Dentists may one day be able to replace missing teeth with ones newly grown from gum cells, say UK researchers.
The team from King’s College London took cells from adult human gum tissue and combined them with another type of cell from mice to grow a tooth.
They say using a readily available source of cells pushes the technology a step nearer to being available to patients.
But it is still likely to be many years before dentists can use the method — via redwolf.newsvine.com
People may in future be able to have missing or diseased teeth replaced with ones grown from cells taken from their own mouth, scientists have predicted.
Hybrid teeth created by combining human gum cells and stem cells from mouse teeth have been grown in laboratory mice by researchers who hope the work could lead to dentures being superseded by new teeth grown on a patient’s jaw.
The mixture of mouse and human cells was transplanted into adult mouse kidneys and grew into recognisable tooth structures coated in enamel with viable developing roots, according to a study published in the Journal Of Dental Research — via redwolf.newsvine.com
We believe that the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do. We call it The fun theory
Doctors in the US have made medical history by effectively curing a child born with HIV, the first time such a case has been documented.
The infant, who is now two and a half, needs no medication for HIV, has a normal life expectancy and is highly unlikely to be infectious to others, doctors believe.
Though medical staff and scientists are unclear why the treatment was effective, the surprise success has raised hopes that the therapy might ultimately help doctors eradicate the virus among newborns.
Doctors did not release the name or sex of the child to protect the patient’s identity, but said the infant was born, and lived, in Mississippi state. Details of the case were unveiled on Sunday at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A deadly form of skin cancer is able to fend off the body’s immune system, UK researchers have found.
Analysis of tumour and blood samples shows that melanoma knocks out the body’s best immune defence.
A potential test could work out which patients are likely to respond to treatment, the Journal of Clinical Investigation reports.
Cancer Research UK said the body’s response was a complex puzzle
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
If you’ve ever found yourself at a paint store with a member of the opposite sex trying to decide between, say, laguna blue
and blue macaw
, chances are you’ve disagreed over which hue is lighter or looks more turquoise.
Take comfort in the fact that the real blame lies with physiology: Neuroscientists have discovered that women are better at distinguishing among subtle distinctions in color, while men appear more sensitive to objects moving across their field of vision — via redwolf.newsvine.com
No one knows for sure how many individual pages are on the web, but right now, it’s estimated that there are more than 14 billion. Recently, though, Hungarian physicist Albert-László Barabási discovered something surprising about this massive number: Like actors in Hollywood connected by Kevin Bacon, from every single one of these pages you can navigate to any other in 19 clicks or less.
Barabási’s findings, published yesterday in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, involved a simulated model of the web that he created to better understand its structure. He discovered that of the roughly 1 trillion web documents in existence — the aforementioned 14 billion-plus pages, along with every image, video or other file hosted on every single one of them — the vast majority are poorly connected, linked to perhaps just a few other pages or documents — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Many dog owners will swear their pups are up to something when out of view of watchful eyes. Shoes go missing, couches have mysterious teeth marks, and food disappears. They seem to disregard the word no
.
Now, a new study suggests dogs might understand people even better than we thought.
The research shows that domestic dogs, when told not to snatch a piece of food, are more likely to disobey the command in a dark room than in a lit room.
This suggests that man’s best friend is capable of understanding a human’s point of view, said study leader Juliane Kaminski, a psychologist at the UK’s University of Portmouth.
The one thing we can say is that dogs really have specialized skills in reading human communication,
she said. This is special in dogs
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
A new tool has been developed that can reconstruct long-dead languages.
Researchers have created software that can rebuild protolanguages — the ancient tongues from which our modern languages evolved.
To test the system, the team took 637 languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific and recreated the early language from which they descended.
The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Archaeologists in Peru say they have discovered a temple at the ancient site of El Paraiso, near the capital, Lima.
Entry to the rectangular structure, estimated to be up to 5,000 years old, was via a narrow passageway, they say.
At its centre, the archaeologists from Peru’s Ministry of Culture found a hearth which they believe was used to burn ceremonial offerings.
With 10 ruins, El Paraiso is one of the biggest archaeological sites in central Peru.
The archaeologists found the structure, measuring 6.82m by 8.04m, in the right wing of the main pyramid — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Scientists have reported on the bizarre sex life of a sea slug that discards its penis after copulation, and then grows a new one.
Dubbed Chromodoris reticulata in Latin, the red-and-white slug — technically a shell-less mollusc — inhabits warms waters in South East Asia.
No other animal is known to repeatedly copulate using such ‘disposable penes’,
Japanese biologists wrote in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, describing the behaviour as extremely peculiar
.
The critter needs 24 hours between couplings to unroll an internally coiled and compressed juvenile penis to replace the used, external organ, scientists found.
It can repeat this feat at least three times — via redwolf.newsvine.com
There’s an unspoken pact scientists make with the public. In the same way that doctors and police are held by law and by honour to tell the truth and protect, a scientist is entrusted with performing research with integrity and transparency. The research is carried out, the process painstakingly recorded in laboratory books. The results are scrutinised by peers, often repeatedly, until the work is published in a journal, where readers trust that the work is done accurately and without disguise.
Publications are the key to science: they are a public acknowledgement and record of what has been done and how it can be repeated by other scientists. This ability to replicate is the key to truth and integrity: if the results can be replicated, they are valid. A new fact, a new discovery, has been made.
Given the importance of validation and publication, you would think access to this vital, new information would be relatively easy. Scientists ought to be shouting their discoveries from the rooftops. And they are? — ?but they’re also often paying to publish their own work behind a paywall.
In practice, the information in peer-reviewed publications is not freely available to the public. It’s not even freely available to other scientists. Journals have been around for hundreds of years but in the last quarter of the 20th century, academic publishing increased exponentially. The costs used to come from the physical processes of typesetting, printing and binding but access is now primarily electronic. Our largest databases are now closing in on 50 million articles and a library like that isn’t just a wealth of knowledge? — it’s a wealthy profit source, too — via redwolf.newsvine.com
It’s a bird. It’s a plane. No, it’s Hello Kitty.
That’s what a seventh grade student from California had in mind when she came up with her dream science project: sending a Hello Kitty doll her dad brought back from a business trip in Japan into space.
Lauren Rojas, a 12-year-old from Antioch, California, got the idea after seeing a television commercial in which a balloon was launched into the sky. She thought she could do the same with her Hello Kitty doll. She would test air pressure and temperature at high altitude for her school’s science fair — via redwolf.newsvine.com
This material, developed by AIST, is an organic substance where the adhesion strength can be varied repeatedly. This is achieved simply by shining light on the material, without heating or cooling it.
When the material has solidified, it’s yellow, but if it’s illuminated with UV light, it gradually liquefies and becomes orange. If you shine green light on the material, it hardens again, and reverts to yellow. This is the first example of a solid-liquid transition caused by light alone, deliberately and reversibly, in a single substance — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A tiny genetic patch
can be used to prevent a form of deafness which runs in families, according to animal tests.
Patients with Usher syndrome have defective sections of their genetic code which cause problems with hearing, sight and balance.
A study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, showed the same defects could be corrected in mice to restore some hearing.
Experts said it was an encouraging
start — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A major trial of a new booster vaccine has ended in failure, marking a major setback in the fight against tuberculosis (TB).
It was the first big study in infants since the Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine was introduced in 1921.
BCG is only partially effective against the bacterium that causes TB, which is why several international teams are working on new vaccines.
The latest, known as MVA85A, failed to protect babies who had already had BCG — via redwolf.newsvine.com
People who regularly take aspirin for many years, such as those with heart problems, are more likely to develop a form of blindness, researchers say.
A study on 2,389 people, in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, showed aspirin takers had twice the risk of wet
age-related macular degeneration.
The disease damages the sweet spot
in the retina, obscuring details in the centre of a patient’s field of vision.
The researchers said there was not yet enough evidence to change aspirin use — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Octopus on the door of the Institut Oceanographique, Paris, originally uploaded by Monceau.
Scientists from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research say they have made a breakthrough that could lead to a potential cure for AIDS.
Associate Professor David Harrich says they have discovered how to modify a protein in HIV so that, instead of replicating, it protects against the infection.
I consider that this is fighting fire with fire,
he said.
What we’ve actually done is taken a normal virus protein that the virus needs to grow, and we’ve changed this protein, so that instead of assisting the virus, it actually impedes virus replication and does it quite strongly.
Associate Professor Harrich says the modified protein cannot cure HIV but it has protected human cells from AIDS in the laboratory — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A tiny capsule swallowed by firefighters is changing the way volunteers work on the front line.
The pill can relay an individual’s core temperature in real time, giving a better understanding of the body’s vulnerability to heat stress to protect firefighters.
Victoria’s Country Fire Authority health and wellbeing officer Peter Langridge said the data gathered in a CFA trial had led to changes in firefighters’ work patterns, including the length of time they are exposed to blazes.
If we see their core body temperature increasing then we know to remove them from the fire and put them into the rehabilitation area,
he said.
Working in hot environments will stress different people at different rates. There is no set formula for how long a person can fight a fire before they start suffering from heat stress or dehydration and management is the key to protecting our fire fighters
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
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