May 12 - 18, 2013: Issue 110

Pittwater Online News receives a lot of information from various sources each week. For Your Interest and Bemusement:

Towards a quantum internet from UNSW - Published on May 1, 2013

A UNSW-led team of Australian researchers has achieved a breakthrough that brings the prospect of a network of super-fast quantum computers - connected via a quantum internet -closer to reality.

 Cyclist's benefit from helmets clearly shown6 May 2013

Cyclists who don't wear a helmet are almost six times more likely to suffer a severe head injury than their helmeted counterparts, according University of Sydney research published in the latest issue of the Medical Journal of Australia today.

In a letter to the editor, Dr Michael Dinh from Sydney Medical School and his co-authors reported on "the relationship between helmet use and head injury severity" in both pedal cyclists and motorcyclists using data from 348 patients admitted to seven Sydney trauma hospitals between July 2008 and June 2009.

Cyclists without helmets were 5.6 times more likely to suffer any head injury than cyclists wearing helmets and 5.5 times more likely to suffer a severe head injury than their protected comrades.

Motorcyclists without helmets were 2.2 times more likely to suffer any head injury than motorcyclists with helmets and 3.5 times more likely to suffer a severe head injury. Additionally, for patients with severe head injury, costs of treatment in hospital were around three times higher for non-helmeted patients than for those who had worn a helmet, the authors wrote.

"The protective effect of helmet use with respect to head injury prevention therefore appears to be greater in pedal cyclists compared with motorcyclists," they wrote.

"[Our] results add to the growing weight of observational data supporting the use of helmets, which should therefore be considered at least as protective for pedal cyclists as they are for motorcyclists."

The Medical Journal of Australia is a publication of the Australian Medical Association.

Health Papers Published this week:

Epilepsy Cured in Mice Using Brain Cells

May 5, 2013 — Epilepsy that does not respond to drugs can be halted in adult mice by transplanting a specific type of cell into the brain, UC San Francisco researchers have discovered, raising hope that a similar treatment might work in severe forms of human epilepsy.

UCSF scientists controlled seizures in epileptic mice with a one-time transplantation of medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) cells, which inhibit signaling in overactive nerve circuits, into the hippocampus, a brain region associated with seizures, as well as with learning and memory. Other researchers had previously used different cell types in rodent cell transplantation experiments and failed to stop seizures.

Cell therapy has become an active focus of epilepsy research, in part because current medications, even when effective, only control symptoms and not underlying causes of the disease, according to Scott C. Baraban, PhD, who holds the William K. Bowes Jr. Endowed Chair in Neuroscience Research at UCSF and led the new study. In many types of epilepsy, he said, current drugs have no therapeutic value at all.

"Our results are an encouraging step toward using inhibitory neurons for cell transplantation in adults with severe forms of epilepsy," Baraban said. "This procedure offers the possibility of controlling seizures and rescuing cognitive deficits in these patients."

The findings, which are the first ever to report stopping seizures in mouse models of adult human epilepsy, will be published online May 5 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

During epileptic seizures, extreme muscle contractions and, often, a loss of consciousness can cause seizure sufferers to lose control, fall and sometimes be seriously injured. The unseen malfunction behind these effects is the abnormal firing of many excitatory nerve cells in the brain at the same time.

In the UCSF study, the transplanted inhibitory cells quenched this synchronous, nerve-signaling firestorm, eliminating seizures in half of the treated mice and dramatically reducing the number of spontaneous seizures in the rest. Robert Hunt, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Baraban lab, guided many of the key experiments.

In another encouraging step, UCSF researchers reported May 2 that they found a way to reliably generate human MGE-like cells in the laboratory, and that, when transplanted into healthy mice,the cells similarly spun off functional inhibitory nerve cells. That research can be found online in the journalCell Stem Cell.

In many forms of epilepsy, loss or malfunction of inhibitory nerve cells within the hippocampus plays a critical role. MGE cells are progenitor cells that form early within the embryo and are capable of generating mature inhibitory nerve cells called interneurons. 

Journal References:

Robert F Hunt, Kelly M Girskis, John L Rubenstein, Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, Scott C Baraban. GABA progenitors grafted into the adult epileptic brain control seizures and abnormal behavior. Nature Neuroscience, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3392

Cory R. Nicholas, Jiadong Chen, Yunshuo Tang, Derek G. Southwell, Nadine Chalmers, Daniel Vogt, Christine M. Arnold, Ying-Jiun J. Chen, Edouard G. Stanley, Andrew G. Elefanty, Yoshiki Sasai, Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, John L.R. Rubenstein, Arnold R. Kriegstein. Functional Maturation of hPSC-Derived Forebrain Interneurons Requires an Extended Timeline and Mimics Human Neural Development. Cell Stem Cell, 2013; 12 (5): 573 DOI:10.1016/j.stem.2013.04.005

Portable Device Provides Rapid, Accurate Diagnosis of Tuberculosis, Other Bacterial Infections

May 5, 2013 — A handheld diagnostic device that Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators first developed to diagnose cancer has been adapted to rapidly diagnose tuberculosis (TB) and other important infectious bacteria. Two papers appearing in the journals Nature Communications and Nature Nanotechnology describe portable devices that combine microfluidic technology with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to not only diagnose these important infections but also determine the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains.

"Rapidly identifying the pathogen responsible for an infection and testing for the presence of resistance are critical not only for diagnosis but also for deciding which antibiotics to give a patient," says Ralph Weissleder, MD, PhD, director of the MGH Center for Systems Biology (CSB) and co-senior author of both papers. "These described methods allow us to do this in two to three hours, a vast improvement over standard culturing practice, which can take as much as two weeks to provide a diagnosis."

Investigators at the MGH CSB previously developed portable devices capable of detecting cancer biomarkers in the blood or in very small tissue samples. Target cells or molecules are first labeled with magnetic nanoparticles, and the sample is then passed through a micro NMR system capable of detecting and quantifying levels of the target. But initial efforts to adapt the system to bacterial diagnosis had trouble finding antibodies - the detection method used in the earlier studies - that would accurately detect the specific bacteria. Instead the team switched to targeting specific nucleic acid sequences.

The system described in the Nature Communications paper, published on April 23, detects DNA from the tuberculosis bacteria in small sputum samples. After DNA is extracted from the sample, any of the target sequence that is present is amplified using a standard procedure, then captured by polymer beads containing complementary nucleic acid sequences and labeled with magnetic nanoparticles with sequences that bind to other portions of the target DNA. The miniature NMR coil incorporated into the device - which is about the size of a standard laboratory slide - detects any TB bacterial DNA present in the sample.

Tests of the device on samples from patients known to have TB and from healthy controls identified all positive samples with no false positives in less than three hours. Existing diagnostic procedures can take weeks to provide results and can miss up to 40 percent of infected patients. Results were even stronger for patients infected with both TB and HIV - probably because infection with both pathogens leads to high levels of the TB bacteria - and specialized nucleic acid probes developed by the research team were able to distinguish treatment-resistant bacterial strains.

Monty Liong, Anh N. Hoang, Jaehoon Chung, Nil Gural, Christopher B. Ford, Changwook Min, Rupal R. Shah, Rushdy Ahmad, Marta Fernandez-Suarez, Sarah M. Fortune, Mehmet Toner, Hakho Lee, Ralph Weissleder. Magnetic barcode assay for genetic detection of pathogens. Nature Communications, 2013; 4: 1752 DOI:10.1038/ncomms2745

Picture: On this 2.5- by 7.5-cm cartridge, DNA extracted from sputum samples is amplified in the chambers on the left. TB-specific sequences are magnetically labeled in the microfluidic mixing channels in the center and detected by passage through the micro-NMR coil on the right. (Credit: Center for Systems Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital)

Protein Complex May Play Role in Preventing Many Forms of Cancer

May 5, 2013 — Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified a group of proteins that are mutated in about one-fifth of all human cancers. The finding suggests that the proteins, which are members of a protein complex that affects how DNA is packaged in cells, work to suppress the development of tumors in many types of tissues.

The broad reach of the effect of mutations in the complex, called BAF, rivals that of another well-known tumor suppressor called p53. It also furthers a growing notion that these so-called chromatin-regulatory complexes may function as much more than mere cellular housekeepers.

"Although we knew that this complex was likely to play a role in preventing cancer, we didn't realize how extensive it would be," said postdoctoral scholar Cigall Kadoch, PhD. "It's often been thought that these complexes play supportive, maintenance-like roles in the cell. But this is really changing now."

Kadoch shares lead authorship of the study with postdoctoral scholar Diana Hargreaves, PhD. Gerald Crabtree, MD, professor of developmental biology and of pathology, is the senior author of the study, published online May 5 inNature Genetics.

Chromatin-regulatory complexes work to keep DNA tightly condensed, while also granting temporary access to certain portions for replication or to allow the expression of genes necessary for the growth or function of the cell.

Members of Crabtree's laboratory have been interested in BAF complexes and their function for many years. Recently, they reported in the journal Nature that switching subunits within these complexes can convert human fibroblasts to neurons, which points to their instructive role in development and, possibly, cancer.

"Somehow these chromatin-regulatory complexes manage to compress nearly two yards of DNA into a nucleus about one one-thousandth the size of a pinhead," said Crabtree, who is also a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. "And they do this without compromising the ability of the DNA to be replicated and selectively expressed in different tissues - all without tangling. In 1994 we reported that complexes of this type were likely to be tumor suppressors. Here we show that they are mutated in nearly 20 percent of all human malignancies thus far examined."

Cigall Kadoch, Diana C Hargreaves, Courtney Hodges, Laura Elias, Lena Ho, Jeff Ranish, Gerald R Crabtree. Proteomic and bioinformatic analysis of mammalian SWI/SNF complexes identifies extensive roles in human malignancy. Nature Genetics, 2013; DOI:10.1038/ng.2628

Discovery May Help Prevent Chemotherapy-Induced Anemia

May 5, 2013 — Cancer chemotherapy can cause peripheral neuropathy - nerve damage often resulting in pain and muscle weakness in the arms and legs. Now, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have discovered that chemo also induces an insidious type of nerve damage inside bone marrow that can cause delays in recovery after bone marrow transplantation. The findings, made in mice and published online today in Nature Medicine, suggest that combining chemotherapy with nerve-protecting agents may prevent long-term bone marrow injury that causes anemia and may improve the success of bone marrow transplants.

Constantly regenerating and maturing, the hematopoietic (blood-producing) stem cells in our bone marrow produce billions of red blood cells (RBC) every day. Cancer chemotherapy is notorious for injuring the bone marrow, leading to anemia, or low RBC counts. But just how chemotherapy harms the bone marrow has not been clear.

Anemia can lead to numerous health problems including chronic fatigue, tachycardia (abnormally rapid heartbeat), cognitive impairment, shortness of breath, depression and dizziness. In addition, studies have shown that cancer patients who develop anemia have a 65 percent increased risk of death compared with cancer patients without anemia.

In an earlier study, senior author Paul Frenette, M.D., professor of medicine and of cell biology and director of the Ruth L. and David S. Gottesman Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Research at Einstein, found that sympathetic nerves within bone marrow direct the movement of hematopoietic stem cells. (The body's sympathetic nervous system helps in controlling most internal organs - increasing heart rate and dilating the pupils of the eye, for example.)

"Since many chemotherapies used in cancer treatment are neurotoxic, we wondered whether they might also damage sympathetic nerves in bone marrow itself, impairing the ability of hematopoietic cells to regenerate and to manufacture RBCs," said Dr. Frenette. "This possibility hadn't been examined before."

Dr. Frenette and his colleagues treated mice with seven cycles of cisplatin, a common chemotherapy drug with known neurotoxic effects. The cisplatin caused peripheral neuropathy problems similar to those seen in cancer patients. The mice were then given fresh bone marrow transplants to see how well their marrow would regenerate. Despite receiving fresh stem cells, the cisplatin-treated mice had delayed recovery of blood counts compared to controls - suggesting that the prior cisplatin treatments had affected the bone marrow and prevented hematopoietic stem cells from regenerating. By contrast, mice treated with carboplatin - a non-neurotoxic chemotherapy - recovered their ability to produce blood after bone marrow transplantation.

Daniel Lucas, Christoph Scheiermann, Andrew Chow, Yuya Kunisaki, Ingmar Bruns, Colleen Barrick, Lino Tessarollo, Paul S Frenette. Chemotherapy-induced bone marrow nerve injury impairs hematopoietic regeneration.Nature Medicine, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nm.3155

Discovery Helps Show How Breast Cancer Spreads

May 5, 2013 — Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have discovered why breast cancer patients with dense breasts are more likely than others to develop aggressive tumors that spread. The finding opens the door to drug treatments that prevent metastasis.

It has long been known that women with denser breasts are at higher risk for breast cancer. This greater density is caused by an excess of a structural protein called collagen.

"We have shown how increased collagen in the breasts could increase the chances of breast tumors spreading and becoming more invasive," says Gregory D. Longmore, MD, professor of medicine. "It doesn't explain why women with dense breasts get cancer in the first place. But once they do, the pathway that we describe is relevant in causing their cancers to be more aggressive and more likely to spread."

The results appear online May 5 in Nature Cell Biology. Working in mouse models of breast cancer and breast tumor samples from patients, Longmore and his colleagues showed that a protein that sits on the surface of tumor cells, called DDR2, binds to collagen and activates a multistep pathway that encourages tumor cells to spread.

"We had no idea DDR2 would do this," says Longmore, also professor of cell biology and physiology. "The functions of DDR2 are not well understood, and it has not been implicated in cancer - and certainly not in breast cancer - until now.

At the opposite end of the chain of events initiated by DDR2 is a protein called SNAIL1, which has long been associated with breast cancer metastasis. Longmore and his colleagues found that DDR2 is one factor helping to maintain high levels of SNAIL1 inside a tumor cell's nucleus, a necessary state for a tumor cell to spread. Though they found it is not the only protein keeping SNAIL1 levels high, Longmore says DDR2 is perhaps the one with the most potential to be inhibited with drugs.

"It's expressed only at the edge of the tumor," says Longmore, a physician at Siteman Cancer Center at Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Hospital and co-director of the Section of Molecular Oncology. "And it's on the surface of the cells, which makes it very nice for developing drugs because it's so much easier to target the outside of cells."

Longmore emphasizes that DDR2 does not initiate the high levels of SNAIL1. But it is required to keep them elevated. This mechanism that keeps tumor cells in a state that encourages metastasis requires constant signaling - meaning constant binding of DDR2 to collagen.

If that continuous signal is blocked, the cell remains cancerous, but it is no longer invasive. So a drug that blocks DDR2 from binding with collagen won't destroy the tumor, but it could inhibit the invasion of these tumors into the rest of the body.

Kun Zhang, Callie A. Corsa, Suzanne M. Ponik, Julie L. Prior, David Piwnica-Worms, Kevin W. Eliceiri, Patricia J. Keely, Gregory D. Longmore. The collagen receptor discoidin domain receptor 2 stabilizes SNAIL1 to facilitate breast cancer metastasis. Nature Cell Biology, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/ncb2743

Magnesium May Be as Important to Kids' Bone Health as Calcium

May 5, 2013 — Parents are advised to make sure their children drink milk and eat other calcium-rich foods to build strong bones. Soon, they also may be urged to make sure their kids eat salmon, almonds and other foods high in magnesium - another nutrient that may play an important role in bone health, according to a study to be presented Sunday, May 5, at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Washington, DC.

"Lots of nutrients are key for children to have healthy bones. One of these appears to be magnesium," said lead author Steven A. Abrams MD, FAAP, professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "Calcium is important, but, except for those children and adolescents with very low intakes, may not be more important than magnesium."

While it is known that magnesium is important for bone health in adults, few studies have looked at whether magnesium intake and absorption are related to bone mineral content in young children. This study aimed to fill that gap.

Researchers recruited 63 healthy children ages 4 to 8 years old who were not taking any multivitamins or minerals to participate in the study. Children were hospitalized overnight twice so their calcium and magnesium levels could be measured.

Participants filled out food diaries prior to hospitalization. All foods and beverages served during their hospital stay contained the same amount of calcium and magnesium they consumed in a typical day based on the diaries. Foods and beverages were weighed before and after each meal to determine how much calcium and magnesium the subjects actually consumed. In addition, parents were given scales to weigh their child's food for three days at home after the first inpatient stay and for three days at home prior to the second inpatient stay so that dietary intake of calcium and magnesium could be calculated accurately.

While hospitalized, children's levels of calcium and magnesium were measured using a technique that involved giving them non-radioactive forms of magnesium and calcium, called stable isotopes, intravenously and orally. Urine was collected for 72 hours. By measuring the stable isotopes in the urine, the researchers could determine how much calcium and magnesium were absorbed into the body. Bone mineral content and density were measured using total body dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry.

Results showed that the amounts of magnesium consumed and absorbed were key predictors of how much bone children had. Dietary calcium intake, however, was not significantly associated with total bone mineral content or density.

"We believe it is important for children to have a balanced, healthy diet with good sources of minerals, including both calcium and magnesium," Dr. Abrams concluded.

The above story is reprinted from materials provided byAmerican Academy of Pediatrics

Disclaimer: These articles are not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Pittwater Online News or its staff.

 Killer whales surprise couple on boat - April 29, 2013

National Library of Australia - New pictures released.

Mother's day is today! Here's a freshly published set on Flickr some gorgeous pics of mothers and their children from our collection. Do any have any personal resonance with you?

Our Pick; Unidentified baby lying in a hollowed out pumpkin : part of a mixed selection of lantern slides and negatives from John Flynn's teaching days in Gippsland, and early AIM [Australian Inland Mission] / Flynn, John, 1880-1951.

Title devised by cataloguer based on accompanying documentation.; Part of the Australian Inland Mission collection.; Photograph of a photograph.; Condition: Silvering; scratched.; Also available in an electronic version via the Internet at: nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an24358485.

 Charles Perkins Centre's Academic Director honoured - 6 May 2013

Professor Steve Simpson's richly multidisciplinary work has revolutionised the understanding of the dietary causes of human obesity and ageing.

The University of Sydney's Professor Steve Simpson has been announced as a new Fellow of the Royal Society. The honour sees him join a fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, including more than 80 Nobel Laureates.

Fellows are elected for life through a peer review process and current Fellows include Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Harry Kroto, Tim Berners-Lee, Paul Nurse and John Sulston.

Academic Director of the Charles Perkins Centre, Professor Simpson is one of the world's foremost entomologists and nutritional biologists.

The Society has acknowledged how Professor Simpson's "seminal work on locust swarming has provided a unifying framework, ranging from chemical events in nervous systems of individual insects to mass migration, using techniques from molecular biology, population genetics, neurophysiology, biochemistry, behaviour, biomathematics, statistical physics, computer science, engineering, robotics, evolutionary theory and landscape ecology."

"His work on nutrition has spanned slime moulds to humans, and has found significant practical applications in aquaculture, conservation biology, nutritional ecology, gerontology, immunity and human metabolic disease."

Professor Simpson leads the development of the Charles Perkins Centre's research and education strategies. The Centre aims to ease the burden of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease by translating the work of the University of Sydney into real-world solutions. Professor Simpson's richly multidisciplinary work has revolutionised the understanding of the dietary causes of human obesity and ageing. It exemplifies the Centre's focus on how new perspectives can yield paradigm shifts in understanding and provide novel solutions.

Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, said: "Science helps us to better understand ourselves and the natural world around us and has a huge role to play in future economic prosperity and the health of our planet and its 7 billion people. In the coming decades we are going to find ourselves more and more dependent on the solutions science can offer to grand challenges such as food shortages, climate change and tackling disease. These scientists who have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society have already contributed much to the scientific endeavour following in the footsteps of pioneers such as Newton, Darwin and Einstein and it gives me great pleasure to welcome them into our ranks."

The Royal Society is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence and each year 44 Fellows are elected from a group of over 700 candidates who are proposed by the existing fellowship.

 Home is where the health is – UNSW – April 2013  

A report by UNSW's Social Policy Research Centre has shown how providing stable housing for people with mental illness has reduced NSW hospitalisation rates by over 80% and saved $30 million in hospital costs. 

 Hawaii Dolphins Play Using Whale Snouts As Slides!

Many species interact in the wild, most often as predator and prey. But recent encounters between humpback whales and bottlenose dolphins reveal a playful side to interspecies interaction. In two different locations in Hawaii, scientists watched as dolphins "rode" the heads of whales: the whales lifted the dolphins up and out of the water, and then the dolphins slid back down. The two species seemed to cooperate in the activity, and neither displayed signs of aggression or distress. Whales and dolphins in Hawaiian waters often interact, but playful social activity such as this is extremely rare between species. 

 Chicken Police

Excuse me... where's my food? 

 Milky Way Black Hole Snacks on Hot Gas - 7th of May, 2013

The Herschel space observatory has made detailed observations of surprisingly hot gas that may be orbiting or falling towards the supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation.

"The black hole appears to be devouring the gas," said Paul Goldsmith, the U.S. project scientist for Herschel at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This will teach us about how supermassive black holes grow."

Our galaxy's black hole is located in a region known as Sagittarius A* -- or Sgr A* for short -- which is a nearby source of radio waves. The black hole has a mass about four million times that of our sun and lies roughly 26,000 light-years away from our solar system.

Even at that distance, it is a few hundred times closer to us than any other galaxy with an active black hole at its center, making it the ideal natural laboratory to study the environment around these enigmatic objects. At Herschel's far-infrared wavelengths, scientists can peer through the dust in our galaxy and study the turbulent innermost region of the galaxy in great detail.

The biggest surprise was the hot gas in the innermost central region of the galaxy. At least some of it is 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit (around 1,000 degrees Celsius), much hotter than typical interstellar clouds, which are usually only a few tens of degrees above absolute zero, or minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273 degrees Celsius).

The team hypothesizes that emissions from strong shocks in highly magnetized gas in the region may be a significant contributor to the high temperatures. Such shocks can be generated in collisions between gas clouds, or in material flowing at high speeds.

Using near-infrared observations, other astronomers have spotted a separate, compact cloud of gas amounting to just a few Earth masses spiralling toward the black hole. Located much closer to the black hole than the reservoir of material studied by Herschel in this work, it may finally be gobbled up later this year.

Spacecraft, including NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, will be waiting to spot any X-ray burps as the black hole enjoys its feast.

Read the full ESA news release.

Herschel is a European Space Agency mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. Picture: This artist's concept illustrates the frenzied activity at the core of our Milky Way galaxy. The galactic center hosts a supermassive black hole in the region known as Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, with a mass of about four million times that of our sun. The Herschel space observatory has made detailed observations of surprisingly hot gas that may be orbiting or falling toward the supermassive black hole. (Credit: ESA-C. Carreau)

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