Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:28:55 GMT

Using Immunotherapy for Treating Food Allergies

Scientists from the National Jewish Medical and Research Center are evaluating the use of immunotherapy to prevent food allergy reactions. They are feeding peanut- and egg-allergic people increasing doses of an investigational protein extract from the foods to induce the participants' immune systems to tolerate the food. This is not the first time this approach has been tried. Last year, a similar study on oral immunotherapy using peanut flour turned out promising results, enabling peanut allergic children to have higher tolerance to peanuts after 2 years of therapy.

This time, older participants with peanut and egg allergies will be studied and exposed to increasing doses of the allergen.

Study participants (ages 12-40 years for peanut allergy and 6-18 years for egg allergy) will start by consuming tiny amounts of either egg or peanut protein. Physicians and staff at National Jewish will observe them closely to see if they have any symptoms of an allergic reaction. Over the course of several months, participants will consume the protein daily at home, coming in every couple of weeks or so to slowly ramp up the amount of protein they consume until they reach a "maintenance dose."

Shortly after reaching the maintenance dose, participants will be tested with a larger amount of either egg or peanut to see if the immunotherapy has reduced the immune system's response. Participants will continue taking the maintenance doses for one to three years to see if they can achieve long-term results. Six to eight weeks after discontinuing the immunotherapy, participants will again consume a larger amount of peanut or egg to see if they have become tolerant of the food.

Let's hope that this study points to a possible treatment for food allergies. Posted by: ruth      Read more     Source

April 10, 2008, 8:11 PM CT

Explaining Science Through Drawings

If a picture is worth a thousand words, creating one can have as much value to the illustrator as to the intended audience. This is the case with "Picturing to Learn," a project in which college students create pencil drawings to explain scientific concepts to a typical high school student. The National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Undergraduate Education, provides support for this effort.

What sets this project apart is its emphasis on inviting students to draw in order to explain scientific concepts to others. The act of creating pencil drawings calls into play a different kind of thought process that forces students to break down larger concepts into their constitutive pieces. This helps clarify the underlying science--from Brownian motion (the movement of particles suspended in a liquid or gas and the impact of raising the temperature of the liquid), to chemical bonding, to the quantum behavior of a particle in a box. In the same assignment, students are asked to evaluate their own drawings, which helps them identify and appreciate critical components.

"Visually explaining concepts can be a powerful learning tool," says Felice Frankel, principal investigator at Harvard University. "The other important part of this is that the teacher immediately identifies student misconceptions."......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 01:00:00 GMT

Hippophae rhamnoides

Again, another thanks to Connor for assembling this series:

Here is the last of four entries featuring a plant from the Global Facilitation Unit for Underutilized Species. Another four part series will be posted in the future. Photo courtesy of Paul Bordoni. Thanks again Hannes and Paul for all the information and photographs!

Hippophae rhamnoides, native over a wide area across Europe and Asia, is one of the important natural resources growing from Europe to northwest China. It can grow in low rainfall areas of mountains, sea coast and semi-desert areas. In western and northern Europe, it is largely confined to sea coasts where salt spray from the sea prevents other larger plants from out-competing it due to its tolerance to high levels of salinity. Sea buckthorn is dioecious, with separate male and female plants. It produces small flowers and red to yellow berries the size of a pea.

For centuries, the people of central and southeastern Asia have used sea buckthorn as an agent of traditional medicine to prevent and treat various ailments. Today, the plant is primarily valued for its fruits, which provide vitamin C, vitamin E, and other nutrients, antioxidants, oils rich in essential fatty acids, and other healthful components. The leaves are also used for making a multi-vitamin herbal beverage. The list of products made with sea buckthorn is long and varied and includes jams, juices, medicinal and cosmetic lotions, nutritional supplements, liquors.

Medicinal uses of sea buckthorn are well documented in Asia and Europe. Clinical tests on medicinal uses were first initiated in Russia during the 1950s. The most important pharmacological functions attributed to sea buckthorn oil are: anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, pain relief, and promoting regeneration of tissues. More than ten different drugs have been developed from sea buckthorn in Asia and Europe.

In large areas of northern China and Mongolia sea buckthorn has been developed into a major environmental resource. Many areas in fact, have become virtually treeless, even though they were once forested. Soil losses have been huge, and several previous attempts to grow various trees to hold down the soil have been unsuccessful. Sea buckthorn has turned out to be useful because it withstands severe weather and grows huge root systems in poor soil (and fixes nitrogen in the soil). For many animal and bird species, sea buckthorn is an important source of food or provides shelter.

The planting and maintenance of sea buckthorn is encouraged by local people in northern China and in Mongolia who can earn income from harvesting the fruits and other parts of the plant. In Nepal a partnership involving an international foundation, university research institutions, local community-based organizations, and practitioners of traditional Tibetan medicine, is working with a hospital and international businesses to build a sustainable program for the cultivation and sale of sea buckthorn in domestic and international markets. Local women''s cooperatives have also been trained to harvest and process wild sea buckthorn berries.

Some producers/retailers/distributors

• Weleda
• Lavera
• Sonnentor
• Lorenz & Lihn Obst-Edl-Erzeugnisse GmbH & Co.

Posted by: Daniel Mosquin      Read more     Source

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:47:05 GMT

Connections Between Handwriting and Personality

(RSS).

[Image credit: margolove]

References

Beyerstein, B. L. (2007). Graphology - a total write-off. In: S. D. Sala (Ed.). Tall tales about the mind and brain: separating fact from fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bradley, N. (2005). Users of Graphology. Graphology, the Journal of the British Academy of Graphology.(January) 69, 55-57.

Dean, G. (1992). The bottom line: effect size. In: B. L. Beyerstein, D. F. Beyerstein (Eds.). The write stuff: evaluations of graphology - the study of handwriting analysis. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Loewenthal, K. (1975). Handwriting and self-presentation. Journal of Social Psychology, 96, 267-270.Labels: Mind-Myths Posted by: Jerry      Read more     Source

March 27, 2008, 9:49 PM CT

Self-Assembled Materials Form Mini Stem Cell Lab

Imagine having one polymer and one small molecule that instantly assemble into a flexible but strong sac in which you can grow human stem cells, creating a sort of miniature laboratory. And that sac, if used for cell treatment, could cloak the stem cells from the human body's immune system and biodegrade upon arriving at its destination, releasing the stem cells to do their work.

Futuristic? Only in part. A research team from Northwestern University's Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine has created such sacs and demonstrated that human stem cells will grow in them. The scientists also report that the sacs can survive for weeks in culture and that their membranes are permeable to proteins. Proteins, even large ones, can travel freely across the membrane.

This new and unexpected mode of self-assembly, would be published March 28 in the journal Science, also can produce thin films whose size and shape can be tailored. The method holds promise for use in cell treatment and other biological applications as well as in the design of electronic devices by self-assembly, such as solar cells, and the design of new materials.

"We started with two molecules of interest, dissolved in water, and brought the two solutions together," said Samuel I. Stupp, Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry and Medicine, who led the research......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

March 27, 2008, 9:23 PM CT

Increased knowledge about global warming leads to apathy

The more you know the less you care at least that seems to be the case with global warming. A telephone survey of 1,093 Americans by two Texas A&M University political researchers and a former colleague indicates that trend, as explained in their recent article in the peer-evaluated journal Risk Analysis.

More informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming, states the article, titled Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the USA.

The study showed high levels of confidence in researchers among Americans led to a decreased sense of responsibility for global warming.

The diminished concern and sense of responsibility flies in the face of awareness campaigns about climate change, such as in the movies An Inconvenient Truth and Ice Age: The Meltdown and in the mainstream medias escalating emphasis on the trend.

The research was conducted by Paul M. Kellstedt, a political science associate professor at Texas A&M; Arnold Vedlitz, Bob Bullock Chair in Government and Public Policy at Texas A&Ms George Bush School of Government and Public Service; and Sammy Zahran, formerly of Texas A&M and now an assistant professor of sociology at Colorado State University......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:13:05 GMT

Two Brains for the Price of One?

covered in this series, there''s a solid grain of truth here but its extent has been wildly exaggerated.

Left side language
The biggest grain of truth is that our verbal powers are concentrated in the left side of our brains. It was Nobel Prize winner Roger W. Sperry who, in the 1960s, first showed that the left hemisphere is specialised for language (Corballis, 2007). He was studying patients suffering from crippling epileptic fits who had decided to undergo surgery to try and relieve their symptoms.

The surgery cut the bundle of white matter - the corpus callosum - that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Along with successfully treating their epilepsy, these ''split-brain'' patients exhibited some strange new symptoms.

Sperry found that after the surgery patients were unable to name objects with the, now disconnected, right side of their brains. Their left-brains, however, seemed to have retained this ability. This lead him to propose that the left hemisphere is specialised for language.

But this specialisation didn''t mean the right hemisphere had no language powers at all. Further experiments suggested the right hemisphere could indeed still process language, just to a lesser degree. For example, patients were able to point to the written names of objects which were presented to their right-brain, although they found themselves unable to say the word.

Right side?
Not long after the left-brain language discovery, researchers began to wonder about the right hemisphere''s special skills. Sure enough the right hemisphere seemed to perform better in some tasks:

• Mentally rotating shapes.
• Identification of melodies.
• Detecting facial emotions.

This seems to correspond well with the myth, after all right-brains are spatial, emotional and creative, aren''t they? Well, yes, but the actual differences found in these experiments are relatively small, especially when compared to the specialisation of the left hemisphere in language.

To completely lose a particular mental faculty, a person normally needs to suffer damage to a particular area in both the left and right hemispheres.In a classic paper published in the journal Neurology, renowned neuropsychologist Brenda Milner points out that while there are many measurable functional differences between the left and the right-brain, there are actually many more similarities between the two hemispheres (Milner, 1971). Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is from studies of brain damage. To completely lose a particular mental faculty, a person normally needs to suffer damage to a particular area in both the left and right hemispheres.

Research continues apace into the functional differences between our right and left hemispheres. But while findings about lateralisation continue to point out surprising new differences about our hemispheric twins, the overall message remains the same: apart from language these differences are generally small. Even in language, to perform at our best, we need both sides of our brain working together.

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[Image credit: Gaetan Lee]

References

Corballis, M. C. (2007) The dual-brain myth. In: S. D. Sala (Ed.). Tall tales about the mind and brain: separating fact from fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Milner, B. (1971). Interhemispheric differences in the localization of psychological processes in man, Neurology, 8, 299-321.Labels: Mind-Myths Posted by: Jerry      Read more     Source

March 20, 2008, 7:58 PM CT

Climate change threatens Amazonian small farmers

A six-year study of Amazonian small farmers and their responses to climate change shows the farmers are vulnerable to natural catastrophes and risky land use practices, say Indiana University Bloomington anthropologists Eduardo Brondizio and Emilio Moran.

The scientists report in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (now accessible online) that an increase in climate anomalies like El Nino could ultimately drive a number of small farmers to ruin, forcing them into Brazilian cities that may be ill-equipped to employ, house and feed them.

The scientists found a rapid decay in farmers' memories even of major climate events. For example, more than 50 percent of the farmers surveyed in 2002 did not recall the El Nino-caused drought of 1997 and 1998 -- the worst drought in recent recorded history.

"Because there's so much variability -- even within a three-year period -- most farmers do not seem to maintain a memory of major weather events unless they had some unusual and specific relevance to their lives," said Brondizio, the paper's corresponding author. "Small farmers' collective memory about past climate events is also impacted by the high rate of turnover as new farmers arrive and others leave for cities or new frontiers. It takes time for farmers to learn about a new environment. High rates of family turnover in rural areas further limit the sharing of knowledge and experiences and forms of collective action, such as preventing the spread of accidental fires, to cope with challenging times."........ Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

March 18, 2008, 8:53 PM CT

Tell Them Where it Hurts

For statues, stress injuries come from standing in place for hundreds of years. Using a novel technique, scientists have now developed a way to predict such fracturing, applying the procedure to Michelangelo's David in an analysis that proved simpler, faster and more accurate than prior methods.

In applying the technique to other objects -- including human bones -- the scientists are also gaining new perspective on how these structures are likely to fail.

On March 18, 2008, Vadim Shapiro of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Igor Tsukanov of Florida International University and their colleagues will present their latest results from their Scan and Solve technique at the International Conference on Computational and Experimental Engineering and Sciences in Honolulu, Hawaii.

"This research is likely to result in a breakthrough technology for performing direct engineering analysis on physical artifacts in situ (in place)," said Shapiro, director of the Spatial Automation Laboratory at his university.

Scan and Solve takes 3-D sampled or scanned data of an object and calculates where points of weakness occur and how those points will be affected by forces acting on them, such as gravity in the case of David or activity in the case of a human bone......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source

March 16, 2008, 9:50 PM CT

Mathematicians find new solutions to an ancient puzzle

A number of people find complex math puzzling, including some mathematicians.

Recently, mathematician Daniel J. Madden and retired physicist, Lee W. Jacobi, found solutions to a puzzle that has been around for centuries.

Jacobi and Madden have found a way to generate an infinite number of solutions for a puzzle known as 'Eulers Equation of degree four.'

The equation is part of a branch of mathematics called number theory. Number theory deals with the properties of numbers and the way they relate to each other. It is filled with problems that can be likened to numerical puzzles.

Its like a puzzle: can you find four fourth powers that add up to another fourth power? Trying to answer that question is difficult because it is highly unlikely that someone would sit down and accidentally stumble upon something like that, said Madden, an associate professor of mathematics at The University of Arizona in Tucson.

The team's finding is reported in the recent issue of The American Mathematical Monthly.

Equations are puzzles that need certain solutions plugged into them in order to create a statement that obeys the rules of logic.

For example, think of the equation x + 2 = 4. Plugging 3 into the equation doesnt work, but if x = 2, then the equation is correct......... Posted by: Beverly      Read more         Source