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Stem cells for stroke victims
THIS UNIVERSE |
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Stem cells for stroke victims Doctors
in Scotland working with British biotech company ReNeuron have treated the first patient in a pioneering clinical trial to test whether stem cell therapy can help patients disabled by stroke. The trial is the first in the world to use neural stem cell therapy in stroke patients, its organisers said on Tuesday, and external experts said it was grounds for “cautious optimism”. Keith Muir of the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, the principal investigator, said the first patient had undergone a successful surgical procedure and been discharged from hospital. The procedure involves injecting ReNeuron’s neural stem cells into patients’ brains in the hope they will repair areas damaged by stroke, thereby improving both mental and physical function. Unlike U.S. company Geron’s clinical trial in patients with spinal cord injuries, which started last month, the Scottish study uses stem cells derived from human foetuses rather than embryos. Foetal stem cells do not have the same flexibility to turn into different tissue types as embryonic ones. Shares in ReNeuron, which won regulatory approval for the trial in January and had initially hoped to launch it in the second quarter of 2010, were 18.4 percent higher by 1110 GMT. Scientists commenting on news of the trial said it was important to guard against raising expectations of miracle cures for thousands of patients in the near future. “The current trial will require extensive tests for efficacy and safety,” said Darren Griffin, a professor of genetics at Britain’s Kent University, who is not involved in the study. “Nevertheless there is room for cautious optimism.” In total, 12 patients will get ReNeuron’s ReN001 cell therapy between six and 24 months after having an ischaemic stroke—caused by a blockage of blood flow in the brain—and their progress will be followed for two years in the trial. If the first study is successful, researchers plan to pursue accelerated clinical development in later-stage clinical trials, focusing initially on more severely disabled stroke patients. Stem-cell technology is viewed as a highly promising new area of medical science, but it has proved controversial, in part because some cell lines are derived from embryos or foetuses. Other research teams are also working with adult stem cells. “It’s far too early to know if the treatment will be successful, but the very fact that the trial is now underway is a milestone for UK stem cell research,” said Anthony Hollander, a professor of rheumatology and tissue engineering at Bristol University. ReNeuron had initially hoped to test its stroke treatment in the United States but switched its efforts to Britain in 2008 following delays at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
regulator. —Reuters |
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Facebook’s futuristic answer to e-mail MARK Zuckerberg, founder of social networking giant Facebook, has said that e-mail would fade out, just like the letter did, as it is slow and informal. The 26-year-old made the claim as he launched the Facebook’s new messaging service, which integrates all web and text-based communications and works instantaneously. The service, perceived as a direct rival to Google’s Gmail, marks a new front in the ongoing and increasingly bitter battle between Facebook and Google to gain the loyalty of users. Zuckerberg revealed that, as rumoured, the 500million people signed up to Facebook would have access to a ‘Facebook.com’ e-mail address. Entire conversation histories going back years will also be saved into users’ accounts and Spam will be completely filtered out, he claimed. “We don’t think that a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail,” the Daily Mail quoted Zuckerberg, as saying at a press conference in San Francisco. “We want people to be able to communicate in whatever way they choose: e-mail, text or Facebook message,” he said. Facebook’s new e-mail system is modelled on instant messaging and on-line chat and will allow people to simplify their communications regardless of how they choose to do it. Texts, e-mail or instant messages will all come into one ‘feed’ and users can respond in any way they want. Zuckerberg said that he was changing Facebook because young people found e-mail was too much of a ‘cognitive load’. He said of the new programme: “It’s not e-mail. It handles e-mail... along with all the different ways you want to communicate.” “The goal of this product is to make it that we can seamlessly integrate across all of these different products very easily,” he added.
— ANI |
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Proof of extra dimensions possible next year: CERN GENEVA: Scientists at the CERN research center say their “Big Bang” project is going beyond all expectations and the first proof of the existence of dimensions beyond the known four could emerge next year. In surveys of results of nearly 8 months of experiments in their Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they also say they may be able to determine by the end of 2011 whether the mystery Higgs particle, or boson, exists. Troposphere is warming too WASHINGTON: Not only is Earth’s surface warming, but the troposphere-the lowest level of the atmosphere, where weather occurs-is heating up too, U.S. and British meteorologists reported on Monday. In a review of four decades of data on troposphere temperatures, the scientists found that warming in this key atmospheric layer was occurring, just as many researchers expected it would as more greenhouse gases built up and trapped heat close to the Earth. Experts find lost genes in wild soybean SINGAPORE: Researchers have found genes in wild varieties of soybean that make them resistant to certain diseases and hope to use them in cultivated species of soy to make them more hardy. They may also have found genes that make wild varieties resistant to drought and saline soil-traits that cultivated soybean will need because the amount of arable land is shrinking around the world. Have astronomers seen the birth of a black hole? WASHINGTON: An exploding star spotted 30 years ago in a nearby galaxy appears to be a newborn black hole, astronomers reported on Monday. X-ray observations suggest the supernova, called SN 1979C, is a black hole in the making, a team of U.S. and European astronomers
said. — Reuters |
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THIS UNIVERSE
What are electromagnetic waves?
Light, heat, radio waves, x-rays, infrared and all such radiation falls in the category of electromagnetic waves. They differ from each other because of the difference in their wave length. This was one of the greatest discoveries of the nineteenth century. They are called electromagnetic waves. They have been given this name because such waves are associated with oscillating electric and magnetic fields normal to each other and propagating in a direction normal to the plane of oscillation. All these waves travel in vacuum at the speed of light. When a car is at high speed, all of a sudden its wheel appears to be spinning backwards although the car is moving in the forward direction. Why and how does this happen? And what is the name of the phenomenon. The effect you see is called stroboscopic effect. To understand this you need to remember the following: When you see a TV picture or a cinema movie you are actually seeing a large number of still images, slightly different from each other, coming one after the other at a rate of about 24 still images in a second! You do not see them as separate because of what is called persistence of vision -which is about one tenth of a second. If the number of still images changed at a rate which less, you will begin to see flicker is the movie. As the scene changes we see continuous movie always moving forward. But a problem can arise if we were watching exactly the same thing, such as a wheel rotating. We discern a wheel rotating if we see the spokes of the wheel following each other in the same direction. But suppose the wheel has only one spectacularly coloured spoke. If in every successive 1/24 second the turning of the wheel takes it in the clockwise direction we would conclude that the wheel is turning in a clockwise direction. But depending on the speed of the car the angle turned in 1/24 a second changes. Indeed we can pass through phases when the wheel turns one full turn in that much time and the wheel would appear to have stopped rotating for a while. Then slightly lower speed might make it appear that there is slow rotation is in the backward direction! It should be clear that the peculiar apparent motion of the wheels of is due to interference between two time gaps. One, the fixed gap between two successive still images of a movie and the other due to the varying period of rotation of the wheel. Readers wanting to ask Prof Yash Pal
a question can e-mail him at palyash.pal@gmail.com |
