Researchers have identified a new target for drugs to help treat the most common form of breast cancer in the developing world, a study released Thursday said.
The target is a molecular ’switch’ in the protein-making machinery of the cancer cell that enables a tumor to aggressively develop its own blood supply.
Women with what is called locally advanced breast cancer can develop tumors that grow anywhere from 2 centimeters to 10 centimeters in diameter.
The tumors are unusually large in many cases--they are often the size of a plum by the time they are diagnosed--due to the extremely dense network of blood vessels feeding them oxygen and nutrients, AFP said.
“Our study shows that an unusual molecular switch occurs that is essential for the development of these large tumors. We think that this switch could be a target for new therapies,“ said Robert Schneider, professor of molecular pathogenesis at New York University School of Medicine.
In a paper in the journal Molecular Cell, Schneider and colleagues at New York University School of Medicine describe how two proteins (4E-BP1 and eIF4G) which are present at elevated levels in locally advanced breast cancer cells selectively increase the action of certain messenger, or mRNA, molecules.
The effect of that process is to increase several fold the production of certain growth factors that drive tumor angiogenesis--the formation of the tumor’s own blood vessels.
“The switch gives us the ability to shut off production of growth factors in the tumor at their source,“ said Schneider.
He said several experimental drugs were in development that would target the “switch,“ with a view to curbing its growth.
If the drugs are shown to be successful in clinical trials, they could eventually be combined with a cocktail of chemotherapy drugs to eliminate the malignancy.
“This research opens new avenues for the development of targeted approaches in the treatment of one of the most common lethal forms of breast cancer worldwide,“ said Silvia Formenti, a co-author and professor of radiation oncology at NYU School of Medicine.
The researchers are also hopeful that the two proteins that are over-expressed or super abundant in locally advanced breast cancer cells could serve as a biomarker for this type of cancer, making it easier to screen for.
Early indications are that it is a reliable guide to the presence of this cancer 85 percent of the time, Schneider said.

A two-year study of college students at The Pennsylvania State University (PSU) shows that students learn better and develop higher-level skills by participating in cooperative (team) activities, compared to traditional classroom teaching methods.
Elsa Sanchez and Richard Craig, professors in the Department of Horticulture at PSU, surveyed students enrolled from 2003-2005 in their Plant Systematics course. The specialized course was designed around a cooperative learning model that required students to work in teams on a variety of activities. For example, students organized a learning fair for elementary school students, participated in hands-on laboratories and worked in randomly assigned teams for their final exam, according to Eurekalert.
“We were interested in learning students’ perceptions and sharing our experiences. We found that students liked the cooperative activities and learned from other team members. As instructors, we found that students participated more in the lecture part of the course as team activities were completed,“ Sanchez stated.
The study has additional implications for how teachers prepare for and deliver classroom instruction. Sanchez noted “it took more organization and planning to use cooperative activities compared to the traditional lecture method“, and added that lectures are far less conducive to facilitating higher levels of thinking than cooperative learning strategies. Student outcomes of class participation showed an increase in several indicators of higher-level thinking, such as application of concepts and analysis and synthesis of information.
“While traditional lectures transfer knowledge, lectures are far less conducive to facilitating higher levels of thinking, such as application of concepts and analysis and synthesis of information,“ Dr. Elsa Sanchez said.
Using cooperative activities also allows students to practice skills that will enhance their future careers, including communication, conflict resolution, creativity and time management. Sanchez sees benefits of using collaborative processes that extend beyond the college classroom, noting that “students benefit from practicing real-world skills that they will need after graduation, and the industry will benefit from future employees who possess skills that promote success.“

Fall, the season of colors: Leaves turn red, yellow, and brown. The disappearance of the color green and the simultaneous appearance of these other colors are also signs of ripening fruit.
A team led by Bernhard Krautler at the University of Innsbruck has now determined that the breakdown of chlorophyll in ripening apples and pears produces the same decomposition products as those in brightly colored leaves. As the researchers report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, these colorless decomposition products, called nonfluorescing chlorophyll catabolytes (NCC), are highly active antioxidants--making them potentially very healthy, ScienceDaily said.
The beautifully colored leaves of fall are a sign of leaf senescence, the programmed cell death in plants. This process causes the disappearance of chlorophyll, which is what gives leaves their green color. For a long time, no one really knew just what happens to the chlorophyll in this process. In recent years, Krautler and his team, working with the Zurich botanists Philippe Matile and Stefan Hortensteiner, have been able to identify the first decomposition products: colorless, polar NCCs that contain four pyrrole rings--like chlorophyll and heme.
Now the Innsbruck researchers have examined the peels of apples and pears. Unripe fruits are green because of their chlorphyll. In ripe fruits, NCCs have replaced the chlorophyll, especially in the peel and the flesh immediately below it. These catabolytes are the same for apples and pears, and are also the same as those found in the leaves of the fruit trees. “There is clearly one biochemical pathway for chlorophyll decomposition in leaf senescence and fruit ripening,“ concludes Krautler.
When chlorophyll is released from its protein complexes in the decomposition process, it has a phototoxic effect: When irradiated with light, it absorbs energy and can transfer it to other substances. For example, it can transform oxygen into a highly reactive, destructive form. As the researchers were able to demonstrate, the NCCs have an opposite effect: They are powerful antioxidants and can thus play an important physiological role for the plant.
It then became apparent that NCCs are components of the diets of humans and other higher animals, and that they could thus also play a role in their systems. Other previously identified important antioxidants in the peels of fruits include the flavonoids. Thus, the saying, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away“ seems to be true, according to Krautler.

In an experiment with mice, the researchers identified and removed certain receptors on the olfactory bulb of their brains--and the result was a batch of fearless rodents.

Fear may be linked to the sense of smell, and can be switched off simply by shutting down certain receptors in the brain, Japanese scientists have found.
In an experiment with mice, the researchers identified and removed certain receptors on the olfactory bulb of their brains--and the result was a batch of fearless rodents, according to Reuters.
To prove their point, the scientists showed pictures of a brown mouse within an inch of a cat, sniffing up its ear, kissing it and playing with its predator’s collar.
“They detect the smell of predators ... like a cat and urine of a fox or snow leopard, but they don’t display any fear. They even show very strong curiosity but they can’t tell the smell is a sign of danger,“ said Hitoshi Sakano at the University of Tokyo’s department of biophysics and biochemistry.
“So these mice are very happy with cats. They play with cats. But before taking the picture, we had to feed the cat,“ he told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Experts have long thought that fear in animals may be prompted by their keen sense of smell.
But this is the first time scientists have discovered that smell detection and how that translates to fear take place in different parts of the olfactory bulb.
“How do our brains interpret the odorous information? What we found is that in the mammalian system, there are two circuits, one is innate and one is associative learning for detecting smells,“ Sakano said.
Sakano and his colleagues created two lines of mice--one lacking the receptors to translate odors and the other lacking receptors for smell detection. They were then exposed to the urine of predators such as snow leopards and foxes.
“(The first group) keeps smelling and they turn around and they show very strong curiosity but they never can tell any danger,“ Sakano said.
As for the second group, Sakano said: “They are very poor in detecting smell, but as soon as they detect the fox urine, they would freeze and they will pretend to be dead.
“They are very poor in detecting smell, discriminating them and associating their memory with detecting information. They are very slow. But when they do, they can immediately tell the danger.“
Mice have about 1,000 smell receptor genes, while humans have only 400 functioning ones and about 800 non-active ones, he said.

Molecules and small particles in the atmosphere change the direction of light rays, causing them to scatter and resulting in colorful sunsets.

The colors of the sunset result from a phenomenon called scattering, says Steven Ackerman, professor of meteorology at UW-Madison. Molecules and small particles in the atmosphere change the direction of light rays, causing them to scatter.
Scattering affects the color of light coming from the sky, but the details are determined by the wavelength of the light and the size of the particle.
The short-wavelength blue and violet are scattered by molecules in the air much more than other colors of the spectrum. This is why blue and violet light reaches our eyes from all directions on a clear day. But because we can’t see violet very well, the sky appears blue, ScienceDaily reported.
Scattering also explains the colors of the sunrise and sunset, Ackerman says.
“Because the sun is low on the horizon, sunlight passes through more air at sunset and sunrise than during the day, when the sun is higher in the sky.
More atmosphere means more molecules to scatter the violet and blue light away from your eyes. If the path is long enough, all of the blue and violet light scatters out of your line of sight. The other colors continue on their way to your eyes. This is why sunsets are often yellow, orange, and red.“
And because red has the longest wavelength of any visible light, the sun is red when it’s on the horizon, where its extremely long path through the atmosphere blocks all other colors.

M101, pictured above, is one of a million galaxies amateur scientists are scrutinizing as part of the Galaxy Zoo project.

The Web-based Galaxy Zoo project has reported preliminary results for its effort to classify a million galaxies according to type and rotation. Scientists need the data to test hypotheses about galaxy evolution and cosmic structure on the largest scales.
The preliminary findings indicate the universe has a property called “handedness.“ Most of the galaxies observed so far rotate counterclockwise. This needs explaining, because according to conventional theories, basic characteristics like rotation should show a random distribution. Project leaders announced the findings on a discussion forum for volunteers at the Galaxy Zoo [www.galaxyzoo.org] Web site, Astronomy.com reported.
Examining handedness requires observations of many different galaxies to provide enough data for meaningful statistical tests. Efforts such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are providing plenty of galaxies to look at, but there aren’t enough astronomers in the world to examine a million galaxies in a short time.
Galaxy Zoo recruited amateur observers to deploy a basic skill the human brain excels at: recognizing patterns. Participants view survey images of galaxies. They first decide if the galaxies are spiral or elliptical in shape. Then, they determine which direction the spirals are spinning.
The project is a collaboration between researchers at Oxford University and Portsmouth University in the United Kingdom and Johns Hopkins University in the United States, using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey II. Fingerprint Digital Media of Belfast developed the site.
In the preliminary report, Galaxy Zoo organizers praised participants highly for their hard work and skill. “Thank you everyone for taking part in this exciting astronomy project,“ reads an October 22 message on the forum by Christopher Lintott, who helps run the project at Oxford University in England. “In the last newsletter we said we were aiming for 20 classifications per galaxy, and with the help of 100,000 of you, we’ve smashed that target. Every galaxy has now been classified by lots of you, and you all turn out to be fabulous astronomers!“
Project scientists are now writing the first research reports based on the new observations. They also hope to use telescopes at Kitt Peak Observatory to study some important non-galaxy objects found in the survey. These include gravitational lenses, massive objects that allow astronomers to see into the most distant corners of the universe.

Botox seems to relieve shoulder pain in arthritis sufferers, a preliminary study found.
“We don’t recommend people start using it until we have the definitive study,“ said study author Dr. Jasvinder Singh, a staff physician at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, HealthDay said.
Singh and his colleagues randomly assigned 43 patients with moderate-to-severe osteoarthritis pain in their shoulders to one of two groups. One group received a single dose of the botulinum toxin type A and lidocaine, a local anesthetic. The other group got a dose of saline (salt water) plus the lidocaine. Neither group knew what they were receiving.
Osteoarthritis is the “wear-and-tear“ type of arthritis, and the risk for it increases with age, obesity and other factors.
At the start of the study, the participants’ pain levels were greater than 4.5 on a scale of zero to 10, with 10 being the worst pain.
The researchers compared the pain levels before the botulinum treatment to levels assessed 28 days later. They found that 38 percent of the botulinum group had a 30 percent or better reduction in their pain scores, compared to 9 percent of the saline group. Those who got botulinum also reported more improvement in shoulder function than the saline group.
The toxin may work, Singh speculated, by reducing the release of certain proteins from nerves in the joint. And that, in turn, may decrease the pain sensation.