The beauty of the flower is a byproduct of what it takes for the plant to attract pollinators.

People love flowers for their array of colors, textures, shapes and fragrances. But is pleasing the human eye the purpose of nature’s floral design? Hardly. Survival is the plant’s top priority, reminds Claude dePamphilis, a Penn State plant evolutionary biologist and principal investigator of the Floral Genome Project, Physorg.com said.
“The beauty of the flower is a byproduct of what it takes for the plant to attract pollinators,“ said dePamphilis. “The features that we appreciate are cues to pollinators that there are rewards to be found in the flower.“
Scent, color and size all attract a diversity of pollinators, which include thousands of species of bees, wasps, butterflies, moths and beetles, as well as vertebrates such as birds and bats. Flying insects, comprising the vast majority of pollinators, stop at the plant to eat nectar and pick up pollen, which they then distribute as they visit additional flowers. Noted dePamphilis, “Pollinators are providing a very important service to the plant without which it couldn’t reproduce.“
To aid insects in finding the nectar--and thus, the pollen--many flowering plants have evolved to possess bright colors (hummingbirds and butterflies favor reds and yellows), as well as “nectar guides“ that may only be visible in ultraviolet (UV) light--a wavelength of the light spectrum bees can see and people cannot. From a bee’s-eye-view, the UV colors and patterns in a flower’s petals dramatically announce the flower’s stash of nectar and pollen.
The patterns on flowers that both humans and pollinators can see--such as the lines on petals called striations[[serve as a sort of air traffic control system for bees, and help guide them into the “bull’s-eye“ of nectar and pollen at the flower’s center, added dePamphilis. Thanks to this co-evolutionary trait that developed between the two species, the bee can efficiently visit many blossoms and pollinate a larger number of plants.

Unlike cameras or human air traffic controllers, the new system can monitor planes even in the heaviest downpour or the thickest fog.

Using magnetic field detectors, a team of researchers, led by Uwe Hartmann and Haibin Gao of Saarland University in Germany, has developed a unique system to pinpoint the location of aircraft at airports even in places where other traffic monitoring systems face difficulties.
Their novel approach, tested at airports in Frankfurt and Saarbruecken in Germany and in Thessaloniki in Greece, relies on an array of small, cheap sensors monitoring the “magnetic fingerprint“ of planes--the slight influence aircrafts’ metallic bodies have on the Earth’s magnetic field, Physorg.com wrote.
“Our tests have shown that the system detects all passing aircraft, 100 percent of them, and in 75 percent of cases can pinpoint their location to within 7.5 meters--a level of accuracy comparable to most existing air traffic management systems,“ Gao says.
Most importantly, the system, developed under the EU-funded Ismael project, has some unique advantages over the most common ground-based monitoring systems in use today.
Because it relies on detecting changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, the system can see through obstacles, such as buildings and the fingers of airliner parking bays--structures that create potentially dangerous areas of shadow for radar systems, particularly at large, sprawling airports.
And, unlike cameras or human air traffic controllers, it can monitor planes even in the heaviest downpour or the thickest fog.
“Thessaloniki airport has a major problem with fog, so bad in fact that it has to close for part of the year because air traffic controllers can’t see the aircraft at the end of the runway two kilometers away. In the tests, the Ismael system showed it can solve that problem,“ Gao explains.
The project manager says that, in all the trials, the system lived up to the researchers’ expectations and it has continued to prove its worth in Frankfurt where it is still operating on an experimental basis. The system has also elicited interest from other airport authorities around the world, although it is likely to be several years before it is used commercially.
The project partners--a mixture of academia and technology firms--have, therefore, approached big equipment manufacturers already supplying the airport market for assistance.

When a measurement made on an electrocardiogram, called the QT interval, is longer than normal, it can indicate an increased risk of cardiac arrest. However, within limits, it is not likely to be dangerous if it’s seen in elite athletes, according to a report by UK investigators.
American and European guidelines recommend that athletes with a long QT interval, even in the absence of symptoms or a family history of heart problems, be disqualified from participating in sports, Dr. Sanjay Sharma told Reuters Health. However, the “significance of an isolated long QT in an asymptomatic athlete is unknown.“
Sharma, from King’s College Hospital, London, UK, and associates investigated the occurrence of prolonged QT in a large group of elite British athletes and evaluated its significance using various tests.
Seven of 2000 athletes (six males, one female) had a prolonged QT interval, the authors report, for an occurrence rate of 0.4 percent, the researchers report in the European Heart Journal. All seven athletes were symptomless and none showed irregular heart rhythms during 48 hours of monitoring.
Similarly, none of the athletes developed episodes of irregular heartbeats during exercise testing, the report indicates, but three of the seven subjects had QT values greater than 500 milliseconds (ms)--considered prolonged--during testing.
One of the five athletes who underwent genetic testing had a positive genetic diagnosis, the researchers report. His corrected QT value (QTc) at rest was greater than 500 ms.
“It is highly unlikely that all 0.4 percent of athletes had true long QT syndrome,“ Sharma explained. It’s more likely that a greater heart mass brought on by exercise causes a slight prolongation of the QT interval.
“Our results suggest that athletes with a QTc of 500 ms or more can be regarded to have definite long QT syndrome and should be disqualified appropriately,“ Sharma said.
“However, athletes with QTc of 440-490 ms may be able to compete,“ provided they have no symptoms, have normal results on exercise testing and 24-hour ECG monitoring, and no first-degree family members with abnormalities “unless subsequent genetic testing proves otherwise.“

An Australian teenage girl has become the world’s first known transplant patient to change blood group and take on the immune system of her organ donor, doctors said on Friday, calling her a “one-in-six-billion miracle.“
Demi-Lee Brennan, now 15, received a donor liver when she was 9 years old and her own liver failed, Reuters wrote.
“It’s like my second chance at life,“ Brennan told local media, recounting how her body achieved what doctors said was the holy grail of transplant surgery. “It’s kind of hard to believe.“
Brennan’s body changed blood group from O negative to O positive when she became ill while on drugs to avoid rejection of the organ by her body’s immune system.
Her new liver’s blood stem cells then invaded her body’s bone marrow to take over her entire immune system, meaning the teen no longer needs anti-rejection drugs.
Doctors from Sydney’s Westmead Childrens’ Hospital said they had no explanation for Brennan’s recovery, detailed in the latest edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.
“There was no precedent for this having happened at any other time, so we were sort of flying by the seat of our pants,“ Michael Stormon, a pediatric hepatologist, told local radio.
Stuart Dorney, the hospital’s former transplant unit head, said Brennan’s treatment could lead to breakthroughs in organ transplant treatment, because normally the immune system of recipients attacked the transplanted tissue.

Injecting blood or bone marrow cells into people who have just received a donated kidney can reduce the need for drugs that suppress the immune system, researchers reported.
The stem cells in the blood and bone marrow helped trick the body into tolerating the transplants, two teams of researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, reported Reuters.
In one series of experiments, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston tested the technique on five volunteers who received a kidney from a relative. Four were eventually weaned off their anti-suppression drugs.
“While we need to study this approach in a larger group of patients before it is ready for broad clinical use, this is the first time that tolerance to a series of mismatched transplants has been intentionally and successfully induced,“ said Dr. David Sachs, who helped lead the study.
Doctors have long sought a permanent and reliable way to trick the body into thinking that a transplanted organ is not a foreign invader. The drugs currently in use can have onerous side effects, including cancer and kidney damage.
Bone marrow makes the body’s immune system cells, and the donor’s immune cells presumably took up residence in the transplant patient’s body and helped create a welcoming reception for the kidney, the researchers said.
This technique has been tried before under different circumstances including on multiple myeloma patients.
The new study involved patients whose kidney failure was caused by other problems. Patients first had their bone marrow partially destroyed and then received a drug that kills off T cells--immune cells that play a key role in rejecting transplanted organs.
The patients ended up with bone marrow that was a temporary mix of their own cells and the cells from the donor.
The first two patients did very well. After problems with a third patient, the researchers added a drug to also kill B cells, another element of the immune system.
All four of the successfully transplant patients continue to have functioning kidneys two to five years later, the researchers said.

The enlarged picture taken in 2004 reveals a mysterious figure.

The idea that there may be life on Mars has been around for centuries, but the theory got a dubious boost from recently released photos of the surface of Mars (taken by the NASA robot Spirit) apparently showing a human-like figure.
Several Internet sites have glommed onto the image and suggested the figure could be alive, according to Space.com.
But what is it? Just a rock, astronomers say.
It’s hard enough to accurately recognize figures and faces across the room. Mars, depending on when you measure it, is about 35 million miles away.
The best telescopes aren’t of much help in determining surface features, and that’s why NASA sent robots with cameras to Mars.
The reason many people see a figure on the Martian landscape is the same reason that people see faces in clouds, Rorschach blots, and coffee stains.
This phenomenon, called pareidolia, is well known in psychology, and it is the cause of many supposedly mysterious and miraculous events.
Strong evidence for this psychological explanation lies in the fact that the Spirit image does not look like Martian life (since we don’t know what life on Mars looks like), but instead resembles life here on Earth, specifically human life. The image is the result of human interpretation.
If you look around the full image of the area (not just the close-up), you will find several rocks and features that resemble non-human Earth life, such as armadillos and snakes.
This is of course not the first time that NASA images have been claimed to show evidence of Martian life. A man named Richard Hoagland claimed that 1976 photographs of the Cydonia region of Mars showed a human-like face and was clear evidence of aliens.
In fact, it will actually be pretty easy to determine whether or not the image is of alien life. In later photographs of the area, either the same shape will be there or it won’t. If it is, it’s a rock (unless, of course, little Martian men can hold the same pose for weeks or months at a time).
This is exactly how the “Face on Mars“ was eventually disproven. On April 5, 1998, the Mars Global Surveyor took photographs of the same region in far higher resolution than was possible in 1976. The new images clearly showed an area heavily eroded, and that the face was simply the result of low image quality, pareidolia, and tricks of light and shadow.

What if swallowing a pill with a camera could detect the earliest signs of cancer? The tiny camera is designed to take high-quality, color pictures in confined spaces. Such a device could find warning signs of esophageal cancer, the fastest growing cancer in the United States.
A fundamentally new design has created a smaller endoscope that is more comfortable for the patient and cheaper to use than current technology. Its first use on a human, scanning for early signs of esophageal cancer, will be reported in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, ScienceDaily reported.
“Our technology is completely different from what’s available now. This could be the foundation for the future of endoscopy,“ said lead author Eric Seibel, a University of Washington research associate professor of mechanical engineering.
In the past 30 years diagnoses of esophageal cancer have more than tripled. The esophagus is the section of digestive tract that moves food from the throat down to the stomach. Esophageal cancer often follows a condition called Barrett’s esophagus, a noticeable change in the esophageal lining. Patients with Barrett’s esophagus can be healed, avoiding the deadly esophageal cancer.
But because internal scans are expensive most people don’t find out they have the condition until it’s progressed to cancer, and by that stage the survival rate is less than 15 percent.
An endoscope is a flexible camera that travels into the body’s cavities to directly investigate the digestive tract, colon or throat. Most of today’s endoscopes capture the image using a traditional approach where each part of the camera captures a different section of the image.
These tools are long, flexible cords about 9 mm wide, about the width of a human fingernail. Because the cord is so wide patients must be sedated during the scan.
The scanning endoscope developed at the UW is fundamentally different. It consists of just a single optical fiber for illumination and six fibers for collecting light, all encased in a pill.
Seibel acted as the human volunteer in the first test of the UW device. He reports that it felt like swallowing a regular pill, and the tether, which is 1.4 mm wide, did not bother him.