A PFO is an opening between two overlapping sections of tissue which form a division between the upper chambers of the heart.

Interventional cardiologists at Rush University Medical Center are investigating whether a heart procedure may be the key to relieving migraines in patients with severe headaches.
Earlier studies have indicated that there may be a link between a particular congenital heart anomaly, a patent foramen ovale (PFO), and migraine. Some patients--particularly those suffering from migraine with aura- have had reductions in the frequency and severity of migraines following closure of their PFO, ScienceDaily said.
In the Rush study, interventional cardiologists will close the PFO in the catheterization lab using an implant that acts like an umbrella, crossing over the chambers in attempt to occlude or close the flaps together.
Principal investigator Dr. Clifford Kavinsky and his team have started enrolling patients for the clinical trial, called MIST II (Migraine Intervention with BioSTAR). The team is looking for individuals with severe migraines to see if they may have a patent foramen ovale.
A PFO is a small opening between two overlapping sections of tissue which form a division between the upper chambers of the heart, the right atrium and the left atrium. In the womb, this opening is present since it makes circulation more efficient for the developing fetus. After birth, the flaps normally fuse together to form a solid wall, called a septum, between the chambers. However, in about 25 percent of the population, the flaps do not fuse together.
The PFO then works like a valve, staying closed most of the time but opening when certain activities cause a build up of pressure inside the chest. When opened, the PFO may permit unfiltered venous blood to cross from the right atrium to the left atrium rather than passing through the lungs. The unfiltered venous blood may contain elements that can trigger migraines in some patients.
“In a smaller predicate trial of similar design conducted in the United Kingdom , headache specialists observed a significant treatment effect with 42 percent of patients experiencing a 50 percent reduction in migraine headache days and 37 percent reduction in frequency and duration of migraine attacks,“ says Kavinsky. “The combination of the bioabsorbable septal repair implant and the longer duration of the MIST II Trial are expected to provide even more positive outcomes.
Finding an effective therapy for this group of patients who are refractory to medical therapy would be an important advance in the treatment of migraine.“

A researcher now wants to make gems of rare beauty from simple chunks of silicon.

This is the ultimate in high tech bling: artificial gems of dazzling color and variety created with a technology that was originally developed for the telecoms industry.
Called photonic crystals, they are used to separate signals carried by different wavelengths within the same optical fiber used to carry telecoms. But that also makes the crystals appear to change color as the viewer’s perspective changes, a phenomenon that occurs naturally in the gemstone opal, according to Telegraph.co.uk.
New Scientist reports that Thomas Mossberg, president of Lightsmyth Technologies in Eugene, Oregon, now wants to make gems of rare beauty from simple chunks of silicon using this technology, though he himself admits that it is “surprising that a high-tech photonic concept might end up making a beautiful thing.“
He uses a method called photolithography to carve circular, hexagonal and triangular spaces between three and 20 millimeters wide into a silicon wafer, etching some 200 different patterns into each gem. Each pattern reflects light of a different wavelength in a different direction, which produces gems that flash a rainbow of colors in all directions.
Within a few weeks he hopes to have a second generation of pure photonic crystal jewels, produced on a transparent material so they can be viewed from either side. And for those who may worry that high tech bling is a bit cheap, he points out they cannot be produced really cheaply, as is the case with cubic zirconia simulated diamonds.
“The tools involved in their creation are state of the art and typically cost millions of dollars,“ he told The Daily Telegraph. “The jewels will carry a bit of a premium because of the current difficulty in producing pure photonic crystal.“
He is also interested in using sapphire instead of silicon. “Sapphire is actually quite a bit more costly than silicon, but it is a material of proven attractiveness and physical qualities in which to create pure photonic crystal jewels.“

The discoveries of large Earth-like planets outside our Solar System, so-called “super-Earths,“ has prompted much speculation about just how Earth-like they may be. Recently, scientists from Harvard University suggested that these planets will, like Earth, have plate tectonics.
Plate tectonics, the movement of the giant plates that make up Earth’s solid outer shell, are responsible for earthquakes, volcanoes, and other major geological events. In essence, they have dominated Earth’s geological history. Earth is the only known planet that has plate tectonics, and this activity has been proposed as one necessary condition for the evolution of life, Physorg.com reported.
However, in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, Harvard planetary scientist Diana Valencia and her colleagues predict that super-Earths--which are between one and ten times as massive as Earth--will fulfill one of the requirements for sustaining life by having plate tectonics.
“Some of these super-Earths may be in the ’habitable zone’ of their solar systems, meaning they are at the right distance from their mother star to have liquid water, and thus life,“ Valencia, the paper’s corresponding author, told PhysOrg.com. “Ultimately, though, only these planets’ thermal and chemical evolution will determine whether they are habitable. But these thermal and chemical properties are closely tied to plate tectonics.“
Using detailed models they developed of the interior of massive terrestrial planets, Valencia and her group determined how the mass of a super-Earth is related to the thickness of its plates and the magnitude of the stresses the plates experience. These stresses, part of the slow, slow convection of Earth’s mantle, are the driving force behind the deformation and subduction (when one plate sinks below another) of the plates. For planets more massive than Earth, this driving force is larger than Earth’s.
The group found that as planetary mass increases, there is an increase in the shear stress and a decrease in the plate thickness. Both of these factors weaken the plates and contribute to plate subduction, which is a key component of plate tectonics. Therefore, the scientists say, the conditions required for plate deformation and subduction are easily met by super-Earths. Their results show that this is particularly true for the larger super-Earths.
“Our work strongly suggests that super-Earths, even if they have no water, will exhibit plate tectonic behavior,“ Valencia said.

Most of us take it for granted that plants respond to light by growing, flowering and straining towards the light, and we never wonder just how plants manage to do so. But the ordinary, everyday responses of plants to light are deceptively complex, and much about them has long stumped scientists.
Now, according to Physorg.com, a new study “has significantly advanced our understanding of how plant responses to light are regulated, and perhaps even how such responses evolved,“ says Michael Mishkind, a program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF).
By conducting experiments with Arabidopsis--a small flowering plant widely used as a model organism--the researchers discovered that the plant prepares to respond to light while it is still in the dark, even before it is exposed to light. This preparation involves producing a pair of closely related proteins (known as FHY3 and FAR1) that increase production of another pair of closely related proteins (known as FHY1 and FHL) that had been identified in previous studies as critical participants in the plant’s light response.
With a plant so primed in the dark, it detects and responds to light via the following steps, light-sensing pigment proteins known as phytochrome A located in the cytoplasm of plants cells detect the light in the far-red end of the spectrum, the phytochrome A is activated through a change in shape that allows it to bind to FHY1 and FHL, the binding of FHY1 and FHL to phytochrome A results in the accumulation of phytochrome A in the cell nucleus, possibly by helping to import phytochrome A into the nucleus, the activated phytochrome A changes the activity of genes located in the cell nucleus that govern plant growth and development, resulting changes in gene expression produce the plant’s developmental responses to light, such as growth, flowering and straining towards the light.
Although these steps had been identified in previous studies, the discovery of how FHY3 and FAR1 regulate plant responses to light adds an important new dimension to our understanding of them.
Moreover, the researchers also discovered the existence of a negative feedback loop between accumulations of phytochrome A in the cell nucleus and the FHY3 and FAR1 proteins that prime the plant’s light response system: the more phytochrome A accumulates in the nucleus, the less FHY3 and FAR1 proteins are produced, and so less phytochrome A is imported into the nucleus. This feedback loop serves as a built-in brake that limits the flow of light responses.

A brain scan study has shown that no matter how wealthy you are, money is most rewarding if you have relatively poor friends, peers and colleagues.
Several studies by sociologists have looked at whether the effect of money on happiness results largely from the things money can buy (the so called absolute income effect) or from comparing one’s income to the income of others (relative income effect) and concluded the latter is most important, even though economists usually only focus on the size of salaries, Telegraph.co.uk reported.
As if to underline this difference, one economist even referred to the “shocking fact“ that people in the West have become no happier in the last 50 years, despite being healthier, wealthier and better traveled.
Now hard evidence to show that relative wealth is more important now comes from an experiment described today in Science by Prof Christian Elger and Prof Armin Falk at the University of Bonn.
They tested men in pairs, asking them to perform the simple task of counting dots on a screen and promising payment for success. Using a brain scanner technique called magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers studied the brain activity of 38 men in all as they played the games, side by side.
If they had solved the task correctly, they received a reward, which might range from 30 to 120 Euros. Each participant also learnt how his partner in the game had performed and how much he would pocket in return.
“We registered enhanced activity in various parts of their brains during the test,“ explains coauthor Dr Bernd Weber, of the Life & Brain Research Centre, Bonn. “One area in particular, the ventral striatum, is the region where part of what we call the ’reward system’ is located.“
“In this area we observed an activation when the player completed his task correctly,“ says Dr Weber. By contrast, when the subject got his estimate wrong, activity in his ventral striatum would subside.
But the most the exciting finding was the influence of another factor: how the rival player was doing. Activation was at its highest for those players who got the right answer while their co-player got it wrong. But participants who got more money than their co-players showed much stronger activation in the “reward centre“ than when both received the same amount.
What was fascinating, said Prof Falk, is that the effect of having more is less strong than that of having less. “Thus activation differences are most pronounced in situations where I have less than you. If you like the pain of having less is stronger than the joy of having more.“
Prof Falk said that conventional economic theory assumes the only important factor is the absolute size of the reward. “The comparison with other people’s rewards shouldn’t really play any role in economic motivation.“
It is the first time that this hypothesis has been challenged using hard evidence from a brain scanner. It does not mean, of course, that the absolute reward has no impact on the “reward center“: more excitement was registered in response to 60 Euros than 30. “But the interesting point to emerge from our study is that the relative size of one’s earnings plays such a major role.“

Widow manufactures a previously unidentified protein that is a component of multiple types of silk.

Web-making spiders employ a host of silk glands to synthesize a variety of silk filaments with different mechanical properties.
Although it is widely believed that the aciniform glands are one such silk factory, there has been no hard evidence linking aciniform-derived proteins and silk--until now, ScienceDaily said.
Craig Vierra and colleagues found that the aciniform gland in the Black Widow manufactures and extrudes a previously unidentified protein that is a component of multiple types of silk.
Vierra and colleagues used mass spectroscopy to analyze the protein content of two types of silk: the variety used for egg cases and the one used to wrap up prey. In both types they uncovered a thin protein fiber with a similar structure to another known silk protein called AcSp1. When they examined the expression of this new protein, termed AcSp1-like protein, in different silk glands, they found that mRNA levels were present at 1000-fold higher concentration in the aciniform gland compared to other glands.
The researchers note this finding is intriguing since it shows that aciniform silk fibers are not made for one specific task but rather get integrated into multiple silk types. They plan to further characterize the mechanics of aciniform silk, but they propose that this thin fiber acts like twine to hold thicker silk fibers together.

Humans aren’t the only ones who go on strike when they get a raw deal.
In a recent research project, brown capuchin monkeys trained to exchange a granite token for a cucumber treat often refused the swap if they saw another monkey get a better payoff--a grape, News.com.au said.
In a follow up study to find out how much the outbursts were driven by greed, frustration that the rewards did not live up to what they had come to expect and so on, it has now been observed that the monkeys will also refuse to participate in trials after they see other monkeys receiving greater reward for making the same effort: in effect--they go on strike.
The discovery by Megan van Wolkenten, Sarah Brosnan and Prof Frans de Waal in studies at Yerkes National Primate Research Centre, Atlanta, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The findings in experiments with 13 capuchins underline that a sense of injustice and fairness is not a uniquely human quality, but is also hard wired into the behavior of other primates.
This means that the anger that human beings feel when they are cheated has a long evolutionary history, and may have helped to underpin the emergence of the cooperative societies found in many higher primates, said Brosnan, of Georgia State University, Atlanta.
The team concludes that the capuchins are sensitive to fairness but this is not driven by greed or frustration alone but also the amount of effort involved.