and other vegetables to follow in part to be eaten by people with kidney disease or on dialysis who cannot handle vegetables with high levels of potassium.
and earlier this month Fujitsu began selling it to a few stores and medical institutions. The company expects sales from its high-tech vegetables to reach ¥400 million ($3. 91 million) in fiscal 2016 the Journal noted o
and even if they managed to stave off crop disease (which can spread very rapidly in a hydroponic culture) they would still need backup food from home.
Two weeks ago at a conference in South africa scientists met to discuss how to contain a deadly banana disease outbreak in nearby Mozambique Africa.
The international delegation of researchers shared their own approaches to the malady hoping to arrive at some strategy to insulate Mozambique and the rest of Africa:
The future looks bleak says Altus Viljoen the South african plant pathologist who organized the conference.
Worse he says the disease's rapid spread endangers banana crops beyond Mozambique s borders.
I originally reported on the malady that s now infecting the Mozambique plantation in the August 2005 print edition of Popular Science.
I described a fungus commonly known as Panama Disease but scientifically termed Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubensis Tropical Race 4 (or Foc-TR4).
When I reported on the disease which was and remains incurable it had spread only to a few Asian nations including Taiwan and Indonesia.
One big question is how the disease actually arrived in Mozambique. At the conference I attended participants offered two theories.
the malady is so virulent that a single clump of dirt on a shoe or a tool can lead to continent-wide infection.
Philippine banana growers have been struggling with Foc-TR4 since the 1990s and the workers in Mozambique were employed by Chiquita management and then by a company called Matanuska
Another idea is that the disease was waiting in the soil all along prior to the arrival of bananas in Mozambique.
Researchers are now analyzing the strain of fungus found in Mozambique to see if it shares genetic markers with samples gathered elsewhere.
Viljoen strongly believes those tests will show that the disease came from the Philippines. Whatever the origin it is certain that the new plantation was equipped poorly to handle the fungus.
Likewise infection from common irrigation sources was one of the primary ways the Gros Michel version of Panama Disease spread in the mid-20th century.
Another likely vector for the spread of the disease was local people walking across the farmland on their way home says Viljoen.
Just five years ago Chiquita s Aguirre told the Cincinnati Enquirer We believe that Panama Disease is limited a very threat
and that Panama Disease represents a long-term danger to the industry. The disease has also recently been identified in the middle East with crops stricken in both Jordan and Oman.
Loyd also confirmed that Chiquita is now researching a replacement banana for the Cavendish. One possibility is modified a version of the fruit developed in Taiwan;
but is highly resistant to Panama Disease. The variety is currently being tested in the Philippines
which every Cavendish plant is essentially a clone) to one with multiple resistant breeds would help insulate plantations against disease
when the disease will hit Latin america which grows the bananas we consume. Mozambique brings disturbing news on that front:
The workers who set up those plantations are now back home says Randy Ploetz the Florida-based plant pathologist who first identified Foc-TR4 in the 1980s.
because they're close enough to human hearts in anatomy. Doctors also already use heart valves taken from pigs and cows in human surgeries.
It seems pig hearts are just a little too foreign for primate bodies to accept easily however.
In previous studies the hearts would trigger a massive immune response in the primates they were transplanted into.
It will be years before pig hearts are ready for human patients if they ever are.
Human patients take immunosuppressant drugs when they get organ transplants so that's not unusual.)It seems
and immune system-suppressing drugs. In an abstract the team submitted to a meeting of heart
and torso surgeons the team reports that when it tried other drug regimens their baboons died in less than a year.
Baboons who received hearts from un-genetically modified pigs rejected the hearts within a day.
but its authors presented it yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery.
In which case this is a pernicious affront to public health. Bad! Well no. There are certainly reasons to be wary of electronic cigs.
There was also a Centers for Disease Control report that concluded the number of calls to poison centers involving e-cigarette liquids containing nicotine rose from one per month in September 2010 to 215 per month in February 2014.
As for health effects he science is inconclusive. There's research suggesting nicotine whether or not you get it from tobacco is enough to cause developmental and mood problems.
We've got decades of slowly accreting research showing the damaging health effects of tobacco monitored in smokers over the course of lifetimes.
in case it does turn out to be a public health disaster. All right. In the meantime what else is up with these regulations?
Last year a study from an international group of scientists showed that the toxins in e-cigarette vapor are 9 to 450 times lower than in tobacco smoke.
The Food and Drug Administration is still determining its regulatory stance. It s sponsoring more research
a Wiffle ball a surgical snakebot and morethis article originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of Popular Science
The speed at which the goats completed the task at 10 months compared to how long it took them to learn indicates excellent long-term memory co-author Dr Elodie Briefer at ETH Zurich said in a statement.
and when you burn them you get a whole cocktail of cancer-causing stuff. Puckett estimated that just more than half of the material processed in Guiyu actually got recycled judging from the tons of plastic leaded glass and burned circuit boards discarded near waterways and in open fields.
In 2002 BAN produced a film about his trip called Exporting Harm: The High-tech Trashing of Asia.
Every day about 100 containers of toxic e-waste arrive in Hong kong alone says Jim Puckett the activist with BAN.
In 2010 The Economist honored him with one of its awards for energy and the environment (along with Steve jobs and Harald zur Housen a Nobel-winning cancer researcher).
They set fire to a fragment inhale the toxic fumes and toss it into the appropriate bin based on odor.
The upshot is that shipments of recyclables into the country must truly be recyclables not contaminants or waste.
and concrete or employ new materials like CLT could make a huge difference in the Earth s health.
and human health Waugh says. Concrete and steel require enormous amounts of energy to produce
For God's sake take care of your health. There have been few such noble labourers in the cause of Natural science as you are.
Our poor boy had the rare case of second rash and sore throat...and as if this was not enough a most serious attack of erysipelas with typhoid symptoms.
I despaired of his life; but this evening he has eaten one mouthful and I think has passed the crisis. He has lived on port wine every three-quarters of an hour day and night.
They also check the modules and the plants'leaves for contaminants which may come from the space station's environment.
#Genetic Pesticides Could Target Individual Speciesif you use a neuro-poison it kills everything Subba Reddy Palli an entomologist at the University of Kentucky who is researching the technology
The idea behind RNAI was awarded the 2006 Nobel prize in physiology/medicine but applying it to fight pests is a recent development.
at the agency s conference center in Arlington Va. There are concerns that RNAI could kill good species closely related to the target pest have health effects on humans or other unknown consquences.
New research you see has found that chemicals excreted by microbes in sloth fur had potent activity against a host of human pathogens
and even breast cancer cells and possess anti-malaria and antibacterial properties. The study found that chemicals isolated from fungi in three-toed sloths were deadly for parasites that cause malaria and Chagas disease (Plasmodium falciparum and Trypanosoma cruzi respectively.
The research was only a partial cataloguing of microbes that live in sloth fur which the scientists describe as a potential goldmine for drug discovery.
It's not surprising on the face of it that sloths harbor some interesting microscopic fur-friends: Cyanobacteria have been known to cover their coats coloring them green
It also comes as no shock that fungi create chemicals of interest to drug developers as fungi have spawned drugs from penicillin to Lovastatin.
The researchers were surprised however by the scope of the fur-fungi's antimicrobial properities. Very few chemicals have been found to have activity against Chagas disease for example
and the drugs currently used to treat it are discontinued often due to their negative side effects. A total of 20 of the chemicals isolated from these microbes were active against at least one bacterial strain
and one had an unusual pattern of bioactivity against Gram-negative bacteria that suggests a potentially new mode of action.
Which means it could one day possibly pave the way for new antibiotics. Several of the chemicals isolated from the fungi also showed strong activity against human breast cancer cells. a
#An Indigenous Malaysian Language Describes Smells As Precisely As English Describes Colorsyou often get a good idea of
what things will taste like from a restaurant menu's descriptions. But try doing the same with descriptions of perfumes in catalogs
#100 Years Of Smoking Studies In Popular Sciencefifty years ago tomorrow then-U s. Surgeon general Luther Terry held a press conference announcing that among other ills smoking caused lung cancer.
His report kicked off America's most intense and successful public health campaign to date. NPR's story about this offers a great peek into what the U s. was like at that time.
For example the story notes that the surgeon general's report was released on a Saturday (It was a Saturday then too) to minimize its impact on tobacco company stocks.
The Journal of the American Medical Association has collected some hard numbers in honor of the anniversary many from a retrospective study the journal published this week:
the number of scientific studies the U s. surgeon general's advisory committee examined before declaring that smoking caused lung cancer laryngeal cancer and chronic bronchitis17. 7 million:
A chain-smoking doctor among Terry's expert report authors was diagnosed with lung cancer within a year of the surgeon general's announcement NPR reports.
He later died of the disease. 8 million: the estimated number of tobacco-related deaths in the U s. that anti-smoking initiatives have prevented since 196419.6:
Health organizations now say there is no healthy level of smoking nor of exposure to secondhand smoke.
At the same time there are hints throughout Popular Science's archives suggesting people knew that they should try to quit that evidence was accumulating for smoking's long-term harms
In that 1910 article by a Dr. George L. Meylan of Columbia University you can see some of the early science of tobacco's health effects.
parents teachers and physicians should strive earnestly to warn youths against its use. Thanks Dr. Meylan.
Fast-forwarding to the years preceding the 1964 surgeon general's report scientists were gathering more rigorous evidence that smoking causes various illnesses including lung cancer.
Popular Science reported on some of these studies in 1958: The U s. Public health Service for example has reported that among veterans who died from lung cancer over a certain period about 10 times as many had been smokers igarette smokers s nonsmokers.
USPHS has reported also that the death rate from coronary heart disease among cigarette smokers was almost two-thirds higher than the rate for nonsmokers.
In cigarette smokers the death rate from all causes was more than half again as high as among nonsmokers.
that for most smoking is a habit not an addiction. The difference between a habit and addiction is that addicts compulsively seek out a behavior even
when they know it harms them. It's now well recognized that nicotine is addictive
The summer after the surgeon general's warning the magazine published a fascinating piece on researchers'efforts to create a safer smoke.
Cigarette addicts with few iron-willed exceptions aren't about to give up the weed it declared.
After a 20 percent plunge immediately following the lung cancer warning tobacco sales were back to normal it reported.
and Women's Hospital in Boston tells Popular Science. Then he met Pedro del Nido a cardiac surgeon at Boston Children's Hospital.
Del Nido specializes in sealing up children's heart defects literally holes in the heart that shouldn't be there.
if Karp could make a surgical glue that would work in the heart. It was a tall order:
and a team of surgeons and engineers to develop a glue that they recently tested in hearts of living rats and pigs.
In the future del Nido hopes this could become a gentler alternative to the stitching doctors rely on for many surgeries.
All the needles and the thread they themselves cause injury to the healthy tissue he says.
Paris-based Gecko Biomedical has licensed the technology and plans to bring it to market in Europe first
They found the patches stayed in place the entire time even after they gave two of the pigs an injection that raised their heart rates to about 190 beats per minute a heart rate a person might achieve
It actually works in the situation that's as close to as what we would see in the human clinical setting as possible del Nido says.
If the new glue passes Gecko Biomedical's further testing and makes its way into hospitals it could be the first such glue that works under the tough conditions in the heart.
There are some U s. Food and Drug Administration-approved surgical glues in use today but they're either not strong enough to use on the heart
or they're strong but would be toxic inside the body so they can only be used for closing cuts on the surface of the skin.
So what made Karp think of using the chemicals he did for this glue? He was inspired by spiders
Karp del Nido and their colleagues published their work today in the journal Science Translational Medicine i
The New york times published a great spoonful of sugar this weekend to help that medicine go down:
Ilagan learned that widely publicized studies purporting to show ill health effects from eating genetically modified foods have been discounted.
Evidences given by the authors suggest that M. mali was introduced probably during the breeding program on Elms against the Dutch elm disease (DED) during
#Extensive use of antibiotics in agriculture creating public health crisis, study showsciting an overabundance in the use of antibiotics by the agriculture
and aquaculture industries that poses a threat to public health economics professor Aidan Hollis has proposed a solution in the form of user fees on the nonhuman use of antibiotics.
In a newly released paper published in the New england Journal of Medicine Hollis and co-author Ziana Ahmed state that in the United states 80 per cent of the antibiotics in the country are consumed in agriculture and aquaculture for the purpose of increasing food production.
This flood of antibiotics released into the environment--sprayed on fruit trees and fed to the likes of livestock poultry and salmon among other uses--has led bacteria to evolve Hollis writes.
Mounting evidence cited in the journal shows resistant pathogens are emerging in the wake of this veritable flood of antibiotics--resulting in an increase in bacteria that is immune to available treatments.
If the problem is unchecked left this will create a health crisis on a global scale Hollis says.
Hollis suggest that the predicament could be alleviated greatly by imposing a user fee on the nonhuman uses of antibiotics similar to the way in
which logging companies pay stumpage fees and oil companies pay royalties. Modern medicine relies on antibiotics to kill off bacterial infections explains Hollis. This is incredibly important.
Without effective antibiotics any surgery--even minor ones--will become extremely risky. Cancer therapies similarly are dependent on the availability of effective antimicrobials.
Ordinary infections will kill otherwise healthy people. Bacteria that can effectively resist antibiotics will thrive Hollis adds reproducing rapidly
and spreading in various ways. It's not just the food we eat he says.
Bacteria is spread in the environment; it might wind up on a doorknob. You walk away with the bacteria on you
and you share it with the next person you come into contact with. If you become infected with resistant bacteria antibiotics won't provide any relief.
While the vast majority of antibiotic use has gone towards increasing productivity in agriculture Hollis asserts that most of these applications are of low value.
It's about increasing the efficiency of food so you can reduce the amount of grain you feed the cattle says Hollis. It's about giving antibiotics to baby chicks
because it reduces the likelihood that they're going to get sick when you cram them together in unsanitary conditions.
These methods are obviously profitable to the farmers but that doesn't mean it's generating a huge benefit.
The real value of antibiotics is saving people from dying. Everything else is trivial. While banning the use of antibiotics in food production is challenging establishing a user fee makes good sense according to Hollis. Such a practice would deter the low-value use of antibiotics with higher costs encouraging farmers to improve their animal management methods
and to adopt better substitutes for the drugs such as vaccinations. Hollis also suggests that an international treaty could ideally be imposed.
Resistant bacteria do not respect national borders he says. He adds that such a treaty might have a fair chance of attaining international compliance as governments tend to be motivated by revenue collection.
Hollis notes that in the U s a move has been made to control the nonhuman use of antibiotics with the FDA recently seeking voluntary limits on the use of antibiotics for animal growth promotion on farms.
Is the Canadian government going to take any action to control the use of antibiotics for food production purposes?
Health Canada is trying to monitor the use of antibiotics but has virtually no control over use.
#Personalized biochemical analysis of breast milk to help enhance nutrition for the smallest infantsphysicians in the Neonatal Intensive care unit in the Maxine Dunitz Children's Health Center launched a pilot study in
The study could lead to a new innovation in personalized medicine: Individually optimized nutrition for the smallest patients.
Currently the only way to determine if premature newborns are malnourished is to monitor their growth rate.
MD chair of the Cedars-Sinai Department of Pediatrics and director of the Division of Neonatology.
For example the pre-term babies who are challenged the most with weight gain are often the babies who are delayed in the development of neurological functions.
We hope this additional information could lead to more rapid weight gain and a quicker release from the hospital for these premature infants.
The above story is provided based on materials by Cedars-Sinai Medical center. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length h
The current mountain pine beetle epidemic has spread across 3. 4 million acres in Colorado since the outbreak was detected first in 1996.
As a next step the researchers plan to use their evolutionary tree to find out how plants evolved to withstand other environmental stresses in addition to freezing such as drought and heat.
and described less than 10 percent of the life forms On earth said Dr. Terry Gosliner Dean of Science and Research Collections at the Academy.
but are very difficult to collect says Dr. Dave Kavanaugh Senior Curator of Entomology at the Academy.
#Greater dietary fiber intake associated with lower risk of heart diseasein recent years a decline in both cardiovascular disease (CVD)
and coronary heart disease (CHD) has been seen in some European countries and the United states. However it still remains a significant issue accounting for almost half (48)
In an accompanying editorial Dr Robert Baron Professor of Medicine at the University of California says this study increases our confidence that benefit as reflected by reduced cardiovascular disease
and coronary heart disease events will in fact accrue with higher dietary fiber intakes. He says that teaching patients to eat whole grains is still challenging
but that encouraging the increase of fiber gradually as well as drinking adequate amounts of water are other practical recommendations.
The above story is provided based on materials by BMJ-British Medical Journal. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Cutting the number of ruminant livestock could have additional benefits for food security human health and environmental conservation involving water quality wildlife habitat
#Biologists find clues to a parasites inconsistencytoxoplasma gondii a parasite related to the one that causes malaria infects about 30 percent of the world's population.
but a small percentage develop encephalitis or ocular toxoplasmosis which can lead to blindness. MIT biologist Jeroen Saeij and his colleagues are trying to figure out why some forms of the disease are so innocuous
while others ravage their victims. In their latest paper they analyzed 29 strains of the parasite
and found that some of those endemic to South america or atypical in North america provoke very strong inflammation in the cells they infect
which can severely damage tissue. You have a lot of strains that are silent and then you have these exotic strains that can cause very severe disease says Saeij the Robert A. Swanson Career Development Associate professor of Life sciences.
The goal of the project was to see how different are these South american strains compared to strains that are really prevalent in North america and Europe.
Toxoplasma spores are found in dirt and easily infect farm animals such as cows sheep pigs and chickens.
Humans can be infected by eating undercooked meat or unwashed vegetables. Infection rates vary around the world:
In the United states it's about 10 to 15 percent while rates in Europe and Brazil are much higher around 50 to 80 percent.
The strains that circulate most commonly in North america and Europe usually cause problems only in people with suppressed immune systems such as AIDS patients
or transplant recipients although some atypical North american and European strains have been associated with severe ocular toxoplasmosis.
It can also be dangerous for a woman to become infected while pregnant as the parasite can cause birth defects.
In South america there is a much higher incidence of severe symptoms in otherwise healthy people. Scientists are still unsure
Hyperinflammatory responsein the new study which appears this week in the journal PLOS Pathogens Saeij
and colleagues infected mouse immune cells known as macrophages with each of the 29 strains they had collected representing global diversity.
Macrophages are one of the parasite's major targets and also a critical part of the host's immune response.
and host--are most active during infection. Most strikingly some South american and some atypical North american strains induced a type of immune reaction usually only seen during viral infection known as the type 1 interferon response.
This generates very strong inflammation in the host cells which the researchers suspect may be causing the severe effects produced by those strains.
Paradoxically the parasite only sets off this immune response after the host cell has killed it spilling the parasite's DNA and RNA into the cell.
It's often not the parasite that causes all the damage but it's actually the host immune response that's causing most of the damage Saeij says.
We think that maybe what's happening is these parasites come in and they trigger a hyperinflammatory host immune response that might cause damage to the eyes.
Toxoplasma is one of the few parasites that can infect any warm-blooded animal says Mariane Melo an MIT postdoc and the paper's lead author.
However we believe that different strains may have evolved to be able to maintain and reproduce optimally in a specific niche in nature
which may explain why different strains of Toxoplasma have such varying effects in different organisms.
She notes that a strain adapted to long-term survival in rats may cause a fatal infection in mice
or vice versa because it might modulate host immune responses too much or not enough in hosts it is adapted not optimally to.
which includes gene expression profiles for all 29 strains into a publicly available database for other researchers to use
We hope that other people will now start studying more of these South american strains. Story Source:
A new article published today in the Canadian Journal of Animal Science reviews current research into a promising alternative to control the disease.
According to the paper the sheep industry has become dependent on drugs to control these parasites. Over time these drugs are less effective as helminths become resistant to the drugs.
Therefore there is pressure on the industry to find alternate strategies. One such strategy is genetic selection.
and a breeding program that aims to pass on this resistance trait could help to control the disease
and ultimately limit production losses attributed to helminth infection. A key advantage to applying genetic selection rather than chemicals to get rid of the worms is that it is permanent
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