Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

UCLA scientists researching bone-loss prevention strategies are set to begin trail that will ultimately see rodents sent up to the International Space Station.

The research team said they hope their work will lead to better treatment strategies for osteoporosis, more efficient methods of bone repair and ways to prevent bone loss during lengthy space travel.

With grant funding provided by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the UCLA study will focus on the efficacy of a molecule called NELL-1 in causing stem cells to trigger bone growth and halt bone degeneration.

“NELL-1 holds tremendous hope, not only for preventing bone loss but one day even restoring healthy bone,” said team member Dr. Kang Ting, a professor in dentistry at UCLA. “For patients who are bed-bound and suffering from bone loss, it could be life-changing.”

The UCLA team will mostly be responsible for performing ground-based rodent trials of NELL-1, while NASA and CASIS will take responsibility for trials conducted aboard the ISS.

“A group of 40 rodents will be sent to the International Space Station US National Laboratory onboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule, where they will live for two months in a microgravity environment during the first ever test of NELL-1 in space,” said Julie Robinson, NASA’s chief scientist for the International Space Station program at the Johnson Space Center.

The space-based studies will enable the examination of NELL-1 in way that would not be possible on Earth, the researchers said.

“Besides testing the limits of NELL-1’s robust bone-producing effects, this mission will provide new insights about bone biology and could uncover important clues for curing diseases such as osteoporosis,” said Ben Wu, a professor of bioengineering at UCLA.

The new UCLA study comes as NASA is also getting set to perform another bone health study involving tiny millimeter-long roundworms known as Caenorhabditis elegans.

That experiment calls for ISS crew members to raise the worms in microgravity, along with a different batch in a centrifuge set to model Earth’s gravity. This will allow a direct contrast of the effects of different gravity levels on the worms in orbit.

Another experiment being performed by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) calls for astronauts on the ISS to cultivate four different generations of the worm, specimens of which will come back to Earth in the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in January.

“The astronauts will cultivate multiple generations of the organism, so we can examine the organisms in different states of development,” said Atsushi Higashitani, principal investigator for both investigations with Tohoku University in Japan. “Our studies will help clarify how and why these changes to health take place in microgravity and determine if the adaptations to space are transmitted from one cell generation to another without changing the basic DNA of an organism.”

“Then, we can investigate if those effects could be treated with different medicines or therapies,” he added.

C. elegans grown in each study will be compared to other worm grown in Japan, the researchers noted.

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The brain may use new pathways to recall old memories, including those of the traumatic events that can trigger post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to a new study appearing in the latest edition of the journal Nature.
In an animal study funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers from the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine found that the brains of rats used a separate brain pathway to recall older fear memories, not the same one used to recall it when it was fresh.
After the rats were conditioned to fear a tone associated with a mild shock, their overt behavior remained unchanged. But the pathway responsible for remembering the traumatic event was altered, and may have grown even stronger, the study authors explained.
As soon as the fear conditioning was complete, a circuit running from the brain’s prefrontal cortex to the part of the amygdala responsible for controlling fear was activated to retrieve the memory, the researchers explained.
Something changed
Several days later, however, they found that the task had been shifted to a different circuit, one running from the prefrontal cortex to an area in the thalamus. This part of the brain, which is known as the paraventricular region (PVT), then communicates with a different region of the amygdala – one that orchestrates fear learning and expression.
Dr. Quirk and his colleagues used a genetic/laser technique called optogenetics to detect the moving memory, and they believe that the PVT could cause fear to become integrated with other adaptive responses, such as stress, thereby strengthening the fear memory.
“While our memories feel constant across time, the neural pathways supporting them actually change with the time,” said study author, Dr. Gregory Quirk. “Uncovering new pathways for old memories could change scientists’ view of post-traumatic stress disorder, in which fearful events occur months or years prior to the onset of symptoms.”
Patients suffering from PTSD and other anxiety disorders often experience prolonged and exaggerated bouts of fear. The authors of the study suggests that this could involve the disruption of a gradual shifting of brain circuitry responsible for retrieving memories of those fear-inducing events.
“In people with anxiety disorders, any disruption of timing-dependent regulation in retrieval circuits might worsen fear responses occurring long after a traumatic event,” he said.
Examining the PVT further
In a second study, published in the same issue of Nature, researchers from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and a team of colleagues from the US, France, and China explained how the long-term fear memory circuit translates stress detection into adaptive behaviors in mice.
This research team, which was led by associate professor Dr. Bo Li, discovered the same changes in memory retrieval circuitry over time, and used powerful genetic-chemical and optogenetic methods to switch pathways on and off.
By doing so, they conclusively demonstrated that neurons originating in the PVT regulate fear processing by acting on a class of neurons that store fear memories in the central region of the amygdala. This activity was traced back to the action of a messenger chemical, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which had been previously linked to mood and anxiety disorders.
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John Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

It may be hard for modern people who consider themselves intellectually sensitive to be told that we are emotionally no better than our early ancestors were. Surely we have been able to throw off the shackles of our evolutionary history and allow intelligence to triumph–right?

Yeah, right.

Discovery’s Trace Dominguez explains that jealousy is not only still prevalent (duh), but likely to be a hangover from the earliest days of humanity, when we lived solely in Africa.

It also has its roots in basically the same things it does today: suspicion, envy, mistrust, anxiety, and protective possession. Males guarded the social group and found food while females maintained social structure and raised offspring. Thus, male jealousy is the result of wanting to protect their own genetic interests by making sure females weren’t, ehem, “mixing” with other males while they were out trying to keep everyone alive.

Females, on the other hand, felt they and their offspring were betrayed if a male went off and shared resources with other females.

Pretty run-of-the-mill, you-knew-this-without-having-to-watch-a-video stuff.

But, as always, it isn’t that simple

According to a study out of Chapman University, which featured responses from 64,000 Americans, motivations for romantic and sexual jealousy still vary depending on gender and sexual orientation. The research found that straight men were more jealous about physical infidelity, whereas other groups–straight women and homosexual men and women–found emotional infidelity more troubling.

The study was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, and according to Time it asked basic biographical information such as income, marital history and sexual orientation, as well as prompting the participants to choose (whether from imagination or personal experience) if they’d be hurt more by sex cheating or love cheating, to be prehistorically blunt.

Psychologist and lead author David Frederick explained, “Heterosexual men really stand out from all other groups. They were the only ones more likely to be most upset by sexual infidelity.”

Outcomes also didn’t change between variables: marital status, a history of being cheated on, income, the length of relationship, or whether a respondent had children or not.

Younger participants of both sexes also reported more distress at being cheated on physically.

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD), one of the major causes of blindness in seniors, may be caused by deposits of microscopic calcium phosphate spheres in the eye, a team of researchers report in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the study, scientists from University College London and the University of Maryland School of Medicine note that this is the first time these mineralized calcium phosphate spheres have been implicated in AMD, a condition affecting one-fifth of people over the age of 75.

AMD causes the vision of those affected to slowly deteriorate, and the cause of the primary form of the disease remains a mystery. The possible involvement of these tiny calcium spherules, also known as hydroxyapatite (HAP), could ultimately lead to early detection of the disease.

Not so HAP-py (sigh)

As the researchers explain, HAP is common in the body. It makes up the hard part of teeth and bones, but it had never before been detected in the retinal samples of elderly patients. This discovery could help scientists learn how AMD develops, as well as how to better diagnose and treat the condition that affects a reported 10 million people in the US alone.

AMD is characterized by a build-up of drusen (deposits of fat and protein) in the retina, which prevents essential nutrients from reaching light-sensitive cells called photoreceptors. Photoreceptors are regularly recycled by cellular processes, which creates waste products. Drusen can trap this material, however, causing it to build-up in the retina.

Previously, scientists did not fully understand how drusen formed and grew to clinically relevant size, but the new study shows that HAP particles could be responsible. The study authors believe that the calcium spheres could attract proteins and fats to the surface, causing them to accumulate over the course of several years or even decades to form drusen.

The research began with the question, “What’s HAP-pening, here?” (We’re getting canned any day now.)

The researchers made their discovery through post-mortem examination of 30 eyes from donors between 43 and 96 years old. Using fluorescent dyes, they were able to identify the miniature calcium spheres. They also examined tissue samples from AMD patients using X-ray diffraction and fluorescent staining chemicals, which helped reveal the role of HAP in the process.

“We found these miniscule hollow spheres inside all of the eyes and all the deposits that we examined, from donors with and without AMD,” explains lead investigator Dr. Imre Lengyel, a senior research fellow at the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Honorary Research Fellow. “Eyes with more of these spheres contained more drusen.”

Dr. Lengyel noted that the spheres appear long before the drusen itself becomes visible during a clinical examination, and that the new techniques can be used to identify drusen build-up long before it becomes visible using current techniques. The findings could potentially advance AMD diagnoses by at least a decade, she added.

“Our discovery opens up an exciting new avenue of scientific research into potential new diagnostics and treatments, but this is only the beginning of a long road.” added Dr. Richard Thompson, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Turning the other cheek might be a good way to approach some unpleasant situations; but new research suggests that, when dealing with hostile bosses, it might be better to give them a taste of their own medicine.

Writing in a recent edition of the journal Personnel Psychology, lead author and Ohio State University professor of management and human resources Bennett Tepper and his colleagues explain that employees felt less like victims if they retaliated against their employers.
Those individuals also experienced less psychological distress, more job satisfaction and more commitment to their employer, according to the OSU professor and experts from Missouri State University, the University of Georgia and the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
“Before we did this study, I thought there would be no upside to employees who retaliated against their bosses, but that’s not what we found,” Tepper said in a statement Tuesday.
“The best situation is certainly when there is no hostility. But if your boss is hostile, there appears to be benefits to reciprocating. Employees felt better about themselves because they didn’t just sit back and take the abuse,” he added.
What makes a boss hostile? And how do we usually react?
For the purposes of the study, hostile bosses were categorized as those who did things like yell at, ridicule and intimidate their workers. Employees who returned hostility by not giving 100% effort, acting like they didn’t know what their bosses were talking about, or ignoring them.
“These are things that bosses don’t like and that fit the definition of hostility, but in a passive-aggressive form. I expect that you don’t have too many employees yelling and screaming at their bosses,” Tepper said.
The research involved two separate studies. In the first, 169 people were asked to complete a pair of surveys by mail, seven months apart. The first survey featured 15 items to measure supervisor hostility in the workplace, and was developed by the OSU professor in 2000.
The questionnaire asked employees to rate how frequently their bosses did things like ridiculing them and telling them that their thoughts and feelings were stupid. Participants also reported how often they retaliated by doing things like ignoring their employers.
Seven months later, the same respondents completed measures of job satisfaction, commitment to their employer, psychological distress and negative feelings. They found that, when a person’s supervisor was hostile but employees chose not to retaliate, the workers had higher psychological stress levels, less job satisfaction and less commitment to their employer.
Those who didn’t turn the other cheek?
Conversely, employees who returned the hostility didn’t see those negative consequences, Tepper explained. However, that left the researchers puzzled as to why employees felt better when they responded to their bosses’ hostility with hostility, and whether or not such retaliation hurt their careers. So they conducted a second study, an online survey of 371 individuals.
Participants in that study were surveyed three times, each three weeks apart. The first asked many of the same questions as the first study, while the second asked questions designed to examine if employees felt like victims in their relationship with their hostile employers.
“In addition to other questions, the third survey asked employees about career outcomes, such as whether they had been promoted and whether they were meeting their income goals,” OSU said.
The results showed that employees who responded to hostility with hostility were less likely to view themselves as victims or to report psychological distress. They were also more likely to be satisfied with the jobs and committed to their employer, according to the researchers.
But couldn’t returning hostility get you, well, fired?
While this type of behavior may seem like a risky career move, Tepper said the second study found that employees who retaliated against hostile bosses reported that they did not believe that they suffered any career setbacks as a result of their actions. He believes that this may be because employees who fight back gain the admiration and respect of their co-workers.
“There is a norm of reciprocity in our society,” the professor said. “We have respect for someone who fights back, who doesn’t just sit back and take abuse. Having the respect of co-workers may help employees feel more committed to their organization and happy about their job.”
However, Tepper added that fighting back is not necessarily the best way to deal with these types of workplace situations. “The real answer is to get rid of hostile bosses, and there may be other responses to hostile bosses that may be more beneficial,” he said. “We need to test other coping strategies.”
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John Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce, told Scientific American that for several years she has been investigating whether the “seven-year itch” (or the tendency to get divorced after seven years of marriage) really exists, and if there is a biological basis for it.

Fisher looked at nature and our evolutionary history and found that pairing for a certain length of time before separating is habitual. However, that length of time is not necessarily seven years.

“I began by studying worldwide data on marriage and divorce and noticed that although the median duration of marriage was seven years, of the couples who divorced, most did so around their fourth year together (the ‘mode’),” she explains. “I also found that divorce occurred most frequently among couples at the height of their reproductive and parenting years—for men, ages 25 to 29, and for women, ages 20 to 24 and 25 to 29—and among those with one dependent child.”

Only 25 percent of primate species are monogamous, and less than 5 percent of mammals form a monogamous bond to raise offspring. Fisher says that of all bird species a much higher 90 percent “team up” to raise young, but most only do so while the young are vulnerable. Once they are grown, the pair will break apart.

“The reason,” Fisher says, is that “the individual that sits on the eggs until they hatch will starve unless fed by a mate.” She explains that, “A few mammals are in the same predicament. Take the female fox: the vixen produces very thin milk and must feed her young almost constantly, so she relies on her partner to bring her food while she stays in the den to nurse.

“When juvenile robins fly away from the nest or maturing foxes leave the den for the last time, their parents part ways as well.”

Fisher says that humans retain traces of this reproductive pattern. In hunter-gatherer societies, women tended to have children around four years apart. Equally, it was around four years old that children moved on to raised by broader community groups more than the parents, who were free to find new partners if they chose to. The four-year divorce peak among modern humans may be an evolutionary hangover from this time.

According to Fisher, “Serial pair bonding may have been beneficial to survival among our forebears because having children with more than one partner produces offspring with greater genetic variety and a wider range of skills. Hence, in the changeable environment of ancient Africa, some offspring would have had a better chance of enduring.”

She adds that: “By understanding this susceptibility in our human nature, we might become better able to anticipate, and perhaps be able to avoid, the four-year itch.”

It is tempting and often useful to look to our ancestry and to nature for clues about our behavior, although those sources can also be ambiguous. Groups who oppose divorce celebrated the documentary movie March of the Penguins, because it showed monogamous pairs of penguins lovingly raising their young, and thought that nature was giving us a sign that we had let things slide, forgetting our natural obligations. However, if the movie had been called March of the Mallards, viewers would have seen ducks mating in what amounts to an orgy, involving males who rather than being faithful had a good chance of going on to perform necrophilia.

Within the complexity of human behavior, there must be more to our major decisions than just reproductive instinct. Humans are not necessarily consistent in any of their actions throughout a lifetime, and according to business site Fast Company “the median number of years a US worker has been in his or her current job is just 4.4.” Did hunter-gatherers become account manager-personal shoppers after four years?

Breaking up after four or seven years certainly seems to be partially biological, but at the same time “well foxes do it” probably won’t hold much sway with divorce courts.

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

A pair of naturally occurring hormones could be a secret weapon in the battle against obesity, according to research published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Cell.

The findings could provide new insight into the ways in which a person’s brain regulates body fat, and could result in the development of more effective ways to shed fat and prevent weight-gain by converting white fat to brown fat.

White fat, or white adipose tissue, serves as an energy store and a thermal insulator. Brown fat, or brown adipose tissue, is primarily used to generate body heat (especially in infants or animals during hibernation). It contains smaller fat droplets and requires more oxygen than white fat.

In their research, Tony Tiganis from the Monash University Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and his colleagues discovered a molecular mechanism that relies upon the combined action of the hormones leptin and insulin to stimulate the fat-burning process.

Leptin is an appetite suppressant generated in fat cells, and insulin is produced in the pancreas in response to rising levels of glucose in the blood, the researchers explained. By working together, however, they can cause the brain to burn off fat instead of storing it. They do this by acting on a group of neurons in the brain that triggers body fat to be burned through the nervous system.

“These hormones give the brain a comprehensive picture of the fatness of the body,” Tiganis explained. “Because leptin is produced by fat cells, it measures the level of existing fat reserves – the more fat, the more leptin. Whereas insulin provides a measure of future fat reserves because glucose levels rise when we eat.”

He explains that fat in adult humans is typically stored in adipocytes, which are specialized cells made from white fat tissue. However, fat cells made from brown adipocytes can be found around a person’s neck and shoulders, and these cells can be induced to burn fat instead of storing it.

Tiganis and his fellow researchers found that leptin and insulin interact with neurons in the brain’s hypothalamus. The hormones can cause these proopiomelanocortin (POMC) neurons to send signals through the nervous system to convert white fat into brown fat, ultimately causing excess fat to be burned off.

In their laboratory work, the researchers were able to demonstrate that the process in regulated within these neurons by enzymes known as phosphatases. Phosphatases inhibit the actions of both leptin and insulin, they explained, and when these inhibitors were reduced, they found that the browning and burning of fat within the body increased.

Typically, this process is used to help a person maintain his or her body weight. However, Professor Tiganis explained that it goes awry in patients with diet-induced obesity, and he said that targeting these two enzymes could ultimately help people lose weight and shed unwanted fat.

“Turning white fat into brown fat is a very exciting new approach to developing weight loss agents. But it is not an easy task, and any potential therapy is a long way off,” he added.

In addition to Monash University, researchers from Harvard Medical School, the Indiana University School of Medicine, the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Toronto were also involved in the research.

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

A daily regimen of low-dose aspirin may not actually help you prevent a heart attack or stroke – in fact, it might actually do more harm than good, according to a new study.

Dr. Salim Virani, a cardiologist and assisting professor of medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, and his colleagues report that approximately one-tenth of all people on aspirin therapy to reduce cardiovascular risk were doing so unnecessarily.

They looked at the health records of nearly 69,000 people who were receiving aspirin for primary prevention at 119 different facilities in the US, and found that nearly 8,000 of them had too low of a risk to need the treatment to prevent a heart attack or stroke.

“Some 7,972 had a less than 6% chance of having a heart attack or stroke within the next 10 years,” Dr. Virani told CNN.com on Friday, adding that doing so “can cause more harm than good. It can cause gastrointestinal bleeding, ulcers and… [bleeding] inside the brain.”

“The brain area can’t accommodate a lot of blood and you can die,” he added. Furthermore, an unneeded aspiring regimen can cause your blood to become thinner, which could be an issue if and when you need to undergo surgery.

As part of the study, Dr. Virani and experts from the University of Colorado, the Michael E. DeBakey Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Houston and the Mid America Heart Institute at Saint Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City reviewed the data of 68,808 patients listed in the National Cardiovascular Disease Registry’s Practice Innovation and Clinical Excellence registry.

They found an 11.6 percent frequency of inappropriate aspirin use throughout the entire cohort, and explained that there was significant practice-level variation in these figures (ranging from 0 percent to nearly 71.8 percent, with a median of 10.1 percent). The study authors published their findings this month in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Furthermore, even patients who should be using an aspirin regimen need to be careful, according to CNN.com. The recommended dosage is just 81 milligrams, equivalent to a baby aspirin in the US, and taking more than that can increase a person’s risk of suffering side effects.

“People weigh the concern of the risks of heart disease over the risk of the side effects. We underestimate the side effects,” Dr. Sharon Bergquist, an assistant professor of medicine at the Emory School of Medicine, told the website.

“Those who have that less than 6 percent risk should be maximizing lifestyle reduction efforts rather than a medication such as aspirin,” she added. Those lifestyle reduction efforts include getting enough exercise, a proper diet, reducing stress levels and getting enough sleep.

People who are currently on an aspirin regimen but don’t need to be should consult with their doctors before stopping, though, in light of a 2011 British Medical Journal study which found that quitting the treatment could increase their risk of a non-fatal heart attack by 60 percent.

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John Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
In 2001, Canadian linguist Sonja Lang came up with Toki Pona, an invented language which has only 120 words. It uses words from English, Esperanto, Finnish, Dutch, Chinese and others, with changed meanings, to produce a simplified language which can assist in the treatment of mental disorders, and also has the potential to persuade those of us who find learning foreign languages difficult.
The Globe and Mail’s Siobhan Roberts explains that Lang devised Toki Pona, which she describes as her “attempt to understand the meaning of life in 120 words,” as a coping mechanism during a bout of depression. The theory is linked to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which proposes that the way in which people think and behave is influenced by what language they use. Lang says that thinking in Toki Pona helped to slow down her runaway thoughts. She believes her own stripped-down language, which uses only 14 letters based on the Latin alphabet, “helps you see patterns, and how things are connected in different ways.”
However, it appears that the extent to which Toki Pona makes life easier depends on what you are trying to do with it. If processing your own thoughts or trying to understand linguistics then it could be highly valuable. If you are trying to apply it to everyday life, possibly not so much.
When attempting to translate a coffee shop order of waffles with bananas and whipped cream, Lang used: “Mi wile jo e pan pi sike mama waso e kili suwi jelo e telo mama soweli kon.” It includes the literal translation of bananas, “kili suwi jelo,” (“yellow fruit”) and waffles translates to “pan pi sike mama waso” (“cereal-grain-product of bird maternal round-things” – the bird maternal round-things being eggs.)
Some translations make more sense – the phrase “Canada has two official languages” is “ma Kanata li jo e toki suli tu,” with the literal translation being, “Canada land has two big talks.” It’s the sort of thing you often come across in foreign languages which is both much cuter than English and makes more sense (when you hear that “snot” in Japanese is “nose water” – hana mizu– you wonder if we need the word snot at all).
Creating new languages is not unheard of, of course. The fantasy genre does it in projects which are committed to building a whole new world, from Tolkien’s spine-tingling poems in Elvish to the weird and wonderful tongues of George R. R. Martin’s characters, with Khal Drogo’s words frightening us even more than his massive tits did. Then there was The Wire (What? They were speaking English?).
But whereas the purpose of new languages in fantasy is to build complex detail, the goal of Toki Pona is to reduce the complexity of language, on the premise that minimalism is psychologically beneficial.
Pekka Roponen, a psychiatrist at the central hospital of Hameenlinnan in Finland, is studying the language’s usefulness in treating patients. He says that: “Classical languages can be used in your inner world to avoid something,” noting that the Finnish language is notoriously complex, and that the country’s suicide and depression rates are among the world’s highest.
He asks his patients to record their daily thoughts in Toki Pona, saying that it, “is meant to focus on the positive, so negative thought patterns and cognitions can be transferred and eliminated by simply using the language.” Or possibly “wicked brain shouting made to lie on calm head sun lounger,” to have a crack at Toki Pona.
The mini-language has multiple uses. Like pidgin languages, reduced versions of existing languages intended to enable two groups who have no common language to communicate, Toki Pona, with its largely online following, could represent a means of communication between people the world over. Could we master Toki Pona in one weekend? If so, it might give people who fear language learning the confidence to push on and study full languages.
The learning site Memrise recently held a 48 hour “Toki Pona-thon” in London, during which time around half of the 17 people involved learned the language fluently in the two days, adding to the 100 or so around the world who already know it. By day two, some spent the morning speaking nothing but Toki Pona, according to attendee and Guardian journalist Ellie Violet Bramley.
One participant even put together this Toki Pona version of the famous Taxi Driver scene after only 14 hours of study, proving that any of us could be terrifying people in new languages quicker than you can say “absolutely not, Mr. Bickle.”

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John Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
In 1911, future Nobel Prize winner George de Hevesy was on the verge of two important breakthroughs. One would revolutionize medicine and enable doctors to look inside the human body like never before; the other would allow him to prove that his landlady was serving him yesterday’s leftovers for dinner.
The Hungarian genius had been set on a fool’s errand by the British, who asked him to separate radioactive and non-radioactive atoms in lead, which it later turned out was impossible to do through the chemical means. He spent two years on the project, frustrated at its lack of progress by day and compounded in his misery at night when he went back to a lonely boarding house where his sour-faced landlady served him stale food. His suspicion that she was recycling leftover meat was a particular gripe.

One night, de Hevesy brought his work home with him and secretly sprinkled some powder containing radioactive particles (along with the inseparable non-radioactive ones) on his meat. The next day, he tested his “fresh” dinner with a snazzy, newly designed radiation detector. Sure enough, traces from the powder made themselves known to the Geiger counter, and the landlady was caught red-handed. Many years later, he was awarded the famous and coveted Nobel Prize for meat (chemistry).
Not content with vanquishing his landlady, de Hevesy had more bad guys to take on. Two German scientists who hated the Nazis, James Frank and Max Born, had sent their Nobel Prize medals to Denmark for safekeeping. Hitler had made it illegal to export gold out of Germany, and with the Nazis having invaded Denmark the scientists were at risk of being found to have exported German gold – i.e. their medals. They faced execution.
But once again George, who was now working at Copenagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, had a trick up his sleeve, or rather in a jar of aqua regia; a caustic mix of nitric and hydrochloric acids. He dissolved the medals in the acid as the sound of Nazi jackboots approached. The institute was ransacked by the Nazis, but unsurprisingly a jar of aqua regia did not tickle their fancy and they left it untouched. De Hevesy fled to Stockholm, but returned to his lab after the war where the jar still stood on a shelf with the dissolved medals inside. The Nobel academy was able to recast the medals from the gold that de Hevesy had reconstituted, returning them to their rightful owners.
In 1943, while in Stockholm, de Hevesy had been awarded a Nobel Prize of his own. It would have been a sad and ironic end to a wonderful story if it had transpired that the Nobel academy had been into his Copenhagen lab, reconstituted Frank and Born’s old medals and given them to de Hevesy as a “fresh,” “new” one. But fortunately even in a world that made Nazis there are some happy endings.
The happiness did not end there. In the 21st century, three scientists who had continued de Hevesy’s progress examining the inside of the body through the use of tracers were awarded Nobel Prizes too. Some of the tracers came from jellyfish rather than lead, in the form of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), but the work started by Hevesy that helped us to look inside hearts, brains and other organs expanded, with Japanese chemist Osamu Shimumora, and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien being awarded Nobel Prizes in 2008 for study done over many years.
For all the trials and tribulations he faced, de Hevesy’s only complaint was the day of lab work he missed while fleeing to Stockholm. An honest meal and undisturbed time in the lab – not too much to ask for a man who changed the course of medicine.
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

While people don’t have the benefit of knowing when they’re going to have a heart attack, NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering professors are working on the next best thing – a test strip with the potential for early detection in some cases.

The NYU professors, along with colleagues from Peking University, are developing a new colloidal gold test strip for cardiac troponin I (cTn-I) detection. cTn-I, they explained, is a marker for myocardial infarction, and patients experiencing this type of heart attack have cTn-I levels that are several thousand times higher than usual.

The test strip uses microplasma-generated gold nanoparticles (AuNPs), and the authors report that is has demonstrated far higher detection sensitivity than conventional test strips. They noted that the new cTn-I diagnostic is based on specific immune-chemical reactions occurring between antigen and antibody on immunochromatographic test strips using AuNPs.

The surfaces of the gold nanoparticles generated by the microplasma-induced liquid chemical process attract more antibodies versus AuNPs produced by traditional chemical methods, the NYU professors said. The result is significantly higher detection sensitivity.

Kurt H. Becker, a professor in the NYU Department of Applied Physics and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, WeiDong Zhu, a research associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and their colleagues have published their findings in a recent edition of the journal Plasma Processes and Polymers.

According to the university, the use of microplasmas to generate AuNP utilizes a special microplasma technology developed by Becker and Zhu. These microplasmas have previously been used in dental applications such as tooth whitening and root canal disinfection, biological decontamination through the inactivation of microorganisms and biofilms, and the disinfection and preservation of fresh fruits and vegetables.

The microplasma-assisted synthesis of AuNPs also has tremendous potential for other types of biomedical and therapeutic applications, including the detection of tumors, cancer imaging, drug delivery, and treatment of degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, they added.

However, it will still take several years for the use of gold nanoparticles in therapy and disease detection in patients to become an everyday thing, and even longer for therapeutic applications, the authors said. One of the biggest challenges they have to overcome, Becker explained, is that synthesizing monodisperse, size-controlled gold nanoparticles, even using microplasmas, is too expensive, time-consuming and labor-intensive to be widely used.

The microplasma technology used in this work is based on research funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Other co-authors of the study include Ruixue Wang, Shasha Zuo and Dong Wu of the Peking University Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, and Jue Zhang and Jing Fang, from the Beijing, China-based university’s College of Engineering.

Last October, Google announced that it was working on a pill that could use nanotechnology to detect several potential health issues, including potential heart attacks and strokes. While the device was designed primarily to detect the early signs of cancer, it could also identify when fatty plaques were about to break free from blood vessel linings and stop blood flow.

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Shayne Jacopian for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

A clip from a Swedish children’s program featuring dancing genitalia went viral last week, and it’s rubbing a lot of people the wrong way. (We’re not going to survive this one.)

The one-minute clip, made for the children’s program Bacillakuten, opens with a drawing of a penis reminiscent of high school bathroom stall graffiti, complete with a smiley face, bouncing its way towards a three- to six-year-old audience until it appears to slap itself right into the screen.

At this point, some of its friends join in, one with a mustache and another with a top hat, as a pair of pants that clearly wouldn’t fit any of them sails past in the background.

“Cue the vaginas!” we imagine the director saying, as, well, that’s what waltzes onto the screen next.

One winks as it moves out of the way for another that has its white hair up in a bun and is aided by glasses and a cane. At its dénouement (We’re not saying climax!!), the video’s characters are all floating and bouncing around as though they were aboard the International Space Station.

This song, aimed at a three- to six-year old audience, intends to teach Swedish children about the human body.

Some of the song’s lyrics translate to: “Here comes Willie at a run, he has no pants,” and “Twinkle is cool, you better believe it, even on an old lady … Willie and Twinkle, what a great gang!”

A slightly varying but equally as humorous translation from the Swedish news site The Local: “Here comes the penis at full pace,” and “the vagina is cool, you better believe it, even on an old lady. It just sits there so elegantly.”

While this had a lot of parents around the world rubbed the wrong way (no pun intended), it didn’t cause quite as much controversy in Sweden.

Cosmopolitan wrote: “This Swedish children’s cartoon features dancing genitals because the Swedes are more open with gender and sexuality talk with young kids. Also, they love hilarious stuff.”
The program’s executive director, Kasja Peters (that pun just happened on its own) adds, “We aim our programs at children, but most parents watch them with the kids and we hope we make it easier for them to talk about and explain things.”

Ultimately, according to Peters, Bacillakuten’s primary goal is “to teach children about the body and its functions. We hope that the song will help in this learning. The song is part of playful learning, which we believe is the best way to reach kids.”

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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

It’s nice to say goodbye to the pricks in your life, particularly when you’re a diabetic and those pricks are physically painful.

Now, thanks to researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Department of Nanoengineering, pricking any may be out of the picture completely.

UCSD nanoengineering professor Joseph Wang and his colleagues have developed an ultra-thin, flexible device that sticks to the skin like a rub-on tattoo and can non-invasively measure blood-glucose levels. The sensor, which is described in a proof-of-concept study published recently in the journal Analytical Chemistry, could make finger-pricks a thing of the past.

“The sensor represents the first example of an easy-to-wear flexible tattoo-based epidermal diagnostic device combining reverse iontophoretic extraction of interstitial glucose and an enzyme-based amperometric biosensor,” the researchers wrote. “In-vitro studies reveal the tattoo sensor’s linear response toward physiologically relevant glucose levels with negligible interferences from common coexisting electroactive species.”

“The iontophoretic-biosensing tattoo platform is reduced to practice by applying the device on human subjects and monitoring variations in glycemic levels due to food consumption,” they continued, adding that their findings indicate that the device “holds considerable promise for efficient diabetes management and can be extended toward noninvasive monitoring of other physiologically relevant analytes present in the interstitial fluid.”

In other words, the device is a wearable and non-irritating way to detect glucose in the fluid just underneath the skin through a combination of glucose excretion and electrochemical biosensing technology. Preliminary tests involving seven healthy volunteers showed that the unit was able to accurate determine their sugar levels, and the researchers believe that the device could also be used not just to help manage diabetes, but for other conditions, including kidney disease.

Hundreds of millions of people all over the world live with diabetes,  Wang and his colleagues said, and a large percentage of them are under instructions to keep close tabs on their blood sugar levels. However, since the standard method of checking glucose requires a prick to the finger in order to draw blood for testing, the technique can discourage people from doing to.

Recently, a glucose sensing wristband had been introduced to patients, but the device wound up being discontinued after causing skin irritation to patients. Wang’s team set out to find a different was to track blood sugar without the pain caused by finger pricks, which is what served as the inspiration for their new non-invasive, tattoo-inspired device.

Back in 2007, a team of researchers from the Dwight Look College of Engineering tested a similar tattoo-inspired device that used fluorescent polymer microbeads implanted just under a patient’s skin. The amount of light emitted by the beads when they were exposed to laser light changed based on glucose levels, and the readings were measured using a watch-like monitor.

When injected under the skin, the microbeads were prevented from entering cells – unlike tattooing, in which cells absorb the pigment. The beads remained in the interstitial spaces between cells, which are filled with water in glucose molecules, and the glucose in the fluids there bind to the microbeads, causing the color to change based on the amount present.

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