Science News
British Engineer Designs Own Heart Valve Implant, Saves Own Life
Engineer, heal thyself By Dan Nosowitz
In 2000, Tal Golesworthy, a British engineer, was told that he suffers from Marfan syndrome, a disorder of the connective tissue that often causes rupturing of the aorta. The only solution then available was the pairing of a mechanical valve and a highly risky blood thinner. To an engineer like Golesworthy, that just wasn't good enough. So he constructed his own implant that does the job better than the existing solution--and became the first patient to try it.
The existing fix, called the Bentall surgery, requires a five-hour invasive slice-and-dice and a heart-lung bypass, after which the damaged part of the aorta is cut out and replaced with a graft and mechanical valve. But Golesworthy saw an opportunity instead of despair: Nobody had thought to use more modern technologies, namely combining MRI tests with computer-aided design tools and new rapid prototyping techniques. Golesworthy saw a chance to create an implant that would support itself and reduce the chance of blood clots, thus eliminating the need to take that dangerous blood thinner. |
Orangutan DNA more diverse than human’s, remarkably stable through the ages
Genome analysis of endangered orangutans to aid conservation efforts and study of human evolution By Caroline Arbanas
Among great apes, orangutans are humans’ most distant cousins. These tree dwellers sport a coat of fine reddish hair and have long been endangered in their native habitats in the rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo in Southeast Asia.
Now, an international team of scientists, led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has decoded, or sequenced, the DNA of a Sumatran orangutan. With this genome as a reference, the scientists then sequenced the genomes of five additional Sumatran and five Bornean orangutans.
Their research, published Jan. 27 in Nature, reveals intriguing clues about the evolution of great apes, including humans, and showcases the immense genetic diversity across and within Sumatran and Bornean orangutans. Diversity is important because it enhances the ability of populations to stay healthy and adapt to changes in the environment. |
Did modern humans go global twice as early as thought?
by Bob Holmes
Homo sapiens might have spread across the world much earlier than previously thought – and it was a favourable climate, not a sophisticated culture, that allowed them to go.
Anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Most palaeoanthropologists believe they stayed there for 140,000 years before migrating around the world, except for an abortive colonisation of what is now Israel about 120,000 years ago.
Genetic evidence suggests that modern humans finally moved out of Africa and into the Middle East about 60,000 years ago. From there, they quickly spread throughout Asia and Europe, outcompeting the indigenous populations of Homo erectus and Neanderthals.
It had been assumed that it was the development of more sophisticated tools and culture that led to this exodus. But that assumption has been challenged thanks to an archaeological find at Jebel Faya in the United Arab Emirates. |
Geobiologists uncover links between ancient climate change and mass extinction
by Marcus Woo
About 450 million years ago, Earth suffered the second-largest mass extinction in its history—the Late Ordovician mass extinction, during which more than 75 percent of marine species died. Exactly what caused this tremendous loss in biodiversity remains a mystery, but now a team led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has discovered new details supporting the idea that the mass extinction was linked to a cooling climate.
"While it's been known for a long time that the mass extinction is intimately tied to climate change, the precise mechanism is unclear," says Seth Finnegan, a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and the first author of the paper published online in Science on January 27. The mass extinction coincided with a glacial period, during which global temperatures cooled and the planet saw a marked increase in glaciers. At this time, North America was on the equator, while most of the other continents formed a supercontinent known as Gondwana that stretched from the equator to the South Pole. |
Technology News
iPhonECG Does Heart-Monitoring On-the-Go
Posted by admin, Tech Automatic
iPhonECG is an electrode-featuring case that has the ability of reading your heart-rate and generating an ECG (electrocardiogram) by transmitting the information gathered directly to an iPhone device.
The case is designed to fit an Apple-phone which can be easily snapped in the holder after which the iPhonECG application will do the rest. The combination of the case and application can take a successful ECG by both holding the electrodes or by placing them on your chest. The app will both store the ECG data locally on the device and transmit it wirelessly. |
LinkedIn looks to link up with investors with IPO
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
SAN FRANCISCO – LinkedIn Corp., the company behind the largest website for professional networking, plans to raise at least $175 million in an initial public offering of stock that could open the IPO floodgates for other widely used online services that connect people with common interests.
The IPO papers filed Thursday by LinkedIn put the 8-year-old company on a path to make its stock market debut in the next three to four months, barring any major stumbling blocks.
It might be the most highly anticipated IPO in the technology industry since software maker VMware Inc. went public in 2007, said Scott Sweet, senior managing partner of IPOBoutique. After VMware raised about $900 million in its IPO, the Silicon Valley company's stock soared more than 70 percent in its first day of trading. |
Reports: Internet disruptions hit Egypt
by Elinor Mills
Amid a third day of anti-government protests, Internet outages and disruptions occurred today in Egypt.
Facebook and Twitter confirmed the disruptions for their sites.
"We are aware of reports of disruption to service and have seen a drop in traffic from Egypt this morning," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. "You may want to visit Herdict.org, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University that offers insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility."
According to Herdict.org, there were 459 inaccessible sites in Egypt and 621 accessible sites.
Twitter's Global PR account reported on the site that: "Egypt continues to block Twitter & has greatly diminished traffic. However, some users are using apps/proxies to successfully tweet."
Meanwhile, there were numerous outages around the Web. |
World desires Apple more than animals, Microsoft
by Chris Matyszczyk
Please lie down. I want you to tell me about what you truly desire. No, truly, deeply and with all your internal insanities exposed.
Would it be peace? Would it be that all animals and people should be saved and cared for? Or would it be a brand new, shiny (and preferably free) iPhone 5?
This plunge into the human psyche has been caused by a new survey, courtesy of Clear. Clear isn't, in fact, something that helps with acne, but a vital part of ad agency M&C Saatchi. (Yes, that C. Saatchi. The one who's married to the charming TV chef, Nigella Lawson.)
Clear surveyed 17,000 people from Singapore, China, the U.K., the U.S., Germany, and North Korea. Oh, wait, they couldn't get through to North Korea. Anyway, they asked these people which brands they desired most.
You will feel tortured into unresponsiveness when I tell you that Apple is the most desirable brand in the world. Google allegedly slips in there at number two (with, no doubt, many votes from China), ahead of BMW, Disney, Gucci, Microsoft, and IKEA--to name just some of the top 15. |
Environmental News
Cutting Pollution May Help the Heart
By Todd Neale, Staff Writer, MedPage Today
In a small town with air heavily affected by residential wood-burning, the use of high-efficiency portable air (HEPA) filters was associated with improved endothelial function in healthy adults, Canadian researchers found.
The reactive hyperemia index -- used as an indicator of microvascular endothelial function -- improved by an average of 9.4% (95% CI 0.9% to 18%) when the filters were turned on compared with when they were turned off, according to Ryan Allen, PhD, of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and colleagues.
Action Points
* Note that this study suggests that air filtration in an area where wood-burning stoves are common is associated with a modest improvement in endothelial function and a reduction in levels of C-reactive protein.
* Point out that there is no evidence that these modest changes will have measureable beneficial effects upon cardiovascular function.
|
VW's diesel hybrid XL1: the most efficient car on the planet?
Niall Firth, technology editor
In a world of soaring fuel prices it's certainly a smart move.
While Volkswagen's new XL1 "Super Efficient Vehicle" might look like a 'futuristic' concept car designed sometime in the late 1980s, its figures are undoubtedly impressive.
Unveiled at the Qatar motor show on Tuesday night, the XL1 claims an incredible fuel consumption of just 0.9 litres per 100km (equivalent to 239 miles per gallon). VW also says it emits just 24g of CO2 per kilometre.
The remarkable figures are all down to a combination of a 0.8 litre diesel engine and an electric motor couple with clever weight-saving design and superior aerodynamics. |
Potential scams top 7,000 in BP spill compensation
By BRIAN SKOLOFF and HARRY R. WEBER
NEW ORLEANS – The $20 billion fund responsible for compensating victims of BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill has received more than 7,000 potentially fraudulent claims, many of which have been referred to the Justice Department for criminal investigations, the fund's administrator told a Senate panel on Thursday.
Attorney Kenneth Feinberg, who is overseeing the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, said of more than 481,000 claims filed, 7,575 are considered potentially fraudulent. The Justice Department has already indicted eight claimants.
The fund was set up in August to handle thousands of claims for compensation from residents, business owners and fishermen across the Gulf Coast and beyond who can prove they suffered financial losses from BP PLC's April 20 oil well blowout off the coast of Louisiana. The Deepwater Horizon explosion killed 11 rig workers and sent millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf. |
Plants Go Down and Not Up
Andy Soos, ENN
When it gets warmer vegetation and animal life adapt and change. Different populations move in from warmer climes to former colder climes. One widely held assumption is that it gets colder as the elevation gets higher so that as the climate gets warmer life that has adapted to a warmer environment will go higher pushing the colder based life forms out. In a paper published January 20th in the journal Science, a University of California researcher and his co-authors challenge a widely held assumption that plants will move uphill in response to warmer temperatures. Between 1930 and 2000, instead of colonizing higher elevations to maintain a constant temperature, many California plant species instead moved downhill an average of 260 feet.
Many forecasts say climate change will cause a number of plants and animals to migrate to new ranges or become extinct. That research has largely been based on the assumption that temperature is the dominant driver of species distributions. However, Greenberg (an assistant project scientist at the UC Davis Center for Spatial Technologies and Remote Sensing) said the new study reveals that other factors, such as precipitation, may be more important than temperature in defining the habitable range of these species. |
Medical News
Stem Cells Show Promise in Repairing a Child's Heart
Children's Memorial Hospital
ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2011) — Visionaries in the field of cardiac therapeutics have long looked to the future when a damaged heart could be rebuilt or repaired by using one's own heart cells. A study published in the February issue of Circulation, a scientific journal of the American Heart Association, shows that heart stem cells from children with congenital heart disease were able to rebuild the damaged heart in the laboratory.
Sunjay Kaushal, MD, PhD, surgeon in the Division of Cardiovascular Thoracic Surgery at Children's Memorial Hospital and assistant professor of surgery at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who headed the study, believes these results show great promise for the growing number of children with congenital heart problems. With this potential therapy option these children may avoid the need for a heart transplant.
"Due to the advances in surgical and medical therapies, many children born with cardiomyopathy or other congenital heart defects are living longer but may eventually succumb to heart failure," said Kaushal. "This project has generated important pre-clinical laboratory data showing that we may be able to use the patient's own heart stem cells to rebuild their hearts, allowing these children to potentially live longer and have more productive lives." |
Study raises safety concerns about experimental cancer approach
Widespread vascular tumors, massive hemorrhage and death reported in mice By Caroline Arbanas
A study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has raised safety concerns about an investigational approach to treating cancer.
The strategy takes aim at a key signaling pathway, called Notch, involved in forming new blood vessels that feed tumor growth. When researchers targeted the Notch1 signaling pathway in mice, the animals developed vascular tumors, primarily in the liver, which led to massive hemorrhages that caused their death.
Their findings are reported online Jan. 25 in The Journal of Clinical Investigation and will appear in the journal’s February issue. |
Biologists’ favorite worm gets viruses
Finding means C. elegans may aid studies of human infections By Michael C. Purdy
A workhorse of modern biology is sick, and scientists couldn’t be happier.
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Jacques Monod Institute in France and Cambridge University have found that the nematode C. elegans, a millimeter-long worm used extensively for decades to study many aspects of biology, gets naturally occurring viral infections.
The discovery means C. elegans is likely to help scientists study the way viruses and their hosts interact. |
As recording technology rapidly improves, neurons give up their secrets cell by cell
Edelman Public Relations
Scientists at The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), designated the "#1 Rehabilitation Hospital in America" by U.S. News & World Report since 1991, report that, thanks to improvements in technology and data analysis, our understanding of the functional principles that guide the development and operation of the brain could improve drastically in the next few years. The advances could herald a neuroscientific revolution, much as increasing processor speeds paved the way for the computing revolution of the last half century.
In the February, 2011 issue of Nature Neuroscience, the researchers, Dr. Ian H. Stevenson and Dr. Konrad P. Kording, performed a meta-analysis of 56 studies conducted since the 1950s (the advent of multi-electrode recordings) in which the activity of neurons was recorded in animals or humans. They found that the number of simultaneously recorded single neurons has grown exponentially since the 1950s, doubling approximately every seven years. |
Space News
Space Photos This Week: Leaky "Heart," Sun Devil, More
Bleeding Heart National Geographic
Water flows from the heart-shaped northern lobe of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, as seen in a recently released picture taken by the ESA/NASA Landsat 5 satellite. Once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, the Aral Sea has been shrinking over the past 50 years as water has been diverted for irrigation.
The whitish area surrounding the lake is a vast salt plain, now called the Aralkum Desert, left behind by the evaporating sea. |
Obama Honors Astronauts Lost in Space Exploration
by Clara Moskowitz
President Barack Obama today called on the country to push forward toward new space frontiers as he honored those Americans who have lost their lives in the pursuit of space exploration.
The president's remarks came on NASA's Day of Remembrance today (Jan. 27) to commemorate the loss of the crews of the Apollo 1 mission, the space shuttle Challenger, and the shuttle Columbia.
"We pause to reflect on the tragic loss of the Apollo 1 crew, those who boarded the space shuttle Challenger in search of a brighter future, and the brave souls who perished on the space shuttle Columbia," President Obama said in a statement. "Through triumph and tragedy, each of us has benefited from their courage and devotion, and we honor their memory by dedicating ourselves to a better tomorrow."
Today is the 44th anniversary of the Apollo 1 accident, when three astronauts were killed by a fire that broke out in their capsule during a ground test in 1967. It was NASA's first fatal space accident. |
Mysterious Night-Shining Clouds Getting Brighter
OurAmazingPlanet Staff
Clouds bright enough to see at night are not as hard to find as they once were.
These so-called night-shining clouds are still rare — rare enough that Matthew DeLand, who has been studying them for 11 years, has seen them only once. But his odds are increasing.
These mysterious clouds form between 50 and 53 miles (80 and 85 kilometers) up in the atmosphere, altitudes so high that they reflect light long after the sun has dropped below the horizon.
DeLand, an atmospheric scientist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., has found that night-shining clouds — technically known as polar mesospheric or noctilucent clouds — are forming more frequently and becoming brighter. He has been observing the clouds in data from instruments that have been flown on satellites since 1978.
For reasons not fully understood, the clouds' brightness wiggles up and down in step with solar activity, with fewer clouds forming when the sun is most active. The biggest variability is in the far north. |
An Astronomer's Field of Dreams
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
An innovative new radio telescope array under construction in central New Mexico will eventually harness the power of more than 13,000 antennas and provide a fresh eye to the sky. The antennas, which resemble droopy ceiling fans, form the Long Wavelength Array, designed to survey the sky from horizon to horizon over a wide range of frequencies.
The University of New Mexico leads the project, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provides the advanced digital electronic systems, which represent a major component of the observatory.
The first station in the Long Wavelength Array, with 256 antennas, is scheduled to start surveying the sky by this summer. When complete, the Long Wavelength Array will consist of 53 stations, with a total of 13,000 antennas strategically placed in an area nearly 400 kilometers (248 miles) in diameter. The antennas will provide sensitive, high-resolution images of a region of the sky hundreds of times larger than the full moon. These images could reveal radio waves coming from planets outside our solar system, and thus would turn out to be a new way to detect these worlds. In addition to planets, the telescope will pick up a host of other cosmic phenomena. |
Odd News
Soldier leaves voicemail marriage proposal - on wrong girl's phone
People Forum
A British soldier is at the centre of an identity hunt after making a marriage proposal to his girlfriend in a voicemail message - but he had called the wrong number.
Calling home from his tour of duty in Afghanistan, the unnamed soldier tells his girlfriend he loves her and says he will be home in three months.
The serviceman, who also reveals his partner is pregnant with his first child, then reveals one of his colleagues had been killed in action recently and that this had, in part, prompted him to call.
He suggests he is only able to phone home around once a month, and that he had tried to establish a video call to pop the question but this had not been possible. |