Fibromyalgia

Fibtomyalgia And What To Watch For

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Fibtomyalgia And What To Watch For

The disorder known as fibromyalgia has been defined as a musculoskeletal pain that spreads to all areas of the body and is often paired with several stressful symptoms, including sometime debilitating chronic fatigue, the occasional loss of memory, definite altering of the patient’s mood, affect of sleeping patterns, the creation of various sleeping disorders, and many others.

Fibromyalgia disorder research have showcased that people with fibromyalgia sometimes are affected by heightened pain sensations that may cause the brain to become overly receptive, causing debilitating fatigue in patients. Fibromyalgia is a very odd disorder, with no single cause, and is a serious and difficult disorder to overcome that affects over two percent of the population.

Those that have fibromyalgia oftentimes claim that they experience migraines and severe headaches. These patients will sometimes suffer from a joint disorder known as TMJ, ortemporomandibular joint disorder. There have been documented cases in which patients suffering from fibromyalgia develop irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS, which can be paired with the fibromyalgia or possibly even caused by it.

This event has been very rare, however.Constant feelings of anxiety and heavy onset states of depression have been found in those patients with fibromyalgia disorder. While the exact cause of fibromyalgia disorder has not been verifiably identified, it has been noted by many researchers and physicians that case in which the symptoms associated to fibromyalgia have come about oftentimes begin not too long after a patient has gone through some form of a physical trauma or has a recent major surgery.

On some rare occasions patients have reported symptoms of fibromyalgia after they have been dealing with lots of physiological stress for an extended period of time and have had difficulty in coping with it.Additionally, it has been documented in several instances that a patient was suffering from some type of infection before thefibromyalgia symptoms began to take place.

As of right now, there is nocure for fibromyalgia, but there are a few available options to those with the disorder in order to help them better cope with the associated symptoms. The options are quite limited, unfortunately, for those suffering from fibromyalgia but several medications and a few natural or home remedies have proven to be rather successful in treating the symptoms attributed to fibromyalgia, providing temporary relief for a short period of time.

Doctors and physicians often recommend to their patients that they get an adequate amount of exercise during the week, try adopt of a healthy diet, and to use various stress relieving techniques that may help them better cope with their new life with fibromyalgia disorder.

What to Monitor

The similarities between the fibromyalgia disorder and many rheumatic disorders known as autoimmune disorders are uncanny. Rheumatoid arthritis and a disorder that is known as systemic lupus erythematosus are very similar to fibromyalgia. While these ailments are actually diseases, and fibromyalgia does not fit into the category of a disease, the similiarities between them are very hard to deny.

Autoimmune disorders and other diseases like it occur when a person’s immune system is defective and produce the factors, known as autoantibodies, the cells that attack the body’s natural proteins in the tissue. The autoantibodies mistake these proteins as antigens, or unnatural proteins that the body doses not produce itself. Researches have recently identifies a select amount of antibodies found in a large amount of fibromyalgia patients that have affected their hormonal and neurological systems.

While the evidence has amounted to an amount to make an undeniable conclusion, it can be theorized that someone’s defective immune system could be a cause to the development of fibromyalgia.

Post-traumatic stress disorder has long been considered a possible factor of fibromyalgia. A recent study indicated that early incidents in which sexual and physical abuse have been experienced is found in quite a few female patients of fibromyalgia, far greater than those in the general population that have not been subject to such abuses.

This could be an indicator that post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, could be a factor in the development of fibromyalgia for some patients. Post-traumatic stress disorder is described as an anxiety disorder that is severe reaction to some specific traumatizing event in someone’s past. Post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms are quite numerous and include emotional withdrawal, extreme irritability, constant mood swings, feelings of hopelessness, the inability to concentrate on small tasks, and excessive startled responses to noise.

These symptoms can last for years and are sometimes not able to be treated. Some evidence supports the theory that post-traumatic stress disorder results from significant changes in the brain and could be the result of a long-term overexposure to various stress hormones in the brain and body.

A generalized hypervigilance resulting from several factors, including sleep deprivation, trauma, genetic susceptibility, and biological abnormalities, causes an amplification of sensations felt throughout the body and processed by the brain at a higher rate. Individuals that have been affected by the condition will be overly sensitive to stimulations from outside of the body and will become agitated and constantly preoccupied by the sensations of pain.

One recent study looked to compare three different groups of individuals. The three groups consisted of individuals with fibromyalgia, individuals that had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and individuals that had not been afflicted by either one of the previous disorders. Each of the three groups was given questionnaires in order to assess the individuals’ responses to noise and pain. Out of the three groups, the group that was the least tolerant of the pain and noise and the most attentive to the stimuli was the group of fibromyalgia patients.

Several factors may contribute to the development of fibromyalgia, but none have them have proven to be a primary cause of it. One should be wary of these possible factors and look to stay updated on the information concerning them. Living with fibromyalgia is made even more difficult by the lack of verifiable information concerning the cause and treatment of the disorder, but there is lots of promising research that could soon provide some answers.

New Biological Clock Shows Body Parts Age At Different Rates

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

According to a UCLA researcher’s newly developed way of measuring a person’s biological clock, a woman’s breasts age faster than the rest of her body.

The novel method developed by Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics and biostatistics at UCLA, was created by studying methylation, a naturally occurring genetic progression that chemically changes DNA.

“To fight aging, we first need an objective way of measuring it. Pinpointing a set of biomarkers that keeps time throughout the body has been a four-year challenge,” Horvath explained. “My goal in inventing this clock is to help scientists improve their understanding of what speeds up and slows down the human aging process.”

According to Horvath’s report in Genome Biology, the geneticist examined over 120 sets of genomic data previously collected by researchers who had looked at the methylation process in both healthy and cancerous human tissue.

Using nearly 8,000 samples of 51 tissue and cell types, Horvath tracked the relationship between age and methylation levels from gestation through 101 years of age. To create his clock, Horvath focused on over 350 genetic markers that vary with age and are found throughout the body.

The UCLA scientist tested the clock’s efficacy by contrasting various tissues’ biological age to their chronological age. When his method was shown to be accurate, Horvath said was ecstatic—and a little astonished.

“It’s surprising that one could develop a clock that reliably keeps time across the human anatomy,” he admitted. “My approach really compared apples and oranges, or in this case, very different parts of the body: the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidney and cartilage.”

Using the new clock as a guide, most of the cell and tissue samples’ biological ages matched their chronological ages. However, a few diverged significantly – most notably women’s breast tissue was found to age faster than the rest of the body.

“Healthy breast tissue is about two to three years older than the rest of a woman’s body,” Horvath said. “If a woman has breast cancer, the healthy tissue next to the tumor is an average of 12 years older than the rest of her body.”

The geneticist speculated that his results could explain why breast cancer is the most common form of the disease in women. Horvath’s clock found that cancerous tissues are 36 years older, on average, than healthy tissue. The results could also explain why age is a key risk factor for many cancers in both genders.

In the study, Horvath also looked at the relative age of pluripotent stem cells, mature cells that have been reprogrammed to an embryonic stem cell-like state that can transition into any type of cell in the body and continue dividing ad infinitum.

“My research shows that all stem cells are newborns,” he said. “More importantly, the process of transforming a person’s cells into pluripotent stem cells resets the cells’ clock to zero.”

“The big question is whether the biological clock controls a process that leads to aging,” Horvath added. “If so, the clock will become an important biomarker for studying new therapeutic approaches to keeping us young.”

The UCLA researcher’s new method also indicated that the rate of human aging isn’t constant.

“The clock’s ticking rate isn’t constant,” he explained. “It ticks much faster when we’re born and growing from children into teenagers, then slows to a constant rate when we reach 20.”

Science

Humans And Rodents Process Their Mistakes

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Brown University

Study finds parallels in neural processing of ‘adaptive control’

People and rats may think alike when they’ve made a mistake and are trying to adjust their thinking.

That’s the conclusion of a study published online Oct. 20 in Nature Neuroscience that tracked specific similarities in how human and rodent subjects adapted to errors as they performed a simple time estimation task. When members of either species made a mistake in the trials, electrode recordings showed that they employed low-frequency brainwaves in the medial frontal cortex (MFC) of the brain to synchronize neurons in their motor cortex. That action correlated with subsequent performance improvements on the task.

“These findings suggest that neuronal activity in the MFC encodes information that is involved in monitoring performance and could influence the control of response adjustments by the motor cortex,” wrote the authors, who performed the research at Brown University and Yale University.

The importance of the findings extends beyond a basic understanding of cognition, because they suggest that rat models could be a useful analog for humans in studies of how such “adaptive control” neural mechanics are compromised in psychiatric diseases.

“With this rat model of adaptive control, we are now able to examine if novel drugs or other treatment procedures boost the integrity of this system,” said James Cavanagh, a co-lead author of the paper who was at Brown when the research was done and has since become an Assistant Professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. “This may have clear translational potential for treating psychiatric diseases such as obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia”

To conduct the study, the researchers measured external brainwaves of human and rodent subjects after both erroneous and accurate performance on the time estimation task. They also measured the activity of individual neurons in the MFC and motor cortex of the rats in both post-error and post-correct circumstances.

The scientists also gave the rats a drug that blocked activity of the MFC. What they saw in those rats compared to rats who didn’t get the drug, was that the low-frequency waves did not occur in the motor cortex, neurons there did not fire coherently and the rats did not alter their subsequent behavior on the task.

Although the researchers were able to study the cognitive mechanisms in the rats in more detail than in humans, the direct parallels they saw in the neural mechanics of adaptive control were significant.

“Low-frequency oscillations facilitate synchronization among brain networks for representing and exerting adaptive control, including top-down regulation of behavior in the mammalian brain,” they wrote.

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Regardless Of Bladder Size, All Mammals Subject To The ‘Law Of Urination’

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editor

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

All mammals, regardless of the size of their bladders, take approximately 21 seconds to urinate, researchers from Georgia Tech have discovered – and they have video evidence to back up their claims.

According to Ron Dicker of The Huffington Post, the investigators observed mammals at Zoo Atlanta in Georgia, and found that species, bladder size, and even gender had little to no impact on the time it took these creatures to complete the urination process. They set out to establish what they call the “law of urination,” which asserts that any mammal weighing at least one kilogram in weight requires 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds) to relieve themselves.

The research might elicit a giggle or two, but as the authors explain in their study, there was a serious scientific reason for the research: “The urinary system evolved to eject fluids from the body quickly and efficiently. Despite a long history of successful urology treatments in humans and animals, the physics of urination has received comparatively little attention.”

“In this combined experimental and theoretical investigation, we elucidate the hydrodynamics of urination across five orders of magnitude in animal mass, from mice to elephants,” they added, according to Discover Magazine. The “nearly constant duration” of urination held true despite the fact that the creatures’ bladder volumes ranged from 100 mL to 100L, and was made possible “by the increasing urethra length of large animals which amplifies gravitational force and flow rate.”

They also analyzed the unique biological mechanisms that make this phenomenon possible. For example, they explain that rodents and other small mammals are forced to urinate one drop at a time, and that their findings reveal that the urethra evolved as a flow-enhancing mechanism that allows the urinary system to be scaled upwards without any parts of its function being compromised. Likewise, with elephants, they found that the massive creatures have wider, longer urethras which compensate for the immense volume of discharge they produce.

“This study may help in the diagnosis of urinary problems in animals and in inspiring the design of scalable hydrodynamic systems based on those in nature,” David L. Hu, an assistant professor of biology whose research interests include “fluid mechanics,” and colleagues Patricia J. Yang, Jonathan C. Pham, and Jerome Choo wrote in their study.

Most previous research in the field had focused primarily on bladder pressure, Hu told Dicker, and expressed hope that his team’s research could be applied to improve human-created hydrodynamic systems such as water towers. And for those interested, Hu confirms that the average urination time for humans is also 21 seconds, and that many of the properties of our bladders “match what would be expected for a mammal of that mass.”

Children Undergoing Weight Loss Surgery As UK Debates How Best To Address Obesity Epidemic

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editor

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

With reports surfacing that 45 patients under the age of 18 have undergone weight loss surgery in the UK over the past six years, experts are debating how best to address the country’s growing obesity epidemic.

According to Emma Innes of the Daily Mail, 22 gastric bypass procedures, 18 gastric bands, two gastric bubble procedures and three stomach staple operations were performed on children between 2007 and 2012, statistics provided by the British parliament this week.

That includes one 14-year-old patient, the youngest person ever recorded to undergo weight loss surgery, UK health minister Jane Ellison told Innes. In addition, nearly 25,000 cases in which people had to be admitted to the hospital for obesity-related issues that ultimately required weight-loss surgery were reported between April 2009 and March 2012 – and the annual total increased each year over during that span.

“These figures are the public health equivalent of the canary in the coal mine. They are the most extreme end of an obesity epidemic that could undo the gains in life expectancy we have seen over the past century,” former health minister Paul Burstow told the Daily Mail. “The solution… can only be found in our homes, our schools and our workplaces. Teaching children about healthy eating and providing free school meals to all infant age children can help. It also needs the responsibility deal with the food industry to deliver.”

The statistics will add fuel to the fire of an ongoing debate in the UK regarding exactly how best to deal with the obesity issue. Earlier this week, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) released new guidelines suggesting that doctors treating overweight patients should have a “respectful” and “non-blaming” attitude during their interactions with these men and women.

“It also suggests obese patients be referred to weight-loss programs, including those run by commercial companies, to help them lose weight,” BBC News reported on Thursday. “It states all healthcare professionals should ‘be aware of the effort needed to lose weight and avoid further weight gain and the stigma adults who are overweight or obese may feel or experience.’”

NICE recommended that all National Health Service (NHS) care providers should “ensure the tone and content of all communications or dialogue is respectful and non-blaming” and that the individual preferences of the patients should be respected in the terminology used to describe their conditions, the British news agency added. Furthermore, doctors should make sure that their facilities “meet the needs of most adults who are overweight or obese.”

However, some medical professionals, including journalist and mental health specialist Dr. Max Pemberton, have some issues with NICE’s new draft guidelines, according to The Telegraph. In particular, he takes umbrage with the organization’s suggestion that doctors avoid using the term “obese” – which they claim could upset patients – and instead advise them that they should “seek a healthier weight.”

“I’m not going to stop diagnosing cancer just because people don’t like hearing the world,” Dr. Pemberton wrote, according to the UK newspaper. “So why should it be different when informing people that they are obese? For too long, my fellow doctors have pussyfooted around their obese patients, too scared to confront the, er, elephant in the room.”

The doctor shared a story of one patient who demanded that he be given weight-loss pills instead of being placed on a diet to shed some pounds, and said that situations like that take place frequently. He said the patients who have no interest in altering their lifestyles “demand to have their cake, eat it…and then pop a pill so that the calories never touch their waistline. And, as a result, Britain now combines austerity with obesity.”

According to Dr. Pemberton, one-third of all children in the UK are considered overweight, and an estimated 300 people are hospitalized every day as a direct result of their obesity. Similarly, the BBC reports that slightly over 25 percent of all adults in England are considered obese, and another 41-percent of men and 33-percent of women are deemed overweight. Obesity-related ailments cost the NHS a reported $8 billion (£5 billion) reach year.

“It would be easy to blame Britain’s lifestyle changes, but the worst of it is attitude,” the doctor said, according to The Telegraph. “People just aren’t bothering to lose weight any more. Perhaps obesity is viewed as more normal. The truth can be the hardest drug to administer. But holding our tongues, prescribing the fat pills and bankrupting the NHS in the process, is the worst solution of all.”

Novel Approach To Monitoring Condition Of Tiger Habitat In Chitwan National Park

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editor

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

An international team of scientists has taken a tiger’s-eye view of conservation efforts, finding a useful way to better understand the tiger’s take on policy.

Jianguo “Jack” Liu at Michigan State University (MSU) led a team twelve years ago which revealed that China needed to revisit how it protected the pandas. The new study, published in Ecosphere, shows that the conservation of tiger habitat in Nepal requires not only good policy, but monitoring even years down the road.

“Understanding long-term outcomes of conservation programs is crucial and requires innovative methods,” Liu said. “Now we’re learning that Nepal’s outstanding efforts to protect tigers are best supported with close monitoring because conservation situations are so dynamic. In both cases, the key is to understand how the people who live near the valued wildlife are faring as well.”

Recent MSU’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability doctoral graduate Neil Carter has spent years studying endangered tigers in Chitwan National Park in Nepal’s Himalayan lowlands. The park was established in 1973 to protect the tigers and the region’s biodiversity. However, it has not been without cost to the people who live around the area that depend on the forests for wood for fuel and building and grasses to thatch roofs and feed their livestock. The policies that govern the park are top-down, with little input from the residents.

Nepal added a buffer zone to the park in 1996 to improve the livelihoods of the people who live there and to improve the ecosystem of the area. People are allowed more access to the forest’s resources in the buffer zone, as well as more input into its management.

The study demonstrates a novel approach to monitoring the condition of the tiger’s habitat, combining satellite images and camera trap data to understand where the tigers hang out. Tigers prefer grasslands because they support high prey numbers and give cover to hunt. Because tigers require such a large area, they also prefer if their cover is not too broken up.

Human populations in Nepal are growing, as is unauthorized use of local natural resources around the park. This reduces the quality of the tiger’s habitat inside of Chitwan National Park. The tigers are migrating into the neighborhoods outside the park – which is important input, both for the buffer’s policies and the park’s policies.

“Many animals have their ranges extending outside of protected areas,” Carter said. “They don’t know and they don’t care where the border signs are. So areas outside protected areas are important as well.”

“In Nepal, we’re finding that there is this middle ground where you can have people using the land and still not only keep land from degrading, but can improve habitat quality. Policies in Chitwan’s buffer zone, such as prohibiting livestock from freely grazing in the forests and community-based forest management, improved habitat quality.”

Carter’s team placed infrared motion-activated cameras at 76 locations inside the park and buffer zone. GPS tracking collars reveal a lot about an individual animal’s behavior, however camera traps give a fuller picture of an area’s traffic. Carter was able to see where the tigers were hanging out and gained some insight into why they chose those places by combining the camera trap data with information about the condition of forests and grasslands in the area.

Over a 20 year span, Carter found that Chitwan National Park is still a desirable habitat for tigers. However, the habitat of the buffer zone has improved over that time, while the habitat of the park has degraded. Conservation managers can use such information to fine tune park policy in order to balance their efforts to protect biodiversity with ways to also allow the people that depend on the forest for survival to thrive.

This study echoes the one performed by Liu in 2001, published in Science. Liu showed that panda habitat was being destroyed quicker inside the world’s most high-profile protected nature reserve than in adjacent areas of China that are not protected. This allowed the Chinese to realign their policies. The findings were also the beginning of a multi-discipline research focus to understand the outcomes of conservation policies from the perspective of coupled human and natural systems.

The tools used by Carter and his colleagues could be innovative for conservation managers around the world.

“This is a pretty easy way to take advantage of tools and methods being used all over the world – camera traps and satellite images– to measure how habitat has changed and to visualize how that has changed across space and time,” Carter said. “It’s a simple way to assess how different policies and practices affect habitat and figure out which ones are working and which ones aren’t to promote effective policy now and in the future.”

More information about Neil Carter’s tiger work, including photos and videos, can be found here.

Planck Telescope Shutting Down

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
After for four years surveying the Universe for the European Space Agency (ESA), the Planck space telescope’s Low Frequency Instrument will be turned off on Saturday, having completed its science operations on October 3.
The telescope’s High Frequency Instrument ended operation in January 2012, after conducting five all-sky surveys. With some operational loose ends still to tie up, Planck will finally be switched off next week.
[ Watch the Video: Planck’s View of the Universe ]
Earlier this year, scientists sifting through the telescope’s data created the most defined image of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is radiation left over from the Big Bang that was imprinted when the Universe was only 380,000 years old.
ESA scientists referred to the CMB as “the most accurate snapshot of the matter distribution in the early Universe,” in a recent press release.
The space agency noted the CMB shows small temperature fluctuations that relate to regions of somewhat different densities of cosmic material during the very early years of the universe – essentially indicating the seeds of cosmic structures, the stars and galaxies of today.
“Planck has delivered the most precise all-sky image of the CMB that is enabling us to test a huge variety of models of the origin and evolution of the cosmos,” said Jan Tauber, ESA’s Planck project scientist. “But long and meticulous work was required before we could start exploiting this wealth of cosmological information, since the CMB is hidden behind foreground glare including emissions from material within our own Galaxy, as well as from other galaxies and galaxy clusters.”
ESA points out Planck allowed for the creation of “the most extensive catalogue of the largest galaxy clusters, the most massive building blocks in our Universe.”
The space agency added that the telescope has identified cold, dense bundles of matter in the Milky Way that are reservoirs of material capable of sprouting new stars.
Planck has provided new details on the relative proportions of the Universe’s component ingredients outside the Milky Way. Standard matter that makes up stars and galaxies is just 4.9 percent of the mass and energy density in the Universe. Dark matter, only seen indirectly by its gravitational effects on visible objects, was found to make up nearly 27 percent of the Universe, more than previously thought.
Planck has also shown that dark energy, a mysterious force believed to be responsible for speeding the expansion of the Universe, makes up over 68 percent of the Universe, less than previously thought.
Planck was launched in May 2009 and placed into an orbit 930,000 miles above Earth. About one month later, the craft began its first all-sky survey, which was completed in September 2009.
In January 2010, Planck’s survey mission was extended by 12 months and the first set of mission data was released three months later.
ESA revealed a massive amount of data from the mission earlier this year, including an all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background. The map indicated the Universe is 13.8 billion years old, slightly older than previously thought.

Uncategorized

Blackspotted Puffer, Arothron nigropunctatus

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The Blackspotted Puffer (Arothron nigropunctatus) or the Dog-faced Puffer, is a demersal marine fish belonging to the family Tetraodontidae.

This species is of small size which achieves lengths of up to 33 centimeters. Its body is oval shaped, spherical and rather elongate. The skin isn’t covered with scales. The fish has no pelvic fin and no lateral line. The dorsal fin and the anal fin are small, symmetric and can be located at the end of the body. The snout is short with two pairs of nostrils and the mouth is terminal with four strong teeth.

The background coloration regarding this fish is variable and can be grey, light brown, bluish, dark bluish, bright yellow, orange-yellow and also occasionally bi-color like bluish and yellow. Some dark coloration occurs around the eyes and the mouth. The skin is sprinkled with dark blotches that vary in their size and their shape.

This species can be found in tropical waters from the Indian Ocean to the center islands of the Pacific Ocean, which means the Indo-Pacific area except for the Red Sea. It resides near the external reef slopes and lagoons from the surface to 25 meters deep.

It feeds on benthic invertebrates, algaes, sponges, coral like Acropora tips, crustaceans, and mollusks.

This pufferfish has a diurn activity, meaning its solitary and defends a territory.

It also secretes a violent poison, the tetrodotoxin, which protects it from voracious predators. In order to ward off potential enemies, they can inflate their bodies by swallowing water or air.

Image Caption: Picture of Black Spotted Puffer Fish, taken September 2006, Dayang, Malaysia. Credit: J.Petersen/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Newly Discovered Asteroid Has Slight Chance Of Impacting Earth

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editor

[ Watch the Video: Earth Receives A Quick Visit From Asteroid ]
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Astronomers working at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Ukraine found a new asteroid on October 13, 2013 and NASA confirmed it came within about 4.2 million miles of Earth on September 16.
While 4.2 million miles seems far enough away, experts said the rock, known as asteroid 2013 TV135, will have a slight chance of impacting Earth when it returns in 2032. While scientists have spent a week making calculations, NASA said the probability of the asteroid impacting Earth is just one in 63,000, or just 0.002 percent.
Asteroid 2013 TV135 is just one of 10,332 near-Earth objects that are being tracked by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program. The asteroid is estimated to be about 1,300 feet in size and its orbit carries it as far out as about three quarters of the distance to Jupiter’s orbit and as close to the sun as Earth’s orbit.
NASA said the asteroid should be easily observable in the coming months and once additional observations are provided to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Initial calculations will be improved during this period, and the most likely result will be a dramatic reduction, or complete elimination.
“To put it another way, that puts the current probability of no impact in 2032 at about 99.998 percent,”stated Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “This is a relatively new discovery. With more observations, I fully expect we will be able to significantly reduce, or rule out entirely, any impact probability for the foreseeable future.”
The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called “Spaceguard,” detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing close to Earth using both ground and space-based telescopes. The program discovers these objects, characterizes them and identifies their orbits to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.
Protecting Earth from potential asteroid impacts is currently a hot topic among scientists. In May scientists from around the world gathered to talk about the threat asteroids pose to Earth and how to deal with them. The researchers from universities, research institutes, national space agencies and space industry professionals were invited out to Spain to discuss Near-Earth Object threat mitigation and effects.
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Image Below: This diagram shows the orbit of asteroid 2013 TV135 (in blue), which has just a 1-in-63,000 chance of impacting Earth. Its risk to Earth will likely be further downgraded as scientists continue their investigations. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Health

UCLA Psychologists Report New Insights On Human Brain, Consciousness

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UCLA psychologists have used brain-imaging techniques to study what happens to the human brain when it slips into unconsciousness. Their research, published Oct. 17 in the online journal PLOS Computational Biology, is an initial step toward developing a scientific definition of consciousness.
“In terms of brain function, the difference between being conscious and unconscious is a bit like the difference between driving from Los Angeles to New York in a straight line versus having to cover the same route hopping on and off several buses that force you to take a ‘zig-zag’ route and stop in several places,” said lead study author Martin Monti, an assistant professor of psychology and neurosurgery at UCLA.
Monti and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study how the flow of information in the brains of 12 healthy volunteers changed as they lost consciousness under anesthesia with propofol. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 31 and were evenly divided between men and women.
The psychologists analyzed the “network properties” of the subjects’ brains using a branch of mathematics known as graph theory, which is often used to study air-traffic patterns, information on the Internet and social groups, among other topics.
“It turns out that when we lose consciousness, the communication among areas of the brain becomes extremely inefficient, as if suddenly each area of the brain became very distant from every other, making it difficult for information to travel from one place to another,” Monti said.
The finding shows that consciousness does not “live” in a particular place in our brain but rather “arises from the mode in which billions of neurons communicate with one another,” he said.
When patients suffer severe brain damage and enter a coma or a vegetative state, Monti said, it is very possible that the sustained damage impairs their normal brain function and the emergence of consciousness in the same manner as was seen by the life scientists in the healthy volunteers under anesthesia.
“If this were indeed the case, we could imagine in the future using our technique to monitor whether interventions are helping patients recover consciousness,” he said.
“It could, however, also be the case that losing consciousness because of brain injury affects brain function through different mechanisms,” said Monti, whose research team is currently addressing this question in another study.
“As profoundly defining of our mind as consciousness is, without having a scientific definition of this phenomenon, it is extremely difficult to study,” Monti noted. This study, he said, marks an initial step toward conducting neuroscience research on consciousness.
The research was conducted at Belgium’s University Hospital of Liege.
Monti’s expertise includes cognitive neuroscience, the relationship between language and thought, and how consciousness is lost and recovered after severe brain injury. He was part of a team of American and Israeli brain scientists who used fMRI on former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in January 2013 to assess his brain responses.
Surprisingly, Sharon, who was presumed to be in a vegetative state since suffering a brain hemorrhage in 2006, showed significant brain activity, Monti and his colleagues reported.
The former prime minister was scanned to assess the extent and quality of his brain processing, using methods recently developed by Monti and his colleagues. The scientists found subtle but encouraging signs of consciousness.
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WHO Officially Labels Air Pollution As Carcinogenic

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[ Watch the Video: Air Pollution Labeled Carcinogenic To Humans ]
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
Prolonged exposure to outdoor air pollution and particulate matter in the atmosphere increase a person’s risk of developing lung cancer, according to the specialized cancer agency of the World Health Organization (WHO).
In a statement released Thursday, the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said that based on a review of published research, there was “sufficient evidence” to believe that exposure to air pollution causes lung cancer, and that there was an increased risk of contracting bladder cancer as well.
As a result, the IARC has decided to classify outdoor air pollution as “carcinogenic to humans (Group 1).” The same classification was given to particulate matter, one of the primary components of that atmospheric pollution. While the exact composition of air pollution and the exposure level can “vary dramatically” from one place to another, the agency said the ruling will apply to all regions of the world.
“Our task was to evaluate the air everyone breathes rather than focus on specific air pollutants,” IARC deputy head Dana Loomis told Reuters. “The results from the reviewed studies point in the same direction: the risk of developing lung cancer is significantly increased in people exposed to air pollution.”
The IARC’s decision will place air pollution in the same category as such carcinogenic substances as cigarette smoke, ultraviolet radiation and plutonium. The WHO, the healthcare-centered arm of the United Nations, said the classification should send a clear message to international governments that it is time to act. Sources of air pollution include car exhausts, industrial and agricultural emissions, and power stations, the British news agency added.
“We consider this to be the most important environmental carcinogen, more so than passive smoking,” said Kurt Straif, the chief of the IARC department responsible for evaluating carcinogenic substances. “This is something governments and environmental agencies need to take care of. People can certainly contribute by doing things like not driving a big diesel car, but this needs much wider policies by national and international authorities.”
However, other experts say the average person’s risk of contracting cancer was exceptionally low, but the risk from air pollution – small though it might be – is virtually impossible to avoid. According to Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics at Harvard University’s School of Public Health who was not on the IARC panel, “You can choose not to drink or not to smoke, but you can’t control whether or not your exposed to air pollution. You can’t just decide not to breathe.
In addition to tobacco smoke, UV radiation and plutonium, other Group 1 carcinogens include asbestos, silica dust, and approximately 100 other substances, Kelland and Nebehay said. According to Loomis, regions where there was said to be relatively high exposure to air pollution and particulate matter include Asia, South Asia, North Africa, eastern North America, and some regions of Central America and Mexico.

New Genetic Blood Test Diagnoses Sepsis In Hours, Not Days

Written By: admin

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Commonly referred to as ‘blood poisoning,’ sepsis is a deadly condition caused by the body’s inflammatory reaction to a bacterial infection that often results in tissue and organ damage.

Now, preliminary studies at King’s College London indicate that a simple genetic test can diagnose the condition in two hours instead of the two days required for a traditional diagnosis, according to a new study in the open access journal PLOS ONE.

“Sepsis is a hidden killer, causing nearly a third of all hospital deaths. Rapid antibiotic treatment for the condition is vital – every minute counts,” said study author Graham Lord, a professor of medicine at King’s College London. “Yet current diagnostic methods can take up to two days, so an accurate diagnostic test that can be carried out at the patient’s bedside is urgently needed.”

To find a biomarker for sepsis, the international team of researchers looked at bits of genetic material known as microRNAs, which encode and regulate DNA – particularly with respect to an immune response. The study scientists took blood samples from three groups of patients at two hospitals in the UK and Sweden: those with sepsis, patients with a similar condition called Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (SIRS), and healthy patients.

Genetic material from the blood samples was amplified to determine which microRNAs were more prevalent as a result of sepsis. According to their report, the team was able to find a group of microRNAs that were more active in the sepsis patients, denoting a potential biomarker for the condition.

“We have for the first time identified a group of biomarkers in the blood that are good indicators of sepsis,” Lord said. “We have shown that it is possible to detect these markers by screening a patient’s blood in the ward, a process which can deliver results within two hours. This is an extremely exciting development which has the potential to completely transform the management of this severe disease and save thousands of lives worldwide every year.”

“These are promising early findings, and now we need to test this approach in a large clinical trial,” he added.

The researchers noted that sepsis appears similar to SIRS, but only sepsis responds to treatment with antibiotics. This distinction makes it vital for clinicians to be able to differentiate the two conditions as using antibiotics in non-sepsis cases can be both ineffective and potentially add to the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

“Not only would an accurate diagnostic test improve outcomes for patients, but it would contribute to tackling the ongoing problem of antibiotic resistance by allowing clinicians to distinguish between SIRS and sepsis and diagnose these severe conditions more accurately,” Lord said.

In an interview with BBC News, the King’s College professor laid out a potential timetable for when the study results could translate into an actual diagnostic test.

“If our early phase result holds up in a large trial, it could have significant effects in saving thousands of lives and reducing the use of unnecessary antibiotics,” he said. “If we can prove its value in prospective trials, we can quite rapidly translate it into NHS clinical care.”

Science

Grand Unified Theory Of Exotic Superconductivity?

Written By: editor

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Scientists introduce a general theoretical approach that describes all known forms of high-temperature superconductivity and their “intertwined” phases

Years of experiments on various types of high-temperature (high-Tc) superconductors—materials that offer hope for energy-saving applications such as zero-loss electrical power lines—have turned up an amazing array of complex behaviors among the electrons that in some instances pair up to carry current with no resistance, and in others stop the flow of current in its tracks. The variety of these exotic electronic phenomena is a key reason it has been so hard to identify unifying concepts to explain why high-Tc superconductivity occurs in these promising materials.

Now Séamus Davis, a physicist who’s conducted experiments on many of these materials at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cornell University, and Dung-Hai Lee, a theorist at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, postulate a set of key principles for understanding the superconductivity and the variety of “intertwined” electronic phenomena that applies to all the families of high-Tc superconductors. They describe these general concepts in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences October 10, 2013.

“If we are right, this is kind of the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ point,” said Davis. “After decades of wondering which are the key things we need to understand high-Tc superconductivity and which are the peripheral things, we think we have identified what the essential elements are.”

Said Lee, “The next step is to be able to predict which other materials will have these essential elements that will drive high Tc superconductivity—and that ability is still under development.”

The role of magnetism

In all known types of high-Tc superconductors—copper-based (cuprate), iron-based, and so-called heavy fermion compounds—superconductivity emerges from the “extinction” of antiferromagnetism, the ordered arrangement of electrons on adjacent atoms having anti-aligned spin directions. Electrons arrayed like tiny magnets in this alternating spin pattern are at their lowest energy state, but this antiferromagnetic order is not beneficial to superconductivity.

However if the interactions between electrons that cause antiferromagnetic order can be maintained while the actual order itself is prevented, then superconductivity can appear. “In this situation, whenever one electron approaches another electron, it tries to anti-align its magnetic state,” Davis said. Even if the electrons never achieve antiferromagnetic order, these antiferromagnetic interactions exert the dominant influence on the behavior of the material. “This antiferromagnetic influence is universal across all these types of materials,” Davis said.

Many scientists have proposed that these antiferromagnetic interactions play a role in the ability of electrons to eventually pair up with anti-aligned spins—a condition necessary for them to carry current with no resistance. The complicating factor has been the existence of many different types of “intertwined” electronic phases that also emerge in the different types of high-Tc superconductors—sometimes appearing to compete with superconductivity and sometimes coexisting with it.

Intertwined phases

In the cuprates, for example, regions of antiferromagnetic alignment can alternate with “holes” (vacancies formerly occupied by electrons), giving these materials a “striped” pattern of charge density waves. In some instances this striped phase can be disrupted by another phase that results in distortions of the stripes. In iron-based superconductors, Davis’ experiments revealed a nematic liquid-crystal-like  phase. And in the heavy fermion superconductors, other exotic electronic states occur.

“When so many intertwined phases were discovered in the cuprates, I was strongly discouraged because I thought, ‘How are we going to understand all these phases?'” said Lee. But after the discovery of the iron-based superconductors about five years ago, and their similarities with the cuprates, Lee began to believe there must be some common factor. “Séamus was thinking along a similar line experimentally,” he said.

In the current paper, Davis and Lee propose and demonstrate within a simple model that antiferromagnetic electron interactions can drive both superconductivity and the various intertwined phases across different families of high-Tc superconductors. These intertwined phases and the emergence of superconductivity, they say, can be explained by how the antiferromagnetic influence interacts with another variable in their theoretical description, namely the “Fermi surface topology.”

“The Fermi surface is a property of all metals and provides a ‘fingerprint’ of the specific arrangements of electrons that are free to move that is characteristic of each compound,” Davis said. “It is controlled by how many electrons are in the crystal, and by the symmetry of the crystal, among other things, so it is quite different in different materials.”

The theory developed by Lee incorporates the overarching antiferromagnetic electron interactions and the known differences in Fermi surface from material to material. Using calculations to “dial up” the strength of the magnetic interactions or vary the Fermi surface characteristics, the theory can predict the types of electronic phases that should emerge up to and including the superconductivity for all those different conditions.

“The basic assumption of our theory is that when we rip away all the complicated intertwined phases, underneath there is an ordinary metal,” said Lee. “It is the antiferromagnetic interactions in this metal that make the electrons want to form the various states. The complex behavior originates from the system fluctuating from one state to another, e.g., from superconductor to charge density waves to nematic order. It is the antiferromagnetic interaction acting on the underlying simple metal that causes all the complexity.”

“So far this theory has correctly produced all the electronic phases that we have observed in each type of strongly correlated superconductor,” Davis said.

The next step is to search through new materials and use the theory to identify which should operate in similar ways—and then put them to the test to see if they follow the predictions.

“It is one thing to say, ‘If we have the key ingredients, then a material is likely to exhibit high Tc superconductivity.’ It is quite another thing to know which materials will have these key characteristics,'” Lee said.

If the search pays off, it could lead to the identification or development of superconductors that can be used even more effectively than those that are known today—potentially transforming our energy landscape.

This research was funded by the DOE Office of Science, in part through the Center for Emergent Superconductivity, a DOE-funded Energy Frontier Research Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

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Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia And The Most Common Symptoms Of The Disorder

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Fibromyalgia And The Most Common Symptoms Of The Disorder

Fibromyalgia is a very stressful disorder that has affected nearly five million Americans over the age of eighteen. The fibromyalgia disorder is best explained as a widespread musculoskeletal pain that is oftentimes accompanied by or can cause fatigue and memory, mood, and sleeping problems.

Those that have researched the fibromyalgia disorder believe that fibromyalgia will heighten the painful sensations of the human body and affects the brain’s processing of those pain signals. Many times, the symptoms associated to fibromyalgia will begin after a person has gone through a physical trauma or some types of surgery.

An infection or a heavy amount of psychological stresses may also trigger the fibromyalgia symptoms. However, it has been documented in many cases that symptoms attributed to fibromyalgia have no identifiable trigger or an event that can be pointed to as the cause.

The fibromyalgia disorder is found more commonly in the female population than it is the male population. Those that have been diagnosed with the disorder oftentimes identify that they have serious tension headaches or migraines and sometimes suffer from a joint disorder known as temporomandibular joint disorder, or TMJ. Irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS, has been documented in some cases of fibromyalgia.

Additionally, heavy anxiety and severe depression have been common associations of fibromyalgia. Currently, there is no verifiable cure for the fibromyalgia disorder, although there are some options available to help ease the symptoms associated with the disorder. These options are typically medications or some natural remedies that those inflicted with the disorder can seek for themselves.

It has been noted that proper exercise, a healthy diet, and use of a variety of stress reducing activities and appropriate relaxation methods can help with the symptoms.

Symptoms

The symptoms that are often attributed to the fibromyalgia disorder are quite plentiful. The pain that is caused by fibromyalgia is often described as an ever-constant dulling ache all over the body, particularly in the muscles and some soft tissue. Widespread pain is best defined as pain that occurs on either side of the body and below and above the waist.

Fibromyalgia can also cause a person to be in even more pain when a firm pressure is added to a specific area on the body, or the body’s tender points. Tender points are usually located on the back part of the head, in between a person’s shoulder blades, on top of the shoulders, the front side of the neck, the upper chest area, the outside of the elbows, the upper hips, the sides of the hips, and on the inside of the knees.

These areas may feel weak and may be subject to intense amounts of pain when they are touched. This makes it rather difficult to apply massages or pressure to help relieve the pain due to the fact that the pain in the area is caused by the application itself. This makes for a terribly frustrating experience for the person inflicted by fibromyalgia.

Sleep 

Those that are inflicted by the fibromyalgia disorder oftentimes report to their doctor or physician that they still feel very tired even though they have gotten an appropriate amount of sleep or that they have been trying to sleep for longer periods of time during the night. A person that is subject to the symptoms of fibromyalgia will frequently have their sleep disrupted by the chronic pain caused by fibromyalgia.

There have been documented cases in which someone that has been affected by fibromyalgia has reported that they have developed various sleep disorders. Sleep apnea has been well documented by those people. Additionally, someone who is diagnosed with fibromyalgia will develop restless legs syndrome due to not being able to shake off their fatigue and sleeping too much to try to get rid of it. These types of sleep disorders oftentimes worsen the symptoms of fibromyalgia.

Coexisting Symptoms

There is quite a large list of symptoms that may affect those with fibromyalgia simultaneously. While there are several medications that may help those that are suffering from these aches and ailments, it can still be quite the hassle to keep up with all of the medications and their side effects.

Fatigue is generally the most common of these symptoms. The severity of fatigue is often described as exhausting and crippling by those that are subject to the fibromyalgia symptom. Weakness and feeling fatigued even after hours of bed rest is quite common amongst those individuals suffering from fibromyalgia.

Anxiety is another symptom that occurs simultaneously with other symptoms of fibromyalgia. This can be the reaction of many sleepless nights, fatigue, or constantly being in pain and becoming agitated with the condition. Anxiety can be very difficult to overcome and should not be something that is overlooked. Those with anxiety as a symptom of their fibromyalgia should seek out treatment for it.

Heavy onset depression is common among individuals with fibromyalgia. Because the disorder oftentimes leaves those that are diagnosed with it feeling useless, tired, fatigued, exhausted, and psychologically agitated, depression can sometimes occur. Depression can be quite hard to avoid when diagnosed with fibromyalgia, but those that have the disorder should continue to look to fill their day with pleasurable and rewarding experiences that will help take their mind off of their condition and current state. Fibromyalgia is not the end of a life and those that are subject to the disorder and its symptoms should be aware of that.

Headaches and migraines are all too common for those who have fibromyalgia. Constant pain all over the body may cause the brain to become agitated and hyperactive to the pains of the body. This is very difficult to avoid. Ibuprofen and Tylenol can help to soothe the pain of a headache or migraine, but should be taken in careful moderation. Moderation is key with all treatments.

While the symptoms of fibromyalgia are bountiful, life with fibromyalgia does not have to define those that have it. Maintaining an active lifestyle in moderation can be very beneficial and make the days go by easier. While there are only temporary reliefs, the relieving treatments are just about as bountiful as the symptoms themselves.

Plants Help Control Carbon Sink, Keep The Earth From Cooking

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April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
According to a new study led by Princeton University, enhanced growth of the Earth’s plants during the 20th century has caused a significant slowdown of the Earth’s transition to being “red-hot.” This study, the first to specify the extent to which plants have prevented climate change since pre-industrial times, found that land ecosystems have kept the planet cooler by absorbing billions of tons of carbon, especially during the past 60 years.
Between 186 billion and 192 billion tons of carbon have been sequestered in the planet’s land-based carbon sink since the mid-20th century. Land use by humans from the 1860s to the 1950s was a substantial source of the carbon entering the atmosphere because of deforestation and logging. Humans began to use land differently after the 1950s, by restoring forests and adopting larger scale / higher yield agriculture. Simultaneously, industries and automobiles continued to steadily admit carbon dioxide that contributed to a botanical boom. Although carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and pollutant, it is also a plant nutrient, reports Morgan Kelly from the Office of Communications for Princeton.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that if Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems had remained a carbon source, they would have generated 65 billion to 82 billion tons of carbon, in addition to the carbon that it would not have absorbed. This would have resulted in a total of 251 billion to 274 billion additional tons of carbon in the atmosphere currently, which would have pushed the atmosphere’s current carbon dioxide concentration to 485 parts-per-million (ppm). This would push well past the scientifically accepted threshold of 450 (ppm) at which the Earth’s climate could drastically and irreversibly change. Currently, the atmospheric concentration is 400 ppm.
The researchers report that those “carbon savings” amount to a current average global temperature that is cooler by a half-degree Fahrenheit. This would have been a sizable jump, according to the team. Since the early 1900s, the planet has warmed by only 1.3 degrees F. Scientists calculate that the global temperature would be dangerously high at a mere 3.6 degrees Fabove pre-industrial levels.
Elena Shevliakova, a senior climate modeler in Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, explains that this study is the most comprehensive look at the historical role of terrestrial ecosystems in controlling atmospheric carbon. Prior studies have focused on how plants might offset carbon in the future, but have not investigated the importance of increased vegetation uptake in the past.
Shevliakova said. “We actually for the first time have a number and we can say what that sink means for us now in terms of carbon savings.”
“Changes in carbon dioxide emissions from land-use activities need to be carefully considered. Until recently, most studies would just take fossil-fuel emissions and land-use emissions from simple models, plug them in and not consider how managed lands such as recovering forests take up carbon,” she said. “It’s not just climate — it’s people. On land, people are major drivers of changes in land carbon. They’re not just taking carbon out of the land, they’re actually changing the land’s capacity to take up carbon.”
REFORESTATION
The study findings provide a potentially compelling argument for continued restoration and preservation of plant life by specifying the “climate impact” of vegetation, according to Scott Saleska, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona who studies interactions between vegetation and climate and was not involved in the study.
“I think this does have implications for policies that try to value the carbon saved when you restore or preserve a forest,” Saleska said. “This modeling approach could be used to state the complete ‘climate impact’ of preserving large forested areas, whereas most current approaches just account for the ‘carbon impact.’ Work like this could help forest-preservation programs more accurately consider the climate impacts of policy measures related to forest preservation.”
Saleska said that although the study showed a strong historical influence of carbon fertilization in carbon absorption, that exchange does have its limits. The research team reported that more vegetation will be needed to maintain the size of the carbon sink if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue rising.
“There is surely some limit to how long increasing carbon dioxide can continue to promote plant growth that absorbs carbon dioxide,” Saleska said. “Carbon dioxide is food for plants, and putting more food out there stimulates them to ‘eat’ more. However, just like humans, eventually they get full and putting more food out doesn’t stimulate more eating.”
The comprehensive Earth System Model (ESM2G) – a climate-carbon cycle model developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid and Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) was used by the research team to simulate how carbon and climate interacted with vegetation, soil and marine ecosystems between 1861 and 2005. Changes in climate and in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, based on fossil fuel emissions of carbon, were predicted by the GFDL model, which also predicted emissions from land-use changes — such as deforestation, wood harvesting and forest regrowth — that occurred from 1700 to 2005.
“Unless you really understand what the land-use processes are it’s very hard to say what the system will do as a whole,” said Shevliakova. “After the 1940s and 1950s, if you look at the land-use change trajectory, it’s been slowed down in the expansion of agriculture and pastures. “When you go from extensive agriculture to intensive agriculture you industrialize the production of food, so people now use fertilizers instead of chopping down more forests. A decrease in global deforestation combined with enhanced vegetation growth caused by the rapid increase in carbon dioxide changed the land from a carbon source into a carbon sink.”
The model is a significant contribution to understanding the terrestrial carbon sink for scientists, according to Saleska. The land-based carbon sink was only discovered about 20 years ago, while models that can combine the effects of climate change and vegetation growth have only been around for a little more than 10 years. Saleska cautions that there is work to be done to refine current climate models, and this new study opens up possibilities while also lending confidence to future climate projections.
“A unique value of this study is that it simulates the past, for which, unlike the future, we have observations,” Saleska said. “Past observations about climate and carbon dioxide provide a test about how good the model simulation was. If it’s right about the past, we should have more confidence in its ability to predict the future.”

Schizophrenia Tied To Abnormal Memory Network In Brain

Written By: admin

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Individuals suffering with schizophrenia are subject to a whole host of disturbing, life-changing symptoms. They can range from disorganized thinking and an inability to plan for the future to full-on hallucinations and paranoid delusions. Through treatment with psychiatric therapy and medication can be effective for some, the psychiatric disease has largely remained a medical mystery.
However, researchers at the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT have uncovered what they term “a faulty brain mechanism” they believe is crucial in the eventual development of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders in humans.
Speaking about the study published in today’s issue of Neuron, Susumu Tonegawa, director at RIKEN-MIT said, “Our study provides new insight into what underlies schizophrenia’s disordered thinking and zeroes in on a new target for future investigation into the neural basis of a cognitive disorder that affects more than 1 percent of the world’s population.” Tonegawa is also a senior author of the study.
This study, like many others in the fields of genetics, was an animal study. The team employed the use of genetically engineered mice that displayed symptoms of schizophrenia. One difficulty faced by this study, in particular, was figuring out how to model the complex nature of disorganized thought in the mice.
The research team began their study with the understanding that human patients suffering from cognitive disorders will present abnormal neural activity in what is known as the default mode network (DMN). The DMN is a network inclusive of the brain’s prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. It is in these areas of the brain scientists believe we process memories.
As the researchers pointed out, because the DMN is involved in recall and the planning of future actions, understanding how it processes information and interacts with other brain areas could help to explain how brain disorders come about when this network is faulty.
COMMUNICATION IS KEY
The genetically modified mice carried a gene mutation that also exists in some sufferers of schizophrenia. More specifically, the mutation entailed the absence of the normal gene for an enzyme known as calcineurin. Calcineurin is critical in creating the synaptic plasticity that is used in learning and memory.
This specific genetically modified mouse was first created some 10 years ago by Tonegawa. He first noted that these mice displayed several of the behavioral symptoms of schizophrenia, like short-term memory impairment, attention deficits and abnormal social behavior.
The non-modified mouse brain goes into a resting state after running a maze, allowing the brain to process the information related to the maze experience. As an example, if you’ve ever played a puzzle game like Tetris or Sudoku, you might find after putting it down you are still playing the game in your mind. This style of information processing is indicative of normal brain function.
However, in the modified mouse brain, the team found the exact opposite occurs. Rather than going into a resting state, electrical activity in the hippocampus actually surged.
“Our study demonstrated an increase in neural activity in the hippocampus during awake resting periods,” said study co-author Junghyup Suh. “More important, we demonstrated – for the first time – disrupted information processing in single cells as well as neural circuits.”
During its maze run, the non-modified mouse brain will fire off neurons in the hippocampus at key locations within the maze. These are known as place fields. Once out of the maze, the normal brain will replay these place fields in specific order during rest periods. This aids in building memory which allows the mouse to move through the maze faster the next time around.
This action, however, did not occur in the same way in the brains of genetically modified mice. The place cells, while collected during the maze run, were seemingly reactivated during the rest period in no discernible order. In fact, the place cells were reactivated at an abnormally high level and almost simultaneously.
“We think that in this mouse model, we may have some kind of indication that there’s a disorganized thinking process going on,” said Suh, a research scientist at the Picower Institute. “During ripple events in normal mice we know there is a sequential replay event. This mutant mouse doesn’t seem to have that kind of replay of a previous experience.”
“Our study provides a novel way to look into the actions of current drugs and treatments and may lead to new insights for improved treatment of psychiatric disorders,” Suh said.
Further studies of these mice could help reveal more about the role of the default mode network in schizophrenia, Tonegawa says.

Curiosity Sampling Confirms Earth Meteorites Are From Mars

Written By: editor
editor

[ Watch the Video: Martian Roots In Many Meteorites ]
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
NASA’s Curiosity rover has proven some of the meteorites discovered have indeed come from the Red Planet, according to a new study published by the American Geophysical Union.
A new measurement of Mars’ atmosphere by Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument shows two forms of argon gas. The lighter and heavier forms, or isotopes, of argon exist naturally throughout the Solar System, but on Mars the ratio of light to heavy is skewed because the planet lost its original atmosphere to space.
Past analyses of gas bubbles trapped inside Martian meteorites have narrowed the Martian argon ratio to between 3.6 and 4.5. Measurements taken by NASA’s Viking landers in the 1970s put the Martian atmospheric ratio to between four and seven, but the latest SAM measurement shows the planet at an argon ratio of 4.2.
“We really nailed it,” Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, lead author of a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters, said in a statement. “This direct reading from Mars settles the case with all Martian meteorites.”
Determining the planet’s atmospheric loss would enable scientists to better understand how Mars transformed from a once water-rich planet to the drier, colder and less hospitable one that it is today.
Atreya said if Mars had held on to its original argon, its ratio of the gas would be the same as that of the Sun and Jupiter, which have so much gravity that isotopes cannot preferentially escape.
Argon only represents a small fraction of the gases lost to space from Mars, but because it is a noble gas it does not react with other elements or compounds, making it a good tracer for knowing the history of the Martian atmosphere.
“Other isotopes measured by SAM on Curiosity also support the loss of atmosphere, but none so directly as argon,” Atreya said. “Argon is the clearest signature of atmospheric loss because it’s chemically inert and does not interact or exchange with the Martian surface or the interior. This was a key measurement that we wanted to carry out on SAM.”
NASA has not had a chance to comment on the team’s finding because the US space agency is still under the grip of the government shutdown. However, a Senate deal was reached on Wednesday, so the US space agency will soon be opening its doors once again, as well as its newswires.

Mapping Out The Unknown With Cyborg Bug Swarms

Written By: editor

Enid Burns for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Researchers at North Carolina State University are looking to bugs, namely cockroaches, to help them with a mapping problem. The researchers are looking to map tricky spaces, such as collapsed buildings, by letting a swarm of cyber cockroaches, dubbed biobots, explore such areas.

NCSU published a paper — “Topological Mapping of Unknown Environments using an Unlocalized Robotic Swarm” — of the research being conducted by Dr. Edgar Lobaton, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and senior author of the paper.

“We focused on how to map areas where you have little or no precise information on where each biobot is, such as a collapsed building where you can’t use GPS technology,” said Lobaton in a statement.

“One characteristic of biobots is that their movement can be somewhat random,” Lobaton added. “We’re exploiting that random movement to work in our favor.”

Field work in such an experiment involves releasing a swarm of biobots, such as remotely controlled cockroaches, which is the topic of research at the same university conducted by Dr. Alper Bozkurt. The biobots are equipped with electronic sensors, and are initially allowed to roam at random. This is because the researchers can’t use GPS to track their movement at first. Precise locations are initially unknown. As the biobots come into range of one another, radio waves signal the researchers to provide a location.

After an initial roaming period, researchers send a signal commanding the biobots to keep moving until they find a wall or other unbroken surface, and then continue moving along the wall. Researchers call this command “wall following,” as the biobots walk along a wall to establish mapping geographies.

Researchers repeat this cycle a few times before commanding the biobots to explore at random, followed again by the wall following command in order to get a picture of the area they are trying to map. The data are collected by new software that uses an algorithm to translate the biobot sensor data into a rough map of the unknown environment.

“This would give first responders a good idea of the layout in a previously unmapped area,” Lobaton said.

The bio sensors can be equipped with more than just geographical sensors, but also sensors that detect hazardous materials such as radioactive or chemical threats, in order to map areas that are contaminated and require special equipment to explore, or areas to avoid altogether.

The research paper will be presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, held the first week of November in Tokyo, Japan. The research was supported by a National Science Foundation Grant and the lead author of the paper is Alireza Dirafzoon, a PhD student at NC State University.

Researchers have conducted simulations to test the software and are currently testing the program with robots. Hopefully the researchers will include a “pied piper” command that will bring all of the biobots back into containment after completing their mapping task, lest a collapsed building develop a biobot infestation problem.

South African Banks Lose Out In Dexter Malware Fraud

Written By: editor
editor

Peter Suciu for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The Showtime series Dexter wrapped up its run last month, but the serial killer lives on – and not in ways that the show runners or the network would likely have had in mind. South African banks have been hit by malware known as “Dexter” that could be one of the biggest cyber-fraud attacks in its history.
According to the Payment Association of South Africa (PASA), the body that oversees local financial transactions, a payment card system of thousands of shops, restaurants and hotels had been compromised and losses are in the tens of millions of rands – just over $1 million (US).
“There’s not a single bank that hasn’t been affected,” PASA Chief Executive Officer Walter Volker told Bloomberg in a phone interview on Tuesday. “We first detected higher volumes of fraud early in the new year.”
The hackers are believed to have loaded software via compromised computers at various outlets, which captured the data stored on the magnetic strip of a bank card. From here the hackers were able to either produce their own fraudulent cards or may have sold the compromised data to a third party.
Hundreds of thousands of customers have likely been affected by the fraud, which has been traced back to Europe. Africa’s biggest lender, Standard Bank Group Ltd., is reportedly aware of the breach and is working to limit its potential exposure, Bloomberg reported.
The South Africa-based TechCentral also reported that the card data was likely obtained from point-of-sale terminals, which were infected with the “Dexter” malware. This code can upload the contents of the terminal’s computer memory to remote servers, which are controlled by criminal syndicates.
The attack had targeted back-end systems from the cards’ magstrips so it did not apparently compromise pin codes or the CVV payment authentication numbers.
The BBC reported this means thieves would not have been able to withdraw money from bank cash machines and could not have used the information gathered to make purchases via the Internet.
“It took quite a while to get to the bottom of [this incident], because it was not the standard Dexter malware, which has been around for a while, and which many antivirus software programs can pick up,” Volker told TechCentral as reported by Ars Technica. “This one was a variant that was changed to [avoid detection] by the antivirus software.”
PASA has noted it will ultimately be the banks, rather than the public or even the businesses, that would face losses as a consequence of the attack.
“The South African card holders – or potentially tourists using their cards at the affected sites – will not be exposed to any losses,” Volker told the BBC. “It’s just the inconvenience of detecting false transactions on their accounts. If that has happened they should just contact their issuing bank.”
Dexter derives its name from a string of code found on one of its files, and it is believed it refers to the US television show that followed the exploits of a serial killer. However, given that Dexter – the character – usually took down bad guys, it is unlikely he’d appreciate the malware being named for him.

Largest Known Star Self-Destructs While Astronomers Observe

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Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A group of international scientists have been observing as the largest known star in the Universe tears itself apart.
Astronomers from the UK, Chile, Germany and the US have watched as W26 in the Westerlund 1 star cluster shed its outer layers and flings a huge cloud of glowing hydrogen gas out to return enriched material back to the interstellar medium.
The latest observation, reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is considered to be a vital step in understanding how massive stars help enrich the space between stars, which is necessary for forming planetary systems.
Westerlund 1 is the most massive cluster of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The cluster, which is 16,000 light years away from Earth, is home to several hundred thousand stars. Astronomers used the Very Large Telescope (VST) at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile to observe Westerlund 1 when they happened to discover W26.
They realized that the star was probably the largest ever discovered, with a radius 1,500 times larger than our Sun. They also discovered that W26 is one of the most luminous red supergiants ever seen.
Glowing hydrogen-gas clouds like the one seen around W26 are rarely found around massive stars, and are even rarer around red supergiants. This was the first ionized nebula ever discovered around such a star. While W26 is too cool to make the gas glow, the astronomers believe the source of the ionizing radiation could be either hot blue stars or possibly a companion star.

The nebula around W26 is similar to the nebula surrounding SN1987A, which is the remnant of a star that exploded as a supernova in 1987. SN1987A was the closest observed supernova to Earth since 1604, and it gave astronomers a chance to better understand the properties of these explosions.

Astronomers will be able to use the new nebula around W26 to better understand the mass loss processes around massive stars. Stars with masses tens of times larger than the Sun live very short and dramatic lives, with some having lifetimes of less than a few million years before they exhaust all of their nuclear fuel and explode as a supernova.
When a massive star reaches the end of its life it becomes highly unstable, ejecting a considerable amount of material from its outer envelopes. This material has been enriched by nuclear reactions deep within the star and includes many of the elements necessary for forming rocky planets like Earth. Knowing more about how this material is ejected and how it affects the evolution of the star would enable scientists to better understand the evolution of our universe.

‘Hunger Hormone’ Ghrelin May Prevent PTSD, Say MIT Researchers

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Michael Harper or redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say drugs created to suppress appetite may also be effective in preventing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). At the heart of the research is ghrelin, what many refer to as the “hunger hormone.”

When this hormone was found to trigger appetite in humans, many drug manufacturers set about creating drugs to block the biochemical as a way to prevent obesity. Yet as MIT researchers kept digging to better understand ghrelin, they found that it’s not just responsible for triggering hunger: it’s also released during bouts of chronic stress.

Now, researchers suggest that if military troops are given a dose of ghrelin as they go into battle, they may be able to better protect themselves against the risk of PTSD. The new research paper, written by assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences Ki Goosens and recent graduate Retsina Meyer also claims ghrelin stimulates the secretion of a growth hormone but does not work in the same way as other stress hormones.

Their paper is published in the online journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Goosens says their research is particularly exciting because no drug is currently being issued to prevent PTSD.

When experienced in normal conditions, stress is not completely harmful. When stress becomes chronic, however, it can lead to anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses. A recent study published in the journal BMJ Open, for instance, found that women who experienced several stressful moments in the middle of their lives were more likely to develop Alzheimer’s.

It’s been previously understood that a part of the brain which causes humans to feel fear can also respond to chronic stress. Unlike any other section of the brain, the amygdala responds to common stress by releasing a particular growth hormone. Goosens and team now say ghrelin triggers the amygdala to release this hormone, which is made in the stomach and then spreads throughout the rest of the body.

To test the effects of this hormone, the MIT researchers fed lab rats with drugs that either stimulated the ghrelin receptor or which overloaded them with growth hormone over an extended period of time. These rats were then trained to be afraid of a particular sound played by the researchers in the laboratory. The tone, they say, was mostly innocuous but could freeze the rats with fear. The animals that were fed the ghrelin receptor drug and the growth hormone drug were more likely to freeze when they heard the sound, a reaction which the researchers say indicates fear.

When the researchers reversed the drug therapy and began blocking the rats’ receptors to ghrelin or the growth hormone, they were no longer so afraid of the tone. The rats reacted in the same way those who had endured traumatic experiences in their life do, said Goosens.

“When you have people with a history of stress who encounter a traumatic event, they are more likely to develop PTSD because that history of stress has altered something about their biology. They have an excessively strong memory of the traumatic event, and that is one of the things that drives their PTSD symptoms,” said assistant professor Goosens.

The researchers then wondered if ghrelin was also responsible for the “fight or flight” hormone which is triggered in moments where adrenaline runs high. This mechanism is triggered by a response in the adrenal glands in rats, but when animals with this gland removed were administered ghrelin, they still became frightened. This indicates that ghrelin and adrenaline act independently of one another, allowing researchers to develop stress therapies specifically designed to address ghrelin.

Good Food, Dopamine And Lowering Your Blood Pressure

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Rebekah Eliason for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Feelings of happiness are triggered by the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. A few of the common triggers for dopamine release are food, sex and drugs. Once the brain receives a dose of dopamine, it is not content with a onetime burst of joy but instead remembers the feeling and works to achieve it again and again. Dopamine enables us to remember how to make decisions that once again give us that happiness kick.

Researchers working at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) in Basel, Switzerland recently discovered a new therapy using the dopamine system. This work, headed by ETH-Zurich professor Martin Fussenegger, lead to the development of a new genetic module which can be controlled by dopamine. The module is activated by the feel-good molecule but is dependent on the dosage. If there is an increase of dopamine in the blood stream, the module responds by producing the active agent.

This specific module is composed of different biological parts interconnecting with one another to produce a synthetic signaling cascade. At the very beginning of the cascade, dopamine receptors are found and function as sensors. The end product is one of two proteins known as SEAP or ANP, which are vasodilators that lower blood pressure. Researchers inserted these signal cascades into human cells and approximately 100,000 were put into capsules. These special capsules were then implanted into mice abdomens.

After injection of the capsules, the mice were exposed to situations such as sexual arousal, triggered by a female mouse in males, the drug methamphetamine, or golden syrup; all of which were designed to correspond with the central reward system that produces dopamine. When the mouse brain responded by creating a “state of happiness,” dopamine was formed and released into the blood by the peripheral nervous system.

Some mice were given varying concentrations of golden syrup so that the happiness level varied. When the sugar was more diluted, less dopamine was produced which caused less of the active agent to circulate in the blood. According to Fussenegger, “This shows that dopamine does not merely switch our module on and off, but also that it responds based on the concentration of the happiness hormone.”

The researchers also designed a dopamine sensor module to produce the antihypertensive agent ANP and placed it in the abdomens of hypertensive male mice. When the male mice came in contact with a female mouse, enough dopamine was released to trigger ANP production that entirely corrected the hypertension and even caused the blood pressure to normalize.

The results of this research showed that dopamine is not only released in the brain in response to feel-good situations but also in the nerves of the sympathetic nervous system, also known as the vegetative system. The brain is connected to the rest of the body through the sympathetic nervous system, even though the dopamine it produces cannot directly enter the blood due to the blood brain barrier. Along with the brain, dopamine receptors have been found in the kidneys, adrenalin glands and on blood vessels themselves.

Dopamine circulating in the blood serum regulates breathing and blood sugar balance. Because of this it has long been thought that brain activity and blood serum dopamine were connected. The research done by the ETH-Zurich researchers has demonstrated this connection, enabling a deeper understanding of the body’s reward system.

Fussenegger explained that eating, for example, could be used as therapeutic input due to this new module. “Using the gene network, we link up with the normal reward system,” he said. Since delicious food triggers feelings of happiness that activate the module, intervention is made in a process that usually is controlled solely by the subconscious. Because of this, daily activities could start to be used as therapeutic interventions.

For now, the dopamine hypertension model is simply a prototype. However, this work has shown that it is possible to intervene in the body’s reward system. “It works in a mouse model that simulates a human disease and the components we used to produce the module also came from humans.”

It is remains unclear whether this treatment will become available to the public, as it may take years or even decades to develop the prototype into a marketable product.

Fibromyalgia

Top 8 Most Important Things about Fibromyalgia

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Important Things about Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is a syndrome that is still little known both to the large public and to the medical specialists.

Although it is acknowledged as a “proper” syndrome and although it affects millions of Americans, the studies that have researched its symptoms and causes are still unclear and doctors have not settled yet for a very specific set of them.

However, some things are clearly established and these help making the diagnosis a little easier. Proper information is the key in ameliorating the symptoms of those who suffer from Fibromyalgia, and this article will hopefully help you understand better what this syndrome is and which are the most important things related to it.

Here are the top 8 most important things everyone (not only those suffering from the syndrome) should know:

1- Fibromyalgia is a type of chronic pain

Thus, pain is the most poignant and most important symptom that patients who suffer from this syndrome will feel. If all 4 quadrants of their bodies are affected by pain, if this lasts for more than 3 months and if, by testing 18 pressure points, 11 of them are painful, then the patient becomes a Fibromyalgia patient.

Of course, pain is not the only symptom that patients with this syndrome show, and some other symptoms include fatigue, insomnia, Restless Leg Syndrome and many, many other disorders and syndromes that are associated with Fibromyalgia.

2- Eating right is important both in preventing Fibromyalgia and in ameliorating its symptoms

Yes, healthy eating is not just about losing weight and it can improve many aspects of one’s life, from the general state of being to very specific symptoms shown by various diseases and syndromes. Fibromyalgia patients can be harshly affected by bad eating habits, such as eating foods high in “bad” fats, junk foods that contain a lot of additives, by sweets and by foods and drinks that are high in caffeine. On the other hand, eating fruits, vegetables, fish (the “fatty” kind, such as salmon, for instance) and nuts will improve the way these patients feel in general (including the level of pain they feel in their bodies).

3- The diagnosis process may take longer than in other cases

Yes, there is a set of examinations and a set of inquiries doctors will make in order to diagnose Fibromyalgia. Sadly though, most of the symptoms shown by patients suffering from this syndrome can overlap with other diseases and disorders, so clearly establishing the diagnosis may not be a short process. Sometimes, certain diseases can be completely mistaken with Fibromyalgia and sometimes they can even overlap with this syndrome (and this includes diseases such as Arthritis, Lyme and many other health conditions).

4- There is no clear medical category in which Fibromyalgia can be placed

On the one hand, it has been long thought to be a mental disorder (sometimes mistaken with hypochondria), but this may not be the case under the recent studies that have been made in this field. On the other hand, most of the specialists nowadays agree that Fibromyalgia is a real disease and that the pain felt by patients is as real as pain can get.

Basically, most of them agree that Fibromyalgia is caused by certain unbalances that appear at the level of the neuro-chemical processes in the human brain, which, in their turn, lead to a bad processing of the pain sensation in the brain. What leads to these unbalances though, is still a mystery.

5- Stress is an important risk factor when it comes to Fibromyalgia

Nowadays’ people live in the era of fast speed and they are forced to move as fast as the technology around them. This leads to increased levels of stress in an increased number of people out there. What some of them may not know though is the fact that stress is not just affecting their state of mind, but that it can be an amazingly important factor into the development of certain medical conditions.

Diabetes, for example, has been related to high levels of stress and so has Fibromyalgia (especially since stress can and will lead to neuro-chemical abnormalities in the brain). Under these circumstances, relaxation becomes more important than ever and you should make sure that you get enough of it, especially if you have a stressful job.

6- Natural remedies can be of an excellent help

Very often, people tend to raise their eyebrows in dismissal when it comes to alternative medicine. However, it has been proved that these methods can help one feel better and that in the case of those who suffer from medical conditions such as Fibromyalgia, they can help relieve stress and pain. Among these natural remedies, acupuncture, yoga and meditation play an important part as adjutants in ameliorating the symptoms of this syndrome.

7- Stomach issues can be a red flag for Fibromyalgia

As mentioned before, nutrition is essential to a general good health. Stomach issues may or may not be related to bad nutrition, but most of the patients with Fibromyalgia show signs of stomach upset in addition to other symptoms of feeling fatigue and low-energized. A thorough analysis is required though in order to tell whether these stomach-related problems are or not related to the fact that the patient may suffer from Fibromyalgia.

8- Bad fitness condition can also be a risk factor in the case of this syndrome

Everybody knows that exercising helps people look better and feel better (especially when it comes to the condition of the heart). But some people may not see any relationship between proper exercise and Fibromyalgia. Truth is that, although extensive exercise is not recommended for patients with this syndrome, a little bit of it will bring them great benefits. The key lies in not overdoing it and in choosing something that is relaxing, healthy and easy to do at the same time (such as a few minutes of walking every day).

Chemicals Banned Decades Ago Discovered In Dead Illinois River Otters

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editor

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

North American river otters in central Illinois are being exposed to chemical substances that had been banned for use in the US at least three decades ago, according to research published in the latest edition of the journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety.

Between 2009 and 2011, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources collected 23 river otter carcasses after the creatures had been accidentally killed. Their bodies were analyzed by experts at the Illinois Natural History Survey (INHS) and autopsies were performed by members of the University of Illinois Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.

Wildlife technical assistant Samantha Carpenter and wildlife veterinary epidemiologist Nohra Mateus-Pinilla of the INHS, as well as Jan Novakofski, an animal sciences professor at the university, looked at the liver concentration of 20 organohalogenated contaminates (OHC) that had been used by agricultural and industrial workers – all but one of which were banned in the 1970s and 1980s.

The toxicology tests revealed that the otters were being exposed to both polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and banned pesticides. In fact, the authors found that the average concentration of the compound dieldrin – an insecticide and the byproduct of the pesticide aldrin – was higher than those found in eight river otters collected in Illinois in both 1984 and 1989. The substance has been banned since 1987, the researchers said.

In addition, the researchers found that liver concentrations of PCBs, which had been used as coolants and insulators in motors and electrical systems before being banned in 1979, and DDE — a byproduct of the prohibited pesticide DDT — which has not been used in the US since the early 1970s, were similar to those in the earlier analysis. PCBs were found to be potentially carcinogenic to humans, and DDT/DDE were found to contribute eggshell thinning in some species of birds, and are toxic to fish and other forms of marine life.

“The PCBs, dieldrin and DDE were the contaminants that we detected in highest concentration, in terms of average concentrations,” Carpenter said.

Dieldrin was banned in 1987, and had previously been used to kill crop pests, termites and mosquitoes – especially in the Midwest agricultural region. Before this compound was banned in 1987, it (and parent compound aldrin) were applied to over 15 million pounds of crops annually.

“Some studies (of dieldrin) exposure find links to cancer, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s and some do not,” the technical assistant added. “But perhaps most concerning is that both dieldrin and PCBs can act as developmental neurotoxicants, meaning that developing fetuses can be harmed at concentrations much smaller than those that can impact the health of adults.”

The concentrations of contaminants found in the river otters varied greatly, though the researchers said that male river otters typically had significantly higher PCB concentrations than their female counterparts. One male otter was found with 3,450 parts per billion (ppb) worth of PCBs in its liver, while another had just 30 ppb. Dieldrin concentrations ranged from 14.4 to 534 ppb.

“For many of the contaminants we did detect a large range. This is a red flag. We need to understand more about what humans and wildlife are being exposed to in different watersheds,” Carpenter said. “We don’t have a good understanding of how much time they spend in a particular area, how long they stay there, how far they go or where they spend most of their time during the winter versus the summer.”

“All of these can contribute to differences in exposure,” she added. “We don’t know enough about how these contaminants behave synergistically… [since] the cocktail of contaminants that we’re exposed to here in the Midwest differs from what humans and wildlife are exposed to in eastern or western North America.”

Adding Citrus Fiber To Meatballs Can Increase Dietary Fiber Content

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
Researchers from the University of Missouri have discovered a novel new way to help people fulfill their daily recommended amount of dietary fiber – by adding a little zest to their meatballs.
In their study, doctoral student Ayca Gedikoglu and associate professor of food science Andrew Clarke reported that most Americans typically consume just half of the dietary fiber recommended by health experts. In order to help increase that intake, they set out to create meatballs that included citrus fiber without adversely affecting the taste and overall quality of the product.
Gedikoglu discussed the research during a presentation this week at the American Meat Science Association (AMSA) conference. She and Clarke recently completed their first test of their newly developed recipe. The trial consisted of three different batches of meatballs, each with different amounts (one percent, five percent and 10 percent) of citrus powder being used as a meat substitute.
The goal was “to see how much of the sweet and tangy powder could be added without adversely affecting the meatballs’ texture and cooking characteristics,” the university explained in a statement. The investigators found that adding citrus fiber increased the cooking yield of the recipe they used, and that both the color and texture of the meatballs were acceptable when either one percent or five percent was added.
According to Gedikoglu, a “restaurant-sized” serving of the citrus meatballs, which contained two percent of the added powder, contained approximately five grams of fiber. Fiber, which is typically found in whole grains, fruit and vegetables, can help people maintain their normal weight, reduce their risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and prevent or relieve the symptoms of constipation. Regular meatballs contain no fiber.
“Soluble fiber, found mainly in whole grains and some fruits, is particularly beneficial for diabetics, because fiber slows sugar absorption and improves blood sugar levels,” the university said. “Fiber tends to make a person feel full faster and stay full longer because it is less ‘energy dense,’ which means the product contains fewer calories.”
The researchers suggest using citrus powder, which is made from citrus peels, as a replacement for bread crumbs in their meatball recipes. The substance can be ordered online for a “relatively inexpensive price,” Gedikoglu said, and could also be added to hamburger recipes to add fiber and “capitalize on the tangy citrus flavor.” She and Clarke now plan to conduct a series of taste tests, as well as analyze the potential antioxidant benefits of the powder.

Juniper Forecasts Wearable Tech Market Set To Grow To $19 Billion By 2018

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editor

[ Watch the Video: Wearable Technology Market Is Growing ]
Enid Burns for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The convergence of fitness and mobile technology make for a great demand. The mobile smart wearable device market is set to reach $19 billion by 2018, according to a report released by Juniper Research. The retail revenue for the market this year is $1.4 billion.
The mobile smart wearable device market is still in its early stages, which means higher prices. Juniper Research expects that the high price points for the devices will drive revenues. The market for such devices has continued to rise, causing Juniper Research to review its forecast upwards.
Two key segments in the consumer electronics market drive this rise: ‘Multimedia & Entertainment’ and ‘Multi-functional’ devices. The wearable market spans several categories for manufacturers and app developers such as health, fitness, sports and communication. To date the fitness market has seen its share of wearable devices such as Fitbit, Jawbone, Withings, as well as devices from Nike and Adidas. The wearable market has seen new interest for a broader range of devices such as smart watches, Google Glass and FiLIP – a wearable computer.
FiLIP is an app-based communication watch for children built with features such as GPS, Wi-Fi and cellular capabilities. The device helps keep parents and kids connected with two-way voice calling, messaging and location functionalities.
While there are prospects for growth in the market, there will also be hurdles. Vendors need to address critical issues from social and technological perspectives to achieve mass adoption. To date the wearable market is in the early adoption stage.
New vendors could enter the space. Fitbit, Withings and other startups are early contenders in what is set to become an increasingly crowded market when established companies enter the ring. Google, Nike and Adidas have been early to enter the market, but rumors are that others will follow.
Juniper Research says that consumers are becoming more aware of wearable technology.
“That heightened awareness has resulted in large part from reports that Apple could be getting ready to launch a new smart watch and from the actual debut of the Samsung Galaxy Gear watch,” wrote CNET‘s Don Reisinger.
It may seem like there is nowhere for the wearable market to go but up, but some are skeptical. “Given the less than stellar reviews for Samsung’s Galaxy Gear watch last month and uncertain demand for the high-priced items in this category, the Juniper forecast looks a tad optimistic. But the firm expects high price points, combined with strong demand, will lead to sharp growth in the next five years,” wrote Mark Walsh from MediaPost.
Prices, while they may remain relatively high, will likely come down as the wearable market matures.
The report comes out in the same week that Fitbit announced its Force band, the next-generation wearable activity monitor for $130. The band is $30 more expensive than the company’s Flex band, and has a number of advancements such as the ability to collect new data such as how many flights of stairs traveled. It also has a display that tells the time, and a button to toggle through data readings.

Science

How Can Researchers Bridge The Gap Between Scholarship And Public Administration?

Written By: editor

Public administrators draw on a number of different sources to inform their work including the news, blogs, podcasts, etc. But why aren’t they drawing on scholarly research from published academics as a key resource and what can scholars themselves do about it? More than they might think, suggests new research.

A new article published in State and Local Government Review (a SAGE Journal) outlines how to conduct and disseminate academic research that is relevant, collaborative, and accessible to local government practitioners.

The research is based on a panel conducted in the summer of 2013 with four highly-experienced local government managers from across the U.S. The managers were asked about their reading practices of academic material and what scholars could do to make their research more accessible and useful for government officials.

Not surprisingly, the managers stressed that relevance is key in helping them decide what to read. The panel members listed public engagement, emotional intelligence, priority-based budgeting, leadership, decision making, motivation, and collaboration as topics that would assist them in their work.

“The managers expressed a preference for articles that identify how the findings can be applied and that are not overly focused on a methodology which may be difficult for some practitioners to follow,” the authors stated

The researchers found that while collaboration with practitioners would help the scholars identify topics that are important to government managers, practitioner participation in scholarly journal articles is low. The article provides suggestions to increase collaboration between scholars and public administrators.

“In addition to the interactions addressed by the local government managers in the panel (having the practitioners serve as adjunct instructors and on advisory boards for graduate programs and intern programs), exchanges between academics and practitioners may be useful,” the authors wrote. “In the latter, faculty members work in a government setting or government officials work in the academic setting for a specified time period.”

The researchers also identified wider dissemination of research articles through professional organizations and evolving open access journals, the release of research findings through other types of media and through blogs, online courses, or webinars, the creation of a journal targeted to government managers, and the creation of sections within a journal that are specifically targeted to government officials as potential solutions to the problem.

The researchers concluded, “If scholarly research is to be more useful for practitioners, academics and journal editors need to reach out to practitioners, listen to what they have to say, and identify ways to be responsive to their needs and interests.”

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Fibromyalgia

The Brain And Fibromyalgia

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

Brain And Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is a rare disorder that affects nearly one out of every twenty Americans. Information about the disorder is quite scarce, and the verifiable primary causes of fibromyalgia have been difficult to prove.

There are a few theories concerning what causes fibromyalgia and what does fibromyalgia necessarily cause in those that have become victim to it. The fibromyalgia disorder can best be defined as a musculoskeletal pain that has spread all over the body of the individual who has been diagnosed with it.

The disorder is oftentimes accompanied by several symptoms, including a chronic fatigue, the occasional memory loss, alterations in mood and emotional response, and the alteration of sleeping patterns creating various sleeping problems and disorders.

Those that have researched the fibromyalgia disorder have noticed that individuals with fibromyalgia are sometimes affected by the heightening painful sensations due to the disorder and can cause the brain to become overly receptive of the symptoms leading to chronic fatigue and several other complications.

Women are disproportionally affected by the fibromyalgia disorder, with no real explanation as to why. People that have been diagnosed with the fibromyalgia often claim to their physicians that they often experience migraines and tension headaches and suffer from a joint disorder that is known as temporomandibular joint disorder, or simply, TMJ.

In some special cases of fibromyalgia,irritable bowel syndrome, or what is known as IBS, has been reported by individuals that are experiencing several other symptoms of fibromyalgia simultaneously. Feelings of anxiety and rather severe states of depression have been documented in patients that have fibromyalgia.

No primary cause of fibromyalgia has been verifiably proven, but there are many speculations. While there is not much substantial proof, it has been documented in many cases that the plethora of symptoms attributed to fibromyalgia begin soon after a person has gone through some type of physical trauma or has had a major surgery.

In some cases,a person has reveled having fibromyalgia-like symptoms after they had been dealing with physiological stresses for a period of time.In special instances, it has been documented that an infection of the body could have triggered the symptoms attributed to fibromyalgia. Currently, there is no absolute cure for fibromyalgia that has been made readily available.

However, there are a few options that exist to help those with fibromyalgia to ease some of their symptoms while coping with the disorder and their ailments. Several medications and some home and natural remedies have been used to treat the symptoms of fibromyalgia.

While these remedies cannot serve as cures, they do have some success if easing the symptoms or providing relief to those that have fibromyalgia for at least a period of time.Physicians recommend that those with fibromyalgia should try to exercise regularly, should adopt of a healthy diet consisting of many fruits and vegetables, and try to use several stress reducing techniques and some relaxation methods that may help to soothe their stress and ease their ailments.

Causes of Secondary Fibromyalgia

Studies have been conducted on fibromyalgia patients that have monitored their brain, hormonal, and metabolic activity. In these studies, the patients’ monitored activity have shown a rather large number of abnormalities. When brain scans of patients diagnosed with fibromyalgia the tests revealed that the patients had reduced blood flow to specific regions of their brains.

The specific regions of the brain were those that were in control of pain sensation to the body. The brain system known as the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal gland axis, a system that controls some very important functions, including depression, growth, stress response, and sleep, is particularly interesting to researchers of fibromyalgia.

A research target that has seen lots of attention lately is the somatomedin C hormone, also known as the insulin-like growth factor in layman’s terms. This hormone is produced by the pituitary gland in the human brain while the body is in deep sleep. Its primary responsibility is to communicate information’s between the brain about pain-producing stimuli. Patients that have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia have very high levels of somatomedin C that is located in the patient’s spinal fluid.

These high levels may cause patients to be hypersensitive to pain and can cause them to feel painful sensations even when their muscular activity is mild in nature. When the pain sensitivity levels are so high, individuals with fibromyalgia may decrease their level of activity to avoid any more painful experiences.

This decrease in activity will ultimate weaken the muscles, thus leading to a sort of loop of muscle atrophy and the increase of pain due to the low level of physical activity. Excesses of the hormone somatomedin C may be the result of genetic defects or can form from unhealthy sleeping habits that were practiced in the early stages of life. The bad sleeping habits may cause brain or hormonal chemical imbalances.

Individuals that have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia often have particularly low levels of a certain neurotransmitter known as serotonin. These individuals may also have low levels of serotonin’s precursor, tryptohphan, an amino acid. The low levels of these brain chemicals have been associated to depression and a number of other symptoms often associated with fibromyalgia.

Symptoms like anxiety, migraine headaches, and the common gastrointestinal distress, are all the result of low levels of the chemicals found in the brain. Possible defects in systems that govern serotonin and epinephrine, another neurotransmitter, have led some researches to believe that migraines and fibromyalgia are related. Patients of fibromyalgia and some sufferers of frequent migraines have been recorded as having low levels of magnesium, as well.

Fibromyalgia has been very difficult to assess for researches, but there has been some progress made. The connections that have been drawn are sometimes just considered to coincidences, but new evidence has been discovered to support these theories. Living with fibromyalgia can be tough, especially since a verifiable cure does not exist. Finding the primary causes of fibromyalgia will be an excellent start, however. Researches are working non-stop to find what factors trigger or contribute to the disorder that is only increasing the amount of people that it affects.

Automatic Home-Brewing Machine Takes Off On Kickstarter

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editor

[ Watch the Video: Get Your Home Brew On With Zymatic ]

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Do you want to start home brewing but don’t have the time to boil water, clean kettles, or learn how to home brew?

The PicoBrew Zymatic may be just the system for you. Part Ron Popeil’s workshop, part espresso machine, the Zymatic lets novice and pro alike dump in their ingredients, push a button, and walk away. Three hours later wort (or unfermented beer) is left and ready for yeast.

While the current government shutdown is keeping countless bottles of new beer out of consumer’s hands, PicoBrew LLC is looking to give consumers a reason to not rely on the US market for their next bottle of brew.

Tech news sites have hailed the Zymatic as a modern marvel while large breweries have taken to using the machine to try out new batches. It’s not yet available and is stuck in its Kickstarter phase, but demand seems to be strong thus far. At the time of this writing, 14 days remain in the fundraising efforts, with $397,000 raised. PicoBrew began its campaign with hopes to raise $150,000.

“Why can’t we brew beer at home as easily as we can make a loaf of bread with a bread-maker, or a shot of espresso with an automatic espresso machine?” asks PicoBrew on its Kickstarter website page.

“We started PicoBrew LLC in early 2010 out of frustration with the state of the art: home beer brewing takes entirely too much time, is too imprecise, and frankly, when you account for all of the clean-up, is not all that fun. We wanted to make the creation of high-quality beer brewing simple, amp up the art, and tone down the tedium.”

The PicoBrew looks to be the auto-tune of home brewing, boiling down the entire process into a system of buttons, buckets and beer.

While the Zymatic makes the tangible aspects of brewing simple enough, the computerized aspect simplifies the procedure even more. Users can create their own recipe with included software or borrow one from someone else. Once the recipe is fed into the system, the rest of the process is largely a “set it and forget it” affair.

The PicoBrew Recipe Crafter borrows from the 3D printing world, allowing users to create their own recipes and then share them with one another. With the Zymatic, home brewers don’t even have to bother with creating a recipe; they can simply use one someone else has created, buy the raw materials, then take the credit in one week after the fermentation process is complete.

The Zymatic starts at $1,699 (the cheaper options have already sold out) and ships with a five gallon corny keg and your first recipe. PicoBrew hopes to ship its first production units in February 2014, with the second round of production units shipping in April. The company also says it will open a website and sell the units there as well.

While brewers of any skill level can certainly make use of the Zymatic, the robotic brew machine seems better equipped for large and established breweries. Here the Zymatic can be used to create test batches on a micro scale without dedicating precious tank space to a beer that might turn out badly. This is especially true considering the level of expertise these large brewers have and their ability to troubleshoot a recipe. Novice brewers, on the other hand, might get a first taste of brewing their own beer, but those looking to learn from the process will likely find themselves disappointed.

Understanding The Link Between Age And Decreased Maximum Heart Rate

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[ Watch the Video: Link Between Age And Decreased Maximum Heart Rate ]
April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
As we age, our maximum heart rate (maxHR) decreases, limiting the performance of aging athletes. Decreased maxHR is also a leading cause for nursing home admittance for otherwise-healthy elderly individuals who no longer have the physical capacity required for independent living.
Until now, however, the reasons for decreased maxHR due to age have been unclear. We say that as we age we just slow down, but a new study from the University of Colorado has provided new insight into what exactly is slowing down.
It is well-known that aerobic capacity decreases with age. Think of the chart in most gyms showing the target heart rate for exercising; as you age, that number goes down. That is not a senior discount, it is simply because older hearts can’t beat as fast as younger hearts. At 120 beats per minute, an older person’s heart is probably working harder — at a higher percentage of maximum heart rate — than the younger person’s heart which is at 150 beats per minute.
Catherine Proenza, PhD, and Roger Bannister, PhD, both from the University of Colorado School of Medicine, led the research group. Their findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reports that one of the reasons for the age-dependent reduction in maxHR is that aging depresses the spontaneous electrical activity of the heart’s natural pacemaker, the sinoatrial node.
The study described a dissertation from Eric D. Larsen, a graduate from Proenza’s lab in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics.
Larson said, “I utilized a method to record ECGs from conscious mice and found that maximum heart rate was slower in older mice, just as it is in older people. This result wasn’t unexpected. But what was completely new was that the slower maxHR was because the individual pacemaker cells — called sinoatrial myocytes, or ‘SAMs’ — from old mice just couldn’t beat as fast as SAMs from young mice.”
Tiny electrical signals from the isolated cells were recorded by the research team. They found that SAMs from old mice beat more slowly, even when they were fully stimulated by the fight-or-flight response, which could be observed in these individual cells. A limited set of changes in the action potential waveform — the electrical signal that is generated by the cells — was the cause of the slower beating. These change in the action potential waveform were caused by altered behavior of some ion channels in the membranes of the older cells. Ion channels are proteins that conduct electricity across the cell membrane — much like tiny pinholes in a balloon that open and close to let the air in and out.
As with many initial discoveries in basic science, the results open many more questions and avenues for further research. The important implication of the study is that it raises the possibility that sinoatrial ion channels and the signaling molecules that regulate them could be novel targets for drugs to slow the loss of aerobic capacity with age.
In the interim, Proenza notes that “although maximum heart rate goes down for everybody equally, regardless of physical conditioning, people can improve and maintain their aerobic capacity at all ages by exercising.”

Serotonin Reduction During Birth Triggers Sensory Maps To Form In The Brain

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April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Precise, well-characterized maps crucial for translating perception into understanding are built in the brain by neurons that process sensory information such as touch and vision. A new study from Kanazawa University of Japan reveals that the brain chemical serotonin is reduced in newborn mice during the act of birth. This reduction triggers sensory maps to form in the brain. The findings, published in the journal Developmental Cell, demonstrate the key role of a dramatic environmental event in the development of neural circuits, revealing that birth itself is one of the triggers that prepares the newborn for survival outside the womb.

“Our results clearly demonstrate that birth has active roles in brain formation and maturation,” says Hiroshi Kawasaki, Professor of Molecular and Developmental Medical Neuroscience of Kanazawa University. “We found that birth regulates neuronal circuit formation not only in the somatosensory system but also in the visual system. Therefore, it seems reasonable to speculate that birth actually plays a wider role in various brain regions.”

From mice to humans, mammals have brain maps representing various types of sensory information. Neurons that process tactile information from whiskers are found in a region of the rodent brain called the barrel cortex. These neurons are arranged in a map corresponding to the spatial pattern of whiskers on the snout, with neighboring columns of neurons responding to stimulation of adjacent whiskers. Prior studies have shown that the neurotransmitter serotonin directs the development of sensory maps. However, the specific role that serotonin plays during normal development has been unclear until now.

The current study finds that the birth of the mice pups leads to a drop of serotonin levels in the newborn mouse’s brain. This triggers the formation of neural circuits in the barrel cortex and in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), a brain region that processes visual information. Neural circuits in the barrel cortex and the LGN formed more quickly when mice were treated with drugs that either induced preterm birth or decreased serotonin signaling. In contrast, when the mice were treated with a drug that increased serotonin signaling, neural circuits in the barrel cortex failed to form. This suggests that a reduction in levels of this neurotransmitter is crucial for sensory map formation.

Serotonin is known to play a key role in mental disorders, leading the research team to question whether it is possible that abnormalities in birth processes and the effects on subsequent serotonin signaling and brain development could increase the risk of psychiatric diseases. “Uncovering the entire picture of the downstream signaling pathways of birth may lead to the development of new therapeutic methods to control the risk of psychiatric diseases induced by abnormal birth,” Kawasaki says.

University Of Chicago Experts Working On Touch-Capable Prosthetic Limbs

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Researchers from the University of Chicago are laying the foundation for prosthetic limbs that could one day convey real-time touch-related data to amputees through a direct interface with the brain.

The blueprint for these touch-sensitive prosthetic limbs, which has been published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents a vital advancement towards new technology that could increase the viability and dexterity of robotic limbs if successfully put into practice.

“To restore sensory motor function of an arm, you not only have to replace the motor signals that the brain sends to the arm to move it around, but you also have to replace the sensory signals that the arm sends back to the brain,” said senior author Sliman Bensmaia, an assistant professor in the university’s Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy.

“We think the key is to invoke what we know about how the brain of the intact organism processes sensory information, and then try to reproduce these patterns of neural activity through stimulation of the brain,” the professor, who is a member of a multi-year Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative, called Revolutionizing Prosthetics, whose goal is to develop an artificial upper limb capable of restoring an amputee’s natural motor control and sensation .

Revolutionizing Prosthetics is managed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and involves an interdisciplinary team of experts from various universities, government institutions, and private-sector firms. Bensmaia’s team at the University of Chicago is working specifically on the sensory aspects of those limbs. The research they conducted, using monkeys, identified patterns of neural activity that take place during regular object manipulation, and successfully adapted them to the prosthesis.

“The first set of experiments focused on contact location, or sensing where the skin has been touched,” the university explained in a statement. “The animals were trained to identify several patterns of physical contact with their fingers. Researchers then connected electrodes to areas of the brain corresponding to each finger and replaced physical touches with electrical stimuli delivered to the appropriate areas of the brain. The result: The animals responded the same way to artificial stimulation as they did to physical contact.”

The study authors then turned their focus to the sensation of pressure, and came up with an algorithm which allowed them to generate the amount of electrical current necessary to create such a sensation. As in the first experiment, the monkey’s responses to both the natural or artificially-generated stimuli were identical.

Finally, they analyzed the burst of brain activity that takes place when a hand touches or released an object. Once again, Bensmaia and his associates found that the brain activity could be mimicked through electrical stimulation. Their study helped the scientists come up with a set of instructions that can be implemented into a robotic arm so that it would provide sensory feedback to a person’s brain through a neural interface.

“The algorithms to decipher motor signals have come quite a long way, where you can now control arms with seven degrees of freedom,” Bensmaia said. “It’s very sophisticated. But I think there’s a strong argument to be made that they will not be clinically viable until the sensory feedback is incorporated. When it is, the functionality of these limbs will increase substantially.”

Fossilized, Blood-Engorged Mosquito Found By Smithsonian Researchers

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Researchers report that they have found a fossilized mosquito specimen that was still blood-engorged from its last meal – a discovery that is detailed in the latest edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The mosquito had been preserved in shale rock for approximately 46 million years after it plummeted into a lake in what is now northwestern Montana, according to Joseph Stromberg of Smithsonian.com. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the discovery is that it isn’t exactly new. It was originally located by an amateur fossil hunter three decades ago, and had been sitting in a basement ever since.

The blood-engorged mosquito fossil may have been lost forever had it not been for Dale Greenwalt, a retired biochemist who has been helping collect fossils in the western US for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History since 2006. Greenwalt met with a family in Whitefish, Montana, and after they heard about his work they decided to donate their personal fossil collection to the institution. It was when he was going through that family’s fossils that he discovered the unique-looking mosquito.

“I immediately noticed it – it was obvious that it was different,” he explained. The fossilized insect had what Stromberg described as a “darkly opaque abdomen,” and Greenwalt believed that it might contain several-million-year-old blood. Staff from the Natural History Museum’s mineral sciences lab used energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and other scanning techniques to analyze the specimen in detail, and determined that his hunch was correct.

“Using two different types of light-refracting x-rays that determine what chemicals are present, Greenwalt and colleagues determined that the female mosquito’s belly was full of iron, a major feature of blood that gets oxygen to the rest of the body,” reports AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein. “Iron levels were higher than elsewhere in her body and anywhere on a non-biting male used as a control subject.”

The researchers then discovered evidence of porphyrins, a group of organic compounds which are bound to iron in blood. All together, their findings help provide “a definitive case” that the mosquito had 46-million-year-old blood in its system. However, North Carolina State University professor Mary Schweitzer is not completely convinced. She told Borenstein that the findings were preliminary, and that the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History team did not actually rule out all other possibilities before reaching their conclusion.

If it is actually blood in the mosquito’s system, it wouldn’t be used to bring back dinosaurs (ala Jurassic Park) or another other long-dead creature, the researchers said. For one thing, dinosaurs would have been long extinct before the mosquito was even born, Borenstein said. Also, even if there was DNA from some long-dead creature in the insect’s system, Stromberg pointed out that there are multiple technical issues that would prevent the type of cloning process featured in the movie from being used in real life.

“Assembling a full genome from DNA fragments requires us to have an understanding of what the whole genome looks like (which we don’t have in this case), and turning that into a living, breathing animal would necessitate putting that DNA into an ovum of a living species very closely related to the mystery creature that we don’t know in the first place,” he wrote. “So, alas, no resurrected ancient creatures will roam free thanks to this new find. Still, the find is scientifically significant, helping scientists better understand the evolution of blood-feeding insects.”

Jaguars, Other Large Felines Have An ‘Obsession’ For Popular Cologne

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

While the jury’s still out on which cologne is most appealing to women, researchers from the Bronx Zoo in New York have discovered that Calvin Klein’s “Obsession for Men” is the most effective fragrance on the market at appealing to large feline species such as cheetahs, jaguars and the panthers.

Experts from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) facility began conducting the scent-based experiments starting in 2010, and according to Victoria Woollaston of the Daily Mail, they tested a variety of different fragrances in order to determine how a pair of cheetahs would react the them.

Pat Thomas, General Curator of the Bronx Zoo, told National Geographic Daily News that some of the colognes and perfumes he and his colleagues tested would encourage “really powerful cheek rubbing behavior” in the cats, causing them to “literally wrap their paws around a tree and just vigorously rub up and down.”

“Sometimes they would start drooling, their eyes would half close, it was almost like they were going into a trance,” he added. “And they would spend minutes rubbing up and down an object that we would sprayed [sic] with certain perfumes or colognes. We knew that cats would respond to various perfumes and colognes because it’s sort of ‘in zoo lore.’ We’ve know about that for years.”

Smell is an essential sense for all types of big cats, and the creatures often engage in cheek rubbing behavior to deposit or pick up scents from other felines, Thomas said. Furthermore, there is a “territorial component” to the activity, in that cheek-rubbing allows them to mark territories or perhaps even pick up reproductive signals from members of the opposite sex.

According to National Geographic, researchers from the WCS conducted trials, first with tigers and then later on with cheetahs. The researchers explained that both synthetic and natural scents are frequently used by the zoos as “olfactory enrichment” tools, and those odors are sprayed inside the felines’ enclosures in order to help keep them in peak condition, both physically and mentally.

The research by Thomas helped WCS field researchers know that they could use “Obsession” to help them in their efforts to obtain more precise estimates of jaguar populations in the wild, the group explained in a statement. The scent appeals to both male and female animals, but only the male version of the Calvin Klein fragrance has been found to be effective. It draws the big cats towards camera traps, allowing photographs of them to be captured as they stop to smell the designer cologne, helping conservationists better track more timid types of wildlife.

Woollaston reported that conservationist and author Roan Balas McNab has been using the scent for the past six years in order to help keep track of the jaguar populations in the jungles of Guatemala. McNab works in a protected tropical rainforest, and uses “Obsession” to keep the creatures occupied long enough to take pictures of them with motion-sensitive cameras. However, he said that the technique only works if animals pass close enough to the camera’s range for the devices to capture acceptable images of them.

“The knowledge about wild animals’ interest in scent has also been used in setting up ‘hair traps’ where scientists can collect hair follicles from some species of wild cats for DNA research,” National Geographic reporters said. “When the animals rub tree bark, for example, they leave behind hair, which scientists can use to extract DNA from the hair follicles to identify diversity in the animal’s population.”

“Loss of habitat due to human agriculture and development and illegal killings has caused several wild cat species to become endangered,” they added. “Thomas is mindful that some people could misuse this knowledge about scents, but he pointed out that ‘Obsession for Men’ was NOT the best performing fragrance in the field, and declined to reveal which perfumes or colognes were the best lures for all cats in the wild.”

Red Wine Compound Helps Radiation Kill Cancer Cells

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[ Watch the Video: Red Wine Scores More Health Points ]

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Previous research has linked red wine to numerous health benefits, and a new study from the University of Missouri has found that a compound in the beverage can be used to boost the effectiveness of radiation-based cancer therapy.

In the study, the red-wine compound resveratrol was used to treat melanoma cells, resulting in 44 percent of the tumor cells being killed. When the melanoma was treated with both resveratrol and radiation, 65 percent of the tumor cells were killed.

“Our study investigated how resveratrol and radiotherapy inhibit the survival of melanoma cells,” said Dr. Michael Nicholl, assistant professor of surgery at the MU School of Medicine. “This work expands upon our previous success with resveratrol and radiation in prostate cancer.”

“Because of difficulties involved in delivery of adequate amounts of resveratrol to melanoma tumors, the compound is probably not an effective treatment for advanced melanoma at this time,” Nicholl noted.

The MU doctor said his team’s findings, which were published in the Journal of Surgical Research, could pave the way for more studies into the cancer-fighting properties of the naturally-occurring compound.

“We’ve seen glimmers of possibilities, and it seems that resveratrol could potentially be very important in treating a variety of cancers,” Nicholl said. “It comes down to how to administer the resveratrol. If we can develop a successful way to deliver the compound to tumor sites, resveratrol could potentially be used to treat many types of cancers.”

“Melanoma is very tricky due to the nature of how the cancer cells travel throughout the body, but we envision resveratrol could be combined with radiation to treat symptomatic metastatic tumors, which can develop in the brain or bone,” he added.

[ Watch The Video: Resveratrol Melanoma Study ]

While Resveratrol supplements are readily available at many stores, Nicholl does not advise that patients depend on them to treat any form of cancer.

Barring any setbacks over the next few years of testing, officials from the University of Missouri expect to request permission from the federal government to start developing a drug to treat cancer in humans. After this approval has been granted, the MU researchers plan to hold clinical trials with the expectation of creating new treatments for cancer.

The Missouri study comes after a UK-funded study published earlier this month found resveratrol is still effective after being metabolized by the body. The study revealed that enzymes within cells reform resveratrol from its metabolized parts – indicating that cellular levels of the compound are higher than previously thought.

“It has been known for many years that resveratrol is rapidly converted to sulfate and glucuronide metabolites in humans and animals – meaning the plasma concentrations of resveratrol itself quickly become very low after administration,” explained Karen Brown, a pharmaceutical chemist at the University of Leicester and co-author of the UK study.

“Our study was the first to show that resveratrol can be regenerated from sulfate metabolites in cells and that this resveratrol can then have biological activity that could be useful in a wide variety of diseases in humans,” Brown added. “Overall, I think our findings are very encouraging for all types of medical research on resveratrol. They help to justify future clinical trials where, previously, it may have been difficult to argue that resveratrol can be useful in humans because of the low detectable concentrations.”

Couples Trying To Conceive Should Avoid Products With Bisphenol A

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Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Women who are pregnant or a trying to conceive should do their best to avoid bisphenol A (BPA), a common chemical found in dozens of household products.

According to new research presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s (ASRM) annual conference in Boston, high levels of BPA in the blood were associated with an 80 percent increase in the risk of miscarriage for pregnant women.

“Until further studies are performed, women with unexplained miscarriages should avoid BPA exposure in an effort to remove one potential risk factor,” Stanford University’s Ruth Lathi, who worked on the BPA research, told the Daily Mail.

“There are some simple things that people can do, but it’s impossible to avoid it completely,” Lathi added. “Avoid anything that involves cooking or warming food in plastic as the chemicals leak out of plastic materials at a higher rate at higher temperatures.”

“Avoid canned food, avoid cooking or heating plastic and also avoid touching things that have high BPA resin – something as simple as a cash register receipt which is coded with resin that has BPA in it,” she continued.

A spokesman from the Miscarriage Association told the Daily Mail that the BPA study was too small to draw any concrete conclusions and warned against giving pregnant women one more thing to worry about avoiding. These women are already told to avoid caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, raw eggs and pate.

While the study researchers said they were uncertain why BPA has a connection to higher rates of miscarriage, they theorized that some women could metabolize the substance differently, causing it to stay in the body longer. The research team called for further studies to be conducted immediately.

BPA has been connected to small risk increases related to child development, and has been banned in baby bottles by the European Union.

Linda Giudice, president of ASRM, told The Telegraph that some previous studies have looked at the impact of chemicals on couples having trouble conceiving, but the findings of the new study indicated that BPA could have significant negative effects on a larger group of people than previously thought.

“These studies extend our observations to the general population and show that these chemicals are a cause for concern to all of us,” Giudice said, adding that those looking to minimize their risk should avoid drinking from plastic bottles that are warm to the touch.

“Don’t leave your water bottles in the car in the sun,” she warned. “Studies show that levels of BPA increase by about 1000-fold in the water of a bottle that has been sitting in the sun.”

The other study presented at the conference discovered that high levels of a group of chemicals called phthalates, which are found in plastics and skin-care products, drastically reduces the chances of conception for men.

The research, which included 500 couples and was performed over a 12-month period, discovered that men who tested high for levels of the chemicals showed a 20 percent lower chance of successful conception. The study found no impact on women trying to conceive.

Treatment For Brain Damage Or Neurological Disorders Could Be As Close As The Wardrobe

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KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Improved range of motion and reduced pain for people with brain injuries and neurological disorders may now be available with a specially-designed elastic body suit fitted with electrodes, which was designed at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology in collaboration with health care and business partners.

The Mollii garment provides an alternative to painful treatments and surgery, by treating the body with electrical stimulation to ease tension and spasms. The result is reduced pain perception and increased mobility.

The idea originated with a Swedish chiropractor, Fredrik Lundqvist, who worked with rehabilitation of brain-damaged patients. Lundqvist struck upon the idea of sewing electrical stimuli – similar to TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) electrodes – into garments that the patient can wear.

He turned to KTH researchers Johan Gawell and Jonas Wistrand at the Department of Machine Design at KTH. “They produced a prototype of the product, and today they are working full time on the development of Mollii,” Lundqvist says.

Designed with ordinary swimsuit material, the body suit has conductive elastic sewn into it, with electrodes located at the major muscles.

Battery-powered light current is conducted via silver wires to 58 electrodes attached to the inside of the garment, which in turn stimulate as many as distinct 42 muscles, according to the patient’s needs.

Batteries are placed in a small control box fitted at the waistband.

“The idea is that the clothes should be used for a few hours, three times a week, and the effect is expected to last for up to two days,” Lundqvist says.

Users are advised engage in movement through training and stretching during the treatment.

“To enhance the quality of life the patient may choose to use Mollii before it’s time to go to work, school or to a social event. That enables the body to function as well as possible when it is really needed,” he says.

The garment has been shown to be highly effective in patient examinations performed in collaboration with a PhD student Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, Lundvist says. “One-hundred percent of the participants in the survey say they have experienced improvements in existing function or quality of life,” he says.

Stroke patients with paralysis on one side have been found to gain increased mobility in spastic limbs, in that they had improved gait and their arms and hands worked better after treatment.

“As a bonus, the patients often sleep better, and their pharyngeal motor skills and speech improved after using Mollii,” Lundqvist says.

“It can also help children with physical disabilities or motor difficulties in the feet, such as constantly walking on toes or with their feet at inward angles,” Lundqvist says.

Treating patients with movement difficulties and pain due to neurological damage can often require surgery, injections of botolinumtoxin (neurotoxin) or strong medications.

“These treatments mean high costs and side effects, while our clothes are simple and safe to use,” Lundqvist says. “You can reduce the number of hospital visits because the therapy can be performed at home. And when the mobility increases, there is less need for walkers or wheelchairs.”

Mollii is an approved CE marked medical device, but independent clinical tests have yet been performed. But the company behind the treatment, Inerventions, has launched a scientific study of the clinical effectiveness of the garment, in partnership with Sweden’s Rehab Medical clinics. Lundqvist says the results should come next year.

Today, Mollii is available through the Swedish health care system as a personal tool prescribed by physical or occupational therapists. And the garment can also be purchased directly from Inerventions.

The price is about EUR 5,600 for two years guaranteed spasticity treatment. If the suit during that time becomes too small, the patient can switch to a new, tested garment at no additional cost.

In Denmark, the garment is already subsidized with municipal funds for treatment of nerve damage, based on recommendations from a physiotherapist.

Inerventions’ goal is to establish Mollii in Europe, the U.S. and Japan. The garment can in the future be used to help patients with chronic pain and people with Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS).

—

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Smoking Cigarettes Can Take A Full Decade Off Your Life

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Two-thirds of all smokers die as a result of their tobacco-based habit, and lighting-up on a regular basis can reduce a person’s lifespan by a full decade, researchers from the Sax Institute in Australia claim in a new study.

According to a report by the Australian Associated Press (AAP), the researchers reviewed four years’ worth of health records belonging to over 200,000 Australians as part of the ‘45 and Up Study.’ They found that smoking is directly linked to the cause of death in two-thirds of all current smokers – far exceeding previous global estimates of 50 percent.

In addition, the research, which was supported by the National Heart Foundation of Australia, found that a smoker’s lifespan will be reduced by at least 10 percent – whether or not people are light, moderate or heavy smokers, Janice Somosot of International Business Times reported on Sunday.

“We all know that smoking is bad for your health. But until now we haven’t had direct large-scale evidence from Australia about just how bad it is,” Australian National University professor Emily Banks, lead investigator and scientific director of the 45 and Up Study, told the AAP. “We’ve been relying on evidence from other countries.”

“Even among less heavy smokers – those smoking an average of 10 cigarettes per day – the risk of death was more than doubled,” added 45 and Up Study co-author, Associate Professor Freddy Sitas, Director of Cancer Council NSW’s Cancer Research Division. “People don’t realize how damaging even light smoking is for your health – for cancer, heart disease, lung disease and a range of other conditions.”

Furthermore, Dr. Rob Grenfell of the National Heart Foundation told the AAP that smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in Australia, and is directly responsible for 15,000 fatalities annually.

The good news, Banks noted, is that kicking the habit can reduce the risk of death – no matter what a person’s age might be.

The results of the45 and Up Study are similar to those of an October 2012 Oxford University study, which found that female smokers who quit prior to the age of 40 can add up to an extra decade to their lifespan. Furthermore, the UK researchers reported that two-thirds of all deaths from smokers between the ages of 50 and 79 are due to smoking-related diseases, including lung cancer, chronic lung disease, heart disease and stroke.

OpenCo Offers Inside Look At High-Tech, Potentially Lucrative World Of Silicon Valley

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online
Thousands of individuals managed to get an inside look at San Francisco-based startups, non-profit groups and corporations, including Google and DropBox, during last week’s OpenCo event.
OpenCo, which was launched by marketing professionals Brian Monahan and John Battelle last year, is described on the event’s official website as “a new type of business conference” that is essentially a mix of “a business conference and artist’s open studio with the vibe of a music festival.”  In its second year, the event was held in San Francisco and three other locations (New York in May, London in June, and Detroit in September).
According to Reuters reporter Malathi Nayak, Monahan and Battelle see OpenCo as “an opportunity for investors, entrepreneurs and even job-seekers to get a close-up look at the San Francisco-area tech scene. Companies that throw open their doors, in turn, get a chance to meet potential talent, gather feedback and make connections.”
The event lasted two days and included consecutive 45-minute sessions at 135 participating companies throughout the city, Nayak said. The unique event provided an opportunity to explore “San Francisco’s thriving local tech scene,” which “has fascinated many aspiring entrepreneurs across the country.”
The number of firms taking part in the conference has nearly doubled from the inaugural OpenCo even in 2012. One of the firms that took part last year, Twitter, was not involved this year. However, the popular microblogging website still made headlines, as it was revealed that one of their engineers made over $10 million last year.
The individual in question is Twitter senior vice president of engineering Christopher Fry, who earned $10.3 million in 2012, reported Sarah McBride of Reuters on Sunday. That salary made him the social network’s second-highest paid employee, behind only Chief Executive Dick Costolo (who earned $11.5 million) and ahead of Chief Technology Officer Adam Messinger, Chief Financial Officer Mike Gupta and Chief Operating Officer Ali Rowghani.
“Welcome to Silicon Valley, where a shortage of top engineering talent amid an explosion of venture capital-backed start-ups is inflating paychecks,” McBride said. “Stories abound about the lengths to which employers will go to attract engineering talent – in addition to the free cafeterias, laundry services and shuttle buses that the Googles and Facebooks of the world are already famous for. One start-up offered a coveted engineer a year’s lease on a Tesla sedan, which costs in the neighborhood of $1,000 a month, said venture capitalist Venky Ganesan.”
Perhaps it is reports such as these that have made events like OpenCo, which give individuals an inside look at some of Silicon Valley’s hottest tech companies as well as other San Francisco industries, so intriguing to people. Or maybe it is having the opportunity to look at prototype products being made by Lit Motors or getting an uncensored look at the technology used by audio platform developers SoundCloud to create their software.
“When you think about tech companies, you think of them as being very private with proprietary technology that you don’t share and be open because somebody might steal your idea, but this completely the opposite,” Perry Simpson, who heads up sports-related e-commerce website Gryndo and was a member of the OpenCo tour, told Nayak. “Here you get a visceral sense of their culture, you put a face on the technology company.”

Study: Shock-Absorbing Running Shoes Don’t Reduce Injury Risk

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[ Watch the Video: Special Running Shoes Don’t Always Prevent Injuries ]

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Despite advertising claims that softer soles in shoes can help runners keep from getting hurt, researchers from France and Luxembourg found no evidence suggesting the hardness of a person’s footwear increases or decreases the risk of running-related injuries.

Writing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, experts from the Luxembourg Public Research Centre for Health’s Sports Medicine Research Laboratory, the Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg Sports Clinique, and Oxylane Research in Villeneuve d’Ascq, France describe how they conducted a double-blind, randomized, controlled trial probing the impact of a runner’s shoes on their running-related injury (RRI) risk.

They provided nearly 250 runners with standard running shoes possessing either a soft study shoes (soft-SS) midsole or a hard study shoes (hard-SS) midsole. The researchers then tracked those runners for a period of five months, collecting information about their running habits and their injuries via a dedicated online platform.

For the purposes of the study, RRI was defined using two criteria. It had to be any type of first-time pain that was sustained during or directly as a result of running, and it had to cause enough harm that it would prevent a study participant from engaging in his or her regular running activity for at least one day.

According to Reuters reporter Miriam Stix, the study authors found that while factors such as an individual’s body weight and overall fitness level did have an impact on injury rates, the amount of padding in a runner’s shoes did not.

“The results do not support the common argument from the running shoe industry that runners with higher body mass should be recommended shoes with greater shock-absorption characteristics,” lead author Dr. Daniel Theisen, a physical therapist and sports science specialist at the Sports Medicine Research Laboratory, told Stix on Friday.

A runner himself, Dr. Theisen told Reuters he expected that the additional shock-absorption in the footwear would actually help relieve running-related mechanical stress on the physique. However, that was not what he and his colleagues found following their analysis of 247 men and women, all of whom were between the ages of 30 and 50, had body mass index scores ranging from normal to slightly overweight, and ran at least 10 miles each week.

“Participants got shoes provided by ‘a renowned sports equipment manufacturer,’ according to the report, which were customized versions of a model sold in stores,” Stix said. “There were no identifying decorations on the shoes, and all appeared identical except that half of the pairs had a soft midsole – a spongy layer beneath the insole of the shoe’s interior.

“The difference in shock absorbing qualities between the shoes with and without the extra cushioning was calculated to be about 15 percent,” she added. “According to Theisen, this was the greatest difference possible while still producing a shoe that looked the same to users. Even the researchers did not know which participants received the softer shoes.”

During the five-month trial period, the runners were asked to train at least once per week and were instructed only to use the shoes they were provided with for the physical activity. A total of 69 runners reported injuries that were counted, and of those cases, 32 runners had been wearing hard-soled shoes while 37 had been wearing softer-soled sneakers.

Dr. Theisen’s team also discovered heavier runners were approximately 13 percent more likely than their normal-weight counterparts to suffer running-related injuries, and that those who had previously been hurt were 75 percent more likely to be injured again. Furthermore, higher-intensity training added 39 percent to an individual’s injury risk, while those with previous running experience were less than half as likely as inexperienced runners to get hurt.

Living Relatives Of 5,300-Year Old-Mummy Located In Austria

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

A team of Austrian researchers have made a discovery that would put those genealogy websites to shame: they have located several living descendants of a 5,300-year-old human mummy.

The prehistoric individual, known as Ötzi the Iceman, was originally found frozen in the Alps back in 1991, according to Steve Nolan of the Daily Mail. The so-called ice mummy suffered from the oldest case of Lyme disease recorded to date, and was also lactose intolerant and predisposed to cardiovascular disease.

Now, forensic scientist Walther Parson and colleagues from the Institute of Legal Medicine at Innsbruck Medical University have identified 19 men who share a specific genetic mutation with Ötzi. These individuals were identified following an analysis of DNA samples from approximately 3,700 blood donors in the state of Tyrol, which is located in the western part of Austria.

“The discovery was made during a broader study into determining the origins of the people who now inhabit the Alpine regions. Along with their blood the donors were asked to provide their place of birth and family history,” said Matthew Day of The Telegraph.

To date, none of the men identified have been informed of their genetic link to Ötzi, Parson told Day. He added his research team is working with colleagues in Italy and Switzerland who are attempting to uncover the same genetic mutation in residents of those two nations.

Research conducted earlier this year by the European Academy of Bolzano/Bozen (EURAC) in Germany suggested the 5‘-2” tall, brown-eyed Ötzi had suffered brain damage, which was likely caused by a blow to the head, Nolan said.

Previous studies had suggested there was a hole in his collarbone, perhaps meaning he had been shot and killed with an arrow. In 2001, researchers from Innsbruck University ran a CAT scan on the mummy’s brain and found dark spots at the back of his cerebrum, suggesting he might have died from a head injury – possibly due to a fall suffered after he had been shot.

“Painstaking research revealed what his last meals were, where he lived and that he was about 45 years old when he met his demise high on the mountain,” Day added. “The ice had also preserved his clothes and a quiver of arrows, giving scientists a unique insight into the lives and technology of people from thousands of years ago.”

New Teaching Strategies Needed To Improve Poor Writing Skills Of US Students

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redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

Only one in four US students are performing at a proficient level in writing, and one Michigan State University (MSU) professor believes the quality of instruction those pupils are receiving is at least partially to blame.

In new research appearing in the journal School Psychology Review, Gary Troia from MSU’s College of Education explained the writing instruction in US classrooms is “abysmal” and the Common Core State Standards are failing to properly address the issue.

Troia and co-author Natalie Olinghouse from the University of Connecticut report in order to improve both the quality of K-12 students’ writing and the quality of the education they receive, schools much change their approach. Specifically, they call for new methods of professional development for the educators whose job it is to help students achieve current writing standards.

“We need to re-orient the way we think about teacher professional development,” Troia, whose work was funded by the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, said in a statement. “We need to be smarter about professional development and make sure it’s comprehensive, sustained and focused on the needs in the classroom.”

The Common Core standards, which have been adopted by 45 states and are currently in the initial stages of implementation, were designed in order to help improve student performance in both mathematics and English language arts (ELA). The ELA requirements are described as research and evidence based, rigorous, internationally benchmarked and in line with typical college and work expectations.

According to the study authors, the standards are strong in some writing-related areas but come up short in others –especially spelling and handwriting, which are not comprehensively covered during the first few years of schooling. In addition, the increasingly essential skill of keyboarding is emphasized only during the third through sixth grade years, and the Common Core fails to address areas of writing useful to community or personal affairs.

“Federal efforts and research dollars tend to focus on reading, math and science, while writing is often left out in the cold. We’re trying to point out that writing is really important and that we should focus more on writing so it’s no longer the neglected ‘R’,” Troia said, referencing a 2003 study from the National Commission on Writing claiming the discipline has not received the attention it deserves at any level of education, from grade school through college.

“When you look at writing instruction in the K-12 classroom, it’s still pretty abysmal. Teachers are generally not adapting instruction for struggling writers and most students struggle with writing if you look at national test scores,” he added, noting the Common Core does not tell educators how to help students meet the writing standards it requires them to achieve.

Since writing-related standards will be new for most of the states adopting the Common Core, Troia and Olinghouse suggest teachers should consult their colleagues and review additional material outside of the classroom in order to learn how best to help improve the quality of their students’ writing.

Specifically, the MSU professor recommended reaching out to school personnel familiar with research-based writing instruction and assessment practices for assistance. Those individuals could include special education teachers, speech-language pathologists or school psychologists, whom Troia refers to as “a valuable resource for teachers and schools in their efforts to deploy evidence-based practices, especially for students who struggle with writing.”

Health

Stomach Cells Naturally Revert To Stem Cells

Written By: editor

New research has shown that the stomach naturally produces more stem cells than previously realized, likely for repair of injuries from infections, digestive fluids and the foods we eat.
Stem cells can make multiple kinds of specialized cells, and scientists have been working for years to use that ability to repair injuries throughout the body. But causing specialized adult cells to revert to stem cells and work on repairs has been challenging.
Scientists from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Utrecht Medical Center in the Netherlands report in the new study that a class of specialized cells in the stomach reverts to stem cells more often than they thought.
“We already knew that these cells, which are called chief cells, can change back into stem cells to make temporary repairs in significant stomach injuries, such as a cut or damage from infection,” said Jason Mills, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Washington University. “The fact that they’re making this transition more often, even in the absence of noticeable injuries, suggests that it may be easier than we realized to make some types of mature, specialized adult cells revert to stem cells.”
The findings are published Oct. 10 in Cell.
Chief cells normally produce digestive fluids for the stomach. Mills studies their transformation into stem cells for injury repair. He also is investigating the possibility that the potential for growth unleashed by this change may contribute to stomach cancers.
In the new report, Mills, graduate student Greg Sibbel and Hans Clevers, MD, PhD, a geneticist at Utrecht Medical Center, identify markers that show a small number of chief cells become stem cells even in the absence of serious injury.
If a significant injury is introduced in cell cultures or in animal models, more chief cells become stem cells, making it possible to fix the damage.
“Chief cells normally are big factories with elaborate networks of tubing and secretory mechanisms for making and secreting digestive juices,” said Mills, the associate director of Washington University’s Digestive Diseases Center. “That all has to be dismantled and recycled so the chief cell can become a stem cell. It’s a remarkable change.”
Mills’ other goals include learning if the chief cells’ transformations are triggered by signals sent by injured tissue, by damage sensors on the chief cells or by some combination of these methods.
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Peanut Butter Smell Test Helps Detect Alzheimer’s Disease

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[ Watch The Video: ‘Peanut Butter Test’ Can Help Diagnose Alzheimer’s ]

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Researchers at the University of Florida have developed a quick, cheap and easy way to confirm a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease or mild cognitive impairment by simply using a spoonful of peanut butter and a ruler, according to a new study in the Journal of the Neurological Sciences.

The Florida research team found that individuals with mild cognitive impairment, a condition that often leads to Alzheimer’s disease, had more difficulty smelling peanut butter just a short distance away from their noses than people without the condition.

Study author Jennifer Stamps said she came up with the idea while working as a graduate student in the clinic of Dr. Kenneth Heilman at the UF McKnight Brain Institute. Stamps said she noticed that patients at the clinic were not tested for their sense of smell. The omission of this test is important because smell is associated with the first cranial nerve and is frequently one of the first functions to be affected during cognitive decline.

“Dr. Heilman said, ‘If you can come up with something quick and inexpensive, we can do it,’” Stamps said.

To test her theory, volunteers from the clinic sat down with a researcher. The participants were then told to close their eyes and mouths and to block one nostril. The clinician then placed a sample of peanut butter against a ruler and under the volunteer’s one open nostril while they breathed normally. The clinician then slid the peanut butter up the ruler one centimeter at a time toward the volunteer until they detected the smell. After recording the distance from the ruler, the same procedure was repeated on the other nostril after a 90-second wait.

The clinicians administering the smell test did not know the patients’ diagnoses, which were typically not confirmed until weeks after the test was performed.

The researchers discovered that patients diagnosed as being in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease had a significant difference in being able to smell the peanut butter between the left and right nostril. The left nostril of those diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s did not detect the odor until it was an average of 10 centimeters farther up the ruler compared to the right nostril. Patients with other kinds of dementia either showed no differences between nostrils or the right nostril was worse than the left.

Of the 24 participants with mild cognitive impairment, 10 patients showed a left nostril deficiency and 14 patients did not.

“At the moment, we can use this test to confirm diagnosis,” Stamps said. “But we plan to study patients with mild cognitive impairment to see if this test might be used to predict which patients are going to get Alzheimer’s disease.”

Until further research can refine the test, the UF clinicians said the peanut butter test will be one more method to investigate neurological function in patients with memory disorders.

“We see people with all kinds of memory disorders,” Heilman said. With many tests currently being performed at the clinic being time-consuming, costly or invasive, “this can become an important part of the evaluation process.”

Fibromyalgia

5 Natural Ways To Help With Fibromyalgia

Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating

 

In order to find relief for symptoms received from fibromyalgia, one does not have to visit a physician’s office and be prescribed some sort of prescription drug that will need to be filled at the local drug store.

While symptoms of fibromyalgia may seem harsh at time, the treatment of these symptoms does not have just as harsh in order to counteract them. There are quite a few natural treatments that can be done without the aid of prescription medication or can be done using home remedies.

The symptoms attributed to fibromyalgia, such as chronic pain and muscle sores, affects nearly one out every fifty Americans. While there is no cure for fibromyalgia and the causes of fibromyalgia have not been identified and confirmed, the correct treatments for the condition are even more scarce and hard to find. The search for the best treatments for the symptoms is far from complete.

However, from those affected by the symptoms attributed to fibromyalgia, around 90 percent of them have attempted to use some form of a natural remedy to help cure them, or at least ease them, of their ailments. While there are no concrete clinical studies that have been able to prove that these natural treatments are the most effective means of dealing with the symptoms, there is really no harm in trying them to figure out which one could work the individual and which ones will not.

Before attempting to use any of the natural remedies, someone suffering from fibromyalgia symptoms should consult with his or her doctor to discover which of the natural remedies they believe will be appropriate for his or her specific condition.

Vitamin D Supplements

There has been discovered a strong correlation between those individuals that have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and a low level of vitamin D and magnesium. Although there is a strong correlation between people with fibromyalgia and low vitamin D levels, there has been no verifiable evidence to showcase that by taking vitamin D supplements, an individual with fibromyalgia will be able to cure themselves of the symptoms.

The sunshine vitamin, or vitamin D, is documented to have at least some effects on the human nerve system and the function of muscles. Some studies have even suggested that if someone has a low level of vitamin D in their system, it can be associated with the chronic pain that often stems from fibromyalgia. In January 2012, a small clinical study was made available online in an issue of Pain Medicine that 30 women’s symptoms began to improve after they had been taking vitamin D supplements for eight weeks. While this study is indeed just one study, there is some promise in the natural remedy.

5 Natural Ways To Help With Fibromyalgia

Acupuncture

Known as one of the most ancient forms of chronic pain treatment, this Chinese medical practice has become more and more relevant in western medicine over the past few decades. The evidence to confirm that acupuncture treatment for chronic pain associated with fibromyalgia is beginning to pile up.

Moreover, there are three current studies that suggest that acupuncture combined with a pulsed electric current can better serve those suffering from ailments of fibromyalgia. This type of fibromyalgia treatment is known as electroacupuncture. This treatment form has been proven to help ease the pain of fibromyalgia, but the effects of the treatment are temporary and will only last for a short amount of time.

S-adenosylmethionine (SAMe)

S-adenosylmethionine is substance that is naturally occurring and produced throughout the human body. It is a substance that is involved in a plethora of the common body processes, and for that reason, its use as a supplemental pain reliever has been heavily studied. The SAMe substance has been used as a form of anti-depressant in the past and has been used to treat chronic pain due to osteoarthritis.

Many studies showcase that by taking the SAMe supplement, those that have been inflicted by fibromyalgia may be able to reduce their pain, stiffness, and fatigue symptoms. The studies are limited, however. While SAMe cannot be found in food, it can be digested in the form of a tablet or pill.

A Good Massage Therapy Treatment

Massage therapy is a very common form of fibromyalgia treatment that has been used for years. Clinical studies have not found a way to showcase the effectiveness of a massage therapy treatment, but the relief that many people with fibromyalgia get from the treatment, including the easing of muscle pain, has been well exemplified.

This type of treatment is extremely safe for those that partake in the action. Message therapy treatments may be able relieve muscle soreness and tightness and help the person receiving the treatment to relax, however there is no existing evidence that a message therapy treatment will have a long-lasting effect on fibromyalgia symptoms.

Visiting a Chiropractor

Chiropractic medicine has been used to treat spinal pain by its use of spinal manipulation and spine realignment to help relieve pain. This natural alternative can be used to improve the function of the back and to foster more natural healing of ailments and pains.

Many studies have suggested that chiropractic manipulation can be quire effective in relieving back tension, neck tension, and migraines. Its use for fibromyalgia symptoms has not been proven to significantly help, but temporary relief has been well documented.

These natural alternative treatments have not been proven to completely get rid of the symptoms attributed to fibromyalgia, but those receiving the treatment as relievers for at least a short period of time have documented many of them. Many more studies must be done before any of them can be proven as viable options, but when someone tries them, they may find that they work really well for their particular condition.

It cannot be said if any of these natural remedies will work for every person, but there is no harm in trying them. As of today, there is no evidenced cure for fibromyalgia, but there are ways to help relieve the symptoms associated to the condition.

Irisin Production During Exercise Boosts Brain Health

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April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Exercise is good for nearly every part of your body, including your brain. According to researchers led by Harvard Medical School, a molecule called irisin is produced in the brain during endurance exercise and apparently has neuroprotective effects.

The research team, led by Dr. Bruce Spiegelman of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, artificially increased the levels of irisin in the blood to activate genes involved in learning and memory. The research team hopes their results, published online in the journal Cell Metabolism, will be useful for designing drugs that use irisin to guard against neuro-degenerative diseases and improve cognition in the aging population.

Scientists have known for a while that exercise can boost cognitive function and lessen symptoms of neurological diseases like depression, stroke, and Alzheimer’s disease. What has been unclear, however, were the mechanisms underlying these effects. Researchers believe that one important player in these mechanisms is a growth factor named brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).

The researchers conducted experiments using mice, finding that a molecule called FNDC5 and its cleavage product, irisin, are elevated in the brain by endurance exercise and that they increase BDNF expression. In contrast, mice genetically modified to have low irisin levels in the brain had reduced levels of BDNF.

Raising levels of irisin in the circulation, according to the study, caused the molecule to cross the blood-brain barrier, where it increased expression of BDNF and activated genes involved in cognition.

“Our results indicate that FNDC5/irisin has the ability control a very important neuroprotective pathway in the brain,” says Dr. Spiegelman.

The team is planning further research to develop a stable form of the irisin protein that can be given to mice by injection and may augment the brain’s natural anti-degeneration pathways.

Freshwater Plants In The Everglades At Risk From Rising Sea Levels

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editor

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Researchers at the University of Miami have confirmed that rising sea levels are threatening the Florida Everglades’ freshwater plants.

Life inside the Everglades depends on the fresh water that flows south from Lake Okeechobee. Both plants and animals alike could face devastation if salt water began to intrude on this community.

The team used satellite imagery from 2001 to 2010 over the southeastern Everglades in an area called Taylor Slough. The satellite imagery confirmed long-term trends of mangrove expansion and aggressive habitat loss near the shore. This trend is related to salt water intrusion caused by sea-level rise and water management practices, according to the new study.

“I was very surprised at how well the results matched our understanding of long-term trends and field data. Normally, we don’t see such clear patterns,” said Douglas Fuller, principal investigator of the study published in the journal Wetlands.

The team found large patches of vegetation loss closer to the coast, about 2.5 miles from the shoreline, in and around a vegetative band of low productivity that has been shifting inland over the past 70 years.

“Less salt-tolerant plants like the sawgrass, spike rush, and tropical hardwood hammocks are retreating. At the same time, salt-loving mangroves continue to extend inland,” according to Fuller, professor of Geography and Regional studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami.

The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan may help to offset some of the changes being caused by future salt water intrusion, but Fuller says that this restoration may not suffice if seal-level rise continues to accelerate.

Taylor Slough is the second largest flow-way for surface water in the Everglades and stretches about 18 miles along the eastern boundary of Everglades National Park. Fuller said the methods used in the study helped the scientists to assess the trends, unlike past research that was limited to plot-level studies.

“These field studies, which provide confirmation of the satellite-based results, involved clipping and weighing plants found in sawgrass prairies and are part of a long-term effort to understand the dynamics of the ecosystems in the Everglades,” Fuller said.

The team would like to apply the methods used in their study to other coastal wetland areas that are similarly being threatened by sea-level rise.

The Social Side Of The Brain’s Release Of Pain-killing Opioids

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editor

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

While previous research has shown that our brains release pain-killing opioids when the body experiences physical harm, a new study in the journal Molecular Psychiatry has revealed that this system is also activated by social pain.

The study researchers also discovered that those who score high on a personality attribute called resilience, or the capacity to cope with environmental change, showed the highest level of natural painkiller activation.

“This is the first study to peer into the human brain to show that the opioid system is activated during social rejection,” said study author David T. Hsu, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan. “In general, opioids have been known to be released during social distress and isolation in animals, but where this occurs in the human brain has not been shown until now.”

In the study, 18 adult participants were asked to look at pictures and fabricated personal profiles of hundreds of other adults. In an attempt to simulate an online dating environment, each volunteer selected some profiles they might be most interested in romantically.

Next, the participants were told to lay down in a brain imaging machine called a PET scanner, where they were eventually told that the individuals they has chosen were not interested in them.

Brain scans taken during these moments of rejection showed opioid release in the participants’ brains. The phenomenon was the most prevalent in the brain regions that are known to be involved in physical pain.

While the participants were told ahead of time that the “dating” profiles were not real, the simulated rejection was enough to stimulate an emotional and opioid response.

According to Hsu, the personality of each participant appeared to play a role in the individual response of their own opioid system.

“Individuals who scored high for the resiliency trait on a personality questionnaire tended to be capable of more opioid release during social rejection, especially in the amygdala,” the emotion-processing region of the brain, Hsu said. “This suggests that opioid release in this structure during social rejection may be protective or adaptive.”

The more opioid release seen in a brain area called the pregenual cingulate cortex, the less the volunteers reported being upset by the news of rejection, the researchers noted.

The scientists also looked at what happens when the volunteers were told that one of the ‘people’ behind a profile they had selected had also reciprocated interest in them. During this type of social acceptance, some brain regions showed more opioid release.

“The opioid system is known to play a role in both reducing pain and promoting pleasure, and our study shows that it also does this in the social environment,” Hsu explained.

The study researchers noted that their findings could be significant for people who suffer from depression or social anxiety who may have an irregular opioid response to the types of social situations examined in the study.

“It is possible that those with depression or social anxiety are less capable of releasing opioids during times of social distress, and therefore do not recover as quickly or fully from a negative social experience,” Hsu said. “Similarly, these individuals may also have less opioid release during positive social interactions, and therefore may not gain as much from social support.”

He added that the knowledge of chemical mechanisms behind social interactions could help some people understand their responses to certain social situations.

Genetic Variant Increases Testicular Cancer Risk Also Evolved To Protect Light Skin

Written By: editor

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Using a genomic analysis, a team of international researchers has identified a specific mutation responsible for a dramatic increase in the risk for testicular cancer.

The mutation is a single-base change to the genetic code that affects the activity of the p53 protein that is responsible for regulating the activity of a large number of genes, including those responsible for protection from UV rays – according to the team’s report in the journal Cell.

“Knowing the inherited genetics of cancer has great potential in medicine,” said study author Gareth Bond, a researcher at Oxford University’s Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. “It can aid the development of tests to predict the risk of developing particular malignancies. It can also tell physicians about the likely prognosis of cancers, and inform therapeutic choices, improving management of the disease.”

About half of all cancers are affiliated with mutations in the p53 gene. Because the p53 protein activates a wide range of cancer-related signaling pathways, the study team hypothesized that cancer risk could be linked to genetic variations for p53-binding sites.

The single-based change, known as a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), was discovered after the team analyzed genetic databases containing nearly 63,000 SNPs in search of mutations that affect p53’s ability to turn on its target genes. The researchers were able to find one particular mutation that is very strongly linked to the risk of developing testicular cancer.

The SNP was found in the genetic code for a p53 response element that codes for a protein named KIT ligand (KITLG).

“It appears that this particular variant permits testicular stem cells to grow in the presence of DNA damage, when they are supposed to stop growing, since such damage can lead to cancer,” said study author Douglas Bell of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Next, the team performed an evolutionary genomic analysis that revealed that other SNPs that alter p53’s ability to bind its receptors have been lost by natural selection. The KITLG mutation not only slipped through the cracks, it has been “positively selected in the Caucasian gene pool.”

To explain why evolutionary forces would select for a cancer-causing mutation, the study authors noted that p53 is activated in certain cells of the skin after exposure to UV radiation, fueling the secretion of KITLG and causing pigment-making cells to multiply, increased melanin production. The result is a skin tan that protects from future exposure to the sun’s rays.

“Over the course of evolution, as humans migrated out of Africa into the dimly lit terrain of the north, they developed lighter skin, most likely to adapt to the lower levels of sunlight,” Bond explained. “Unfortunately, that adaptation also left their skin susceptible to UV damage. It is intriguing to speculate that the better version of the KITLG p53 response element is evolution’s compensation for that vulnerability. But it appears to come at a cost—which is a greater risk for testicular cancer.”

“I’d speculate that serious sun damage to skin would have posed a mortal threat to our early ancestors,” he added.

Gasoline Prices Unaffected By Ethanol And Biofuels

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editor

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Contrary to popular belief, biofuels like ethanol may not help lower the price at the pump, according to findings reported in The Energy Journal.
Over the past couple of years, some people have claimed that the widespread use of ethanol has reduced the wholesale cost of gasoline by $0.89 to $1.09 per gallon. However, Christopher Knittel, an MIT economist and co-author of the new paper, says this claim is unfounded.
“The point of our paper is not to say that ethanol doesn’t have a place in the marketplace, but it’s more that the facts should drive this discussion,” Knittel, the William Barton Rogers Professor of Energy and a professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said in a recent statement.
The majority of ethanol sold in the US is made from corn, and currently it constitutes 10 percent of US gasoline, up from 3 percent in 2003. A previous study claimed that this biofuel helped lower gas prices, but the latest research shows that this study was problematic due to the “crack ratio.”
The crack ratio is what energy analysts use to understand the relative value of gasoline compared to oil. The higher the crack ratio, the more expensive gasoline is in relative terms. If ethanol were a notably cheap component of gasoline production, its increasing presence in the fuel mix might reveal itself in the form of a decreasing crack ratio.
Researchers say that the increased proportion of ethanol in gasoline merely correlated with the declining crack ratio, and did not contribute in any casual sense. Instead, the team believes that changing oil prices have driven the change in the crack ratio, and that when those prices are accounted for, the apparent effect of ethanol goes away.
The past study said if ethanol production came to an immediate halt then gas prices would rise by 41 to 92 percent. However, Knittel said that this scenario isn’t as gruesome to the wallet as the previous authors portrayed.
“In the very short run, if ethanol vanished tomorrow, we would be scrambling to find fuel to cover that for a week, or less than a month,” Knittel says. “But certainly within a month, increases in imports would relax or reduce that price impact.”
He said policy decisions about gasoline production are driven by a complex series of political factors, and that his study was not intended to suggest any policy preference on his part. However, he added that even ethanol backers in policy debates have reason to keep examining its value.
“Making claims about the benefits of ethanol that are overblown is only going to set up policymakers for disappointment,” Knittel said.