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Making Clearer Pictures
Software helps astronomers see what's hidden in noisy and blurred images of stars and galaxies. Metropolis Data Consultants uses the same techniques to give doctors and the police clearer pictures to work on.
Astronomers use all sorts of telescopes to explore outer space. Some are optical telescopes - bigger and better versions of those you might have at home. Using lenses and mirrors, they make distant objects seem much nearer than they are.
Other telescopes look for radio waves, x-rays and other types of radiation. They give astronomers a different view of the universe - one that deepens their understanding.
But whichever they use, the problem for astronomers is the same. When they're looking at faint objects far out into space, they don't get perfect pictures.
Blur and noise.
To start with, things move. The Earth is rotating, for example, and the satellites that carry telescopes aren't absolutely stationary. Blurring is inevitable.
To make things even worse, some kinds of telescope add noise to the picture. When the image itself is faint, the result is the sort of picture you get when your TV isn't tuned in properly. You can see that something is there but you can't see it clearly.........
Posted by: Emily Permalink Source
Human Behavior Changes Infectious Diseases
"When people are serially monogamous (that is, interactions take place one at a time), groups with different behavior favor strains with different properties," explain the authors. "When new interactions occur frequently, rapidly transmitted strains are most successful, but when new interactions take place infrequently there is extra pressure on strains to have a long infectious period".
Eames and Keeling focused their study on sexually transmitted infections, where the assumption of monogamy is most applicable, but stress that their conclusions may have wider relevance.
"There are implications for all sorts of other infections too," Eames continues. "Just think of the behavioral differences between village and city life: one with quiet streets and few new faces, and the other with thousands of hurrying people and crowded public transport. That's two very different environments for a pathogen. There are always going to be plenty of factors that determine which strains emerge, but human mixing behavior has a big part to play".........
Posted by: Emily Permalink Source
Keeping Babies From Deadly Infections
Passed from mother to child during birth, group B streptococcus can cause sepsis, pneumonia, meningitis, neurological damage and, in a small percentage of newborns, even death.
Eventhough all women are tested for group B streptococcus during pregnancy, current screening methods can leave some babies at risk for contracting an infection from the bacterium. But the new test, which UF scientists studied for several months as part of a clinical trial, allows health-care workers to quickly screen mothers during labor, improving the odds that babies will receive preventive care so they will not be infected during delivery.
"Without any intervention, (group B strep) is the most common cause of early-onset infection in newborns," said Rodney Edwards, M.D., a UF assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology in the College of Medicine who led the clinical trial at UF, one of six sites to study the test. "It can cause sepsis, meningitis and pneumonia. The likelihood of dying if you are a newborn is 5 percent. (With meningitis) even if the baby makes it through the infection there is a chance of cerebral palsy and cognitive delay".........
Posted by: Emily Permalink Source
Identical Twins Be Genetically Different
Scientists at the University of Michigan Medical School are just beginning to understand how two people who are so similar biologically can be so different when it comes to the development of diseases like rheumatoid arthritis.
U-M researchers have discovered three genes that are over-expressed in rheumatoid arthritis, or RA, that were not known to be associated with the disease before. They also found that non-genetic factors influenced the expression of these genes and that the expression patterns varied between identical twins where only one twin had RA. Results of the U-M study were published in the recent issue of Arthritis and Rheumatism.
RA is a chronic inflammatory disease that damages joints. RA causes pain, loss of movement, and bone deformities. It affects 2.1 million Americans. There are many genetic factors that put people at a high-risk for developing RA, yet only 15 percent of identical twins will both develop it.
Scientists compared gene expression patterns of 11 pairs of monozygotic twins, who shared the same egg and were genetically identical, but only one of them had RA. They found three new genes that were significantly over-expressed in the twin with RA compared to the one without the disease. This is the first report for RA that examines gene expression patterns in monozygotic twins.........
Posted by: Emily Permalink Source
Quit smoking
Image courtesy of American Lung Association
U.S. Surgeon General Luther L. Terry's original report on the health consequences of smoking, published in 1964, warned that smoking during pregnancy increased the risk of low birth weight and other complications in newborns. These dangers were confirmed by subsequent research. During the 1980s, it had become a major scientific argument in the campaign against smoking.........
Posted by: Emily Permalink Source
Honored For Aiding Voting For Disabled
Ted Selker
MIT Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Ted Selker has long been intrigued by how to ease the polling-place challenges facing sight, hearing and developmentally disabled voters. As the MIT director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, Selker has built and tested technology for improving voting security and accuracy, with special attention to the needs of impaired voters.
On July 26, Selker will receive the Thomas Paine Award from the American Association of People With Disabilities (www.aapd-dc.org), during the annual event commemorating the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, passed on July 26, 1990. The award, being given only for the second time, goes to someone who has made a "significant contribution to increasing the voting participation of people with disabilities," said Jim Dickson, AAPD vice president for governmental affairs.
"Ted has been extremely helpful in both the technology and hardware, but he has also been extremely important teaching the disability-advocacy community and election officials about the accuracy, security and accessibility for people with disabilities, which turns out to be good for everybody," Dickson said.........
Posted by: Emily Permalink Source
Developing Safer Anti-obesity Drugs
Dr. Joel Elmquist, professor of internal medicine
That knowledge could aid in the design of safer anti-obesity drugs nearly a decade after Fen-phen was banned for causing harmful side effects.
The study, which tested the effect of several drugs that alter serotonin levels in the brain, found that serotonin activates some neurons and melanocortin-4 receptors, or MC4Rs, to curb appetite and at the same time blocks other neurons that normally act to increase appetite.
The dual effect helps explain how such drugs, including Fen-phen, spur weight loss.
The finding, available online and in the July 20 issue of Neuron, also reinforces the role of serotonin - a regulator of emotions, mood and sleep - in affecting the brain's melanocortin system, a key molecular pathway that controls body weight.
"The more we understand about the pathways and the way serotonergic drugs regulate body weight, the more it one day might lead to harnessing beneficial properties of anti-obesity treatments like Fen-phen and minimizing the harmful side effects," said Dr. Joel Elmquist, professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern and co-senior author of the study.........
Posted by: Emily Permalink Source
Antioxidants May Slow Vision Loss
"Much more work needs to be done to determine if what we did in mice will work in humans," said Peter Campochiaro, the Eccles Professor of Ophthalmology and Neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "But these findings have helped to solve a mystery".
In patients with RP, rod photoreceptors die from a mutation, but it has not been known why cone photoreceptors die. After rods die, the level of oxygen in the retina goes up, and this work shows that it is the high oxygen that gradually kills the cones. Oxygen damage is also called "oxidative damage" and can be reduced by antioxidants. So for the first time, scientists have a treatment target in patients with RP, added Campochiaro. His team's findings appeared in the July online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Retinas in all mammals, from mouse to man, are made up of light-sensitive cells known as cones and rods, named for their shapes, which convert light into nerve signals that are then transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve. Cones are needed to see colors and make vision possible in bright light, whereas the far more numerous rods permit sight in low light. The human retina contains approximately 125 million rod cells and six million cone cells. In diseases like RP and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), these cells die off and eventually lead to blindness (in the case of RP) or legal blindness (in the case of AMD).........
Posted by: Emily Permalink Source
Distinguished Professor Of Ophthalmology
J. William Harbour
Washington University Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton joined Larry J. Shapiro, M.D., executive vice chancellor for medical affairs and dean of the School of Medicine, in announcing the appointment.
"Endowed professorships are among the most important gifts a university can receive because they allow us to recognize outstanding individuals and to support their important contributions in research and education," Wrighton says. "In addition to supporting Dr. Harbour's current work, this distinguished chair also honors a seminal figure in Washington University's history."
"Dr. Paul Cibis was one of the true pioneers of modern vitreoretinal surgery, a remarkably gifted physician and scientist," Shapiro says. "It is highly appropriate that a professorship endowed in his name help to support the work of Bill Harbour, a physician/scientist who is one of our most gifted eye surgeons."
The Cibis Distinguished Professorship was established in 2000 by a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. It honors the late Paul A. Cibis, M.D., an important figure in the history of Washington University's Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences.........
Posted by: Emily Permalink Source
Earlier Use Leads To Better Speech
A cochlear implant's external component senses sound and sends electrical signals to an internal component that stimulates the hearing nerves in the inner ear.
In contrast, a child of the same age who had a cochlear implant 31 months earlier made more sophisticated statements: "OK, now the people goes to stand there with that noise and now - Woo! Woo!" and "OK, the train's coming to get the animals and people".
The testing session was part of research that indicates the earlier a deaf infant or toddler receives a cochlear implant, the better his or her spoken language skills at age 3 and a half. The research was conducted by Johanna Grant Nicholas, Ph.D., research associate professor of otolaryngology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and colleague Ann E. Geers, Ph.D., from the Southwestern Medical School at the University of Texas at Dallas.
"Ninety percent of children born deaf are born to hearing parents, and these parents know very little about deafness," Nicholas says. "They don't know how to have a conversation in sign language or teach it to their children. Many of these parents would like their children to learn spoken language".........
Posted by: Emily Permalink Source
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