David Bradley – Page 334

H5N1 Vaccine Available

cockerel Elena Govorkova and colleagues at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, have developed a vaccine against the potential lethal H5N1 strain of avian influenza. The vaccine protects, it seems, without triggering antibody production as is normally the case.

While lab tests show the vaccine to be effective, there is a problem with this preliminary study. It was not carried out on humans, so we shall not know whether it would be of any use should a pandemic arise. But, at least the laboratory ferrets, will be protected.

A peak you reach

Rather than relying on MRI and follow-up biopsy to provide information about a suspect abnormality in the breast, researchers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York have demonstrated in preliminary trials that NMR spectroscopy could be used to significantly reduce the number of biopsies required to detect the early stages of breast cancer. NMR can lock on to the choline peak associated with malignancy during the MRI scan.

Lia Bartella MD and her colleagues found that NMR could reduce the need for biopsy by 58%. They demonstrated that 23 of 40 suspicious lesions could have been spared biopsy, and none of the resultant cancers would have been missed, in a study group. “All cancers in this study were identified with MR spectroscopy,” explains Bartella, “There were no false-negative results. These results should encourage more women to take this potentially life-saving test.”

More…

Owl pellet dissection

A friend of mine is into nature conservation in a big way and one of the tools of the trade, which to the outsider may seem rather odd, is owl pellet dissection. I had a go at dissecting an owl pellet myself, here you can see the results

Owl pellets are the regurgitated remains (bones, feathers and other indigestibles) that accumulate in this bird of prey’s gizzard after it dines on small rodents and other critters. The dessicated pellets are to be found lying where they are discarded by the owl and can provide important information about what critters are being preyed on in owl territory.

The only way to get at that information, however, is to tease apart the pellet with tweezers and other implements to extract the bones from the tangle of hair and other detritus. It needs a steady hand, a keen eye, and a lot of patience. What you will find within is quite amazing though, tiny jaw bones and skulls, femurs, tibias pelvic bones and more.

Identifying which bone belongs to which creature takes even more patience, but it is possible and provides useful insights into the prevalence or otherwise of particular small mammals in a given area where owls prey.

For more on owl pellet dissection, check out this site http://www.kidwings.com/owlpellets/.

The reason I bring it up (pardon the pun) today, is that owl pellet dissection was the hot new search phrase on the sciencebase site this last month, with dozens of visitors all flapping for information on the subject. It’s not a topic that’s been searched for here before, so I thought I’d provide some background in case we have another flutter of en-raptor-ed activity.

Alchemical musings

In my guise as ChemWeb’s Alchemist this week I report on how there may be no need for a magic bullet in cancer chemotherapy and a basic (as opposed to acidic) approach could be all that is needed. Also spotted a smashing discovery that could explains glassy substances and precludes an ideal standard for physicists.

The Alchemists all sees the swirling clouds clearing as various holes in the ozone layer finally seem to be on the mend, and we learn of a co-polymer that not only fends off barnacles but can smell nice too.

Finally, spontaneous chiral resolution with achiral ligands.

Herring Gulls fighting

These two birds I photographed in my in-law’s garden were anything but lovebirds, although they might look like they were dancing seconds before and seconds after they were tearing each other’s feathers off and spitting blood. This didn’t seem to be a bar-room brawl between chums fighting over fishy scraps, these two were at it for a good half an hour. It has to have been a territorial or mating rights argument of some sort.

Nature really is red in beak and claw.

Gardenia delight for diabetes

An extract of the gardenia fruit, which is used in traditional Chinese medicine, could provide a new lead in the search for drugs to treat the symptoms of type 2 diabetes. The extract contains a chemical that apparently reverses some of the pancreatic dysfunction that underlies the disease, according to researchers writing in the June 7 issue of Cell Metabolism.

The chemical in question is genipin. This compound was previously found to cross-link proteins, but it has also now been shown to inhibit the enzyme uncoupling protein 2 (UCP2) through another mechanism. In both animals and humans, high concentrations of UCP2 appear to inhibit insulin secretion from the pancreas and increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.

“We think the increase in UCP2 activity is an important component of the pathogenesis of diabetes,” said Bradford Lowell of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. “Our goal therefore was to discover a UCP2 inhibitor capable of working in intact cells, as such an inhibitor could theoretically represent a lead compound for agents aimed at improving beta cell function in type 2 diabetes.”

Study coauthor Chen-Yu Zhang’s familiarity with traditional Chinese medicine led the team to consider the extract of Gardenia jasminoides Ellis fruits. Pancreas cells taken from normal mice secreted insulin when treated with the extract, they found, whereas the cells of mice lacking UCP2 did not. The results suggested that the extract worked through its effects on the UCP2 enzyme.

“When I first saw the results, I was in disbelief,” Lowell said. “I didn’t think we could ever be that lucky.” However, blinded repetition of the initial experiments confirmed the results every time, he said.

Through a series of chemical analyses, the researchers then zeroed in on genipin as the active compound. Genipin, like the extract, stimulated insulin secretion in control but not UCP2-deficient pancreas cells.

They further found that acute addition of genipin to isolated pancreatic tissue reversed high glucose- and obesity-induced dysfunction of insulin-producing beta cells. A derivative of genipin that lacked the chemical’s cross-linking activity continued to inhibit UCP2, they reported.

That’s a good sign for the therapeutic potential of genipin-related compounds, according to Lowell, as such indiscriminate cross-linking would likely have adverse effects. However, further work will need to examine whether inhibition of UCP2 itself might also have some negative consequences.

Coal powered cars

It would be ironic, to say the least, if fossil fuels, such as coal turned out to be the saving grace in the future hydrogen economy, in which this purportedly clean fuel powers our cars and homes through the essentially Victorian technology of fuel cells.

Nevertheless researchers at Pennsylvania State Universityhave demonstrated that coal might be the most convenient storage medium for this explosively elemental gas. More importantly, the production and storage of hydrogen take place in a two-in-one process, according these latest results due to appear in Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS, to its fiends)

Angela Lueking and colleagues at Penn State have used low-cost anthracite, milled, or ground, into fine particles in the presence of cyclohexene, to produce a molecular structure that can trap and hold hydrogen.

The process offers a novel option for the distributed production of hydrogen, for supplying a power source to fuel-cell powered cars, as it would involve production in a small-scale facility located near end-users, rather than in distant central complexes.

SOURCE: JACS, DOI: 10.1021/ja0604818. Look this paper up using our DOI tool or add the tool to your website to allow visitors to track papers through the paper’s unique ID code.

Coffee and alcohol

The morning after the night before often gets a kickstart with a steaming mug of Java, but drinking coffee could be helping those who partake of alcoholic beverages more than was previously thought, at least according to research published today in the Archives of Internal Medicine. According to researchers in California, drinking coffee may have a preventative effect on developing the alcoholic liver disease cirrhosis.

Cirrhosis progressively destroys healthy liver tissue and replaces it with scar tissue. Viruses such as hepatitis C can cause cirrhosis, but long-term, heavy alcohol use is the most common cause of the disease in developed countries. Most drinkers, however, never develop cirrhosis, thankfully, because other factors such as genetics, diet and nutrition, smoking and the interaction of alcohol with other toxins that damage the liver are involved.

Arthur Klatsky and colleagues at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, in Oakland, have analyzed data from 125,580 individuals (55,247 men and 70,333 women) who did not report liver disease when they had baseline examinations, between 1978 and 1985. Participants filled out a questionnaire to provide information about how much alcohol, coffee and tea they drank per day during the past year. Some of the individuals also had their blood tested for levels of certain liver enzymes; the enzymes are released into the bloodstream when the liver is diseased or damaged.

By the end of 2001, 330 participants had been diagnosed with cirrhosis, including 199 with alcoholic cirrhosis. For each cup of coffee they drank per day, participants were 22 percent less likely to develop alcoholic cirrhosis.

The researchers don’t suggest that physicians prescribe coffee to prevent alcoholic cirrhosis, coffee brings its own problems, after all, including detrimental effects on the cardiovascular system. “Even if coffee is protective, the primary approach to reduction of alcoholic cirrhosis is avoidance or cessation of heavy alcohol drinking,” says Klatsky. I assume that the research did not investigate whether decaf has a beneficial effect. Either way, it’s a pointless morning-after drink anyway, you’re probably better off going for green tea, or a herbal infusion as an alternative to the hair of the dog, just make sure you use it to wash down a nice fry up of sausage, eggs, and tomatoes.

Erotic brain

What a surprise! Medical researchers have discovered that women’s brains light up when they look at erotic images just as men’s brains do.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis measured brainwave activity of 264 women as they viewed a series of 55 colour slides that contained various scenes from water skiers to snarling dogs to partially-clad couples in sensual poses.

What they found may seem like a “no brainer.” When study volunteers viewed erotic pictures, their brains produced electrical responses that were stronger than those elicited by other material that was viewed, no matter how pleasant or disturbing the other material may have been. This difference in brainwave response emerged very quickly, suggesting that different neural circuits may be involved in the processing of erotic images.

“That surprised us,” says WUSTL’s Andrey Anokhin, “We believed both pleasant and disturbing images would evoke a rapid response, but erotic scenes always elicited the strongest response.”

As subjects looked at the slides, electrodes on their scalps measured changes in the brain’s electrical activity called event-related potentials (ERPs). The researchers learned that regardless of a picture’s content, the brain acts very quickly to classify the visual image. The ERPs begin firing in the brain’s cortex long before a person is conscious of whether they are seeing a picture that is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.

Previous research has suggested that men are more stimulated by erotic images than women. Anokhin says the fact that the women’s brains in this study exhibited such a quick response to erotic pictures suggests that, perhaps for evolutionary reasons, our brains are programmed to preferentially respond to erotic material.

“Usually men subjectively rate erotic material much higher than women,” he says. “So based on those data we would expect lower responses in women, but that was not the case. Women have responses as strong as those seen in men.”

So when one sees statistics on net usage that reveal porn accounts for 80% of traffic, it might not just be males who are using up all that bandwidth? Really? Well, I never!

What’s most intriguing though, is that when one searches for the original news release on this item from WUSTL, the cached page in Google shows the context for the phrase “erotic images elicit” as being:

“Attention grabber Erotic images elicit strong response from brain … When study…”

Well, WUSTL press officer, it certainly grabbed my attention. The news release could have done with a few more pictures though!

Chemical Solutions from Damien Hirst

Brit artist Damien Hirst (no relation to Geoff Hurst, of course) is well-known for his fascination with chemistry, his company is called Science, he opened a gallery cafe called Pharmacy, and he’s just completed an interview with the Royal Society of Chemistry in its latest effort to make the subject trendy among young people.

When asked what could be done to change perceptions of chemistry or to render the subject glamorous like forensic science or medicine. This is what he had to say…

“Hard to say but perhaps it’s something to do with how the subject is perceived by the kids through the media – I mean look at the medical and forensic shows that are on TV, however far from the truth. The fact that chemistry isn’t seen as an exciting subject at school, that it involves equations and other disciplines, etc. is also probably something to do with it. How is it taught ? What are its applications? In reality Chemistry is one of the sciences that shows us the building blocks of life. If that’s not exciting enough then what is?”

Having presented such a cogent argument, I really think he should stick to pickling cows.

Anyway, what’s the RSC doing separating forensic science from chemistry, as if 99% of what those guys do isn’t based on either straight analytical or bio-based work?

By the way, in case you’re wondering why the RSC is “interviewing” Mr Hirst, it’s because his latest artistic creation, a bronze statue depicting a pregnant woman, is in the forecourt of the organisation’s London office.