Cancer scientists at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia have shown that a gene that is involved in regulating aging also blocks prostate cancer cell growth. The researchers, led by Kimmel Cancer Center director Richard Pestell, M.D., Ph.D., hope the newly found connection will aid in better understanding the development of prostate cancer and lead to new drugs against the disease.
SIRT1 is a member of a family of enzymes called sirtuins that have far-reaching influence in all organisms, including roles in metabolism, gene expression and aging.
SIRT1 is the target of the Sirtris Pharmaceutical efforts to develop a more potent and longer lasting variation on resveratrol. High doses of resveratrol turn on the SIRT1 gene. So one obvious implication of this research is that resveratrol might restore the androgen sensitivity of androgen insensitive prostate cancer by turning on SIRT1 which will somehow change mutated androgen receptors and make them no longer stimulate prostate cancer cell growth. That, in turn, would make that fatal form of prostate cancer back into a form that can be controlled with Lupron and other testosterone suppressor drugs.
“We know that sirtuins play a role in aging, and that the risk for prostate cancer increases with aging, but no one has ever linked the two until now,” says Dr. Pestell, who is also professor and chair of cancer biology at Jefferson Medical College.
“We’ve shown that by making a prostate cancer with cells overexpressing a mutation for the androgen receptor, which is resistant to current forms of therapy, we can almost completely block the growth of these cells with SIRT1,” he says. Dr. Pestell and his team report their findings in November in the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology.
Turning on SIRT1 stopped cancer growth.
According to Dr. Pestell, prostate cancer cells can express a mutation that makes patients resistant to current forms of treatment such as hormonal therapy. Such therapy focuses on inactivating the androgen receptor by giving agents that shut off testosterone production.
In one experiment, the scientists took a series of mutations in androgen receptors from prostate cancer patients who are resistant to hormonal therapy and showed that SIRT1 blocks receptor activity, halting cancer growth. “We systematically tested each androgen receptor mutation,” Dr. Pestell explains. “These mutant receptors are resistant to current therapies and are all blocked by expression of SIRT1,” adding that prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels were used to confirm this. Rising PSA levels are frequently an indication of prostate cancer growth or recurrence, whereas falling levels indicate tumor shrinkage.
This result does not suggest (at least not to me) that resveratrol will reduce the risk of getting prostate cancer in the first place. The SIRT1 gene's protein product probably prevents mutated androgen receptors from stimulating an existing prostate cancer. But usually prostate cancer grows with non-mutated androgen receptors in its early stage. Though I can't rule out the possibility that higher activation of SIRT1 (using resveratrol or Sirtris' SRT501 experimental drug or another drug) might reduce prostate cancer risks.
If resveratrol or Sirtris's SRT501 work to restore androgen sensitivity to prostate cancers they will buy prostate cancer sufferers months or perhaps years of additional life. Still, this is not an ideal solution. The testosterone suppressor drugs that would likely still be necessary probably reduce cognitive function, certainly cause muscle mass loss, and cause other harmful side effects. But if cancer cell growth can be stopped by this method the cells might also become more amenable to other treatments such as vaccines and monoclonal antibodies.
Thanks to Robert Silvetz for the heads up on this report. Also see my previous posts on resveratrol: Resveratrol Increases Energy In Humans, Mice and Wine Compound Resveratrol Protects Mice From Obesity Damage.
Resveratrol occurs in such low concentrations in wines as compared to the doses used in experiments to tweak sirtuin genes that some scientists suspect that other compounds in wines are delivering the heart healthy benefits claimed for wine consumption. British researchers think the've identified which compounds in wines deliver the biggest benefit and which wines have the most of such compounds.
"The endothelial cells which line our arteries are an important site of action for the vascular protective effects of polyphenols," Roger Corder, of Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry in London, said in a prepared statement. "We purified the most biologically active polyphenols and identified them as procyanidins."
The researchers then tested wines from two regions in southwest France and Sardinia and compared them with wines from other countries. The wines from France and Sardinia had surprisingly high levels of procyanidins, often five to 10 times more than wines produced elsewhere, the researchers found.
Wines high in tannins are the ticket.
The benefit comes from suppressing construction of a peptide that constricts blood vessels.
Procyanidins, however, suppressed the synthesis of a peptide called endothelin-1 that constricts blood vessels.
"The traditional production methods used in Sardinia and southwestern France ensure that the beneficial compounds, procyanidins [tannins], are efficiently extracted," says researcher Roger Corder of Queen Mary's William Harvey Research Institute of the University of London, in a news release.
"This may explain the strong association between consumption of traditional tannic wines with overall well-being, reflected in greater longevity," he says.
Soak the grapes with their seeds longer.
The winemakers of that region tend to use more traditional techniques in which Tannat grapes are soaked with their seeds longer, boosting the procyanidins.
You could also take pills that contain grape seed extract. Maybe swallowing grape seeds while eating seeded grapes is a good idea?
I'm eating dark chocolate and cranberries to get the same compounds. Walnuts, raspberries, blueberries, apples, and dark grape juice are all good source. I would expect that vintners in other regions could adjust their wine preparation techniques to greatly increase the concentrations of the procyanidins as well.
You have options. Choose a way to get more procyanidins.
The demand for beauty enhancement treatments is growing so rapidly that doctors from other specialties are switching fields to complete against dermatologists and plastic surgeons. The New York Times reports that dermatologists and plastic surgeons are complaining that doctors from other specialties lack the training needed to properly provide competent service.
Dermatologists and plastic surgeons refer to their new colleagues as “out of scope” or “noncore” physicians, and they strongly object to the intrusion, insisting that cosmetic medicine requires lengthy training.
But the dispute also has all the elements of a turf war, with specialists reluctant to cede ground in a field in which Americans spend an estimated $12 billion a year.
“Dentists are doing Botox, and urologists are doing hair transplants and vein removal,” said Dr. Ellen Gendler, a dermatologist in Manhattan who is a clinical associate professor at New York University School of Medicine. “Everyone wants to be a plasticologist.”
For their part, some doctors from other fields contend that the latest cosmetic procedures, like facial injections and vein removal, are far less complicated and risky than Caesarean sections or appendectomies and that the fundamentals can be learned in continuing-education classes.
Certainly some of these treatments are not hard to deliver and even a nurse could be trained to do them. But I'd be really hesitant to have plastic surgey on my face by someone who until recently was delivering babies or removing appendixes. Buyer beware. Try to meet people who have used a particular doctor for the type of treatment you want. Look up information about malpractice lawsuits. Be careful.
Family docs are switching to beauty therapies and cosmetic treatments.
The American Academy of Family Physicians, a national group that represents 94,000 family practitioners and medical students, has started offering courses for its members on how to use Botox, facial fillers, lasers and chemical peels.
As I've argued previously, the growing popularity of therapies aimed at rolling back the signs of aging and increasing beauty are great market signals that provide great incentives for the development of more effective treatments. I expect the more entrepreneurial market for optional but popular plastic surgery and dermatological treatments will pioneer many stem cells therapies and gene therapies.
Here's yet another way (other ways including lowered offspring intelligence) that women who smoke cigarettes damage their unborn fetal children. Cigarette smoking causes fetuses to grow up into adults who are more likely to smoke.
The authors base their findings on over 3,000 mothers and their children, who were part of a long term pregnancy study in Brisbane, Australia (MUSP) in 1981.
They assessed the smoking patterns of liveborn children when they reached the age of 21 in relation to the behaviour of their mothers during the pregnancy.
Around a third of the women said that they had smoked during their pregnancy.
The proportion of the children who took up regular smoking was greater among those whose mothers had smoked during the pregnancy than among those whose mothers had not.
Children whose mothers had smoked while pregnant were almost three times as likely to start smoking regularly at or before the age of 14 and around twice as likely to start smoking after this age as those whose mothers were non-smokers.
Smoking patterns among children whose mothers stopped smoking while pregnant, but then resumed the habit, were similar to those whose mothers had never smoked.
Note that the kids born to mothers who temporarily stopped smoking while pregnant did not have a higher risk of developing nicotine addiction later in life.
This reminds me of a 2001 study on the effect of meth on developing brains. Fetuses exposed to meth become more prone to brain damage from using meth when adults.
Exposure before birth to methamphetamine, an increasingly popular "club" drug, renders males, even as adults, much more susceptible to the drug's brain-damaging effects, reveals a study performed in mice by researchers at the University of Chicago.
If males who were prenatally exposed to methamphetamine take the drug themselves as teens or adults, the increased toxicity could hasten the onset of brain disorders such as Parkinson's disease, warn the authors in the August issue of the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, published electronically on July 13.
"No one who values his or her brain should take this drug," cautions neurotoxicologist Alfred Heller, M.D., Ph.D., professor of neurobiology, pharmacology and physiology at the University of Chicago and director of the study. "If you're male, and if your mother took methamphetamine -- and it's difficult to be certain she didn't -- you should not go near this drug."
My guess is that the biggest cost of addictive drug use comes from the effects on fetuses and babies exposed to the drugs their moms use. Lower IQs, higher irritability, and greater impulsitivty are just some of the ways that fetal drug exposure is causing lifelong costs for exposed offspring and for the rest of us since we have to deal with these damaged people.
Our ancestors did not undergo selective pressures to select for offspring better able to handle addictive drugs. If they had encountered these compounds over tens of thousands of years the compounds would probably not even be addictive. We'd have genetic variations that protect us from opioids, amphetamines, and nicotine.
My guess is that the biggest cost of addictive drugs comes from damage to developing fetuses and babies. Lower IQs, attention deficit disorder, greater impulsivity, and other cognitive changes are among the costs and probably reduce earnings potential as well as increase criminality and other behaviors that harm self and others.
Ever since I was a child I've read in low lighting conditions and continue to do so to this day. Yet as a kid I was repeatedly scolded and told that reading without lots of bright light would damage my eyes. I didn't believe these claims (having discovered that lots of things adults believe are not based on any scientific knowledge). Several years ago I came across an article which quoted a chairman of a medical school ophthalmology department who said that reading with little light will do no harm to your eyes and that claims to the contrary are just a popular myth.
I also sit with a chair tilted back and have also done that for as long as I can remember. I've been waiting for evidence that vindicated me on that choice too. Now researchers in Scotland think they've found evidence that the conventional wisdom on correct sitting posture is bad for your back and you are best off with a higher angle between your thighs and torso.
CHICAGO -- Researchers are using a new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to show that sitting in an upright position places unnecessary strain on your back, leading to potentially chronic pain problems if you spend long hours sitting. The study, conducted at Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen, Scotland, was presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
Normal is bad.
“A 135-degree body-thigh sitting posture was demonstrated to be the best biomechanical sitting position, as opposed to a 90-degree posture, which most people consider normal,” said Waseem Amir Bashir, M.B.Ch.B., F.R.C.R., author and clinical fellow in the Department of Radiology and Diagnostic Imaging at the University of Alberta Hospital, Canada. “Sitting in a sound anatomic position is essential, since the strain put on the spine and its associated ligaments over time can lead to pain, deformity and chronic illness.”
Back pain is the most common cause of work-related disability in the United States, and a leading contributor to job-related absenteeism, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. By identifying bad seating postures and allowing people to take preventative measures to protect the spine, Dr. Bashir and colleagues hope to reduce back strain and subsequent missed work days.
“We were not created to sit down for long hours, but somehow modern life requires the vast majority of the global population to work in a seated position,” Dr. Bashir said. “This made our search for the optimal sitting position all the more important.” The researchers studied 22 healthy volunteers with no history of back pain or surgery. A “positional” MRI machine was used, which allows patients freedom of motion—such as sitting or standing—during imaging. Traditional scanners have required patients to lie flat, which may mask causes of pain that stem from different movements or postures.
The patients assumed three different sitting positions: a slouching position, in which the body is hunched forward (e.g., hunched over a desk or slouched over in front of a video game console); an upright 90-degree sitting position; and a “relaxed” position where the patient reclines backward 135 degrees while the feet remain on the floor. Measurements were taken of spinal angles and spinal disk height and movement across the different positions.
That bolt upright sitting posture shows the most sign of strain on the spine.
Spinal disk movement occurs when weight-bearing strain is placed on the spine, causing the internal disk material to misalign. Disk movement was most pronounced with a 90-degree upright sitting posture. It was least pronounced with the 135-degree posture, indicating that less strain is placed on the spinal disks and associated muscles and tendons in a more relaxed sitting position.
The “slouch” position revealed a reduction in spinal disk height, signifying a high rate of wear and tear on the lowest two spinal levels. Across all measurements, the researchers concluded that the 135-degree position fared the best. As a result, Dr. Bashir and colleagues advise patients to stave off future back problems by correcting their sitting posture and finding a chair that allows them to sit in an optimal position of 135 degrees.
“This may be all that is necessary to prevent back pain, rather than trying to cure pain that has occurred over the long term due to bad postures,” he added. “Employers could also reduce problems by providing their staff with more appropriate seating, thereby saving on the cost of lost work hours.”
What I still want to know: Should one lean back and have just the upper part of the back touch the back of the chair? Or should the whole chair back be tilted at the same angle as the back and touch the back all the way down?
Neuroscientist David Robbe of Rutgers University and his colleagues tested the impact of THC and a synthetic cannabinoid on rats that had their heads restrained. The drugs affected certain brain waves: the theta (four to 12 hertz) and fast ripple (100 to 200 hertz) waves diminished significantly, whereas the drug had a slightly lesser impact on gamma (30 to 80 hertz) waves. Because theta and gamma oscillations are thought to play a critical role in creating and storing short-term memories--and fast ripple oscillations may allow such short-term memories to be moved into long-term storage--this suppression could mean missing memories for the rats.
The stoners ought to try to remember the details of this research to think about it next time they take a toke.
The THC caused hippocampus nerve signal firings to fall out of sync and to fire less powerfully. The rats had been trained to alternate their routes through a maze and the rats on THC did a far worse job of remembering which route to take next based on which route they took previously.
Normal rats accurately alternate their routes about 90% of the time. But rats given THC, which caused asynchronous nerve firing, chose a random direction on each run, and so chose the correct route 50% of the time.
The disruptive effect of THC wore off within a few hours. Robbe says he hopes to find out whether chronic exposure to the drug causes lasting effects on the hippocampus in rats. Scientists studying people have found that long-term marijuana users gradually become worse at learning and remembering things (see Pot-smoking your way to memory loss).
Neurons that spend a lot of time firing in some different way in response to a drug probably reconfigure somehow in response to the different pattern of firing. Brains strengthen and weaken connections in response to stimuli, whether those stimuli come from the environment or from drugs or an interaction of the two.
What I'd like to know: What does the THC do to change the development of a fetal hippocampus?
BMW has developed a prototype 7 series car which runs on either hydrogen or gasoline. Read the linked review from MIT's Technology Review below for the details. The company plans to produce only 100 of these cars and lease them out to selected customers in the United States and Europe for several months at a time in order to get feedback and experience with hydrogen. The engine is a standard internal combustion design rather than a fuel cell because BMW couldn't find a fuel cell that could deliver the power and perform with the reliability needed in a production automobile. BMW's engineers had to compromise on both the gasoline and hydrogen performance of this engine in order to build an engine that'll run on both gasoline and hydrogen. But a couple of other characteristics of the vehicle stood out to me in the reivew. First off, if hydrogen leaks past the pistons into the crankcase it can blow up the engine.
Still, the company has gone further than any other in regulating the combustion of hydrogen. Just three years ago, the engine would run for several minutes and then break down with a big bang, says Melcher. "Boom. We love explosions!" he laughs. It turned out that a little bit of hydrogen was leaking past the pistons, mixing with oil, and exploding. That problem was solved by modifying the piston rings to prevent leakage. Engine control systems also had to be modified to deal with the far faster combustion of hydrogen--it burns 100 times faster than gasoline--and to regulate it in such a way as to keep emissions of combustion byproducts like nitrogen oxides to trace levels.
This isn't a problem on a fairly new engine. But after, say, 100,000 miles the rings and cylinders get worn. Hydrogen (H2) is a much smaller molecule than the hydrocarbons in gasoline. So the wearing on a cylinder and rings will start letting hydrogen through much sooner than they will start letting gasoline through. So I expect a failure mode of exploding engines. Am I wrong to expect this?
But the more fundamental flaw is due to the need to use liquified hydrogen in order to make it sufficiently energy dense. Hydrogen must be kept very cold to stay in a liquid state. This car's hydrogen storage container is extremely well insulated. But a half tank of hydrogen will still heat up fast enough to evaporate away in just 9 days. That just seems unacceptable to me.
As the hydrogen becomes gaseous, pressure rises inside the tank. At a certain point, a pressure-relief valve opens. A little bit of hydrogen gas vents out (about 10 to 12 grams per hour), goes through a catalytic converter to turn it into water, and exits the car through a special pipe in the rear bumper. If you aren't driving the car, it takes only 17 hours before this venting starts. A half-full tank will almost completely "boil off" in nine days.
Granted, once you've lost your hydrogen you can still operate the vehicle with gasoline from the gasoline tank. But the need for a back-up gasoline tank uses up more space, makes the vehicle heavier, and the lost hydrogen costs money.
Hydrogen has 3 big problems as an automotive power source, the first two of which are illustrated in this car:
I do not know when the fuel cell and solid hydrogen storage problems will be solved. But my suspicion is that the battery problem for electric cars will be solved first.
Then there is the problem of how to produce hydrogen in ways that do not pollute. First off, if the environmental goal is the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions (a more expensive goal to reach than the reduction of conventional pollutant emissions) then production of hydrogen from hydrocarbon fossil fuels makes it a lot easier to capture the carbon. The hydrogen production is done in large centralized facilities where the weight and durability of carbon capture equipment does not pose the problems that carbon capture would in cars.
Also, hydrogen could be produced from nuclear reactors designed to optimize the production of hydrogen. That might turn out to be the cheapest and environmentally friendliest way to produce hydrogen.
Hydrogen is not the only way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles. Better batteries to enable the electric car is another approach. Also, biomass for liquid fuels is still another and more immediately adoptable approach.
Currently biomass is the big growth area. The high costs of fossil fuels seem likely to continue the shift toward biomass. But the increasing popularity of hybrid cars has increased the incentive for companies to develop better batteries. So I'm expecting battery technology to make some big advances in the next several years. Both biomass and batteries can advance by smaller steps driven by demand for existing products. Hydrogen has to make big strides on a multitude of problems without a current market to help fund its advance. So I'm much less optimistic about hydrogen in the short to medium term.
Depending on the wind speed average and the amount of energy consumed every month, Skystream typically lowers a household electricity bill by 20% to 90%. It is not uncommon for Skystream owners with total-electric homes to have monthly utility bills of only $8 to $15 for nine months of the year (2005 data). The amount of money a Skystream saves you in the long run will depend upon its installed cost, the amount of electricity you use, the average wind speed at your site, and other factors.
For a typical home in California, where the cost of energy is $0.14/KWh, the Skystream 3.7 will produce 400 KWh per month. This will save a household $672 per year on their utility bill. At this rate, they will pay for their Skystream system in approximately 12 years (after rebates, payback is as low as 7 years. This example assumes: $8,500 installed cost, power in an 8 MPH breeze with full output achieved at 20 mph.
Skystream lists conditions you need to meet for their product to work for you. They say you need at least a half acre of land that is unobstructed. Note that eliminates most suburban and city homes right there. Also, you need zoning permission to put up a tower 42 feet high (12.8 meters). Plus, you need a utility that'll let you sell back excess electricity. All these factors shrink the market. Though I can imagine large commercial buildings putting up a batch of these things on their roofs.
The Skystream 3.7 just won a Popular Science magazine award.
FLAGSTAFF - AZ, November 7, 2006/PRNewswire/ -- Today Southwest Windpower announced its newest product, the Skystream 3.7™, has been awarded a 2006 Best of What’s New Award from Popular Science in the Home category. Each year, Popular Science reviews thousands of new products and innovations and includes the top 100 winners in its annual Best of What’s New issue. To win, a product or technology must represent a significant step forward in its category.
“Best of What’s New is the ultimate Popular Science accolade, representing a year’s worth of work evaluating thousands of projects,” said Mark Jannot, editor of Popular Science. “These awards honor innovations that not only influence the way we live today, but that change the way we think about the future.”
Skystream is a next-generation residential power appliance that hooks up to the home to help reduce or eliminate monthly electricity costs. Skystream is the first compact, user-friendly, all-inclusive wind generator (with controls and inverter built in) designed to provide quiet, clean electricity in very low winds. With Skystream, homeowners and small business owners now have the power to choose their electricity source.
For the sake of argument let us grant them their assertion that in many homes in California the Skystream can pay itself back in 12 years or even 7 years with government rebates. So should people in the rest of the United States (or the world for that matter) rush to buy Skystreams for their homes? That depends on local conditions, and not just wind conditions.
First off, that payback time depends on the ability to sell back excess electricity to your local electric utility when the wind is blowing hard and you are not using much electricity. Now, if you always use lots of electricity that might not matter. But if you live in an area where you can't sell back excess electricity and your energy usage is highly uneven then that'll make the payback time much longer.
Second, electric costs vary considerably around the United States. Electricity costs more in California than in most states. In 2006 (and all these numbers are up sharply from 2005) California's electricity is about 14.52 cents per kilowatt-hour (kwh) and in New England it costs about 16.23 cents per kwh with 16.72 per kwh in New York (wow!) versus a US national average of 10.41. The mountain states pay only 9.01 and Wyoming only 7.68. Other really cheap states (generally heavy users of coal but with hydro power too) include Tennessee and Utah at 7.7, .Missouri at 7.62, Nebraska at 7,48, North Dakota at 7.11, and South Dakota at 7.87. Down at the bottom are coal states Kentucky at 7.08 and West Virginia at 6.25. Idaho appears to have the cheapest electricity in America at 6.23 cents per kwh. Outside of New England and Californa the two other high cost electric states are Alaska at 14.74 and Hawaii at an incredible 23.53.
If you live in one of higher cost states then you should find out if you can sell electricity back to your utility. If you live in Hawaii and get a fair amount of wind then the ability to sell electricity your utility probably doesn't matter. These Skystream gadgets could be just the ticket to lower electric power costs.
Unless you live in a pretty windy place it would be imprudent to install one of these things without first installing some sort of cumulative wind speed measuring device at the same altitude as you'd install this device. Or find some other way to find out what your typical wind speeds work out to.
If you live in a lower cost electricity state then you save less in two ways. First off, when you use less utility power you save less money. Second, if you can even sell electric power back to your utility you earn back less money off your electric bill.
Cheap home wind power will make battery powered cars more desirable. Imagine we get cheap high energy density batteries that'll power a car for a couple hundred miles. That'd make all undependable energy sources (e.g. wind, solar, even hydropower from streams that run only when it rains) more attractive. You come home at night, plug in the car to the wind mill, and it charges only part of the time.
With batteries to charge up you won't care whether the wind blows in the afternoon, evening, or early morning. You won't even care if it blows every day. If your car can go hundreds of miles you don't need for it to get recharged every day. You just need to average enough to keep your car ready to go.
The restrictions on wind tower installation in suburban and urban environments makes photovoltaics a better longer term bet for local generation using renewable energy sources. But photovoltaics still cost much more than wind and utility power. For people living in rural areas home wind power could become pretty popular. It will deliver power even in the short days of winter when photovoltaics will deliver less electricity. Also, it will complement solar even in the summer by delivering some power at night.
Faced with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress some big companies that extract and use large amounts of fossil fuels are reexamining their opposition to restrictions on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and on other so-called greenhouse gases. Companies would rather start bargaining once they see CO2 emissions regulations as inevitable.
Exxon Mobil Corp., the highest-profile corporate skeptic about global warming, said in September that it was considering ending its funding of a think tank that has sought to cast doubts on climate change. And on Nov. 2, the company announced that it will contribute more than $1.25 million to a European Union study on how to store carbon dioxide in natural gas fields in the Norwegian North Sea, Algeria and Germany.
George W. Bush still has over 2 years left to go in his presidency. So the energy industry does not face an immediate threat of tougher regulations. But they need to think long term because their capital investments have operational lifespans measured in decades.
The US electric power industry has not expanded much since being mostly deregulated. Demand growth has reached a point where the industry can't wait any longer to build new plants. They suddenly find themselves wanting regulatory certainty that was less important when they were only trying to prevent costly regulations on existing plants.
Duke Energy, for example, has not added significant power generation in two decades, and customer demand is rising 1 to 2 percent a year. The company has included a price for the carbon emitted in its cost estimates for a new coal-fired generating plant proposed for Indiana.
"If we had our druthers, we'd already have carbon legislation passed," said John L. Stowell, Duke Energy's vice president for environmental policy. "Our viewpoint is that it's going to happen. There's scientific evidence of climate change. We'd like to know what legislation will be put together so that, when we figure out how to increase our load, we know exactly what to expect."
One reason companies are turning to Congress is to avert the multiplicity of regulations being drafted by various state governments.
Electric power plant operators face a dilemma. Electric power plants last decades. Decisions on their designs made today need to be optimal over the life of the plants. Should they build nuclear? Coal with conventional emissions controls only? Coal with CO2 capture technologies?
If they built new electric generator plants now under current regulations and tougher regulations are enacted 5 or 10 years from now the cost of retroffing those plants to capture CO2 will be far higher later than if they design and build the plants to allow CO2 capture. But if the tough regulations do not come fairly soon then the money spent on the CO2 capturing design will turn out to be a bad investment. They are better off knowing sooner when the regulations will come and what the regulations will be.
Regulatory uncertainties are not their only problem. They have to make guesses about future natural gas prices and also possible breakthroughs in competing technologies such as wind and photovoltaics. Huge capital investments made today in nuclear or coal could turn out bad choices 10 years from now if photovoltaics become dirt cheap.
Tougher regulations on CO2 emissions are pluses for all the non-fossil fuel energy sources. Companies like Duke and Entergy would be a lot more inclined to build nuclear plants if, say, CO2 emissions taxes were going to add 2 cents per kwh of coal generated electricity.
What I'd like to know: What does Duke Energy think its cost is for using today's technology to do full CO2 capture and sequestration for a new coal-fired electric power plant?
What I'd also like to know: Does the cost of full CO2 capture and sequestration make new nuclear power plants a cheaper source of electricity than coal?
As for the environmental effects of CO2 emissions regulations in the United States: China's growth in use of coal is so fast that US efforts to restrict emissions won't matter.
Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.
To make matters worse, India is right behind China in stepping up its construction of coal-fired power plants — and has a population expected to outstrip China's by 2030.
The US capacity expansion is down in the noise next to China.
By 2012, the plants in three key countries - China, India, and the United States - are expected to emit as much as an extra 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to a Monitor analysis of power-plant construction data. In contrast, Kyoto countries by that year are supposed to have cut their CO2 emissions by some 483 million tons.
...
China is the dominant player. The country is on track to add 562 coal-fired plants - nearly half the world total of plants expected to come online in the next eight years. India could add 213such plants; the US, 72.
To restate an argument that I know long time readers are already bored of by now: We need to accelerate the development of non-fossil fuels energy technologies. If we make those technologies cheap enough they will replace coal and oil without the need for impossible to achieve international treaties. China and India aren't going to go along with the greenie dreams of some affluent Western environmentalists. Poorer people have more immediate worries.
One-third of the engineers at MIT now work on biological problems, according to Graham C. Walker, MIT biology professor. Yet it can be challenging for biology and engineering students to understand each other.
The divide, deeper than mere semantics, can touch on basic cultural differences, he says. "Even among top-level scientists, our fundamental ways of conducting inquiry differ, depending on our interests and training."
Teaching introductory biology to MIT undergraduates, Walker experiences the disciplinary disconnect firsthand. "It's a constant challenge," he says, "to find ways to make biology comprehensible and relevant to students who think like engineers."
Professor Walker has a $1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to figure out better ways to teach biology to engineers. MIT now has a biological engineering degree program. These are signs of the times.
Biology used to advance at a snail's pace because its tools were so primitive. The influx of talent from semiconductor engineering and other engineering disciplines has greatly sped up the rate of progress in the field and promises to speed it up by orders of magnitude in the future. The field of microfluidics chases the idea of highly automated and cheap labs on a chip.
Imagine a chip made using semiconductor processes that has lots of reaction vessels and miniature tubes and valves, all digitally controllable. No more pipettes. No petri dishes. No lab techs making mistakes from the tedium. Software will be able to carry out long experimental sequences. Computer programs with limited domain-specific artificial intelligence will even be able to generate hypotheses and carry out experiments. That's where the world of biology is going.
Pure simulation is also going to play a larger role in biological research. Rather than use real cells and real organisms an increasing fraction of biological research will take place in computer simulations using math and known rules of behavior of biological components and systems. The faster the computers become the more of all biological research will become doable in mathematical models written in software.
Using mouse embryonic stem cells Harvard researchers funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have created a first draft map of how a set of proteins interact with each other to maintain embryonic stem cell state.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers have created a map that charts the largely unexplored protein landscape that regulates a stem cell's ability to differentiate into multiple types of mature cells.
Understanding this protein network in greater detail could give stem cell biologists a new set of tools to coax mature cells to revert to an embryonic state, said the researchers. Reprogramming adult cells in this way could provide an alternative source of stem cells to use in regenerating tissues damaged by disease or trauma, rather than employing embryonic cells, they said.
HHMI investigator Stuart Orkin and his colleagues at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School published their findings November 8, 2006, in an advanced online publication in the journal Nature.
They've also shown that depletion of concentration of a few of the proteins causes the cells to start showing signs that they are becoming more differentiated (specialized) to become cell types that carry out specific functions.
All these proteins will become targets for drug development to block or enhance their effects in order to shift cells into other states. Scientists will build on this work to create more detailed maps of how these proteins interact to control cell state. Likely still other proteins will be found to also interact with these proteins to control cell state. An increasingly more detailed map of relations between these proteins will provide a guide for where to intervene to control stem cell state. This report is a great foundation for further work along this line.
Orkin hopes the map will help guide the development of improvements in methods to better control reprogramming of cell state.
Orkin said that thus far experiments aiming at reprogramming mature cells into a stem cell-like state have yielded cells that imperfectly resemble embryonic stem cells. “However, with this new understanding of the network of regulatory factors, it might be possible to refine this approach to reprogramming,” he said.
He's being overly modest here. Of course this map will be useful for development of techniques to control cell state.
Note how these researchers think of the proteins in cells as forming complex circuits just as computer chips have complex circuits.
The regulatory network that maintains a stem cell's ability to become many different cell types - a characteristic called pluripotency - also prevents the cell from inappropriately differentiating into a mature cell, while keeping it poised to undergo maturation when required. This precise control relies on intricate circuits of interacting proteins that both regulate one another and govern the activity of genes.
While I sometimes write posts about promising individual stem cell treatments no one announcement of a promising treatment or even a dozen such announcements will amount to much of a breakthrough given our current deficient state of knowledge on how cells work. The real breakthroughs that will provide us with the most power to produce treatments are going to come from the development of knowledge on how cells control their differentiation (i.e. how cells specialize to become heart muscle cells or liver cells or other specialized types). So this announcement is much more important than the average report about stem cell advances.
Once scientists understand the complex circuitry governing cell differentiation the next set of real important breakthroughs (though mostly invisible to the general public) will come. Scientists will seek to intervene in those cellular circuits and to do so they will develop techniques to tweak those circuits in highly precise and controlled ways.
Cells in the embryonic state are several state changes away from any other state such as muscle cell or artery lining cell or liver cell. Once we have detailed knowledge of the circuits that control cell state the need for embryonic stem cells will go way down. It will become possible to start with a cell in any state and tweak it to shift into any other state.
Previous research has shown that the Nanog gene is a key regulator of whether a stem cell acts like an embryonic stem cell. Orkin's team used this previously discovered knowledge about Nanog to use it as a starting point to map the cell differentiation regulatory circuitry.
As the jumping-off point of their mapping effort, Orkin and his colleagues used a protein called Nanog, which other researchers' experiments had indicated was central to regulation of stem cell pluripotency. The researchers first tagged Nanog so that when they removed it from cells, they would simultaneously remove any proteins that were attached to it.
These experiments enabled them to identify numerous proteins that interact with Nanog, including some already known to regulate pluripotency. To confirm that the proteins they had found functioned to maintain stem cell pluripotency, they depleted the levels of several proteins in embryonic cells and observed that the cells then expressed markers of differentiation.
Drugs could emulate the depletion of a protein by blocking its activity. So each of these several proteins are obvious targets for drug development. To change stem cells into specialised cells or vice versa we need drugs that will bind to these regulatory proteins to turn them on or disable them. Scientists will gradually assemble large toolsets of molecules that can bind to regulatory proteins and by using them in different combinations and orders they will be able to change any cell type to any other cell type.
The researchers have created an initial map of how the proteins interact to maintain embryonic stem cell state.
Next, the researchers created a protein interaction map that showed the relationships among the various proteins. The map will provide stem cell biologists with an important guide for future studies, said Orkin. “Even though some of these factors were known to be important in pluripotency, exactly how they work and who they talk to and interact with was completely unknown,” he said.
This research is important for another reason: These scientists did not try to study one or two proteins at a time. If they did we'd have to wait another century before rejuvenation therapies become possible. The development of assay tools which allow measurement of many proteins or many genes at once has allowed scientists to study complex networks of interactions. Since cells contain many kinds of components functioning in complex networks this ability to collect more data about more target cell components at once is essential if we are to have a chance of benefitting from stem cell therapies.
Early DNA sequencing and testing technology made it easier to find single point mutations where just a single DNA letter is different. Now scientists are employing techniques that allow identification of larger scale differences where big sections of the genome show up as multiple copies and the number of copies varies between people. At least 10% of human genes vary between people in the number of internal sequences or whole genes that are found in each person.
New research shows that at least 10 percent of genes in the human population can vary in the number of copies of DNA sequences they contain—a finding that alters current thinking that the DNA of any two humans is 99.9 percent similar in content and identity.
I never bought into the politically correct claims from figures around the human genome project a few years ago about how genetically similar we all are. Humans have evolved in too many local environments with unique selective pressures for that to be the case. Even this paper does not uncover the full extent of genetic variation in the human species. Expect to see more such reports.
This discovery of the extent of genetic variation, by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) international research scholar Stephen W. Scherer, and colleagues, is expected to change the way researchers think about genetic diseases and human evolution.
The idea that large copy variations exist is not new news. Reports have been coming out over the last few years suggesting that copy variations play a big role. But this is the first report I'm aware of that tries to more comprehensively measure the extent of human genetic variation due to copy variations. Note again that Scherer's group has not discovered all such genetic variations. Their sample size of only 270 people from 3 races doesn't begin to capture the extent of the variation within each race let alone the variations in Amerinds, Australian Aborigines, and other groups. Plus, their technique for detecting copy variations probably has limitations that caused them to miss some even in the samples they studied.
Discovery of large numbers of functionally significant variations is good news for a number of reasons. The greater number of variations allows even more comparisons of humans to see how variations on each gene affect how human metabolism functions. Also, it provides indication that we need more methods of DNA testing in order to do personal genome testing.
This group found copy variations that affected 10% of all genes. But, again, this represents a lower bound on the total. The variations that are going to be harder to find are the ones that are rarer. Every person alive probably has genetic variations unique to them. We need really cheap personal DNA sequencing and DNA testing to uncover all the variations that exist.
Genes usually occur in two copies, one inherited from each parent. Scherer and colleagues found approximately 2,900 genes—more than 10 percent of the genes in the human genome—with variations in the number of copies of specific DNA segments. These differences in copy number can influence gene activity and ultimately an organism's function.
Scherer's team used DNA samples from 270 people who have given DNA to the International Hap Map project. That project is aimed at identifying single letter genetic variations and how groups of single letter variations tend to occur together. Their goal is not only to map the extent of genetic variation but also to look for ways to predict some variations due to the presence of other variations.
To get a better picture of exactly how important this type of variation is for human evolution and disease, Scherer's team compared DNA from 270 people with Asian, African, or European ancestry that had been compiled in the HapMap collection and previously used to map the single nucleotide changes in the human genome. Scherer's team mapped the number of duplicated or deleted genes, which they call copy number variations (CNVs). They reported their findings in the November 23, 2006, issue of the journal Nature.
Scherer, a geneticist at the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto, and colleagues searched for CNVs using microarray-based genome scanning techniques capable of finding changes at least 1,000 bases (nucleotides) long. A base, or nucleotide, is the fundamental building block of DNA. They found an average of 70 CNVs averaging 250,000 nucleotides in size in each DNA sample. In all, the group identified 1,447 different CNVs that collectively covered about 12 percent of the human genome and six to 19 percent of any given chromosome—far more widespread than previously thought.
Many genes linked to a variety of diseases have copy number variations (CNVs).
Not only were the changes common, they also were large. "We'd find missing pieces of DNA, some a million or so nucleotides long," Scherer said. "We used to think that if you had big changes like this, then they must be involved in disease. But we are showing that we can all have these changes."
The group found nearly 16 percent of known disease-related genes in the CNVs, including genes involved in rare genetic disorders such as DiGeorge, Angelman, Williams-Beuren, and Prader-Willi syndromes, as well as those linked with schizophrenia, cataracts, spinal muscular atrophy, and atherosclerosis.
In related research published November 23, 2006, in an advance online publication in Nature Genetics, Scherer and colleagues also compared the two human genome maps—one assembled by Celera Genomics, Inc., and one from the public Human Genome Project. They found thousands of differences.
"Other people have [compared the two human genome sequences]," Scherer said, "but they found so many differences that they mostly attributed the results to error. They couldn't believe the alterations they found might be variants between the sources of DNA being analyzed."
A lot of the differences are indeed real, and they raise a red flag, he said.
Doing individual DNA testing on copy variations is probably harder than doing it for single letter differences. But this research paper will probably cause more scientists to work on better and cheaper techniques for measuring copy variations.
Personalized genome sequencing—for individualized diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease—is not far off, Scherer pointed out. "The idea [behind comparing the human genome sequences] was to come up with a good understanding of what we're going to get when we do [personalized sequencing]," he explained. "This paper helps us think about how complex it will be."
Copy variations can deliver a few benefits. First off, having more copies of a gene can allow it to get expressed more rapidly. There's a limit to how fast a gene can get transcribed (read) to make messenger RNA. If more copies of the gene exist then they can get read in parallel to produce more copies of messenger RNA (mRNA) in a given amount of time. Then the mRNA gets translated into chains of amino acids which form peptides which, in turn, make up proteins or serve other roles.
Copy variations also make it possible for each copy to take get mutated to make custom versions of peptides that can do different things under different circumstances. One copy can serve the old purpose for which the gene exists and another copy can mutate to better serve some new need that has arisen.
Mark Clayton of the Christian Science Monitor reports that home micro combined-heat-and-power (micro-CHP) systems are becoming cheap enough that the market for home electric generators that also supply heat is starting to take off.
Since Malin changed his home heating system to micro-CHP in February, 18 other families in the Boston area also have adopted the technology, which squeezes about 90 percent of the useful energy from the fuel. That's triple the efficiency of power delivered over the grid.
Factories and other industrial facilities have used large CHP systems for years. But until the US debut of micro-systems in greater Boston, the units had not been small enough, cheap enough, and quiet enough for American homes. Add to that the public's rising concern about electric-power reliability - seen in a sales boom of backup generators in the past couple of years - and some experts see in micro-CHP a power-to-the-people energy revolution.
"Right now these residential micro-CHP systems are just a blip," says Nicholas Lenssen of Energy Insights, a technology advisory firm in Framingham, Mass. "But it's a ... technology that ... could have a big impact as it's adopted more widely over the next five to 10 years."
Get this: These things pay for themselves by lowering total cost of electricity.
Micro-CHP doesn't come cheap - just with a long-term discount. Basic systems cost from $13,000 to $20,000, installed. Even at the lower range, that's at least $6,000 more than a new high-efficiency hot-air furnace, even after a gas company rebate. Result: The payback period on the initial investment is three to seven years, depending on the cost of electricity, say officials at Climate Energy. The company expects to install about 200 systems next year, mostly in New England.
How fast they pay back probably varies by a lot more than 3 to 7 years. This is so for a few reasons. First off, residential electric costs in the United States vary from 6.23 cents per kilowatt-hour (kwh) in Idaho to 23.53 cents per kwh in Hawaii. Even that table which lists average electric costs per state understates the range of variation since some areas of states have different rates than other areas of the same states. Similarly, per capita electric energy usage by state varies by a factor of 4. Plus, the heat that comes from the gas-fired home electric generators saves much more money in colder states than in warmer states. During warmer periods the heat from the electric generator just becomes waste heat. If you use a lot of electricity, live in a cold state, have natural gas available (not all do) and it is fairly cheap then the economic argument for getting a micro-CHP device is very strong.
Micro-CHP could make home solar power more practical. Micro-CHP could kick in when the sun does not shine. Throw in some micro wind turbines on the roof and then micro-CHP would only need to kick in when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow.
In my posts Eternal Youth, Overpopulation, And Instincts To Reproduce and Selective Pressure Grows For Belief In God I argued that a continued decline in fertility rates in industrialized countries seems unlikely because selective pressures are increasing the frequency of alleles that favor the desire to have offspring. Not everyone was persuaded by this argument, as the comments on those posts attest. Well, a new study by the CDC reports not only did fertility in the United States not decline in 2005, it actually increased slightly.
The number of births and the general fertility rate (GFR) increased slightly, whereas the crude birth rate remained unchanged from 2004 to 2005. The preliminary estimate of births in 2005, 4,140,419, increased 1 percent from 2004 (Tables 1, 5, 6, and 8) (2). Births rose for Hispanic, American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN), Asian or Pacific Islander (API), and non-Hispanic black women, but declined slightly for non-Hispanic white women. The crude birth rate in 2005 was 14.0 births per 1,000 total population, unchanged from 2004. The preliminary 2005 GFR (66.7 births per 1,000 women age 15-44 years), however, rose slightly from 2004, to the highest level since 1993 (2). The GFR rose for Hispanic and AIAN women, declined slightly for API women, and was essentially unchanged for non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic black women.
We are going to witness an increase in fertility as both genes and beliefs that favor fertility get selected for. It is not reasonable to expect the human race will escape selective pressures for higher fertility.
Even the development of biotechnologies for offspring genetic engineering will not stop natural selection from operating on the human genome. Natural selection operates on genetic variations. Whether the genetic variations are generated by chance events that generate mutations or by human minds choosing alleles from a catalog the result will be variations in offspring desire to have children of their own. Therefore selective pressures will still be able to work when we reach the point where people can make choices on which genes to give to their offspring.
It seems reasonable to expect that people who like children the most will be the ones who are most inclined to select genetic variations that cause their offspring to share their ardour for babies and children. Those children will have more children and will be more likely to give their children the same sorts of genetic variations. So how does reproductive biotechnology end natural selection? I do not see it happening unless governments intervene.
A team at University of British Columbia in Canada including Weihong Song has found that oxygen deprivation activated the gene BACE1 which causes beta anyloid production and therefore likely more plaque formation.
Song’s team found that oxygen deprivation triggers a greater activation of the BACE1 gene. More beta-amyloid means more plaques and, in turn, more neuron death. So getting enough oxygen to the brain may help stave off Alzheimer’s in people with known risk factors, says Song.
A diet that reduces your risk of heart disease will probably reduce your risk of Alzheimer's.
BACE1 converts amyloid into beta amyloid.
The link between low oxygen and plaque formation may be a gene called BACE 1, he added. This gene encodes a protein that converts the precursor amyloid molecule to the more dangerous beta-amyloid form. In their studies with mice, Song's group found that lower oxygen levels increased the activity of the gene.
Lower oxygen might also lead to Alzheimers by reducing the amount of energy available to dispose of plaque. Lower oxygen reduces the ability of cells to break down sugar for energy. The energy gets used to run many cellular processes including junk disposal. So oxygen deprivation could also work to cause brain diseases by reducing the ability of cells to take out the trash.
Eat a diet that is good for your heart and circulatory system. You'll also reduce your risk of stroke, dementia, Alzheimer's, and other degenerative diseases as well.
Sheffield University professor Bill Ledger claims he has developed a test which will predict the decline of a woman's fertility by comparing hormone levels to results from other women.
The first two are Inhibin B and AMH, which decline as the menopause approaches.
The third is a pituitary hormone known as FSH - this tends to increase when the menopause nears.
A combination of the three will indicate the woman's reserve fertility, scientists say.
This is then plotted onto a graph showing the woman's position compared with the average fertility for women of the same age.
The predictive nature of this test means that the woman's ovarian reserve can be predicted for the next two years, says manufacturer Lifestyle Choices which is linked to the University of Sheffield.
The test costs £179 in British pounds or about $339 US.
Used in advance of IVF, it would give women judged to have a low chance of success time to prepare emotionally for the heartache of failing to conceive.
It could also allow those judged to be the least fertile to decide against having IVF, which costs up to £7,000 a time.
Prof Ledger said: "I don't think you can persuade a woman not to have a go with IVF because they are really desperate and it is a life-changing thing to decide you'll never have children.
"But you can soften the blow if you warn them from the start that the hormone results are dreadful and the chance of getting eggs, let alone embryos and babies is less than say, five per cent."
Women with poor odds can then consider donor eggs or adoption. Egg donation is harder to arrange in jurisdictions where donors can not sell their eggs. But British women who want to buy eggs could probably buy eggs in America. That'd increase the cost due to travel expenses. But some women can afford it.
Beyond age 35 the odds of conception go down rapidly.
Figures from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority show that fertility rates plummet beyond the age of 35, reaching almost zero by 45. Miscarriage also becomes a risk the older women conceive. At 40, the risk is double that at 20 years, with 40% of all pregnancies leading to miscarriages.
Fewer eggs and less chance of a pregnancy going to completion both work against successful pregnancies once a woman reaches her 40s. Though some women age more slowly and still can have successful pregnancies into their 40s.
Resveratrol increases energy production in humans and increases mouse endurance on treadmills.
CAMBRIDGE, MA and Strasbourg, France – November 16th, 2006 – Sirtris Pharmaceuticals and the University Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg announced that in an article published today in Cell, “Resveratrol improves mitochondrial function and protects against metabolic disease by activating SIRT1 and PGC-1α.” Lagouge et al., Cell. 2006; 127: 1–14, SIRT1 was shown for the first time in a human population to accelerate metabolic rate.
In a human population in Finland, SIRT1 was linked to increased energy expenditure as demonstrated by genetic studies of three variants of the SIRT1 gene. The study also showed that treating mice with resveratrol increased mitochondrial biogenesis leading to increased exercise endurance and protection from diet induced obesity. Activation of SIRT1, the best characterized of the recently-discovered family of sirtuin enzymes, was shown to be the mechanism by which these therapeutic benefits occur.
The doses used in mice, 200 mg/kg and 400 mg/kg, is milligrams per day per kilogram of body weight of the mice. Well, scale that to humans and it becomes clear the dose is very high. A 150 lb human is 68 kilograms. That works out to over 27 grams per day.
Mice were dosed with 200 mg/kg or 400 mg/kg of resveratrol daily in either normal chow or high fat chow. The mice on resveratrol lost weight due to decreased fat, and this was attributed to an increase in the number and function of mitochondria. The resveratrol-treated mice also exhibited improved insulin sensitivity and an increased metabolic rate. Notably, mice treated with resveratrol showed a two-times increase in exercise endurance. These effects were shown to be mediated through SIRT1 and PGC-1α.
The scientists who did the work are at prestigious research universities.
The authors of the Cell article include the teams of the principal investigator Johan Auwerx, M.D. Ph.D., Professor at the Medical Faculty in Strasbourg, at IGBMC (Unité mixte de recherche CNRS, Inserm, University Louis Pasteur), France, and of Pere Puigserver, Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore (now at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School in Boston), both members of the Scientific Advisory Board of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, and Sirtris scientists: Peter Elliott, Ph.D. Senior Vice President and Head of Development, Phil Lambert, Ph.D. Senior Director of Pharmacology, and Jill Milne, Ph.D., Senior Director of Biology.
It would be hard to get regulatory approval for a drug that increased life expectancy because it is a claim that is hard to prove in a clinical trial. But Sitris is chasing a more provable claim: That their modified resveratrol molecule, SRT501, will reduce the symptoms of old age and obesity such as high unhealthy blood lipids and insulin resistance in the form of type II diabetes.
“This work is significant because it shows that a SIRT1 activator can protect against metabolic disease, highlighting the therapeutic potential of sirtuins. Resveratrol a compound found in the skin of red grapes and hence in red wine, could very well explain the French Paradox,” said Johan Auwerx.
Sirtris has initiated a human Phase 1b clinical trial in diabetes with SRT501, a proprietary formulation of resveratrol with improved bioavailability. SRT501 is the first small molecule to enter human clinical trials that is designed to activate SIRT1. Sirtris has applied this scientific discovery to the development of SRT501, which activates SIRT1, for the treatment of diseases of aging such as metabolic and mitochondrial disorders. In addition, Sirtris has a robust pipeline of novel small molecule drug candidates that are potent SIRT1 activators and are chemically distinct from resveratrol.
“This important work highlights the significance of SIRT1 as a therapeutic target for metabolic disease. Based on the continuing scientific evidence, as shown in this most recent Cell article, we are continuing to advance drug candidates to translate the science of sirtuins into new treatments for diseases of aging, such as diabetes,” said Peter Elliott, Ph.D. Senior Vice President and Head of Development at Sirtris Pharmaceuticals.
“These new human data support SIRT1 as a therapeutic target for metabolic disease. Our broad pipeline of sirtuin modulators have potential in a number of diseases of aging,” said Christoph Westphal, M.D., Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals.
Now for the qualifiers and caveats.
Back in March 2005 Sirtris co-founder David Sinclair of Harvard said that most commercial resveratrol preparations have no active resveratrol in them - with activity measured by the ability to activate the SIR2 enzymes.
Resveratrol is not an easy molecule to protect from oxidation. Most commercially available supplements I have tested have no ability to stimulate SIR2 enzymes.
Longevinex sells resveratrol to many researchers. But their commercial resveratrol preparation has only 100 mg of resveratrol per capsule and costs more than $1 per capsule. But the recent study by David Sinclair and Rafael de Cabo showing resveratrol protected mice from the harms of obesity used a dose of resveratrol that would be the equivalent of 1600 mg for a 150 lb human. Whereas the study above on mice used the equivalent of 27 grams (27,000 milligrams) of resveratrol for a 150 lb human.
Bulk sources of resveratrol from knotweed can be found on the internet. But which of those sources is selling real active resveratrol? Your guess is as good as mine.
Then there's the question of whether this stuff is safe. We do not know. Okay? Really, we do not know. We need a big study of large numbers of people taking a gram of resveratrol a day with all sorts of checks done on them to look for bad signs. My guess is we are not going to see such a study on resveratrol because the money is in making a patentable commercial variation of resveratrol into a marketable drug. That'll take 6, 7, 8 years more and hundreds of millions of dollars.
In the comments section of my post on the David Sinclair and Rafael de Cabo study on resveratrol you'll see a reader who claims he's taking over 1 gram of resveratrol a day with very beneficial effects. He thinks he has a good trustworthy source for large doses.
Where do resveratrol and the Sirtris drug SRT501 fit into the larger picture of anti-aging treatments and life extension? If they work then they probably work by slowing down aging the same way that calorie restriction does. The interest in the Sir1 and similar sirtuin genes comes from studies on calorie restriction's effects on gene expression in yeast and rodents. But we do not know for sure that calorie restriction will increase human life expectancies.
Now, if resveratrol and SRT501 do extend life that's a good thing because they'll help keep us alive until rejuvenation therapies such as gene therapies and stem cell therapies become available. That companies are trying to develop drugs that mimic the effects of calorie restriction is a good thing. I wish them luck and watch their progress closely.
But we still need the rejuvenation therapies and we need even greater efforts to develop rejuvenation therapies. For more on that read about Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS). We won't need to slow the rate of aging when we can reverse aging. Though slowing the rate of aging will still let us go longer between rejuvenation therapy episodes.
An article in the Washington Post reports claims by fertility clinics and couples looking for donor eggs that Asian egg donors in the United States are hard to find.
But as egg donation has surged over the past two decades, clinics and donor recruiting agencies say the supply of ethnic minority donors, especially Asians, has not kept pace with demand. For reasons probably involving complex cultural attitudes about fertility and basic marketing principles, Asian eggs are hard to find.
This strikes me as a temporary problem. Higher prices will bring forward more donors. Asian ethnics would be smart to advertise in college newspapers at elite colleges to get eggs from smarter students. The costs are higher. But the benefit of having smarter kids on average will pay itself back many times over.
Clinics that are offering only $6000 could always raise their offering prices. Surely some of their customers could afford to pay more. The money is a very small portion of the total costs for raising a kid.
Donors are usually in their fertile 20s. After passing medical and psychological tests, they inject themselves with hormone stimulants for about one month. They are then anesthetized while a physician removes the eggs with a needle. Most clinics in the Washington region pay donors about $6,000.
The Web site of the Washington Fertility Center asks for "urgently needed" Chinese, Ethiopian, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Middle Eastern, Filipino and Vietnamese donors. Recently, its online donor database featured 152 donor profiles. Among the donors were two of Middle Eastern descent and 10 Asians, of whom one was part Indian -- one of the rarest donor ethnicities, doctors say.
Some are afraid to tell their relatives and friends they can't start a pregnancy.
Because infertility is seen as failure in some cultures, and because adoption is uncommon among Asians and Muslims, some observers speculate that despairing infertile couples opt for egg donation without telling anyone -- which also prevents them from asking relatives or friends to be donors. That secrecy makes a donor of the same ethnicity even more crucial, doctors say.
To women of those wanted ethnicities who want to make money selling their eggs: Ask yourself how much money it would take to make it worth going through the time and effort and risks from ovary stimulation drugs such as ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. My advice: Demand what you think will make it worth the risks and trouble.. If you are provably very smart (e.g. very high IQ, high SAT scores, advanced scientific or medical degrees) then demand tens of thousands of dollars. If you offer to sell your eggs try to get top dollar.
The article reports on the practice of Indian Americans buying eggs in India. This allows selection of donors from the same caste and region.
When genetic testing becomes cheap and detailed in what it reveals I expect to see a large increase in the use of donor eggs. The advantages of donor eggs will become greater once eggs can be chosen to produce healthier, smarter, better looking, and better behaved kids.
The New York Times reports on an international collaboration of scientists called the Holocene Impact Working Group which believes asteroids hit the Earth far more often than previously thought and 600 feet high chevrons 3 miles from the ocean in Madagascar are evidence for a massive asteroid 4800 years ago which a caused tsunami wave. (and the article is a good primer on how geologists look at soil samples for evidence of past events)
Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion. Instead of once in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate, catastrophic impacts could happen every 1,000 years.
The researchers, who formed the working group after finding one another through an international conference, are based in the United States, Australia, Russia, France and Ireland. They are established experts in geology, geophysics, geomorphology, tsunamis, tree rings, soil science and archaeology, including the structural analysis of myth. Their efforts are just getting under way, but they will present some of their work at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December in San Francisco.
This year the group started using Google Earth, a free source of satellite images, to search around the globe for chevrons, which they interpret as evidence of past giant tsunamis. Scores of such sites have turned up in Australia, Africa, Europe and the United States, including the Hudson River Valley and Long Island.
First of all, isn't it great that Google Earth is speeding research into the asteroid threat? Is it possible for us non-experts to look at Google Earth pages and recognize Chevrons? Can someone collect a set of Google Earth URLs that display chevrons from around the world?
The chevrons these scientists are finding are all pointed at nearby large bodies of water. So all over the world there are signs of past massive waves which have slammed inland at various times in history. But scientists who study near earth asteroids are skeptical because they find too few asteroids to account for the number of chevrons claimed to be from mega-tsunamis due to ocean asteroid hits.
Asteroid detection and deflection research already struck me as woefully underfunded before I read this article. Now the possibility that major asteroids might strike the Earth far more frequently than previously believed makes the urgency of asteroid research even greater.
If someone spots an asteroid tomorrow that is going go hit the Earth 2 days later we'll all spend the following 2 days feeling really really stupid for not doing more to prevent an entirely avoidable threat to our existence. Why not avoid that outcome and find the orbit of every asteroid out there?
The guys are going under the knife in order to stave off the appearances of aging.
Although men still comprise only 12% of all cosmetic surgery patients, a growing number are seeking minimally invasive procedures to take the edge off aging. From 2000 to 2005, the number of men seeking these procedures increased 44% to 911,850, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgery.
The two biggest factors driving this trend, say experts, are the advances in products used to minimize wrinkles, and a growing feeling among men that getting cosmetic procedures is acceptable. "Men used to say, 'So what? I'm a guy. Who cares?' " says Dr. Brian Kinney, a Los Angeles-based plastic surgeon. "Now they do care. A lot of guys reach age 35 and want to nip any signs of aging fast. They consider it part of their upkeep."
Are guys doing this more to look young and virile in the workplace or in order to be more appealing to women?
I think having a middle aged or old aged look used to be more of a prerequisite for moving up the corporate ladder in large and slow changing corporations. Now the examples of business success tend to be guys in their 20s and 30s who made it big in venture capital start-ups. Youthfulness is more correlated with the qualities needed to success in business. So I'd expect a middle aged guy who wants to present his ideas to venture capitalists to worry that the VCs want to see someone young and energetic looking. Hence the desire for treatments that help a guy look bright eyed and bushy tailed.
What's the best news in all this? The bigger demand for treatments that simulate youth also means a bigger the demand for products that actually restore youth. All those guys who are buying the nip/tuck treatments are a potential market for stem cell therapies. People making pitches to venture capitalists to fund a start-up to develop stem cell therapies for facial collagen production are going to be able to point at the big bucks guys and gals are willing to spend on plastic surgery.
We are already seeing crude forms of cell therapies now where fat cells are taken from other parts of the body and injected into the face in order to restore shrunken facial appearances. Methods to train cells to grow and to become other cell types will be eagerly embraced by plastic surgeons and plastic surgery patients. Their demand for stem cell therapies will provide revenue flows to fund refinements of the first stem cell therapies that hit the plastic surgery market.
MIT's Technology Review reports a company is going to build a demonstration plant for a technology which they claim will produce ethanol from wood chips as cheaply as ethanol from corn.
Experimental methods for converting wood chips and grass into ethanol will soon be tested at production scale. Mascoma Corporation, based in Cambridge, MA, is building demonstration facilities that will have the capacity to produce about one-half to two million gallons of ethanol a year from waste biomass. The startup recently received $30 million in venture-capital money, which is fueling its scale-up plans.
Mascoma is genetically engineering microorganisms to do part of the work to convert wood into simple sugars. They say at the current state of their technology their production cost will be similar to that of corn ethanol. They expect further development of their technology will cut their ethanol production cost in half.
Corn ethanol does not scale. Whereas some experts think wood ethanol could scale all the way to a total replacement for gasoline.
Corn grain, the current source of ethanol in the United States, requires large amounts of land and energy to produce. This, along with the demand for corn as food, limits the total amount of ethanol that can be produced from corn to about 15 billion gallons a year--about three times what is currently produced. If the fuel is to supplant a sizable fraction of the 140 billion gallons of gasoline consumed each year in the United States, ethanol producers will need to turn to biomass such as wood chips and switchgrass. These resources are cheaper and potentially much more abundant, and they can be converted to ethanol much more efficiently than corn can because they require less energy to grow (see "Redesigning Life to Make Ethanol").
Since ethanol has less energy per gallon than gasoline that potential 15 billion gallons of ethanol amounts to only 10 billion gallons of gasoline or one fourteenth of current US gasoline consumption. Since demand is rising it represents an even smaller fraction of future demand and does not address demand for diesel, aircraft fuel, and other uses of fossil fuels.
Biomass from wood and other sources might be able to replace all gasoline in the United States.
Indeed, ethanol from such sources could replace "a very large fraction" of the gasoline currently used for vehicles, says Gregory Stephanopoulos, professor of chemical engineering at MIT. He says some experts estimate that with gains in efficiency and high yields of ethanol, all the gasoline for transportation could be replaced; the most conservative estimates say that about 20 percent could be replaced.
As I read the continuing series of reports on advances in biomass technology I'm starting to get a sense that the people who are fighting to prevent global warming are fighting yesterday's battle. Biomass energy is going to drop so far in price that ethanol will replace most of the current uses of gasoline and diesel fuel. If that happens then environmentalists will need to start worrying about how much of the world's landmass will get shifted into production to produce biomass for energy.
My guess is that wood biomass will be less disruptive for animals and insects. Trees take years to grow. So once planted the area they occupy will provide habitat for species that can migrate in. But I'd like to see analyses on the likely effects of large scale tree biomass energy from people with expertise on habitats. Will even savannahs get planted with trees and will a large number of types of habitats become monocultures that support a smaller range of plants and animals?
Harvard environmental studies professor Michael McElroy argues the United States does not have enough land to scale up ethanol production all that much.
Some 73.4 million acres of land were harvested for corn in the United States in 2004—23 percent of the nation’s total cultivated land area. Anticipating the demand for additional corn for ethanol, the futures market currently projects a 25 percent increase in the price of a bushel of corn for 2007. How will farmers respond to this incentive? There are two possible options. One is to increase the total planted area. The second is to favor corn over alternative crops, such as soybeans. But soybeans are already in short supply globally, and there are plans to use them as a source of biodiesel fuel as well. And if we opt to expand the total cultivated area, we will have to open up much less productive acreage for cultivation, with presumably higher applications of fertilizer and additional reliance on irrigation. Neither option is attractive in terms of either economics or the implications for environmental quality. At a minimum, we should expect higher prices for the production of either ethanol, or food, or both (corn and soybeans are essential components of animal feed in the United States).
I've done rough calculations in previous posts where I figured out how much land mass it would take to grow enough corn to replace all oil and natural gas in used in the United States. The rough estimate was well over a third of the US land mass assuming that production yield on the additional acres would be as high as the 160 bushels typically seen on existing corn acres and under cultivation in the United States. But of course the additional acres would have far lower productivity. Plus, the pesticide run-off, the additional demands for irrigation water, and other problems with scaling up makes corn ethanol completely impractical as a major source of energy.
Some existing ethanol production plants get 2.6 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn. I've seen claims that some plants get 2.7 gallons of ethanol per bushel and an announcement for a technology that might boost the ratio to 2.8 gallons per bushel. Multiply by two thirds to get the energy equivalent for gallons of gasoline.
Suppose we imagine a future technology that'll extract 3 gallons of ethanol per bushel of corn. That's like 2 gallons of gasoline. Then an acre would produce 2 gallons times 160 bushels or 320 gallons of gasoline equivalent energy. But there's an unresolved controversy as to how much energy input is needed to produce the bushels of corn in the first place. Some fraction of the ethanol output would need to be fed back into agricultural production to make the corn. So the net energy yield per acre of corn is probably far less than the equivalent of 320 gallons of gasoline per acre and might even be less than 100 gallons.
Now consider the 140 or so billion gallons of gasoline that the United States consumes per year. At 100 gallons per acre we are talking 1.4 billion acres to produce enough corn to make enough ethanol to replace gasoline. But the United States contains only 2.3 billion acres and some of that is desert and in Alaska and in areas where there's not enough water for farming. You'll find arguments for scaling up biomass production in sunnier Brazil where farms could operate all year round. But aren't the rain forests in Brazil already getting cut down too fast for other purposes?
Trying thinking about what ethanol means for a place like India which has 10 times the population density of the United States. An industrializing India that joins a worldwide move to biomass energy would put such a large fraction of its land under cultivation that you can just plain forget about the survival of any rare big cat or primate species outside of zoos. Fuggedaboutit. The way FuturePundit sees it biomass energy is a bigger threat to wildlife in the 21st century than is global warming. We ought to be thinking about how to accelerate nuclear power and photovoltaics as ways to save wildlife habitats and slow the rate of extinction of species.
Yoshiro Kawaoka and colleagues at University of Wisconsin in Madisonj have found that some strains of H5N1 bird influenza have mutations that increase their ability to bind to human cells.
Two mutations in the viral hemagglutinin surface protein independently enable H5N1 influenza A virus to bind to human receptors, researchers report in Nature this week.
That's not good news. Avian influenza is highly lethal for infected humans.
Two mutations found in human patients increase binding of the virus to human cells.
Whereas viruses from chickens and ducks could only recognize avian receptors, some viruses from human patients could recognize both human and avian cell receptors. "Once we identified the differences between the isolates, we narrowed down the specific changes that make avian H5N1 recognize the 2,6 receptors," Kawaoka explained. The changes were just two mutations, at positions 182 and 192 on the hemagglutinin sequence.
Half the 250 people known to have been infected by H5N1 have died. If the virus mutates into a form that is transmitted easily between humans while still retaining much of its current lethality you would be well advised to buy a lot of supplies and avoid contact with other humans for several months while a vaccine gets developed.
A highly lethal H5N1 would probably become less lethal with time since less sick people will get around more and spread the disease more widely. So you are also better off avoiding the disease in the early months in hopes that if eventually exposed you'll get a less lethal version.
It is also possible that antibodies taken from infected people who recover could be extracted and used as treatment for those who get it later. So, again, don't be the first one on your block to get a pandemic influenza virus.
In a few years the risk from H5N1 or any other influenza strain will go down due to development of faster means to scale up and produce vaccines. Also, better drugs will be found for suppressing the excess inflammation response by which more deadly influenza strains probably kill.
Blotches and discolorations can add as much as 10 to 12 years to a woman's perceived age.
Cincinnati, OH (October 24, 2006) -- A new study is revealing that wrinkles aren't the only cue the human eye looks for to evaluate age. Facial skin color distribution, or tone, can add 10-12 years to a woman's perceived age.
The study, published in the latest issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, used three-dimensional imaging and morphing software to remove wrinkles and furrows from pictures of