Scientists have made the lethal virus Ebola harmless in the lab, potentially aiding research into a vaccine or cure.
Taking a single gene from the virus stops it replicating, US scientists wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, BBC said.
Ebola, currently handled in highly secure labs, kills up to 80 percent of those it infects.
However, one expert said the new method may not yet be a fail-safe way of dealing with the virus.
The need for a “biosecurity level 4“ (BSL4) laboratory for any work involving Ebola means that very few research institutions are capable of doing this.
Researchers wear biosafety suits with their own air supply, and the air pressure in the room is less than the pressure outside, so any leak would mean air flowing inwards rather than outwards.
This makes anything more than small-scale study of the virus very difficult to arrange.
If Ebola could be kept in a viable form, yet with the risk of infection removed, then conventional labs might be able to study it.
The researchers, from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, say that they have found a “great system“ to do this.
They said that a single one of Ebola’s eight genes, called VP30, is the key, as without it, the virus cannot replicate within host cells by itself.
However, the scientists still want the virus to replicate in order to study it, so they developed monkey kidney cells which contained the protein needed.
Because the cell was providing the protein, and not the virus itself, it could only replicate within those cells, and even if transferred into a human, would be harmless.
In an effort to prove this, they used the monkey cells for dozens of cycles of infection and replication, without once encountering a form of the virus capable of making another creature ill.
“We wanted to make biologically contained Ebola virus,“ said Yoshihiro Kawaoka.
“The altered virus does not grow in any normal cells. This system can be used for drug screening and for vaccine production.“

Increased blood sugar levels signal a heightened risk of heart disease, especially among women, a new study finds.
In fact, women may face a greater risk for heart disease at lower blood sugar levels than men, HealthDay reported.
“The new definition of high fasting glucose, which is defined as a blood sugar between 100 and 125 milligrams per deciliter [of blood], has the same predictive value of diabetes and heart disease as the old definition of fasting glucose, which was 110 to 125 milligrams per deciliter,“ said lead researcher Dr. Caroline Fox, a medical officer with the Framingham Heart Study.
Moreover, for any level of blood sugar, women have a higher risk of developing diabetes and heart disease compared with men, Fox added.
In the study, Fox and her colleagues collected data on 4,058 men and women who were the children of the original participants in the Framingham Heart Study, a 50-year research project named for a Massachusetts town.
During four years of follow-up, 291 people in Fox’s trial developed heart disease.
The researchers found that the higher the blood sugar at the start of the study, the greater the likelihood of developing heart disease.
Based on the new definition of high blood sugar, the researchers determined that women were at greater risk for developing heart disease than men.
Specifically, women whose blood sugar was at 110 to 125 milligrams per deciliter of blood had the same risk of developing heart disease as women with diabetes.
Dr. John B. Buse, president for medicine & science at the American Diabetes Association (ADA), said this study confirms what other studies have found.
“Women who don’t have diabetes usually don’t have heart attacks,“ said Buse, who is director of the Diabetes Care Center at the University of North Carolina. “Women with diabetes, basically, all have heart attacks.“
People at risk of diabetes should have their blood sugar measured, Buse added. “If the fasting glucose test is elevated more than 100 milligrams per deciliter [of blood], it means that you are at risk of developing diabetes and you may have some excess risk of heart disease, particularly if you are a woman,“ he said.
The ADA recommends that everyone over age 45 should have a fasting glucose test, Buse said. “Normal is less than 100 milligrams per deciliter, so 99 is normal, 100 isn’t,“ he said.

The quieter corona wreathing the sun reaches temperatures of millions of degrees.

Powerful magnetic waves have been confirmed for the first time as major players in the process that makes the sun’s atmosphere strangely hundreds of times hotter than its already superhot surface.
The magnetic waves--called Alfven waves--can carry enough energy from the sun’s active surface to heat its atmosphere, or corona, Space.com said.
“The surface and corona are chockfull of these things, and they’re very energetic,“ said Bart de Pontieu, a physicist at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in California.
The sun contains powerful heating and magnetic forces which drive the temperature to tens of thousands of degrees at the surface--yet the quieter corona wreathing the sun reaches temperatures of millions of degrees.
Scientists have speculated that Alfven waves act as energy conveyor belts to heat the sun’s atmosphere, but lacked the observational evidence to prove their theories.
De Pontieu and his colleagues changed that by using the Japanese orbiting solar observatory Hinode to peer at the region sandwiched between the sun’s surface and corona, called the chromosphere.
Not only did they spot many Alfven waves, but they also estimated the waves carried more than enough energy to sustain the corona’s temperatures as well as to power the solar wind (charged particles that constantly stream out from the sun) to speeds of nearly 1 million mph.
However, the chromosphere findings alone could not prove the waves carried their energy into the sun’s atmosphere.
Some waves may get reflected back down to the sun instead of passing through the transition region between the surface and atmosphere. Waves that reach the corona also become more difficult to detect using current instruments, thanks to the long line-of-sight.
De Pontieu’s group turned to researchers at the University of Oslo, Norway, who had created a computer simulation representing part of the sun. Once they knew what to look for, the researchers found magnetic waves within the simulation of the corona that strongly resembled the Alfven waves directly observed in the chromosphere.
Even as the simulations helped establish Alfven waves as energy carriers for the sun’s atmosphere and solar wind, the new observational findings will help modelers create improved sun simulations.
De Pontieu’s group focused on Alfven waves generated by the sun’s heat turbulence, but other researchers examined Alfven waves generated when the sun’s magnetic field lines stress and snap back together like invisible magnets.
That reconnection force also creates jets of X-rays that shoot outwards from the sun, as captured by Hinode’s instruments.

For parents worried about how to treat children’s colds now that some medicines have been called into question, the answer may be a dose of saltwater.
A nasal spray made from Atlantic Ocean seawater eased wintertime cold symptoms faster and slowed cough and cold symptoms from returning among children ages 6 to 10, researchers in Europe reported, according to Reuters.
It may be that the salt water has a simple mechanical effect of clearing mucus, or it could be that trace elements in the water play some more significant role, though the exact reason why such a solution works is not known, said Dr. Ivo Slapak and colleagues at the Teaching Hospital of Brno in the Czech Republic.
The researchers said that while saline washes have long been mentioned as a treatment for colds, scientific evidence about whether they work is poor.
The report was published days after the US Food and Drug Administration said children under 2 should not be given nonprescription cough and cold medicines because they are too dangerous for that age group, with deaths, convulsions and rapid heart rates reported in rare cases.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has said cough and cold products are ineffective for children under age 6, and may also be risky.
The Czech study involved 390 children with uncomplicated cold or flu symptoms. Some of the children were given standard treatments such as nasal decongestants. Others received those same medications plus the saline nasal wash, which the authors said “preserves the concentrations of ions and trace elements at levels comparable with those of seawater.“
The study lasted for 12 weeks in the winter of 2006. Children given the salt water spray got it six times a day initially and three times a day in the latter part of the study when the investigators were looking at whether it would prevent symptoms from redeveloping.
The noses of children given the spray were less stuffy and runny the second time they were checked, the study said. And eight weeks after the study began, those in the saline group had significantly fewer severe sore throats, coughs, nasal obstructions and secretions than those given standard treatments.
Fewer children in the saline group had to use fever-reducing drugs, nasal decongestants and mucus-dissolving medications or antibiotics, the researchers said. In addition children who used the salt spray were sick less often and missed fewer school days.

Earthquakes don’t always mean death and destruction--at least for the microbes deep in the crust.
Regular rumblings could be what enables them to stay alive, and maybe even Martian bugs too, Newscientist.com wrote.
Earth’s crust is known to host hardy bacteria even several kilometers below the surface.
These cells have no sun or organic material to sustain them, so they feed off the chemical energy in reactive molecules like hydrogen dissolved in the water seeping out of the rock.
This means their growth and survival is limited by the flow of nutrients from deeper sources.
Now Norman Sleep and Mark Zoback of Stanford University in California say that earthquakes could provide these nutrients. The researchers’ calculations show that seismic events would happen regularly enough to ensure a dependable supply of food right across a tectonic plate, sustaining microbial life for billions of years.
Earthquakes would open up cracks in the crust, they say, releasing pockets of deeper nutrient-rich water and exposing fresh rock that would further drive the chemical reactions that release molecules like hydrogen.
This mechanism might also keep microbes supplied with nutrients deep in the single-plate crust of Mars, they say.

Women’s skulls are thicker than men’s, but they both shrink slowly after we reach adulthood. That’s the conclusion of a new imaging study of 3,000 people published in the Inderscience International Journal of Vehicle Safety.
The detailed results could help in the design of more effective devices for protecting the head in vehicle collisions and other accidents, ScienceDaily reported.
Jesse Ruan of the Ford Motor Company and colleagues at Tianjin University of Science and Technology have devised a non-invasive method for determining and analyzing the critical geometric characteristics of a person’s skull. Their approach is based on head scan images of 3,000 patients at the Tianjin Fourth Central Hospital.
The researchers found that the average thicknesses of the skull in men were 6.5 millimeters, but 7.1 mm in women. The average front to back measurement for men was 176 mm in men, but was less in women at 171 mm. Average width was 145 mm in men and 140 mm in women, the team found.
“Skull thickness differences between genders are confirmed in our study,“ Ruan says, “The next step will be to find out how these differences translate into head impact response of male and female, and then we can design the countermeasure for head protection.“
Skull thickness, as one might expect, improves the outcome for anyone suffering a head injury, but studies have also demonstrated that skull shape can also have an effect. However, the detailed relationship between skull thickness and shape and how well a person tolerates a head injury have not been settled with most studies simply extrapolating from smaller to larger skull and thickness to predict the likely effects of an impact.
The current research, which involved a detailed statistical analysis of the various measurements for all 3,000 people scanned. The analysis shows that the distribution of skull size, shape and thickness do not follow a so-called ’normal’ distribution pattern and so such extrapolations may be invalid.
“Reliable biomechanical geometric data of the human skull can help us to better understand the problem of head injury during an impact,“ the researchers say, “and help in the design of better head protective devices.“

Cabbage white butterfly.

Nowhere in nature is there so much beautiful color as on the wings of butterflies. Scientists, however, are still baffled about exactly how these colors are created.
Marco Giraldo has been examining the structure of the surface of the wings of the cabbage white and other butterflies, ScienceDaily wrote.
Among the things he has discovered is why European cabbage whites are rebuffed more often than Japanese ones. Giraldo will be awarded a PhD by the University of Groningen on 25 January 2008.
The colors on butterfly wings are used as an advertisement. The patterns on the wings enable butterflies to recognize their own species at a distance and differentiate between males and females--rather handy when you’re hunting for a partner.
Just like a pointillist painting, the surface of the wing is a huge collection of colored dots, called scales, each about 50 x 250 micrometers in size.
However, scientists don’t yet know very much about how the color on the wings is formed.
What they do know is that the colors are created in two different ways: via pigments and via nanostructures on the scales, which ensure that light is distributed in ways that are sometimes spectacular. These so-called structure colors can clearly be seen on the morpho butterflies of the South American rainforests.
Marco Giraldo examined the structure and the pigments of the wings of the cabbage white and other whites from the Pieridae family. The physicist chose the whites because they have relatively simple pigmentation.
By comparing the scales of various sorts under an electron microscope, he discovered how the coloration of whites is caused. Giraldo is the first to clarify how the color of these butterflies is influenced by the nanostructural characteristics.
Although the spatial structure of a scale depends on the type of butterfly, there are a number of general characteristics: A scale consists of two layers, linked by pillars. The undersurface is virtually smooth and without structure, but the upper surface is formed by a large number of elongated, parallel ridges, about one to two micrometers from each other.
The color is determined by the dispersal of light by the scale structures and by the absorption of light by any pigments present.
Giraldo discovered that these two layers form an optimal construction: with more than two layers the reflection may be improved, but the wing would become disproportionately heavy.
New color methods can be developed using the knowledge derived from Giraldo’s research. It may be possible to apply the nanostructures observed in butterflies to create impressive optic effects in paint, varnish, cosmetics, packaging materials and clothes.