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Converting Adult Somatic Cells To Pluripotent Stem Cells Using A Single VirusScientists have found a more efficient way to create induced pluripotent stem cells using a single virus vector instead of multiple viruses in the reprogramming process. The ability to combine four vectors into single "stem cell cassette" containing all four genes using a combination of 2A peptides and IRES dramatically improves iPS cell production efficiency -- 10 times higher than previously reported studies.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am How Cheating Ants Give Themselves AwayIn ant society, workers normally give up reproducing themselves to care for their queen's offspring, who are their brothers and sisters. When workers try to cheat and have their own kids in the queen's presence, their peers swiftly attack and physically restrain them from reproducing.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am Antioxidants Offer Pain Relief In Patients With Chronic PancreatitisAntioxidant supplementation was found to be effective in relieving pain and reducing levels of oxidative stress in patients with chronic pancreatitis.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am Looking Through Galileo’s EyesIn 1609, exactly four centuries ago, Galileo revolutionized humankind's understanding of our position in the Universe when he used a telescope for the first time to study the heavens, which saw him sketching radical new views of the moon and discovering the satellites orbiting Jupiter.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am Mortality Rates Higher For Heart Disease Patients In Poorer Neighborhoods, Study SuggestsHeart disease patients living in poorer areas of B.C. are up to twice as likely to die from chronic diseases than patients living in better-off areas, a University of British Columbia study has found.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am Women's Brains Recognize, Encode Smell Of Male Sexual SweatSocioemotional meanings, including sexual ones, are conveyed in human sweat. Nineteen healthy female subjects inhaled olfactory stimuli from four sources, one of which was sweat gathered from sexually aroused males.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Jan 2009 | 1:00 am In Fight Against Pathogens, Calcium Helps Plants Make Their Own AspirinCalcium builds strong bones, good teeth--and healthy plants, according to a new study.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm Sea Level Rise Of One Meter Within 100 YearsNew research indicates that the ocean could rise in the next 100 years to a meter higher than the current sea level -- which is three times higher than predictions from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm On A High-fat Diet, Protective Gene Variant Becomes Bad ActorNew evidence in mice bolsters the notion that a version of a gene earlier shown to protect lean people against weight gain and insulin resistance can have the opposite effect in those who eat a high-fat diet and are heavier, reveals a new report in the journal Cell Metabolism.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm Synthetic HDL: New Weapon To Fight Cholesterol ProblemsScientists now offer a promising new weapon that could help fight high cholesterol levels and the deadly heart disease that often results: synthetic high-density lipoprotein, or HDL -- the "good" cholesterol. The researchers successfully designed synthetic HDL and show that their nanoparticle version is capable of irreversibly binding cholesterol. The synthetic HDL, based on gold nanoparticles, is similar in size to HDL and mimics HDL's general surface composition.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Jan 2009 | 7:00 pm Senate to consider expanding wilderness protection (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jan 2009 | 10:22 am Astronauts Primed for Space Station Power Boost (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - WASHINGTON - Seven astronauts are gearing up to launch toward the International Space Station next month to deliver a final piece of the outpost's power grid, the last major American-built addition to the orbiting laboratory.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jan 2009 | 2:35 am Rare tree kangaroo species has twins at Neb. zoo (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jan 2009 | 2:28 am Amazon Deforestation: Earth's Heart and Lungs Dismembered (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jan 2009 | 1:24 am How We Get Our BearingsWe use geometric cues and feature cues.Source: Livescience.com | 11 Jan 2009 | 1:21 am Ukraine signs gas transit monitoring deal (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Jan 2009 | 12:37 am Belfast art set to collide with quantum physicsThe parallel universes of quantum physics and theatre are about to collide as scientists on the French-Swiss border attempt once more to recreate the Big Bang. With uncanny timing, an Irish play about the experiment at the Cern laboratory which is designed to explain the universe's origins will be staged while the real life drama of unlocking the cosmos' mysteries takes place 300ft under the earth on the outskirts of Geneva. The Gentlemen's Tea Drinking Society throws four men together in a single room, one of whom is a genius scientist with a secret to reveal - he has discovered the Higgs boson or the so-called "God Particle". One of the main purposes of the largest scientific experiment ever conducted is to find that elusive particle which physicists believe pervades all space and unites all other particles. They will try this at the Cern lab using the Large Hadron Collider which took 30 years to build, cost more than $10 billion and runs underground for 27 kilometres. The play is the brainchild of Richard Dormer who shot to fame in Ireland, Britain and the United States a couple of years ago for his one-man portrayal of the triumphs and trials of Ulster snooker legend Alex "Hurricane" Higgins. In a dank room adjacent to St Patrick's Catholic Church in Belfast's Donegall Street, Dormer explained that his interest in the hunt for Higgs boson was inspired by a Belfast wall mural. "I used to cycle past a gable wall end at a pathway near the Lagan river and there was this new mural that caught my attention. It said, 'How can quantum gravity explain the origins of the universe?' It really got my mind going about the subject as I have always loved science and science fiction." The Cern scientists initial failure to trigger a Big Bang last September has turned out to be fortuitous for Dormer. A second attempt is scheduled for early spring, when the play goes on tour. "We don't know what they (the scientists) will find, but this play has taken reality and is just running with it and asking what if. Hopefully, this is art running in parallel with reality," Dormer said. Asked about the lack of technological props and backdrops, the play's director Rachel O'Riordan said the production was a drama about science, not about putting scientific experiments on the stage. "The last thing you want to do is put something so complicated on stage that it alienates an audience. Most people have an awareness about Cern. You are talking to someone who failed their maths GCSE. All this stuff about the universe makes Newton seem simple." The experiment triggered worldwide fears that the Large Hadron Collider would cause a black hole and swallow up the world. O'Riordan added that audiences needn't fear that the play will create a tear in space or time. Belfast born DJ David Holmes, who produced the music for Ocean's Twelve and Hunger, has written the play's soundtrack. Given that his most famous character before now was a chain smoking, hard drinking, cocaine snorting snooker player, how does Dormer switch to playing a wheelchair-bound scientist who has cracked a key secret of the cosmos? "Actually, they are very similar, as Alex was a scientist in his own right," says Dormer. "He knew what geometry was. He thought about the positioning of objects in space. His character was also a genius." The Gentlemen's Tea-Drinking Society holds its premiere on 4 February at the Old Museum until 14th and then goes on tour in Ireland until 10 March. It then opens at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow before moving to London. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 11 Jan 2009 | 12:05 am TV star hails Alzheimer's 'heroic' carersAlmost half of those who care for people with Alzheimer's receive no help from social services, have little or no respite care and frequently feel threatened by the sufferers they look after. A YouGov survey of 767 carers of Alzheimer's sufferers reveals that 27% of sufferers waited three years or longer for an official diagnosis. Another 17% never received one. Fiona Phillips, who resigned as a GMTV presenter in December after her father developed the disease, commissioned the YouGov survey as part of her investigation into the lives of the half a million unpaid carers of Alzheimer's sufferers in Britain for Channel 4's Dispatches. The programme tells how she fought to get help for her 74-year-old father, one of the 700,000 victims of Britain's "hidden epidemic". Her struggle began two years ago, after her mother, Amy, died aged 74, having suffered from Alzheimer's for 15 years. She realised her father was also ill. "In a funny way, it's easier this time because I know what I'm dealing with," Phillips said. "Dad has been diagnosed, but I don't think he realises what is happening. He keeps forgetting words and it's so sad because he was such an active, intelligent man with an opinion on everything, but he's in a much happier state than mum, who was just crying all the time." Phillips recently moved her father, Phil, out of his home in Wales - a seven-hour drive away - into sheltered housing near his brother, an hour from London, but the experience of trying to care for him, while being a full-time working mother of two young children, has made her critical of the support available. "This is a huge and pressing crisis, which the government claims to be addressing," she said. "But my investigation reveals the scandalous reality of families around Britain left alone to shoulder the burden of care for their loved ones. "These half a million unpaid carers do a heroic job, and save the government £6bn a year, but too often have to fight their way through NHS and local government bureaucracy to get even the smallest bit of help. "The shocking findings of our survey of carers revealed that 41% got little or no respite care and more than half received no help at all from social services. In addition, I discovered that some victims never get a formal diagnosis. "Diagnosis is critical; without it, sufferers have no access to drugs or other treatment. But too many doctors aren't trained to pick up the symptoms, and can still dismiss what is a physical, killer disease as just the price you pay for getting old." Phillips added: "Even if you are lucky enough to get an early diagnosis, depending on where you live, there's the struggle to get the drugs that can help slow down the ravages of the disease... thanks to a controversial ruling [by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence], people in the early stages of Alzheimer's are currently very unlikely to get access to any drugs at all." The survey also found that 19% of carers sometimes or often feel threatened by the sufferers they care for. Two-thirds said they would like training. "Alzheimer's is a degenerative disease of the brain, not an inevitable part of growing old, which so many people still seem to think," said Phillips. "Currently in Britain, 700,000 people have some form of dementia, a figure projected to grow to a million sufferers in less than 20 years. It's a timebomb. But it's not just a disease of the old - my mum developed symptoms at about 60, and was dead 15 years later. "This is a huge and pressing crisis, but on current government budgets there simply isn't enough social care to go round - which is why I have to supplement care for my dad from social services by paying a charity to help look after him, so he can retain some independence for as long as possible. I can afford it but thousands can't, leaving them drained of funds, being forced to give up work, and socially isolated." Last year, before she resigned from GMTV, Gordon Brown tried to co-opt Phillips as a health minister, responsible for communicating policy in the Lords, as part of his "government of all the talents". Phillips refused, but remains keen to take an active part in putting together the government's delayed strategy on dementia. Without a firm funding commitment, however, she believes nothing will change. "Families will carry on with their daily struggle to cope because they do it out of love. The fact that we are not giving them the support they need is a disgrace." The Dispatches findings come after last week's Alzheimer's Research Trust survey revealed that 23,000 Alzheimer's patients a year are being killed by antipsychotic, so-called "chemical cosh" drugs, which have been found to double the risk of death. • Dispatches: Mum, Dad, Alzheimer's and Me is on Channel 4 tomorrow at 8pm. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 11 Jan 2009 | 12:05 am Alzheimer's: the factsEarly symptoms, risk factors and causes of the diseaseSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 11 Jan 2009 | 12:05 am Mars robot sets out on an epic trekIn a few days, a robot vehicle no bigger than a golf cart will complete its analysis of a small patch of red Martian soil. Then it will turn south to continue a journey that will become the longest overland trek ever made on another world. Opportunity is one of a pair of six-wheeled robots that have been trundling across Mars since 2004. In that time, Opportunity and its partner, Spirit, have uncovered vital information about the planet's past and shown that, although apparently sterile and barren today, Mars was once Earth-like, with a thick atmosphere and plenty of water. The small probes, which will mark their fifth anniversary on Mars this month, have helped to transform our knowledge of the Red Planet. Yet each was designed to survive there for only three months, a startling 20-fold increase in operating life that was hailed by scientists at Nasa last week. "We were surprised when we reached our first year on Mars, but now we have got used to it," said John Callas, the project's manager at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. '"I don't see any reason why they cannot go on for years to come." Spirit and Opportunity touched down, encased in huge inflated airbags, on 3 and 24 January 2004 respectively, and have since sent back more than a quarter of a million photographs, survived dust storms, descended into craters and, in one case, climbed a mountain. Opportunity has operated continuously without a hitch, while Spirit suffered one major glitch two years ago when a wheel jammed. However, the little rover has still managed to move around fairly well on its remaining five wheels. For both craft, the unexpected high winds on Mars were a major contribution to their longevity, for they have prevented dust from settling on their solar panels and allowed them to maintain their power supplies. "As for the loss of the wheel on Spirit, that turned out to be a stroke of luck," added Callas. "It created a furrow behind the rover and, when we looked at those tracks, we found that Spirit had uncovered a patch of very pure silicon rock that we have subsequently discovered was laid down aeons ago by an ancient hot spring. It was a key piece of evidence to support the idea that water flowed over the surface of Mars billions of years ago." After Venus, Mars is Earth's closest planetary neighbour and for much of the 19th and 20th centuries was assumed to be the home of alien life forms. The alien invaders in HG Wells's War of the Worlds were Martians, for example. Then in 1976, two US Viking robot probes landed on Mars and showed that it was a rocky, hostile world with a painfully thin atmosphere and no water on its surface. The prospects of finding life there were rated as almost zero. But recent research projects - with Spirit and Opportunity in the vanguard - have since shown that Mars, although grim today, once had oceans, rivers and a thick atmosphere. These discoveries raise two key questions: did primitive life get a chance to evolve before catastrophe struck Mars and, if so, does it still lurk beneath the planet's surface? And second, what happened to Mars? Why was an Earth-like world abruptly turned into a desert planet? These are key questions that now dominate the investigation of the planet and experiments aimed at finding answers will form the core of future missions. The scientists who were involved in the design and construction of Spirit and Opportunity are already working on a new, more sophisticated and far larger follow-up mission: the Mars Science Laboratory. This probe - the size of a Mini Cooper, according to Callas - will be launched next year and is scheduled to reach the Red Planet in 2012. It will be capable of moving around the surface, while stopping to drill into the Martian soil in search of organic material. It will also be fitted with sensors for detecting chemicals in the atmosphere, in particular methane, whose presence will be another indicator that complex organic reactions are occurring on the planet. "The Mars Science Laboratory will provide us with a lot more important information although, in the end, the only way we will know unambiguously that there is, or was, life on the planet is to bring back samples of Martian soil and rock to Earth - although that will require a mission that will involve a fleet of spacecraft, capable of rendezvousing in space, will be very expensive and will take at least another decade for us to get ready for," added Callas. In the meantime, Spirit and Opportunity will continue to trundle on their separate ways across the red deserts of Mars. Spirit is now heading for a promising rocky outcrop nicknamed Goddard by Nasa scientists. "It might be a volcanic crater, and that is something that we haven't seen before," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, a principal investigator for the mission. Meanwhile, Opportunity has already left Victoria Crater, which it has been investigating for the past two years and is now heading towards an even larger crater, Endeavour. "We may not get there, but scientifically it is the right direction," added Squyres. This point was backed by Callas. "It's a trip of around 13 kilometres, longer than Opportunity's entire journeying to date," he said. "The main problem will be knowing when to stop the rover and when to keep going - like a long-distance car trip on Earth. You cannot halt at every place that looks interesting. You won't reach your destination. On the other hand, if we saw a dinosaur bone sticking out the ground that would be worth taking a look at, I suppose. "Certainly, the trip to Endeavour is ambitious but given what these rovers have done already, I am confident Opportunity will succeed." guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsSource: Science | guardian.co.uk | 11 Jan 2009 | 12:05 am Mars in focus• Mars is viewed, by Galileo, through a telescope for the first time in 1609.Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 11 Jan 2009 | 12:05 am 14 Percent of U.S. Adults Can't ReadEducation Department says some 32 million U.S. adults lack basic literacy.Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jan 2009 | 5:23 pm When Childbirth Was Natural, and DeadlyThe eighteenth century was a time when a mother, not her baby, needed to be delivered.Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jan 2009 | 4:18 pm A New Use For Recycled TiresT-Blocks, which are made of old tires and concrete.Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jan 2009 | 4:10 pm EPA eCycling Program Hits New HighEPA announced a 30 percent increase in electronics recycling through its Plug-In to eCycling program.Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jan 2009 | 4:03 pm Recycling the Big StuffWhat if you needed to dispose of something bigger, or more obscure?Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jan 2009 | 3:56 pm Obese Now Outweigh the OverweightMore Americans are now obese compared to being simply overweight.Source: Livescience.com | 10 Jan 2009 | 3:50 pm Rare 'dinky' bird migrates to US for first time (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jan 2009 | 3:48 pm The Nation's Weather (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Jan 2009 | 11:52 am Ants 'get aggressive with cheats'Worker ants in colonies with a queen are physically attacked by their peers if they try to reproduce, a study says.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Jan 2009 | 9:38 am
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