The Greening of the Garden State

June 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Before we discuss big issues like global warming, carbon pricing and renewable energy, I toss a couple of “lightning round” questions at Ralph Izzo, the chairman, president and CEO of New Jersey-based PSEG, a $13.3-billion a year energy company with strong commitment to solar power and action to curb climate change.

First, Yankees or Mets? Izzo grew up in Queens (Mets country) and pitched for the baseball team at Columbia University (Yankee territory), where he earned an B.S. and M.S. in mechanical engineer and a Ph.D in applied physics. “Yankees, Knicks, Rangers, Giants,” Izzo replied. He’s still a big sports fan.

Second, Democrat or Republican? After a stint as a research scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Izzo worked as a science fellow in the office of Sen. Bill Bradley, a New Jersey Democrat, and then as an energy-and-tech policy adviser to New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican. “Independent,” he said. “Pretty much down right down the yellow stripe.” True enough — he’s given money to George Bush and Hillary Clinton.

Third, nuclear power or “clean coal”? Much as it would be nice to light up the world with wind, solar or geothermal power, odds are that the U.S. will need nuclear power, coal or natural gas to provide baseload (i.e., round the clock) electricity for the foreseeable future. Izzo, as a utility CEO and a scientist, gave nuclear his qualified endorsement over clean coal.

“The technology is in existence already,” he said. “It has a more benign environmental footprint. It doesn’t have the mercury, NO2, SO2 or carbon baggage. Having said that, all of our investments right now are in natural gas.”

For about a decade, Izzo explained, new conventional gas and then combined cycle gas plants will satisfy growing demand for peak power from PSE&G’s 2.1 million customers. PSE&G is the regulated utility owned by parent company PSEG, which also owns an independent, unregulated power producer called PSEG Power. PSE&G probably won’t need a big baseload plant until the early 2020s, at which point the company hopes to have a nuclear plant ready to go, as it told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last month. That’s risky, given the cost and regulatory uncertainty surrounding nukes, but less so than relying on unproven technology to capture and store CO2 from coal. “To build a new coal plant with a 40-year expected life is a risk that we’re not comfortable taking,” Izzo said.

PSEG and Izzo aren’t well known outside of New Jersey, but they should be. I’d heard Izzo speak a few months ago, and was impressed by his straight talk about climate; we met again last week here in Washington. Unlike some CEOs and politicians, who take what author Eric Pooley calls the “Trojan Horse approach that tucks climate into the belly of the beast and lets clean energy and green jobs pull the contraption along,” Izzo says straight out curbing global warming is the right thing to do, for environmental reasons.
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“I don’t understand why we can’t recognize that this is an obligation we have to future generations,” he says.

“I don’t have a problem with saying it’s OK for our generation to pay more for electricity — the EPA is now saying it’s a little more than $100 a year — so that our children and grandchildren and children can inherit a better planet.”

PSEG’s actions reflect those sentiments. Just last week, the Solar Electric Power Association ranked PSEG No. 3 of 143 participating utilities in its solar rankings (PDF available for download here), meaning that the New Jersey firm has integrated more megawatts of installed solar (29.55MW) into its system than any others except No. 1 Pacific Gas & Electric (85.2MW) and No. 2 Southern California Edison (74.2 MW). PSEG has a program called Solar 4 All under which it is installing small solar panels on about 200,000 utility and street lights, building small installations on its own sites and lending money to business and residential customers to buy solar panels. These make business sense because of New Jersey’s generous renewable energy subsidies. Meanwhile, PSEG’s unregulated arm has built solar systems for an M&M factory in New Jersey (lending new meaning to the term “green M&Ms”), and for American Electric Power in Ohio and the Jacksonville Electric Authority in Florida.

PSEG also would like to deliver what it calls “universal access to energy conservation” in much the same way as utilities historically provided universal access to gas and electricity. Targeting cities like Newark and Trenton, the company is bringing energy audits, insulation, programmable thermostats and efficient lights to families and small business–and getting reimbursed by regulators, just the way it would get paid to build new generating plants. Efficiency, it’s sometimes said, is the cheapest and best form of renewable power.

Some other things I learned from my conversation with Izzo:

The company’s energy storage efforts are coming along slowly. Energy storage is often seen as a technology that will enable broader deployment of renewable sources, and PSEG is part owner of a company called Energy Storage & Power, which owns compressed air energy storage (CAES) technology (an example from Alabama is pictured at left). The idea is to compress air using cheap off-peak electricity from wind or coal plants, then release the air and resell the electricity during peak hours to replace more costly natural gas-fired electricity. Unfortunately, the economics of CAES are challenging for now because natural gas prices are so low, Izzo said. CAES “works from a scientific and technology point of view without question,” Izzo said. “The challenge is, is it economically viable?” Batteries may turn out to be better long-term approach to energy storage. (See Electricity that’s cheaper than free for more on CAES.)

A price on carbon is necessary, but not sufficient to stimulate renewable energy, Izzo says. Some economists say that a national renewable energy standard won’t be needed if the government puts a price on carbon, but Izzo said solar and wind won’t be able to compete with coal and natural gas until the carbon price gets significantly higher than anything proposed on Capitol Hill. “To simply say, let there be a price on carbon, so that renewables are built on the base of the new market price, would result in many parts of the country not building renewables,” he said. Better to nurture the solar and wind industries right away, so that utilities can turn to them at scale when carbon prices rise years from now.

That’s assuming that the U.S. Senate listens to CEOs like Izzo and acts soon to regulate global warming pollutants — no sure thing, alas.

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Sperm identification could improve male fertility

May 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 29 (IANS) Researchers have discovered a method to select sperm with the highest DNA integrity that is likely to improve male fertility.

The method is comparable to that of the egg’s natural selection abilities, says a new study.

‘Our results could help address the fact that approximately 40 percent of infertility cases can be traced to male infertility,’ said study co-author Gabor Huszar, senior research scientist in obstetrics, gynaecology and reproductive sciences at Yale School of Medicine.

Huszar said that past semen analysis focused on sperm concentration and motility (ability to move spontaneously and actively). It was assumed that if a man had a high sperm count and active sperm he was fertile.

But there was no information on the sperm’s fertility or its ability to attach to its mark, the female gamete.

In an ideal case, the egg naturally selects the optimal sperm, but during in-vitro (test tube) fertilisation treatment of men who had only a few sperm, clinicians did not know whether they were injecting the correct sperm into the egg for fertilisation.

‘We have now found a biochemical marker of sperm fertility so that we can select sperm with high genetic integrity,’ Huszar said.

Huszar and his colleagues tested the idea that binding sperm to hyaluronic acid selects sperm with high DNA integrity.

They studied semen samples from 50 men, and a part of the sperm in the semen was allowed to bind to hyaluronic acid. These sperm were isolated, and the DNA chain integrity was compared to the original sperm in semen.

The team used a reagent that stained sperm with high DNA integrity green, whereas sperm with fragmented DNA, and diminished DNA integrity were stained red.

‘The sperm with fragmented DNA work like scratched CDs,’ Huszar said. ‘They seem to be operational, but when you play them, some of the information is missing.’

‘These damaged sperm may also carry chromosomal aberrations that could be related to genetic diseases,’ Huszar added, according to an Yale release.

Other Yale authors included Artay Yagci, William Murk and Jill Stronk. These findings are slated for publication in the June/July issue of the Journal of Andrology.

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Genes and brain centers that regulate meal size in flies identified

May 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 21 (ANI): Scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Yale University have identified two genes that appear to regulate meal sizes and frequency in fruit flies.

Both genes, the leucokinin neuropeptide and the leucokinin receptor, have mammalian counterparts that seem to play a similar role in food intake, indicating that the steps that control meal size and meal frequency are not just behaviorally similar but are controlled by the same genes throughout the animal kingdom.

In animals, food intake is regulated to keep body weight constant over a long period of time. Most animals consume food in discrete bouts-that is, in meals.

“Identifying the genes and molecules that regulate meal-related parameters is essential for understanding the relationships between body weight and caloric intake,” says Bader Al-Anzi, a research scientist at Caltech and the lead author of the Current Biology study.

Al-Anzi and his colleagues developed an assay to examine feeding behavior in the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. In this assay, genetically normal flies were starved for one day and then transferred into a vial containing sugar meal mixed with red food dye. Invariably, the flies became satiated during their exposure to red food, and their small abdomens turned red. Next, the researchers performed the same experiment using mutant fly strains.

“Our hope was that if flies contained mutations in genes involved in meal regulation, those flies would eat excessive amounts of red food, making them visibly bloated with red abdomens,” says Al-Anzi,

Two mutant fly strains produced notable results. One strain contained a mutation in the gene encoding the leucokinin neuropeptide (a peptide initially identified for its ability to induce insect gut contraction), and the second strain contained mutated versions of the receptor that binds to leucokinin. In the assay, both types of fly mutants ate to such excess that they became visibly bloated, with their crops-food storage organs-stretched to the limit with red-dyed food.

Surprisingly, Al-Anzi says, “although in the short term these flies tend to overeat, in the long run they consume a similar amount of food as normal flies. This was largely due to the fact that they are compensating for the large increase in meal size by reducing the number of times they eat.” Whereas mutant flies consumed four or five large meals in a single day, normal flies ate seven or eight small meals.

In additional experiments, Al-Anzi and his colleagues found that although the leucokinin neuropeptide is found exclusively in the brain, the leucokinin receptor is found in neurons located in both the brain and the foregut-an area of the gut that contains stretch receptors known to be responsible for monitoring meal size in other insects.

The researchers also found that introducing a normal copy of the leucokinin neuropeptide or of the leucokinin receptor gene to these neurons in their corresponding mutant flies fully restored normal feeding behavior.

Furthermore, when these same neurons were destroyed in normal, nonmutant flies, the flies began to consume abnormally large meals, just like mutants.

“This proves that we identified the right genes responsible for the flies”” bingeing as well as the fly brain center that regulates meal size and frequency,” Al-Anzi says.

The study will appear in the June 8 issue of the journal Current Biology. (ANI)

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Irregular medication use increases seniors’ chances of falling

May 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 20 (ANI): A new study says that older adults increase their chances of falling by not taking their medications as directed.

This new finding comes from a recent study of Boston-area residents over age 70, which found that those who sometimes neglected their medications experienced a 50 percent increased rate of falls compared with those who did not.

“Falls can now be added to the growing list of poor health outcomes associated with non-adherence to medication,” said lead author Sarah D. Berry, a research scientist with the Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife in Boston.

“Because non-adherence is common and easy to screen for, health care providers should discuss this subject with their patients,” she added.

Berry and her co-authors are the first investigators to study the association between falls and medication adherence. The team used data gathered from subjects in the Maintenance of Balance, Independent Living, Intellect, and Zest in the Elderly of Boston (MOBILIZE Boston) Study, a community-based cohort of seniors recruited for the purpose of studying novel risk factors for falls.

They examined responses from a total of 246 men and 408 women with an average age of 78. Between 2005 and 2008, 376 individuals in this group reported a total of 1,052 falls.

A participant was characterized as having low medication adherence if he or she answered yes to any of the following questions: Do you ever forget to take your medications? Are you careless at times about taking your medications? When you feel better do you sometimes stop taking your medications? Sometimes if you feel worse when taking your medication, do you stop taking it? High adherence was defined as a “no” answer to every question. In total, 48 percent of the respondents were classified as having low medication adherence.

Those in the low-adherence group experienced falls at an annual rate of 1.5 times that of the high adherence group. This association persisted after adjusting for other variables, including age, sex, cognitive function, and total number of medications.

The study has been published the latest edition of the Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological and Medical Sciences. (ANI)

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Gene mutation in liver cells to help with drug prescriptions

May 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 11 (ANI): A tiny gene mutation in human liver cells might help indicate proper dosage for half of all drugs, suggests a new American study.

The study has been published online in The Pharmacogenomics Journal.

Researchers at Ohio State University and colleagues have identified this mutation, and have shown that it alters the level of a protein in the liver responsible for processing between 45 per cent and 60 per cent of medications used to treat a wide range of conditions.

Each gene contains two alternative forms – called alleles – that are identical in most people.

However, in this case, the researchers found that the activity level, or expression, of one allele differs from its partner allele in a single gene.

That small difference is called a single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP.

This SNP affects the gene””s protein-producing process, in turn lowering the level of an enzyme known as CYP3A4.

The faster a drug is processed, or metabolized, by this enzyme in the liver, the more quickly it is eliminated from that tissue and the body as a whole.

When this enzyme level is lowered by the presence of this SNP, people are likely to require smaller doses of medicines that the enzyme metabolizes.

But this also means that higher doses of these same drugs can be dangerous to people with the mutation if those levels become toxic.

The study further showed that people with the mutation who take a certain class of cholesterol-lowering drugs do indeed require lower doses of these medications to achieve the same effect that higher doses produce in people without the SNP.

The researchers suggest that this mutation could serve as a molecular biomarker to aid doctors in clinical practice, affecting dosing requirements, patients”” response to medications and toxicity levels of numerous drugs, especially anti-cancer medications.

Lead author Danxin Wang, a research scientist and adjunct assistant professor of pharmacology at Ohio State, said: “With some cancer drugs, there is a very narrow therapeutic index, meaning that if doctors give patients a slightly higher dose, it will cause toxicity. We believe this same biomarker could be used to predict that toxicity threshold in cancer patients.”

Wang noted that using this SNP as a biomarker could reduce the guesswork associated with prescribing drugs.

Wang said: “Right now, because there are no biomarkers available to predict CYP3A4 activity, trial and error determines whether cholesterol goes down with the prescribed dose.

“You never know who has what enzyme level, so you never really know what dose to give an individual if you don””t have a biomarker.” (ANI)

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Erectile dysfunction drug could enhance delivery of herceptin to brain tumours

May 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 8 (ANI): A drug currently approved to treat erectile dysfunction could significantly improve the delivery of the anti-cancer drug Herceptin to certain hard-to-treat brain tumours, according to a new study at Cedars-Sinai”s Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute.

The research could help doctors improve treatments for lung and breast cancers that have metastasized to the brain.

Even if a cancer is susceptible to drugs, these drugs must penetrate the “blood-brain barrier” if they”re to treat cancer that”s metastasised to the brain.

“Mother Nature created this barrier to protect our brains from dangerous substances, but here we need to get through the barrier to deliver the drugs, and that”s a problem,” says study author Dr. Julia Y. Ljubimova.

Dr. Keith Black, lead research scientist on this project, has studied the blood-brain barrier for about two decades.

Research conducted by his team found that the erectile dysfunction drugs sildenafil (Viagra) and vardenafil (Levitra), which inhibit the enzyme phosphodiesterase 5 (PDE5), could increase the permeability of the blood-brain tumour barrier and boost the effectiveness of the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin.

“No matter how effective against cancer a chemotherapeutic agent may be, it can have little impact on brain tumours if it cannot cross the blood-brain tumour barrier. As we find new drugs that are able to target these tumour cells, it is imperative that we develop better ways to enable the medications to reach their targets,” he said.

In the current study, the researchers examined whether PDE5 inhibitors might also increase the blood-brain tumour barrier”s permeability to Herceptin— a monoclonal antibody used to treat lung and breast tumours that are positive for HER2/neu.

Herceptin is a large molecule that does not easily cross the blood-brain tumour barrier, a limitation that severely reduces its effectiveness at treating brain metastases.

The researchers first measured vardenafil”s effects on the permeability of the blood-brain tumour barrier.

Using a mouse model, the scientists showed that vardenafil led to a two-fold increase in the amount of Herceptin that reached brain metastases of lung and breast cancers.

Next, they examined whether this increase in blood-brain barrier permeability improved Herceptin”s effectiveness at treating these brain metastases by giving mice vardenafil in tandem with Herceptin.

The results showed that the combination of vardenafil plus Herceptin boosted mean survival by 20 percent, compared to Herceptin alone (72+/-18 days versus 59+/-9 days).

The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE. (ANI)

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Low-maintenance strawberry may be good space crop

May 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, May 4 (ANI): A strawberry that requires little maintenance and energy seems to meet NASA guidelines for foods that could be grown in space, say scientists.

Cary Mitchell, professor of horticulture at Purdue University, and Gioia Massa, a horticulture research scientist, tested several cultivars of strawberries and found one variety, named Seascape, which seems to meet the requirements for becoming a space crop.

“What we”re trying to do is grow our plants and minimize all of our inputs,” Massa said. “We can grow these strawberries under shorter photoperiods than we thought and still get pretty much the same amount of yield.”

Seascape strawberries are day-neutral, meaning they aren”t sensitive to the length of available daylight to flower. Seascape was tested with as much as 20 hours of daylight and as little as 10 hours. While there were fewer strawberries with less light, each berry was larger and the volume of the yields was statistically the same.

“I was astounded that even with a day-neutral cultivar we were able to get basically the same amount of fruit with half the light,” Mitchell said.

The findings, which were reported online early in the journal Advances in Space Research, showed that the Seascape strawberry cultivar is a good candidate for a space crop because it meets several guidelines set by NASA.

Strawberry plants are relatively small, meeting mass and volume restrictions. Since Seascape provides fewer, but larger, berries under short days, there is less labor required of crew members who would have to pollinate and harvest the plants by hand. Needing less light cuts down energy requirements not only for lamps, but also for systems that would have to remove heat created by those lights. (ANI)

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Nearly 4 million Californians report sexual, physical violence

April 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, April 30 (ANI): A study has found that nearly 4 million adults in California have reported being a victim of physical or sexual violence at the hands of a spouse, companion or other intimate partner.

According to a new policy brief from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, of those victims, more than 1 million reported being forced to have sex by an intimate partner.

Although reported incidences of intimate partner violence, or IPV, are widespread, especially among women and certain ethnic groups, reported IPV was surprisingly high among lesbians, gays and bisexuals in California, who are almost twice as likely to experience violence as heterosexual adults, researchers said.

Specifically, 27.9 percent of all lesbian or gay adults reported experiencing IPV in their adult lives.

The rate of reported IPV is even higher among bisexual adults, at 40.6 percent. In contrast, only 16.7 percent of heterosexual adults reported incidences of IPV.

“This is not a group commonly associated with violence,” the study”s lead author, Elaine Zahnd, a sociologist and senior research scientist at the Public Health Institute, which partners with the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research in conducting the California Health Interview Survey, said.

“These findings should cause us to reconsider our assumptions about the root causes of violence, even as we redouble our efforts to eradicate it,” she stated.

Zahnd noted that the large number of Californians experiencing violence made the preservation of state-subsidized domestic violence shelters and services, currently under threat from budget cuts, all the more essential.

Also important, the researchers said, is routine screening by health providers to check for signs that might be indicative of violent victimization among men and women, such as substance abuse.

In the study, researchers found that nearly one in 10 victims of recent IPV engaged in binge drinking, possibly as a way of coping with the mental and emotional trauma of abuse.

Such signs might help health providers identify a problem that is often not obvious, as only 56.5 percent of victims report talking about such violence with a third party.

“This is often an invisible health crisis,” study co-author David Grant, director of UCLA”s California Health Interview Survey, said.

The study, supported by the Blue Shield of California Foundation, draws on new data on IPV from the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), the nation”s largest state health survey and consequently one of the largest surveys of IPV victims in the nation.

The survey is conducted by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, in collaboration with the Public Health Institute, the California Department of Public Health and the Department of Health Care Services. (ANI)

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NASA’s satellite images show Icelandic volcanic ash moving into Germany

April 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

London, Apr 17(ANI): Images taken by NASA’s scientific research satellite have revealed that Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano ash clouds are now moving into Germany.

NASA’s Terra satellite flew over the volcano on Friday and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS instrument aboard Terra captured a visible image of Eyjafjallajokull’s ash plume over England and the Netherlands, stretching into Germany.

Meanwhile, the ban on flights in British airspace has been extended until at least 7p.m. due to the threat posed by the volcanic ash.

Restrictions have also been reapplied to Manchester, Liverpool and Blackpool airports, having briefly been lifted.

A Texas University researcher, who has explored Icelandic volcanoes for the past 25 years, said that if history is any indication, the erupting volcano and its immense ash plume could intensify.

Jay Miller, a research scientist in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program who has made numerous trips to the region and studied there, said the ash produced from Icelandic volcanoes can be a real killer.

“What happens is that the magma from the volcano is around 1,200 degrees and it hits the water there, which is near freezing. What is produced is a fine ash that actually has small pieces of glass in it, and it can very easily clog up a jet engine. If you were to inhale that ash, it would literally tear up your lungs,” Miller said. (ANI)

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Extraterrestrial cyclone may help reveal Neptune’s internal structure

March 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Sydney, March 29 (ANI): A team of astronomers has detected an extraterrestrial cyclone at Neptune’s south pole, which may improve our understanding of the violent weather conditions that rage across the distant planet and its internal structure.

According to a report in ABC Science, the team of astronomers made the discovery while studying clouds on other planets using the giant 10-metre Keck Telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

“Ever since the 1989 Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune, scientists have known of a white spot racing around the planet’s south pole,” said Dr Mate Adamkovics, a research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

“But very high resolution images taken in July 2007, thanks to the adaptive optics on Keck, allowed us to see that the spot had divided into two, and then just two days later in another image from Keck showed they had recombined,” he added.

Adamkovics and colleagues, led by Statia Luszcz-Cook, believe they are probably seeing methane clouds caught in a powerful cyclonic vortex of winds at Neptune’s south pole.

“I’ve seen the same sort of thing at one of Saturn’s poles, and we know that’s caused by clouds caught in a giant hurricane like vortex,” Adamkovics said.

“Neptune’s clouds are behaving the same way. Although we can’t see it, a vortex is likely to be at the heart of this activity,” he said.

“Although huge by Earth standards, being thousands of kilometres wide, extraterrestrial hurricanes are remarkably similar to the ones we see on Earth, including a well-formed eye in the middle and a surrounding ring of strong convection,” he added.

The clouds on Neptune are also consistent with clouds formed by the up welling and condensation of methane gas.

In other words, it rains methane on Neptune.

Adamkovics hopes the study will provide further incentive for a new mission to the outer gas giants Uranus and Neptune.

“That would be the only way to verify that the dynamics seen at Neptune’s pole are analogous with what we see closer in on Saturn,” he said.

“We still need to know more about the internal energy that’s driving these weather patterns. It’s not just heat from the Sun, and gravitational heating, those we know about fairly well,” he added.

“There’s got to be some radiological heating as well. So, by studying clouds on other planets like Neptune, we can understand more about that planets internal structure,” he added. (ANI)

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Global warming threatens plant diversity

March 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, March 24 (ANI): A new study by scientists at the Universities of Bonn, Gottingen and Yale, has determined that climate change is set to produce worldwide changes in the living conditions for plants in the coming decades, which would threaten their diversity.

As a result of global warming, moist regions could in future provide habitats for additional species, and in arid and hot regions, the climatic prerequisites for a high degree of plant diversity will deteriorate.

According to Dr. Jan Henning Sommer of Bonn University’s Nees Institute for Biodiversity of Plants asserts, “Climate change could bring great confusion to the existing pattern of plant diversity, with scarcely predictable consequences for our ecosystems and mankind.”

The potential impact of climate change on global plant diversity has now, for the first time, been quantified and modeled on a regional basis.

The researchers have investigated the numbers of plant species to be found in different regions under current climatic conditions, and the subsequent interrelationship they uncovered has now been applied to 18 different climate change scenarios for the year 2100.

In their study, the researchers have emphasized the clear division of our planet into two parts as regards the impact of climate change on plant diversity.

“Additional capacity for plants species richness could be created everywhere where today cool and moist climatic conditions prevail,” said Dr. Holger Kreft, a research scientist from Bonn and co-author of the study.

“On the other hand, in areas which today have a hot tropical or sub-tropical climate the prerequisites for high species numbers will deteriorate,” he said.

This division also has a political dimension, in the sense that favoured areas coincide largely with the industrialised nations, who are responsible for the majority of global warming due to their high amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

The study also points clearly to the consequences of a half-hearted climate policy.

Should the global temperature rise by 1.8 degree Celsius with respect to the year 2000, then the proportion of favoured and disadvantaged regions in terms of species richness would still remain in balance.

“Even if the climate protection goals agreed in Copenhagen are achieved, we would still tend to be heading for a rise in temperature of up to 4 degree C,” said Sommer.

In this case, the projected losses of capacity for plant species richness would considerably exceed possible gains in other regions. (ANI)

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It’s official: Steaming cup of morning coffee helps you stay fit

March 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Washington, Mar 16 (ANI): A steaming hot cup of coffee in the morning can actually do wonders for your health.

And now two new studies have provided more support to the drink’s benefits.

Touted as “the devil”s brew,” coffee contains several nutrients (eg, calcium) as well as hundreds of potentially biologically active compounds (eg, polyphenols) that may promote health.

For instance, observational studies have suggested a beneficial link between coffee consumption and type 2 diabetes.

Two studies have lent additional information concerning the potential health benefits of coffee.

These studies provide additional support for the emerging health benefits of coffee.

Rigorous clinical intervention trials will be needed to understand more fully the biological mechanisms.

The studies by Kempf and Sartorelli “add to a growing literature suggesting that my steaming cup of morning coffee might help me stay healthy,” said ASN Spokesperson Dr. Shelley McGuire.

“I”m a research scientist, but I still trust that foods and beverages which have been part of our culture for generations are probably good for us, or at least they”re probably not bad for us in moderation! Of particular interest is the well-controlled clinical trial that suggests coffee can lower chronic inflammation and even raise our ”good” cholesterol. I for one will enjoy my coffee even more in the weeks to come,” she added.

The studies have been published in the April 2010 issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition report. (ANI)

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Arctic sea ice cover reaches minimum extent for 2009

September 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, September 18 (ANI): A new study has found that the Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for this year, the third-lowest recorded since satellites began measuring sea ice extent in 1979.

The study was carried out by researchers from to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.

While this year’s September minimum extent was greater than each of the past two record-setting and near-record-setting low years, it is still significantly below the long-term average and well outside the range of natural climate variability, said NSIDC Research Scientist Walt Meier.

Most scientists believe the shrinking Arctic sea ice is tied to warming temperatures caused by an increase in human-produced greenhouse gases being pumped into Earth’s atmosphere.

Atmospheric circulation patterns helped the Arctic sea ice spread out in August to prevent another record-setting minimum, said Meier.

“But, most of the 2009 September Arctic sea ice is thin first- or second-year ice, rather than thicker, multi-year ice that used to dominate the region,” said Meier.

“The minimum 2009 sea-ice extent is still about 620,000 square miles below the average minimum extent measured between 1979 and 2000 — an area nearly equal to the size of Alaska,” he added.

“We are still seeing a downward trend that appears to be heading toward ice-free Arctic summers,” Meier said.

CU-Boulder’s NSIDC will provide more detailed information in early October with a full analysis of the 2009 Arctic ice conditions, including aspects of the melt season and conditions heading into the winter ice-growth season. (ANI)

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Scientists aim to improve water quality in space

September 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, September 14 (ANI): In a research aimed at improving the quality of water in space, University of Utah chemists have developed a two-minute water quality monitoring method that just started six months of tests aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

“Now they bring water back on the space shuttle and analyze it on the ground. The problem is there is a big delay. You’d like to be able to maintain iodine or silver (disinfectant) levels in real time with an onboard monitor,” said Marc Porter, a University of Utah professor of chemistry and chemical engineering.

The new method involves sampling space station or space shuttle galley water with syringes, forcing the water through a chemical-imbued disk-shaped membrane, and then reading the color of the membrane with a commercially available, handheld color sensor normally used to measure the color and glossiness of automobile paint.

The sensor detects if the drinking water contains enough iodine (used on U.S. spacecraft) or silver (used by the Russians) to kill any microbes.

The International Space Station has both kinds of water purification systems.

“Our focus was to develop a small, simple, low-cost testing system that uses a handheld device, doesn’t consume materials or generate waste, takes minimal astronaut time, is safe and works in microgravity,” said Porter.

As a spinoff, the test is being modified so it can quickly check water for the level of arsenic – a natural pollutant in places like Bangladesh and the U.S. Southwest and Northeast – and it can be adapted to quickly, inexpensively test for other pollutants.

“It is a general method. It could be used on the ground for testing all kinds of water contaminants such as arsenic, chromium, cadmium, nickel and other heavy metals,” said Lorraine Siperko, a senior research scientist in Porter’s laboratory.

The method is easy to use and much cheaper than existing tests, according to Porter.

The water-monitoring system fits in a pack the size of a small ice chest. It was launched on August 28 on space shuttle Discovery bound for the International Space Station.

During the past decade, the water quality monitoring method was developed and tested during about two dozen low-gravity flights on NASA’s “vomit comet” research aircraft such as the KC-135 and C-9, which took off from Ellington Air Force Base in Texas.

“Now, the experiment is in space for the first time,” Siperko said.

On the space station, “once per month they will check the water for iodine and silver. That data will be downloaded and relayed back to Earth, to Johnson Space Center in Texas,” she added. (ANI)

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Scientists grow retina cells from skin-derived stem cells

August 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, August 25 (ANI): University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have successfully grown multiple types of retina cells from two types of stem cells, giving new hope that damaged retinas may soon come to be repaired by cells grown from the patient’s own skin.

The researchers have also said that their discovery may soon lead to laboratory models for studying genetically linked eye conditions, screening new drugs to treat those conditions and understanding the development of the human eye.

“This is an important step forward for us, as it not only confirms that multiple retinal cells can be derived from human iPS cells using the Wisconsin approach, but also shows how similar the process is to normal human retinal development,” says David Gamm, an assistant professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences, who led a Waisman Center research team along with Jason Meyer, a research scientist

“That is quite remarkable given that the starting cell is so different from a retinal cell and the whole process takes place in a plastic dish. We continue to be amazed at how deep we can probe into these early events and find that they mimic those found in developing retinas. Perhaps this is the way to close the gap between what we know about building a retina in mice, frogs and flies with that of humans,” he adds.

Meyer says the retina project began by using embryonic stem cells, but incorporated the induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells-human stem cells made from skin-as they became available.

Ultimately, the group was able to grow multiple types of retina cells beginning with either type of stem cell, starting with a highly enriched population of very primitive cells with the potential to become retina.

The retina develops from a group of cells that arise during the earliest stages of the developing nervous system.

The Wisconsin team took cells from skin, turned them back into cells resembling embryonic stem cells, and then triggered the development of retinal cell types.

“This is one of the most comprehensive demonstrations of a cell-based system for studying all of the key events that lead to the generation of specialized neural cells. It could serve as a foundation for unlocking the mechanisms that produce human retinal cells,” Meyer says.

Following their success in using the iPS cells, the researchers are expecting that their advance will lead to studying retinal development in detail, and treating conditions that are genetically linked.

They hope that someday ophthalmologists may be able to repair damage to the retina by growing rescue or repair cells from the patient’s skin.

Earlier this year, scientists from the University of Washington showed that human ES cells had the potential to replace retinal cells lost during disease in mice.

“We’re able to produce significant numbers of photoreceptor cells and other retinal cell types using our system, which are lost in many disorders,” Meyer says.

The study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)

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New process can remove sulfur components and CO2 from power plant emissions

August 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, August 19 (ANI): Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a reusable organic liquid that can pull harmful gases such as carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide out of industrial emissions from power plants.

The process could directly replace current methods and allow power plants to capture double the amount of harmful gases in a way that uses no water, less energy and saves money.

“Power plants could easily retrofit to use our process as a direct replacement for existing technology,” said David Heldebrant, PNNL’s lead research scientist for the project.

Harmful gases such as carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide are called “acid gases”.

The new scrubbing process uses acid gas-binding organic liquids that contain no water and appear similar to oily compounds.

These liquids capture the acid gases near room temperature. Scientists then heat the liquid to recover and dispose of the acid gases properly.

These recyclable liquids require much less energy to heat but can hold two times more harmful gases by weight than the current leading liquid absorbent used in power plants.

It is a combination of water and monoethanolamine, a basic organic molecule that grabs the carbon dioxide.

PNNL’s previous work with the all-organic liquids focused on pulling only carbon dioxide out of emissions from power plants.

New work will show how the process can be applied to other acid gases such as sulfur dioxide.

“Current methods used to capture and release carbon dioxide emissions from power plants use a lot of energy because they pump and heat an excess of water during the process,” said Heldebrant.

In PNNL’s process called “Reversible Acid Gas Capture,” the molecules that grab onto the acid gases are already in liquid form, and don’t contain water.

The acid gas-binding organic liquids require less heat than water does to release the captured gases.

Heldebrant and colleagues demonstrated the process in previous work with a carbon dioxide-binding organic liquid, called CO2BOL.

In this process, scientists mix the CO2BOL solution into a holding tank with emissions that contain carbon dioxide. The CO2BOL chemically binds with the carbon dioxide to form a liquid salt solution.

In another tank, scientists reheat the salt solution to strip out the carbon dioxide.

Non-hazardous gases such as nitrogen would not be captured and are released back into the atmosphere.

The toxic compounds are captured separately for storage. At that point, the CO2BOL solution is back in its original state and ready for reuse. (ANI)

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Promising drug target for aggressive form of breast cancer identified

July 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, July 9 (ANI): Researchers at Andel Research Institute (VARI) have identified a potential target for the treatment of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer.

They found that the Met gene may play a critical role in the development of an aggressive form of breast cancer known as basal breast cancer.

“Breast cancer mortality rates are actually declining, but the cancers that don’t respond to traditional treatments tend to be more aggressive and have decreased survival rates,” said VARI Research Scientist Carrie Graveel, Ph.D., lead author of the study.

VARI Distinguished Scientific Fellow George Vande Woude, Ph.D., who heads the laboratory that conducted the research, said: “Met has already been associated with decreased survival in breast cancer, but this study identifies its importance in specific types that can be distinguished at the molecular level.”

In the 1980′s, Dr. Vande Woude’s laboratory at the National Cancer Institute demonstrated that inappropriate levels of Met occur in human tumours, and that cells with inappropriate Met signaling dramatically impact the spread of cancer.

This signaling is implicated in most types of human cancers and high Met expression often correlates with poor prognosis.

“We found Met in the majority of breast cancers. But levels were highest in aggressive types, making Met a promising drug target that could help patients that currently have few treatment options,” said VARI Research Technician Jack DeGroot, another of the study’s authors.

The study has been published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. (ANI)

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Milky Way’s “dark matter” mystery solved by astrophysicists

July 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, July 9 (ANI): A team of astrophysicists has solved a mystery that led some scientists to speculate that the distribution of certain gamma rays in our Milky Way galaxy was evidence of a form of undetectable “dark matter” believed to make up much of the mass of the universe.

In two separate scientific papers, the astrophysicists show that this distribution of gamma rays can be explained by the way “antimatter positrons” from the radioactive decay of elements, created by massive star explosions in the galaxy, propagate through the galaxy.

Thus, the scientists said, the observed distribution of gamma rays is not evidence for dark matter.

“There is no great mystery,” said Richard Lingenfelter, a research scientist at UC San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences who conducted the studies with Richard Rothschild, a research scientist also at UCSD, and James Higdon, a physics professor at the Claremont Colleges.

“The observed distribution of gamma rays is in fact quite consistent with the standard picture,” he added.

Over the past five years, gamma ray measurements from the European satellite INTEGRAL have perplexed astronomers, leading some to argue that a “great mystery” existed because the distribution of these gamma rays across different parts of the Milky Way galaxy was not as expected.

To explain the source of this mystery, some astronomers had hypothesized the existence of various forms of dark matter, which astronomers suspect exists, but have not yet found.

What is known for certain is that our galaxy and others are filled with tiny subatomic particles known as positrons, the antimatter counterpart of typical, everyday electrons.

The scientists calculated that most of the gamma rays should be concentrated in the inner regions of the galaxy, just as was observed by the satellite data.

“The observed distribution of gamma rays is consistent with the standard picture where the source of positrons is the radioactive decay of isotopes of nickel, titanium and aluminum produced in supernova explosions of stars more massive than the Sun,” said Rothschild.

The scientists point out that a basic assumption of one of the more exotic explanations for the purported mystery – dark matter decays or annihilations – is flawed, because it assumes that the positrons annihilate very close to the exploding stars from which they originated.

“We clearly demonstrated this was not the case, and that the distribution of the gamma rays observed by the gamma ray satellite was not a detection or indication of a ‘dark matter signal’,” said Lingenfelter. (ANI)

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UK Govt. awareness program to cut teen pregnancies ineffective

July 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, July 8 (ANI): A government awareness program in England, devised to cut down teenage pregnancies, drunkenness or cannabis use, had no impact, suggests a study.

Lead authors Meg Wiggins of the Institute of Education, University of London, and Chris Bonell at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, say that the Young People’s Development Programme, initiated in 2004, may have even increased pregnancies.

Partakers were either taking part in YPDP (intervention group) or a youth programme away from YPDP funds (comparison group).

The study found young women in the YPDP group reported significantly more pregnancies, as much as 16 per cent, than in the comparison group, which stood at 6 per cent.

Those in the YPDP group also more commonly reported early heterosexual experience and expectation of teenage parenthood, namely 58 per cent versus 33 per cent and 34 per cent versus 24 per cent respectively.

No definite explanation was found for the results.

Douglas Kirby, a senior research scientist based in the US, said that such findings did not apply to all youth development approaches.

The study has been published in the online edition of the British Medical Journal. (ANI)

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Wildlife declining in Kenya’s national parks at same rate as outside areas

July 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Washington, July 8 (ANI): A new study has indicated that long-term declines of elephants, giraffe, impala and other animals in Kenya are occurring at the same rates within the country’s national parks as outside of these protected areas.

“This is the first time we’ve taken a good look at a national park system in one country, relative to all of the wildlife populations across the whole country, and we found that wildlife populations inside and outside of the parks are declining at much the same rate,” said David Western, an adjunct professor of biology at UC San Diego, who headed the study.

Western said this finding, while surprising to those who regard national parks as sanctuaries where wildlife populations are protected, illustrates the problems that maintaining these protected areas can create on wildlife and ecosystems inside as well as outside of the parks.

“What we’re now beginning to understand is that the pressures around the parks are also affecting the wildlife in the parks,” said Western, a former director of the Kenyan Wildlife Service, which commissioned the study two years ago.

His research team, which included Samantha Russell, a research scientist at the African Conservation Center, and Innes Cuthill, a biologist at Britain’s Bristol University, compiled data from more than 270 counts of wildlife in Kenya over a period of 25 years.

“Many of the population changes that occur are drought-driven, occurring over a 5 to 10 year period,” said Western.

“These data cover a long period of time and overcome that seasonal periodic drought-driven effect on wildlife,” he added.

The scientists noted in their study paper that many of Kenya’s 23 national park and 26 national reserve boundaries do not take into account the seasonal migrations of animals.

So when land surrounding the parks is allowed to be developed for agriculture and other uses, migratory routes and important sources of food for wildlife are destroyed.

“The most disturbing finding from our study is that the biggest parks do not provide insulation from wildlife losses,” said Western. “In fact, the biggest losses are occurring in the big parks, rather than the smaller ones,” he added.

Western said that to protect Kenyan wildlife from further declines, the Kenyan government needs to set policies to share the profits of ecotourism with local communities so that they can reap the economic benefits of protecting the wildlife and ecosystems within and surrounding the national parks. (ANI)

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