#New cancer marker identified; possible therapeutic target for breast cancer A new way to detect --and perhaps treat--one of the deadliest types of breast cancer has been found.
Led by researchers at Boston University School of medicine (BUSM), the study appears online in Breast cancer Research. Basal-like breast cancer (BLBC) is an aggressive form of breast cancer
and is referred often to as"triple negative, "which means it is not responsive to the common medical therapeutics.
BLBC is more likely to metastasize --or spread to different areas of the body--quicker and earlier,
Researchers from BUSM and the University of Cyprus compared the markers on the surface of the cancer cells to gene expression profile of breast tumors deposited by researchers in international public databases
When they looked at publically available data on patients they were able to predict the likelihood of progression-free survival based on
they found that the tumor growth was significantly slower in models. Furthermore, models that received the altered cancer cells had very small or no metastasis to the lungs,
which suggested that IL13RA2 was involved in cancer growth and spread.""This discovery offers a glimmer of hope for patients stricken with BLBC.
Personalized cancer therapies could be developed by targeting breast cancer cells that express copious levels of IL13RA2,
"explained corresponding author Sam Thiagalingam, Phd, associate professor of genetics & genomics, medicine and pathology & laboratory medicine at BUSM.
Other deadly cancers, including brain, pancreatic, ovarian, and colonic cancers also can have high levels of IL13RA2
which suggests its importance.""Studies directed at this biomarker will be of high significance to improve the quality of life of all cancer patients harboring this alteration,"added Thiagalingam.
While this is hopeful news for some patients, more research is needed to further understand not only IL13RA2, but other molecules in breast cancers that may guide diagnosis, prognosis,
and ultimately drug development and therapy y
#Paper Test Quickly Detects Ebola, Dengue, And Yellow fever Researchers in the US have developed a silver nanoparticle-based paper test to simultaneously detect dengue, yellow fever and Ebola.
This could provide a cheap and reliable diagnosis for all three diseases, that as quick as a home pregnancy test.
The Ebola epidemic in West Africa underscores an urgent need for rapid diagnostics; quick identification and patient isolation can benefit the sick and the healthy.
However, dengue, yellow fever and Ebola all initially manifest as a fever and headache, so are mixed easily up.
Now, this huge problem has a tiny solution an 8×3cm lateral flow test. Lee Gehrke and his team at the Massachusetts institute of technology and Harvard Medical school adapted the traditional single marker lateral flow test to diagnose several diseases at once.
It costs $2, takes 10 minutes, and there is no need for a power supply, trained specialist or expensive equipment.
The test is made from strips of paper containing antibodies attached to triangular silver nanoparticles of varying size according to the disease they recognize
and bind to. Silver nanoparticles appear as different colours according to their size, so when a patient serum sample migrates through the device,
distinctive colored lines appear on the paper to indicate positive results for Ebola, dengue or yellow fever.
This pattern of lines can be analysed by eye but the team are also working on a mobile phone application to aid diagnosis. n app could be very useful for diseases that are mosquito-spread,
says Gehrke. t adds a date and geographical stamp to the test results so the spread of disease can be followed in real-time.
Warren Chan, an expert in nanomaterials-based diagnostics at the University of Toronto in Canada
sees the research as an exciting step forward: hey have solved the immense problem of detecting multiple disease targets at the same time.
The next step will be to clinically validate the technology. Gehrke team are now testing the device in both field and clinical studies,
and plan to adapt it to diagnose a wider range of viruses r
#U s. Northeast Battered by Blizzards after Record Snow By Elizabeth Barberboston (Reuters)- Biting cold and driving snow kept the U s. Northeast in the grip of another major winter storm on Sunday that made February
One South Boston restaurant added the hashtag##cabin fever#to its Twitter messages. The area's deepest snowfall on Sunday was the 20 inches (50 cm) recorded in Ipswich, Massachusetts,
Massachusetts State Police said in a tweet. Across the state about 600 members of the National guard were helping out during the blizzard,
It will only be available in the Ebola Treatment Units, not the hospitals,"Sakoba Keita,
Guinea's anti-Ebola task force said about two dozen new cases of Ebola had been recorded in the last two weeks, taking the total number to 53 as of Friday.
Health officials have not provided any data for the results of the trials of the anti-Ebola drug.
The epidemic has killed nearly 9, 000 people over the last year, mainly in the three worst-affected West african nations.
Amber Cooper from Washington University in St louis, US, and colleagues found women aged 45 to 55 exposed to the organic compounds were up to six times more likely to be unexposed menopausal than peers.
which makes polymer products more pliable and is still in use. igher everyday exposure levels were associated with menopause coming,
The researchers exploited data collected by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from people across the US from 1999-2008, including women age at their last menstrual cycle.
therefore consider hundreds of menopausal women in whom NHANES scientists had measured at least one potential endocrine disruptor chemical (EDC) by gas or liquid chromatography-mass spectroscopy.
These compounds are both biomarkers for human exposure to the plasticiser di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP
Several PCBS, the pesticide Mirex and ß-hexachlorocyclohexane, a by-product of the pesticide Lindane, were linked also strongly to earlier menopause.
Jessica Tyrrell from the University of Exeter, UK, who previously found an income-chemical exposure link in NHANES data,
#Farming Now Worse for Climate Than Clearing Forests Efforts such as these to slow deforestation have delivered some of humanity few gains in its otherwise lackadaisical battle so far against global warming.
The year before, nearly 60,000 acres of rainforest had been torn out of the municipality. Now farmers and loggers were being arrested by armed police,
accused of environmental crimes. t was a radical operation, the newly elected mayor later recalled during an interview with a Princeton university researcher. ll stopped our economic activity.
A few years later, Brazil central bank made it harder for property owners there, and in 35 other blacklisted areas,
to borrow money unless they proved they were protecting the rainforest. The campaign marked a sharp change from the 1970s
when the federal government, then a military dictatorship, had encouraged clearcutting. Now the federal government was cracking down on itnd doing so successfully.
In 2010, fewer than 1, 000 acres of Alta Floresta was deforested. Efforts such as these to slow deforestation have delivered some of humanity few gains in its otherwise lackadaisical battle so far against global warming.
A gradual slowdown in chainsawing and bulldozing, particularly in Brazil, helped reduce deforestation annual toll on the climate by nearly a quarter between the 1990s and 2010.
A new study describes how this trend has seen agriculture overtake deforestation as the leading source of land-based greenhouse gas pollution during the past decade.
While United nations climate negotiations focus heavily on forest protections the researchers note that delegates to the talks ignore similar opportunities to reform farming. he decline in deforestation over the past decade
or two is a success story, Rob Jackson, a professor at Stanford university earth sciences school, said.
He was not involved with the new study. The deforestation slowdown has, n large part, he said,
been driven by new forestry rules in Brazil, by the U n. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest degradation (REDD) program,
which funds forest conservation, and similar policies elsewhere. The new study, led by the U n. Food and agriculture organization
and published in Global Change Biology, quantifies the reductions in climate pollution from the degradation and clearcutting of forests.
Clearcutting most often clears space for agriculture, suggesting agriculture indirect climate impacts surpass the impacts of deforestation for timber and other commodities.
The researchers aim to tally those indirect impacts later this year. This paper was an early step in a larger effort to better understand
and report on the climate repercussions of how land is used. very year, wel have updates,
lead author Francesco Tubiello said. The study is also a reminder that the burning of fossil fuels remains the main cause of global warming.
Burning fuel produces about four times more climate pollution every year than forestry and agriculture combined figure that is growing.
The research shows that the recent climate-protecting gains in forests are being canceled nearly out by efforts to satisfy the world growing appetitearticularly its appetite for meat.
Greenhouse gases released by farming, such as methane from livestock and rice paddies, and nitrous oxides from fertilizers and other soil treatments rose 13 percent after 1990, the study concluded.
Agricultural climate pollution is caused mostly by livestock. Cows and buffalo are the worst offendersheir ruminating guts
and decomposing waste produce a lot of methane. They produce so much methane, and eat so much fertilized feed,
that livestock are blamed for two-thirds of agriculture climate pollution every year. ee seeing an expansion of agricultural lands in some areas because of the growing global population,
Jackson, who is a co-chair of the Global Carbon Project, which studies the global carbon cycle,
said. ee also seeing intensification of agriculture. Although annual climate pollution from deforestation is declining,
experts warn that recent gains could quickly be reversed. Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest spiked recently following nearly a decade of declines, for example,
as farmers and loggers rushed to exploit loopholes in forest protection laws. Some parts of Central africa are seeing deforestation in areas where it was not previously a problem.
And cutting down trees can reduce moisture levels in a rainforest which could cause parts of the Amazon to start dying offven if everybody chainsaws simultaneously jammed.
The researchers drew on three global datasets to try to hone in on land changing contribution to global warming.
Such impacts are harder to quantify accurately than are the pollution impacts of burning fuel.
Governments invest fewer resources tracking and reporting complex climate indicators for deforestation and agricultural activity than is the case for the energy sector.
The paper noted a gulf between global efforts to reduce the climate impacts of deforestation, and the dearth of a global response to the climate impacts of food production.
REDD is a major focus of U n. climate negotiations but agriculture is discussed barely during the talks. here been a lot of discussion back and forth,
and perhaps a good deal of polemic, about REDD, Steve Schwartzman, director of tropical forest policy at the Environmental defense Fund, said. ut, over time,
I think all the major actors have come to the conclusion that reducing emissions from deforestation is a key piece of solving the climate change puzzle.
Agriculture has only come onto the agenda more recently. Some countries, particularly India, have been averse to discussing agricultural impacts during U n. climate negotiationsargely
because they fear that the outcomes of such talks could reduce agricultural output and worsen food shortages. oor countries are not going to sit idly by
and just impose reductions in food production to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets, Schwartzman said. Doug Boucher, the director of climate research at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says agriculture climate impacts could be reduced without taking food off tables.
Reducing the overuse of fertilizers, protecting the organic content of soils by changing farming practices,
and keeping rice paddies flooded for fewer weeks every season could all contribute to a climate solution,
he said. The biggest opportunities for reforming agriculture climate impacts can sometimes be found miles from where any food is grown.
Reducing waste where food is sold, prepared, eaten and, in many cases, partly tossed in the trash as uneaten leftovers
or unsellable produce, reduces the amount of land, fertilizer and equipment needed to feed everybody. hifting consumption toward less beef and more chicken,
and reducing waste of meat in particular, are what seem to have the biggest potential, Boucher said.
This article is reproduced with permission from Climate Central. The article was published first on February 3, 2015 t
#Britain Votes to Allow World's First"3-Parent"IVF Babies By Kate Kellandlondon (Reuters)- Britain on Tuesday became the first country to allow a"three-parent"IVF technique which doctors
say will prevent some inherited incurable diseases but which critics see as a step towards creating designer babies.
The treatment is known as"three-parent"in vitro fertilization (IVF) because the babies, born from genetically modified embryos,
would have DNA from a mother, a father and from a female donor. It is designed to help families with mitochondrial diseases,
incurable conditions passed down the maternal line that affect around one in 6, 500 children worldwide.
After an emotionally charged 90-minute debate that some lawmakers criticized as being too short for such a serious matter,
parliament voted 382 to 128 in favor of the technique, called mitochondrial donation. The vote paves the way for a medical world first for Britain,
but one that is fiercely disputed by some religious groups and other critics. The process involves intervening in the fertilization process to remove mitochondria,
which act as tiny energy-generating batteries inside cells, and which, if faulty, can cause inherited conditions such as fatal heart problems, liver failure,
brain disorders, blindness and muscular dystrophy. MITOCHONDRIAL DNA is separate from DNA found in the cell nucleus and does not affect human characteristics such as hair or eye color, appearance or personality traits."
the choice to become a mother without fear of passing on a lifetime under the shadow of mitochondrial disease to their child,"Robert Meadowcroft,
chief executive of the Muscular dystrophy Campaign, said following the Vote in an open letter to lawmakers, 11 international campaign groups, including the U s. United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation,
described the condition as"unimaginably cruel.""""It strips our children of the skills they have learned,
and tires their organs one by one until their little bodies cannot go on any more, "they wrote.
referring to Cameron's son Ivan who suffered from cerebral palsy and severe epilepsy and died aged six in 2009.
Critics say the technique will lead to the creation of genetically modified"designer babies"however,
Proposed new laws allowing the treatments to be carried out Britain still have to be approved by the upper house,
a 68-year-Old south Korean man developed a cough and fever. He visited four health facilities seeking treatment
and inadvertently triggered the biggest outbreak of Middle east Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outside that region, and what is verging on national panic at home.
Hundreds of schools have locked their gates as the outbreak rekindled fears of a similar coronavirus that caused Severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2002
The South korean"index patient"was running a farm equipment company in Bahrain, according to a South korean official,
More than half of South korea's infections have been traced to a hospital in Pyeongtaek city, 65 km (40 miles) southwest of Seoul, where the man shared a room with another patient."
and it appears that more infections took place as he went out of the room for checks,
sneezing and coughing in the hall, "said Kim Woo-joo, an infectious disease specialist advising the government.
Others became infected at three of the four health facilities the man visited, authorities said. Officials have not identified the hospitals where MERS patients are being treated,
but the Pyeongtaek facility has been shut and staff quarantined. A nurse there said there was a lack of knowledge about the virus
when the man was hospitalized. Health officials have said hospital staff had not been aware of the man's Middle east trip."
"There's little understanding. His visit to us was just unavoidable exposure to other people in the hospital,"the nurse,
who is in quarantine at home, said by telephone. She declined to be identified. When the man was admitted at another hospital,
where he was diagnosed finally, he at first only told staff he had visited Bahrain, which is considered not a MERS danger zone,
health officials said. In fact, the man had also been to Saudi arabia and the United arab emirates, the countries with the most MERS cases and most of its approximately 440 fatalities."
"We reported him to the disease control center but because he went to Bahrain, which was all we knew at that time,
his case dragged on, "said an official at the hospital where he was diagnosed on May 20,
who also declined to be identified.""Too much time was spent finding him positive.""The person the index patient shared a room with at the Pyeongtaek hospital contracted MERS,
He is in hospital in China. As of Wednesday, the index patient was on a respirator in a government-designated hospital.
most of the MERS infections in South korea came from the health facilities the index patient visited. x
#Injectable Brain Implant Spies on Individual Neurons A simple injection is now all it takes to wire up a brain.
silky mesh studded with tiny electronic devices, and shown that it unfurls to spy on and stimulate individual neurons.
The implant has the potential to unravel the workings of the mammalian brain in unprecedented detail. think it great,
a very creative new approach to the problem of recording from large number of neurons in the brain, says Rafael Yuste, director of the Neuro technology Center at Columbia University in New york,
who was involved not in the work. If eventually shown to be safe, the soft mesh might even be used in humans to treat conditions such as Parkinson disease,
says Charles Lieber, a chemist at Harvard university on Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the team. The work was published in Nature Nanotechnology on June 8.
Neuroscientists still do not understand how the activities of individual brain cells translate to higher cognitive powers such as perception and emotion.
but the use of brain implants is limited currently by several disadvantages. So far, even the best technologies have been composed of relatively rigid electronics that act like sandpaper on delicate neurons.
They also struggle to track the same neuron over a long period, because individual cells move
The Harvard team solved these problems by using a mesh of conductive polymer threads with either nanoscale electrodes
or transistors attached at their intersections. Each strand is as soft as silk and as flexible as brain tissue itself.
Nanowires that poke out can be connected to a computer to take recordings and stimulate cells. So far, the researchers have implanted meshes consisting of 16 electrical elements into two brain regions of anaesthetized mice
where they were able to both monitor and stimulate individual neurons. The mesh integrates tightly with the neural cells,
Neurons ook at this polymer network as friendly, like a scaffold he says. The next steps will be to implant larger meshes containing hundreds of devices, with different kinds of sensors,
and to record activity in mice that are awake, either by fixing their heads in place,
or by developing wireless technologies that would record from neurons as the animals moved freely.
and to add hairpin-shaped nanowire probes to the mesh to record electrical activity inside and outside cells.
says Jens Schouenborg, head of the Neuronano Research Centre at Lund University in Sweden, who has developed a gelatin-based eedlefor delivering electrodes to the brain.
But he remains sceptical of this technique: would like to see more evidence of the implant long-term compatibility with the body,
he says. Rigorous testing would be needed before such a device could be implanted in people. But, says Lieber,
it could potentially treat brain damage caused by a stroke, as well as Parkinson disease. Lieber team is funded not by the US govern ment US$4. 5-billion Brain research through advancing innovative neurotechnologies (BRAIN INITIATIVE,
launched in 2013, but the work points to the power of that effort multidisciplinary approach,
says Yuste, who was an early proponent of the BRAIN INITIATIVE. Bringing physical scientists into neuroscience
and describe what they seeut for artificial intelligence systems, that a daunting task. That because it combines two separate skills:
Scientists at the University of Toronto and the University of Montreal have developed software, modeled on brain cell networks,
Their approach builds on earlier work involving natural language processinghe ability to convert speech or text from one language to anotherr, more generally,
and sentences. t about both the combination of image information with natural language, says Richard Zemel, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto. hat what new herehe marriage of image and text.
then you can translate it into text. ut how does the software model nowwhat in the image in the first place?
and giraffe standing in a forest with trees in the background. But occasionally it stumbles.
Sometimes similar-looking objects are mistaken simply for one another sandwich wrapped in tinfoil can be misidentified as a cell phone,
or cars being assembled in a factory daunting task if the thousands of images on one hard drive haven been labeled.)
Is the model thinking? here are analogies to be made between what the model is doing and
and his colleagues will be presenting a paper on the work, how, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention, at the International Conference on Machine learning in July o
#Cuttlefish Camouflage Inspires New Shape-Shifting Materials 3-D printing is radically transforming fields ranging from jewelry-making to jet engine fabrication.
Now innovators are moving beyond the production of solid, static objects to create materials that can be transformed
Using a 3-D printer, engineers have fabricated a new soft material with a modifiable surface texture.
a Phd student at Massachusetts institute of technology who conducted this study as part of his master thesis. Cuttlefish are cephalopods with large, elongated bodies and tentacles around their mouths.
Inspired by these aquatic masters of disguise, Guttag and co-author Mary Boyce, dean of engineering at Columbia University,
they developed a 3-D printing process that uses two types of polymers: one rigid, one flexible.
The printer inserts an array of the rigid polymers into a bed of squishy material composed of the more flexible type.
its naturally smooth surface takes on a patterned texture that depends on the spacing and shapes of the embedded rigid polymers.
Shengqiang Cai, an engineer at the University of California, San diego, who was not involved with this study,
but may also provide valuable insights into the underlying mechanics of biological surface patterning. Once the material is printed,
its rigid polymers are stuck in a fixed array and cannot change positions relative to one another.
For example, by using elongated rigid polymers instead of spherical ones, scientists could create surfaces that are smooth along one direction but ridged in the opposite direction.
Some rigid polymers might yield differently textured surfaces depending on the strength of the applied force.
but further compression would cause the polymers to rotate relative to one another, creating a different topography.
Other polymers could swell or shrink relative to the soft material. In the sample Guttag and Boyce printed to physically test their code,
the rigid polymers were about a centimeter in diameter and the bed of soft material was about a meter across.
#Inflammation Factories: Before and after One of the most surprising discoveries in the field of immunology is the finding that cells build structuresalled inflammasomeso launch the process of inflammation.
Then within 24 hours or so of an infection or injury, they start to take these structures apart."
"Imagine assembling a factory in a few minutes when a product is needed and then breaking it down once the need has passed,
and you get the picture, "Wajahat Z. Mehal of Yale university writes in the June 2015 issue of Scientific American.
This unexpected insight could lead to new treatments for Alzheimer's disease, gout and a host of other ailments,
Mehal explains in the article"Inside the Inflammation Factory.""The temporary presence of inflammasomes can be seen in these photographs from Mehal's lab. In the photograph on top,
a hugely important water resource that sustains 40 million people in those states, supports 15 percent of the nation's food supply,
The severe shortages of rain and snowfall have hurt California's $46 billion agricultural industry and helped raise national awareness of the longer-term shortages that are affecting the entire Colorado river basin.
state officials the first cutback to farmers'water rights since 1977, and ordered cities and towns to cut water use by as much as 36 percent.
but some farmers are already ignoring the new rules, or challenging them in court. The drought shows no sign of letting up any time soon,
and the state's agricultural industry is suffering. A recent study by U. C. Davis researchers projected that the drought would cost California's economy $2. 7 billion in 2015 alone.
In addition to the economic cost, the drought has subtle and not-so-subtle effects on flora and fauna throughout the region.
Explosive urban growth matched with the steady planting of water-thirsty crops which use the majority of the water don't help.
Arcane laws actually encourage farmers to take even more water from the Colorado river and from California's rivers than they actually need,
and federal subsidies encourage farmers to plant some of the crops that use the most water.
As the former Arizona governor and U s. Secretary of the interior Bruce Babbitt told Propublica:""There is enough water in the West
but there are all kinds of agriculture efficiencies that have not been put into place.""While there are mixed views on
whether climate change can be blamed for California's drought, a recent National oceanic and atmospheric administration (NOAA) reportfound climate change was not the cause.
Global warming has caused excessive heat that may have worsened the drought's effects, but it isn't necessarily to blame for the lack of rain.
It's true that recent years have yielded much less rain and snow than previous times in history,
but that's just a result of"natural variance"and not necessarily because of man-made pollution.
"Yuhas made the unfortunate mistake of complaining on social media that he and his neighbors deserve more water
the fact remains that agriculture uses the most water, by far. Farming and agriculture use more than 70 percent of the water that flows from the Colorado river to the seven river basin states.
In addition to those crops, cotton is one of the thirstiest crops a farmer can grow, especially in a desert.
As it happens, many of the crops that use less water entitle farmers to fewer federal subsidies,
and so farmers don't have much of an incentive to switch crops. Though cotton production has dropped steeply in California
since 1995, California farmers have gotten $3 billion in federal subsidies to grow it. On top of subsidies,"Use it or Lose it"clauses in state water laws actually encourage farmers to flood their fields with much more water than they need
lest they lose the right to that amount of water in the future. Urban development is also a big factor.
Las vegas has grown faster than any other city in the West, its footprint doubling in the past 25 years as more and more people have moved there.
The state's"water czar,"Felicia Marcus, continues to crack down on water waste, and creative ad campaigns are finding varying degrees of success. The state has cut deliveries of water to farmers through the state and federal aqueduct systems,
and is now beginning to tackle the tough tasks of reforming water rights and curtailing some of the state's most senior users.
The federal government is also sending millions of dollars in"drought aid""and local counties are exploring how to desalinate ocean water to replenish water supplies.
Some enterprising individuals are even proposing to revive old plans to tow icebergs or haul water down from Alaska.
Some people are conscientiously conserving water in their homes in little waysy not washing their cars
or by capturing shower water from inside for their gardens outside, for instance. The drought has inspired also innovation in water conservation for restaurants, pools and lawns.
To the extent that climate change exacerbates the drought California's efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may eventually help.
In 2006 the state passed a law mandating that it buy less coal fired energy. The Los angeles Department of Water and Power is now also selling its stake in the Navajo Generating station to invest in clean energy alternatives,
though the plant (which generates more climate-warming gases than almost any other plant in the nation) will continue pumping Colorado river water to Arizona.
Will California cutbacks alleviate the larger Colorado river problem? California uses almost one-third of the entire Colorado river flow,
providing a substantial supply for both L a. and San diego. The All-American Canal moves water along the tail-end of the Colorado river near the Mexican border, nourishing one of the state's most valuable agriculture areas,
so water shortages there affect food supply everywhere. Calculations by the Pacific Institute indicate that, by eating food grown in California,
and Dairy cows and chickens and other animals eat a lot of crops, which in turn require a lot of water.
Some research has suggested that the country's meat industries create such a high demand for water-thirsty feed crops, that if every American ate meat one less day a week,
Power prices may also rise as hydroelectric plants have difficulty generating with low water flowsnd to the extent that very complicated power distribution affects a larger region,
Finally, California and the rest of the Colorado river basin amount to the world's seventh largest economy,
For more on this story, read how federal dollars are financing the water crisis in the West,
how Las vegas'water chief preached conservation while backing growth and all about the power plant that's fueling America's drought.
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