Paraphyletic

Science News

... “I thought it was very odd to have only one positive emotion,” says cognitive scientist Aleix Martinez of Ohio State University in Columbus.

So he and colleagues came up with 16 combined ones, such as “happily disgusted” and “happily surprised.” Then the researchers asked volunteers to imagine situations that would provoke these emotions, such as listening to a gross joke, or getting unexpected good news.

When the team compared pictures of the volunteers making different faces and analyzed every eyebrow wrinkle, mouth stretch and tightened chin, “what we found was beyond belief,” Martinez says. For each compound emotion, almost everyone used the same facial muscles, the team reports March 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

Surprise!

Acid-bath method for making stem cells under fire

Miguel Valderrabano

Alcohol may ease the nerves that cause atrial fibrillation

About 1 in 12 Americans over age 80 has atrial fibrillation, a kind of heart arrhythmia. Surgeons and cardiologists have come a long way, honestly, in treating the disorder, which weakens heart flow and significantly increases the chances of ischemia, as well as blood clot-caused strokes. Doctors have even figured out how to fix atrial fibrillation (also called a fib or a-fib) intravenously, via catheter.

The typical treatment now is to burn areas cardiac nerve clusters that are known to be part of the electrical cascade that causes a-fib. Sounds sort of dangerous, but it was the big breakthrough about 10 years ago.

Problem, though, is that this does not seem to be a permanent solution for a lot of people. The nerves somehow repair, or else nearby pathways are recruited for mayhem... and the a-fib returns.

A new technique involves doing all that burning stuff, but ALSO injecting 98% ethanol into a nerve cluster near one of the major cardiopulmonary veins. Electrophysiological measurements at the site (what CAN'T they do through catherers these days?) shows this might be a more permanent solution for a-fib patients.

Power And Syred/Science Photo Library

What your earwax says about your ancestry

... "We could obtain information about a person's ethnicity simply by looking in his ears," chemist Katharine Prokop-Prigge said. Prokop-Prigge is one of the researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia who measured the earwax smells. The team was inspired to see if ethnic groups have different earwax odors after learning that the same gene controls both a person’s underarm odor and the type of earwax they make...

New live-cell printing technology works like ancient Chinese woodblocking

With a nod to 3rd century Chinese woodblock printing and children's rubber stamp toys, researchers in Houston have developed a way to print living cells onto any surface, in virtually any shape. Unlike recent, similar work using inkjet printing approaches, almost all cells survive the process, scientists report in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers, led by Houston Methodist Research Institute nanomedicine faculty member Lidong Qin, Ph.D., say their approach produces 2-D cell arrays in as little as half an hour, prints the cells as close together as 5 micrometers (most animal cells are 10 to 30 micrometers wide), and allows the use of many different cell types. They've named the technology Block-Cell-Printing, or BloC-Printing.

"We feel the current technologies are inadequate," Qin said. "Inkjet-based cell printing leaves many of the cells damaged or dead. We wanted to see if we could invent a tool that helps researchers obtain arrays of cells that are alive and still have full activity."

The NYT's Mark Bittman ponders an American cereal manufacturer's decision to cut genetically modified organisms (GMOs) from one of its products.

Bittman begins asking legitimate questions about the economics of GMOs, but his column gets confused by the time he reaches his third and final point, in which he intimates that "organic" foods are "cleaner." Cleaner than what, it's not clear, but we're to assume he means non-organic, possibly GMO foods.

There are two legitimate safety concerns with GMOs. Just two.

Are the plants or animals containing foreign genetic elements evolutionarily superior to local, wild versions, or competitively superior to other species in the area? If yes, a GMO or its genes are likely to "escape" into the environment, causing unforeseeable ecological changes and possibly damage.

Do the introduced genes to GMOs encode products that cause an allergic response (in humans or other animals of interest, such as pets)?

American companies are required to answer both questions before the FDA will approve widespread, commercial use of a new GMO product.

Commercial GMOs don't contain poisons and they aren't "dirty," as Bittman suggests. A newly invented GMO may not be good for the environment and it may not be healthy, but only rigorous scientific testing can determine that. So many GMOs have been shown to be evolutionarily or ecologically inferior to wild cousins, or shown to contain no allergens, that to dismiss any GMO without having first tested it is irrational.

A common strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus may be a wolf in sheep's clothing.

The deadly USA300 strain, which swept across the country in the 1990s and currently lurks in NFL locker rooms, appears to have swiped genetic components from [Staphylococcus epidermis]. Some of the borrowed genes make the microbe immune to toxins secreted by human skin, researchers report December 17 in mBio.

Image by Tony Hu lab

Early stages of breast cancer could soon be diagnosed from blood samples

What could someday be the first blood test for the early detection of breast cancer was shown in preliminary studies to successfully identify the presence of breast cancer cells from serum biomarkers, say the Houston Methodist Research Institute scientists who are developing the technology.

With a New York University Cancer Institute colleague, the researchers report in an upcoming Clinical Chemistry (now online) that the mixture of free-floating blood proteins created by the enzyme carboxypeptidase N accurately predicted the presence of early-stage breast cancer tissue in mice and in a small population of human patients.

"In this paper we link the catalytic activity of carboxypeptidase N to tumor progression in clinical samples from breast cancer patients and a breast cancer animal model," said biomedical engineer Tony Hu, Ph.D., who led the project. "Our results indicate that circulating peptides generated by CPN can serve as clear signatures of early disease onset and progression."

The technology is not yet available to the public, and may not be for years. More extensive clinical tests are needed, and those tests are expected to begin in early 2014.