Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion

The most advanced noninvasive, radiosurgery tool for treating a variety of brain disorders--including tumors--is now being used by specialists at UCSF Medical Center. The new machine expands UCSF’s ability to provide state-of-the-art, specialized care to patients.
Called the Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion, the machine is the latest generation in gamma knife radiosurgery, a noninvasive technology that delivers a finely focused, high dose of radiation to a specific area of the brain, according to ScienceDaily.
Its precision allows radiation to reach a particular target without damaging surrounding brain tissue, making it ideal for treating brain tumors.
It is also effective for treating epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, trigeminal neuralgia (a nerve condition causing chronic pain) and abnormal blood vessel formations located deep in the brain.
Abnormalities measuring less than one inch in diameter--the size of a tiny pebble--can be treated with gamma knife radiosurgery.
“This machine allows us to distribute a highly effective dose of radiation to diseased tissue more quickly and accurately than ever before,“ says Mitchel Berger, MD, professor and chairman of the UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery and director of the UCSF Brain Tumor Research Center. “Patients can be treated on an outpatient basis, in only a couple of hours, with little or no complications or side effects. This is a great benefit for patients who have already endured so much due to their diagnosis.“
The new machine has greater flexibility and reach than the previous model, assisting UCSF neurosurgeons in treating more areas of the head and now the neck.
Doses of radiation can be delivered to multiple target areas in one session, avoiding the need to move the patient or adjust the machine. This further reduces the amount of time a patient has to undergo treatment and reduces discomfort.
Radiation exposure to other parts of the body is extremely low, making it an excellent treatment option for children and women of child-bearing age.
Gamma knife surgery has become the world’s most widely used radiosurgery treatment for brain disorders due to its extraordinary accuracy, reduction of excess radiation dose to the body and extensive history and clinical documentation.
Unlike other systems designed to treat the whole body, Leksell Gamma Knife is specifically designed to optimize treatment to the head and neck.

Scientists in Pennsylvania are reporting development of a fuel cell that uses pollution from coal and metal mines to generate electricity, solving a serious environmental problem while providing a new source of energy.
They describe successful tests of a laboratory-scale version of the device in a new study, Xinhuanet.com said.
In the new study, Bruce E. Logan and colleagues point out that so-called acid-mine drainage (AMD) is a serious environmental problem that threatens the health of plants and animals as well as the safety of drinking-water supplies, due mainly to the high acidity of contaminated waters and its high content of metals, particularly iron.
AMD poses difficult and costly environmental clean-up problems.
They describe development of a new type of fuel cell that is based on microbial fuel cells, which are capable of generating electricity from wastewater. Using a solution similar to AMD, they showed that the device efficiently removed dissolved iron from the solution while also generating electricity at power levels similar to conventional microbial fuel cells. Improvements in the fuel cell will lead to more efficient power generation in the future, the researchers say.
The iron recovered by the device can be used as a pigment for paints or other products, they note.

It is not science fiction to think that our eyes could very soon be the key to unlocking our homes, accessing our bank accounts and logging on to our computers, according to Queensland University of Technology researcher Sammy Phang.
Research by Phang, from QUT’s Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering, is helping to remove one of the final obstacles to the everyday application of iris scanning technology, ScienceDaily reported.
Phang said the pattern of an iris was like a fingerprint in that every iris was unique. “Every individual iris is unique and even the iris pattern of the left eye is different from the right. The iris pattern is fixed throughout a person’s lifetime“ she said.
“By using iris recognition it is possible to confirm the identity of a person based on who the person is rather than what the person possesses, such as an ID card or password.
“It is already being used around the world and it is possible that within the next 10 to 20 years it will be part of our everyday lives.“
Phang said although iris recognition systems were being used in a number of civilian applications, the system was not perfect. “Changes in lighting conditions change a person’s pupil size and distort the iris pattern,“ she said.
“If the pupil size is very different, the distortion of the iris pattern can be significant, and makes it hard for the iris recognition system to work properly.“
To overcome this flaw, Phang has developed the technology to estimate the effect of the change in the iris pattern as a result of changes in surrounding lighting conditions. “It is possible for a pupil to change in size from 0.8mm to 8mm, depending on lighting conditions,“ she said.
Phang said by using a high-speed camera which could capture up to 1200 images per second it was possible to track the iris surface’s movements to study how the iris pattern changed depending on the variation of pupil sizes caused by the light. “The study showed that everyone’s iris surface movement is different.“
She said results of tests conducted using iris images showed it was possible to estimate the change on the surface of the iris and account for the way the iris features changed due to different lighting conditions.
“Preliminary image similarity comparisons between the actual iris image and the estimated iris image based on this study suggest that this can possibly improve iris verification performance.“

Researchers discovered seven types of wild strawberries that contain higher antioxidant levels and more potential to reduce cancer risk.

We’ve all seen the term “super food“ used to describe those nutrition-loaded edibles that promote health and discourage disease.
Powerhouse foods high in antioxidants and phytochemicals that block the development of cancer cells have been touted as nature’s way to fight off the potentially devastating disease, Physorg.com reported.
When it comes to familiar super foods, strawberries rank among the best. These tasty red berries are known to be a significant source of vitamin C, a natural antioxidant that attracts and neutralizes free radicals--those invasive, highly reactive molecules that damage the body’s natural cancer fighting cells. Many scientists believe that antioxidants can prevent cellular and tissue damage in the human body.
Dr. Shiow Y. Wang, a plant physiologist and biochemist at the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, led a recent study that investigated the antioxidant capacity and anticancer activity of multiple species of wild strawberries.
According to Dr. Wang, “antioxidants are natural plant chemicals that play an important role in promoting human health. While we have known that wild strawberries are a good source for obtaining desirable traits to be used in breeding programs, little information was available on antioxidant activities and their inhibitory effects on the growth of cancer cells in specific species of wild strawberries.“
The study published in the Journal of the American Society for Horticultural Science found that antioxidant capacity and anti-cancer activity vary greatly among different types of wild strawberries. Researchers discovered seven types of wild strawberries that contain higher antioxidant levels and more potential to reduce cancer risk.
“These seven types may be especially useful in developing cultivars with greater anticancer potential. They showed significantly greater anti-proliferation effects than other genotypes we tested“, stated Dr. Wang.
Results of the research study will be valuable to scientists, fruit breeders, and produce growers interested in producing berries that are high in antioxidants.
Varieties of the “super seven“ strawberries may soon become available in local markets in the US, giving consumers a sweet new way to fight cancer.

Elite athletes--often perceived as the epitome of health and fitness--may be more susceptible to common illness and are therefore proving useful in helping scientists understand more about the immune system.
Nic West, a PhD candidate at Griffith University, has enlisted elite rowers to help him study the role of salivary proteins that act as a barrier to infectious agents such as respiratory viruses, according to ScienceDaily.
He said salivary proteins such as lactoferrin and lysozyme act to prevent microbes from infecting the body and typically increase as the body fights off infection. They have a direct antimicrobial effect and also help modulate other aspects of the body’s immune response.
“We want to understand the mucosal immune system better and the factors that increase a person’s susceptibility to illness.“
An initial observational study comparing elite rowers with sedentary individuals over five months clearly showed that exercise was associated with a significant reduction in the concentration of lactoferrin.
“Theoretically, exercise is a stress on the body and leads to a greater susceptibility to illness. The decrease in salivary proteins, one of the body’s first lines of defence against infection, may help explain this.“
However a second study comparing the concentration of salivary proteins in rowers at rest, after moderate exercise, and after high intensity exercise, showed that exercise increased rather than decreased lactoferrin and lysozymes in the short term.
“Salivary proteins increased by about 50 per cent following exhaustive exercise which may be a transient activation response that increases protection in the immediate post-exercise period,“ he said.
His research over the next 18 months will test the effectiveness of a nutritional intervention in ameliorating the effects of hard physical activity on the immune system.
“There is some research to indicate that probiotics and resistant starches are useful in boosting mucosal barrier function.“
West said the beauty of the immune system was that it had a natural ’redundancy’--with overlapping components in the event of any one protective mechanism failing.
“So we also have mechanical barriers against infection such as the cilia in our nose, and immunity led by cells such as lymphocytes.“

Plump babies may really be happier babies, Canadian and British researchers reported on Monday in a study that found people who had a low birth weight were more likely to have depression and anxiety later in life.
Adverse conditions in the womb that interfere with a baby’s growth may also cause brain differences, the researchers report in the December issue of Biological Psychiatry, Reuters said.
Ian Colman of the University of Alberta and colleagues in Britain studied the records of 4,600 Britons born in 1946 who took part in a 40-year study.
“We found that even people who had just mild or moderate symptoms of depression or anxiety over their life course were smaller babies than those who had better mental health,“ Colman said in a statement.
“It suggests a dose-response relationship. As birth weight progressively decreases, it’s more likely that an individual will suffer from mood disorders later in life.“
The researchers simply looked at medical records and did not examine a possible cause. Colman said it is possible that when mothers are stressed, stress hormones are passing through the placenta to the fetus.
“If this theory is correct, you would find that when stressful events occur, the people who were smaller babies would be more likely to become depressed or anxious,“ he said.
“One of the surprising findings from our research was that people who had worse mental health throughout their lives had also reached developmental milestones, like standing and walking for the first time, later in life than those who had better mental health.“
The researchers did not look for any absolute weight but said there was a clear trend.
“Most notably, the group that had absence of symptoms had the highest birth weight, whereas the group with repeated severe symptoms had the lowest birth weight,“ they wrote.
“As weight at birth increased, the likelihood of symptoms of depression and anxiety across the life course decreased.“
Not all small babies are fated to have poor mental health, the researchers said, noting that in 1946 records did not indicate whether the children were born prematurely.
“Being born small isn’t necessarily a problem. It is a problem if you were born small because of adverse conditions in the womb--and low birth weight is what we looked at in this study because it is considered a marker of stress in the womb,“ Colman said.
“When a mother is really stressed, blood flow to the uterus is restricted and the fetus gets fewer nutrients, which tends to lead to lower birth weight.“
Other studies have linked low birth weight to a higher risk of diabetes and heart disease in later life.

Elephants can identify individuals from the scent of urine.

Elephants keep track on up to 30 absent relatives by sniffing out their scent and building up a mental map of where they are, research suggests.
Herd members use their good memory and keen sense of smell to stay in touch as they travel in large groups, according to a study of wild elephants in Kenya, BBC reported.
The University of St Andrews studied 36 family groups of elephants living in Amboseli National Park.
Wild elephants form matriarchal family groups which travel, hunt for food, and socialize together. Individuals need to keep track of each other, as family members split up into smaller groups or overtake companions as they wander the home range.
Psychologists from the University of St Andrews collected samples of female elephant urine from the ground and presented it to relatives to trick them into believing that the elephant had recently passed by.
Elephants showed surprise when they encountered the scent of an individual who was actually walking behind them so could not possibly have been there.
“We reckoned that only if each elephant was continually updating its memory of where everyone was, and was able to identify specific individuals from their urine, would they show any different reaction to this case,“ said co-researcher Dr Lucy Bates.
The elephants also reacted when the urine was from a family member who was far away, and not supposed to be in the area.
Dr Byrne said it is hard enough for humans to keep tabs on each other, let alone elephants, which have poor day vision.
“But our elephants are doing it in parties of 20 to 30 family members.“
But Dr Byrne said that elephants have two advantages over humans--their excellent sense of smell and, if their popular reputation is anything to go by, a good memory.
“It may be that where elephants really excel in memory is not remembering things for very long periods but in everyday working memory--where it is important to update and delete things rather than remember things forever,“ he added.