the-BA : Science News Digest - 23 November 2007

British banknotes (image copyright: istockphoto.com)

In the science news this week: a revolution in stem cell research, the surfer with a ‘theory of everything’ and wormholes that could speed up computers. Plus, how relative wealth makes us happier...

The Telegraph reported that two groups of scientists have independently published research showing that human skin cells can be reprogrammed so that they are indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells. Although the work is at an early stage, it could provide a more practical way of treating degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and diabetes, or repairing damage caused by a stroke or heart attack, than therapeutic cloning (which involves the use of human embryos).

The method works by introducing specific genes into fibroblast cells isolated from skin. A simple recipe turns them into embryonic stem cell-like cells, or ‘iPS’ cells, which are capable of developing into a wide variety of cell types. Professor James Thomson, whose study was published in the journal Science, said, ‘It’s going to completely change the field.’

Already other eminent scientists working in the area have said that they intend to adopt the technique. Sir Martin Evans, the British stem cell pioneer who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine earlier this year, said, ‘We have been waiting for this.’ His group at Cardiff University plans to make the new method simpler, safer and more straightforward so that it could be used on patients.

Professor Shinya Yamanaka, head of the Japanese team whose work was published in the journal Cell, showed that the iPS cells can be turned into brain and cardiac muscle cells. ‘These cells should be extremely useful in understanding disease mechanisms and screening effective and safe drugs,’ he said.
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Significant progress has also been made in the use of gene therapy as a method to treat degenerative brain disease. For the first time it has been shown to be effective against Parkinson’s disease.

In an ongoing trial, 12 Parkinson’s patients showed an average of 30 per cent improvement three to six months after treatment with a human gene that quietens overactive nerve cells. The gene was introduced by injection directly into the part of the brain most affected by the disease. The Guardian reported that brain scans showed the improvement was caused specifically by brain circuit changes brought about by the therapy, rather than the placebo effect or the surgery used to inject the gene-based drug.
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Scientists have found a protein that suppresses anaphylactic shock - the extreme allergic reaction that causes a cascade of substance release from mast cells in the immune system that can cause a life-threatening rapid constriction of the airways.

Mice engineered to be deficient in the protein RGS13 appeared healthy, but experienced an anaphylactic response twice as large as normal mice. The protein is also found in humans in only a limited number of cells, including mast cells, raising the possibility that it could be an attractive target for the development of drugs to treat and prevent allergic reactions.

The team from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, now plan to study the gene in humans and compare healthy individuals with those suffering from allergies and anaphylaxis, to see whether a test could be developed to identify people most at risk, reported the Telegraph.
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Researchers have found differences in the sensory areas of the brain of people who suffer from migraines. A comparison of 24 migraine sufferers with 12 non-sufferers revealed that the somatosensory cortex area of the brain was up to 21 per cent thicker in the former group.

Lead researcher, Dr Nouchine Hadjikhani, from Massachusettts General Hospital in Boston, said that it was not clear whether the difference was the cause of, or was caused by, the migraines, but that it offered an explanation as to why people with migraines seem more sensitive to pain in general and often have other pain and sensory problems.
(Read more at BBC News)
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The arrival of flu season and recent outbreaks of bird flu have again raised the issue of a future pandemic. Alan Johnson, the Government’s Health Secretary, revealed plans to bolster the UK’s defences against such a situation. ‘I can tell the House today that the Government is planning to double the stock of anti-virals, to cover at least half of the population,’ he told Parliament. He stated that a future pandemic was one of the ‘most severe risks currently facing the UK’.

The stockpile of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu would provide a key defence while a vaccine against the virus was developed. A stockpile of vaccine to treat healthcare staff based on the H5N1 strain of bird-flu virus exists, since this is the virus scientists suspect is most likely to mutate to cause a human pandemic. But according to Professor Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer for England, this is by no means certain – so a mass vaccination using the H5N1 vaccine would not make sense.
(Read more in the Guardian)
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Meanwhile, the Times reported research that suggests businesses are inadequately prepared to deal with a future flu pandemic. The official pandemic plan makes no provision for ensuring businesses can continue to operate, and the Government recommends that companies make their own preparations. However, while Nottingham University Business School has calculated that a pandemic could cost British companies £95 billion, the new study indicates fewer than a quarter have made adequate plans.
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A physicist who has no university affiliation and spends much of the year surfing and snowboarding has caught the attention of Hollywood, as well as the scientific community, by proposing a ‘theory of everything’.

’Since I’m not in academia, I only publish papers when I think I’ve found something cool,’ Garrett Lisi told the Telegraph. His theory aims to unite Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity with quantum mechanics, and is based on E8 – ‘the most elegant and intricate structure known to mathematics’.

E8 is a complex, eight-dimensional pattern with 248 points. Its geometry could explain why elementary particles appear to belong to families - in his theory, Lisi has linked the various known elementary particles and forces to E8’s 248 points and, so far, interactions predicted by the pattern match real world observations. There are also 20 gaps that remain which Lisi thinks represent as yet undiscovered particles, raising the possibility that these could be detected in the future – at the Large Hadron Collider, for example.

Lisi welcomes the opportunity to test predictions offered by his theory, adding: ‘It is futile to argue with nature, if she says your theory is wrong. This E8 Theory is mathematically and aesthetically beautiful, and so far it seems to agree with the physics we know. But it is a new theory, and not completely understood yet, and, of course, it may turn out to be wrong.’
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Also in the Telegraph was a discussion of the potential offered by ‘electromagnetic wormholes’ that could transmit light invisibly, possibly even between remote regions. Scientists have described such a wormhole in the journal Physical Review Letters. Based on elecromagnetic radiation, rather than the space-time wormhole popular in science fiction, the wormholes could function as invisible light-carrying cables.

The designs for electromagnetic wormholes are currently theoretical, but the technology needed to create them already exists and is being studied to make invisibility cloaks by bending light around objects. Both involve ‘metamaterials’ that have been engineered at the atomic level to interact with light in unusual ways.

The wormholes open up all kinds of opportunities, with potential applications in areas ranging from information technology to medicine. For example, they could potentially be used to create three-dimensional video displays, superfast computers based on light, or body scanners.
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In other news, a couple of American cosmologists made an unsettling claim: that by observing dark energy, astronomers could have reduced the life-expectancy of the universe. The shocking possibility was raised as a result of their investigation into the consequences of quantum theory for the cosmos.

You can read more about this perplexing allegation in the Telegraph.
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Scientists are revising their ideas of how large scorpions and spiders once were after the discovery of a giant fossilised sea scorpion claw. The 46cm find, discovered in rocks 390 million years old, suggests the creature was 2.5 metres long – more than half a metre longer than it was previously thought such creatures grew to.
(The Guardian)
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If babies don’t tend to like your company, you might want to reassess your social skills – new research suggests infants as young as six months old are already able to make rapid judgements of people based on how they behave towards others.

Kiley Hamlin and colleagues at Yale University devised experiments to test whether babies were able to evaluate the behaviour of others. They performed puppet shows of a character trying to climb a hill and used different shaped objects that either helped the climber, or hindered it.

Six-month and ten-month-old babies were then asked to choose between the helper and anti-social toys, and the helper one was found to be a firm favourite. The possibility that the babies made their choices based on a preference for the appearance of certain characters, or for pushing up or down actions, was ruled out by varying the experiments.

’We can’t say that [this ability] is hard-wired but we can say it is pre-linguistic and pre-explicit teaching,’ Kiley Hamlin told BBC News. ‘We don’t think this says that babies have any morality but it does seem an essential piece of morality to feel positive about those who do good things and negative about those who do bad things – it seesm like an important piece of a later more rational and moral system.’
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And finally...

Money might not be able to buy happiness, but it seems that money can make us happy if we have more than colleagues and friends, whatever the actual level of wealth.

Evidence for the importance of relative wealth comes from a study published in Science in which Professors Christian Elger and Armin Falk tested pairs of men while studying their brain activity using magnetic resonance imaging. The 38 men were instructed to count dots on a screen and were promised payment if they were correct. If they were successful, they received a reward that varied from 30 to 120 Euros. They were also informed how their partner had performed and the amount they had received.

During the task, enhanced activity was observed in multiple parts of the brain, including the ventral striatum, which is known to be part of the ‘reward system’. How the rival player was doing was found to influence the activity in this region: activation was highest for players who got the right answer while their co-player got it wrong, but when both received a reward the level of activation was much greater in the participant who got more money, compared to when they both received the same amount.

While the absolute amount of the reward did have an effect (activity was higher in response to 60 Euros than 30, for example), the striking finding was the fact that the relative size of earnings played such as major role.

‘Our findings are in sharp contrast to the typical assumption in economics according to which people care only about their own achievements and performance levels,’ said Professor Falk.

As the Telegraph put it, ‘the implications of this work is that we are trapped on a “hedonic treadmill”... which means an endless effort to “keep up with the Joneses” to stay happy’.

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