What’s the News: Fitting in is a perennial problem for almost everybody, especially immigrants and their children (for more, see The Joy Luck Club). And anxiety about food is definitely part of it: when your friends think your mom’s home cooking is weird, well, maybe you’ll just pretend you don’t like it either. In fact, maybe you’ll eat more French fries and pizza than is entirely healthy to fit in, something that might explain why newly arrived immigrants balloon to the rest of the U.S. population’s levels of obesity in just 15 years. In a study designed to see how being perceived as un-American changed peoples’ food choices, scientists behaved badly and then brought out the menus.
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Mouse embyronic stem cells
What’s the News: Reprogrammed stem cells—cells taken from an adult and turned back into stem cells—can be rejected by the body, at least in mice, suggests a new Nature study. Donated tissues and organs are often attacked by a patient’s immune system, since reprogrammed stem cells can be made from a patient’s own skin, researchers had hoped these cells offered a way to avoid such rejection by letting patients, in essence, donate tissue to themselves. But the new finding may be a significant setback to what is a promising line of treatment.
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What’s the News: A non-invasive test that measures brain waves could help doctors better diagnose whether a patient is truly in a vegetative state, according to a preliminary study published today in Science. What’s more, the results suggest that a particular pathway of communication in the brain is disrupted in vegetative patients but not patients with somewhat less severe brain damage—which could not only improve diagnosis, but help researchers better understand these tragic conditions.
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As the number of bacteria in mosquitoes’ guts (x axis) went up,
the malaria parasite levels dropped faster than a cartoon anvil.
What’s the News: We know the bacteria living in our guts are important to our health—but the bacteria in mosquitoes’ guts could be too. Researchers have discovered a species of mosquito gut bacteria that destroys the malaria parasite, keeping the disease from spreading to humans. This explains why some Anopheles mosquitoes (the only genus that transmits malaria) don’t spread it, and it spurs the imagination towards possible ways of tamping down the disease.
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Staphylococcus aureus
What’s the News: Adding sugar to certain antibiotics can boost their bacteria-battling ability, according to a study published today in Nature. In particular, sugar helps the drugs wipe out persisters, bacteria that evade antibiotics by essentially going dormant only to flare up again once the danger has passed. This technique could lead to the development of inexpensive, more effective treatments for bacterial infections.
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What’s the News: When vampire bats bite their victims, their saliva releases an enzyme called desmoteplase, or DSPA, into the bloodstream, which causes blood to flow more readily. Several years ago, scientists realized that the same enzyme that gives bats more blood for their bite may also help stroke victims by breaking down blood clots. Dubbed Draculin, this blood-clot-bashing drug has now entered a phase 2 study: In hospitals across the country, scientists are currently comparing Draculin with traditional anticoagulants to see if it increases the three-hour window doctors have to treat post-stroke blood clots. “This is one of the studies that actually extends that window up to 9 hours,” says lead researcher Michel Torbey. “We’re hoping the bat saliva, in itself, dissolves the clot with lower risk of bleeding in the brain afterwards.” (more…)
What’s the News: Forget masking our scent or making us taste bad—sensory overload might be our most potent tool in repelling mosquitoes. And we might someday have a repellent for the job: Scientists have just discovered a molecule that zaps all of a mosquito’s odor receptors at once, overwhelming it. The molecule’s not ready to be deployed yet, but early tests indicate it could be thousands of times more effective than DEET.
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Video games might do more than get you off your fanny.
What’s the News: Getting in shape with Wii Bowling was just the beginning: scientists are now studying whether videogames that use breath as a controller can encourage healthy habits in children with cystic fibrosis.
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Aplysia californica
What’s the News: Researchers have considerably weakened—and perhaps even erased—long-term memories in Aplysia, a type of marine slug, and in neurons in a lab dish, by blocking the activity of a particular enzyme. Understanding how to weaken and erase such memories could one day lead to new treatments for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, who are haunted by memories of traumatic events.
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What’s the News: Going undercover can require some sacrifices–burning off your fingerprints, for instance, a la Gattaca. It’s the same story with bacteria: they can slip below antibiotics’ radar without any mutations, but only using an elaborate system of self-sabotage. A new study reveals the workings of this biochemical disguise.
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Metastatic melanoma cells
What’s the News: Souped-up cells from a patient’s own immune system could one day be used to treat advanced melanoma, according to a preliminary study published in Science Translational Medicine investigating the safety of the technique. The researchers manipulated a patient’s immune system cells to better recognize cancer cells in the lab and then re-introduced those cells into the body—an approach called “adoptive T-cell therapy.”
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What’s the News: Please back away from the armadillo, ma’am. You can watch them from a distance, even take pictures, but don’t play with or eat Texas’s state mammal: scientists have just confirmed that it is a source of leprosy infections in humans.
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What’s the News: As a European court looks poised to ban the patenting of technologies using human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), a group of prominent scientists has issued a warning: regenerative medicine is never going to leave the lab if no one can make money on it.
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What’s the News: Engineers and patients dream of mechanical prosthetic limbs that can talk and listen to the brain, moving in response to thought and sending back sensory information. For that dream to become reality, electrodes from the prosthetic have to connect with nearby nerve cells—a tricky proposition, given that nerve cells in an amputated limb won’t grow without proper structural support. A new tubular scaffold, described in detail by Technology Review, has tiny grooves that fit bundles of nerve cells, which could provide the support nerves need to interface with a mechanical limb better than current designs.
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What’s the News: Researchers have known for decades that what a woman eats during her pregnancy can impact her child’s weight later in life. Now, a new study shows a possible mechanism for how mom’s diet affects baby’s weight: Epigenetic changes—changes that can increase or decrease the expression of a particular gene but don’t alter the genetic sequence—to a gene involved in fat metabolism can be passed from mother to child during pregnancy.
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