona Lisa you think you look at a woman, but you have been fooled: there is no woman there; someone just applied some paint to a rectangular piece of canvas. Well, we do the same thing, except that our canvas happens to be a cornfield."

When you put it that way it is perfectly all right for teams of artists to run through the fields at night and produce things like the spider, the bicycle or more elaborate geometric designs. People like Jim Schnabel have participated in the game and there are even international competitions in circle making, with recognition for the most complex productions. No wonder people are convinced that all the circles are made for fun by a team of humans crushing the corn for kicks when the subject comes up in discussions among scientists or businessmen today. The difficult question is, "does this explain ALL the circles, or only the relatively simple ones?" The artists I spoke to in Switzerland confessed that some of the extraordinary designs were beyond their ability to produce them. While the initial "weather phenomenon" theory of Terence Meaden and others has not survived, there are still people who firmly believe the complex designs are made by Aliens and some who state they are a warning from Gaia. Among the technical community there are also those who pursue the idea first expressed by Dr. Jean-Pierre Petit, Jean-Jacques Velasco and others, looking to military electronics as the key to the mystery. ...

via Daily Grail Frontpage | TDG - Science, Magick, Myth and History.

Oil spill may be worst ever. BP warned of rig fault ten years ago. Bush fed regulators let industry police itself.

When I first heard about this, I thought, what's the big deal, another oil tanker leaking oil. Well, it's not a tanker, this is not a ship, it is an oil well under the ocean. Under 5,000 feet of water. This is almost a mile down. (A mile is 5,280 feet.) The pressure, I think, is a bone crushing 2,350 pounds per square inch. Take a look at the graphic below and you can see the problem. We opened the flood gates to huge reservoir of oil and it will just keep pouring out until we do something drastic. That's why this is a big deal.

Obama fears unprecedented disaster

... The Coast Guard conceded Saturday that it's nearly impossible to know how much oil has gushed since the blast, after saying earlier it was at least 1.6 million gallons — equivalent to about 2½ Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Even at that rate, the spill should eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident as the worst U.S. oil disaster in history in a matter of weeks. But a growing number of experts warned that the situation may already be much worse.

... Scientists were sampling the waters, and the federal government said all seafood harvested so far appeared safe.

- msnbc

BP faces fresh questions over the cause of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill after it emerged that problems with the type of equipment that led to the disaster were first reported a decade ago.

In June 2000, the oil giant issued a "notice of default" to Transocean, the operator of the rig that blew up last month. The dispute was over problems with a blowout preventer, a set of iron slabs that should close out-of-control wells. It failed on the Gulf of Mexico rig, triggering the explosion and oil spill.

Transocean acknowledged at the time that the preventer did "not work exactly right". The rig in question, the Discover Enterprise, was unable to operate for extended periods while the problem was fixed.

The preventer was made by Hydril, now owned by GE's oil and gas arm, and Cameron International, a Houston company. Cameron also made the preventer on the Deepwater Horizon, the rig that exploded. Its preventer was fitted at about the same time BP was complaining of problems with its sister vessel.

BP's past problems with the preventer emerged as a giant oil slick, fed by the uncapped well, began lapping the coast of Louisiana, threatening to create America's worst environmental disaster since the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989.

The US Coast Guard estimated that it is releasing 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the sea - though some experts claim it may be flowing at fives times that rate.

Fears were growing this weekend that the well head could fall apart, potentially unleashing an unresticted flow into the ocean.

Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, flew to Houston today to manage the worsening crisis. More than $23billion (£15billion) has been wiped off BP's market value amid growing worries over the costs of the clean-up. Estimates range from $3billion to $12billion. Hayward pledged to pay all "legitimate" claims arising from the spill.

Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have all declared states of emergency as winds pushed the slick toward sensitive marshlands and fishing areas.

President Barack Obama issued a moratorium on new drilling until the cause of the disaster was determined. He also ordered the Department of Defense to use cargo planes to spray chemical dispersant. ...

via BP warned of rig fault ten years ago - Times Online.

Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen called the bid to shut down a wellhead spewing at least 210,000 gallons of oil a day from nearly a mile beneath the ocean surface “one of the most complex things we’ve every done.”

He went on to say that, in a worst-case scenario, the well could vent 4.2 million gallons of oil into the Gulf daily. Currently, a crumpled “riser” pipe is preventing the full flow of oil – like a kinked garden hose – though reports suggest it is gradually deteriorating. ...

BP, the company that owned the Louisiana oil rig that exploded last week, spent years battling federal regulators over how many layers of safeguards would be needed to prevent a deepwater well from this type of accident.

*** But according to aides to Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who has followed offshore drilling issues for years, the industry aggressively lobbied against an additional layer of protection known as an “acoustic system,” saying it was too costly. In a March 2003 report, the agency reversed course, and said that layer of protection was no longer needed.

“There was a big debate under the Bush administration whether or not to require additional oil drilling safeguards but [federal regulators] decided not to require any additional mandatory safeguards, believing the industry would be motivated to do it themselves,” Carl Pope, Chairman of the Sierra Club told ABC News. - link

Video showing what a blowout preventer looks like:

Here's a graphic showing three ways they will attempt to stop the flow:

Frogs and humans are kissing cousins

Xenopus tropicalis matures faster than the more widely studied cousin Xenopus laevis.

Gene order of Xenopus tropicalis shows surprising similarity to that of mammals.

What's the difference between a frog, a chicken, a mouse and a human? Not as much as you'd think, according to an analysis of the first sequenced amphibian genome.

The genome of the western clawed frog, Xenopus tropicalis, has now been analysed by an international consortium of scientists from 24 institutions, and joins a list of sequenced model organisms including the mouse, zebrafish, nematode and fruit fly. What's most surprising, researchers say, is how closely the amphibian's genome resembles that of the mouse and the human, with large swathes of frog DNA on several chromosomes having genes arranged in the same order as in these mammals. The results of the analysis are published in Science this week1.

"There are megabases of sequence where gene order has changed very little since the last common ancestor" of amphibians, birds and mammals about 360 million years ago, says bioinformaticist Uffe Hellsten at the US Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, a co-author on the study.

That close genomic relationship doesn't hold true for all vertebrates, he notes. The zebrafish genome, for example, shows a much different gene order.

Such conservation has important evolutionary implications. "By comparing the genomes of these different animals, you can really tell what the ancestral complement of genes may have been," says Richard Harland, a molecular and developmental biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who also took part in the study.

In addition, says Harland, it belies the view that genomes as a rule evolve quickly. "I think the old expectation was that there was a lot of chromosome rearrangement, but I think increasingly we are finding that chromosomal translocations are pretty rare."

The similarity in genome sequence also validates the frog as a human disease model. Within conserved sequences in X. tropicalis, the researchers found genes that are similar to 80% of human genes known to be associated with diseases. "It's going to make genetic screens in Xenopus immediately more useful," says Frank Conlon, a geneticist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, who is not an author of the new study but helped to assign biological functions to genes in the sequence.

Having the sequence in hand, he adds, provides a crucial tool for bringing a host of Xenopus assays on basic biological functions — such as cell division, protein expression and phenotype identification — down to the genomic level. ...

via Frogs and humans are kissing cousins : Nature News.

What You Eat Affects You, Your Kids and Your Grandkids

While cancer victims usually blame themselves — I shouldn't have smoked, should have eaten better, should have exercised — or the cruelty of chance, they may now have a new scapegoat: Grandma.

Eating poorly during pregnancy can increase your children's and your grandchildren's risk of cancer, even if they themselves eat healthily, a new study on rats suggests.

The risk associated with high-fat diets, especially those high in omega-6 fatty acids, "can be passed from one generation to another without any further exposure," said lead researcher Sonia de Assis of Georgetown University.

While done in rats, the diets used by the study mirrored some typical American eating habits, and so the researchers suspect the results could hold for humans as well.

The research was presented last week at the American Association for Cancer Research's annual meeting in Washington D.C.

During the study, some pregnant rats were fed a diet high in omega-6 fat while others received standard fare. After the babies were delivered, all the mothers, their children and their eventual grandchildren ate healthy moderate-fat diets.

Granddaughters of the rats that gobbled excess fat during pregnancy had a 30-percent greater chance of developing breast cancer than those with grandparents who ate healthfully. When only one grandmother, on either the mother's or father's side, had indulged, the granddaughter's disease risk was 19-percent higher.

For the high-fat diet, the study used a chow that was 43-percent fat, predominantly from omega-6 rich vegetable oil. Most recommendations for a healthy diet include keeping fat intake at 25 to 30 percent, de Assis told LiveScience, "but with fast foods and everything, a lot of people eat more than that each day."

This should not imply that fat causes cancer — many fats are quite good for you, after all. But it is more bad news for omega-6 fatty acids, found in corn oil and most non-grass-fed meats.

Omega 6s, while essential to a healthy diet, should be balanced with omega 3s. The optimum ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 is likely between 4:1 to 1:1, but in the typical American diet the ratio is more like between 20 and 16:1. This imbalance has previously been linked to a host of health problems, including depression, infertility, heart disease and, yes, cancer.

In the new study, the researchers theorize the increased cancer risk might be a result of the epigenetic effects of omega-6 fats. (Epigenetics refers to the idea that even if genes themselves aren't altered, how they function can change.) Omega 6s may indirectly turn off genes that slow cell apoptosis (normal cell death). Cells can then proliferate and lead to tumors, which are essentially a bundle of multiplying cells gone wild.

Somehow, the fat must also be affecting the "germ line," the pathways that lead to viable sperm and eggs, for the effect to be crossing multiple generations. ...

via http://www.livescience.com/health/grandma-caused-my-cancer-100428.html | LiveScience.

Bees face extinction as billions of colonies die worldwide

The world faces a future with little meat and no cotton because of a catastrophic collapse in bee colonies, experts have warned.

Many vital crops are dependent on pollination by honeybees, but latest figures show a third failed to survive the winter in the U.S.

More than three million colonies in America and billions of bees worldwide have died since 2006.

Pesticides are believed to be a key cause of a crisis known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CDD), damaging bee health and making them more susceptible to disease.

But scientists do not know for certain and are at a loss how to prevent the disaster. Other potential factors include bloodsucking parasites and infections.

Some experts believe bees are heading for extinction.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the U.S. fell by 34 per cent last winter, according to a survey by the country’s Agricultural Research Service, and some commercial beekeepers have reported losses of more than 60 per cent over a year.

In Britain, the latest report into the fate of the estimated 250,000 honeybee  colonies is expected this month after losses of up to a third in the last two  winters.

Bees are a critical part of the food chain because flowering plants depend on  insects for pollination and the honeybee is the most effective.

It pollinates 90 commercial crops worldwide, including most fruit and  vegetables – from apples to carrots – alfalfa for cattle feed, nuts, oil-seed  rape and cotton.

A world without honeybees would mean a largely meatless diet of rice and  cereals, no cotton for textiles, no orchards or wildflowers and decimation  among wild birds and animals in the bee food chain.

Bees are worth £26 billion to the global economy, and £200 million in Britain.

'Bees contribute to global food security and their extinction would represent a  terrible biological disaster,' said Bernard Vallat of the World Organisation  for Animal Health.

U.S. scientists have found 121 different pesticides in samples of bees, wax and  pollen, increasing fears that pesticides are a key problem.

The wipe-out of so many colonies has been dubbed ‘Marie Celeste’ syndrome  because many hives have been found empty, with no sign of dead bees.

The British government’s National Bee Unit denies the existence of CDD over  here, blaming the bloodsucking varroa mite and rainy summers that have stopped  bees foraging for food.

via Bees face extinction as billions of colonies die worldwide | Mail Online.

US youngsters are too fat to fight, warn generals

Rising rates of obesity among young Americans could undermine the future of the US military, two retired generals have warned.

More than a quarter of young Americans are now too fat to fight, they said.

Writing in the Washington Post, the ex-commanders said the fat crisis ruled out more potential military service recruits than any other medical factor.

They want Congress to introduce laws to give US children better nutrition in schools, with less sugar, salt and fat.

John Shalikashvili and Hugh Shelton, both former chairmen of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: "Obesity rates threaten the overall health of America and the future strength of our military."

"We consider this problem so serious from a national security perspective that we have joined more than 130 other retired generals, admirals and senior military leaders in calling on Congress to pass new child nutrition legislation," the commanders added.

The warning comes amid mounting fears that childhood obesity has turned into an "epidemic" affecting an astonishing one in three young American people.

Mr Shalikashvili and Mr Shelton pointed to post-school lunch laws from 1946, which recognised that poor nutrition reduced the pool of military recruits.

"We must act, as we did after World War II, to ensure that our children can one day defend our country, if need be."

via BBC News - US youngsters are too fat to fight, warn generals.

Great reason to get in shape, so you can fight in a war.

How important is geographical isolation in speciation?

A genetic study of island lizards shows that even those that have been geographically isolated for many millions of years have not evolved into separate species as predicted by conventional evolutionary theory.

Professor Roger Thorpe and colleagues Yann Surget-Groba and Helena Johansson, at Bangor University, UK, reveal their findings April 29 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

Since Darwin's study of the Galapagos Islands, archipelagos have played a central role in understanding how new species evolve from existing ones (speciation). Islands epitomize allopatric speciation, where geographic isolation causes individuals of an original species to accumulate sufficient genetic differences to prevent them breeding with each other when they are reunited.

Current day Martinique in the Lesser Antilles is composed of several ancient islands that have only recently coalesced into a single entity. The phylogeny and geology show that these ancient islands have had their own tree lizard (anole) species for about six to eight million years.

Capitalizing on the islands' meeting, the authors genetically tested the lizards for reproductive isolation from one another. In using selectively neutral genetic markers, the authors saw that these anoles are freely exchanging genes and therefore not behaving as separate species. Indeed, there is more genetic isolation between conspecifics from different habitats than between those lizards originating from separate ancient islands.

The findings reject allopatric speciation in a case study from a system thought to exemplify it, and suggest the potential importance of speciation due to differences in ecological conditions (ecological speciation). "The next step is to identify the genes controlling the traits influencing the process of speciation," said Roger Thorpe.

via How important is geographical isolation in speciation?.

Mars’ gypsum can provide evidence of life

Scientists have suggested that if it is ever to be proved that life had existed on Mars, the evidence might be found in the vast fields of gypsum on the Red Planet's surface.

The claim had been made at a NASA conference in Houston, Texas, which was held to coincide with the Astrobiology Science Conference, reports ABC Science.

Professor JWilliam Schopf of the University of California, Los Angeles told the meeting that microscopic fossils have been discovered in gypsum deposits on Earth, and may also exist in similar deposits on Mars.

Schopf says fossilised remains of plankton, diatoms and cyanobacteria, or ''pond scum'', have been discovered in gypsum in the northern Italian Alps.

He says the deposits formed some 5.6 million years ago when the Mediterranean Sea dried up after being cut from the Atlantic Ocean by tectonic plate movement.

Gypsum is a common calcium sulphate dihydrate mineral. It precipitates out of seawater and is usually found in evaporated beds in association with sedimentary rocks. It is very soft and until recently, was not considered the sort of place where fossil evidence for life was likely to be found.

Schopf says if fossils trapped in gypsum can last on Earth for millions of years, they might also be found on the dried up sea beds of Mars as well.

Images of the Martian surface taken from space by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter indicate the existence of gypsum dunes in the northern polar region of the Red Planet.

Dr Steve Squyres, principal investigator for the science payload on NASA''s Mars Exploration Rover Mission, told the meeting that the rover Opportunity, which landed near the Martian equator, was also in an area carpeted with sulphate rocks.

Opportunity touched down on the red planet on 25 January 2004, 21 days after its sister rover Spirit.

It touched down on a dried out Martian flood plain called the Chryse Planitia back on the 20 July 1976 and continued operating until November 1982.

One of the aims of the Viking 1 mission was to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. On board was the Labelled Release Experiment, designed to test for any biological reactions from a sample of Martian soil.

Although the experiment produced result, scientists concluded the reaction was chemical rather than biological.

via Mars’ gypsum can provide evidence of life.

Mammoths had 'anti-freeze blood', gene study finds

Mammoths had a form of "anti-freeze" blood to keep their bodies supplied with oxygen at freezing temperatures.

Nature Genetics reports that scientists "resurrected" a woolly mammoth blood protein to come to their finding.

This protein, known as haemoglobin, is found in red blood cells, where it binds to and carries oxygen.

The team found that mammoths possessed a genetic adaptation allowing their haemoglobin to release oxygen into the body even at low temperatures.

The ability of haemoglobin to release oxygen to the body's tissues is generally inhibited by the cold.

The researchers sequenced haemoglobin genes from the DNA of three Siberian mammoths, tens of thousands of years old, which were preserved in the permafrost.

The mammoth DNA sequences were converted into RNA (a molecule similar to DNA which is central to the production of proteins) and inserted into E. coli bacteria.

The bacteria faithfully manufactured the mammoth protein.

"The resulting haemoglobin molecules are no different than 'going back in time' and taking a blood sample from a real mammoth," said co-author Kevin Campbell, from the University of Manitoba in Canada.

Scientists then tested the "revived" mammoth proteins and found three distinctive changes in the haemoglobin sequence allowed mammoth blood to deliver oxygen to cells even at very low temperatures.

This is something the haemoglobin in living elephants cannot do.  ...

via BBC News - Mammoths had 'anti-freeze blood', gene study finds.

Ninety-year-old West Yorkshire woman hits hole-in-one

A 90-year-old woman from West Yorkshire has amazed her fellow golfers by hitting a hole in one.

Mary Tattersall made the 181yd (165m) shot on the second hole at Shay Grange Golf Centre in Heaton near Bradford.

The pensioner, who has only been playing golf for two years, said she felt amazed and stunned to have achieved the feat.

She was given a special trophy by the club to mark her success on the par three hole.

'Amazing woman'

"I was going around with friends and on the second tee off was amazed to find that I couldn't find my ball and it was in the hole," Ms Tattersall said.

"I was quite amazed really, and stunned, and so were my fellow golfers at the same moment."

Ms Tattersall was 88 when she took up golf to get some exercise and make new friends.

Jordan Gibson, owner of Shay Grange, said she was a natural at the sport.

He said: "It's very rare to get a hole in one. Mary is a real natural with excellent hand and eye co-ordination. She loves golf and plays in all weathers.

"She is an amazing woman, when you see her getting in and out of her car I always feel I should go and help her, but she just jumps out, swings her clubs on her back and she's away."

Ms Tattersall said: "I'm not a competitive person, I only come up to the Shay because it's a very good exercise, better than going to the gym."

via BBC News - Ninety-year-old West Yorkshire woman hits hole-in-one.

Hawking: Time travel will happen

There's something very comforting when a scientist as well regarded as Stephen Hawking admits to keeping quiet for fear of "being labeled a crank."

Thankfully, he seems to have conquered his fears in a new documentary series for the Discovery Channel, in which he has already considered how man might truly conquer space. Or, indeed, how spacemen might come down to our meager Earth and dismember us as so much fast food.

Hawking has already warned in his documentary that we should be very wary about making contact with beings from out there. "If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans," he said in "Stephen Hawking's Universe."

But, as he presented his latest ideas about what travel in the future might resemble, he reportedly admitted that he had kept quiet on the subject for fear of being labeled a heretic by the scientific community.

Thrusting off his heretical shackles, he reportedly suggested that spaceships will one day be so fast that we won't know whether we've come or gone. Hawking suggests that Einstein's theories of relativity will become as relatively obsolete as, who knows, the home phone. He posits that, at some point when we're all long gone, a day on a spaceship traveling at 650 million miles per hour would be akin to one year on Earth.

Please don't expect me to check his math. I can barely total up my savings at Safeway. However, somehow one can imagine that technology will follow an inevitable path toward the unimaginable, a path that will change humanity even more profoundly than the laptop has changed love lives.

He does reportedly stress, however, that time travel will only be performed in a forward motion. Which, sadly, excludes a sudden reality show re-enactment of Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." ...

via Hawking: Time travel will happen | Technically Incorrect - CNET News.

Prostate cancer vaccine wins US approval

A "vaccine" which harnesses the body's own immune system to fight prostate cancer has been approved for use by US drug regulators.

Provenge - which is designed to be used in men with advanced disease - is the first of its kind to be accepted by the Food and Drug Administration.

Each dose has to be individually tailored and it is an expensive treatment at $93,000 per patient.

It will add to, rather than replace, existing treatments, said experts.

Doctors have been working on therapies that prompt the immune system to fight tumours for decades.

Potential success stories include an experimental vaccine for melanoma which is in the late stages of development.

This latest therapy is made by collecting special blood cells from each patient that help the immune system recognise cancer as a threat.

These are then mixed with a protein found on most prostate cancer cells and a substance which kick-starts the immune response.

Advanced disease

The drug is not a "cure" but is used in advanced prostate cancer that has spread to other sites in the body and is no longer responding to standard hormone treatment.

Clinical trials showed that the treatment extended the lives of patients by four months.

This compares with an average of three months with chemotherapy.

Dr Phil Kantoff, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who helped run the studies of Provenge said: "The big news here is that this is the first immunotherapy to win approval, and I suspect within five to ten years immunotherapies will be a big part of cancer therapy in general."

Prostate cancer accounts for about 12% of male deaths from cancer in the UK and is the second most common cause of cancer death in men.

In older men aged 85 and over, the disease is the most common cause of all deaths from cancer.

John Neate, chief executive of The Prostate Cancer Charity, said: "The news that this type of immunotherapy may offer additional survival benefit is promising."

But he added: "There are still questions to answer, even if the treatment fulfils its early promise.

"At present, we believe there are currently no laboratories in Europe equipped to undertake this treatment.

"Furthermore, this treatment is not currently approved in the UK and it will still be some years before doctors know enough about its long term effectiveness and side effects to be confident about its potential place in the armoury against advanced prostate cancer."

Dr Chris Parker, Cancer Research UK's prostate cancer expert said: "We hope this approval will open new avenues of research into using a patient's own immune system to treat cancer."

via BBC News - Prostate cancer vaccine wins US approval.

Berkeley Scientists Discover Inexpensive Metal Catalyst for Generating Hydrogen from Water

Hydrogen would command a key role in future renewable energy technologies, experts agree, if a relatively cheap, efficient and carbon-neutral means of producing it can be developed. An important step towards this elusive goal has been taken by a team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley. The team has discovered an inexpensive metal catalyst that can effectively generate hydrogen gas from water.

“Our new proton reduction catalyst is based on a molybdenum-oxo metal complex that is about 70 times cheaper than platinum, today’s most widely used metal catalyst for splitting the water molecule,” said Hemamala Karunadasa, one of the co-discoverers of this complex. “In addition, our catalyst does not require organic additives, and can operate in neutral water, even if it is dirty, and can operate in sea water, the most abundant source of hydrogen on earth and a natural electrolyte. These qualities make our catalyst ideal for renewable energy and sustainable chemistry.”

Karunadasa holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division and UC Berkeley’s Chemistry Department. She is the lead author of a paper describing this work that appears in the April 29, 2010 issue of the journal Nature, titled “A molecular molybdenum-oxo catalyst for generating hydrogen from water.” Co-authors of this paper were Christopher Chang and Jeffrey Long, who also hold joint appointments with Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley. Chang, in addition, is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

Hydrogen gas, whether combusted or used in fuel cells to generate electricity, emits only water vapor as an exhaust product, which is why this nation would already be rolling towards a hydrogen economy if only there were hydrogen wells to tap. However, hydrogen gas does not occur naturally and has to be produced. Most of the hydrogen gas in the United States today comes from natural gas, a fossil fuel. While inexpensive, this technique adds huge volumes of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Hydrogen can also be produced through the electrolysis of water – using electricity to split molecules of water into molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. This is an environmentally clean and sustainable method of production – especially if the electricity is generated via a renewable technology such as solar or wind – but requires a water-splitting catalyst.

Nature has developed extremely efficient water-splitting enzymes – called hydrogenases – for use by plants during photosynthesis, however, these enzymes are highly unstable and easily deactivated when removed from their native environment. Human activities demand a stable metal catalyst that can operate under non-biological settings.

Metal catalysts are commercially available, but they are low valence precious metals whose high costs make their widespread use prohibitive. For example, platinum, the best of them, costs some $2,000 an ounce.

“The basic scientific challenge has been to create earth-abundant molecular systems that produce hydrogen from water with high catalytic activity and stability,” Chang says. “We believe our discovery of a molecular molybdenum-oxo catalyst for generating hydrogen from water without the use of additional acids or organic co-solvents establishes a new chemical paradigm for creating reduction catalysts that are highly active and robust in aqueous media.”

The molybdenum-oxo complex that Karunadasa, Chang and Long discovered is a high valence metal with the chemical name of (PY5Me2)Mo-oxo. In their studies, the research team found that this complex catalyzes the generation of hydrogen from neutral buffered water or even sea water with a turnover frequency of 2.4 moles of hydrogen per mole of catalyst per second.

Long says, “This metal-oxo complex represents a distinct molecular motif for reduction catalysis that has high activity and stability in water. We are now focused on modifying the PY5Me ligand portion of the complex and investigating other metal complexes based on similar ligand platforms to further facilitate electrical charge-driven as well as light-driven catalytic processes. Our particular emphasis is on chemistry relevant to sustainable energy cycles.” ...

via Berkeley Scientists Discover Inexpensive Metal Catalyst for Generating Hydrogen from Water « Berkeley Lab News Center.

Fighting fungal infections with bacteria

A bacterial pathogen can communicate with yeast to block the development of drug-resistant yeast infections, say Irish scientists writing in the May issue of Microbiology. The research could be a step towards new strategies to prevent hospital-acquired infections associated with medical implants.Researchers from University College Cork in Ireland studied the interaction between the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which is often associated with severe burns, and the yeast Candida albicans, which can grow on plastic surfaces such as catheters. Both microbes are very common and although they are normally harmless to healthy individuals, they can cause disease in immunocompromised people.

The team discovered that molecules produced by P. aeruginosa bacteria were able to hinder the development of C. albicans 'biofilms' on silicone, when the yeast cells clump together on the surface of the plastic. Interestingly, the interaction between the two organisms did not depend on the well-studied bacterial communication system called Quorum Sensing, indicating that a novel signalling mechanism was at play.

C. albicans is the most common hospital-acquired fungal infection and can cause illness by sticking to and colonising plastic surfaces implanted in the body such as catheters, cardiac devices or prosthetic joints. This biofilm formation is a key aspect of C. albicans infection and is problematic as biofilms are often resistant to the antibiotics used to treat them. Dr John Morrissey, who led the team of researchers, said, "Candida albicans can cause very serious deep infections in susceptible patients and it is often found in biofilm form. It is therefore important to understand the biofilm process and how it might be controlled."

Dr Morrissey believes his work may lead to significant clinical benefits. "If we can exploit the same inhibitory strategy that the bacterium P. aeruginosa uses, then we might be able to design drugs that can be used as antimicrobials to disperse yeast biofilms after they form, or as additives onto plastics to prevent biofilm formation on medical implants," he said. "The next steps are to identify the chemical that the bacterium produces and to find out what its target in the yeast is. We can then see whether this will be a feasible lead for the development of new drugs for clinical application."

via Fighting fungal infections with bacteria.