Patients with common immune disorders such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis could one day be treated with bone marrow transplants, scientists claimed.
Hopes for the new treatment follow the development of a more efficient transplant technique which avoids the need for radio- or chemotherapy, both of which have potentially dangerous side-effects, Guardian said.
Traditional bone marrow transplants are used to treat only life-threatening conditions, such as leukaemia or lymphoma. The treatment infuses healthy adult stem cells into the patient, which then form fresh blood and immune cells.
But before the transplant can be done, patients must receive a course of radiotherapy or chemotherapy to wipe out the defective cells in their bone marrow. The therapy can cause widespread damage, leaving patients brain damaged, at greater risk of cancer, or infertile.
Researchers at Stanford University’s institute for stem cell biology and regenerative medicine reasoned it might be possible to perform bone marrow transplants without needing risky therapy beforehand. In theory, it would allow doctors to treat auto-immune disorders such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and type one diabetes by giving patients a new, healthy immune system.
In a study in mice, Professor Irving Weissman, who led the research, used antibodies to kill off blood and immune system stem cells in the bone marrow.
They found the antibodies destroyed more than 98 percent of the targeted cells. “It is essentially a surgical strike against the blood-forming stem cells,“ said Weissman, whose study appears in the journal Science. The team was then able to transplant healthy stem cells into the animals, which developed into a new blood and immune system.
Although the work is at an early stage, it offers hope for a radical new treatment of common debilitating conditions for which there are currently no cures.
Auto-immune conditions are caused by a malfunctioning of the immune system which causes it to launch an attack on the body. Combined, the diseases affect millions of people worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, multiple sclerosis alone affects 2.5 million people.
The treatment needs more development before it can be considered for trials in humans. First, the scientists do not know if the antibody they used to kill off cells in the mice will work safely in humans. Second, the mice used in the study did not have a full immune system, so the treatment may have worked better than in normal animals.

Just as silicon is the wonder material for the computer age, carbon nanotubes will most likely be the materials responsible for the next evolutionary step in electronics and computing. Their extraordinary properties have identified them as having the potential to revolutionize many technologies.
In particular, it is widely believed that carbon nanotubes will take electronic devices to the next level. Many people expect the hugely popular LCD and plasma screens of today to be replaced by field emission flat screen displays (FED-TV).
FED-TV’s take all the best aspects of CRT’s, LCD’s and plasma TV’s and roll them into a single package. While the technology exists, manufacturers are at present unable to compete with LCD’s and plasma displays on a cost basis. However, carbon nanotubes have the ability to change all that, ScienceDaily said.
In order to incorporate carbon nanotubes into devices like these field emission flat screen displays, an intimate knowledge of the properties of various forms of carbon nanotubes is invaluable. Researchers from University of Latvia, University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, University of London and Mid Sweden University have just published work characterizing the conductive and field emission properties of single and multi walled carbon nanotubes.
In this research the conductive and field emission properties of individual single and multi-walled carbon nanotubes were assessed using an in-situ transmission electron microscope-scanning tunneling microscope (TEM-STM) technique. The nanotubes were grown by chemical vapor and supercritical fluid deposition techniques.
Experimental field emission characteristics for all carbon nanotubes investigated fitted well to the Fowler-Nordheim equation when different work functions were applied. Differences in field emission and conductive properties are analyzed and related to the structure of the carbon nanotubes. The method presented can be applied in order to make in situ selection of carbon nanotubes with desired properties for specific electronic applications.
The researchers found that conductivity and field emission properties were nanotube structure dependent. The structure of the outer layers and whether or not the nanotubes were filled with C60 molecules were key factors in determining the properties of the carbon nanotubes.
These findings make a significant contribution to the understanding of the structure/property relationships for carbon nanotubes, which in turn bring the next generation flat panel televisions and monitors a bit closer to our lounge rooms and offices.

Studies of some of the worst radiation incidents show effects on workers and residents aren’t nearly as severe as commonly thought.
According to Physorg.com, from a 1957 accident at a secret nuclear facility in Siberia to German uranium mines to the nuclear radiation release at Chernobyl in 1987, researchers are finding long-term dangers seem overblown.
Instead of tens of thousands of deaths from those incidents, documented cancer and other radiation-related deaths have been only in the hundreds, the German newspaper said. Research shows health-related
problems, including genetic deformities, also were overstated.
The research includes work done by GSF Research Center for Health and the Environment in Neuherberg, Germany--Europe’s largest radiation protection institute-- for the European Union’s Southern Urals Radiation Risk Research project, and by the US National Cancer Institute, as well as a US-Japanese epidemiological study.
“For commendable reasons, many critics have greatly exaggerated the health risks of radioactivity,“ Albrecht Kellerer, a Munich radiation biologist said. “But contrary to widespread opinion, the number of victims is by no means in the tens of thousands.“

Vitamin E supplements can significantly reduce the risk of heart attacks and related deaths for diabetics who carry a particular version of a gene, according to researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the Clalit Health Services in Israel.
After 18 months of treatment, people with the haptoglobin (Hp) 2-2 gene who took 400 International Units (IU) of vitamin E daily had more than 50 percent fewer heart attacks, strokes, and related deaths than Hp 2-2 patients who took a placebo pill. 40 percent of individuals with diabetes carry the Hp 2-2 gene, Eurekalert reported.
Most of the difference came from the reduced number of heart attacks among those taking vitamin E. In the group of 1,434 Hp 2-2 individuals taking part in the study, seven people had a heart attack, compared to 17 who did not take the vitamin. Dr. Andrew Levy, of the Technion Faculty of Medicine, said there were no side effects observed in patients who took vitamin E.
The study suggests that genetic testing for the Hp 2-2 gene “may be useful to identify a large group of diabetes individuals who could potentially derive cardiovascular benefit from a very inexpensive treatment,“ Levy said.
The finding is a new answer to an old question: can antioxidant vitamins such as vitamin E help prevent heart disease? Previously, cardiologists routinely prescribed vitamin E for their patients, but the practice has dwindled as several major studies in the past decade showed no heart-protective effects and potential harm from vitamin E mega-doses.
However, Levy and colleagues suspected that there might be one group of patients who could benefit from vitamin E: diabetic individuals with a particular variant of the haptoglobin gene.
Haptoglobin is a powerful antioxidant protein that stabilizes the iron-rich red blood cell molecule called hemoglobin, preventing inflammation in the walls of arteries.
There are several versions of the haptoglobin gene. In previous studies, Levy and colleagues showed that Hp 2-2 is an inferior antioxidant compared to its genetic siblings, and that this difference is exaggerated in patients with diabetes. The researchers also discovered that diabetic patients with Hp 2-2 are two-to-three times more likely than other diabetics to suffer a cardiovascular event such as a heart attack.
“This version of the gene does not determine whether or not an individual will develop diabetes but rather whether an individual with diabetes is susceptible to developing the devastating complications associated with diabetes such as heart disease, kidney disease or visual loss,“ Levy noted.
A genetic test for Hp 2-2 is commercially available, said Levy, who is also a consultant for Synvista Therapeutics, which owns a patent on the use of Hp testing to predict diabetic complications.

Eating a diet rich in a wide variety of grains is likely to not only help in the prevention of diabetes and heart disease, but also pancreatic cancer.

Eating more whole grain and fiber-rich food may lower the risk of pancreatic cancer by about 40 percent, study findings suggest.
Dr. June M. Chan, of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues identified this reduced risk among adults who ate two or more servings of whole grains each day compared with those who ate less than one serving a day, according to Reuters.
They also noted about a 35 percent reduction in risk among individuals who ate the highest amount of fiber (26.5 grams per day or more) compared with those who ate the least (15.6 grams per day or less).
“There is a possibility that diet can affect one’s risk of pancreatic, as well as other cancers,“ Chan told Reuters Health, “and that eating a diet rich in a wide variety of grains is likely to not only help in the prevention of diabetes and heart disease, but also this very deadly cancer.“
The researchers looked at grain intake among 532 people with pancreatic cancer and 1,701 people without pancreatic cancer among the San Francisco Bay area population.
The two groups were similar in age, gender, and body weight, and had a similar history of diabetes, but those with pancreatic cancer were more frequently current smokers, the investigators note in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Overall, the results of the study suggest that eating more whole grains may protect against pancreatic cancer.
On the other hand, eating two or more servings of doughnuts a week, compared with less than a serving a month, was found to raise the risk of pancreatic cancer.
However, so did eating two or more servings a week of cooked breakfast cereals such as oatmeal, which the investigators suspect may be explained by their inability to distinguish between sweetened or ’instant’ cereals and less refined cereals.
“The risk reductions associated with some whole grain foods and fiber provide general support for the hypothesis that whole grains are better than more refined and sweetened grains for pancreatic cancer prevention,“ Chan said. However, “further studies are needed to confirm this,“ Chan added.

Fluid contained inside the plants' pitchers has the perfect viscoelastic properties to prevent the escape of any small creatures.

Carnivorous plants supplement the meager diet available from the nutrient-poor soils in which they grow by trapping and digesting insects and other small arthropods. Pitcher plants of the genus Nepenthes were thought to capture their prey with a simple passive trap but in a paper in PLoS One, Laurence Gaume and Yoel Forterre, a biologist and a physicist from the CNRS, working respectively in the University of Montpellier and the University of Marseille, France show that they employ slimy secretions to doom their victims.
They show that the fluid contained inside the plants’ pitchers has the perfect viscoelastic properties to prevent the escape of any small creatures that come into contact with it even when diluted by the heavy rainfall of the forest of Borneo in which they live, ScienceDaily reported.
Since Charles Darwin’s time, the mechanism of insect-trapping by Nepenthes pitcher plants from the Asian tropics has intrigued scientists but is still incompletely understood. The slippery inner surfaces of their pitchers have--until now--been considered the key trapping devices, while it was assumed that the fluid secretions were only concerned with digestion.
Gaume and Forterre were able to combine their separate expertise in biology and physics to show that the digestive fluid of Nepenthes rafflesiana actually plays a crucial role in prey capture.
The pair took high-speed videos of flies and ants attempting to move through plants’ fluid. Flies quickly became completely coated in the fluid and unable to move even when diluted more than 90 percent with water. Physical measurements on the fluid showed that this was because this complex fluid generates viscoelastic filaments with high retentive forces that give no chance of escape to any insect that has fallen into it and that is struggling in it.
That the viscoelastic properties of the fluid remain strong even when highly diluted is of great adaptive significance for these tropical plants which are often subjected to heavy rainfalls.
For insects, this fluid acts like quicksand: the quicker they move, the more trapped they become. Its constituency is closely akin to mucus or saliva, which, in some reptiles and amphibians, serves a very similar purpose.
The exact makeup of this fluid, apparently unique in the plant kingdom, remains to be determined; however, it may point the way to novel, environmentally friendly approaches to pest control.

Saline irrigation is a safe, inexpensive and effective method for treating chronic nasal and sinus symptoms, according to a new study.
According to HealthDay, researchers at the University of Michigan Health System also concluded that saline irrigation--the flushing of nasal passages with a salt water mixture--is more effective than commonly used saline sprays at providing short-term relief of chronic nasal symptoms.
The study included 121 adults with chronic nasal and sinus symptoms. Sixty were treated for eight weeks with saline irrigation, and 61 were treated with saline spray.
The patients in the saline irrigation group showed greater improvement at two, four and eight weeks.
After completion of the study, 61 percent of patients in the spray group reported having symptoms “often or always,“ compared with 40 percent of patients in the irrigation group.
“The irrigation group achieved a clinically significant improvement in quality of life in terms of severity of their symptoms, whereas the spray group did not. Strikingly, (the irrigation group) also experienced 50 percent lower odds of frequent nasal symptoms compared with the spray group,“ lead author Dr. Melissa A. Pynnonen, clinical assistant professor in the department of otolaryngology, said in a prepared statement.
The study, published in the current issue of the journal Archives of Otolaryngology--Head & Neck Surgery, received funding from NeilMed Pharmaceuticals, which makes a saline sinus rinse.
Tens of millions of Americans suffer from chronic nasal and sinus conditions. Treatments include antibiotics, antihistamines and anti-inflammatory drugs. The findings of this study suggest that doctors should recommend saline irrigation more often for patients with chronic sinus and nasal conditions, Pynnonen and her colleagues said.