9/27/2011 PERMALINK
One out of every three sun-like stars have Earth-sized planets within their habitable zone. We live in a dangerous Cosmos that regularly produces extinction level events such as asteroid and comment strikes, massive planet-scorching solar flares in stars just like our own, gamma ray burst from black holes, rouge wandering black holes and perhaps many others not yet known. In our Cosmos intelligent species must either spread across multiple star systems are suffer a premature extinction that cuts their potential lifespans short by millions of future generations off children that will never be born. The Kepler orbiting observatory is specifically designed to find Earth-like planets around nearby stars. And astronomers have now calculated the likelihood of finding such planets around other stars using the latest data from the Kepler mission. The results are very encouraging. Wesley Traub of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena has looked at nearby stars most similar to our Sun, the classifications F, G or K to see how often various types of planets surround them. "About one-third of FGK stars are predicted to have at least one terrestrial, habitable-zone planet," says Traub. So it appears that there are plenty of other potential homes for our species out there awaiting our arrival.

9/23/2011 PERMALINK
Scientists can now reconstruct the images you are watching using scans of your brain.. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers. As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers. “This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study.

9/23/2011 PERMALINK
Scientists have reversed the aging process in human adult stem cells. Reversing the aging process for human adult stem cells, which are responsible for helping old or damaged tissues regenerate creates a path for developing stem cell treatments that can repair the host of ailments that occur because of tissue damage as people age. A research group led by the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and the Georgia Institute of Technology conducted the study in cell culture that pinpoints what is going wrong with the biological clock underlying the limited division of human adult stem cells as they age. The regenerative power of tissues and organs declines as we age. An understanding of the molecules and processes that enable human adult stem cells to initiate self-renewal and to divide, proliferate and then differentiate in order to rejuvenate damaged tissue is thought to be the key to regenerative medicine cures for many age-related diseases. "We demonstrated that we were able to reverse the process of aging for human adult stem cells by intervening with the activity of non-protein coding RNAs originated from genomic regions once dismissed as non-functional 'genomic junk'," said Victoria Lunyak, associate professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

9/13/2011 PERMALINK
Modded T cells cure leukemia. In a cancer treatment breakthrough, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Abramson Cancer Center and Perelman School of Medicine have shown sustained remissions of up to a year among a small group of advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients thanks to genetically modded versions of their own T cells. Patients' cells were removed and modded in Penn's vaccine production facility, then infused back into the patient's body. The findings are the first demonstration of the use of gene transfer therapy to create "serial killer" T cells aimed at cancerous tumors. "Within three weeks, the tumors had been blown away, in a way that was much more violent than we ever expected," said senior author Carl June, MD, director of Translational Research and a professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in the Abramson Cancer Center, who led the work. "It worked much better than we thought it would." The response of one 64-year old patient was typical. Prior to his T cell treatment, his blood and marrow were replete with tumor cells. For the first two weeks after treatment, nothing seemed to change. Then on day 14, the patient began experiencing chills, nausea, and increasing fever, among other symptoms. Tests during that time showed an enormous increase in the number of T cells in his blood that led to a tumor lysis syndrome, which occurs when a large number of cancer cells die all at once. By day 28, the patient had recovered from the tumor lysis syndrome - and his blood and marrow showed no evidence of leukemia. "This massive killing of tumor is a direct proof of principle of the concept," says co-principal investigator David Porter, MD, professor of Medicine and director of Blood and Marrow Transplantation. Estimates are that the newly lethal modded T cells killed 2 pounds of cancer cells.

9/09/2011 PERMALINK
HCN2 gene mod promises to put an end to your chronic back, arthritic and headache pain. Deleting the HCN2 gene stops chronic pain without affecting acute pain reception, says researcher Peter McNaughton at the University of Cambridge. The research promises an end to the kind of chronic lower back, arthritic and headache pain experienced by millions, especially as we age. Now that the HCN2 regulator of chronic pain gene has been identified, compounds that block the protein it produces can be developed and gene mods to permanently prevent chronic pain are possible.

9/08/2011 PERMALINK
Thousands of ticking 'time bombs' in out galaxy threaten to cause human extinction. New research by astrophysicist Rosanne Di Stefano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows that some old stars might be held up by their rapid spins, and when they slow down, they explode as supernovae. Thousands of these "time bombs" could be scattered throughout our Galaxy ready to explode when their spin slows sufficiently.
In our Galaxy, scientists estimate that there are three Type Ia supernovae every thousand years. If a typical super-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf takes millions of years to spin down and explode, then calculations suggest that there should be dozens of pre-explosion systems within a few thousand light-years of Earth.  Close enough to destroy our species, unless we have spread outward to other star systems before a close one's slowing spin cause it to go off.
Gama ray burst from supernovas, asteroid and comet impacts, gas clouds that can strip off a planets atmosphere, stellar bursts powerful enough to scorch planetary surfaces -- our Cosmos is a very dangerous neighborhood. Something that causes it to function as an intelligence generation engine. Either a species like our own learns to take control of its own evolution and progress rapidly enough outward to explore and colonize our Cosmos. Find out what all the hazards are and find ways to avoid them. Or our Cosmos will punish us with a premature extinction.

9/07/2011 PERMALINK
Gene therapy cures 14 of 16 kids with "bubble boy disease". Nine years after getting gene therapy for a rare, inherited immune system disorder often called "bubble boy disease," 14 out of 16 children have been cured, researchers report. “These children, who would have died very young without treatment, are participating in life as fully as their brothers and sisters,” researcher H. Bobby Gaspar, MD, PhD recently told the health web site WebMD.

9/07/2011 PERMALINK
Regeneration of age/disease damaged spinal discs using stem cells. Neurosurgery researchers at UC Davis Health System have used a new, leading-edge stem cell therapy to promote the growth of bone tissue following the removal of cervical discs -- the cushions between the bones in the neck -- to relieve chronic, debilitating pain.
The procedure was performed by associate professors of neurosurgery Kee Kim and Rudolph Schrot. It used bone marrow-derived adult stem cells to promote the growth of the bone tissue essential for spinal fusion following surgery, as part of a nationwide, multicenter clinical trial of the therapy. Removal of the cervical disc relieves pain by eliminating friction between the vertebrae and/or nerve compression. Spinal fusion is used following surgery for degenerative disc disease, where the cushioning cartilage has worn away, leaving bone to rub agains bone and herniated discs, where the discs pinch or compress nerves.
"We hope that this investigational procedure eventually will help those who undergo spinal fusion in the back as well as in the neck," said Kim, who also is chief of spinal neurosurgery at UC Davis. "And the knowledge gained about stem cells also will be applied in the near future to treat without surgery those suffering from back pain."

9/06/2011 PERMALINK
Stem cell 'breakthrough' promises to regenerate colon damage due to aging or disease. In what researchers call a crucial advance towards regenerative medicine, Human colon stem cells have been identified and grown in the lab for the first time by researchers of the Colorectal Cancer Lab at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona.
Throughout life, stem cells of the colon regenerate the inner layer of our large intestine in a weekly basis. For decades scientists had evidences of the existence of these cells yet their identity remained elusive. Scientists led by the ICREA Professor and researcher Eduard Batlle have discovered the precise localization of the stem cells in the human colon and worked out a method that allows their isolation and in vitro expansion (propagation in lab-plates). Batlle's team has established the conditions for maintain living human colon stem cells (CoSCs) outside of the human body: "This is the first time that it has been possible to grow single CoSCs in lab-plates and to derive human intestinal stem cell lines in defined conditions in a lab setting," explains the IRB Barcelona researcher Peter Jung, first author of the study together with Toshiro Sato, from the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands.

9/04/2011 PERMALINK
Exercise influences stem cells to become bone instead of fat. McMaster researchers have discovered that working out triggers influential stem cells to become bone instead of fat, improving overall health by boosting the body's capacity to make blood.
The body's mesenchymal stem cells are most likely to become fat or bone, depending on which path they follow. Using treadmill-conditioned mice, a team led by the Department of Kinesiology's Gianni Parise has shown that aerobic exercise triggers those cells to become bone more often than fat. The exercising mice ran less than an hour, three times a week, enough time to have a significant impact on their blood production, says Parise, an associate professor. In sedentary mice, the same stem cells were more likely to become fat, impairing blood production in the marrow cavities of bones. "The interesting thing was that a modest exercise program was able to significantly increase blood cells in the marrow and in circulation," says Parise. "What we're suggesting is that exercise is a potent stimulus -- enough of a stimulus to actually trigger a switch in these mesenchymal stem cells."

9/02/2011 PERMALINK
Yale Scientists Find Stem Cells That Tell Hair It’s Time to Grow. Yale researchers have discovered the source of signals that trigger hair growth, an insight that may lead to new treatments for baldness. The researchers identified stem cells within the skin's fatty layer and showed that molecular signals from these cells were necessary to spur hair growth in mice. "If we can get these fat cells in the skin to talk to the dormant stem cells at the base of hair follicles, we might be able to get hair to grow again," said Valerie Horsley, assistant professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology and senior author of the paper.

9/01/2011 PERMALINK
Blood plasma from the young can improve the performance of old brains. Tony Wyss-Coray, a neuroscientist at Stanford University has uncovered chemical signals in aged blood that can dampen the growth of new brain cells, suggesting that the decline in brain function with age could be caused in part by blood-borne factors rather than an intrinsic failure of brain cells. Older mice, in contrast, injected with blood plasma from younger mice had an increase in new neurons, less inflammation, and greater activity at synapses. "You could almost call this a rejuvenation effect," Wyss-Coray says.