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Gene Therapy Improves Sight in Near-Blind Patients
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Leber congenital amaurosis usually begins affecting sight in early childhood and causes total blindness by the time a patient is 30.
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Gene therapy for a rare type of inherited blindness has improved the vision of four patients who tried it, boosting hopes for the troubled field of gene repair technology, scientists said.
Two separate teams of doctors reported successes in using gene therapy to treat Leber congenital amaurosis, or LCA, Reuters reported.
LCA damages light receptors in the retina. It usually begins affecting sight in early childhood and causes total blindness by the time a patient is 30. There is no treatment.
Both teams used a common cold virus to deliver a normal version of one damaged gene that causes the disease, called RPE65, directly into the eyes of patients.
Although both trials were only testing for safety, patients reported they could see a little better afterwards, the researchers told a meeting of eye specialists in Florida and also reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Katherine High of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and colleagues said all three of their volunteers had improved vision after the treatments. Dr. Robin Ali of University College London and colleagues said one of their three volunteers got better.
Because the patients were adults, already had severe sight loss and received only low doses of treatment, researchers had not expected to see a benefit at all.
“This result is important for the entire field of gene therapy,“ said High, a former president of the American Society of Gene Therapy.
One volunteer in Ali’s trial, Steven Howarth, said he had significant improvement in night vision, allowing him to navigate a simulation of a night-time street.
“Now, my sight when it’s getting dark or it’s badly lit is definitely better. It’s a small change--but it makes a big difference to me,“ Howarth said in a statement.
“The fact we see any evidence of improvement under these circumstances gives great hopes for the effectiveness of the treatment,“ Ali said in a telephone interview.
In High’s trial, three patients aged 19, 26 and 26, all reported better vision.
“Patients’ vision improved from detecting hand movements to reading lines on an eye chart,“ said Dr. Albert Maguire of Children’s Hospital.
In each case, only one eye was treated, so the other eye could be used as a “control“ to tell whether vision improved.
Ali and his team are working on the research with Targeted Genetics Corp, which made the genetically engineered virus. The Children’s Hospital and University of Pennsylvania team developed their own virus, called a vector, to carry the corrective gene.
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Emotional Words Best Heard in Left Ear
New research suggests that declarations of love, jokes, or words of anger are best remembered when they are heard through the left ear, while instructions, directions and non-emotional messages have more impact on the right side.
It is all to do with how our brains process information. Although the left and right hemispheres, or sides, of the brain are similar structures, they have specialized functions, Timesonline said.
The left side, it is suggested, is more logic-based and dominant, while the right is the more imaginative side, more visual, intuitive, emotional and spatially aware.
Because the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, the left ear has been shown in some research to be the route to the emotional side of the brain, and the right ear to the non-emotional, logical side.
But it’s not just ears that are affected. The right eye has been shown to be best for processing colors, the right foot is the most vulnerable to tickling and the left side is the favored one for holding babies.
The different hemispheric roles are, for example, more pronounced in patients who have no corpus callosum, the structure that connects the two hemispheres.
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Plastic Red Blood Cells Created
Red blood cells travel through the bloodstream delivering vital oxygen to body tissues and taking away unwanted carbon dioxide--and they have to squeeze through blood vessels as thin as 3 micrometers across to do it.
But in some diseases, such as malaria and sickle cell disease, red blood cells lose this ability to deform, NewScientist wrote.
Because of the small size of red blood cells and the demanding work they do, nobody has succeeded in making artificial versions to help people with such conditions.
Now though Joseph DeSimone, a chemical engineer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US, thinks he knows how.
He has created tiny sacks of the polymer polyethylene glycol just 8 micrometers across-- in the range of human red blood cells--that are capable of deforming in a way that allows them to pass through the tiniest capillaries.
Polyethylene glycol is biologically benign, but binds easily with other substances, which makes it ideal for carrying cargo through the blood, says DeSimone.
For example, a haemoglobin-type molecule carried inside the bag could deliver oxygen to the body and carry away carbon dioxide. The bags could also deliver drugs instead, or help as contrast agents for scans such as magnetic resonance imaging, PET or ultrasound.
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Language Skills
Psychologists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that
children as young as six are as adept at recognizing possible verbs and their past tenses as adults.
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Ant Extracts Can Treat Arthritis
Ants may be an unwelcome intruder at picnics, but they could soon be a welcome guest in your medicine cabinet. Chemists in China report identification of substances in a certain species of ants that show promise for fighting arthritis, hepatitis, and other diseases.
For centuries, ants have been used as a health food or drink ingredient in China to treat a wide range of health conditions, including arthritis and hepatitis, ScienceDaily reported.
Researchers suspect that these health effects are due to anti-inflammatory and pain-killing substances in the ants. However, the exact chemicals responsible for its alleged medicinal effects are largely unknown.
In the new study, Zhi-Hong Jiang and colleagues analyzed extracts from a particular species of Chinese medicinal ant (Polyrhacis lamellidens) commonly used in folk medicine. The researchers identified at least two polyketides, potent natural products also found in plants, fungi and bacteria that have shown promise in studies by others for fighting arthritis, bacterial infections, and a variety of other diseases.
Computerized Combat Glove Developed
RallyPoint Inc., a startup based in Cambridge, MA, has developed a sensor-embedded glove that allows a soldier to easily view and navigate digital maps, activate radio communications, and send commands without having to take his hand off his weapon.
According to Technologyreview, for soldiers carrying a plethora of equipment, finding and using electronic controls on their bodies can be awkward, says Forrest Liau, the president and cofounder of RallyPoint. “We wanted to make a device that would have all the necessary components in a combat-ready way,“ he says.
A sensor-laden glove for wearable computing is not an entirely new concept. Researchers at MIT, the University of Toronto, and the Georgia Institute of Technology have been working on systems that focus on detecting hand and arm movements by using accelerometers, gyroscopes, and other high-tech sensors. But Gerd Kortuem, an assistant professor of computing at Lancaster University, in England, says that most of these prototypes “don’t work reliably and are not robust enough.“
Birds Can Detect Predators Using Smell
Many animal species detect and avoid predators by smell, but this ability has largely been ignored in the study of birds, since it was traditionally thought that they did not make use of this sense.
However, according to ScienceDaily, it has now been discovered that birds are not only capable of discerning their enemies through chemical signals, but that they also alter their behavior depending on the perceived level of risk of predation.
The use of smell to detect chemical signals can be useful for birds in various situations, such as feeding and orientation. However, they can greatly increase their chances of survival if they can tell whether or not the smell they have detected is associated with a predator.
Luisa Amo de Paz, the study’s lead author, explained that, “Birds can detect the presence of a predator“ thanks to their sense of smell. Working as a biologist at the Spanish National Research Council’s Natural History Museum while the study was carried out, Amo de Paz is currently working for the Netherlands Institute of Ecology.
The research provides the first ever evidence to show that birds are able to distinguish their predators using chemical signals.
New Rock Drilling Tool Coming
Tunneling through soft ground is relatively easy. Set a drilling machine to work in hard rock such as granite or basalt, though, and the rate of progress drops dramatically because of slow cutting speed and the increased rate at which drill bits wear out.
According to NewScientist, one way to speed up drilling would be to heat up the rock ahead, causing it to crack. Engineers have attempted to do this using gas jets, lasers and even electric heaters, but with little success, says Jacques Ouelett, a mining engineer at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Instead, he suggests fitting a drilling head with a low energy microwave generator to heat rock just ahead of the drill bit. This fractures the rock efficiently making it much easier to cut.
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