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The Neanderthal With the World's Oldest Tumor

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:30:41 -0600

A benign bone tumor that afflicts modern-day humans has now been found in one of our ancestors: a Neanderthal more than 120,000 years old.

The discovery of a fibrous dysplasia in a Neanderthal rib is the earliest known bone tumor on record, predating other tumors by more than 100,000 years. The rib, recovered from a site in Krapina, Croatia, indicates that Neanderthals were susceptible to the same types of tumors modern-day humans get, despite living in a remarkably different environment.

“They didn’t have pesticides, but they probably were sleeping in caves with burning fires,” says David Frayer, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas and the co-author of a new paper about the discovery. “They were probably inhaling a lot of smoke from the caves. So the air was not completely free of pollutants—but certainly, these Neanderthals weren’t smoking cigarettes.”

The tumor’s journey from inside a bone over 120,000 years old to the pages of the journal PLOS ONE was a long one. It started in 1899, when a paleontologist named Dragutin Gorjanovic-Kramberger was digging by a cave near the Croatian village of Krapina. After coming upon a single human molar, a pile of animal bones, and a small stone tool, Gorjanovic-Kramberger and colleagues began an excavation at the site.

They soon realized they had stumbled upon the world’s largest collection of Neanderthal artifacts.

Among the findings: animal bones, stone tools, and almost 900 fossilized Neanderthal remains dating back more than 120,000 years. In 1918, Gorjanovic-Kramberger described the bones:

“It is perfectly logical to assume that these Neanderthal men, who spent day and night in the open, eating a simple diet, had to be healthy and less prone to illnesses we have today. Accidents were therefore far more common in their struggle to survive and caused injury or even mutilation to the body.”

But the Neanderthals also suffered from illness: conditions like severe arthritis, periodontitis, and tuberculosis, whose tell-tale signs have remained on the bones for more than 100,000 years.

Facebook Edition!

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:28:10 -0600

Hello fellow followers. I have created a new Facebook page that gets direct feeds from here. If you prefer that method, it is now available via https://www.facebook.com/becauseofscience

Introducing Project Loon: Balloon-powered Internet access

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:30:28 -0600

The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem.

There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity—jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month’s income.

Solving these problems isn’t simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we’re unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access.

7 Takeaways From Supreme Court's Gene Patent Decision

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:53:42 -0600

What does the decision mean for patients and the biotech industry? We talked to experts about some of the big takeaways:

1. Naturally occurring genes are no longer patentable.

The Court on Thursday sided with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and threw out patents held by Utah-based Myriad Genetics used in a popular but expensive breast and ovarian cancer test that detects mutations in the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2.

The test gained national attention after actress Angelina Jolie revealed that herdecision to undergo a double mastectomy was the result of testing positive for one of the mutations.

This week’s ruling, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, states that naturally occurring DNA segments are not patentable.

“I think the major takeaway is that human genes as they exist in [cells] are unpatentable subject matters going forward,” said Jacob Sherkow, a fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Law and the Biosciences.

The ruling applies not only to BRCA1 and 2, but also to thousands of other patented genes associated with various diseases such as colon cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and muscular dystrophy.

2. Synthetic DNA is still fair game.

The Court tried to strike a balance in its ruling by banning some types of gene patents but not others.

While companies can no longer patent genes with the same sequences found in cells, the decision allows edited forms of genes not found in nature—known as complementary DNA, or cDNA—to be patented.

cDNA is not useful for diagnostic tests, but it is crucial for producing protein-based drugs, explained Robert Cook-Deegan, a professor of genome ethics, law, and policy at Duke University’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy.

“Those are the billion-dollar molecule patents,” Cook-Deegan said. “Biotech companies care a great deal about cDNA patents, and it should be reassuring to them that those patents are still fine.”

Hank Greely, a bioethicist and law professor at Stanford University, predicts

cDNA patents will become even more valuable as scientists move beyond merely exploiting naturally occurring proteins.

“In the longer run, as we move into an era of synthetic biology, where we start trying to improve upon nature, then I think [cDNA patents] will be important,” Greely said.

3. Prices for testing genetic diseases are already falling.

Hours after the ruling was announced, other biotech companies announced competing tests for the BRCA1 and 2 genes. One company, DNATraits, said it will offer the test for $995—about one-third the cost of Myriad’s test.

Cook-Deegan said he was surprised at how fast companies reacted to the Court ruling.

“At least one company thinks they can safely enter the market,” he said, referring to DNATraits. “They think they can’t get sued, and I think they’re probably right.”

4. It could get easier to sequence whole genomes.

The high court’s ruling could help clear the way for companies that are developing whole genome sequencing technologies that determine an organism’s entire DNA sequence at once, rather than one gene at a time.

“Because Myriad and other companies had patents directed to pieces of isolated genomic DNA, it was at least an open question whether whole genome sequencing would have infringed on those patents,” Sherkow said.

“I don’t think it resolves the issue definitively, but the Court’s ruling opens the door for whole genome sequencing to proceed without the fear of being sued for patent infringement.”

5. There are implications beyond human genes.

Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University, says the ruling will extend beyond companies that focus on human genes because it “applies to not just human genes, but also patents over plant, animal, and microbial genes.

“So I think there’s going to be some upheaval in parts of the biotech world beyond just human [gene] companies.”

6. Whether Myriad’s secret patient database will be opened is unclear.

Cook-Deegan of Duke University called the Court’s ruling “really sensible,” but thinks that Myriad should be forced to publicize its database of results from women who have taken its tests over the years.

“Myriad has eight years of data that they have not shared publicly. I want to know what’s going to happen to that data,” Cook-Deegan said. “As far as I’m concerned, everyone who’s done the tests anywhere in the world should have the rights to access that data because they were acquired under an illegal monopoly.”

But Stanford’s Sherkow thinks that’s unlikely to happen. “The Court’s decision does not implicate Myriad’s database of clinical outcomes,” he said. “Myriad can continue to keep those as trade secrets, and they don’t have to disclose that information.”

7. The ruling might not actually matter that much.

While the ACLU hailed the Court’s decision as a major victory for “civil liberties, scientific freedom, patients, and the future of personalized medicine,” Stanford’s Greely argued that the ruling is relatively unimportant.

One reason is that the gene patents held by many companies were set to expire soon anyway—in the case of Myriad, in 2016. “They were going to disappear as a problem,” Greely said.

Furthermore, the old gene patents don’t affect many current tests that only look at small bits of a gene, as opposed to the entire gene.

“The new technologies for sequencing would probably not even infringe on the Myriad patents anyway because of the way the patents were written and how the new technologies actually do the testing,” Greely said.

The Court’s ruling also leaves other legal questions unanswered. For example, can naturally occurring proteins or molecules be patented?

The answer to that question would ultimately have a more significant impact on the biotech industry, Greely says, because many modern drugs start out as naturally occurring molecules.

Early bird beat Archaeopteryx to worm by 10m years

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 16:30:37 -0600

A prehistoric beast the size of a pheasant has become a contender for the title of oldest bird to stalk the Earth.

The small, feathered “Dawn” bird lived around 160m years ago, about 10m years before Archaeopteryx, which holds the official title of the earliest bird known to science.

The new species, which scientists have named Aurornis xui, had claws and a long tail, with front and hind legs similar to those of Archaeopteryx, but some features of its bones were more primitive. It measured 50cm from its beak to the tip of its tail.

Encased in sedimentary rock, the fossil preserved traces of downy feathers along the animal’s tail, neck and chest, but the absence of larger feathers suggests it was not able to fly.

When scientists reconstructed the evolutionary tree of similar beasts using measurements from their skeletons, A xui appeared on the bird lineage, but closer to the base of the tree than Archaeopteryx.

“It’s an important fossil,” said Gareth Dyke, a senior palaeontologist involved in the study at Southampton University. “Aurornis pushes Archaeopteryx off its perch as the oldest member of the bird lineage.”

Archaeopteryx holds a prized position in evolutionary history. The fossil, discovered in Germany in 1861, proved that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs, and was the first fossil to support Darwin’s theory of evolution, which had been published only two years earlier.

Quantum gravity takes singularity out of black holes

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:30:42 -0600

Falling into a black hole may not be as final as it seems. Apply a quantum theory of gravity to these bizarre objects and the all-crushing singularity at their core disappears.

In its place is something that looks a lot like an entry point to another universe. Most immediately, that could help resolve the nagging information loss paradox that dogs black holes.

Though no human is likely to fall into a black hole anytime soon, imagining what would happen if they did is a great way to probe some of the biggest mysteries in the universe. Most recently this has led to something known as the black hole firewall paradox – but black holes have long been a source of cosmic puzzles.

According to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, if a black hole swallows you, your chances of survival are nil. You’ll first be torn apart by the black hole’s tidal forces, a process whimsically named spaghettification.

Eventually, you’ll reach the singularity, where the gravitational field is infinitely strong. At that point, you’ll be crushed to an infinite density. Unfortunately, general relativity provides no basis for working out what happens next. “When you reach the singularity in general relativity, physics just stops, the equations break down,” says Abhay Ashtekar of Pennsylvania State University.

The same problem crops up when trying to explain the big bang, which is thought to have started with a singularity. So in 2006, Ashtekar and colleagues applied loop quantum gravity to the birth of the universe. LQG combines general relativity with quantum mechanics and defines space-time as a web of indivisible chunks of about 10-35 metres in size. The team found that as they rewound time in an LQG universe, they reached the big bang, but no singularity – instead they crossed a “quantum bridge” into another older universe. This is the basis for the “big bounce” theory of our universe’s origins.

Now Jorge Pullin at Louisiana State University and Rodolfo Gambini at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, have applied LQG on a much smaller scale – to an individual black hole – in the hope of removing that singularity too. To simplify things, the pair applied the equations of LQG to a model of a spherically symmetrical, non-rotating “Schwarzschild” black hole.

In this new model, the gravitational field still increases as you near the black hole’s core. But unlike previous models, this doesn’t end in a singularity. Instead gravity eventually reduces, as if you’ve come out the other end of the black hole and landed either in another region of our universe, or another universe altogether. Despite only holding for a simple model of a black hole, the researchers – and Ashtekar – believe the theory may banish singularities from real black holes too.

That would mean that black holes can serve as portals to other universes. While other theories, not to mention some works of science fiction, have suggested this, the trouble was that nothing could pass through the portal because of the singularity. The removal of the singularity is unlikely to be of immediate practical use, but it could help with at least one of the paradoxes surrounding black holes, the information loss problem.

A black hole soaks up information along with the matter it swallows, but black holes are also supposed to evaporate over time. That would cause the information to disappear forever, defying quantum theory. But if a black hole has no singularity, then the information needn’t be lost – it may just tunnel its way through to another universe. “Information doesn’t disappear, it leaks out,” says Pullin.

Scientists develop CO2 sequestration technique that produces 'supergreen' hydrogen fuel

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:30:24 -0600

Lawrence Livermore scientists have discovered and demonstrated a new technique to remove and store atmospheric carbon dioxide while generating carbon-negative hydrogen and producing alkalinity, which can be used to offset ocean acidification.

The team demonstrated, at a laboratory scale, a system that uses the acidity normally produced in saline water electrolysis to accelerate silicate mineral dissolution while producing hydrogen fuel and other gases. The resulting electrolyte solution was shown to be significantly elevated in hydroxide concentration that in turn proved strongly absorptive and retentive of atmospheric CO2.

Further, the researchers suggest that the carbonate and bicarbonate produced in the process could be used to mitigate ongoing ocean acidification, similar to how an Alka Seltzer neutralizes excess acid in the stomach.

“We not only found a way to remove and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while producing valuable H2, we also suggest that we can help save marine ecosystems with this new technique,” said Greg Rau, an LLNL visiting scientist, senior scientist at UC Santa Cruz and lead author of a paper appearing this week (May 27) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

HIV weak spot found in Scripps-led study

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 16:30:34 -0600

A weak spot on the surface of HIV-1, the most prevalent AIDS virus, is far larger than originally thought, according to a study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute.

This “supersite of immune vulnerability” may be helpful in developing an AIDS vaccine, said the study published Sunday in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. Its first author is Leopold Kong and senior author is Ian A. Wilson, both of Scripps.

Much of HIV’s surface mutates rapidly, escaping the body’s immune system and also vaccines. But certain regions of the surface required for infection can’t mutate much. These areas can be targeted by antibodies that neutralize a broad range of HIV strains.

Wilson and colleagues have searched for years for these broadly neutralizing antibodies, which they plan to use as a template for a vaccine. The newly discovered weak region provides a good target for producing even more of the broadly neutralizing antibodies, the paper said.

The paper “tracks a course for the next critical step in vaccine design,” said infectious disease researcher Robert C. Liddington of the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, who was not involved in the study. Liddington’s research includes broadly neutralizing antibodies, for HIV and influenza, another highly mutable virus.

Producing a so-called universal flu vaccine that protects against the great majority of strains requires some of the same technology needed for an HIV vaccine. Wilson and his colleagues are researching a universal flu vaccine in a partnership with Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a division of Johnson & Johnson.

The vulnerable region occurs on a part of the HIV shell called gp120, used by the virus to attach to cells it infects. Because it performs an essential function, mutations on gp120 are constrained. That appears to make the region an ideal vaccine target.

Quantum Magnetism Observed For First Time, Physicists Say

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 16:30:26 -0600

Using super-chilled atoms, physicists have for the first time observed a weird phenomenon called quantum magnetism, which describes the behavior of single atoms as they act like tiny bar magnets.

Quantum magnetism is a bit different from classical magnetism, the kind you see when you stick a magnet to a fridge, because individual atoms have a quality called spin, which is quantized, or in discrete states (usually called up or down). Seeing the behavior of individual atoms has been hard to do, though, because it required cooling atoms to extremely cold temperatures and finding a way to “trap” them.

The new finding, detailed in the May 24 issue of the journal Science, also opens the door to better understanding physical phenomena, such as superconductivity, which seems to be connected to the collective quantum properties of some materials.

Accidental find shows Vitamin C kills tuberculosis

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 16:30:33 -0600

Scientists said Tuesday they had managed to kill lab-grown tuberculosis (TB) bacteria with good old Vitamin C — an “unexpected” discovery they hope will lead to better, cheaper drugs.

A team from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York made the accidental find while researching how TB bacteria become resistant to the TB drug isoniazid.

The researchers added isoniazid and a “reducing agent” known as cysteine to the TB in a test tube, expecting the bacteria to develop drug resistance.

Instead, the team “ended up killing off the culture”, according to the study’s senior author William Jacobs, who said the result was “totally unexpected”.

Reducing agents chemically reduce other substances.

The team then replaced the cysteine in the experiment with another reducing agent — Vitamin C.

It, too, killed the bacteria.

“I was in disbelief,” said Jacobs of the outcome published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Even more surprisingly… when we left out the TB drug isoniazid and just had Vitamin C alone, we discovered that Vitamin C kills tuberculosis.”

Scavenger cells help limbs to regrow

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 16:30:31 -0600

An immune system cell that helps limbs regrow in salamanders brings hope that we may eventually be able to mimic the animal’s amazing regenerative powers, say Australian researchers.

The findings by Dr James Godwin, of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, and colleagues, are published in today’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Salamanders (axolotls) are unique amongst vertebrates in being able to repair their hearts, tails, spinal cord and brain, and even regrow whole limbs during adult life, says Godwin.

He sees their “perfect regeneration” as a holy grail. “We’re trying to work out what the requirements are so we can unlock that potential in mammals,” he says.

First-ever high-resolution images of a molecule as it breaks and reforms chemical bonds

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 16:30:27 -0600

hen Felix Fischer of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) set out to develop nanostructures made of graphene using a new, controlled approach to chemical reactions, the first result was a surprise: spectacular images of individual carbon atoms and the bonds between them.

“We weren’t thinking about making beautiful images; the reactions themselves were the goal,” says Fischer, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division (MSD) and a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. “But to really see what was happening at the single-atom level we had to use a uniquely sensitive atomic force microscope in Michael Crommie’s laboratory.” Crommie is an MSD scientist and a professor of physics at UC Berkeley.

What the microscope showed the researchers, says Fischer, “was amazing.” The specific outcomes of the reaction were themselves unexpected, but the visual evidence was even more so. “Nobody has ever taken direct, single-bond-resolved images of individual molecules, right before and immediately after a complex organic reaction,” Fischer says.

The researchers report their results in the June 7, 2013 edition of the journal Science, available in advance on Science Express.

Breast Milk Protein HAMLET Reverses Antibiotic Resistance in MRSA, Pneumococcus

Fri, 31 May 2013 16:30:27 -0600

According to a new study reported in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, a human breast milk protein complex called HAMLET can help reverse the antibiotic resistance of bacterial species, including penicillin-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

In petri dish and animal experiments, HAMLET (Human Alpha-lactalbumin Made Lethal to Tumor Cells) increased bacteria’s sensitivity to multiple classes of antibiotics, such as penicillin and erythromycin.

“The effect was so pronounced that bacteria including penicillin-resistant S. pneumoniae and methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) regained sensitivity to the antibiotics they were previously able to beat,” said lead author Laura Marks and her colleagues from the University at Buffalo.

In a 2012 study published in PLoS ONE, the team described HAMLET’s effects against S. pneumoniae, also Acinetobacter baumanii and Moraxella catarrhalis. The newly-published PLoS ONE paper details protein’s effects on MRSA.

“HAMLET has the potential minimize the concentrations of antibiotics we need to use to fight infections, and enable us to use well-established antibiotics against resistant strains again,” explained senior author Prof Anders Hakansson.

Bioteeth From Stem-Cells Will Regrow Complete Teeth, Superior to Implants

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:31:01 -0600

Replacing missing teeth with new bioengineered teeth, grown from stem cells generated from a person’s own gum cells, is a future method that could be superior to the currently used implant technology, but for now not all required pieces are in place.

New research, published in the Journal of Dental Research and led by Professor Paul Sharpe, an expert in craniofacial development and stem cell biology at King’s College London’s Dental Institute, describes an important preliminary step towards the development of this method by sourcing the required cells from a patient’s own gum.

Research towards producing bioengineered teeth, also called bioteeth, aims to grow new and natural teeth by employing stem cell technology which generates immature teeth (teeth primordia) that mimic those in the embryo. These can be transplanted as small cell pellets into the adult jaw to develop into functional teeth, given the right circumstances, programming and assembly — all of that difficult to master and not even tested yet — the researchers say.

Remarkably, despite the very different environments, embryonic teeth primordia were found to develop normally in the adult mouth. Embryonic tooth primordia cells can readily form immature teeth following dissociation into single cell populations and subsequent recombination, but until now the available sources of these cells were impractical to use in a general therapy.

“What is required is the identification of adult sources of human epithelial and mesenchymal [stem] cells that can be obtained in sufficient numbers to make biotooth formation a viable alternative to dental implants,” said Sharpe.

Russian researchers find more evidence to support notion that lightning is caused by cosmic rays

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:30:42 -0600

Russian physicists Alex Gurevich and Anatoly Karashtin claim, in a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, they have found more evidence to support their idea that lightning is caused by cosmic rays. The notion was first proposed by Gurevich back in 1992, and has been a source of debate ever since.

No one really knows what causes lightning to form and strike—the prevailing view is that it comes about as a result of collisions between ice crystals in clouds and hail stones. But because clouds and the lightning they produce are unpredictable and hard to pin down, no one has been able to prove this theory. Another theory, proposed by Gurevich twenty years ago, says that lightning is formed from the collisions between cosmic rays and water droplets present in thunderclouds. Now he and a colleague claim to have found evidence to support this idea.

Gurevich suggests that cosmic rays entering thunder clouds cause the air in them to be ionized, resulting in a lot of free electrons floating around. The electronic field already present in the cloud, he continues, leads to the free electrons being boosted to higher energies. When the electrons present in the air collide with water atoms, more electrons are released, setting off what he describes as an avalanche of high-energy particles that eventually give way to a “runaway breakdown”—a discharge that is witnessed as a lightning strike.

Consumption of artificially and sugar-sweetened beverages cause type 2 diabetes

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:30:30 -0600

Background: It has been extensively shown, mainly in US populations, that sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) are associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D), but less is known about the effects of artificially sweetened beverages (ASBs).

Objective: We evaluated the association between self-reported SSB, ASB, and 100% fruit juice consumption and T2D risk over 14 y of follow-up in the French prospective Etude Epidémiologique auprès des femmes de la Mutuelle Générale de l’Education Nationale–European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition cohort.

Design: A total of 66,118 women were followed from 1993, and 1369 incident cases of T2D were diagnosed during the follow-up. Cox regression models were used to estimate HRs and 95% CIs for T2D risk.

Results: The average consumption of sweetened beverages in consumers was 328 and 568 mL/wk for SSBs and ASBs, respectively. Compared with nonconsumers, women in the highest quartiles of SSB and ASB consumers were at increased risk of T2D with HRs (95% CIs) of 1.34 (1.05, 1.71) and 2.21 (1.56, 3.14) for women who consumed >359 and >603 mL/wk of SSBs and ASBs, respectively. Strong positive trends in T2D risk were also observed across quartiles of consumption for both types of beverage (P = 0.0088 and P < 0.0001, respectively). In sensitivity analyses, associations were partly mediated by BMI, although there was still a strong significant independent effect. No association was observed for 100% fruit juice consumption.

Conclusions: Both SSB consumption and ASB consumption were associated with increased T2D risk. We cannot rule out that factors other than ASB consumption that we did not control for are responsible for the association with diabetes, and randomized trials are required to prove a causal link between ASB consumption and T2D.

Physicists Attempt to Measure Gravitational Mass of Antihydrogen

Sun, 19 May 2013 16:30:42 -0600

“The atoms that make up ordinary matter fall down, so do antimatter atoms fall up? Do they experience gravity the same way as ordinary atoms, or is there such a thing as antigravity?”

“These questions have long intrigued physicists,” said Dr Joel Fajans of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, co-author of a paper reporting the results in Nature Communications. “Because in the unlikely event that antimatter falls upwards, we’d have to fundamentally revise our view of physics and rethink how the Universe works.”

So far, all the evidence that gravity is the same for matter and antimatter is indirect, so the team decided to use their ongoing antihydrogen research to tackle the question directly.

The ALPHA experiment captures antiprotons and combines them with antielectons (positrons) to make antihydrogen atoms, which are stored and studied for a few seconds in a magnetic trap. Afterward, however, the trap is turned off and the atoms fall out. The researchers realized that by analyzing how antihydrogen fell out of the trap, they could determine if gravity pulled on antihydrogen differently than on hydrogen – the anomaly would be noticeable in ALPHA’s existing data on 434 anti-atoms.

New forensic technique for estimating time of death by checking internal clock of the human brain

Sat, 18 May 2013 16:30:36 -0600

People with severe depression have a disrupted “biological clock” that makes it seem as if they are living in a different time zone to the rest of the healthy population living alongside them, a study has found.

It is the first time that depression has been linked unequivocally to the internal circadian clock of the human brain, which regulates the body’s day-and-night cycle over a 24 hour period, scientists said.

The researchers found that they could estimate a healthy person’s time of death to within a few hours by analysing the activity levels of a set of genes - whether they are switched on ‘high’ or ‘low’ - within certain regions of the deceased brain.

However, this correlation broke down when they analysed the autopsied brains of people who had suffered from depression. Their gene activity bore little relationship to the hour of death, which indicated they suffered a severely disrupted sleeping pattern, the scientists found.

The findings suggest that patients with severe depression could be better treated if there was some way of improving the relationship between the daily cycle of gene activity of the brain with the actual time of day or night, they said.

“We think the depressed individuals are more likely to be out-of-sync with the regular wake-sleep timing,” said Jun Li of the University of Michigan, the lead author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Reservoir deep under Ontario holds billion-year-old water

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:30:34 -0600

Scientists working 2.4 kilometres below Earth’s surface in a Canadian mine have tapped a source of water that has remained isolated for at least a billion years. The researchers say they do not yet know whether anything has been living in it all this time, but the water contains high levels of methane and hydrogen — the right stuff to support life.

Micrometre-scale pockets in minerals billions of years old can hold water that was trapped during the minerals’ formation. But no source of free-flowing water passing through interconnected cracks or pores in Earth’s crust has previously been shown to have stayed isolated for more than tens of millions of years.

“We were expecting these fluids to be possibly tens, perhaps even hundreds of millions of years of age,” says Chris Ballentine, a geochemist at the University of Manchester, UK. He and his team carefully captured water flowing through fractures in the 2.7-billion-year-old sulphide deposits in a copper and zinc mine near Timmins, Ontario, ensuring that the water did not come into contact with mine air.

To date the water, the team used three lines of evidence, all based on the relative abundances of various isotopes of noble gases present in the water. The authors determined that the fluid could not have contacted Earth’s atmosphere — and so been at the planet’s surface — for at least 1 billion years, and possibly for as long as 2.64 billion years, not long after the rocks it flows through formed. The study appears today in Nature1.

Scientists create human stem cells through cloning

Thu, 16 May 2013 16:30:38 -0600

After more than 15 years of failures by scientists around the world and one outright fraud, biologists have finally created human stem cells by the same technique that produced Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996: They transplanted genetic material from an adult cell into an egg whose own DNA had been removed.

The result is a harvest of human embryonic stem cells, the seemingly magic cells capable of morphing into any of the 200-plus kinds that make up a person.

The feat, reported on Wednesday in the journal Cell, could re-ignite the field of stem-cell medicine, which has been hobbled by technical challenges as well as ethical issues.

Until now, the most natural sources of human stem cells have been human embryos, whose use in research poses ethical quandaries. The technique announced on Wednesday, by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center, uses unfertilized human eggs.

Eliminating the need for human embryos could boost attempts to use stem cells and their progeny to replace cells damaged or destroyed in heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries and other devastating conditions.

But the achievement could also revive fears of reproductive cloning, or producing genetic copies of living (or dead) individuals.