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Interesting. We should inform Eva Rivas, she would be stoked! 
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Re: News in Science
Jerusalem Post
May 9 2010
Holding back the darkness
By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
08/05/2010 18:51
A new campaign aims at preventing Alzheimer's.
There isn't a single, effective long-term treatment for Alzheimer's
disease, so it seems unrealistic to plan on preventing this widespread
form of dementia by 2020. But an American father-and-son team with
much experience in brain disease and epidemiology ` Dr. Zaven and Dr.
Ara Khachaturian ` think it can be achieved, with a lot of brain power
and billions of dollars. And they want Israel to be part of it.
There were other massive projects that took a decade or less to
accomplish, such as the US Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s
(seven years); the Panama Canal in the early 1900s (10 years); the
Manhattan Project for the atomic bomb to end World War II (six years);
the Apollo Program to get America on the moon before 1970 (eight
years); and the Human Genome Project (by 2000) in a decade.
Thus, said the Khachaturians in a recent interview with The Jerusalem
Post at Jerusalem's Inbal Hotel, `it isn't so outlandish to take only
10 years to prevent elderly people from getting Alzheimer's ` or at
least to delay its onset long enough so that it's like prevention
because people will die of something else.'
THEY WERE at the hotel for a few days to convene a think tank for
establishing an international research consortium called the Campaign
to Prevent Alzheimer's Disease by 2020 (www.pad2020.org). Attended by
delegates from Israel, the US, Europe and Russia, the meetings were
intended to form a partnership with leading Israeli physicians and
scientists in the field.
Additional meetings are planned over the next six months to explore
the feasibility of designing a prototype for a comprehensive
international database on healthy aging. This will greatly enhance
efforts by scientists and biotechnology companies to develop valid
diagnostic tests as well as therapies that delay or ultimately prevent
the onset of many chronic diseases that affect memory, movement and
mood. `If we can delay the onset of mental disability by only five
years, we can cut the costs by half,' said Zaven.
Around the world, there are 34 million victims of Alzheimer's and
other types of dementia; five or six million live in the US, and about
100,000 in Israel. But many post-World War II Baby Boomers now
entering retirement are likely to live into their 90s, so Alzheimer's
will become an even more severe problem unless something is done to
stop it.
THE US National Institute on Ageing describes Alzheimer's as an
irreversible, progressive brain disease that slowly destroys memory
and thinking skills and eventually even the ability to carry out the
simplest tasks. In most people with Alzheimer's, symptoms first appear
after age 60. Dementia, which can be caused by other factors such as
insufficient oxygen to the brain, is the loss of cognitive functioning
` thinking, remembering and reasoning.
Alzheimer's, the most common type of dementia, was named in 1906 after
Dr. Alois Alzheimer, who conducted a pathology examination of the
brain tissue of a woman who had died of an unusual mental illness. Her
symptoms had included memory loss, language problems and unpredictable
behavior. The physician found many abnormal clumps (now called amyloid
plaques) and tangled bundles of fibers (called neurofibrillary
tangles) in her brain. Plaques and tangles are two of the main
features of Alzheimer's. The third is the loss of connections between
nerve cells.
Although we still don't know what triggers Alzheimer's, it is known
that brain damage can begin as many as 20 years before problems
appear. As more and more plaques and tangles form in particular brain
areas, healthy neurons begin to work less efficiently. They eventually
lose their ability to communicate with each other and they die. This
process spreads to a nearby structure, called the hippocampus, which
is essential in forming memories. As more and more neurons die,
affected brain regions begin to shrivel. By the final stage of
Alzheimer's, damage is widespread and brain tissue has shrunk
significantly. Memory problems are one of the first signs of
Alzheimer's, but people have problems with memory as they age even
without Alzheimer's, so diagnosis can be certain only at autopsy.
As Alzheimer's progresses, memory loss continues, and changes in other
cognitive abilities appear. Problems can include getting lost, having
trouble handling money and paying bills, repeating questions, taking
longer to complete normal daily tasks, poor judgment, and small mood
and personality changes. People are often diagnosed in this stage.
In moderate Alzheimer's, damage occurs in sections of the brain that
control language, reasoning, sensory processing and conscious thought.
Memory loss and confusion increase, and people begin to have problems
recognizing family and friends. They may be unable to learn new
things, carry out tasks that involve multiple steps (such as getting
dressed), or cope with new situations, and may have hallucinations,
delusions or paranoia.
At the severe final stages, plaques and tangles have spread throughout
the brain, and brain tissue has shrunk significantly. Victims cannot
communicate and are completely dependent on others. Near the end, the
person may be in bed most of the time as the body shuts down.
SCIENTISTS ARE investigating associations between cognitive decline
and vascular and metabolic conditions such as heart disease, stroke,
high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. Understanding these
relationships and testing them in clinical trials will help us
understand whether reducing risk factors for these diseases may help
with Alzheimer's as well.
Even though there is no cure, early diagnosis is beneficial for
several reasons, since there are medications that slow the decline,
and families can make plans for living arrangements, financial and
legal matters and developing support networks.
Four Alzheimer's medications have been approved so far by the US Food
and Drug Administration: donepezil (Aricept), rivastigmine (Exelon)
and galantamine (Razadyne) for mild to moderate Alzheimer's and
memantine (Namenda) for the moderate-to-severe stage. These drugs work
by regulating neurotransmitters, and may help maintain thinking,
memory and speaking skills ` but they don't change the underlying
disease process and may help only for a few months or years.
The worldwide cost of caring for dementia patients is estimated at
over $400 billion a year, $3 billion in Israel alone. With the ageing
of the population, dementia is a looming catastrophe. PAD2020, a
non-profit organization based in Rockvillle, Maryland, gets financial
support from the Helen Bader Foundation (which was previously involved
in funding early childhood development) and the US Alzheimer's
Association, plus at least one `educational grant' from a
pharmaceutical company. But the elder Khachaturian asserted that the
drug firm is allowed absolutely no influence on policies. `It's
clearly a hands-off policy. We're applying to most major drug
companies and foundations for financial support, as we insist that the
project not become the monopoly of any single company or institution,'
Zaven insisted. The US government, aware of the urgency, is expected
to eventually donate much of the funding.
Zaven Khatchaturian (the surname is Armenian), a neuroscientist who
specialized in brain ageing, worked at the University of Pittsburg and
became director of Alzheimer's research at the US National Institutes
of Health. Ara, an expert in epidemiology and biostatistics at Johns
Hopkins, joined his father to serve as a founding trustee and
executive vice president of PAD2020 because he believes in the cause.
`STATISTICS ALONE don't present a full picture of the destructive
effects of these illnesses,' said Zaven, a leader of neuroscience
research programs for more than 30 years who is now president of
PAD2020. `Brain mechanisms were my scientific interest, and when I was
sent to the NIH Institute on Ageing, I was asked to develop strategic
planning on brain ageing. Alzheimer's was not well known then, and few
scientists were interested in it. I created most of the programs.'
Current therapies, he continued, `provide symptomatic relief [only] in
the short run. We know that high cholesterol and high blood pressure
are early warning signals of heart disease, but we have no proven
markers for early-stage dementia. New approaches that identify
incipient disease, and novel therapies that will prevent or modify the
progression of brain cell death and the onset of the most disabling
symptoms are urgently needed.'
Zaven had been to Israel only once before, for a short visit, and
Ara's arrival was his first. So why did they think Israel was a
natural partner? `Because it's an important place for Alzheimer's
research. The population is small enough and manageable, and Israelis
have a relatively long life expectancy. The country,' added Zaven,
`has a solid scientific infrastructure and much successful involvement
in medical research. There is a great deal of fantastic medical talent
here. Israel could be a prototype for a partnership linking the US and
Europe.' The Israel Alzheimer's Association has voiced its support, he
said.
Specifically, the Khatchaturians want healthy Israelis in their 30s or
40s whose parents were diagnosed with Alzheimer's to volunteer to be
observed over years so information on their mental function can be
gathered. `They would be called in for an examination, imaging, blood
tests and neurological and cognitive assessments every year so changes
could be determined. We also intend to look for biological markers
that can predict who is likely to get the disease,' added Ara.
In the US, said Zaven, there are people with a family history of
dementia who are actually keen on being examined because they fear
they have inherited it. Dr. Alan Roses, a neurologist at Duke
University in North Carolina, has discovered a susceptibility gene for
Alzheimer's, said Zaven, `but one gene alone is not enough to cause
the disease. It occurs in combination with environmental factors and
additional genes.'
Despite the large number of victims, it is amazing that there is no
national Alzheimer's database. `This is needed to record cognitive
changes,' said the father. `Doctors take their blood pressure, but
don't examine brain function.'
PAD2020 is at too early a stage to determine where the money needed
will come from, but Zaven believes one billion dollars a year over 10
years would be enough. That's only a drop in the bucket compared to
the costs of treating and minding Alzheimer's patients.
The Khatchaturians are unwilling to be involved in a repeat of the
Decade of the Brain established by the first Bush Administration in
1980 that `produced absolutely nothing. There was a lot of hoopla and
many meetings, but it lacked a strategic plan. The dementia situation
has gotten a lot more severe since then.'
The project poses various ethical problems, such as the fact that
people participating in research have to know that in the future,
their personal data could lead to the development of medications. `The
data will be preserved anonymously, but we need to develop solid
safeguards to ensure privacy,' Ara said.
It will not be a simple struggle. US medical investigators said last
week that there is `no firm evidence' that any preventive measures are
effective. The independent panel convened by the NIH said many
measures including mental stimulation, exercise and a variety of
dietary supplements have been studied, but the value of such
strategies in delaying the onset or reducing the severity of decline
has never been demonstrated by rigorous studies.
`We wish we could tell people that taking a pill or doing a puzzle
every day would prevent this terrible disease, but current evidence
doesn't support this,' said Prof. Martha Daviglus, the panel's
chairman and a preventive medicine expert at Northwestern University.
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Re: News in Science
This study is pretty interesting because it contradicts previous studies claiming no genetic links between modern humans and neanderthals. I wonder how different their testing methods were and why the different results.Originally posted by Muhaha View PostLeave a comment:
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Re: News in Science
Neanderthals, Humans Interbred—First Solid DNA Evidence
Most of us have some Neanderthal genes, study finds.
Ker ThanA Neanderthal-female reconstruction based on both fossil anatomy and DNA (file photo).
Photograph by Joe McNally, National Geographic
for National Geographic News
Published May 6, 2010
The next time you're tempted to call some oaf a Neanderthal, you might want to take a look in the mirror.
According to a new DNA study, most humans have a little Neanderthal in them—at least 1 to 4 percent of a person's genetic makeup.
The study uncovered the first solid genetic evidence that "modern" humans—or Homo sapiens—interbred with their Neanderthal neighbors, who mysteriously died out about 30,000 years ago.
What's more, the Neanderthal-modern human mating apparently took place in the Middle East, shortly after modern humans had left Africa, not in Europe—as has long been suspected.
"We can now say that, in all probability, there was gene flow from Neanderthals to modern humans," lead study author Ed Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a prepared statement.
That's no surprise to anthropologist Erik Trinkhaus, whose skeleton-based claims of Neanderthal-modern human interbreeding—previously contradicted with DNA evidence—appear to have been vindicated by the new gene study, to be published tomorrow in the journal Science.
"They've finally seen the light ... because it's been obvious to many us that this happened," said Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who wasn't part of the new study.
Trinkhaus adds that most living humans probably have much more Neanderthal DNA than the new study suggests.
"One to 4 percent is truly a minimum," Trinkaus added. "But is it 10 percent? Twenty percent? I have no idea."
(Also see "Neanderthals, Modern Humans Interbred, Bone Study Suggests.")
Surprising Spot for Neanderthal-Human Mating
The genetic study team reached their conclusion after comparing the genomes of five living humans—from China, France, Papua New Guinea, southern Africa, and western Africa—against the available "rough draft" of the Neanderthal genome. (Get the basics on genetics.)
The results showed that Neanderthal DNA is 99.7 percent identical to modern human DNA, versus, for example, 98.8 percent for modern humans and chimps, according to the study. (Related: "Neanderthals Had Same 'Language Gene' as Modern Humans.")
In addition, all modern ethnic groups, other than Africans, carry traces of Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, the study says—which at first puzzled the scientists. Though no fossil evidence has been found for Neanderthals and modern humans coexisting in Africa, Neanderthals, like modern humans, are thought to have arisen on the continent.
"If you told an archaeologist that you'd found evidence of gene exchange between Neanderthals and modern humans and asked them to guess which [living] population it was found in, most would say Europeans, because there's well documented archaeological evidence that they lived side by side for several thousand years," said study team member David Reich.
For another thing, Neanderthals never lived in China or Papua New Guinea, in the Pacific region of Melanesia, according to the archaeological record. (See "Neanderthals Ranged Much Farther East Than Thought.")
"But the fact is that Chinese and Melanesians are as closely related to Neanderthals" as Europeans, said Reich, a population geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University.
(See pictures of a reconstructed Neanderthal and take a Neanderthals quiz.)
Neanderthal-Human One-Night Stand?
So how did modern humans with Neanderthal DNA end up in Asia and Melanesia?
Neanderthals, the study team says, probably mixed with early Homo sapiens just after they'd left Africa but before Homo sapiens split into different ethnic groups and scattered around the globe.
The first opportunity for interbreeding probably occurred about 60,000 years ago in Middle Eastern regions adjacent to Africa, where archaeological evidence shows the two species overlapped for a time, the team says.
And it wouldn't have taken much mating to make an impact, according to study co-author Reich. The results could stem from a Neanderthal-modern human one-night stand or from thousands of interspecies assignations, he said.
(Related: "Neanderthals Grew Fast, but Sexual Maturity Came Late.")
More DNA Evidence for Neanderthal-Human Mating
The new study isn't alone in finding genetic hints of Homo sapiens-Homo neanderthalensis interbreeding.
Genetic anthropologist Jeffrey Long, who calls the Science study "very exciting," co-authored a new, not yet published study that found DNA evidence of interbreeding between early modern humans and an "archaic human" species, though it's not clear which. He presented his team's findings at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Albuquerque, New Mexico, last month.
Long's team reached its conclusions after searching the genomes of hundreds of modern humans for "signatures of different evolutionary processes in DNA variation."
Like the new Science paper, Long's study speculates that interbreeding occurred just after our species had left Africa, but Long's study didn't include analysis of the Neanderthal genome.
"At the time we started the project, I never imagined I'd ever see an empirical confirmation of it," said Long, referring to the Science team's Neanderthal-DNA evidence, "so I'm pretty happy to see it."Leave a comment:
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Re: News in Science
U.S., Russian (Armenian?) scientists create element 117
A team of American and Russian physicists have created a new, super-heavy element, filling in a gap in chemistry's periodic table.
Researchers working at a particle accelerator at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, 120 kilometres north of Moscow, created six atoms of element 117.
The discovery fills in the gap between the previously synthesized elements 116 and 118, meaning all the elements with atomic numbers between one and 118 have been observed.
"During a long (half a year) experiment, six events of the 'birth' of the new element were registered," A.N. Sissakian of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna said in a statement.
The element — which has no formal name but is known as ununseptium — was created by accelerating an atom of calcium (element 20) in a cyclotron and smashing it into an atom of berkelium (element 97).
Berkelium is itself an artificially produced element. Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's High Flux Isotope Reactor in Tennessee synthesized 22.2 milligrams of the element and shipped it to Russia for the experiment.
The particular isotope of berkelium used has a half-life of 320 days, meaning that in less than a year, it loses half of its mass to radioactive decay.
Each of the six atoms of element 117 decayed in a fraction of a second.
The research, published Friday in the journal Physical Review Letters, is providing more evidence that heavier isotopes of artificially produced elements will become more and more stable, a theory called the "stability island."
"The properties of a decay of an isotope of the 117th element and its daughter products … together with the isotopes of elements 112-116 and 118 synthesized in Dubna before, are the direct proof for the existence of the 'stability island' of super-heavy nuclei," said Sissakian.
Element 117 won't likely get a formal name any time soon. In March, element 112 became the latest element to get a formal name from the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry: copernicium, symbol Cn. It was discovered in 1996.
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Re: News in Science
xxxxroach of the Sea Wows the WebUpdated: 1 hour 31 minutes ago
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Katie Drummond
Contributor
AOL News (April 1) -- An enormous crustacean that attached itself to a submarine scouring the depths of the Gulf of Mexico is eliciting shock, awe and a touch of skepticism among Web readers -- but scientists say the critter is just an impressive example of a supersized species.
Photos of the beast were posted on Reddit, under the title "By God, it's a monster!" by a user who said he worked for a deep-sea surveying company. His crew found the creature hooked onto the bottom of a remotely operated vehicle. He estimated that the behemoth -- which measures 2 1/2 feet long -- was creeping along at a depth of about 8,500 feet.
Nearly 800 commenters responded to the initial query, with reactions that ranged from outright disgust to culinary craving.
Gwynzer, Reddit
This giant isopod, which measures 2 1/2 feet long, fastened itself to a submarine in the Gulf of Mexico. The scavengers feast on carcasses of dead whales and fish.
"Damn, Nature. You scary!" wrote one.
"Nasty things, but I heard the meat's not too bad," responded another.
Online investigations also helped identify the critter, which is a Bathynomus giganteus, or giant isopod. The crustaceans are related to shrimp and crabs, and are thought to dwell in the deep seas of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Their name suggests otherwise, but most giant isopods are less than a foot long -- making the recent deep-sea discovery a supersized version. That could be because of a condition called gigantism, which is suspected to be common among crustaceans inhabiting particularly cold water regions.
"In crustaceans, bathymetric gigantism may also in part reflect decreases in temperature leading to longer lifespans and thus larger sizes in indeterminate growers," writes C.R. McClain, a Duke University deep-sea biological systems expert who blogs at Deep Sea News.
In the 1990s, an expedition off the coast of Australia reinforced the speculation. Researchers found that the deeper the water, the larger the lurking isopods.
Giant isopods might make tasty prey, but they're also hungry predators: The scavengers feast on carcasses of dead whales and fish. They have been known to attack sea-dwellers that are still alive and swimming.
That zealous appetite is probably one reason they've survived so long: Fossil records date these xxxxroaches of the sea back more than 160 million years, before the Earth's continents were even formed.
And while the timing of the critter's Web debut sparked skepticism that it was nothing more than a supersized April Fools' gag, McClain, for one, is convinced.
""I've seen the pictures, and they are real, and they really do get that big," he said.
With a gross-out factor on par with last year's tongue-eating parasite, it's hard to believe that this giant isopod might not even be the ultimate example of the species. Notes Deep Sea News blogger Kevin Zelnio, "the maximum reported size of Bathynomus giganteus is likely to be an artifact of our sampling."
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Re: News in Science
Junk food addiction info
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Re: News in Science
Climate Change Killed Dinosaurs, Scientist SaysUpdated: 4 hours 26 minutes ago
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Joseph Schuman
Senior Correspondent
AOL News (March 28) -- Was it long-term climate change, rather than a rogue asteroid, that killed off the dinosaurs?
That's the conclusion of German paleontologist Michael Prauss, who studied 65-million-year-old fossils drilled out of the earth in the Brazos River area of Texas and argues that radical changes to the flora and fauna of the era began long before arrival of the massive space rock widely associated with one of the largest mass extinctions in the history of the planet.
That impact, at what is now Chicxulub, Mexico, in the past 30 years has become the primary suspect in the death of the dinosaurs. And it was the subject of an article in the journal Science earlier this month in which 41 scientists from around the world argued that a wealth of global data show the extinctions began at the same time that the asteroid's crash sent debris across the atmosphere and blocked out the sun for years.
DEA Picture Library/Getty Images
A German scientist refutes the widely accepted theory that an asteroid led to dinosaurs' extinction, saying long-term climate change was to blame instead. Above, an illustration shows a herd of Hadrosaurus running away from fire.
But Prauss, writing in next month's edition of the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology and working with Princeton paleontologist Gerta Gerta Keller -- a well-known critic of the Chicxulub theory -- maintained the impact was just one in a chain of catastrophic events that caused substantial environmental upheaval.
"The resulting chronic stress, to which of course the meteorite impact was a contributing factor, is likely to have been fundamental to the crisis in the biosphere and finally the mass extinction," Prauss said.
Those events include the massive, years-long volcanic activity in what is now the Deccan Plateau of India, and which, like the Chicxulub asteroid impact, is conventionally used by paleontologists to separate the Cretaceous period from the Paleogene period.
The Cretaceous, with a relatively warm climate a high sea levels, was the last era of the dinosaurs and the large marine reptiles that lived at the same time. And Prauss also takes issue with other paleontologists' use of Chicxulub as the historical demarcation point.
"The actual impact took place well before the geochemically and micropaleontologically defined Cretaceous Paleogene boundary," he said.
In support of his theories, Prauss cites his analysis of samples taken from drill cores and rock sections dating to the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary near Brazos, which is about 620 miles from the Chicxulub crater.
The appearance and distribution of microfossils -- the remains of algae, pollen and plant spores -- demonstrate that significant and persistent variations of the ecosystem built steadily over the late Cretaceous and continued over several million years, Prauss said. They can especially be seen in the fluctuation of sea levels and productivity of marine algae, and the so-called fern spike -- a widespread surge in fern spores that signaled landscapes were repopulating after an ecosystem was destroyed.
Prauss said the fern spike began well before the Paleogene period began, and that the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary -- and the asteroid impact -- marked only the peak of a trend that began millions of years earlier.
"In the light of the new data, both of these points have to be refuted," Prauss said.
Earlier this month, when the Chicxulub paper appeared in Science, one of its authors told AOL News that a goal of the team's work was to respond to arguments coming from the minority of paleontologists who cast doubt on the asteroid's role in killing the dinosaurs.
"It is almost impossible to change the skeptics' minds," Tamara Goldin said. "But we hope we can communicate to the scientific community and the public that this impact-induced environmental catastrophe did happen."
Still, it's important to note that both papers are using geological data to tie environmental events to the period that produced the latest dinosaur fossils scientists have found. In other words, paleontologists are dating the scene of the crime and placing environmental suspects at the scene with some pretty strong arguments.
But there's no direct evidence showing what killed the dinosaurs, leaving open a debate that's likely to continue.
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