Obesity is in the genes. And with all these wonder drugs and genetic manipulation being such a fad in science nowadays, it won't be long till scientists find a way to get rid of these genes. They're actually three steps closer to it, after finding three genes that appear to promote weight gain. More details in the full article.

A year ago, the FDA allowed for over-the-counter purchase of Plan B, a "morning after" birth control pill for women. Since then, sales have doubled, but scientists still aren't even sure what the long term consequences of taking the pill are. Since then, Plan B has sparked a controversy through medical groups in the US.

Plan B works by preventing the release of an egg from the ovary or preventing a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus. The process sparked a controversy, likening it to abortion. Some views are so strong that some pharmacies refused to sell it. A group of pharmacists in Seattle even sued Washington state for the ruling.

One other issue is that the drug will promote promiscuity, an alarming suggestion since the full effects of the drug aren't known yet. Charmaine Yoest of the Family Research Council says that "the FDA doesn't know what the long-term consequences are of having women take the drug outside the parameters of the way it's prescribed, and so this is really gambling on women's health."

Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, is one of the leading advocates for the pill saying

We have an alarmingly high rate of teenage pregnancies in this country — 750,000 each year, and that population also needs access to emergency contraception [...] Emergency contraception is contraception. It prevents pregnancy. And there's no reason for pharmacists not to be providing contraceptives.

There's a new crop on the block and it's got scientists abuzz about its potential to be a new source of biofuel. No, it's not some rare ginseng-wolfsbane hybrid wonder plant that you find in the deepest bowels of Africa. It's actually much closer to home than you think, like on marginal farmland on eastern Washington to North Dakota. Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the little plant that could, the Camelina plant!

What makes scientists excited about the Camelina? For one, Camelina can grow in dry, undesirable conditions. Another thing is that it can produce a significant amount of oil from its seeds, and it doesn't need heavy exposure to chemicals such as fertilizer and insecticides to flourish. Economic, hardy, and relatively low-maintenance - what's not to like?

With all these boons from the Camelina plant, it's not surprising that people have decided to ride the wave, so to speak. Targeted Growth, a Seattle biotech firm, is already making plans with the wonder crop, hoping to plant 1 million acres by 2009. Farmers in Montana have also taken action, with more than 50,000 acres already bristling with Camelina.

Certainly good news for the alternative fuel market, and with Camelina seeds yielding a very high amount of omega-3 fatty acids, a substance believed to reduce the risk of certain heart diseases. It probably won't be long before we're all cooking with Camelina oil. Updates about this new wonder plant as we get them!

NASA has unveiled a model of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a new space telescope that is set to be the successor of the Hubble Space Satellite, at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. This according to the BBC.

The JWST, named in honor of former NASA Administrator James E. Webb, will be larger than its predecessor and will take up a position 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. It will also be equipped with a 6.5-meter mirror -- nearly three times the size of the one on Hubble -- that will reportedly enable it to see to the farthest reaches of the Universe.

"Clearly we need a much bigger telescope to go back much further in time to see the very birth of the Universe," said Edward Weiler, director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre. The US$ 4.5 billion JWST is scheduled to launch in June 2013.

Peter Hofstee is one of the brilliant minds behind the Cell that powers our PlayStation 3 (PS3) video game consoles. Designs for the technology, which started seven years ago, include multiple uses aside from playing video games. And the fruits of his labor, including those of Microsoft's and IBM Corp.'s, are beginning to be realized today.

Aside from the Folding@Home Project that has received a very warm welcome within the gaming community, the Cell technology is being used quite differently in Rochester, Minnesota. Mayo Clinic researchers are currently using an IBM Cell blade server and the clinic's own software to accelerate the processing of 3D medical images such as magnetic resonance imaging.

Germany Fraunhofer Institute scientists, on the other hand, used several Cell servers to reconstruct a 3D image of a beating human heart from MRI scans. The importance of this is that it allowed doctors to view the organ with special glasses and make virtual incisions in real time.

Also, the University of Washington in Seattle utilized the technology last year by demonstrating how the Cell technology can improve the quality and speed of ultrasound scans. "In the future, you might be operating on somebody and repairing their heart valve while only making minimal incisions and not even having to string a camera inside," commented Hofstee.

Hofstee's own PS3 is one of the 30,000 units newly lined up to participate in the Folding@Home project. Currently, more than 270,000 systems are actively helping, two-thirds of which are PS3 units.

In the future, when man finally dares to move further and further into the outer reaches of space, deflector shields will help protect astronauts against space radiation. Yeah, the whole "deflector shields" thing sounds like something straight out of "Star Trek", but if current experiments pay off, it could become a reality.

According to the New Scientist, a group at the University of Washington in Seattle has just completed a round of experiments investigating one possible approach: using a bubble of charged particles, or plasma, as a deflector shield. A second team, led by Ruth Bamford of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, has also begun deflector shield experiments. Bamford's team also hopes to eventually fly a test satellite surrounded by a cloud of plasma in space.

The Bamford team's research is built on the fact that plasma clouds have strong magnetic and electric fields that can deflect charged particles. The team plans to use a simple magnetic field generator to trap a cloud of plasma and test its particle-deflecting abilities. The real test of their research, though, will come when they attract funding for a demo mission that uses wires around a spacecraft to generate a magnetic field that can contain a plasma cloud.

"Hopefully we'll be able to fly a test mission in the next, say, 10 to 15 years," said team member Robert Bingham of Rutherford Appleton Lab.

A shoemaker rock fish estimated to be 90 to 115 years of age was caught off the coast of Alaska in the Bering sea by Seattle-based fishermen.

The fish was hoisted up from a depth of about 2,100 feet by the crew of the Kodiak Enterprise. The fish stood out from the rest of the catch because of its extraordinary size. The fish is 44 inches in length and weighs 60 pounds.

The ship, owned by Trident Seafoods, handed the fish to scientist Paul Spencer who examined the fish's ear bone called the otolith. The bone gives biologists an idea of the specimen's age because it bears growth rings like a tree trunk.

 

The old fish is under the custody of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. The century-old fish comes second in size to a specimen 47 inches long found years ago.

Further examination has revealed that the rock fish is female, and even in its advanced age, has the potential to reproduce as the ovaries looked healthy and carried developing embryos.

Researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle are excited over an experimental cancer drug that slowed down muscular dystrophy in mice. Although still preliminary, he researchers called it "very dramatic and impressive.”

 

There are a number of muscle-wasting diseases which are all incurable including Duchenne muscular dystrophy - the most common form found children. In Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the lack of a muscle protein known as dystrophin causes muscle weakness that lead to breathing problems. Patients usually die in their teens or early twenties.

The drug called trichostatin A (TSA) was being tested on skin cancer in mice when researchers noted that it affected the production of a molecule known as follistatin. Follistatin can indirectly cause muscle growth and counteract the deterioration caused by faulty dystrophin.

One advantage of TSA is that it can be taken orally in simple pill form unlike gene therapy. However, unlike gene therapy, TSA must be taken continuously. Right now, the potential side effects of long-term TSA use are still unknown.

According to Jennifer Bailey of the University of Washington, the saying that "History repeats itself" applies to grandma right here, and the repeat is disturbingly three-fold.

In a three-generational study conducted by Bailey's team, they found that substance use carries over to the next generations of the user. This is not a new finding as we see in different societies, where vices are inherited by the succeeding generations of the individual. However, the study's findings suggests that not only will our sons or daughters inherit our substance usage, but also down to our grandchildren.

Bailey and her team used data from the Seattle Social Development Project (SSDP) for their Intergenerational Project wherein 808 respondents who had a biological child were followed from ages 10 to 27. Bailey's team studied the respondents' substance use and behavioral problems as well as those of their parents and children, who ranged from 1 to 13 years of age.

What they found was that children with attention problems and stealing during adolescence were also the ones whose grandparents smoked, used marijuana, or drank in binges. The behavioral problems at the adolescent phase (ages 13 to 14) were linked to substance use at a later age (15 to 18) and into early adulthood 'till age 27. These results were reported in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology.

Furthermore, the 27-year-olds who used certain substances also had children with behavioral problems. 43 percent of cigarette smoking-grandparents was linked specifically to cigarette smoking among their children. Bailey says, "Children of smokers, heavy drinkers or marijuana users are more likely to have behavior problems when they are young, and consequently more likely to have drug problems themselves as they get old," Bailey said in a university statement. "These children then grow up to be adult substance users, whose kids have behavior problems and the cycle is repeated."

Bailey says that this study is significant because we don't realize that not only is our specific vice inherited by our children and grandchildren, they also become prone to drinking heavily and drug abuse. However, she reminds us that their study is not deterministic in any way, that children of substance users are destined to end up the same way, but rather that these children become more prone and likely to acquire the same habits and vices that their parents/grandparents had.

The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) has captured amazingly detailed images of a dead star stealing huge amounts of matter from its larger companion. These images will hopefully help scientists to better understand the behavior of matter when subjected to extreme magnetic fields.

The system under study consists  of an ordinary star and a white dwarf -  the highly dense corpse of a burned out star. While white dwarves normally take material from their companions, this particular white dwarf has a hunger out of all proportion to its relatively miniscule size.  Even with its compressed mass taken into consideration, this star's  magnetic field is unusually strong - millions of times stronger than that of our own Sun.

This white dwarf's magnetic field is channeling matter from its partner onto its poles, which creates bright spots at each pole.  SALTICAM takes brightness measurements several times per second, so the spots appear to blink on and off as it passes behind its companion in its orbit.

These changes in brightness are practically never seen in white dwarf systems, as most of these have much weaker magnetic fields. "It's a really a remarkable light curve," says Paula Szkody of the University of Washington in Seattle. "We just didn't have this kind of information on this type of system before. It's a way of looking at what happens to matter under these extreme conditions."