Sat, 24 May 2008 22:19:36 GMT

Plant Flavonoid Luteolin Reduce Inflammatory Response

© Harris Graber Scientists have found that luteolin, a plant flavonoid found in celery and green peppers can disrupt a key component of the inflammatory response in the brain typical of aging and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis. Graduate research assistant Saebyeol Jang studied the inflammatory response in microglial cells. She spurred inflammation by exposing the cells to lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a component of the cell wall of many common bacteria.

Those cells that were also exposed to luteolin showed a significantly diminished inflammatory response. Jang showed that luteolin was shutting down production of a key cytokine in the inflammatory pathway, interleukin-6 (IL-6). The effects of luteolin exposure were dramatic, resulting in as much as a 90 percent drop in IL-6 production in the LPS-treated cells.
In vivo experiments in mice also showed similar results. The authors suggest that these results indicate a possible role for luteolin in treating neuroinflammation.

Source Posted by: ruth      Read more     Source

May 14, 2008, 9:29 PM CT

Climate is changing life on global scale

A vast array of physical and biological systems across the earth are being affected by warming temperatures caused by humans, says a new analysis of information not previously assembled all in one spot. The effects on living things include earlier leafing of trees and plants over a number of regions; movements of species to higher latitudes and altitudes in the northern hemisphere; changes in bird migrations in Europe, North America and Australia; and shifting of the oceans plankton and fish from cold- to warm-adapted communities. The study appears in the May 15 issue of the leading scientific journal Nature.

Humans are influencing climate through increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and the warming world is causing impacts on physical and biological systems attributable at the global scale, said lead author Cynthia Rosenzweig, a scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Columbia Center for Climate Systems Research. Both are affiliates of The Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Rosenzweig and scientists from 10 other institutions across the world analyzed data from published papers on 829 physical systems and some 28,800 plant and animal systems, stretching back to 1970. Their analysis of revealed a picture of changes on continental scales; prior studies had looked mainly at single phenomena, or smaller areas. In physical systems, 95% of observed changes are consistent with warming trends. These include wastage of glaciers on all continents; melting permafrost; earlier spring river runoff; and warming of water bodies. Among living creatures inhabiting such systems, 90% of changes are consistent with warming. The scientists say it is unlikely that any force but human-influenced climate change could be driving all this; factors like deforestation or natural climate variations could not explain it. Their work builds upon the consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in 2007 declared manmade climate warming likely to have discernible effects on biological and physical systems......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

Fri, 09 May 2008 02:11:34 GMT

Atriplex hortensis

Sorry about the errant entry notification sent earlier today. I made some updates to that entry and the upgraded software decided that was enough to send out a new notification, so I''ll have to figure out how to suppress that in the future.

Here''s today''s entry, written by Connor:

Also known as orache and mountain-spinach, Atriplex hortensis can be found in cultivation worldwide. It is possibly native to central Asia, but the widespread cultivation obscures its origin. Mountain-spinach was formerly in the Chenopodiaceae before this entire family was included in the Amaranthaceae (via Wikipedia).

Plants For A Future Database reports a number of intriguing uses of orache. Not only do they taste like spinach, the leaves of mountain-spinach are suggested as an externally-applied remedy for gout. The seeds, when mixed with wine, are thought to be a possible treatment for jaundice.

Atriplex hortensis is a halophyte, meaning it grows well in saline soils. This is an increasingly valuable trait in cultivated plants, given the widespread use of irrigation. About one-half of the Earth''s land surface is "perennial desert or drylands" requiring irrigation for use in cultivation, a consequence of which is soil salinization (from Improving crop salt tolerance (PDF)). Irrigation salinity is "the rise in saline groundwater and the build up of salt in the soil surface in irrigated areas. Inefficient irrigation or applying more water than the plants can use means that this excess water leaks past the root zone to groundwater (recharge). This excess water can cause the watertable to ''mound'' under irrigation areas and in some cases the ground becomes waterlogged."

Species of Atriplex are able to tolerate saline soils because they concentrate the accumulated salt in specialized cells on the leaf surface called trichomes (from Vesiculated Hairs: A Mechanism for Salt Tolerance in Atriplex halimus L. (PDF)). In Introduction of a Na+/H+ antiporter gene from Atriplex gmelini confers salt tolerance to rice, the ability of transgenic rice plants to tolerate saline soil was evaluated. A gene from Atriplex responsible for a protein pump which transports salt ions across the cell membrane and the vacuole membrane was incorpoarated into rice plants. The transgenic plants were more tolerant of saline conditions not because they transported more ions into their cells reducing water loss through osmosis, but because they were able to transport more salt into the vacuoles of individual cells. Older leaves of the transgenic plants died because of this but the younger leaves continued to grow.

Many thanks to annkelliot@Flickr for a great photo (original via the UBCBG BPotD Flickr Pool). Posted by: Daniel Mosquin      Read more     Source

May 5, 2008, 8:09 PM CT

Cells Communicate To Activate The Cell Division Machinery

A study performed by scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) on the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, unveils how distinct signaling pathways operate between neighboring cells in order to activate the cell proliferation machinery that results in the organized growth of the fly wing. The signaling pathways involved in this process are also conserved in humans, and when altered in diverse tissues give rise to the appearance of different types of cancer, including cancer of the colon and skin, and leukemia. The study has been undertaken in the Cell and Development Biology Laboratory headed by ICREA Research Professor, Marco Milán, at IRB Barcelona, and has been released in and advanced online format by the EMBO Journal.

The scientists have shown that the Notch and Wnt/Wingless signaling pathways exert control over the cell division machinery through two gene effectors, the proto-oncogen dMyc and the micro-RNA bantam. Regulated by Notch and Wnt/Wingless, these two genes instruct another gene, E2F, to activate the cell division machinery. "All the components were already known but we have clarified the order in the signaling cascade and the interaction between the molecular elements that regulate proliferation for the correct development of the wing", explains Hector Herranz, first author of the article......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

May 3, 2008, 7:39 PM CT

Fixing up 'this old house' may increase young

Ripping out and tearing down to create a divinely designed home, a la HGTV, is all the rage today and the economic downturn may be leading more families to renovate rather than relocate. But a new study has observed that parents need to be aware that all this interior renovation can put their children's health at risk due to exposure to lead.

The study conducted by scientists at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center observed that interior renovation of older housing is linked to a modest increase in childrens blood lead level (BLL) and associated long-term health risks. These findings will be presented by co-author Stephen Wilson, M.D., at the Pediatric Academic Society (PAS) annual meeting in Honolulu on May 3.

Any person working on a home where children reside or visit frequently should know that their renovation work could cause lead hazards for the kids if the home was built before 1978, when the government banned lead-based paint in housing, said Adam Spanier, M.D., Ph.D. M.P.H., the studys lead author and director of the Pediatric Environmental Health and Lead Clinic at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center.

The study of 249 children, all living in homes built before 1978, observed that those who resided in houses where renovations had been done had higher blood lead levels than those in houses where no renovating had been done. Scientists used multivariable analysis to find that the kids who had lived through renovation projects had a 12 percent increase in mean BLL by age 2 compared with other children (p<0.01). The increase in BLL seemed related directly to the renovation work, given that if renovation took place within one month previous to measurement, 2-year-old children had a 1.6 micrograms per deciliter increase in average BLL and if the renovation was more recent (within a month before blood tests were done), in comparison to an average jump of 0.8 micrograms per deciliter in children whose houses had been renovated two to six months before measurement (p<0.01)......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 30, 2008, 6:39 PM CT

Injecting Sulfate Particles into Stratosphere

A much-discussed idea to offset global warming by injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere would have a drastic impact on Earth's protective ozone layer, new research concludes.

The study, led by Simone Tilmes of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., warns that such an approach would delay the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by decades and cause significant ozone loss over the Arctic.

The study results are published recently in the journal Science Express The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR's principal sponsor, as well as by NASA and other agencies.

"Our research indicates that trying to artificially cool off the planet may be a perilous endeavor," Tilmes says. "While climate change is a major threat, this solution could create severe problems for society.".

"The challenges of global warming mitigation are extremely complex," said Cliff Jacobs, program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric Sciences. "Continued investment in basic research will allow the most cost-effective solutions--and those of the most benefit to society--to be found.".

Climate scientists, concerned that society is not taking sufficient action to prevent significant changes in climate, have studied various "geoengineering" proposals to cool the planet and mitigate the most severe impacts of global warming......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 30, 2008, 5:49 PM CT

Zebrafish may help solve ringing in vets' ears

Ernest Moore, an audiologist and cell biologist at Northwestern University, developed tinnitus -- a chronic ringing and whooshing sound in his ears -- twenty years ago after serving in the U.S. Army reserves medical corps. His hearing was damaged by the crack of too a number of M16 rifles and artillery explosions. He suspects his hearing also suffered from hunting opossum with rifles as a kid on his grandmother's farm in Tennessee.

Ever since his ears began ringing, Moore has been researching a cure. He's at the forefront of just a small band of such researchers in the country. There's a lot riding on his work.

Half of the soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan exposed to explosive devices suffer from tinnitus. The major cause is exposure to loud noises, which can damage and destroy hair cells of the inner ear. It's the number one war-related disability.

Nearly 400,000 troops collected disability for service-related tinnitus in 2006, which cost $539 million in 2006. The number climbs nearly 20 percent each year. It could hit $1 billion by 2011, as per the American Tinnitus Association.

An additional 12 million Americans have tinnitus severe enough to seek medical attention. In about two million of those cases, patients are so debilitated they can't function normally......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 28, 2008, 5:35 PM CT

Leaving our mark

Whether you live in a cardboard box or a luxurious mansion, whether you subsist on homegrown vegetables or wolf down imported steaks, whether you're a jet-setter or a sedentary retiree, anyone who lives in the U.S. contributes more than twice as much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere as the global average, an MIT class has estimated.

The class studied the carbon emissions of Americans in a wide variety of lifestyles--from the homeless to multimillionaires, from Buddhist monks to soccer moms--and compared them to those of other nations. The somewhat disquieting bottom line is that in the United States, even people with the lowest energy usage account for, on average, more than double the global per-capita carbon emission. And those emissions rise steeply from that minimum as people's income increases.

"Regardless of income, there is a certain floor below which the individual carbon footprint of a person in the U.S. will not drop," says Timothy Gutowski, professor of mechanical engineering, who taught the class that calculated the rates of carbon emissions. The results will be presented this May at the IEEE International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment in San Francisco.

While it may seem surprising that even people whose lifestyles don't appear extravagant--the homeless, monks, children--are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, one major factor is the array of government services that are available to everyone in the United States. These basic services--including police, roads, libraries, the court system and the military--were allocated equally to everyone in the country in this study. Other services that are more specific, such as education or Medicare, were allocated only to those who actually make use of them......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

April 24, 2008, 10:20 PM CT

Ozone hole recovery may reshape southern hemisphere climate change

A full recovery of the stratospheric ozone hole could modify climate change in the Southern Hemisphere and even amplify Antarctic warming, as per researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

While Earth's average surface temperatures have been increasing, the interior of Antarctica has exhibited a unique cooling trend during the austral summer and fall caused by ozone depletion, said Judith Perlwitz of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and NOAA. "If the successful control of ozone-depleting substances allows for a full recovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica, we may finally see the interior of Antarctica begin to warm with the rest of the world," Perlwitz said.

Perlwitz is lead author of a new study on the subject would be published April 26 in Geophysical Research Letters. Co-authors include Steven Pawson and Eric Nielson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Ryan Fogt and William Neff of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder. The study was supported by NASA's Modeling and Analysis Program.

The authors used a NASA supercomputer model that included interactions between the climate and stratospheric ozone chemistry to examine how changes in the ozone hole influence climate and weather near Earth's surface, said Perlwitz......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:35:40 GMT

Pine Bark Extract Pycnogenol For Osteoarthritis Symptoms

Yet another study involving the medical utility of Pycnogenol indicates that the pine bark extract can reduce all osteoarthritis symptoms by 56 percent. The study revealed a particularly high efficacy of Pycnogenol for lowering joint pain by 55 percent. Moreover, patients required dramatically less standard pain medication (-58 percent), which greatly improved the gastrointestinal complications resulting from the pain medication by 63 percent. In addition to the osteoarthritis results, 76 percent of the patients in the Pycnogenol group and 79 percent in the placebo group showed visible ankle and foot edema at inclusion of the study. After the three months, edema decreased in 79 percent of the Pycnogenol patients and only one percent in placebo-treated patients. Source Posted by: ruth      Read more     Source