The News reader from Sicilian.Net

Gene therapy is the addition of new genes to a patient's cells to replace missing or malfunctioning genes. Researchers typically do this using a virus to carry the genetic cargo into cells, because that’s what viruses evolved to do with their own genetic material.

The treatment, which was first tested in humans in 1990, can be performed inside or outside of the body. When it’s done inside the body, doctors may inject the virus carrying the gene in question directly into the part of the body that has defective cells. This is useful when only certain populations of cells need to be “fixed.” For example, researchers are using it to try to treat Parkinson's disease, because only part of the brain must be targeted. This approach is also being used to treat eye diseases and hemophilia, an inherited disease that leads to a high risk for excess bleeding, even from minor cuts. [More]

Despite the proliferation of antibiotics and assorted antibacterial hand lotions and wipes, bacteria remain a moving target for hospitals and clinics seeking to protect their patients from infections. One approach gaining traction in the effort to banish bacteria is to mimic the way the human body attacks these microorganisms by punching holes in bacterial cell membranes and hobbling their ability to morph into antibiotic-resistant pathogens. [More]

Abuse of opiates such as heroin, methadone and morphine destroy brain cells, reducing attention span and memory. But new research shows there may be a way to regain some lost patience and recall. [More]

Twelve years ago, biologists and clinicians hoped for a fleeting moment that combining several new drugs might completely eliminate HIV from the body and thus achieve a cure. Those hopes quickly vanished when it was discovered that the virus hides in a dormant state inside certain cells out of reach of this therapeutic cocktail.

Ever since, researchers in the war against AIDS have looked for drugs to coax the elusive virus out of hiding so that other drugs or the patients' own immune systems could target them. But most of the meds were either toxic or ineffective. A few compounds derived from plants showed promise in the laboratory, but scientists could not procure sufficient quantities to move ahead with drug development.

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Robin Williams thought that the platypus was cobbled together by an inebriated deity: “Let’s take a beaver.  Let’s put on a duck’s bill.”  Now we know how weird the platypus is at the genetic level.  Because researchers published the sequence of the platypus genome in the May 8th issue of the journal Nature.  Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller commented on the platypus genome research that same night at the American Museum of Natural History:

SHANGHAI, China--The death toll from a 7.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked western China yesterday rose to nearly 12,000 and scores more were feared dead as rescuers continued to sift through the rubble of flattened schools and homes in search of thousands still missing, according to Xinhua news agency reports from the local government.

Wang Zhengyao, disaster relief division director at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, said that 11,921 people had died so far in the country's worst earthquake in three decades.

The atom is like a solar system, with electrons whirling around the nucleus like planets orbiting a star. No, actually, it isn’t. But as a first approximation to help us visualize something that is so invisible, that image works as a metaphor.

Science traffics in metaphors because our brains evolved to grasp intuitively a world far simpler than the counterintuitive world that science has only recently revealed. The functional activity of the brain, for example, is nearly as invisible to us as the atom, and so we employ metaphors. Over the centuries the brain has been compared to a hydraulic ma­chine (18th century), a mechanical calculator (19th century) and an electronic computer (20th century). Today a popular metaphor is that the brain is like a Swiss Army knife, with specialized modules for vision, language, facial recognition, cheating detection, risk taking, spi­rit­uality and even God.

A fatal, Alzheimer's-like disease that attacks cheetahs' internal organs and has impeded breeding of the cats in captivity may be spread by their feces. Researchers from Japan and China report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that the disease, AA amyloidosis, was transmitted to mice exposed to fecal proteins from a cheetah that died of it.

The cheetah is classified as an endangered species. Only 12,000 to 15,000 are believed to remain in about 25 countries, down from 100,000 in 44 countries in 1900, according to the Cheetah Conservation Fund. Breeders would like to have a self-sustaining population of cheetahs in captivity, but in North America only 20 percent of captive cheetahs reproduce, and only 75 to 80 percent of cubs survive to reproductive age, says Adrienne Crosier, a reproductive biologist at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.

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So this week I'm taking it back to a study published in Nature in 1976 to tell you about a freaky auditory illusion called the McGurk effect. However, it also requires some visual input, so I'll have to send you to a video at http://snipurl.com/sciam-illusion (or simply click to play the video posted below this transcript.) [More]

From chemistry to code-breaking, genetics to geology, these scientifically precocious young men and women have gone on to win Nobel Prizes--and live fascinating lives

Since 1942 the science talent search first sponsored by Westinghouse, and later by the Intel Corporation, has launched approximately 2,500 young finalists and winners into the national limelight.

FINALIST YEAR: 1955

HIS FINALIST PROJECT: Measuring the movement of cosmic ray particles

 Although they are, in cosmic terms, mere scraps--insignificant to the grand narrative of heavenly expansion--planets are the most diverse and intricate class of object in the universe. No other celestial bodies support such a complex interplay of astronomical, geologic, and chemical and biological processes. No other places in the cosmos could support life as we know it. The worlds of our solar system come in a tremendous variety, and even they hardly prepared us for the discoveries of the past decade, during which astronomers have found more than 200 planets.

The sheer diversity of these bodies’ masses, sizes, compositions and orbits challenges those of us trying to fathom their origins. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s, we tended to think of planet formation as a well-ordered, deterministic process--an assembly line that turns amorphous disks of gas and dust into copies of our solar system. Now we are realizing that the process is chaotic, with distinct outcomes for each system. The worlds that emerge are the survivors of a hurly-burly of competing mechanisms of creation and destruction. Many are blasted apart, fed into the fires of their system’s newborn star or ejected into interstellar space. Our own Earth may have long-lost siblings that wander through the lightless void.

Editor's Note: This slideshow is a supplement to the Feature "The Chaotic Genesis of Planets" from the May 2008 issue of Scientific American.

Barely a decade ago scientists who study how planets form had to base their theory on a single example--our solar system. Now they have dozens of mature systems and dozens more in birth throes. No two are alike.

Editor's Note: This story is a supplement to the Feature "The Chaotic Genesis of Planets" from the May 2008 issue of Scientific American.

Meteorites are not just space rocks but space fossils--planetary scientists’ only tangible record of the origin of the solar system. Planetary scientists think that they come from asteroids, which are fragments of planetesimals that never went on to form planets and have remained in deep freeze ever since. The composition of meteorites reflects what must have happened on their parent bodies. Intriguingly, they bear the scars of Jupiter’s early gravitational effects.