Ways to Help the Environment

An interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor proposes several ways to slow global warming and limit the impact of CO2 emissions. All of the theories discussed are purely theoretical at this point, and some of the more outlandish ideas are to use satellites with movable mirrors to deflect some of the sun's energy, or dispersing a cloud small, highly reflective particles into the atmosphere which would function as billions of tiny mirrors.

Though the ideas themselves are firmly in the realm of science fiction at this point, what concerns me is that the article never addresses the issues of who would fund and control such a global scale effort. Paradoxically, it may be a good thing that even the most feasible of these plans is still a long way from being implemented, considering the potential to abuse or even weaponize some of the ideas that were discussed.

The Genetics of Fear

A study published in a recent issue of Psychological Science has helped shed some light on the genetic underpinnings of the human fear response. Participants in an experiment were trained to fear an image when it appeared on a monitor by administering an electric shock, and researchers measured the participants ability to "unlearn" their fear by showing them the same image the following day, but omitting the shocks and seeing how the subjects reacted. The results showed that those who have a polymorphism coding for a short version of the enzyme COMT--which facilitates the breakdown of dopamine--are much more susceptible to neurotic behavior and anxiety disorders.

This is a great article because it shows how the popular assumption that one's response to fearful stimuli is a learned behavior may be wrong, and the study points the way towards eventually crafting different medications for people with specific genetic profiles.

Yucca Mountain Project Getting Scrapped

Despite the fact that the government has already spent $13.5 billion on the project, the Obama administration has decided to scrap plans to use the proposed nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Pro-nuclear energy groups are understandably angry about this reversal, especially considering that no other central facility exists to handle the waste generated by America's nuclear power reactors (the waste is currently stored on site at the power plants).

Alcohol in pregnancy may give kids a taste for booze

I stumbled upon this article about alcohol consumption during pregnancy and its consequences on the fetus. As we all know, what you consume during your pregnancy really affects your child and its health once you give birth but a study with mice and alcohol further confirms this notion with respect to alcohol:

Alcohol may taste sweeter if you were exposed to it before birth, suggests a study in rats. The findings may shed new light on why human studies have previously linked fetal alcohol exposure to increased alcohol abuse later in life, and to a lower age at which a person first starts drinking alcohol.

Alcohol's taste is a mixture of sweet and bitter components. To test whether prenatal alcohol exposure could affect the perception of these components, Steven Youngentob at the State University of New York in Syracuse and John Glendinning at Columbia University in New York measured how avidly rats consumed ethanol, sweet water or bitter water.

They found that young rats whose mothers had consumed alcohol during pregnancy preferred ethanol and consumed more of the bitter water than the offspring of mothers that didn't consume alcohol. Rats that had been exposed to alcohol in the uterus also seemed to be more attracted to the smell of alcohol.

Prenatal exposure seems to reduce the perceived bitterness of alcohol, making it seem sweeter, says Youngentob.

Both of these differences seemed to disappear once the rats reached adulthood – but only if they hadn't tasted alcohol during their youth. If prenatally exposed rats did consume alcohol in their youth, these preferences seemed to become set for life.

"The take-home message is to keep kids away from alcohol for as long as possible – particularly if they have had prenatal exposure," says Youngentob.

Aversion therapy?

The next question is whether it might be possible to reverse these preferences.

"If we knew a child had prior fetal exposure to ethanol, are there strategies that could be used with those kids to devalue those odour and taste preferences?" Youngentob asks. For example, preliminary studies in rats have suggested that giving a young prenatally exposed rat some alcohol and a drug that makes them sick at the same time, stops their craving for alcohol.

Youngentob also believes that the ability to transfer dietary flavours from mother to fetus may have had evolutionary benefits.

"One of the ways that animals learn what's good to eat in the world, is on the basis of what mom ate during pregnancy," he says. We already know that babies will show a preference for the flavour of anise if their mothers consumed it during pregnancy, and flavours can also be transferred through breast milk.

This is a great thing to keep in mind for the future for yourself and your friends. Although it seems like an obvious concept, a study into this subject with definitive proof of alcohol and its effects really conveys an important message to all of us about this matter.

www.newscientist.com

Wine and Cancer

So as I was scanning the headlines today, I saw multiple articles on wine and its help or hindrance in the fight against cancer. Namely, it's interesting to me that so many studies come out these days that tout wine and other alcohol as good things one minute and a bad things the next. Check out the findings on following studies and decide if/how it will impact your drinking habits.

From:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090303161423.htm
"Men and women who consume two or more alcoholic drinks a day could increase their risk of developing pancreatic cancer, according to a study published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research."

From: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Lifestyle/Wine-ups-breast-cancer-risk/articleshow/4246455.cms
"A new study, led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has revealed that both red and white wine are equal offenders when it comes to increasing breast-cancer risk. The researchers found that women who consumed 14 or more drinks per week, regardless of the type (wine, liquor or beer), faced a 24 percent increase in breast cancer compared with non-drinkers."

From: http://www.livescience.com/health/090307-isns-wine-beer-bones.html
"A glass of wine or a bottle or two of beer a day may strengthen the bones of older men and women, but drinking more than that could actually weaken bones, according to new research from the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston. [The researchers] speculated that silicon found in beer is contributing to the higher bone density in men. It is less clear why liquor and wine might protect bone density."

From: http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSCOL47056620080414
"A compound found in the skin of red grapes and red wine may help induce pancreatic cancer cells to malfunction and die, a lab study has found. They found that the wine compound disrupted the activity of the cancer cells' mitochondria, energy-producing centers needed for cells to function. Resveratrol also impaired certain cancer-cell proteins that thwart chemotherapy by pumping drugs out of the cell."

Broccoli and Asthma

Here’s something that caught my eye because it had to do with asthma. Apparently there is a compound that naturally occurs in broccoli and some other “cruciferous” veggies which may protect against the inflammation that causes asthma and other respiratory diseases.

The chemical, Sulforaphane, causes concentrations of antioxidant enzymes in the airway areas to increase and that may protect us from the free radicals which lead to the inflammation. The UCLA researchers who performed the study gave 65 people varying amounts of broccoli or alfalfa spouts (which don’t have Sulforaphane) and found the people who were given broccoli had significant increases in the antioxidant enzymes.

The research team says it is too early to say how much broccoli one needs to ingest to see the effect, but they recommend including it in any healthy diet.

You can see a press release on the research at this website:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-03/uoc--bmh030209.php

Record Radiation Blast Detected!!

On June 11th last year (2008), the GLAST satellite was launched as a joint venture between NASA, The U.S. Department of Energy, and many European countries in efforts to study gamma-ray astronomy. As we know, Gamma rays are forms of light with the highest energy. GLAST (Gamma Ray Large Area Telescope) has thus since recorded many different sources of gamma rays emminating from many different areas of the universe. This following news story has been it's biggest find and has been in the news last week!

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Astronomers have detected the strongest radiation blast from deep space ever known, exceeding the power of almost 9,000 exploding stars.

The gamma ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away in the constellation Carina. Its light has taken most of the age of the universe to reach us.

Gamma ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the universe. Scientists believe they occur when exotic massive stars run out of fuel and collapse to form a black hole.

Jets of material powered by processes that are not yet fully understood are thought to blast outwards at nearly the speed of light, generating intense gamma rays.

The new explosion, designated GRB 080916C, was spotted last year by the American space agency Nasa's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which is designed to detect gamma radiation.

Astronomers soon discovered that the gamma ray burst belonged in the record books.

The short-lived blast, described today in the online version of the journal Science, was more powerful than nearly 9,000 ordinary supernovae, or exploding stars.

Scientists calculated that the material emitting the gamma rays must have been moving at 99.9999% the speed of light.

The explosion was enigmatic as well as spectacular due to a curious time delay separating the highest-energy emissions from the lowest. Scientists are still trying to understand the reason for the time delay, which may have a straightforward physical cause or be due to peculiar quantum effects.

Professor Peter Michelson, a member of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope team, said: "Burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood. This one burst raises all sorts of questions. In a few years, we'll have a fairly good sample of bursts, and may have some answers."

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Observations like these are always an amazing piece of evidence and concrete material for astronomers and scientists to study and analyze to gain more insight into our universe and open doors into things we might never have known.

Genetic Screenings for Newborns

This was an entirely new thing for me: now-routine genetic screenings for newborns across all 50 states. While light of the science and research, the article names a few of the 29 rare diseases that can be tested for in infants using just a prick on the heel to extract blood for examination. Apparently in the last few years, testing across the United States has jumped from only half of the hospitals implementing the tests to now nearly 96% of all American hospitals.

The article is easy to read, and just fascinating in seeing how far medicine and technology have come.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/health/18screening.html?_r=1&ref=health

One Father's Attempt to Hack His Daughter's Genetic Code

This article is about a father whose daughter is sick with a variety of rare and strange genetic disorders that medical experts and doctors could not fully explain. This father, with a medical degree and background in genetic consulting, has set out to map his daughter's genetic code in order to find what exactly is wrong with his child.

http://www.wired.com/medtech/genetics/magazine/17-02/ff_diygenetics

Scientists zero in on Earth's original animal.

I was looking around the web for articles regarding the first organisms that lived on our planet and I came across an amazing article on livescience.com. Sea sponges have been thought by some scientists to be the most primitive living animals, the closest living things to approximate Earth's original animal, down at the base of the tree of life for the animal kingdom. But the squishy things are now being pushed aside by a group of amoeba-shaped creatures called Placozoans, according to a new analysis which shows the fairly simple but still multi-cellular animals are closer to the base of the tree, researchers say.

A weirder result follows from the fact that the analysis finds that corals, jellyfish, sponges, comb jellies and Placozoans (aka the "lower" animals) evolved in parallel to "higher" animals including flatworms, insects, mollusks and chordates (which includes all animals with backbones, ranging from frogs to apes and humans).

Nervous systems are found in both groups (among the lower animals, jellyfish have nervous systems), so the new arrangement means that these systems must have evolved twice in the history of animal evolution, said Rob DeSalle, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who did the analysis along with Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis, also at the museum.

DeSalle said the finding is unsurprising to him.

"Things in organisms that look alike a lot of times aren't really derived from a common ancestor," he said. "The nervous system of cnidarians [a lower animal group that includes corals, jellyfish and hydras], and Bilateria [the higher animals group that includes humans] are constructed with the same molecules and often times using the same genes. But it is possible that the cnidarians' nervous system really is not the same nervous system found in Bilaterians."

Many lower animals other than jellyfish lack nervous systems, DeSalle said, but they could have the rudiments of a nervous system and we just haven't seen them. "Placozoans and sponges both have genes for nervous systems in their genomes," he said. "They just don't do it. They don't make it."

The new tree also underscores the fact that evolution does not proceed along a straight line, counter to many cartoons. And it's pretty common to find things evolving more than once, DeSalle said.

"You see that in other systems and kinds of anatomy — dorsal-ventral polarity in animals, which means having a stomach and back, has evolved twice. It's different in invertebrates and vertebrates. Even if you flip the things upside down, in other words, they are not the same," he said.

And the eye is another example, he said. "They are incredibly complex things, but they have evolved many times," he said. The famous biologist Ernst Mayr once wrote a paper stating that the eye had evolved 25 different times in nature, so "it's not that far-fetched to think that the nervous system would have evolved twice," DeSalle said.

Carbofuran (Furadan)

National Geographic headliner for health this week revolves around poisoned lions in Kenya. As I watched the video Lions Poisoned in Kenya I began to focus on the food web and the different plans of recovery for the affected species (specifically addressing scavengers and lions). Recorded moments of dying vultures and lions made me contemplate about how many other animals in the tropics could be be affected by the pesticide Furadan or Carbofuran (which is widely available in Kenya). Carbofuran is highly toxic and can be used inappropriately. I was disturbed at the assumption that the herdsmen were to be blamed for this tragedy. I expect that the motive is for survival, but the outcome causes more harm. My heart is torn because the issue is far more complicated. Human culture is taught to favor the lions, the hippos, and the vultures since they are widely recognized. A certain type of competitive hierarchy is built which is easily influenced by the media and society. How does human culture measure importance?

Another topic I was thinking about is the:

Diversity in the Tropics

There are several reasons or theories-- physical and historical, to why tropical diversity is high. For example, tropical areas are less seasonal (warm to hot and moist year round), and they sit in the equatorial sections of the world. The source of it all depends on the Earth's tilt and movement. This in turn affects biodiversity in certain regions. Kenya has a tropical ecosystem that provides evolution to progress at a quicker pace. In addition animals specialize in food sources. Historically, there are less interruption with ice sheets and climate change (temperature plays a large role in biodiversity).

Although this may be true for an area such as Kenya, lions are large mammals who need improvement in survival and reproduction. If Carbofuran has a detrimental effect on large mammals, how concerned should humans be? Is it not interesting that down the line, the goal to survive actually makes a turn and attacks those who have initiated the problem.

Stem Cell Research Breakthrough

Lost in the midst of the Inauguration craze last week was the approval by the FDA for an embryonic stem cell trial, marking the first tests in human from such cells. While it may not be a coincidence that the approval came the same week as a new administration promoting change took office, researchers and biologists alike can rejoice in this breakthrough decision, allowing further embryonic research 10 years after its possibilities were first discovered.

This first clinical trial will explore the treatment of spinal chord injuries, a project put on hold last March in leu of sufficient data. Paid for and conducted by the biotechnology company Geron, doctors explored the long term effects of the use of embryonic cells and provided video evidence of the treatment restoring motility in paralyzed laboratory mice. While their research may have been amongst the largest proposals presented to the FDA, many feel that it was President Obama's promise to loosen the grasp the Bush administration had over embryonic stem cell funding.

While the article itself does not provide much in the way of the science involved, it does cite the different organization and researchers/doctors involved in this medical breakthrough. The reporter also included some alternatives to embryonic methods developed over the past decade, alternatives that can avoid the controversies surrounding the obtaining and use of human embryos.

( F.D.A. Approves Stem Cell Trial )

More Research on Slowing Aging

This press release for an article published in the January 21 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reminded me a lot of what we discussed last class.

Apparently three researchers at Brown have found a fruit fly gene that extend the life span of the flies from ~35 days to ~70 days. They first found this "I'm not dead yet" gene in 2000, but it wasn't until recently that they understood how it worked.

Essentially they now know that the gene/genes are altering the metabolism of the flies such that free radical levels in the flies cells decrease. Free radicals can damage cells and, in turn, shorten life spans.

This study makes me want to research what has been published on the impact of antioxidants on human health. I've always heard eating foods rich in antioxidants (like pomegranates, blueberries, and red grapes) helps to reduce free radicals, but how much does one really need to eat in order to see a health impact?

New Twist on Nature/Nurture Argument

The debate about how the genetic makeup and surrounding environment influence an organism's development is often described as the Nature vs. Nurture debate, but evidence from a variety of sources is increasingly showing that this discussion should be phrased more accurately as "Nature and Nurture". But even this reformulation leaves something to be desired, because of how the environmental impact on one's genes is often portrayed. Research being conducted by Dr. Art Petronis at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health is giving a deeper insight into how complex the interaction between one's environment and genetic profile really is. Genes are traditionally thought of as more or less unchanging (except for the natural deterioration of gene function associated with age), and one's environment is described as the element that determines how and which genes are expressed in a given organism. Dr. Petronis' study of epigenetic factors--molecules that attach to DNA and alter how it is expressed--is helping to piece together important puzzles, such as why one identical twin will develop a disease while the other does not. His research is showing that one's environment not only determines which genes are expressed, but that the environment can chemically alter an individual's genes, and hence how the are expressed, in subtle but important ways. The most fascinating part is that Dr.Petronis has been able to show that these epigenetic factors are partially heritable, meaning that we are all born not only with our DNA, but also the environmental agents that can change how it functions. Pretty weird stuff.

"A compound in women's armpit extract could potentially open the door to sniffable contraceptives"

A nice article on human pheromones in this weeks Nature.

What do you think?
Any questions you would ask the author if you could?
Why do you think it has been so difficult to find pheromones in humans?

Thanks to Dave Plachetzki!

Obesity Benefits Big Oil

This is a portion of a blog I wrote for Miller-McCune Magazine's website...

Two University of Illinois researchers estimate that as many as 1 billion gallons of fuel are consumed each year in the United States due to excess weight in the American population.
The recently published study in the journal Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment says between 734 million and 1.104 billion gallons of fuel could be saved annually through improved fuel economy if weights of all overweight, obese and extremely obese Americans could be reduced to their maximum normal body mass index. Quantitatively, that's a large volume of fuel, but compared to the 75 billion gallons consumed by passenger vehicles each year in America, it's a relatively small percentage.
Jacobson and King recognize that the 1 billion gallons of gasoline translates to only about 0.8 percent of the fuel consumed annually by noncommercial passenger vehicles in America; however, this small amount equates to approximately 9.71 million metric tons of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere each year. That's equivalent to taking 1.7 million passenger cars and light trucks off the road for a year.

More Fox News - so juicy!

Now Fox News is ready to tackle a REAL health issue - extended breastfeeding. There are a lot of random assertions without any scientific backing on this episode but what struck me the most was the cutoff date for breastfeeding suggested by the interviewed psychotherapist, Dr. Virginia Klein (BTW - not a child psychologist) . She said that breastfeeding should end when the child can chew. This occurs before the first birthday for most children which puts her cutoff earlier than the earliest weaning age recommended by the American Association of Pediatricians (1 year) and the World Health Organization (2 years). Breastfeeding longer than 2 years has been shown to possibly have some benefits. For example, nursing toddlers may have fewer and less severe illnesses. There are no studies showing any psychological detriment to extended breastfeeding. Not a lot of studies have been done on this, though, so there is really no way to know.
Perhaps instead of pushing her personal opinion on a health segment, Dr. Klein should have advocated for more research on the subject.