A team of scientists has announced a genomic sequence for the rest of us: mapping the DNA of a grain fungus that wreaks havoc with beer brewing.
The genomic sequence of the fungal plant pathogen, Fusarium graminearum, has been completed, providing scientists a roadmap to combating a fungus that infects wheat and barley crops, rendering them unusable.
“Eighty percent of all babies born in the US that have cystic fibrosis (CF) are born to parents with no previous family history.” This attention-getting quote, used frequently by an activist in the CF community, makes it powerfully clear what few people realize: that both parents did not know they would pass on to their child the life-altering CFTR gene, the gene mutated in cystic fibrosis. In fact, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation estimates that more than 10 million Americans are unknowing, asymptomatic carriers of CF, which causes a thickening mucous to surround the lungs and serves as a catalyst for multiple, life-threatening infections throughout a lifetime.
As politicians and the public leap aboard the hydrogen fuel bandwagon, a University of California, Berkeley, energy expert suggests we all step back and take a critical look at the technology and consider simpler, cheaper options.
In a paper appearing in the July 18 issue of Science, Alex Farrell and David Keith present various short- and long-term strategies that they say would achieve the same results as switching from gasoline-powered vehicles to hydrogen cars.
“Hydrogen cars are a poor short-term strategy, and it’s not even clear that they are a good idea in the long term,” said Farrell. “Because the prospects for hydrogen cars are so uncertain, we need to think carefully before we invest all this money and all this public effort in one area.”
Parents with lower incomes and educational levels are more likely than higher-paid, better-educated parents to have teenage children who smoke, according to a recent study in Massachusetts. A telephone survey of 1,308 adolescents by Elpidoforos Soteriades, M.D., M.Sc., and Joseph DiFranza, M.D., appears in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Some previous studies had tied low socioeconomic status with increased teen smoking, but others found no association.
Expertise derived from working on the joint NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moon Titan is now being applied to underground drilling machines. This is providing tunnelling engineers with an improved ability to virtually ‘see’ some 40 metres into solid rock and pinpoint obstacles ahead. It’s an old miners’ expression: “There is darkness in front of the pick”. Billions of years of geological history has laid down complex folds of strata, patterns of faulting and embedded irregular objects in the ground beneath our feet. The character of the earth can and often does change unexpectedly with every metre excavated.
Adding to the long list of the benefits of aspirin, researchers have found that it is responsible for reducing toxic bacteria associated with serious infections. A study led by Dartmouth Medical School describes how salicylic acid-produced when the body breaks down aspirin-disrupts the bacteria’s ability to adhere to host tissue, reducing the threat of deadly infections.
Men who have at least three metabolic abnormalities are at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes and heart disease, researchers report.
Using a new, simplified definition of the “metabolic syndrome”? the clustering of certain metabolic-related heart disease risk factors ? researchers predicted diabetes and coronary heart disease (CHD) at an early stage of disease development. This is noteworthy because early prediction might identify people who may benefit from aggressive lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise to delay or derail the disease process, says lead author Naveed Sattar, M.D., an honorary consultant in clinical biochemistry at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in Scotland.
As the nation gears up for another season of West Nile virus, a new study extends the understanding of the clinical spectrum of West Nile symptoms, and points to extreme muscle weakness or paralysis as a significant cause of complications in affected patients. The study appears in the July 8 issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
A novel telescope that uses the Antarctic ice sheet as its window to the cosmos, has produced the first map of the high-energy neutrino sky. The map, unveiled for astronomers here today at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, provides astronomers with their first tantalizing glimpse of very high energy neutrinos, ghostly particles that are believed to emanate from some of the most violent events in the universe ? crashing black holes, gamma ray bursts, and the violent cores of distant galaxies.
Imagine that your doctor, using a small hand-held sensor, could detect from a drop of your blood if you carry the gene for cystic fibrosis, or whether or not you have HIV. Or on the battlefield, a soldier could wear a small sensor that detects the smallest amount of anthrax in the air. In the food industry the same type of sensor could check for the DNA signature of salmonella.
Microscopes are not the only tools available to study disease. A new ESA project employs satellites to predict and help combat epidemic outbreaks, as well as join the hunt for the origin of the deadly Ebola virus. Ebola haemorrhagic fever kills many people in Central Africa each year. It can cause runaway internal and external bleeding in humans and also apes. What remains unidentified is the jungle-based organism serving as the virus’s host.
Deep convection, or mixing, of ocean waters in the North Atlantic, widely thought to occur in only the Labrador Sea and the Mediterranean, may occur in a third location first proposed nearly 100 years ago by the explorer and oceanographer Fridtjof Nansen. The findings, reported this week in the journal Nature, may alter thinking about the ocean’s overturning circulation that affects earth’s climate.
Bigger and brighter isn’t better, at least not when trying to view moving objects. That is the counter-intuitive result of a study performed by a team of Vanderbilt psychologists which sheds new light on one of the most sophisticated processes performed by the brain: identifying and tracking moving objects. “The bigger an object, the easier it is to see. But it is actually harder for people to determine the motion of objects larger than a tennis ball held at arms length than it is to gauge the motion of smaller objects,” says Duje Tadin, first author of the paper on the study appearing in the July 17 issue of the journal Nature.
Scientists report that significantly fewer asteroids could hit the Earth’s surface than previously reckoned. Researchers have built a computer simulation that predicts whether asteroids with a diameter up to one kilometre (km) will explode in the atmosphere or hit the surface. The results indicate that asteroids with a diameter greater than 200 metres (the length of two football pitches) will hit the surface approximately once every 160,000 years ? way down on previous estimates of impacts every 2,500 years.