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Malaria parasites entering red blood cells

Image: Cocha Banner Magazine

Issue no. 39, 2011 Published: Nov 11, 2011
Malaria vaccine hope after blood entry route discovered
Brain analysis can help predict psychosis: study
Single-molecule 'electric car' taken for test drive
Speed-of-light experiment to be repeated
Re-programmable cells to create new life forms
Kilogram faces quantum diet after weight problem
Artificial intelligence joins the fossil hunt
'Urine power' tests are successful
Carbon monoxide calms city dwellers down

Malaria vaccine hope after blood entry route discovered
The route all strains of the most deadly malaria parasite use to enter red blood cells has been identified by researchers at the Sanger Institute in Cambridge. The scientists involved said the finding offered 'great hope' for the development of an effective vaccine. There are many malaria parasites but Plasmodium falciparum is the most deadly. It is exceptionally good at evading and bamboozling the immune system. Within five minutes of being bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito, the parasite is already hiding inside the liver. It then emerges from the liver at a different stage in its life cycle and infects red blood cells, where it starts reproducing. The human immune system struggles to build up resistance to malaria and researchers have struggled in the laboratory. There is still no approved vaccine against malaria. Large scale trials of the most advanced prototype - RTS,S - showed it halved the risk of getting malaria. The Sanger Institute study looked at the moment the parasite infected a red blood cell. They were looking for proteins on the surface of Plasmodium and red blood cells which were necessary for the parasite to identify its target and invade. Others had been found before, but none were universally used. The team discovered that 'basigin', a receptor on the surface on red blood cells, and 'PfRh5', a protein on the parasite, were crucial. In all strains of Plasmodium falciparum tested so far, interrupting the link protected the blood cells from attack.
BBC News / Nature Nov 10, 2011	back to top

Brain analysis can help predict psychosis: study
Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how serious or long term a psychotic patient's illness may become and help doctors make more accurate decisions about how best to treat them, according to researchers from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry and University College London. They found that using computer algorithms to analyze MRI brain scans can predict a patient's outcome. In future the method could lead to a quick reliable way of predicting how a patient's illness will develop, allowing doctors to give the best treatments to those most in need and avoid giving long courses of antipsychotic drugs to people with only very mild forms of psychosis. Psychosis is a condition that affects people's minds, altering the way they think, feel and behave. The most common forms of psychosis are part of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia - which affects around 24m people worldwide - and bipolar disorder, but psychotic symptoms can also occur in conditions like Parkinson's disease and alcohol or drug abuse.
Reuters / Psychological Medicine Nov 07, 2011	back to top

Single-molecule 'electric car' taken for test drive
Scientists have shown off what can be described as the world's smallest electric car - made of a single, carefully designed molecule. The molecule has four branches that act as wheels, rotating when a tiny metal tip applied a small current to them. With 10 electric bursts, the car was made to move six billionths of a metre. The approach joins recent single-molecule efforts, and seems to overcome the forces that often dominate at such tiny scales. The 'batteries' of the electric car come by way of the tip of what is called a scanning tunnelling microscope - an extraordinarily fine point of metal that ends in just an atom or two. As the tip draws near the molecule, electrons jump into it. The motor of the approach lies with the four 'molecular rotors' that act as the car's wheels; they undergo a change in shape when they absorb the electrons.
BBC News / Nature Nov 09, 2011	back to top

Speed-of-light experiment to be repeated
Researchers at CERN, the world's largest laboratory in Switzerland, announced last month that tiny neutrinos had been observed travelling marginally faster than light. But the results met with widespread scepticism within the scientific community, not least because Einstein's theory of special relativity - one of the cornerstones of modern physics - makes such a feat impossible. The results from the Opera experiment appeared to show that the particles had travelled 732km through the Earth from CERN to the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy marginally faster than light would have done. According to Einstein nothing should be able to travel faster than light, and evidence that neutrinos were capable of doing so would have a fundamental impact on our understanding of the universe and of time. The findings were so unlikely and of such critical importance that the researchers chose not to claim a 'discovery', instead inviting scientists across the world to scrutinise their data for errors. Now the team will rerun their experiment with some alterations which they hope will rule out many of the supposed flaws in their findings.
Telegraph Oct 28, 2011	back to top

Re-programmable cells to create new life forms
An international team of scientists has embarked on an ambitious research project to develop an in vivo biological cell that can be reprogrammed like a computer operating system. It could revolutionise synthetic biology, they say, and would pave the way for scientists to create completely new and useful forms of life. 'We are looking at creating a cell's equivalent to a computer operating system in such a way that a given group of cells could be seamlessly re-programmed to perform any function without needing to modify its hardware,' says prof. Natalio Krasnogor of the University of Nottingham. 'We are talking about a highly ambitious goal leading to a fundamental breakthrough that will, ultimately, allow us to rapidly prototype, implement and deploy living entities that are completely new and do not appear in nature, adapting them so they perform new, useful functions.' The results could be everything from new sources of food to medical breakthroughs such as drugs tailored to the individual and the growth of new organs for transplant patients. The project - dubbed Towards a Biological Cell Operating System, or AUdACiOuS - will begin by attempting to make e.coli bacteria much easier to program.
TG Daily Nov 08, 2011	back to top

Kilogram faces quantum diet after weight problem
The guardians of the world's most important standards of weights and measures have turned to quantum physics to try to resolve a dilemma. Since 1889, the kilogram has been defined in accordance with a piece of metal kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in the Paris suburb of Sevres. Ninety-percent platinum and 10-percent iridium, the British-made cylinder was proudly deemed at its founding to be as inalienable as the stars in the sky. It is kept under three glass cases in a safe in a protected building, the Pavillon de Breteuil. In 1992 came a shock: the famous kilo was no longer what it should be. Over a century the prototype had changed by around 50 microgrammes compared to six other kilos also stored in Sevres. The enigma poses a theoretical challenge to physicists, and complicates the work of labs which need ultra-precise, always-standard measurement. It is a bedrock of the International System of Units (SI), the world's most widely-used system of measurement units for daily life, precision engineering, science and trade. The SI has seven 'base units' - the kilo, metre, second, ampere, kelvin, mole and candela - from which all other units are derived. But unlike its counterparts, the kilo is the last unit that is still defined by a material object. The masters of the SI have now decided to phase out the kilo cylinder and to replace it by a fixed value based on the Planck Constant, which corresponds to the smallest packet of energy, or quanta, that two particles can exchange. On October 21, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) agreed to use the constant to calculate the value of the kilo. But adopting this 'will not be before 2014', after experiments to assess the accuracy of measurement techniques to ensure accuracy to within 20 parts per billion.
Yahoo / AFP Nov 07, 2011	back to top

Artificial intelligence joins the fossil hunt
The traditional image of the fossil-hunting palaeontologist - traipsing across parched badlands armed with nothing but hand tools and a sharp eye - may be in for an overhaul. Artificially intelligent software that scans satellite images of potential dig sites could greatly increase the number of fossils unearthed. A predictive model developed by researchers from Western Michigan University and Washington University uses neural networks to spot promising fossil sites from satellite data. The team began by feeding the software a list of known locations in the 10,000 km2 Great Divide basin, labelling them either as being fossil-rich or belonging to one of four other categories - barren, forest, scrub or wetland. Rather than telling the system what to look for to identify each type of location, they had it analyse six bands of visible and infrared light recorded by the Landsat 7 satellite and come up with its own identifying marks. Next the software sorted unknown areas of the basin into the five categories. Using only the satellite data, the computer had learned that the area's fossil sites were in sandstone - but not all sandstone has fossils at the surface. To distinguish fossil-rich sandstone, the team added two other requirements to the software. The rocks had to be 50 million years old and the land had to be sloped by at least 5 degrees, so erosion was likely to have exposed fossils. They also modified the computer model to account for the 15m resolution of the satellite data, which meant that pixels often spanned more than one type of surface. The team compared model predictions with the characteristics of other known locations they had not fed into the computer. It correctly identified 79% of the known fossil sites as likely to contain fossils, and correctly classified 84% of all the other locations.
New Scientist Nov 08, 2011	back to top

'Urine power' tests are successful
Research into producing electricity from urine has been carried out by scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol. It is claimed the publication of a research paper into the viability of urine as a fuel for Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) is a world first. MFCs contain the same kind of bacteria that is found in soil, the human gut or waste water from sewers. 'Regulating the flow' The bacteria anaerobically (without oxygen) respire just like any other living organism, and this process gives off electrons. Those electrons are then passed through an electrode and a measure of electricity is generated. Bacteria feed on the urine, which they effectively use as a fuel to continue to breathe and give off electrons. The researchers say tests have produced small amounts of energy, but more research could produce 'useful' levels of power.
BBC News Nov 09, 2011	back to top

Carbon monoxide calms city dwellers down
Carbon monoxide in cities could actually be drugging residents into placidity, according to scientists at Tel Aviv University. They say that their research indicates that low levels of the poisonous gas can have a narcotic effect. And this helps city dwellers cope with other urban stresses, such as noise levels. The discovery was made as part of a wider project designed to study the impact of environmental stressors on the human body. Most environmental observation stations are to be found outside city centres, and the researchers wanted to measure how people living in an urban environment confronted stressors in their daily lives. They asked 36 healthy individuals between the ages of 20 to 40 to spend two days in Tel Aviv, Israel's busiest city. These people travelled various routes to sites such as busy streets, restaurants, malls and markets, by public and private transportation or by foot. Meanwhile, researchers monitored the impact of heat and cold, noise pollution, carbon monoxide levels, and social load, or the impact of crowds. The participants reported to what extent their experiences were stressful, and this was compared with sensor data that measured heart rate and pollutant levels. Noise pollution emerged as the biggest source of stress. But the most surprising findings related to the levels of CO that the participants inhaled. Not only were these much lower than predicted - around 1-15 parts per million every half hour - but the gas appeared to have a narcotic effect on the participants, counteracting the stress caused by noise and crowd density.
TG Daily Nov 09, 2011	back to top