Ulcer bacteria may protect from asthma

Ulcer bacteria may protect from asthma:

"Among teens and children ages 3 to 19 years, carriers of H. pylori were 25 percent less likely to have asthma."

Children aged 3 to 13 were 59 percent less likely to have asthma if they also had H. pylori, they reported in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The researchers used data on more than 7,000 U.S. children from the National Health and Nutrition Survey conducted from 1999 to 2000 by the National Center for Health Statistics.

The study showed that 5.4 percent of children born in the 1990s tested positive for H. pylori.

"If you look at the people born in 1919, 60 percent are positive. That's a huge change," Blaser said in a telephone interview. "I have referred to this as global warming of the stomach."

During the same time, asthma rates have soared. Among the children aged 3 to 19 in the study, 23 percent had asthma, Blaser said.
[...]
"Maybe the same antibiotics that made H. pylori go away make something else go away." Or perhaps the bacteria somehow protects against asthma directly, perhaps by changing the body's immune response.

Expectant moms who eat nuts boost child asthma risk

Expectant moms who eat nuts boost child asthma risk:

Pregnant women who eat nuts or nut products like peanut butter daily raise the risk their children will develop asthma by 50 percent, Dutch researchers said on Tuesday.

The study also showed that moderate amounts did not seem to have an effect, meaning it is too soon to say whether pregnant women should give up nuts because they contain many important nutrients and healthy fats a developing fetus needs, they said.

The Doping Dilemma

Michael Shermer examines The Doping Dilemma, specifically in cycling, and describes the immense advantage from using recombinant erythropoietin (r-EPO) to stimulate the production of red blood cells:

One of the subtle benefits of r-EPO in a brutal three-week race like the Tour de France is not just boosting HCT levels but keeping them high. Jonathan Vaughters, a former teammate of Armstrong’s, crunched the numbers for me this way: “The big advantage of blood doping is the ability to keep a 44 percent HCT over three weeks.” A “clean” racer who started with a 44 percent HCT, Vaughters noted, would expect to end up at 40 percent after three weeks of racing because of natural blood dilution and the breakdown of red blood cells. “Just stabilizing [your HCT level] at 44 percent is a 10 percent advantage.”

Scientific studies on the effects of performance-enhancing drugs are few in number and are usually conducted on nonathletes or recreational ones, but they are consistent with Vaughters’s assessment. (For obvious reasons, elite athletes who dope are disinclined to disclose their data.) The consensus among the sports physiologists I interviewed is that r-EPO improves performance by at least 5 to 10 percent. When it is mixed in with a brew of other drugs, another 5 to 10 percent boost can be squeezed out of the human engine. In events decided by differences of less than 1 percent, this advantage is colossal.

Hunger Can Make You Happy

Hunger can make you happy — or at least motivated:

When our bodies notice we need more calories, levels of a hormone called ghrelin increase. Ghrelin is known to spur hunger, but new research suggests this may be a side effect of its primary job as a stress-buster.

Researchers manipulated ghrelin levels in mice through a variety of methods, including prolonged calorie restriction, ghrelin injection and a genetic modification rendering the mice numb to ghrelin’s effect.

Mice who had limited ghrelin activity seemed depressed. If pushed into deep water they made no effort to swim. When introduced to a maze, they clung to the entryway. And when placed with other mice, they tended to keep to themselves. (These behaviors were reversed when the mice were given a low-dose antidepressant commonly prescribed to humans.)

In contrast, mice with high levels of ghrelin swam energetically in deep water, looking for escape. They eagerly explored new environments. And they were much more social.

Nobody Lives Past Thirty

Al Fin shares an amusing cartoon. I hope I don't ruin the joke by pointing out that the average age of paleolithic humans might have been quite low, but some early humans lived to be quite old.

Why magnesium is like vitamin D and how it cures depression

Dennis Mangan explains why magnesium is like vitamin D and how it cures depression:

In a paper I recently came across, Rapid recovery from major depression using magnesium treatment (pdf), the author writes about several case studies in which magnesium supplements brought about a complete cure from depression, as well as better mental performance in some cases. It seems that magnesium deficiency is widespread; according to this paper, nearly 90% of the American population ingests less than the (already minimal) RDA. Add to that the fact that numerous conditions can cause a significant depletion of body magnesium, conditions such as the drinking of alcohol and catecholamine elevation caused by stress, and you've got the makings of a massively widespread deficiency.

Back to depression. The paper's author found that magnesium supplementation cures major depression in as few as 7 days. There are good reasons why this should be so. Michael Maes, a "highly cited" scientist and physician, has found that pro-inflammatory cytokines may be at the root of depression, which is, in other words, a physical illness. Magnesium deficiency results in a major increase in inflammatory cytokines. For much, much more, try this Google Scholar page on magnesium and inflammation.

So why is magnesium like vitamin D? Mainly because no one thinks about it. When industrialization got going and most people started spending a great deal of their lives indoors, not a lot of thought was given to the absence of direct sunlight on the skin and what it would do to human health; as it turns out, the health consequences are serious. Likewise, it seems that in the past most people obtained dietary magnesium from hard water, which hardly anyone drinks anymore. (By the way, numerous studies have shown a substantial reduction in heart disease rates in places where hard water is drunk; see, e.g., this one from Taiwan, which found a 40% risk reduction from the water with the highest magnesium levels.) While magnesium is plentiful in certain foods, it's not necessarily well absorbed - and in any case most people don't get enough from food to begin with.

Magnesium deficiency is implicated, in addition to depression and heart disease, in migraine, cancer, and a horde of other bad things. Dr. Michael Eades wrote that if he could only take one supplement, it would be magnesium.

Manhattanhenge

Media-savvy astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about Manhattanhenge:

What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rose in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.

For Manhattan, a place where evening matters more than morning, that special day comes on Thursday, May 29h this year, one of only two occasions when the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street for the last fifteen minutes of daylight. The other day is Saturday, July 12th. These two days give you a photogenic view with half the Sun above and half the Sun below the horizon — on the grid. The day after May 29th (Friday, May 30th), and the day before July 12 (Friday, July 11) will also give you Manhattanhenge moments, but instead you will see the entire ball of the Sun on the horizon — on the grid. My personal preference is the half-Sun.

As you may know, had Manhattan's grid been perfectly aligned with the geographic north-south line, then the days of Manhattanhenge would be the spring and autumn equinoxes, the only two days on the calendar when the Sun rises due-east and sets due-west. But Manhattan's street grid is rotated 30 degrees east from geographic north, shifting the days of alignment elsewhere into the calendar.

How Many of You Expect to Die?

How Many of You Expect to Die?, Dr. Joanne Lynn asked:

The audience fell silent, laughed nervously and only then, looking one to the other, slowly raised their hands.

“Would you prefer to be old when it happens?” she then asked.

This time the response was swift and sure, given the alternative.

Then Dr. Lynn, who describes herself as an “old person in training,” offered three options to the room. Who would choose cancer as the way to go? Just a few. Chronic heart failure, or emphysema? A few more.

“So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia?” Dr. Lynn asked.

On the screen above the dais, she showed graphs describing the three most common ways that old people die and the trajectory and duration of each scenario. Cancer deaths, which peak at age 65, usually come after many years of good health followed by a few weeks or months of steep decline, according to Dr. Lynn’s data. The 20 percent of Americans who die this way need excellent medical care during the long period of high functioning, she said, and then hospice support for both patient and family during the sprint to death.

Deaths from organ failure, generally heart or lung disease, peak among patients 10 years older, killing about one in four Americans around age 75 after a far bumpier course. These patients’ lives are punctuated by bouts of severe illness alternating with periods of relative stability. At some point rescue attempts fail, and then death is sudden. What these patients and families need, Dr. Lynn said, is consistent disease management to head off crises, aggressive intervention at the first hint of trouble and advance planning for how to manage the final emergency.

The third option, death following extended frailty and dementia, is everyone’s worst nightmare, an interminable and humiliating series of losses for the patient, and an exhausting and potentially bankrupting ordeal for the family. Approximately 40 percent of Americans, generally past age 85, follow this course, said Dr. Lynn, and the percentage will grow with improvements in prevention and treatment of cancer, heart disease and pulmonary disease.

These are the elderly who for years on end must depend on the care of loved ones, usually adult daughters, or the kindness of strangers, the aides who care for them at home or in nursing facilities. This was my mother’s fate, and she articulated it with mordant humor: The reward for living past age 85 and avoiding all the killer diseases, she said, is that you get to rot to death instead.

You can see why people don't want to think about this.

Scientists Uncover Deadly Ebola Virus's "Achilles' Heel"

Scientists Uncover Deadly Ebola Virus's "Achilles' Heel":

The so-called Ebola virus glycoprotein, or "spike protein," was first discovered a decade ago and has been a target for scientists attempting to design vaccines and therapies to prevent it from infecting cells. But, until now, researchers did not understand the protein's structure — and thus, the best way to attack it.

The so-called Ebola virus glycoprotein, or "spike protein," was first discovered a decade ago and has been a target for scientists attempting to design vaccines and therapies to prevent it from infecting cells. But, until now, researchers did not understand the protein's structure — and thus, the best way to attack it.

Researchers discovered that the compound is wrapped in benign carbohydrates that mask the virus's deadliness, allowing it to elude immune system scouts. (The human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, that causes AIDS also has this trait.) The good news: the discovery could pave the way for drugs designed to see through that protective coating — and trigger the immune system to attack.

"The structure of the glycoprotein shows us the very few sites on its surface that are not cloaked by carbohydrate," Ollmann Saphire explains. "These [sites] are the chink in the armor, or the Achilles' heel, that we can target antibodies against."
[...]
Researchers made their latest finding by studying the bone marrow of a lucky survivor of a 1995 Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, a city in the southwestern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They found the glycoprotein attached to an antibody (a protein unleashed by the immune system to fight viruses) in the marrow, the soft core of bones where red blood cells are manufactured.

According to Ollmann Saphire, there is a receptor located deep in the bowl-shaped structure of Ebola's glycoprotein that latches onto the surface of host cells and tricks a protein there into granting the virus entry. Once inside the cells, the fast-acting Ebola co-opts their machinery to make millions of copies of itself and floods the person's bloodstream.

FDA issues warning on Cipro, similar antibiotics

Years ago, when I was taking a fairly long course of hardcore antibiotics for a sinus infection, I noticed that my Achilles tendons would pop where they attached to the bone. I wasn't sure what to make of it until I stumbled across a study noting that tendon injuries were higher in athletes who had recently taken antibiotics. When I mentioned this to my doctor, he looked at me like I was delusional.

Now the Food and Drug Administration has ordered makers of fluoroquinolone drugs — like Cipro, Levaquin, and Floxin — to add a "black box" warning that they can cause tendon ruptures.

Creating Alien Life on Earth

Al Fin notes that Japanese chemists have succeeded in creating alien life on earth — or at least alien DNA:

The researchers used high-tech DNA synthesis equipment to stitch together four entirely new, artificial bases inside the sugar-based framework of a DNA molecule. This resulted in unusually stable, double-stranded structures resembling natural DNA. Like natural DNA, the new structures were right-handed and some easily formed triple-stranded structures. The unique chemistry of these structures and their high stability offer unprecedented possibilities for developing new biotech materials and applications, the researchers say.

Science Writer Jim Holt Explores Why We Laugh

Science Writer Jim Holt Explores Why We Laugh:

V. S. Ramachandran, the brain researcher, has a theory about the origin of laughter — that when you're in the jungle and there's an apparent threat, the first member of the kinship group to notice that it's not a real threat emits this stereotyped vocalization. And it's contagious, so everyone starts laughing. That's also the basis of the relief theory of humor, that there's a release of the energy you had summoned up to solve some puzzle. Kant said that the essence of humor is a strained expectation dissolving into nothing.

Who invented the joke? We've been joking forever, right?

No, the classic joke form — setup with incongruity, punch line that resolves the incongruity — seems to have come out of Greece and Rome. There's this guy in Greek -mythology called Palamedes who invented practically everything — numbers, currency, lighthouses, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He also supposedly invented the joke. And, of course, he was stoned to death.

Humans Wore Shoes 40,000 Years Ago, Fossil Suggests

Humans Wore Shoes 40,000 Years Ago, Fossil Suggests:

A previous study of anatomical changes in toe bone structure had dated the use of shoes to about 30,000 years ago.

Now the dainty-toed fossil from China suggests that at least some humans were sporting protective footwear 10,000 years further back, during a time when both modern humans and Neandertals occupied portions of Europe and Asia.

The fossils go back further than any sandal remains:

The first forms of protective footwear probably evolved from simple wrappings used to insulate the feet from snow and freezing temperatures, experts say.

The oldest preserved shoe remains, dating to roughly 10,000 years ago from the western United States, are simple sandals woven of plant fibers.
[...]
In a previous study, Trinkaus found that shoe-wearing and barefoot human groups show characteristic differences in the size and strength of their middle toe bones.

Consistent shoe use results in a more delicate bone structure, because footwear reduces the force on middle toes during walking.

In his latest study, this anatomical evidence allowed Trinkaus to date the origin of shoes to a period long before the oldest known shoe remains.

Researchers open secret cave under Mexican pyramid

Researchers open secret cave under Mexican pyramid — well, it used to be secret, a long time ago:

Archeologists are opening a cave sealed for more than 30 years deep beneath a Mexican pyramid to look for clues about the mysterious collapse of one of ancient civilization's largest cities.

The soaring Teotihuacan stone pyramids, now a major tourist site about an hour outside Mexico City, were discovered by the ancient Aztecs around 1500 AD, not long before the arrival of Spanish explorers to Mexico.

But little is known about the civilization that built the immense city, with its ceremonial architecture and geometric temples, and then torched and abandoned it around 700 AD.

It sounds to me like they summoned an unspeakable evil and did not know how to kill it, so they buried it deep within the earth. Right? Occam's Razor, and all that...

Of sommeliers and stomachs

The Economist speaks of sommeliers and stomachs, exploring the health benefits of red wine, which is high in polyphenols, and how those polyphenols might help, since they don't seem to make the trip from the stomach to the bloodstream in large amounts:

[Dr Kanner] and his colleagues fed a group of rats one of two meals — either red meat from a turkey (a foodstuff shown by previous research to raise malondialdehyde levels in humans) or such meat mixed with red-wine concentrate. An hour and a half after the rats had eaten, they were killed. Dr Kanner then removed their stomachs and analysed the contents. As he reports in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the wine concentrate did indeed reduce the formation of malondialdehyde. It also cut the level of hydroperoxides, another group of oxidising agents that cause cell damage.

Caloric Restriction Comes in a Pill

Caloric Restriction Comes in a Pill:

In 2006, Sinclair and National Institute on Aging gerontologist Rafael de Cabo, also a co-author of the Cell Metabolism study, used resveratrol to improve the health and extend the lives of obese mice on high-calorie diets. The latest study involved both obese and normal mice, fed standard, low- and high-calorie fare.

Regardless of mouse weight and diet, resveratrol worked wonders. At two years of age, or the mouse equivalent of senescence, the mice were more coordinated than their non-dosed counterparts. Their bones were thicker and stronger, their eyes free of cataracts, their hearts beating strong. At the cellular level, tissues displayed gene-level changes almost identical to those produced by caloric restriction.

The mitochondria of resveratrol-taking mice also proved healthy. Mitochondrial degeneration has been implicated in a variety of diseases, leading some researchers to believe that heart disease, cancer and dementia — all the so-called diseases of aging — have a common root.

"The mice had tremendous health benefits from taking resveratrol," said de Cabo. "If any of those parameters translate to humans, it will be tremendous."

More Evidence for a Revolutionary Theory of Water

More Evidence for a Revolutionary Theory of Water:

In the recent study, Nilsson and colleagues probed the structure of liquid water using X-ray Emission Spectroscopy and X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy. These techniques use powerful X-rays, generated by a synchrotron light source, to excite electrons within a water molecule's single oxygen atom. Tuning the X-rays to a specific range of energies can reveal with tremendous precision the location and arrangement of the water molecules. In this way Nilsson's team found that water is indeed made up of tetrahedral groups, but clear evidence also emerged for the dominance of a second, less defined structure in the mix.

The idea that liquid water is made up of two structures is not new. German physicist Willhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in the late 19th century, published a paper proposing that liquid water comprised two different structures — one tetrahedral "ice-like" structure, and another more loosely arranged structure, which helped explain why water behaves in such unusual ways. Now, more than a century later, the current study is giving new life to Röntgen's "two structure" model.

"It is amazing that the modern usage of X-rays demonstrates that Röntgen, more than 100 years ago, was on the right path," said Nilsson. "Water is still not fully understood, although it is the basis of our existence. I expect more surprises to be discovered in the future."

GM mosquito 'could fight malaria'

GM mosquito 'could fight malaria':

In the team's experiments, equal numbers of genetically modified and ordinary "wild-type" mosquitoes were allowed to feed on malaria-infected mice.

As they reproduced, more of the GM, or transgenic, mosquitoes survived. After nine generations, 70% of the insects belonged to the malaria-resistant strain.

A detail seemingly meant to terrify non-scientists:

The scientists also inserted the gene for green fluorescent protein (GFP) into the transgenic mosquitoes which made their eyes glow green.

This helped the researchers to easily count the transgenic and non-transgenic insects.

Over on the Freakonomics blog, they seem most concerned about the Ellsberg Paradox, and whether we prefer measurable risk to immeasurable uncertainty, but I'm more concerned that life-saving aid only causes more misery in any impoverished land without enough food to go around.

Fortified Cassava Could Provide A Day's Nutrition In A Single Meal

Fortified Cassava Could Provide A Day's Nutrition In A Single Meal:

Scientists have determined how to fortify the cassava plant, a staple root crop in many developing countries, with enough vitamins, minerals and protein to provide the poor and malnourished with a day's worth of nutrition in a single meal.

The researchers have further engineered the cassava plant so it can resist the crop's most damaging viral threats and are refining methods to reduce cyanogens, substances that yield poisonous cyanide if they are not properly removed from the food before consumption. The reduction of cyanogens also can shorten the time it takes to process the plant into food, which typically requires three to six days to complete.

Studies also are under way to extend the plant's shelf life so it can be stored or shipped.

The international team of scientists hopes to translate the greenhouse research into a product that can be field tested in at least two African nations by 2010. Funded by more than $12.1 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the group of researchers is led by Richard Sayre, a professor of plant cellular and molecular biology at Ohio State University.

Golden Cow-Nose Ray Migration

Amateur photographer Sandra Critelli has taken some breathtaking photos of thousands of poisonous golden cow-nose rays migrating along the clockwise current from Mexico's Yucatan peninsula to western Florida.

150th Anniversary of Theory of Evolution

Today is the 150th anniversary of the Theory of Evolution — or of its presentation to the scientific world:

1858: The Linnaean Society of London listens to the reading of a composite paper on how natural selection accounts for the evolution and variety of species. The authors are Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Modern biology is born.

Scientists of the time knew that evolution occurred. The fossil record showed evidence of life forms that no longer existed. The question was, how did it occur?

Darwin had been working on his theory since 1837, soon after his epic voyage on the HMS Beagle. The hypermethodical naturalist wanted not only to classify the prodigious variation he had observed, but also to explain how it came to be.

He felt he would need to publish extensive documentation of natural selection to overcome popular resistance to so radical a notion. So he planned a comprehensive, multivolume work to convince scientists and the world.

Darwin was still working on his magnum opus when in June 1858 he received a letter from an English naturalist working in Malaysia. Alfred Russel Wallace was young and brash. When he conceived of natural selection, he didn't plan a 10-volume lifework. He just dashed off a quick paper on the subject and mailed it to the author of The Voyage of the Beagle, asking him to refer it for publication if it seemed good enough.

Darwin was crestfallen. Was he about to lose credit for two decades of work? Wallace had suggested that Darwin forward the paper to Scottish geologist Charles Lyell. Along with English botanist Joseph Hooker, Lyell was one of a small handful of people Darwin had shown early drafts of his own work on natural selection.

Darwin wrote to Lyell and Hooker, and they arranged for a joint paper to be read at the forthcoming meeting of the Linnaean Society of London. (Founded in 1788 and named for Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish scientist who devised the binomial system of taxonomy, it is the world’s oldest active biological society.)

Neither Darwin nor Wallace attended the meeting. Wallace was still in Malaysia. Darwin was at home with his wife mourning the death of their 19-month-old son just three days earlier.

The secretary of the society read the 18-page paper, comprising four parts:

1. The readers' own letter of introduction explaining the extraordinary circumstances;
2. An excerpt from Darwin's unpublished draft, part of a chapter titled, "On the Variation of Organic Beings in a State of Nature; on the Natural Means of Selection; on the Comparison of Domestic Races and True Species";
3. An abstract of Darwin's 1857 letter on the subject to Harvard University botanist Asa Gray;
4. Wallace's manuscript, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type."

The paper and the meeting did not cause an immediate sensation. Other papers were read the same day. The society had routine business to transact. The meeting was long (.pdf). But the paper was accepted for publication in the society's Proceedings later that year.

Was this a remarkable case of simultaneous discovery? Not quite. It was more like simultaneous announcement. What is remarkable is that both Darwin and Wallace credited their central insight to reading Thomas Malthus' essay, Population, first published in 1798.

Darwin read Malthus in 1838 and immediately realized how it applied to his own work. Wallace had read it around 1846, but first saw its import for explaining evolution while he lay recovering from fever in Malaysia a dozen years later.

Malthus observed that population was held in check because not every individual would survive to reproduce. As Wallace wrote, "It suddenly flashed upon me ... in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain -- that is, the fittest would survive."

But the same differences in temperament that had led to Darwin's delay and Wallace's rush to publication now worked to Darwin's advantage ... and ultimately greater fame. Wallace was already on to his next big thing: amassing huge collections of natural specimens in hopes of winning both fame and fortune.

Darwin was on to his next big thing: At the urging of his friends, he published a magnificent one-volume summary of his work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, in 1859.

That produced an intellectual and cultural splash, perhaps the largest of the 19th century. And it is the sesquicentennial of the book next year, along with the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, which will be more widely marked than the 1858 event.

Some Proof that Marijuana is a Powerful Medicine

Jürg Gertsch, of ETH Zürich, and his collaborators from three other universities have provided some proof that marijuana is a powerful medicine — not because of its supposed active ingredient, THC, but because of another ingredient, beta-caryophyllene:

Gertsch and his team published their findings on June 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.They focused on the anti-inflammatory properties of the impressive substance — testing it on immune cells called monocytes and also in mice.

Since beta-caryophyllene seems to be powerful, occurs naturally in many foods, and does not get people high, it could turn out to be a nearly ideal medication. The organic compound is also phenomenally cheap. Sigma Aldrich sells it, in kosher form, for forty-two dollars per kilogram.

Of course, since it's already cheaply available, it's in no one's interest to spend the money to get it FDA approved.

Fake virus could make safe new vaccines

Fake virus could make safe new vaccines:

The researchers used a unique method to make their virus, relying on a built-in redundancy in DNA, the material that carries genetic instructions in organisms.

DNA's code is written using just four nucleic acids, represented by the letters A, C, T and G. These are combined in various ways to make amino acids, which in turn make proteins.

It is possible to make an amino acid with more than one combination of these letters -- for example, GCC and GCG both code for the amino acid alanine. For unknown reasons, organisms favor certain combinations.

Futcher's team made their polio virus using the less-favored combinations of the virus's genetic code.

They hoped these would stimulate the immune system in the same way as "wild-type" polio, without causing disease, and that is what appears to have happened, they wrote.

Each difference in the genetic code weakened the virus in a different way.

"This 'death by a thousand cuts' strategy could be generally applicable to attenuating many kinds of viruses," they wrote.

"Even for an inactivated rather than live virus approach, these features would allow a vaccine to be made from a safer starting material than the corresponding wild-type virus."

Polio vaccines have virtually eradicated the disease in most countries. But an oral vaccine that uses a weakened version of a live polio virus can sometimes get back into the water supply and mutate into a form that can infect people.

Doctors have been looking for a safer yet effective polio vaccine that is as easy to administer as the drops. Dr. Jonas Salk's original polio vaccine, which effectively rid the United States of the feared virus in the 1950s and 1960s, used a "killed" polio virus but had to be injected.

Long Trip

It looks like "magic mushrooms" send users on a Long Trip — a long, largely pleasant trip:

"Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives," comparing it with the birth of a child or the death of a parent, says neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who lead the research. "It's one thing to have a dramatic experience you say is impressive. It's another thing to say you consider it as meaningful 14 months later. There's something about the saliency of these experiences that's stunning."

Griffiths gave 36 specially screened volunteers psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms. The compound is believed to affect perception and cognition by acting on the same receptors in the brain that respond to serotonin, a neurotransmitting chemical tied to mood.

Afterward, about two thirds of the group reported having a "full mystical experience," characterized by a feeling of "oneness" with the universe. When Griffiths asked them how they were doing 14 months later, the same proportion gave the experience high marks for transcendental satisfaction, and credited it with increasing their well-being since then.

But is a lasting, false sense of profundity a good thing?

Helminthic Therapy

Helminthic therapy doesn't sound terribly creepy — until you realize what a helminth is:

In 2004, David Pritchard applied a dressing to his arm that was crawling with pin-size hookworm larvae, like maggots on the surface of meat. He left the wrap on for several days to make sure that the squirming freeloaders would infiltrate his system.

“The itch when they cross through your skin is indescribable,” he said. “My wife was a bit nervous about the whole thing.”

Hookworms kill 65,000 people a year and afflicts hundreds of thousands with anemia, but by suppressing the immune system they can reduce allergy symptoms:

In the late 1980s, the Wellcome Trust issued a grant, and Dr. Pritchard and his Nottingham team set up camp on Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea.

“We didn’t speak the language, and we were sparsely equipped,” he recalled. “But we established a rapport with the people. We gave them worm tablets and would ask them politely, in pidgin English, to collect their fecal matter in buckets for us.”

Hookworm infiltrates a victim’s system when the larvae, hatched from eggs in infected people’s excrement, penetrate the skin, often through the soles of the feet. From there, they enter the bloodstream, travel to the heart and lungs, and are swallowed when they reach the pharynx. They mature into adults once they reach the small intestine, where they can subsist for years by latching onto the intestinal wall and siphoning off blood. After sieving the fecal samples to extract hookworms eliminated when the worm treatment pill was given, the team reached an intriguing conclusion: Villagers with the highest levels of allergy-related antibodies in their blood had the smallest and least fertile parasites, indicating that these antibodies conferred a degree of protection against parasite infection.

And the hookworms seemed equipped to retaliate. After colonizing a digestive tract, the host often showed signs of a blunted immune response, leading Dr. Pritchard to suspect that the worms were reducing the potency of the body’s defenses to make their environment more hospitable.

“Sitting in the jungle for long periods gives you time to think,” he noted. “And this led to the idea that worm burdens of tolerable intensity could be beneficial under some circumstances.”

He began considering a left-field possibility. What if he could round up allergy sufferers, give them worms and see whether their wheezing and watery eyes disappeared?

Nearly 20 years later, his musing began to come to fruition. After Dr. Pritchard’s self-infection experiment, the National Health Services ethics committee let him conduct a study in 2006 with 30 participants, 15 of whom received 10 hookworms each. Tests showed that after six weeks, the T-cells of the 15 worm recipients began to produce lower levels of chemicals associated with inflammatory response, indicating that their immune systems were more suppressed than those of the 15 placebo recipients. Despite playing host to small numbers of parasites, worm recipients reported little discomfort.

Trial participants raved about their allergy symptoms disappearing. Word about the study soon appeared online among chronic allergy sufferers, and a Yahoo group on “helminthic therapy” sprung up.

“Many of the people who were given a placebo have requested worms, and many of the people with worms have elected to keep them,” Dr. Pritchard said.

Accidental fungus leads to promising cancer drug

Accidental fungus leads to promising cancer drug — after some polymers are added:

The drug was known experimentally as TNP-470, and was originally isolated from a fungus called Aspergillus fumigatus fresenius.

Harvards's Donald Ingber discovered the fungus by accident while trying to grow endothelial cells — the cells that line blood vessels. The mold affected the cells in a way known to prevent the growth of tiny blood vessels known as capillaries.

Ingber and Folkman developed TNP-470 with the help of Takeda Chemical Industries in Japan in 1990.

But the drug affected the brain, causing depression, dizziness and other side-effects. It also did not stay in the body long and required constant infusions. The lab dropped it.

Efforts to improve it did not work well. Then Benny and colleagues tried nanotechnology, attaching two "pom-pom"-shaped polymers to TNP-470, protecting it from stomach acid.

In mice, the altered drug, now named lodamin, went straight to tumor cells and helped suppress melanoma and lung cancer, with no apparent side effects, Benny said.

All untreated mice had fluid in the abdominal cavity, and enlarged livers covered with tumors. Mice treated with lodamin had normal-looking livers and spleens, the researchers said.

Twenty days after being injected with cancer cells, four out of seven untreated mice had died, while all treated mice were still alive, Benny's team reported.

Fossil fills out water-land leap

Fossil fills out water-land leap:

About one hundred million years before dinosaurs began to roam the Earth, Ventastega [curonica] was to be found in the shallow waters and tidal estuaries of modern day Latvia.

According to lead author, Professor Per Ahlberg, from Uppsala University, Sweden, this creature had the head of a tetrapod, an animal adapted to live on land. The body, though, was fish-like but with four primitive flippers.

"From a distance, it would have looked like an alligator. But closer up, you would have noticed a real tail fin at the back end, a gill flap at the side of the head; also lines of pores snaking across head and body.

"In terms of construction, it had already undergone most of the changes from fish towards land animal, but in terms of lifestyle you are still looking at an animal that is habitually aquatic."

Experts believe that Ventastega was an important staging post in the evolutionary journey that led creatures from the sea to the land.

Sexual Antagonism

Sexual antagonism provides a genetic explanation for homosexuality:

Gay couples can't have biological kids together. So if homosexuality is genetic, why hasn't it died out?

A study published last week in PLoS One tackles the question. It starts with four curious patterns. First, male homosexuality occurs at a low but stable frequency in a wide range of societies. Second, the female relatives of gay men produce children at a higher rate than other women do. Third, among these female relatives, those related to the gay man's mother produce children at a higher rate than do those related to his father. Fourth, among the man's male relatives, homosexuality is more common in those related to his mother than in those related to his father.

Can genes account for these patterns? To find out, the authors posit several possible mechanisms and compute their effects over time. They conclude that only one theory fits the data. The theory is called "sexually antagonistic selection." It holds that a gene can be reproductively harmful to one sex as long as it's helpful to the other. The gene for male homosexuality persists because it promotes—and is passed down through—high rates of procreation among gay men's mothers, sisters, and aunts.

This theory doesn't account for female homosexuality, which another new study (reviewed in Human Nature last week) attributes to nongenetic factors. It also doesn't account for environmental or prenatal chemical factors in male homosexuality, such as the correlation between a man's probability of homosexuality and the number of boys previously gestated in his mother's womb. But it does explain the high similarity of sexual orientation between identical twins, as well as patterns of homosexuality in families. It's also plausible because sexually antagonistic selection has been found in other species. And many scientists who think environmental and prenatal factors influence homosexuality also believe that genes play a role.

The authors note that according to their computations, the theory implies some testable predictions. One such prediction can be checked against existing data. The prediction is that on average, if you're a straight man, the reproductive pattern among your aunts will reverse the pattern seen among aunts of gay men. That is, your paternal aunts will produce children at a higher rate than your maternal aunts will. The authors check this prediction against the available data. Sure enough, it holds up.

So the genes aren't for homosexuality so much as they're for androphilia, i.e., attraction to men.

It’s mine, I tell you

Researchers have started studying the evolutionary roots of the endowment effect:

Owen Jones, a professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University, and Sarah Brosnan, a primatologist at Georgia State University, suspect the answer is that, in the evolutionary past, giving things up, even when an apparently fair exchange seemed to be on offer, was just too risky. These days, as they discuss in a paper just published in the William and Mary Law Review, there are contracts, rights and other ways of enforcing bargains. Animal societies have none of these mechanisms. As Adam Smith observed in the “Wealth of Nations”, “nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.”

To put flesh on their idea, Dr Jones and Dr Brosnan have been trying to overcome Smith’s observation by training chimpanzees to trade. In 2006 Keith Chen of Yale University showed that capuchin monkeys could learn to do so, and also seemed to exhibit the endowment effect. Chimps, it turns out, can manage to truck too. In the chimp study, tubes of peanut butter and frozen juice bars were used. Both treats were designed to be difficult to eat quickly. This makes it possible for animals that would otherwise consume any food they were given at the first opportunity at least to consider the idea of an exchange.

When presented with a choice, 60% of the chimps preferred peanut butter to juice. However, when they were endowed with peanut butter, 80% of them chose to keep it instead of exchanging it for juice. It was as if the peanut butter became more valuable as soon as it was possessed. And an opposite endowment effect was observed when the chimps were given juice.

Observing the endowment effect in three primate species suggests it does, indeed, have deep evolutionary roots. Better still, before they started work Dr Jones and Dr Brosnan predicted that the strength of the effect would vary with the evolutionary salience of the item in question. Lo and behold, when they tried the same experiments using bone and rope toys, no endowment effect was seen. Food is vital. Toys are not.

Steffen Huck, an economist at University College, London, has an alternative hypothesis:

In societies with markets, customers can go elsewhere. But in a small, tribal society there may be no alternative seller. In that case, those who were reluctant to trade might get better prices. It may thus make sense for an owner to be psychologically predisposed to hold out for a high price as soon as someone else expresses interest in one of his possessions—something Dr Huck’s models predict would, indeed, be evolutionarily beneficial.

Dark Knight Director Shuns Digital Effects for the Real Thing

Dark Knight Director Shuns Digital Effects for the Real Thing — but not totally:

"So we got an Imax shot of Christian Bale as Batman standing on top of the Sears Tower," Pfister says. "Here we are with our principal actor standing on the edge of one of the tallest buildings in the world. I think a lot of people will assume that's CGI." Perhaps, but when you see the shot (featured in the first trailer), your eye instinctively detects something different, something thrilling and rare: photographic reality.

Settling for anything less, Nolan feared, would send the Batman franchise back into camp and mummery. That's why he transported his hero to the very real city of Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the real world has its drawbacks. "The Chinese government was a nightmare in terms of filming stuff," Pfister sighs. "They wanted to limit the amount of helicopter activity over the city."

And Nolan needed helicopters. He especially wanted to minimize digital meddling in those high-altitude Imax sequences. His reasons were both aesthetic and practical: Imax film stock is enormous, roughly 10 times the size of 35-mm celluloid, and it soaks up a vast amount of visual information. Those dimensions are what make the image so rich and sharp, even spread over a screen the size of a blimp hangar. While conventional films are digitized at 2K resolution (2,000 pixels across), or 4K at most, adding visual effects to Imax footage requires digitizing each frame at up to 8K. In other words, the difficulty and expense of doing f/x rise exponentially with the size of the negative.

If I may geek out here for a moment — math-geek out, that is — the expense of doing f/x should rise polynomially — quadratically, in fact — with the (linear) size of the negative. An image with twice as many pixels across should have four times as many pixels total — two squared.

What? Why are you looking at me like that?

Scholars set date for Odysseus' bloody homecoming

Scholars set date for Odysseus' bloody homecoming:

Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.

It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers say in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
[...]
Homer reports that on the day of the slaughter the sun is blotted from the sky, possibly a reference to an eclipse. In addition, he mentions more than once that it is the time of a new moon, which is necessary for a total eclipse, the researchers say.

Other clues include:

• Six days before the slaughter, Venus is visible and high in the sky.


• Twenty-nine days before, two constellations — the Pleiades and Bootes — are simultaneously visible at sunset.


• And 33 days before, Mercury is high at dawn and near the western end of its trajectory. This is the researchers' interpretation, anyway. Homer wrote that Hermes, the Greek name for Mercury, traveled far west to deliver a message.

Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap

Almost a year ago I came across Cambridge physics professor David MacKay's Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air.

Now the The Reg is giving the work some mainstream coverage in Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap:

MacKay tells The Reg that he was first drawn into this field by the constant suggestion — from the Beeb, parts of the government etc — that we can seriously impact our personal energy consumption by doing such things as turning our TVs off standby or unplugging our mobile-phone chargers.

Anyone with even a slight grasp of energy units should know that this is madness. Skipping one bath saves a much energy as leaving your TV off standby for over six months. People who wash regularly, wear clean clothes, consume hot food or drink, use powered transport of any kind and live in warm houses have no need to worry about the energy they use to power their electronics; it’s insignificant compared to the other things.

Most of us don’t see basic hygiene, decent food and warm houses as sinful luxuries, but as things we can reasonably expect to have. This means that society as a whole needs a lot of energy, which led MacKay to consider how this might realistically be supplied in a low-carbon fashion. He’s coming at the issues from a green/ecological viewpoint, but climate-change sceptics who are nonetheless concerned about Blighty becoming dependent on Russian gas and Saudi oil — as the North Sea starts to play out — will also find his analysis interesting. Eliminating carbon largely equates to eliminating gas and oil use.

“I don’t really mind too much what your plan is,” MacKay told The Reg this week. “But it’s got to add up.”

Sex, Policy, and Devolution

Tyler Cowen cites a very good sentence from Matt Yglesias:

Liberals tend to believe that sexual orientation is determined by genetics but that gender-difference in behavior is not, whereas conservatives tend to believe the reverse.

Randall Parker (FuturePundit) followed up that liberals only pretend to believe in natural selection:

Also, liberals do not favor policies that will stop natural selection. Rather, they favor policies that will stop some suffering in the short run but which will cause dysgenesis. We are DEVO. D-E-V-O.

Bright Chunks at Phoenix Lander's Mars Site Must Have Been Ice

Bright Chunks at Phoenix Lander's Mars Site Must Have Been Ice:

Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.

Million-Dollar Babies

Preemies can cost 15 times as much to care for as full-term babies — in their first year alone — making some of them Million-Dollar Babies:

Preemies are a quickly expanding class of patients in the U.S., Britain, and other advanced nations. And the costs and technical challenges of caring for them are a growing source of controversy. Nearly 13% of all babies in the U.S. are preemies, a 20% increase since 1990. A 2006 report by the National Academy of Sciences found that the 550,000 preemies born each year in the U.S. run up about $26 billion in annual costs, mostly related to care in NICUs. That represents about half of all the money hospitals spend on newborns. But the number, large as it is, may understate the bill. Norman J. Waitzman, a professor of economics at the University of Utah who worked on the National Academy report, says the study considered just the first five years of the preemies' lives. Factor in the cost of treating all of the possible lifelong disabilities and the years of lost productivity for the caregivers, and the real tab may top $50 billion, Waitzman says.

In the U.S., corporations handle most of the financial burden. Employers generally cover some or all of the hospital charges in their health plans, and they also must deal with lost work hours of staff who spend weeks, sometimes months, attending to their premature infants. Corporations pay out nearly 15 times as much for babies born prematurely in their first year of life as for full-term babies, at an average cost of about $41,000 per child. For the earliest of the preemies, who are born in fewer than 28 weeks and spend up to three months in the hospital, the tab is higher. Says Waitzman: "The million-dollar babies are there."

Ryan was not a million-dollar baby, but he wasn't far from it. The cost for his first two months in the hospital exceeded $400,000, not including certain surgeries and procedures. Because Eric is a technology security expert at the U.S. Energy Dept. and Andrea is an intelligence analyst for a government contractor, the family had good health insurance through the Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program. They could also navigate the government bureaucracy and get Ryan qualified for Medicaid, which covered the bills that Blue Cross didn't. To help pay for a nurse, they applied for another state program in Maryland. "We used to play a game: How many bills would we get?" says Eric. "We got up to 12 per day."

The trend points to more and more "heroic" rescues:

Technological breakthroughs are allowing physicians to save babies at younger and younger ages. Births at 28 weeks are now routine, and the outer edge of viability is 22 weeks. In the next three to five years, doctors could push the threshold to as low as 20 weeks, at which age the infants would weigh about 1 pound, measure 10 inches long, and require even more costly and complicated treatments.

No one wants to admit the enormous opportunity cost of keeping a preemie alive. Not only does preemie care cost a lot, but premature babies often have lingering medical problems and disabilities — and keeping a disabled child typically means having fewer other, healthy children.

Of course, the real reason for all these heroic measures is that they're making some folks a lot of money:

For hospitals struggling with cost overruns in other areas, NICUs can be havens of healthy revenue growth and profits. Children's National sets the goal of 4% profit margins overall, but NICU profits can be double that. Last November the hospital unveiled a $75 million tower that features various specialty units to treat heart and brain problems of preemies. Its expansion plans include a second NICU that will open in 2009. It will have 54 beds, boosting Children's total preemie capacity by 25%. All of the rooms will be private and will be equipped with Internet systems that allow neurologists to monitor brain function from their homes.

Cancer patient recovers after injection of immune cells

Cancer patient recovers after injection of immune cells:

A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors have disclosed.

The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure.

After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs.

Doctors took cells from the man's own defence system that were found to attack the cancer cells best, cloned them and injected back into his body, in a process known as "immunotherapy".

Food Revolution That Starts With Rice

Cornell professor Norman T. Uphoff is leading a Food Revolution That Starts With Rice:

Harvests typically double, he says, if farmers plant early, give seedlings more room to grow and stop flooding fields. That cuts water and seed costs while promoting root and leaf growth.
[...]
Dr. Uphoff grew up on a Wisconsin farm milking cows and doing chores. In 1966, he graduated from Princeton with a master’s degree in public affairs and in 1970 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a doctorate in political science.

At Cornell, he threw himself into rural development, irrigation management and credit programs for small farmers in the developing world.

In 1990, a secret philanthropist (eventually revealed to be Charles F. Feeney, a Cornell alumnus who made billions in duty-free shops) gave the university $15 million to start a program on world hunger. Dr. Uphoff was the institute’s director for 15 years.

The directorship took him in late 1993 to Madagascar. Slash-and-burn rice farming was destroying the rain forest, and Dr. Uphoff sought alternatives.

He heard that a French Jesuit priest, Father Henri de Laulanié, had developed a high-yield rice cultivation method on Madagascar that he called the System of Rice Intensification.

Dr. Uphoff was skeptical. Rice farmers there typically harvested two tons per hectare (an area 100 by 100 meters, or 2.47 acres). The group claimed 5 to 15 tons.

“I remember thinking, ‘Do they think they can scam me?’ ” Dr. Uphoff recalled. “I told them, ‘Don’t talk 10 or 15 tons. No one at Cornell will believe it. Let’s shoot for three or four.’ ”

Dr. Uphoff oversaw field trials for three years, and the farmers averaged eight tons per hectare. Impressed, he featured S.R.I. on the cover of his institute’s annual reports for 1996 and 1997.

Dr. Uphoff never met the priest, who died in 1995. But the success prompted him to scrutinize the method and its origins.

One clear advantage was root vigor. The priest, during a drought, had noticed that rice plants and especially roots seemed much stronger. That led to the goal of keeping fields damp but not flooded, which improved soil aeration and root growth.

Moreover, wide spacing let individual plants soak up more sunlight and send out more tillers — the shoots that branch to the side. Plants would send out upwards of 100 tillers. And each tiller, instead of bearing the usual 100 or so grains, would puff up with 200 to 500 grains.

One drawback was weeds. The halt to flooding let invaders take root, and that called for more weeding. A simple solution was a rotating, hand-pushed hoe, which also aided soil aeration and crop production.

But that meant more labor, at least at first. It seemed that as farmers gained skill, and yields rose, the overall system became labor saving compared with usual methods.

Dr. Uphoff knew the no-frills approach went against the culture of modern agribusiness but decided it was too good to ignore. In 1998, he began promoting it beyond Madagascar, traveling the world, “sticking my neck out,” as he put it.

Slowly, it caught on, but visibility brought critics.

The verdict isn't in yet.

Bumper stickers reveal link to road rage

Bumper stickers reveal link to road rage — something I'd long suspected:

Bumper stickers such as “Make Love, Not War” and “More Trees, Less Bush” speak volumes about a vehicle's driver — but maybe not in the way they might hope. People who customize their cars with stickers and other adornments are more prone to road rage than other people, according to researchers in Colorado.
[...]
The researchers recorded whether people had added seat covers, bumper stickers, special paint jobs, stereos and even plastic dashboard toys. They also asked questions about how the participants responded to specific driving situations.

To keep the participants from realizing that the team was collecting information about aggressive driving, questions such as “If someone is driving slow in the fast lane, how angry does this make you?” were interspersed with decoy questions such as “What kind of music do you listen to in the car?”. Szlemko's team used a pre-existing scale called “Use of vehicle to express anger” to diagnose the presence of road rage in their participants.

People who had a larger number of personalized items on or in their car were 16% more likely to engage in road rage, the researchers report in the journal Applied Social Psychology.

“The number of territory markers predicted road rage better than vehicle value, condition or any of the things that we normally associate with aggressive driving,” say Szlemko. What's more, only the number of bumper stickers, and not their content, predicted road rage — so "Jesus saves" may be just as worrying to fellow drivers as "Don't mess with Texas".

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol — or, rather, they create them:

Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory — funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems — Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.

The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.

Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.

The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.

“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.

ADHD an advantage for nomadic tribesmen?

Is ADHD an advantage for nomadic tribesmen? Yeah:

A study led by Dan Eisenberg, an anthropology graduate student from Northwestern University in the US, analyzed the correlates of body mass index (BMI) and height with two genetic polymorphisms in dopamine receptor genes, in particular the 48 base pair (bp) repeat polymorphism in the dopamine receptor D4 (DRD4) gene.

The DRD4 gene codes for a receptor for dopamine, one of the chemical messengers used in the brain. According to Eisenberg "this gene is likely to be involved in impulsivity, reward anticipation and addiction"