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Graphic processing units based brain research helps robot perform tasks

Written By Unknown on Senin, 29 April 2013 | 22.10

PUNE: Two researchers in Japan have used graphic processing units(GPUs) and the CUDA parallel programming model to create a 100,000 neuron simulation of the human cerebellum, one of the largest simulations of its kind in the world. Interestingly, they have put their model to the test by applying this knowledge to teach a robot to learn to hit a ball.

Tadashi Yamazakiat the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, and Jun Igarashi at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Okinawa, recently issued a paper detailing how they used NVIDIA GPUs to build a large-scale network model of the human cerebellum.

The two believe that modelling the cerebellum could help robots move around more easily and learn to respond autonomously to their environments, a problem that has proven to be a daunting problem for conventional approaches. And in turn, they hope to shed more light on how cerebellum motor control works.

Their work is part of a subfield of robotics called "biomimetic" robotics that aims to help robots deal with ever-changing environments by mimicking some of the ways that humans solve these problems.

According to Igarashi, their work involved modeling realistic neural brain function to enable the robot to interact with its environment, which is no easy task. "Our physical actions change the environment, which changes the sensory input to human brain. The brain then processes this changed sensory information and determines what action to take. It is called the 'sensorimotor loop'" Igarashi explains. "The brain must continue to choose appropriate actions on the basis of gradually-changing sensory information."

One of the biggest challenges in modeling neural brain function is simulation speed. Using a CPU alone it took 98 seconds of compute time to figure out how to respond to a stimulus lasting just one second. Using GPUs resulted in a 100x speedup, giving the GPU-based system the speed needed to handle real world tasks.

To show their system in action, the researchers demonstrated their robotic system learning - in real time - how to hit a small plastic ball thrown by a toy pitching machine with a round plastic racket.


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Drug-resistant malaria parasite discovered

LONDON: Scientists have discovered three new drug-resistant strains of the malaria parasite in Cambodia, which they say have spread to other parts of Asia as well.

The parasites are genetically different from other strains around the world and are able to withstand treatment by artemisinin - a front-line drug against malaria.

Reports of drug resistance of the parasites in western Cambodia first emerged in 2008. The problem has since spread to other parts of South East Asia, 'BBC News' reported.

"All the most effective drugs that we have had in the last few decades have been one by one rendered useless by the remarkable ability of this parasite to mutate and develop resistance," Dr Olivo Miotto from the University of Oxford and Mahidol University in Thailand, said.

"Artemisinin right now works very well. It is the best weapon we have against the disease, and we need to keep it," Miotto, the lead author of the study, said.

Scientists do not understand why, but since the 1950s parasites there have developed a resistance to a succession of malaria drugs.

They are worried the same will happen with artemisinin drug as well. This drug is used widely around the world against the mosquito-borne disease and can treat an infection in a few days when it is used in combination with other drugs.

Scientists sequenced the genomes of 800 malaria-causing parasites (Plasmodium falciparum) collected from around the world in order to investigate.

"When we compared the DNA of the parasites in Cambodia, they seem to have formed some new populations that we have not really seen elsewhere," Miotto said.

The international team found three distinct groups of drug-resistant parasites present in the area.

Researchers said they did not yet understand what genetic mutations had occurred that enabled the parasites to withstand artemisinin treatment, the report said.

However, they said that understanding their genetic fingerprint would help them to quickly spot and track these strains if they spread further.

"It could be a tool for detecting in real time the emergence of drug resistance," Miotto said.

The study was published in the journal Nature Genetics.


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Drug-resistant malaria parasite discovered

LONDON: Scientists have discovered three new drug-resistant strains of the malaria parasite in Cambodia, which they say have spread to other parts of Asia as well.

The parasites are genetically different from other strains around the world and are able to withstand treatment by artemisinin - a front-line drug against malaria.

Reports of drug resistance of the parasites in western Cambodia first emerged in 2008. The problem has since spread to other parts of South East Asia, 'BBC News' reported.

"All the most effective drugs that we have had in the last few decades have been one by one rendered useless by the remarkable ability of this parasite to mutate and develop resistance," Dr Olivo Miotto from the University of Oxford and Mahidol University in Thailand, said.

"Artemisinin right now works very well. It is the best weapon we have against the disease, and we need to keep it," Miotto, the lead author of the study, said.

Scientists do not understand why, but since the 1950s parasites there have developed a resistance to a succession of malaria drugs.

They are worried the same will happen with artemisinin drug as well. This drug is used widely around the world against the mosquito-borne disease and can treat an infection in a few days when it is used in combination with other drugs.

Scientists sequenced the genomes of 800 malaria-causing parasites (Plasmodium falciparum) collected from around the world in order to investigate.

"When we compared the DNA of the parasites in Cambodia, they seem to have formed some new populations that we have not really seen elsewhere," Miotto said.

The international team found three distinct groups of drug-resistant parasites present in the area.

Researchers said they did not yet understand what genetic mutations had occurred that enabled the parasites to withstand artemisinin treatment, the report said.

However, they said that understanding their genetic fingerprint would help them to quickly spot and track these strains if they spread further.

"It could be a tool for detecting in real time the emergence of drug resistance," Miotto said.

The study was published in the journal Nature Genetics.


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It's official: Cellphone use can be contagious

Written By Unknown on Sabtu, 27 April 2013 | 22.10

LONDON: Using a cellphone is contagious, according to a new study which found that a person is twice as likely to talk on a mobile, or check for messages, if a companion did the same. Females are more likely to use their cellphones than men because it was more 'integrated into the daily lives of women', researchers said.

"What we found most interesting was just how often people were using their mobile phones. Every person we observed used his/her phone at least once while one woman was on hers about half of the time," said Daniel Kruger, the study's co-author from the University of Michigan.

"Individuals may see others checking their incoming messages and be prompted to check their own," Kruger said. In the study, almost two dozen students in two groups, were observed "unobtrusively", who were seen socializing near an unnamed university campus, The Daily Telegraph reported. Researchers recorded every moment a person used their mobile phone around campus between January and April last year.

Kruger said the study found when one of the group used their mobile phone, their companions were more likely to follow shortly after.


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New therapy to end insulin jabs for diabetics

LONDON: Daily insulin shots for diabetics may soon be passe. Scientists have found a solution to control blood sugar and in fact cure diabetes from within the human body. Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) scientists have discovered a hormone, betatrophin, that increases production of insulin-secreting pancreatic cells 30 times the normal rate.

This has raised hopes that the hormone, secreted by liver and fat cells, will not only drastically improve control of blood sugar levels but actually cure patients suffering from diabetes.

Experts say they have never seen any treatment that causes such an enormous leap in beta cell replication. Publishing their findings in medical journal Cell, scientists said the new beta cells only produce insulin when called for by the body.

This offers the potential for the natural regulation of insulin and a great reduction in the complications associated with diabetes, the leading medical cause of amputations and non-genetic loss of vision.

Lead HSCI researcher Doug Melton carried out the study in mice but said the gene exists in humans too.

"Our idea here is relatively simple. We would provide this hormone, the type 2 diabetic will make more of their own insulin-producing cells, and this will slow down, if not stop, the progression of their diabetes," said Melton

Melton sees betatrophin primarily as a treatment for type 2 diabetes, but believes it might play a role in the treatment of type 1 diabetes as well, perhaps boosting the number of beta cells and slowing the progression of that autoimmune disease when it's first diagnosed.

"We've done the work in mice," Melton said. "But of course we're not interested in curing mice of diabetes, and we now know the gene is a human gene. We've cloned the human gene and, moreover, we know that the hormone exists in human plasma; betatrophin definitely exists in humans."

The team of researchers, which also includes postdoctoral fellow Peng Yi, cautioned that much work remains to be done before it could be used as a treatment in humans.

Diabetes is one of India's biggest health challenges. By 2030, India's diabetes burden is expected to cross the 100 million mark, against 87 million estimated earlier.


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Having fewer kids helping women live longer, grow taller & slimmer

LONDON: Women are becoming taller and slimmer as they are living longer and are having fewer kids due to improved health-care and nutrition, a new study claims.

A Durham University study of people living in rural Gambia shows that the modern-day "demographic transition" towards living longer and having fewer children may also lead women to be taller and slimmer. The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, may have relevance around the globe. Researchers show that changes in mortality and fertility rates in Gambia, likely related to improvements in medical care since a clinic opened there in 1974, have changed the way that natural selection acts on body size.

For the study, data was collected over a 55-year period (1956-2010) by the UK Medical Research Council on thousands of women from two rural villages in the West Kiang district of Gambia.

Over the time period, those communities experienced significant demographic shifts — from high mortality and fertility rates to rapidly declining ones. The researchers also had data on the height and weight of the women. Their analysis shows that the demographic transition influenced directional selection on women's height and body mass index (BMI). Selection initially favoured short women with high BMI but shifted over time to favour tall women with low BMI. "This is a reminder that declines in mortality rates do not necessarily mean evolution stops, but that it changes," said Ian Rickard, prof of anthropology.


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Space debris problem now urgent: Scientists

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 26 April 2013 | 22.10

PARIS: Governments must start working urgently to remove orbital debris, which could become a catastrophic problem for satellites a few decades from now, a space science conference heard on Thursday.

Since 1978, the total of junk items whizzing around the planet has tripled, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the European Space Agency's Space Debris Office.

"There is a wide and strong expert consensus on the pressing need to act now to begin debris removal activities," he said in an ESA press release at the end of a four-day conference in Darmstadt, Germany.

"Our understanding of the growing space debris problem can be compared with our understanding of the need to address Earth's changing climate some 20 years ago," he said.

According to a count by ESA and NASA, there are more than 23,000 items in orbit that are bigger than 10 centimetres (four inches) across, and hundreds of thousands of items between one and 10 cms (0.4 to four inches) across.

Even though these items are relatively small and there is a lot of room in orbit, any collision could be calamitous because of the high level of kinetic energy.

Debris travels on average at 25,000 kilometres (15,600 miles) per hour, so even an object of small mass has the potential to cripple a satellite or punch a hole in the International Space Station (ISS).

The junk results mainly from disused rocket stages, failed launches and abandoned or broken-down satellites, the result of 55 years of space exploration.

These large objects eventually collide, creating more debris which in turn smashes together -- a dangerous cascade cycle known as the Kessler Syndrome.

A major debris field was caused in 2007 when China tested an anti-satellite weapon on an old weather satellite, triggering an international outcry.

At the current rate of rocket launches, the collision risk could eventually rise by a factor of 25.

The Darmstadt conference brought together more than 350 experts from Europe, North America and Asia, including specialists from national space agencies and industry.

They heard proposals aimed at removing the largest chunks of debris out of orbit at the rate of five to 10 items per year.

These pieces could be nudged into a death plunge in the atmosphere by netting or harpooning them from a robot vessel or bombarded by an ion cannon to deflect them onto a new course.

Another idea is to attach a "solar sail" to large items of debris that would be gently driven by the solar wind -- the particles blasted out by the Sun.


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Earth's core 1000 degrees hotter than thought

LONDON: The temperature near the Earth's centre is 6000 degrees celsius, 1000 degrees hotter than last reported 20 years ago, scientists have found.

These measurements confirm geophysical models that the temperature difference between the solid core and the mantle above, must be at least 1500 degrees to explain why the Earth has a magnetic field.

The study was led by Agnes Dewaele from the French national technological research organisation CEA, and members of the French National Center for Scientific Research CNRS and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility ESRF in Grenoble.

The Earth's core consists mainly of a sphere of liquid iron at temperatures above 4000 degrees and pressures of more than 1.3 million atmospheres. Under these conditions, iron is as liquid as the water in the oceans.

The temperature difference between the mantle and the core is the main driver of large-scale thermal movements, which together with the Earth's rotation, act like a dynamo generating the Earth's magnetic field.

To generate an accurate picture of the temperature profile within the Earth's centre, scientists looked at the melting point of iron at different pressures in the laboratory, using a diamond anvil cell to compress speck-sized samples to pressures of several million atmospheres, and powerful laser beams to heat them to 4000 or even 5000 degrees Celsius.

"We have developed a new technique where an intense beam of X-rays from the synchrotron can probe a sample and deduce whether it is solid, liquid or partially molten within as little as a second, using a process known diffraction," said Mohamed Mezouar from the ESRF.

"And this is short enough to keep temperature and pressure constant, and at the same time avoid any chemical reactions," said Mezouar in the study published in journal Science.

The scientists determined experimentally the melting point of iron up to 4800 degrees Celsius and 2.2 million atmospheres pressure.

They then used an extrapolation method to determine that at 3.3 million atmospheres, the pressure at the border between liquid and solid core, the temperature would be 6000 degrees.


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Nasa observes meteors colliding with Saturn's rings

WASHINGTON: The first direct evidence of small meteors breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn's rings has been found by Nasa's Cassini spacecraft.

These observations make Saturn's rings the only location besides Earth, the Moon and Jupiter where scientists and amateur astronomers have been able to observe impacts as they occur, Nasa said.

Studying the impact rate of meteoroids from outside the Saturnian system helps scientists understand how different planet systems in our solar system formed.

The solar system is full of small, speeding objects. These objects frequently pummel planetary bodies. The meteoroids at Saturn are estimated to range from about one centimeter to several meters in size.

It took scientists years to distinguish tracks left by nine meteoroids in 2005, 2009 and 2012.

Results from Cassini have already shown Saturn's rings act as very effective detectors of many kinds of surrounding phenomena, including the interior structure of the planet and the orbits of its moons.

For example, a subtle but extensive corrugation that ripples 19,000 kilometres across the innermost rings tells of a very large meteoroid impact in 1983.

"These new results imply the current-day impact rates for small particles at Saturn are about the same as those at Earth - two very different neighbourhoods in our solar system - and this is exciting to see," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

"It took Saturn's rings acting like a giant meteoroid detector - 100 times the surface area of the Earth - and Cassini's long-term tour of the Saturn system to address this question," Spilker said.

The Saturnian equinox in summer 2009 was an especially good time to see the debris left by meteoroid impacts. The very shallow Sun angle on the rings caused the clouds of debris to look bright against the darkened rings in pictures from Cassini's imaging science subsystem.

"We knew these little impacts were constantly occurring, but we didn't know how big or how frequent they might be, and we didn't necessarily expect them to take the form of spectacular shearing clouds," said Matt Tiscareno, lead author of the study.

"The sunlight shining edge-on to the rings at the Saturnian equinox acted like an anti-cloaking device, so these usually invisible features became plain to see," he said.


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How you sneeze may hold clues to your personality

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 25 April 2013 | 22.10

WASHINGTON: Are you a snorter or a squeaker? The way you sneeze can reveal a lot about your personality, a new US study suggests. The way we sneeze reflects certain components of our personality, said Dr Alan Hirsch, a neurologist, psychiatrist and founder of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago.

According to Hirsch, "Sneezes are like laughter. Some (laughs) are loud, some are soft. And its similar with sneezing. It will often be the same from youth onward in terms of what it sounds like."

He added, "It's more of a psychological thing and represents the underlying personality or character structure," he said.

A person who is demonstrative and outgoing, for instance, would most likely have a loud explosive sneeze, whereas someone who's shy might try to withhold their sneezes, resulting in more of a Minnie Mouse-type expulsion. "In general, sneezing is an involuntary phenomenon, part of the body's mechanism of defence, a way of clearing out bacteria or other agents that would be injurious," said Dr Gordon Siegel, a Chicago otolaryngologist. "That being said, you can control to a degree the way it comes out," he said.

Siegel said the shape of our nose or the bone structure of our face might contribute a small degree to certain sneezing styles.


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Found: Genes that delay pregnancy

NEW YORK: Researchers, led by an Indian-origin scientist, have identified genes which help female mice and some other mammals delay the onset of pregnancy. Unlike in humans, the remarkable ability, known as embryonic diapause, is a temporary state of suspended animation that occurs when environmental conditions are not favourable to the survival of the mother and the newborn.

A new study, published in the journal Open Biology, reveals the molecular mechanism responsible for pausing and resuming a pregnancy. After an egg is fertilized, it forms a cluster of cells known as a blastocyst, which implants in the wall of the mother's uterus, 'LiveScience' reported.

However, in diapause, the blastocyst is prevented from implanting and preserved in an dormant state until pregnancy resumes. How this process occurred was a mystery till now.

Researcher Sudhansu Dey, from Cincinnati Children's Research Foundation, and colleagues were studying the process of embryo implantation in mice when they noticed that a gene called MSX1 was very active just before implantation. They began to suspect that it might play a role in diapause, Dey said.

Researchers used hormones to induce pregnancy delays in mice, mink and Tammar wallabies to investigate further. During this delayed state, Dey's team measured how active the MSX1 gene and other related genes were in generating protein-making instructions. They imaged tissue from the animals to see where the gene was active. Finally, they tested whether these genes were being made into proteins. Researchers found that the MSX genes were more active when pregnancies were delayed, and found this was true for all three animals.

The results show that MSX genes, which are part of an ancient family of genes, have been preserved over much of evolutionary time, and play an important role in delaying pregnancy under harsh conditions, Dey said. He wants to know whether the same genes may enable delayed pregnancies in other animals and if it could have implications for humans.


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Just one sugar-sweetened drink a day ups risk of diabetes

LONDON: Drinking one 336ml serving size of sugar-sweetened soft drink a day can be enough to increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 22 per cent, researchers have warned.

The increased risk of 22 per cent is for each extra 336ml sugar sweetened drink, so would apply to someone who had one drink versus someone who had none, or someone who had two drinks versus someone who had one.

The study by Dora Romaguera, Petra Wark and Teresa Norat, of the Imperial College London, UK, and colleagues was published in the journal Diabetologia and comes from data in the InterAct consortium.

They used data on consumption of juices and nectars, sugar-sweetened soft drinks and artificially sweetened soft drinks collected across eight European cohorts participating in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), covering some 350,000 participants.

The researchers did a study which included 12,403 type 2 diabetes cases and a random sub-cohort of 16,154 identified within EPIC.

They found that, after adjusting for confounding factors, consumption of one 336ml serving size of sugar-sweetened soft drink per day increased the risk of type 2 diabetes by 22 per cent.

This increased risk fell slightly to 18 per cent when total energy intake and body-mass index (BMI) were accounted for. Both factors are thought to mediate the association between sugar-sweetened soft drink consumption and diabetes incidence.

Researchers also observed a statistically significant increase in type 2 diabetes incidence related to artificially sweetened soft drink consumption, however this significant association disappeared after taking into account the BMI. '

This probably indicates that the association was not causal but driven by the weight of participants. Participants with a higher body weight tend to report higher consumption of artificially sweetened drinks, and more likely to develop diabetes.

Pure fruit juice and nectar consumption was not significantly associated with diabetes incidence, however, it was not possible using the data available to study separately the effect of 100 per cent pure juices from those with added sugars.

Researchers said the increased risk of diabetes among sugar-sweetened soft drink consumers in Europe is similar to that found in a meta-analysis of previous studies conducted mostly in North America.

"Given the increase in sweet beverage consumption in Europe, clear messages on the unhealthy effect of these drinks should be given to the population," Romaguera said.


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New flu passes more easily from bird to human: WHO

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 24 April 2013 | 22.10

BEIJING: A lethal new strain of bird flu that emerged in China over the past month appears to jump more easily from birds to humans than the one that started killing people a decade ago, World Health Organization officials said on Wednesday.

Scientists are watching the virus closely to see if it could spark a global pandemic but say there is little evidence so far to show the virus can spread easily from human to human.

WHO's top influenza expert, Dr Keiji Fukuda, told reporters at a briefing in Beijing that people seem to catch the H7N9 virus from birds more easily than the H5N1 strain that began ravaging poultry across Asia in 2003. The H5N1 strain has since killed 360 people worldwide, mostly after contact with infected fowl.

Health experts are concerned about H7N9's ability to jump to humans, and about the strain's capacity to infect birds without causing noticeable symptoms, which makes it difficult to monitor its spread.

"This is definitely one of the most lethal influenza viruses we have seen so far," Fukuda said. But he added that experts are still trying to understand the virus, and that there might be a large number of mild infections that are going undetected.

The H7N9 bird flu virus has infected more than 100 people in China, seriously sickening most of them and killing more than 20, mostly near the eastern coast around Shanghai.

In comparison, the earlier bird flu strain, H5N1, is known to kill up to 60 of every 100 people it infects.

Wednesday's briefing came at the end of a weeklong joint investigation by WHO and Chinese authorities in Beijing and Shanghai.

Experts said they still aren't sure how people are getting infected but said evidence points to infections at live poultry markets, particularly through ducks and chickens. They said it was encouraging that reported infections appeared to slow down after the closure of live poultry markets in affected areas.


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Hubble captures possible 'comet of the century'

NEW YORK: NASA's iconic Hubble Space Telescope has captured the clearest view yet of Comet ISON, which experts believe could become one of the brightest comets ever seen when it lights up the sky later this year.

Comet ISON was discovered in September 2012 by Russian amateur astronomers Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok.

The new photos were snapped on April 10, when the comet was slightly closer than Jupiter. At the time the icy wanderer was about 621 million kilometers from the Sun and 634 million km from the Earth.

The new images are already helping astronomers take a bead on the mysterious Comet ISON, which may shine as brightly as the full Moon when it makes its closest pass by the Sun in late November, SPACE.com reported.

Images show that ISON is already becoming quite active, though it is still pretty far from our star. The comet's dusty head, or coma, is about 5,000 km wide, and its tail is more than 92,000 km long, astronomers said.

It sports a dust-blasting jet that extends at least 3,700 km - no more than 4.8 to 6.5 km across.

Researchers said this small core makes the comet's behaviour on its trip around the Sun, which will bring ISON within nearly 1.2 million km of the solar surface, especially tough to predict.

ISON is apparently making its first trip through the inner solar system from the distant, icy Oort cloud.

Therefore, it is difficult to know if ISON will live up to its expectations or fizzle out like Comet Kahoutek - another possible "comet of the century" - did in 1973.

"As a first-time visitor to the inner solar system, Comet C/ISON provides astronomers a rare opportunity to study a fresh comet preserved since the formation of the solar system," Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, who led the team that imaged the comet, said.

"The expected high brightness of the comet as it nears the Sun allows for many important measurements that are impossible for most other fresh comets," Li said.


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Asian monsoon getting predictable

NEW DELHI: While the monsoon in India may be as unpredictable as always, the met department could take a leaf out of the US's book. A Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego-led study reports on a crucial connection that could drastically improve the ability of forecasters to reliably predict the monsoon a few months in advance.

Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie from Scripps and colleagues from NOAA found that a winter appearance of the climate phenomenon called El Nino in the Pacific Ocean can leave its mark on monsoon formation in the Indian Ocean a full six months later. In between is an atmospheric phenomenon called the Pacific-Japan pattern that provides the teleconnection between the two ocean basins and further poleward to East Asia. "It has long been a mystery that climate anomalies in the region correlate better with El Nino in the preceding winter than with the one developing in the concurrent summer," said Xie, a climate scientist and inaugural holder of the Scripps Roger Revelle Chair in Environmental Science.

"The new paper shows that Indian Ocean temperature and atmospheric anomalies in the western Pacific are physically coupled, and their interactions amplify each other. We demonstrated that this new mode of coupled ocean-atmospheric anomalies is predictable a season ahead. Such predictions have tremendous benefits to society." The National Science Foundation-funded study, "Origin of seasonal predictability for summer climate over the Northwestern Pacific," appears online on April 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ngar-Cheung Lau and Gabriel Vecchi of NOAA are also co-authors. El Nino is a climate phenomenon coupling the ocean and atmosphere that includes a shift in the distribution of warm water in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. El Nino years are characterized by unusual weather and storm activity globally. The summer after a major El Nino features above-average sea-surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean.

El Nino exerts its influence via the Pacific-Japan pattern, which can bring to East Asia cool, wet weather in the subsequent summer, while La Nina leads to dry, hot weather. The violent storm activity associated with El Nino takes place in the eastern Pacific Ocean, but the chain of events the researchers describe ultimately ends up being detected in the western Pacific Ocean.

Xie likened it to an echo effect, saying that El Nino serves to pull clouds and convection eastward toward the International Date Line, which means those clouds are not available over the western Pacific to keep ocean surface temperatures cool. It also weakens winds in the northern Indian Ocean and the effects of those weakened winds travel back eastward to the Pacific Ocean.

"The last sound El Nino makes is in the western Pacific Ocean," Kosaka said, "because the positive feedback between the Indian Ocean and Pacific-Japan pattern we found amplifies climate anomalies in this region." The last echoes of El Nino have devastating consequences to the region. Extremes in the East Asian summer monsoon have been behind some of the largest natural and economic disasters to hit the region in the last 20 years. The authors note that excessive rains and cool temperature in Japan in 1993 caused a widespread failure of that country's rice crop that opened it to imports from other countries. Dry monsoon phases led to widespread heat waves and drought in several East Asian countries in 2004.

Kosaka cautioned, however, that there is much more work to be done to make prediction of the Asian monsoon reliable. El Nino is just one factor; other regional patterns complicate the sequence that ultimately produces monsoon rains, Kosaka said. But the paper does establish that El Nino influences the monsoon and describes the means by which it does so, she said.


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​Gujarat scientists set to decode Indian genes

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 23 April 2013 | 22.10

AHMEDABAD: Ten years ago, the prestigious Human Genome Project (HGP) was completed giving scientists a first glimpse of the massive instruction book that orchestrates all the complexities of human biology. Of the 200 people pooled for the project, however, not one was from India as our country did not participate in the project. This is set to change.

Gujarat-based Sardar Patel University (SPU) has undertaken what can be colloquially called a 'swadeshi' study to unravel the genome specific to Indians. Since India is in itself a diverse country, the project will study the genes of three Indians — one each from North India, South Indian and the North-East.

Vice-chancellor of SPU Dr Harish Padh said the study 'Analysis of Indian genome' has been funded by the Gujarat State Biotechnology Mission. "North Indians have many Caucasian characteristics since they belong to Aryan descent, South Indians belong to Dravidian descent while north-east people are of Mongoloid descent. Three Indians from these regions will be anonymously selected and their genome will be documented," said Dr Padh.

Padh said this will be the first dedicated complete genetic study specific to Indians. A majority of the diseases, including cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes and cardiac illnesses which are exploding in India, have genetic origins.

"The project involved analysis of DNA sequence to understand normal functioning of the human body and changes in sequence which leads to diseases. There are many known genetic variations which cause diseases but we are looking forward to finding certain newer mutations and variants. The complete genetic study will open a guidebook for prevention and better treatment of diseases," said Padh.

He said that while most of the diagnostic and drug therapies are developed using Caucasian and European genetic bench-marks, the Indian genome would help develop specific diagnostic tests and drug therapies for Indians.

The project will be undertaken by a four-member team headed by Dr Padh and is expected to be completed in six months.


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3,000-year-old skeletons found in Indonesian cave

MELBOURNE: Archaeologists have discovered remains of 66 humans dating back to 3000 years in a cave in Sumatra island of Indonesia.

The team which excavated the Harimau or Tiger Cave also found the first example of rock art in Sumatra besides the discovery of 66 human burials.

"Sixty-six is very strange," said Truman Simanjuntak from Jakarta-based National Research and Development Center for Archaeology, adding that he and his colleagues have never found such a big quantity of burials.

"It means that this cave was occupied intensely by humans and they continued to occupy it for a very, very long time," he said.

The findings shed new light on the complex cultural behaviour of Indonesia's first farming communities, who lived in the limestone caves of Harimau and used them as a burial place and a 'workshop' for tool-making activities.

With much of the cave still to be excavated, researchers are excited about the secrets they might hold.

"There are still occupation traces deeper and deeper in the cave, where we have not excavated yet. So it means the cave is very promising," Simanjuntak said.

Simanjuntak visited University of Wollongong, Australia earlier this month to address researchers at the Centre for Archaeological Science (CAS).

CAS researchers will likely date the findings from the cave.


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Mysterious water on Jupiter came from comet smash

PARIS: Enigmatic traces of water in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter came from a comet that crashed into the giant planet in 1994, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Tuesday.

Astronomers have been debating the water for 15 years after telltale molecules were spotted by an infrared telescope.

Some argued the water brewed up from lower levels of the gassy planet, but others said it could not have crossed a "cold barrier" separating the stratosphere from the cloud level below.

ESA's deep-space Herschel telescope has now found that most of the water is concentrated in Jupiter's southern hemisphere.

The molecules are clustered at high altitude around the sites where 21 fragments from Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 whacked into Jupiter in July 1994 in one of the most spectacular recorded events in astronomy.

The collisions left dark scars in Jupiter's roiling atmosphere that persisted for weeks.

"According to our models, as much as 95 per cent of the water in the stratosphere is due to the comet impact," said Thibault Cavalie of the Bordeaux Astrophysics Laboratory in southwestern France.

Other potential sources, including water vapour disgorged by one of Jupiter's icy moons or interplanetary particles of icy dust, can be ruled out, he said in a press release issued by ESA.

The study appears in the European journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Comets are believed to be primeval balls of ice and dust left over from the building of the solar system.

Cometary bombardment is believed by some experts to have provided the infant Earth with its abundance of water, the stuff of life.


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​‘Life began before Earth was born’

Written By Unknown on Senin, 22 April 2013 | 22.10

WASHINGTON: Life existed long before Earth came into being, and may have originated outside our solar system, scientists claim. Researchers say life first appeared about 10 billion years ago — long before Earth, which is believed to be 4.5 billion years old.

Geneticists have applied Moore's Law — which states that computers increase exponentially in complexity, at a rate of about double the transistors per integrated circuit every two years - to the rate at which life on Earth grows in complexity.

Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore, and Richard Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida , replaced the transistors with nucleotides — the building blocks of DNA and RNA — and the circuits with genetic material.

Their findings suggest life first appeared about 10 billion years ago, far older than the Earth's projected age of 4.5 billion years, Tech-NewsDaily reported.

Like in the 2012 sci-fi movie 'Prometheus' , as our solar system was forming, preexisting bacteria-like organisms , or even simple nucleotides from an older part of the galaxy, could have reached Earth by hitching an interstellar ride on comets, asteroids or other inorganic space debris.

However, the calculations are not a scientific proof that life predates Earth — there's no way of knowing for sure that organic complexity increased at a steady rate at any point in the universe's history . "There are lots of hypothetical elements to (our argument ) ... but to make a wider view, you need some hypothetical elements," Sharov said.

Sharov said that if he had to bet on it, he'd say "it's 99% true that life started before Earth — but we should leave 1% for some wild chance that we have not accounted for."

The theory of "life before Earth" , if found true, debunks the long-held sciencefiction trope of the scientifically advanced alien species.

Moreover, if genetic complexity progresses at a steady rate, then the social and scientific development of any other alien life form in the Milky Way galaxy would be roughly equivalent to those of humans, the report said.

"Contamination with bacterial spores from space appears the most plausible hypothesis that explains the early appearance of life on Earth," Sharov said.


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Depression leads to heart disease and vice versa

WASHINGTON: A researcher at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, has identified factors in the brain that distinguish susceptibility and resiliency to depression and heart disease comorbidity.
The finding would be a major advance in predicting, preventing and treating these disorders.

Depression is the leading cause of disability with more than 350 million people globally affected by this disease.

In addition to debilitating consequences on mental health, depression predisposes an individual to physiological disease such as heart disease, and conversely heart disease increases the risk of depression.

According to the World Health Organization by the year 2020 heart disease and depression will be the number one and number two leading causes of disability in developed countries. While the co-occurrence of these disorders is well recognized, an understanding of the underlying mechanisms that lead to this relationship are lacking.

Dr. Susan K. Wood, a Research Associate at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, investigates brain-related biomarkers for depression-heart disease comorbidity.

She uses a rodent model of social stress likened to bullying in people that she has found to produce depressive-like behaviors and dysfunctional cardiovascular changes in a susceptible subset of rodents.

Her previous work highlighted a role for the stress-related neurohormone corticotropin-releasing factor in rendering an individual vulnerable to stress-induced depression and heart disease. Intrigued by what other biomarkers may be distinct her latest study is the first to identify gene and protein expression differences in the brains of rodents that are either vulnerable or resilient to developing stress-induced depressive-like behaviors and cardiovascular dysfunction. The study, conducted in male rats, compared expression of 88 genes involved in signaling within the brain between socially stressed and non-stressed rats.

It revealed more than 35 genes in stressed rats that had altered expression compared with non-stressed controls. Many of the genes that were differentially expressed were related to inflammation.

Follow-up studies measuring protein levels revealed that Interleukin-1beta and Monocyte chemotactic protein-1, inflammatory markers known to play a role in depression and heart disease, were suppressed in the brains of the resilient subset of rats and Interleukin-1beta was increased in the vulnerable group.

Dr. Wood measured the gene and protein levels under resting conditions 24 hours after just 5 daily 30-minute exposures to social stress.

She is continuing these studies as an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine with the hope that these findings will uncover new targets to treat the mind and body.

Her findings will be presented during Experimental Biology 2013 in Boston, MA.


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Biggest family tree of human cells created

LONDON: Scientists have created the biggest family tree of human cells yet, mapping unique factors for an incredible 166 different cell types that exist in an individual's body.

Cells are the basic unit of a living organism. The human body consists of a vast array of highly specialised cells, such as blood cells, skin cells and neurons.

In total, more than 250 different cell types exist. In the study, scientists tried to answer how the different types are related to each other, which factors are unique for each cell type, and what determines the development of a certain cell.

Biologists at the Universities of Eastern Finland, Tampere and Luxembourg, Tampere University of Technology and the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, US, designed a computer-based method that used already existing biological data from research groups all over the world and analysed them in an entirely new way.

This led to the identifications of unique factors for 166 different human cell types. These factor, or master regulators, determine the development and distinguish different cell types from each other.

With this information they could map the relationship between the cell types in a family tree. These outcomes may serve as basis for the development of cell replacement therapies.

"Many diseases, such as Parkinson's disease and diabetes, or extensive burns result in the loss or altered functionality of cells," said Dr Merja Heinaniemi, first author of the study.

"Ideally one would like to replace those sick or lost cells again by healthy ones to cure the patients. This study forms an important step towards the development of such therapies," Heinaniemi, from the University of Eastern Finland, said.

"The next goal is to better understand the differentiation of cells into other cell types with the help of master regulators on a genome-wide basis in order to find ways to enhance cell differentiation for medical applications," Heinaniemi.

"This study illustrates the importance of computational biology for medicine. Such large amounts of biological data can only be analysed with computer-based methods," said Professor Matti Nykter of the University of Tampere.

The study was published in the journal Nature Methods.


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It's official! Crying babies calm down when carried

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 21 April 2013 | 22.10

NEW YORK: Parents, please note! Picking up and carrying a crying infant will automatically calm the child, even slowing down the fast beating of its heart, a new study has found.

Japanese researchers found that when mothers in the study carried their babies while walking around, the infants became noticeably more relaxed and stopped crying and squirming.

The babies' rapidly beating hearts also slowed down, evidence that the children were feeling calmer.

"Infants become calm and relaxed when they are carried by their mother," said study researcher Dr Kumi Kuroda, who investigates social behaviour at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Saitama, Japan.

The study observed similar responses in mouse babies. Since carrying (meaning holding while walking) can help stop an infant from crying, Kuroda said, it can offer mothers a way to soothe short-term irritations to their children, such as scary noises or vaccinations, MyHealthNewsDaily reported.

For the small study, researchers monitored the responses of 12 healthy infants ages 1 month to 6 months.

Young babies carried by a walking mother were the most relaxed and soothed, compared with infants whose mothers sat in a chair and held them, the study found.

As a mother stood up and started to walk with her child cradled close in her arms, scientists observed an automatic change in the baby's behaviour.

Kuroda recommends that when a baby starts crying, a brief period of carrying may help parents to identify the cause of the tears. She acknowledged carrying might not completely stop the crying, but it may prevent parents from becoming frustrated by a crying infant.

Although this study looked at a baby's behaviour in response to its mother, Kuroda said the effect is not specific to moms, and any primary caregiver for the infant can perform the carrying.

The researchers observed the same carrying-induced calming effects when fathers, grandmothers and an unfamiliar female with caregiving experience carried babies who were under 2 months old, Kuroda said.

The findings were published in the journal Current Biology.


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Can quakes actually calm the Earth?

NEW YORK: A 8.6-magnitude earthquake that struck the Indian Ocean in 2012 may have had a calming effect on the other quakes in the world, a new study has claimed.

The powerful quake near Sumatra, Indonesia, seemed to have actually quietened the global earthquakes, according to two reports presented at the Seismological Society of America's annual meeting in Salt Lake City.

The April 11, 2012 quake was the largest strike-slip shake-up (which moves horizontally) ever recorded, 'OurAmazingPlanet' reported.

Although the quake triggered earthquakes worldwide for up to six days, however, once the triggered quakes stopped, there was a sharp drop in moderate earthquakes for more than three months, said Fred Pollitz, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey's (USGS) California.

Pollitz noted the seismic monitors detected no earthquakes bigger than magnitude 6.5 for 95 days. Normally, quakes of this size hit every 10 days, he said.

"That is quite a rare occurrence. The chance of that happening is about 1 in 10,000," Pollitz said.

Pollitz believes the Indian Ocean earthquake's unusually energetic seismic waves, which traversed shallowly through Earth's crust for long distances, could have shifted stresses on faraway faults, delaying earthquakes.

"Usually, these dynamic seismic waves only increase the chance of an earthquake at any distance. We've documented, for the first time, that they can also decrease the chance of an earthquake," Pollitz said.

"We need to go back and look at these other earthquakes and see if this is a general pattern of a temporary increase and a longer-term decrease," Pollitz said.

The quake may have had a rare calming effect after some time had passed, it did, however, spark a global furry of quakes immediately, as many massive quakes often do.

Tom Parsons, a USGS geophysicist, wants to know how often dangerously large temblors follow strong earthquakes.

"Every time we have a magnitude 7 or something larger, should the whole rest of the planet be concerned about the increase in hazard?" Parsons said.

Parsons analysed hundreds of earthquakes of at least magnitude 7.0 in the past 30 years. Only 24 of the 260 big earthquakes triggered large earthquakes globally.

The study found that risk of earthquakes bigger than magnitude 5.0 translates to one or two per cent in the hours following a large earthquake.


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Scientists want Higgs boson to be renamed

LONDON: What's in a name? A lot - at least as far as the Higgs boson is concerned.

Some leading scientists want the elusive God particle, called Higgs boson after its discoverer Peter Higgs, to be renamed in order to also credit the other researchers involved in its discovery.

Scientists argue that Higgs, the genial but reclusive Edinburgh University physicist who predicted the existence of the 'God particle' in a 1964 paper, was just one of six researchers involved. The others should also be credited, they say.

A variety of names have been suggested as replacements. One idea proposed is to call it the Brout-Englert-Higgs, or BEH, particle, to reflect the roles of Belgian physicists Robert Brout and Francois Englert, whose paper on the topic came out just before that of Higgs, The Sunday Times reported.

Another is to rename it the BEHGHK (pronounced Berk) particle, with the extra letters representing Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble, based at Imperial College London, whose joint paper followed Higgs's by a few weeks.

"It should not be called the Higgs. The rest of us are fighting not just for our ego but for our place in the annals of physics," Hagen said.

The debate has raised tensions within the physics community. Last month, at a conference organised by The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), speakers were told not to use that name but instead refer to the BEH boson.

The programme for the meeting at Moriond, in France, also referred to it as the SM Scalar boson.

"Higgs is the wrong name for this particle because the paper where the mechanism and structure was first set out was ours," said Englert, who chaired the session at which the particle was discussed.

"Maybe the name should not matter but it is not pleasant if you have done important work to be ignored. What's more, Brout was my friend and should not be forgotten," Englert said.

Others scientists are not so concerned. "The name Higgs boson has been in common use for 40 years and it is silly to try to change it. There is no chance that any of the longer names on offer will ever be in everyday use. They are just too clumsy," Kibble, now emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College, said.

Higgs, 83, could not be contacted, the report said.


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Two Earth-like planets that could host life discovered

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 19 April 2013 | 22.10

WASHINGTON: NASA scientists have discovered two new Earth-like planets in the habitable orbit of a Sun-like star, 1,200 light-years away, which could potentially host life.

Using observations gathered by NASA's Kepler Mission, the team, led by William Borucki of the agency's Ames Research Center, found five planets orbiting a Sun-like star called Kepler-62.

Four of these planets are so-called super-Earths, larger than our own planet, but smaller than even the smallest ice giant planet in our Solar System.

"The detection and confirmation of planets is an enormously collaborative effort of talent and resources, and requires expertise from across the scientific community to produce these tremendous results," said Borucki.

These new super-Earths have radii of 1.3, 1.4, 1.6, and 1.9 times that of Earth. In addition, one of the five was a roughly Mars-sized planet, half the size of Earth.

Kepler-62 is one of about 170,000 stars observed by the Kepler Space Telescope, with a mass about 69 per cent of that of our Sun.

The two super-Earths with radii of 1.4 and 1.6 Earth radii orbit their star at distances where they receive about 41 per cent and 120 per cent, respectively, of the warmth from their star that the Earth receives from the Sun.

The planets are thus in the star's habitable zone, they have the right temperatures to maintain liquid water on their surfaces and are theoretically hospitable to life.

Theoretical modelling of the super-Earth planets, Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f, suggests that both could be solid, either rocky - or rocky with frozen water.

"This appears to be the best example our team has found yet of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star," Alan Boss from Carnegie Institution for Science said in a statement.

Kepler-62e, a super-Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of a star smaller and cooler than the Sun, located about 1,200 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra orbits its host star every 122 days and is roughly 60 per cent larger than Earth in size.

Scientists do not know if it is a water world or if it has a solid surface, but its discovery signals another step closer to finding a world similar to Earth.

The study was published in Science Express.


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Scientists take 8 year olds to Everest to help find future cure for patients in ICUs

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 18 April 2013 | 22.10

LONDON: The world's highest peak will now help scientists study how human bodies cope with the low oxygen levels experienced at extreme altitude.

A dedicated team of intensive care doctors, nurses and scientists are taking more than 200 people to the Himalayas to study how our bodies respond to low levels of oxygen.

This experiment that includes volunteers who are identical twins, adults and children as young as eight will ultimately help scientists find cure for patients in Intensive Care Units suffering from low oxygen intake.

Researchers from University College London's Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine (CASE) will lead the team on a trek to three locations in the Himalayas: Everest Base Camp, Namche Bazaar and Kathmandu.

Here, at altitudes over 1,400 metres, clinicians will conduct experiments on themselves and volunteers which will help scientists to develop treatments that will benefit critically ill patients in intensive care.

Although intensive care units save many lives, up to 40% of patients admitted will not survive.

"Some people seem to manage better with low oxygen levels than others, and there is still limited understanding about why this is," says expedition leader Dr Daniel Martin (UCL Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine), one of five UCL researchers involved in the Xtreme Everest expedition.

The Himalayas might be thousands of miles from UK hospital wards but the expedition is necessary because of the difficulties associated with studying patients in intensive care units, not least of which is the fact that they are so ill.

Looking at how healthy volunteers respond at high altitudes will enable the medical investigators to better understand the ways in which different people cope with low oxygen levels.

Some people seem to manage better with low oxygen levels than others, and there is still limited understanding about why this is

For the first time the researchers will also be conducting experiments with the local Sherpas.

"Sherpas are incredibly good at tolerating low levels of oxygen," says Dr Martin, "but very little is currently known about their physiology."

The research will build on the findings of a previous expedition to the summit of Mount Everest in 2007.

"The most important processes we identified were microcirculation - the delivery of fresh blood to the smallest blood vessels - and the mitochondria, which are the 'power-houses' of our cells and make all the energy," continues Dr Martin. It is these processes that will be the focus of the research this Spring.

The first volunteers will be put on exercise bikes before giving blood, saliva, hair and urine samples. They will undergo numerous tests designed to monitor their ability to adjust to low levels of oxygen.

Researchers will be record blood flow, nitric oxide levels, lung function and levels of oxygen in the volunteers' muscles, all of which will provide invaluable information that will help to save the lives of critically ill patients.

The expedition is supported in part by UCLH, the Royal Free Charity and London Clinical Hospitals.


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Now, an Indian effort to cut childhood vaccine prices

LONDON: First, Indian generic drug firms gave the world anti-AIDS and anti-cancer drugs at less than half the global price.

Now, another Indian company will help bring down global cost of immunising millions of the world's most vulnerable children against five deadly and debilitating diseases.

Indian vaccine company Biological E Ltd has slashed the price of its five-in-one vaccine by 30%.

A supply agreement makes the five-in-one shot available to GAVI for just $1.19 per dose, compared to the 2012 weighted average price of $2.17.

Ten years ago, there was only one European supplier for the five-in-one vaccine at a price of $3.56.

Today there are five suppliers, including two in India, and a price that is down to its lowest level yet.

This new, more cost-effective price provides the opportunity for the GAVI Alliance to pay up to $150 million less over the next four years compared with using lowest cost alternative suppliers.

Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of the GAVI Alliance said "This is great news for children in the world's poorest countries and it shows that our innovative public-private partnership model is working well."

Demand for pentavalent vaccine has been growing globally and was recently introduced in India.

Around 70 of the 73 GAVI-eligible countries having already introduced it, and the three remaining countries - Somalia, Indonesia, and South Sudan - approved to do so.

UNICEF managed the tender process for GAVI, which saw agreements made with Biological E, Crucell, GlaxoSmithKline, Serum Institute of India and new pentavalent supplier, LG Life Sciences of the Republic of Korea.

The GAVI Alliance was created in 2000 to accelerate the introduction of new vaccines so that all children, no matter where they live, have the same access to this life-saving technology. National governments, donors and vaccine suppliers must all play their part to ensure infants in the poorest countries are protected.

Mahima Datla, Managing Director of Biological E said "This partnership demonstrates the growing role of developing world manufacturers in the sustainable supply of effective, affordable vaccines. We are proud that our work to provide affordable prices for a variety of countries means life-saving vaccines can reach the most underprivileged children in the world."

Pentavalent vaccines combine the antigens for five infectious diseases in a single shot, namely diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B and Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib).

Pentavalent is already GAVI's most widely used vaccine and by 2020 GAVI support for this vaccine will have helped to avert more than seven million deaths.

India recently became the 117th country to introduce the pentavalent vaccine in its national immunization programme.


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A giant mother galaxy found from the Universe's infancy

A super-massive galaxy 12.8 billion light years from Earth has been discovered giving birth to the equivalent of an astonishing 3000 Suns every year. It contains stars with a total mass nearly 40 billion times the mass of our Sun, and is shrouded in a dust cloud 100 billion times the mass of Sun.

This ancient giant was formed when the Universe was just 880 million years old, making it one of the youngest galaxies known. The fact that it is producing stars at this stupendous rate has come as a surprise to astronomers because theory predicts a more steady and slower rate so early in the life of our Universe, created after a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

The findings are reported by a team of 64 astronomers in today's issue of the scientific journal Nature. The astronomers used 12 orbiting and ground-based telescopes to home in on what appeared to be a bright blur in deep space.

The galaxy, dubbed HFLS3, is being described as a "maximum star-burst" galaxy because of its prodigious star formation rate.

"This galaxy is proof that very intense bursts of star formation existed only 880 million years after the Big Bang," Dominik Riechers, of Cornell University said, according to a statement by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, US. Reichers was at Caltech when he conducted the research.

"We've gotten a valuable look at a very important epoch in the development of the first galaxies," he added.

The 12 international telescope facilities ranged from visible-light telescopes, to instruments working at infrared, millimeter-wave, and radio wavelengths.

Last month, a Caltech-led team of astronomers -- a few of whom are also authors on this newer work -- discovered dozens of similar galaxies that were producing stars as early as 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. But none of them existed as early as HFLS3, which has been studied in much greater detail.

The fact that it was detectable without the help of lensing means that it is intrinsically a bright galaxy in far-infrared light.

Because the galaxy is enshrouded in dust, it's very faint in visible light. The galaxy's stars, however, heat up the dust, causing it to radiate in infrared wavelengths. This makes it appear very bright - nearly 30 trillion times as luminous as the sun and 2,000 times more luminous than the Milky Way - when infrared telescopes are used to observe it.

The astronomers were able to find HFLS3 as they sifted through data taken by the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, which studies the infrared universe. The data was part of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey ( HerMES), an effort to observe a large patch of the sky (roughly 1,300 times the size of the moon) with Herschel.

Other telescopes were used to decipher its composition and other characteristics.


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Key link between obesity and type 2 diabetes discovered

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 17 April 2013 | 22.10

MUMBAI: New research published in the journal 'Cell Metabolism' has identified a key mechanism in the immune system involved in the development of obesity-linked type 2 diabetes. The findings open up new possibilities for the treatment and prevention of this condition, which is becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide. The study is by Dr Jane Howard and Professor Graham Lord, King's College London, and colleagues, and is funded by the UK medical research council.

There are an estimated 371 million people with diabetes in the world and around 90 per cent of these cases are type 2 diabetes. By 2030, there will be some 550 million with the condition based on current trends. Cases of diabetes have more than doubled since 1980, with 70 per cent of the trend due to ageing populations worldwide and the other 30 per cent estimated to be due to the increasing prevalence of risk factors including obesity.

"In 2011, India had 62.4 million people with type 2 diabetes, compared with 50.8 million the previous year. By 2030, the International Diabetes Federation predicts that India will have 100 million people with diabetes."

The association between obesity and diabetes has long been recognized but the molecules responsible for this association are unclear. Dr Jane Howard, lead author in this research and colleagues from King's, studied genetically engineered mice that lack T-bet, a protein which regulates the differentiation and function of immune cells. They found that the mice had improved insulin sensitivity despite being obese.

"When T-bet was absent, this altered the relationship between fat and insulin resistance; the mice had more intra-abdominal fat but were actually more sensitive to the glucose lowering effects of insulin,' said Dr Howard. 'As fat accumulation in the abdomen is typically associated with worsening insulin resistance and other features of the metabolic syndrome, the findings seen were both unusual and unexpected."

It turned out that the intra-abdominal fat of these mice contained fewer immune cells and was less inflamed than that of normal mice. The researchers then went on to discover that by transferring immune cells lacking T-bet to young, lean mice they were able to improve insulin sensitivity. "It appears that T-bet expression in the adaptive immune system is able to influence metabolic physiology," added professor Lord.

Although human obesity is often associated with insulin resistance and diabetes, this is not always the case. "Our data suggests that obesity can be uncoupled from insulin resistance, through the absence of T-bet," said Dr Howard.

Several of the main drugs currently used to treat type 2 diabetes work by improving insulin sensitivity. Further studies are needed to identify other molecules in the pathway of action of T-bet which could pave the way for future drug development in the treatment of Type 2 diabetes. The administration of specific immune cells as immunotherapy to improve insulin resistance may also one day become a therapeutic possibility. "This is just the start," said Dr Howard, "The idea that the immune system can impact on metabolism is very exciting, but more research needs to be done before we can bring this work from the bench to the bedside for the benefit of patients."


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India needs more paramedical staff trained in respiratory medicines-- panel of government medical colleges

MUMBAI: The over burdened doctors in the chest medicine departments in most of the government medical colleges in India may be relieved by developing a new paramedical specialty- 'The respiratory therapists' says a forum of heads of the departments (HODs) of government medical colleges of 47 medical colleges and institutions from 15 states and 2 union territories across India.

They were meeting for the '1st national respiratory meet of HODs of pulmonary medicine of government medical colleges in India' conducted at Chest Research Foundation in Pune last week. This was the first time that HODs in respiratory were meeting to review, discuss and debate current status of the respiratory post graduate departments in India with respect to the three major aspects of their functioning: patient care, post graduate education and original research pertinent to our country.

The need for this meeting was felt due to the increasing prevalence of common lungs related problems like asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, tuberculosis, diffuse lung diseases etc and the poor existing quality of care that is given to the respiratory illnesses despite our country being one of the leading manufacturers of the generic drugs for illnesses related to the lungs.

The meeting saw participation from several premier institutes in India including the PGI, Chandigarh, V. P. Chest Institute in Delhi, CMC Vellore, LRS TB Hospital Delhi, PGIMS Rohtak etc. Dr. Nilima Kshirsagar, National Chair, Clinical Pharmacology, ICMR Govt. of India, Dean, ESI-PGIMSR, MGM Hospital Mumbai and the Ex- Vice Chancellor of the Maharashtra university of health sciences while addressing the forum said that times are changing. The teachers must remain updated with the latest technological advancements and use them to their benefit in developing a healthy student- teacher relationship or mentorship. She suggested that to ensure that a medical post graduate student has acquired a certain level of knowledge and skills, we could take example from the west and integrate competency based model that includes explicit expectations & assessment at the end of certain duration into training, and avoid deconstruction of practice.

The key opinion leaders came to several probable solutions to the challenges faced today, one of which was development of a B. Sc/ M. Sc course by the universities to create 'respiratory therapists' who would be trained paramedical staff to assist the doctors. A few sporadic courses initiated by individual institutes do exist but the need is global.

They also suggested training and strengthening the primary and secondary health care providers in managing common respiratory problems so that the tertiary care centres can focus on more complicated diseases. Procurement and maintenance of basic essential diagnostic tools at government medical college level as well as training of the teachers in using these equipments was stressed upon.

Doctors also agreed that we need to inculcate good communication skills in the medical students and provide structured training for the same. Regarding upgrading the training of medical students the HODs opined that we should have more focused training at the undergraduate level so that diagnosis and management of common respiratory problems should be done even by a medical graduate. Lack of inter departmental exposure during post graduate training renders a Chest Physician less confident of managing other systemic diseases like diabetes and high blood pressure. Same is true for a student training in general medicine who does not get adequate training in management of respiratory diseases and leaves it to the chest physician whose number is much lower than those in Internal Medicine. Hence the HODs were of the opinion that both these specialties should get inter departmental 4 to 6 months rotational postings. Once we have more and more internal medicine and general practitioners handling the huge burden of common respiratory diseases like asthma, COPD, tuberculosis etc; the two specialties could be merged and pulmonology would then exist as a super-specialty like cardiology, endocrinology, neurology etc. Doctors also urged on regular up-gradation of teachers' technical as well as training skills to make them better educators.

There was a consensus on the need for more research in respiratory medicine relevant to our country and the HODs felt that training in research methodology should be fortified in the colleges. Also there should be adequate incentives for researchers which is lacking in our country barring certain institutes. Support from the pharma industry was also called for funding of quality research.


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Were 'hobbit' hominids island dwarfs?

PARIS: Japanese scientists on Tuesday waded into a row over so-called " hobbit" hominids whose remains, found on a remote Indonesian island a decade ago, have unleashed one of the fiercest disputes in anthropology.

The most detailed computerized scan of a skull of Homo floresiensis — "Man of Flores" — backs theories that the minute humans were a local product of evolution, they said.

Marooned descendants of a hominid called Homo erectus, these people progressively "dwarfed," becoming smaller and smaller to match the availability of food on the island, they suggested.

The findings are a knock to rival hypotheses that surfaced after an Australian-Indonesian team unearthed the bizarre remains in a cave in 2003.

Dubbed after the wee folk in JRR Tolkien's tale, the "hobbits" were just over a metre (3.25 feet) tall, weighed around 25 kilos (55 pounds) and had a brain roughly the size of a chimp's, our closest primate relative.

The find raised huge questions about the human odyssey.

Was H. floresiensis a separate species?

And if so, how come it shared the planet with Homo sapiens some 13,000 years ago, when — so far as was known — anatomically modern man was the sole, supreme strain of human?

A team led by Yousuke Kaifu of the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo measured the brain capacity of "LB1," the most intact specimen out of nine found on Flores, using a computed tomography (CT) scanner.

They put the brain size at 426 cubic centimetres (14.4 fluid ounces), somewhat higher than earlier estimates of around 400 cc (13.5 fluid ounces), but still only a third of a H. sapiens brain, which is around 1,300 cc (40.5 fluid ounces).

The small brain size, argues the Kaifu team, is consistent with a slimmed-down descendant of Homo erectus — "upright man" who was the first human to leave Africa.

H. erectus lived from around 1.7 million years ago to roughly 50,000 years ago. Fossil evidence points to a creature that was about the size and weight of H. sapiens, but with a smaller brain.

Kaifu's team believe that the hobbits' ancestor was a scrawnier, Javanese version of erectus. Its brain size would have been around 860 cc (29 fluid ounces).

Its descendants, cut off from the rest of the world, went through thousands of years of diminution, scaling down in size to match availability of food on the island, according to their theory.

This phenomenon, known as insular dwarfing, is well known among biologists. Indeed, Flores at the time had a pygmy elephant called a stegadon, butchered remains of which were found in the floor of the hobbits' cave.

"Contrary to expectations by some researchers, it is possible that large-bodied Javanese Homo erectus migrated to the solitary island and evolved into Homo floresiensis by marked island dwarfism," Kaifu believes.

Two other ideas have come forward to explain the mysterious folk.

One is that they were descendants of a much earlier, small-brained hominid called Homo habilis. But, say critics, no evidence has ever been found that this human reached Asia.

The other is that the Flores bones are simply those of H. sapiens who suffered from a neurological disability called dwarf cretinism, possibly because of iodine deficiency in their diet. This would have made their brains abnormally small.

But, say naysayers, cretinism does not explain how the little hominids were smart enough to kill animals, use fire and wield stone tools to butcher their prey.

The insular dwarfism theory is not new, but Kaifu said he can further back it by a computer simulation from 20 worldwide populations of modern humans.

These show that the scaling down of H. floresiensis' brain, in line with its tiny body, is entirely possible.

"New models of the brain-size reduction in the evolution of H. floresiensis ... show (a) more significant contribution of scaling effect than previously claimed," according to the paper, appearing in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.


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‘Discussing salary still an office taboo’

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 16 April 2013 | 22.10

NEW YORK: When it comes to discussing salaries, most employees still follow the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy, according to a new global study.

Discussing salary is still an office taboo and a majority of workers admit they are not only uncomfortable discussing their salary, but also talking about vacation, sick time and bonuses with their coworkers , the study found. The research was based on the responses of 3,000 people on an employment website.

Overall, 35% of workers said that they are never comfortable talking about salary with co-workers . An additional 20% of workers said they are seldom comfortable talking with fellow employees about their pay.

Only 18% of workers said they are very comfortable talking about salary, while 14% said they are often comfortable when discussing salary, the BusinessNewsDaily reported.


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A star-burst spewed iron, bacteria on Earth consumed it

Debris containing iron from a star that exploded 2.2 million years ago was consumed by bacteria on earth, scientists have discovered. This is the first biological signature from an event in deep space.

Scientists led by Shawn Bishop of the Technical University of Munich in Germany analysed samples of sediment core from the bottom of eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, dating to between about 1.7 million and 3.3 million years ago, scientific journal Nature reported. They found that there were traces of iron-60 in the 2.2 million year old layer. Iron-60 is an isotope of iron that does not form on Earth.

Preliminary findings were reported at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver, Colorado.

Certain types of bacteria that live on ocean floors consume iron to make tiny magnetic crystals and use it as an internal compass to guide them to better conditions. These are called 'magnetotactic' bacteria.

Bishop's analysis showed minuscule levels of iron-60 which could be in fossilized remains of these bacteria that existed 2.2 million years ago.

Although it is not clear as to which star exploded around that time, Nature suggested that it might be in the Scorpius-Centaurus stellar association, at a distance of about 424 light years from the Sun.

Star explosions are called supernova and they are thought to spew many elements including metals at enormous speed. They also emit high energy radiation like gamma ray bursts, thought to have caused the Ordovician-Silurian extinction in which 60 percent of life perished some 450 million years ago.

In 2004 iron-60 was discovered for the first time in a sample taken from the Pacific Ocean floor. Scientists calculated that it had arrived from some supernova in the distant past.

"For me, philosophically, the charm is that this is sitting in the fossil record of our planet," Bishop told Nature. He and his team are now working on a second core, also from the Pacific, to see if it too holds the iron-60 signal.


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Scientists may have detected dark matter particle

WASHINGTON: For the first time, scientists, including an Indian-origin physicist, have observed concrete hints of a particle behind the elusive dark matter that is believed to hold the cosmos together but has never been directly observed.

The international Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment involving Texas A&M high-energy physicist Rupak Mahapatra reported a WIMP-like signal at the 3-sigma level, indicating a 99.8 per cent chance - or, in high-energy parlance.

"In high-energy physics, a discovery is only claimed at 5-sigma or better," Mahapatra said.

"So this is certainly very exciting, but not fully convincing by the standards. We just need more data to be sure. For now, we have to live with this tantalising hint of one of the biggest puzzles of our time," he said.

Notoriously elusive, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) rarely interact with normal matter and therefore are difficult to detect.

Scientists believe they occasionally bounce off, or scatter like billiard balls from, atomic nuclei, leaving behind a small amount of energy capable of being tracked by detectors deep underground the particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and even instruments in space like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) mounted on the International Space Station (ISS).

Mahapatra said the latest analysis represents comprehensive data gleaned from the largest exposure with silicon detectors during the CDMS-II operation, an earlier phase of the overall experiment involving more than 50 scientists from 18 international institutions.

"This result is from data taken a few years ago using silicon detectors manufactured at Stanford that are now defunct," Mahapatra said.

"We are only 99.8 per cent sure, and we want to be 99.9999 per cent sure. At 3-sigma, you have a hint of something. At 4-sigma, you have evidence. At 5-sigma, you have a discovery," Mahapatra said.


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Want to curb your hunger pangs? Try skipping a rope

Written By Unknown on Senin, 15 April 2013 | 22.10

NEW YORK: Aerobic exercise that involves vertical movements of the body such as rope-skipping can curb feelings of hunger and fatty food cravings, a study has found.

The researchers set to find out whether the " gut disturbance" that happens during exercise that moves the centre of mass up and down would change levels of hormones like ghrelin more than other exercise. Ghrelin is a hormone released when we're hungry. The researchers asked 15 men to either skip rope for 30 minutes or ride a stationary bicycle, or rest on separate days.

The men reported feeling less hungry when they were jumping rope, compared with when they were cycling , at 25 minutes into the exercise sessions.


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Lab-made rat kidneys raise hopes for dialysis patients

NEW YORK: Scientists have discovered yet another way to make a kidney - at least for a rat - that does everything a natural one does, researchers reported on Sunday, a step toward savings thousands of lives and making organ donations obsolete.

The latest lab-made kidney sets up a horse race in the booming field of regenerative medicine, which aims to produce replacement organs and other body parts.

Several labs are competing to develop the most efficient method to produce the most functional organs through such futuristic techniques as 3D printing, which has already yielded a lab-made kidney that works in lab rodents, or through a "bioreactor" that slowly infuses cells onto the rudimentary scaffold of a kidney, as in the latest study.

The goal of both approaches is to help people with kidney failure. In the United States, 100,000 people with end-stage renal disease are on waiting lists for a donor kidney, but 5,000 to 10,000 die each year before they reach the top of the transplant list.

Even the 18,000 U.S. patients each year who do get a kidney transplant are not out of the woods. In about 40 percent the organ fails within 10 years, often fatally.

If what succeeded in rats "can be scaled to human-sized grafts," then patients waiting for donor kidneys "could theoretically receive new organs derived from their own cells," said Dr. Harald Ott, of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He led the research reported on Sunday in the online edition of Nature Medicine.

That would minimize the risk of rejection and make more organs available.

Ott's group used an actual kidney as its raw material, but competing labs are using 3D bioprinters to create the starting material, the scaffold or framework of the organ.

"With a 3D bioprinter, you wouldn't require donor organs," said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina and a pioneer in that technology.

"The printer also lets you be very precise in where the cells go" on and in the scaffold. But he hailed the Massachusetts General Hospital work as "one more study that confirms these technologies are possible."

'BIOENGINEERED'

Ott and his team started with kidneys from 68 rats and used detergent to remove the actual cells. That left behind a "renal scaffold," a three-dimensional framework made of the fibrous protein collagen, complete with all of a kidney's functional plumbing, from filter to ureter.

The scientists then seeded that scaffold with renal cells from newborn rats and blood-vessel-lining cells from human donors. To make sure each kind of cell went to the right spot, they infused the vascular cells through the kidney's artery - part of the scaffold - and the renal cells through the ureter.

Three to five days later, the scientists had their "bioengineered" kidneys.

When the organs were placed in a dialysis-like device that passed blood through them, they filtered waste and produced urine.

But the true test came when the scientists transplanted the kidneys into rats from which one kidney had been removed. Although not as effective as real kidneys, the lab-made ones did pretty well, Ott and his colleagues reported.

Ott said he thinks using different kinds of cells to build up a kidney on the scaffold could work even better, since the immaturity of the renal cells they used might have kept the lab-made transplant from performing as well as nature's.

If the technology is ever ready to make kidneys for people, the cells would come from the intended recipient, which would minimize the risk of organ rejection and reduce the need for lifelong immune suppression to prevent that.

Although the technique requires human kidneys to provide the scaffold, the organs do not have to be in as good working order as those for transplant.

"That gives you the potential to make use of kidneys offered for transplant that would otherwise be discarded," said Atala, perhaps because they have a viral infection or other disease.

Atala himself is nevertheless forging ahead with 3D printing. He and his colleagues have used that technique to make not only kidneys but also mini-livers which, implanted in lab rodents, made urea and metabolized drugs like a natural one.

They are now trying the more difficult feat of making larger, pig-sized kidneys, as a stepping-stone to human kidneys. (Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Vicki Allen)


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Skin cells directly turned into brain cells

WASHINGTON: US researchers say they have directly converted ordinary skin cells to the type of brain cells destroyed in patients with multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and other myelin disorders.

The breakthrough research at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine now enables "on demand" production of myelinating cells, which provide a vital sheath of insulation that protects neurons and enables the delivery of brain impulses to the rest of the body.

In patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), cerebral palsy (CP), and rare genetic disorders called leukodystrophies, myelinating cells are destroyed and cannot be replaced.

The new technique involves directly converting fibroblasts - an abundant structural cell present in the skin and most organs - into oligodendrocytes, the type of cell responsible for myelinating the neurons of the brain.

"Its 'cellular alchemy,'" said Paul Tesar, assistant professor of genetics and genome sciences at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine and senior author of the study.

"We are taking a readily accessible and abundant cell and completely switching its identity to become a highly valuable cell for therapy," Tesar said.

In a process termed "cellular reprogramming," researchers manipulated the levels of three naturally occurring proteins to induce fibroblast cells to become precursors to oligodendrocytes (called oligodendrocyte progenitor cells, or OPCs).

Researchers rapidly generated billions of these induced OPCs (called iOPCs).

They showed that iOPCs could regenerate new myelin coatings around nerves after being transplanted to mice - a result that offers hope the technique might be used to treat human myelin disorders.

When oligodendrocytes are damaged or become dysfunctional in myelinating diseases, the insulating myelin coating that normally coats nerves is lost. A cure requires the myelin coating to be regenerated by replacement oligodendrocytes.

Until now, OPCs and oligodendrocytes could only be obtained from fetal tissue or pluripotent stem cells. These techniques have been valuable, but with limitations.

"The myelin repair field has been hampered by an inability to rapidly generate safe and effective sources of functional oligodendrocytes," said co-author and myelin expert Robert Miller.

"The new technique may overcome all of these issues by providing a rapid and streamlined way to directly generate functional myelin producing cells," Miller said.

The study was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.


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Polio vaccine developer Koprowski dies

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 14 April 2013 | 22.10

PHILADELPHIA: A pioneering scientist who developed a polio vaccine used two years before Jonas Salk's injectable version has died. Dr. Hilary Koprowski was 96.

Koprowski developed an oral vaccine using the live polio virus that was first used on humans in 1950.

Koprowski's son Christopher says his father's vaccine was the first to show clinical success. Salk famously developed an injectable version later, while Dr. Albert Sabin was the first to have an oral vaccine licensed in the U.S.

But Christopher Koprowski says his father was happy with the scientific recognition he received without the celebrity of his better-known fellow researchers.


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New technique to yield gold from crop plants

NEW YORK: Scientists have developed a new technique which they claim can grow and harvest gold from crop plants.

The technique of finding gold called phytomining uses plants to extract particles of the precious metal from soil.

Some plants have the natural ability to take up through their roots and concentrate metals such as nickel, cadmium and zinc in their leaves and shoots.

For years, scientists have explored the use of such plants, dubbed hyperaccumulators, for pollution removal.

However, there are no known gold hyperaccumulators, because gold doesn't easily dissolve in water so plants have no natural way of taking the particles in through their roots, LiveScience reported.

"Under certain chemical conditions, gold solubility can be forced," said Chris Anderson, an environmental geochemist and gold phytomining expert at Massey University in New Zealand.

Fifteen years ago, Anderson first showed it was possible to get mustard plants to suck up gold from chemically treated soil containing gold particles.

The technique includes finding a fast-growing plant with a lot of aboveground leafy mass, such as mustard, sunflowers or tobacco. The next step is to plant the crop on soil that contains gold.

Once the crops reach their full height, treat the soil with a chemical that makes gold soluble. When the plant transpires, water is pulled up and out through tiny pores on its leaves, it will take up the gold water from the soil and accumulate it in its biomass. It can then be harvested.

Getting the gold into plants is the easy part. Getting the gold out has proved more difficult, Anderson explained.

"Gold behaves differently in plant material," Anderson told the website.

If the plants are burned, some of the gold will stay attached to the ash, but some will disappear. Processing the ash poses difficulties, too, and requires the use of huge amounts of strong acids, which can be dangerous to transport.

The gold found in plants are nanoparticles, so there may be great potential for the chemical industry, which uses gold nanoparticles as catalysts for chemical reactions, Anderson said.

Gold phytomining won't ever take the place of traditional gold mining, Anderson said.

He is currently working with researchers in Indonesia to develop a sustainable system for small-scale artisanal gold miners to use the technique to reduce the mercury pollution from their operations.

However, some scientists warn the environmental risks associated with growing gold itself may be too high. Cyanide and thiocyanate, the same hazardous chemicals used by mining companies to get gold to leach out of rock, must be used to dissolve gold particles in soil water.


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Meditation can increase your body temperature

SINGAPORE: Feeling cold? Try meditation! Meditation can make you feel warmer, a new study conducted in Tibet suggests, which found the core body temperature can be controlled by the brain.

Researchers led by Associate Professor Maria Kozhevnikov from the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences showed, for the first time, that it is possible for core body temperature to be controlled by the brain.

The scientists found that core body temperature increases can be achieved using certain meditation techniques (g-tummo) which could help in boosting immunity to fight infectious diseases or immunodeficiency.

Published in science journal PLOS ONE, the study documented reliable core body temperature increases for the first time in Tibetan nuns practising g-tummo meditation.

The g-tummo meditative practise controls "inner energy" and is considered by Tibetan practitioners as one of the most sacred spiritual practises in the region, researchers said.

Monasteries maintaining g-tummo traditions are very rare and are mostly located in the remote areas of eastern Tibet.

The researchers collected data during the unique ceremony in Tibet, where nuns were able to raise their core body temperature and dry up wet sheets wrapped around their bodies in the cold Himalayan weather (-25 degree Celsius) while meditating.

Using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings and temperature measures, the team observed increases in core body temperature up to 38.3 degree Celsius.

A second study was conducted with Western participants who used a breathing technique of the g-tummo meditative practise and they were also able to increase their core body temperature, within limits.

The findings showed that specific aspects of the meditation techniques can be used by non-meditators to regulate their body temperature through breathing and mental imagery.

The techniques could potentially allow practitioners to adapt to and function in cold environments, improve resistance to infections, boost cognitive performance by speeding up response time and reduce performance problems associated with decreased body temperature.


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Found: New 2m-year-old human ancestor with a pigeon-toed gait

Written By Unknown on Sabtu, 13 April 2013 | 22.10

LONDON: A part-human and part-ape-like creature that existed two million years ago in South Africa, had a pigeon-toed gait, human-like front teeth, and was an able climber, new research has found. Researchers at Wits University in South Africa, including Peter Schmid from the University of Zurich, have described the anatomy of a single early hominin in six new studies.

The fossils discovered four years ago in Malapa near Johannesburg show a mixture of primitive features of australopiths and advanced features of later human species. The researchers led by prof Lee Berger believe the new species is currently the best candidate for a direct ancestor of our own genus Homo. "They show a narrow upper ribcage , as the large apes have such as orang-utans , chimpanzees and gorillas," said Schmid. Along with the largely complete remnants of the pectoral girdle, it has a conical ribcage with a raised shoulder joint, which looks like a permanent shrug.

The less well-preserved elements of the lower thorax on the other hand indicate a slim waist, similar to that of a human being.

Au sediba, like all the other representatives of the Australopithecus genus, had arms that were suitable for climbing as well as possibly for brachiation. Its conical shape makes it difficult to swing their arms when walking upright or running, plus they were a similar length to an ape's . "They probably couldn't run over longer distances, especially as they were unable to swing their arms, which saves energy,"he said. An examination of the lower extremities shows a heel, metatarsus, knee, hips and back, which are unique. These clearly belong to an individual, which is unique to fossil record of the earliest hominins.

'Tools shaped hands'

Anew fossil belonging to the oldest known anatomically modern hand suggests the strength and dexterity needed to make and use the latter tools quickly shaped our hands into what they are today , 'New Scientist' said. Our ancestors' tools went from basics to hand axes 1.7 million years ago.


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Apple-shaped body ups risk of kidney disease

LONDON: People with apple-shaped bodies are more prone to serious kidney diseases, a study published in American Society of Nephrology has found.

Indians mostly have such physical features with concentration of fat around abdomen. The study said people with such body types suffer from higher blood pressure in their kidneys than those with pearshaped bodies. This could lead to increased risk of developing kidney diseases later in life. The study said such individuals may benefit from treatments that reduce kidney blood pressure.

Such mechanisms underlying this risk were not well understood. To study the issue, Arjan Kwakernaak from the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands looked for links between waist-tohip ratio, which reflects central body fat distribution, and kidney measures in 315 individuals with an average body mass index of 24.9 kg/m2, considered normal weight. Higher waist-to-hip ratios were associated with lower kidney function, lower kidney blood flow, and higher blood pressure within the kidneys.


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Many Russians expect contact with aliens

MOSCOW: Almost one in four Russians (23 per cent) expect the human race to be contacted by representatives of an alien civilization in the next 50 years, says an opinion poll.

But a majority (53 percent) said they did not believe in aliens. The poll quizzed 1,500 respondents.

"Those who believed that contact would be beneficial for humanity were two times greater than those who believed the opposite," the Public Opinion Foundation pollster said in a statement.

The poll was carried out to mark Cosmonauts Day, which commemorates Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin's groundbreaking flight into space in 1961.

The findings came shortly after an influential priest in Russia's Orthodox Church said people often mistook angels and demons for aliens.


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People with apple-shaped bodies at risk of kidney disease

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 12 April 2013 | 22.10

WASHINGTON: High blood pressure in the kidneys of people with apple-shaped bodies may put them at an increased risk of developing kidney disease later in life, according to a new study.

The study published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN) suggests that these individuals may benefit from treatments that reduce kidney blood pressure.

People with "apple-shaped" bodies - when fat is concentrated mostly in the abdominal area - are more likely than those with "pear-shaped" bodies to develop kidney disease.

To study the issue, Arjan Kwakernaak, from University Medical Center Groningen, in The Netherlands and his colleagues looked for links between waist-to-hip ratio, which reflects central body fat distribution, and kidney measures in 315 healthy individuals with an average body mass index of 24.9 kg per square metre.

Higher waist-to-hip ratios were associated with lower kidney function, lower kidney blood flow, and higher blood pressure within the kidneys.

"We found that apple-shaped persons - even if totally healthy and with a normal blood pressure - have an elevated blood pressure in their kidneys. When they are also overweight or obese, this is even worse," said Kwakernaak.

This suggests that elevated blood pressure in the kidneys of individuals with apple-shaped bodies may be responsible for their increased risk of developing kidney disease later in life.

Previous studies have shown that high blood pressure in the kidneys can be treated through salt restriction or with drugs that block what is known as the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system.

"Our current data suggest that such interventions could be particularly useful in subjects with a central body fat distribution," said Kwakernaak.


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