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Moons are bright side for Pluto
Research news and discovery
BILL VARIE/CORBIS
In brief– I feel for you
Could gene therapy help alcoholics stay on the wagon? STRUGGLING to give up the drink? Gene therapy might be the answer. Rats bred to crave alcohol will drink 50 per cent less for more than a month after being injected with viruses engineered to disrupt the gene for a key enzyme involved in alcohol metabolism. Many people in east Asia react badly to alcohol because of mutations in the gene for aldehyde dehydrogenase. But these mutations also reduce the risk of succumbing to alcoholism by two-thirds or more. Aldehyde dehydrogenase is blocked by the drug
disulfiram, also known as Antabuse, which is sometimes used to help alcoholics quit the habit. “But you have to take it every day, so there is a big problem with compliance,” says Amalia Sapag at the University of Chile in Santiago. To provide a longer-lasting effect, Sapag’s team engineered adenoviruses to carry an “antisense” version of the aldehyde dehydrogenase gene. This produces RNA that binds to the original gene’s messenger RNA, blocking enzyme production. A single injection of viruses reduced the enzyme’s activity in rats’ livers by 80 per cent, Sapag revealed at the American Society of Gene Therapy meeting in Seattle earlier this month.
Allergy alert over slippery chemical COULD a chemical used in the manufacture of stain-resistant fabrics and carpets make people more susceptible to allergies? Perfluoro-octanoic acid (PFOA), also used to make all-weather clothing and non-stick surfaces, has already been identified as a “likely” human carcinogen by an advisory panel to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Now Jean Meade and 14 | NewScientist | 23 June 2007
colleagues at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Morgantown, West Virginia, have shown that in mice at least, it may prime the immune system to overreact to allergens. Animals given PFOA before being exposed to an egg allergen produced more allergen-specific antibodies and experienced more constriction of their airways than those exposed to the allergen
alone (Toxicological Sciences, DOI: 10.1093/toxsci/kfm053). Robert Rickard, a science director at DuPont – which makes Teflon coatings – says PFOA is unlikely to cause allergy-related problems in humans, though no studies have looked at this question. PFOA is found in the blood of nearly everyone, yet how it gets there is a mystery. It should not turn up in final manufactured products, although DuPont has measured very small amounts in treated carpets and upholstery.
“I’M TOUCHED, I really am.” What happens in the brains of people who sense physical touch when they see someone else being touched could shed light on how all of us feel empathy for others. A study of 10 volunteers with the condition – mirror-touch synaesthesia – shows they are also especially sensitive to other people’s emotions. “They all scored higher in standard questionnaires to measure emotional empathy, which means they had better gut instincts for what others feel,” says Michael Banissy of University College London. When Banissy’s team tested the volunteers’ cognitive empathy, which requires rational thought, their scores were the same as people without the condition, reinforcing the notion of a link between emotional empathy and mirror-touch synaesthesia (Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn1926).
Moons are bright side for Pluto AS THE newest kid in its class Pluto may not be the biggest, but it can claim to have more friends – even if they are only its moons. In 2006, Pluto was demoted to “dwarf planet” status, and last week it suffered a new blow. Observations pinned down the mass of an even larger icy world in the outer solar system called Eris, revealing that it outweighs Pluto by a hefty 27 per cent. Michael Brown and Emily Schaller at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, measured how long Eris’s single moon took to orbit, and used this figure to calculate the dwarf planet’s mass at 17 billion billion tonnes (Science, vol 316, p 1585). Pluto retains the upper hand in one respect. It has three moons, while Eris appears to have only one. www.newscientist.com
BILL VARIE/CORBIS
In brief– I feel for you
Could gene therapy help alcoholics stay on the wagon? STRUGGLING to give up the drink? Gene therapy might be the answer. Rats bred to crave alcohol will drink 50 per cent less for more than a month after being injected with viruses engineered to disrupt the gene for a key enzyme involved in alcohol metabolism. Many people in east Asia react badly to alcohol because of mutations in the gene for aldehyde dehydrogenase. But these mutations also reduce the risk of succumbing to alcoholism by two-thirds or more. Aldehyde dehydrogenase is blocked by the drug
disulfiram, also known as Antabuse, which is sometimes used to help alcoholics quit the habit. “But you have to take it every day, so there is a big problem with compliance,” says Amalia Sapag at the University of Chile in Santiago. To provide a longer-lasting effect, Sapag’s team engineered adenoviruses to carry an “antisense” version of the aldehyde dehydrogenase gene. This produces RNA that binds to the original gene’s messenger RNA, blocking enzyme production. A single injection of viruses reduced the enzyme’s activity in rats’ livers by 80 per cent, Sapag revealed at the American Society of Gene Therapy meeting in Seattle earlier this month.
Allergy alert over slippery chemical COULD a chemical used in the manufacture of stain-resistant fabrics and carpets make people more susceptible to allergies? Perfluoro-octanoic acid (PFOA), also used to make all-weather clothing and non-stick surfaces, has already been identified as a “likely” human carcinogen by an advisory panel to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Now Jean Meade and 14 | NewScientist | 23 June 2007
colleagues at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Morgantown, West Virginia, have shown that in mice at least, it may prime the immune system to overreact to allergens. Animals given PFOA before being exposed to an egg allergen produced more allergen-specific antibodies and experienced more constriction of their airways than those exposed to the allergen
alone (Toxicological Sciences, DOI: 10.1093/toxsci/kfm053). Robert Rickard, a science director at DuPont – which makes Teflon coatings – says PFOA is unlikely to cause allergy-related problems in humans, though no studies have looked at this question. PFOA is found in the blood of nearly everyone, yet how it gets there is a mystery. It should not turn up in final manufactured products, although DuPont has measured very small amounts in treated carpets and upholstery.
“I’M TOUCHED, I really am.” What happens in the brains of people who sense physical touch when they see someone else being touched could shed light on how all of us feel empathy for others. A study of 10 volunteers with the condition – mirror-touch synaesthesia – shows they are also especially sensitive to other people’s emotions. “They all scored higher in standard questionnaires to measure emotional empathy, which means they had better gut instincts for what others feel,” says Michael Banissy of University College London. When Banissy’s team tested the volunteers’ cognitive empathy, which requires rational thought, their scores were the same as people without the condition, reinforcing the notion of a link between emotional empathy and mirror-touch synaesthesia (Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn1926).
Moons are bright side for Pluto AS THE newest kid in its class Pluto may not be the biggest, but it can claim to have more friends – even if they are only its moons. In 2006, Pluto was demoted to “dwarf planet” status, and last week it suffered a new blow. Observations pinned down the mass of an even larger icy world in the outer solar system called Eris, revealing that it outweighs Pluto by a hefty 27 per cent. Michael Brown and Emily Schaller at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, measured how long Eris’s single moon took to orbit, and used this figure to calculate the dwarf planet’s mass at 17 billion billion tonnes (Science, vol 316, p 1585). Pluto retains the upper hand in one respect. It has three moons, while Eris appears to have only one. www.newscientist.com