Scientists Report First Success in Cloning Human Stem Cells

It’s been 17 years since Dolly the sheep was cloned from a mammary cell. And now scientists applied the same technique to make the first embryonic stem cell lines from human skin cells.

Ever since Ian Wilmut, an unassuming embryologist working at the Roslin Institute just outside of Edinburgh stunned the world by cloning the first mammal, Dolly, scientists have been asking – could humans be cloned in the same way? Putting aside the ethical challenges the question raised, the query turned out to involve more wishful thinking than scientific success. Despite the fact that dozens of other species have been cloned using the technique, called nuclear transfer, human cells have remained stubbornly resistant to the process.

Until now. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a professor at Oregon Health & Science University and his colleagues report in the journal Cell that they have successfully reprogrammed human skin cells back to their embryonic state. The purpose of the study, however, was not to generate human clones but to produce lines of embryonic stem cells. These can develop into muscle, nerve, or other cells that make up the body’s tissues. The process, he says, took only a few months, a surprisingly short period to reach such an important milestone.

Nuclear transfer involves inserting a fully developed cell – in Mitalipov’s study, the cells came from the skin of fetuses – into the nucleus of an egg, and then manipulating the egg to start dividing, a process that normally only occurs after it has been fertilized by a sperm. After several days, the ball of cells that results contains a blanket of embryonic stem cells endowed with the genetic material of the donor skin cell, which have the ability to generate every cell type from that donor. In Dolly’s case, those cells were allowed to continue developing into an embryo that was then transferred to a ewe to produce a cloned sheep. But Mitalipov says his process with the human cells isn’t designed to generate a human clone, but rather just to create the embryonic stem cells. These could then be manipulated to create heart, nerve or other cells that can repair or treat disease.

“I think this is a really important advance,” says Dieter Egli, an investigator at the New York Stem Cell Foundation. “I have a very high confidence that versions of this technique will work very well; it’s something that the field has been waiting for.” Egli is among the handful of scientists who have been working to perfect the technique with human cells and in 2011, succeeded in producing human stem cells, but with double the number of chromosomes. In 2004, Woo Suk Hwang, a veterinary scientist at Seoul National University, claimed to have succeeded in achieving the feat, but later admitted to faking the data. Instead of generating embryonic stem cell lines via nuclear transfer, Hwang’s group produced the stem cells from days-old embryos, a technique that had already been established by James Thomson at University of Wisconsin in 1998.

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New Plasma Device Considered Holy Grail of Energy Generation

Scientists at the University of Missouri have devised a new way to create and control plasma that could transform American energy generation and storage.

Randy Curry, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering, and his team developed a device that launches a ring of plasma at distances of up to two feet. Although the plasma reaches a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun, it doesn’t emit radiation and is completely safe in proximity to humans.

While most of us are familiar with three states of matter – liquid, gas and solid – there is also a fourth state known as plasma, which includes things such as fire and lightning. Life on Earth depends on the energy emitted by plasma produced during fusion reactions within the sun.

The secret to Curry’s success was developing a way to make plasma form its own self-magnetic field, which holds it together as it travels through the air.

“Launching plasma in open air is the ‘Holy Grail’ in the field of physics,” said Curry.

“Creating plasma in a vacuum tube surrounded by powerful electromagnets is no big deal; dozens of labs can do that. Our innovation allows the plasma to hold itself together while it travels through regular air without any need for containment.”

The plasma device could also be enlarged to handle much larger amounts of energy, he said.

Ricin: What is it?

Government officials in Washington have shut down mail delivery to the US Senate after detecting ricin in a letter addressed to Mississippi senator Roger Wicker, a Republican, on 16 April. Here are some facts about the toxin.

What is ricin?

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ricin is a poison found naturally in castor beans, and can be derived from the waste product, called ‘mash’, left over when castor beans are processed to make castor oil.

How deadly is ricin?

According to the CDC, ricin is “very toxic.” Data from tests in monkeys suggest that just 3 milligrams of inhaled ricin can kill an adult.

How does it work?

Ricin inactivates ribosomes, components responsible for manufacturing proteins within human cells. Cells stop making proteins essential to life and die.

What are the symptoms of ricing poisoning?

That depends on how ricin enters the body. Inhaled ricin can cause breathing difficulties, fever, cough and nausea. Ingested ricin can cause vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, and seizures. Symptoms can appear as early as 4 hours and as late as 24 hours after exposure. Death can occur between three and six days after exposure.

How does one become exposed?

It’s possible to become poisoned with ricin by eating large quantities of castor beans or by ingesting the poison itself, but ricin is a more potent and deadly bioterror agent when inhaled as aerosol particles. Simply touching ricin is not likely to kill a person unless he or she ingests it from the skin.

Has ricin been used as an agent of warfare and bioterrorism?

Ricin has a long history as an agent of biological warfare¹. The US War Department first considered using ricin in 1918 and worked with British scientists to develop a ricin bomb that appears never to have been used in combat. The US military experimented with inhalable ricin powders in the 1940s and the Iraqi military packed it into artillery shells in the 1980s. Ricin was most likely used to kill Bulgarian journalist Georgi Markov in Great Britain in 1978. Ricin was also detected in 2003 and 2004 in a South Carolina postal facility, in a mailroom serving the office of the US Senate’s then-majority leader Bill Frist, and in a letter sent to the White House, though it did not cause any illnesses or deaths in those cases. In the mid-1990s, members of a militia group, the Minnesota Patriots Council, were convicted of conspiring to kill law enforcement officials using ricin. It has also been found in the possession of suspected terrorist groups such as al Qaeda.

How is ricin detected?

Sensors at locations around the country, such as mail sorting facilities, check routinely for the presence of ricin and other pathogens. If a sample tests positive, it is transferred to a lab that performs follow-up tests using antibodies targeted to ricin proteins or DNA from the castor bean plant. In this instance,ricin was initially detectedat a Washington DC mail sorting facility and its presence was confirmed by a laboratory in Maryland.

Can ricin poisoning be treated?

There is no antidote to ricin toxin. One company, Soligenix of Princeton, New Jersey, is developing a vaccine against ricin, but it has only progressed through very early-stage clinical trials and has not been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. It could theoretically be given to poisoning victims under an “emergency use authorization” that permits the use of unapproved treatments and vaccines if no alternative exists. However, the vaccine works by stimulating the body in advance of an attack to produce protective antibodies against ricin. Since the symptoms of ricin poisoning are irreversible four hours after exposure,  the vaccine is not likely to help soon enough to save lives after the discovery of a ricin release. The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is funding research into drugs to treat ricin poisoning.

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Tectonic Summary of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Iran

The April 16, 2013 M 7.8 earthquake east of Khash, Iran, occurred as a result of normal faulting at an intermediate depth in the Arabian plate lithosphere, approximately 80 km beneath the Earth’s surface. Regional tectonics are dominated by the collisions of the Arabian and India plates with Eurasia; at the longitude of this event, the Arabian plate is converging towards the north-northeast at a rate of approximately 37 mm/yr with respect to the Eurasian plate. Arabian plate lithosphere is subducted beneath the Eurasian plate at the Makran coast of Pakistan and Iran, and becomes progressively deeper to the north.

The subducted Arabian plate is known to be seismically active to depths of about 160 km. The frequency of moderate and large earthquakes within the subducted Arabian plate is not high compared with similar events in some other subducted plates worldwide, but several earthquakes have occurred within this slab in the region of today’s event over the past 40 years, including a magnitude 6.7 shock 50 km to the south in 1983. In January of 2011, a M 7.2 earthquake occurred approximately 200 km to the east, in a similar tectonic environment to the April 16 earthquake.

More details @usgs.com

Feds Fault Preemie Researchers For Ethical Lapses

Federal officials say a large study of premature infants was ethically flawed because doctors didn’t inform the babies’ parents about increased risks of blindness, brain damage and death.

The study involved more than 1,300 severely premature infants at nearly two dozen medical institutions between 2004 and 2009. The infants were randomly assigned to receive two different levels of oxygen to see which was better at preventing blindness without increasing the risk of neurological damage or death.

In a March 7 letter, a Department of Health and Human Services official told the researchers that the study “was in violation of the regulatory requirements for informed consent” because parents weren’t told in advance about the “reasonably foreseeable risks.”

In fact, the consent form signed by parents “did not identify any risks” from subjecting the infants to either the low or high levels of oxygen used in the study,” writes Lisa Buchanan of the Office for Human Research Protections, part of HHS.

The study, published in 2010 by the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that infants who got the higher level of oxygen had more than twice the incidence of severe blindness, while infants who got the lower level were slightly more likely to die.

Among the 654 babies in the low-oxygen group, 130 died — 3.2 percent more than in the high-oxygen group.

In the high-oxygen group, 91 of 509 developed blindness — a rate of nearly 18 percent, compared to 9 percent in the low-oxygen group.

The study was designed to address a long-standing problem in the care of very premature babies. It’s known that if they get too much oxygen, that can cause blindness from a condition called retinopathy of prematurity. But if they don’t get enough, they can suffer brain damage and death.

About 500 infants a year become legally blind from this condition, out of about 28,000 US infants born every year weighing less than 2 3/4 pounds.

The feds’ letter was addressed to Richard Marchase, an executive at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a lead institution in the multicenter study.

Marchase says, in an interview with The New York Times, that the death rate of infants in the low-oxygen group was actually lower than a similar group of infants born around the same time who weren’t in the study.

He also maintains that all the infants in the study were given enough oxygen to keep their blood levels within the standard range.

But the HHS letter takes issue with that contention. The study was designed, it said, to give infants in the high-oxygen group “more oxygen than average infants receiving standard care, and infants assigned to the lower range received less.”

Marchase seems to acknowledge that the study’s informed consent language could have been better. In the future, he tells the Times, “We will to the best of our ability let the subjects or their parents know as thoroughly as possible what previous studies suggest in terms of risk. We are going to be very sensitive to that going forward….”

The flawed consent forms were approved by ethics committees at all 23 medical centers involved in the study. They included such prestigious institutions as Stanford, Yale, Duke, Tufts and the University of California, San Diego.

The ethical problem came to light because a consumer group called Public Citizen called on HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to apologize to the parents of the 1,316 infants who agreed to participate in the study.

“The word ‘unethical’ doesn’t even begin to describe the egregious and shocking deficiencies in the informed-consent process for this study,” Dr. Michael Carome of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group says in a press release. He says it’s likely that many parents would not have agreed to enroll their infants in the study if they had known about the risks.

Carome formerly worked for the HHS Office of Human Research Protections.

In addition to an apology from Sebelius, Public Citizen calls on HHS to investigate “how the HHS system for review and oversight of clinical trials failed so miserably.”

Punch Leaves Man With Star-Shaped Cataract

A man in Austria developed a cataract shaped like a star in his eye after he was punched, according to a report of his case.

The 55-year-old went to his doctor because his vision in that eye had progressively worsened over the previous six months, according to doctors who treated the man.

The patient said he’d been punched nine months earlier, the doctors wrote in their report.

Talk about seeing stars, sheesh.

Hollywood Director James Cameron Donates Deep-Sea Craft for Research

James Cameron, the director who gave us critically-acclaimed films like The Terminator, Titanic, Avatar, is giving us the craft that he built and rode into the sea’s deepest spot last year – well not us per se, but to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), according to the New York Times.

The director-explorer’s donation to WHOI is part of a new collaboration meant to speed ocean exploration, the partners announced this week.

The undersea craft, which cost Cameron roughly $10 million out of pocket and is known as “Deepsea Challenger,” will be used mainly to aid the design of advanced technologies, rather than to routinely carry scientists into the sea’s depths, the Times reported. However, scientists at the institution are already planning to use the cameras and lighting systems on the craft on the upcoming dive by the remotely controlled vehicle Nereus, which will return to trenches in the Atlantic and the Pacific over the next two years.

Sperm Works Best in the Winter, Study Finds

Researchers at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev found that sperm concentration and the percentage of fast motility—the ability to move spontaneously and independently—decreased significantly from spring into summer and fall, rebounding in the winter.

The physical structure of the sperm cells was also the healthiest in the winter months, according to the study, which tested 6,455 semen samples over the course of three years.

“This study was aimed to explore the possibility that changing weather is somehow related to the quality of sperm, a phenomenon well known from the animal world,” study leader Eliahu Levitas said in an email.

The Father of All Men Is 340,000 Years Old

A change in the way we understand the root of the tree where Y chromosome originated from has left geneticists amazed

Albert Perry carried a secret in his DNA: a Y chromosome so distinctive that it reveals new information about the origin of our species. It shows that the last common male ancestor down the paternal line of our species is over twice as old as we thought.

One possible explanation is that hundreds of thousands of years ago, modern and archaic humans in central Africa interbred, adding to known examples of interbreeding – with Neanderthals in the Middle East, and with the enigmatic Denisovans somewhere in southeast Asia.

Perry, recently deceased, was an African-American who lived in South Carolina. A few years ago, one of his female relatives submitted a sample of his DNA to a company called Family Tree DNA for genealogical analysis.

Geneticists can use such samples to work out how we are related to one another. Hundreds of thousands of people have now had their DNA tested. The data from these tests had shown that all men gained their Y chromosome from a common male ancestor. This genetic “Adam” lived between 60,000 and 140,000 years ago.

All men except Perry, that is. When Family Tree DNA’s technicians tried to place Perry on the Y-chromosome family tree, they just couldn’t. His Y chromosome was like no other so far analysed.

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“The Y-chromosome tree is much older than we thought,” says Chris Tyler-Smith at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, who was not involved in the study. He says further work will be needed to confirm exactly how much older.

“It’s a cool discovery,” says Jon Wilkins of the Ronin Institute in Montclair, New Jersey. “We geneticists have been looking at Y chromosomes about as long as we’ve been looking at anything. Changing where the root of the Y-chromosome tree is at this point is extremely surprising.”

(via NewScientist)

Three Radical New Brain-Mapping Tools Obama’s Plan Could Deliver

The Obama administration wants to make a huge investment in mapping the human brain, according to The New York Times. How can they get the most bang for their buck? We have details on three future technologies that are being eyed by the scientists behind the bold proposal.

The U.S. already has one big brain-mapping effort under way, the Human Connectome Project, which aims to map the connections between regions of the human brain. The new project would go beyond this static depiction and map the activity of individual neurons in real time.

“All the really interesting features of the brain — language, perception, cognition, the mind — emerge from collections of neurons interacting with each other in ways we don’t understand,” said neuroscientist John Donoghue of Brown University, one of the architects of the proposed project. It’s those interactions, the electrochemical blips coursing through networks of interconnected neurons, that the new Brain Activity Map project aims to capture.

The Connectome project focuses mostly on static images of the brain. Although it does include some measures of brain activity, the fMRI scans it will use provide a view that’s something like that of a city seen from an airplane window. What the scientists behind the proposed Brain Activity Map want instead are detailed street maps with real-time traffic info. Ideally, they want to record every blip of every neuron in a network of thousands, or even millions.

The scientists hope they’ll get as much as $3 billion over the next decade to build a new set of dream tools for studying how the human brain works when it’s healthy and what goes wrong in disorders like epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. Here are three ideas they’ve discussed, all in various stages of development.

“Sure, they sound far-fetched,” Donoghue said. “But we’re on the cusp of being able to do them.”

Continue..

Life Confirmed in Buried Antarctic Lake

Blobs and smears of microbial life growing in clear plastic disks are confirmation of a community living in a lake buried beneath the Antarctic ice, scientists studying the lake have said.

Water retrieved from subglacial Lake Whillans contains about 1,000 bacteria per milliliter (about a fifth of a teaspoon) of lake water, biologist John Priscu of Montana State University told Nature News. Petri dishes swiped with samples of the lake water are already growing colonies of microbes at a good rate, Nature News reported.

Lake Whillans is 2,625 feet (800 meters) below the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. After breaking through the ice on Jan. 28, researchers are returning to the United States with 8 gallons (30 liters) of lake water and eight sediment cores from the lake bottom. These samples will be tested for signs of microbial life, which could shed light on the types of extreme life that is able to thrive in such harsh environments.

Now, I don’t want to get people too excited but just imagine what the results could imply for a future mission to the Galilean satellite, Europa.

Largest Prime Number Discovered

The largest prime number yet has been discovered — and it’s 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long.

The number — 2 raised to the 57,885,161 power minus 1 — was discovered by University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper as part of a giant network of volunteer computers devoted to finding primes, similar to projects like SETI@Home, which downloads and analyzes radio telescope data in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The network, called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) harnesses about 360,000 processors operating at 150 trillion calculations per second. This is the third prime number discovered by Cooper.

“It’s analogous to climbing Mt. Everest,” said George Woltman, the retired, Orlando, Fla.-based computer scientist who created GIMPS. “People enjoy it for the challenge of the discovery of finding something that’s never been known before.”

In addition, the number is the 48th example of a rare class of primes called Mersenne Primes. Mersenne primes take the form of 2 raised to the power of a prime number minus 1. Since they were first described by French monk Marin Mersenne 350 years ago, only 48 of these elusive numbers have been found, including the most recent discovery.

After the prime was discovered, it was double-checked by several other researchers using other computers.

While the intuitive way to search for primes would be to divide every potential candidate by ever single number smaller than itself, that would be extremely time-consuming, Woltman told LiveScience.

“If you were to do it that way it would take longer than the age of the universe,” he said.

Instead, mathematicians have devised a much cleverer strategy, that dramatically reduces the time to find primes. That method uses a formula to check much fewer numbers.

The new discovery makes Cooper elligible for a $3,000 GIMPS research discovery award.