Researchers in Oxford have treated a man with an advanced gene therapy technique to prevent him from losing his sight.
It is the first time that anyone has tried to correct a genetic defect in the light-sensing cells that line the back of the eye.
The president of the Academy of Medical Sciences said the widespread use of gene therapy of this treatment will be soon be possible — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The bacteria in our gut may be controlling our lives more than we ever realised.
In the latest findings, published today in Nature, a link between gut bacteria and the development of multiple sclerosis in mice was shown. Studies have also examined gut bacteria in relation to obesity, depression and much more.
More human studies are emerging hinting at the role the bacteria in our guts may play well beyond helping us to digest our food — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The world’s oldest scientific academy, the Royal Society, has made its historical journal, which includes over 8000 scientific papers, permanently free to access online.
The plague, the Great Fire of London and even the imprisonment of its editor — just a few of the early setbacks that hit the Royal Society’s early editions of the Philosophical Transactions. But against the odds the publication, which first appeared in 1665, survived. Its archives offer a fascinating window on the history of scientific progress over the last few centuries.
Nestling amongst illustrious papers by Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin are some undiscovered gems from the dawn of the scientific revolution, including gruesome tales of students being struck by lightning and experimental blood transfusions — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Now a team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 18th century. They described their workat a meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland, Ore.
Discovered in an academic archive in the former East Germany, the elaborately bound volume of gold and green brocade paper holds 75,000 characters, a perplexing mix of mysterious symbols and Roman letters. The name comes from one of only two non-coded inscriptions in the document.
Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, collaborated with Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden to decipher the first 16 pages. They turn out to be a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society that apparently had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology.
It began as a weekend project this year, Dr Knight said in an interview, adding: I don’t have much experience in cryptography. My background is primarily in computational linguistics and machine translation
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
A human antibody has been shown to protect lab monkeys from the deadly bat-borne Hendra virus, US scientists say.
The Hendra virus has killed more than 20 horses in NSW and Queensland, but no humans, this year.
But four of the seven people known to have contracted the disease in the past have died — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A Northern Ireland man has been jailed for three months for causing £3,000 of damage to his flat after attempting to turn his own faeces into gold using an electric heater.
Paul Moran, 30, admitted arson and endangering the lives of others, the Belfast Telegraph reports. He will spend 12 months on licence upon his release.
The would-be Dumbledore apparently used an electric heater in his Enniskillen flat in his misguided attempt to turn his own crap and other waste products
into a noble metal, in July last year, the BelTel reports.
However, rather than uncovering the secrets of transmutation, his experiment necessitated a visit from the fire brigade, and caused £3,000 of damage to his Housing Executive flat — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Preliminary results from the trial of a malaria vaccine show that it protected nearly half of the children who received it from bouts of serious malaria, scientists said Tuesday.
The vaccine, known as RTS,S and made by GlaxoSmithKline, has been in development for more than 25 years, initially for the American military and now with most of its support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The clinical trial is scheduled to continue through 2014 and will include tests on more than 15,000 children, from infancy on up. Early results released at a Seattle malaria conference on Tuesday showed that three doses protected 47 percent of the 6,000 children ages 5 months to 17 months from severe malaria. (The age group was chosen because newborns have some protection from their mothers’ antibodies) — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The UK mainland’s first fully intact Viking boat burial site has been uncovered in the north-west Highlands, archaeologists have said.
The site, at Ardnamurchan, is thought to be more than 1,000 years old.
Artefacts buried alongside the Viking in his boat suggest he was a high-ranking warrior.
Archaeologist Dr Hannah Cobb said the artefacts and preservation make this one of the most important Norse graves ever excavated in Britain
.
Dr Cobb, from the University of Manchester, a co-director of the project, said: This is a very exciting find
.
She has been excavating artefacts in Ardnamurchan for six years — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In a contest that matches humans against some of the world’s hottest chilli peppers, no one wins. Last week, restaurant in Edinburgh, Scotland, held a competition to eat the extra-hot Kismot Killer curry. Some of the competitive eaters were left writhing on the floor in agony, vomiting and fainting.
According to reports, two British Red Cross workers overseeing the event at the Kismot Indian restaurant in Edinburgh but became overwhelmed by the number of casualties and ambulances were called. Half of the 20 people who took part in the challenge dropped out after witnessing the first diners vomiting, collapsing, sweating and panting.
So what exactly are the health impacts of eating really hot chilli peppers? Can eating too much of the spicy stuff kill you? — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Of course, what is the point of doing an experiment without documenting it? So I carefully selected four sizable chunks of skin (heh heh heh!) and scanned them on my flat-bed scanner (more squirming). Then, I fed them to four different Venus flytraps (#1: typical plant; #2: Justina Davis; #3: Dentate Traps; #4: Red Piranha). Just in case the plants would not like the skin or would not go through the normal digestion process, I included small earwigs with the skin-chunk sacrifices for plants #2 and #3.
A quick recap summary. I fed DISEASED HUMAN TISSUE to my plants. Yep, not just regular human fragments, but DISEASED HUMAN FRAGMENTS.
After a week, the traps opened. I had predicted the skin chunks would be relatively inert and unaffected. After all, these were hard, crusty chunks of skin from the sole of my diseased feet. Surely the Venus flytraps would have no effect upon them.
Was I ever wrong! The skin chunks were almost completely digested. Worse, what was left no longer had much cohesion, but was gooey and slimy, like little boogers. Uck! Uck! Uck! And what is with the weird hue shift to bacon color?? Uck! Uck! Uck! Iä! Iä!
So I guess that if you were to get caught by a sufficiently large Venus flytrap, your skin would easily be digested, and the plant would be able to proceed to your other internal tissues. Gross! — via The Carnivorous Plant FAQ
Channel 4 could find itself at the centre of another taste row after agreeing to broadcast a documentary showing the body of a British man being mummified like an Egyptian Pharoah.
The macabre programme, called Mummifying Alan, will make television history when it airs later this month as a scientific embalming experiment is unprecedented — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Just a touch of a female pheromone can send male longfin squids into a frenzied rage, potentially giving wimpy squid males a chance to fight for the ladies.
Whether there exists a human analogue to the pheromone, called Loligo beta-microseminoprotein, is a matter of premature speculation. But the findings do reveal a potentially fascinating subject for further research.
It’s like Popeye’s spinach. When they touch it, they say ‘let’s go’ and start to kick ass,
said biologist Roger Hanlon of the Marine Biological Laboratory, who reported the findings 10 February in Current Biology. It’s a beautiful, robust response. It may be a mechanism for smaller males who have trouble being dominant to mate with females
— via Wired
Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but new diamonds
may be an engineer’s.
A new form of highly-compressed carbon may be even stronger than diamonds, since it may be able to withstand extreme pressure from all directions, unlike diamonds which are harder in one orientation than another.
Natural diamonds are created when carbon is subjected to extreme heat and pressure deep within the Earth. A team of Stanford University scientists created the new diamonds
by compressing glassy carbon to above 400,000 times normal atmospheric pressure.
Glassy carbon 2Carbon, the fourth most abundant element in the universe, can take on many forms, called allotropes. Diamonds and graphite are two familiar allotropes of carbon. Glassy carbon and buckminsterfullerenes are two others. Glassy carbon was first synthesized in the 1950’s. It combines the properties of glass and ceramics with those of graphite.
The newly created allotrope, or new diamond
, can withstand 1.3 million times normal atmospheric pressure in one direction while confined under a pressure of 600,000 times atmospheric levels in other directions. Diamonds are the only other substance which can withstand that kind of pressure — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A nanotube fibre that twists like muscles in an elephant trunk has been discovered, which could one day propel nanobots.
Professor Geoff Spinks of the University of Wollongong’s Intelligent Polymer Research Institute and colleagues report their findings today in the journal Science — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Switching off a single gene can help treat sickle cell disease by keeping the blood forever young. The illness is caused by a mutant form of adult haemoglobin, but not by foetal haemoglobin. Targeting BCL11A, the gene responsible for the body’s switch-over from foetal to adult haemoglobin, effectively eliminates the condition in mice.
The mutant form of adult haemoglobin forms long sticky chains inside red blood cells. The cells containing these chains can clog small blood vessels, depriving organs of oxygen and causing pain. In severe cases, sickle cell disease can be fatal. Tricking the body into make foetal haemoglobin again can alleviate symptoms, though.
That’s because foetal haemoglobin does not form sticky chains. However, it is produced in the body only during development in the womb and in the six months following birth. It has a higher affinity for oxygen than adult haemoglobin, vital in allowing the developing foetus to steal
oxygen from its mother’s blood — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Life expectancy for people with HIV in the UK has increased by 15 years in the past decade, thanks to modern drugs and earlier treatment, a study suggests.
Health authorities should consider more widespread testing for HIV, given the benefits of early treatment, UK researchers report in the BMJ.
The Terrence Higgins Trust says people at risk should get tested now.
Figures suggest more than 80,000 UK are living with HIV, and about 25% are unaware they have the infection — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Australia’s carbon tax is set to become law after the lower house of parliament passed the government’s historic but controversial set of bills to establish the world’s most broadly based carbon pricing scheme.
Against last-minute efforts by the opposition to delay the passage of the bills and 11th hour pleas for amendments by some business groups, the government passed its 18 pieces of legislation by a vote of 74 to 72 just before 10am — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A north Queensland mining company has discovered one of the world’s largest deposits of the rare earth, scandium.
Scandium is used to make solid oxide fuel cells, which are used generating electricity from natural gas and renewable fuels.
This discovery has been made at a former nickel mine at Greenvale, just out of Townsville — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Australian vets say they are having great success treating arthritic dogs with stem cells and researchers developing arthritis treatments for humans are taking a keen interest in the technique.
The trouble is that some dog owners feel their four-legged friends are getting better treatment than they are — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Graphene, an exotic form of carbon consisting of sheets a single atom thick, exhibits a novel reaction to light, MIT researchers have found: Sparked by light’s energy, the material can produce electric current in unusual ways. The finding could lead to improvements in photodetectors and night-vision systems, and possibly to a new approach to generating electricity from sunlight.
This current-generating effect had been observed before, but researchers had incorrectly assumed it was due to a photovoltaic effect, says Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, an assistant professor of physics at MIT and senior author of a new paper published in the journal Science. The paper’s lead author is postdoc Nathaniel Gabor; co-authors include four MIT students, MIT physics professor Leonid Levitov and two researchers at the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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