the neverending story~♥

jtotheizzoe:

Hey Kids! Measles are Marvelous!

At least that’s what a new anti-vaccination children’s book would have you believe. Outright lying wasn’t enough for the anti-vaccination movement. Deceiving parents just wouldn’t do it. Now they are aiming square at the kids.

From the book’s description:

This book takes children aged 4 – 10 years on a journey of discovering about the ineffectiveness of vaccinations, while teaching them to embrace childhood disease, heal if they get a disease, and build their immune systems naturally.

“… build their immune systems naturally”? Do you know WHY we developed vaccines for measles? Because measles is not marvelous (just look at the symptoms).

Just like this book, it can be deadly.

Cant’ make this stuff up. Head -> desk.

(via Skepchick)

sciencecenter:

Cell aging hack could be a breakthrough for longevity research

Humans have long sought the trick to being able to live forever, and more than a few disreputable corporations are willing to tell you that they’ve found the solution. A new paper in Nature, while limited in its scope, details some exciting findings in mice, and their implications for human immortality. Darren Baker of the Mayo Clinic was studying a protein called p16, a tumor inhibitor but also a marker that, when present in a cell, signals that the cell is at its replication limit. Unfortunately, the slowed down cells don’t just die and get flushed away, but instead linger and release inflammatory proteins. 

Baker’s team, led by himself and Mayo Clinic gerontologist Jan van Deursen, started by engineering a mouse strain that aged unnaturally fast. When they inactivated p16 and other senescence-linked genes in embryonic mice, aging proceeded normally.

It hinted at the importance of cellular senescence, but wasn’t so convincing as if the mice had senesced over the course of their lives, then been treated. To accomplish this, Baker and van Deursen designed a fast-aging mouse strain that would, upon receiving a drug trigger, expel p16-producing cells from fatty tissues, muscles and eyes.

When the mice were given the drug, muscle wasting stopped. Cataracts didn’t grow. Health was maintained until their hearts, which were unaffected by the senescence-clearing hack, gave out.

Senescence “appears to be relevant,” said Sierra. “It plays a role in age-related diseases.”

The scientists have been careful to note the limits of their research and their findings, but the results are still promising and worthy of follow-up.

ikenbot:

This Is NASA’s Cancer-Sniffing Cellphone Sensor

What if you could use your phone to test the air for toxins? What if you could monitor your health simply by blowing on it? Sounds amazing, right? Nanosensor technology developed by NASA Ames is going to make that a reality.

Jing Li, a scientist at NASA Ames, has been working for years on what will be the greatest phone accessory of all time. It’s a small chip (about the size of a postage stamp) that houses 32 nanosensor bars. Each bar is composed of a different nano-structure material. Because each sensor bar is unique it can respond to different chemicals in different ways, enabling it to not only differentiate between them, but also to monitor their relative levels, in real time.

In its current state (which is looking mighty close to production-ready), it’s housed in a small case that attaches to a smartphone. For legal reasons they wouldn’t say which smartphone it’s built to attach to, but you can probably guess. Eventually, it will be built to attach to many other popular models. The idea is to develop a low-cost version so that consumers can afford to have them for health and safety applications. But let’s back up a second.

This nanosensor technology was originally developed by NASA Ames for space applications. This is NASA, after all. The first usage was monitoring for fuel leaks around launch vehicles. They’ve been on the International Space Station since 2008, monitoring air-quality and checking for formaldehyde in the air. Future applications could include taking samples on asteroids and Mars missions. So that’s where it started, but the Department of Homeland Security is now funding this project in order to bring it back down to earth—and to consumers.

The most exciting potential use, though, is how it could diagnose and monitor people with medical conditions. For example, for diabetes patients there is a direct correlation between the level of acetone in their breath and the level of sugar in their blood. The nanosensor could be used as a completely non-invasive diagnosis and measurement method. Just breathe on your phone. No more pricking your finger a million times a day. We have a pretty serious aversion to the word revolutionary here, but this thing fits the bill.

Full article

discoverynews:

The Liquid Planet

Using high-speed photography, German photographer Markus Reugels captures a variety of celestial wonders inside a water droplet.

As part of his “Setup Liquid Art” series, spherical representations of the Earth, Jupiter, and the moon, among other objects are depicted. The twist: they are “liquid planets,” comprised of a drop of water caught mid-fall.

And there’s no computer manipulation — these shots are real.

more images here

sciencecenter:

Helpful fetuses donate stem cells to their mother 

This is a pretty astounding finding. Researchers have long discussed the potential for stem cells to be used to replace dead or damaged tissue, but, once again it appears that nature has beaten us to the punch. A team from the Mt Sinai School of Medicine bred male mice whose cells expressed GFP (a fluorescent protein, allowing for the cells to be tracked) and mated them with normal female mice. This meant that the fetus cells, with half of the male’s genetic material, would also be tagged fluorescently. Then the researchers induced a heart attack in half of the female mice. When they checked the heart afterwards, they found lots of glowing green stem cells which had to have been donated by the fetus. Incredibly, some of the cells had even differentiated into, for example, smooth muscle cells responsible for beating. 

Fetal stem cells have already been implicated in helping human mothers heal from heart disease. Hopefully more research along these lines can finally deliver on the promise of stem cells.

mothernaturenetwork:

The Chinese New Year arrived on Jan. 23 and it is a particularly special year: the Year of the Dragon. Unlike the western New Years Eve holiday, which is often a wild and crazy night marked with excess, Chinese New Year traditions are all about family, friends and, of course, good food. Learn more.

jtotheizzoe:

Stem cells transformed into brain cells to treat Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease is a debilitating condition where dopamine-producing cells (dopamine is a chemical messenger in the brain) in a region of the brain called the substantia nigra die off. This region of the midbrain is important to basic movments, and the symptoms include tremors and shaking (like Michael J. Fox).

Although we still don’t know why they die, it’s long been a goal to try and replace these damaged neurons with healthy ones. Stem cells, you say?

Oh yeah, we’re all over that, as reported in Nature this week:

In a series of experiments, the team gave animals six injections of more than a million cells each, to parts of the brain affected by Parkinson’s. The neurons survived, formed new connections and restored lost movement in mouse, rat and monkey models of the disease, with no sign of tumour development. The improvement in monkeys was crucial, as the rodent brains required fewer working neurons to overcome their symptoms.

On the prospect of future human trials, Dr Studer said: “We now have the right cells, but to put them into humans requires them to be produced in a specialised facility rather than a laboratory, for safety reasons. We have removed the main biological bottleneck and now it’s an engineering problem.”

(via guardian.co.uk, image of dopamine-producing neural stem cells from Sonja Kriks/Lorenz Studer)

itsfullofstars:

“Diamond” Planet Found; May Be Stripped Star
 
Exotic crystalline world orbits fast-spinning stellar corpse, study says.

An exotic planet as dense as diamond has been found in the Milky Way, and astronomers think the world is a former star that got transformed by its orbital partner.

The odd planet was discovered orbiting what’s known as a millisecond pulsar—a tiny, fast-spinning corpse of a massive star that died in a supernova.

Astronomers estimate that the newfound planet is 34,175 miles (55,000 kilometers) across, or about five times Earth’s diameter.

In addition, “we are very confident it has a density about 18 times that of water,” said study leader Matthew Bailes, an astronomer at the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing in Melbourne, Australia.

“This means it can’t be made of gases like hydrogen and helium like most stars but [must be made of] heavier elements like carbon and oxygen, making it most likely crystalline in nature, like a diamond.”

Keep reading.