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University scientists in black hole hunt
BBC -- Scientists from Durham University are leading the hunt for black holes. A team is heading for Africa to help set up one of the world's most advanced telescope arrays. The High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) will be based in Namibia and search for gamma rays - found close to black holes. The scientists will also be looking at how gamma radiation affects the human body.

posted by West 1:39 PM

 

Brain picks up language early, powerfully
HANOVER, N.H., Aug. 29 (UPI) -- Canadian and U.S. researchers have found each bite-sized syllable of nascent speech uttered by infants originates straight from the brain's language centers, revealing these bio-circuits go online much earlier than thought. For decades, many scientists had assumed when babies babbled, they merely were exercising their lips, tongue and jaws for the day when they started talking. Instead, the brain's initiation of speech is "up and running much earlier than we ever knew," researcher Laura-Ann Petitto, a cognitive neuroscientist at Dartmouth College, told United Press International. This suggests doctors one day may detect potential language problems in very young babies "before they even utter their first word," Petitto said. Meanwhile, research from Italy and France has found learning a language requires complex statistics and algebra-like thinking more intense than previously reported. "This research contributes to our understanding of the property that is most characteristic of the human species -- language," said researcher Jacques Mehler, a cognitive psychologist at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy. "It may explain why we are able to acquire grammatical systems while other organisms are not, even when they are our close ancestors."

posted by West 1:35 PM

 

Couples asked to donate to embryo bank
timesonline.co.uk -- STEM cells from thousands of human embryos are to be stored for use by medical researchers. The Medical Research Council will announce next month that it is to create the world’s first stem-cell bank. The Department of Health welcomed the proposals last night and confirmed that the bank will include human cells from embryos as well as those from adults. “We welcome the initiative. The cell bank will provide researchers with accredited cell lines which have been ethically derived with proper consent from donors,” a spokeswoman said. Scientists believe that the study of human embryo cells could allow the development of new treatments for a vast range of diseases, including Parkinson's and diabetes. However, the decision will lead to consternation among some religious groups and scientists about the destruction of large numbers of human embryos Woman who undergo IVF treatment will be asked to donate excess embryos to the bank. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has been working with the MRC to draw up consent forms. It said it would ensure that couples did not face any undue pressure. The creation of a stem-cell bank comes after it was recommended by a group of experts, chaired by Professor Liam Donaldson, the Government's Chief Medical Officer, in August 2000. The committee said that regulated cloning for research into new therapies should be allowed but that reproductive cloning should remain illegal.

posted by West 6:22 PM

 

Gene Separates Early Humans from Apes
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A gene that separates humans from the apes and all other animals seems to have disappeared from humans up to three million years ago, after they first stood upright but before their brains started to grow, researchers said on Monday. Most animals have the gene but people do not -- and it may be somehow involved in the expansion of the brain, the international team of researchers said. The gene controls production of a sialic acid -- a kind of sugar -- called Neu5Gc, the researchers write in an advance online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "This mutation occurred after our last common ancestor with bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) and chimpanzees, and before the origin of present-day humans," they wrote. Neanderthal skeletons, the oldest early humans from who DNA has been obtained, also lack the sugar. "It happens to be first known genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees where there is a major outcome," Ajit Varki of the University of California San Diego, who led the research, said in a telephone interview. "We are exploring the consequences of this." Varki said the role of the gene is not fully understood.

posted by West 12:02 PM

 

Second cloned endangered animal on the way
UPI -- A Massachusetts biotech company appears to be just several months away from the successful birth of the second ever endangered species to be cloned, United Press International has learned. The company, Advanced Cell Technology, of Worcester, successfully implanted cloned embryos of a type of wild cattle called a Banteng into surrogate cow mothers two months ago and "everything looks excellent," said Robert Lanza, vice president of medical and scientific development at the firm. The cow has a 9-month gestation period, so birth is expected in 7 months, Lanza said. A total of 16 cows are pregnant with the cloned embryos at an undisclosed facility in Iowa.

posted by West 10:08 AM

 

Cloned pigs raise human transplant hopes
BBC -- A British biotechnology company is claiming a breakthrough in the quest to create organs for transplant from pigs into humans. PPL Therapeutics, based near Edinburgh in Scotland, says it has created the first so-called "double knock-out" pigs, genetically-engineered to lack both copies of a gene which causes rejection. Scientists have given a mixed reaction to the claim. Some experts say it represents a genuine advance, while others caution that it is one small step along a very long road.

posted by West 5:33 PM

 

Wildlife park to clone mammoth
CNN -- In an eerie recreation of Steven Spielberg's blockbuster movie "Jurassic Park", scientists are planning to clone an extinct animal to be the central attraction of a wildlife park.

The Times of London reports that Japanese scientists are planning to use tissue from the legs and testicles of a dead mammoth to clone the extinct creature and display it at an Ice Age wildlife park in Siberia.

Mammoths became extinct about 10,000 years ago, but using a technique that involves impregnating an Indian elephant -- its closest genetic relative -- with mammoth sperm and then repeating the procedure with its offspring could produce a creature that is 88 percent mammoth in 50 years, the report said.

An alternative technique would involve cloning the mammoth from DNA found in the soft tissue, but although methods of extraction have improved, complete strands of DNA from mammoths are still hard to come by.

posted by West 7:31 PM

 

Scientists find way to 'type with eyes'
independent.co.uk -- Computer scientists have devised a method of "typing" without a keyboard using clever software that creates words and sentences using eye movements alone.

Two Cambridge University researchers have shown that their invention does not result in eye-strain, is just as fast as conventional typing and results in fewer mistakes.

David Ward and David MacKay, physicists in the university's Cavendish Laboratory, are making the software freely available in the hope that computer firms will use the idea, which promises to revolutionise technology for the disabled.

In a study published today in the journal Nature, the scientists say that the system, which monitors the gaze of the user's eye to type up to 34 words a minute, is faster and more reliable than similar "on-screen" keyboards that rely on eye movements.

The software works by following the eye with a tracker and camera as it runs along a list of letters arranged in alphabetical order on the screen. When the eye fixes on a letter, the computer offers a series of intelligent choices about what the next letter should be.

Dr Ward and Dr MacKay say that it is like choosing a desired piece of text from an enormous library of books on a shelf. Instead of choosing each letter in turn, writing becomes like a navigational task.

"The software works like a video game in which the user steers even deeper into an enormous library. A language model is used to shape this library in such a way that it's quick and easy to select probable sequences of characters, and hard to make spelling mistakes," Dr MacKay said.

To write "hello", the user first gazes on the letter "h" and automatically finds a series of further choices beginning "ha", "hb", "hc and so on. The user enters "he" and the computer offers up the next most likely option, including "hel".

posted by West 7:27 PM

 

Racing to the 'God Particle'
wired.com -- Physicists from all over the world are racing to prove the existence of a particle that's surmised to be at the heart of the matter. Literally. Dubbed the "God particle" by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, the Higgs boson is a controversial particle believed to bestow mass on all other particles.

posted by West 8:22 AM

 

'Handmade' cloning cheap and easy
NewScientist.com -- Handmade cloning, a new way to create genetically identical copies of animals, is not only cheaper and simpler than existing methods, but appears to work better too. "It's so much simpler than anything we are doing today, it's dramatic," says Michael Bishop, ex-president of Infigen, a cattle-cloning company in Wisconsin. "It's a huge step towards roboticising the whole process." Fusing half-eggs with a cell creates an embryo. The technique could speed up the introduction of cloning in farming, where the aim is to clone the best milk or meat-producing animals. And conservationists in South Africa could soon use it to clone endangered species. The technique was developed by Gábor Vajta at the Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Tjele together with Ian Lewis, programme leader for the Cooperative Research Centre for Innovative Dairy Products in Australia. Details of the method will soon be published. At the moment, the key instrument in cloning is the "micromanipulator", an expensive machine that allows a skilled technician to grab an egg cell under the microscope, insert a very fine needle to suck out its nucleus, and then use another needle to transfer a nucleus from the animal to be cloned. An alternative is to fuse the empty egg with a cell from the animal. Either way, it is a tricky and time-consuming process. In the new technique, egg cells are split in half under a microscope using a very thin blade (see graphic). The halves quickly seal up. A dye is used to identify the halves containing the nucleus, which are then discarded, leaving only empty "cytoplasts". To create a cloned embryo, a cell from an adult animal is fused first with one cytoplast, then another, by briefly zapping them with an electric current.

posted by West 4:41 PM

 

Cross-species testes transplant successful
NewScientist.com -- Testis tissue from goats and pigs has been grafted onto the backs of mice and shown to produce normal sperm, capable of fertilising eggs. It is the first time testis tissue from such distant species has produced mature sperm when grafted in mice. "It might work for primates or even humans," claims Ina Dobrinski of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the co-authors of the study.

posted by West 4:39 PM

 

Opposition to Nanotechnology
The New York Times -- The great Gray Goo debate is beginning to matter. The controversy involves the potential perils of making molecular-size objects and devices, a field known as nanotechnology. From its earliest days, nanotechnology has had its fear-mongers, warning of novel and terrifying risks. Who could be sure how products so small that they would be invisible to the human eye would behave, particularly when the nanoworld's basic design elements — atoms and small molecules — are governed by the surreal laws of quantum mechanics rather than the more familiar Newtonian physics of large objects? The ultimate nightmare was the so-called Gray Goo catastrophe, in which self-replicating microscopic robots the size of bacteria fill the world and wipe out humanity. Until recently, though, the debate was restricted to the relatively small community of nanotechnology researchers and experts. The risks they discussed often seemed cartoony or vague compared with the dazzling breakthroughs they projected in fields like medicine, supercomputing, energy and environmental cleanup. Now, though, nanotechnology is toddling into commercialization, with nanoscale particles being embedded in consumer products like sunscreens, stain-resistant khakis and wound dressings. A number of companies are racing to scale up production of carbon nanotubes — molecule-size cylinders of carbon with unusual electrical, thermal and structural properties. For the first time, nanotechnology is encountering the kind of real-world headwinds that have impeded biotechnology.

posted by West 4:34 PM

 

Nonprofit Genome Group Sets Up New Center
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Genome mogul Craig Venter announced he was back in business on Thursday with a new, not-for-profit venture aimed at a faster, better and cheaper approach to mapping DNA. Venter, who left the top position in January at the genome company he helped found, Celera Genomics, said he was helping set up a nonprofit center equipped with the latest equipment to sequencing genomes as quickly as possible. "This will be bigger than existing centers," Venter said in a telephone interview. Celera was the best-known private company trying to make money off genome sequencing, and Venter left as Celera changed its business model to concentrate more on developing drugs. His new effort will combine work from The Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, as well as two groups set up with Venter cash -- the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives and The Center for the Advancement of Genomics. It will be bankrolled initially by the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation, set up with some of the profits Venter made in earlier initiatives, including the founding of the now-rival Human Genome Sciences Inc. "We decided to just expand what TIGR was doing plus our two other institutions into a new mega-center nearby the TIGR campuses," Venter said. "The need for sequencing all the way around is increasing quite substantially."

posted by West 1:24 PM

 

Mice first to produce other species' sperm
UPI -- In a scientific first with possible implications for endangered species and infertile males, mice bearing testicular tissue transplanted from newborn animals have produced sperm from other species, researchers report. The authors of the study, published in the Aug. 15 issue of the British journal Nature, contend the feat may lead to novel ways to preserve the lifelines of animals on the brink of extinction and prized livestock, as well as new alternatives for men incapable of siring children. Some scientists not involved in the study questioned whether the research will net such end-results, however. In the experiments, male mice produced working gametes first from other mice, then from pigs and goats.

posted by West 1:21 PM

 

Jumping genes delete sections of DNA
ANN ARBOR, Mich., Aug. 8 (UPI) -- So-called jumping genes appear to be able to delete sections of DNA, an effect that could cause disease and have profound implications for the evolution of the human genome, a new study reveals. It was known previously that components of DNA called Line 1 elements jumped around, inserted themselves in the middle of genes and had disruptive effects, but this is the first time it has been shown they actually can delete significant portions of DNA, John Moran, an author of the study and assistant professor of human genetics and internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, said in describing the results of the research. These L1 elements technically are classified as transposons -- bits of DNA that can move around to different positions on the genome of a single cell -- could have implications for causing disease, but some of the deletions also may be beneficial, Moran told United Press International. Haig Kazazian, chairman of the University of Pennsylvania's department of genetics and author of an accompanying review of transposons, said the study shows L1 elements "could have substantial effect on the evolution of the genome and how it's changing."

posted by West 8:49 AM

 

Dogs Being Trained To Smell Cancer
CLEVELAND -- Researchers have found a new way to hunt for cancer cells, possibly before even the most sensitive equipment could detect them. They're not using expensive hospital equipment, but rather, man's best friend. Shing Ling, 2, is more than just a furry companion for researcher Michael McCulloch. He and other researchers are developing a pilot program to train dogs to identify who has cancer. "(Cancer patients) have a different bouquet of odor that's detectable to the dog," he said. McCulloch collects breath samples for both lung cancer patients and healthy patients. Shing Ling is being trained to detect which is which.

posted by West 8:25 AM

 

RIVERS OF GRAVITY: Discovery sheds light on dark matter
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Aug. 1 (UPI) -- Four independent teams of scientists have found massive filaments of hot gas that snake through the universe like an intergalactic web and may lead to new clues about the mysterious substance called dark matter. The gas filaments not only account for many times the material that is contained in all the visible stars and galaxies, but they also suggest where even more matter might be found because the gas clouds seem to have been shaped by rivers of gravity, the scientists said. At present, no one can account for more than about 10 percent of the matter cosmologists say is necessary to allow the gravitational behavior of the universe. For example, the clusters of stars that comprise most galaxies should not be able to clump together at the speeds at which they orbit galactic cores. The rest of the universe apparently is composed of dark matter, which so far has remained shielded from view. The new findings, from the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory -- a less-well-known cousin of the Hubble Space Telescope that studies the universe in wavelengths beyond those of visible light -- could provide valuable insight into the location of the missing mass because cosmologists think the gas filaments were formed by the gravitational influence of dark matter. "These observations are a major advance in our understanding of how the universe evolved over the last 10 billion years," said Fabrizio Nicastro, who heads the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

posted by West 11:07 PM