Fungus Threatens Crop Production At Mexican, Central American Coffee Plantations

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
We hope you were able to take advantage of one of the many free National Coffee Day giveaways on Monday, because ecologists at the University of Michigan report that a fungus has been sweeping across plantations in Mexico and Central America, limiting coffee production and forcing price increases in the process.
According to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology, which is funding Ivette Perfecto’s investigation into the matter, several countries – including Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica – have already been forced to declare national emergencies as a result of a fungus known as coffee rust.
In fact, the current outbreak of coffee rust (which is also known as Hemileia vastatrix) is said to be the worst since the pathogen first arrived in the region some four decades ago. Guatemalan farmers believe coffee production there could drop by 40 percent, and given that Central America supplies up to 15 percent of the world’s coffee supply, the ongoing blight could ultimately make a cup of your favorite espresso or cappuccino much more expensive.
“It’s hard to overstate the social and economic importance of coffee – it literally touches our lives every day,” NSF Division of Environmental Biology program director Doug Levey said in a statement Monday. The agency added that coffee is “one of the most traded commodities in the world,” and that it “provides support for millions of small farmers and is an important economic engine in tropical countries,” including 20 in Latin America.
The origins of this fungus date back 150 years ago, when coffee rust first appeared in the Lake Victoria region of Africa, the NSF said. It soon spread throughout the coffee-growing areas of that continent and into Southeastern Asia. By 1970, it had made it to Brazil, and it has since spread to every coffee-producing country on Earth because the fungal spores are dislodged from coffee leaves by rain and then carried elsewhere by the wind.
“It became so devastating in Sri Lanka, southern India and Java that coffee agriculture had to be abandoned,” Perfecto said. She and fellow UM ecologist John Vandermeer have conducted more than a decade’s worth of research at an organic coffee plantation in Chiapas, Mexico. More than 60 percent of the plants at their site have been defoliated due to the rust, which affects the plants by halting photosynthesis.
Part of the problem, she and fellow UM ecologist John Vandermeer explain, is the growing trend to abandon traditional growing techniques in which coffee plants are placed beneath tall shade trees. Farmers are reducing the number of shade trees on their plantations, they noted, and in order to increase production, they’ve started producing sun coffee (coffee in which the tree canopy is removed or thinned).
“Coffee farmers are also relying more heavily on pesticides and fungicides to manage threats to their plants,” Perfecto said, noting that the increased reliance of these techniques has led to concern about how to exactly combat the threat of coffee rust. Levey said that the best control method is most likely “promoting the ecological balance between the fungus that causes the disease and the organisms that naturally rein it in.”
Furthermore, the Michigan researchers note that the lack of shade may have caused another type of fungus, known as white halo fungus (Lecanicillium lecanii), to die out. White halo fungus helps keep coffee rust at bay, and without it the fungus had started to spread like wildfire. The two fungi are part of a complex coffee plant ecosystem that also includes the ant Azteca instabilis and another coffee pest, green coffee scale (Coccus viridis), the authors said.
The four species “are embedded in a system of ecological interactions,” said Perfecto. The ants are reliant upon green coffee scale, which is in turn consumed by the white halo fungus that attacks and destroys coffee rust. All three are required on a farm to combat Hemileia vastatrix, and this works best under a shady canopy, she added.
“This research reveals a surprisingly natural ecosystem nested within a major agricultural crop,” Levey said. “It demonstrates that an ‘agroecosystem’ can be used as a model to study the natural control of plant diseases that threaten crop production.”
“But this mutual benefit depends on how farms are managed,” the NSF added. “In the case of coffee rust, fewer canopy trees cut down would be a major step forward, say Perfecto and Vandermeer. Bring back the shade… and the Azteca ants, green coffee scale and the… white halo fungus… will reappear.”
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New Research Reveals That Dolphins Are Sensitive To Magnetic Stimuli

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Add dolphins to the list of species that are sensitive to magnetic stimuli, as a new study published Tuesday in Naturwissenschaften – The Science of Nature revealed that the creatures alter their behavior when swimming near magnetized objects.
Lead author Dorothee Kremers of the Université de Rennes in France and her colleagues made their discovery while conducting research in the delphinarium of Planète Sauvage, and they claim their findings provide experimental behavioral evidence that marine mammals are magnetoreceptive, or capable of perceiving magnetic fields.
Magnetoreception, the study authors explain, is believed to play a key role in orientation and navigation in some species, including birds, sharks, stingrays and honeybees. While some observations of free-ranging cetacean mammals’ migration routes and stranding sites led to the assumption that creatures like dolphins, whales and purposes were sensitive to the geomagnetic field, there was little experimental evidence to support those claims.
Kremers and her co-authors tested the spontaneous response of six captive bottlenose dolphins to the presentation of two magnetized and demagnetized controlled devices while they were swimming freely. They found that the dolphins approached the device more frequently when it contained a strongly magnetized neodymium block versus a demagnetized block that was identical in form and density and undistinguishable with echolocation.
During the experimental sessions, the dolphins were able to freely swim into and out of the pool where the barrel containing the blocks was located. All six of the dolphins were studied at the same time, and each of them was able to interact with the barrel at any time during any given session with no restrictions, the investigative team said.
The individual who was given the job to place the barrels in the pool did not know whether the blocks had been magnetized or not, and the same was also true for the individual tasked with analyzing the videos of the dolphins’ reactions to the barrels.
The research revealed that the cetaceans approached the barrel much faster when it contained a strongly magnetized block than when it contained a similar nonmagnetized one. However, the dolphins interacted with both types of barrels the same way, suggesting that it was more likely that they were more intrigued by the barrel with the magnetized block than actually physically drawn to it.
“Dolphins are able to discriminate between objects based on their magnetic properties, which is a prerequisite for magnetoreception-based navigation,” Kremers explained in a statement. “Our results provide new, experimentally obtained evidence that cetaceans have a magnetic sense, and should therefore be added to the list of magnetosensitive species.”
In January 2010, neurobiologists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) published research associating two related photoreceptor proteins found in butterflies to animal navigation using the Earth’s magnetic field. The following month, a husband-and-wife team of neurobiologists from Frankfurt, Germany reported that iron containing short nerve branches in the upper beak of birds may serve as a magnetometer to measure the vector of the Earth’s magnetic field.
In April 2012, researchers reported in the journal Science that specific neurons in the brains of pigeons encoded the direction and intensity of the Earth´s magnetic field, which provided the birds an inborn internal global positioning system. Then earlier this year, trials conducted at the Oregon Hatchery Research Center revealed that salmon had the capability to use the magnetic field to return to the river where they were born in order to spawn as adults.

Greenland Ice Sheet Less Stable Than Believed

Written By: Brett Smith
editor

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Prevailing models from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet have made the calculation that the ice sheet sits atop hard bedrock.

A new study from a team of British and American scientists has thrown out that assumption, however, and found that the ice sheet may be melting faster than previously thought.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the team’s report is based on the calculation, derived from ground surveys, that soft and porous sediments sit at the bed of the ice sheet.

The Greenland Ice Sheet spans about 660,000 square miles – around the size of Alaska. The massive sheet of ice, and others like it, is constantly in motion, and often this motion causes it to segment and break apart.

“When these large ice sheets melt, whether that’s due to seasonal change or a warming climate, they don’t melt like an ice cube,” said study author Marion Bougamont of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute. “Instead, there are two sources of net ice loss: melting on the surface and increased flow of the ice itself, and there is a connection between these two mechanisms which we don’t fully understand and isn’t taken into account by standard ice sheet models.”

Lakes which develop on the tops of glaciers, referred to as supraglacial lakes, often form in the summer. Researchers have discovered that many of these lakes drain in a matter of hours, when cracks open up and drain tremendous amounts of water into the subglacial space. In warmer years, these drainage events are predicted to become even more regular.

In the study, the researchers used a three-dimensional model, along with an observational data of surface area melting created by researchers at Aberystwyth University. The Cambridge scientists could then accurately recreate how the ice sheet’s periodic movements shifted in response to the quantity of surface meltwater being drained to the ground below.

“Not only is the ice sheet sensitive to a changing climate, but extreme meteorological events, such as heavy rainfall and heat waves, can also have a large effect on the rate of ice loss,” said study author Poul Christoffersen. “The soft sediment gets weaker as it tries to soak up more water, making it less resistant, so that the ice above moves faster. The Greenland Ice Sheet is not nearly as stable as we think.”

In this study, the scientists first used the overall quantity of surface runoff as a method for generating their model, but the end result from this experiment disagreed with observations. Next, the team looked at only water located briefly in supraglacial ponds on the ice sheet’s surface area. They discovered that only a small fraction of the meltwater which develops on the surface is held in supraglacial lakes and the high degree and rate of lake drainage events leads to the ice sheet accelerating, as has been previously witnessed.

The researchers concluded that there is a limit to how much water can be held in the ground underneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. This means the ice sheet is highly sensitive to global warming along with meteorological events, like heavy rainfall, which are projected to increase in frequency.

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Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia Tai-Chi Treatment: Is It Effective or Not?

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Fibromyalgia can be a terrible thing to live with. The debilitating pain, the fact that there are many people who are bedridden (in the most literal sense of the word) by this syndrome and the fact that there seems to be no hope on finding out what causes it (and, consequently, on developing a cure for it) are all factors that contribute to the harsh change most of the fibromyalgia patients have to go through.

Fibromyalgia is a syndrome, not a disease. Its causes are unknown and it cannot even be prevented. All in all, fibromyalgia is a huge riddle even for those who work in the medical field and even for those who have been studying it for so much time.

What Are The Things That May Cause Fibromyalgia?

We don’t know exactly what it is that causes this syndrome to develop. We do know, however, that it can be terrible and that its wide range of symptoms can be confusing and misguiding.

It is not rare that people get misdiagnosed with several other conditions (such as chronic fatigue syndrome, lupus and so on) and their fibromyalgia gets away without any diagnosis.

Even more, it is not rare that doctors rule out even the possibility of fibromyalgia because they don’t believe it is an actual medical condition.

Although the cause of this syndrome is not yet known or understood, the truth is that medical research has been able to point out the fact that there may be some things that can contribute to the way in which it develops in the human body. These risk factors include:

– Poor sleeping habits, which can make any kind of pain feel much worse, which can cause fatigue and other symptoms that can be found in fibromyalgia patients too.

– A lack of proper functioning of the neurotransmitters dealing with pain could be one of the risk factors or causes for this syndrome too. Apparently, in the case of people with fibromyalgia, the neurotransmitters that send the “pain” messages to the brain do not work properly, which leads the brain to perceive pain more intensely than normally.

– Other neurotransmitters could be to blame for fibromyalgia too (for example, serotonin levels have been found to be very low in the case of patients suffering with this syndrome, which could cause them to suffer from depression, pain and fatigue as well).

Fibromyalgia Tai-Chi Treatment

– Genetics appear to play an important role too. According to recent studies, there are genes in the human body which seem to be connected (at least indirectly) to fibromyalgia.

– Certain stressful events in one’s life can trigger fibromyalgia too. It is believed that things such as living in an abusive relationship, giving birth, suffering an accident and many other similar events in one’s life can trigger fibromyalgia.

What Treatment Can You Have Access To?

There are various forms of treating fibromyalgia, but no way to cure it. Some of the treatments have proven to be more effective than others, while there are treatments that are only effective for certain people and not so great for the rest of them.

Here are the main types of treatment a person diagnosed with fibromyalgia could have access to:

This can be of two main types

FDA approved to treat fibromyalgia or simply medication to treat the separate symptoms. The FDA approved drugs to treat this syndrome are Lyrica, Cymbalta and Savella (and only the last one was created from the very beginning with the purpose of treating fibromyalgia patients).

Although these medicines have proven to alleviate stress, depression and pain, the truth is that nobody knows precisely how they function. Even more than that, it is definitely worth noting that there are side effects to these drugs that can get quite serious, especially since they are very much similar to anti-depressants (and adverse effects such as suicidal thoughts and insomnia can appear).

Physical therapy and exercising

It can be very difficult for someone with fibromyalgia to work out, but it can really ameliorate the pain and it can lift the spirits, so it is definitely worth trying to attend at least a few physical therapy sessions and to see if it doesn’t work for you.

Deep tissue laser therapy

This is a type of therapy that takes about 10 minutes/session and which basically relaxes the muscles to the point where this can alleviate the pain.

Natural treatments

Medical marijuana (which is available in 23 states in America) can be one of the best treatments for pain, depression and other fibromyalgia-related symptoms. Also, certain herbs, massages and a healthy lifestyle can help a lot both with the pain and with the other symptoms experienced by the patients diagnosed with this syndrome.

Could Tai Chi Be an Option?

Tai Chi is a Chinese practice that belongs to the great “repertoire” of the so-called “traditional Chinese medicine”. Together with acupuncture and herbal therapy, it has been around for thousands of years (long before Europeans even thought of “medicine”, actually).

Tai Chi is a martial art at its origin, but it has been used for its health benefits too. Basically, it involves very slow and steady movements which are meant to stretch the body, make you control your mind, thoughts, and breathing and which are also meant to make the spiritual energy of the body flow well through it.

Generally speaking, people who picked up Tai Chi for their fibromyalgia say that they have experienced a lessening of the symptoms and their intensity. They believe that this ancient Chinese practice has helped them feel less pain, sleep better and feel better as well.

There are also studies made into this and they show that the vast majority of those who tried Tai Chi showed great results after several weeks from starting to practice it. If you are willing to try it as well, make sure you only do it under the supervision of an instructor truly specialized in this art!

Understanding The Five Most Common Sleep Disorders

Written By: rclapper
editor

Rayshell Clapper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Sleep is crucial to living a healthy life. Without enough good sleep people may be irritable, moody and disinhibited. Lack of good sleep can even lead to apathy, slowed speech, flattened emotional responses, impaired memory, and bring on the inability to be novel or multitask as the American Psychological Association identifies. Sleep is crucial for our mental, emotional and physical health, so it is necessary to understand some of the different sleep disorders which could affect a person.

As MedlinePlus identifies, there are five common kinds of sleep disorders: insomnia, sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, narcolepsy, and parasomnias. Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

Insomnia

MedlinePlus further explains that insomnia includes trouble with falling asleep, staying asleep, or some combination of both, which all leads to the possibility of not receiving enough sleep or just getting poor-quality sleep and not feeling refreshed upon waking.

What are the symptoms of insomnia? The most common include the following:

• Lying awake for a long time before you fall asleep
• Sleeping for only short periods
• Being awake for much of the night
• Feeling as if you haven’t slept at all
• Waking up too early

After proper diagnosis, treatment may include lifestyle changes, counseling, and medications.

Sleep Apnea

When a person has very shallow breathing or quits breathing while asleep, that person likely suffers from sleep apnea. These pauses in breathing can last for a few seconds to a few minutes and may occur 30 times or more in an hour as MedlinePlus explains. If one is not breathing normally, that person will not be getting good enough sleep.

People who are overweight, male, have small airways, snore, or have a family history are more at risk for sleep apnea. Though snoring can be a symptom of sleep apnea, not all who snore have this sleep disorder. For some, sleep apnea can even lead to insomnia and thus the person suffers from two sleep disorders. Sleep apnea can lead to heart disease as well, so once diagnosed, treatment is critical. Treatment includes lifestyle changes, mouthpieces, surgery and breathing devices.

Restless Legs Syndrome

A third sleep disorder that prevents sufferers from getting the sleep their minds and bodies need is called Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS). MedlinePlus states that RLS “causes a powerful urge to move your legs. Your legs become uncomfortable when you are lying down or sitting. Some people describe it as a creeping, crawling, tingling, or burning sensation. Moving makes your legs feel better, but not for long. RLS can make it hard to fall asleep and stay asleep.”

For this sleep disorder, lifestyle changes can help. By establishing regular sleep habits, using relaxation techniques, and incorporating moderate exercise daily, one can help RLS. If these do not work, there are medications as well.

Narcolepsy

Though a different type of sleep disorder, narcolepsy can still cause major sleep issues for people. This sleep disorder causes extreme sleepiness and attacks of daytime sleep according to MedlinePlus. That means people who suffer from narcolepsy will be so extremely tired that they fall asleep randomly throughout the day whether they are at work, with the family, or wherever.

The symptoms include the following:

• Extreme daytime sleepiness
• Cataplexy
• Hallucinations
• Sleep paralysis

Though no cure exists, treatment can help control symptoms and may include lifestyle changes and medications.

Parasomnias

Experiences including nightmares, night terrors, sleepwalking, sleeptalking, head banging, wetting the bed, and grinding one’s teeth are all examples of parasomnias. These experiences happen when asleep and can often affect whether a person receives good sleep or enough sleep. Each can be treated in a variety of ways including through lifestyle changes, counseling, and medications.

No sleep disorder should be taken lightly. Though these are the most common, others exist that can impact whether or not an individual receives proper sleep. Without it, people suffer physically, mentally and emotionally. Sleep helps our bodies heal from aches, pains and illnesses. Sleep helps us deal with what happens to us and think about things subconsciously, and sleep helps us with our emotional well-being. A sleep disorder has much impact, which is why they each deserve attention.

Signs Of Activity Surface At Mount St. Helens As 10th Anniversary Of Last Eruption Nears

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Ten years ago Wednesday, Mount St. Helens in Washington erupted after being quiet for nearly two decades, and now US Geological Survey (USGS) scientists are concerned that the volcano could mark the occasion by becoming active once again, various media outlets reported over the weekend.
The volcano reawakened in September 2004 and erupted on October 1, remaining active until late January 2008, according to the USGS. That event began with relatively small ejections of ash, which were followed by over three years of continuous slow lava extrusion – a stark contrast to the catastrophic May 1980 eruption that killed 57 and caused over $1 billion in damage.
“Since that time, scientists have been heavily monitoring the area to pinpoint when the next eruption will take place,” said Tara West of Inquisitr News. Experts expect “future dome-building eruptions at the volcano,” and while they are uncertain exactly when that could occur, Mount St. Helens is starting showing signs of activity, she added.
“It looks like Mount St. Helens is getting ready to erupt again and it can happen in the order of years to decades,” USGS seismologist Seth Moran told the Associated Press (AP) on Sunday. Moran and USGS geologist Dan Dzurisin went on to explain that there are signs indicating the magma chamber that fueled the 2004-08 eruptions is recharging, and that the agency is monitoring that activity.
Moran and Dzurisin explained that the agency is focusing on the rate of recharge, and is looking to see whether or not the magma will be able to compress in the chamber instead of flowing towards a surface outlet. While the USGS said they were able to predict the eruption of 10 years ago by monitoring earthquakes in the region, Moran noted that the volcanic activity “exposed some weaknesses in our monitoring.”
The eruption that started in 2004 was the second of two dome-building phases, the first of which began following the 1980 event, according to the AP. The second lava dome appeared at a different location in the crater, and the lava which appeared during the most recent eruption was far more solid than that observed during the earlier phase.
Despite the recent lack of eruption, the lava dome’s shape is still changing, the wire service added. It fractures as it cools, causing it to settle and fall apart, Dzurisin explained. The shape of the crater rim has also been altered by falling rocks. Over the past few centuries, Mount St. Helens has gone through phases of explosive eruptions followed by phases of rebuilding, scientists said, and future dome-building eruptions are expected to occur there.
Moran told the AP that it appears as though the volcano is preparing to erupt again, and that the eruptions will likely be closer in nature to the one which started in 2004 and not its more destructive predecessor. Ultimately, its crater is expected to fill in, returning Mount St. Helens to the more rounded shape it had prior to 1980.
“It will rebuild itself. It may just take a lot longer to get there,” the USGS seismologist said.
In the meantime, the agency has issued an advisory recommending that residents and businesses in the region be “aware of potential future hazards and consult with local emergency-management agencies for advice on how to prepare for volcano and other types of natural hazards,” and that renewed activity at Mount St. Helens could include “resumption of lava-dome growth, eruption of basaltic or andesitic tephra and lava flows, explosive eruptions of dacitic tephra and pyroclastic flows, and large lahars that sweep down valleys heading on the volcano.”
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Breast Cancer Drug Perjeta Shows ‘Unprecedented’ Success In Clinical Trials

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Perjeta, a new breast cancer drug developed by Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, has shown “unprecedented” success in extending the lives of patients in a clinical trial, according to research results released on Sunday.
According to Andrew Pollack of the New York Times, patients who took the drug had a median survival period nearly 16 months longer than those in the control group – the longest time ever for a drug used as an initial treatment for metastatic breast cancer, the researchers behind the study claimed.
Furthermore, it could be one of the longest for the treatment of any form of cancer, Pollack added. The researchers, who presented their results Sunday at the annual meeting of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Madrid, said that most treatments prolong survival rates of patients with metastatic cancer (meaning it spread to other parts of the body) by only a few months.
“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” lead author Dr. Sandra M. Swain of the MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington told Pollack. “It’s really unprecedented to have this survival benefit.”
Dr. Swain and her colleagues gave Perjeta (also known as pertuzumab) to patients suffering from a form of breast cancer known as HER2-positive, which accounts for up to 25 percent of all breast cancers, according to Reuters reporter Ben Hirschler. By adding the new treatment to older medicine Herceptin and chemotherapy, they were able to extend the lifespan of HER2-positive patients by 15.7 months versus those on Herceptin and chemotherapy alone.
“The result is a vindication of combining medicines that fight tumor cells in a variety of ways,” Hirschler said. “Both Herceptin and Perjeta are antibodies designed to block the function of HER2, a protein produced by a cancer-linked gene. Perjeta… binds to a different part of the same protein, which makes combining the two drugs extra effective.”
“Adding Perjeta to treatment with Herceptin and chemotherapy resulted in the longest survival observed to date in a clinical study of people with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer,” said Dr. Sandra Horning, Roche’s chief medical officer and the head of the company’s product development, according to the Wall Street Journal. She called the survival results “a magnitude of improvement we rarely see in clinical trials in advanced cancer.”
The trial involved a total of 800 patients, the Journal’s Andrew Morse said, and patients receiving Perjeta along with the Herceptin and chemotherapy lived for a median of 56.5 months compared to just 40.8 months for those who did not receive pertuzumab. Like Herceptin (which is also marketed by Roche) Perjeta is a biologic therapy which is derived from organisms and works by blocking the HER2 protein.
“Perjeta was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2012 and is already considered the standard of care in the United States,” said Pollack. However, the successful results could lead to increased use for the drug, which is reportedly used by only half of the women eligible for the treatment. In the US, Perjeta costs about $5,900 a month while Herceptin carries a price tag of roughly $5,300 a month, a Roche spokesman told the Times.
“I think these data are really compelling,” ESMO Executive Board Member Eric Van Cutsem, a professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium who was not involved in the research, told Reuters. “When you see in breast cancer such a big change in survival with not a lot of cardio-toxicities then that is really practice-changing.”
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Central California Rocked By Swarm Of More Than 600 Earthquakes In 24 Hours

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
In what is being called one of the worst spells of seismic activity in a decade, residents of the Mammoth Lakes region of central California experienced more than 600 earthquakes in the span of 24 hours late last week.
According to Willis Robinson of the Daily Mail, the so-called “earthquake swarm” started just before 5am on Thursday and the earthquakes themselves ranged in magnitude from 1.0 to 3.8. At least 109 of them were magnitude 2.0 or greater, and at least six were greater than magnitude 3.0, he added.

David Shelly, a seismologist at the US Geological Survey’s Volcano Science Center, told the Los Angeles Times that the activity originated in the Long Valley caldera east of the central Sierra Nevada Range, and that the strongest was a 3.8 magnitude earthquake which occurred six miles from Mammoth Lakes at 9:21pm on Thursday.
“This is one of the largest earthquake swarms we’ve seen in the past decade or so,” he said, adding that the USGS was closely monitoring the region, but did not believe it was linked to any volcanic activity in the area.
Shelly also told the Associated Press (AP) that the earthquake could have been caused by water pressure from nearby hot springs, which would have shifted through the ground surface causing the tectonic plates to become stressed.
Robinson said the region in which the earthquakes occurred is one of the most seismically active in the country, and is also home to 17 volcanoes, most of which are dormant. There are also a vast number of fault lines in the Long Valley Caldera, a crater formed 760,000 years ago during a “super-eruption” that covered much of what is now the Western US in a blanket of hot ash.

Shelly told Los Angeles Times writer Veronica Rocha that this recent span of activity was not nearly equal in size or scale to some of the activity measured in the 1980s and 1990s. As Rocha explained, the region was hit with a swarm of multiple 6.0-magnitude temblors in the 1980s, and in 1998, the region experienced a series of primarily 4.9-magnitude earthquakes that took place over the span of several months.
Shelly confirmed that the central part of the Long Valley Caldera has been slowly uplifting over the past few decades, and earthquake swarms such as the one that happened last week occasionally occur due to the volcanic and tectonic interactions in the area. While there is magma deep in the Earth, it is not what’s moving.
“The earthquakes are usually triggered when water and carbon dioxide above the magma move up into higher layers of the earth’s crust and into the cracks of the small faults. The increase in fluid pressure sets off the movements,” Rocha said. Shelly emphasized that this does not indicate the volcano is becoming more active, only that this is an “ongoing process in the volcanic system.”
In addition, Lori Sandoval of Tech Times reports that the USGS described the earthquakes as “small, brittle-failure (rock breaking) events,” and emphasized that they would not result in magma movement. The agency said they are able to “distinguish between brittle-failure earthquakes and those resulting from magma movement by the characteristics of the seismic waveforms,” and added that the earthquake swarm posed no immediate threat.
“At the beginning of this year, residents commemorated the 20th anniversary of the North Ridge earthquake,” Robinson noted. “It centered in Reseda, a neighborhood in the north-central San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, killing 57 people and injuring more than 5,000.”
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MIT-Developed Submersible Robot Could Help Foil Smugglers

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A new football-sized underwater robot developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) could discreetly follow alongside a ship and perform ultrasound scans to search for smuggled contraband.
According to BetaWired reports, the submersible unit is oval-shaped with a flattened panel on one side which slides along a surface to perform the ultrasound scans. The robot was originally developed to search for fractures in the water tanks of nuclear reactors, but could also seek out false hulls and propeller shafts used by smugglers to hide their goods.
“Transport by sea has been a favorite of smugglers for centuries – it’s hard to patrol an entire coastline, and it’s easier to move a ton of stuff by sea than by land,” said Gizmodo reporter Chris Mills. “In the future, though, getting your contraband through a port might be made exponentially more difficult by this tiny, ultrasound-packing submersible robot.”
“The device is perfect for the job, not only because it’s small, but also because it doesn’t leave visible bubble trails as it moves underwater,” added Engadget’s Mariella Moon. “Also, its propulsion system’s housed within the permeable half of the device itself, so it can potentially hide in clumps of algae to avoid being spotted without getting itself tangled when it starts up. The other half is watertight and houses its circuits, batteries, antenna and other electrical components.”
The underwater robot was created by MIT graduate student Sampriti Bhattacharyya and engineering professor Harry Asada, who recently presented their work at the 2014 IEEE/International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Moon said. They said that if the device could be produced for roughly $600 per unit, port authorities would be able to use a fleet of 20 or more of them to perform inspections together.
“The duo used a 3D printer to make the device’s main components, but in order to offer the device at that price point, their mass production process needs to be low-cost, as well,” Moon added. “Right now, though, the two are focused on making a second prototype with wireless charging capabilities, longer battery life and the ability to perform ultrascans on ships without having to touch their barnacle-encrusted hulls.”
Bhattacharyya explained to Larry Hardesty of the MIT News Office that the elliptical shape of the robot makes it naturally unstable, and that this trait was intentional. She compared it to fighter jets, which are made unstable by design so that they can be maneuvered more easily – an asset that will help the robot when it is attempting to execute tight maneuvers, but a liability when it is attempting to travel in a straight line while scanning the hull of a ship.
The robot was designed so that all of the tubes exit it at different angles, Bhattacharyya said. This provides for the greatest degree of control over the machine’s instabilities. During initial tests, the MIT researchers only looked at the robot’s ability to navigate to an underwater surface and stay in contact with it while traveling in a straight line, Hardesty explained, so the current prototype unit has not yet been equipped with an ultrasound sensor.
The rechargeable lithium batteries used in the prototype last about 40 minutes, which the developers believe should give the robot enough time to inspect multiple small ships before needing to be recharged. Ideally, they view the units as being part of teams that could be rotated into and out of active duty in order to recharge, but Bhattacharyya pointed out that the next prototype would feature wirelessly rechargeable batteries and propulsion system modifications that could increase the robot’s operational time between changes to over 1 1/2 hours.
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FOR THE KINDLE: The History of 3D Printing: redOrbit Press

Lung Flute Helps COPD Patients Breathe Easier: Study

Written By: editor

By Ellen Goldbaum, University at Buffalo

Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) report improved symptoms and health status when they use a hand-held respiratory device called the Lung Flute®, according to a new study by the University at Buffalo. Usually caused by smoking, COPD, which includes chronic bronchitis and emphysema, is the third leading cause of death in the US.

The Lung Flute, manufactured by Medical Acoustics, (Buffalo), uses sound waves to break up mucus in the lungs. The device allows patients to clear lung mucus simply by blowing into the hand-held respiratory device, which produces a low frequency acoustic wave.

Published on Sept. 23 in Clinical and Translational Medicine, the 26-week study demonstrates that patients using the Lung Flute experience less difficulty breathing and less coughing and sputum production than a control group, which saw no change in COPD symptoms.

“This study confirms that the Lung Flute improves symptoms and health status in COPD patients, decreasing the impact of the disease on patients and improving their quality of life,” says Sanjay Sethi, MD, principal author of the study and professor and chief, division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine in the Department of Medicine, UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

The device is approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat COPD and other lung diseases characterized by retained secretions and congestion. It also is approved by FDA to obtain deep lung sputum samples for “laboratory analysis and pathologic examination.”

Colleagues of Sethi’s in the UB medical school are now studying the Lung Flute for use in improving symptoms in asthma. The device is also being investigated for diagnostic use in tuberculosis and lung cancer.

The study followed 69 patients with COPD for six months; it was conducted at the Veterans Affairs Western New York Healthcare System (Buffalo VA) by researchers at the UB medical school.

“This study confirms and extends the results of a previous, 8-week study of 40 patients that was conducted in 2010 to obtain FDA approval for the Lung Flute,” says Sethi, whose clinical practice is at the Buffalo VA.

He has led a series of clinical trials demonstrating the safety and efficacy of the Lung Flute, including those that played a key role in the FDA’s approval of the device for diagnostic and therapeutic uses.

Improvement in the current study was demonstrated by responses reported by patients on the Chronic COPD Questionnaire, which assesses changes in COPD symptoms and the St. George’s Respiratory Questionnaire, which measures quality of life. On both questionnaires, patients using the Lung Flute reported significant improvements.

In addition, the Body-Mass Index, Airflow Obstruction, Dyspnea and Exercise Capacity (BODE) score was measured repeatedly in the study. “The BODE index provides a more comprehensive assessment of COPD patients,” explains Sethi. “As the disease worsens, the BODE index goes up as it did in the control group. But for patients using the Lung Flute, the BODE index stayed flat.”

Sethi adds that the study points to a potential decrease in exacerbations, flare-ups of respiratory symptoms, as a result of using the Lung Flute. Researchers are planning longer-term studies that will focus specifically on how the device affects exacerbations, a key part of what makes COPD patients sicker and leads to health care utilization.

Sethi notes that while similar devices have been developed for cystic fibrosis, the Lung Flute is the only one that has undergone extensive testing specifically for COPD patients. In a previous study comparing a device developed for cystic fibrosis with the Lung Flute, the Lung Flute was superior for COPD patients.

“All therapeutic studies on using the Lung Flute for COPD have been done here in Buffalo,” says Sethi. “We have the biggest database by far on using the device in COPD. The Lung Flute is the only one that has been tested and been clearly shown to benefit COPD patients.”

The research is the result of a partnership between UB and Medical Acoustics.

Continue reading…

Cancer During Pregnancy: Chemotherapy And Radiotherapy Are Safe For Babies

Written By: editor
editor

European Society for Medical Oncology

Presentations at ESMO 2014 examine the impact of in-utero exposure to chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the safety of lymph node biopsy in pregnancy, and the outcomes of unplanned pregnancy during cancer treatment

Children who are exposed to chemotherapy or radiotherapy while in the womb suffer no negative impacts on mental or cardiac development, international studies presented at the ESMO 2014 Congress in Madrid have shown.

“When chemotherapy is administered after the first trimester of pregnancy, we cannot discern any problems in the children,” says lead author Dr. Frederic Amant, KU Leuven and University Hospitals Leuven in Belgium. “Fear about the risks of chemotherapy administration should not be a reason to terminate a pregnancy, delay cancer treatment for the mother, or to deliver a baby prematurely.”

Concerns about the potential impact of cancer treatment on unborn children has until recently left some oncologists hesitant to administer treatments to pregnant cancer patients, says Amant. To address these concerns, his group has led three new studies presented at ESMO 2014.

In the first study, 38 children prenatally exposed to chemotherapy were recruited from the International Network for Cancer, Infertility and Pregnancy (INCIP) registry and assessed for mental development and cardiac health. Their outcomes were compared to 38 control children who were not exposed to chemotherapy.

At a median age of almost two years of age, mental development as measured by the Mental Development Index was in the normal range for both groups of children, and were not significantly different. Cardiac dimensions and functions were within normal ranges for both groups.

This is the first case control study on the developmental outcome of children exposed in utero to chemotherapy. It shows that chemotherapy during pregnancy can be considered safe for mental development and cardiac functioning of the child, the authors say.

Commenting on the results, Dr. Fedro Alessandro Peccatori, Director of the Fertility & Procreation Unit at the European Institute of Oncology’s Division of Gynaecologic Oncology, who was not involved in the study, said that these results confirm that chemotherapy administration during pregnancy does not alter neurodevelopment after birth, nor cause cardiac alterations.

“This paper points to the very important issue of long-term safety of prenatal exposure to chemotherapy and reinforces the notion that chemotherapy during gestation does not endanger the fetus and her or his subsequent development. To further ameliorate neonatal outcome, a special effort should be made to prolong pregnancy duration, and stringent long-term follow-up should be pursued to confirm these findings. Meanwhile, specific measures to support prematurely delivered babies and their families should be implemented.

Future studies will explore the effects of specific chemotherapy types in detail, and longer term follow-up, to fine tune the findings.

In a second study, Amant and colleagues explored the impact of radiotherapy on the children of women with cancer.

The study included 16 children and 10 adults who had been exposed to radiotherapy in utero. This is the first long-term follow-up study of children prenatally exposed to medical radiation, and the study showed that neuropsychological, behavioral and general health outcomes for those exposed to radiotherapy were within normal ranges. One child revealed a severe cognitive delay, however other pregnancy-related complications are confounding factors, they report.

Amant hopes the new results will provide clinicians with the evidence they need to ensure pregnant women with cancer receive the best quality care. “It’s a good feeling to know that research data can be implemented immediately into the clinic. Our data will inform physicians and patients and help them to take decisions in a difficult situation.”

Commenting, Peccatori noted that the long-term follow-up of children and adults whose mothers have been treated with radiation therapy during gestation is an important topic.

“The main message is that neuropsychological, behavioral and general health outcomes were within the normal range in all, but 3 of the 16 children studied. This is the first long-term follow-up study of children and adults exposed to radiotherapy in utero. Pregnancy, particularly advanced pregnancy, has been traditionally considered a contra-indication to radiotherapy. New radiation techniques and more sophisticated simulations of the received fetal dose may change this scenario, but caution remains mandatory when giving radiotherapy to a pregnant woman, particularly in the third trimester.”

Sentinel node biopsy safe for pregnant women with cancer

It is safe and effective to check for the spread of early breast cancer in pregnant women using sentinel node biopsy rather than completely dissecting the node, researchers from the International Network of Cancer, Infertility and Pregnancy and the German Breast Group have shown in another study presented at ESMO 2014 in Madrid.

Sentinel lymph node biopsies have been the topic of intensive research over the last 2 decades, and have replaced the older and more invasive method of axillary lymph node dissection for women patients without clinically suspicious axillary lymph nodes.

This method removes the first (or ‘sentinel’) lymph node receiving lymphatic drainage from the tumor, therefore most likely to contain metastatic cells. If the SLN does not contain metastatic disease, the remainder of the lymph nodes do not have to be removed, thereby sparing the patient the associated side-effects such as lymphedema and reduced movement.

The latest guidelines for doctors still advise that they perform axillary lymph node dissection and avoid sentinel lymph node biopsy during pregnancy, due to lack of safety data, explains Sileny Han of University Hospitals Leuven, Belgium, who is presenting the results of a new study at ESMO 2014. “We aim to add to the body of evidence that sentinel node biopsy is feasible during pregnancy and should be considered an option.”

This study is the largest series to date to assess this question. The researchers studied 97 women with breast cancer who underwent sentinel node biopsy. Their aim was to assess whether the sentinel lymph node procedure is safe from an oncologic point of view for the mother.

After a median follow-up of 35 months, eight patients had experienced a loco-regional relapse, meaning their cancer recurred in the same or other breast, the chest wall, including two who developed tumors in their lymph nodes. Four patients developed distant metastases, of whom three died of breast cancer.

These results show that sentinel lymph node biopsy during pregnancy has a low axillary recurrence rate, they write. “This staging method can be considered during pregnancy instead of standard axillary lymph node dissection for early stage, clinically node negative breast cancer.”

Adds Peccatori, co-author on this study: “Axillary staging in early breast cancer is a changing paradigm. Data from different institutions in Europe and US have demonstrated that in non-pregnant patients, sentinel node biopsy is an effective staging procedure that holds equivalent results to axillary lymph node dissection even in patients with up to three positive sentinel nodes, if post operative systemic treatment is adequate. Furthermore, hand sentinel node biopsy is associated with improved arm motility, decreased armpit pain and numbness and shorter hospital stay. Why should we deny this procedure to pregnant breast cancer patients?”

Unplanned pregnancy during cancer treatment

Another study from Amant’s group shows the importance of thinking about contraception during cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment. Sarah van Peer and colleagues checked the database of the International Network for Cancer Infertility and Pregnancy for women who became pregnant during cancer diagnosis or during treatment.

The INCIP database currently includes 1011 patients from 21 countries (at the time it included 897 patients).

Overall, 3.23% (29/897) of the patients in the database became pregnant after cancer diagnosis or during treatment. Of those 29 patients, three pregnancies were identified during diagnostic examinations for suspected malignancy but before definite diagnosis, 18 during treatment, and seven after cancer diagnosis but before treatment was started.

“The core message from our results is that it is vital for doctors and patients to discuss contraception during cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment. Although fertility issues are not the focus of attention at this time, it is necessary to provide advice about contraception. And although we know it’s possible to treat patients with chemotherapy/radiotherapy during pregnancy when necessary, it’s still better to avoid this situation, if possible.”

Says Peccatori, “Discussion about effective contraception remains a high priority for oncologists dealing with young patients with cancer. The incidence of unplanned pregnancy during cancer treatment probably remains a rare event. Nonetheless, the high emotional impact of an unplanned pregnancy and the possible maternal consequences in terms of treatment modification should prompt more effective interventions in this field.”

Enzyme-Blocking Molecule Could Lead To Development Of Cancer-Fighting Wonder Drug

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Researchers at Imperial College London have identified a molecule that blocks the activity of a disease-causing enzyme – a breakthrough that could ultimately lead to the development of a wonder drug that could be used to fight cancer, neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, and even diabetes.
Writing in Friday’s edition of Nature Communications, lead investigator Ed Tate, a professor in the school’s department of chemistry, and his colleagues have discovered how to switch off N-myristoyltransferase (NMT), an enzyme that makes changes to proteins that has been “implicated in the development and progression of a range of human diseases.”
According Sarah Knapton, Science Correspondent with The Telegraph, the changes made by the NMT enzyme are irreversible and prevent damaged cells from dying. Instead, it actually speeds up their replication, which can cause cancer and can even make them resistant to chemotherapy, she said.
The enzyme has also been implicated in Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and inflammatory conditions.
In the new study, Tate and his colleagues analyzed living human cancer cells and located over 100 proteins modified by NMT, nearly all of which have been identified for the first time in their natural environment. They went on to map all of the proteins and establish a small drug-like molecule capable of blocking the enzyme’s activity – thus inhibiting its ability to modify the proteins, and leading to a potential new way to treat cancer and other NMT-related diseases.
“We now have a much fuller picture of how NMT operates, and more importantly how it can be inhibited, than ever before,” the professor said in a statement. “This is the first time that we have been able to look in molecular detail at how this potential drug target works within an entire living cancer cell, so this is a really exciting step forward for us.”
“This work opens a completely new avenue for the treatment of these diseases, and works very differently from other drugs currently under development,” he added, according to Knapton. “Eventually we hope this would simply be a pill you could take. It will be perhaps 10 years or so to a drug ‘on the market’ but there are many hurdles to get over.”
The researchers used a specialized set of tools to identify and analyze NMT and the proteins it changes, then used mass spectrometry to quantify the effect of an NMT inhibitor molecule. They utilized a process known as apoptosis, which programs a cell to die, to examine the interaction because the DNA that had been damaged.
The process, the study authors explained, is vital in cancer chemotherapy and is frequently deactivated in drug resistant cancers. Previous, scientists were only aware that NMT modified a handful of proteins during apoptosis. However, the results of the new study have led to the identification of several additional proteins types that are affected by the enzyme, suggesting potential new ways to help overcome drug resistance.
Experts from the University of York collaborated on the research, which was primarily funded by Cancer Research UK and The Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council. Additional support was provided by The Medical Research Council, The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the European Union.
“This promising research could lead to new treatments for cancer patients, and for people with other types of disease too,” Cancer Research UK senior science officer Dr. Emma Smith told The Telegraph. “Drugs targeting the molecule the team studied could make current cancer treatments more potent and help stop the cancer coming back. The next steps will be to develop this idea and make a drug – but there’s a way to go before we’ll know if it’s safe and effective in people.”

Inexpensive Harry Potter-Inspired Cloaking Device Developed At University Of Rochester

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Researchers from the University of Rochester in New York have developed an inexpensive new way to create a Harry Potter-esque invisibility cloak using ordinary lenses to obscure objects from sight at a variety of angles.
According to Carrie Putnam of Reuters, the device known as the Rochester Cloak is not actually a cloak at all, but a device that resembles the equipment typically used by an eye doctor. When an item is placed behind its layered lenses, the object appears to be “cloaked” or hidden from view, while everything surrounding it appears undisturbed.
This is not the first attempt to build a so-called invisibility cloak inspired by the one featured in JK Rowling’s novels []. In fact, Rex Santus of Mashable said that “efforts toward a real-life invisibility cloak have popped up more than a few times over the last several years.”
[ Watch the Video: How Does Cloaking Work In The Real World? ]
However, Santus added, “none have quite moved beyond the muggle world, but scientists seem keen on bringing a true disappearing cloak to reality.” Furthermore, while it might have drawn inspiration from Harry Potter, he said that the Rochester Cloak “wouldn’t exactly be useful in aiding Harry and friends’ exploits at Hogwarts.”
What these invisibility cloaks can do is bend light around an object in order to essentially hide it from view, and according to Rochester physics professor John Howell and graduate student Joseph Choi, their take on it is less complicated and less expensive than previous versions. Furthermore, they claim that it is the first device of its kind capable of hiding objects in three dimensions, regardless of what angle they are being viewed at.
“A lot of people have worked on a lot of different aspects of optical cloaking for years,” Howell told Putnam on Friday. In a statement, he explained that while there had been “many high tech approaches to cloaking,” the basic concept behind them involved making it so that light appears to “pass around something as if it isn’t there” – a process which typically requires the use of “high-tech or exotic materials.”
Howell and Choi’s Rochester Cloak, however, required the use of slightly more than $1,000 worth of materials, and the developers believe that it can be done even less expensively. Cheap does not mean ineffective, however, as Putman said that in their tests, the researchers successfully cloaked a hand, a face and a ruler.
The researchers, who have submitted a paper detailing their findings to the journal Optics Express, said that their device can be scaled up to the size of the lenses, which makes it possible to cloak fairly large objects. In addition, the device is broadband, which means that it works for the entire visible spectrum of light, instead of just for select frequencies.
[ Watch the Video: The Rochester Cloak ]
However, while they tout their work as an improvement over previous cloaking devices, they admit that it is not perfect. Choi said that it “bends light and sends it through the center of the device, so the on-axis region cannot be blocked or cloaked.” What that means is that the cloaked region is doughnut-shaped. Furthermore, he and Howell said that the cloak has edge effects, but those effects can be reduced if the lenses used in the device are large enough.
Howell, who said that he first became interested in experimenting with cloaking devices while helping his children with a holiday project, said that there are numerous potential applications for their device. For example, it could allow a surgeon to “look through his hands to what he is actually operating on,” he said, while the principles could be applied to a vehicle to allow drivers to see through blind spots.

Autonomous Robots Could Provide Restore Electricity Following Power Outages

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Natural disasters are often compounded by the power failures and cell tower outages that they cause, but a team of engineers led by Nina Mahmoudian of Michigan Technological University is developing a new team of robots that could solve these issues, assisting search-and-rescue operations in the process.

Mahmoudian and her colleagues, who presented their research at the 19th World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control in South Africa last month, have already developed a tabletop model of an autonomous power distribution system that can bring electricity to where it is needed most.

“The aim is to study the use of the autonomous mobile power-grid systems after disasters to accelerate search, rescue, and recovery efforts,” the authors of the study wrote. “The concept is demonstrated through an autonomous electrical cabling and connection mission between a power source and a power load in a cluttered environment using lab-size platforms.”

Their system “will be scalable to real-size” and that it would emphasize returning power to communications towers, they added. “The ultimate goal of this work is developing intelligent power electronics and a distributed autonomous mobile microgrid. It will be capable of regulating power flow at a desired voltage and frequency level, meeting load demands and adaptable to changes in situation, power demands, or generations.”

Those towers are typically located in hard-to-reach areas, assistant mechanical engineering professor Mahmoudian explained in a statement. Deploying robots to those places to restore power could get the lines of communication back up and running more quickly, thus making it easier for rescue personnel to find and assist those individual who are most in need.

The developers have programmed robots to restore power in small electrical networks, link up power cords and batteries to light a small lamp or set a flag waving with a small electrical motor, the study authors said. The machines operate independently, selecting the shortest path and avoiding obstacles during their journey.

The robots are capable of transporting devices such as batteries, photovoltaic systems or generators – and they can even recharge each other. Furthermore, the team said that they are working with electrical engineers to incorporate power converters into the machines, since different countries have different electrical requirements.

In addition to helping with disaster recovery efforts, their autonomous power distribution system could also be used by military personnel, especially for special forces companies participating in covert missions. Mahmoudian explained that in these cases, the power systems could be set up at a location before the troops arrive, making it so that the soldiers are not required to carry heavy equipment with them.

For their next project, the research team is looking to develop a full-sized working model of the robot network. Their first one will be a tank-like vehicle that was donated by Michigan Tech’s Keweenaw Research Center, and Mahmoudian said that this project “will let us develop path-planning algorithms that will work in the real world.”

In addition to Mahmoudian and Weaver, co-authors on the study included mechanical engineering graduate student Barzin Moridian, electrical engineering undergraduate Daryl Bennett and mechanical engineering professor Rush Robinett. The research was funded by the Michigan Tech Center for Agile Interconnected Microgrids.

India’s Space Program Faces Challenges, Even After Mangalyaan Success

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

When the Mars Orbiter Mission Mangalyaan (MOM) successfully entered orbit around the Red Planet, it was a defining moment for the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) – but as media reports published late last week revealed, it also shed light on some of the challenges facing the country’s fledgling space program.
Once Mangalyaan completed its orbital insertion maneuver on Wednesday, it made the ISRO just the fourth agency to have traveled to Mars, joining NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos). In addition, it allowed India to become the first Asian country to successfully reach the Red Planet, as well as the first space program ever to do so on its first attempt.
It should have been a moment of immense pride, especially for those who had a hand in building the MOM spacecraft, but as Reuters reporter Aditya Kalra pointed out on Friday, “S.M. Vaidya, head of business at conglomerate Godrej’s aerospace division that made the spacecraft’s engine and thruster components, sounded surprisingly downbeat.”
While Vaidya told Kalra that the mission was a major achievement and one of which ISRO officials should be thrilled about, he added that one mission to Mars was not enough to sustain the country’s small but promising space travel industry. The success of the project had “boosted” India’s “prestige in the global space race” and “raised the profile of Indian companies involved in the project,” Kalra said, but the news wasn’t all good.
“Godrej and some other firms are frustrated at what they say is the slow execution of projects and lack of government support, which are hampering India’s efforts to compete with China and Russia as a cheaper option for launching satellites,” the Reuters reporter said. “Unless they fly more, they will not buy more from us,” explained Vaidya.
Mangalyaan was built in 15 months for a reported $74 to $75 million, making it a bargain in comparison to NASA’s over $600 million MAVEN spacecraft. Two-thirds of the orbiter’s parts were manufactured by domestic firms such as Godrej & Boyce and Larsen & Toubro, which according to Reuters is India’s largest engineering company.
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said he wants to expand India’s 50-year-old space program. The government has increased funding for space research by 50 percent to almost $1 billion this financial year. But the program is still small, and the small number of launches limits the growth potential of private companies that supply them,” Kalra said, adding that government data said that ISRO accomplished nearly 30 missions from 2007 for 2012.
During that time period, it had planned to conduct more than twice that amount, but they were delayed due to “development complexity,” according to the news agency. India plans to conduct 58 missions from 2012 through 2017, but only 17 have been complete to date, and Kalra said that the ISRO would not comment on why that was.
“Some company executives and experts do not see that changing any time soon, with the absence of heavy rocket launchers, too few launch facilities and bureaucratic delays hampering growth,” the Reuters reporter added. “India performs only a handful of launches annually, compared with 20 or more carried out by the United States, Russia and China, according to the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), a defense ministry think-tank.”
Similarly, while the low price tag of the MOM equipment has been one of the primary talking points of the mission, NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel explained that the cost-cutting measures did require ISRO to make some concessions in terms of quality – specifically, less sophisticated equipment that won’t last as long, fewer cameras and fewer scientific instruments.
Amaresh Kollipara, a managing partner of the company Earth 2 Orbit (which pairs private satellite providers with the Indian space agency), told NPR that the comparison between Mangalyaan and MAVEN was similar to the difference between “a Honda Civic” and “a Mercedes S-Class.” Brumfiel added that India also chose a less expensive orbit than NASA – one that required less engine firing to slow down, but keeps the probe further away from the planet.
In addition, the money allocated to the engineers involved on each project varied greatly. According to Bruce Jakosky, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder and the primary investigator on the MAVEN project, his team had as many as 600 people working on the NASA probe at one point.
Kollipara noted that he had heard reports suggesting that the ISRO aerospace engineering team members were being paid the equivalent of approximately $1,000 per month (50,000 to 60,000 rupees per month) for their hard work. “I can assure you that NASA engineers earn a lot more than that,” he told NPR.
While addressing the MOM team following the vehicle’s successful entry into orbit on Wednesday, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that “despite our many limitations,” the ISRO team had “achieved the near impossible” and that “inspired our future generations.” He added, “the success of our space program is a shining symbol of what we are capable of as a nation.”

Simple Blood Test Could Be Used As Tool For Early Cancer Diagnosis

Written By: editor

University of Bristol
Hypercalcaemia is the most common metabolic disorder associated with cancer, occurring in 10 to 20 percent of people with cancer. While its connection to cancer is well known, this study has, for the first time, shown that often it can predate the diagnosis of cancer in primary care.
A simple blood test could identify those with hypercalcaemia, prompting doctors to investigate further.
The research, published in the British Journal of Cancer, analyzed the electronic records of 54,000 patients who had elevated levels of calcium and looked at how many of them went on to receive a cancer diagnosis.
Dr. Fergus Hamilton, who led the research from the Center for Academic Primary Care at the University of Bristol, said: “All previous studies on hypercalcaemia and cancer had been carried out with patients who had already been diagnosed with cancer – hypercalcaemia was seen as a late effect of the cancer.
“We wanted to look at the issue from a different perspective and find out if high calcium levels in blood could be used as an early indicator of cancer and therefore in the diagnosis of cancer.”
Analysis of the data from 54,000 patients found that in men, even mild hypercalcaemia (2.6–2.8 mmol l−1) conferred a risk of cancer in one year of 11.5 percent. If the calcium was above 2.8 mmol l−1, the risk increased to 28 percent. In women, the risks were much less, with the corresponding figures being 4.1 percent and 8.7 percent.
In men, 81 percent of the cancer associated with hypercalcaemia was caused by lung, prostate, myeloma, colorectal and other haematological cancers. In women, cancer was much less common.
Dr. Hamilton added: “We were surprised by the gender difference. There are a number of possible explanations for this but we think it might be because women are much more likely to have hyperparathyroidism, another cause of hypercalcaemia. Men rarely get this condition, so their hypercalcaemia is more likely to be due to cancer.”
The research is part of the Discovery Program, which aims to transform the diagnosis of cancer and prevent hundreds of unnecessary deaths each year. In partnership with NHS trusts and six Universities, a group of the UK’s leading researchers into primary care cancer diagnostics are working together in a five-year program.
If successful, the program should transform the diagnosis of cancer and prevent hundreds of unnecessary deaths each year. The program objectives are to design and test new service pathways to cancer diagnosis which are based on sound medical evidence, make efficient use of resources to take full account of patient views.

Common Curry Ingredient Could Help The Brain Battle The Affects Of Alzheimer’s

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Eating spicy Indian food could help boost the brain’s ability to heal itself, according to new research published in Friday’s edition of the journal Stem Cell Research and Therapy.

According to Damian Gayle of The Daily Mail, aromatic turmerone, a compound found in the popular curry spice turmeric, could encourage the growth of nerve cells believed to help repair the brains of those suffering from neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

In lab tests involving rats, researchers from the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-3) in Germany, the University Hospital of Cologne Department of Neurology and the Max Planck Institute for Neurological Research found that aromatic turmerone promoted the proliferation of brain stem cells and their development into neurons.

The study authors believe it could help scientists develop new ways to treat conditions that kill brain cells, which include strokes and Alzheimer’s. However, they told BBC News health reporter Smitha Mundasad that additional trials are required to see if the affect is applicable to humans.

The researchers injected the rodents with the compound, and then scanned their brains, Mundasad explained. They found that activity increased in the regions of the brain known to be involved in nerve cell growth following infusion with the bioactive compound. Specifically, they found that the subventricular zone (SVZ) was wider and the hippocampus had expanded in the brains of rats injected with aromatic turmerone.

In a different part of the trial, the researchers bathed rodent neural stem cells (NSCs) in different concentrations of aromatic tumerone extract. NSCs are stem cells found within adult brains that differentiate into neurons, and play a vital role in the self-repair and recovery of brain function in neurodegenerative diseases, the authors explained.

Rat fetal NSCs were cultured and grown in six different concentrations of aromatic tumerone during a 72-hour period, and at some concentrations, the compound was shown to increase stem cell proliferation by as much as 80 percent without having any impact on cell death. Furthermore, the cell differentiation process also became accelerated in cells treated with the aromatic tumerone compound when compared to untreated controls.

In a statement, lead author and INM-3 researcher Dr. Maria Adele Rueger said, “While several substances have been described to promote stem cell proliferation in the brain, fewer drugs additionally promote the differentiation of stem cells into neurons, which constitutes a major goal in regenerative medicine. Our findings on aromatic turmerone take us one step closer to achieving this goal.”

Dr. Laura Phipps of Alzheimer’s Research UK told the BBC that it is “not clear whether the results of this research would translate to people, or whether the ability to generate new brain cells in this way would benefit people with Alzheimer’s disease.” Until additional research reveals the compound’s impact on neurodegenerative diseases, she that that people should not take the new study as “a sign to stock up on supplies of turmeric for the spice rack.”

Microsoft To Show Off Newest Version Of Windows On Tuesday

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The newest version of the Windows operating system will be unveiled – along with a new official name for the software known internally as “Threshold” – at a Microsoft press event scheduled for Tuesday.
According to Reuters reporter Bill Rigby, analysts are predicting that the company will likely either launch an entirely new brand for their follow-up to Windows 8, or will simply refer to the product as ‘Windows’ when it is released early next year.
“The name change is symbolic of a new direction and style for Microsoft, which is veering away from an aggressive focus on Windows and PCs,” Rigby said. “The switch also represents a desire to erase the ill will generated by Windows 8, an ambitious attempt to redesign Windows with tablet users in mind, which ended up annoying and confusing the core market of customers who use mice and keyboards.”
Microsoft is reportedly hoping that the new OS will improve sales to businesses, many of which passed on the unfamiliar tile-based interface of Windows 8 and opted instead to remain with its four-year-old predecessor, according to Samuel Gibbs of The Guardian.
“Windows 8 was not a shining moment for Microsoft. Probably the biggest issue that lingers is the negative brand equity in the name,” said Michael Silver, an analyst at tech research firm Gartner. Among the complaints, Rigby said, was the loss of the popular start-button menu and the introduction of the modern user interface, which features a colorful grid of tiles that represented apps (a feature which could easily be changed to a traditional desktop).
“The Windows 8.1 update brought back the start button to Windows 8, but it simply opened the tiled start screen and not a start menu similar to Windows 7 or previous version of Windows,” said Gibbs. “Recent leaks indicate the start menu will come back in the next Windows, with an option of tacking on tiles if preferred.”
The Redmond, Washington-based company declined The Guardian’s request to comment on a potential new name, nor would they address speculation on what it planned to announce at Tuesday’s event, which will be held in San Francisco. It would only state that it would have a “discussion” about the future of the Windows OS.
“The choice of wording and venue are key to a humbler, lower-profile Microsoft” under new chief executive Satya Nadella, Rigby explained. Nadella “is keen to rebuild respect in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley as it moves away from the PC and to play a bigger part in the mobile computing world” of Apple and Google, he added.
“Nadella is resigned to the fact that sales of PCs have leveled off, and with it sales of Windows,” the Reuters reporter added. In a new era of computing that has been dominated by tablets and smartphones, Windows currently powers just 14 percent of all devices sold last year, Gartner told Reuters. Nadella is hoping to combat that by focusing on selling high-quality services, such as its Office suite of productivity software, and cloud-based document storage.
As previously reported by redOrbit’s John Hopton, experts are hoping that the new version of Windows will not only solve the issues associated with previous versions such as Windows 8 and Vista, but will also help close the gap in differences between the operating systems responsible for running the Xbox One and Windows smartphones.
The challenge, Rigby said, “is to come up with killer apps and services users can’t live without.” As Forrester analyst David Johnson said, the company “built their business on being very good at delivering what people needed in the moment… That’s what Microsoft has to get back to, innovating and creating things that people find indispensable.”

Fibromyalgia

The Benefits and Risks of Trazodone Treatments

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

What is Trazodone?

Trazodone is an antidepressant that regulates serotonin production and reuptake. By increasing the concentration of usable serotonin, this medication elevates mood, counteracts pain and restores normal sleep patterns. This medicine mitigates the symptoms of both depression and anxiety, in most cases.

How It Treats Fibromyalgia

According to researchers, trazodone enhances the quality of sleep, improves cognitive lucidity and functioning, and diminishes the symptoms of anxiety and depression. Of course, researchers have also sparked major concerns about potential side effects.

Studies

According to a series of controlled, clinical studies, Trazodone proved to be just as effective as other antidepressants on the market. Of course, these studies have also revealed a number of alarming side effects, including a heart condition that will be discussed.

Side Effects

This medication has the unmatched ability to treat both constipation and glaucoma. Unlike many medications, it does not induce anticholinergic reactions, hence its effectiveness in treating these conditions. Trazodone is also known to produce sedative effects, which can markedly reduce symptoms of agitation, anxiety and sleep deprivation. Of course, fibromyalgia sufferers who experience chronic fatigue and lethargy are greatly inconvenienced by these sedative effects.

Additional confirmed side effect is that of cardiac arrhythmias. This has been experienced by patients with and without preexisting heart conditions.

Another seldom observed, but, serious side effect is known as priapism, in which the male penis does not recede from its erect state for a period of at least 4 hours. While this is a rare condition, it does signal concern among men in the fibromyalgia community. The first few months of treatment for this condition generally present the highest risk for this side effect.

Trazodone as a Fibromyalgia Treatment

Precautions

Given the side effects of this medication, precautionary measures should be taken by patients and doctors. If a patient is highly sensitive to trazodone, then a smaller dosage may be sufficient in this case.

As for minors combining trazodone with other antidepressants, doctors and parents should heed the warning signs presented by researchers-namely suicidal tendencies among youth. In terms suicidal thought processes, precautionary measures and early intervention are crucial. Both suicidally depressed minors and adults should consume this medication in small doses for safety purposes. Many antidepressants have been known to evoke an indifferent mental state, and therefore, increase the prospect of suicide. Another alarming side effect of this medication is the rare incidence of seizures.

With regard to overdoses, Trazodone is safer than some antidepressants on the market. Furthermore, people rarely succumb to overdose on this med, as trazodone toxicity levels are mild at most. But in rare cases, when trazodone is consumed in excess, it spikes toxicity levels in the bloodstream and lowers blood pressure. In one of the worst cases of trazodone overdose ever reported, a patient developed blockages in the atrioventricular region of the heart, along with the failure of several organ systems.

Trazodone interacts with a liver enzyme known as CYP3A4. This particular enzyme is responsible for the metabolic processes that activate trazodone. Essentially, when this enzyme is impeded in some way, concentrations of trazodone increase drastically in the blood stream. Specific foods, herbs and medications are responsible for suppressing the effects of CYP3A4, which can be dangerous. One of these foods happens to be grapefruit, but only in large quantities.

How Does Trazadone React With Other Medications?

Patients are advised to never combine Trazodone with other medications. Trazodone may increase the potency of alcohol, depressants, and barbiturates in the bloodstream in some cases. For this reason, it may induce fatigue and disorganized thinking. Generally, patients who ingest trazodone with other medications spike their digoxin and phenytoin levels.

In terms of trazodone and its impact on anesthetics, more research should be conducted in this field. Additionally, more research should be pursued in the studies of trazodone and its relative effect on monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

Is Trazadone the only option?

While Trazodone confers its share of benefits, it presents a few perilous risk factors, as well. Patients should thoroughly acquaint themselves with both the risks and benefits before taking this medication.

If trazodone proves to be ill-suited for a patient, a different brand of antidepressant may be the solution. Luckily, patients can choose one of many routes to recovery and may very well expand their treatment options if they choose to.

As stated, fibromyalgia heightens the risk of developing tachycardia, arrhythmia, and severe fatigue in many cases. In select incidences, this med has intensified preexisting suicidal tendencies in patients. If you have a history of suicidal thought patterns or tendencies, consult with your doctor to discuss alternative treatment options. Additional treatments may include the use of anticonvulsants, sleep aids, muscle relaxers, and steroid injections.

Many patients have either supplemented or replaced traditional therapies with homeopathic remedies. Physical therapy happens to be one of the most sought after treatments methods, as it aids mobility and range of motion.

Furthermore, massage therapy can remove energy blockages, promote qi flow, smooth trigger points, and reduce muscle tension and pain. Shiatsu massage, deep tissue massage, and trigger point massage therapy are widely acclaimed in the fibromyalgia community. Shiatsu massage is especially effective because it interacts directly with nerve pathways in the central nervous system.

When trazodone presents insurmountable risks to a patient’s health, acupuncture and biofeedback prove to be viable means of treatment. In terms of homeopathic medicine, acupuncture and biofeedback are remedial sources of recovery and pain relief. Biofeedback enables the mind to achieve a certain degree of mastery over bodily functions, including pain. Furthermore, acupuncture has been said to modify how the nervous system perceives and expresses pain.

Fibromyalgia patients are often advised to curtail their diets, in terms of excluding sugar, junk food, trans fats, caffeine, MSG, and nightshade plants. Sugar and caffeine are one of the most aggravating stimulants for a fibromyalgia sufferer. Essentially, a raw diet is the only viable dietary option there is for such patients. And of course, aerobic exercise has proven to be highly effective for patients who require pain therapy.

No Single ‘Missing Link’ Found In Dinosaur-To-Bird Evolution Process

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The early stages of the process through which birds evolved from dinosaurs was slow and gradual, and there was no single “missing link” separating the two different types of creatures, according to research published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Current Biology.
Lead author Dr. Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and his colleagues analyzed the anatomical make-up of more than 850 body features in 150 extinct species in order to map the evolutionary journey from meat-eating dinosaurs to ancient birds. Based on the fossil records, they found that the emergence of birds took place bit-by-bit over the course of 150 million years.
“There was no moment in time when a dinosaur became a bird, and there is no single missing link between them,” Dr. Brusatte said in a statement. “What we think of as the classic bird skeleton was pieced together gradually over tens of millions of years. Once it came together fully, it unlocked great evolutionary potential that allowed birds to evolve at a super-charged rate.”
“Our study adds to a growing number of works that approach this problem from different angles, but all seem to confirm that the origin of birds was a truly special event in Earth history,” added Dr. Graeme Lloyd, a lecturer at the University of Oxford. “It is particularly cool that it is evidence from the fossil record that shows how an oddball offshoot of the dinosaurs paved the way for the spectacular variety of bird species we see today.”
According to Dan Vergano of National Geographic, birds are essentially defined by the unique traits that they possess – including feathers, hollow bones, a beak and a wishbone. While paleontologists previously believed that the 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird, marked a massive evolutionary leap forward, research conducted over the past 20 years indicates that the avian characteristics had started showing up in dinosaurs far earlier.
The new study “confirms” the latter point-of-view, Vergano said, by discovering that “the dinosaur forebears of birds began gradually evolving avian traits almost as soon as dinosaurs appeared on Earth some 230 million years ago.” The research indicates that the first 80 million years of the evolutionary process occurred gradually, and was followed by “a burst of bird diversity” following the arrival and first powered flights of the Archaeopteryx.
“Once the whole body plan finally came together, then something was unlocked and they started evolving really fast,” Dr. Brusatte told Vergano, with Oxford colleague Roger Benson adding that the study provided “statistical confirmation of a view about bird evolution that paleontologists have described for a while. Scientifically, it would have been crazier if they had shown birds appearing from dinosaurs all of a sudden out of nowhere.”
Though the process began slowly, it eventually reached a point where it exploded and produced thousands of species in a relatively short period of time, LiveScience reporter Tanya Lewis wrote on Thursday. This took place after the basic body-type of the bird had been established, and avian species began arising far more quickly than other types of dinosaurs – which supports a hypothesis put forth by US paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson in the 1940s that suggested that extreme bursts of evolution typically follow the origin of a new body type.
Lewis said the authors were uncertain what about birds made them so successful. Dr. Brusatte suggested that their prosperity might have been due to the fact that they were small, warm-blooded and quick-moving, but that is only speculation. “But the researchers really don’t know why avians outperformed their comrades,” Lewis added. “You might as well ask why Homo sapiens were so successful, compared with other human relatives.”

Independent Innovation, Not Population Expansion, Responsible For Advanced Stone Age Tools

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A cache of new artifacts discovered at a 325,000-year-old site in Armenia reveals that Stone Age tools were not strictly an African invention that spread due to population expansion, but occurred independently and intermittently at various locations throughout the Old World, an international team of experts report in Friday in the journal Science.
Lead author Daniel Adler, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut, and his colleagues analyzed the thousands of tools recovered from the Nor Geghi 1 site – a site preserved between two lava flows that took place between 200,000 and 400,000 years ago. They found that they provide evidence for the simultaneous use of two distinct types of technology: biface and Levallois.
Biface technology is typically associated with hand axe production during the Lower Paleolithic, while Levallois technology is a type of stone tool production method usually attributed to the Middle Stone Age in Africa and the Middle Paleolithic in Eurasia, the study authors explained. Archeologists traditionally use the advent of Levallois technology and the disappearance of biface technology to mark the transition from the Lower Paleolithic to the Middle Paleolithic approximately 300,000 years ago, they added.
Experts have argued that Levallois technology was invented in Africa and only spread to Eurasia when human populations started to expand. As it began to spread, it replaced local biface technology, thus linking populations with their technologies and equating technology changes with demographic changes, the study authors said. However, finding the two types of technologies together at Nor Geghi 1 “provides the first clear evidence that local populations developed Levallois technology out of existing biface technology,” the university said in a statement.
Dr. Simon Blockley, a member of the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and one of the authors of the new study, said that the team’s discovery “provides a major new insight into how Stone Age tools developed during a period of profound human behavioral and biological change. The people who lived there 325,000 years ago were much more innovative than previously thought, using a combination of two different technologies to make tools that were extremely important for the mobile hunter-gatherers of the time.”
The findings, he added, “challenge the theory held by many archeologists that Levallois technology was invented in Africa and spread to Eurasia as the human population expanded. Due to our ability to accurately date the site in Armenia, we now have the first clear evidence that this significant development in human innovation occurred independently within different populations.”
The newly published paper submits that while biface and Levallois technology are different in many ways, they share a common pedigree. In biface technology, the researchers explained, a stone mass is shaped by removing flakes from two surfaces in order to produce a tool such as a hand axe. Those flakes are treated as waste. On the other hand, Levallois technology involved removing flakes from a stone mass to produce a convex surface from which flakes of predetermined size and shape are detached. Those flakes, not the mass itself, are the desired products.
“Archaeologists suggest that Levallois technology is optimal in terms of raw material use and that the predetermined flakes are relatively small and easy to carry. These were important issues for the highly mobile hunter-gatherers of the time,” the University of Connecticut said. “It is the novel combination of the shaping and flaking systems that distinguishes Levallois from other technologies, and highlights its evolutionary relationship to biface technology.”
By comparing archeological data from various sites in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, the researchers were also able to demonstrate that this evolutionary process was gradual and intermittent, and that it took place independently within different human populations that shared a common technological ancestry. To put it another way, their work demonstrates that Levallois technology evolved out of existing biface technology in different places at different times. The results, the authors said, show how long ago humans developed the capacity for innovation.
Image 2 (below): This image shows Levallois and biface tools. Credit: Royal Holloway, University of London

Fibromyalgia

Treating Fibromyalgia: What Can Deep Tissue Laser Therapy Do for You?

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Fibromyalgia is a riddle comprised out of many symptoms and solving it feels almost impossible, especially since not even the world’s greatest researchers have been able to get to the “ground zero” of this syndrome.

Although there are many doctors not acknowledging the existence of this syndrome, the truth is that millions of people have to live with it every single day of their lives. Fibromyalgia is not curable and it is not preventable and it can sometimes attack even the most surprising of people.

Fibromyalgia: The Knowledge We Have so Far

What we know about fibromyalgia is that it is a real disorder and that its main symptom is widespread pain. However, together with the pain, patients very frequently experience a wide array of other symptoms too.

Nausea, vomiting, digestive issues, irritable bladder, lack of concentration, short-term memory issues, swelling, arthritis and joint pain, sensitivity to light, odors, medication and noise, sensitivity to certain kinds of food, stiffness, reduced tolerance to exercising, numbness, tingling sensation, sensitivity of the jaw, depression, sleep-related problems – these (and many more) can be among the symptoms fibromyalgia patients can very frequently show.

The major question fibromyalgia poses to doctors from all over the world is what its causes may be. Although we’ve come a very long way when it comes to medical research and technology, the truth is that we can still not tell precisely what causes fibromyalgia.

It may be caused by genetics, as there are many people for whom it does run in the family and as doctors have managed to detect the presence of certain polymorph genes in the bodies of those who suffer from this syndrome.

But at the same time, genetics cannot be the only explanation for fibromyalgia, since the same genes can be responsible for a number of other medical conditions (some of which are extremely similar to fibromyalgia).

Stress, low quality sleep and a dysfunction of the nerve cells that makes the pain feel worse in the brain – these are other explanations medics have given to fibromyalgia. And yet, no research has been fully conclusive. And until we do get our answers, all patients are left to do is treat each symptom separately and manage their condition as well as they can, while hoping that a cure will be developed as soon as possible.

Fibromyalgia Treatment and Deep Tissue Laser Therapy

Living with Fibromyalgia

Patients diagnosed with fibromyalgia have to go through a lot and they sometimes are left unable to perform daily activities properly. Some have clearly opened their hearts and they have told their stories of how they were bedridden for years.

Even celebrities have come out to speak about their fibromyalgia too (and Morgan Freeman is probably one of the most famous people who has ever admitted openly that he suffers from this condition).

Living with fibromyalgia can feel like a long string of painful days, medication and therapies meant to alleviate the pain and the other symptoms. It can sometimes feel extremely depressing and it can get patients into an endless loop from which they cannot actually come out.

Fibromyalgia is definitely not something to play around with and if you show chronic pain symptoms (pain that lasts for more than 3 months – or at least this is how most of the medical specialists would classify this) you should definitely visit a doctor and see if he/she can diagnose you.

Diagnosing fibromyalgia is sometimes as enigmatic as the causes of the syndrome itself.

There are a lot of symptoms and the vast majority of them are very much similar to symptoms of depression, arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome and myofascial pain syndrome as well. Sometimes, the symptoms even overlap completely, leading doctors to putting a wrong diagnosis.

Deep Tissue Laser Therapy and How It Can Help Fibromyalgia Patients

Laser therapy has proven to be effective in treating various forms of pain – fibromyalgia included. Although it is definitely not able to actually cure chronic pain, the studies have shown that this kind of therapy can considerably alleviate the pain patients experience due to their fibromyalgia.

In fact, even the Food and Drug Administration in the United States of America has approved deep tissue laser therapy as a complementary therapy that can help with the management of various chronic pain conditions.

For those seeking an alternative to prescription medication and other therapies, laser therapy can be quite efficient. During the treatment, you will probably experience a soothing type of warmth and there will be no pain. The treatment does not last more than 10 minutes and the first results can be felt immediately.

However, if you do choose to go for deep tissue laser therapy, make sure that you choose a facility where the equipment is very efficient and where the people are well-trained.

Other Treatments for Fibromyalgia

The FDA has approved several types of medication to treat fibromyalgia as well. Lyrica, Cymbalta and Savella are the 3 drugs that have been approved for this condition and out of them only the last one has been approved for fibromyalgia treatment since the beginning (the other ones were used to treat conditions such as depression, anxiety and so on).

Furthermore, physical therapy and regular exercising (light workouts) can make the biggest difference. It is proven that exercising can help the body release more endorphins and this can help you with alleviating pain and with increasing your mood in general.

Naltrexone is a drug that used to be administered for those who needed to alleviate drug and alcohol withdrawal symptoms, but more recently it has been found that it too works with the endorphin levels in the human body and that it has the power to alleviate the fatigue, the pain and the stress experienced by patients with fibromyalgia.

Yoga, Tai-Chi, meditation and acupuncture are also quite commonly chosen as alternative and complementary therapies by patients suffering with this syndrome and although some may be skeptical on the benefits these therapies can bring into one’s life many others consider that their pain has become more manageable since they started with these Eastern practices.

New Study Concludes That A Significant Amount Of Earth’s Water Is Older Than The Sun

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The water found on planet Earth predates the formation of the sun – a discovery that could have implications in the ongoing search for life on other planets, according to research appearing in Friday’s the journal Science.
Scientists have long wondered whether the water found on our planet, in lunar craters and elsewhere originally came from ice ionized when the solar system was formed, or if it actually predated the solar system and was produced in the cold interstellar cloud of gas in which the sun was formed, explained Reuters reporter Irene Klotz.
Lead researcher Lauren Cleeves, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, and her colleagues had been analyzing how cosmic rays and other high-energy phenomenon impacted planet-forming disks of matter circling around young stars, Klotz said. While conducting their research, they realized that those conditions weren’t right for synthesizing new H2O molecules, meaning that it could have only formed as ice in interstellar gases.
[ Listen to the Podcast: Hunting For Cosmic Rays – With Special Guest Dr. Stephan Funk ]
Based on their work, the study authors concluded that the water found on the Earth predated the sun. By demonstrating that water is “inherited” from the environment when a star is born, they believe that their findings suggest that other exoplanetary systems would have also had access to abundant water during their formation.
In their research, Cleeves and her fellow investigators focused on hydrogen and its heavier isotope deuterium, the Carnegie Institution of Science (one of the organizations that had experts participating in the study) said in a statement. Since isotopes of an element have a different mass than the original, they also behave somewhat differently during chemical reactions.
For this reason, scientists can discern the conditions under which water molecules formed by comparing their ratio of hydrogen to deuterium. Interstellar water-ice has a high ratio of deuterium to hydrogen because of the very low temperatures at which it forms, the researchers explained, though until now it was unknown how much of the deuterium enrichment was removed by chemical processing during the Sun’s birth, or how much deuterium-rich water-ice the newborn Solar System was capable of producing on its own.
The team developed models that simulated a protoplanetary disk in which all of the deuterium from space ice had already been eliminated through chemical processing, requiring the system to start over by producing ice that contains deuterium over a period of one million years. Their goal was to see if the system could reach the deuterium to hydrogen ratios found in the Earth’s ocean waters, meteorite samples, and so-called “time capsule” comets.
According to the Carnegie Institution, it was unable to do so, which told the study authors that at least a portion of the water in our solar system had to have originated in interstellar space – and, consequently, predated the birth of our sun. The findings, explained Carnegie’s Conel Alexander, “show that a significant fraction of our Solar System’s water, the most-fundamental ingredient to fostering life, is older than the Sun, which indicates that abundant, organic-rich interstellar ices should probably be found in all young planetary systems.”
“The implication of these findings is that some of the solar system’s water must have been inherited from the Sun’s birth environment, and thus predate the Sun itself,” Cleeves added in a statement. “If our solar system’s formation was typical, this implies that water is a common ingredient during the formation of all planetary systems. To date, the Kepler satellite has detected nearly 1,000 confirmed extrasolar planets. The widespread availability of water during the planet-formation process puts a promising outlook on the prevalence of life throughout the galaxy.”
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Keep an eye on the cosmos with Telescopes from Amazon.com

Four Separate Fireball Events Reported Tuesday Throughout Eastern US

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Approximately 150 people throughout the eastern half of the US reported witnessing four large fireballs traveling throughout the skies during a 24-hour period on Tuesday, various media outlets are reporting.
According to Aaron Homer of the Inquisitor, a total of four separate unique events took place. The term ‘fireball’ is actually an unscientific term for a phenomenon created by a meteor, he explained. As the piece of dust or rock travels across the Earth’s atmosphere, friction causes the air surrounding the meteor to heat up and cause a fireball-like streak.
The first was witnessed in Florida and Georgia; the second was viewed by at least 77 people in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New York, and Kentucky; the third was detected by more than two dozen witnesses in the skies above Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, and Kentucky; and the fourth was viewed in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland, Homer added.
Mike Hankey of the American Meteor Society (AMS) said that three of events each occurred within one and a half hours of one another (between 8:30pm and 9:55pm EDT). He noted that it was “rare” for “multiple significant fireball events” to be reported during the same evening, and after an in-depth analysis, the AMS declared that each one was a unique event.
The organization reached that conclusion based on a review of the “time, proximity of witnesses and pointing data gathered,” Hankey said. He added that it was “likely” one or more of the fireballs were “captured on camera by the NASA fireball network,” and encouraged anyone who might have witnessed one to file a report with the AMS.
“Much speculation as to whether the fireballs were meteors or space debris circulated on the internet Wednesday. However, at least two of the four fireballs have been confirmed as meteors,” said Greensburg (IN) Daily News reporter Amanda Browning. “Whether the cause of the fireballs was meteors or space debris… people all across the country will have their eyes on the skies tonight, hoping to catch a glimpse of an interplanetary fireball.”
Earlier this month, at approximately 11pm EDT on September 14, another fireball was observed in the skies over the East Coast and Midwest, according to Doyle Rice of USA Today. The AMS said that it ultimately received more than 300 reports about that meteor, ranging as far north as New Hampshire, as far south as Virginia and as far west as Ohio.
“There were a wide range of colors reported for this object but nearly everyone agreed that it was very bright, bright enough to cast shadows. There are no major meteor showers active at this time so this meteor was most likely a random occurrence, not associated with any known meteor showers,” said Robert Lunsford of the AMS.
“For viewers located in the northern hemisphere, we are entering a period of elevated meteor activity now through the first month of 2015,” he added. “As the length of night increases, expect to see more meteors and possibly fireballs as the Earth intersects orbiting material left behind by both asteroids and comets as they circle the sun.”

Lower Buffet Prices Lead To Less Taste Satisfaction

Written By: editor
editor

Ozge Sigirci, Cornell Food and Brand Lab

Does the price you pay at a buffet influence how much you like the food? Surprisingly, yes! In a new Cornell Food and Brand Lab study published in the Journal of Sensory Studies, researchers found that when charged more for an all-you-can-eat buffet diners rated the food higher than when charged less for the same food.

In the study, conducted by researchers David Just PhD., Ozge Sigirci, and Brian Wansink PhD. author of the forthcoming book, Slim by Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life, 139 diners in an Italian all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant were either charged $4 or $8 for the lunch buffet. The buffet offered pizza, salad, breadsticks, pasta, and soup. After finishing, diners were asked to rate the taste of the pizza and how much they enjoyed the dining experience on a 9 point scale.

“People set their expectation of taste partially based on the price—and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I didn’t pay much it can’t be that good. Moreover, each slice is worse than the last. People really ended up regretting choosing the buffet when it was cheap,” says Just. Diners who paid the higher price for the buffet rated the pizza as being 11% tastier. In contrast, those paying $4, half as much for the same food, not only enjoyed the pizza less, but they enjoyed the food less and less with each additional piece of pizza. In both situations diners ate an average of three slices of pizza.

Based on these findings the researchers recommend that buffet owners think twice before setting a low buffet cost, even though cheap all-you-can-eat buffets are popular, people tend to stick to the “you get what you pay for” mentality and will rate the food lower in quality.

According to Wansink, there’s also news you can use if you’re a consumer, “Avoid cheap all-you-can-eat buffets. Go to the most expensive buffet you can afford. You’ll eat the same amount but enjoy the experience and the food more!”

Alzheimer’s Patients Can Still Feel The Emotion Long After The Memories Have Vanished

Written By: editor
editor

John Riehl, University of Iowa

UI study offers good news for caregivers, health care workers

A new University of Iowa study further supports an inescapable message: caregivers have a profound influence—good or bad—on the emotional state of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. Patients may not remember a recent visit by a loved one or having been neglected by staff at a nursing home, but those actions can have a lasting impact on how they feel.

The findings of this study are published in the September 2014 issue of the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, and can be viewed online for free here.

UI researchers showed individuals with Alzheimer’s disease clips of sad and happy movies. The patients experienced sustained states of sadness and happiness despite not being able to remember the movies.

“This confirms that the emotional life of an Alzheimer’s patient is alive and well,” says lead author Edmarie Guzmán-Vélez, a doctoral student in clinical psychology, a Dean’s Graduate Research Fellow, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.

Guzmán-Vélez conducted the study with Daniel Tranel, UI professor of neurology and psychology, and Justin Feinstein, assistant professor at the University of Tulsa and the Laureate Institute for Brain Research.

Tranel and Feinstein published a paper in 2010 that predicted the importance of attending to the emotional needs of people with Alzheimer’s, which is expected to affect as many as 16 million people in the United States by 2050 and cost an estimated $1.2 trillion.

“It’s extremely important to see data that support our previous prediction,” Tranel says. “Edmarie’s research has immediate implications for how we treat patients and how we teach caregivers.”

Despite the considerable amount of research aimed at finding new treatments for Alzheimer’s, no drug has succeeded at either preventing or substantially influencing the disease’s progression. Against this foreboding backdrop, the results of this study highlight the need to develop new caregiving techniques aimed at improving the well-being and minimizing the suffering for the millions of individuals afflicted with Alzheimer’s.

For this behavioral study, Guzmán-Vélez and her colleagues invited 17 patients with Alzheimer’s disease and 17 healthy comparison participants to view 20 minutes of sad and then happy movies. These movie clips triggered the expected emotion: sorrow and tears during the sad films and laughter during the happy ones.

About five minutes after watching the movies, the researchers gave participants a memory test to see if they could recall what they had just seen. As expected, the patients with Alzheimer’s disease retained significantly less information about both the sad and happy films than the healthy people. In fact, four patients were unable to recall any factual information about the films, and one patient didn’t even remember watching any movies.

Before and after seeing the films, participants answered questions to gauge their feelings. Patients with Alzheimer’s disease reported elevated levels of either sadness or happiness for up to 30 minutes after viewing the films despite having little or no recollection of the movies.

Quite strikingly, the less the patients remembered about the films, the longer their sadness lasted. While sadness tended to last a little longer than happiness, both emotions far outlasted the memory of the films.

The fact that forgotten events can continue to exert a profound influence on a patient’s emotional life highlights the need for caregivers to avoid causing negative feelings and to try to induce positive feelings.

“Our findings should empower caregivers by showing them that their actions toward patients really do matter,” says Guzmán-Vélez, who was a Summer Research Opportunities Program student in 2008. “Frequent visits and social interactions, exercise, music, dance, jokes, and serving patients their favorite foods are all simple things that can have a lasting emotional impact on a patient’s quality of life and subjective well-being.”

The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (grant number: P01 NS19632), a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship awarded to Guzmán-Vélez, Kiwanis International, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, an American Psychological Association of Graduate Students Basic Psychological Research Grant, and the William K. Warren Foundation.

> Continue reading…

Fibromyalgia

The Most Common Fibromyalgia Symptoms in Women

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Today, it is estimated that as many as ten million of Americans suffer from fibromyalgia; even if they aren’t officially diagnosed with it (the number of Americans officially diagnosed with fibromyalgia is probably much closer to five million).

People are far more likely to develop fibromyalgia if they have a family history of fibromyalgia.  For example, someone whose grandparent suffered from fibromyalgia, or even a great-grandparent or a more distant relative, is more likely to develop fibromyalgia versus a person who comes from a family with no history of fibromyalgia whatsoever.

We don’t yet know if fibromyalgia is a genetic disease, but hopefully new scientific and medical research will yield the answer to that sometime soon.

Fibromyalgia mostly develops in middle aged people, even though young adults, teenagers, and even little children have been known to develop it too.  Between the two genders, women are far more likely to develop fibromyalgia than men.

Today, it is estimated that more than eighty percent of all fibromyalgia sufferers are women, an astonishing figure.  Why are the numbers so lopsided?  Just like how we don’t know if fibromyalgia is a genetic disease, we also don’t know the reasons why women are the primary sufferers of fibromyalgia.

For this article, we will discuss the primary symptoms of fibromyalgia in women, and as we shall see, many of the symptoms of fibromyalgia that women suffer from are some of the most common symptoms of fibromyalgia all together.

The Pain of Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is distinctive from other types of similar disorders because the pain is very different. The pain begins very dull and not very noticeable, but is chronic all throughout the body and gradually gets much worse over time without proper treatment.  Eventually, it may get to the point where your ability to move is hindered, and your performance at work could suffer.

Many people who suffer from fibromyalgia report being in bed for most of the day.  Not only that, but fibromyalgia sufferers also have great difficulty sleeping and feel very fatigued during the day.  They also suffer from anxiety and mood swings, and in extreme cases, depression.

Fibromyalgia Symptoms in Women

 The Tender Points of Fibromyalgia

One of the simplest ways to tell if you have fibromyalgia in the first place is to check the ‘pressure points’ throughout your body. There are eighteen pressure points throughout the body that send a sharp, shooting pain throughout the body when pressure is applied to them.  If a person feels this kind of pain in eleven out of these eighteen pressure points, then chances are very high that they have fibromyalgia.  These pressure points include the back of the head, the knees, the sides of the hips, the upper part of the buttocks, the chest, elbows, neck, shoulders, and between the shoulders.

Fatigue

Another very common symptom of fibromyalgia is fatigue. Not only do people with fibromyalgia find it very difficult to sleep, but they feel very tired throughout the day.  Sometimes all it takes is the chronic pain alone of fibromyalgia to make you stay awake all night, or wake up at various points throughout the night.

This fatigue, combined with the chronic pain, is what inhibits a person’s ability to think and comprehend things, affecting their driving skill on the road or their performance at work.  Not to mention, but a lack of sleep is only bound to make the pain feel worse.  All in all, fatigue is a major symptom of fibromyalgia.

Difficulty Concentrating

As we have just previously mentioned, fatigue can lead to a difficult in focusing on everyday tasks. But if this persists, it can lead to worse problems such as having a difficulty remembering something just from the previous day, getting confused from what you read or hear, or even speaking mixed up words.

Migraine Headaches

Not to mention the chronic pain that goes on throughout the body, but most women who suffer from fibromyalgia also have to endure consistent migraine headaches. Migraine headaches can cause stomach aches, nausea, vomiting, and light flashes.  Currently, scientists and medical researchers are conducting tests to find out more about the relation between headaches and fibromyalgia, but for now, the reason why people with fibromyalgia are more likely to develop migraine headaches on a regular basis over people who don’t have fibromyalgia remains unclear.

Painful Menstrual Periods

In women, menstrual periods can be very painful with fibromyalgia, and can develop a condition called endometriosis, where tissue that only grows in the uterus also grows in other areas in the pelvis. Endometriosis can cause even more painful periods than fibromyalgia.

Bladder Problems

Women with fibromyalgia also may experience bad bladder problems. Studies have compared men who have fibromyalgia with women who have fibromyalgia and have come to the conclusion that women with fibromyalgia are exponentially more likely to have bladder problems than men.  Women who suffer from bladder problems may have heightened diarrhea and feel constipated, bloated, and stomach cramps.

Restless Legs Syndrome

Women who suffer from fibromyalgia get a strange feeling in their legs that cause them to wake up at irregular intervals throughout the night. This is called restless legs syndrome, and is far more likely to develop in anyone who has fibromyalgia versus people who don’t.  Roughly one third of all fibromyalgia sufferers simultaneously have to suffer restless legs syndrome.  Restless legs syndrome can also contribute to sleepiness and fatigue throughout the day.

Sensitive Skin

The last fibromyalgia symptom for women that we will talk about here is developing sensitive skin. You’ll find yourself much more sensitive to the temperature, so maybe if the temperature in the summer time is at ninety degrees and drops to seventy five over the next few days, you could develop goose bumps.  You’ll also feel much more sensitive to touching everyday things, and might feel pain in the skin more easily.

New Species Of Armored Dinosaur Found In New Mexico

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editor

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
What do New Mexico and Alberta, Canada, have in common? Perhaps not much today, but millions of years ago they were both inhabited by closely related species of ankylosaurid dinosaurs, according to a study from the University of Alberta, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and the State Museum of Pennsylvania. The findings, published in PLOS ONE, describe a newly discovered species of armored dinosaur found in the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness area of New Mexico.
Alberta was home to at least five different ankylosaurid dinosaur species between 76 and 66 million years ago. This group of dinosaurs includes the club-tailed giants like Ankylosaurus. In the southern parts of the continent, however, very few ankylosaurids are known. A team of scientists from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and the State Museum of Pennsylvania discovered the new species, Ziapelta sanjuanensis, in 2011. The Bisti / De-Na-Zin Wilderness, where the fossils were found, is a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) facility comprised of over 41,000 acres of badlands south of Farmington, NM. In Navajo, Bisti means “a large area of shale hills,” while De-Na-Zin takes its name from the word for “cranes.”
A group of researchers from the University of Alberta, including recent PhD graduate Victoria Arbour and current doctoral student Michael Burns, were invited to participate in the project because of their expertise in the diversity of ankylosaurs from Alberta.

Image Above: University of Alberta researchers Michael Burns and Victoria Arbour display a fossil from a newly discovered armored dinosaur called Ziapelta sanjuanensis. Credit: University of Alberta
“Bob Sullivan, who discovered the specimen, showed us pictures, and we were really excited by both its familiarity and its distinctiveness—we were pretty sure right away we were dealing with a new species that was closely related to the ankylosaurs we find in Alberta,” Arbour said.
Ziapelta sanjuanensis is different from other ankylosaurs because of the unusually tall spikes found on the cervical half ring. The half ring is a bony structure, much like a yoke, sitting over the neck. The animal’s skull is also different from others of its species.
“The horns on the back of the skull are thick and curve downwards, and the snout has a mixture of flat and bumpy scales—an unusual feature for an ankylosaurid,” notes Arbour. “There’s also a distinctive large triangular scale on the snout, where many other ankylosaurids have a hexagonal scale.”
Ziapelta roamed North America during the Late Cretaceous. During this time, known as the end of the age of dinosaurs, a vast inland sea divided North America and both Alberta and New Mexico had beachfront property. Fossils from ankylosaurs have been found in several of the rocky formations of southern Alberta, but so far, none in the lower part of an area called the Horseshoe Canyon Formation.
“The rocks in New Mexico fill in this gap in time, and that’s where Ziapelta occurs,” says Arbour. “Could Ziapelta have lived in Alberta, in the gap where we haven’t found any ankylosaur fossils yet? It’s possible, but in recent years there has also been increasing evidence that the dinosaurs from the southern part of North America—New Mexico, Texas, and Utah, for example—are distinct from their northern neighbors in Alberta.”
Arbour says that they will be on the lookout for Ziapelta in the Horseshoe Canyon Formation in the future.

Revisiting The Pluto Debate: Should It Be Considered A Planet?

Written By: Chuck Bednar
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Pluto may no longer be a planet in the eyes of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), but as a recent debate hosted by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) revealed, not everyone agrees with the official assessment that led to its 2006 demotion.
“What is a planet? For generations of kids the answer was easy. A big ball of rock or gas that orbited our Sun, and there were nine of them in our solar system,” the CfA explained. “But then astronomers started finding more Pluto-sized objects orbiting beyond Neptune. Then they found Jupiter-sized objects circling distant stars, first by the handful and then by the hundreds. Suddenly the answer wasn’t so easy. Were all these newfound things planets?”
The debate led to an August 2006 meeting of IAU scientists in Prague in the Czech Republic, where it was decided to adopt a new definition of the word ‘planet’ that excluded Pluto from the club. Instead, the distant, ice-covered sphere was downgraded to a ‘dwarf planet,’ according to Mason Inman of National Geographic News.
The definition agreed upon by those in attendance at the IAU meeting said that a full-fledged planet had to orbit the sun, had to be large enough to have become round due to the force of its own gravity, and had to dominate the neighborhood around its orbit. It is because of this last factor that Pluto failed to meet the criteria, as it is only about twice the size of its ‘moon’ Charon, while all true planets were found to be far larger than their moons.
The IAU definition “baffled the public and classrooms around the country,” the CfA said. “For one thing, it only applied to planets in our solar system. What about all those exoplanets orbiting other stars? Are they planets? And Pluto was booted from the planet club and called a dwarf planet. Is a dwarf planet a small planet? Not according to the IAU. Even though a dwarf fruit tree is still a small fruit tree, and a dwarf hamster is still a small hamster.”
At the September 18 event, a trio of experts – Dr. Gareth Williams, associate director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge; Dr. Dimitar Sasselov, director of Harvard’s Origins of Life Initiative; and Dr. Owen Gingerich, a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory – debated what characteristics should actually be used to define what a planet is, said Huffington Post reporter Macrina Cooper-White.

Full length video of the debate and audience voting.
Dr. Gingerich, who chaired the IAU planet definition committee, argued that a planet “is a culturally defined word that changes over time” and that it shouldn’t be up to scientists to establish the criteria. Dr. Williams defended the IAU definition and reiterated that Pluto does not qualify for planetary status, while Dr. Sasselov said that Pluto was a planet because they should be defined as “the smallest spherical lump of matter that formed around stars or stellar remnants,” the Smithsonian said.
After each scientist made his best case, those in attendance were asked to vote on what a planet is or isn’t, and whether or not Pluto should be considered one. They chose Dr. Sasselov’s definition and declared that they believed Pluto should be viewed as a planet. While he did not participate in the debate, Bill Nye contacted Cooper-White to weigh in on the debate, stating that it was “fine with me” if astronomers want to refer to Pluto as a planet.
“If that is the route they choose, I believe they will add the several other objects way out there that have enough gravity to be spherical,” he told The Huffington Post in an email. “I love Pluto as much as the next guy, but it has a different origin from the traditional planets and orbits in a different plane.”
“It might be exciting to have names for hundreds of new (very old) planets, but I would be fine with 8 ‘traditionals” and hundreds of “Plutoids,’” Nye added. “These objects are out there and have the characteristics they have regardless of what we call them. But I know, people get pretty passionate about it.”
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Keep an eye on the cosmos with Telescopes from Amazon.com

CDC: US Diabetes Incidence, Prevalence Rates Appear To Be Slowing Down

Written By: Chuck Bednar
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Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

The incidence and prevalence rates of diabetes in the US may be leveling off after doubling between 1990 and 2008, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Linda Geiss of the CDC’s Atlanta chapter and her colleagues reviewed data from 1980 through 2012 for nearly 665,000 adults between the ages of 20 and 79, and used that information to determine the annual percentage change in rates of the prevalence and incidence of diagnosed diabetes (type 1 and type 2 combined).

According to USA Today’s Kim Painter, a total of 8.3 percent of all adults had been diagnosed with diabetes as of 2012. However, the rates at which new diagnoses are accumulating and the overall number of cases rising have slowed in recent years – findings that the study co-author and CDC diabetes expert Dr. Ann Albright called surprising and encouraging.

The researchers believe that the trend could be linked to a recent slowing in obesity rates, explained MedPage Today staff writer Kristina Fiore. However, the news wasn’t all good, as the researchers found that incidences continue to grow in the Hispanic and black populations, and that prevalence rates were still rising among those with high school education or less, she added.

In addition to the obesity epidemic, the aging of the population and the growing number of at-risk populations were also found to play a role in the doubling disease rates experienced between 1990 and 2008, Betsy McKay of the Wall Street Journal explained.

The disease “has become a major driver of health-care expenditures in the U.S., accounting for an estimated $245 billion in direct and indirect medical costs in 2012, the most recent year available,” she added. Dr. Albright told McKay that while the numbers were encouraging, the number of people with diabetes was still on the rise – even though the rates are leveling off – and that it was too early to say that the tide had turned in regards to the disease.

In a statement, the study authors reported that diabetes prevalence per 100 persons was 3.5 in 1990, 7.9 in 2008, and 8.3 in 2012. The incidence per 1,000 persons was 3.2 in 1990, 8.8 in 2008, and 7.1 in 2012. Both prevalence and incidence increased sharply from 1990 through 2008 (4.5 percent for prevalence, 4.7 percent for incidence) before leveling off with no significant change from 2008 through 2012, they added.

“The report reflects only diagnosed cases,” Painter said. “A previous CDC report said 8 million of the nation’s 29 million people with diabetes have not been diagnosed. An additional 86 million adults are thought to have pre-diabetes – blood sugar levels high enough to be worrisome but not high enough to be called diabetes. Together, those groups add up to about half of US adults.”

Robert Ratner, chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association, told USA Today that the findings of the new study should be interpreted “with caution” and that some other research has suggested that the diabetes epidemic is not slowing down at all. Regardless, Ratner added that slowing down the incidence and prevalence of the disease was not enough. “We need to start preventing diabetes,” he said. We need to stop it.”

Were Monarch Butterflies Responsible For Unusual Weather Radar Readings?

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Large blue blobs appearing on weather radar last week above southern Illinois and central Missouri likely belonged to a swarm of Monarch butterflies, according to officials at the US National Weather Service in St. Louis.
According to Kim Bell of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the radar masses indicated the presence of moderately heavy rain, but those readings were observed on a day that was otherwise bright and clear. There was no trace of bad weather to explain what meteorologists were seeing.
“Keen observers of our radar data probably noticed some fairly high returns moving south over southern Illinois and central Missouri,” the NWS posted on its Facebook page last week. “We think these targets are Monarch butterflies.”

Image above credit US National Weather Service Saint Louis Missouri.
The agency concluded that the blobs were most likely biological in nature due to the “high differential reflectivity values” and the “low correlation coefficient values.” High differential reflectivity indicates these are flat or oblate targets, while the low correlation coefficient indicates that the targets were changing shape.
Both of those traits are explainable by Monarchs, which would appear to be oblate while in flight and would seem to be changing shape as they were flapping their wings. According to Doyle Rice of USA Today, the butterflies were most likely migrating southward en route to spend the winter in Mexico.
Becky Oskin of LiveScience said that forecasters believe the swarm of butterflies was flying between 5,000 feet and 6,000 feet (1,525 meters to 1,825 meters) above the ground. Likewise, the timing indicates that the blob’s movements matches up with a recent exodus of Monarchs from the Great Lakes region.
“The monarchs may have gathered together because of favorable weather conditions. Monarchs take advantage of air currents to soar like birds, conserving energy for their two-month trip to Mexico. Sometimes the butterflies fly in ones or twos, but swarms of dozens or hundreds of stunning orange-winged insects have been sighted by people tracking their migration,” she added, citing information obtained from the nonprofit group Monarch Watch.
The butterflies have been under duress this spring due to an ongoing drought, as well as an unexpectedly cold winter and a lack of their primary food source (milkweed), said Rice. Furthermore, this incident does not mark the first time that weather radar has detected biological matter this year, having already spotted grasshoppers in New Mexico around Memorial Day and mayflies in Wisconsin in July.
Not everyone is convinced that the radar masses were really butterflies, however.
“If there are enough monarchs migrating through to cover a 200-mile stretch of land at one time, that would be a great thing,” Wendy Caldwell, program coordinator for the Monarch Joint Venture at the University of Minnesota, told Bell. “But without more evidence, I would be hesitant to believe it. It could certainly be living things. There are many birds that migrate and dragonflies. It isn’t necessarily monarchs.”

Federal Food Program Puts Food on the Table, But Dietary Quality Could Be Improved

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editor

American Cancer Society

A new American Cancer Society study suggests that participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as the food stamp program, had lower dietary quality scores compared with income eligible non-participants. The authors say the findings emphasize the need to bolster programs aimed at enhancing the dietary quality of SNAP participants.

The SNAP program aims to assist low-income individuals and households with the resources to obtain a nutritionally adequate diet. In 2013, approximately 47.6 million individuals, or about one in seven Americans, participated in the program. Although SNAP aims to help families “put food on the table” and prevent food insecurity, some studies have found that SNAP participation is also linked to increased likelihood of weight gain and obesity. The 2014 Farm Bill included several provisions aimed at facilitating and encouraging SNAP participants to eat healthier, including requiring SNAP retailers to carry foods from a range of food groups and more fresh foods and creating a pilot program to provide for grants to test the use of incentives to encourage fruit and vegetable purchases by SNAP participants. SNAP-Ed, the nutrition education companion to the SNAP program, has been revamped in recent years with the goal of promoting healthier food choices.

For their study, published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, researchers led by Binh T. Nguyen, PhD, of the American Cancer Society, explored the diet quality of SNAP participants using data from a nationally representative sample of over 4,000 adult Americans from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2003-2010 (NHANES).

Their analyses revealed that compared with low-income nonparticipants, SNAP participants had lower dietary quality scores overall and lower scores for fruits and vegetables, seafood and plant proteins, and had higher intake of empty calories. The groups had comparable scores on intakes of whole grains, refined grain, total dairy, total protein, fatty acid, and sodium. The researchers found that the relationship between SNAP participation and lower dietary quality was primarily observed in women, Hispanics, young adults and those who were food secure.

“The results suggest a need for interventions that encourage a healthier diet among SNAP participants in general but also particularly in the subgroups we’ve identified as being particularly at risk,” said Dr. Nguyen. “We do, however, want to emphasize the importance of SNAP; our findings underscore the need for additional education, incentives, and other interventions to make sure not only that people are getting calories, but also that they’re getting them from the right foods.”

Additional coauthors on the study include Dr. Kerem Shuval of the American Cancer Society, and Drs. Valentine Y. Njike and David L. Katz of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center.

Article: Nguyen, B. T., Shuval, K., Njike, V. Y., & Katz, D. L. (2014). The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Dietary Quality among U.S. Adults: Findings from a Nationally Representative Survey. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 89(9), 1211–1219.

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We Drink More Alcohol On Gym Days, According To Northwestern Medicine Researchers

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editor

Erin White, Northwestern University

People of all ages more likely to indulge in alcohol on days when they’re more active

A new Northwestern Medicine® study finds that on days when people exercise more — typically Thursdays to Sundays — they drink more alcohol, too.

This is the only study to use smartphone technology and a daily diary approach for self-reporting physical activity and alcohol use.

“Monday through Wednesday people batten down the hatches and they cut back on alcohol consumption,” said David E. Conroy, lead author of the study. “But once that ‘social weekend’ kicks off on Thursdays, physical activity increases and so does alcohol consumption.”

Conroy is a professor of preventive medicine and deputy director of the Center for Behavior and Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He also is a faculty affiliate of the Methodology Center at The Pennsylvania State University, where the research was conducted.

The study was published online in Health Psychology, an American Psychological Association journal.

“Insufficient physical activity and alcohol use are both linked to many health problems, and excessive alcohol use has many indirect costs as well,” Conroy said. “We need to figure out how to use physical activity effectively and safely without having the adverse effects of drinking more alcohol.”

One hundred and fifty study participants, ages 18 to 89, recorded their physical activity and alcohol use in smartphones at the end of the day. They did so for 21 days at a time, at three different times throughout one year.

Other studies on physical activity and alcohol relied on people self-reporting their behavior over the past 30 days.

“In this study, people only have to remember one day of activity or consumption at time, so they are less vulnerable to memory problems or other biases that come in to play when asked to report the past 30 days of behavior,” Conroy said. “We think this is a really good method for getting around some of those self-report measurement problems.”

The previous studies, which relied on 30-day self-reporting, concluded that physically active people tend to drink more alcohol — something this study did not find.

“We zoomed in the microscope and got a very up-close and personal look at these behaviors on a day-to-day basis and see it’s not people who exercise more drink more — it’s that on days when people are more active they tend to drink more than on days they are less active,” Conroy said. “This finding was uniform across study participants of all levels of physical activity and ages.”

Through future studies at the Center for Behavior and Health at Feinberg, Conroy hopes to discover what drives people to drink more on days they exercise more.

“Perhaps people reward themselves for working out by having more to drink or maybe being physically active leads them to encountering more social situations where alcohol is consumed — we don’t know,” Conroy said. “Once we understand the connection between the two variables we can design novel interventions that promote physical activity while curbing alcohol use.”

The National Institute on Aging grant AG035645 and the National Institute on Drug Abuse grant P50 DA010075 funded this study. Other study authors include Nilam Ram, Aaron L. Pincus, Donna L. Coffman, Amy E. Lorek, Amanda L. Rebar and Michael J. Roche of The Pennsylvania State University.

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Nanotubes Help Healing Hearts Keep The Beat

Written By: editor
editor

Mike Williams, Rice University

Rice University, Texas Children’s Hospital patch for defects enhances electrical connections between cells

Carbon nanotubes serve as bridges that allow electrical signals to pass unhindered through new pediatric heart-defect patches invented at Rice University and Texas Children’s Hospital.

A team led by bioengineer Jeffrey Jacot and chemical engineer and chemist Matteo Pasquali created the patches infused with conductive single-walled carbon nanotubes. The patches are made of a sponge-like bioscaffold that contains microscopic pores and mimics the body’s extracellular matrix.

[ Watch the Video: Nanotubes Help Healing Hearts Keep The Beat ]

The nanotubes overcome a limitation of current patches in which pore walls hinder the transfer of electrical signals between cardiomyocytes, the heart muscle’s beating cells, which take up residence in the patch and eventually replace it with new muscle.

The work appears this month in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano. The researchers said their invention could serve as a full-thickness patch to repair defects due to Tetralogy of Fallot, atrial and ventricular septal defects and other defects without the risk of inducing abnormal cardiac rhythms.

The original patches created by Jacot’s lab consist primarily of hydrogel and chitosan, a widely used material made from the shells of shrimp and other crustaceans. The patch is attached to a polymer backbone that can hold a stitch and keep it in place to cover a hole in the heart. The pores allow natural cells to invade the patch, which degrades as the cells form networks of their own. The patch, including the backbone, degrades in weeks or months as it is replaced by natural tissue.

Researchers at Rice and elsewhere have found that once cells take their place in the patches, they have difficulty synchronizing with the rest of the beating heart because the scaffold mutes electrical signals that pass from cell to cell. That temporary loss of signal transduction results in arrhythmias.

Nanotubes can fix that, and Jacot, who has a joint appointment at Rice and Texas Children’s, took advantage of the surrounding collaborative research environment.

“This stemmed from talking with Dr. Pasquali’s lab as well as interventional cardiologists in the Texas Medical Center,” Jacot said. “We’ve been looking for a way to get better cell-to-cell communications and were concentrating on the speed of electrical conduction through the patch. We thought nanotubes could be easily integrated.”

Nanotubes enhance the electrical coupling between cells that invade the patch, helping them keep up with the heart’s steady beat. “When cells first populate a patch, their connections are immature compared with native tissue,” Jacot said. The insulating scaffold can delay the cell-to-cell signal further, but the nanotubes forge a path around the obstacles.

Jacot said the relatively low concentration of nanotubes — 67 parts per million in the patches that tested best — is key. Earlier attempts to use nanotubes in heart patches employed much higher quantities and different methods of dispersing them.

Jacot’s lab found a component they were already using in their patches – chitosan – keeps the nanotubes spread out. “Chitosan is amphiphilic, meaning it has hydrophobic and hydrophilic portions, so it can associate with nanotubes (which are hydrophobic) and keep them from clumping. That’s what allows us to use much lower concentrations than others have tried.”

Because the toxicity of carbon nanotubes in biological applications remains an open question, Pasquali said, the fewer one uses, the better. “We want to stay at the percolation threshold, and get to it with the fewest nanotubes possible,” he said. “We can do this if we control dispersion well and use high-quality nanotubes.”

The patches start as a liquid. When nanotubes are added, the mixture is shaken through sonication to disperse the tubes, which would otherwise clump, due to van der Waals attraction. Clumping may have been an issue for experiments that used higher nanotube concentrations, Pasquali said.

The material is spun in a centrifuge to eliminate stray clumps and formed into thin, fingernail-sized discs with a biodegradable polycaprolactone backbone that allows the patch to be sutured into place. Freeze-drying sets the size of the discs’ pores, which are large enough for natural heart cells to infiltrate and for nutrients and waste to pass through.

As a side benefit, nanotubes also make the patches stronger and lower their tendency to swell while providing a handle to precisely tune their rate of degradation, giving hearts enough time to replace them with natural tissue, Jacot said.

“If there’s a hole in the heart, a patch has to take the full mechanical stress,” he said. “It can’t degrade too fast, but it also can’t degrade too slow, because it would end up becoming scar tissue. We want to avoid that.”

Pasquali noted that Rice’s nanotechnology expertise and Texas Medical Center membership offers great synergy. “This is a good example of how it’s much better for an application person like Dr. Jacot to work with experts who know how to handle nanotubes, rather than trying to go solo, as many do,” he said. “We end up with a much better control of the material. The converse is also true, of course, and working with leaders in the biomedical field can really accelerate the path to adoption for these new materials.”

Seokwon Pok, a Rice research scientist in Jacot’s lab, is lead author of the paper. Co-authors are research scientist Flavia Vitale, graduate student Omar Benavides and former postdoctoral researcher Shannon Eichmann, all of Rice. Pasquali is chair of Rice’s Department of Chemistry and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, of materials science and nanoengineering and of chemistry. Jacot is an assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice, director of the Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering Laboratory at the Congenital Heart Surgery Service at Texas Children’s and an adjunct assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine.

The National Institutes of Health, the Welch Foundation and Texas Children’s Hospital supported the research.

Read the abstract at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn503693h

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Fibromyalgia

Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi and Their Surprising Relationship with Fibromyalgia

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Frequently downplayed, commonly misunderstood and not always treatable, fibromyalgia is one of the medical world’s most intriguing riddles. It shows so many symptoms that it can really hide underneath a number of other conditions (arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, myofascial pain syndrome, lupus and so on) and it is so difficult to diagnose that insurance companies are reluctant over the credibility of the one blood test that has ever been developed for spotting this syndrome.

5 million. That is the number of people in the United States only who have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and who have to live through terrible pain and for whom daily activities can be a true hassle. For some, even getting out of the bed seems impossible. Others manage their condition as well as they can. But for all of them, this syndrome is more real than anything.

What We Know About It?

We know very little about fibromyalgia and it seems that with every year that passes by we know even less instead of advancing in our research. One very good example on how opinions related to fibromyalgia change over time is related to how it used to be diagnosed. When doctors analyzed the 18 tender points in the human body, they believed that fibromyalgia should be diagnosed only when at least 11 of these points are painful. However, these days this rule is not followed any longer, mainly because there are fibromyalgia patients with less painful tender points than that as well.

Symptoms of fibromyalgia can be extremely variable. Headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, irritable bladder, arthritis, joint pain, swelling, insomnia, restless leg syndrome, fibro fog (a series of cognitive problems such as short-term memory related issues) and many other symptoms can appear as well. All these symptoms can sometimes make doctors believe patients suffer from anything else other than fibromyalgia and they place wrong diagnoses, which means that patients don’t get the proper treatment.

Fibromyalgia is, indeed, not curable. However, it can be managed with the help of medication, alternative therapies and physical therapy too. Medication can be either of the kind that targets at particular symptoms or one of the three types of drugs that are FDA-approved for treating this syndrome. Lyrica, Cymbalta and Savella are these drugs and the first two were initially created to treat diabetes nerve pain, seizures, depression and anxiety. Although Savella was created for fibromyalgia from the very beginning, it too is an anti-depressant at its very core. This also means that it can come with adverse effects specific of anti-depressants too and the most dangerous one are suicidal thoughts.

Do you drink Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi Do you suffer fibromyalgia symptoms

What Causes Fibromyalgia?

While fibromyalgia can be diagnosed, this is not even by far the most enigmatic thing about it. The fact that we don’t know its causes is even more puzzling even for the world’s most important medical researchers.

There are some theories that have been elaborated over what may cause fibromyalgia. One of them is related to the idea that genetics may play a very important role in everything. A large number of people who are born in families with fibromyalgia develop it as well. Furthermore, it was found out that there are certain genes that may be responsible with perceiving pain more intensely than it is normal.

Furthermore, lack of sleep could also be an important factor in the development of this syndrome. There are people out there who believe that insomnia is a cause and not a symptom of fibromyalgia and that it can cause the body, again, to perceive pain more intensely than in the case of well-rested people.

Depression, as well as going through some stressful events, could also be important in the analysis of how fibromyalgia is developed. According to those going for this theory, depression causes a drop in the serotonin levels and stressful events (both at a physical level – such as an injury – and at an emotional level – such as going through the loss of someone you love) can trigger the onset of fibromyalgia.

What Do Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi Have to Do With Fibromyalgia?

Sodas are extremely unhealthy for your body. The acids in them can destroy the stomach, the additives can destroy your entire body and the sugars are very harmful too. However, when thinking of unhealthy sodas, most of the people believe that only those which contain sugar are bad for them.

This is completely wrong. According to more recent studies, diet sodas (diet Coke, diet Pepsi and so on) could actually be as dangerous as the normal sodas and, under certain circumstances, they could be even worse.

The main reason diet sodas should be avoided at all times is related to their main ingredient replacing sugar: aspartame (which may come under other names too, such as NutraSweet for example). When aspartame is used in soda, its processing temperature exceeds 85 degrees Fahrenheit and, at that point, it can transform into Formaldehyde and into formic acid as well. Formic acid is extremely dangerous for the human body and, just to get an idea on how harmful it can be, think of the fact that fire ants’ sting contains this poison.

When this poison gets in your body, methanol toxicity develops and it can cause certain symptoms to appear. Very frequently, people show symptoms similar to multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus and fibromyalgia and they are diagnosed with these conditions. However, they continue using aspartame and this causes them even more harm (to the point where their very lives could be endangered – such as in the case of those diagnosed with lupus and continuing to drink aspartame sodas).

While diet coke may not be able to explain the very cause of fibromyalgia or of other similar conditions, the truth is that it can indeed be very unhealthy for your entire body. If you have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia symptoms, then you should make sure to remove sodas from your life as much as possible and to avoid anything containing aspartame at all costs. Have your 8 glasses of water daily and you will be much healthier and much happier about the way in which you feel!

Arthritis and Fibromyalgia: How Much Alike Are They?

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating
John

Arthritis is one of the most common bone-related diseases in the world. In the United States, statistics show that more than 50 million Americans suffer from some form of arthritis. And yet, believe it or not, this disease is still a riddle.

Fibromyalgia may not be as common arthritis (with nearly 5 million Americans suffering from it officially), but it is so much related to arthritis that it is sometimes mistakenly diagnosed as it. Mysterious too, fibromyalgia can affect one’s life to the point where daily activities are a major chore – and arthritis can do the same thing.

What is Arthritis and What Is Its Treatment?

Arthritis is a disease of the joints where they become inflamed and painful. It is believed that there are more than 100 forms of arthritis, but the most common one is osteoarthritis. Rheumatoid arthritis is quite common, as well as psoriatic arthritis, gout and septic arthritis.

The main symptom shown by people with this disease is joint pain, which can become prolonged and it is usually localized. Swelling of the joints and stiffness develops too. Furthermore, other symptoms can appear as well: malaise, poor sleeping, muscle aches, tenderness, inability to use the hand or the feet properly and so on.

The various forms of arthritis are caused by different things. For example, osteoarthritis is caused by natural wear and tear of the joints and this is why it appears later on in life. Septic arthritis can be caused by an infection in the joint. However, rheumatoid arthritis cannot be explained in the real sense of the word.

As an autoimmune disease, rheumatoid arthritis develops without any actual reason. The body’s immune cells are created when there is an infection of some sort or when there is a virus in the body that needs to be eliminated. However, in the case of an autoimmune disease, the body’s immunity cells will start attacking healthy tissues (in the case of rheumatoid arthritis, they will start attacking the joints in the various parts of the body without any kind of reason to do this).

Arthritis cannot be cured, but it can be treated. Osteoarthritis is usually prescribed with paracetamol and rheumatoid arthritis is prescribed with ibuprofen, but when these less harmful drugs cannot do their job any longer, the doctor will most likely prescribe other types of medication as well.

Furthermore, physical therapy can make the difference for arthritis patients and it can help alleviate the pain and the stiffness. Alternative therapies are used too, including acupuncture, Tai Chi, Yoga and other Eastern practices which are believed to function well against various forms of chronic pain.

A healthy lifestyle, losing weight (if necessary), and constant exercise (even if at low intensities) can change one’s life from one that is lived in pain to one that is lived normally. A lot of people with arthritis manage their condition successfully.

Arthritis Treatments and Fibromyalgia Symptoms

Fibromyalgia: Why Is It So Complicated?

If things regarding arthritis are fairly clear (except for rheumatoid arthritis), fibromyalgia complicates everything. Fibromyalgia is not a disease, but a syndrome, which means that it brings together a series of symptoms (which can sometimes be of the most diverse types). The main symptoms fibromyalgia patients show is chronic widespread pain. However, do bear in mind the fact that this is a type of pain that is not localized as in the case of arthritis.

Aside from pain, fibromyalgia brings together with it a lot of other symptoms, including headaches, sleeping issues, depression, anxiety, joint pain (and even arthritis as a co-morbid condition), bladder problems, bowels problems, swelling, stiffness, cognitive issues (known as “fibro fog” and characterized by short term memory problems, lack of concentration and so on) and many other symptoms that can be debilitating for the patients.

With such a wide range of symptoms, putting the right diagnosis seems very difficult (and, in most of the cases, it is). While arthritis can be quite easily diagnosed with specific tests, fibromyalgia is diagnosed by analyzing a series of 18 tender points, by analyzing the symptoms and by ruling out the possibility of other similar medical conditions (arthritis too). There is only one type of blood test that can spot fibromyalgia, but it is currently inaccessible for most of the people (it costs around $750 and it is not currently covered by most of the insurance companies).

Even more than that, fibromyalgia’s causes cannot be explained in any way possible. There are some theories that have been elaborated by researchers, but these theories seem to be related more to certain risk factors than to causes that could lead to fibromyalgia. Poor sleeping patterns, genetics, lack of proper functioning of the pain neurotransmitters, chemical imbalances, depression – they all seem to play an important role in how fibromyalgia develops, but nobody can tell for sure which one of these is the actual cause (or if any of them are truly causes, for that matter).

As you can see, there are some similarities between arthritis and fibromyalgia, but they are completely different in nature. They both run in the family and, at least to some extent, they are both enigmatic. Neither of them can be cured, but both of them can be treated efficiently with the use of medication, physical therapy and alternative therapies as well. However, do bear in mind the fact that the treatment given for fibromyalgia very frequently goes beyond pain medication and that many patients are prescribed FDA approved drugs to treat this condition which are very similar in nature to anti-depressants (which does not happen in the case of arthritis).

Differentiating between arthritis and fibromyalgia is important precisely for this reason. Physical therapy, exercising, home remedies and alternative medicine and practices could work for both of these conditions, but when it comes to medication fibromyalgia may need different drugs than arthritis. Make sure you are properly diagnosed and that you receive adequate treatment and you increase your chances of living a happier and more normal life!

Fibromyalgia

The History of Fibromyalgia

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Fibromyalgia is best characterized by the musculoskeletal pain that affects most parts of the body, in addition to its associated fatigue, sleep, mood and memory issues.

About fibromyalgia

Many researchers assume fibromyalgia causes pain sensations within the body to amplify, mainly through affecting how the brain interprets pain signals. On an interesting note, people with fibromyalgia are also likely to have other conditions, such as tension headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, depression and anxiety.

The symptoms associated with fibromyalgia, in some cases, start following physical trauma, bodily infections, surgery or after experiencing significant psychological stress. Some people develop fibromyalgia over time, experiencing symptoms gradually with no single event triggering the condition. Women are known to have a higher risk of developing fibromyalgia than men.

Fibromyalgia actually has no known cure. People with fibromyalgia can, however, use medications and other alternative treatments to reduce the symptoms of the condition.

Although there’s no cure yet, medical researchers and doctors are working to find out more information about the disorder. That way, they may eventually find a cure. Part of understanding a potential cure involves ‘going back in time’ to learn about the history of fibromyalgia.

The history of fibromyalgia

The term fibromyalgia originates from these Greek and Latin root words: fibro, myo and algos. These words, when translated, respectively refer to fibrous tissues, muscles and pain.

When combined as fibromyalgia, they refer to the main symptoms of the condition: painful tendons, ligaments and muscles. Of course, fibromyalgia is best characterized by the widespread pain that blossoms throughout the body’s soft tissues.

History of Fibromyalgia

Early History – Characterization

Fibromyalgia may have existed for centuries before the 1900s. Conditions with symptoms similar to fibromyalgia have been recorded in medical journals since the early 1800s. There are even reports of similar illness with fibromyalgia-like symptoms dating back to as early as 1500BC.

Fibromyalgia was first thought as a mental disorder, due to the fact that little information about early fibromyalgia existed at the time. Doctors actually first described a fibromyalgia-like condition as early as the 1800s. The condition, known as muscular rheumatism, had symptoms like stiffness, aches, pains, fatigue and trouble sleeping.

One of the most notable early accounts of fibromyalgia actually comes from the Bible. The passages Job 7:3-4 and 30:16-17 describe his physical pain, which demonstrated similarities to fibromyalgia.

Another early real life case of fibromyalgia happened to Florence Nightingale in the mid 1800s. She fell ill with fibromyalgia-like symptoms when working during the Crimean War, and ‘never completely recovered’ from the condition. She spent most of her last years bedridden and suffering from fibromyalgia-like pain and fatigue.

Modern fibromyalgia originates from an earlier condition with similar characteristics as fibromyalgia. Fibrostis, which originated from a 1904 lecture held by Sir William Gowers, is the earliest recorded form of fibromyalgia.

Gowers and colleagues believed fibrositis was caused by inflammation originating from the fibrous tissues in the body. Research from the 1970s and 1980s debunked that assumption, proving that no muscle inflammation occurred in cases of fibrositis (fibromyalgia). By then, the research refocused on learning more about the dysfunction of the central nervous system.

By the mid-1970s, fibrostis was changed to fibromyalgia, and 1990 saw the American College of Rheumatology establish the condition’s current criteria for diagnosis.

The Timeline Of Fibromyalgia

As mentioned in the previous sections, fibromyalgia has actually been around for centuries. Although not immediately identified as fibromyalgia, the symptoms of the condition more or less revealed that fibromyalgia was around far earlier than most medical researchers assumed.

In order to understand how fibromyalgia has developed over the years, the following is a timeline of events marking the historical medical development of fibromyalgia.

1600s: Symptoms of a condition like fibromyalgia were appointed a name: muscular rheumatism.

1816: Dr. William Balfour, a University of Edinburgh surgeon, characterized fibromyalgia for the first time.

1824: Dr. Balfur first described the ‘tender points’ associated with fibromyalgia.

1904: Sir William Gowers first established the term ‘fibrositis,’ which referred to the inflammation of fibers. It helped described the tender points in people with muscular rheumatism.

1972: Dr. Huge Smythe established the foundation for modern fibromyalgia by describing the condition’s encompassing pain and tender points.

1975: The first sleep electroencephalogram study that identified sleep-related symptoms of fibromyalgia was performed.

1976: Fiberositis was changed to fibromyalgia, after the medical community didn’t find any evidence of inflammation causing fibromyalgia-like symptoms.

1981: The first controlled study, which validated known fibromyalgia-like symptoms and tender points, was published.

1987: The American Medical Association established fibromyalgia as a legitimate physical condition.

1990: The American College of Rheumatology created diagnostic criteria fibromyalgia, which was made for research purposes. The fibromyalgia criteria later became a tool for clinicians, allowing them to properly diagnose patients.

2007: The United States Food and Drug Administration approved Lyrica for fibromyalgia treatment. Since then, Cymbalta and Savella have also received approval by the FDA for treatment.

The theories and history of fibromyalgia

Over the years, different theories about fibromyalgia have appeared in the medical community. Many of the theories focus on figuring out what causes fibromyalgia, in addition to what the condition may actually be.

For hundreds of years, doctors actually considered a psychological disorder, since there wasn’t enough evidence supporting fibromyalgia as a condition during those early days. Today, we now know fibromyalgia is a disorder with specific symptoms that make people feel constant pain and fatigue.

The 20th century

Starting in the 20th century, fibromyalgia started becoming recognized by medical professionals as a real physical condition. It was first thought to have been a disease within the muscles and surrounding fibrous tissues.

Tests performed on patients with the condition were found to have lacked the damage originating from inflamed muscles and tissues. Some researchers also attributed early fibromyalgia as an autoimmune disorder, but research didn’t find any evidence supporting that.

The 21st century

Once the 21 century arrived, medical researchers and doctors were able to perform better fibromyalgia research. The new laboratory testing methods, along with brain-imaging techniques, allowed researchers to finally identify ‘sensitization of the central nervous system’ in people with fibromyalgia.

With that information in mind, medical researchers and doctors now continue to research fibromyalgia in order to uncover new information about the long term disease.

UN Climate Change Summit: Companies And World Leaders Pledge Money, Promise Action On Climate Change

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
While US President Barack Obama and Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio attracted much of the press coverage for the 2014 UN Climate Change Summit on Tuesday, behind the scenes more than 120 world leaders met together to debate policy and commit resources to solving the growing issue.
According to The Guardian, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon opened the event by calling climate change the “defining issue of our age” and said that the world’s response to it would “define our future. To ride this storm we need all hands on deck. That is why we are here today.”
“We need a clear vision. The human, environmental and financial cost of climate change is fast becoming unbearable. We have never faced such a challenge, nor such an opportunity,” he added. “There is only one thing in the way: us. That is why I have asked you to be here today… I’m asking you to lead. We must cut emissions. Science says they must peak by 2020 and decline sharply thereafter. By the end of this century we must be carbon neutral.”
Among those who answered the Secretary-General’s call was French president François Hollande, who in his statement said that his country would commit $1 billion (750 million euros) “over the next few years” to a global fund designed to help poor nations adapt to the effects of global warming, according to Reuters reporter Valerie Volcovici.
Hollande joins German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who also pledged $1 billion over four years in July to the Green Climate Fund, and South Korean President Park Geun-hye pledged to contribute up to $100 million to help the UN battle climate change – a contribution that includes $50 million currently being paid to the fund. Volcovici said that developing countries are seeking contributions of $15 billion before the end of the year.
Also at the climate summit, more than two dozen countries and as many as 100 corporations (including McDonald’s and Wal-Mart) and organizations signed the “New York Declaration on Forests” – a pledge aimed at cutting deforestation in half by 2020 and completely ending the practice worldwide by the year 2030. However, also noteworthy is Brazil’s unwillingness to sign the agreement.
“Trees store carbon dioxide but when cut down, they release the heat-trapping greenhouse gas to the atmosphere,” said Wendy Koch of USA Today. “If the goal is met, the U.N. estimates the impact would be equivalent to taking every car in the world off the road. The participants, including dozens of environmental and indigenous groups, also pledge to restore more than one million square miles of forest worldwide by 2030.”
Koch said that the declaration has the backing of most developed countries, including the US, Canada, France and the EU. However, Brazil – which is home to the Amazon rainforest – opted against signing the pledge, telling reporters that it was because officials there were not included in the preparation process. While the country itself did not sign the pledge, however, USA Today reports that three Brazilian states (Acre, Amapa and Amazonas) did.
The Guardian also reported that Chile committed to a 20 percent reduction of CO2 by 2020 at the summit, as well as a tax on carbon emissions; that Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abe said that his country has delivered $16 billion in climate aid over the past three years, as promised; and that Switzerland and Denmark promised to contribute a combined $170 million to the aforementioned Green Climate Fund.
“It’s not just countries and world leaders pledging to cut back on emissions – a few leading oil and gas companies are saying they will, too,” noted Brian Ries of Mashable. Among those companies are: ENI of Italy; Petróleos Mexicanos or Pemex; the US gas company Southwestern Energy; Norway’s Statoil Group; BG Group, the former British Gas, and Thailand’s oil and gas company, PTT, launched on Tuesday the Oil & Gas Methane Partnership, which pledges to cut the emissions of methane, he said.
“I am so glad to see concrete initiatives that will help reduce the release of short-lived climate pollutants into the atmosphere,” Ban Ki-moon said in a statement. “These announcements show how governments, corporations and civil society can work together to reduce emissions.”

UN Climate Change Summit: Obama Touts US Efforts, Challenges China To Reduce Emissions

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Speaking at the 2014 UN Climate Change Summit on Tuesday, US President Barack Obama challenged China to do more to help reduce carbon emissions and protect the environment.
In comments made during the one-day meeting hosted by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York, the President said that China – which is the most populous nation on Earth and also experienced the quickest increase in carbon pollution levels – had to join the US to lead other countries in CO2 reduction.
“We have a responsibility to lead. That’s what big nations have to do,” Obama said to a round of applause from the delegates on hand, according to CNN.com’s Elizabeth Hartfield and Leigh Ann Caldwell. He added that the “urgent and growing threat of climate change” would ultimately “define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other” issue facing the world today.
Obama, who has used his executive powers to help combat global warming in America, spoke to over 100 world leaders at Tuesday’s event in order to spur on efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, said Mark Landler and Coral Davenport of the New York Times. He pledged that the US would establish ambitious new emission reduction goals prior to next year’s climate negotiation, but added the work would need to continue after he left office.
“Yes, this is hard, but there should be no question that the United States of America is stepping up to the plate,” the President said, according to Landler and Davenport. However, he went on to warn that any attempt to solve the problem of climate change was doomed to fail without strong international support. “We can only succeed in combating climate change if we are joined in this effort by every nation, developed and developing alike.”
“Today, I call on all countries to join us, not next year or the year after that, because no nation can meet this global threat alone,” he added. “We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.”
To that end, Obama touted an executive order announced earlier this year that will require US power plants to cut pollution levels by 30 percent of 2005 levels by the year 2030, the New York Times reported. He also vowed that the country would meet its previous pledge to reduce overall CO2 emissions 17 percent from 2005 level by 2020.
In addition, CNN.com reported that the President had previously revealed a plan to reduce carbon pollution in June 2013. That plan included directing the US Environmental Protection Agency to establish new emission standards for active coal plants, and by working with countries such as China and India to establish new plans to address the greenhouse gas emissions at a global level.
“Reciting record-setting temperatures and a litany of natural disasters, from hurricanes and wildfires to droughts and floods, Mr. Obama tried to raise the sense of urgency surrounding climate change at a United Nations meeting dominated by fears of terrorism,” said Landler and Davenport. However, they added that while the event “showcased how climate change has become a genuinely global preoccupation,” it also “reinforced the divides between developed and developing countries” on the issue.
Chinese President Xi Jinping chose not to attend the meeting, and instead sent vice premier Zhang Gaoli as his country’s representative. At the summit, Zhang said that China’s carbon intensity was down 28 percent this year from 2005 levels, and that 24 percent of the country’s installed energy capacity was coming from renewable sources.
Zhang went on to state that the nation was on pace to meet its goal of reducing emissions from 2005 levels by at least 45 percent by 2020, according to Landler and Davenport. He added that “as a responsible major developing country, China will make an even greater effort to address climate change and take on international responsibilities that are commensurate with our national conditions.”
“The climate speech, the civil society discussion and other UN activities came just hours after the United States and allies made their first airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria,” said David Jackson of USA Today. “On Wednesday, Obama delivers his annual address to the United Nations General Assembly. Later that day, [he] chairs a special meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss concerted international action against the Islamic State.”

LA Serving As Pilot City For NASA’s New Megacities Carbon Project

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
By the end of the year, NASA plans to have a network of 15 monitoring stations around the Los Angeles basin that will use commercially available high-precision greenhouse gas analyzers to continually sample the local air as part of its Megacities Carbon Project, the US-based agency revealed on Tuesday.
The LA network will encompass the portions of the South Coast Air Basin that produce the most intense greenhouse gas emissions in California. It will utilize in-situ sensors located throughout the region to provide continuous, highly accurate measurements of greenhouse gas mixing ratios of CO2, CH4, and CO, the organization added.
Riley Duren of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory serves as the principal investigator of the LA component of the Megacities Carbon Project, and he hopes to work alongside a group of international partners to deploy a global urban carbon monitoring system that will eventually make it possible for local legislators to fully account for all of the sources and storage sites (sinks) of carbon, as well as to monitor how they change over time.
Los Angeles joins Paris as the two pilot cities taking part in the initiative, though NASA said that efforts are currently underway to expand the project to other locations throughout the world. The LA pilot project is being funded by NASA, NOAA, the Keck Institute for Space Studies and the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Project partners include the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and others.
“LA is a giant laboratory for climate studies and measurement tests,” Duren said in a statement Tuesday. “The LA megacity sprawls across five counties, 150 municipalities, many freeways, landfills, oil wells, gas pipelines, America’s largest seaport, mountains, and even dairies, all within an area measuring about 80 miles [130 kilometers] on a side.”
According to NASA, urbanization has concentrated over half of the planet’s population, as well as at least 70 percent of all CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and a significant amount of methane emissions, into a miniscule fraction of Earth’s land surface. The 40 largest cities in the world combined would rank as the third-largest emitter of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (exceeding the total national emissions of Japan), and experts expect the trend to continue.
As such, the organization said there is “an urgent need” to get the massive growth of fossil-fuel related carbon emissions in cities under control, as well as to establish new baseline measurements that will make it easier to study these emission trends. While the majority of countries and some US states produce annual greenhouse gas emission inventories based on data such as energy statistics, this information is typically not available at the city level.
“Cities around the world are expected to undergo rapid change in the next 20 years,” NASA explained. “Many, particularly in the developing world, are undergoing unconstrained growth, with emissions growing by more than 10 percent a year. The United Nations predicts that Earth’s urban population will double by 2050, dramatically increasing the number and size of megacities, and their carbon footprints.”
“The Megacities project combines direct surface measurements of urban greenhouse gases from instruments located in air sampling stations atop radio towers and buildings, with broader, denser remote-sensing observations from aircraft, mountaintops and satellites,” the agency added. “Other instruments track winds and vertical motion of the atmosphere — both of which are key to interpreting the greenhouse gas measurements.”
NASA recently launched the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), a satellite which is able to detect the enhanced CO2 levels above the world’s largest cities, and has started using it to monitor LA as part of the Megacities initiative. The researchers are compiling high-resolution emissions data with data from local governments that they will compare to Megacities project measurement data in order to improve emission estimates.
“The result will be independent, accurate assessments of carbon emissions and a better understanding of the factors that affect them. Sustained monitoring over several years will enable assessment of trends,” said NASA. “Ultimately, the concept of a global carbon-monitoring system focused on the largest carbon emitters hinges on the ability to extend pilot efforts like those in LA and Paris to other megacities, smaller cities and large power plants.”
“This involves establishing surface measurement networks in representative areas while taking advantage of the broader coverage of satellite observations,” the agency added. “The atmospheric measurements will be linked with other information used by decision-makers, such as traffic data. Transparent sharing of satellite observations could prove vital in cities in the developing world, where ground data on emissions are not available.”
Duren explained that the concept is to measure and track emissions for the individual cities, to better understand how and why those levels are changing, and to ultimately link observed changes in the atmosphere with specific human activities. To do this in LA, they plan to use 15 monitoring stations (including a pair of so-called “super sites” at Caltech in Pasadena and atop nearby Mt. Wilson) to analyze gas emissions and collect other measurements.

ISRO’s Mangalyaan Orbiter Joins MAVEN In Orbit Around Mars

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
UPDATE – September 24, 2014, 6:10 a.m.
India’s Mars Orbiter Mission Mangalyaan (MOM) successfully entered orbit around Mars early Wednesday morning (local time), making the country the first Asian nation to successfully reach the Red Planet as well as the first space program to do so on its first attempt, according to Wall Street Journal blogger Joanna Sugden.
“As the country’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi looked on, space scientists at mission control in Bangalore, India’s tech capital, announced that the Mangalyaan orbiter had entered Mars orbit after a 10-month voyage from Earth,” she said. Upon completion of the feat, he congratulated the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) team responsible for the feat and said that they had “achieved the near impossible.”
According to Alan Boyle of NBC News, the car-sized probe flawlessly completed its scheduled 24-minute burn, which allowed it to enter orbit following a 300 day, 485 million mile trek. ISRO joins NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) as the only organizations to have reached the Red Planet.
“Through your achievement, you have honored our forefathers, and inspired our future generations,” Modi told the mission team, according to Boyle. “We Indians are a proud people. Despite our many limitations, we aspire for the best. The success of our space program is a shining symbol of what we are capable of as a nation.”
“The odds were stacked against us,” Mr. Modi added in a televised news conference, according to the New York Times. “When you are trying to do something that has not been attempted before, it is a leap into the unknown. And space is indeed the biggest unknown out there.”
Sugden added that the economically-built MOM, which cost just under $75 million to build and launch while NASA’s MAVEN satellite carried a $671 million price tag, had prompted Modi to quip in June that the vehicle cost less to make than the motion picture “Gravity.” It launched from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center in November 2013.
Over the next several weeks, both Mangalyaan and MAVEN will adjust their orbits in preparation for their respective scientific missions, Boyle said. Both missions are looking to analyze changes to the atmosphere of Mars, and both the NASA and ISRO teams have vowed to worth together in the weeks ahead. MAVEN will focus its efforts on the planet’s upper atmosphere, while MOM will monitor its weather, capture images of the surface and map its mineral composition.
On Wednesday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden issued the following statement:
“We congratulate the Indian Space Research Organisation for its successful arrival at Mars with the Mars Orbiter Mission.
“It was an impressive engineering feat, and we welcome India to the family of nations studying another facet of the Red Planet. We look forward to MOM adding to the knowledge the international community is gathering with the other spacecraft at Mars.

“All space exploration expands the frontiers of scientific knowledge and improves life for everyone on Earth. We commend this significant milestone for India.”
—–
ORIGINAL – September 23, 2014, 9:00 a.m.
Just days after NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft successfully entered orbit around Mars, a probe designed and built in India remains on pace to arrive at the Red Planet on Wednesday morning.
If the domestically-built, budget-priced $75 million Mars Orbiter Mission Mangalyaan (MOM) succeeds, it will allow the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to join NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) as the only organizations to have traveled to the fourth planet from the sun.
Furthermore, CNN.com’s Madison Park said that the orbiter could make India the first Asian nation to reach Mars, and Katy Daigle of the Associated Press (AP) added that it would also become the first country to successfully complete the feat on its very first attempt.
Like MAVEN, Mangalyaan was launched in November 2013, escaping Earth’s atmosphere during the early morning hours on December 1 and beginning a 300 day, 485 million mile trek to the Red Planet that is expected to end on Wednesday.
ISRO officials confirmed on Monday that navigation calculations indicated MOM had entered the planet’s gravitational sphere of influence, said BBC News. Likewise, science journalist Pallava Bagla told the BBC the gravity of Mars had already “started acting on the orbiter and it would gather more speed” ahead of its planned entry into the orbit of the Red Planet.
According to Arun Ram of the Times News Network (TNN), ISRO scientists successfully reignited the spacecraft’s primary engine for a period of four seconds on Monday. The test-firing was a scheduled trial to ensure that the liquid apogee motor (LAM), which had been idle for about 300 days, was still in good working order before Wednesday’s scheduled 24-minute orbital entry maneuvers.
An unidentified ISRO scientist told Ram that the agency was “relieved” the engines were in good shape, as there had been some concern that the long duration of inactivity could have caused some components of the engine to be affected by the corrosive fuel used in MOM. Should the main engine fail to fire during final entry, an alternative plan could see the agency fire the vehicle’s eight thrusters to capture the Martian orbit.
ISRO chief K. Radhakrishnan told Daigle that Mangalyaan had completed 98 percent of its voyage, and that the mission would “establish the capabilities of India to orbit a spacecraft around Mars.” Likewise, S. Satish, a space expert based in Bangalore, India, told Park that MOM was “a great technical achievement for the country.”
“The mission has been freighted with patriotic significance for India since its inception, and is seen as a symbolic coup over its neighbor, China, which is also ramping up its space ambitions,” the CNN reporter added. “Once it enters the orbit, India’s Mars Orbiter Mission will be in the company of NASA’s two Mars rovers on the ground, a European orbiter, and MAVEN, which has been there since Sunday.”
Mangalyaan, which means “Mars craft” in Hindi, successfully lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center at 2:38pm local time on November 5. Its payload includes five scientific instruments: the Lyman Alpha Photometer (LAP), Methane Sensor for Mars (MSM), Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyzer (MENCA), Mars Color Camera (MCC) and Thermal Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (TIS).

Global Warming Linked To Potential Increase In Adverse Health Conditions

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Expected increases in the number of extremely hot days experienced by some parts of the US could cause an increase in heat-related health conditions, according to new research published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In the study, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine report that the cities such as New York and Milwaukee could see the number of days that are hotter than 90 degrees Fahrenheit triple by 2050, and Dallas could experience twice as many 100 degree days.

As a result, a greater number of people could experience heat stress, respiratory disorders such as asthma and allergic disorders (which are exacerbated by fine particulate pollutants), and both vectorborne and waterborne infectious diseases. Furthermore, climate change could also reduce crop yields, cause an increase in plant diseases, and result in mental health disorders like PTSD and depression which are associated with natural disasters.

Lead author Jonathan Patz, director of the UW-Madison Global Health Institute, and his colleagues say they wrote the study to encourage efforts that will both benefit the health of the planet and protect the wellbeing of people, including the so-called co-benefits of reducing fossil fuel use and adapting to ongoing climate changes.

“Climate change already is affecting global health,” said Patz, who presented the research Tuesday during the Civil Society Event on Action in Climate Change and Health. “The good news is that clear health benefits are immediately available, from low-carbon strategies that today could result in cleaner air or to more active transport options that can improve physical fitness, ultimately saving lives and averting disease.”

He and his colleagues analyzed the scientific data behind some of the current and projected climate-related health risks, which include an increase in extreme heat waves and storm events, an increased risk of waterborne and infectious diseases, chronic health risks associated to air pollution, and a rise in malnutrition and obesity-related risks from unhealthy, carbon-intensive diets.

“Climate change is an enormous public health challenge because it affects our health through multiple pathways,” said Patz, who also serves as a professor in the Nelson Institute and the Department of Population Health Sciences at UW-Madison. “But if the risks are so interdependent, so, too, are the opportunities.”

Those opportunities, he said, include a chance to improve air quality by reducing the amount of unhealthy ozone (smog) in the atmosphere. The research has demonstrated a link between the number of extremely hot days and the amount of high-ozone days over the last several years in cities like Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin.

Their findings are “consistent with well-known linkages between climate and ozone in urban areas, and serves as a major pathway for the health impacts of climate change,” said UW-Madison associate professor Tracey Holloway. Furthermore, the analysis submitted a number of science-based strategies to reduce global fossil fuel consumption, including designing more sustainable cities, reducing meat consumption and promoting active transportation.

“Evidence shows there is a significant health benefit in active transport, particularly in the area of chronic disease,” explained Patz. “And with current disease trends in industrializing nations, burning less fossil fuel can yield potentially large dividends for public health.”

“These findings dovetail with recent World Health Organization (WHO) studies that identified major health benefits from low carbon housing, transport and agriculture,” added WHO health policy expert Carlos Dora. “Many of these benefits come from reductions in air pollution, but low carbon strategies also can increase physical activity, reduce traffic injuries and improve food security.”

UN Climate Change Summit: DiCaprio Calls For Action As World Works Towards 2015 Agreement

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Best known as a leading man for several Hollywood blockbusters, actor Leonardo DiCaprio assumed a new role on Tuesday as he addressed world leaders on the topic of global warming at the 2014 UN Climate Change Summit in New York on Tuesday.
“As an actor I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious problems,” he said at the event, according to a transcript of the speech published online by UK newspaper The Guardian. “I believe humankind has looked at climate change in that same way: as if it were a fiction, happening to someone else’s planet, as if pretending that climate change wasn’t real would somehow make it go away.”
“But I think we know better than that. Every week, we’re seeing new and undeniable climate events, evidence that accelerated climate change is here now. We know that droughts are intensifying, our oceans are warming and acidifying, with methane plumes rising up from beneath the ocean floor. We are seeing extreme weather events, increased temperatures, and the West Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheets melting at unprecedented rates, decades ahead of scientific projections,” he added. “None of this is rhetoric, and none of it is hysteria. It is fact.”

DiCaprio, who earlier this month was appointed as a UN Messenger of Peace by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in order to work as an advocate for climate change related issues, established a foundation in 1998 designed to help promote the last wild places on Earth and create a more harmonious relationship between nature and mankind.
According to the Huffington Post, the actor said that the issue of global warming had “grown beyond the choices that individuals make” and that “decisive, large-scale action” was required to tackle the problem at a government and industrial level. He went on to state that renewable energy was “not only achievable but good economic policy” and that recent scientific studies had indicated clean, renewable energy could supply the entire planet with energy by 2050.
“I am not a scientist, but I don’t need to be. Because the world’s scientific community has spoken, and they have given us our prognosis, if we do not act together, we will surely perish,” DiCaprio said. “Now is our moment for action. We need to put a pricetag on carbon emissions, and eliminate government subsidies for coal, gas, and oil companies. We need to end the free ride that industrial polluters have been given in the name of a free-market economy, they don’t deserve our tax dollars, they deserve our scrutiny.”
DiCaprio, who Frank Pallotta of CNN Money said documented the summit in photos through his Instagram account, was among those who participated in the People’s Climate March in New York on Sunday. He was joined by fellow actors Mark Ruffalo, Evangeline Lilly and Edward Norton, as well as more than 100,000 public officials, scientists, students and activists, according to Variety.com news editor Alex Stedman.
Tuesday’s one-day climate summit involved over 100 world leaders, who met with the hopes of laying the foundation for a new global treaty to address the issue of global warming next December, according to the Associated Press (AP). It also revealed the sharp divide which exists between different countries on key issues such as deforestation, carbon pollution and methane leaks from oil and gas production, the wire service added.
During the event, the European Union (EU) announced that its member nations would cut greenhouse gases so that by 2030 they would be 40 percent below the 1990 level, the AP said. An effort to establish the first-ever deadline on Tuesday to end deforestation by 2030 was set by 150 countries, however Brazil – a key player in the practice – refused to sign the agreement.
“World leaders promised in their non-binding remarks to spend a total of at least $5 billion to make the world more sustainable. That often includes turning away from the burning of coal, oil and gas and away from the destruction of the world’s carbon-absorbing forests,” the news organization said. “Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, stressed it could be done without harming the economy,” and vowed that over the next seven years, the EU would provide nearly $3.9 billion to “help developing countries become more sustainable.”

Researchers Explore The Relationship Between Weight And Stress-Induced Inflammation

Written By: editor
editor

Brandeis University

If you’re overweight, you may be at greater risk for stress-related diseases like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer, according to a new study by Brandeis University.

It’s long known that psychological stress can trigger biological responses similar to the effects of illness or injury, including inflammation. While normal inflammation is an important part of our body’s healing response, runaway inflammation can contribute to chronic and life-threatening diseases.

In a recently published paper in Brain, Behavior and Immunity, Brandeis researchers observed that overweight and obese individuals have higher levels of stress-induced inflammation than those within a healthy weight-range.

“We’ve known that overweight and obese individuals already have chronic, low grade inflammation,” says psychology professor Nicolas Rohleder, the study’s principal investigator. “Now, it seems that when you add stress to the mix, it’s a double hit.”

The paper was authored by graduate student Christine McInnis, with fellow doctoral candidates Danielle Gianferante, Luke Hanlin, and Xuejie Chen, as well as co-investigators Myriam Thoma, Juliana Breines, and Suzi Hong.

The researchers measured interleukin-6 (IL-6), an inflammatory agent linked to stress, to evaluate inflammation levels in normal-weight and overweight individuals over the course of two psychological stress tests. They classified weight based on several factors, including body mass index (BMI) and body fat percentage. Individuals with a BMI of 25 or higher were classified as overweight.

On the first day of testing, lean and overweight individuals reacted similarly to stress, despite higher starting levels of IL-6 in overweight participants. On the second day of testing, however, the IL-6 levels of overweight participants nearly doubled, while the levels of lean participants remained the same as on the first day.

McInnis and Rohleder observed that the relationship between BMI and IL-6 levels was linear — the higher the BMI, even among lean individuals, the higher the IL-6.

“It seems that every percentage point of body fat makes your more susceptible to inflammation,” says McInnis.

With about two thirds of Americans classified as overweight, and worldwide obesity rates doubling since 1980, understanding the health risks of obesity could not be more important, says McInnis.

“We know that there are serious diseases associated with obesity. Now we are one step closer to understanding how and why,” she says.

Research Study Analyzes The Best Exercise For Obese Youths

Written By: editor
editor

Marta Cyperling, University of Calgary

Combination of aerobic exercise and resistance training brings strongest results in test

What exercise program can best fight the “epidemic” of teen obesity? According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics, by combining aerobic exercise with resistance training.

The Healthy Eating Aerobic and Resistance Training in Youth (HEARTY) study, led by researchers at the University of Calgary and University of Ottawa, involved 304 overweight teens in the Ottawa/Gatineau area between the ages of 14 to 18. All were given the same four weeks of diet counseling to promote healthy eating and weight loss before being randomly placed into four groups. The first group performed resistance training involving weight machines and some free weights; the second performed only aerobic exercise on treadmills, elliptical machines and stationary bikes; the third underwent combined aerobic and resistance training; and the last group did no exercise training.

What’s the best exercise to lose fat?

“Obesity is an epidemic among youth,” says Dr. Ron Sigal of the University of Calgary’s O’Brien Institute for Public Health and Libin Cardiovascular Institute of Alberta. “Adolescents who are overweight are typically advised to exercise more, but there is limited evidence on what type of exercise is best in order to lose fat.”

In the overall study population, each type of exercise reduced body fat significantly and similarly. All three exercise programs caused significantly more fat loss than in the diet-only control group. Among youths who completed at least 70 percent of the study’s exercise sessions, the percentage of body fat decreased “significantly more in those who did combined aerobic and resistance exercise than in those who only did aerobic exercise,” says co-principal researcher Dr. Glen Kenny of the University of Ottawa.

“Remarkably, among participants who completed at least 70 percent of the prescribed exercise sessions, waist circumference decreased close to seven centimeters in those randomized to combined aerobic plus resistance exercise, versus about four centimeters in those randomized to do just one type of exercise, with no change in those randomized to diet alone.”

The appeal of resistance training

Supervised by personal trainers, youths in the three exercise groups were asked to train four times per week for 22 weeks at community-based facilities. Changes in body fat were measured using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines. Because aerobic exercises such as cycling or jogging can be challenging for overweight people, resistance training is potentially attractive because excess body weight poses far less of a disadvantage, and gains in strength come much more quickly than gains in aerobic fitness.

Researchers hope that the study will contribute to a national debate about childhood and teenage obesity, potentially leading to a consistent, long-term strategy on how to best deal with the problem. Eighty percent of overweight youth typically continue to be obese as adults, adversely affecting the quality of their lives and contributing to chronic disease problems. Adult obesity increases risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and disability.

The study was led by doctors Sigal and Kenny, and the research team included co-principal investigators, Gary Goldfield and Stasia Hadjiannakis of the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, Janine Malcolm of Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, and Angela Alberga, previously a PhD student at the University of Ottawa and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary.

The study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health, and Sigal is funded by Alberta Innovates – Health Solutions.

Job Loss Fears May Boost First-Time Asthma Risk

Written By: editor
editor

Emma Dickinson, BMJ-British Medical Journal

Finding backs other research indicating link between asthma and work related stress

The findings back up other epidemiological studies pointing to a link between the development of asthma and stress, particularly work related stress, say the researchers.

They base their findings on just over 7000 working adults, who responded to the German Socio-Economic Panel Study—an annual representative survey of the German population—in 2009 and 2011, when questions about asthma were asked.

The survey covered a period of severe economic downturn across Europe, which began in 2008. And all respondents were asked in 2009 how likely they thought it was that they might lose their job over the next two years.

Their answers were graded in 10% increments from 0-100%, and divided into high versus low or no threat. The researchers used a cut-off point of a 50% or greater likelihood of unemployment versus a less than 50% probability.

Between 2009 and 2011, 105 new cases of asthma were diagnosed among the survey group, half of whom were women.

Those who felt that the likelihood of losing their job over the next two years was high tended to be slightly younger, had reached a lower level of education, a lower monthly income, and were more likely to be single than those who felt the risk was low (2787) or non-existent (2593).

And those who didn’t feel their tenure was secure were less likely to be on permanent contracts and more likely to have been diagnosed with depression.

After taking into account various sociodemographic factors, depression, and lifestyle, the analysis indicated that asthma risk seemed to rise with increasing job insecurity. For every 25% increase in the perceived threat of job loss, the risk of asthma rose by 24%.

Among those who believed that they were very likely to lose their job the risk of asthma rose to 60% compared with those who thought job loss was unlikely or non-existent.

This is an observational study, so no definitive conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect. But the researchers they say their results are “consistent with epidemiological studies, which have shown that psychological stress in particular work related stress, may be risk factors for new onset asthma.”

And they add: “Our findings may also provide a possible explanation for the increased prevalence of respiratory symptoms during the recent economic crisis in the UK.”

Fibromyalgia

The Link between Fibromyalgia and Thyroids

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Roughly twenty million people in the United States are diagnosed with hypothyroidism, and of those, a large percentage end up being diagnosed with fibromyalgia as well.  Both of the conditions have many similar symptoms, such as fatigue, depression, anxiety, and muscle and joint soreness and pain.

This is one reason why it is extremely difficult to officially diagnose fibromyalgia in the first place (let alone treat it), because they share so many of the same symptoms as other diseases.

The process for diagnosing fibromyalgia is long and expensive, taking up to many months or even entire years.  Doctors will conduct a series of physical tests and symptom evaluations to narrow down the list of possible conditions that you might have.

Today, it is estimated that around five million American suffer from Fibromyalgia, most in middle aged women.  Men and children (teens in particular) can also develop fibromyalgia, though it is much less common in them.

The Symptoms

There are many symptoms of fibromyalgia, including pain and soreness throughout the body (particular in the muscles and joints); headaches, especially in the back of the head; pain in the neck and shoulder; pain in the hips and buttocks; pain in the knees; extreme fatigue and sleepiness throughout the day; difficulty sleeping at night and then feeling the urge to sleep during the say; diahhrea and vomiting; chest pain; short breaths; swollen tissues; incoherent thoughts; the inability to remember clearly; dry mouth; a numbness in the hands and feet; bloating and cramping; feeling numb when exposed to new temperature changes; palpitations; pain throughout the arms and legs; tender sore spots in the body that feel only more painful when pressure is applied to them; muscle twitching; urinating frequently; anxiety and depression; and the inability to even remember little things (such as names or numbers) from the previous day(s).

Fibromyalgia thyroid

Diagnosing Fibromyalgia

Like we have said, diagnosing fibromyalgia is extremely difficult since the symptoms of it are present in other medical diseases and conditions as well.  Just look over the symptoms that we’ve gone over.  That’s a very thick and dense list, so it’s easy to see why doctors have to make a long list of possible medical conditions and then take months and sometimes years to conduct physical tests and symptoms evaluation to officially give you a diagnosis.

When looking to diagnose you for fibromyalgia, doctors will especially look for if you have had this continuous pain for a minimum time period of at least three months, have had pain on both sides of the bone and above the waist and below, and whether you have had back pain as well.  If you have all of these things, they will look for pain in a majority of the eighteen tender spots in the body.

These tender spots are where the neck muscles attach to the base of the skull, muscles over the shoulder blade, the muscles where the shoulder blade meets the neck, below the elbow on both arms, the upper buttocks, the hip bones, the lower part of the neck, the upper part of the breast bone, and just above the knees.

Okay, wait a minute.  You read this article wanting to know the link between fibromyalgia and thyroids, and instead, we’re talking about the symptoms and diagnosis of fibromyalgia?  Actually, this is where the link between thyroids and fibromyalgia comes in; it’s just important to understand the symptoms and diagnosis process of fibromyalgia first.

If you are thyroid patient, you may be displaying the same symptoms and signs of fibromyalgia.  If so, then you will want to consult with a practitioner who specializes in these kinds of symptoms.  On the other side of things, if you are a fibromyalgia patient, then you will want to also consult your practitioner or medical professional to see if you might have a thyroid problem.  This thyroid problem may not only be a factor in your fibromyalgia symptoms, but they may be entirely causing it as well.

Many people only take a thyroid test to determine whether or not they have an imbalance in thyroids, but many doctors and medical professionals recommend that you want to take a thyroid test to see if you have fibromyalgia as well.  Previously, the medical train of thought has been that the symptoms for thyroid hormone deficiency are caused by hypothyroidism, and that only patients with hypothyroidism should be allowed to use a thyroid hormone, at levels designated by their doctor.

Many doctors though have challenged this train of thought, believing that the effort to learn more about fibromyalgia is linked to the effort to learn more about and treat thyroid deficiency.  Many doctors and medical professionals have begun to think that the symptoms for fibromyalgia are instead symptoms for a resistance to thyroid hormones or hypothyroidism.

A patient with cellular resistance may also have perfectly fine thyroid hormone levels and still have the symptoms of hypothyroidism.  However, many people are not even closely aware of this.  This is because that if you have hypothyroidism, then it’s all too common for you to also have the same symptoms as fibromyalgia, such as muscles and joint pain and aches, fatigue, anxiety, depression, etc.  A doctor who sees these symptoms may diagnose you with fibromyalgia, when you might only have hypothyroidism or something related.

The symptoms that you have for fibromyalgia may only be the symptoms for hypothyroidism that has either been undertreated or not treated at all.  As your hypothyroidism or even your deficiency in thyroid hormones gets worse, the number of tissues and the symptoms will only increase.  The more and more pain and symptoms that you feel, then the more likely your doctor will follow the steps and soft spots of diagnosing fibromyalgia that we discussed above.  You may be diagnosed with fibromyalgia when the real problem had to do with thyroids.

Over 10 Million iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus Units Sold During First Weekend, Apple Announces

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Apple announced on Monday that it has sold more than 10 million units of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, making it the biggest launch weekend for a new smartphone in the company’s history.
In a statement, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said that sales had “exceeded our expectations for the launch weekend, and we couldn’t be happier,” though he did not indicate individual figures for each phone.
The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus went on sale in 10 regions on Friday, and the company had previously announced that it had received a record-setting four million preorders during the first 24 hours.
Michael Calia of the Wall Street Journal reports that it was not clear if those preorders were included in the weekend totals, but noted that the smartphone was not yet available in China.
Beyond the sales figures, Apple “didn’t give many other details, which means we don’t know how many people opted to buy the larger iPhone 6 Plus or how much storage they bought,” explained Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Brustein.
Those figures are important, Brustein explained, because phones with more memory result in a larger profit margin for the company. In addition, another unanswered question was which wireless carriers new iPhone 6 owners selected, and whether or not they were able to use the devices to lure away customers from their rivals.
In comparison, Calia said that Apple reported selling nine million iPhones during the first weekend that its 5S and 5C models were available, while in 2012, it sold more than 5 million iPhone 5 devices. However, he added that, unlike the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, the iPhone 5, 5S and 5C were also available in China during the first weekend.
“Apple’s shares were little changed at $100.98 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq on Monday,” said Reuters reporter Soham Chatterjee, adding that analysts are predicting “the company’s first-quarter revenue is likely to be 9 percent higher than Wall Street estimates, based on reported sales and projected demand for the new iPhones.”
“While Apple’s opening weekends for iPhones get lots of attention, the sales number isn’t just a measure of how popular the phones are going to be,” Brustein explained. “Comparing this year’s launch to last year’s isn’t straightforward because the circumstances are different. That said, the company sold more more-expensive phones this year (no analogue to the inexpensive 5C), and it did so without launching in China (as it did last year).”
“We’ll learn more in the weeks and months ahead,” he said, adding that the devices will launch in over 20 additional countries this Friday and will be available in 115 countries by the end of the year. While quarterly sales figures will allow for “a more straightforward comparison,” he said that “by announcing a number that was pretty much right in the center of analyst expectations, Apple is showing that nothing particularly unusual happened over the weekend.”

Google+ Sign Ups No Longer Required For New Users Of Other Google Services

Written By: Chuck Bednar
editor

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
After two-plus years of requiring new users to create Google+ accounts when signing up for other services, Google is allowing them to opt-out of the previously mandatory social media accounts, according to published reports.
On Friday, Martin Beck of Marketing Land reported that the Mountain View, California-based firm quietly dropped the Google+ requirement earlier this month by allowing users to click a “no thanks” button while signing up for Gmail, Drive or other Google services.
Google has required new users to set up a profile on their social media website since January 2012, and Beck said that some viewed the requirement as “a strong-arm tactic” on the part of the tech giant. However, a Google+ account is still required to review restaurants, post videos on YouTube or rate content on the Play store, he added.
“Eliminating the forcible aspect of the process is a smart move for Google. It should help the company further distance itself from missteps such as the extremely unpopular integration of YouTube comments and Google+,” said Beck.
“Some will see this change as more evidence that Google is de-emphasizing (or even preparing to kill) its three-year-old social network,” he added. “But more likely, in my opinion, is that Google will continue making subtle changes to the service, making improvements to popular Google+ products like Hangouts and Hangouts on Air or even spinning off its excellent photo product so people without Google+ accounts can use it.”
According to Asian News International (ANI), Google has previously stopped pushing its over 300 million Google+ users to use their real names on their accounts back in July, and in April, they replaced “Sign In With Google+” buttons in exchange for a more straightforward method that has users sign into their Google accounts.
“We updated the signup experience in early September,” a Google spokesperson told Sophie Curtis of The Telegraph on Monday. “Users can now create a public profile during signup, or later, if and when they share public content for the first time (like a restaurant review, YouTube video or Google+ post).”
“It remains to be seen if this slight tweak represents some sort of greater signal regarding Google’s ambitions with Google+,” added David Murphy of PC Magazine. “At least, that’s the current speculation – not helped by the fact that Google senior vice president for social and Google+ co-creator, Vic Gundotra, stepped down from his position this past April.”
Curtis noted that unidentified sources have told reporters that a massive Google+ reorganization was underway, and that the social network would be re-classified internally as a platform instead of a product. In June, it removed search results from Google+ author profiles in what was called an attempt to “clean up the visual design” of the service, and admitted that the content had not proved to be as useful to their users as they had originally hoped.
“With the removal of mandatory Google+ profiles for Gmail users, it appears that Google is taking another step back from its social network, which was once pegged as a rival to Facebook and Twitter,” she added.
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The Flavor Of Dry Roasted Peanuts Just Might Not Be Worth It

Written By: rclapper

Rayshell Clapper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

People around the globe eat peanuts. We eat them raw, fried, boiled, roasted, dry roasted, and even mushed into that delicious concoction called peanut butter. However, many people, particularly in the Western world, have serious peanut allergies. But why is that? Oxford University researchers recently discovered a possible answer to just this question.

Oxford researchers found strong evidence that the act of roasting and dry roasting peanuts may be the culprit responsible for many of the peanut allergies in the world. The study found that roasting and dry roasting changes the chemical composition of the peanuts, which the immune system recognizes and then becomes primed for an allergic immune response at the next exposure to peanuts.

To further support this, the study team looked to the East, where people eat lots of peanuts. In the East, fewer people have peanut allergies despite the fact that they ate just as much or more peanuts. The major difference? In the East, people eat their peanuts raw, boiled, or fried, but rarely do they eat them roasted, whereas in the West people eat far more roasted and dry roasted peanuts than raw, boiled, or fried.

In an effort to better understand the peanut allergy and just how it begins, the study, which was funded by the National Institute for Health and Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, the US National Institutes of Health, and the Swiss National Science Foundation, had researchers exposing mice to purified proteins from dry roasted peanuts and from raw peanuts. The researchers either injected the peanut proteins under the skin of mice, or applied them to broken skin, or introduced the proteins to the stomach directly. Then the researchers measured the immune responses of the mice at a later date.

As the Oxford researchers point out, “The mice that had been initially exposed to dry roasted peanuts generated greatly increased immune responses to peanuts, compared to mice that had been exposed to raw peanut proteins. The types of immune responses seen are characteristic of allergic reactions.” This directed the research team to the conclusion that dry roasted peanuts are a potential and likely trigger for peanut allergies.

According to first author Dr. Amin Moghaddam of Oxford University, “Our results in mice suggest that dry roasted peanuts may be more likely to lead to peanut allergy than raw peanuts: the dry roasting causes a chemical modification of peanut proteins that appears to activate the immune system against future exposure to peanuts.”

A peanut allergy, like many other food allergies, is not something to trifle with because for those with extreme allergies even a whiff of peanut particles in the air can lead to a closed throat and the need for an EpiPen in order to fight off anaphylaxis. As it turns out, traditionally peanut allergies are the most common of food allergies, so understanding triggers is important.

According to MedlinePlus if someone has an allergic reaction to peanuts, they are likely to experience some or all of these symptoms:

• Itching or swelling in the mouth
• Stomach issues such as vomiting, diarrhea, or abdominal cramps and pain
• Hives or eczema
• Tightening of the throat and trouble breathing (otherwise known as anaphylaxis)
• Drop in blood pressure

Other symptoms may vary from food allergy to food allergy and person to person, but on the whole at least one of these will present itself. It is important to note that anaphylaxis, a serious drop in blood pressure, and stomach issues can all lead to death if extreme enough.

Understanding what triggers food allergies will better help to prevent more in the future. Moreover, understanding symptoms will help us to react and seek proper medical attention. Ideally, though, the Oxford University findings will better help all to prevent peanut allergies so that we can enjoy the tastiness of this nut, especially in the form of peanut butter, only raw instead of roasted.

The study is published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.