Welcome to Sott.net
Fri, 05 Nov 2021
The World for People who Think

Science & Technology
Map

Beaker

Alzheimer's Research Fraud: Harvard To Go on Trial


Alliance for Human Research Protection
Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00 UTC
Image
© leadpile.com
The US Court of Appeals, 1st Circuit overturned a summary judgement by a lower court ordering a whistleblower lawsuit filed by Dr. Kenneth Jones against Harvard Medical School, its teaching hospitals, Brigham and Women's and Massachusetts General Hospital, and Dr. Marilyn Albert (Principal Investigator) and Dr. Ronald Killiany to proceed to trial.

The case involves the largest Alzheimer's disease [AD] research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (from 1980 through 2007) for a large project aimed at identifying early physical signs of Alzheimer's by scanning certain regions of the brain with MRIs.

Dr. Jones was the chief statistician for the NIH grant. He blew the whistle after realizing that measurements used to demonstrate the reliability of the study had been secretly altered. Without these alterations, Dr. Jones explained, there was no statistical significance to the major findings of the study. When he insisted that the altered measurements be subjected to an independent reliability study, and that the manipulated results could not be presented as part of a $15 million federal grant extension application, he was terminated and his career came to an end.

The allegations in the suit concern multiple research fraud: data manipulation, significant deviations from the protocol, altered and re-traced MRI scans. To get positive results, Dr. Jones alleges, Dr. Killiany "fraudulently altered the MRI study data prior to 1998 to produce false results of a statistically significant correlation between conversion to AD and volume of the EC [entorhinal cortex]." US ex rel. Jones v. Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard University.
      Read More...
Arrow Down

Unregulated Antibiotics in American Animal Feed from Spent Ethanol Grain

Monica Eng
Chicago Tribune
Mon, 14 May 2012 10:36 UTC
Image
Lawmakers press FDA on this unregulated practice

As the battle wages on over the safety of feeding antibiotics to livestock for growth promotion, a new report reveals yet another source of unregulated antibiotics in American animal feed--spent ethanol grain.

The new report by advocacy group the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy suggests that a relatively new source of food for livestock may contain levels of penicillin, erythromycin and other antibiotics. Both of these are medically important drugs whose effectiveness in treating humans can be compromised by overuse in animal feed for non-sick animals.

When the Food and Drug Administration discovered the antibiotic residues in the grain in 2008, it started requiring ethanol/distiller grain producers to get approval for their presence as a food additive. But the IATP report claims that the antibiotic companies are skirting this rule by relying on their self affirmed GRAS status as approval enough. GRAS (generally recognized as safe) approval requires only that a company proves to itself that its product is safe. It can voluntarily report those findings to the FDA as well.
      Read More...
Star

Astrophysicists discover new heating source in cosmological structure formation


Physorg
Tue, 15 May 2012 15:58 UTC
New heating source space
© ESA/NASA, the AVO project and Paolo Padovani
A supermassive black hole is surrounded by a dust ring (torus). The collapse of gas onto the black hole launches an energetic jet of matter and radiation, which is transported over cosmological distances. A jet that is pointing into our direction is called a "blazar"

So far, astrophysicists thought that super-massive black holes can only influence their immediate surroundings. A collaboration of scientists at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) and in Canada and the US now discovered that diffuse gas in the universe can absorb luminous gamma-ray emission from black holes, heating it up strongly. This surprising result has important implications for the formation of structures in the universe. The results have just been published in The Astrophysical Journal and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Every galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Such black holes can emit high-energy gamma rays and are then called blazars. Whereas other radiation such as visible light and radio waves traverses the universe without problems, this is not the case for high-energy gamma rays. This particular radiation interacts with the optical light that is emitted by galaxies, transforming it into the elementary particles electrons and positrons. Initially, these elementary particles move almost at the speed of light. But as they are slowed down by the ambient diffuse gas, their energy is converted into heat, just like in other braking processes. As a result, the surrounding gas is heated efficiently. In fact, the temperature of the gas at mean density becomes ten times higher, and in underdense regions more than one hundred times higher than previously thought.

A Journey into the Cosmic Youth

"Blazars rewrite the thermal history of the universe", emphasizes Dr. Christoph Pfrommer (HITS), one of the authors. But how can this idea be tested? In the optical spectra of quasars there is a plethora of lines, called the "line forest". The forest originates from the absorption of ultra-violet light by neutral hydrogen in the young Universe. If the gas becomes hotter, weak lines in the forest are broadened. This effect represents an excellent opportunity to measure temperatures in the early Universe, while it was still growing up.
      Read More...
Info

Researchers Examine Human Breast Milk Ingredient

Connie K. Ho
RedOrbit
Tue, 15 May 2012 13:17 UTC
Breastfeeding
© Photos.com
A report by the University of Illinois (UI) demonstrates that human milk oligosaccharides (HMO) can create short-chain fatty acids that can help beneficial microbial populations in an infant's gut. The bacterial composition can alter itself as the baby grows older and its needs change. Based on the fact that HMOs are a large part of human milk and absent from infant formula, the researchers wanted to better understand what formula-fed babies were not receiving.

Published in the April issue of the Journal of Nutrition, the study was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The researchers worked to identify HMO's actions in the infant. Sharon Donovan of UI was one of the lead researchers on the project who wanted to demystify the influences of HMO.

"We refer to HMO as the fiber of human milk because we don't have the enzymes to break down these compounds. They pass into the large intestine where the bacteria digest them," commented Donovan, the Melissa M. Noel Endowed Professor in Nutrition and Health at UI. "We're curious about the role they play in the development of the breast-fed infant's gut bacteria because the bacteria found in the guts of formula-fed infants is different."

The researchers found that a complex combination of HMO and a single HMO component could create patterns of short-chain fatty acids that would adapt as the baby got older. For the infant, the healthy microbiome could have short and long term effects. While beneficial bacteria could protect the infant from infections caused by virulent bacteria in the short term, it bolstered the immune system to address chronic health problems like asthma and food allergies in the long term.
      Read More...
Info

Expectations, Previous Experiences Influence Perception Of Pain

Connie K. Ho
RedOrbit
Tue, 15 May 2012 13:12 UTC
Boy and Needle
© Ilya Andriyanov / Shutterstock
For many people, pain and needles go hand in hand. They shudder at the thought of going to the dentist or the doctor because of those pointy items. A new study looks at these preconceived notions of pain and needles, looking specifically at how these thoughts can affect a patients' experience. The project, completed by a group of German researchers, states that past experiences with needle pricks, combined with information received before having an injection, can influence pain experience.

The new research is published in the May issue of the journal Pain.

"Throughout our lives, we repeatedly experience that needles cause pain when pricking our skin, but situational expectations, like information given by the clinician prior to an injection, may also influence how viewing needle pricks affects pain," noted lead author Marion Höfle, a doctoral student in the research Multisensory Integration group led by Dr. Daniel Senkowski of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Charité University Medicine Berlin, in a prepared statement.

In the experiment, study participants watched various clips while also receiving painful or painless electric stimuli that were administered on their hand. The clips included images of a needle pricking a hand, a Q-tip touching a hand, and a hand standing alone. The images were shown to the participants on a screen that was placed above the participants' hand; it gave the participants the experience that the video image was their own hand.
      Read More...
Magic Wand

Electricity from viruses: A new electric generator developed by scientists

John Platt
Mother Nature Network
Mon, 14 May 2012 12:28 UTC
Image
© Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Novel generator uses harmless viruses to create an electric charge.

When people get a cold or the flu, they tend to experience a lack of energy. But what if viruses could actually generate energy - not to power your body, but to charge your electronic devices?

That's the idea behind a new electric generator developed by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The scientists coated a postage-stamp-sized electrode with specially engineered, harmless viruses that, when tapped, generated enough electricity to power a small LCD display. Their research was published online May 13 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The scientists are exploiting a principle known as piezoelectricity - the generation of energy through mechanical stress, specifically pressure or vibrations. Piezoelectricity was first identified more than 130 years ago and is used in many common devices, but this is the first time that it has been generated by biological materials. The piezoelectric devices that are currently on the market rely upon toxic materials such as lead and lithium.
      Read More...
Saturn

The Outer Limits: NASA Probe Sees the 'Edge' of Our Solar System for First Time - and it's Completely Different from What We Thought

Rob Waugh
Daily Mail, UK
Fri, 11 May 2012 09:52 UTC
  • Solar system 'travelling more slowly than thought'
  • 'Bow shock' - like a sonic boom in space - does not exist
  • 25 years of research turned on its head
  • Detected by the orbitiing IBEX probe, with information from Nasa's two Voyager craft
Image
© unknown
The IBEX spacecraft has revealed a 'missing' boundary at the edge of our solar system
Image
© unknown
Our solar system doesn't move quickly enough to generate a 'bow shock' - the galactic equivalent of a 'sonic boom'
Nasa's probes have seen the 'edge' of our solar system for the first time - and it's completely different from what scientists thought.

Our solar system is flying through space more slowly than we thought - and Nasa's IBEX - Interstellar Boundary Explorer - has found it doesn't have a 'bow shock', an area of gas or plasma that shields our solar system as it hurtles though space

'The sonic boom made by a jet breaking the sound barrier is an earthly example of a bow shock,' says Dr. David McComas, principal investigator of the IBEX mission.
      Read More...
Meteor

You Just Got a Haircut from Asteroid 2012 JU

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Mon, 14 May 2012 21:49 UTC
2012 JU
© JPL
Orbit diagram for asteroid 2012 JU.
OK, we admit that's a bit of an exaggeration, but an asteroid about the size of a school bus did come fairly close to Earth yesterday! On May 13, Asteroid 2012 JU passed harmlessly between Earth and Moon. This space rock is somewhere between 8 and 17 meters across, and it came within about 190,000 kilometers (118,000 miles) from Earth - about a half a Lunar Distance (LD), or 0.0014 AU. Its looping orbit is currently closely aligned with Earth's (click here to see JPL's orbit diagram applet) and will be moving rather slowly away from us over the next few weeks.

There are two other known space rocks that will be making somewhat close passes by Earth later this month: 2010 KK37, which might be about 43 meters wide, will come within 2.3 LD (880,000 km) on May 19, and 2001 CQ36, which might be as big as 170 meters wide, will go by at 10 LD (3.8 million km) on May 30. There is no threat of any of these asteroids hitting our planet.

Asteroids passing between the Earth and Moon happens on a fairly regular basis. Last month, on April 1, a 46-meter wide asteroid named 2012 EG5 came within 230,000 km, and on March 26 of this year, two smaller asteroids shaved by at a mere 58,000 km and 154,000 km. And in January 2012 BX34 passed by at just 59,600 km from the Earth's surface.
      Read More...
Arrow Up

More Than 8 Million Americans Sleepwalk, Surprising Scientists

Stephanie Pappas
LiveScience
Mon, 14 May 2012 15:00 UTC
Sleepwalking
© Dreamstime
Sleepwalking disorder.
Adult sleepwalkers are more common than previously realized, with upward of 8 million American adults prone to nighttime ambulation, a new study finds.

In fact, about 3.6 percent of U.S. adults have walked in their sleep at least once in the previous year, researchers report Monday (May 14) in the journal Neurology. One percent experienced at least two episodes of sleepwalking per month.

The findings are higher than previous studies had suggested, the researchers wrote, including an estimate from a decade-old study of the general European population, which found that only about 2 percent of people had trouble with sleepwalking within the previous year.

Results from the new study also showed certain mental illnesses, including depression, and some antidepressant medications were linked with a higher risk of experiencing sleepwalking.

The study may provide some clues for treating the disorder, said study researcher Maurice Ohayon, a psychiatrist at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

"Now we know the biggest associations with sleepwalking, and the first thing to do is remove these pathological associations - sleep apnea, insomnia, alcohol consumption," Ohayon told LiveScience. "The key thing we must say to people is, don't be ashamed to be a sleepwalker."
      Read More...
Heart - Black

Big Pharma Collaboration to Find Uses (make money) From Warehoused Drugs

Julie Steenhuysen and Anna Yukhananov
Reuters
Thu, 03 May 2012 06:22 UTC
Image
© Reuters/Lucas Jackson
A pharmacy employee dumps pills into a pill counting machine as she fills a prescription while working at a pharmacy in New York December 23, 2009.
The U.S. government will help drug companies find treatments for a host of diseases through a new collaboration in which researchers will test experimental drugs provided by manufacturers.

The National Institutes of Health said on Thursday that Pfizer Inc, AstraZeneca Plc and Eli Lilly and Co have agreed to make 24 compounds available for a pilot phase of the project, the biggest of its kind ever launched in the United States.

All of the compounds have been tried in people and found to be safe, but the drugmakers have abandoned them because they did not work for the disease they were intended to treat. The NIH will provide $20 million in grants each year to researchers trying to find new uses for the compounds.
      Read More...
Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts