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Chronic fatigue syndrome eased by cancer drug
IN BRIEF
Tim Nowack, Georgia Tech
THIS is one flyweight battle that promises not to be a washout: the mosquito versus the raindrop. The two combatants might be of roughly equal size, but the raindrop weighs in 50 times as heavy. Why then, wondered David Hu at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, do mosquitoes flourish in humid conditions where rain is common? To find out, Hu’s team used high-speed cameras to film the insects flying in a specially constructed “rain box” – a small container with a mesh roof through which water can be sprayed to simulate a rain shower. The footage showed that the flying mosquitoes are knocked off course only momentarily when hit. Next, the team filled Styrofoam pellets with a variety of liquids so that the pellets mimicked the size and shape of the insects, and pummelled them with fake rain. Analysis showed that when droplets hit a pellet with a mosquito-like mass, they deform but don’t splash. As a result, little momentum is transferred from the water to the object. Hu calculated that a raindrop would lose as little as 2 per cent of its velocity after hitting a mosquito, and the momentum transferred would not be enough to disrupt the flight of the insect (arxiv.org/ abs/1110.3051).
18 | NewScientist | 29 October 2011
No paint needed! Virus patterns produce dazzling colour HOW do you make vibrant colours without any dye or paint? Call up a fleet of viruses that self-assemble into patterns that reflect only certain wavelengths of light. Patterns are a common source of colour in nature. The blue on the bills of ruddy ducks and the faces and rumps of mandrills comes from the protein collagen. Unlike pigments, where colour arises because molecules absorb specific wavelengths, collagen has no inherent colour. It only looks blue when its fibres arrange themselves into patterns.
Seung-Wuk Lee at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues wondered if they could make colours in the lab using a harmless, rod-shaped virus that naturally twists like collagen’s protein bundles. They dipped a glass slide into a transparent solution of virus and pulled it out gradually, which caused an intricately structured film resembling noodles to solidify on the slide (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10513). At high virus concentration and slow pulling speed, the team
produced an iridescent film on the slide, while tugging at higher speeds compressed the wiggles in the noodles, creating films with uniform colour. The team made different colours on the same slide by varying the pulling speed, resulting in red, blue, green and yellow stripes. Amy Blum of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, suggests coating clothing with the virus pattern. The colours might then resist bleach, which works by tweaking the light-absorbing chemical bonds in pigments. martin Parr/magnum photos
Mosquitoes can stand the rain
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Cancer drug eases chronic fatigue A DRUG normally used to treat lymphoma could hold the key to chronic fatigue syndrome. Symptoms of CFS, also known as ME, eased in 10 of 15 people given rituximab. A team led by Øystein Fluge and Olav Mella at the Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, discovered by chance that rituximab might help people with CFS after seeing symptoms ease in a patient who had both lymphoma and CFS (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal. pone.0026358). Rituximab is used to destroy B cells that have become cancerous. These white blood cells might also be involved in CFS, by producing antibodies that mistakenly attack the body’s own tissue, the trial suggests. Two of the 15 people given the drug appear to have fully recovered in the three years since the trial began. “Those two are both back at work,” Mella says. “It’s the most encouraging drug result so far in the history of this disease,” says Charles Shepherd, medical adviser to the UK ME Association. “Although it’s a small trial it’s produced dramatic results.”
If you must sunbathe, stick to mornings WANT to top up your tan? Then aim to catch some rays early in the day when your circadian rhythms might make it safer. “If you really must go to a tanning booth, do it in the morning,” says Aziz Sancar of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His team found that a mouse’s circadian rhythms impede its ability to repair DNA damage caused by UV radiation in the morning. Because mice are nocturnal, you would expect the opposite in people. After three UVB sessions a week for 25 weeks, mice placed under a UV
lamp only in the early morning had five times as many tumours as mice exposed 12 hours later. In mice, “handyman” proteins that fix DNA damaged by UV seem to be more active in the evening. Mice bred to have no circadian rhythms were as likely to develop cancer in the morning as in the evening (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/ pnas.1115249108). Asthma and heart attacks are also more prevalent at specific times of the day, probably because circadian rhythms affect the activity of cells.
Tim Nowack, Georgia Tech
THIS is one flyweight battle that promises not to be a washout: the mosquito versus the raindrop. The two combatants might be of roughly equal size, but the raindrop weighs in 50 times as heavy. Why then, wondered David Hu at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, do mosquitoes flourish in humid conditions where rain is common? To find out, Hu’s team used high-speed cameras to film the insects flying in a specially constructed “rain box” – a small container with a mesh roof through which water can be sprayed to simulate a rain shower. The footage showed that the flying mosquitoes are knocked off course only momentarily when hit. Next, the team filled Styrofoam pellets with a variety of liquids so that the pellets mimicked the size and shape of the insects, and pummelled them with fake rain. Analysis showed that when droplets hit a pellet with a mosquito-like mass, they deform but don’t splash. As a result, little momentum is transferred from the water to the object. Hu calculated that a raindrop would lose as little as 2 per cent of its velocity after hitting a mosquito, and the momentum transferred would not be enough to disrupt the flight of the insect (arxiv.org/ abs/1110.3051).
18 | NewScientist | 29 October 2011
No paint needed! Virus patterns produce dazzling colour HOW do you make vibrant colours without any dye or paint? Call up a fleet of viruses that self-assemble into patterns that reflect only certain wavelengths of light. Patterns are a common source of colour in nature. The blue on the bills of ruddy ducks and the faces and rumps of mandrills comes from the protein collagen. Unlike pigments, where colour arises because molecules absorb specific wavelengths, collagen has no inherent colour. It only looks blue when its fibres arrange themselves into patterns.
Seung-Wuk Lee at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues wondered if they could make colours in the lab using a harmless, rod-shaped virus that naturally twists like collagen’s protein bundles. They dipped a glass slide into a transparent solution of virus and pulled it out gradually, which caused an intricately structured film resembling noodles to solidify on the slide (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10513). At high virus concentration and slow pulling speed, the team
produced an iridescent film on the slide, while tugging at higher speeds compressed the wiggles in the noodles, creating films with uniform colour. The team made different colours on the same slide by varying the pulling speed, resulting in red, blue, green and yellow stripes. Amy Blum of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, suggests coating clothing with the virus pattern. The colours might then resist bleach, which works by tweaking the light-absorbing chemical bonds in pigments. martin Parr/magnum photos
Mosquitoes can stand the rain
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Cancer drug eases chronic fatigue A DRUG normally used to treat lymphoma could hold the key to chronic fatigue syndrome. Symptoms of CFS, also known as ME, eased in 10 of 15 people given rituximab. A team led by Øystein Fluge and Olav Mella at the Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, discovered by chance that rituximab might help people with CFS after seeing symptoms ease in a patient who had both lymphoma and CFS (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal. pone.0026358). Rituximab is used to destroy B cells that have become cancerous. These white blood cells might also be involved in CFS, by producing antibodies that mistakenly attack the body’s own tissue, the trial suggests. Two of the 15 people given the drug appear to have fully recovered in the three years since the trial began. “Those two are both back at work,” Mella says. “It’s the most encouraging drug result so far in the history of this disease,” says Charles Shepherd, medical adviser to the UK ME Association. “Although it’s a small trial it’s produced dramatic results.”
If you must sunbathe, stick to mornings WANT to top up your tan? Then aim to catch some rays early in the day when your circadian rhythms might make it safer. “If you really must go to a tanning booth, do it in the morning,” says Aziz Sancar of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His team found that a mouse’s circadian rhythms impede its ability to repair DNA damage caused by UV radiation in the morning. Because mice are nocturnal, you would expect the opposite in people. After three UVB sessions a week for 25 weeks, mice placed under a UV
lamp only in the early morning had five times as many tumours as mice exposed 12 hours later. In mice, “handyman” proteins that fix DNA damaged by UV seem to be more active in the evening. Mice bred to have no circadian rhythms were as likely to develop cancer in the morning as in the evening (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/ pnas.1115249108). Asthma and heart attacks are also more prevalent at specific times of the day, probably because circadian rhythms affect the activity of cells.