Ingredient in Bananas May Prevent HIV Transmission
March 16, 2010
Topnews.us
By Jacob Ramsey
A new study reveals that a chemical has been found in bananas which may help prevent the transmission of virus causing AIDS.
The scientists from the University of Michigan said that the chemical lectin in bananas has been found as effective as two anti-HIV drugs, when tested in a laboratory. The scientists are now examining how this lectin could help combat AIDS.
Condoms and drugs are still in use to prevent the transmission of virus during sexual intercourse that causes AIDS. Scientists revealed that women living in poor countries require other forms of treatment to prevent the disease.
Lectin may help prevent the disease as it is very useful and is less expensive.
Lectins are sugar-binding proteins which play a vital role in recognition phenomena. This protein helps to identify the virus.
“That’s particularly true in developing countries where women have little control over sexual encounters so development of a long-lasting, self-applied microbicide is very attractive”, revealed study Senior Author Dr. David Marvovitz.
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Bacterial Trail May be Next Forensic Clue
March 16, 2010
Breitbart
Forensic scientists could soon use hand germs to help identify criminals and victims, a study said Monday.
Researchers led by Noah Fierer of the University of Colorado at Boulder swabbed individual keys on three personal computer keyboards, extracted bacterial DNA from the swabs and compared the results with bacteria on the fingertips of the keyboards’ users.
They also lifted germs from an unspecified number of other private and public computer keyboards that the three individuals did not use to see if there was a cross-over between the bacteria on an individual’s hands and bacteria on keyboards that had never been touched by that individual.
The bacteria on each person’s fingers were “personal” and gave a much closer match to the germs on the keyboard they used than to bacteria found on keyboards they had never touched, the researchers said.
The researchers also swabbed nine personal computer mice that had not been touched for at least 12 hours and took bacteria samples from the palms of their owners.
The bacteria on each mouse were “significantly more similar” to those found on the owner’s hand than to bacteria taken from 270 other hands, which were on record from previous studies.
“Each one of us leaves a unique trail of bugs behind as we travel through our daily lives,” said Fierer, a professor at the University of Colorado’s ecology and evolutionary biology department, adding that hand bugs could “become a valuable new item in the toolbox of forensic scientists.”
Hand germs are abundant, can be lifted from small areas and are remarkably hardy. The researchers found that colonies of hand bacteria remain essentially unchanged after two weeks at room temperature, and recovered within hours of handwashing.
Fingerprints, however, can be smudged or impossible to obtain, such as on fabric.
And unless there is blood, tissue, semen or saliva on an object, it is often difficult to obtain enough human DNA for forensic identification, said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“Given the abundance of bacterial cells on the skin surface… it may be easier to recover bacterial DNA than human DNA from touched surfaces although additional studies are needed to confirm that this is actually true,” the study said.
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Climate “Experts” Claim January Was The Hottest In History
February 26, 2010
Express
By Donna Bowater
CLIMATE scientists yesterday stunned Britons suffering the coldest winter for 30 years by claiming last month was the hottest January the world has ever seen.
The remarkable claim, based on global satellite data, follows Arctic temperatures that brought snow, ice and travel chaos to millions in the UK.
At the height of the big freeze, the entire country was blanketed in snow. But Australian weather expert Professor Neville Nicholls, of Monash University in Melbourne, said yesterday: “January, according to satellite data, was the hottest January we’ve ever seen.
“Last November was the hottest November we’ve ever seen. November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen.” Veteran climatologist Professor Nicholls was speaking at an online climate change briefing, added: “It’s not warming the same everywhere but it is really quite challenging to find places that haven’t warmed in the past 50 years.”
His extraordinary claims came after the World Meteorological Organisation revealed 2000 to 2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850.
But UK forecaster Jonathan Powell, of Positive Weather Solutions, said: “If it is the case and it is borne out that January was the hottest on record, it is still no marker towards climate change.
“It’s all part of a cyclical issue and nothing should be read too deeply into that.
“It’s been the coldest for 30 years in Britain but we predicted that and climate change always tends t o throw up anomalies. It’s all in line with predictions and I won’t be sold on climate change at all. The data is either faulty or manufactured to make it look like it shouldn’t.”
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Deadly Hybrid Flu Possible
February 22, 2010
HealthDay News
Research in mice suggests the avian flu virus and the ordinary seasonal flu virus could combine to create a new deadly kind of flu, researchers say.
A single bit of genetic material from the seasonal virus converted the avian flu — officially known as H5N1 — into a very dangerous form, the scientists report in a study published in the Feb. 22-26 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Some hybrids between H5N1 virus and seasonal influenza viruses were more pathogenic than the original H5N1 viruses. That is worrisome,” study senior author Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a news release.
Avian flu, also known as bird flu, has killed 262 people, according to the World Health Organization, but it hasn’t become very infectious between people.
The researchers warn that swine flu — H1N1 — could also play a role in viral combinations.
“With the new pandemic H1N1 virus, people sort of forgot about H5N1 avian influenza. But the reality is that H5N1 avian virus is still out there,” Kawaoka said. “Our data suggests that it is possible there may be reassortment between H5N1 and pandemic H1N1 that can create a more pathogenic H5N1 virus.”
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Scientists Using Heat to Freeze Water?
February 11th, 2010
Live Science
By Charles Q. Choi
Imagine water freezing solid even as it’s heating up. Such are the bizarre tricks scientists now find water is capable of.
Popular belief contends that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). Surprisingly, if water lies in a smooth bottle and is free of any dust, it can stay liquid down to minus 40 degrees F (minus 40 degrees C) in what’s called “supercooled” form. The dust and rough surfaces that water is normally found in contact with in nature can serve as the kernels around which ice crystals form.
Now researcher Igor Lubomirsky at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues have discovered another way to control the freezing point of water — via what are called quasi-amorphous pyroelectric thin films. These surfaces change their electrical charge depending on their temperature.
When pyroelectic surfaces are positively charged, water becomes easier to freeze, and when they have a negative charge, it becomes harder to freeze.
The researchers saw that supercooled water could freeze as it’s being heated, as long as the temperature changes the surface charge as well. For instance, when supercooled water is on a negatively charged lithium tantalate surface, it will freeze solid immediately when the surface is heated to 17.6 degrees F (minus 8 degrees C) and its charge switches to positive.
Curiously, positively charged surfaces inspire supercooled water to freeze from the bottom up, while negatively charged surfaces cause it to freeze from the top down. This likely has to do with how water molecules orient themselves — the negatively charged oxygen atoms in water molecules naturally point toward positively charged surfaces, while the reverse is true with hydrogen atoms.
“The difference between the positive and negative charge was unexpected,” Lubomirsky said.
The ability to better control the freezing temperature of supercooled water could be critical for a variety of applications, including the survival of cold-blooded animals, the cryo-preservation of cells and tissues, the protection of crops from freezing, and the ability to understand and trigger cloud formation.
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Scientists Discover the Secret of Ageing
February 15th, 2010
ft.com
By Clive Cookson
One of the biggest puzzles in biology – how and why living cells age – has been solved by an international team based at Newcastle University, in north-east England.
The answer is complex, and will not produce an elixir of eternal life in the foreseeable future.
But the scientists expect better drugs for age-related illnesses, such as diabetes and heart disease, to emerge from their discovery of the biochemical pathway involved in ageing.
The Newcastle team, working with the University of Ulm in Germany, used a comprehensive “systems biology” approach, involving computer modelling and experiments with cell cultures and genetically modified mice, to investigate why cells become senescent. In this aged state, cells stop dividing and the tissues they make up show physical signs of deterioration, from wrinkling skin to a failing heart.
The research, published by the journal Molecular Systems Biology, shows that when an ageing cell detects serious damage to its DNA – caused by the wear and tear of life – it sends out specific internal signals.
These distress signals trigger the cell’s mitochondria, its tiny energy-producing power packs, to make oxidising “free radical” molecules, which in turn tell the cell either to destroy itself or to stop dividing. The aim is to avoid the damaged DNA that causes cancer.
The Newcastle discovery plays down the role of telomeres, the protective tips on the ends of human chromosomes, which gradually become shorter as we grow older.
“There has been a huge amount of speculation about how blocking telomere erosion might cure ageing and age-related diseases,” said Tom Kirkwood, director of Newcastle’s Institute of Ageing and Health. “The telomere story has over-promised and the biology is more complicated.”
He added: “Our breakthrough means that we stand a very much better chance of making a successful attack on age-related diseases while at the same time avoiding the risk of unwanted side-effects like cancer.”
His colleague Thomas von Zglinicki emphasised caution in the research’s next stage – to investigate ways to prevent cellular senescence.
“It is absolutely essential to tread carefully in trying to alter processes that cause cells to age, because the last thing we want is to help age-damaged cells from breaking out to become malignant,” said Mr von Zglinicki.
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The Kevin Trudeau Show: 2-10-10
Today, Kevin passes on the wisdom of a member of Bilderberg. Find out what is in store for 2010 and when the economic version of hurricane Katrina will hit America. Kevin also investigates how hard federal employees really work for your well-being and how much of your money is being thrown away.
The Near Extinction of Social Security
The Wages of Recession
Terrorists Now Required To Register
Airport Body Scan Radiation Risk
Nicotine Drugs Overhyped
Longer Needles Needed For Obese
Prescription Drugs are the New Crack Cocaine
Natural Health Remedies Removed From Canadian Shelves
GQ Has Jumped on The ‘Hazards of Cell Phones’ Wagon
Plus, professional astrologer and author, Sioux Rose, gives you her predictions for the world in 2010 and explains how the ‘Moon Dance’ affects your body and soul. Click here for more information on how to purchase her books and how to get your personal astrology reading today!
Take Trudeau on the Go! Click here to download this show to your iPod, mp3 player, or PC through iTunes!
Click HERE to listen to The Kevin Trudeau Show RIGHT NOW!!!
Boost Your Learning and Your Memory with Magnesium
February 4th, 2010
Natural News
By S. L. Baker
Magnesium, as NaturalNews has reported through the years, is an essential nutrient that benefits health in many important ways. For example, research has shown it helps to prevent heart disease, slashes the risk of cerebral palsy, and can even treat age-related hearing loss. Now a study by Chinese scientists, published in the in the January 28th issue of the journal Neuron, shows magnesium could have a powerful impact on the brain, too — and boost learning and memory.
In a statement to the media, the researchers noted that diet can affect cognitive capacity. Because learning and memory tend to decline with age and disease, they decided to search for dietary factors that could prevent these changes by having a positive influence on the sites of communication between brain cells (neurons) called synapses. Professor Guosong Liu, Director of the Center for Learning and Memory at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, led the new study to see whether supplementing the diet with magnesium could boost brain power in this way.
The results suggest increasing magnesium intake could be a successful, drug-free way to improve brain function. It also supports the idea that too-low levels of magnesium could result in increased deterioration of memory in aging humans.
“Magnesium is essential for the proper functioning of many tissues in the body, including the brain and, in an earlier study, we demonstrated that magnesium promoted synaptic plasticity in cultured brain cells,” Dr. Liu explained in the press statement. “Therefore it was tempting to take our studies a step further and investigate whether an increase in brain magnesium levels enhanced cognitive function in animals.”
Using a new magnesium compound dubbed magnesium-L-threonate (MgT) that can significantly increase magnesium in the brain when used as a dietary supplement, the research team gave magnesium to lab rats of different ages along with their regular diet. Then the scientists checked the animals for behavioral and cellular changes associated with memory.
“We found that increased brain magnesium enhanced many different forms of learning and memory in both young and aged rats,” stated Dr. Liu. In fact, the research revealed an increase in the number of functional synapses and enhancement of a host of processes in the brain that are necessary for learning and memory.
“Our findings suggest that elevating brain magnesium content via increasing magnesium intake might be a useful new strategy to enhance cognitive abilities,” Dr. Liu concluded in the media statement. “Moreover, half the population of industrialized countries has a magnesium deficit, which increases with aging. This may very well contribute to age-dependent memory decline; increasing magnesium intake might prevent or reduce such decline.”
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Missing DNA Tied to Obesity
February 3rd, 2010
HealthDay Reporter
By Randy Dotinga
Adding more evidence to theories linking DNA to weight, European scientists report that a genetic variation seems to virtually guarantee that a person will become obese.
The genetic variation in question robs people of about 30 genes and appears to be found in seven of every 1,000 severely obese people, the researchers report. The same variation also may be linked to mental retardation and learning disabilities.
“Obesity is definitively a genetic trait, and it is very likely that additional small chromosomal abnormalities exist that may dramatically increase the risk of obesity and may also be linked to brain developmental problems,” said Dr. Philippe Froguel, co-author of a study published in the Feb. 4 issue of the journal Nature and head of genomic medicine at Imperial College London.
In the new study, researchers examined the genes of teens and adults who had learning difficulties and developmental delays. Thirty-one people were missing the genes in question, and all were obese.
The researchers then looked at the genomes of 16,053 people who were either of normal weight or obese. Nineteen people had the same genetic deletion, and all were severely obese.
“We feel that this is a major advance — the first paper to convincingly demonstrate that a relatively rare genetic variant can also be an important cause of common obesity,” said study co-author Alexandra Blakemore, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London.
“Although the percentage of severely obese people with this (variation) is just under one person, that adds up to an awful lot of people in total,” Blakemore said. “The effect on carriers is very strong.”
But what are the missing genes doing to the body to make people become obese? That remains to be determined.
“The mechanism by which this genetic defect unveils itself may give us insight into how other conditions lead to obesity. There may be an enzyme or a protein that is involved in the development of obesity,” said Dr. Stuart Weiss, an assistant clinical professor at NYU Langone Medical Center, who is familiar with the study findings.
Finding the cause “will allow us to investigate medications and therapies” that could turn something in the body on or off, he said.
Not all obese people can get skinnier by eating less and exercising more, Weiss said. “The bottom line is that they may be able to eat less, but their bodies may be so efficient that they can extract calories from food much more effectively and may not be burning energy as efficiently as others,” he said.
This fact leads to unhappy news for some obese people, he said. “If you’re eating just one pea and you’re gaining weight, you’ll have to cut the pea in half.”
Still, the future could bring genetic tests for patients that could allow doctors to tailor treatments to their particular bodies, he added.
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Britain Starting Food Crisis as Soil is Vanishing
February 3rd, 2010
Telegraph.co.uk
By Andrew Hough
Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished and will eventually lead to the “topsoil bank” becoming empty, an Australian conference heard.
Chronic soil mismanagement and over farming causing erosion, climate change and increasing populations were to blame for the dramatic global decline in suitable farming soil, scientists said.
An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the world’s farming land “moderately or severely eroded”, the Carbon Farming conference heard.
A University of Sydney study, presented to the conference, found soil is being lost in China 57 times faster than it can be replaced through natural processes.
In Europe that figure is 17 times, in America 10 times while five times as much soil is being lost in Australia.
Soil is also a valuable store of carbon and can release the greenhouse gas if it is ploughed or dug up.
The conference heard world soil, including European and British soils, could vanish within about 60 years if drastic action was not taken.
This will lead to a global food crisis, chronic food shortages and higher prices, the conference heard.
Despite better than average farming practices, European soil might last for 100 years if no further damage occurs worldwide, scientists said.
In reality, however, increased land pressures aimed at compensating global production losses would likely mean it will run out faster, they added.
Last September the government launched new plans to protect the nation’s soil which included farmers being asked to use less fertiliser.
Britain imports about 40 per cent of all its food it consumes, a figure that has steadily risen over the past few years.
Almost £32 billion of food was imported into the UK in 2008 up from more than £27.7 billion the year before.
John Crawford, professor of Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Sydney, who presented the study, said it was unknown how long soil will last.
“It could be as little as 60 years and that is a scary figure because it is not obvious that we have time to reverse decline and still meet future demands for food,” he said.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that soil is the most precious resource we have got, and… (we) are not up to the task of securing it for our children never mind our grand children.”
Prof Crawford, the former chair of the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council’s Agri-Food Committee, said restoring soil required several factors.
These factors include minimum ploughing, improved management and “resting” soil by covering crops which helps replace carbon in soil.
It can however, take decades to significantly increase the amount of useful carbon in soil, which helps make it fertile.
While organic farming could be part of the answer, he said there was “no clear evidence that we can feed the current population using organic approaches, never mind meeting demands in time”.
Latest forecasts predict the world’s population will grow from 6.8 billion to more than 9 billion by 2050, placing even further pressure on food production and farming.
The world last year faced a cereal crisis as wheat stocks dropped to a 30-year low after demand for wheat and rice outstripped supply for the past six out of the previous seven years.
This resulted in grain prices rocketing, which sparked civil unrest in many countries.
Extreme evidence of how soil is being eroded was seen in September when Sydney was blanketed by its worst dust storm in 70 years.
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