Rodent of the Week: Chemo disrupts birth of new brain cells

Rodent of the Week: Chemo disrupts birth of new brain cells: "

Many people refer to something called chemo-brain that occurs while on chemotherapy. The medications, while attacking cancer cells, also seem to affect cognitive function. A new study depicts what happens in the brain from these potent drugs and suggests a method that may help resolve the problem.

Researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center developed a rodent model to test which among four commonly used chemotherapy drugs crossed the blood-brain barrier. Two medications were known to cross the barrier and two were not expected to do so. But the study showed all four drugs caused a significant breakdown of brain cell regeneration in the animal model, including a 15.4% reduction in new brain cells after use of fluorouracil, a 30.5% reduction following cyclophosphamide, a 22.4% reduction following doxorubicin and a 36% reduction following paclitaxel.

"It could be that all of the chemo drugs cross into the brain after all, or that they act via peripheral mechanisms, such as inflammation, that could open up the blood-brain barrier," the lead author of the study, Dr. Robert Gross, said in a news release.

Previous studies, however, have shown that the experimental growth hormone, IGF-1, may increase the number of new brain cells, which could reduce the cognitive effect of chemotherapy.

The study was published online in the journal Cancer Investigation.

— Shari Roan

Photo credit: Advanced Cell Technology, Inc.

"

About 1% of U.S. children have autism spectrum disorder, the CDC says

About 1% of U.S. children have autism spectrum disorder, the CDC says: "

About 1 in 110 U.S. children suffers from autism spectrum disorders, a broad classification that includes autism, Asperger's syndrome and pervasive developmental disabilities, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported today in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The data, which were released on a provisional basis in October, coincide well with other estimates of autism prevalence, including a report in the journal Pediatrics that same month.

The new data represent a 50% increase from two years ago, when the agency estimated the prevalence of the disorder at about 1 in 150 children. At least some of the increase comes from better diagnosis of the disorder, but some apparently also comes from a complex mix of genetic and environmental factors -- although it is not clear what those factors might be. The new study did not investigate potential causes of the disorder, said lead author Catherine Rice, a behavioral health scientist at the CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. Other CDC groups are looking at potential causes, she said.

The study focused on children who were 8 years old in 2006, the most recent year for which data were available, because other studies have shown that most cases of autism spectrum disorders are diagnosed by that age. The researchers studied case records of children at 11 sites on the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, which covers about 8% of U.S. children. Case records were reviewed to ensure that appropriate diagnostic criteria for the disorders were met, but the children were not studied directly.

The researchers found that 2,757 of 307,790 8-year-olds in the sites had an autism spectrum disorder, an overall prevalence of 9 per 1,000. Rates at individual sites ranged from a low of 4.2 per 1,000 in Florida to a high of 12.1 in Arizona and Missouri. Rice said it is likely the low rates represent an underreporting, but she had no explanation for the states with the highest rates.

Boys were about 4.5 times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with the disorder, which matches well with earlier studies that found about 80% of victims are male. That means that about 1 in 70 boys suffers from the disorder, compared with about 1 in 315 girls. The average age of diagnosis was 4.5, about five months earlier than had been the case in 2002.

-- Thomas H. Maugh II

"

Drink soda, gain 10 pounds of fat a year!

Drink soda, gain 10 pounds of fat a year!: "

If you can’t win hearts and minds, appeal to their stomachs. That's seems to be the philosophy of the New York City health department, which recently released nauseating videos of a man attempting to drink what looks like a gloopy, gelatinous cup of fat.



Viewers seem to have gotten the hint -- but they're spitting it right back out. New Yorkers had had it up to here. They’d been putting up with subway ads sending the same message, as well as a failed proposal for a soda tax this year. "I want this on my Ipod," one commenter at New York Magazine said of the video.

Then again, said commenter Alexandre Laudet over at the Huffington Post, "We are so bombarded with info we almost need to be shocked into listening at times so if it works, why not?"

The American Beverage Assn. called the ads "sensationalized." That may be so -- and it may have inspired the contrarian consumer to crack open another can of soda -- but I'll bet you a mineral water that anyone who's seen the ad will think twice before taking that first sip.

-- Amina Khan

"

Dark Matter Particles May Have Been Detected

Dark Matter Particles May Have Been Detected: "During two seminars at Stanford and Fermilab on Thursday, researchers described signals for two events detected deep in an old iron mine in Minnesota that might mark the first detection of dark matter — or not. The presenters said the chances that the signals they detected were caused by something other than "neutralino" dark matter particles was 23 percent. "One source indicates that we'd need less than 10 total detections within the CDMS' range in order to have a high degree of confidence in the results." The NY Times describes the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search methodology: "The cryogenic experiment is nearly half a mile underground in an old iron mine in Soudan, Minn., to shield it from cosmic rays. It consists of a stack of germanium and silicon detectors, cooled to one-hundredth of a degree Kelvin. When a particle hits one of the detectors, it produces an electrical charge and deposits a small bit of energy in the form of heat, each of which are independently measured. By comparing the amounts of charge and heat left behind, the collaboration’s physicists can tell so-called wimps from more mundane particles like neutrons, which are expected to flood the underground chamber from radioactivity in the rocks around it." Here are the research team's summary notes of the latest results (PDF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"

California's population grows by less than 1%

California's population grows by less than 1%: "The slowest rate in more than a decade is blamed primarily on the recession, specifically high unemployment and foreclosures.





California's population grew less than 1% in the last year, the slowest growth rate in more than a decade and a vivid indicator of the continued toll that the deep recession has taken on the state.

"

Asshole

Asshole: ""

We had a deal. A few Senators just lied to us.

We had a deal. A few Senators just lied to us.: "I've seen a few post-mortems of the public option campaign kicking around the Internets. Invariably, as more are written, some will blame the people leading the campaign for not adopting different tactics which, the authors of the post-mortems will claim, could have led to victory.

Before this line of writing becomes too widespread, we all need to remember that the only reason we didn't win the public option campaign was because a few Senators lied to us. Unless someone can think of ways to have prevented them from lying, then these post-mortems will be useless.

Back on May 21st, there were only 28 Senators in support of a triggerless public option. Through your tireless participation in a whip count effort, by October 8th we raised that number to 51 when Jon Tester came out in support. By October 30th, when Evan Bayh said he wouldn't filibuster, we were up to 56 Democrats for cloture on health care reform with a public option.

From that point, the only four Senators we still needed all lied to us in one form or another. Both Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln signed a document stating that they supported a public option, only to reverse their positions. Blanche Lincoln's website still comically claimed she supported a public option even as she was declaring her opposition to one on the Senate floor.

Still, Landrieu, Lincoln and Ben Nelson were all part of the group of ten Senators who forged a deal on the public option that included a Medicare buy-in. Further, immediately after that deal was reached, Harry Reid contacted Joe Lieberman to see if he liked the deal. Lieberman told Harry Reid that he was liking what he was seeing, and just wanted to wait for the CBO report. Further, Lieberman had supported an even stronger Medicare buy-in (for Americans aged 50-64) as recently as September 2009.

Six days later, Lieberman and Nelson went on national television to engage in some more mendacity. Lieberman said he would filibuster the deal, even though he had told Reid he liked it, and even though he had recently advocated for it. Ben Nelson badmouthed the deal even though he helped forge it.

And then, when the lying was all done, Rahm Emanuel ordered the Democratic Senate caucus to do as Lieberman said. And the Democratic Senate caucus not only is ready to comply, but to do so without punishing Lieberman (or any of the other liars, for that matter).

To put it bluntly, we had won the campaign, but were lied to by a small number of Senators. In particular, we were lied to by Joe Lieberman. If you have a post-mortem that could have prevented the lying, I'd love to hear it. For, were it not for the lying, the public option campaign would have been won.

Update: Just stop yelling at each other in the comments. Just stop it. It doesn't help anything. I'll keep that in mind myself.

Update 2: Instead of yelling at each other, watch Franken shut Lieberman down. It will make you feel a little better:

"

When asked to pray, what do doctors say?

When asked to pray, what do doctors say?: "

Families often turn to prayer when a loved one is in the hospital. But what happens when they ask their doctor to take part?

A new study reveals how physicians deal with a request for prayer by patients and their families in clinical settings. The 30 doctors surveyed by researchers from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and Rice University in Houston were pediatricians or pediatric oncologists chosen from 13 highly ranked hospitals.

In nearly all cases, the patients or their families brought up the idea of prayer, and it was most often related to a child who was seriously ill or dying. And while every physicians wanted to be respectful of the families, they handled prayer requests differently. Researchers boiled those variations down into four scenarios.

In the first, doctors actively took part in the prayer. Some, when asked, attended religious ceremonies such as baptisms. Said one, "...I had the parents ask me to be there for the baptism given to the baby because the baby was dying...I stay at the bedside myself because, I felt like, you know they're part of my family, so...I love to share that."

In the second, physicians were present for the prayers but did not take part, instead standing with the families and perhaps showing respect by bowing their heads. Some even spoke at funerals. Said one pediatric oncologist, "I participate [in prayers]. I mean in the sense that I generaly sit quietly and listen to their prayer in what I hope is a respectful manner."

One, when asked to lead a prayer, explained his reaction: "If somebody wishes me to lead a prayer, I say, 'I don't think that's appropriate or I would prefer not to but I'll be happy to be here with you.' " The physician went on to say he feels it is "manifestly unfair of patients to demand something so personal of their physicians."

In the third scenario, doctors tweaked prayer requests to make them more realistic and appropriate. "I try not to bring myself into it," said one physician, "because I don't want this to be about me, and I don't want them [the family] to think that I have more...power to cure their child than I actually have."

In the fourth, physicians referred patients and family members to religious or spiritual leaders or to the hospital chaplain. One doctor explained that while she told families she would keep them in her prayers, she would also suggest they also talk to a chaplain. "If I don't feel comfortable," she said, "if I feel that their religion is something that I have a hard time understanding, I often ask if they would like to have some spiritual guidance."

The study appears in the December issue of Southern Medical Journal.

Photo credit: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times

"

A cap-and-trade exercise riles Copenhagen

A cap-and-trade exercise riles Copenhagen: "

Ironies abound here at the global climate talks, from the simple
(holding a global-warming summit in freezing cold, inviting thousands
of delegates from impoverished nations to one of the world’s most
expensive cities) to the sad (the Danish people, some of the nicest on
the planet, being represented on television by baton-wielding police
cracking down on protesters).

But
perhaps the most fascinating irony of all is playing out inside the
host Bella Center, where environmentalists and other nonprofit groups
are getting a quick and brutal immersion in the “cap-and-trade” system
that President Obama has proposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in
the United States.

The
problem here in Copenhagen is space: The Bella Center holds 20,000
people at capacity. The United Nations issued more than double that
many credentials for the climate summit. So as more and more people
arrived this week – delegates, environmentalists, Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez – summit organizers started limiting who could come inside.

They
started by issuing “secondary passes” to nonprofits and requiring
those passes for admission. The groups, commonly referred to as non-governmental organizations or NGOs, are free to trade the passes
amongst themselves.

The
number of passes has declined each day. By some groups’ estimates, the
entire U.S. environmental movement – consisting of 90 groups and
thousands of people – will be down to fewer than 10 total passes by
Thursday.

If
that plan sounds familiar, it should. It’s a super-compressed version
of how Obama wants to reduce the emissions that scientists blame for global
warming: declining cap, tradeable permits, near phase-out in the long
term.

Not
that the parallel is any comfort to NGOs, who complained bitterly today
that their numbers would be reduced from 15,000 total last week to
1,000 total on Thursday.

Mary
Robinson, the honorary chair of Oxfam International, said in a statement
that her group “is extremely concerned about the limited access which
observers have to the international climate talks and the outright
exclusion of some organizations altogether. With the negotiations here
in crisis we desperately need the engagement and witness of people's
organizations to keep the pressure on political leaders to deliver a
fair, ambitious and binding climate deal.”

Conference
organizers said today they will open an overflow center offsite on
Thursday for the locked-out NGOs to watch proceedings. No word on
whether a secondary pass market has sprung up yet.

--Jim Tankersley in Copenhagen

"

When will plug-in cars pay off?

When will plug-in cars pay off?: "

Automakers are promising that affordable plug-in hybrid electric vehicles will be available in the next couple of years, but a new report contends that it will be decades before the fuel savings and lower emissions make up for the high cost of batteries.

Plug-in hybrid - Automotive industry - Technology - Electric vehicle - Energy"

Life expectancy reaches new high

Life expectancy reaches new high: "

The average American lives 77 years and 11 months -- the highest life expectancy in history, according to statistics released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since 2000, life expectancy has increased by about 1.1 years. White women live the longest, an average of 80-and-a-half years.

The data, from 2007, show continued improvements in life expectancy for all Americans, although women are faring better than men, and whites fare better than other racial groups. The gap between whites and blacks declined by 35% between 1989 and 2007. But the race differential is still 4.6 years.

The improvements are largely due to medical advances in the treatment of heart disease, cancer, stroke and lower respiratory disease, said the author of the report, from the National Center for Health Statistics. Some health experts have warned that the obesity epidemic, however, may begin to undermine the trend in a longer life expectancy.

Among states, Hawaii has the lowest death rate, while West Virginia has the highest.

-- Shari Roan

Chart: Percentage of deaths caused by common maladies from 1980 to 2005. Credit: National Center for Health Statistics

"

Wounded soldier's shattered pancreas gets replaced in a whole new way

Wounded soldier's shattered pancreas gets replaced in a whole new way: "

Six days before Thanksgiving, a 21-year-old Air Force enlistee, Tre Francesco Porfirio, was pulling duty in Afghanistan when three high-velocity bullets tore through his pancreas — the fist-size organ that produces insulin and enzymes we need to extract fuel from the food we eat.

With an injury like that, Porfirio's prognosis was very difficult: If he could survive long enough to get to a specialized transplant center, he could perhaps get a transplant of islet cells from a deceased donor and take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life. Or doctors could remove his pancreas, leaving him completely dependent on insulin. Either way, an early death from complications of Type 1 diabetes was highly likely.

But doctors who improvised a way to help the serviceman quickly made Porfirio a pioneer in the technique of islet-cell transplantation instead.

On Tuesday, Dr. Camillo Ricordi, director of the University of Miami's Diabetes Research Institute, told the story of a long-distance islet cell transplant — a still-experimental procedure considered to be the best hope for treating those, such as Type 1 diabetes patients, with a non-functioning pancreas. The transplant involved flying Porfirio's shattered pancreas — now removed — from an operating room at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in Washington to Ricordi's specialized laboratory, more than 1,000 miles away, at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine. There, on the night before Thanksgiving, the delicate islet cells of Porfirio's own pancreas were extracted and purified — a specialized operation performed at only a handful of transplant centers across the country.

Until now, if you were a patient who couldn't make it in time to one of 15 cities with medical centers equipped to prepare islet cells for transplant, you were out of luck. But physicians willing to try anything to help Porforio have shown that may no longer be true.

The stew of islet cells prepared at the University of Miami was sent back to Walter Reed. There — under the supervision of Ricordi's team in Coral Gables, Fla., watching remotely — physicians carefully fed the purified cells through a tube into the airman's liver. Within days of the procedure, performed on Thanksgiving, Porfirio's islet cells did what all physicians hope they will do in such cases: They began to produce insulin, effectively doing the work of the excised pancreas.

Porfirio is unusual also in that his islet cells came from his own pancreas, which, while in shreds, was not dead yet. Most patients must rely on a deceased donor's pancreas and must take anti-rejection drugs to ensure their immune system doesn't attack the foreign cells. The ability to use Porfirio's own islet cells for the transplant, while "very rare," according to Ricordi, means he will not face rejection issues that make such transplants a lifelong challenge for recipients.

That remote transplant, said Ricordi in an interview, is a first: it could mean patients whose pancreas is destroyed by diabetes or trauma can be treated, potentially, anywhere in the country. Having shown that islet cells can be prepared for transplantation remotely and returned in time to a waiting patient — and then, that physicians with minimal training in such transplants can be supervised in doing them — Ricordi's team says that many more patients may gain access to the procedure. Patients with chronic pancreatitis, an inflammation of the insulin-producing organ, may, with some fancy logistics, be able to get the treatment they need close to home. And patients whose pancreas is compromised or destroyed by trauma can be treated where they are.

— Melissa Healy

"

A cup (or more) of coffee or tea a day could keep Type 2 diabetes away

A cup (or more) of coffee or tea a day could keep Type 2 diabetes away: "

Did you make a stop at your favorite coffee place today for some java or a cup of tea? If not, you may want to schedule one for tomorrow. Because a new study shows that coffee and tea consumption--even decaf versions--could help lower the risk of Type 2 diabetes.

The study, which appears today in Archives of Internal Medicine, is a meta-analysis of 457,922 people in 18 studies published between 1966 and 2009 that looked at the link between drinking coffee and diabetes risk. After analyzing the research, the study authors concluded that every extra cup of coffee consumed in one day was correlated with a 7% decrease in the excess risk of diabetes. Even better results were found for bigger coffee and tea consumers--drinking three to four cups a day was associated with about a 25% reduced diabetes risk compared with those who drank between none and two cups day.

Researchers also saw positive results with decaf coffee and tea (some tea varieties do have caffeine, but typically far less than the average cup of coffee). People who drank more than three to four cups of decaf a day had about a one-third lower risk than those who didn't drink any. And tea drinkers who consumed more than three to four cups a day had about a one-fifth lower diabetes risk than non-tea drinkers.

Because the decreased risk was seen among those who didn't consume caffeine, researchers concluded that that substance couldn't be the only key ingredient. Attention has been focused on other chemicals found in the beverages: magnesium (shown in studies to reduce diabetes risk), lignans (plant-derived chemical compounds that have antioxidant properties), and chlorogenic acids (also plant-derived antioxidants that slow down glucose release after eating).

In the study, researchers speculated that identifying the components of coffee and tea active in reducing Type 2 diabetes risk could potentially pave the way for new therapies to treat the disease. Health experts could also recommend drinking coffee and tea to at-risk patients, in addition to counseling them to exercise more and lose weight.

-- Jeannine Stein

Photo credit: Alex Garcia / Chicago Tribune

"

Shifting gears in L.A. -- latimes.com

Shifting gears in L.A. -- latimes.com

Posted using ShareThis

Kids and drugs: Worrisome signs, here and on the horizon

Kids and drugs: Worrisome signs, here and on the horizon: "

The federal government's annual report of kids' alcohol and drug abuse and attitudes about that abuse seems reassuring enough: Compared with that of recent years, marijuana use is down, use of hallucinogens is way down and use of methamphetamine is way, way down.

But the researchers and public officials who crunch those numbers warned that some of statistics gleaned from an annual survey of 46,000 American eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders are worrisome.

Marijuana use is a good example. American students' marijuana use has declined steadily since the mid-1990s. Now, one in three high school seniors says he or she has smoked marijuana at some point in the past 30 days; just over one in four 10th-graders has done so; and 11.8% of eighth-graders acknowledge they've smoked pot in the past month.

While those numbers represent a steady decline in pot use among U.S. students over the past 15 years, it's a decline that has stalled in the past five years. And kids' attitudes about marijuana use suggest a reversal may be ahead. In 1991, 58% of eighth-graders said they believed occasional marijuana use is harmful. By last year, that number had declined to 48% last year and this year slumped to 45%.

Gil Kerlikowske, the Obama administration's drug policy advisor, called such numbers "a warning sign."

"When beliefs soften, drug use worsens," said Kerlikowske, whose office is expected to release its first draft of policy initiatives to combat and treat drug abuse in February. "Drug use becomes more acceptable," Kerlikowske added in a news conference Monday morning in Washington, D.C.

University of Michigan researcher Lloyd Johnston, who oversees the yearly survey of American school kids, said there was "serious softening" in the risks kids perceived in use of the party drug Ecstasy, of LSD and of inhalants. He called the survey results "an early warning sign [that] a new generation of kids are interested ... in rediscovering these drugs, because they don't understand why they shouldn't be using them."

Closer to home, the survey shows that U.S. adolescents continue to raid their parents' and their friends' medicine chests for drugs to abuse. Use of prescription painkillers is at an all-time high, with one in 10 high school seniors reporting they have taken Vicodin for nonmedical reasons in the past year, and one in 20 seniors reporting the nonmedical use of Oxycontin in that period.

Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has commissioned the survey for each of the past 35 years, added that teenagers' use of prescription stimulant drugs is holding steady, with just over one in 20 10th- and 12th-graders reporting they have taken "speed" prescribed to many kids in treatment of ADHD symptoms. Volkow said that in many cases, teenagers are taking these drugs before tests or study sessions as "cognitive enhancers." While fewer kids report they're taking Ritalin, the survey detected that much of that decline has merely shifted to Adderall, a newer ADHD drug.

The officials said that kids report some confidence that prescription drugs are less harmful -- in part because they are prescribed by doctors and not produced in street labs. In the survey's first accounting of where kids get the drugs they take, it found that two in three who reported illicit drug use said they got the drugs from a friend or relative. Almost one in five said he or she got drugs with a prescription from a doctor.

-- Melissa Healy

"

The Swiftboating of Science

The Swiftboating of Science: "

Colleague Ari Michelsen alerted me to this article in The Progress Report byFaiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Zaid Jilani, and Alex Seitz-Wald, Global Warming, A Fake Scandal.

I excerpted the following two sections, because the term 'swiftboating' caught my eye. Looks like we have a new application for the process!

THE SWIFTBOATING OF SCIENCE BEGINS: The coordinated attack began last month when more than a thousand stolen internal e-mails from the CRU were dumped on a Russian web server. Hackers then used a computer in Saudi Arabia to post the e-mails on the climate skeptic website Air Vent. Skeptic blog "Watts Up With That" then picked up the story, and it wasn't long before the National Review and the rest of the right-wing blogosphere leaped on the hacked e-mails. Within a few days of the leak, Sen. David Vitter's (R-LA) staff began distributing a letter claiming that the stolen e-mails revealed that global warming "could well be the greatest act of scientific fraud in history." Soon after, right wingers of all stripes took up the cause of using the e-mails to debunk climate science, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, oil empire tycoon David Koch, and radical Fox News host Glenn Beck. Despite all this hysteria, the truth is that the content of the e-mails proved no such thing. Right wingers point to exchanges between climate scientists disparaging global warming deniers, which by itself does nothing to disprove the case of a warming planet. The most prominent e-mail deniers are touting is one from Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann sent to CRU chief Phil Jones, where Mann wrote, "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." While conspiracy theorists were quick to declare that this was evidence of Mann and Jones conspiring to hide data skeptical of global warming, as Time explains, Jones's "'trick'...simply referred to the replacing of proxy temperature data from tree rings in recent years with more accurate data from air temperatures. It's an analytical technique that has been openly discussed in scientific journals for over a decade -- hardly the stuff of conspiracy." Even conservative writer Megan McArdle has admitted, "I have so far seen no evidence of the kind of of grand conspiracy that some critics have charged."

THE MEDIA BOOSTS THE CONSPIRACY: Despite the fact that the e-mails in no way disprove the science of climate change, the mainstream media almost instantly took up the right wing's spin and used it to undermine the case for the existence climate change. NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams quickly adopted the conservative Climategate smear, asking, "Have the books been cooked on climate change?" Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal accused climate scientists of being Stalinists. A variety of Fox News hosts and guests promoted the e-mails over and over again as refuting the science of climate change. One of the worst media reports on the non-scandal appeared on CBS News. The network reported that the "e-mails seem to show that some of the top experts decided to exclude or manipulate some research that didn't help prove global warming exists," and said that the e-mails could cause the Copenhagen conference to "only produce the framework for an agreement that then will be passed on to next year." The mainstream media's willingness to grant legitimacy to the conspiracy theories has had unfortunate consequences. Two of the scientists whose e-mails were leaked have received death threats, prompting the FBI to launch an investigation. The Saudi negotiator in Copenhagen told the press that his government's "confidence" in the science of climate change "has been shaken" by the hacked e-mails.

Read the entire article here.

“I would assume that more interesting issues will be found in the files, and that a useful debate about the degree of politicization of climate science will emerge. A conclusion could be that the principle, according to which data must be made public, so that also adversaries may check the analysis, must be really enforced. Another conclusion could be that scientists like Mike Mann, Phil Jones and others should no longer participate in the peer-review process or in assessment activities like IPCC.” -- Hans van Storch

"

Toyota aims to roll out plug-in Prius in two years (AFP)

Toyota aims to roll out plug-in Prius in two years
(AFP): "

AFP - Toyota Motor said Monday that it plans to begin commercial sales of its first plug-in hybrid vehicle in about two years, aiming to meet growing demand for fuel-efficient cars.

"

Darwin's illness and other Christmas tales from BMJ

Darwin's illness and other Christmas tales from BMJ: "

Despite his contributions to sciences, Charles Darwin -- born 200 years ago -- was a very sick individual. During his voyages on the HMS Beagle, he was incapacitated by seasickness most of the time. Even on land, he suffered a variety of symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, intermittent abdominal pain, weakness and lethargy, headache, dizziness, visual disturbances, "inordinate flatulence" and diarrhea. At times, he was so disabled by his illness that he became a virtual recluse. Scholars have attributed these symptoms to a variety of disorders, both mental and physical, but a reexamination suggests that the evolution pioneer suffered from a genetic disorder known as cyclical vomiting syndrome, Dr. John A. Hayman of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, reports today in the BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal.

The report is one of several odd but interesting tidbits that the journal editors collect through the course of the year, then publish in their annual Christmas issue. Others in this issue include the futility of listening to "Nellie the Elephant" during CPR training, an unusual relationship between diastolic and systolic blood pressures in healthy people, and perceived age as a predictive marker for aging.

Scholars examining Darwin's life have speculated that he might have suffered such psychological conditions as hypochondria, panic disorders, "repressed anger toward his father" and guilt over his rejection of his early religious beliefs. Potential physical explanations include a middle ear infection, arsenic poisoning and a tropical parasitic disease. But Hayman noted that all of these can be rejected for good cause. His symptoms began before he was exposed to any tropical parasites, for example, he never suffered deafness or tinnitus (which would have been associated with a middle ear infection) and he never received sufficient arsenic-containing drugs to cause the symptoms. The illness was present for 50 years and eased in his old age. Darwin died at age 73 from heart problems, but an autopsy showed no internal physical abnormalities. Despite the illness, he fathered not only the modern theory of evolution, but also 10 healthy children, all conceived during his ill health.

The best explanation for all his symptoms, Hayman said, is cyclical vomiting syndrome, or CVS, which is caused by a mutation in a gene called MTTL1 in mitochondrial DNA. The disease "is neither well-known nor well-recognized," he wrote, but is related to classical migraine without an aura. It is primarily a disease of children, but it may persist into adulthood or appear for the first time in adulthood. People with the disorder experience abdominal, circulatory and cerebral symptoms, including headaches and anxiety.

In addition to the match in symptoms, research shows that Darwin's mother, Susannah, suffered vomiting and boils and motion sickness as a child, as well as excessive sickness during pregnancies. She died with abdominal pain when Charles was 8. Her younger brother, Tom, had similar symptoms, and a sister, Sarah, said that Tom and Charles had the same illness. That is consistent with a mitochondrial genetic defect, which is passed down through the maternal line.

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation or CPR is a lifesaving technique. Studies have shown that CPR initiated by bystanders to heart attack victims in the minute or two before paramedics arrive can double survival rates from 21% to 43%. Although it appears simple, however, many people taught CPR quickly forget what to do. Studies have shown that as little as two weeks after training, only about 40% of students remember how to perform it.

One technique to get users to remember how to perform CPR is to set it to music. A previous small study has shown that the BeeGees song "Stayin' Alive" is about 100 beats per minute, which is the correct timing for CPR if chest compression is performed on the beat. That study has not been followed up, however.

A team at the Birmingham University School of Medicine in England attempted to teach CPR to 130 volunteers using either a common nursery rhyme called "Nellie the Elephant," K.C. & the Sunshine Band's "That's the Way (I Like It)" or no music. Listening to "Nellie" significantly increased the number of volunteers who applied compressions at the proper rate of close to 100 per minute (32%), compared with 9% for "That's the Way" and 12% for no music. Unfortunately, it also increased the proportion of compressions that were too shallow, meaning the effort did not force air to be expelled form the lungs. Listening to either song could not be recommended, they concluded.

Further research would be useful, they also said. Songs that might be considered include Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust," the Backstreet Boys' "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)" and, for those with a country bent, Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart."

The golden ratio is a principle found widely in nature and in architecture, one that is believed to be especially pleasing to the eye. Two quantities are said to be in the golden ratio when the ratio between their sum and the larger one is the same as that between the larger and the smaller. That ratio, called by the Greek letter phi, is 1.6180339887.... The Italian mathematician Leonardo Pisano, called Fibonacci, discovered a mathematical sequence from which phi can be calculated.

Examples of phi in nature include leaf branches, the florets in a cauliflower head and the face of George Clooney. In architecture, phi is found in the proportions of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the Parthenon in Athens and the works of Le Corbusier.

Statistician Hanno Ulmer of the Innsbruck Medical University in Austria and his colleagues decided to look for phi in blood pressures. They examined 377 people in a primary care group in the far west of Austria who had been offered routine screening for at least two decades. They found that the ratio of systolic to diastolic blood pressures in those who survived the entire 20 years had a mean of 1.618, virtually identical to phi, and those who died had a mean ratio of 1.7459.

"This finding suggests that blood pressure values in 'well' individuals, but not in those who are at risk of dying, exhibit the golden ratio," they wrote. They also concluded, however, that this discovery is unlikely to be of clinical value for individual patients.

And finally, a team led by Dr. Kaare Christensen of the University of Southern Denmark studied how perceived age correlates with lifespan. They studied 1,826 Danish twins whose physical health was monitored. Photographs of the twins were shown to a panel of 20 female geriatric nurses, 10 male student teachers, and 11 older women, who evaluated their perceived age. The survival of the twins was then monitored for seven years. The team concluded that the member of each twin set who looked older was more likely to die first. They speculated that perceived age is a good general indication of a patient's overall health.

-- Thomas H. Maugh II

Photos: Top, Charles Darwin. Middle, the BeeGees' "Stayin' Alive" is sometimes used to time CPR compressions; credit: Lennox McLendon / Associated Press. Bottom, George Clooney's facial proportions exhibit the golden ratio, explaining why he is generally viewed as handsome; credit: Jason Merrit / Getty Images.

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