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Transplant drug improves memory of mice with learning disorder
60 SECONDS Barrier Reef Marine Park to create the world’s largest network of marine “no-take” zones. Fishing was totally banned in a third of the park – well over 100,000 square kilometres – including parts of each of the 70 biologically distinct “bioregions”. Line fishers on the reef primarily target coral trout. According to surveys by Russ and colleagues, numbers of this species had increased by between 30 and 75 per cent in the majority of notake areas, 18 months to two years after re-zoning (Current Biology, vol 18, p 514). The team is monitoring 160 fish species in total, but so far only numbers of coral trout have changed since the re-zoning.
Now you see it…
Reversible brains
WAR DEAD ESTIMATES TOO LOW
A DRUG that prevents immune rejection in human transplant Current tools for gauging the human patients has improved the cost of war seriously underestimate memory of mice with a hereditary fatalities, say researchers who have learning disorder. The finding developed a new method. suggests the disorder is a result of Estimating the death toll of reversible abnormalities in brain wars is notoriously difficult. In 2002, chemistry rather than irreversible researchers at Uppsala University in differences in architecture, as was Sweden and the International Peace previously assumed. Research Institute, Oslo, in Norway, Tuberous sclerosis complex used media and eyewitness reports to (TSC) is a genetic disease that produce the first version of what is causes memory and learning considered the most comprehensive problems. The drug rapamycin is record of 20th-century conflict. known to interact with an enzyme However, Ziad Obermeyer and that makes proteins needed for colleagues at the Institute for Health memory – as well as suppressing Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle immune cells – so Alcino Silva and compared the Scandinavian estimates for his colleagues at the University of 13 conflicts with estimates for the same California, Los Angeles, wondered wars from the World Health Organization. if it might have an effect on TSC. These were extrapolated from telephone Within three days of injecting it into mice with a version of TSC, the animals were as good as normal mice at finding submerged escape platforms and hidden food in mazes (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm1788). Trials are now under way in the UK to test rapamycin in people with TSC. Half of those with TSC develop autism, but whether rapamycin “would be relevant or even desirable” for people with autism is not yet clear, says Simon Baron-Cohen of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. –What if no one survived to tell the tale?– www.newscientist.com
When potential US transplant recipients join the waiting list they should say how willing they’d be to accept “highrisk” organs that might, for example, be infected with HIV. This would help avoid litigation and costly delays, write researchers in The New England Journal of Medicine (vol 358, p 2832).
“Phoenix has scored a first by digging ice up from Mars itself”
Pain-relieving peppers
to have more than one source, says Timothy Titus of the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona. “One of the things that Mars has tried to tell us over the last several decades is, ‘Don’t assume I’m going to be simple’.”
Neuroscientists have confirmed what traditional Chinese medicine has known for centuries: that the molecule responsible for the buzzing tingle of Sichuan peppers – fruits of the socalled toothache tree – is an effective anaesthetic. It generates a feeling akin to “touching one’s tongue to the terminals of a 9-volt battery” (Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.2143).
Cheetahs transcend politics
interviews in which people were asked about family members who had died. They found the WHO’s method produced figures on average three times as high as the Scandinavian ones for those wars. They suggest using the relationship between the two data sets to produce more accurate estimates for other conflicts not estimated by the WHO (BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.a137). The researchers have already used this method to estimate those killed in the current Iraq conflict. Starting with eyewitness figures from Iraq, Obermeyer calculates that 184,000 people have died since the 2003 invasion. Interestingly, this is much less than the estimate of a controversial survey published in The Lancet (vol 368, p 1421), which put fatalities at 600,000 back in 2006.
Despite a bitter international row over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Iranian government has joined forces with the United Nations Development Programme to save the Asiatic cheetah. The cat is critically endangered, with fewer than 100 individuals remaining in the Iranian deserts.
The end isn’t nigh
DAVID LEESON/DALLAS MORNING NEWS/CORBIS
SCIENTISTS are rarely happy when the stuff they’re trying to study disappears. But in this case it was just what they were hoping for. On 15 June, NASA’s Phoenix lander dug into the soil in the Martian arctic and removed chunks of bright material. Four days later they had disappeared, proving the chunks were frozen water, which turns directly from a solid to vapour when exposed to the Martian atmosphere. Though the Mars rover Opportunity has “touched” water ice frost before when it appeared temporarily on part of its surface, Phoenix has scored a first by
Transplant truths
digging it up from the planet itself. The Phoenix team now plans to take ice on board the probe to establish whether it is the frozen remnant of an ancient ocean or an accumulation of frost from the atmosphere. It may turn out
Sleep easy, the world’s most powerful particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, will not gobble us all up. So says a report from the collider’s safety assessment group. It’s the latest attempt to quash rumours that the LHC could create Earth-obliterating black holes or strangelets, and comes to largely the same conclusion as the group’s previous study in 2003.
Giant icy tongue An enormous sea-ice “tongue” is growing at an astonishing rate from the Antarctic’s West Ice Shelf. Steve Rintoul at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Australia says it often grows several hundred kilometres in just a few weeks. He reckons a major ocean current draws ice out to sea (Journal of Geophysical Research, DOI: 10.1029/2007JC004541).
28 June 2008 | NewScientist | 7
Now you see it…
Reversible brains
WAR DEAD ESTIMATES TOO LOW
A DRUG that prevents immune rejection in human transplant Current tools for gauging the human patients has improved the cost of war seriously underestimate memory of mice with a hereditary fatalities, say researchers who have learning disorder. The finding developed a new method. suggests the disorder is a result of Estimating the death toll of reversible abnormalities in brain wars is notoriously difficult. In 2002, chemistry rather than irreversible researchers at Uppsala University in differences in architecture, as was Sweden and the International Peace previously assumed. Research Institute, Oslo, in Norway, Tuberous sclerosis complex used media and eyewitness reports to (TSC) is a genetic disease that produce the first version of what is causes memory and learning considered the most comprehensive problems. The drug rapamycin is record of 20th-century conflict. known to interact with an enzyme However, Ziad Obermeyer and that makes proteins needed for colleagues at the Institute for Health memory – as well as suppressing Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle immune cells – so Alcino Silva and compared the Scandinavian estimates for his colleagues at the University of 13 conflicts with estimates for the same California, Los Angeles, wondered wars from the World Health Organization. if it might have an effect on TSC. These were extrapolated from telephone Within three days of injecting it into mice with a version of TSC, the animals were as good as normal mice at finding submerged escape platforms and hidden food in mazes (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm1788). Trials are now under way in the UK to test rapamycin in people with TSC. Half of those with TSC develop autism, but whether rapamycin “would be relevant or even desirable” for people with autism is not yet clear, says Simon Baron-Cohen of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. –What if no one survived to tell the tale?– www.newscientist.com
When potential US transplant recipients join the waiting list they should say how willing they’d be to accept “highrisk” organs that might, for example, be infected with HIV. This would help avoid litigation and costly delays, write researchers in The New England Journal of Medicine (vol 358, p 2832).
“Phoenix has scored a first by digging ice up from Mars itself”
Pain-relieving peppers
to have more than one source, says Timothy Titus of the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona. “One of the things that Mars has tried to tell us over the last several decades is, ‘Don’t assume I’m going to be simple’.”
Neuroscientists have confirmed what traditional Chinese medicine has known for centuries: that the molecule responsible for the buzzing tingle of Sichuan peppers – fruits of the socalled toothache tree – is an effective anaesthetic. It generates a feeling akin to “touching one’s tongue to the terminals of a 9-volt battery” (Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.2143).
Cheetahs transcend politics
interviews in which people were asked about family members who had died. They found the WHO’s method produced figures on average three times as high as the Scandinavian ones for those wars. They suggest using the relationship between the two data sets to produce more accurate estimates for other conflicts not estimated by the WHO (BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.a137). The researchers have already used this method to estimate those killed in the current Iraq conflict. Starting with eyewitness figures from Iraq, Obermeyer calculates that 184,000 people have died since the 2003 invasion. Interestingly, this is much less than the estimate of a controversial survey published in The Lancet (vol 368, p 1421), which put fatalities at 600,000 back in 2006.
Despite a bitter international row over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Iranian government has joined forces with the United Nations Development Programme to save the Asiatic cheetah. The cat is critically endangered, with fewer than 100 individuals remaining in the Iranian deserts.
The end isn’t nigh
DAVID LEESON/DALLAS MORNING NEWS/CORBIS
SCIENTISTS are rarely happy when the stuff they’re trying to study disappears. But in this case it was just what they were hoping for. On 15 June, NASA’s Phoenix lander dug into the soil in the Martian arctic and removed chunks of bright material. Four days later they had disappeared, proving the chunks were frozen water, which turns directly from a solid to vapour when exposed to the Martian atmosphere. Though the Mars rover Opportunity has “touched” water ice frost before when it appeared temporarily on part of its surface, Phoenix has scored a first by
Transplant truths
digging it up from the planet itself. The Phoenix team now plans to take ice on board the probe to establish whether it is the frozen remnant of an ancient ocean or an accumulation of frost from the atmosphere. It may turn out
Sleep easy, the world’s most powerful particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, will not gobble us all up. So says a report from the collider’s safety assessment group. It’s the latest attempt to quash rumours that the LHC could create Earth-obliterating black holes or strangelets, and comes to largely the same conclusion as the group’s previous study in 2003.
Giant icy tongue An enormous sea-ice “tongue” is growing at an astonishing rate from the Antarctic’s West Ice Shelf. Steve Rintoul at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Australia says it often grows several hundred kilometres in just a few weeks. He reckons a major ocean current draws ice out to sea (Journal of Geophysical Research, DOI: 10.1029/2007JC004541).
28 June 2008 | NewScientist | 7