Happyhour Gene Determines Sensitivity to Alcohol

From NewScientist:

A newly identified gene called happyhour makes fruit flies sensitive to booze. Drugs that mimic the effects of the gene may offer a new treatment against alcohol abuse, researchers say. Read more...

Could We Have Prevented HIV/AIDS

And can we prevent the next epidemic?

The Fountain of Youth Flows With Heavy Water

Bed Bugs an Increasing Problem

Bed bugs have always been somewhat of a mythical creature to me. Probably because because of the little rhyme recited every night by my parents as they tucked me in: "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite. And if they do, get out your shoe, and beat them 'til they're black and blue." (The second line wasn't recited by my parents, but learned later from peers at school.)

Anyway, I have never taken this warning particularly seriously, but there may now be reason to heed the warning with a little more care. Check it out (from 60 Second Science):

Federal environmental regulators are hosting the first-ever "bed bug summit" to discuss emerging infestations of the insects around the country.

At the behest of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), some 300 people gathered in Arlington, Va., yesterday and today to swap ideas about how to get rid of the critters, whose bites make up to half of victims itchy with hives. While there's no official count of how many people are bitten, cities including New York, Chicago, Boston and Cincinnati have reported growing bed bug problems, which experts blame in part on declining use of pesticides amid concerns about their health effects. Read more...

New Breed of Cancer Vaccine Shows New Promise

Seattle bio-tech company Dendreon has announced that it's anti-cancer vaccine, Provenge, prolongs the lives of prostate cancer patients. 500 patients for who no other therapies were effective participated in the study, but the exact results have not been released (leading to some suspicion regarding the truth of the claim).

While most vaccines rely on prevention, provenge works by targeting immune cells/molecules to established tumors. Many believe this type of vaccine could be less toxic and more effective than chemotherapy or radiation, and when used in conjunction with chemo, the results appear to be synergistic.

However, while preliminary results are certainly promising, the FDA has been reluctant to approve Provenge - inciting outcry and criticism by many cancer-patient advocates. Maybe these latest results will help (when the details are finally released - and if the claims are true).

(link to article about another alt. treatment with nanoparticles)

Image: T-cell

Source
Scientific American: 60 Second Science
New Hope For Cancer Vaccines
by Gary Stix

New Yorkers to be Entered in Science Experiment

Michael Bloomberg and Thomas R. Frieden forego the constraints of compelling evidence and consent to engage NY in the largest unapproved science experiment in a long time.

Check out this article by John Tierney from the NYT:

Suppose you wanted to test the effects of halving the amount of salt in people’s diets. If you were an academic researcher, you’d have to persuade your institutional review board that you had considered the risks and obtained informed consent from the participants.

You might, for instance, take note of a recent clinical trial in which heart patients put on a restricted-sodium diet fared worse than those on a normal diet. In light of new research suggesting that eating salt improves mood and combats depression, you might be alert for psychological effects of the new diet. You might worry that people would react to less-salty food by eating more of it, a trend you could monitor by comparing them with a control group.

But if you are the mayor of New York, no such constraints apply. Read more...

Do you want New York's mayor and health commissioner leading a nationwide initiative to halve the salt in your food? Join the discussion. Go to TierneyLab »

Tuning in on Back Pain

Full article from NewScientist:

TUNING forks, brushes and erasers can all help to quickly and cheaply reveal which painkiller to prescribe for back pain.

From a patient's description, doctors struggle to distinguish between neuropathic pain from nerve damage, such as in sciatica, and pain from inflammation, yet each requires a different painkiller. Only expensive tests such as MRI scans reveal the source precisely, leading Joachim Scholz of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and his colleagues to look for a quicker, cheaper way.

The team compiled a list of quick questions and physical tests and assessed the response of patients diagnosed with each type of pain. From this, they whittled the list down to six questions and 10 physical tests that included rubbing brushes, safety pins, tuning forks and pencil erasers on the back. Together, the tests can show whether or not the pain is neuropathic (PLoS Medicine, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000047).

The whole list takes just 15 minutes to complete and also distinguishes between three types of neuropathic pain.

Masturbation Relieves Hay Fever

From NewScientist:

Spring is here and with it come the woes of hay fever. Never fear, however, as there may be a quick and pleasurable treatment to clear those bunged noses, for guys at least – a well-timed ejaculation.

That's what Sina Zarrintan, a neurologist from the Tabriz Medical University in Iran proposes, anyway. The logic behind the proposal is based on the fact that the nose and the genitals are both connected to the same part of the nervous system that controls certain reflexes – the sympathetic nervous system.

A blocked nose is caused by swollen and inflamed nasal blood vessels, irritated by an infection or pollen in the air. But during ejaculation, the sympathetic nervous system constricts blood vessels across the body. That should soothe the swollen nasal blood vessels, freeing the airway for normal breathing, according to Zarrintan. Read more...

Small Farms May Suffer Under New Food Safety Rules

From SciAm.com:

As salmonella-tainted pistachios and peanuts fuel the latest in a series of foodborne-illness outbreaks, lawmakers are proposing a flurry of bills aimed at strengthening the country's neglected food safety system.

But while food industry giants that have long opposed new regulations are beginning to change their tune, small-scale producers are growing increasingly vocal about their own concerns.

The problem, they say, is that small farmers, who are most accountable for their food's freshness and health, may suffer the heaviest burden under proposed new food rules.

"A lot of people worry that what's on the books right now is very much geared toward the biggest agricultural players," said Patty Lavera, assistant director of the nonprofit consumer group Food and Water Watch. "It's sort of a one-size-fits-all approach, and when its one size fits all, it's usually written by the big guy."
...
"A small farm is much more likely to grow multiple things and have a diversified approach," Lavera said. "So if they have to take 19 steps for each of those crops, it's much harder for them than a large farm that only grows one or two things."

Small farmers argue that they are already much more accountable to their customers for the quality of their product than are mass-production facilities, and that they will be crushed under the weight of well-meaning laws aimed at large industrial offenders. Read more...

Towards a Cure for Heart Attacks

From SciAm.com:

Even though heart attacks may not be deadly, they can leave your ticker damaged. The reason: they occur when blood flow to a section of heart muscle becomes blocked. If the flow of blood isn't restored quickly, a section of the heart muscle becomes damaged from the lack of oxygen and begins to die, weakening its ability to pump blood.
...
A study in Science today confirms that some heart muscle cells do, in fact, regenerate slowly over the course of a person's lifetime.
...
Those results suggest that heart cells could, in fact, be nudged to regenerate or artificially replaced through cell transplants, according to an editorial accompanying the study. "Even though cardiomyocyte (heart muscle cell) turnover is low in the adult heart, the fact that it occurs at all suggests that it can potentially be therapeutically exploited," write Charles Murray, co-director of the University of Washington's Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, and Richard Lee, an associate physician in cardiology at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Read more...

Science Works to Ensure Safe Food

From SciAm.com:

During the most recent outbreak of salmonella poisoning, which was connected to peanut butter and other peanut products, the food-borne bacteria has sickened nearly 700 people and may have contributed to the death of nine, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reports. That came on the heels of an outbreak last summer, finally traced back to jalapeño peppers imported from Mexico, that was responsible for more than 1,400 infections, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reports.

And when deadly pathogens enter the food supply, the financial costs can add up, too. The peanut butter salmonella outbreak caused the recall of thousands of peanut-related products, and Georgia Peanut Commission executive director Don Koehler says the total loss could be more than $1 billion.

So what are researchers doing to protect our food?

Read more...or check out this slideshow.

And You Thought You Were Old

From SciAm.com:

And you thought you felt old: Last week, in the village of Prishakhtinsk in central Kazakhstan, Sakhan Dosova celebrated what she, her family and Kazakh officials all agree was her 130th birthday. If true, her advanced age would shatter the old-timer record set by Jeanne Calment, who died in Arles, France, in 1997 at the age of 122.

Dosova has a passport and an identification card verifying she was born March 27, 1879; she doesn't have a birth certificate but apparently that is because such records were not routinely kept where she grew up in the late 19th century. Soviet census records, however, list her as being 46 years old in 1926, further supporting Dosova's über-Methuselah status. (To add perspective, if Dosova's story is true, she was pushing 40 during the 1917 Russian Revolution and when World War I ended in 1918, and she was born the same year as Albert Einstein and Joseph Stalin.) Read more...

Caffeine Cuts Workout Pain

Check out this podcast from 60 Second Science (partial transcript follows):

Coffee before biking? You may have to stop on the side of the road sooner, but new research suggests that caffeine can help you get more bang from your workout buck, because it keeps you from feeling the burn. Read the rest of the transcript...

Fact or Fiction: Raw veggies are healthier than cooked ones

From SciAm.com (featuring a Cornell professor):

Cooking is crucial to our diets. It helps us digest food without expending huge amounts of energy. It softens food, such as cellulose fiber and raw meat, that our small teeth, weak jaws and digestive systems aren't equipped to handle. And while we might hear from raw foodists that cooking kills vitamins and minerals in food (while also denaturing enzymes that aid digestion), it turns out raw vegetables are not always healthier. Read more...

Combined Feed (New Scientist)

I have too much fricking work!!! Which means no time for blogging, and you get a combined post with all the coolest most interesting new stuff from NewScientist.com:

Flowers on the Moon?

A firm that has designed habitats for plants and animals living in microgravity now hopes to grow the first flowers on the moon, the company's founders announced on Friday.

Engineering firm Paragon Space Development plans to build a greenhouse to fly to the moon. It is set to travel on a lunar lander designed by Odyssey Moon, a competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million contest to send an unmanned lunar rover to the moon. Read more...

Locked Drugs

Future drugs could feature built-in security to prevent them reaching the wrong tissue inside the body, says an international team of biochemists.

The researchers have developed a light-activated "combination lock", a molecule that only becomes active when exposed to two distinct colours of light in the right order. It could provide a way to ensure that small packages of drugs deliver their payload only exactly where and when it is needed, says Joakim Andréasson at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. The lock was developed with colleagues at Arizona State University.

Molecular locks have been made before. But they used chemicals as the trigger, which makes for a sluggish system, says Andréasson, because they diffuse slowly through the body. Using pulses of light is much faster and also allows the lock to be opened and closed repeatedly, because there are no chemical residues to foul the molecular mechanism. Read more...

Artificial Baby Butter Increases Healing

AN ARTIFICIAL version of the buttery coating that protects and nurtures a fetus's developing skin could find a use outside the womb, in speeding up wound healing and treating eczema.

Natural vernix caseosa contains a mixture of fatty compounds that waterproof the fetus. Crucially, it also contains dead cells called corneocytes, which store large amounts of water and ensure that the fetus does not get dehydrated. Vernix may also act as a barrier to infections. Read more...

California Considers Ban on Blacks (cars that it)

News that California may ban the sale of black cars for climate protection reasons raised the hackles of many a petrolhead yesterday.

At the root of the stir was a presentation (pdf) by the Environmental Protection Agency's Air Resources Board (CARB). The Cool Paints initiative suggests that the state should set a minimum level of reflectivity for all car paints and windows.

More reflective vehicles, goes the idea, could stay up to 10 °C cooler in the sunshine state - this in turn could reduce the need to have air conditioning on and thereby cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Read more...

Climate Changes Borders

Italy and Switzerland are planning to redraw their shared alpine border, as global warming is melting the glaciers that originally guided the line. Although peaceful, the move raises fears of future conflicts over shifting borders and resources.

Glaciers and ice fields around the world are melting as temperatures rise, with Europe's high mountains particularly hard hit. Read more...

Fat Firefighters

From 60 Second Science:

Think firefighters and emergency medical technicians (EMTs) are in tip-top shape? Not necessarily, according to a new study published today in the journal Obesity. Researchers found that 77 percent of emergency responder recruits in Boston are either overweight or obese, a result they say is likely similar in other cities and towns.

"Both firefighters and EMTs have pretty significant risks of cardiovascular events [such as heart attacks] as a result of the physical demands of the job…They are also at risk for musculoskeletal injuries," says study co-author Antonios Tsismenakis, a medical student at Boston University School of Medicine. Carrying additional pounds magnifies these risks, he adds. "If an emergency responder goes down," he says, "that has potential implications for his or her colleagues, and for you and me." Read more...