Forcing Cancer to Eat Itself to Death

by

A protein found in ovarian cancer tumors transforms cancer cells into hungry cannibals, slowing women’s cancer growth, researchers at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center report.

This finding, published in the November issue of Cancer Research, paves the way for the creation of a drug that would force ovarian cancer cells to eat themselves to death.

Ovarian cancer killed over 15,000 women in 2007, while an additional 22,000 women were diagnosed. Because there are no sure-fire methods of early detection, researchers agree that finding aggressive treatments for the cancer is essential.

Chandra Bartholomeusz, part of this M.D. Anderson Cancer Center team, conducted the series of experiments on ovarian tumor tissue from 395 women, in which she stimulated one batch of ovarian cancer cells to produce more of this protein, called PEA-15, and another batch to inhibit the manufacture of the protein. She was surprised to find that the cancer cells lacking PEA-15 increased in number by 115% compared to controls.
Full Article »

When Going “Green” May Prove Harmful

by
Scope Correspondent

Going green may be the mantra of the day, but at least one “green” solution—introducing insects to target invasive knapweed—can have indirect destructive consequences for the native species they’re meant to protect.

Gallflies used to combat invasive knapweed in Montana, which does an estimated $14 million of damage statewide, have recently been shown to hurt native plant growth through indirect food chain “ripple effects.” The flies, originally introduced in the 1970s, provide an attractive source of extra calories for native deermice, which leads to a deermouse population increase. Since the deermice are natural predators of native seeds, the increased population means more hungry rodent mouths eating native seeds that would have otherwise taken root and grown.
Full Article »

How to Avoid Bad Genes

by

Scientists have shown that female flies mate with multiple males to avoid bad genes.

In the recent study, insect biologists discovered that female fruit flies exposed to male flies with a defective gene—one that destroys Y chromosomes, thus reducing sperm count and producing only daughters—evolved a higher rate of mating with multiple males than did females exposed to a normal male population.

This behavior in females, called polyandry, is common in several species, says Nina Wedell, one of the lead researchers. Though it was not always believed to be so (Darwin’s theory of male-male competition driving sexual selection, or choosing which male’s sperm perpetuates the species, persisted until about the 1980s) researchers have found vast evidence that females mate more often than necessary for full fertilization of their eggs.
Full Article »

Deciphering the Turkey Genome

by

Just in time for Thanksgiving and the holiday season, researchers are taking a closer look at turkey DNA.

An international consortium has started to sequence the entire genome of the wild and domesticated turkey, meleagris gallopavo.

Information gleaned from reading the turkey’s complete genetic code—its blueprint for life—could help commercial poultry producers grow meatier, healthier, and more productive turkeys, say the researchers.

Genes could be identified for important traits in turkeys raised for their meat, “things like strong legs, body weight, low fat, egg production … and disease resistance,” says Janet Fulton, a molecular biologist at the poultry breeding company HyLine International.
Full Article »

Paralyzed Monkeys Move Body with Their Thoughts

by

Nerve signals, it seems, can leapfrog between the body and the computer.

By activating a single neuron, researchers created an artificial nerve pathway that restored wrist movement in two paralyzed monkeys.

While still at least a decade away from human clinical trials, this strategy has implications for the treatment of paralysis, especially for conditions relating to spinal cord injury and stroke.

Monkeys were trained to play a video game where they used side-to-side wrist motion to reach targets and earn food rewards. Then researchers used drug injections to temporarily paralyze the monkeys’ regular nerve pathways for wrist motion.

With the monkeys’ arms now paralyzed, they placed electrodes on individual neurons inside the monkeys’ brains, routed the signal from the electrodes to a computer, and then fed that signal directly to electrodes in the monkeys’ wrists. Paralyzed monkeys were consistently able to move their wrists and successfully play the video game using this artificial nerve pathway.

“Nearly every neuron that we tested could be used to control this type of stimulation,” says University of Washington researcher Chet Mortiz, lead author of the study.
Full Article »

Making Visible What Is Invisible

by

Forensic science may turn to an explosive chemistry set for a future fingerprinting boost.

Recently, while British researchers were investigating the properties of a synthetic sulfur-nitrogen polymer, they discovered a side effect that made their fingerprints appear to the naked eye upon polymerization—that is, bonding multiple small molecules together to form long chains of molecules.

Fingerprints are formed from the unique pattern of ridges on our fingers and come in two categories. Patent fingerprints result when a medium such as paint, oil, or blood is transferred from the finger to a surface. These prints can easily be seen and are often photographed rather than lifted for forensic analysis.
Full Article »

Thanks for the (Long-Lasting) Memories

by

If you’ve ever been afraid to ride that dusty, old bike again, don’t despair. It turns out the neurons in your brain that once were able to help you balance on two wheels may still be equipped to remember. At least that’s what a new study seems to say about how the neurons in brains store information.

Neuroscientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany have come across an important clue on how memory storage is accomplished, whether that involves remembering how to ride a bike, make killer chess moves, or react to a dangerous situation. Furthermore, the study implies that once you’ve learned to do these things the memory stays encoded in the mind, embedded in the structure of neurons.

“It’s an absolutely beautiful study,” says Eric Knudsen, a neuroscientist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who has worked on similar problems. “They are using the latest technology to look at structural plasticity,” changes in the brain’s neuronal structure sparked by experience.
Full Article »

Giant Dinosaur Migrator Dethroned

by

The “poster-boy” of migrating dinosaurs, the Edmontosaurus, a large hadrosaur that looked like a cross between a gigantic duck and a buffalo, has been dethroned from its title of greatest known land migrator. This polar dinosaur from the Late Cretacean period, some 70 million years ago, was believed to have travelled distances nine times farther than mule deer and four times farther than wildebeests. But new research from the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada, argues that Edmontosaurus could not have met the energy requirement to accomplish such a feat.

Paleontologists were first exposed to the concept of dinosaur migration in the 1920s, through ideas put forth by Friedrich von Huene in Germany. Yet the image of great herds of hadrosaurs travelling south from the Arctic following the thirty-degree-latitude arc of the sun to avoid total winter darkness and seek food, pursued by equally hungry tyrannosaurs, was popularized in the 1970s.
Full Article »

The Wow Factor

by

“You’re going to feel a little pressure now.”

She squeezes the stuffed red bull toy tighter. Her jaw clenches. Her eyes—one covered with gauze, the other pried open with a suction ring—are difficult to see. A massive cone-shaped laser descends into the cavity of her open eye, connecting to the suction cup and flattening the eye. “It hurts,” she whimpers.

Two doctors and a technician cluster around her head. “Lie still,” one doctor says. “You’re doing very well,” the other coos.

The patient does not seem convinced.

The laser does its work. I watch her eye, magnified several times on a computer screen, as tiny bubbles fill a circle over her pupil from bottom to top. The laser is erasing tissue in her cornea, just beneath the surface of her eye, leaving a layer of bubbles in its place. The bubbles form a perforated circle—a flap—and all that remains is to separate it from the eye, like tearing off a stamp, and lift it up.

And then to do the second eye. This one hurts worse, and she squirms under the laser. “Lie still,” they say again. Her chest heaves. Her breath comes in quick gasps. The doctors hover. One pats her shoulder. “You’re doing great,” he says. A few seconds later it’s over.

But they haven’t even gotten to the good part. They’ve just made the flaps. If all goes well, after lifting each flap, peeling it back, shooting a second laser into the tissue below, and sealing the flap back on again, she’ll be able to read her alarm clock in the morning.
Full Article »

Seized

by

Until she was a middle-schooler, Maria Caroll thought that everyone saw ghosts. Then her sister’s “Aren’t we too old for that stuff?” punctured her assumption. After that, she talked less about the woman’s spectral face in the window across the street, kept to herself the flickering lights and nocturnal visitors that danced along her walls. More than ghosts continued to follow her, though. She went to college, studied and traveled in Europe, but still lived in a world where time was periodically erased, years of memories and dreams crunched into a second, and where her sense of self sometimes dissolved into an ecstatic bliss or intense fear.

Then, when she was twenty, she started falling, tripping over sharp rocks, and losing consciousness on public transportation. She returned to Connecticut to seek medical help. Maria suspected that doctors would label her life-long reality as pathology, and they did. Tests revealed abnormal brain waves. Her periodic journeys to the other side of consciousness were the work of connected neurons firing rapidly in synchronous, excessive volleys, as if machine gun fire had suddenly ripped through the electrical concerto playing in the brain. Maria was diagnosed with epilepsy. Full Article »

Page 1 of 7Next