The Enemy Within - Unexpected Cell Type Orchestrate Immune Turmoil in Flu - via ScienceNow

When a patient gets killed by a specially lethal kind of flu, as in the recent outbreaks of H1N1 or H5N1 (swine and avian) strains of flu virus, it might be the body's own defenses that make the final move. The flu and other infections can provoke so-called cytokine storms or immunological storms. One hallmark of these events is a surge of chemical messengers called cytokines and chemokines into tissues and the blood, promoting inflammation. Immune cells, including macrophages and natural killer cells, also flood the lungs. The combination can cause fatal disease with lung and other organs damage. Some flu strains might initiate more often these immune waves. For example, animal studies suggest that the Spanish flu virus (the one that killed millions in the 1918 epidemia) makes the immune system overaggressive. Cells that line the lungs and airways and the immune cells that move in after infection are responsible for cytokine storms—or at least that's what researchers thought.

A team led by chemical biologist Hugh Rosen and virologist Michael Oldstone of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, investigated the S1P pathway, a molecular control circuit that fine-tunes immune responses. The scientists gave influenza-infected rodents a compound that stimulates the S1P1 receptor. The treatment prevented a cytokine outburst and reduced movement of immune cells into the lungs. When the researchers looked after the cells in the lungs that carry the S1P1 receptor, they found that it occurs on endothelial cells, which line lymphatic and blood vessels, and on the white blood cells known as lymphocytes. To determine which of these two cell types controls the cytokine surge, the researchers tested the S1P1 receptor activator in genetic modified mice that lack lymphocytes. The compound also prevented the storms in these animals, suggesting that endothelial cells, not lymphocytes, orchestrate cytokine release. This fascinating finding opens a whole new avenue of research into flu and potentially many other infectious and inflammatory diseases, where endothelial cells may have a previously unknown important role.

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Surprising Cells Rein In Killer Flu - ScienceNOW - http://bit.ly/pe8PUo

Concurso 'Dance Your Ph.D.' 2011 - via ScienceNOW

A revista Science divulgou a nova edição de seu concurso anual "Dance Your PhD", no seu blog de notícias, ScienceNOW. O concurso é um desafio bem-humorado a cientistas com doutorado ou estudantes de doutorado de explicar ou expressar sua tese, sua pesquisa e resultados na forma de uma coreografia de dança. É um concurso amador e sem pretensões artísticas, o propósito é a diversão, mas que tem um prêmio que não deixa de ser significante. Como diz a página do concurso, "você pode ganhar US$ 1000,00 e fama geek instantânea na internet, além do reconhecimento pela Science". Além disso, este ano a melhor performance ganhará uma viagem a Bruxelas. As regras são simples: você deve: (1) ser doutor ou (2) estar fazendo doutorado e (3) obrigatoriamente, fazer parte da coreografia! O concurso é aberto a todas as áreas da ciência e a todos os países, sem distinção. Para participar, você deve criar e filmar sua coreografia (na página do concurso pode-se encontrar dicas de como fazer isso), fazer upload para o site vimeo.com e mandar o link pra os organizadores do concurso até 10 de Outubro de 2011! Aos interessados, mãos à obra e boa sorte!

Artigo no blog da Science:
http://bit.ly/nqEYyh
Página do concurso:
http://bit.ly/10MOn

I, Robot

Via ScienceNOW: Robotic avatars of disabled people walking around and interacting with other people? This possibility has now a little more of science and a little less of fiction due to a new development reported at IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society conference in Boston. A group from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland has devised a way of merging human-driven control and robotic control to create a smooth form of subconcious remote thought control. People wearing an array of tiny electrodes in a cap could control the movements of a robot a 100-mile away almost as easily as we can control our own movements. This new non-invasive technology will be next tested in locked-in patients that lack any possibility of movement. This new development can open the way to a new era for disabled patients and their relation to other people.
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Disabled Patients Mind-Meld With Robots - ScienceNOW

The Running Mice

Researchers of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues genetically engineered mice to lack the IL-15Rα gene, and the modified mice ran six times farther than normal mice each night. Previous studies had suggested that IL-15Rα is important for muscle strength. The genetically-modified mice seemed to lack fast-twitch muscles - muscles that allow more precise movements but tire faster - and to have only slow-twitch muscles - which have more endurance but do not allow fine movements. This could explain why the mice did not tire, but the cause of their behavioral changing was not clear. Why they wanted to run for hours every night? The scientists argue that human resistance to fatigue could be affected by this same gene and that this could be a possible target for human diseases.
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Missing Gene Helps Mice Run for Hours - ScienceNOW

Bacteria Flash Like Christmas Lights - ScienceNOW

Cool blinking bacteria allow scientists to discover a whole new electrophysiological phenomenon. Bacteria can depolarize like neurons do, a group of scientists who were studying neurons discovered by chance. See the cool video showing flashing live bacteria in Science web page.

Bacteria Flash Like Christmas Lights - ScienceNOW

Magnetic Nanoparticles Fry Tumors - ScienceNOW

In a new study, a team from Korea found that injecting mice with tiny magnets and cranking up the heat eliminated tumors from the animals' bodies with no apparent side effects.

The idea of killing cancer with heat isn't new. Like normal cells, cancer cells start to die when body temperature rises above 43˚C. The trick is figuring out how to kill the cancer without harming the body's own cells. One promising idea, known as magnetic hyperthermia, involves injecting minuscule "nanoparticles," basically microscopic lumps of iron oxide or other compounds, into tumors to make them magnetic. The patient is put into a magnetic field that reverses direction thousands of times every second. This therapy has not been tested in humans yet. The magnetic nanoparticles are excited by the applied field and begin to get hot, heating and potentially destroying the surrounding cancer tissue. Read more:

Magnetic Nanoparticles Fry Tumors - ScienceNOW

New Drug Hope for 'Aging' Kids - ScienceNOW

A drug approved to treat cancer and prevent the rejection of transplanted organs may also help children with progeria—a disease that resembles accelerated aging and typically kills those afflicted by their teens—according to a new study. The drug's effects on cells from these children is so striking, and the condition so devastating, that physicians and scientists are debating whether to proceed immediately with a clinical trial. Read more:
New Drug Hope for 'Aging' Kids - ScienceNOW

The Mental Hazards of City Living - ScienceNOW

 Provocative new study says urban life alters the way the brain handles social stress.
 Psychiatrist Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and collaborators at the Central Institute of Mental Health and the University of Heidelberg Medical Faculty in Mannheim, Germany, have previously used brain-imaging methods to search for abnormalities in the brains of people with genetic risk factors for mental illness. In the new study, Meyer-Lindenberg says, the group wanted to apply the same approach to environmental risk factors, which can be even more powerful than genetic factors. "Urbanicity ... has a much higher associated risk than any gene," he says. "The idea was to take people with that risk factor and see if there's anything different in their brains."
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The Mental Hazards of City Living - ScienceNOW