Parkinson’s disease was first identified 200 years ago, but so far, there is no cure. Most people have the disease for many years before it’s diagnosed, making it too late for effective treatment. So scientists are focusing on research in an effort to stop the disease before symptoms appear. VOA’s Deborah Block has more during Parkinson’s awareness month in the United States.
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Researchers in Britain have shown that genetic manipulation can prevent or slow the symptoms of Parkinson’s, in the inherited form of the disease. That’s a minority of Parkinson’s patients, but the researchers are learning more about what causes nerve cells in the brain to die. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Three university engineering graduates in Uganda are taking on one of the leading killers of young children in Africa – pneumonia. They say the prototype of their invention, a “smart jacket” they have named Mama’s Hope, can diagnose the illness faster and more accurately than the current medical protocol.
Four-month-old Nakato Christine writhes on a hospital bed, breathing fast. On the other end of the bed is her twin sister, in the same condition.
Nakato coughs as Senior Nurse Kyebatala Loy adjusts the nasal gastric tube.
“They have been put on oxygen because they have difficulty in breathing and the feeding is also difficult because of their fast breathing,” Kyebatala said.
Since January, 352 babies have been admitted with pneumonia to pediatric ward 16 at Mulago National Referral Hospital in Kampala.
Pneumonia is the leading infectious cause of death for children under five years of age in Africa and south Asia, according to the World Health Organization. In 2015, pneumonia killed nearly a million children worldwide.
A key problem is the challenge involved in diagnosing the disease. The sooner the sick children start receiving antibiotics, the better their chance of survival. But health workers armed with stethoscopes and thermometers can miss the infection in its early stage. Dr. Flavia Mpanga of the U.N. Children’s Fund in Kampala says other methods, like the respiratory timer, can lead to misdiagnosis.
“If you see the respiratory timer, it’s got a ticking mechanism that confuses the community health workers. When they are taking the breathe rates, they confuse the ticking sound of the respiratory timer with the breathe rates and every child is almost diagnosed with pneumonia,” said Dr. Mpanga.
She says over-diagnosis means some children are taking antibiotics they don’t need, which is also a public health problem.
A trio of recent university engineering graduates in Uganda think they have an answer. They have been working with the Mulago School of Public Health to test a prototype of their invention, the smart jacket, called Mama’s Hope.
Two of the inventors, 26-year-old Beseufekad Shifferaw and 25-year-old Brian Turyabagye, gave VOA a demonstration.
“Ahh so…[zipper sound]… the jacket…is placed on the child…first, this goes around the child and then the falcon fastening is placed, and then the flaps are placed…[fade out]”
“This jacket will simply measure the vital signs of pneumonia. That is the breathing rate, the state of the lungs and the temperature,” said Turyabagye. “Now those signs are transmitted to our unit here, through which a health worker can read off the readings, which include cough, chest pains, nausea or difficulty in breathing. With those additional signs and symptoms, they are coupled with the result that has been measured by the jacket and it gives a more accurate diagnosis result.”
For now, it is just a prototype. But the inventors say their tests have shown that the smart jacket can diagnose pneumonia three times faster than traditional exams.
UNICEF has put the team in touch with its office in Copenhagen in charge of innovations to help them advance in the pre-trial stage. Dr. Mpanga sees potential.
“My only hope is that this jacket can reach a commercial value and be regulatory-body approved so that it can help the whole world,” said Dr. Mpanga.
Dr. Mpanga says taking the guess work out of pneumonia diagnosis could save countless lives in the developing world.
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Shaking, slowness of movement and difficulty talking, those are the most obvious symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The progressive neurological disorder affects the way the brain connects with muscles. It has no cure, and the treatments address only the symptoms. April is Parkinson’s Awareness Month. Faiza Elmasry has more. VOA’s Faith Lapidus narrates.
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As humans struggle to control the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet, scientists are searching for natural ways to remove them from the atmosphere. One group of researchers is drilling deep into a mountain range in Oman, looking for answers to how nature turns carbon dioxide gas into rock. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
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An emergency-room doctor in the U.S. Midwest has been arrested and charged with performing female genital mutilation on girls between the ages of 6 and 8, in the first criminal case brought under a 1996 law that outlawed the practice.
Jumana Nagarwala, a 44-year-old doctor at a hospital in Detroit, Michigan, is accused of performing genital mutilation on young girls as far back as 2005, according to a criminal complaint released Thursday. The U.S. Department of Justice said she “performed horrifying acts of brutality on the most vulnerable victims.”
Nagarwala had an initial court appearance before a U.S. magistrate Thursday in Detroit and was ordered detained until Monday, pending a further hearing on the felony charges she is facing, which specifically involve two 7-year-old girls she operated on in February.
Senior officials called the charges “disturbing” and “deplorable,” and said U.S. law-enforcement agencies “are committed to doing whatever is necessary to bring an end to this barbaric practice, and to ensure no additional children fall victim to this procedure.”
Physician denies charges
A preliminary criminal complaint released by the U.S. Department of Justice said Nagarwala told federal agents she knew that performing female genital mutilation is a crime in the United States and denied that she conducted the procedure on anyone.
Nagarwala, who received her medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, has been licensed as a physician in Michigan since 2001; state records show no formal complaints or disciplinary action against her. Her lawyer, Shannon Smith, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case.
If convicted, Nagarwala faces a fine and up to five years in prison for performing female genital mutilation, also known as FGM. She would be the first person prosecuted under the 1996 law prohibiting FGM.
In the most recent case outlined in the complaint, the FBI, using court-ordered telephone records and video surveillance, tracked two Minnesota mothers and their 7-year-old daughters as they visited Nagarwala at a medical office near Detroit, and where the physician allegedly performed FGM procedures on the girls two months ago.
Examination confirms FGM
One of the children told an investigator this week that they were in Michigan to see a doctor because “our tummies hurt,” and were examined by Nagarwala. The doctor reportedly told the girl she was going to perform a procedure to “get the germs out” of her body.
Doctors who examined the girls this week confirmed that their genital areas were “abnormal” and bore signs of mutilation.
The girls were interviewed by an FBI child forensic expert and identified Nagarwala as the doctor who operated on them. The parents of one of the victims later admitted to the FBI that they had taken their daughter to Nagarwala for a “cleansing” of extra skin.
The hospital that employed Nagarwala apparently was not involved in the case, and the physician was not listed as having any links to the office in Livonia, outside Detroit, where she examined the girls.
Agents of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, who worked together on the case, said they have identified multiple other incidents where young girls have been victims of FGM allegedly performed by Nagarwala between 2005 and 2007, according to the criminal complaint.
“Female genital mutilation constitutes a particularly brutal form of violence against women and girls,” acting U.S. Attorney Daniel Lemisch of the Eastern District of Michigan said in a statement. “The practice has no place in modern society and those who perform FGM on minors will be held accountable under federal law.”
Female genital mutilation, sometimes called female circumcision, is the ritual removal of some or all of the external female genitalia. The practice is found in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and last year UNICEF estimated that 200 million women alive today in 30 countries — 27 African nations, Indonesia, Iraqi Kurdistan and Yemen — have undergone the procedure.
Many U.S. women at risk
Although it is illegal, female genital mutilation is practiced in some African diaspora communities in the United States. According to a 2012 study by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, more than 500,000 women and girls were at risk of female genital mutilation or its consequences in the United States, more than three times higher than an earlier estimate based on 1990 census data. The study said the increase was due to rapid growth in the number of immigrants from countries where the procedure is commonly practiced.
In 2012, Congress passed a law making it illegal to transport a girl outside the United States for the purpose of performing FGM.
The practice is rooted in attempts to control women’s sexuality and ideas about purity, modesty and beauty that persist in some communities. It is usually initiated and carried out by women, some of whom see it as an honorable practice, or who fear that failing to have their daughters and granddaughters cut will expose the girls to social exclusion.
There are no known health benefits from female circumcision, but a wide range of complications can result: recurrent infections, difficulty urinating and passing menstrual flow, chronic pain, the development of cysts, an inability to get pregnant, complications during childbirth and even fatal bleeding.
A survivor’s story
“When we think of female genital mutilation, we usually think of African cultures and non-Christian religions,” said Renee Bergstrom, an American survivor of genital cutting. “However, my FGM took place in white Midwest America.”
Bergstrom and other women discussed the issue in a video produced by the U.S. State Department and posted online last month.
Until Nagarwala’s arrest, the most high-profile case related to FGM in the United States was that of a father in the state of Georgia. Khalid Adem, an Ethiopian citizen, was deported last month after serving 10 years in prison for using scissors to cut the genitals of his 2-year-old daughter. He was charged with aggravated battery and cruelty to children, not under terms of the federal FGM law invoked in Nagarwala’s case.
VOA’s Victoria Macchi contributed to this story.
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People living in arid, drought-ridden areas may soon be able to get water straight from a source that’s all around them — the air, American researchers said Thursday.
Scientists have developed a box that can convert low-humidity air into water, producing several liters every 12 hours, they wrote in the journal Science.
“It takes water from the air and it captures it,” said Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-author of the paper.
The technology could be “really great for remote areas where there’s really limited infrastructure,” she said.
The system, which is currently in the prototype phase, uses a material that resembles powdery sand to trap air in its tiny pores. When heated by the sun or another source, water molecules in the trapped air are released and condensed — essentially “pulling” the water out of the air, the scientists said.
A recent test on a roof at MIT confirmed that the system can produce about a glass of water every hour in 20 to 30 percent humidity.
Companies like Water-Gen and EcoloBlue already produce atmospheric water-generation units that create water from air.
What is special about this new prototype, though, is that it can cultivate water in low-humidity environments using no energy, Wang said.
“It doesn’t have to be this complicated system that requires some kind refrigeration cycle,” she said in an interview with Reuters.
An estimated one-third of the world’s population lives in areas with low relative humidity, the scientists said. Areas going through droughts often experience dry air, but Wang said the new product could help them still get access to water.
“Now we can get to regions that really are pretty dry, arid regions,” she said. “We can provide them with a device, and they can use it pretty simply.”
The technology opens the door for what co-author Omar Yaghi called “personalized water.”
Yaghi, a chemistry professor at University of California, Berkeley, envisions a future where the water is produced off-grid for individual homes and possibly farms using the device.
“This application extends beyond drinking water and household purposes, off grid,” he said. “It opens the way for use of [the technology] to water large regions as in agriculture.”
In the next few years, Wang said, the developers hope to find a way to reproduce the devices on a large scale and eventually create a formal product. The resulting device, she believes, will be relatively affordable and accessible.
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A fossil found by an elk hunter in Montana nearly seven years ago has led to the discovery of a new species of prehistoric sea creature that lived about 70 million years ago in the inland sea that flowed east of the Rocky Mountains.
The new species of elasmosaur is detailed in an article published Thursday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Most elasmosaurs, a type of marine reptile, had necks that could stretch 18 feet, but the fossil discovered in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge is distinct for its much shorter neck — about 7{ feet.
“This group is famous for having ridiculously long necks, I mean necks that have as many as 76 vertebrae,” said Patrick Druckenmiller, co-author of the article and a paleontologist with the University of Alaska Museum of the North. “What absolutely shocked us when we dug it out — it only had somewhere around 40 vertebrae.”
The smaller sea creature lived around the same time and in the same area as the larger ones, which is evidence contradicting the belief that elasmosaurs did not evolve over millions of years to have longer necks, co-author Danielle Serratos said.
Elasmosaurs were carnivorous creatures with small heads and paddle-like limbs that could grow as long as 30 feet. Their fossils have been discovered across the world, and the one discovered in northeastern Montana was well-preserved and nearly complete.
Hunter David Bradt came across the exposed fossil encased in rock while he was hunting for elk in the wildlife refuge in November 2010, Druckenmiller said. He recognized it as a fossil, took photographs and alerted a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee.
The refuge along the Missouri River is popular with hunters for its big game and remote setting.
“This is a vast, remote and rugged place that has changed very little since Lewis and Clark passed through these lands more than 200 years ago,” refuge manager Paul Santavy said.
Bradt, who lives in Florence, Montana, did not immediately return a call for comment.
It took three days to excavate the fossil, but much longer to clean and study it before the determination could be made that it was a new species, Druckenmiller said.
He and Serratos submitted their findings to the journal last year.
Druckenmiller said the inland sea that stretched the width of Montana to Minnesota and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico was teeming with marine reptiles, but relatively few of their fossils have been excavated.
“It’s a total bias — just more people out there are interested in land-living dinosaurs than marine reptiles,” he said. “There would be a lot more known if more people were studying them.”
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The world’s most experienced spacewoman says she’s thrilled to get an extra three months off the planet.
The commander of the International Space Station, Peggy Whitson, told the Associated Press on Thursday that five months into her mission, she’s still not bored. She misses cooking, though, and a diverse menu. Plus, she’s afraid there isn’t much chocolate left to celebrate Easter this Sunday.
Earlier this month, NASA announced Whitson will stay up until September, stretching her mission to nearly 10 months. NASA is taking advantage of an empty seat in a Russian Soyuz capsule for her return.
The 57-year-old Whitson — the oldest woman to fly in space — is on the verge of setting a U.S. record for most accumulated time in space. This is her third space station stint.
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government introduced legislation Thursday to let adults possess 30 grams of marijuana in public – a measure that would make Canada the largest developed country to end a nationwide prohibition on recreational marijuana.
Trudeau has long promised to legalize recreational pot use and sales. U.S voters in California, Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada voted last year to approve the use of recreational marijuana, joining Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska.
The South American nation of Uruguay is the only nation to legalize recreational pot.
The proposed law allows four plants to be grown at home. Those under 18 found with small amounts of marijuana would not face criminal charges.
Officials said Canadians should be able to smoke marijuana legally by July 1, 2018. The federal government set the age at 18, but is allowing each of Canada’s provinces to determine if it should be higher. The provinces will also decide how the drug will be distributed and sold. The law also defines the amount of THC in a driver’s blood, as detected by a roadside saliva test, that would be illegal. Marijuana taxes will be announced at a later date.
The Canadian government closely followed the advice of a marijuana task force headed by former Liberal Health Minister Anne McLellan. That panel’s report noted public health experts tend to favor a minimum age of 21 as the brain continues to develop to about 25, but said setting the minimum age too high would preserve the illicit market.
Canadian youth have higher rates of cannabis use than their peers worldwide.
“If your objective is to protect public health and safety and keep cannabis out of the hands of minors, and stop the flow of profits to organized crime, then the law as it stands today has been an abject failure,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told a news conference. “Police forces spend between $2 billion and $3 billion every year trying to deal with cannabis, and yet Canadian teenagers are among the heaviest users in the western world … We simply have to do better.”
Goodale said they’ve been close touch with the U.S. government on the proposed law and noted exporting and importing marijuana will continue to be illegal.
“The regime we are setting up in Canada will protect our kids better and stop the flow of illegal dollars to organized crime. Our system will actually be the better one,” Goodale said
Former Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, who is the parliamentary secretary to the justice minister, said officials learned from the experiences from other jurisdictions like Colorado and Washington state.
While the government moves to legalize marijuana, retail outlets selling pot for recreational use have already been set up. Trudeau has emphasized current laws should be respected. Police in Toronto, Vancouver and other cities raided stores earlier last month and made arrests.
The news that Canada was soon going to announce the law was noticed online last month by Snoop Dogg , who tweeted “Oh Canada!” Canadian folk singer Pat Robitaille released a “Weed song” to coincide with the government’s announcement.
The number of newly diagnosed childhood cancer cases worldwide rose by 13 percent during the past two decades, according to an agency of the World Health Organization.
In a study published in the journal The Lancet Oncology, researchers with the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, reported the incidence of childhood cancer was 140 per million per year from 2001-2010 among children up to age 14.
The incidence was 124 per million cancers annually throughout the 1980’s, according to data from a previous IARC study.
Eva Steliarova-Foucher works in the cancer surveillance section of the IARC, which is part of the WHO.
She said cancers that strike adults, notably cancers of the breast, colon and prostate, are often caused by genetic mutations that accumulate over time.
In children, she said, the disease is likely due to a genetic predisposition, adding that children tend to get different cancers than adults.
“The first most common cancer in children is leukemia, and this was seen in all the regions. And then it is followed by cancers of the central nervous system in mostly high-income countries, and it was lymphoma in the other world, in low-income countries.”
The data were collected from 153 cancer registries in 62 countries, departments and territories covering about 10 percent of the world’s children.
The best records of childhood cancers were from Western countries, including the United States, which kept records on almost 100 percent of sick children. Five percent or less of the data came from Africa and Asia, according to the report. In those low resource settings, Steliarova-Foucher says many cancers may go undiagnosed because of a lack of awareness and the unavailability of diagnostic equipment.
But she stresses that collection of data is important because, “You need to know how many cases there will be in the next years so that you have enough amenities to take care of these children. You need to know how much their treatment will cost also. So, these data provide the first indicator of the burden (of cancer) in this population.”
For the first time, the IARC report also gathered cancer data on adolescents, between the ages of 15 and 19. The incidence there was 185 cancers in one million teens each year, with lymphoma and melanoma at the top of the list.
By knowing the incidence of childhood cancer, Steliarova-Foucher says researchers can begin to identify some of the factors that may contribute to childhood cancer, including environmental pollutants and infections, which might be avoided.
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Restaurant inspectors found 13 violations at Mar-a-Lago, the exclusive Florida resort owned by President Donald Trump, the Miami Herald reported.
Undercooled meat, potentially dangerous raw fish and two broken coolers were among the problems found at the private club that charges $200,000 in initiation fees and has become known as the Southern White House, the newspaper reported late Wednesday.
Neither Mar-a-Lago nor the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, which last inspected the club on Jan. 26, immediately responded to Reuters requests for comment Thursday.
Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985. This weekend, he is to make his seventh trip to the Palm Beach property as the 45th president of the United States.
Violations found just days before the state visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe included failure to use proper parasite destruction on fish intended to be served raw or undercooked, the Herald reported, quoting the inspection report.
Inspectors ordered that the fish be cooked immediately or tossed out.
Inside the broken coolers, inspectors found raw meats meant to be stored at 41 degrees that were potentially dangerously warm, including ham at 57 degrees, raw beef at 50 degrees, duck at 50 degrees and chicken at 49 degrees, the newspaper said.
Other violations included sinks with water too cold to sanitize hands and rusty shelves inside walk-in coolers.
Three were “high priority” violations, meaning they could allow for illness-causing bacteria in meals served in the dining room, the newspaper said.
Mar-a-Lago was issued a citation for the broken coolers, which the club was ordered to empty and repair.
It was not the first time a Trump eatery has gotten negative publicity since his November 2016 election. The restaurant in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City was reviewed by Vanity Fair in December 2016 under the headline “Trump Grill Could Be the Worst Restaurant in America.”
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Sleep deprivation has been linked to weakened immune systems and could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions, so it is no wonder many Americans are looking to apps to help them sleep.
A new analysis of the 35 popular apps available to download has led researchers to say the apps need improvement.
There are hundreds of sleep apps available for Android devices or iPhones, most use soothing sounds to help people fall asleep. But researchers say less than half of the apps they looked at offered any “general information about sleep” or explain the hazards of not getting enough sleep.
“We were surprised that some of the apps didn’t say anything about the recommended amount of sleep someone should get on a regular basis,” said University of Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Diana Grigsby-Toussaint, who led the new analysis with colleagues at the New York University School of Medicine . “And there weren’t a lot of apps that had any information about the benefits of sleep.”
They also looked at whether the apps “include reminder messages to help users meet their sleep goals,” where they linked to social media so that the user could get positive reinforcement from friends, and did they provide information about what habits enhanced or interfered with sleep.
Most importantly, did the apps help the users sleep?
“From a population health perspective, I really see this as how do we use these apps in terms of educating people about the importance of sleep,” she said. “And how do you then use the apps as a tool to help people to get to that point where they do engage in healthy sleeping habits?”
According to the researchers, many of the apps were well designed, but “just four of the 35 apps described the health risks associated with not getting enough sleep, like high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and depression.”
Just four provided information about habits that can cause sleep problems such as drinking alcohol or caffeine before bedtime. Only six had “sleep reminders,” and only one “included rewards or praise for success in reaching one’s goals.”
The analysis was published in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports.
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Much like human soldiers in combat, members of a large, black, termite-eating ant species found in sub-Saharan Africa march in formation into battle and afterward retrieve wounded comrades and carry them back home to recover.
Scientists on Wednesday described the unique rescue behavior of the African Matabele ants, called Megaponera analis, after observing them in Ivory Coast’s Comoé National Park, but did not ascribe charitable motives to the insects.
“This is not an altruistic behavior,” said entomologist Erik Frank of the University of Würzburg in Germany, who led the research published in the journal Science Advances.
“The ants do not help the injured out of the goodness of their hearts. There is a clear benefit for the colony: these injured ants are able to participate again in future raids and remain a functioning member of the colony.”
The ants, which get up to almost three-quarters of an inch (2 cm) long, specialize in hunting termites and use a distinctive raiding strategy.
Scouts leave the nest in search of termite-foraging sites, then recruit up to 500 nest mates and lead them to the termites in a column formation. Ants injured while fighting with termites, sometimes losing limbs or becoming disabled when termites cling to them, excrete pheromone chemicals from their bodies to signal comrades for help.
Uninjured ants then hoist up the wounded and carry them, as well as the dead termites, back to the nest in the same column formation, sometimes as far as about 165 feet (50 meters).
Once back at the nest, other ants remove termites that may be grasping the injured ants. Ants that lost one or two of their six legs are able to adapt their locomotion, often regaining running speeds similar to a healthy ant within 24 hours.
Nearly all the rescued ants participated in subsequent raids, sometimes less than an hour after being injured.
Frank said he was surprised to find this behavior in an invertebrate species.
“It first sounded illogical to me why they should evolve this type of helping behavior,” Frank said. “After a closer look, we realized that the good of the individual, saving the injured, can also be for the good of the colony, and that individuals can be very valuable in ants.”
In addition to primates such as apes and monkeys, rescue behavior has been seen in certain other mammals including elephants, rats and dolphins, Frank said.
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Scientists are touting a discovery that they think might cure HIV infection. They’ve engineered an antibody that blocks the virus from entering and infecting key immune system cells.
The process, developed at the Scripps Researcher Institute in California, involves tethering an antibody, which fights infection, directly onto T cells, the immune system cells that are targeted by the AIDS virus. Eventually, if enough immune cells become infected and destroyed by HIV, the disease progresses to AIDS, which leads to certain death. The antibodies, however, block the receptor on the T cells that HIV uses to enter and destroy them.
It’s what immunochemist Richard Lerner called a form of “cellular vaccination.” He said the genetic alteration of the T cells with tethered antibodies does not interfere with the immune cells’ ability to fight other pathogens.
Lerner is the senior author of a study describing the work in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Experimental HIV vaccines attempt to stimulate an immune response, creating HIV-specific antibodies to attack and destroy infected cells. But Lerner says the concentration of antibodies flowing freely in the bloodstream is too low to reach every infected T cell.
‘Survival of the fittest’
This approach is different, protecting only some healthy T cells.
“You don’t really care about the rest of the body,” Lerner explained. “You would just like to shield those cells from viruses and a virus attack. So that’s the chemical principle. Never mind immunizing the whole body. Just immunize the cells that are the real victims.”
His team added a gene to T cells which instructed them to synthesize antibodies that would bind with the cellular receptor called CD4. That is the doorway to the cell for HIV. Having antibodies hanging on to the cell surface blocks that doorway.
It’s hoped that eventually in humans, these HIV-resistant cells will multiply into the millions, passing on the protective gene, as the unprotected, infected cells die off, eradicating the AIDS virus from the body and affording a long-lasting cure.
At least that’s what experiments in the laboratory suggested when both genetically engineered and unprotected human T cells were exposed to HIV.
Lerner said the engineered T cells would be introduced into a patient’s bone marrow, which would produce protective cells en masse.
“We hope to, after securing their safety and so on and so forth, in a patient with HIV, [the engineered cells] can harm their [infected] cells with [the] resistance of ours, and … hopefully the good cells will be selected over the bad cells. And that will be the end of HIV in that patient,” Lerner said.
It’s an approach that Lerner calls a Darwinian “survival of the fittest.”
Scripps investigators are working with City of Hope, an independent research and comprehensive cancer treatment center in Duarte, California, that has a lot of experience with bone marrow transplantation. The center will carry out clinical trials of the engineered, HIV-resistant T cells with an eye toward advancing what scientists hope will be a cure for AIDS.
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Scientists have identified the oldest-known forerunner of the dinosaurs and are expressing surprise at how little it actually resembled one.
Researchers on Wednesday described fossils of a long-necked, four-legged, meat-eating reptile called Teleocrater rhadinus that reached up to 10 feet (3 meters) long and prowled a Tanzanian floodplain roughly 245 million years ago.
It lived during the Triassic Period millions of years before the first dinosaurs. Scientists called it a close cousin rather than a direct dinosaur ancestor.
Its appearance differed from what scientists had expected from the earliest representatives of the dinosaur evolutionary lineage. Teleocrater possessed an unexpected combination of crocodile-like and dinosaur-like characteristics.
“I’m surprised by the mosaic of features that it possesses,” said paleontologist Ken Angielczyk of the Field Museum in Chicago, one of the researchers in the study published in the journal Nature.
“In terms of how it shakes up our understanding of dinosaur evolution, Teleocrater shows that the earliest members of the dinosaur lineage were very unlike dinosaurs, and that many ‘typical’ features of dinosaurs accumulated in a step-wise fashion instead of all evolving at close to the same time.”
Dinosaurs belong to a larger group called archosaurs that about 250 million years ago cleaved into two branches: crocodilians in one and another that includes dinosaurs, extinct flying reptiles called pterosaurs, and birds, which evolved from feathered dinosaurs.
Teleocrater is the oldest-known member of the dinosaur-pterosaur-bird archosaur branch.
Scientists had expected such a dinosaur forerunner to be a smallish, two-legged predator resembling early dinosaurs such as Herrerasaurus, which lived about 231 million years ago in Argentina. While dinosaur predators were bipedal, Teleocrater instead was four-legged, looking superficially like a modern Komodo dragon.
Virginia Tech paleontologist Sterling Nesbitt, the study’s lead author, said fossils representing at least four individuals were found in southern Tanzania, representing about half the skeleton.
Much like a croc and unlike a dinosaur, Teleocrater’s ankle joints could rotate from side to side as well as flexing up and down, providing a crocodile-like gait.
It also boasted telltale dinosaur features such as characteristic depressions for jaw muscle attachment on the roof of the skull, extra surfaces for the backbones to attach to one another, and distinctive hip muscle attachments on the thigh bone.
Teleocrater’s remains were found in the same Tanzanian region as fossils of the two-legged meat-eater Nyasasaurus, which lived perhaps a couple of million years later. Some scientists regard Nyasasaurus as the earliest-known dinosaur.
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A Russian cosmonaut who has returned to Earth after a mission on the International Space Station said on Wednesday he had taken a relic of a Russian Orthodox saint with him.
Astronauts and cosmonauts routinely take small items such as their children’s toys or CDs with them as reminders of home.
Sergei Ryzhikov told Russian news agencies that he would give the tiny relic of St. Serafim of Sarov’s body, which he received from its home monastery last year, to an Orthodox church in Star City outside Moscow, home to the cosmonaut training center.
Serafim of Sarov, one of Russia’s most revered saints known for his hermitical lifestyle, died in the early 19th century.
Ryzhikov, who came back with two other crew members on Monday after six months in space, said he would celebrate the relic’s return at a church service in Star City on Thursday.
“We always wait for some sort of miracle, but the fact that a piece of the relics traveled to the orbit and blesses everything onboard and outside, including our planet, is a big miracle in itself,” he said.
Space exploration in atheist Soviet society was often portrayed as debunking the existence of God. A popular Soviet-era propaganda poster showed a cosmonaut floating in space and declaring: “There is no God!”
Russia has since experienced a religious revival, with the overwhelming majority of Russians now identifying themselves as Russian Orthodox.
In what would have seemed an absurdity to fiercely atheist Soviet space pioneers, Soyuz spacecraft now routinely receive pre-launch blessings from Orthodox priests and Russian cosmonauts have put up small icons at the Space Station.
Cosmonauts have taken tiny relics of at least six Orthodox saints and a piece of the Holy Cross into space with them.
Russia celebrates Space Day on April 12, exactly 56 years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space.
A shrimp that uses a very loud sound to stun its prey has been named after legendary rock band Pink Floyd.
The Synalpheus pinkfloydi, a kind of pistol shrimp, has an oversized pink claw, which, when snapped, creates a blast that’s louder than a gunshot.
Sammy de Grave of Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History, who named the shrimp, combined the loudness, the pink color and his love for Pink Floyd to come up with the name.
“I have been listening to Floyd since The Wall was released in 1979, when I was 14 years old. I’ve seen them play live several times since, including the Hyde Park reunion gig for Live 8 in 2005,” he told The Telegraph newspaper, referencing the anti-poverty benefit concerts. “The description of this new species of pistol shrimp was the perfect opportunity to finally give a nod to my favorite band.”
When Synalpheus pinkfloydi snaps its claw, it creates a “high-pressure cavitation bubble which collapses to produce one of the loudest sounds in the ocean,” The Telegraph reported. The sound can be as loud as 210 decibels, which is enough to stun or kill small fish.
The bubble is also hot, reaching temperatures as high as 4,400 degrees Celsius.
This is not the first time de Grave has named a crustacean after his love of rock and roll, the BBC reports. The Elephantis jaggerai is a tribute to Mick Jagger, front man of the Rolling Stones.
De Grave’s description of the shrimp, which was discovered off the Pacific coast of Panama, was published in the journal Zootaxa.
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Guinea worm is on course to become the second human disease to be eradicated, after smallpox, thanks largely to intervention overseen by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Little was known about the infection for decades, as diseases like malaria took priority. However, previously unpublished research from the 1970s, released this month, shows the burden the disease has had on millions of people.
Watch: Jimmy Carter Leads Push to Eradicate Guinea Worrm
Guinea worm is contracted when people drink water contaminated with tiny crustaceans that contain the worm larvae. A year later, a meter-long female worm emerges through a painful blister, often disabling the infected person for months.
Professor Brian Greenwood, a British scientist, first came across Guinea worm in the 1970s when working in northern Nigeria. He says little was known about the disease, despite millions suffering from it across Africa and India.
“People were much more concerned with malaria, bilharzia and other tropical infections,” Greenwood said. “And part of the reason was that these people were so disabled they never got to the clinic or the hospital. So that if you looked in hospital records, you did not see this as a big problem.”
Greenwood spent four years studying the disease and trying to find out why sufferers often developed repeat infections, without developing immunity.
“We extracted some of the worms,” he said. “And the traditional way is winding them out on a matchstick, just gradually. And the problem is that if the worm then snapped inside, then they got a very severe reaction.”
Greenwood credits the Carter Center, a charitable foundation set up by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, for helping fight the disease to the brink of eradication.
There is no vaccine or treatment. Instead, community education programs teach people to filter drinking water and avoid entering water sources.
Speaking in 2011, Carter described the initial difficulties.
“It was kind of an insult to say ‘this disease comes out of your pond,'” he said. “So we have had to do a lot of diplomacy and convincing the people there to take care of their own problems. Well, it has worked. And now almost every nation on earth has eradicated or eliminated Guinea worm.”
When the Carter Center first became involved in 1986, there were around 3.5 million cases in 21 countries; last year, 25 cases were recorded in only three countries — Chad, Ethiopia and South Sudan.
Greenwood’s early study of Guinea worm remained unpublished, as he was directed to focus on malaria and meningitis instead; but last year in London, he met Carter, who persuaded him to publish the research.
“I hope that we have been able to document what a horrible disease this was,” Greenwood said. “And it is really important that people realize that. And if we do get eradication in the next year or two, which I hope will be the case, that this will not just be seen as a minor thing, but to be a really very important public health triumph.”
The last few cases of Guinea worm remain because they are the most difficult to reach. Many are in conflict areas like South Sudan, but scientists are optimistic this ancient disease can be eradicated within the next few years.
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Another “Great Spot” has been found at Jupiter, this one cold and high up.
Scientists reported Tuesday that the dark expanse is 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometers) across and 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) wide. It’s in the upper atmosphere and much cooler than the hot surroundings, thus the name Great Cold Spot. And unlike the giant planet’s familiar Great Red Spot, this newly discovered weather system is continually changing in shape and size. It’s formed by the energy from Jupiter’s polar auroras.
A British-led team used a telescope in Chile to chart the temperature and density of Jupiter’s atmosphere. When the researchers compared the data with thousands of images taken in years past by a telescope in Hawaii, the Great Cold Spot stood out. It could be thousands of years old.
“The Great Cold Spot is much more volatile than the slowly changing Great Red Spot … but it has reappeared for as long as we have data to search for it, for over 15 years,” the University of Leicester’s Tom Stallard, lead author of the study, said in a statement.
Stallard said Jupiter’s upper atmosphere may hold other features. Scientists will be on the lookout for them while also studying the Great Cold Spot in greater detail, using ground telescopes as well as NASA’s Juno spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter, he said.
The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
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Climate change could cause stronger turbulence for airline passengers, according to a new study.
Researchers at the University of Reading in England say “turbulence strong enough to catapult unbuckled passengers and crew around the aircraft cabin” could become two or three times more common.
“For most passengers, light turbulence is nothing more than an annoying inconvenience that reduces their comfort levels, but for nervous fliers even light turbulence can be distressing,” said Paul Williams, who conducted the research. “However, even the most seasoned frequent fliers may be alarmed at the prospect of a 149 percent increase in severe turbulence, which frequently hospitalizes air travelers and flight attendants around the world.”
Specifically, researchers used supercomputer models to look at how wintertime transatlantic clear-air turbulence at an altitude of 12 kilometers will change when there is twice as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which could happen by the end of this century.
The models show light turbulence could increase by 59 percent, light-to-moderate turbulence could jump by 75 percent, moderate-to-severe turbulence could rise by 127 percent and severe turbulence could bounce a whopping 149 percent.
The reason, according to the researchers is that climate change “is generating stronger wind shears in the jet stream.”
“Our new study paints the most detailed picture yet of how aircraft turbulence will respond to climate change,” said Williams.
The study is published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
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An independent U.S. panel of experts has changed course on its recommendation against routine PSA screening of men for prostate cancer.
In a draft recommendation, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force said men between the ages of 55 and 69 should be screened using the prostate-specific antigen test on an “individualized” basis. The panel concluded, in its new guidance, that the potential benefits of screening slightly outweighed the harm.
The new draft guidelines echo those of several leading medical groups, but they don’t make the decision any easier for men: With their doctor’s help, they have to decide whether to take an imperfect PSA test that carries a small chance of detecting a deadly cancer and a larger chance of triggering unneeded worry and treatment with serious side effects.
“This isn’t a one-size-fits-all” recommendation, said the panel’s chair, Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a San Francisco internist who already follows the advice and discusses the potential pros and cons with her patients.
Men whose greatest concern is reducing their chances of dying from cancer are sometimes willing to face the consequences and choose testing. “Other men will realize the likely benefit is small and aren’t willing to risk the harms,” she said.
Controversial call
In a 2012 recommendation that caused controversy within the medical community, the task force expressed concern that routine use of the PSA test was leading to unnecessary biopsies and other tests in men suspected of having prostate cancer.
Critics of that recommendation worried that as a result of any reduction in testing, prostate cancer might be diagnosed at a more advanced stage in some men.
According to new data released by the task force, the test would let three men out of 1,000 avoid metastatic cancer and would prevent one to two prostate cancer deaths in 1,000.
The revised guidance is based on the findings of the European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer.
A longer follow-up period revealed that slightly more men in the 55-69 age group benefited from screening when the disease was suspected.
‘Thoughtful’ policy
The American Urological Association is hailing the proposed new recommendation as “thoughtful and reasonable.” But the association expressed concern that, under the guidelines, men 70 and older would not be screened for prostate cancer.
A statement issued by the association said, “We believe that selected older healthier men may garner a benefit from prostate cancer screening,” even though the group acknowledged there is limited evidence that men in this age group benefit from the PSA test.
The revised draft recommendation is open to public comment before a final recommendation is issued.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is a national independent volunteer panel of medical experts created in 1984. It is funded, staffed and appointed by an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The task force is charged with making “evidence-based” recommendations about clinical preventive services, including health screenings, counseling services and preventive medications.
Some information for this report came from AP.
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Industrial air pollution causes nearly 3.5 million deaths a year, and international trade is shifting some of the harmful effects from consuming nations to producing nations, according to a study in the journal Nature.
The authors say high consumption in the United States and Western Europe harms health in manufacturing countries such as China, and the pattern is continuing among developing nations in Asia.
“Take an example of a toy,” says Steve Davis, an Earth system scientist with the University of California, Irvine, and one of the report’s authors. He explains that toys sold in America are most often made in China, displacing the emissions that would otherwise be released in the United States.
“We’re effectively outsourcing the pollution that comes from the manufacture of that product,” he said.
750,000 premature deaths
Worldwide, the scientists estimate air pollution produced by exported goods and services caused more than 750,000 premature deaths in the baseline year of the study, 2007.
The report by Davis and his colleagues at Beijing’s Tsinghua University and other institutions found the cross-border effects of trade-related pollution is greater than the cross-boundary impact of industrial pollution caused by weather patterns.
Particulate matter from China was linked to 65,000 premature deaths outside of China, largely in Japan and the Korean peninsula, and including 3,100 deaths in the United States and Western Europe. But U.S. and European consumption of goods produced in China was linked to nearly 110,000 premature deaths in China.
The researchers say that as China becomes a consuming society, its manufacturing is shifting, but the pattern is similar, as production and pollution are “outsourced by China into other up-and-coming industrialized countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, India,” said Davis.
Those countries are bearing the health costs.
The study examined 13 regions of the world and Davis said researchers were surprised levels of harm from emissions that were displaced from one country to another by outsourcing.
Trump order criticized
Davis notes that China’s industrial cities are plagued with pollution, and the country is working to clean up its air. Yet as China expands its use of “scrubbers” that remove fine particulate matter from industrial emissions, environmentalist are accusing President Donald Trump of reversing the U.S. commitment to clean air. On March 28, Trump signed a sweeping executive order to increase America’s energy independence and boost American jobs by reducing the federal government’s role in controlling emissions.
“There’s a concern that in the pursuit of economic gains, we’re maybe willing to now sacrifice our environmental quality,” Davis said, noting the United States has long “pointed a finger at China” for its emissions.
The study’s authors say environmental pollution caused by manufacturing, and by worldwide trade, requires a global response that balances the need for clean air and economic growth.
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A U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts made a parachute landing in Kazakhstan on Monday, wrapping up a nearly six-month mission aboard the International Space Station, a NASA TV broadcast showed.
The Russian Soyuz capsule, which left the station shortly before 4 a.m. EDT (0800 GMT), touched down southeast of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 7:20 a.m. EDT (1120 GMT).
Seated in the capsule were returning station commander Shane Kimbrough of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko from Russian space agency Roscosmos.
“It’s really neat to be part of something this big, something bigger than ourselves … even bigger than a nation,” Kimbrough said during a change-of-command ceremony on Sunday.
“We get the ability up here to interact with things that actually benefit all of humanity. It’s really humbling.”
Three crew members remain aboard the station, a $100 billion research laboratory that flies about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth. In command is NASA’s Peggy Whitson, who on April 24 will break the 534-day record for the most time spent in space by a U.S. astronaut.
Whitson, a veteran of two previous missions on the station, is the first woman to hold the post of commander twice.
Whitson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and France’s Thomas Pesque will be joined by two new crew members on April 20.
The U.S. and Russian space agencies agreed last week to extend Whitson’s mission by three months.
Russia is reducing its station cadre to two from three members until its new science laboratory launches to the space station next year, the head of Roscosmos said last week at the U.S. Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Whitson will return to Earth in September, having amassed a career U.S. record of 666 days in orbit. Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, who has 878 days in orbit, is the world’s most experienced space flier.
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