Gene key to taste bud development identifiedDURHAM, N.C. - Scientists have identified a gene that controls the develop-ment of taste buds.

The gene, SOX2, stimulates stem cells on the surface of the embry-onic tongue and in the back of the mouth to transform into taste buds, according to the researchers. Stem cells are immature cells that can de-velop into several different cell types depending on what biochemical in-structions they receive.

"Not only did we find that SOX2 is crucial for the development of taste buds, but we showed that the amount of SOX2 is just as important," said Brigid Hogan, Ph.D., chair of the Duke University Medical Center Depart-ment of Cell Biology and senior member of the research team. "If there isn't enough SOX2 present, or if there is too much, the stem cells will not turn into taste buds."

The researchers made their discovery in mice, but they believe the same process occurs in humans.

According to the researchers, the findings will help scientists better understand how the behavior of certain stem cells is controlled. The SOX2 gene is already known to be crucial in controlling whether embry-onic stem cells remain undifferentiated and whether stem cells in the brain, eye and inner ear differentiate into specialized nerve cells.

Taste bud cells, much like skin cells, continually slough off and are re-placed by new ones. So the new findings not only provide insights into the interactions between SOX2 and tongue stem cells during embryonic development, but also into how stem cells continue to operate in adults, the researchers said.

The researchers published the findings in the October 2006 issue of the journal Genes and Development. The work was supported by the Na-tional Institutes of Health.

Their findings were entirely serendipitous, Hogan said."In my laboratory, we were studying the role of SOX2 in the develop-

ment of the lung, esophagus and the gut in embryonic mice" she said. "We were quite surprised when we accidentally found the gene's role to be so pronounced in the developing tongue."

The particular strain of mice that Hogan and her colleagues use had been developed by Larysa Pevny, Ph.D., a geneticist and developmental neurobiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is co-author with Hogan of the journal report. In engineering her new mouse strain for studying stem cells in the nervous system, Pevny com-bined the SOX2 gene with another gene, derived from jellyfish, and in-serted the combination into the animals' chromosomes. She selected the added gene for its capacity to produce a special protein, called en-

hanced green fluorescent protein, that glows green when exposed to ul-traviolet light.

"When we shine light on tissue from these animals, any cell that is ex-pressing SOX2 will fluoresce, or light up," Pevny explained. "This allows us to directly visualize those areas where SOX2 is active. It is a very powerful tool."

In their work, Hogan and her colleagues use this fluorescence marker as a tool for tracking the activity of SOX2 in the esophagus, among other sites. As they worked with the mice, they noticed that specific areas on the tongue and in the back of the mouth lit up, in addition to areas in the esophagus. Further studies, Hogan said, confirmed that SOX2 was present in high amounts during the development of taste buds.

In another set of experiments, Hogan's team used another variant of the mouse strain made by Pevny in which the SOX2 gene was altered to produce only low levels of SOX2. In these animals, the stem cells in the tongue were not transformed into taste buds, she said. Instead, the cells became the "scaly" cells that cover the surface the tongue and help to direct food to the back of the mouth.

The new findings could lead to a better understanding of developmen-tal disorders of the gut caused by mutations in the human SOX2 gene, Hogan said. For example, babies with such mutations can develop a tra-cheoesophageal fistula, a condition in which there is an abnormal con-nection between the windpipe and throat that requires surgery for cor-rection.

Cancer patients receiving chemotherapy or radiation therapy often re-port the loss of taste during treatments. These therapies target cells that are dividing, making them effective in killing cancer cells but also causing the unwanted side effect of killing taste buds. When the cancer treatments end, the taste buds gradually return, Hogan said.

Scientists stop colon cancer growth in mice by blocking just one enzyme

Drug that inhibits inflammatory factor is already in human clinical trials for use in diabetes

GALVESTON, Texas - Texas researchers have discovered what may become a potent new weapon in the fight against colon cancer.

In cell culture experiments, scientists from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) and the University of Texas at Ar-lington determined that stopping the activity of a single enzyme called aldose reductase could shut down the toxic network of biochemical sig-nals that promotes inflammation and colon cancer cell growth.

In a dramatic demonstration of the potential of this discovery, they fol-lowed up this work with animal studies showing that blocking the pro-

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duction of aldose reductase halted the growth of human colon cancer cells implanted in laboratory mice.

"By inhibiting aldose reductase we were able to completely stop the further growth of colorectal cancer tumor cells," said UTMB professor Satish K. Srivastava, senior author of a paper about the discovery to be published Oct. 1 in the journal Cancer Research.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, colon cancer is the country's second leading cancer killer. In 2002, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 70,651 men and 68,883 women were diagnosed with colon cancer in the United States; 28,471 men and 28,132 women died from the disease.

In a series of cell-culture experiments, Srivastava and his colleagues-including lead author and postdoctoral fellow Ravinder Tammali, assis-tant professor Kota V. Ramana, and Sharad S. Singhal and Sanjay Awasthi of the University of Texas at Arlington- investigated aldose re-ductase's role in colon cancer cell growth. First they stimulated colon cancer cells with growth factors, chemicals known to kick-start inflam-matory chain reactions that encourage colon cancer cells to proliferate; this proliferation process then itself produces even more inflammation and cancer cell growth. (Chronic inflammation is strongly linked to the development of colon and other cancers.)

The researchers then blocked aldose reductase activity and checked the responses of known molecular links in the chain of colon cancer cell growth.

"In a nutshell, when we inhibited aldose reductase by using pharmaco-logical inhibitors or genetic manipulations, all the inflammatory players were significantly blocked," Srivastava said. "We really understand this toxic signaling pathway much better now."

In their mouse experiments, the researchers implanted human colon cancer cells beneath the skin of "nude mice"-a hairless and immune-de-ficient variety commonly used in medical research. Tumor progression stopped completely in the mice treated with genetic material known as small interfering RNA (or "siRNA") that was engineered to prevent cells from making the aldose reductase enzyme.

The treated mice seemed unharmed by the procedure. In contrast, the untreated "control" animals experienced uncontrolled tumor growth.

As exciting as such results are, Srivastava pointed out, the distance between a brand-new procedure that works in nude mice and one that works in humans is considerable.

However, substantial research has already been done on developing drugs that inhibit aldose reductase in people, because the enzyme is also involved in causing such complications of diabetes as blindness and nerve damage.

Aldose reductase inhibitors might be in use against human colon can-cer in a relatively short time, Srivastava said, since one candidate is al-ready in phase 3 clinical trials in the United States for prolonged use in diabetes, and an aldose reductase inhibitor is already available for clini-cal use in Japan. Such drugs would likely be used after surgery as a "chemo-preventive" measure to keep cancer cells missed by surgery in check. "As far as I am aware, there is no other chemo-preventive agent that has been shown to be so effective in laboratory animals," the re-searcher said.

Stellar birth control in the early universeNew Haven, Conn. - An international team of astronomers based at

Yale and Leiden University in The Netherlands found that "old stars" dominated many large galaxies in the early universe, raising the new question of why these galaxies progressed into "adulthood" so early in the life of the universe.

Every year only a handful of new stars are born out of the gas that fills the space between the stars in galaxies like the Milky Way. To account for the large number of stars in the Universe today, about 400 billion in the Milky Way alone, it was thought that the "stellar birth rate" must have been much higher in the past.

Surprisingly, in this study appearing in the October 2 issue of Astro-physical Journal, astronomers using the 8.1m Gemini telescope in Chile report that many of the largest galaxies in the Universe had a very low stellar birth rate even when the Universe was only about 20 percent of its present age.

"Our new results imply that the stars in many large galaxies were born when the Universe was in its infancy, in the first few billion years after the Big Bang," said team leader Mariska Kriek, a PhD student from Lei-den University and Yale. "The results confirm what some astronomers had suspected - galaxies seem to have some method of 'birth control' that is very effective."

These new findings add to growing evidence that in big galaxies the for-mation of new stars was significantly suppressed after an initial period of vigorous activity. "These galaxies had a very violent early youth, but rose into stable adulthood well be-fore many galaxies like the Milky Way were even in kindergarten," said Kriek."

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The astronomers used the uniquely powerful Gemini Near Infrared Spectrograph, to analyze the light of distant galaxies simultaneously over many different wavelengths. They studied 20 galaxies so distant that their light had been traveling for nearly 11 billion years, or 80 per-cent of the age of the Universe.Extremely massive black holes in the centers of galaxies may serve as 'cosmic contraceptives' in the early Universe, suppressing the birth of new stars. The blue beam of light in this Hubble Space Telescope image of the nearby galaxy M87 emanates from a black hole which has a mass exceeding a billion times that of the Sun. NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

"The unexpected finding is what was not found - we expected to see a prominent signal from ionized Hydrogen, the tell-tale signature of star birth. Remarkably, for nine of the twenty galaxies that we observed, this signature is not seen at all," said Pieter van Dokkum, associate professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University. "It gives a firm limit on the stellar birth rate in these objects."

One suggestion is that enormous black holes in the centers of large galaxies may be responsible for suppressing star formation. When mate-rial spirals into a black hole, huge amounts of energy are released and are rapidly injected into the galaxy's gas. This energy injection may di-lute the gas sufficiently to prevent future star birth.

"Evidence for the presence of these black holes is seen in several of the galaxies studied, lending support to the idea that black holes serve as cosmic contraceptives in the young Universe," said van Dokkum.Thirsty GiantIn Teeming India, Water Crisis Means Dry Pipes and Foul SludgeBy SOMINI SENGUPTANEW DELHI, Sept. 28 - The quest for water can drive a woman mad.

Ask Ritu Prasher. Every day, Mrs. Prasher, a homemaker in a middle-class neighborhood of this capital, rises at 6:30 a.m. and begins fretting about water.

It is a rare morning when water trickles through the pipes. More often, not a drop will come. So Mrs. Prasher will have to call a private water tanker, wait for it to show up, call again, wait some more and worry about whether enough buckets are filled in the bathroom in case no wa-ter arrives.

“Your whole day goes just planning how you’ll get water,” a weary Mrs. Prasher, 45, recounted one morning this summer, cellphone in hand and ready to press redial for the water tanker. “You become so edgy all the time.”

In the richest city in India, with the nation’s economy marching ahead at an enviable clip, middle-class people like Mrs. Prasher are reduced to

foraging for water. Their predicament testifies to the government’s as-tonishing inability to deliver the most basic services to its citizens at a time when India asserts itself as a global power.

The crisis, decades in the making, has grown as fast as India in recent years. A soaring population, the warp-speed sprawl of cities, and a vast and thirsty farm belt have all put new strains on a feeble, ill-kept public water and sanitation network.

The combination has left water all too scarce in some places, contami-nated in others and in cursed surfeit for millions who are flooded each year. Today the problems threaten India’s ability to fortify its sagging farms, sustain its economic growth and make its cities healthy and hab-itable. At stake is not only India’s economic ambition but its very image as the world’s largest democracy.

“If we become rich or poor as a nation, it’s because of water,” said Sunita Narain, director of the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi.

Conflicts over water mirror the most vexing changes facing India: the competing demands of urban and rural areas, the stubborn divide be-tween rich and poor, and the balance between the needs of a thriving economy and a fragile environment.

New Delhi’s water woes are typical of those of many Indian cities. Na-tionwide, the urban water distribution network is in such disrepair that no city can provide water from the public tap for more than a few hours a day.

An even bigger problem than demand is disposal. New Delhi can nei-ther quench its thirst, nor adequately get rid of the ever bigger heaps of sewage that it produces. Some 45 percent of the population is not con-nected to the public sewerage system.

Those issues are amplified nationwide. More than 700 million Indians, or roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have adequate sanitation. Largely for lack of clean water, 2.1 million children under the age of 5 die each year, according to the United Nations.

The government says that 9 out of 10 Indians have access to the pub-lic water supply, but that may include sources that are going dry or are contaminated.

The World Bank, in rare agreement with Ms. Narain, warned in a report published last October that India stood on the edge of “an era of severe water scarcity.”

“Unless dramatic changes are made - and made soon - in the way in which government manages water,” the World Bank report concluded, “India will have neither the cash to maintain and build new infrastruc-ture, nor the water required for the economy and for people.”

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The window to address the crisis is closing. Climate change is ex-pected only to exacerbate the problems by causing extreme bouts of weather - heat, deluge or drought.A River of Waste

The fabled Yamuna River, on whose banks this city was born more than 2,000 years ago, is a case study in the water management crisis confronting India.

In Hindu mythology, the Yamuna is considered to be a river that fell from heaven to earth. Today, it is a foul portrait of crippled infrastruc-ture - and yet, still worshiped. From the bridges that soar across the river, the faithful toss coins and sweets, lovingly wrapped in plastic. They scatter the ashes of their dead.

In New Delhi the Yamuna itself is clinically dead.As the Yamuna enters the capital, still relatively clean from its 246-

mile descent from atop the Himalayas, the city’s public water agency, the New Delhi Jal Board, extracts 229 million gallons every day from the river, its largest single source of drinking water.

As the Yamuna leaves the city, it becomes the principal drain for New Delhi’s waste. Residents pour 950 million gallons of sewage into the river each day.

Coursing through the capital, the river becomes a noxious black thread. Clumps of raw sewage float on top. Methane gas gurgles on the surface.

It is hardly safe for fish, let alone bathing or drinking. A government audit found last year that the level of fecal coliform, one measure of filth, in the Yamuna was 100,000 times the safe limit for bathing.

In 1992, a retired Indian Navy officer who once sailed regattas on the Yamuna took his government to the Supreme Court. The retired officer, Sureshwar D. Sinha, charged that the state had killed the Yamuna and violated his constitutional right, as a practicing Hindu, to perform ritual baths in the river.

Since then, the Supreme Court ordered the city’s water authority to treat all sewage flowing into the river and improve water quality. In 14 years, that command is still unmet.

New Delhi’s population, now 16 million, has expanded by roughly 41 percent in the last 15 years, officials estimate. As the number of people living - and defecating - in the city soars, on average more than half of the sewage they pour into the river goes untreated.

A government audit last year indicted the Jal Board for having spent $200 million and yielding “very little value.” The construction of more sewage treatment plants has done little to stanch the flow, in part be-cause sewage lines are badly clogged and because power failures leave them inoperable for hours at a time.

“It has not improved at all because the quantity of sewage is con-stantly increasing,” said R. C. Trivedi, a director of the Central Pollution Control Board, which monitors the quality of the Yamuna River. “The gap is continually widening.”

Making matters worse, many New Delhi neighborhoods, like Janata Colony - Hindi for People’s Colony - are not even connected to sewage pipes. Open sewers hem the narrow lanes of the slum. Every alley car-ries their stench.

Some canals are so clogged with trash and sludge that they are no more than green-black ribbons of muck. It is a mosquitoes’ paradise. Malaria and dengue fever are regular visitors.

Not long ago, a 2-year-old boy named Arman Mustakeem fell into one such canal and drowned. His parents said they found him floating in the open sewer in front of their home.

These canals empty into a wide storm drain. It, in turn, runs through the eastern edges of the city, raking in more sewage and cascades of trash, before it merges with effluent from two sewage treatment plants, and finally, enters the Yamuna.

Carrying the capital’s waste on its back, the Yamuna meanders south to cities like Mathura and Agra, home to the Taj Mahal. It is their princi-pal source of drinking water, too. New Delhi’s downstream neighbors are forced to treat the water heavily, hiking up the cost.

With New Delhi slated to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010, the government proposes to remake this riverfront with a sports and recre-ation complex. In the meantime, the Yamuna, vital and befouled as it is, bears the weight of New Delhi’s ambitions.

At dawn each morning, men sink into the still, black waters to retrieve whatever can be bartered or sold: rings from a dead man’s finger, coins dropped by the faithful, the remnants of rubber sandals, plastic water bottles.

The dhobis, who launder clothes, line up on one stretch of riverbank, pounding saris and bedsheets on stone tablets. A man shovels sand from the river bottom: every bullock cart he fills for a cement maker will fetch him a coveted $5.50. Men and boys bathe.

“This river is worshiped,” said a bewildered Sunny Verma, 24. “Is this the right way of worshiping it?”

So shaken was Mr. Verma on his first visit to the Yamuna this year that he now works full time to shake up others. He joined an environmental group called We for Yamuna.

“If you want to worship the river, you should give it more respect,” he said. “You should treat it the right way. You should question the govern-ment. You should ask the state to actually do something for the river.”

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Deluge and DroughtMrs. Prasher has the misfortune of living in a neighborhood on New

Delhi’s poorly served southern fringe.As the city’s water supply runs through a 5,600-mile network of bat-

tered public pipes, 25 to 40 percent leaks out. By the time it reaches her, there is hardly enough.

On average, she gets no more than 13 gallons a month from the tap and a water bill from the water board that fluctuates from $6 to $20, at its whimsy, she complains, since there is never a meter reading anyway.

That means she has to look for other sources, scrimp and scavenge to meet her family’s water needs.

She buys an additional 265 gallons from private tankers, for roughly $20 a month. On top of that she pays $2.50 toward the worker who pipes water from a private tube-well she and other residents of her apartment block have installed in the courtyard.

Nearly a fourth of New Delhi households, according to the government commissioned Delhi Human Development Report, rely at least in some part on such wells. It is one of the principal reasons groundwater in New Delhi is drying up faster than virtually anywhere in the country: 78 per-cent of it is considered overexploited.

Still, the new posh apartment buildings sprouting across New Delhi and its suburbs sell themselves by ensuring a 24-hour water supply - usually by drilling wells deep underground. “Imagine never being thirsty for water,” boasts a newspaper advertisement for one new develop-ment.

Warning of “an unparalleled water crisis,” the study released in Au-gust found that 25 percent of New Delhi households had no access to piped water, and that 27 percent got water for less than three hours a day. Nearly two million households, the report also found, had no toilet.

The daily New Delhi hustle for water only adds to the strains on the public system.

A few years ago, for instance, to compensate for the low water pres-sure in the public pipeline, Mrs. Prasher and her neighbors began tap-ping directly into the public water main with so-called booster pumps, each one sucking out as much water as possible.

It was a me-first approach to a limited and unreliable public resource, and it proliferated across this me-first city, each booster pump further draining the water supply.

The situation for New Delhi, and all of India, is only expected to worsen. India now uses an estimated 829 billion cubic yards of water ev-ery year - that is more than guzzling an entire Lake Erie. But its water needs are growing by leaps. By 2050, official projections indicate, de-mand will more than double, and exceed the 1.4 trillion cubic yards that India has at its disposal.

Yet the most telling paradox of the city’s water crisis is that New Delhi is not entirely lacking in water. The problem is distribution, hampered by a feeble infrastructure and a lack of resources, concedes Arun Mathur, chief executive of the Jal Board.

The Jal Board estimates that consumers pay no more than 40 percent of the actual cost of water. Raising the rates is unrealistic for now, as Mr. Mathur well knows. “It would be easier to ask people to pay up more if we can make water abundantly available,” he said. A proposal to priva-tize water supply in some neighborhoods met with stiff opposition last year and was dropped.

So the city’s pipe network remains a punctured mess. That means, like most everything else in this country, some people have more than enough, and others too little.

The slums built higgledy-piggledy behind Mrs. Prasher’s neighborhood have no public pipes at all. The Jal Board sends tankers instead. The women here waste their days waiting for water, and its arrival sets off desperate wrestling in the streets.

Kamal Krishnan quit her job for the sake of securing her share. Five days a week, she would clean offices in the next neighborhood. Five nights a week, she would go home to find no water at home. The buck-ets would stand empty. Finally, her husband ordered her to quit. And wait.

“I want to work, but I can’t,” she said glumly. “I go mad waiting for water.”

Elsewhere, in the central city, where the nation’s top politicians have their official homes, the average daily water supply is three times what finally arrives even in Mrs. Prasher’s neighborhood.

Mrs. Prasher rations her water day to day as if New Delhi were a desert. She uses the leftover water from the dog bowl to water the plants. She recycles soapy water from the laundry to mop the balcony.

And even when she gets it, the quality is another question altogether.Her well water has turned salty as it has receded over the years. The

water from the private tanker is mucky-brown. Still, Mrs. Prasher says, she can hardly afford to reject it. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she said. “It’s water.”

First dark spot discovered on UranusDavid Shiga

A mysterious dark spot has appeared in the clouds of Uranus - some-thing that has never before been seen clearly on the icy planet. Scientist do not know what makes it dark and why it is appearing now.

Its more distant neighbour, Neptune, has displayed prominent dark spots from time to time. They also display a puzzling range of behav-iours, sometimes moving back and forth in latitude, and sometimes changing shape with time.

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They are thought to be related to eddies in the atmosphere, but ex-actly how the eddies cause dark patches is unclear.

Now, the Hubble Space Telescope, which has frequently scrutinised the planet since 1994, has seen the first such spot on Uranus. Lawrence Sromovsky of the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, US, led the team that found the spot, which appeared in an image taken on 24 August.

Like the dark spots on Neptune, Uranus's spot is probably related to an eddy in the atmosphere, but why it is dark is unclear, Sromovsky says.

"It could be the spot is a region where there's less cloudiness, where we're seeing deeper into the atmosphere," he told New Scientist. "Or it could be a region of darker materials."Dredged up

If it is dark material, it might have been dredged up from deeper in the atmosphere. Alternatively, it might be converging at the spot from higher up in the atmosphere, he says.

The timing of the spot's appearance may have to do with the ap-proach of spring in the northern hemisphere, where the spot was found, says team member Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boul-der, Colorado, US.

Uranus, unlike the solar system's other planets, is tilted almost com-pletely on its side, with its rotational axis lying nearly in its orbital plane. So its south pole has been facing the Sun for a couple dozen years during the northern hemisphere's summer.

As more of its surface is exposed to the Sun during the lead-up to spring, which will occur in Decem-ber 2007, its atmosphere is expected to become more active, like that of Neptune.A dark spot 1700 by 3000 kilometres wide appears in this image of Uranus taken in visible and near-infrared light on 24 August (Im-age: NASA/ESA/L Sromovsky/U Wisconsin)

"We have hypothesised that Uranus might become more Neptune-like as it approached its equinox," she says. "The sudden appearance of this unusual dark feature suggests we might be right."Different wavelengths

The changing circulation patterns may be to blame for the spot, says Sromovsky: "What we might be seeing is an uplifting of some of the ed-

dies that we normally don't see because they're normally deeper in the atmosphere," he says.

The team plans to look at Uranus again in October using the Keck tele-scope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, US. Sromovsky is not sure whether they will see the spot in those observations, because they will not cover ex-actly the same wavelengths as Hubble did. "We're going to certainly look for it though," he says.

The Hubble images were taken with the High Resolution Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), which shut down unexpectedly on 23 September (see Hubble's key camera shuts down again).

The use of the High Resolution Channel and the rest of the ACS have been suspended while engineers investigate the problem.

Scientists bid to take Neanderthal DNA sampleKARL MANSFIELD

SCIENTISTS are attempting to extract DNA for the first time from the fossilised bones thought to be of a Neanderthal man who roamed Britain 35,000 years ago.

Experts plan to use a tooth from an upper jaw to establish whether the closest relative of modern humans lived on the British Isles later than it was once thought.

The fragment of an upper jaw, which was found in 1926 at Kent's Cav-ern in Devon, was originally thought to be human, but experts now think it could date back even further.

Chris Stringer, research leader in Human Origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said it was a critical test that could have historic re-sults. The only late Neanderthal fossils on the British Isles were found on the Channel Islands around 1910.

However, Stringer said the teeth discovered at the site date back to a time when the island was joined to France around 50,000 years ago.

The director of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (AHOB) project said: "Neanderthal DNA is very distinct and would show up clearly in tests. It is a critical test as this could be the first late Nean-derthal fossil on mainline Britain.

"But it is also historic if there is modern human DNA as this would prove they were here earlier than previously thought.

"Neanderthals are so close to us in time, living 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, and a closely related species. We have lots of Neanderthal tools but no fossils. The team is excited about the tests, but we need a bit of luck as the DNA may not have survived."

The roots, crown, size and shape of the tooth, which is thought to date back 35,000 years, would also be studied.

Torquay Museum in Devon, which looks after the piece of jaw bone, has agreed in principle to the DNA and carbon dating tests, Stringer said.

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The group, which found evidence which dated the arrival of primitive ancestors in Britain to 700,000 years ago, 200,000 years earlier than previous findings, includes archaeologists, paleontologists and geolo-gists from the Natural History Museum, the British Museum, Royal Hol-loway, University of London, and the University of Durham.

AHOB was set up in 2001 and funded for five years with £1.2m from the Leverhulme Trust which provides grants for education and research.

The second phase of research, which is called AHOB2 and runs until 2010, starts today after the Leverhulme Trust provided a £999,000 grant.

The next phase will include comparative studies in continental Europe.The new project will also test the theory that there were no humans in

Britain between 180,000 and 60,000 years ago due to the creation of the English Channel, making access to Britain more difficult.

Harder you look, the less you seeThe harder you focus on something, the less well you may actually

see it, US researchers have discovered.This paradox, described in Nature Neuroscience, might explain how it

is possible to miss visual cues.Volunteers asked to pay close attention to black and white stripes

were less able to discern them as a result.The New York University team believe prolonged attention to an un-

changing image effectively 'exhausts' vision after helping it initially.Researchers know that it is easier to see objects when there is more

contrast between their lighter and darker areas.Previous work has suggested that paying closer attention to or focus-

ing on an object makes it easier to see by effectively increasing this con-trast.

Although focusing your sight on an object is helpful initially, investiga-tors Samuel Ling and Marisa Carrasco found that this benefit soon fades.

Dr Carrasco explained: "Usually when we attend to something perfor-mance is better. But not always.

"If, for example, you are monitoring a screen and all the time you at-tend to a particular location on that screen then you are not going to be sensitive after a while.

"It's really paradoxical because you would think you are doing your best by focusing your attention."Evolutionary advantage

The researchers believe this paradox may have an evolutionary ad-vantage.

For example, tuning out visual information that you have already pro-cessed frees up the brain's limited resources to detect changes in other parts of the environment - a necessary ability for animals preyed upon in the wild.

But this can also backfire, Dr Will Curran, from the School of Psychol-ogy at Queen's University of Belfast, pointed out.

Predators can take advantage of this too, staying still for prolonged periods between intermittent advances on their prey until they are within striking distance, he said.

Professor Peter McOwan, professor of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London, said: "These results show a fascinating new kind of attentional illusion - the longer you 'look' the less you 'see'.

"Discovering and examining illusions like these will really help us un-derstand how human perception works.

"Visual attention helps us decide what's important, and understanding how this works in humans may allow us to build smarter computer vision systems that know what to look for."

The researchers stressed that their findings should not be any cause for real concern in everyday life.Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/5326742.stm

Greenland Ice Sheet Still Losing MassData gathered by a pair of NASA satellites orbiting Earth show Green-

land continued to lose ice mass at a significant rate through April 2006, and that the rate of loss is accelerating, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.

An iceberg calved from a glacier floats in the Jacobshavn fjord in southwest Greenland. A new CU-Boulder study indicates Greenland con-tinues to lose ice mass, and the rate of loss is accelerating. (Photo cour-tesy Konrad Steffen, CU-Boulder)

The study indicates that from April 2004 to April 2006, Greenland was shedding ice at about two and one-half times the rate of the previous two-year period, according to CU-Boulder researchers Isabella Velicogna and John Wahr. The researchers used measurements taken with the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, to calculate that Greenland lost roughly 164 cubic miles of ice from April 2004 to April 2006 - more than the volume of water in Lake Erie.

The new study, published in the Sept. 21 issue of Nature, follows on the heels of a study published in Science in August by a University of Texas at Austin team using GRACE that showed Greenland lost 57 cubic miles of ice annually from 2002 to 2005. The new CU-Boulder study indi-cates the speed-up in ice mass loss charted by the researchers has been occurring primarily in southern Greenland, said Velicogna.

"The acceleration rate really took off in 2004," said Velicogna, a re-searcher at the CU-Boulder-based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. "We think the changes we are seeing are prob-ably a pretty good indicator of the changing climatic conditions in Greenland, particularly in the southern region."

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Studies by several research groups indicate temperatures in southern Greenland have risen by about 4.4 degrees F in the past two decades, she said.

The CU-Boulder findings also are consistent with studies charting a dramatic acceleration of the Kangerdlugssaq and Helheim glaciers in southeast Greenland using satellite radar observations, said Wahr. A 2006 study by researchers at the University of Wales, for example, showed the two glaciers have doubled their speed and are dumping twice as much ice into the sea as they did five years ago.

"Our results correlate well with independent observations of glacier acceleration in the south of Greenland," said Wahr, also a professor of physics at CU-Boulder. "It's a fairly straightforward story - the ice loss in Greenland increased dramatically in 2004, particularly in the south, and it is continuing."

CIRES Director Konrad Steffen, who has maintained more than 20 cli-mate stations in Greenland for nearly two decades, said temperatures have warmed by more than 4 degrees F along the western slope of its ice sheet since 1990. "The increased surface melt of snow and ice pro-vides additional meltwater to lubricate the bottom of the ice sheet and increases the ice flow velocity toward the coast," said Steffen, a CU-Boulder geography professor who was not involved in the Nature study.

Launched in 2002 by NASA and Germany, the two GRACE satellites whip around Earth 16 times a day at an altitude of 310 miles, sensing subtle variations in Earth's mass and gravitational pull. Separated by 137 miles, the satellites measure changes in Earth's gravity field caused by regional changes in the planet's mass, including ice sheets, oceans and water stored in the soil and in underground aquifers.

A change in gravity due to a pass by GRACE over a portion of Green-land imperceptibly tugs the lead satellite away from the trailing satellite, said Velicogna. A sensitive ranging system allows researchers to mea-sure the distance of the two satellites down to as small as 1 micron - about 1/50 the width of a human hair - and to then calculate the ice mass in particular regions of Greenland.

In March 2006, Velicogna and Wahr used GRACE to determine that the Antarctic ice sheet - which holds 70 percent of Earth's freshwater - lost up to 36 cubic miles of ice annually from April 2002 to August 2005. Greenland, the largest island in the world, harbors about 10 percent of the world's freshwater in its ice sheet, which is up to two miles thick in places. If the Greenland ice sheet melted completely, the world's oceans would rise more than 20 feet, according to scientists.

Significant ice loss in Greenland has the potential to have severe ef-fects on the climate of the Northern Hemisphere, said Velicogna, who also is affiliated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which manages GRACE for NASA. Scientists believe that large amounts

of freshwater purged from Greenland's eastern coast could help to weaken the counterclockwise flow of the North Atlantic Current, lowering water and wind temperatures and potentially triggering abrupt cooling events in northern Europe.CIRES is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmo-spheric Administration. Animation of the GRACE mission is available on the Web at http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/gallery/animations/.

Body reveals its inflammation 'off switch'Deb MacKenzie NewScientist.com news service

Researchers have shed light on how the body switches off its immune response, a key step towards understanding autoimmune diseases and controlling inflammation.

When immune cells die, they transform into “sponges” that soak up the molecules responsible for causing inflammation, researchers have discovered. The new information may lead to better drugs to treat in-flammatory disorders, such as eczema.

Inflammation is characterised by a red, painful swelling around a wound caused by blood fluids, proteins and immune cells flooding into an area of the body in response to germs or damage. Its biological pur-pose is to allow immune cells to get from the blood to the trouble spot to fight infection.

But too much inflammation can be devastating. It is what causes death in diseases such as flu, while chronic, misdirected inflammation causes conditions from eczema to arthritis. As a result, researchers have been looking for ways to "turn-off" the inflammatory response.Ultimate scavengers

Now, Charles Serhan and colleagues at Harvard University in Boston, US, have discovered an important natural braking mechanism. In a healthy inflammatory response, immune cells called leukocytes are at-tracted to the site of injury, where they are activated by molecules called chemokines. The leukocytes emit powerful germ-killing chemicals, and then commit suicide.

The researchers discovered that dying leukocytes act like sponges, soaking up chemokines, preventing them from attracting more leuko-cytes. It is the body’s way of controlling inflammation - a good thing, since too much of their germ-killing chemicals can damage healthy sur-rounding tissue.

These dying leukocytes are the “ultimate scavenging entity”, Serhan says. As they die, they even produce more of the molecules - called CCR5 - that help them soak up chemokines. Then the whole lot is gob-bled by debris-removing cleaner cells called macrophages.Complete turnaround

This system is just one part of a complicated web of inflammation con-trols. But understanding this natural chemokine-soaking mechanism is

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vital to learning more about how inflammation and autoimmune disor-ders progress, the team says. For example, mice bred to lack another molecule that soaks up chemokines develop a skin inflammation similar to psoriasis in humans.

Serhan told New Scientist that one day it may be possible to control chronic inflammatory disease by making drugs that promote the natural signals that turn inflammation off.

Such drugs could also be used to turn off the chronic inflammation un-derlying many auto-immune diseases. “This is a complete 180° turn from the drugs sought today and used in the last century,” he says, which have focused on drugs that block the signals that turn inflamma-tion on in the first place.Journal reference: Nature Immunology (DOI: 10.1038/ni13920)

Cell Differentiation No Barrier to CloningDolly the cloned ewe has been at the center of controversy since she

was announced to the world in 1997. Beneath the philosophical consid-erations, the science of the cloning feat-in particular the type of cell used to kick off the process-has been an issue of some debate. Some have argued that so-called adult stem cells-root cells in most tissue that kick into action to replace damaged tissue-must have been involved. But a new test in mice shows that adult stem cells are actually worse than regular cells for the purposes of cloning with current techniques. More-over, it delivered two cloned pups from the genetic material contained in fully formed white blood cells.Cloning relies on a process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus of a donor cell is transferred into a fertilized egg that has been emptied of its chromosomes. That egg now contains an exact duplicate of the donor's genome, and if all goes well when it is im-planted into a surrogate mother, a clone will result. Xianzhong Yang of the University of Connecticut and Tao Cheng of the University of Pitts-burgh as well as a host of colleagues examined the cloning potential of three different types of cells: hematopoietic stem cells, progenitor cells and granulocytes. Each represents a different stage in the differentiation process of blood cells; stem cells can become any kind of blood cell, pro-genitor cells are already on a particular track and granulocytes are a specific type of white blood cell (further specified as neutrophils).

The researchers expected that nuclei transferred from stem cells would be the best in creating clones. "We thought that adult stem cells would give a much higher efficiency while terminally differentiated cells would give the lowest or zero," Yang explains. "To our surprise, when we compared cells from the same animal, instead of decreasing from stem cells with differentiated cells, we see a tremendous increase." In fact, only 4 percent of stem cell transfers produced nascent embryos com-pared with 8 percent of progenitor cells and 35 percent of granulocytes.

Out of 1,368 granucolyte transfers at least 34 percent reached the blas-tocyst stage, and two actually resulted in living pups (who did not sur-vive for long), according to the paper presenting the result published on-line in Nature Genetics on October 1.

This is an important confirmation on several levels: most critically, adult stem cells are notoriously difficult to collect and store, whereas differentiated cells are plentiful and stable. "You can get [differentiated cells] anywhere in your body," Yang notes. "Most adult stem cells cannot be cultured in vitro without differentiation." Plus, hopes for therapeutic cloning rest on the ability to produce embryonic stem cells from cells harvested from diseased patients.Stem cells harvested from embryos rather than adults remain the most powerful for cloning and other purposes; Yang's team showed that cloning from such cells succeeded in 49 percent of attempts and led to 18 mouse pups. Of course, such embryonic stem cells are not available in adult patients, so being able to create them from regular cells is an important step. But mystery still surrounds the best way to clone. "We think that adult stem cells are more quiescent; we think that it's like a locked, closed door," Yang explains. "We think that differentiation is a way that opens some doors and makes it easier for nuclear transfer pro-gramming to go back into embryonic stem cells."

"We have some very encouraging data from an ongoing study that you can modify the status of cells and increase the efficiency of cloning," he adds. "If we modify the epigenetic status," that is, turning certain genes on or off, "it could be that you could increase the effi-ciency. This opens the door for a lot of different studies." The odds are that Dolly's genome came from a differentiated cell, but the quest for the best way to create cloned animals continues. -David Biello

New study: Preterm birth causes one-third of all infant deaths

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. - Premature birth was the underlying cause of nearly twice as many infant deaths than previously estimated, according to a new analysis by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The analysis, published today in Pediatrics, found that in 2002 preterm birth, birth at less than 37 completed weeks gestation, contributed to more than one-third of infant deaths within the first year of life.

"We have long known that babies born too soon face many challenges - even death," said Joann Petrini, Ph.D., director of the March of Dimes Perinatal Data Center. "But this research confirms the urgent role pre-venting preterm birth can play in improving infant mortality in the United States."

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The U.S. infant mortality rate has declined since 1995 except between 2001 and 2002, when the rate increased for the first time since 1958.

In 2002, the National Center for Health Statistics listed short gesta-tion/low birth weight as the cause of 17 percent of infant deaths. How-ever, two-thirds of the infants who died in 2002 were born prematurely. This difference led the CDC researchers to speculate that premature birth plays a greater role in infant death than the official reporting sys-tem indicates.

The researchers proposed a new method to determine the contribu-tion of premature birth to infant mortality. They reviewed causes of in-fant death and combined conditions, such as respiratory distress syn-drome, which frequently occur in premature babies. This new method doubled the percentage of infant deaths caused by premature birth to 34.3 percent.

More than 95 percent of those deaths were of infants who were born at less than 32 weeks gestation, the definition of infants who are "very preterm."

Birth defects are the leading cause of infant death, followed by prema-turity, according to the official reporting systems. But, using this new classification, premature birth would be the most frequent cause of in-fant death.

More than a half million babies are born too soon each year and the preterm birth rate has increased more than 30 percent since 1981. Ba-bies who do survive face risks of lifelong challenges of cerebral palsy, mental retardation, chronic lung disease, and vision and hearing loss, as well as other developmental problems."The Contribution of Preterm Birth to Infant Mortality in the United States," was published in Vol. 118, No. 4, of Pediatrics. A podcast of Dr. William M. Callaghan, of the CDCs Division of Reproductive Health, the lead author, is expected to be available at www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth.The March of Dimes works to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality. For more information, visit marchofdimes.com or nacersano.org for Spanish.

Progesterone shows promise as treatment for traumatic brain injuries

ATLANTA - Emory University researchers have found that giving proges-terone to trauma victims shortly following brain injury appears to be safe and may reduce the risk of death and the degree of disability. The results of this study-the first clinical trial of its kind in the world-will be available online in the October issue of the peer-reviewed journal, An-nals of Emergency Medicine, on October 2. Researchers say the next step will be to confirm their findings in a much larger group of traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients.

"Progesterone treatment for TBI has been extensively studied in labo-ratory animals for more than 15 years, but this is the world's first use of progesterone to treat brain injury in humans," says Arthur Kellermann, MD, MPH, professor and chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine, Emory University School of Medicine and a co-author of the study. "Emory scientist Donald Stein was the first to discover that pro-gesterone has neuroprotective effects, and much of the foundational work on progesterone for TBI was from his laboratory. Their results were so impressive, that we felt it was time to take this treatment to the bed-side for testing in patients who had suffered a serious brain injury. We are grateful to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (a division of the National Institutes of Health) for their support of this work," says Kellermann.

Approximately 1.5 to 2 million people in the U.S. sustain a TBI each year, leading to 50,000 deaths and 80,000 new cases of long-term dis-ability. It is also a major cause of death and disability among children and military personnel. Despite the enormity of the problem, scientists have failed to identify effective medications to improve outcomes follow-ing a TBI. In fact, no new medical therapies have been developed for traumatic brain injuries in over 30 years.

Emory's researchers designed a clinical trial to assess the promise of progesterone for treatment of TBI. Their three-year pilot study, called ProTECT (which stands for "Progesterone for Traumatic brain injury-Ex-perimental Clinical Treatment"), enrolled 100 participants. Their phase II study was primarily designed to evaluate whether progesterone can be administered intravenously in a reliable way, and whether the treatment is safe to use in humans with TBI. The researchers also hoped to find preliminary evidence that the treatment might be effective.

Although it is widely considered a "sex steroid," progesterone is also a neurosteroid that exerts protective effects on human tissue. It is natu-rally present in small but measurable amounts in the brains of males and females. Laboratory studies suggest that progesterone is critical for the normal development of neurons in the brain and exerts protective effects on damaged brain tissue.

Study participants were enrolled at Grady Memorial Hospital (the site of the study because it is Atlanta's only Level 1 Trauma Center). To be a candidate for the study, patients had to reach the hospital within 11 hours of injury. People enrolled in the study had a "blunt" traumatic brain injury, which typically occurs from a car accident, motorcycle crash or a fall. Enrolled patients had an initial Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score ranging between 4 and 12. The GCS is a widely used scale that quantifies the initial level of impairment from a TBI. A score of 4-8 signals severe TBI, usually accompanied by coma, while a score of 8-12 signals a moderate TBI.

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Because study candidates were cognitively impaired, their family members or other legal representatives were asked to give proxy con-sent for enrollment in the study. Four out of every five patients (80 per-cent) enrolled received intravenous progesterone, and one of every five (20 percent) received placebo. Patients, family members, doctors nor study staff knew which participants received progesterone or placebo until the study was completed. Thirty days after injury, objective rating scales were used to assess each participant's neurological function and level of disability.

In an earlier paper, the researchers reported that progesterone can be reliably given intravenously and achieve predictable levels in the blood-stream. The new paper reports the team's findings about drug safety and effectiveness.

"We found encouraging evidence that progesterone is safe in the set-ting of TBI, with no evidence of side effects or serious harmful events," says David Wright, MD, assistant professor in the Department of Emer-gency Medicine at Emory and lead author of the study. "In addition, we found a 50 percent reduction in the rate of death in the progesterone-treated group. Furthermore, we found a significant improvement in the functional outcome and level of disability among patients who were en-rolled with a moderate brain injury." The researchers evaluated disabil-ity using the Disability Rating Scale, an objective measurement tool, and assessed functional outcome using the highly validated Glasgow Out-come Scale.

The researchers found no significant differences in the rate of adverse events among patients who received progesterone compared to those who received placebo. About 30 percent of patients given placebo died within 30 days of head injury, compared to only 13 percent of those given progesterone. Most patients who died had a severe TBI. Because more severe TBI patients in the progesterone group survived, it is not surprising that they had a higher average level of disability at 30 days than survivors in the placebo group. One-year outcomes will be reported at a later date.

Progesterone is a promising treatment because it is inexpensive, widely available and has a long track record of safe use in humans to treat other diseases. The team previously reported that IV progesterone can be easily administered in an arm or hand vein rather than through a central IV line in the neck, chest or groin.

Donald Stein, PhD, Asa G. Candler Professor of Emergency Medicine and neurobiologist at Emory, discovered the neuroprotective properties of progesterone. He and members of his lab have been studying proges-terone for almost 20 years.

"Our research has found that male and female rats with brain injury developed less brain swelling and recovered more completely when they

are treated with progesterone shortly following the injury," Dr. Stein ex-plains. "The hormone seems to slow or block damaging chemicals that are released after a brain injury, protecting the brain from the death of brain cells."

The research team is now planning a large, multi-center, phase III clin-ical trial designed to test the effectiveness of progesterone in 1000 pa-tients with TBI and hopes to secure funding from the NIH for this project. They also hope to study the effects of progesterone treatment in animal models of blast-related brain injury, a major cause of death among com-bat personnel. They plan to implement a study of progesterone to treat pediatric brain injury as well, because brain injury is a leading cause of death and disability in children.

Equally exciting, animal research at Emory and elsewhere indicates that progesterone may limit damage from transient and permanent is-chemic stroke. In light of these findings, Emory researchers hope to initi-ate a similar pilot clinical trial to study the effectiveness of progesterone or a progesterone metabolite to treat patients with acute stroke.

'RNA interference' scoops Nobel prize for MedicineGaia Vince NewScientist.com news service

Two US scientists won the Nobel prize for Medicine on Monday for their discovery of RNA interference - pioneering work that has revolu-tionised the field of molecular biology and is leading to powerful genetic medicines.

Andrew Fire at Stanford University in California, and Craig Mello at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester, each received a gold medal and will share 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.37 million).

The pair "discovered a fundamental mechanism for controlling the flow of genetic information", the Nobel prize jury said.

“It must be the quickest Nobel prize in terms of time from findings to award,” says Nick Hastie, director of the Human Genetics Unit at the Medical Research Council, UK.

Hastie says their award was widely expected and highly deserved: “Their findings have led to an enormous scientific revolution - they have opened up a whole new area of biology with great medical application.”Gene silencing

In 1997, the Fire-Mello team discovered that they were able to “si-lence” certain genes in a cell's DNA by using two strands of RNA mole-cules. This prevented the genes from being expressed.

Dubbed RNA interference (RNAi), the finding has become an ex-tremely useful research tool, because it allows genetic researchers to “knock-out” specific genes, observe the consequent disruptions, and so determine exactly what the gene does.

It is being used as a genome-wide tool, to search thousands of genes in a cell and screen for their function. The technique has already re-

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vealed genes responsible for muscle problems and diabetes,” Hastie says.

A byproduct of the discovery of RNAi was the finding that although cells in the human body only contain one strand of RNA, they do have micro-RNA - tiny sections of RNA that can act a little like double-stranded RNA and also silence the activity of certain genes. Experts be-lieve the body uses micro-RNA in its immune response.

In 2004, it was discovered that a mutation in one of these micro-RNAs caused diabetes, (see Bits of RNA wield power over genes).Group effort

Researchers are using RNAi and micro-RNA in drug development, hop-ing that by shutting down genes that cause disease they will be able to cure diseases such as cancer and HIV.

“I am very honoured that our work has received such positive atten-tion,” said Fire in a statement. “Science is a group effort. Please recog-nise that the recent progress in the field of RNA-based gene silencing has involved original scientific inquiry from research groups around the world."

He added: "Any prize recognition should go to the many scientists who have made individual contributions, and to the spirit of scientific com-munity that has allowed information and ideas to flow freely.”

The Medicine prize is the first of this week's coveted Nobel honours. The Physics prize will be announced on Tuesday and Chemistry on Wednesday.

Giant Radio Telescope May Go to Australia or AfricaAustralia and South Africa have been shortlisted to host the Square

Kilometer Array, a massive radio telescope that will be built in 2018. The array will have thousands of antennas, spread out over an area of 3,000 km (1,800 miles), and should be 50 times more powerful than the most powerful array of radio telescopes we have today. The Australian site will be near Meekathara in the western side of the country, while the South African site will be near Carnarvon. Both sites were chosen be-cause of the low interference of man-made radio signals in the surround-ing countryside.

Australia and Southern Africa have been short-listed as the countries to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a giant next-generation radio telescope being developed by scientists in 17 countries.

The decision was made by the International SKA Steering Committee, following advice from an external committee of 7 scientists from 5 coun-tries that examined the four site bids.Artist illustration of the SKA. Image credit: SKA

Both Australia and Southern Africa can meet the full range of require-ments for the SKA, said Prof Richard Schilizzi, International SKA Project

Director, in announcing the decision today in Dwingeloo, The Nether-lands.

The SKA will be a set of thousands of antennas, not a single giant in-strument, spread over 3000 kilometres, but with half of the antennas lo-cated in a central region 5 kilometres across. The SKA will be 50 times more sensitive than the most powerful radio telescopes we now have. It will peer deep into the cosmos to pick up signs of the first stars and gal-axies to form after the Big Bang; it will trace the effects of the mysteri-ous Dark Energy that is driving the Universe apart at an ever increasing speed; and it will map out the influence of magnetic fields on the devel-opment of stars and galaxies. Observations of pulsars will allow the SKA to look for the effects of gravitational waves from merging massive black-holes at the centres of other galaxies. If there are extra-terrestrial intelligences out there in the Milky Way with airport or ionospheric radars, the SKA will detect them.

For Australia, the core site is proposed to be at Mileura station, about 100 km west of Meekathara in Western Australia. Other dishes would be distributed over the Australian conti-nent with the possibility of extension into New Zealand. In Southern Africa, the central location would be at the Karoo site in the Northern Cape region of South Africa, about 95 km from Carnarvon, with further dishes located in South Africa itself and in neighbour-ing African countries - Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique, Madagasgar, Mauritius, Kenya, and Ghana.

A key requirement of the core site is that there must be a very low level of man-made radio signals, because interference will mask the faint cosmic radio waves the telescope is de-signed to detect. Furthermore, South Africa and Australia are both mak-ing excellent progress towards protecting these unique environments with radio-quiet zones that will limit the use of radio transmitting equip-ment said Prof Phil Diamond, past-chair of the International SKA Steering Committee.

Both the Australian and Southern African sites can see much of the same sky as other major groundbased optical, infrared and sub-millime-tre telescopes and both have a good view of the southern sky, which is where the centre of our Galaxy goes overhead. Both also have stable ionospheric conditions, which is important for the low-frequency obser-vations the SKA will make.

China and Argentina/Brazil also bid to host the SKA. Both sites were also considered exceptional sites for radio astronomy, but failed to meet

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at least one of the broad range of exacting requirements for the Square Kilometre Array. The proposed Chinese site would place unacceptable restrictions on the placement of the central elements of the SKA and the joint Argentinian/Brazilian proposal was eliminated because the iono-spheric conditions above South America would limit the SKA’s perfor-mance at low frequencies.

Further analysis of the short-listed sites will now be carried out, with the final decision on which of the two sites will host the SKA expected towards the end of the decade. Original Source: Jodrell Bank News Re-lease

Obese may be food 'junkies' with constant cravingsAndy Coghlan NewScientist.com news service

Obese people become as addicted to food in the same way that junkies do to their drugs, according to a new study, which may explain their constant cravings.

Evidence that the obese are food “junkies” comes from brain scans of seven obese people who were fitted with electrical devices designed to fool them into thinking they are full by making their stomachs stretch.

The implanted devices, known as “gastric stimulators”, provide low-level electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve, which runs from the stomach to the brain. When the device is switched on, the vagus nerve stimulation causes the stomach to expand and produce peptides that send a message of “fullness” to the brain.

“We know that if we eat, our stomach sends a signal to the brain via the vagus nerve. The ingredients of food touch the wall of the stomach and the signal goes through to the brain to say ‘eat more’ or ‘eat less’,” says Gene-Jack Wang at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, US.

“But we wanted to know which area of the brain the signal goes to,” Wang explains. So he and his colleagues gave participants radioactive sugar so that they could use a scanner to see which parts of the brain were active, by tracing where the sugar was metabolised in the brain.Cocaine craving

“We know the 'hunger centre' of the brain is the hypothalamus, but what we observed was astonishing,” Wang says.

The team found that when the gastric stimulators were turned on, the seahorse-shaped parts of the brain, called the hippocampus were acti-vated.

“[The hippocampus] is the area related to memory and the reward system. The areas lighting up were areas activated in drug addicts. It’s very similar to what triggers the craving for cocaine,” he says. So de-spite receiving the “full” signal, they still have the craving for more.

Magic bulletThe findings help explain why it is so difficult to retreat from obesity.

“We now know the decision to eat involves emotion and the cognitive system too. This study shows how the brain tries to manipulate the body, not the other way around,” he explains. It is difficult for an obese person to diet because they can’t suppress the craving to get their next “fix” even when physiologically, they’re getting a “full” signal from the stomach, Wang says. Such people may continue to feel hungry, even when they have eaten an amount that would satisfy the hunger of a healthy person.

It shows that we cannot find a magic bullet for obesity, and that we must consider other areas of the brain, Wang says.

Steven Heymsfield, at Merck in Rahway, New Jersey, US, says: “It’s en-tirely possible that hunger addiction overrides other signals. The addic-tion thing is a very compelling idea when applied to obesity.” Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0601977103)

Tuberculosis Strain Subverts Immune ResponseResearchers may have glimpsed a means

by which the tuberculosis bacterium could adapt itself to different human populations. The loss of a gene from one strain of tuber-culosis (TB) allows the bug to subvert the im-mune response of its host, potentially ex-plaining why the strain caused an unusually severe outbreak at a U.K. school, re-searchers report. Related strains are a major cause of the disease in India and among Asians living in the U.K., raising the possibil-ity that the mutation could be part of an adaptation to those populations.TB TRICKS: A strain of tuberculosis that caused a unusally aggressive outbreak in the U.K. might have done so by dialing down the immune response of its hosts, allowing the bacterium (dark red) to sicken lung cells (blue) more readily Image: ROBERT WILKINSON.

Despite being a scourge that kills more than two million people each year, Mycobacterium tuberculosis is believed to cause significant dis-ease in only 5 to 10 percent of exposed individuals. Researchers were therefore curious about a well-documented 2001 outbreak at a commu-nity college in Leicester, U.K., in which 77 out of 254 who hosted the pathogen fell ill. Strains of tuberculosis vary widely in their genetic makeup, so researchers began looking for a genetic explanation of the

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high rate of disease. Investigators cultured the outbreak-causing strain of bacterium and found it lacked a gene called Rv1519 present in a ref-erence strain.

At first blush the loss of the gene seems to make the outbreak strain less hardy, they found; it grew relatively slowly in a nutrient broth and was less tolerant to acidity and hydrogen peroxide than the reference bacterium. Interestingly, the outbreak strain grew at a normal pace in cultured human white blood cells, apparently by subverting the immune response to its benefit. The infected cells produce less inflammation-in-ducing chemicals-a major component of the immune response-and more anti-inflammatory chemicals, the group reports online October 2 in Pro-ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. The weakened im-mune response would explain the rate of disease seen in the Leicester TB outbreak.

Earlier this year researchers identified different subgroups of tubercu-losis that coincide with specific ethnic populations, perhaps because they transmit best in those groups. The new study does not directly ad-dress the idea, says lead author Robert Wilkinson of Imperial College London and the University of Cape Town. "All we can say is it fits rather well with that scheme," he explains. Figuring out if circulating TB strains carry genetic variations that cause different disease outcomes is espe-cially important for trying to design or administer a vaccine, says TB re-searcher Sebastien Gagneux of the Institute for Systems Biology. It's also a major challenge. "To get down to the real bacterial factors is re-ally difficult," he says. -JR Minkel

Salmon farms kill wild fish, study showsNew research confirms that sea lice from fish farms kill wild salmon.

Up to 95 per cent of the wild juvenile salmon that migrate past fish farms die as a result of sea lice infestation from the farms. The results of the research have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of The United States of America.

"We know that fish farms raise sea lice levels, and we know that sea lice kill fish," said the study's lead author Martin Krkosek, a Ph.D. stu-dent at the University of Alberta Centre for Mathematical Biology. "This is the first study to combine field surveys, experiments and mathemati-cal modeling in one system to estimate the total impact of the farms."

The primary sea lice hosts are adult salmon. Under natural conditions, the adults are far offshore when the juveniles are migrating out to sea. Fish farms put adult salmon in net pens along the migration routes. The result is a cloud of sea lice through which the juveniles must migrate. "It takes only one or two sea lice to kill a juvenile pink or chum salmon," said Krkosek. "The juveniles are so vulnerable because they are so small - only one to two inches long."

"We often worry about wildlife making humans sick, but here is a case where humans are making wildlife sick," said study co-author Dr. Mark Lewis, a mathematician and biologist at the University of Alberta.

The study found an increasing number of salmon were killed over the migration season, from 9 per cent in early spring when the sea lice pop-ulation was low to 95 per cent in late spring when the sea lice popula-tion was higher.

"Everyone knows that only a small fraction of juvenile salmon survive to return as adults," said Lewis. "The fish-farm sea lice are reducing that fraction even more."

The research was conducted by a team of biologists and mathemati-cians working in coastal British Columbia. "We counted sea lice on more than 14 thousand juvenile salmon migrating past fish farms, and con-ducted mortality experiments with more than 3,000 fish," said Krkosek. "We then used mathematical models to combine this information and estimate the total impact of the farms."

"The work is of an impeccably high standard, and will be very difficult to refute," said Dr. Andy Dobson, an epidemiologist from Princeton Uni-versity who specializes in wildlife diseases.

The study's implications may be severe for wild salmon. "Even the best case scenario of an additional ten per cent mortality from farm-ori-gin sea lice could push a fish stock into the red zone," said biologist Dr. John Volpe, a study co-author at the University of Victoria.

Although the study was conducted in British Columbia, the results ap-ply globally. "This study really raises the question of whether we can have native salmon and large scale aquaculture - as it is currently prac-ticed - in the same place," said Dr. Ransom Myers, a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University.

"It also raises a more distant specter," said Dobson. "When are we go-ing to see the first human disease caused by aquaculture?"

The research was funded primarily by the National Research Council of Canada and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Further support came from the David Suzuki Foundation, the Canadian Sablefish Association, and the British Columbia Wilderness Tourism Association.

"The analysis in this paper almost certainly underestimates the total mortality of juvenile salmon, " said study co-author Dr. Neil Frazer, a physicist at the University of Hawai'i. "We considered only the direct ef-fects of sea lice on fish survival. We did not include the secondary ef-fects of increased predation on infected fish."

"The debate is over," said study co-author Alexandra Morton, a biolo-gist with the Raincoast Research Society. "This paper brings our under-standing of farm-origin sea lice and Pacific wild salmon to the point where we know there is a clear severe impact."

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Low birth weight infants may have cognitive and physical problems when they reach adolescence

Sixteen-year-olds who weighed less than 2,000 grams (about 4.5 pounds) at birth and are not disabled are still more likely than the aver-age teenager to have physical and mental difficulties, according to a re-port in the October issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Low birth weight is known to increase the risk for major disabilities such as cerebral palsy and mental retardation, but researchers now sus-pect that low birth weight may also contribute to minor difficulties in motor skills and in thinking, learning and memory (cognitive abilities). These problems may last into adolescence, according to background in-formation in the article.

Agnes H. Whitaker, M.D., Columbia University and New York State Psy-chiatric Institute, New York, and colleagues studied 474 non-disabled adolescents who were born at or admitted to one of three New Jersey hospitals between 1984 and 1987 and weighed less than 2,000 grams at birth. The participants, who had an average age of 16 at the time of as-sessment for this study, underwent intelligence and motor tests in their homes.

Compared with the standardization sample, or the large group of teens used to provide a reference point for the assessments, the adoles-cents with low birth weight had more motor problems. Their IQ scores were within the normal range, but on average were significantly lower than the average for their age group. Those who were male, who had in-juries to the white matter (nerve tissue) of the brain on neonatal ultra-sound and who spent more days on a ventilator as an infant were more likely to have motor difficulties. Social disadvantages, a lower fetal growth ratio (calculated by dividing birth weight by the median weight for the infant's age) and white matter injury also predicted lower IQ scores.

"The finding that, independent of social risk, specific prenatal, perina-tal and neonatal biological risk factors are associated with cognitive and motor outcomes as late as adolescence runs counter to the view that, absent severe disability, early biological risk factors are of little impor-tance in later life," the authors conclude. "The prevention of white mat-ter injury and the need for mechanical ventilation may be key to improv-ing motor outcomes, whereas the prevention of intrauterine growth re-tardation (or perhaps impaired head growth) and white matter injury may be key to improving cognitive outcomes. Taken together, these findings suggest that enhanced maternal-fetal and neonatal care have the potential to substantially improve cognitive and motor outcomes for non-disabled low birth weight adolescents."

Super chow, laced with semi-synthetic vitamin E deriva-tive, inhibited spread of cancer in mice

PHILADELPHIA - A chemically altered form of vitamin E mixed into mouse chow dramatically reduced spread of aggressive mammary cancer in mice, suggesting that the compound in pill form could be used to treat human metastatic cancer, according to a report in the October 1 issue of the journal Cancer Research.

The study, by investigators at the University of Arizona, is the first to show that the synthetic compound has potent anti-cancer properties when given in the simplest way possible - as a dietary supplement.

"We tried other ways of delivering different forms of the synthetic vita-min, such as by force feeding and injections, but found that one form, á-TEA, was more effective when incorporated into food, and that makes it much more clinically useful," said the study's lead investigator, Em-manuel T. Akporiaye, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Immunobiol-ogy at the University of Arizona.

Mice eating the super chow had a 4.8-fold reduction in the number of tumors that spread to the lungs, compared to control mice, Akporiaye said. An even greater effect was seen when the animals began eating á-TEA-laced food as a cancer preventive, he said. "These preliminary studies are very promising, and it could be that combining this synthetic vitamin E derivative with other anti-cancer treatments may offer the po-tential of both treating and preventing human breast cancer," Akporiaye said.

Although vitamin E (alpha tocopherol) is an anti-oxidant, it cannot de-stroy tumor cells by itself, he said. To improve the vitamin, derivatives have been created by swapping a hydroxyl chemical group with an acid. One is alpha-tocopheryl succinate (á-TOS), which used a succinic acid residue, and another is alpha-tocopheryloxyacetic acid (á-TEA), which used acetic acid.

Replacing the hydroxyl group in vitamin E helps force cancer cells to self destruct, Akporiaye said, because the compounds work to free up pro-apoptotic proteins that are normally held in check within cells. "Cell survival is maintained when pro-apoptotic proteins are confined, and these synthetic forms of vitamin E release them, pushing the cell into committing suicide," he said.

"Only a little part of vitamin E is changed in these synthetic deriva-tives, but they show amazing anticancer properties, and they selectively target tumor cells," Akporiaye said.

To make the synthetic vitamins water soluble (not fat soluble like nat-ural vitamin E), researchers have added sodium hydroxide. In this way, these vesiculated forms, called Vá-TOS and Vá-TEA, can be delivered clinically through injection or oral gavage (feeding through a tube), and

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experiments have shown they can treat melanoma, lung and breast can-cer in rodent models.

In this study, the Arizona researchers evaluated the anti-tumor effect of Vá-TOS and Vá-TEA on mice with an aggressive form of mammary cancer that is similar to human breast cancer that readily metastasizes. They also looked at how well á-TEA would affect tumor growth if incorpo-rated into the food ("chow") that the mice ate.

They found that injecting Vá-TOS or Vá-TEA into the peritoneal cavity of the mice reduced the average volume of tumors by two fold, com-pared to control mice that did not receive the injections. Administering Vá-TOS daily through a feeding tube had the same effect on tumor size, but Vá-TOS was ineffective when delivered in this way, Akporiaye said. "We found that Vá-TOS wasn't stable, and returned to its natural vitamin E state," he said.

To gauge the effectiveness of a dietary treatment, the researchers had special rat chow manufactured that incorporated a fairly large quan-tity of á-TEA into the food. They then tested the chow as a cancer pre-ventive and as a cancer treatment.

For the prevention study, the mice ate á-TEA chow starting on the same day that they were injected with rodent mammary tumor cells known to spread quickly to the lungs and bones. The mice were allowed to eat as much food as they wanted, and at the end of 29 days, the av-erage tumor volume was reduced by 6.7-fold, compared to control mice who had not been fed á-TEA.

In the therapy experiment, mice started eating á-TEA chow 11 days af-ter tumors were implanted, and in the experimental group, there was a 3.6-fold reduction in average tumor volume compared to control mice, Akporiaye said.

In both preventive and therapeutic studies, mice fed á-TEA chow had a 4.8-fold reduction in the number of tumors that had spread to the lungs, compared to control mice. "The results were very impressive," he said. "The chow was very effective in slowing down the growth rate of the tu-mor and significantly reducing metastases."

The á-TEA diet produced no visible adverse side effects, not even weight loss, Akporiaye said.

"The combined characteristics of ease of delivery, relevance of route of delivery and selectivity for killing tumor cells suggest that dietary á-TEA may be useful for treating metastatic breast cancer," he said.

The researchers are now testing the effect of reduced doses of á-TEA in the chow and plan to test the synthetic vitamin in combination with dendritic cell immunotherapy. "When you kill tumor cells, they release antigens that can be picked up by specialized cells that stimulate the immune system,, and this two-step process could provide a longer last-ing outcome," Akporiaye said.

Molecular atlas provides new tool for understanding estro-gen-fueled breast cancer

BOSTON - Lurking in unexplored regions of the human genome are thou-sands of previously unknown on/off switches that may influence how the growth of breast cancer is driven by estrogen, new research by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers has revealed.

In the October issue of Nature Genetics, the investigators present the first complete map of the molecular "control panels" - stretches of DNA that turn genes on and off - operated by the cells' estrogen receptor, the master regulator of cell growth in the most common form of breast can-cer. The map, which includes thousands of such control regions, pro-vides scientists with a new tool for understanding how genes are regu-lated, and may eventually help doctors match patients with treatments that are most likely to be effective for them and overcome the problem of resistance to current hormone therapies, the study authors say.

The estrogen receptor (ER) is an intricate protein net in the nucleus of breast cancer cells. When the receptor snares an estrogen molecule, it sets in motion a cascade of activity among genes involved in cell growth and division. In many breast tumors, cells have an unusually large num-ber of ERs, so they proliferate rapidly in the presence of estrogen. Drugs that block the ER, such as tamoxifen and fulvestrant, are often able to stop or slow the growth of these estrogen-driven tumors.

"For the most part, the sequence of steps between the activation of the estrogen receptor and the beginning of tumor cell division has been unclear. We've known of only a handful of the portions of genes that bind to the ER - the so-called control regions that activate or deactivate the genes," says Dana-Farber's Myles Brown, MD, the senior author of the new study. "With this project we've located all of them, and found there are thousands more than were previously known." Since most genes have more than one control region, the map points to about 1,000 genes influenced, to some degree, by the ER.

The binding-site map was compiled with a novel two-step procedure called ChIP-on-chip. Researchers first used a technique called chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) to purify the regions of genes that take or-ders from the ER. They then placed these pieces of DNA on "microarray chips" containing the entire human genome sequence. This allowed the researchers to identify all the points in the genome where binding with the ER takes place.

The researchers coined the word "cistrome" to describe the map they had produced - an atlas of all gene segments influenced by the ER. "cis" refers to a DNA segment that regulates a gene's activity in response to a signal from outside the gene (while "trans" refers to a factor that acts on DNA); and "ome" - from the Greek word for manager - refers to the full

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set of such segments, as "genome" refers to all the genes within human cells.

The map contains many surprises, the study authors say. For one, the majority of binding sites within the cistrome are often very far from the portions of the genes that contain the blueprints for proteins. This over-turns the commonly held notion that the ER might favor sites close to the protein-coding regions of genes.

"More than 70 percent of breast cancers are ER-positive, meaning their growth is driven by estrogen," Brown says, "and the estrogen re-ceptor is the most important target for therapy for these tumors. Know-ing the complete set of ER binding sites gives us a new resource for un-derstanding the role of estrogen in breast cancer. By identifying genes associated with the ER in breast tumors, it opens up previously unex-plored regions of the genome involved in the estrogen-dependence of breast cancer."

The knowledge may one day help researchers and physicians deter-mine which treatments are likely to work best in individual patients and restore the potency of cancer drugs to which patients have become re-sistant, added Brown, who is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.Why don't all moles progress to melanoma?

University of Michigan scientists discover how skin cells block cancer-causing mutations

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Everyone has moles. Most of the time, they are nothing but a cosmetic nuisance. But sometimes pigment-producing cells in moles called melanocytes start dividing abnormally to form a deadly form of skin cancer called melanoma. About one in 65 Americans born this year will be diagnosed with melanoma at some point during their lifetime.

Scientists know that 30 percent of all melanomas begin in a mole. They know that 90 percent of moles contain cancer-causing mutations. What scientists didn't know is how melanocytes stop these mutations from triggering the development of cancer.

Maria S. Soengas, Ph.D., and other scientists in the Multidisciplinary Melanoma Clinic at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, have found the answer to this important question in an unex-pected place - a structure inside cells called the endoplasmic reticulum, or ER.

"Our results support the direct role of the endoplasmic reticulum as an important gatekeeper of tumor control," says Soengas, who is an assis-tant professor of dermatology in the U-M Medical School. "Until now, no one knew there was a connection between ER stress and the very early stages of tumor initiation."

Results of the U-M study - involving melanocytes from normal human skin and biopsies of non-malignant human moles - are being published in the October issue of Nature Cell Biology.

The endoplasmic reticulum is the cell's protein production factory. The process begins when chains of amino acids are deposited in the ER membrane in response to coded instructions from genes. Chaperone proteins fold these amino acids into specific shapes. When too many of them build up in the membrane, or when something goes wrong with the folding process, the system gets bogged down. This can stress or even kill the cell.

To prevent this, the ER sends out distress signals to activate what sci-entists call the unfolded protein response (UPR). This slows the protein production process and gets rid of excess incoming amino acids, giving the ER a chance to catch up. If that doesn't work, the UPR causes the cell to destroy itself in a process called apoptosis.

"Traditionally, the ER's role was considered to be limited to protein folding or protein modification," Soengas says. "But scientists like Ran-dal Kaufman, a U-M professor of biological chemistry and co-author on our paper, have found that the ER can sense changes in glucose, nutri-ents, oxygen levels and other aspects of cellular physiology associated with diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer's disease."

"In our study, we found that the ER senses the activity of certain onco-genes in the melanocyte and triggers a response that prevents the ma-lignant transformation of these cells," Soengas adds.

According to Soengas, the tumor suppressive mechanism induced by the ER in melanocytes with these cancer-causing mutations is prema-ture senescence - a form of "suspended animation" that stops the cell cycle and keeps cells from dividing, but doesn't kill them.

"The cells are held in check - they don't die, but they don't proliferate either," Soengas explains. "In the case of moles, melanocytes can stay this way for 20 to 40 years or even your whole life. For most of us, just holding cells in an arrested state is sufficient to prevent the develop-ment of cancer. That's why so many people have moles, but few have melanoma."

In the study, U-M scientists found that the tumor suppressive response in melanocytes varied depending on the type of oncogene being ex-pressed in the cell.

"We found that some oncogenes activated the endoplasmic reticulum, while other oncogenes didn't," Soengas says.

In a previous study, Soengas and colleagues found that certain onco-genes use a different senescence mechanism, which doesn't activate the ER, to block the transformation of melanocytes. Both these mecha-nisms work in addition to or independent from other well-known tumor suppressor mechanisms involving apoptosis.

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Soengas says the results of the study will be important in helping sci-entists understand all the different mechanisms melanocytes use to pro-tect themselves against oncogenes. But she cautions that there are no immediate clinical applications for the study and additional research will be required.

In future research, Soengas will attempt to determine exactly how oncogenes trigger the unfolded protein response in malignant and non-malignant skin cells. "By comparing what happens in normal melanoc-tyes with what happens in melanoma, we may be able to come up with events that are specific for tumor cells, which could be used for future drug development," she says.

Cialis improves sexual function for prostate cancer sur-vivors

In the first randomized trial of its kind, Tadalafil, a drug typically pre-scribed for erectile dysfunction in men, has been proven to increase the sexual function of prostate cancer survivors, according to a study re-leased today from the International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biol-ogy*Physics, the official journal of ASTRO.

Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men, with an estimated 235,000 Americans expected to be diagnosed with it this year. In its early stage, prostate cancer can be treated with surgery and radiation therapy or a combination of the two. With more advanced can-cer, treatment options can vary.

The walnut-sized prostate is located near the tubes that carry urine and semen. After treatment, some patients report trouble achieving an erection sufficient for sexual activity, also called erectile dysfunction or ED. In this study, doctors wanted to test whether the drug Tadalafil, which sells under the brand name Cialis, would help prostate cancer sur-vivors with ED who were treated with three-dimensional conformal radi-ation therapy (3D-CRT). This is the first randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial to examine Tadalafil's lasting effect in treating patients who have ED after radiation therapy for prostate cancer.

Nearly 360 patients were treated for prostate cancer at the Erasmus MC-Daniel den Hoed Cancer Center in The Netherlands between 1998 and 2002. Among them, 60 patients complaining of erectile dysfunction after radiation therapy were included. Patients were eligible if they were treated with 3D-CRT at least 12 months before the study entry, agreed not to use any other treatment for ED and agreed to make at least one sexual intercourse attempt every week during the 12-week trial. Pa-tients were given an initial 4-week course of no treatment at all; how-ever, patients had to attempt sexual activity at least once a week in this 4-week period.

Patients were given 20mg of Tadalafil or a placebo for 6 weeks. Pa-tients were allowed to take the drug or placebo at-will with no restric-tions on food or alcohol, but no more than once per day. The men were instructed that the drug would be effective for as long as 36 hours after dosing. After the first 6-week period of the trial, participants were moved onto alternative treatment; patients who were given placebo were switched to Tadalafil and vice versa.

Doctors found that successful intercourse was reported in 48 percent of the survivors who took Tadalafil versus the 9 percent of the men who were given placebo. There was also a reported improvement of the qual-ity of erections in 67 percent of the patients versus only 20 percent of the placebo group.

"Fortunately, prostate cancer is a very curable disease with most pa-tients living at least five years after diagnosis. Now that we've proven we can beat the disease, it's imperative that we work to help maintain the quality of life for the men who survive it, including preserving their sexual function," said Luca Incrocci, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the study. Dr. Incrocci is a radiation oncologist at the Erasmus MC-Daniel den Hoed Cancer Center in The Netherlands. "This study proves that the drug Cialis is effective in helping men maintain their sexual health."Negative effects of caffeine are stronger on daytime sleep

than on nocturnal sleepThis press release is also available in French.

Montreal - A new study at the Université de Montréal has concluded that people drinking coffee to get through a night shift or a night of studying will strongly hurt their recovery sleep the next day. The study published in the current issue of Neuropsychopharmacology was conducted by Dr. Julie Carrier from the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal. Dr. Carrier runs the Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal.

"We already knew that caffeine has important effects on nocturnal sleep. It increases the time taken to fall asleep, it increases the amount of awakenings, and it decreases the amount of deep sleep. We have shown that these effects of caffeine on sleep are way stronger when taken at night prior to a daytime recovery sleep episode than in the evening before a nocturnal sleep episode."

"Caffeine makes daytime sleep episodes too shallow to override the signal from the biological clock that tells the body it should be awake at this time of day," explains Dr. Carrier. "We often use coffee and other sources of caffeine during the nighttime to counteract sleepiness gener-ated by sleep deprivation, jet lag, and shift-work. However, this habit may have important effects when you then try to recuperate during day-time."

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Thirty-four moderate caffeine consumers participated in both caffeine (200 mg) and placebo (lactose) conditions in a double-blind crossover design. Seventeen subjects followed their habitual sleep–wake cycle and slept in the laboratory during the night (Night), while 17 subjects were sleep deprived for one night and recovery sleep started in the morning (DayRec). All subjects received a capsule of 100 mg of caffeine (or placebo) 3 hours before bedtime, and the remaining dose 1 hour before bedtime. Compared to placebo, caffeine lengthened sleep latency, in-creased stage 1, and reduced stage 2 and slow-wave sleep (SWS) in both groups. However, caffeine reduced sleep efficiency more strongly in the DayRec group, and decreased sleep duration and REM sleep only in that group.Italian public smoking ban leads to fall in hospital heart at-

tack admissions in under 60sReduction in passive smoking exposure probably the main reason

say researchersHospital admissions for acute heart attack in people under 60 fell by

11% in the Piedmont region of Italy in the five months after the introduc-tion of a ban on smoking in indoor public places, compared with admis-sions for the same period in the previous year.

Importantly, nearly all of the fall was probably due to reductions in ex-posure to passive smoking, the researchers, from the University of Turin, concluded.

Their results, published in the latest on line edition of European Heart Journal[1] (Tuesday 3 October) add more evidence to studies supporting the effectiveness of smoking regulations, according t[2].

"The argument of the 'victimless crime' clearly and finally has to leave the discussion based on accumulating data, including this new re-search," said editorial co-author Dr Peter Radke, consultant cardiologist at the Department of Cardiology and Angiology at the University Hospi-tal of Schleswig-Holstein in Lübeck, Germany.

The Italian Government banned smoking in all indoor public places on 10 January 2005. The researchers, led by Dr Francesco Barone-Adesi, analysed all hospital admissions with discharge diagnoses of acute my-ocardial infarction (AMI), and AMI deaths, between January 2001 and June 2005 for residents throughout the region of Piedmont (population 4.3 million).

"From February 2005 to June 2005, the immediate period following the ban, we found a significant drop in admissions for AMI among both men and women under the age of 60, with 832 cases compared to 922 for the same months in the previous year. Moreover, the rates of AMI had, if anything, been increasing between 2001 and 2004, so the reduction we saw in the first half of 2005 was not attributable to long-term trends. In

fact, as there was evidence that AMI was increasing over time, it's possi-ble that our estimate of an 11% decrease after the introduction of the ban is even an underestimate," said Dr Barone-Adesi, who is a cancer researcher at the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Turin.

He said that both active and passive smoking contributed to the fall, but that only around 1% was likely to be due to active smoking, a con-clusion reached after studying the effects of the ban on the habits of ac-tive smokers. "We found that the observed reduction in active smoking after the ban could account for only a 0.7% decrease in admissions and that about a 10% decrease is due to the sharp reduction of exposure to passive smoking."

The decrease in admissions was confined to under 60s. Dr Barone-Adesi said several studies had found that the relative risk and attribut-able risk of AMI for smoking decreases with age. The reason was still a matter of debate, but a probable explanation was that other risk factors become more important as people age. It was also the case that younger people tend to spend more time in public places exposed to smoke, so a different effect was not unexpected.

He said that smoking acts on the aggregation of platelets in the blood and was most likely to increase acutely the risk of AMI. "This may ex-plain our finding of an 11% decrease in the first five months after the ban began. It suggests that smoking regulations may have important short-term effects on health. The long-term effects on respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and cancer will have to be evaluated over the years to come."

Co-author of the editorial, Professor Heribert Schunkert, Director of the Department of Cardiology and Angiology at University Hospital of Schleswig-Holstein, said that Dr Barone-Adesi and his team provided fur-ther evidence from national registries and surveys - an 8.9% fall in ciga-rette sales, 7.6% reduction in cigarette consumption and a more than 90% reduction in nicotine vapour phase concentration in pubs and dis-cos - suggesting that the smoking ban in Italy did reduce overall smok-ing, which was likely leading to the observed effect on AMI admissions.

"The implications of the study for public measures of health are impor-tant. While there are some limitations to the Barone-Adesi study, in our view these findings are an important addition to the growing body of re-search indicating that tightening the regulations on public smoking will play a vital role in improving public health and reducing deaths from smoking."

Dr Radke said that in October 2000 South Africa was the first country in the world to ban smoking in public areas and some US states and cities instituted smoking-free regulations before the European Union. Ireland was the first northern hemisphere country to ban smoking in en-closed places from March 2004 and has become the leading model for

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Europe. Norway, Sweden, Italy and Scotland have instituted countrywide legislation and more EU countries are due to follow suit.

"It took quite a long time to implement smoking-free policies in the 'old world', but Europe is on the move," he concluded.

Rice's single-pixel camera takes high-res imagesEngineers use new mathematics and micro mirrors in 'multiplexed

camera'HOUSTON - For all their ease and convenience, there are few things more wasteful than digital cameras. They're loaded with pricy microproces-sors that chew through batteries at a breakneck pace, crunching millions of numbers per second in order to throw out up to 99 percent of the in-formation flowing through the lens.

Using some new mathematics and a silicon chip covered with hun-dreds of thousands of mirrors the size of a single bacterium, engineers at Rice University have come up with a more efficient design. Unlike a one megapixel camera that captures one million points of light for every frame, Rice's camera creates an image by capturing just one point of light, or pixel, several thousands of times in rapid succession. The new mathematics comes into play in assembling the high-resolution image - equal in quality to the one-megapixel image - from the thousands of sin-gle-pixel snapshots.

The research will be presented Oct. 11 at the Optical Society of Amer-ica's 90th annual meeting, Frontiers in Optics 2006, in Rochester, New York.

The oddest part about Rice's camera may be that it works best when the light from the scene under view is scattered at random and turned into noise that looks like television tuned to a dead channel.

"White noise is the key," said Richard Baraniuk, the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "Thanks to some deep new mathematics developed just a couple of years ago, we're able to get a useful, coherent image out of the randomly scattered measure-ments."

Baraniuk's collaborator Kevin Kelly, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, built a working prototype camera using a digital micromirror device, or DMD, and a single photodiode, which turns light into electrical signals. Today's typical retail digital camera has mil-lions of photodiodes, or megapixels, on a single chip.

DMDs, which are fabricated by Texas Instruments and today used pri-marily in digital televisions and projectors, are devices capable of con-verting digital information to light and vice versa. Built on a microchip chassis, a DMD is covered with tiny mirrors, each about the size of a mi-crobe, that are capable of facing only two directions. They appear bright when facing one way and dark when facing the other, so when a com-puter views them, it sees them as 1's or 0's.

In a regular camera, a lens focuses light, for a brief instant, onto a piece of film or a photodiode array called a CCD. In the single-pixel cam-era, the image from the lens is shined onto the DMD and bounced from there though a second lens that focuses the light reflected by the DMD onto a single photodiode. The mirrors on the DMD are shuffled at ran-dom for each new sample. Each time the mirrors shift, a new pixel value is recorded by the photodiode. In effect, the lens and DMD do what the power-hungry microchip in the digital camera usually does; they com-press the data from the larger picture into a more compact form. This is why the technique goes by the name "compressive sensing."

Today, it takes about five minutes to take a picture with Rice's proto-type camera, which fills an entire corner of one of the table's in Kelly's laboratory. So far, only stationary objects have been photographed, but Kelly and Baraniuk say they should be able to adapt the "time-multi-plexed" photographic technique to produce images similar to a home snapshot because the mirrors inside DMDs can alter their position mil-lions of times per second. However, their initial efforts are aimed at de-veloping the camera for scientific applications where digital photography is unavailable.

"For some wavelengths outside the visible spectrum, it's often too ex-pensive to produce large arrays of detectors," Kelly said. "One of the beauties of our system is that it only requires one detector. We think this same methodology could be a real advantage in terahertz imaging and other areas."

Alaskan storm cracks giant iceberg to pieces in faraway Antarctica

Study tracks surprising connection between distant eventsA severe storm that occurred in the Gulf of Alaska in October 2005

generated an ocean swell that six days later broke apart a giant iceberg floating near the coast of Antarctica, more than 8,300 miles away. A team of scientists led by Professors Douglas MacAyeal at the University of Chicago and Emile Okal at Northwestern University present evidence connecting the two events in the October issue of the journal Geophysi-cal Research Letters.

"We are reporting on a unique kind of seismological signal picked up by seismometers we deployed on the iceberg, which is generated by sea swell when it rocks the iceberg," said Okal, professor in geological sci-ences at Northwestern.

Oceanographers have known since the early 1960s that ocean swells can travel half way around the world. But the new study, funded by the National Science Foundation, raises the possibility that an increase in storms driven by climate change could affect far-flung parts of the globe.

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"One of the things we're debating in the world right now is whether global warming might increase the storminess in the oceans," said MacAyeal, professor in geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago.

"The question we then pose is: Could global storminess have an influence on the Antarctic ice sheet that had never been thought of?"

Daily satellite images generated by re-searchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, showed that on a clear, calm day last Oct. 27, iceberg B15A broke into half a dozen pieces. B15A measures approximately 60 miles long and 18.5 miles wide. It is half of B15, which became the world's largest iceberg in March 2000 when it broke away from the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica.Landsat satellite image of iceberg B15 in January 2001. The iceberg covered about 11,000 square miles, approximately twice the size of Delaware.

Over the following years, MacAyeal and co-author Jonathan Thom from UW-Madison's Antarctic Meteorological Research Center had planted seismometers and other instruments on B15A and on Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf to study "iceberg songs" and related phenomena.

"We deployed these instruments to look at a kind of harmonic tremor that the icebergs are making in a way that we still don't understand ter-ribly well," Okal said. "We are trying to figure out how the icebergs are sort of making music when various phenomena that we think are linked to the cracking of iceberg masses takes place."

After the team observed the break up of B15A in satellite images, they arranged for a crew flying a Twin Otter aircraft from McMurdo Station in Antarctica to recover the seismometer left on B15A the previous year to learn more. That seismometer and others are on loan to the team from the national Incorporated Research Institutions in Seismology organiza-tion in New Mexico.

"They flew out to the iceberg, which was an all-day trip," MacAyeal said. "It was a superhuman effort, because they had to virtually fill the aircraft cabin with barrels of fuel, land several times, throw the fuel bar-rels out, pump the fuel into the wing tank, and then continue on."

The seismometer record showed movement in the iceberg starting 12 hours before the iceberg broke up and continuing for three days follow-ing. Despite prevailing mild conditions, the iceberg moved half an inch up and down and four inches from side to side. The research team sus-pected ocean swell as the cause.

"It's been known for a long time that swell can travel," Okal said. "If you have a seismometer on an island, the swell will hit the island and it will contribute to the noise of a seismometer. It plagues our seismic recording on island stations."

But islands respond to swell at a much smaller amplitude than the team's seismometer had recorded. "I was surprised at the level of ampli-tude that we were recording," Okal said. If the signal really did indicate ocean swell, the team decided, then there must have been a storm somewhere to create it.

The team was able to calculate the distance to the storm from seis-mometer data by comparing arrival times of the faster-moving long-wavelength waves to the slower-moving short-wavelength waves. To the scientists' amazement, the storm was 13,500 kilometers (8,370 miles) away.

"Our jaws dropped," MacAyeal said. "We looked in the Pacific Ocean and there, 13,500 kilometers away, six days earlier, was the winter sea-son's first really big, nasty storm that developed and lasted for about a day and a half in the Gulf of Alaska."

The researchers then began uncovering other links of evidence lead-ing from the Gulf of Alaska to the iceberg.

"We looked at the wave-buoy records in Hawaii and Alaska. We saw that the waves in Alaska were about 35 feet tall and then two days later they were down to 15 feet as they passed Hawaii on their way south," MacAyeal said. And three days after that, a sensitive seismometer on Pitcairn Island in the south Pacific recorded the passage of the storm waves.

"Finally, we see the waves arriving in Antarctica at the site where the iceberg broke up and at several other sites in Antarctica," he said.

Tiny ocean swells may seem too small to break an iceberg, but the crew of Captain Cook's Endeavour knew well their hazards. The Endeav-our ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef near Australia on a calm night in 1770. "But there was just enough swell to pick up the Endeavour and pound it relentlessly against the coral heads," MacAyeal said. Until his crew lightened the ship, Cook feared it would be pounded to smithereens.

And just like the Endeavour, the iceberg had run aground near Cape Adare and the Possession Islands in Antarctica before the swell hit. "We think that B15A was in the right position where these waves would be fatal to it," MacAyeal said. "The iceberg shattered like a gracile wine glass being sung to by a heavy soprano."

The experience of B15A appears to be fairly common. MacAyeal and his colleagues also detected other distant storms in Antarctic seismome-ter records. "The most impressive event was a typhoon in the Pacific that had been a category five hurricane called Olaf. It produced a very

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strong reaction on all of our seismometers, so we know that hurricanes do send their waves down to the Antarctic as well," he said.

In fact, the team found that distant storms in the tropics and both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres correlated with all 38 seismological events recorded on their seismometers from December 2004 to March 2005.

Such events may also help explain some baffling paleoclimatic evi-dence from the north Atlantic Ocean. Between 15,000 and 80,000 years ago, the region looked much like Antarctica today. Deep-sea oceanogra-phers have found layers of ice-rafted debris in ocean-floor sediments. This debris-sand that freezes into the bottom of a glacier-gets carried out into the ocean via icebergs. When the iceberg melts, the debris rains out onto the ocean floor.

"The deep-sea sediments show that icebergs coming from all around the edge of the north Atlantic calved all at once," MacAyeal said. But glaciologists have had difficulty explaining why. "If calving is sensitive to ocean storminess and to ocean waves, then we have a common cause for iceberg calving around the entire periphery of the north Atlantic," he said.Brief, high-dose steroid treatment offers extended relief to

giant cell arteritis patientsATLANTA - A new study offers both hope and a practical treatment option for patients with giant cell arteritis (GCA). Researchers from Emory Uni-versity and the Mayo Clinic have found that by treating newly diagnosed GCA patients with just three days of a high-dose intravenous steroid, pa-tients relapsed less in the following year and were able to significantly taper off usage of an oral steroid. The study is published in the October issue of the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism.

Giant cell arteritis is characterized by inflammation of arteries, primar-ily in the head, and affects 20 out of every 100,000 people. GCA inflam-mation may lead to swelling and headaches, or, as it progresses, vision loss, strokes and aortic aneurysms. While past research has shown a ge-netic link to the disease, which primarily affects Caucasian women over the age of 50, there is no known cause or cure.

For the last 40 years, physicians have been able to treat and reverse some symptoms of GCA by prescribing prednisone, to be taken daily over a year or more. "Patients improve promptly and reliably, within days of when we treat them," says Cornelia M. Weyand, MD, PhD, co-di-rector of the Kathleen B. and Mason I. Lowance Center for Human Im-munology at Emory University and an author of the paper. "The problem is that patients have to take prednisone for a long time and in high doses, and they are at risk of developing side effects." Common side ef-fects include hypertension, diabetes and osteoporosis.

While scientists have attempted to develop new drugs that would be more effective and have fewer side effects, their results have been un-successful. "We and others tried to look into other types of treatments that could help with this disease," says Jšrg Goronzy, MD, PhD, senior author of the paper, and co-director of the Lowance Center.

"Even the modern and effective immunosuppressants do not improve the situation with these patients," says Dr. Weyand.

Faced with these ineffective new agents and with the limitations and drawbacks of the current treatment, Dr. Goronzy and Dr. Weyand turned to animal models. After implanting inflamed arteries into mice, they ob-served the effect of different doses of steroids on the inflammation. "We learned that the doses of steroids, although already high, really didnÕt take away the disease," says Dr. Weyand. "But if we increased the dose to very high levels, we could then eradicate the inflammation."

Equipped with those initial results, they designed a double-blind hu-man study to examine whether a brief period of pulsing with high-dose intravenous steroids soon after diagnosis could reduce the long-term need for prednisone and improve patient recovery.

As the article and an accompanying editorial report, the research showed extremely positive long-term results. Those patients who had been given the initial high dosage had fewer relapses of the disease (21, as compared to 37 relapses). Seventy-one percent were also able to re-duce their daily dose of prednisone to 5 milligrams after a year of treat-ment (compared to only 15 percent in the control group), avoiding the need for long-term steroids.

The results will be good news at Emory's new Vasculitis Clinic, the only center for inflammatory blood vessel diseases in the Southeast. "We can do better in treating this disease, and what we do at the beginning is very important for the long-term prognosis of patients," says Dr. Weyand.

Humble shoelace tag carried more currency than gold on Columbus's travels

The humble device that prevents shoelaces from fraying was deemed to be worth more than gold by the indigenous Cubans who traded with Columbus's fleet, a study led by UCL (University College London) archae-ologists has discovered.

Reporting in next month's edition of the Journal of Archaeological Sci-ence, the researchers analysed burial material - such as beads and pen-dants - excavated from one of the largest burial sites in northeast Cuba. To their surprise very little gold was discovered, despite its relative abundance in the region. Instead, the most common artefacts were small metal tubes made of brass that were often threaded into neck-laces.

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While brass making was widespread in medieval and earlier Europe, no evidence exists of brass production in America by indigenous people in the Caribbean - known as Taíno - before the arrival of the Europeans. Using microstructural and chemical analysis, the researchers were able to prove the brass originated in Germany.

Columbus's 1492 Spanish fleet was the first European presence to ar-rive in Cuba and radiocarbon dating shows remains from the burial site at El Chorro de Maíta, Cuba date from a few decades after the conquest. Columbus's diaries also mention the trade of lacetags.

A review of relevant literature and paintings from European sources revealed that the most likely origin of the tubes was not beads but strung together lacetags, or aglets, from European clothing. From the 15th century onwards, these were used to prevent the ends of laces from fraying, and to ease threading in the points for fastening clothes such as doublets and hose. Examples of such usage include a 1636 por-trait of William Style of Langley (Tate Gallery, London), which depicts the use of aglets in his waist to secure his trousers through his jacket. Origi-nal lacetags excavated from across London that date back to the 13th century can also be found in the Museum of London's Archaeological Ar-chive.

Dr Marcos Martinón-Torres, of the UCL Institute of Archaeology, who led the research, explains: "Early chroniclers report that pure gold, or caona, was considered the least valuable metal amongst indigenous Cubans, significantly less esteemed and less sacred than copper-based alloys. Allegedly, the smell and iridescence of brass was what made it particularly appealing. If we couple this with the contrasting eagerness of the Spanish for plundering noble metals, then we have a paramount factor explaining the scarcity of gold in the cemetery at El Chorro de Maíta, and the relative abundance of brass.

"It would have been impossible for the first Europeans arriving in the Caribbean to envisage the colossal value that their metal would accom-plish in trade with the indigenous population. Accordingly, one could not expect them to have loaded up their ships with unnecessarily large amounts of metals. Upon arrival, with virtually any metal gadget becom-ing precious amongst the Taíno, European conquerors would have traded anything they had at hand, including the cheap and dispensable lacetags. Moreover, these had a suitable shape for threading and turn-ing into visible pendants. Functional European brass was thus conceptu-ally transformed, not only, into an ornament but it conveyed supernatu-ral powers to the wearer."

Located in the Banes area of the Holguín province, El Chorro de Maíta is well known as one of the largest archaeological sites in northeast Cuba. During the 1980s, 120 skeletons were excavated, of which 25 per cent were found with burial goods thought to signify their wealth or posi-

tion in Taínos society. Alongside ornaments made of stone, pearl, resin and coral, three types of metal objects were identified. Initial analysis by archaeologist Roberto Valcárcel Rojas of the Ministry of Science, Tech-nology and Environment in La Habana, Cuba, found they were composed of gold and two types of alloy, gold-copper-silver and zinc-rich copper al-loys - or brass.

The lack of more sophisticated technical equipment and expertise pre-vented further analysis until Mr Valcárcel visited the unique on-site facil-ities in the UCL Institute of Archaeology last year, where scanning elec-tron microscopy and X-ray microanalytical techniques were applied to the artefacts.

"The key to deciphering where metals come from is to look at their geochemical signature," explains Dr Martinón-Torres. "The technology to exploit copper and silver was unknown to the Taíno but was in common use on mainland South American, which strongly suggests that the alloy was imported from within America. However, brass production was un-known outside Europe.

"Brass is an alloy composed of copper and zinc but, depending on where the constitute metals come from, they also have traces of other elements. Using techniques equivalent to looking at the DNA of the metal we were able to show that minute iron, lead and tin impurities were consistent with brass objects from Nuremberg at this time.

"Although we lack detailed information on the supply of brass in 16th century Spain, it seems very plausible that the German metal used for these tubes could have reached Spain via established commercial routes before being brought to Cuba."

Professor Thilo Rehren, of the UCL Institute of Archaeology, and senior author of the study, says: "Acquiring gold of the New World quickly be-came one of the major aspirations of the European colonists, and ethno-historical accounts highlight how they endeavoured to liaise with the emerging local elites to barter for their circulating gold and exploit some of their other natural resources. The relationship between Europeans and Americans, in which metals seem to have played a very significant role, dramatically affected the later history of both peoples. The removal of noble metals had a significant impact on the later economy and goes some way to explaining why Europe is rich today compared with Cuba."

Roy Stephenson, the Museum of London's archaeological archive man-ager, added: "This is fascinating work carried out by UCL which will shed light on what appears to be quite dreary and repetitive finds, but in real-ity tells a compelling story about international trade."Vital SignsAt Risk: A Link Between Poverty and a Telltale ProteinBy NICHOLAS BAKALAR

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People living below the poverty line are more likely to have very high levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation that increases the risk for heart disease and death, a new study has found.

C-reactive protein is produced in response to injury or infection, but some people have chronically high levels of it. The study, published in the September issue of Brain, Behavior and Immunity, found no signifi-cant difference by socioeconomic status in those with moderate or high levels of C-reactive protein, but there was a significant difference in very high levels.

The researchers used data from a nationally representative group of 7,634 adults who were 20 and older and who enrolled in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Only 9.1 percent of partici-pants above the poverty line had C-reactive protein levels above 10 mil-ligrams a liter, compared with 15.7 percent of people below the poverty level.

About two-thirds of the high levels could be attributed to acute or chronic illness, obesity and lack of exercise. The explanation for the rest was unknown. Dawn E. Alley, the study’s lead author, said, “People in poverty are more susceptible to infection, and because they lack health care and have other social stresses, they are less likely to recover.”

The authors acknowledged that C-reactive protein data were available only at one time point and that some data collection relied on self-re-ports, which can be biased. It is impossible based on these data, they write, to conclude that poverty itself is a cause of very high levels of the protein.

Dr. Alley, who completed the study while at the University of Southern California, is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.In Europe It’s Fish Oil After Heart Attacks, but Not in U.S.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHALROME - Every patient in the cardiac care unit at the San Filippo Neri Hospital who survives a heart attack goes home with a prescription for purified fish oil, or omega-3 fatty acids.

“It is clearly recommended in international guidelines,” said Dr. Massimo Santini, the hos-pital’s chief of cardiology, who added that it would be considered tantamount to malprac-tice in Italy to omit the drug.

In a large number of studies, prescription fish oil has been shown to improve survival af-ter heart attacks and to reduce fatal heart rhythms. The American College of Cardiology recently strengthened its position on the med-

ical benefit of fish oil, although some critics say that studies have not defined the magnitude of the effect.

But in the United States, heart attack victims are not generally given omega-3 fatty acids, even as they are routinely offered more expensive and invasive treatments, like pills to lower cholesterol or implantable de-fibrillators. Prescription fish oil, sold under the brand name Omacor, is not even approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in heart patients.

“Most cardiologists here are not giving omega-3’s even though the data supports it - there’s a real disconnect,” said Dr. Terry Jacobson, a preventive cardiologist at Emory University in Atlanta. “They have been very slow to incorporate the therapy.”

The fact that heart patients receive such different treatments in so-phisticated hospitals around the world highlights the central role that drug companies play in disseminating medical information, experts said.

Because prescription fish oil is not licensed to prevent heart disease in the United States, drug companies may not legally promote it for that purpose at conferences, in doctors’ offices, to patients or even on the In-ternet.

“If people paid more attention to guidelines, more people would be on the drug,” Dr. Jacobson said. “But pharmaceutical companies can’t drive this change. The fact that it’s not licensed for this has definitely kept doctors away.”

For example, on Solvay Pharmaceutical’s Web site for Omacor, www.-solvay -omacor.com, the first question a user sees is, “Are you a U.S. cit-izen?”

If the answer is yes, the user is sent to a page where heart attacks are not mentioned. (In the United States, Omacor is licensed only to treat the small number of people with extremely high blood triglyceride lev-els.)

So community doctors do not learn how to use the drug. Lack of F.D.A. approval also means that insurers will not pay for treatment with Oma-cor. Approval from the agency for the use of the drug in heart disease is not expected soon.

A study published last month in The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine found that only 17 percent of family doctors were likely to prescribe fish oil to their patients, including patients who had suffered a heart attack. There was a great need, the authors concluded, to “im-prove awareness of this important advice.”

The fact that fish oil is also sold as a nutritional supplement has made it harder for some doctors to regard it as a powerful drug, experts said.

“Using this medicine is very popular here in Italy, I think partly be-cause so many cardiologists in this country participated in the studies and were aware of the results,” said Dr. Maria Franzosi, a researcher at

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the Mario Negri Institute in Milan. “In other countries, uptake may be harder because doctors think of it as just a dietary intervention.”

In the largest study of fish oil - conducted more than a decade ago - Italian researchers from the Gissi Group (Gruppo Italiano per lo Studio della Sopravvivenza nell’Infarto), gave 11,000 patients one gram of pre-scription fish oil a day after heart attacks. After three years, the study found that the number of deaths was reduced by 20 percent and that the number of sudden deaths by 40 percent, compared with a control group.

Later studies have continued to yield positive results, although some scientists say there are still gaps in knowledge.

This summer, a critical review of existing research in BMJ, The British Medical Journal, “cast doubt over the size of the effect of these medica-tions” for the general population, said Dr. Roger Harrison, an author of the paper, “but still suggested that they might benefit some people as a treatment.”

Dr. Harrison said he believed that people should generally increase their intake of omega-3 acids, best done by eating more fish.

Still, he acknowledged that it was difficult to eat foods containing a gram of omega-3 acids each day. “If you ask me do I take omega-3 sup-plements every day, then, embarrassingly, the answer is yes,” said Dr. Harrison, a professor at Bolton Primary Care Trust of the University of Manchester in England.

“I, too, am caught up in this hectic world where I have little time to shop and prepare the healthy foods I know I should be eating,” he said.

It seems natural for Italy to be at the forefront of the fish oil trend and home to the largest clinical trials. Scientists have long noted that Mediterranean diets are salubrious for the heart and theorized that the high content of broiled and baked fish might be partly responsible.

But the landmark Gissi-Prevenzione trial of fish oil had methodological weaknesses: the patients treated with prescription fish oil pills were compared with untreated patients, rather than with patients given a dummy pill. This meant that, despite impressive results, the trial did not meet the F.D.A.’s standards for approval. Yet by 2004, regulators in al-most all European countries, including Spain, France and Britain, had ap-proved Omacor for use in heart attack patients.

Marylou Rowe, a spokeswoman for Reliant Pharmaceuticals, which owns the license for the drug in the United States, said that further trials of Omacor would be needed for it to be licensed for heart attack patients in the United States. But she refused to discuss a timetable.

The American College of Cardiology now advises patients with coro-nary artery disease to increase their consumption of omega-3 acids to one gram a day, but it does not specify if this should be achieved by eat-ing fish or by taking capsules. But over-the-counter preparations of fish

oil have much less rigorous quality control and are often blends of the two fish oils know to be beneficial in heart disease with other less useful fatty acids.

For that reason, Dr. Jacobson of Emory gives the prescription drug, “off label,” to cardiac patients, even though the F.D.A. has not approved it for that use. “Then I know exactly what they’re getting, and there is no mercury,” he said.

He said he tells patients who cannot afford the prescription version that they can take the over-the-counter supplements, although there is uncertainty about the dose and they probably need three to four pills a day.

In Europe, meanwhile, research on prescription fish oil, which is now thought to act by stabilizing cell membranes, has gained momentum. The Gissi Group is conducting two huge trials using fish oil in patients with abnormal heart rhythms and in patients with heart failure.Really?The Claim: Raisins Soaked in Gin Can Ease Arthritis PainBy ANAHAD O’CONNORTHE FACTS In 2004, Teresa Heinz Kerry, the Mozambique-born heiress and wife of John Kerry, who was then running for president, advocated an unusual remedy for arthritis while discussing health care at a cam-paign stop in Nevada.

“You get some gin and get some white raisins - and only white raisins - and soak them in the gin for two weeks,” she said. “Then eat nine of the raisins a day.”

Although some people poked fun at the statement, Mrs. Heinz Kerry was repeating a popular folk remedy that has been around for decades. Countless Web sites for arthritis sufferers mention it as a cure for pain, and several books on folk remedies promote it. But whether there is any real science behind it is an open question.

To date, no rigorous studies have examined whether gin or raisins - to-gether or alone - can ease arthritis symptoms. Grapes contain com-pounds called proanthocyanidins, which are thought to help fight infec-tion and reduce inflammation. They also contain resveratrol, the power-ful antioxidant that scientists say gives red wine many of its disease-fighting properties.

Dr. Steven Abramson, the director of rheumatology at the New York University Hospital for Joint Diseases, said studies are looking at whether resveratrol and other substances in red wine can affect joint disease. But raisins are a poor source of resveratrol, which is usually destroyed when grapes are dried. And the Agriculture Department says levels of proanthocyanidins in raisins are “undetectable.”

As for the gin, Dr. Abramson said, some people find it can help dull pain, but only in moderation.

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THE BOTTOM LINE There is no evidence that raisins soaked in gin have any particular effect on arthritis pain.Second OpinionAnswers Fall Short for Nausea After SurgeryBy DENISE GRADY

“Thank you for being a part of our study,” said a questionnaire given to surgery patients at Duke University. “We are going to ask you how you feel about postoperative nausea and vomiting.”

Most people could answer with a few choice words, especially anyone who has ever woken up in a recovery room, wretched and retching. Not surprisingly, the patients in the Duke study, published in 2001, rated throwing up as a good thing to avoid.

If only it could be avoided. Somehow, the wonders of modern medicine have not quite reached this queasy zone. Nausea and vomit-ing, a blight since the dawn of ether, are still among the most common complications of surgery, anesthesia and pain medicine, affecting any-where from 20 to 80 percent of patients.

Is this really so hard to fix? Or are doctors just too busy with more pressing matters?

“It’s an overwhelming problem,” said Dr. Charles Berde, chief of pain medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston. “It’s right at the center of what everybody who studies postoperative pain tries to deal with. There’s an enormous amount of interest in how to do a better job.”

Part of the problem is that it’s hard to predict who will get sick, be-cause people respond differently to drugs and to surgery. And once the symptoms start, they are hard to quell. Antinausea medicines can help, but not enough, Dr. Berde said.

“In studies, maybe 45 percent will vomit instead of 65 percent,” he said. “In no way does it make the risk very low.”

Some patients are more likely than others to feel ill after surgery: women vomit more often than men, and people who tend to get carsick or seasick have a higher risk. Some get sicker than others; there are people who may vomit for a week after an operation, Dr. Berde said.

Certain operations are more likely to cause the problem, including breast surgery, tonsillectomy, gynecologic procedures and operations on the ears, eye muscles, digestive tract or testes. All can affect nerves that communicate with the brain center that controls vomiting.

The strongest painkillers - morphine and other narcotics related to opium - are notorious for producing nausea, as well as other side effects like itching, constipation, difficulty urinating, paranoia, anxiety, bad dreams and confusion.

“The problem is that morphine and the other narcotics act on pain re-ceptors, but in the same doses also act on receptors in the brain and nervous system that cause nausea and vomiting,” said Dr. Margaret

Wood, chairwoman of anesthesiology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Colum-bia. “Unfortunately, the two are invariably associated. It’s not 100 per-cent predictable that morphine will always cause nausea and vomiting, but it is very common.”

Often, people who are sent home from the hospital with a prescription for a narcotic are not warned that the drug may make them feel sick, an issue that is growing as more operations are done on an outpatient ba-sis.

“Doctors want to be optimistic,” Dr. Berde said. “They want to be truthful, but in preoperative discussions they often underplay the likeli-hood of nausea, itching and constipation because they don’t want to make patients worry, and they may believe that focusing on side effects might make them more likely to occur.”

But, he said, the issue has to be addressed.“People should know that these drugs are useful but they have limita-

tions, and if you’re having vomiting, you should call your doctor and see about trying something different,” he said. Some hospitals, he said, send patients home with antinausea medicine as well, just in case.

But, he added, “patients need to know they can call somebody at mid-night after surgery and get clear advice both on managing symptoms and on figuring out when the symptom requires more specific assess-ment for potential postsurgical problems.”

Even a patient’s own history is not necessarily a good predictor of re-actions to a drug. When someone vomits after an appendectomy, was the culprit morphine - or a burst appendix? Some people can tolerate one narcotic but not another, and the only way to find out is by trial and error.

“We are remarkably unscientific about how we take care of this,” Dr. Berde said. “A lot of it is by custom, a lot is by how people got trained.” Sometimes, he added, doctors simply rely on records of what patients were able to tolerate before.

Both he and Dr. Wood said that the best solution is to find ways to minimize the need for the general anesthetics and narcotics that cause so much trouble.

One approach is to use local or regional anesthetics - techniques like nerve blocks and the spinals or epidurals often used for childbirth - to numb the area being operated on before and after surgery. These meth-ods involve the Novocain-type drugs used for dental work. People can still be given medicines to make them sleep through the operation, but the anesthesia does not have to be as deep, and patients need less mor-phine later or perhaps none at all. These techniques work especially well for operations on the knee, hip and shoulder.

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For the orthopedic operations, Dr. Berde said, “the data are very good that you have better pain relief, better rehab and people eat sooner and vomit less.”

The nerve blocks take time to administer, which can clog operating room schedules, but Dr. Berde said some hospitals had solved that prob-lem by setting up separate “induction rooms” where the blocks can be started and given time to take effect before the patient is wheeled into the operating room.

But not all hospitals offer these procedures. Anesthesiologists need special training to administer nerve blocks properly, and qualified ones are more likely to be available at hospitals where a lot of surgery is done. In any case, regional anesthesia is not always possible, Dr. Wood said, noting, for instance, that it is difficult to perform and not always effective for operations on the digestive tract. And spinals and epidurals can have side effects of their own, like headaches and a drop in blood pressure.

After surgery, doctors have also tried using nonnarcotic painkillers like Advil or Aleve to help patients get by with less morphine.

“They are very effective,” Dr. Wood said, but she added that recent reports about small increases in heart risks have made doctors more cautious about using the nonnarcotic drugs. (Tylenol has not been linked to heart problems.)

Dr. Berde has been working with other researchers to try to develop a long-lasting local anesthetic that would work for two days after a single shot and that could be injected into a surgical site before the operation. The research involves a venom from puffer fish and a toxin from algae, both known to cause prolonged numbness. The goal, he said, is to re-duce patients’ needs for opiates.

Drug companies are also trying to develop better antinausea drugs, including some that can be given along with opiates to block their ef-fects on receptors in the stomach and brainstem that stimulate vomit-ing.

Ultimately, the solution may lie in the unfolding science of pharma-cogenomics, which deciphers the genetic traits that determine how an individual responds to a particular drug.

“One could hope that out of that will come the prediction that in the future, when you go to preop testing, they will be able to say, we predict that you will do better with fentanyl than morphine, or better with Dilau-did than fentanyl,” Dr. Berde said. “But I think it’s several years away.”

Supersensitive profiling deciphers wisps of DNAJohn Pickrell NewScientist.com news service

Police in the UK are trialling a new DNA profiling technique that may help to decipher previously inscrutable samples and resolve many thou-sands of unsolved crimes.

Developed by the government's Forensic Science Service (FSS), the computer-based technique allows the profiling of small, poor quality and mixed DNA samples from crime scenes. Nothing like it has been used anywhere else in the world before, the FSS claims.

When more than one person has touched a surface - the arm of a chair or a steering wheel for example - existing technologies have trou-ble distinguishing between the different DNA samples.

Now the new software, called DNAboost, could help forensic scientists identify 40% more samples than presently possible - and ultimately in-crease crime detection rates by up to 15%, they suggest.Cold cases

"The software allows us to carry out a much more sophisticated inter-pretation process," says Paul Hackett, DNA manager at the FSS in Birm-ingham, UK. Though DNA detection methods have become more and more detailed, analysis techniques have struggled to keep up, he told New Scientist.

In conjunction with a form of supersensitive DNA testing also devel-oped by the FSS, the technique could double the number of unsolved "cold cases" that can be cracked. The plan is to work with police forces across the UK on cases that have lain dormant for up to 10 years, says Hackett.

“This means a great many more cases have the potential to be solved and a great many more families could look forward to securing justice,” he says.

Starting on Wednesday, the technique is being trialled by four police forces in the north of England. Following a three month trial period, it is scheduled to be extended to police forces in the rest of England and Wales.

The FSS runs the world's first and largest national DNA database. The organization handles over 10,000 samples of DNA from crime scenes and 50,000 from individuals every month.

Out-of-Body Experience? Your Brain Is to BlameBy SANDRA BLAKESLEE

They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self.

Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces.

But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus re-sulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body. In another woman, electrical current delivered to the

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angular gyrus produced an uncanny feeling that someone was behind her, intent on interfering with her actions.

The two women were being evaluated for epilepsy surgery at Univer-sity Hospital in Geneva, where doctors implanted dozens of electrodes into their brains to pinpoint the abnormal tissue causing the seizures and to identify adjacent areas involved in language, hearing or other es-sential functions that should be avoided in the surgery. As each elec-trode was activated, stimulating a different patch of brain tissue, the pa-tient was asked to say what she was experiencing.

Dr. Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland who carried out the procedures, said that the women had normal psychiatric histories and that they were stunned by the bizarre nature of their experiences.

The Sept. 21 issue of Nature magazine includes an account by Dr. Blanke and his colleagues of the woman who sensed a shadow person behind her. They described the out-of-body experiences in the February 2004 issue of the journal Brain.

There is nothing mystical about these ghostly experiences, said Peter Brugger, a neuroscientist at University Hospital in Zurich, who was not involved in the experiments but is an expert on phantom limbs, the sen-sation of still feeling a limb that has been amputated, and other mind-bending phenomena.

“The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experi-ence, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a pres-ence,” Dr. Brugger said.

Scientists have gained new understanding of these odd bodily sensa-tions as they have learned more about how the brain works, Dr. Blanke said. For example, researchers have discovered that some areas of the brain combine information from several senses. Vision, hearing and touch are initially processed in the primary sensory regions. But then they flow together, like tributaries into a river, to create the wholeness of a person’s perceptions. A dog is visually recognized far more quickly if it is simultaneously accompanied by the sound of its bark.

These multisensory processing regions also build up perceptions of the body as it moves through the world, Dr. Blanke said. Sensors in the skin provide information about pressure, pain, heat, cold and similar sensations. Sensors in the joints, tendons and bones tell the brain where the body is positioned in space. Sensors in the ears track the sense of balance. And sensors in the internal organs, including the heart, liver and intestines, provide a readout of a person’s emotional state.

Real-time information from the body, the space around the body and the subjective feelings from the body are also represented in multisen-sory regions, Dr. Blanke said. And if these regions are directly simulated

by an electric current, as in the cases of the two women he studied, the integrity of the sense of body can be altered.

As an example, Dr. Blanke described the case of a 22-year-old student who had electrodes implanted into the left side of her brain in 2004.

“We were checking language areas,” Dr. Blanke said, when the woman turned her head to the right. That made no sense, he said, be-cause the electrode was nowhere near areas involved in the control of movement. Instead, the current was stimulating a multisensory area called the angular gyrus.

Dr. Blanke applied the current again. Again, the woman turned her head to the right. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.

The woman replied that she had a weird sensation that another per-son was lying beneath her on the bed. The figure, she said, felt like a “shadow” that did not speak or move; it was young, more like a man than a woman, and it wanted to interfere with her.

When Dr. Blanke turned off the current, the woman stopped looking to the right, and said the strange presence had gone away. Each time he reapplied the current, she once again turned her head to try to see the shadow figure.

When the woman sat up, leaned forward and hugged her knees, she said that she felt as if the shadow man was also sitting and that he was clasping her in his arms. She said it felt unpleasant. When she held a card in her right hand, she reported that the shadow figure tried to take it from her. “He doesn’t want me to read,” she said.

Because the presence closely mimicked the patient’s body posture and position, Dr. Blanke concluded that the patient was experiencing an unusual perception of her own body, as a double. But for reasons that scientists have not been able to explain, he said, she did not recognize that it was her own body she was sensing.

The feeling of a shadowy presence can occur without electrical stimu-lation to the brain, Dr. Brugger said. It has been described by people who undergo sensory deprivation, as in mountaineers trekking at high altitude or sailors crossing the ocean alone, and by people who have suffered minor strokes or other disruptions in blood flow to the brain.

Six years ago, another of Dr. Blanke’s patients underwent brain stimu-lation to a different multisensory area, the angular gyrus, which blends vision with the body sense. The patient experienced a complete out-of-body experience.

When the current flowed, she said: “I am at the ceiling. I am looking down at my legs.”

When the current ceased, she said: “I’m back on the table now. What happened?”

Further applications of the current returned the woman to the ceiling, causing her to feel as if she were outside of her body, floating, her legs

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dangling below her. When she closed her eyes, she had the sensation of doing sit-ups, with her upper body approaching her legs.

Because the woman’s felt position in space and her actual position in space did not match, her mind cast about for the best way to turn her confusion into a coherent experience, Dr. Blanke said. She concluded that she must be floating up and away while looking downward.

Some schizophrenics, Dr. Blanke said, experience paranoid delusions and the sense that someone is following them. They also sometimes confuse their own actions with the actions of other people. While the cause of these symptoms is not known, he said, multisensory processing areas may be involved.

When otherwise normal people experience bodily delusions, Dr. Blanke said, they are often flummoxed. The felt sensation of the body is so seamless, so familiar, that people do not realize it is a creation of the brain, even when something goes wrong and the brain is perturbed.

Yet the sense of body integrity is rather easily duped, Dr. Blanke said.And while it may be tempting to invoke the supernatural when this

body sense goes awry, he said the true explanation is a very natural one, the brain’s attempt to make sense of conflicting information.CommentaryNumbers Are Male, Said Pythagoras, and the Idea PersistsBy MARGARET WERTHEIM

When I was a physics major in the late 1970’s, my very few fellow fe-male students and I had high hopes that women would soon stand equal with men in science. But progress has proved slower than many of us imagined. A report last month by the National Academy of Sciences doc-uments widespread bias against women in science and engineering and recommends a sweeping overhaul of our institutions.

While there may indeed be subtle biological differences contributing to the scarcity of women in the top ranks of science, interviews make clear that many female scientists continue to experience both overt and covert discrimination.

The academy’s report is welcome, yet there is reason to believe that when it comes to the mathematically intensive sciences like physics and astronomy, it is not just bureaucracies that stand in the way.

Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male. Though women are no longer barred from uni-versity laboratories and scientific societies, the idea that they are in-nately less suited to mathematical science is deeply ingrained in our cul-tural genes.

The problem goes back to the ancient Greeks, particularly to Pythago-ras, the philosophical giant who dreamed the dream that became mod-ern physics. Pythagoras almost certainly learned his famous theorem

about right-angled triangles from the Babylonians, but we owe to him a far greater idea: “All is number,” he declared, becoming the first person to say that the physical world could be described by the language of mathematics.

Pythagoras also gave us the idea of the “music of the spheres,” a set of mathematical relationships that would describe the structure of the universe itself. His vision would eventually give rise to the scientific rev-olution led by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. The search for a theory of everything today is the latest version of the ancient Pythagorean quest for divine “cosmic harmonies.”

Though many cultures have developed sophisticated mathematical traditions, including the Chinese, the Arabs, the Indians and the Mayans, the West is the one that came to see the material world as an embodi-ment of mathematical laws. And from the beginning, the search for such laws was viewed as an innately male activity.

The Pythagorean society of the fifth century B.C. was a cradle of math-ematical research, but Pythagoreanism was also a religion, and like many Greek cults its beliefs were dualistic. For Pythagoreans, reality consisted of two parts: on one side were the mind and spirit and the transcendent realm of the gods; on the other side were the body and matter and the mundane realm of the earth. Like many Greek thinkers, the Pythagoreans associated the mind/spirit side of reality with male-ness and the body/matter side with femaleness.

Pythagoras introduced numbers into this mix and put them on the male side of the ledger. In the Pythagorean system, thinking about num-bers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathe-matics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm.

At the end of the Middle Ages, Pythagorean interest in a mathematical approach to science began to gain ground, and it is here that we begin to see the seeds of modern physics.

“The creation of number was the creation of things,” Thierry of Chartres wrote in the 12th century, when the first universities were formed and academic learning was formalized. The universities were founded to educate the clergy, and since women could not be priests they could not attend. Many university departments did not admit women at all until the early 20th century, and physics departments were often among the last to accept students and professors who were women.

The Pythagorean association of mathematics with transcendence was easily imported into a Christian context, giving rise to the idea of the Judeo-Christian god as a mathematical creator. When Stephen Hawking links a theory of everything to the mind of god today, he is reiterating

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an essentially Pythagorean view. But this godly-mathematical connec-tion also sat easily with the Catholic tradition of a male-only priesthood. Thus, from the start, women were excluded from this academic field and its associated sciences.

When the early scientific societies formed in the 17th and 18th cen-turies, most continued this misogynistic trend. Henry Oldenburg, an original secretary of the Royal Society in Britain, wrote that the organi-zation’s mission was to “raise a Masculine Philosophy.” Not until 1945 did this bastion of science admit a woman as a full member.

Female physicists have continued to confront deep-seated prejudices. Emmy Noether, who discovered that all physical conservation laws were associated with mathematical symmetries, was a contemporary to Ein-stein and helped work out some of the math of general relativity. She did so without a formal academic position and mostly without pay.

Lise Meitner, who developed the theory of nuclear fission, was not in-cluded when the Nobel Prize was given for this work in 1944. The Har-vard University physics department did not give tenure to a woman until 1992.

This week, the Swedish Academy announces the Nobel Prizes in sci-ence. It will be remarkable if any women are on the list. Marie Curie won a Nobel in physics in 1903; the only woman to follow her was Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963, when she shared the award for her theory about the structure of atomic nuclei. In mathematics women have fared even worse. The Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel, has never gone to a woman.

Many women who have gone into science since the 1970’s continue to be stunned at how slow change has been. Gail G. Hanson, distinguished professor of physics at the University of California, Riverside, and the only woman to have won the W. K. H. Panofsky Prize in experimental particle physics, said by phone: “At this point there seems to be an ac-ceptance of women in science at relatively junior levels. But once we get to more senior levels, a kind of antagonism sets in.”

As a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Dr. Hanson discovered quark jets, the work for which she would later be awarded the Panofsky Prize. Yet throughout her research career, she said, she has continued to be treated like a junior colleague, not like a leading researcher.

Dr. Hanson is the subject of a chapter in a new book tracing the lives and work of 40 outstanding female physicists of the past century. Called “Out of the Shadows” and edited by Nina Byers and Gary Williams, physicists at the University of California, Los Angeles, the book recounts the barriers many of these women faced - and continue to face today. A number of younger female physicists contacted for this article agreed

that bias remained real, but they did not want to be quoted on the record.

With sadness and anger evident in her voice, Dr. Hanson said: “I thought these kinds of things only happened in the 1950’s. It’s appalling that women still confront these hurdles.”

She added: “And when you get the prizes, you’re often treated even worse. Men can tolerate a woman in physics as long as she is in a subor-dinate position, but many cannot tolerate a woman above them.”

The National Academy’s report states that we still have a long way to go. Compared with their male colleagues of similar experience, female scientists and engineers are underpaid, undervalued and underrepre-sented in the top tiers of science. Given the long history of antipathy to-ward women of a mathematical bent, it was perhaps naïve to think we could change our institutions in a generation. It is not just bureaucratic will that needs to shift; it is the cultural zeitgeist.

Margaret Wertheim is the author of “Pythagoras’ Trousers,” a cultural history of physics and women.

Optics tests for early Alzheimer's diagnosis make signifi-cant advances

Very early detection, potential low cost to be discussed at meetingWASHINGTON - Providing an update on progress and new findings on his optical tests for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease, Lee Goldstein of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School will de-scribe dramatic new developments in the technology during a plenary talk at Frontiers in Optics, the annual meeting of the Optical Society of America (OSA) in Rochester, N.Y., which takes place next week.

At the plenary talk, Goldstein will present "proof of concept" evidence obtained in mice that the tests can detect early molecular signs of the disease in the eye even before Alzheimer's pathology is present in the brain. This achievement raises hopes for detecting the disease at its ear-liest stages and slowing the progression of the disease to a crawl.

Goldstein envisions that the tests could become part of a suite of "uni-versal early screening technologies" that would be a routine part of an annual physical exam for people starting in middle age. With the tests, envisioned to be relatively inexpensive, physicians would be able to monitor patients year to year for any signs that the disease is present and progressing. The goal, according to Goldstein, is to catch the dis-ease early in its course when treatment is likely to be most effective.

The technology may have additional value in accelerating clinical test-ing of new emerging treatments for the disease.

At last year's annual OSA meeting, Goldstein unveiled two laser-based eye tests that could detect unusual cataracts composed of the amyloid beta protein, the same molecules that are the hallmark of Alzheimer's

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disease. Previously, Goldstein and his colleagues had discovered evi-dence that Alzheimer's was not just a brain disease, but rather a "sys-temic" one that manifests itself in the lens of the eye. The amyloid beta proteins that form plaques in the brain and impair cognitive function also build up near the edge of lens, ultimately forming an unusual "supranuclear" cataract that is very different from more familiar, age-re-lated cataracts.

Fortunately, Goldstein says, the only pathological molecules that seem to form in this particular part of the lens are the amyloid beta particles, tremendously simplifying the researcher's task of differentiating Alzheimer's from other disease states involving the lens. "Mother Nature dealt us a lucky hand here," he says.

Both of the optical tests involve the use of a low-intensity laser that very briefly is directed into the lens, shining low-power light into the eye. The light is safe and barely visible to the patient and does not pro-vide any discomfort, Goldstein says.

In the first test, light enters the lens and ricochets or "scatters" from tiny particles too small for the eye to see. The "quasi-elastic" light scat-tering test can detect small clumps of beta-amyloid particles in the lens. The beta-amyloid proteins collect as aggregates in the lens as small as tens to hundreds of nanometers in size. Small increases in the size or number of these nanometer-scale particles create large effects in light scattering that are detected and analyzed by the technology, he says.

Recently, Goldstein and his colleagues have shown in animal trials that this test can detect the particles that form the unusual cataract as-sociated with Alzheimer's disease, but even before they coalesce into something that can be seen with the naked eye.

"We can pick this up in entirely clear lenses," Goldstein says. "This is exactly what we want to be doing."

The second test uses eye drops that contain a specially designed "lig-and" that specifically binds to amyloid beta proteins. When laser light from the instrument is directed into the lens, the amyloid then emits a characteristic light signal that is detected and analyzed by the technol-ogy. Goldstein emphasizes that these are not imaging tests-the output of the technology is not a picture to be read like a chest X-ray-but rather a "molecular diagnostic" that can detect and analyze suspicious amyloid beta deposits in the lens.

Recently, Goldstein and his colleagues showed in mice that they could pick up signs of the protein in the lens even before the classic amyloid brain lesion of Alzheimer's disease developed in the brain. This is vitally important, he says, as early detection is the only way that physicians can effectively treat the disease. In addition, detecting Alzheimer's early through eye tests can monitor the effectiveness of the many drugs be-ing developed to slow the condition.

Meanwhile, these techniques have been tested in a Phase I trial in hu-mans with phase III multicenter human clinical trials slated for next year. In the end, the tests could cost less than $300 per test, he says. As a po-tential early screening tool and confirmatory diagnostic technology, this is the ballpark range for a widely used test, he says. As no definitive test for diagnosing Alzheimer's currently exists, the tests may also help to differentiate the earliest stages of Alzheimer's from other neurodegener-ative diseases and normal changes in cognition associated with aging.

So the eyes may be more than a poet's window to the soul. They may also be a gateway to the brain and to effective early treatment of a dev-astating brain disorder. The Alzheimer's disease research of Goldstein and his team is funded by the National Institutes of Health, American Federation for Aging Research, Alzheimer's Association, and the Ameri-can Health Assistance Foundation. Goldstein is a co-founder and scien-tific consultant to Neuroptix Corporation, a Massachusetts-based diag-nostic biotechnology company that has licensed and is developing the technology for clinical use.

Chemical found in curry may help immune system clear amyloid plaques found in Alzheimer's disease

UCLA/VA researchers found that curcumin - a chemical found in curry and turmeric - may help the immune system clear the brain of amyloid beta, which form the plaques found in Alzheimer's disease.

Published in the Oct. 9 issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, the early laboratory findings may lead to a new approach in treating Alzheimer's disease by enhancing the natural function of the immune system using curcumin, known for its anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties.

Using blood samples from six Alzheimer's disease patients and three healthy control patients, the researchers isolated cells called macrophages, which are the immune system's PacMen that travel through the brain and body, gobbling up waste products, including amy-loid beta.

The team treated the macrophages with a drug derived from curcumin for 24 hours in a cell culture and then introduced amyloid beta. Treated macrophages from three out of six Alzheimer's disease patients showed improved uptake or ingestion of the waste product compared to the pa-tients' macrophages not treated with curcumin. Macrophages from the healthy controls, which were already effectively clearing amyloid beta, showed no change when curcumin was added.

"Curcumin improved ingestion of amyloid beta by immune cells in 50 percent of patients with Alzheimer's disease. These initial findings demonstrate that curcumin may help boost the immune system of spe-cific Alzheimer's disease patients," said Dr. Milan Fiala, study author and

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a researcher with the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the VA Greater Los Angeles Health Care System. "We are hopeful that these positive results in a test tube may translate to clinical use, but more studies need to be done before curcumin can be recommended." The patients ranged in age from 65 to 84. Fiala noted that the patients whose immune cells responded were younger and had higher scores on a Mini-Mental State Examination suggesting that curcumin may help those with less advanced dementia. Some of the patients may have al-ready had additional curcumin in their systems due to participation in another UCLA study, which may have impacted findings.

"Our next step will be to identify the factors that helped these immune cells respond," said Laura Zhang, a study author and a UCLA/VA re-search assistant in Fiala's lab.

Fiala noted that the method researchers used to test the immune cell response of macrophages may provide a novel way of evaluating the ef-fectiveness of drugs in clearing amyloid beta from the brain and may help to individualize Alzheimer's disease treatment.

According to Fiala, macrophages are the soldiers of the innate im-mune system - the part of the immune system which is present at birth. Curcumin may support the body's natural immune fighting function in directly helping macrophages clean away amyloid-beta. The treatment of macrophages with curcumin is radically different from some of the vaccine approaches currently being studied.

Investigator seeks to uncover roots of DNA’s ‘sweet’ se-cret

Research by Vanderbilt biochemist Martin Egli, Ph.D., is providing clues to the origin of DNA. by Melissa Marino

DNA's simple and elegant structure - the “twisted ladder,” with sugar-phosphate chains making up the “rails” and oxygen- and nitrogen-con-taining chemical “rungs” tenuously uniting the two halves - seems to be the work of an accomplished sculptor.

Yet the graceful, sinuous profile of the DNA double helix is the result of random chemical reactions in a simmering, primordial stew.

Just how nature arrived at this molecule and its sister molecule, RNA, remains one of the greatest - and potentially unsolvable - scientific mys-teries.

But Vanderbilt biochemist Martin Egli, Ph.D., isn't content to simply study these molecules as they are. He wants to know why they are the way they are.

“These molecules are the result of evolution,” said Egli, professor of Biochemistry. “Somehow they have been shaped and optimized for a particular purpose.”

“For a chemist, it makes sense to analyze the origin of these mole-cules.”

One particular curiosity: how did DNA and RNA come to incorporate five-carbon sugars into their “backbone” when six-carbon sugars, like glucose, may have been more common? Egli has been searching for the answer to that question for the past 13 years.

Recently, Egli and colleagues solved a structure that divulges DNA's “sweet” secret. In a recent issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Egli and colleagues report the X-ray crystal structure of homo-DNA, an artificial analog of DNA in which the usual five-carbon sugar has been replaced with a six-carbon sugar.

By exchanging the sugars that make up the DNA backbone, re-searchers can make and test plausible “alternatives” to DNA - alternatives that nature may have tried out before arriving at the final structure. These alter-native structures can then re-veal why DNA's genetic system is more favorable than the other possible forms.

“If you can change the mole-cules chemically or functionally, you can see what is so particu-lar about them, why are they optimal, why are they better than others,” he said.This graphic illustrates the differences between “normal” DNA, left, and homo-DNA.

Although homo-DNA was first synthesized in 1992, a detailed picture of the molecule's structure had been lacking. Egli's high resolution struc-ture is now able to provide answers to some of the lingering questions about why DNA is made the way it is.

While the homo-DNA structure shows a number of similarities with DNA, it is much more stable than DNA. However, it has a more haphaz-ard appearance than normal DNA, looking more like a “slowly writhing ribbon” than the tightly twisted ladder of DNA.

“The reason that DNA was 'picked' is not because it's thermodynami-cally extremely stable,” Egli said. “There are others - including homo-DNA - that are actually superior in that regard.”

Egli's structure also shows that homo-DNA has more flexibility in how the bases (rungs of the ladder) bind. The bases in normal DNA adhere to a somewhat strict binding scheme - guanine (G) binds with cytosine (C)

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and adenine (A) binds with thymine (T). In this “Watson-Crick” base pair-ing, the G:C bonds are much stronger than A:T or any other bonds.

“In homo-DNA, the Watson-Crick base pairing rules are changed,” Egli said. “For example, G:C is similar to G:G or A:A, so you have a much more versatile pairing system in homo-DNA. Therefore, the nature of the sugar in the backbone affects the pairing rules.”

But despite homo-DNA's apparent versatility in base pairing and its thermodynamic stability, other features of the molecule's architecture probably preclude it from being a viable genetic system

For example, it cannot pair with other nucleic acids - unlike DNA and RNA which can and must pair with each other. Also the steep angle, or inclination, between the sugar backbone and the bases of homo-DNA re-quires that the pairing strands align strictly in an antiparallel fashion - unlike DNA which can adopt a parallel orientation. Finally, the irregular spaces between the “rungs” prevent homo-DNA from taking on the uni-form structure DNA uses to store genetic information.

The findings suggest that fully hydroxylated six-carbon sugars proba-bly would not have produced a stable base-pairing system capable of carrying genetic information as efficiently as DNA.

“The structure now provides insight of a chemical nature that (the six-carbon sugar) is just too 'bulky.' It has too many atoms,” Egli said.

The new insights provided by this structure lie at the heart of the most fundamental of scientific inquiries - the origin of life on Earth. If the pieces of DNA and RNA hadn't come together just so, life as we know it would not exist.

Although Egli's structure has ruled out six-carbon sugars as viable al-ternatives for the sugar backbone of DNA, the existence of a plethora of sugars - as well as alternative bases - make for an almost endless num-ber of possibilities from which nature selected the winning DNA combi-nation.

“Homo-DNA is just one alternative system. There are hundreds of sug-ars, as many as you can think of. It will be almost impossible to look at all of them,” Egli said.

“But the big red herring of this work could be that nature never went through these other sugars. Maybe it just hit on gold (these five-carbon sugars) very early and took off from there.”The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Ameri-can Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund.

Report challenges common ecological hypothesis about species abundance

DURHAM, N.C. - A new report finds little empirical evidence to support a widely held ecological assumption that species are most abundant near

the centers of their geographic ranges and decline in abundance near the ranges' edges.

"When we reviewed data from published studies that looked at species abundance at multiple sites across a range, we found almost no evidence that supported the so-called 'abundant-center hypothesis' and strong evidence that contradicted it," said Raphael D. Sagarin, associate director for oceans and coastal policy at Duke University's Nicholas Insti-tute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

"This is troubling," Sagarin said, "because a lot of current thinking on ecological and evolutionary issues - including how species will respond to climate change, how to identify probable locations of pest outbreaks, how genetic diversity is distributed among populations and where to lo-cate habitat preserves - has been based on the hypothesis."

The validity of these ideas now needs to be re-examined using empiri-cal studies, he said.

Sagarin is one of the principal authors of the report, which appeared in the September 2006 issue of the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolu-tion. Other authors are Steven D. Gaines of the University of California-Santa Barbara's Marine Science Institute and Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology; and Brian Gaylord of the University of Cal-ifornia-Davis's Bodega Marine Laboratory and Section of Evolution and Ecology.

For their analysis, the authors reviewed not only published studies but also some new sets of data that they had compiled from field observa-tions in a number of coastal locations of such invertebrate species as sea urchins, sea anemones and snails. They found that most of the stud-ies showed that patterns of abundance were affected by a complex in-terplay of environmental, physical, biological, genetic and geographical factors that the abundant-center hypothesis failed to take into account.

Population clusters and high abundance sometimes occurred right at the geographic edges of the species' ranges, they found.

"Ecologists need to go back into the field and sample populations, tak-ing advantage of new technologies that allow us to see what populations are actually like on scales not previously possible," Sagarin said. "In some way, it's a return to old-school ecology, but armed with high-tech tools we didn't have 30 years ago."

Advances in remote sensing, biophysical monitoring, ecological physi-ology, molecular genetics and genomics are rapidly enhancing scien-tists' ability to identify population and individual patterns across large spatial scales, he said. Scientists can collect data on such factors as growth rates, genetics, climate, human-caused impacts and species in-teractions in different parts of a population's range, and then look at the overlay of these variables and see the larger story, rather than making a simplifying assumption based on one variable.

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"Theory and experimentation have their place," Sagarin said. "They can play important roles in helping us predict, in general, future changes in species' ranges due to climate change. But you need empirical field-based data to know, more specifically, how this is going to look on the ground. When a range shifts, is it going to look like the gradual arrival of a new species, or like an actual invasion? Theory alone can't tell us that."

2 Americans Win Nobel in PhysicsBy DENNIS OVERBYE

Two American astronomers who uncovered evidence on the origin of the universe and how it grew into galaxies were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday.

The astronomers, John C. Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and George F. Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, will split the prize of 10 million Swedish kroners, about $1.37 million.

Dr. Mather and Dr. Smoot led a team of more than 1,000 scientists, engineers and technicians behind the Cosmic Background Explorer, or COBE, satellite launched in 1989. Its mission was to study a haze of mi-crowave radiation thought to be a remnant of the Big Bang that started the universe.

In its citation, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences wrote, “The COBE results provided increased support for the Big Bang scenario for the origin of the universe, as this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of cosmic microwave background radiation measured by COBE.”

The satellite measured the temperature and distribution of the mi-crowaves, including the detection of faint irregularities, the seeds from which things like galaxies could have grown. A result was a resounding confirmation of a universe born in a terrific explosion of space and time 14 billion years ago and in which the ordinary matter that makes up stars and people is overwhelmed by some mysterious “dark matter.”

“What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe and its evolution,” Dr. Smoot said in a news conference on the results in 1992. About a map showing the splotchy seeds of galaxy formation, he fa-mously said, “If you are religious, it is like looking at God.”

The announcement of the prize delighted astronomers who had long anticipated a Nobel for the COBE work, which led to a wave of theorizing and experiments that have contributed to the emerging picture of what is known as a preposterous universe, full of dark energy pushing it apart as well as dark matter.

James E. Peebles, a Princeton cosmologist, said, “COBE was deeply im-portant. Those two measurements set cosmology on the track to our present well-based theory of the expanding universe.”

Michael S. Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, said the COBE measurements had ushered in an era of “precision cosmology” that continues to this day. “This is likely to be the first of a number of prizes in cosmology in this golden age we find ourselves in,” Dr. Turner said.

This was not the first prize for work involving cosmic background radi-ation, which was discovered as a persistent radio hiss by Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson of Bell Laboratories in 1964. They received a No-bel in 1978. Measurements by them and a rapidly growing army of radio astronomers, including the late David T. Wilkinson of Princeton, sug-gested that the microwaves were uniform and fit the spectrum of a so-called black body with a temperature of about 3 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero, the signature of a dying Big Bang fireball when the cos-mos was only 400,000 years old.

Overnight, the few partisans of the rival steady-state theory of an un-changing universe melted away. But the only way to be sure was to measure the microwaves in all directions and at all wavelengths from space, away from atmospheric distortions and influences.

The tool for this task was COBE.Dr. Mather, who was born in 1946 in Roanoke, Va., and grew up near

Rutgers University in rural New Jersey, studied at Swarthmore College and then at the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked for NASA his entire career.

He has been involved with the satellite since 1974, when it was first a gleam in NASA’s eye. Until then, he said at a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington, he had been hoping to get out of the mi-crowave work because it was too difficult. “But here I am,” he said.

Dr. Mather served as overall project scientist for the COBE mission and headed one of its three instrument teams, in an experiment to measure the spectrum of the microwaves precisely. Praising the COBE results as a “huge team effort,” he recalled that his perspective was that “this was a mission that was impossible.”

The satellite was launched in 1989, after a delay caused by the explo-sion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. The results from Dr. Mather’s instrument, the Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer, or Fi-ras, established that the Big Bang afterglow had a perfect black body spectrum with a temperature of 2.725 degrees Kelvin.

Dr. Smoot, who was born in 1945 in Yukon, Fla., and studied physics as an undergraduate and a graduate student at the Massachusetts Insti-tute of Technology, was lead investigator for a COBE instrument de-signed to measure spatial variations in the microwaves.

Astronomers knew that the radiation could not be completely uniform because the universe today is not uniform. Matter is concentrated in gal-axies. According to the standard theory, the seeds for these galaxies

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should show up as slight hot and cool spots in the relic of the Big Bang fireball. Many cosmologists, however, worried that these lumps, amount-ing to a hundredth of a thousandth of a degree, according to the best theories, were beyond detection.

Lawrence M. Krauss, a cosmologist at Case Western Reserve Univer-sity, said, “People had hoped to see lumps, but it almost looked like a pipe dream.”

In April 1992, however, Dr. Smoot electrified a meeting of the Ameri-can Physical Society in Washington by reporting that the COBE Differen-tial Microwave Radiometer had seen and mapped the lumps.

Cosmologists now believe that these lumps or ripples are a result of quantum fluctuations, tiny jitters in the force fields that filled the uni-verse when it was a fraction of a millionth of a second old.

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at M.I.T., said: “I think the discovery of cosmic microwave fluctuations was as revolutionary for physics as the discovery of DNA was for biology. These fluctuations are our cosmic DNA, the blueprints encoding how the baby universe would develop.”

The seeds in COBE’s map correspond to superclusters of thousands of galaxies, the largest assemblages of matter in the modern universe. In discussing the results in the 1990’s, Dr. Smoot said that it was partly to emphasize the gigantic scale of these fluctuations, as well as their im-portance, that he had made the comment about seeing God.

He received a fair amount of ribbing in the news media for that com-ment. In an interview with The New York Times in 1992, he said, “It re-ally is like finding the driving mechanism for the universe, and isn’t that what God is?”

Huge 'launch ring' to fling satellites into orbitDavid Shiga

An enormous ring of superconducting magnets similar to a particle ac-celerator could fling satellites into space, or perhaps weapons around the world, suggest the findings of a new study funded by the US air force.

Proponents of the idea say it would be much cheaper than conven-tional rocket launches. But critics warn that the technology would be difficult to develop and that the in-tense g forces experienced during launch might damage the very satellites being lofted into space.

Previous studies have investi-gated the use of magnets to accel-erate satellites to the high speeds required for launch. But most have focused on straight tracks, which

have to gather speed in one quick burst. Supplying the huge spike of en-ergy needed for this method has proven difficult.

The advantage of a circular track is that the satellite can be gradually accelerated over a period of several hours. And the setup is technologi-cally feasible and cost effective, suggests a recent, preliminary study of the idea funded by the air force's Office of Scientific Research.A ring of superconducting magnets fires a projectile off a ramp at 8 kilometres per second, fast enough to reach orbit (Artist’s concep-tion: J Fiske/LaunchPoint)

The air force has now given the go-ahead for more in-depth research of the idea. The two-year study will begin within a few weeks and be led by James Fiske of LaunchPoint Technologies in Goleta, California, US.

The launch ring would be very similar to the particle accelerators used for physics experiments, with superconducting magnets placed around a 2-kilometre-wide ring.Mach 23

The satellite, encased in an aerodynamic, cone-shaped shell that would protect it from the intense heat of launch, would be attached to a sled designed to respond to the forces from the superconducting mag-nets.

When the sled had been accelerated to its top speed of 10 kilometres per second, laser and pyrotechnic devices would be used to separate the cone from the sled. Then, the cone would skid into a side tunnel, los-ing some speed due to friction with the tunnel's walls.

The tunnel would direct the cone to a ramp angled at 30° to the hori-zon, where the cone would launch towards space at about 8 kilometres per second, or more than 23 times the speed of sound. A rocket at the back end of the cone would be used to adjust its trajectory and place it in a proper orbit.

Anything launched in this way would have to be able to survive enor-mous accelerations - more than 2000 times the acceleration due to gravity (2000g). This would seem to be an obstacle for launching things like communications satellites, but Fiske points out that the US military uses electronics in laser-guided artillery, which survive being fired out of guns at up to 20,000g.Long-range weapons

The US air force's interest stems from the ring's potential to launch small, 10-kilogram satellites into orbit, though the team says it has not been told what kind of satellites these are. Aeronautics researcher Alan Epstein at MIT in Cambridge, US, who is not on the team, says the ring could potentially be used as a weapon.

Aside from microsatellites, the launch ring would be ideal for deliver-ing supplies to support human spaceflight, such as food and water, which are not sensitive to such high accelerations, Fiske says. "Nearly all

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of this materiel could be shipped via launch rings, resulting in major re-ductions in the cost of manned space activities," he told New Scientist.

Such a launch ring is technologically possible, but getting the projec-tile safely through the atmosphere would be challenging, says Epstein.

Among other things, it would be difficult to keep it from overheating and to make sure it follows the desired trajectory when subjected to winds and friction from the atmosphere, he says: "None of these chal-lenges are trivial at all."

Team member Michael Ricci, also at LaunchPoint, thinks these difficul-ties can be overcome. "They're certainly not issues that can just be dis-counted, but we believe both of those are solvable," he told New Scien-tist, citing previous research on nuclear warheads, which are designed to move through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.Cheaper by the dozen

If the ring launched hundreds of satellites a year, it would be cheaper than conventional rocket launches. With 300 launches per year, the team estimates the ring could put payloads into orbit for $745 per kilo-gram. If the launch rate reached 3000 launches per year, they calculate that would drop to $189 per kilogram. Today, it costs more than 100 times that to send payloads into space.

However, Epstein says he cannot imagine a demand for that many launches in the foreseeable future. Ricci counters that demand is cur-rently being held back by the high cost of rocket launches: "If you had orbital launch capabilities at one-tenth or one-hundredth the cost, there'd be a lot more demand."

If the results of the team's upcoming, more detailed design study are promising, the team would like to proceed by building a small test ver-sion of the ring, measuring 20 to 50 metres across, although no funding has been promised for this as yet.

If everything went well with the test ring, the team would hope to at-tract funding to build a full-scale version, which would take about four years to build, Ricci estimates.

Although Epstein is sceptical about the prospects for such a ring, he cautions that if built, the ring itself could become a target for attacks. This is because of its potential for use as a weapon, launching missiles that could reach anywhere in the world. "The ring then becomes one of the most important targets on the planet," he told New Scientist.

Powerful drug comes with an 'off switch'Debora MacKenzie

A new drug, designed with its own built-in antidote, could revolutionise drug safety, allowing effective use of potentially risky drugs.

Researchers have designed an anti-clotting drug that becomes inac-tive - allowing blood to form clots - when light of a specific frequency is shone on it.

Anti-clotting drugs are widely used in medicine, including in situations where the blood is transported outside of the body for a time, such as during heart surgery or kidney dialysis. But once back in the body, blood that cannot clot can cause catastrophic bleeding and stroke.

Heparin is often used as an anti-clotting agent in such situations, as it has an antidote that can be applied quickly if it is needed. But heparin can cause allergic reactions. Better, more modern anti-clotting agents cannot be used in these situations, however, as they have no fast anti-dote.Shine a light

Alexander Heckel and colleagues at the University of Bonn, in Ger-many, may now have solved the problem. They have been experiment-ing with a “toolbox” of artificial nucleotides that change shape when bathed in light of a certain wavelength.

The team experimented with a potential anti-clotting drug called an aptamer, which is a string of 15 nucleotides - the building blocks of DNA. This aptamer works by binding and blocking a major molecule involved in the body’s blood-clotting reaction, called thrombin.

The researchers turned off this blocking action by causing the mole-cule to bend into a hairpin shape. They achieved this by stringing four extra nucleotides on one end of the aptamer. One of these was a shape-changing nucleotide, while the others were nucleotides that would nor-mally bind with the sequence of nucleotides at the other end of the ap-tamer.

Without the right kind of light, the shape-changing nucleotide did not match its opposite number at the other end of the aptamer, and the two ends did not bind together. But when the light was switched on, the arti-ficial nucleotide changed shape and became a match. This allowed the two ends of the aptamer to bind together in the hairpin shape, switching off the aptamer's anti-clotting action.

The team found it could "turn off" the aptamer in seconds, even when it was already bound to thrombin.

Such light-sensitive artificial nucleotides might be added to other nu-cleotide-based drugs, the researchers say. This could include drugs to control gene regulation and many crucial proteins.

Treatment 'to neutralise all flu'Scientists say they are developing an entirely new way of providing

instant protection against flu.In preliminary tests, it was found to protect animals against various

strains of the virus - and may also protect against future pandemic strains.

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University of Warwick researchers used a flu virus naturally stripped of some genetic material to compete with other invading flu viruses.

This slowed the rate of infection so much the body could fight it off.

In effect, the invading virus became its own vaccine by triggering an immune re-sponse sufficiently powerful to neutralise it before it could gain a strong enough foothold.Flu virus

The Warwick team plan to develop the treatment as a nasal spray.Experts warned much more testing was required.However, they said the development of the vaccine was timely, amid

concerns the H5N1 bird flu strain circulating in south east Asia could mu-tate into a pandemic strain which would put millions of lives at risk.

Existing vaccination methods depend on stimulating the body's im-mune system, so that white blood cells produce antibodies that attach to the surface of the virus and start the process of killing it.

This works well for many diseases, such as smallpox, polio and measles, but is much less effective with flu, as the coat of the flu virus is continually changing.

Vaccination against one strain of flu is totally ineffective against an-other.Crowded out

Professor Nigel Dimmock has spent more than two decades develop-ing the new approach.

The "protecting virus" with which he worked had naturally lost around 80% of the genetic material of one of its eight RNA constituent seg-ments. This deletion makes the virus harmless and prevents it from re-producing by itself within a cell, so that it cannot spread like a normal in-fluenza virus.

However, if it is joined in the cell by another influenza virus, it retains its harmless nature but starts to reproduce - and at a much faster rate than the new influenza virus.

This fast reproduction rate - spurred by the new flu infection - means that the new invading influenza is effectively crowded out.

This vastly slows the progress of the new infection, prevents flu symp-toms, and gives the body time to develop an immune response to the harmful new invader.One size fits all

The Warwick team believes its research indicates the protecting virus would have the same effect regardless of the strain of flu infection.

This is because the coat of the virus is irrelevant to the protection process - the effect works on the virus genes inside the cell.

In addition it protects instantly, whereas protection generated by con-ventional flu vaccination takes two to three weeks to become fully effec-tive.

Experiments so far show that a single dose of protecting virus can be given six weeks before, and 24 hours after an infection with flu virus and be effective.

The Warwick research team has now filed a patent on the protecting virus and is exploring ways of taking it through human clinical trials and testing on birds.

Professor John Oxford, a virologist at Queen Mary College School of Medicine, London, said: "This is cutting edge science, but there is a lot that could still go wrong.

"To have something that could more or less guarantee coverage against anything that this virus could throw at us would be absolutely spot on."

Ghengis Khan wonder berry could conquer heart diseaseBerries taken since the time of Ghengis Khan could form the basis of

the next big thing in heart health. Sea buckthorn is a known source of biologically active chemicals and is used in Tibet, Mongolia, China and Russia for health drinks and various cosmetics. Juice extracted using current methods is of poor quality, but scientists in India have devel-oped a highly efficient technique to extract large quantities of choles-terol-lowering compounds. Two companies have shown interest in the process including one based in Mongolia.

In research due to be published this week in SCI's Journal of the Sci-ence of Food and Agriculture (DOI 10.1002/jsfa2620) Dr C Arumyghan and his team at the Regional Research Laboratory, Trivandrum report the implementation of a new process which retains more than 40% of polyphenols - the same beneficial chemicals found in red wine, 50% of flavonoids and 70% of vitamin C present in the pulp of the red berries.

Antioxidants in the berries inhibit so-called 'bad' LDL cholesterol oxidi-sation, which could provide a new weapon to fight cardiovascular dis-ease. When LDL cholesterol is oxidized, it sticks to the lining of blood vessels. Consuming the berries in food or drinks is expected to prevent the arteries from clogging up.

Arumughan is confident that this technology had great potential, say-ing "No previous report has shown efficiency matching ours". Aru-mughan's team have unlocked the nutrients by applying novel process-ing technique for the first time. The key to their success is using continu-ous high speed centrifugation (spinning) to separate the juice and the solid sludge.

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Study identifies factors correlated with cerebral palsySeveral factors, including maternal infection during pregnancy, very

preterm birth, and certain findings on brain MRI scans were correlated with cerebral palsy, according to a study in the October 4 issue of JAMA.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings have been reported for specific clinical cerebral palsy (CP) subgroups or lesion types but not in a large population of children with all CP subtypes. Additional information about the causes of CP could help identify preventive strategies, accord-ing to background information in the article.

Martin Bax, D.M., F.R.C.P.C.H., of Imperial College London and Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, London, and colleagues examined the corre-lates of CP in a population sample and compared clinical findings with information available from MRI brain scans. The study included 585 chil-dren with CP who were born between 1996 and 1999; 431 children were clinically assessed and 351 had a brain MRI scan at 18 months of age or later. The research was conducted at eight European study centers (North West London and North East London, England; Edinburgh, Scot-land; Lisbon, Portugal; Dublin, Ireland; Stockholm, Sweden; Tübingen, Germany; and Helsinki, Finland).

The researchers found that 39.5 percent (158 of 400) of the mothers reported an infection during the pregnancy, including 19.2 percent who reported a urinary tract infection and 15.5 percent who reported taking antibiotics during the pregnancy. Fifty-one children (12 percent) were known to be from a multiple pregnancy, with 48 from a twin pregnancy and 3 from a triplet pregnancy. This compares with a population rate of multiple pregnancy of about 1.5 percent. In addition, 235 children (54 percent) were born at term, whereas 47 children (10.9 percent) were very preterm (born less than 28 weeks gestation), 69 (16 percent) were born between 28 and 31 weeks, and 79 (18.3 percent) were born be-tween 32 and 36 weeks gestation. Emergency cesarean deliveries were performed in 32.3 percent of births.

Among children with clinical evaluation, 351 (81.4 percent) had a brain MRI scan assessed for the study. The scans showed that white-matter damage of immaturity (brain areas affected due to not being fully developed) was the most common finding (42.5 percent). Only 11.7 percent of these children had normal MRI findings. There were good cor-relations between the MRI and clinical findings.

"Not only do MRI scans help reveal the pathologic basis of the condi-tion but, also, the findings have strong correlations with clinical findings. This may be useful in helping parents, clinicians, and others involved in the care of children with CP to understand the nature of the children's condition and to predict their needs in the future. Therefore, all children with CP should have an MRI scan," the authors write.

"We think it is not unreasonable to assume that with increased aware-ness of possible preventive measures, over the next decade the rate of CP could be reduced substantially, thus reducing the burden on families and saving tremendous sums of money for health services," the re-searchers conclude.(JAMA. 2006;296:1602-1608. Available pre-embargo to the media at www.jama-media.org.)Editor's Note: Ongoing funding for this study is provided by the Castang Foundation, having been initiated by the Little Foundation. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contribu-tions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.Editorial: Complexity of the Cerebral Palsy SyndromesIn an accompanying editorial, Michael E. Msall, M.D., of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago Comer Children's and LaRabida Children's Hospitals, Chicago, comments on the study by Bax and colleagues."The key translational question is how to use advances in maternal-fetal medicine, neonatology, and developmental neuroscience to describe the best explanatory mechanisms for children with a CP syndrome. Most impor-tant is how to use the best science to understand potential pathways that would decrease the functional severity of CP.""With respect to ongoing management, a long-term whole-child focus that optimizes health, developmental, and functional outcomes, community par-ticipation, and family well-being is in order. In this way, an informed and compassionate science for children with neurodisability can be developed." (JAMA. 2006;296:1650-1652. Available pre-embargo to the media at www.jama-media.org.)

Black tea soothes away stressDaily cups of tea can help you recover more quickly from the stresses

of everyday life, according to a new study by UCL (University College London) researchers. New scientific evidence shows that black tea has an effect on stress hormone levels in the body.

The study, published in the journal Psychopharmacology, found that people who drank tea were able to de-stress more quickly than those who drank a fake tea substitute. Furthermore, the study participants - who drank a black tea concoction four times a day for six weeks - were found to have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood after a stressful event, compared with a control group who drank the fake or placebo tea for the same period of time.

In the study, 75 young male regular tea drinkers were split into two groups and monitored for six weeks. They all gave up their normal tea, coffee and caffeinated beverages, then one group was given a fruit-flavoured caffeinated tea mixture made up of the constituents of an av-erage cup of black tea. The other group - the control group - was given a caffeinated placebo identical in taste, but devoid of the active tea ingre-

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dients. All drinks were tea-coloured, but were designed to mask some of the normal sensory cues associated with tea drinking (such as smell, taste and familiarity of the brew), to eliminate confounding factors such as the 'comforting' effect of drinking a cup of tea.

Both groups were subjected to challenging tasks, while their cortisol, blood pressure, blood platelet and self-rated levels of stress were mea-sured. In one task, volunteers were exposed to one of three stressful sit-uations (threat of unemployment, a shop lifting accusation or an inci-dent in a nursing home), where they had to prepare a verbal response and argue their case in front of a camera.

The tasks triggered substantial increases in blood pressure, heart rate and subjective stress ratings in both of the groups. In other words, simi-lar stress levels were induced in both groups. However, 50 minutes after the task, cortisol levels had dropped by an average of 47 per cent in the tea drinking group compared with 27 per cent in the fake tea group.

UCL researchers also found that blood platelet activation - linked to blood clotting and the risk of heart attacks - was lower in the tea drinkers, and that this group reported a greater degree of relaxation in the recovery period after the task.

Professor Andrew Steptoe, UCL Department of Epidemiology and Pub-lic Health, says: "Drinking tea has traditionally been associated with stress relief, and many people believe that drinking tea helps them relax after facing the stresses of everyday life. However, scientific evidence for the relaxing properties of tea is quite limited. This is one of the first studies to assess tea in a double-blind placebo controlled design - that is, neither we nor the participants knew whether they were drinking real or fake tea. This means that any differences were due to the biological ingredients of tea, and not to the relaxing situations in which people might drink tea, whether they were familiar with the taste and liked it, and so on.

"We do not know what ingredients of tea were responsible for these effects on stress recovery and relaxation. Tea is chemically very com-plex, with many different ingredients. Ingredients such as catechins, polyphenols, flavonoids and amino acids have been found to have ef-fects on neurotransmitters in the brain, but we cannot tell from this re-search which ones produced the differences.

"Nevertheless, our study suggests that drinking black tea may speed up our recovery from the daily stresses in life. Although it does not ap-pear to reduce the actual levels of stress we experience, tea does seem to have a greater effect in bringing stress hormone levels back to nor-mal. This has important health implications, because slow recovery fol-lowing acute stress has been associated with a greater risk of chronic ill-nesses such as coronary heart disease."

New study finds chocolate chip cookies lower cholesterolRight Direction Cookies™ decrease bad cholesterol

Right Direction Chocolate Chip CookiesTM lower cholesterol and im-prove lipid subfraction profile, lowering the risk of heart disease, accord-ing to a published study in The Journal of Nutrition (October). The choco-late chip cookies, made with a combination of psyllium and plant sterols, are a tasty all-natural approach to reducing cardiovascular risk associ-ated with cholesterol.

The American Heart Association estimates at least 50 percent of the American adult population has high cholesterol. The study revealed eat-ing two Right Direction Cookies daily showed a ten percent decrease in LDL cholesterol as well as shifting the LDL particles toward a less athero-genic pattern.

Normal cholesterol levels are usually associated with a lower risk for cardiovascular disease, but not always. Recent studies reveal small, dense LDL particles have been linked to increased formation of fatty substances and cholesterol buildup in the arteries, even for individuals with total cholesterol levels under 200 mg/dl.

The randomized, double blind study researched 33 healthy adults with moderately high cholesterol between the ages 35–65 at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT. Participants were randomly assigned to the Right Direction Cookie group or the placebo cookie group. Two cookies per day were consumed for four weeks. After a three week washout pe-riod, subjects received the other cookies for an additional four weeks. At the end of each treatment period, two blood samples were drawn on different days (to control for day-to-day variability) and collected.

Final results revealed a ten percent decrease of LDL cholesterol levels in the plasma of the participants of the Right Direction Cookie group. The decrease was in the worst kind of lipoproteins, those that were smallest and most likely to raise risk for heart disease. Body weight did not change and there were no changes in HDL (good) cholesterol. Ac-cording to the Center for Disease Control, a 10 percent decrease in total cholesterol levels may result in an estimated 30 percent reduction in the incidence of coronary heart disease.

The soluble fiber in Right Direction Cookies absorbs fluids, cholesterol, fat and bile, carrying them through the digestive tract and out of the body in the stool. The plant sterols lower blood cholesterol by blocking cholesterol absorption from food during digestion. Psyllium is an excel-lent source of soluble fiber and when consumed regularly, it has a posi-tive effect in the treatment of obesity, high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, constipation, hemorrhoids and coronary artery dis-ease.

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"Our results suggest dietary treatment with Right Direction Cookies significantly affected the total number of lipoprotein particles and re-duced plasma concentrations," said Jay Udani, a key researcher of the study and Medical Director of Medicus Research. "LDL levels dropped due to the high amount of plant sterols and soluble fibers in Right Direc-tion Cookies."About Right Direction CookiesCreated by two nutritionists in Kenilworth, NJ, Right Direction Cookies are a novel product with enough soluble fiber and plant sterols to help lower cholesterol. Currently, Right Direction Cookies are available at specialty stores and online at www.rightdirectioncookies.net for $13.99 per box, for a one week supply of 14 cookies. For more information, visit the Web site or call 866.535.3696.14 chocolate chip cookies is NOT a one-week supply! It would proba-bly last half that long, unless the soluble fiber and plant sterols coun-

teract the flavor of the chocolate chips.Supernova radioisotopes show sun was born in star clus-

ter, scientists sayCHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The death of a massive nearby star billions of years ago offers evidence the sun was born in a star cluster, say astronomers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rather than being an only child, the sun could have hundreds or thousands of celestial sib-lings, now dispersed across the heavens.

In a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, as-tronomy professors Leslie W. Looney and Brian D. Fields, and undergrad-uate student John J. Tobin take a close look at short-lived radioactive iso-topes once present in primitive meteorites. The researchers' conclusions could reshape current theories on how, when and where planets form around stars.

Short-lived radioactive isotopes are created when massive stars end their lives in spectacular explosions called supernovas. Blown outward, bits of this radioactive material mix with nebular gas and dust in the process of condensing into stars and planets. When the solar system was forming, some of this material hardened into rocks and later fell to Earth as meteorites.

The radioisotopes have long since vanished from meteorites found on Earth, but they left their signatures in daughter species. By examining the abundances of those daughter species, the researchers could calcu-late how far away the supernova was, in both distance and time.

"The supernova was stunningly close; much closer to the sun than any star is today," Fields said. "Our solar system was still in the process of forming when the supernova occurred."

The massive star that exploded was formed in a group or cluster of stars with perhaps hundreds, or even thousands, of low-mass stars like

the sun, Fields said. Because the stars were not gravitationally bound to one another, the sun's siblings wandered away millennia ago.

Our solar system, rather than being the exception, could be the rule, the astronomers said. Planetary system formation should be understood in this context.

"We know that the majority of stars in our galaxy were born in star clusters," Looney said. "Now we also know that the newborn solar sys-tem not only arose in such a cluster, but also survived the impact of an exploding star. This suggests that planetary systems are impressively rugged, and may be common even in the most tumultuous stellar nurs-eries."

Experimental ragweed therapy offers allergy sufferers longer relief with fewer shots

Americans accustomed to the seasonal misery of sneezing, runny noses and itchy, watery eyes caused by ragweed pollen might one day benefit from an experimental allergy treatment that not only requires fewer injections than standard immunotherapy, but leads to a marked reduction in symptoms that persists for at least a year after therapy has stopped, according to a new study in the October 5 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The research was sponsored by the Immune Tolerance Network, which is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the National Institute of Dia-betes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), both components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Juvenile Diabetes Re-search Foundation International.

"As many as 40 million Americans suffer from seasonal allergies caused by airborne pollens produced by grasses, trees and weeds," says NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. "Finding new therapies for allergy sufferers is certainly an important research goal."

"This innovative research holds great promise for helping people with allergies," says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. "A short course of immunotherapy that reduces allergic symptoms over an extended pe-riod of time will significantly improve the quality of life for many people."

Ragweed is one of the most common pollens in the United States and is prevalent in the Northeast, Midwest and the South. In Baltimore, where the NEJM study was conducted, the ragweed pollen season lasts from mid-August to October.

Physicians treat people suffering from mild and moderate ragweed al-lergies with antihistamines or nasal corticosteroids. However, when peo-ple with allergies do not respond to these treatments or experience se-vere symptoms, the next therapeutic option is a course of subcutaneous injections of the allergen, which is called allergen immunotherapy. Al-though this standard immunotherapy is often effective, it has two major

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drawbacks. First, it can cause systemic allergic reactions, such as ana-phylaxis, a hypersensitivity reaction that can lead to severe and some-times life-threatening physical symptoms. Second, to provide long-last-ing relief, standard immunotherapy may require frequent injections over a 3- to 5-year period. The large number of injections over such an ex-tended period of time often results in many people not completing the treatment.

In the study detailed in NEJM, lead investigator Peter Creticos, M.D., medical director of the Johns Hopkins Asthma and Allergy Center in Bal-timore, and his research team found that an investigational therapy based on the major ragweed allergen, Amb a 1, coupled to a unique short, synthetic sequence of DNA that stimulates the immune system, reduced allergy symptoms in adults for at least one year when given just once a week over a 6-week period. The therapeutic agent was provided by Dynavax Technologies Corp., based in Berkeley, CA.

"For almost 100 years, we've been using the tedious process of giving allergy sufferers one to two shots a week for up to 4 to 5 years to ensure its success," Dr. Creticos says. "This study is an important immunother-apy advance in that we've shown you can induce long-lasting relief from allergic rhinitis with just a few weeks of injections."

The study initially involved 25 adult volunteers, ages 23 to 60, with a history of seasonal allergic rhinitis, positive skin test reactions to rag-weed pollen, and an immediate reaction when nasally challenged with ragweed. Prior to the start of the 2001 fall ragweed season, the study participants received six injections, each a week apart, of either the in-vestigational therapy in increasingly higher doses or a placebo. They re-ceived no other injections throughout the course of the study. Fourteen volunteers received the study drug; 11 were given the placebo. The therapy was well-tolerated and caused only limited local reactions, which required neither medication nor change in treatment dose. No clinically significant, therapy-related adverse events occurred.

Throughout the 2001 and 2002 ragweed seasons, the volunteers were monitored for allergy-related symptoms, including the number of sneezes and the degree of post-nasal drip, allergy medication use and quality-of-life scores. Compared with the placebo recipients, the group that received the therapy experienced dramatically better outcomes that continued throughout the 2002 ragweed season even though ther-apy ended one year earlier.

Clearly, the regimen of only six injections showed therapeutic promise when compared with the current therapy, the study authors note. How-ever, because the results are based on a small number of volunteers and the long-term safety of the therapy is unknown, they say additional clinical trials with longer-term follow-up to adequately assess the ther-apy's safety and effectiveness are necessary.

How the experimental therapy relieves ragweed allergy symptoms is not fully understood at this time. When exposed to ragweed pollen, peo-ple who are allergic to ragweed experience an increase in IgE (im-munoglobulin) antibodies; immunotherapy blocks this increase in IgE. Researchers believe the experimental therapy tempers the release of immune regulatory proteins called cytokines, which blocks increases in the level of IgE antibodies.

"Using ragweed as a model allergen system with a predictable sea-sonal pattern of symptoms and pollen counts, it is possible to correlate pollen levels with symptoms and measure treatment effects on symp-toms. This enables us to better understand immune response to aller-gens and serves as an approach to similar therapies to manage other al-lergic reactions for which there are currently no treatments, such as food allergies," says Marshall Plaut, M.D., chief of the Allergic Mecha-nisms Section of NIAID's Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplan-tation.New drug blocks influenza, including bird flu virus

MADISON - Opening a new front in the war against flu, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have reported the discovery of a novel compound that confers broad protection against influenza viruses, in-cluding deadly avian influenza.

The new work, reported online this week (Oct. 4, 2006) in the Journal of Virology, describes the discovery of a peptide - a small protein mole-cule - that effectively blocks the influenza virus from attaching to and entering the cells of its host, thwarting its ability to replicate and infect more cells.

The new finding is important because it could make available a class of new antiviral drugs to prevent and treat influenza at a time when fear of a global pandemic is heightened and available antiviral drugs are los-ing their potency.

"This gives us another tool," says Stacey Schultz-Cherry, a UW-Madi-son professor of medical microbiology and immunology and the senior author of the new report. "We're quickly losing our antivirals."

The new drug, which was tested on cells in culture and in mice, con-ferred complete protection against infection and was highly effective in treating animals in the early stages of infection. Untreated infected ani-mals typically died within a week. All of the infected animals treated with small doses of the drug at the onset of symptoms survived.

"Pretreatment with (the peptide) provided 100 percent protection against numerous subtypes (of flu), including the highly pathogenic H5N1 viruses...," according to the Journal of Virology report.

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The new drug, known as "entry blocker," is a fragment of a larger hu-man protein whose role in biology is to help things pass through mem-branes such as those that encapsulate cells.

Although the peptide's precise mechanism for thwarting flu remains to be deciphered, it seems to work by blocking the virus' ability to latch onto a key cell surface molecule that the virus uses to get inside cells. To survive and reproduce, viruses must gain access to cells where they make new infectious particles to infect yet more cells in a cascade of in-fection.

The scientific team emphasized that while the new drug shows great promise, much work remains to determine optimal dosage, efficacy and safety before the drug can be tested in a human patient. One possibility is that the new agent could be used as part of an anti-influenza cocktail of drugs, much like those used to treat HIV infection. The team hopes to move the research into preclinical phase as quickly as possible.

Currently, there are a few effective antiviral medications on the mar-ket for influenza, but they are beginning to show signs that they are los-ing their effectiveness, and scientists and health professionals worry that the flu virus, and especially the H5N1 bird flu virus, will evolve to the point where existing drugs are no longer effective. Drugs now on the market work by either preventing virus replication within the cell or pre-venting the release of viruses from the cell.

The peptide found by the Wisconsin group seems to work in an en-tirely different way.

"It attacks a completely different part of the virus life cycle," explains Curtis R. Brandt, a co-author of the study and a UW-Madison professor of medical microbiology and immunology and of ophthalmology and visual sciences. "The virus can't even get into the cell. The peptide is blocking the very earliest step in infection."

Antiviral drugs are considered to be a critical line of defense in the event of an influenza epidemic or pandemic. Vaccines are the most im-portant defense, but new vaccines must be customized in response to an outbreak of disease and it can take as long as a year to formulate and manufacture vaccine in quantity. Antiviral drugs, it is anticipated, would be used to buy time to produce a vaccine in the event of a flu pandemic.

And one intriguing possibility, the Wisconsin scientists add, is that the drug might be able to help stimulate an immune response to flu as the peptide failed to block all of the virus particles in their experiments. A few persistent virus particles, while not enough to make a patient sick, could give the immune system the viral template it needs to mount an effective response, just like a vaccine.

The flu-thwarting qualities of the peptide were observed after similar peptides were found by Brandt and his colleagues to stop herpes sim-plex virus infection.Hail to the hornworts: New plant family tree sheds light on evolution of life cycles

ANN ARBOR, Mich.-In the history of life on earth, one intriguing mys-tery is how plants made the transition from water to land and then went on to diversify into the array of vegetation we see today, from simple mosses and liverworts to towering redwoods.

A research team led by University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Yin-Long Qiu has new findings that help resolve long-debated questions about the origin and evolution of land plants. The work will be published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci-ences.

Two major steps kicked off the chain of events that helped land plants prosper, forming the basis for modern land-based ecosystems and fundamentally altering the course of evolution of life on earth, said Qiu. The first step was the colonization of land by descendents of aquatic plants known as charophyte algae. That event opened up a vast new world where the sun's intensity was undimin-ished by passage through wa-ter and where carbon dioxide-another essential ingredient for plant life-was abundant.

The second event was a key change in plant life cycles. Plants exhibit a phenomenon known as alternation of generations, in which two alternating forms with different amounts of DNA make up a complete life cycle. One form, known as a sporophyte, produces spores, which grow into individuals of the other form, called gametophytes. Ga-metophytes produce gametes-eggs and sperm-which unite to form a fer-tilized egg capable of becoming a new sporophyte, thus completing a life cycle. While all plants exhibit alternation of generations, some spend most of their life cycle as sporophytes, and others spend more time in the gametophyte phase.

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"Early in the history of plant evolution, a shift occurred," said Qiu, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. "If you look at the so-called 'lower' plants such as algae, liverworts and mosses, they spend most of their life cycle as gametophytes. But if you look at plants like ferns, pines and flowering plants, they spend most of their time as sporophytes. Geneticists, developmental biologists and evolutionists have been wondering how the switch happened and have put forth two competing hypotheses."

For each hypothesis, scientists have come up with an evolutionary scheme showing how different plant lineages should be related to ex-plain the generation shift. Studies over the last century have produced conflicting results on relationships among early land plant lineages, leaving unanswered the most critical question of how the shift in alter-nation of generations occurred. Qiu's group used three complementary sets of genetic data, involving more than 700 gene sequences, to re-solve relationships among the four major lineages of land plants: liver-worts, mosses, hornworts and vascular plants (which include ferns, pines and flowering plants). Their analysis showed that liverworts-tiny green, ribbon-like plants often found along river banks-represent the first lin-eage that diverged from other land plants when charophyte algae first came onto land, and an obscure group called hornworts, often found in abandoned corn fields, represents the progenitors of the vascular plants.

"Basically we captured a few major events that happened in the first few tens of millions of years of land plant evolution," Qiu said. The re-sults make sense in light of the plants' life cycle patterns. Charophyte al-gae, liverworts and mosses spend most of the cycle in a free-living ga-metophyte phase; the sporophyte is a small, short-lived organism that lives on the gametophyte. Vascular plants, on the other hand, spend most of their time as free-living sporophytes, with small, short-lived, ga-metophytes that often live on the sporophytes. Hornworts may hold a clue to understanding how this shift happened, as they spend most of their life cycle in the gametophyte phase, but their sporophytes--unlike those of liverworts and mosses-show a tendency to become free-living.

Understanding evolutionary relationships among plant groups is cru-cial to understanding their biology, just as understanding relationships among primates advances our knowledge of human behavior, anatomy and physiology, Qiu said.

"As humans, we're always interested in knowing where we came from and why we are different from other primates," Qiu said. "Now that we know, from phylogenetic analyses, that our closest relative is the chim-panzee, we can compare the chimpanzee genome with our own genome and compare the chimpanzee brain with our own brain and compare chimpanzee behavior with human behavior.

But this all assumes we know the chimpanzee is our brother. What if we didn't know? Understanding evolutionary history really is the founda-tion of biology, and with today's emphasis on biofuels and medically im-portant plants, it should be clear how important it is to learn the evolu-tionary history of all the organisms on our planet."

Qiu collaborated on the project with 20 other researchers from the University of Michigan; the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Universitat Bonn in Germany; the Univer-sity of Chicago; Southern Illinois University; the University of Akron in Ohio; Freie Universitat Berlin in Germany; Dresden University of Tech-nology in Germany and Harvard University. The U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Michigan Society of Fellows provided funding.RELM-beta: A new link in the chain between bacteria and

inflammatory bowel diseaseCrohn's disease and ulcerative colitis are the most common forms of

inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Although IBD is thought to be caused by an inappropriate immune response to the bacteria living naturally in the gut, exactly how bacteria trigger this response is not known. Now, in a study appearing online on October 5 in advance of publication in the November print issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers from the University of Philadelphia have shown that mice lacking the protein RELM-beta are protected from colitis induced by ingestion of dextran sodium sulfate (DSS).

Previous studies have shown that bacteria in the gut induce cells of the intestine to produce RELM-beta. So, David Wu and colleagues set out to investigate whether this protein had a role in IBD. They found that mice lacking RELM-beta were protected from DSS-induced colitis and that RELM-beta was highly expressed in the colon of mice that sponta-neously develop an IBD-like disease. As RELM-beta was found to activate macrophages to produce pro-inflammatory factors both in vitro and in vivo, the authors suggest that RELM-beta is one important link between bacteria and the onset of IBD.Fossils pinpoint tropics as Earth's most fruitful biodiversity

spawning groundStudy indicates loss of tropical biodiversity would affect entire

globeA team of scientists has completed a study that explains why the trop-

ics are so much richer in biodiversity than higher latitudes. And they say that their work highlights the importance of preserving those species against extinction.

"If you came from outer space and you started randomly observing life on Earth, at least before people were here, the first thing you'd see was

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this incredible profusion of life in the tropics," said the report's lead au-thor, David Jablonski, the William Kenan Jr. Professor in Geophysical Sci-ences at the University of Chicago. "This is the single most dramatic bio-diversity pattern on this planet."

Jablonski and his co-authors, Kaustuv Roy, of the University of Califor-nia, San Diego, and James Valentine, of the University of California, Berkeley, present their new findings on the origins of this global diver-sity trend in the Oct. 6 issue of the journal Science.

Why the tropics are so much richer in species and evolutionary lin-eages than elsewhere on Earth has loomed as one of the largest ques-tions facing biologists for more than a century. Biologists have proposed virtually every possible combination of origination, extinction and immi-gration to explain the pattern at one time or another. But for the past 30 years, they have tended to view the tropics either as a cradle of diver-sity, where new species originate, or as a museum of diversity, where old species persist. And no resolution has been in sight.

The fossil data of the past 11 million years has broken this logjam. It shows that it's not an either/or proposition. The new study is the first to amass enough data to dissect the roles of extinction, origination and im-migration directly. "I think we've killed the idea that the tropics is either a cradle or a museum of biodiversity. It's both," said Valentine, professor emeritus of integrative biology at UC Berkeley.

As the engine of global biodiversity, the tropics are where new species evolve and persist while spreading to higher latitudes, said Roy, a UCSD biology professor. "The world is connected. It's a global village, even for organisms. Along the California coast here, most of the marine species belong to lineages that originated in the tropics."

The Science study underscores the need to avert a tropical diversity crises, its authors said.

"Human-caused extinctions in the tropics will eventually start to affect the biological diversity in the temperate and high latitudes," Roy said. "This is not going to be apparent in the next 50 years, but it will be a long-term consequence."

Noted Valentine: "We should preserve the tropics, because without them, we've lost a key source for diversity in higher latitudes."

The fossil record indicates that the tropics have enjoyed a richness of biodiversity spanning at least 250 million years. Jablonski compared the population of species on Earth to the population of a modern town. To understand how that population mix came about would entail an exami-nation of birth records, cemetery records and immigration records.

The team acquired its data for the Science study by analyzing bi-valves, a class of marine life that includes clams, scallops and oysters. "They live everywhere," Jablonski said. "They're found from the Arctic

Ocean to the hottest part of the tropics, and they have left a great fossil record."

This record permitted the team to track more than 150 bivalve lin-eages back through time and answer a series of key questions: Where do they start? How long do they last? Where do they persist? And where do they spread?

As the paleontologists traced the lineages back into geologic time, they found a consistent pattern in each slice of time, regardless of the prevailing climatic conditions. Over the entire 11-million-year period, they found that more than twice as many bivalve lineages started in the tropics than at higher latitudes. Meanwhile, only 30 varieties of organ-isms that lived only in the tropics went extinct, compared to 107 that lived outside the tropics, or at all latitudes.

"It's a really striking, surprising pattern," Jablonski said. "And it ap-pears that other animals and plants were playing the same game, even on land," now that previous studies are looked at with new eyes.

The three paleontologists began working on the problem more than a decade ago. The first step involved completing a massive standardiza-tion of all living and many fossil bivalve species to ensure their consis-tent and proper classification.

To accomplish the task, Jablonski churned through stacks of mono-graphs, some dating back to the 19th century, and combed drawer after drawer of bivalve specimens in the Smithsonian Institution and other natural history museums in Chicago, London, Brussels, Belgium; and Lei-den, the Netherlands.

The forces behind the flood of evolutionary activity that flows from the tropics remain a mystery. "But now that we have a handle on the dy-namics that set up this spectacular planet-sized gradient, we can begin to get at the underlying processes in a whole new way," Jablonski said.

Jablonski, Roy and Valentine will attempt to address this and related questions as they push their analysis further back in time.Physical exercise has little impact on obesity in young chil-

drenMovement and Activity Glasgow Intervention in Children (MAGIC) for the prevention of obesity: Cluster randomised controlled trial

BMJ Online FirstPhysical activity is unlikely to have a significant effect in reducing lev-

els of obesity amongst pre-school children, but could lay the foundations for a healthier future, a BMJ study reveals today.

Childhood obesity has become an increasing problem over recent years (1), yet there is a lack of high quality evidence on the issue, and how it can best be tackled. A team of researchers from Glasgow under-took a large study - involving 545 pre-school children from 36 nurseries -

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to ascertain whether or not an increase in levels of exercise could re-duce a child's Body Mass Index (BMI).

The participating children (average age of 4.2 years) took part in a nursery based active play programme consisting of three sessions of 30 minutes each week. In addition their parents were given guidance on in-creasing physical play at home. BMI readings for each child were taken after six months and then again after a year, they were also assessed for movement skills and 'habitual physical activity and sedentary behav-iour' - i.e. whether or not the increased activity led to a reduction in sedentary behaviour and/or an increase in physical activity.

The researchers found that the increased level of exercise had little effect on the BMI or on the activity behaviours of the children. However, it did help to improve the children's motor and movement skills. The re-searchers say that this improvement may foster an increase in activity levels by increasing the confidence and ability of children to carry out physical activity, which could affect long-term levels of body fat.

The authors conclude that to prevent obesity in early childhood may require change not just at nursery school and home, but also in the 'wider environment', and that changes in diet are also necessary. They call for further research into the issue 'to identify successful and sustain-able interventions for obesity prevention and physical activity promotion in young children'.

People should be paid for donating an organA legalised and regulated system for paying people to donate organs

should be created to help answer the large demand for transplants and prevent exploitation of poor people, says an article in this week's BMJ.

The author - an organ transplant surgeon - has written an opinion piece arguing for payments to be made for live organ donation, saying it does not go against current ethical practice in healthcare and would help with the "desperate" need for organs.

Many people who agree to participate in medical research do so for fi-nancial reward, points out the author Amy Friedman, associate professor of surgery at Yale University School of Medicine in the USA.

"If it is reasonable, legal, and ethically justified to motivate someone using monetary reward to participate in human research, then by exten-sion the same person should be allowed a monetary inducement or re-ward for donating an organ," writes Professor Friedman.

The buying and selling of regenerative products such as human hair, blood and semen occurs and human eggs are now sought openly with a price offered for them - payment is legal in the USA.

Professor Friedman says proper supervision of a transplant process would minimise potential medical and surgical harm and might be ac-complished through a centralised, multi-disciplinary panel with responsi-

bility for determining standardised criteria for donors and recipients as well as a uniform fee.

Kidneys are covertly transplanted in third world countries at the mo-ment from poorer people to wealthier recipients, she says, with little evi-dence of the outcomes.

"Bringing these activities out of the closet, by introducing governmen-tal supervision and funding will provide equity for the poor, who will get equal access to such transplants."

FUZEON with investigational HIV drug results in remark-able number of patients achieving undetectable

Results unveiled at ICAAC show that over 90 percent of treatment-experienced patients achieve treatment goal of undetectable viral

loadBasel - Exciting new clinical data demonstrate that 90 to 95 percent of treatment-experienced HIV patients who initiate therapy with FUZEON® (enfuvirtide) and the investigational integrase inhibitor MK-0518 can achieve undetectable levels of HIV (less than 400 copies per mL of blood)1. Such response rates have never been achieved in clinical trials of HIV patients living with drug-resistant virus. This significant antiviral effect achieved by adding FUZEON to other new drugs, known as the "FUZEON effect", has been consistently demonstrated across a number of studies.2 These data were presented at the 46th annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC).

"These remarkable results show us that by partnering FUZEON and a novel integrase inhibitor, treatment-experienced patients can have a similar chance to achieve the ultimate goal of treatment, undetectable viral load, as treatment-naïve patients," said Dr Anton Pozniak, the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London. "Today, we already see that using FUZEON with darunavir or tipranavir, we have the right drugs to help us achieve the treatment goal of undetectable viral load in the ma-jority of treatment-experienced patients. But more importantly we look set to achieve this goal of undetectable in more patients in the future with the availability of FUZEON and exciting novel agents such as MK-0518."About the results presented at ICAAC

Investigators reported results of a 24-week, Phase II, Merck-sponsored study of MK-0518 in treatment-experienced patients with resistance to protease inhibitors, nucleoside analogues and non-nucleoside ana-logues. Patients received one of three doses of MK-0518 (200 mg, 400 mg or 600 mg) twice-daily in combination with an optimised background regimen of anti-HIV drugs. In the subset of patients who received FUZEON for the first time in their drug regimen, 90 to 95 percent of 32 subjects achieved undetectable HIV, compared to 60 to 70 percent of 82

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subjects who received MK-0518 without FUZEON. FUZEON usage was as-sociated with dramatically increased response rates in the study by ap-proximately 50 percent.Compliment new treatment guidelines

These findings are consistent with the recently updated HIV treatment guidelines, which emphasise undetectability as the goal of therapy in treatment-experienced patients, as well as the need to initiate multiple active anti-HIV agents simultaneously in order to achieve this goal.3-5 Recent clinical trials have convinced the authors of the guidelines that undetectable viral load should be the goal for all treatment-experienced patients. These trials, including POWER and RESIST, confirm the efficacy of the new drugs darunavir and tipranavir and emphasise that FUZEON should be the cornerstone to achieve undetectable levels of virus for treatment-experienced patients.

First Quantum Teleportation between Light and MatterResearcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garch-ing and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen have succeeded in transferring a quantum state of light to a material object - an en-

semble of atoms.The concept of quantum teleportation - the disembodied complete

transfer of the state of a quantum system to any other place - was first experimentally realised between two different light beams. Later it be-came also possible to transfer the properties of a stored ion to another object of the same kind. A team of scientist headed by Prof. Ignacio Cirac at MPQ and by Prof. Eugene Polzik at Niels Bohr Institute in Copen-hagen has now shown that the quantum states of a light pulse can also be transferred to a macroscopic object, an ensemble of 10 to the power of 12 atoms (Nature, 4 October 2006). This is the first case of successful teleportation between objects of a different nature - the one represent-ing a "flying" medium (light), the other a "stationary" medium (atoms). The result presented here is of interest not only for fundamental re-search, but also primarily for practical application in realising quantum computers or transmitting coded data (quantum cryptography).Since the beginning of the nineties research into quantum teleportation has been booming with theoretical and experimental physicists. Trans-mission of quantum information involves a fundamental problem: Ac-cording to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle two complementary prop-erties of a quantum particle, e.g. location and momentum cannot be precisely measured simultaneously. The entire information of the sys-tem thus has to be transmitted without being completely known. But the nature of the particles also carries with it the solution to this problem: the possibility of "entangling" two particles in such a way that their properties become perfectly correlated. If a certain property is mea-

sured in one of the "twin" particles, this determines the corresponding property of the other automatically and with immediate effect.

With the help of entangled particles, successful teleportation can be achieved roughly as follows: An auxiliary pair of entangled particles is created, the one being transmitted to "Alice" and the other to "Bob". (The names "Alice" and "Bob" have been adopted to describe the trans-mission of quantum information from A to B.) Alice now entangles the object of teleportation with her auxiliary particle and then measures the joint state (Bell measurement). She sends the result to Bob in the classi-cal manner. He applies it to his auxiliary particle and "conjures up" the teleportation object from it.

Are "such "instructions for use" merely mental games? The great chal-lenge to theoretical physicists is to devise concepts which can also be put into practice. The experiment described here has been conducted by a research team headed by Prof. Eugene Polzik at Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. It follows a proposal made by Prof. Ignacio Cirac, Managing Director at MPQ, and his collaborator Dr. Klemens Hammerer (also at MPQ at that time, now at University of Innsbruck, Austria).

First the twin pair is produced by sending a strong light pulse to a glass tube filled with caesium gas (about 1012 atoms). The magnetic moments of the gas atoms are aligned in a homogenous magnetic field. The light also has a preferential direction: It is polarised, i.e. the electric field oscillates in just one direction. Under theses conditions the light and the atoms are made to interact with one another so that the light pulse emerging from the gas that is sent to Alice is "entangled" with the ensemble of 1012 caesium atoms located at Bob’s site.

Alice mixes the arriving pulse by means of a beam splitter with the ob-ject that she wants to teleport: a weak light pulse containing very few photons. The light pulses issuing at the two outputs of the beam splitter are measured with photo-detectors and the results are sent to Bob.

The measured results tell Bob what has to be done to complete tele-portation and transfer the selected quantum states of the light pulse, amplitude and phase, onto the atomic ensemble. For this purpose he ap-plies a low-frequency magnetic field that makes the collective spin (an-gular momentum) of the system oscillate. This process can be compared with the precession of a spinning top about its major axis: the deflection of the spinning top corresponds to the amplitude of the light, while the zero passage corresponds to the phase.

To prove that quantum teleportation has been successfully performed, a second intense pulse of polarised light is sent to the atomic ensemble after 0.1 milliseconds and, so to speak, "reads out" its state. From these measured values theoretical physicists can calculate the so-called fi-delity, a quality-factor specifying how well the state of the teleported ob-ject agrees with the original. (A fidelity of 1 is equivalent to a perfect

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agreement, while the value zero indicates that there has been no trans-fer at all.) In the present experiment the fidelity is 0.6, this being well above the value of 0.5 that would at best be achieved by classical means, e.g. by communicating measured values by telephone, without the help of entangled particle-pairs.

Unlike the customary conception of "beaming", it is not a matter here of a particle disappearing from one place and re-appearing in another. "Quantum teleportation constitutes methods of communication for appli-cation in quantum cryptography, the decoding of data, and not new kinds of transportation", as Dr. Klemens Hammerer emphasizes. "The importance of the experiment is that it is now possible for the first time to achieve teleportation between stationary atoms, which can store quantum states, and light, which is needed to transmit information over great distances. This marks an important step towards accomplishing quantum cryptography, i.e. absolutely safe communication over long distances, such as between Munich and Copenhagen." [OMS]Original work: Jacob F. Sherson, Hanna Krauter, Rasmus K. Olsson, Brian Juls-gaard, Klemens Hammerer, Ignacio Cirac and Eugene S. PolzikQuantum teleportation between light and matterNature 443, 557-560(5 October 2006).Emotionally ambivalent workers are more creative, innova-

tivePeople who experience emotional ambivalence - simultaneously feel-

ing positive and negative emotions - are more creative than those who feel just happy or sad, or lack emotion at all, according to a new study.

That's because people who feel mixed emotions interpret the experi-ence as a signal that they are in an unusual environment and thus re-spond to it by drawing upon their creative thinking abilities, said Christina Ting Fong, an assistant professor at the University of Washing-ton Business School. This increased sensitivity for recognizing unusual associations, which happy or sad workers probably couldn't detect, is what leads to creativity in the workplace, she added.

"Due to the complexity of many organizations, workplace experiences often elicit mixed emotions from employees, and it's often assumed that mixed emotions are bad for workers and companies," said Fong, whose study appears in the October issue of the Academy of Management Jour-nal. "Rather than assuming ambivalence will lead to negative results for the organization, managers should recognize that emotional ambiva-lence can have positive consequences that can be leveraged for organi-zational success."

For her research, Fong conducted two studies. In the first, she asked 102 college students to write about certain emotional experiences in their lives with the goal of invoking in them feelings of happiness, sad-ness, neutrality or ambivalence. She then had them complete a com-

monly used measure of creativity called the Remote Associates Test that explored their ability to recognize common themes among seem-ingly unrelated words. The results demonstrated that while there were no differences among happy, sad and neutral individuals, people who were feeling emotionally ambivalent performed significantly better on this creativity task.

For the second study, she showed the 138 students either a film clip of the comedy "Father of the Bride" or a dull screen saver. In the film clip, a young woman, on the eve of her wedding day, discussed with her fa-ther the joy associated with her upcoming wedding and the sadness in-volved with growing up and entering adulthood. The screensaver and the clip were chosen to make people feel either neutral or ambivalent, respectively. Then the students took the Remote Associates Test.

She found that the emotionally ambivalent people who saw the clip showed increased creativity in comparison to those who watched the screensaver, but only when they believed their emotional ambivalence was unusual. Surprisingly, she said, no relationship was found between positive emotions and creativity or negative emotions and creativity.

According to Fong, one implication of this research is that when peo-ple feel mixed emotions, they see this as a signal that they are in a situ-ation that might contain lots of unusual associations, and thus will need to respond by using more creative thinking.

"Managers who want to increase the creative output of their employ-ees might benefit from following in the footsteps of companies like de-sign firm IDEO or Walt Disney, which pride themselves on maintaining odd working environments. On some level, the bicycles that hang from the ceiling at IDEO and the colorful, casual environment at Disney prob-ably help their employees sharpen their abilities to come up with novel and innovative ideas."

Fong said that in previous studies she found women who are in super-visory positions are more likely to be emotionally ambivalent than women in lower status positions. Combining her previous research with this study, Fong said, suggests that women in high-status positions will be more creative managers.USC researchers discover breast cancer stem cells in bone

marrowMay mean greater risk for breast cancer patients than previously

thoughtLos Angeles - Almost all tumor cells found in the bone marrow of early stage breast cancer patients appear to be breast cancer stem cells, sug-gesting the risk of disease spread for all breast cancer patients may be greater than previously thought, according to a ground-breaking study

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by Richard J. Cote, professor of pathology and urology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC).

"Most Early Disseminated Cancer Cells Detected in Bone Marrow of Breast Cancer Patients Have a Putative Breast Cancer Stem Cell Pheno-type" which appears in this week's issue of Clinical Cancer Research, provides the first evidence of the putative stem/progenitor cells within tumor cells collected from the bone marrow.

Stem cells are a type of cell in breast tumors that are believed to seed the growth of new cancers. These cells are only a small part of the vast number of cells within tumors, but they can act like adult stem cells - a basic cell that can grow into different types of specialized cells.

Much current research has focused on the theory that it is these stem cells landing in a distant site that creates metastases, and not simply single cells that detach from the primary tumor and travel to another part of the body.

Although disseminated tumor cells, either in the bone marrow or lymph nodes, are already regarded as a prerequisite for relapse and metastasis, no studies have as yet examined these cells for the exis-tence of the stem cell phenotype.

"The primary implication is that it is the stem cell population in can-cers that are presumed to be the only cells capable of forming metas-tases," said Cote. "Metastasis is the most important event for determin-ing outcome in cancer patients."

In the study, Cote and colleagues looked at 50 bone marrow speci-mens from women whose breast cancer was caught in its earliest stages, but in whom tumor cells were detected in the bone marrow. Us-ing a newly developed immunohistochemical protocol, Cote and col-leagues found the tumor cells from all patients contained a population of putative stem cells.

The presence of CD44 protein with the absence of CD24 protein de-fines the stem cell population of tumor cells. Only a small proportion of tumor cells at the primary tumor site in the breast have been shown to have the stem cell characteristics. It has been shown that only the stem cells have the ability to form metastases in experimental models.

What was surprising to Cote and his colleagues, who anticipated some stem cells within the disseminated tumor cells, was that the majority of the remote tumor cells have the stem cell characteristics, and that they appeared in the bone marrow of breast cancer patients whose disease was caught in the earliest stages.

"We know that the presence of disseminated tumor cells in the bone marrow is a bad feature, as it is an indicator of future metastases, but we didn't know if these were the cells that actually cause disease pro-gression," said Cote. "This data suggest that the vast majority of pa-tients with disseminated tumor cells may have a life-time risk for re-

lapse. We definitely need to pursue molecular studies of these putative stem cells."The study was funded by a grant from the National Cancer Institute.Marija Balic, Henry Lin, Lillian Young, Debra Hawes, Armando Giuliano, George McNamara, Ram H. Data, Richard J. Cote, "Most Early Disseminated Cancer Cells Detected in Bone Marrow of Breast Cancer Patients Have a Pu-tative Breast Cancer Stem Cell Phenotype," Clinical Cancer Research, Octo-ber 1, 2006, Volume 12, Num 19, 5615-5621.Blood cells linked to heart attacks, other inflammatory dis-

easesCox-2 production initiated by cellular cross talk

SALT LAKE CITY - It's a case of miscommunication with catastrophic conse-quences.

Two human blood cells that help fight blood loss, infection, and inflam-mation are responsible as well for starting a series of molecular events that results in overproduction of Cox-2, an enzyme involved in heart at-tack, stroke, atherosclerosis, and other inflammatory diseases.

The finding by researchers at the University of Utah and University of South Carolina means scientists may be able to develop drugs to pre-vent or lessen the severity of inflammatory diseases, such as atheroscle-rosis and heart attack. Discovery of the signaling mechanism will be in-valuable in sorting out the roles Cox-2 plays in those diseases, according to Guy A. Zimmerman, M.D., University of Utah School of Medicine pro-fessor of internal medicine, senior author of the study detailing the re-search.

"This discovery has immediate clinical relevance," said Zimmerman, director of the medical school's Program in Human Molecular Biology and Genetics. "This opens the potential of developing medications for both the prevention of long-term atherosclerosis (clogged arteries) and the acute events of heart attack."

The study, reported in the Journal of Clinical Investigation online, also was led by Dan A. Dixon, a former member of Zimmerman's lab now at South Carolina.

The researchers identified a biochemical signaling pathway between human blood platelets, cells essential for blood clotting, and monocytes, white blood cells the body makes to fight inflammation and infection. But, according to Zimmerman, the biological systems involved in blood clotting and inflammation also are related to a host of human diseases.

The Utah and South Carolina researchers discovered that the blood platelet signals the monocyte two times, triggering production of Cox-2, an enzyme that helps regulate inflammation. But when blood platelets and monocytes get their signals crossed, it can lead to overproduction of the enzyme and result in cardiovascular diseases that strike and kill millions of people worldwide.

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Zimmerman compares the signaling between blood platelets and monocytes to a pair of molecular control switches that turn Cox-2 pro-duction on and off. "It's a mechanism for precise control of Cox-2 pro-duction," he said. "But if one of the switches is turned on too high or low, it can lead to inappropriate production of Cox-2 in disease."

The first signal from the platelet tells the monocyte to turn on the gene that provides the instructions necessary to make Cox-2. These in-structions are carried in small molecule called messenger RNA. When the blood platelet signals the monocyte, the cell decodes the instruc-tions from the Cox-2 gene in a process called transcription. This results in production of messenger RNA that specifically codes for Cox-2. After the messenger RNA is transcribed, the blood platelet then sends a sec-ond signal to the monocyte that regulates stability of the Cox-2 messen-ger RNA and further decoding of the genetic information in a process called translation.

This results in production of the Cox-2 protein and controls how much, and at what time point, it is produced.

Drugs called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents, which inhibit pro-duction of Cox-2 and reduce inflammation, are some of the most widely used medications in the world for arthritis and other inflammatory dis-eases. But some of these drugs, also called Cox-2 inhibitors, such as Vioxx, increase the chance of heart attack.

Identifying the signaling mechanism between blood platelets and monocytes makes it possible to develop new drugs to modify Cox-2 pro-duction. "Knowing these steps gives you an initial blueprint about how to modify Cox-2," Zimmerman said. Understanding this mechanism may enable researchers to develop drugs that help people during a heart at-tack, or prevent heart attack, stroke or other inflammatory diseases.

Study shows unique garlic product works like the real thing

Clinical trial holds promise as a 'Better than Nature' means of help-ing to maintain a healthy cardiovascular system without raw garlic

associated side effects(RENO, NV) - A study presented at the Annual Meeting of the American College of Nutrition today shows that a new proprietary garlic product developed by Nutra Products, Inc., Garli-Eze®, delivers allicin, the key bioactive ingredient of garlic, to the body in amounts equal to that of fresh high allicin garlic macerate and yielded no unsocial responses due to chewing fresh garlic.

Allicin is a very short-lived bioactive in garlic and thus requires elegant and sophisticated methods to measure its appearance. The study pre-sented used a method developed by Dr. Larry Lawson, a world renowned garlic researcher, and which was published as a seminal re-

search article in 2005 in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. This method employs a highly sensitive method of analyzing the breath after ingestion of garlic and unequivocally can determine if garlic was both delivered to the body for absorption, and its subsequent absorp-tion.

Dr. Rick Falkenberg, Chief Technical Officer of Nutra Products Inc., the maker of Garli-Eze®, "Allicin is the only known key biologically active compound of fresh crushed garlic. We believe a high level of allicin deliv-ered directly to the gastrointestinal tract is a key to helping maintain a healthy cardiovascular system. This preliminary human study indicates that Garli-Eze® can deliver large amounts of allicin directly to the upper gastrointestinal tract where it can be easily absorbed. Using innovative state-of-the-art manufacturing we have developed a process that deliv-ers as much natural allicin as fresh garlic without offensive odors or dis-comfort. This new, all natural proprietary process is designed to elimi-nate the degradation of alliinase which occurs when high potency garlic mixes with stomach acid. In fact, Garli-Eze activates in stomach acid yet doesn't use an 'enteric coating', which typically employs a mix of syn-thetic chemicals designed to protect the capsule contents from stomach acid. Garli-Eze is the first commercial garlic product to perform like fresh, raw garlic."

"We have taken the guesswork out of the garlic buying process for the industry. We believe our innovation will deliver a competitive edge to suppliers who in turn will be able to ensure consumers receive the bene-fits of fresh raw garlic without the sometimes unfriendly side effects," Falkenberg said.

Since 1993 a number of peer-reviewed and published studies have demonstrated an association between allicin standardized garlic supplement consumption and antimicrobial, antibacterial, blood thinning, lipid reduction and other cardio vascular benefits. Consumption of garlic supplements with standardized allicin levels as part of a healthy diet and active lifestyle may help maintain a healthy cardiovascular system.

But does it go well with Mongolian Barbecue and pasta?

LSD treatment for alcoholism gets new lookSome participants still have not had a drink 40 years after the tri-

alsFor the past five years, Dr. Erika Dyck has been unearthing some in-

triguing facts related to a group of pioneering psychiatrists who worked in Saskatchewan, Canada in the '50s and '60s.

Among other things, the University of Alberta history of medicine pro-fessor has found records of the psychiatrists' research that indicate a

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single dose of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, provided in a clinical, nurtur-ing environment, can be an effective treatment for alcoholism.

Her findings are published this month in the journal Social History of Medicine.

After perceiving similarities in the experiences of people on LSD and people going through delirium tremens, the psychiatrists undertook a series of experiments. They noted that delirium tremens, also know as DTs, often marked a "rock bottom" or turning point in the behavior of al-coholics, and they felt LSD may be able to trigger such a turnaround without engendering the painful physical effects associated with DTs.

As it turns out, they were largely correct."The LSD somehow gave these people experiences that psychologi-

cally took them outside of themselves and allowed them to see their own unhealthy behavior more objectively, and then determine to change it," said Dyck, who read the researchers' published and private papers and recently interviewed some of the patients involved in the original studies-many of whom had not had a sip of alcohol since their single LSD experience 40 years earlier.

According to one study conducted in 1962, 65 per cent of the alco-holics in the experiment stopped drinking for at least a year-and-a-half (the duration of the study) after taking one dose of LSD. The controlled trial also concluded that less than 25 per cent of alcoholics quit drinking for the same period after receiving group therapy, and less than 12 per cent quit in response to traditional psychotherapy techniques commonly used at that time.

Published in the Quarterly Journal for Studies on Alcohol, the 1962 study was received with much skepticism. One research group in Toronto tried to replicate the results of the study, but wanted to observe the effect of LSD on the patients in isolation, so they blindfolded or tied up the patients before giving them the drug. Under such circumstances, the Toronto researchers determined LSD was not effective in treating al-coholism.

The Saskatchewan group argued that the drug needed to be provided in a nurturing environment to be effective. However, the Toronto re-searchers held more credibility than the Saskatchewan researchers-who were led by a controversial, British psychiatrist, Dr. Humphry Osmond-and the Saskatchewan group's research was essentially buried.

But Dyck believes there is value in the Saskatchewan group's experi-ments.

"The LSD experience appeared to allow the patients to go through a spiritual journey that ultimately empowered them to heal themselves, and that's really quite an amazing therapy regimen," Dyck said. "Even interviewing the patients 40 years after their experience, I was surprised at how loyal they were to the doctors who treated them, and how pow-

erful they said the experience was for them-some even felt the experi-ence saved their lives."

In spite of the promise LSD showed as psychotherapy tool, its subse-quent popularity as a street drug, and the perception of it as a threat to public safety, triggered a worldwide ban in the late 1960s-including its use in medical experiments. However, the ban on its use in medical ex-periments appears to be lifting, Dyck noted. A few groups of researchers in the U.S., including a team at Harvard, have recently been granted permission to conduct experiments with LSD.

"We accept all sorts of drugs, but I think LSD's 'street' popularity ulti-mately led to its demise," Dyck said. "And that's too bad, because I think the researchers in Saskatchewan, among others, showed the drug is unique and has some intriguing properties that need to be explored fur-ther."MSU entomologists mass-rear wheat stem sawfly enemies

By Carol FlahertyWith wheat stem sawfly natural enemies in demand, Montana State

University entomologists are investigating ways of increasing their avail-ability.

This fall, the entomologists are concluding a two-year study that in-volved mass-rearing parasitic wasps that attack wheat stem sawfly lar-vae that tunnel the interior of developing wheat plants. The team in-cludes entomologists David Weaver, master's graduate Godshen Pallip-parambil-Robert and undergraduate Melissa Frazier of Kalispell.

Pallipparambil-Robert's work, as part of his completed master's de-gree, used large cages placed over wheat at the Post Agronomy Farm west of Bozeman. He deliberately infested the enclosed wheat with wheat stem sawflies, and then introduced the parasitic wasps. His re-search explored whether supplemental food provided as nectar from flowering plants or as honey water increases the number of parasitic wasps produced in each cage. Another part of his thesis project exam-ined whether using special ultraviolet and visible light-transmitting win-dows increases the number of parasites.

"After two years, the research shows that the added light consistently causes small increases in the number of parasitic wasps, while the food supply is probably not important in these mass-rearing cages, because the parasitoids were added in large numbers, and attacked the available sawflies before the need to feed may have become critical " Weaver said. At lower parasitoid densities, supplemental food might be much more important, and research from other systems suggests that this is definitely true in natural settings. However, the goal of the research is to find ways to increase the supply of parasitoids from a controlled system to Montana wheat growers.

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"Right now, the number of people wanting parasitic wasps far out-number what we can deliver," he said. The small, orange parasitic wasps are part of the naturally occurring suppression of wheat stem sawfly that varies greatly from field to field throughout Montana. The wasps pro-duce two generations of offspring a year, compared to only one for the wheat stem sawfly.

A number of Montana counties now have established populations of these natural enemies in their wheat fields, thanks to pilot scale re-search co-sponsored by the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee; USDA, CSREES Special Research Grants; the Montana Board of Research and Commercialization Technology; and the BNSF Railway Foundation. However, the process of locating parasitic wasp populations for redistri-bution is inefficient, and having the ability to reliably mass produce these organisms would be an asset.

Even a slight increase in efficiency could translate into the ability to produce thousands of additional parasitic wasps, which could then be distributed to wheat stem sawfly infested sites.

Pallipparambil-Robert has just begun work on a doctorate in entomol-ogy at the University of Arkansas. The late summer and autumn efforts are being completed by Frazier. It became her job to tend the cages of parasitic wasps every few days, after Palliparambil-Robert departed.

Weaver said more research is needed to determine precisely how many sawflies and parasitic wasps need to be added to each cage and to determine the best time to add the wasps. The current research shows that enough parasitoids can be produced to establish a founding population in an infested wheat field using the straw residue from a sin-gle mass-rearing cage.

Mass-rearing of the parasitic wasps is only one of three or four ap-proaches for sawfly management that are being pursued at MSU. The drought conditions of recent years have made the work more pressing, since drought favors damage by wheat stem sawflies, which are now more widely distributed in Montana than years ago.

"There are larger areas of sawfly damage all along the Golden Trian-gle, the northern tier of Montana counties as well as the area around Lewistown, Circle and Jordan," Weaver said. Currently, MSU is specifi-cally partnering with MSU Extension county agents to redistribute and monitor populations of parasitic wasps, as part of an expanded effort to establish the more effective parasitoid populations in those areas.

"We hope to see the populations there grow, and what Pallipparambil-Robert's work will do is to help us have the ability to have parasitoids more readily available for future efforts," Weaver said. "Right now, we have to locate a large population of these beneficial insects before we can redistribute them. If we can reliably have them available at a known location, we could do our job much more efficiently."

A "how to" MontGuide for the conservation of these parasitic wasps, which supports the redistribution efforts, is currently being written and should become available over the winter.

HiRISE Camera on NASA orbiter gets detailed view of op-portunity at Victoria Crater

With stunningly powerful vision, the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken a remarkable picture that shows the exploration rover Opportunity poised on the rim of Victoria crater on Mars.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera de-tailed the entire 800-meter (roughly half-mile) Victoria crater and the rover - down to its rover tracks and shadows - in a single high-resolution image taken Wednesday (Oct. 3).

Alfred S. McEwen of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Lab-oratory released portions of the image that show views of the rover and crater at a NASA press conference in Washington, D.C., today. McEwen is principal investigator for HiRISE, which is operated from UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson.

"We're poised to have a fantastic mission, and we're not even at prime science mission yet," McEwen said at NASA press briefing this morning. "This was our very first attempt to image 'off-nadir' (at an angle as op-posed to straight down), and it worked fabulously well," McEwen added. "It's been an exciting week."

Opportunity drove nine kilometers (more than five miles) to Victoria crater, an impact crater at Meridi-ani Planum, near Mars' equator. The HiRISE cam-era took its pic-ture five days later, at 3:30 p.m. local Mars time, as the sun was about 30 degrees above the hori-zon, illuminating the scene from the west. The NASA orbiter was flying 297 kilome-ters (185.6 miles) above the

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planet's surface. The HiRise camera is able to resolve objects that are 89 centimeters (35 inches) across at that altitude.This high-resolution part of a new HiRISE image shows the rover, Opportunity, at Victoria crater on Mars. It also shows the rover wheel tracks in the soil behind it, and the rover's shadow, including the shadow of the camera mast. Since this image was taken, Op-portunity has moved to the very tip of Cape Verde to perform more imaging of the interior of the crater. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Opportunity has since driven north to the tip of the Cape Verde promontory, where the rover will take images of the crater interior.

HiRISE's stunning overview of Victoria crater shows a distinctive scal-loped shape to its rim. This is formed by eroding crater wall material moving downhill. Layered sedimentary rocks are exposed along the in-ner wall of the crater, and boulders that have fallen from the crater wall are visible on the crater floor. A striking field of sand dunes covers much of the crater floor.

"The ground-truth we get from the rover images and measurements enables us to better interpret features we see elsewhere on Mars, in-cluding very rugged and dramatic terrains that we can't currently study on the ground," McEwen said.

"Stay tuned," McEwen said at the NASA briefing. "If you think this HiRISE image is spectacular, just wait."The HiRISE images for Victoria crater are available online at http://hi-roc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/TRA/TRA_000873_1780/.Images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment and additional in-formation about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mro and http://HiRISE.lpl.arizona.edu.

Sense of justice discovered in the brainHelen Phillips NewScientist.com news service

A brain region that curbs our natural self interest has been identified. The studies could explain how we control fairness in our society, re-searchers say.

Humans are the only animals to act spitefully or to mete out "justice", dishing out punishment to people seen to be behaving unfairly - even if it is not in the punisher's own best interests. This tendency has been hard to explain in evolutionary terms, because it has no obvious repro-ductive advantage and punishing unfairness can actually lead to the punisher being harmed.

Now, using a tool called the “ultimatum game”, researchers have identified the part of the brain responsible for punishing unfairness. Sub-jects were put into anonymous pairs, and one person in each pair was given $20 and asked to share it with the other. They could choose to of-

fer any amount - if the second partner accepted it, they both got to keep their share.

In purely economic terms, the second partner should never reject an offer, even a really low one, such as $1, as they are still $1 better off than if they rejected it. Most people offered half of the money. But in cases where only a very small share was offered, the vast majority of "receivers" spitefully rejected the offer, ensuring that neither partner got paid.Fehr's fair

Previous brain imaging studies have revealed that part of the frontal lobes known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC, becomes active when people face an unfair offer and have to decide what to do. Researchers had suggested this was because the region somehow sup-presses our judgement of fairness.

But now, Ernst Fehr, an economist at the University of Zurich, and col-leagues have come to the opposite conclusion - that the region sup-presses our natural tendency to act in our own self interest.

They used a burst of magnetic pulses called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) - produced by coils held over the scalp - to temporarily shut off activity in the DLPFC. Now, when faced with the opportunity to spitefully reject a cheeky low cash offer, subjects were actually more likely to take the money.

The researchers found that the DLPFC region's activity on the right side of the brain, but not the left, is vital for people to be able to dish out such punishment.

"The DLPFC is really causal in this decision. Its activity is crucial for overriding self interest," says Fehr. When the region is not working, peo-ple still know the offer is unfair, he says, but they do not act to punish the unfairness.Moral centre?

"Self interest is one important motive in every human," says Fehr, "but there are also fairness concerns in most people."

"In other words, this is the part of the brain dealing with morality," says Herb Gintis, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, US. "[It] is involved in comparing the costs and benefits of the material in terms of its fairness. It represses the basic instincts."

Psychologist Laurie Santos, at Yale University in Connecticut, US, com-ments: "This form of spite is a bit of an evolutionary puzzle. There are few examples in the animal kingdom." The new finding is really exciting, Santos says, as the DLPFC brain area is expanded only in humans, and it could explain why this type of behaviour exists only in humans.

Fehr says the research has interesting implications for how we treat young offenders. "This region of the brain matures last, so if it is truly overriding our own self interest then adolescents are less endowed to

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comply with social norms than adults," he suggests. The criminal justice system takes into account differences for under-16s or under-18s, but this area fully matures around the age of 20 or 22, he says. Journal refer-ence: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1129156)

Ig Nobel prizes hail 'digital rectal massage'Jeff Hecht NewScientist.com news service

"I have always hoped to win a real Nobel prize for medicine," Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine told New Sci-entist. Nevertheless, he settled for the Ig Nobel prize in medicine in-stead, handed out along with nine other Ig Nobel prizes in a Thursday evening ceremony at Harvard University in Massachusetts, US.

It might be some consolation to note that a real Nobel prize winner was pushing a broom on stage to sweep away the paper airplanes tradi-tionally thrown by the audience. The Annals of Improbable Research, which produces the Ig Nobel ceremony, points out that the 10 years that Harvard physicist Roy Glauber has spent sweeping the stage did not af-fect his selection as a physics laureate in 2005.

Fesmire, a specialist in emergency medicine and cardiology, probably did not have a real Nobel in mind when he published "Termination of in-tractable hiccups with digital rectal massage" in Annals of Emergency Medicine (vol 17, p 872). He was, it transpires, attempting to help a man who walked into the emergency room after hiccuping for 72 hours at up to 30 times a minute.Heart stopper

Runaway electrical impulses in the vagus nerve cause intractable hic-cups, so Fesmire attempted to block them by stimulating the nerve. Gagging, tongue pulling, sinus massage and pressing the eyeball to stimulate the vagus all failed to stop the hiccups. Then he remembered reading about a case in which digital rectal massage - inserting a finger into a patient’s anus - had slowed a racing heartbeat, an effect similar to runaway hiccups.

"It worked, and the rest is history," he says. He has not needed to go that far again for other patients, but Majed Odeh of Bnai Zion Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, did a few years later and wrote a paper with the same title that earned him a share of the Ig Nobel.

However, Fesmire will not be trying it again. In researching his Ig No-bel acceptance speech, he told New Scientist that he found a treatment sure to be more popular with hiccup patients. "An orgasm results in in-credible stimulation of the vagus nerve. From now on, I will be recom-mending sex - culminating with orgasm - as the cure-all for intractable hiccups."Eye-popping bird brain

Not any bird brain can scoop an Ig Nobel prize, but studying bird brains earned the ornithology prize for the late Philip May at the Univer-

sity of California at Los Angeles and Ivan Schwab of the University of California at Davis, both in the US. May wondered why the pileated woodpecker did not get concussed while pounding its beak into trees up to 12,000 times a day.

He found the bird had evolved a thick skull of spongy bone which held its contents tightly in place, like foam packing material. The birds also evolved their own versions of seat belts. A millisecond before the bird's beak hits the wood, the nictitating membrane over its eyes tightens to keep them from popping out on impact.

Schwab suggests woodpeckers may have evolved small brains to make them more impact resistant, but admits that birds with little brain-power may have been the ones most likely to try head-butting trees in the first place.Screeeeeeeeeech

The acoustics prize honoured research into another of those timeless questions, why do fingernails screeching on a blackboard send chills down the spine of virtually everyone who hears the sound?

Volunteers rated the sound of a three-pronged garden rake on slate top of the annoyance scale, followed by metal on metal and Styrofoam rubbing against itself, says Randolph Blake, now at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, US.

His experiments showed the frequencies in the middle of the audio range were the ones that drove people up the wall. Blake says chim-panzee warning cries "are remarkably similar to fingernails on a chalk-board". It is possible our reactions are instinctive, hearkening back to warning signals screeched by our pre-human ancestors when they spot-ted a sabre-tooth on the prowl, he suggests.

Blake shares the prize with former colleagues Lynn Halpern and James Hillenbrand.

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