Can we make software that comes to life? Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom - Their aim is to address one of the greatest challenges in modern science: how to create a genuine artificial life form. The idea that life owes its ...OTC:ALIF
New Technique To Compress Light Could Open Doors For Optical ... Science Daily (press release) - Jul 30, 2008 This finding flies in the face of the previous dogma that light compression comes with the drawback of short propagation distances, Zhang said. ...
Francisella Tularensis: Stopping A Biological Weapon Science Daily (press release) - Jul 27, 2008 The disease is probably transmitted by insects like mosquitoes, ticks and deer flies. People can also become infected by contact with contaminated food or ...
Virgin America and Virgin Galactic Launch Race for Space, Pilot ... Earthtimes (press release), UK - Jul 28, 2008 "Virgin-branded companies are known for being innovative and for thinking big, so we're honored to link an airline that is reinventing the domestic flying ...
Saturn's moon may host an ocean Science News - Jul 14, 2008 The spectrometer will look again for sodium when it flies through the plumes on October 9, says Hunter Waite of the Southwest Research Institute in San ...
?Die Hard? Comes Back to Life at the Academy RushPRnews.com (press release), Canada - Jul 25, 2008 ?Die Hard? (1988) stars Bruce Willis as John McClane, a New York City cop who flies to Los Angeles on Christmas Eve to reconcile with his estranged wife, ...
Water project that won't be aids park that will San Diego Union Tribune, United States - Jul 28, 2008 These four lateral lines on the map someday will link with a north-south coastal trail and the Pacific Crest Trail to the east, Bobertz predicted. ...
DAVID DONALD Daily Commercial, FL - Jul 26, 2008 A speaker and a remote controller combine to catch and eat pesky flies. "I'm trying to make a robot that chases flies," said Amelia Garback, 5. ...
Ford Foundation still funding anti-Israel groups Jewish Telegraphic Agency, NY - Jul 23, 2008 ?We're not in the business of censorship because that flies in the face of our values,? she said. ?Having said that, you really do need to monitor because ...
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A family of peptidoglycan recognition proteins in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster - T Werner, G Liu, D Kang, S Ekengren, H Steiner, D … - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2000 - National Acad Sciences ...Science, March 24, 2006; 311(5768): 1761 - 1764. ... page C. Martinelli and JM Reichhart
Evolution and integration of innate immune systems from fruit flies to man ...
… of Pax 6 function and upstream activation by Notch signaling in eye development of frogs and flies - Y Onuma, S Takahashi, M Asashima, S Kurata, WJ … - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2002 - National Acad Sciences ... upstream activation by Notch signaling in eye development of frogs and flies. ... Department
of Life Sciences, Core Research for Evolution Science and Technology ...
Blow flies (Insecta: Diptera: Calliphoridae) from Indochina - H KURAHASHI, L CHOWANADISAI - Species Divers, 2001 - sciencelinks.jp Blow flies (Insecta: Diptera: Calliphoridae) from Indochina. Accession
number;01A0928029. Title;Blow flies (Insecta: Diptera: Calliphoridae) from Indochina. ...
IMMUNOLOGY: Enhanced: Pathogen Surveillance--the Flies Have It - RS Khush, F Leulier, B Lemaitre - Science, 2002 - sciencemag.org ... introduction to Drosophila melanogaster and links to Internet ... 24 March 2000 issue
of Science (a special ... A student presentation titled "Flies Are Us: Drosophila ...
[BOOK] Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks - M Buchanan - 2003 - books.google.com ... webs of any ecosystem and with the network of business links underlying any ... These
discoveries are making a new science of networks possible, a science that is ...
IMMUNOLOGY: Fly Development Genes Lead to Immune Find - G Vogel - Science, 1998 - sciencemag.org ... 1942 - 1944 DOI: 10.1126/science.281.5385.1942. ... pathogen, Anderson speculates that
both humans and flies may have ... do know that Toll provides a link between the ...
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Sex, flies and microarrays - J Quackenbush - Nature Genetics, 2002 - nature.com ... NEWS AND VIEWS Sex, flies and microarrays Nature Genetics News and Views (01 Dec
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Sleepless for science: Flies show link between sleep, immune system in Stanford study
By Mitzi Baker
STANFORD, Calif. — Go a few nights without enough sleep and you’re more likely to get sick, but scientists have no real explanation for how sleep is related to the immune system. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine are finding that fruit flies can point to the answers.
What they have learned thus far is that illness and sleep disruption may be a two-way street: sick flies can’t sleep, and losing sleep makes them more susceptible to infection.
“When flies get sick, they stop sleeping,” said David Schneider, PhD, assistant professor of microbiology and immunology. “Disrupting sleep in turn disrupts the immune system, which makes them even more infected and it’s downhill from there in a ‘spiral of death.’” Schneider is the senior author of a study on the sleep patterns of flies published in the May 15 issue of Current Biology.
Schneider worked with postdoctoral scholar Mimi Shirasu-Hiza, PhD, who is the study’s first author, to examine the connection between illness and sleep patterns by infecting fruit flies with one of two bacteria—Streptococcuspneumoniae or Listeria monocytogenes.
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The infected flies lost their “day” and “night” patterns of activity, which are part of the regular changes that occur in the course of a day, called circadian rhythm. Uninfected flies alternate between 12 hours of high activity and 12 hours of low activity. The researchers found the sick flies had fewer sleep sessions and shorter periods of continuous sleep than did healthy flies. They basically just didn’t sleep well, concluded the researchers.
The researchers can’t say for sure say whether a disruption of the brain’s central clock, which is the area of the fly brain that exhibits circadian gene activity, was responsible for the changes seen in the sick flies. But the behavior of the ill flies looked a lot like that of flies known to have disruptions in their genes controlling circadian rhythm.
So the next step, after confirming that flies lost sleep when infected, was to ask the converse: when sleep is disrupted, does that affect immunity?
The challenge was how to disrupt the flies’ sleep. Schneider tried building a machine that jostled the flies randomly. “All it was really good at doing was throwing the tubes around the room,” said Schneider. “Also it was too regular, the flies got used to it so they could nap.”
Another option was to keep the flies in continuous light. But Schneider and Shirasu-Hiza decided that an even better way would be to turn to established fly strains isolated decades ago that possess disruptions in their genes controlling circadian rhythm. In this case, these mutant flies could be kept under exactly the same light and temperature conditions as the normal flies.
They looked at flies that were defective in one of two genes, called “timeless” and “period”. They found that the loss of either gene’s function made the flies more sensitive to bacterial infections and these sick flies died significantly faster than control flies, which lived two to four times as long as the sick ones.
“We want to know how the internal clock knows the animal is infected, and how does the immune system know that you are not sleeping properly?” said Schneider. “How do those messages get sent back and forth?”
Their findings also raise the question of why the flies have a change in their sleep pattern when infected. The researchers speculate that from an evolutionary standpoint, there may be some microbes that are fought better when sleep is disrupted, although clearly not the two microbes they tested in the current study. “We think that is the reason flies do this,” said Schneider, “but sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes it’s a bad thing.”
Building on their findings, they can begin to answer these questions. Shirasu-Hiza will be testing mutant flies with other circadian rhythm genes missing.
They hope their work inspires researchers who work on vertebrates to explore the molecular underpinnings of the interaction between sleep and immunity.
“The cool thing is that many of the clock genes are conserved between flies and vertebrates; we have ‘period’ and we have ‘timeless’,” said Schneider. “As usual, it doesn’t work in exactly the same way, but what the fly does is let us find genes that are involved in the process, and then go figure out exactly how they are rewired to work in the human. The fly is really good for prospecting.”
Pollutants, food ingredients, solvents may all cause harm, researchers say.
By Alan Mozes HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, May 14 (HealthDay News) -- A detailed analysis of hundreds of completed breast cancer studies has linked disease development with environmental exposure to more than 200 chemical compounds.
The finding is part of an effort to build a free, online breast cancer database for researchers and the public.
Described as "the most comprehensive of its kind," the database will highlight growing concern about environmental carcinogens such as pollutants, food contaminants, and organic solvents. The scope of the project will also extend to work that explores risk-related lifestyle factors such as diet, levels of physical activity, smoking/drinking habits and body mass.
"This compilation is a great effort, because it summarizes all the evidence and gives us hints of what to look for next," explained researcher Leslie Bernstein, a professor of preventive medicine with the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
The results are outlined in a supplement to the May 14th online issue of Cancer. The database is already accessible at either www.silentspring.org/sciencereview or www.komen.org/environment.
According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), carcinogens are defined as agents that instigate abnormal cell division or harmful changes in the structure of a cell's DNA. They include chemicals, radiation, or infectious agents, among other things.
The ACS also notes that with the exception of skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common cancer among American women. This year, almost 179,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with the disease, and about 40,000 will die.
The International Agency of Research on Cancer has already classified 90 or so compounds as human carcinogens, according to the ACS. But Bernstein's team said that most of the chemicals to which people are routinely exposed have not undergone any testing for carcinogenic risk. An estimated 80,000 chemicals are registered in the United States for commercial use, according to the researchers.
For more than two years, Bernstein worked alongside colleagues from Harvard University, the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and the Silent Spring Institute to amass and sort through approximately 900 national and international breast cancer studies focused on carcinogens.
The team honed in on 460 human breast cancer studies, of which more than 150 looked at specific environmental carcinogens among breast cancer patients. Most of those studies were conducted in the 1990s.
The remaining studies involved animal or laboratory research. The researchers pointed out that animal studies are valid references, because all known human carcinogens have also triggered tumors in animal subjects.
In the animal studies alone, evidence surfaced that linked 216 chemicals to the onset of breast tumors. These included 36 industrial chemicals, 6 chlorinated solvents, 18 products of combustion, 10 pesticides, 18 dyes, four type of radiation, 47 pharmaceuticals, and 17 hormones.
Of these compounds, the researchers isolated 73 that can be found in either human food or consumer products.
They noted, for example, the lingering hazards associated with polychlorinated biphenyls (or PCBs), which were typically used in the production of electrical equipment until federally banned in 1979. PCBs continue to pose a risk via contaminated rivers, fish, and pre-existing building construction, the researchers warned.
In addition, the authors categorized 35 compounds as carcinogenic air pollutants, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (or PAHs), which are byproducts of combustion.
The team also drew attention to another group of 25 organic compounds, including dioxins, which are produced by waste incineration and manufacturing. These carcinogenic chemicals are present in many American workplaces and place more than 5,000 women at an increased risk for breast cancer, the researchers said. These include women working in machine shops, dry cleaners, hairdressers, glass manufacturers, and aircraft maintenance facilities, all of which use harmful organic solvents.
Furthermore, among the identified carcinogens, 29 are produced in large amounts -- upwards of one million pounds or more per year.
The database project did not set strict guidelines as to how to limit exposure to carcinogens. But the authors said they encouraged research and government oversight into the problem. They advised that people do try and limit their exposure to PCB-contaminated fish, gasoline-generated air pollution, chlorinated tap water, non-stick coated cookware, and detergents containing fluorescent whiteners.
Just how carcinogenic, in terms of breast cancer risk, are these and other compounds on the list? The jury is still out on that question, Bernstein said.
"Women are terribly concerned about environmental causes of breast cancer," she said. "But it's really very difficult to study. Often the only way we've been able to look at some of these things is during occupational exposures or accidents -- what we usually call disasters."
"So, this work is a very useful tool for those of us who want to try to understand what we've missed in breast cancer. Now, it's up to us to do something with all this information," Bernstein said.
Janet Gray, a professor of psychology and the director of the program in science, technology and society at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., called the new database "an enormous contribution."
"Its greatest value is just the sheer comprehensive nature of the work, which allows both the public and researchers to have access to huge amounts of information in one place," she said. "I think this effort will really move us forward."
Known and Probable Carcinogens
Including Industrial Processes, Occupational Exposures, Infectious Agents, Chemicals, and Radiation)
What Is a Carcinogen?
Cancer is caused by abnormalities in a cell’s DNA (its genetic "blueprint"). These may be inherited from parents, or they may be caused by outside exposures to the body such as chemicals, radiation, or even infectious agents.
Substances that can cause changes that can lead to cancer are called carcinogens. Some carcinogens do not act on DNA directly, but lead to cancer in other ways, such as causing cells to divide at a faster rate, which could increase the chances that DNA changes will occur.
Carcinogens do not cause cancer in every case, all the time. Substances classified as carcinogens may have different levels of cancer-causing potential. Some may cause cancer only after prolonged, high levels of exposure. And for any particular person, the risk of developing cancer depends on many factors, including the length and intensity of exposure to the carcinogen and the person’s genetic makeup.
How Do We Determine if Something Is a Carcinogen? Scientists get much of their data about whether something might cause cancer from laboratory (cell culture and animal) studies. Although it isn’t possible to predict with certainty which substances will cause cancer in humans based on animal studies alone, virtually all known human carcinogens that have been adequately tested produce cancer in lab animals. In many cases, carcinogens are first found to cause cancer in lab animals and are later found to cause cancer in people. Because there are far too many substances (natural and manmade) to test each one in lab animals, scientists use knowledge about chemical structure, other types of lab tests, and information about the extent of human exposure to select chemicals for testing.
Most studies of potential carcinogens expose the lab animals to doses that are higher than common human exposures. This is so that cancer risk can be detected in relatively small groups of animals. For most carcinogens, it is assumed that those that cause cancer at larger doses in animals will also cause cancer in people. Although it isn’t always possible to know the relationship between exposure dose and risk, it is reasonable for public health purposes to assume that lowering human exposure will reduce risk.
Another important way to identify carcinogens is through epidemiologic studies, which look at human populations to determine which factors might be linked to cancer. While these studies also provide useful information, they also have their limitations. Humans do not live in a controlled environment. People are exposed to numerous substances at any one time, including those they encounter at work, school, or home; in the food they eat; and the air they breathe. And it is usually many years (often decades) between exposure to a carcinogen and the development of cancer. Therefore, it can be very hard to single out any particular exposure as having a definite link to cancer.
By combining data from both types of studies, scientists are able to make an educated assessment of a substance’s cancer-causing ability. When the available evidence is compelling but not felt to be conclusive, the substance may be considered to be a probable carcinogen.
How Are Carcinogens Classified?
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)
The most widely used system for classifying carcinogens comes from the IARC, which is part if the World Health Organization (WHO). In the past 30 years, the IARC has evaluated the cancer-causing potential of about 900 likely candidates, placing them into one of the following groups:
Group 1: Carcinogenic to humans
Group 2A: Probably carcinogenic to humans
Group 2B: Possibly carcinogenic to humans
Group 3: Unclassifiable as to carcinogenicity in humans
Group 4: Probably not carcinogenic to humans
Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the agents are of probable, possible, or unknown risk. Only about 90 are classified as "carcinogenic to humans."
National Toxicology Program (NTP)
In the United States, the NTP releases the Report on Carcinogens about every 2 years. The NTP is formed from parts of several different government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The Report on Carcinogens (RoC) identifies 2 groups of agents:
"Known to be human carcinogens"
"Reasonably anticipated to be human carcinogens"
Unlike the IARC’s list, the RoC does not list substances that have been studied and found not to be carcinogens. Below are the lists of known and probable human carcinogens from both groups.
Known Human Carcinogens
International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) "Carcinogenic to Humans" (Group 1)
Agents and Groups of Agents
Aflatoxins (naturally occurring mixtures of)
4-Aminobiphenyl
Arsenic and arsenic compounds (Note: This evaluation applies to the group of compounds as a whole and not necessarily to all individual compounds within the group)
Estrogens, nonsteroidal (Note: This evaluation applies to the group of compounds as a whole and not necessarily to all individual compounds within the group)
Estrogens, steroidal (Note: This evaluation applies to the group of compounds as a whole and not necessarily to all individual compounds within the group)
Ethylene oxide
Etoposide in combination with cisplatin and bleomycin
Formaldehyde
Gallium arsenide
Gamma radiation
Helicobacter pylori (infection with)
Hepatitis B virus (chronic infection with)
Hepatitis C virus (chronic infection with)
Herbal remedies containing plant species of the genus Aristolochia
Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (infection with)
Human papillomavirus type 16
Human papillomavirus type 18
Human T-cell lymphotropic virus type I
Melphalan
8-Methoxypsoralen (Methoxsalen) plus ultraviolet A radiation
MOPP and other combined chemotherapy including alkylating agents
Mustard gas (Sulfur mustard)
2-Naphthylamine
Neutrons
Nickel compounds
Opisthorchis viverrini (infection with)
Oral contraceptives, combined (Note: There is also conclusive evidence that these agents have a protective effect against cancers of the ovary and endometrium)
Oral contraceptives, sequential
Phosphorus-32, as phosphate
Plutonium-239 and its decay products (may contain plutonium-240 and other isotopes), as aerosols
Radioiodines, short-lived isotopes, including iodine-131, from atomic reactor accidents and nuclear weapons detonation (exposure during childhood)
Radionuclides, alpha-particle-emitting, internally deposited (Note: Specific radionuclides for which there is sufficient evidence for carcinogenicity to humans are also listed individually as Group 1 agents)
Radionuclides, beta-particle-emitting, internally deposited (Note: Specific radionuclides for which there is sufficient evidence for carcinogenicity to humans are also listed individually as Group 1 agents)
Radium-224 and its decay products
Radium-226 and its decay products
Radium-228 and its decay products
Radon-222 and its decay products
Schistosoma haematobium (infection with)
Silica, crystalline (inhaled in the form of quartz or cristobalite from occupational sources)
Solar radiation
Talc containing asbestiform fibers
Tamoxifen (Note: There is also conclusive evidence that this agent (tamoxifen) reduces the risk of contralateral breast cancer)
2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin
Thiotepa
Thorium-232 and its decay products, administered intravenously as a colloidal dispersion of thorium-232 dioxide
Treosulfan
Vinyl chloride
X- and Gamma radiation
Mixtures
Alcoholic beverages
Analgesic mixtures containing phenacetin
Areca nut
Betel quid with tobacco
Betel quid without tobacco
Coal-tar pitches
Coal-tars
Mineral oils, untreated and mildly treated
Salted fish (Chinese-style)
Shale-oils
Soots
Tobacco products, oral tobacco products
Wood dust
Exposure Circumstances
Aluminum production
Arsenic in drinking water
Auramine, manufacture of
Boot and shoe manufacture and repair
Coal gasification
Coke production
Furniture and cabinet making
Hematite mining (underground) with exposure to radon
