which included billions of dollars for science, and also charged the OSTP with improving public access to research (see Into the open).
when thousands petitioned the White house to require free access to journal articles arising from US taxpayer-funded research.
a publisher based in College Park, Maryland. Source: M. Laakso & B c. Bj#rk BMC Med. 10,124 (2012) It will probably be a year
But Dylla suggests that the full text of papers could reside on publishers websites, with agencies just providing links.
which they see as deflecting attention from their own web pages. The embargo time before papers are free could vary by discipline and journal
a biologist and open-access advocate at the University of California, Berkeley, says that he is disappointed."
which work is immediately free to read. The UK funding agencies plan to finance this gold open-access route by diverting some 1%of the national research budget
and requiring that authors or their institutions use it to pay publishers up-front to make work public.
researchers in the United states and the rest of Europe are obliged not to use science funds to make their work free immediately i
Full-term babies#those born after 37 weeks'gestation#display remarkable linguistic sophistication soon after they are born:
and what is due to learning immediately after birth? asks neuroscientist Fabrice Wallois of the University of Picardy Jules Verne in Amiens, France.#
#To answer that, Wallois and his team needed to peek at neural processes already taking place before birth.
the researchers played soft voices to premature babies while they were asleep in their incubators a few days after birth,
The work could also lead to better techniques caring for the most vulnerable brains, Wallois adds,
including premature babies. The team's results appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
says Janet Werker, a developmental psychologist at the University of British columbia in Vancouver, Canada. They are,
"It is possible that the experience of birth triggers a set of processes that prime the brain of a premature infant to respond to language in ways that a same-aged fetus will not
#Tagged seals help find missing piece in global climate puzzle By tracking the voyages of elephant seals off Antarctica,
and with the help of satellite imaging and undersea sensors, researchers have discovered a long-elusive source for the deep ocean streams of cold water that help to regulate the Earth's climate.
In particular, water samples from an area called the Weddell gyre contain atmospheric pollutants known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCS),
Now, Kay Ohshima, a physical oceanographer at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, and his colleagues have traced that water to a fourth AABW source,
the researchers used satellite sensors to hunt for polynya regions where ice formed particularly rapidly.
When satellite data suggested that Cape Darnley might be a candidate, the researchers moored instruments on the seabed,
In addition, they relied on data from elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) tagged with instruments that monitor ocean conditions."
The new finding fills a gap in researchers understanding of the Southern ocean s role in global climate,
the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet and changes in sea level, says Richard Alley, a geophysicist at Pennsylvania State university in University Park,
the resulting changes in cold-water circulation could have important effects on global climate, letting the ocean depths warm
#Stealth nanoparticles sneak past immune system s defences Small man-made peptides can help to sneak drug-bearing nanobeads past the ever-vigilant immune system,
Although scientists are developing nanoparticles that help to deliver drugs to the right place, all therapeutic molecules face a deadly foe#the immune system.
Its macrophages are designed to spot any intruding molecules in the blood and destroy them in a process called phagocytosis.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia have now found a way to stop macrophages from destroying drug-bearing nanoparticles.
Biophysicist Dennis Discher, who led the work, says that he was inspired when he saw another group's work describing the structure of CD47."
"I saw a minimal part of CD47 we could take out and make, he says. This was the part of CD47 that attaches to a macrophage receptor protein,
The work of Discher and his team is published today in Science1. Using computer simulations to make sure that the CD47 fragment was folded correctly
and was stable, the group designed and made a 21-amino-acid peptide based on the fragment.
They then stuck the peptide to commercially available polystyrene nanobeads. The beads also carried a dye
After half an hour, the mouse blood had four times as many beads with the peptide fragment than the other bead,
fluorescent nanobeads accumulated in the tumours. Nanoparticles tend to accumulate in tumours because of the tumour s haphazard structure and leaky blood vessels.
The nanoparticles spill through these blood vessels and get stuck in the tumour. Buoyed by the evidence that the peptide-carrying nanobeads were circulating in the blood
Discher and his team also tagged their nanobeads with the anticancer drug paclitaxel. They saw that their peptide-carrying system shrank tumours just as well as the standard paclitaxel carrier, Cremophor,
but without that carrier's toxic side effects. Neil Barclay of the University of Oxford, UK, was part of the team that worked out the CD47 structure that inspired Discher s work2."
"It s neat, he says of Discher s research.""It s a new way of trying to get the immune system to prevent phagocytosis of drugs or particles.
Discher hopes that the system can be improved with custom-made nanobeads, rather than being limited to the off-the-shelf ones he and his team used."
"We want to make this accessible and reproducible, he says a
#Moon-size exoplanet circling sun-like star smallest yet A newfound world called Kepler 37 b could easily blend in to the long and growing list of known extrasolar planets,
given its nondescript name. But the new addition to the catalogue of 800-plus exoplanets stands out in at least one major respect#it is far smaller than any planet yet discovered outside of our solar system.
The researchers used NASA s Kepler space telescope to identify the three planets orbiting Kepler 37, a star some 200 light-years away that is somewhat smaller than the sun. The spacecraft monitors more than 150,000 stars in the Milky way
Planets smaller than Earth block relatively small amounts of starlight which limits astronomers ability to detect them with Kepler.
says Greg Laughlin, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa cruz, who did not contribute to the new study.
and this is a side dividend to the main mission, is that the galactic planetary census is a lot different than we had believed from looking at our own planetary system,
Barclay and his colleagues used computer modeling to identify potential false positives and then rule them out with additional observations from the ground.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Thursday approved the first retinal implant for use in the United states. The FDA s green light for Second sight s Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System gives hope to those blinded
by a rare genetic eye condition called advanced retinitis pigmentosa, which damages the light-sensitive cells that line the retina.
For Second sight, FDA approval follows more than 20 years of development, two clinical trials and more than $200 million in funding#half from the National Eye Institute, the Department of energy and the National Science Foundation
and the rest from private investors. The Argus II has been approved for use in Europe since 2011 and implanted in 30 clinical-trial patients since 2007.
The FDA s Ophthalmic Devices Advisory Panel in September 2012 voted unanimously to recommend approval.
The Argus II includes a small video camera, a transmitter mounted on a pair of eyeglasses, a video processing unit and a 60-electrode implanted retinal prosthesis that replaces the function of degenerated cells in the retina,
the membrane lining the inside of the eye. Although it does not fully restore vision,
this setup can improve a patient s ability to perceive images and movement, using the video processing unit to transform images from the video camera into electronic data that is wirelessly transmitted to the retinal prosthesis.
Retinitis pigmentosa#which affects about one in 4, 000 people in the US and about 1. 5 million people worldwide#kills the retina s photoreceptors,
the rod and cone cells that convert light into electrical signals transmitted via the optic nerve to the brain s visual cortex for processing.
Second sight plans to adapt its technology to someday assist people afflicted with age-related macular degeneration, a similar but more common disease.
cultivate a network of surgeons who can implant the device and recruit hospitals to offer it.
The Argus II is not the only retinal implant under development. Retina Implant AG takes a slightly different approach by making a prosthetic inserted beneath a portion of the retina.
The company s technology is a three-by three-millimeter microelectronic chip (0. 1-millimeter thick) containing about 1, 500 light-sensitive photodiodes,
amplifiers and electrodes surgically inserted beneath the fovea (which contains the cone cells) in the retina s macula region.
The fovea enables the clarity of vision that people rely on to read watch TV and drive.
The chip helps generate at least partial vision by stimulating intact nerve cells in the retina. The nerve impulses from these cells are led then via the optic nerve to the visual cortex where they create impressions of sight.
The chip s power source is positioned under the skin behind the ear and connected via a thin cable#no glasses or camera required.
In May the company announced the first UK patients participating its latest trial had received successfully implants.
To date surgeons have implanted Retina Implant prosthetics in 36 patients through two clinical trials over six years.
Stanford university researchers are in the early stages of developing self-powered retinal implants where each pixel in the device is fitted with silicon photodiodes.
These sensors detect light, and control the output of a pulsed electrical current. Patients would wear goggles that emit near-infrared pulses that transmit both power and data directly to the photodiodes.
Other retinal prosthesis are powered by inductive coils that, along with other components, must be implanted surgically in the patient s head.
The researchers reported on the plausibility of their design in the May 2012 issue of Nature Photonics,
describing in vitro electrical stimulation of healthy and degenerate rat retina by photodiodes powered by near-infrared light.
Weill Cornell Medical College researchers in New york city are taking retinal prosthetics in a different direction,
having deciphered the neural codes that mouse and monkey retinas use to turn light patterns into patterns of electrical pulses that their brains translate into meaningful images.
The chip converts images that come into the eye into streams of electrical impulses, and the mini-projector then converts the electrical impulses into light impulses that are sent to the brain.
Rather than increasing the number of electrodes placed in an eye to capture more information
this work focuses on the quality of the artificial signals themselves so as to improve their ability to carry impulses to the brain t
#How to turn living cells into computers Synthetic biologists have developed DNA modules that perform logic operations in living cells.
Synthetic biology seeks to bring concepts from electronic engineering to cell biology, treating gene functions as components in a circuit.
To that end, researchers at the Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT) in Cambridge have devised a set of simple genetic modules that respond to inputs much like the Boolean logic gates used in computers."
a synthetic biologist at Boston University in Massachusetts who was involved not in the study. Collins developed the genetic toggle switch that helped to kick-start the field of synthetic biology more than a decade ago2.
A wide range of computational circuits for cells have been developed since, including a simple counter that Collins
a synthetic biologist at MIT who led the latest research.""We wanted to show you can assemble a bunch of simple parts in a very easy fashion to give you many types of logical functions.
He and his colleagues devised 16 plasmids#one for#each of the binary logic functions allowable in computation.
although recombinases have been used similarly in the past#to write data into a DNA memory, for example#the latest work takes the idea a step further by making the DNA part of the computation itself."
"If the DNA that you alter is a regulatory element, like a promoter sequence or a terminator, then that gives you the ability to control something inside the cell.
Christopher Voigt, a synthetic biologist also at MIT, calls the artificial modules"a very digital and permanent way to store information in DNA.
if the cells had encountered two environments and in what order. Voigt says that there is another advantage to this system."
#which would be important for a biologist wanting to record key moments in a cell s ancestry.
Lu says that the approach could also be useful in biotechnology. Using simple forms of these addressable switches,
#When Google got flu wrong When influenza hit early and hard in the United states this year,
it quietly claimed an unacknowledged victim: one of the cutting-edge techniques being used to monitor the outbreak.
A comparison with traditional surveillance data showed that Google Flu Trends, which estimates prevalence from flu-related Internet searches,
had overestimated drastically peak flu levels. The glitch is no more than a temporary setback for a promising strategy,
experts say, and Google is sure to refine its algorithms. But as flu-tracking techniques based on mining of web data
and on social media proliferate, the episode is a reminder that they will complement, but not substitute for, traditional epidemiological surveillance networks."
"It is hard to think today that one can provide disease surveillance without existing systems, says Alain-Jacques Valleron, an epidemiologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris,
and founder of France s Sentinelles monitoring network.""The new systems depend too much on old existing ones to be able to live without them,
he adds. This year s US flu season started around November and seems to have peaked just after Christmas,
making it the earliest flu season since 2003. It is also causing more serious illness and deaths than usual, particularly among the elderly,
because, just as in 2003, the predominant strain this year is H3n2###the most virulent of the three main seasonal flu strains.
Traditional flu monitoring depends in part on national networks of physicians who report cases of patients with influenza-like illness (ILI)##a diffuse set of symptoms
including high fever, that is used as a proxy for flu. That estimate is refined then by testing a subset of people with these symptoms to determine how many have flu and not some other infection.
With its creation of the Sentinelles network in 1984, France was the first country to computerize its surveillance.
Many countries have developed since similar networks###the US system, overseen by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta,
Georgia, includes some 2, 700 health-care centres that record about 30#million patient visits annually.
But the near-global coverage of the Internet and burgeoning social media platforms such as Twitter have raised hopes that these technologies could open the way to easier
The mother of these new systems is launched Google s in 2008. Based on research by Google and the CDC, it relies on data mining records of flu-related search terms entered in Google s search engine,
combined with computer modelling. Its estimates have matched almost exactly the CDC s own surveillance data over time
###and it delivers them several days faster than the CDC can. The system has since been rolled out to 29 countries worldwide,
and has been extended to include surveillance for a second disease, dengue. Sources: Google Flu Trends (www. google. org/flutrends;
CDC; Flu Near Yougoogle Flu Trends has continued to perform remarkably well, and researchers in many countries have confirmed that its ILI estimates are accurate.
But the latest US flu season seems to have confounded its algorithms. Its estimate for the Christmas national peak of flu is almost double the CDC s (see Fever peaks),
and some of its state data show even larger discrepancies. It is not the first time that a flu season has tripped Google up.
In 2009, Flu Trends had to tweak its algorithms after its models badly underestimated ILI in the United states at the start of the H1n1 (swine flu) pandemic###a glitch attributed to changes in people s search behaviour as a result of the exceptional nature of the pandemic (S. Cook et al.
PLOS ONE 6, e23610; 2011). ) Google would not comment on thisyear s difficulties. But several researchers suggest that the problems may be due to widespread media coverage of this year s severe US flu season,
including the declaration of a public-health emergency by New york state last month. The press reports may have triggered many flu-related searches by people who were not ill.
Few doubt that Google Flu will bounce back after its models are refined, however.""You need to be constantly adapting these models,
they don t work in a vacuum, says John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical school in Boston, Massachusetts."
"You need to recalibrate them every year. Brownstein is one of many researchers trying to harness the power of the web to establish sentinel networks made up not of physicians,
but of ordinary citizens who volunteer to report when they or someone in their family are experiencing symptoms of ILI.
Flu Near You, a system run by the Healthmap initiative co-founded by Brownstein at Boston Children s Hospital,
was launched in 2011 and now has 46,000 participants, covering 70,000 people. SLIDESHOW France's Sentinelles'network of doctors reporting cases of influenza-like illness has produced a clear picture of how the 2012-13#flu season has evolved.
Sentinelles UMR-S 707 Inserm, UPMCSENTINELLES, UMR-S 707 Inserm, UPMCSENTINELLES, UMR-S 707 Inserm, UPMCSENTINELLES, UMR-S 707 Inserm, UPMCSENTINELLES
#Computer program roots out ancestors of modern tongues In Fiji, a star is a kalokalo. For the Pazeh people of Taiwan, it is mintol,
An algorithm devised by researchers in Canada and California now offers an answer#in this case, bituqen.
Statistician Alexandre Bouchard-C# t#of the University of British columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and his co-workers say that by making the reconstruction of ancestral languages much simpler,
but the authors say that earlier algorithms tended to be rather intractable and prescriptive. Bouchard-C# t#and colleagues'method can factor in a large number of languages to improve the quality of reconstruction,
and it uses rules that handle possible sound changes in flexible, probabilistic ways. The program requires researchers to input a list of words in each language, together with their meanings,
Linguists routinely construct such trees using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology. The algorithm can automatically identify cognate words (ones with the same root) in the languages.
It then applies rules known to govern sound changes to deduce the probable root of each set of cognates.
Bouchard-C# t#and his colleagues found that their predictions matched those of the manual method in about 85%of cases (including bituqen."
admits Bouchard-C# t#."It looks as though this method could be a very useful laboursaving device,
says linguist Don Ringe of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. But he cautions that methods that are"correct
Bouchard-C# t#and his colleagues used the method to test a hypothesis about language evolution first proposed in 1955 (ref. 2),
but it emerged clearly from the data set of 637 languages. This functional load'hypothesis had been viewed with some scepticism,
#Small-molecule drug drives cancer cells to suicide Cancer researchers have pinned down a molecule that can kick-start the body s own tumour-destroying systems,
The molecule, TIC10, activates the gene for a protein called TRAIL (tumour-necrosis-factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand),
which has long been a target for cancer researchers looking for drugs that would avoid the debilitating effects of conventional therapies."
so boosting this will not be as toxic as chemotherapy, says Wafik El-Deiry, an oncologist at Pennsylvania State university in Hershey and lead author of the study,
which is published today in Science Translational Medicine1. Experiments showed that TIC10 had potent effects against a variety of tumours,
Mice with glioblastomas that were treated with TIC10 in combination with bevacizumab#a drug used against diseases including brain tumours
which apoptosis#or cell death#is induced in cancer cells immediately next to healthy ones. Healthy cells are stimulated also to increase the amount of TRAIL receptors on their cell surface.
This is by no means the only mechanism thought to trigger cell death in cancer. In particular, cancer researchers have been developing a number of drugs,
including TRAIL-based therapeutics, that work by activating the cellular messenger tumour protein 53 (p53).
But p53-based methods are not always effective, says El-Deiry. Most tumours have dysfunctional p53,
so in order to develop new therapeutics for cancer, one needs them to be effective in tumours with mutated p53,
he explains. His team's approach bypasses p53 entirely. Although the study was limited to mice,
The potential for TRAIL to usher in a new age in cancer therapy was identified first in the mid-1990s3.
although early clinical trials for TRAIL-based therapies showed little toxicity, they were not very successful at treating cancer,
says Andrew Thorburn, an oncologist at the University of Colorado Denver, who co-authored a review on the subject last year4."
"All the large clinical trials found no significant survival benefit to adding TRAIL-based therapeutics to standard treatments, he ads.
Many large biomedical research groups have shelved their TRAIL-based drugs L
#Europe bets on drug discovery Two sites shuttered by the pharmaceutical giant Merck, one in Scotland and one in The netherlands, will soon be humming again with the work of drug discovery.
But the hum will not be business as usual. It will be the sound of a public-private consortium placing a high-stakes wager:
a nearly##200-million (US$271-million) bet that it can boost a languishing pharmaceutical sector by fusing academic innovation with industrial-scale screening,
using robots to test chemicals for biological activity.""If it really works, it might provide a future model to operate early drug discovery,
says J#rg H#ser, a champion of the idea who works at Bayer Healthcare in Wuppertal, Germany.
The scheme, announced on 7 february, is sponsored by the Europe s Innovative Medicine Initiative. The European commission s Seventh Framework Programme is contributing##80#million to the venture,
with the remaining##116#million coming from in kind contributions from industry partners and regional governments.
Called the European Lead Factory, the consortium consists of 30 academic and corporate partners, and aims to fill company pipelines with promising drug candidates.
The current dearth of candidates H#ser believes, is due to gaps in the range of biological targets that industry is pursuing
and in the libraries of compounds screened for activity against those targets. To fill those gaps,
the pharmaceutical partners will be able to use the library#including molecules from their competitors#in their own drug screens.
Any academic group or company can also propose assays to test molecules in the library for biological activity.
Lead-factory scientists will run these assays free of charge and confirm any promising results, working mainly in laboratory space closed by Merck in 2011 at Oss in The netherlands.
Follow-up work will be done at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Results will be provided confidentially to the groups that proposed the assays
so that they can pursue further work and publications. The hope is that members will build on the results to improve the molecules biological properties
and to gather evidence, such as tumour shrinkage, that the compounds may work as drugs. These molecules can then be licensed back to companies for further development.
The scheme hopes to become self-sustaining by requiring milestone payments as drugs move from laboratory to clinic and from additional partnerships and screening services."
"I think this is completely new, says Ton Rijnders, co-director of the initiative and scientific director of the nonprofit research enabler Top Institute Pharma in Leiden, The netherlands.
but to identify biological pathways that might make good drug targets. The European initiative, by contrast, aims to propel drug development.
Factory partners will get first right of refusal in licensing deals. Such restrictions are essential
say experts.""To justify the subsequent investments you have to make in hit-to-drug lead programmes,
it is crucial that you can patent the results and protect them, says H#ser.
the real value is created in subsequent work.""I ve never worried about the notion that the MLP was a public collection,
whose work at the Scripps Research Institute Molecular Screening Center in La jolla, California, led to a compound now in clinical trials for multiple sclerosis.
Aled Edwards leads the Structural genomics Consortium at the University of Toronto, Canada, in which some drug companies contribute both chemical analysis and screening support,
but all data are publicly available. Keeping data open and focusing on specific drug mechanisms makes his consortium s approach much simpler."
"Intellectual-property deals, assays coming from everywhere, multi-institutional agreements. Wow, that s hard, he says."
"But they are very smart people who have done this before. So if anyone can do it,
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