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A team of scientists has called for new awareness of the potential for antibiotic-resistant illnesses from the marine environment, and pointed to the marine realm as a source for possible cures of those threats.

The group stated that newly completed studies of ocean beach users point to an increasing risk of staph infections, and that current treatments for seafood poisoning may be less effective due to higher than expected antibiotic resistance.

The group also asserts that new research has identified sponge and coral-derived chemicals with the potential for breaking down antibiotic resistant compounds and that could lead to new personalized medical treatments.

“While the marine environment can indeed be hostile to humans, it may also provide new resources to help reduce our risks from illnesses such as those caused by water borne staph or seafood poisoning,” stated Paul Sandifer, chief scientist of NOAA’s Oceans and Human Health Initiative.

“It is critically important that we continue research on the complex interactions between the condition of our oceans and human health,” said Carolyn Sotka, also with the NOAA Oceans and Human Health Initiative.

“We’ve found significant new tools to fight the antibiotic resistance war,” said NOAA research scientist Peter Moeller, in describing the identification of new compounds derived from a sea sponge and corals.

According to Moeller, “The first hit originates with new compounds that remove the shield bacteria utilize to protect themselves from antibiotics. The second hit is the discovery of novel antibiotics derived from marine organisms such as corals, sponges and marine microbes that fight even some of the worst infectious bacterial strains.”

“With the variety of chemicals we find in the sea and their highly specific activities, medicines in the near future can be customized to individuals’ needs, rather than relying on broad spectrum antibiotics,” he added.

The research team noticed a sponge that seemed to thrive despite being located in the midst of a dying coral reef.

After extraction, testing showed that one of the isolated chemicals, algeliferin, breaks down a biofilm barrier that bacteria use to protect themselves from threats including antibiotics.

The same chemical can also disrupt or inhibit formation of biofilm on a variety of bacteria previously resistant to antibiotics which could lead to both palliative and curative response treatment depending on the problem being addressed.

“This could lead to a new class of helper drugs and result in a rebirth for antibiotics no longer thought effective,” said Moeller. “Its potential application to prevent biofilm build-up in stents, intravenous lines and other medical uses is incredible,” he added.

Iridium Satellite LLC said on Thursday it had no advance warning of an impending collision between one of its communications satellites and a defunct Russian military satellite above Siberia.

Amid questions of liability, negligence and possible lawsuits, the closely held company rejected suggestions that it might have come to disregard “conjunction reports” — potential accident alerts — routinely relayed by the US military.

“Iridium didn’t have information prior to the collision to know that the collision would occur,” said Liz DeCastro, a company spokeswoman. “If the organizations that monitor space had that information available, we are confident they would have shared it with us.”

She was responding to questions about an 18-month-old presentation by retired US Air Force General John Campbell, Iridium’s executive vice president for government programs.

Iridium had been receiving a weekly average of 400 conjunction reports from the US Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Centre that tracks debris in space, Campbell told a June 2007 forum hosted by the George C Marshall Institute, a Washington research group.

“So the ability actually to do anything with all the information is pretty limited,” he said, describing a kind of data overload. The conjunction reports were issued every time a potential threat object was to pass within five kilometers (3 miles) of a commercial satellite, he said.

“Even if we had a report of an impending direct collision, the error would be such that we might manoeuvre into a collision as well as move away from one,” he told the panel.

Campbell then endorsed the so-called “Big Sky” theory — that space is so vast that the chances of a collision are infinitesimal, despite more than 18,000 pieces of orbiting junk big enough to track.

“We figure that the risk of a collision on any individual conjunction is about 1 in 50 million,” he said at the time, adding: “Clearly that risk is something bigger than zero.”

‘DODGEBALL’ TO AVOID DEBRIS

Marine Corps General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former head of the command that runs US military space operations, said countries with satellites in space will have to play “dodgeball” for decades to avoid debris from the collision. It occurred about 485 miles above the Russian Arctic on Tuesday.

James Lewis, a former official at the State and Commerce departments now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, raised a question at the same forum about whether Iridium might have a case against the Russians.

“There was negligence somewhere,” he said. Asked about this at the forum, Cartwright declined to discuss it but said he would like to see more information-sharing on debris avoidance with Russia, China, France and other countries using space.

The mishap marked the first time two intact spacecraft accidentally ran into each other, Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist of NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, told Space.com.

There have been four other cases in which space objects have collided accidentally in orbit, NASA said. But those were considered minor events and involved parts of spent rockets or small satellites.

Cartwright, who from 2004 to 2007 headed the Pentagon’s Strategic Command responsible for space operations, said the military had been alerted by Iridium to the sudden “non-reporting” of the destroyed craft.

Iridium runs a network that uses 66 satellites to provide voice and data services for areas not served by ground-based communications networks. The network has about 300,000 clients.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was not possible for the US military to track and predict the movements of all 18,000 objects in space all the time.

“Because there is so much, you have to prioritize what you’re looking at,” he said. “There are limits on your ability to track and compute every piece…”

“We did not predict this collision,” he said.

China added significantly to space debris when it used a ground-based ballistic missile to blow apart an obsolete weather satellite in a January 2007 arms test. The United States used a missile from a Navy warship to explode a tank of toxic fuel on a crippled U.S. spy satellite last February.

China’s anti-satellite test “alone increased our risk due to space junk by a factor of about three and increased the overall risk of collision by about 15 percent,” Campbell told the forum in 2007.

A new study by researches at Queensland University of Technology has revealed the identity and origin of tiny, potentially hazardous particles emitted from common laser printers.

Professor Lidia Morawska from QUT’s International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health conducted the study to find the answer of questions raised by earlier findings that almost one third of popular laser printers emitted large numbers of ultrafine particles.

These tiny particles are potentially dangerous to human health because they can penetrate deep into the lungs.

Morawska said the latest study found that the ultrafine particles formed from vapours, which are produced when the printed image is fused to the paper.

“In the printing process, toner is melted and when it is hot, certain compounds evaporate and those vapours then nucleate or condense in the air, forming ultrafine particles,” Morawska said.

“The material is the result of the condensation of organic compounds which originate from both the paper and hot toner,” Morawska added.

In the study, the researchers compared a high-emitting printer with a low-emitting printer and found that there were two ways in which printers contributed to the formation of these particles.

“The hotter the printer gets, the higher the likelihood of these particles forming, but the rate of change of the temperature also contributes,” Morawska said.

“The high emitting printer operated at a lower average temperature, but had rapid changes in temperature, which resulted in more condensable vapour being emitted from the printer.

“The printer with better temperature control emitted fewer particles,” Morawska added.

Morawska said this study provided information, which would help consumers better understand the risks of laser printers and would help the printer industry to design low or no emission printers.

A new study has shown that exercise improves quality of life in postmenopausal women regardless of whether they lose weight.

For the study, Corby K. Martin, Ph.D., of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and Louisiana State University System, Baton Rouge and colleagues studied the effect of 50 percent, 100 percent and 150 percent of current public health physical activity recommendations on quality of life in 430 sedentary postmenopausal women (average age 57.4).

Participants were randomly assigned to a non-exercise control group (n=92) or one of three exercise groups: exercise energy expenditure of 4 kilocalories per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of body weight per week (4-KKW) (n=147), 8-KKW (n=96) or 12-KKW (n=95).

A short health survey was used to measure physical and mental aspects of quality of life at the beginning of the study and six months later.

“Adherence to exercise was 95.4 percent, 88.1 percent and 93.7 percent for the 4-, 8- and 12-KKW groups, respectively, and each group spent 73.9, 138.3 and 183.6 minutes per week exercising,” the authors said.

The average weight loss in the control, 4-KKW, 8-KKW and 12-KKW groups was 0.94 kilograms (2.07 pounds), 1.34 kilograms (2.95 pounds), 1.86 kilograms (4.10 pounds) and 1.34 kilograms (2.95 pounds), respectively.

“A dose-response effect of exercise on quality of life was noted for all aspects of quality of life except bodily pain,” the authors said.

“In addition, the 4-KKW group had significantly improved general health perception, vitality and mental health compared with the control group. All three exercise groups had significantly improved social functioning compared with the control group.

“Our results indicate that improved quality of life can be added to the list of exercise benefits and that these improvements are dose dependent and independent of weight loss, at least among people similar to this study’s sample.

“The exercise doses are easily obtainable and were well tolerated by sedentary women, resulting in confidence that the exercise doses used in this study can be achieved by women in the community,” they added.

The study is published in February 9 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

A new research has suggested that shopping locally may not be as good for the environment as having food delivered to your home.

The study, by researchers from the University of Exeter in the UK, shows that on average, lower carbon emissions result from delivering a vegetable box than making a trip to a local farm shop.

The researchers compared trips to a local farm shop with deliveries made by companies that distribute organic vegetable boxes to their customers.

They study also took into account the carbon emissions produced by cold storage, packing and the transportation of goods to a regional ‘hub’.

By bringing this data together, the researchers were able to calculate the total carbon emission.

The study found that if the average car journey made to a farm shop is a round-trip of more than 6.7 km, then home delivery was a better option even if the competing farm shop used no lighting, heating or chilling.

While a delivery van will travel up to 360 km to deliver an organic vegetable box, this trip will cover a large number of addresses; so the carbon emissions per customer will be surprisingly low.

According to David Coley from the Centre for Energy and the Environment at the University of Exeter, lead author on the study, “People are becoming familiar with the phrase ‘food miles’, but don’t have a very clear understanding of what it means.”

“We need to look more thoroughly at the many factors that lie behind putting food on our tables, before we can say what is better or worse for the environment,” he said.

“Rather than focus on food miles, it would be more meaningful to look at the carbon emissions behind each food item,” said Coley.

“While the concept of food miles was useful in getting people to think about the issues around carbon emissions and food transport, it’s time for a more sophisticated approach,” he added.

A new research has suggested that the three-year drought in California, US, may be a consequence of the expanding tropics, which are a gradual result of human emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet.

Climate scientists have documented a slow progression of low-latitude weather systems towards the poles, and this has been matched by rising temperatures in many temperate regions.

According to a report in New Scientist, deciding whether this broadening of the tropical belt is linked to the greenhouse effect has been difficult, however.

Part of the reason is that there are many ways of defining the tropics, explained Thomas Reichler of the University of Utah.

Geographically, the tropical belt is contained between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. It is also the region on either side of the equator where temperatures tend to be hot and humid all year.

But, the simplest and most easily tracked characteristic of the tropics lies high above, at the boundary between the troposphere, where weather systems form, and the stratosphere above it.

Over the tropics, the tropopause, as this boundary is known, tends to lie several kilometers higher up in the atmosphere.

The change in altitude is relatively easy to measure.

“It is much more difficult to detect significant changes in the lower levels of the atmosphere and surface rainfall pattern,” said Jian Lu of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

Using the tropopause, Lu and Reichler tracked the position of the tropical belt since the 1960s and found it has slowly been getting wider.

“There is a lot of natural variation from year to year, but we see a slow, gradual change,” said Reichler.

On average, the tropical boundaries are moving 0.7 degrees towards the poles each decade. This amounts to roughly 70 kilometers per decade, or 350 kilometers in 50 years.

The team then plugged their data into a leading climate model. If the model included human emissions, it matched the real data. Without the emissions, it didn’t.

“Our main conclusion is that greenhouse gases and [the depletion of stratospheric] ozone are the culprits for the widening,” said Lu. “These two work in the same direction, both pushing the boundary of the tropics polewards,” he added.

According to Reichler, the expansion of the subtropics is more feared, with climate models quoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicting that the Mediterranean region and the south-west of the US are heading towards devastating droughts.

Reichler said that this latest study suggests this is a result of the poleward march of the tropics.

Stem cell transplantation seems to stop and, in some cases, undo neurological damage in people with multiple sclerosis, a small study shows.

The trial involved just 21 patients, but a larger, randomized trial is under way in the United States, Canada and Brazil.

“This is the first trial for any phase of MS, whether early or later, of any therapy anywhere that has shown reversal of neurological disability,” said study author Dr. Richard K. Burt, chief of the division of immunotherapy at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

MS is a disease in which the immune system turns on the body and attacks myelin, the protective covering on nerve cells. The disease usually starts with a “relapse-remitting” phase, with alternating periods of flare-ups of symptoms and relatively peaceful spans. After a decade or so, however, most patients move into the more severe, secondary-progressive form of the disease.

“There is a need to find a means by which we can control the progression of MS, particularly in these patients who are not responding to FDA-approved therapies,” said Patricia O’Looney, vice president of biomedical research at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Treatments are clustered toward the relapse-remitting stage, with little available for the latter stage. “Generally, when you get to late progressive MS, nothing really works,” Burt said.

The technique used in this study, autologous non-myeloablative hemopoietic stem cell transplantation, “resets” the immune system and is already used for secondary-progressive MS.

“This has primarily been used over the last 10 to 15 years in progressive MS patients, people who are doing terribly, and we have nothing to offer them,” O’Looney explained. “There have been some fatalities associated with this aggressive protocol.”

And success was limited.

But, for the new study, researchers tweaked the technique and moved it to relapse-remitting patients who were younger than in previous studies.

“This is a safer approach, and we do it earlier in the disease because people have less disability so it’s safer again,” Burt said.

The study involved 21 patients with the earlier stage of the disease who were not responding to treatment with interferon.

The procedure basically involves stripping the patient’s body of its immune cells, and then repopulating the body with stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow.

“You’re trying to wipe out the immune system and then, with one’s own cells, reconstitute it with the hope that the new cells will not target myelin. That’s the theory, get rid of bad cells and reconstitute it with new cells from one’s own body so hopefully they haven’t been triggered yet to attach to myelin,” O’Looney said.

Seventeen of the participants improved by at least one point on a scale used to measure disability. Five participants relapsed, then went into remission after more treatment.

After about three years, none of the patients’ disease was progressing and 16 were no longer relapsing. And some experienced improvements, all without major side effects.

The findings were published online Jan. 30 in The Lancet Neurology and will appear in the March print issue of the journal.

Still, specialists are curbing their enthusiasm until further results are seen.

“We need to see a larger number of samples… and [we need to] know if the benefit they’re seeing is due to the immune system being reset or because the immune system has been suppressed and will return as the way it was,” O’Looney said.

About 100 million years ago, Triceratops likely engaged in horn-to-horn battles with its kin, according to a new analysis of the scrapes, bruises and healing fractures preserved on fossils of the dinosaurs’ bony headgear.

“Paleontologists have debated the function of the bizarre skulls of horned dinosaurs for years now,” said lead study researcher Andrew Farke, curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in California. “Some speculated that the horns were for showing off to other dinosaurs, and others thought that the horns had to have been used in combat against other horned dinosaurs. Unfortunately, we can’t just go and watch a Triceratops in the wild.”

Past research has also suggested Triceratops’ horns served as a means of communication and species recognition.

The results from Farke’s new study point to combat as one usage.

“We’re not suggesting Triceratops was using its horns only for fighting,” Farke told LiveScience. “I like to think of the horns on these animals as kind of like the Swiss Army knives of the dinosaur world. They were using their horns for a variety of functions.”

Horn patterns

Farke and his colleagues analyzed bone injuries from hundreds of fossils belonging to Triceratops and Centrosaurus.

Both dinosaurs belong to the family Ceratopsidae, but while Triceratops sported two long horns above its brows and a shorter one topping its beak-like snout, Centrosaurus had two smaller brow horns and a longer one on its nose. Both dinosaurs were equipped with a bony frill around their necks.

With such different horn patterns, the researchers assumed that if the dinosaurs were horn-butting with members of their own species the injuries of Triceratops and Centrosaurus should also be different from each other. But if they weren’t poking and butting one another with those horns, the injuries should be relatively similar, perhaps due to random nicks from clumsily running into a tree or head butts from predators, Farke said.

Triceratops combat

The team found the so-called squamosal bone on the skull that forms part of the frill was injured 10 times more frequently in Triceratops compared with Centrosaurus. “The most likely culprit for all of the wounds on Triceratops frills was the horns of other Triceratops,” Farke said. The combat would have been similar to that among modern antelopes and among deer.

Farke’s previous research showed that if Triceratops were engaging in horn-to-horn combat with other Triceratops, the squamosal bone would be an area most frequently injured.

With Centrosaurus showing so few bony injuries, the researchers are unsure if this dinosaur fought with its horns.

“Possibly Centrosaurus wasn’t using its horns for fighting, or if it was doing this, it was concentrating its energies on parts away from the skull, like maybe flank-butting or something like that,” Farke said.

The study, detailed in the Jan. 28 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE, was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

Scientists have found evidence of early human existence in Malaysia that dates back to 1.83 million years, which is proof of human mobility coming from Asia and Southeast Asia, and not just out of Africa.

According to a report in New Strait Times, the evidence was obtained from the discovery of artefacts in Bukit Bunuh, Lenggong, Perak, by researchers from Universiti Sains Malaysia’s (USM) Centre for Archaeological Research.

Associate Professor Mokhtar Saidin, the centre’s director, said that the evidence found included stone-made tools such as axes and chopping tools.

The artefacts were found embedded in suevite rock, formed as a result of the impact of meteorite crashing down at Bukit Bunuh.

The suevite rock, reputedly the first found in Southeast Asia, was sent to the Geochronology Japan Laboratory three months ago and carbon dated using the fission track dating method.

Mokhtar said that the results were sent back to USM two weeks ago and it showed the rock was dated to 1.83 million years ago.

He said based on current studies, there was fresh evidence of human mobility coming from Asia and Southeast Asia, and not just out of Africa.

“This discovery may make the rewriting of the ‘out of Africa’ theory necessary,” he said.

Based on world evidence, there was early human existence “out of Africa” in Georgia (1.8 to 1.7 million years ago); Sangiran, Jawa, Indonesia (1.7 to 1.2 million years ago); as well as Longgupo and Yuanmou in China (1.8 to 1.6 million years ago).

He noted that with the new evidence, there was a possibility that the hominids in Java could have migrated from Bukit Bunuh as a result of destruction from the impact of meteorites.

The four square-kilometre site, which was first excavated between 2001 and 2003, revealed a Palaeolithic culture, dated at 40,000 years ago.

The meteorite crash site was also discovered, the impact of which had caused the stones in its original state at Bukit Bunuh to melt, congeal and subsequently form the suevite rock.

According to USM Vice-Chancellor Tan Sri Prof Dzulkifli Abdul Razak, the discovery was an important one for USM and the country as it would enable researchers to understand the origins of early humans in this region.

He said that the new discovery would also change the understanding of human exploration in this region.

If scientists have their way, geoengineering could well be the future weapon to combat global warming and cool the climate.

This is the conclusion of a the first comprehensive assessment of the climate cooling potential of different geoengineering schemes carried out by researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

The key findings of the assessment are:

Enhancing carbon sinks could bring CO2 back to its pre-industrial level, but not before 2100 - and only when combined with strong mitigation of CO2 emissions.

Stratospheric aerosol injections and sunshades in space have by far the greatest potential to cool the climate by 2050 - but also carry the greatest risk.

Surprisingly, existing activities that add phosphorous to the ocean may have greater long-term carbon sequestration potential than deliberately adding iron or nitrogen.

On land, sequestering carbon in new forests and as ‘bio-char’ (charcoal added back to the soil) have greater short-term cooling potential than ocean fertilization.

Increasing the reflectivity of urban areas could reduce urban heat islands, but will have minimal global effect.

Other globally ineffective schemes include ocean pipes and stimulating biologically-driven increases in cloud reflectivity.

“The realisation that existing efforts to mitigate the effects of human-induced climate change are proving wholly ineffectual has fuelled a resurgence of interest in geo-engineering,” said lead author Professor Tim Lenton of UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences.

“This paper provides the first extensive evaluation of their relative merits in terms of their climate cooling potential and should help inform the prioritisation of future research,” he added.

Geo-engineering is the large-scale engineering of the environment to combat the effects of climate change - in particular to counteract the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

A number of schemes have been suggested including nutrient fertilization of the oceans, cloud seeding, sunshades in space, stratospheric aerosol injections, and ocean pipes.

“We found that some geoengineering options could usefully complement mitigation, and together they could cool the climate, but geoengineering alone cannot solve the climate problem,” said Professor Lenton.

Injections into the stratosphere of sulphate or other manufactured particles have the greatest potential to cool the climate back to pre-industrial temperatures by 2050.