October 10, 2006, 10:23 PM CT

Poultry And Antibiotic Resistance

Clinic researcher and his colleagues have found.

Results of the nearly $1.4 million three-year study, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia, are in the November 1 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Edward Belongia, M.D., Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation, Marshfield, Wis., and his colleagues examined poultry exposure as a risk factor for antibiotic resistance in Enterococcus faecium, a gut bacterium that is increasingly the cause of infections in hospitals. The investigation team focused on use of a growth-promoting antibiotic, called virginiamycin, in poultry.

Virginiamycin is closely related to quinupristin-dalfopristin, an antibiotic licensed to treat patients with serious, antibiotic-resistant infections. The drug is prescribed under the brand name Synercid.

According to Belongia, "There is a relative lack of data on the impact of antibiotic use in livestock and its relationship to antibiotic resistance in humans, but there is a fair amount of indirect evidence suggesting that antibiotic use could pose a risk to human health".

"We've known for a long time that resistant bacteria can be found on retail poultry products, but our study is one of the first to show an association between human carriage of antibiotic resistance genes and eating poultry or handling raw poultry.........

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October 10, 2006, 10:15 PM CT

Research Development And Economic Growth

New calculations from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) suggest research and development (R&D) accounted for a substantial share of the resurgence in U.S. economic growth in recent years. Using data from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) annual surveys of government, academic, industry and non-profit R&D expenditures, the bureau determined R&D contributed 6.5 percent to economic growth between 1995 and 2002.

Some 40 percent of the nation's productivity and growth is unaccounted for in the gross domestic product (GDP), according to BEA Director Steve Landefeld. That's mainly because reliable data in some economic sectors simply don't exist.

NSF and agencies in many other nations collect extensive R&D expenditure data because R&D is vital to economic growth and social welfare, and often results in unimagined benefits. Indeed, the resources organizations devote to R&D influence both economic growth and international competitiveness.

In 2004, NSF's Division of Science Resources Statistics (SRS) enter into a multi-year agreement with BEA to use data from R&D expenditure surveys SRS routinely collects to produce an R&D "satellite account" -a supplemental set of data that can be factored into economic measurements--to determine the impact of R&D spending by various organizations on U.S. growth and productivity.........

Posted by: Beverly      Permalink         Source

October 10, 2006, 10:09 PM CT

Who wants to be a Grid millionaire?

The worlds largest scientific Grid has reached a major milestone, dealing with over a million programs each month for the last six months. Researchers submitting programs to the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project range from biochemists simulating drugs for malaria to geophysicists analysing oil and gas fields. UK sites play a key role in EGEE, running around a fifth of all the programs this year.

Twenty-one sites at universities and research centres around the UK are part of the EGEE Grid, contributing nearly five thousand central processing units (CPUs). Dr Robin Middleton of CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire is a former Chair of the EGEE management board. He comments, "From the latest figures, its clear that EGEE now runs a Grid thats being used extensively by researchers in the UK and worldwide. We're very pleased that the UK can play such a major role in this ground-breaking project".

The EGEE Grid has clusters of hundreds and even thousands of PCs, in institutes and universities around the world in total over 25,000 CPUs are involved. Several million gigabytes of data storage in disk and tape facilities also contribute to make EGEE the worlds largest scientific Grid infrastructure.

In the UK, particle physicists from the GridPP project are among the major providers and users of the Grid. Robert Aymar, Director General of CERN, the worlds largest particle physics laboratory, emphasized the importance of this Grid infrastructure. "We are just over one year away from the anticipated launch of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, based at CERN. We expect this device will open up new horizons in particle physics," said Dr. Aymar. "Thousands of physicists around the world will need to use the Grid to access and analyse their data. The EGEE infrastructure is a key element in making the LHC Computing Grid possible, and thus the success of the LHC is associated with the success of the EGEE project".........

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October 10, 2006, 9:33 PM CT

Paints Bleak Scene In Iraq

Is the Iraq that Americans see today on their TV screens--rife with escalating violence that seems to verge on civil war--the inevitable result of the U.S. invasion to depose Saddam Hussein? Or did critical mistakes doom our best intentions to establish a democracy?

Those questions, posed by MIT visiting scholar Barbara K. Bodine, jumpstarted a conversation between two prominent journalists appearing in a panel titled "Reporters' Notebook: The US in Iraq," a MIT Center for International Studies (CIS) Starr Forum hosted by CIS on October 3.

"It's fashionable in some circles to say now: 'If only we had committed more resources to the occupation effort,'" said Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the former Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, and author of the recently published "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," an account of life in the U.S. enclave in Baghdad, the Green Zone.

But Chandrasekaran speculates that perhaps the United States tried to do too much, too soon: "We needed to have had a smaller footprint there, to be less ambitious." For example, the United States didn't want to impose "just any old democracy." Officials wanted a secular, federalist democracy with an American-style free market, he said. They tried to institute bank sector reform, a flat tax, even laws on microchip design and intellectual property.........

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October 10, 2006, 9:29 PM CT

Hispanic Heritage Winner Sets Sights High

Setting high goals and achieving them is crucial, says Freshman Eletha Flores of Maryland, the recipient of the 2006 Hispanic Heritage Foundation's National Youth Award for Engineering and Mathematics.

More than 13,000 high school students from across the country applied for the awards. Only nine students were selected in the various categories. MIT freshman Luis Flores (no relation) also received one of the awards in the sports category. The award winners receive $8,000 plus a laptop computer.

Eletha Flores' commitment to excellence started early. "Either I go all the way or I don't do it," said Flores, who set her sights on MIT at the beginning of her high school career. "I knew it was the top engineering school in the country".

Throughout high school, Flores maintained a 4.2 grade point average and consistently challenged herself with summer programs such as MIT's Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science (MITES) and an internship in space robotics at NASA.

As the middle child between two brothers and a child of divorce, her time at home was not always easy, Flores said, adding that her high school was not as challenging as she might have wished. Still, she found hardship motivating. "It gave me such a perspective on what life could be".........

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October 10, 2006, 9:22 PM CT

No Hands Video

Now, a St. Louis-area teenage boy and a computer game have gone hands-off, thanks to a unique experiment conducted by a team of neurosurgeons, neurologists, and engineers at Washington University in St. Louis.

The boy, a 14-year-old who suffers from epilepsy, is the first teenager to play a two-dimensional video game, Space Invaders, using only the signals from his brain to make movements.

Getting subjects to move objects using only their brains has implications toward someday building biomedical devices that can control artificial limbs, for instance, enabling the disabled to move a prosthetic arm or leg by thinking about it.

Many gamers think fondly of Atari's Space Invaders, one of the most popular breakthrough video games of the late '70s. The player controls the motions of a movable laser cannon that moves back and forth across the bottom of the video screen. Row upon row of video aliens march back and forth across the screen, slowly coming down from the top to the bottom of the screen. The objective is to prevent any one of the aliens from landing on the bottom of the screen, which ends the game. The player has an unlimited ammunition supply.

The aliens can shoot back at the player, who has to evade, moving left and right. There are lots of levels of play, reflecting the speed at which the aliens descend. The Washington University subject mastered the first two levels of play, using just his imagination.........

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October 9, 2006, 10:07 PM CT

Teens And Cigarette Ads

Today alone, more than 4,400 U.S. teenagers will start smoking, as per statistics from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration. A number of of these adolescents will be lured to cigarettes by advertisements and movies that feature sophisticated models and actors, suggesting that smoking is a glamorous, grown-up activity. However, teens who are savvier about the motives and methods of advertisers may be less inclined to take to cigarettes, a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine study indicates.

Teens with above-average smoking media literacy (SML) are nearly half as likely to smoke as their less media-literate peers, as per the lead study in the current issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health. The results not only suggest that SML training could be an effective intervention to decrease teen smoking, but they also provide some of the first quantitative evidence linking SML to smoking.

"A number of factors that influence a teen's decision to smoke like peer influence, parental smoking and risk-seeking tendency are difficult to change," said the study's lead author, Brian Primack, M.D., Ed.M., assistant professor in the School of Medicine's division of general internal medicine. "However, media literacy, which can be taught, may be a valuable tool in efforts to discourage teens from smoking".........

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October 9, 2006, 8:59 PM CT

Why Unexpected Dennis Surge Occurred?

When Hurricane Dennis passed North Florida on July 10, 2005, it caused a 10-foot storm surge in some areas along Apalachee Bay -- about 3 to 4 feet more than forecasted-- that couldn't be explained only by the local winds that conventionally drive storm surge.

Now, scientists at Florida State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have found that the surge in Apalachee Bay was amplified by a "trapped wave" that originated off the southwest Florida coast. The discovery of this previously undocumented storm surge phenomenon has changed how NOAA's National Hurricane Center prepares storm surge models for the Gulf of Mexico. New modeling procedures will help improve the accuracy of storm surge forecasts for the entire Gulf coast from Florida to Texas.

Scientists Steven Morey, Mark Bourassa, Dmitry Dukhovskoy and James O'Brien of FSU's Center for Ocean Atmospheric Prediction Studies and Stephen Baig of NOAA's Tropical Prediction Center of the National Hurricane Center drew their conclusions after conducting numerical experiments with storm surge models. Their research was published in the Oct. 4 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Hurricane Dennis formed from a tropical depression that originated near the southern Windward Islands on July 4, 2005. It strengthened as it traveled northwest through the Caribbean Sea until it made landfall in Cuba as a Category 4 hurricane. It then traveled west of the Florida Shelf, and the storm's maximum sustained winds weakened to 54 mph before it made landfall on the western Florida Panhandle.........

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October 9, 2006, 8:54 PM CT

Weaknesses In High-tech Immigration

Legislation pending before Congress "would admit foreign computing and engineering (C&E) workers in numbers much greater than historical trends or casual assumptions about future employment levels," as per a recent study from Georgetown University, commissioned by IEEE-USA.

The August report from Georgetown's Institute for the Study of International Migration concluded that the estimated number of new high-tech visas available under the "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006" (S.2611) over the next 10 years could be 1.88 million. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the number of new C&E workers needed by our economy over the decade is 1.25 million.

Thus, Congress was considering authorizing enough high-skill visas to fill every C&E job created in the United States over the next decade and still have 630,000 visas left over.

"The report calls into question Congress' approach to high-skill immigration reform," IEEE-USA President Ralph W. Wyndrum Jr. said. "Its analysis provides needed context to the immigration numbers being discussed on Capitol Hill".........

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October 8, 2006, 7:20 PM CT

Exercise For Older Adults

For a number of elderly adults, a visit to the doctor is not complete without the bestowal of at least one prescription. What if, in addition to prescribing medications as necessary, physicians also prescribed exercise? Ann Yelmokas McDermott, PhD, a researcher in the Lipid Metabolism Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University, and Heather Mernitz, PhD, now of the Nutrition and Cancer Biology Laboratory at the USDA HNRCA, propose using the familiar concept of a prescription to help physicians incorporate exercise recommendations into their routine practice. In the journal American Family Physician, McDermott and Mernitz provide clinicians with explicit guidelines for giving their older patients effective "exercise prescriptions".

Their motto for determining an exercise prescription is 'FITT-PRO':

• Frequency
• Intensity
• Type
• Time
• Progression

As per FITT-PRO principles, an exercise prescription must explicitly instruct the patient regarding what type of exercise to do, how often, how hard, and for how long. The exercises must also progress over time as the patient becomes more physically fit. McDermott and Mernitz caution that, as with medicine prescriptions, these exercise parameters must be personalized to suit each patient's health status and goals.........

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