In the current issue of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, they report insights that could potentially lead to the development of custom-tailored anti-cancer drugs.

What makes cancer cells so dangerous is that they proliferate much more rapidly than other cells. An important contribution to this capability is made by a particular group of proteins, the so-called kinases. And it's against the kinases that many cancer drugs in development today take aim. Another promising approach came to light a few years ago with the discovery that the proliferation of cancer cells could also be arrested through proteasome inhibition. Yet the first drug to employ this strategy caused a number of severe side-effects. Despite that, the drug is expected to generate revenues of more than a billion U.S. dollars this year.

In the search for alternatives, San Diego-based Nereus Pharmaceuticals homed in on a species of marine bacteria known as Salinispora tropica. These bacteria produce a small molecule that kills affected cells by disabling proteasomes, which serve as their waste processing plants. "In the life cycle of a cell, proteins are always being built up that will need to be demolished after they have done their work," explains TUM Professor Michael Groll, leader of the research team in Munich. "If this breakdown is blocked, the cells choke on their own waste."

After promising preclinical trials, the bacteria-produced Salinosporamide A (NPI-0052; Sal-A) has advanced into human clinical trials. "Over millions of years, the bacteria developed this substance into a perfect weapon," says Dr. Barbara Potts, vice president for chemical and oncological development at Nereus Pharmaceuticals. The ideal cancer drug would kill only cancer cells, while doing the least harm possible to healthy cells. The researchers took a closer look at the pathway for this reaction, in the hope that they might better understand the mechanism and the best approach to future generation analogues.

The research team of Barbara Potts and Michael Groll managed to produce crystals of proteasomes blocked by Salinosporamide A and determined, through X-ray crystallography, the precise arrangement of the atoms. It became clear why the bacterial poison is so effective: The molecule fits an opening in the proteasome like a key, and locks it up. A subsequent reaction transforms the molecule to a complex that can no longer be detached, in effect breaking off the key in the lock. Vital processes come to a halt.

Halogen-hydrocarbons are favored in industrial chemistry, because the halogen atom can be easily separated from other groups. It's just this trick that the Salinispora tropica bacterium employs in the case of Salinosporamide A. It uses a chloride as its so-called "leaving group" to trigger an internal reaction forming a ring-like bond. If the ring is closed, the lock is jammed.

The researchers next produced variants of Salinosporamide A and once again succeeded in crystallizing them and using X-ray techniques for structural analysis. By replacing the chlorine atom with fluorine, they were able to observe the progress of the reaction. After the key had been stuck in the lock for one hour of reaction time, the biochemists were still able to pull it out again. A few hours later, the fluorine was split off, and the lock was blocked.

"After the millions of years that have gone into the evolutionary development of this method in bacteria, it's unlikely that a better way to block the proteasome is even possible," Groll says. "Now that we know how the best possible reaction proceeds, we can alter it in targeted ways with the aim of developing tailored, effective proteasomal drugs that will have improved safety and efficacy."

The application, "Outbreaks Near Me," builds upon the mission and proven capability of HealthMap, an online resource that collects, filters, maps and disseminates information about emerging infectious diseases, and provides a new, contextualized view of a user's specific location – pinpointing outbreaks that have been reported in the vicinity of the user and offering the opportunity to search for additional outbreak information by location or disease.

Additional functionality of Outbreaks Near Me is the ability to set alerts that will notify a user on their device or by e-mail when new outbreaks are reported in their proximity, or if a user enters a new area of activity.

"We hope individuals will find the new app to be a useful source of outbreak information – locally, nationally, and globally," says HealthMap co-founder John Brownstein, PhD, assistant professor in the Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP). "As people are equipped with more knowledge and awareness of infectious disease, the hope is that they will become more involved and proactive about public health."

The new application also features an option for users to submit an outbreak report. This will enable individuals in cities and countries around the world to interact with the HealthMap team and participate in the public health surveillance process. Users may take photos – of situations and scenarios of, and/or leading to, disease – with their iPhone and submit them to the HealthMap system for review and eventual posting as an alert on the worldwide map.

"This is grassroots, participatory epidemiology," says HealthMap co-founder Clark Freifeld, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab and research software developer at CHIP. "In releasing this app we aim to empower citizens in the cause of public health, not only by providing ready access to real-time information, but also by encouraging them to contribute their own knowledge, expertise, and observations. In enabling participation in surveillance, we also expect to increase global coverage and identify outbreaks earlier."

HealthMap was founded in 2006 and mines the Internet – searching disparate data sources such as news reports, curated personal accounts, official alerts, blogs and chat rooms – to track and map infectious disease outbreaks. While the data have been shown to provide early information on new outbreaks, users are encouraged to interpret the data appropriately as it is drawn from both official and unofficial sources.

The HealthMap Web site (http://www.healthmap.org) averages 10,000 unique visits a day, including regular users from the World Health Organization, the CDC, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. During the peak of H1N1 swine flu this spring, visits to the site rose substantially, with as many as 150,000 visitors coming to the Web site to search for information.

Outbreaks Near Me was developed with support from Google.org and is available at no cost for download in the iTunes App Store. For more information on Outbreaks Near Me, visit: http://healthmap.org/iphone.php.

The report (published September 1, 2009 by the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science) found that unless future efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are much more successful than they have been so far, additional action in the form of geoengineering will be necessary if we are to cool the planet. Geoengineering technologies were found to be very likely to be technically possible and some were considered to be potentially useful to augment the continuing efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing emissions. However, the report identified major uncertainties regarding their effectiveness, costs and environmental impacts.

Professor John Shepherd, who chaired the Royal Society’s geoengineering study, said, “It is an unpalatable truth that unless we can succeed in greatly reducing CO₂ emissions we are headed for a very uncomfortable and challenging climate future, and geoengineering will be the only option left to limit further temperature increases. Our research found that some geoengineering techniques could have serious unintended and detrimental effects on many people and ecosystems - yet we are still failing to take the only action that will prevent us from having to rely on them. Geoengineering and its consequences are the price we may have to pay for failure to act on climate change.”

The report assesses the two main kinds of geoengineering techniques – Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) and Solar Radiation Management (SRM). CDR techniques address the root of the problem – rising CO₂ – and so have fewer uncertainties and risks, as they work to return the Earth to a more normal state. They are therefore considered preferable to SRM techniques, but none has yet been demonstrated to be effective at an affordable cost, with acceptable environmental impacts, and they only work to reduce temperatures over very long timescales.

SRM techniques act by reflecting the sun’s energy away from Earth, meaning they lower temperatures rapidly, but do not affect CO₂ levels. They therefore fail to address the wider effects of rising CO₂, such as ocean acidification, and would need to be deployed for a very long time. Although they are relatively cheap to deploy, there are considerable uncertainties about their regional consequences, and they only reduce some, but not all, of the effects of climate change, while possibly creating other problems. The report concludes that SRM techniques could be useful if a threshold is reached where action to reduce temperatures must be taken rapidly, but that they are not an alternative to emissions reductions or CDR techniques.

Professor Shepherd added, “None of the geoengineering technologies so far suggested is a magic bullet, and all have risks and uncertainties associated with them. It is essential that we strive to cut emissions now, but we must also face the very real possibility that we will fail. If “Plan B” is to be an option in the future, considerable research and development of the different methods, their environmental impacts and governance issues must be undertaken now. Used irresponsibly or without regard for possible side effects, geoengineering could have catastrophic consequences similar to those of climate change itself. We must ensure that a governance framework is in place to prevent this.”

Of the CDR techniques assessed, the following were considered to have most useful potential:

• CO₂ capture from ambient air – this would be the preferred method of geoengineering, as it effectively reverses the cause of climate change. At this stage no cost-effective methods have yet been demonstrated and much more research and development is needed.
• Enhanced weathering – this technique, which utilises naturally occurring reactions of CO₂ from the air with rocks and minerals, was identified as a prospective longer-term option. However more research is needed to find cost-effective methods and to understand the wider environmental implications.
• Land use and afforestation – the report found that land use management could and should play a small but significant role in reducing the growth of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. However the scope for applying this technique would be limited by land use conflicts, and all the competing demands for land must be considered when assessing the potential for afforestation and reforestation. Should temperatures rise to such a level where more rapid action needs to be taken, the following SRM techniques were considered to have most potential:
• Stratospheric aerosols – these were found to be feasible, and previous volcanic eruptions have effectively provided short-term preliminary case studies of the potential effectiveness of this method. The cost was assessed as likely to be relatively low and the timescale of action short. However, there are some serious questions over adverse effects, particularly depletion of stratospheric ozone.
• Space-based methods – these were considered to be a potential SRM technique for long-term use, if the major problems of implementation and maintenance could be solved. At present the techniques remain prohibitively expensive, complex and would be slow to implement.
• Cloud albedo approaches (eg. cloud ships) – the effects would be localised and the impacts on regional weather patterns and ocean currents are of considerable concern but are not well understood. The feasibility and effectiveness of the technique is uncertain. A great deal more research would be needed before this technique could be seriously considered.

The following techniques were considered to have lower potential:

• Biochar (CDR technique) – the report identified significant doubts relating to the potential scope, effectiveness and safety of this technique and recommended that substantial research would be required before it could be considered for eligibility for UN carbon credits.
• Ocean fertilisation (CDR technique) – the report found that this technique had not been proved to be effective and had high potential for unintended and undesirable ecological side effects.
• Surface albedo approaches (SRM technique, including white roof methods, reflective crops and desert reflectors) – these were found to be ineffective, expensive and, in some cases, likely to have serious impacts on local and regional weather patterns.

For more information, see: http://www.royalsociety.org/geoengineeringclimate

“For the first time ... it is possible to provide a detailed picture of the dog, with its birthplace, point in time, and how many wolves were tamed,” says Peter Savolainen, a biology researcher at KTH.

Together with Swedish colleagues and a Chinese research team, he has made a number of new discoveries about the history of the dog.

These discoveries are presented in an article in the scientific journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, where it is claimed that the dog appeared 16,000 years ago, in Asia, south of the Yangtze River in China.

This is a considerably more specific date and birthplace than had previously been put forward.

“Our earlier findings from 2002 have not been fully accepted, but with our new data there will be greater acceptance. The picture provides much more detail,” says Peter Savolainen.

The time for the emergence of the dog conforms well with when the population in this part of the world went from being hunters and gatherers to being farmers, which was 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

According to Peter Savolainen, the research indicates that the dog has a single geographic origin but descends from a large number of animals. At least several hundred tamed wolves, probably even more.

“The fact that there were so many wolves indicates that this was an important, major part of the culture,” says Peter Savolainen.

He adds that the research findings provide several exciting theories. For example, the original dogs, unlike their later descendents in Europe, which were used as herders and guard dogs, probably ended their lives in the stomachs of humans.

In 1935 one of the founders of modern genetics, J. B. S. Haldane, studied men in London with the blood disease haemophilia and estimated that there would be one in 50,000 incidence of mutations causing haemophilia in the gene affected - the equivalent of a mutation rate of perhaps one in 25 million nucleotides across the genome. Others have measured rates at a few further specific genes or compared DNA from humans and chimpanzees to produce general estimates of the mutation rate expressed more directly in nucleotides of DNA.

Remarkably, the new research, recently published in Current Biology, shows that these early estimates were spot on - in total, we all carry 100-200 new mutations in our DNA. This is equivalent to one mutation in each 15 to 30 million nucleotides. Fortunately, most of these are harmless and have no apparent effect on our health or appearance.

"The amount of data we generated would have been unimaginable just a few years ago," says Dr Yali Xue from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and one of the project's leaders. "But finding this tiny number of mutations was more difficult than finding an ant's egg in the emperor's rice store."

Team member Qiuju Wang recruited a family from China who had lived in the same village for centuries. The team studied two distant male-line relatives - separated by thirteen generations - whose common ancestor lived two hundred years ago.

To establish the rate of mutation, the team examined an area of the Y chromosome. The Y chromosome is unique in that, apart from rare mutations, it is passed unchanged from father to son; so mutations accumulate slowly over the generations.

Despite many generations of separation, researchers found only 12 differences among all the DNA letters examined. The two Y chromosomes were still identical at 10,149,073 of the 10,149,085 letters examined. Of the 12 differences, eight had arisen in the cell lines used for the work. Only four were true mutations that had occurred naturally through the generations.

We have known for a long time that mutations occur occasionally in each of us, but have had to guess exactly how often. Now, thanks to advances in the technology for reading DNA, this new research has been possible.

Understanding mutation rates is key to many aspects of human evolution and medical research: mutation is the ultimate source of all our genetic variation and provides a molecular clock for measuring evolutionary timescales. Mutations can also lead directly to diseases like cancer. With better measurements of mutation rates, we could improve the calibration of the evolutionary clock, or test ways to reduce mutations, for example.

Even with the latest DNA sequencing technology, the researchers had to design a special strategy to search for the vanishingly rare mutations. They used next-generation sequencing to establish the order of letters on the two Y chromosomes and then compared these to the Y chromosome reference sequence.

Having identified 23 candidate SNPs - or single letter changes in the DNA - they amplified the regions containing these candidates and checked the sequences using the standard Sanger method. A total of four naturally occurring mutations were confirmed. Knowing this number of mutations, the length of the area that they had searched and the number of generations separating the individuals, the team were able to calculate the rate of mutation.

"These four mutations gave us the exact mutation rate - one in 30 million nucleotides each generation - that we had expected," says the study's coordinator, Chris Tyler-Smith, also from The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "This was reassuring because the methods we used - harnessing next-generation sequencing technology - had not previously been tested for this kind of research. New mutations are responsible for an array of genetic diseases. The ability to reliably measure rates of DNA mutation means we can begin to ask how mutation rates vary between different regions of the genome and perhaps also between different individuals."

This work was supported by the Joint Project from the NSFC and The Royal Society, and the Wellcome Trust.

A woman's waistline may have less to do with rigorous exercise and abstaining from sweets than it does with the genes of her parents, according to a new study by Prof. Gregory Livshits from the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and colleagues from King's College in London. Dr. Livshits and his colleagues have found a scientific link between the lean body mass of a woman and her genes. They've determined that thinness -- like your smile or the color of your eyes -- is an inheritable trait.

Bad News First, Then the Good

Prof. Livshits, whose findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (2007), says, "The bad news is that many of our physical features, including our weight, are dependent on our genes. The good news is that women still have an opportunity to go against their genetic constitution and do something about it."

Until now, scientists were not sure to what extent environmental influences and genetics played a role in a woman's body size. When controlling for the variance of age, the differences in womens' body sizes can be predicted in the genes more than 50 percent of the time, the researchers found.

Prof. Livshits conducted his study on more than 3,000 middle-aged women in the United Kingdom who belonged to either an identical or fraternal twin pair. He measured their "total lean mass," one of the three major components of body weight, and compared it to markers in their genes.

A Slim Chance?

Additional collaborative research between the two teams, which builds on the past study, is to be published in the next few months. It may help pave the way for a "skinny gene test," which one day may help women trying to lose weight understand what kind of battle they can expect.

Those without the lean genes, however, will always find it harder to stay slim, predicts Prof. Livshits. But before your diet falls by the wayside, consider Prof. Livshits' contention that genetics can be overcome.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

It's important to not have high expectations, he warns. "Women need to know that what they can do about their body weight -- especially when they age -- is relatively little, and they will do it only with much difficulty."

Very few studies to date have been able to associate a body's lean mass with genetics. The topic is a specialty at the Tel Aviv University lab, one of the top labs in the world to study the genetics of aging of body composition. This area includes the study of bone, fat and lean mass as it develops in a person over time.

Research on body composition components -- their growth, degradation and genes -- is part of Prof. Livshits' ongoing work on aging and health. Issues such as weight gain are complex, he says, especially when age is factored in.

So don't get too jealous of your friend's dress size. It may be mostly out of your hands -- and in your DNA.

Adapted from materials provided by Tel Aviv University.

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Solar tsunamis are launched by huge explosions near the Sun's atmosphere, called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Although solar tsunamis share much in common with tsunamis on Earth, the solar version can travel at over a million kilometers per hour.

The tsunami took place on 19th May 2007 and lasted for about 35 minutes, reaching peak speeds around 20 minutes after the initial blast. The observations were made by a team from Trinity College Dublin.

The discovery was presented by David Long at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast on April 2. “The energy released in these explosions is phenomenal, about two billion times the annual world energy consumption in just a fraction of a second. In half an hour, we saw the tsunami cover almost the full disc of the Sun, nearly a million kilometres away from the epicentre,” said Long.

STEREO’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUVI) instruments monitor the Sun at four wavelengths which correspond to temperatures ranging between 60 000 and 2 million degrees Celsius. At the lowest of these temperatures, scientists can see structures in the chromosphere, a thin layer of the solar atmosphere that lies just above the Sun’s visible surface. At temperatures between 1 and 2 million degrees Celsius, scientist can monitor features at varying levels in the solar corona.

The SOHO spacecraft, which was launched in 1995, also monitors the Sun at these wavelengths but only took images four times per day, giving scientists rare snapshots of these tsunamis. STEREO’s EUVI instruments take an image every few minutes to create a series, making it possible for scientists to track how the wave spreads over time.

This is the first time that a tsunami has been observed at all four wavelengths, which enabled the team to see how the wave moved through the different layers of the solar atmosphere.

“To our surprise, the tsunami seems to move with similar speed and acceleration through all the layers. As the chromosphere is much denser than the corona, we’d expect the pulse there to drag. It’s a real puzzle,” said Dr Peter Gallagher.

To complicate matters, the interval between images is not the same for all four cameras. At the time of the tsunami, the cameras monitoring radiation at 1 million degrees Celsius were set to take an image every 2.5 minutes. They recorded much higher speeds and accelerations for the wave than the other cameras, which were on 10 or 20 minute cycles. By taking a sample of one image in four, the data from these cameras matched the lower values observed in the other layers.

“We’ve thought for some time that the tsunamis might be caused by magnetic shockwaves but, in previous snapshots, the waves appeared to be travelling too slowly. However, we’ve seen from this set of observations that if the time interval between images is too long, it’s easy to underestimate the speed that the waves are moving. With a few more rapid-sequence observations of solar tsunamis, we should finally be able to identify the cause of these waves,” said Gallagher.

Adapted from materials provided by Royal Astronomical Society.

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Agricultural Research Service (ARS) microbiologist Peter S. Holt and entomologist Christopher J. Geden found that the common housefly, Musca domestica, readily picks up bacteria from its surroundings. When the chickens eat the flies, the bacteria get inside the birds. Holt works in the Egg Safety and Quality Research Unit at the ARS Richard B. Russell Research Center in Athens, Ga., while Geden is at the ARS Center for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology in Gainesville, Fla.

ARS is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific research agency.

In three experiments, Holt placed chickens in individual, adjacent laying cages. Geden delivered fly pupae just 48 hours short of hatching as flies; this timing ensures the flies aren't exposed to any microbe prior to emergence. The fly pupae were placed in an open box in the bird room. Three days later, hens were orally infected with Salmonella.

The researchers detected the bacteria in and on 45 to 50 percent of the flies within the first 48 hours of the flies' hatching.

Next, uninfected hens were exposed to the newly infected flies. Just being around the flies didn't cause healthy birds to become infected, but eating infected flies did. This showed that simple physical contact may not be the primary method of transfer of Salmonella bacteria to different surfaces in a poultry house. But, according to the researchers, a hen's eating of contaminated flies does seem to be the primary mechanism of transmission of Salmonella from flies to birds.

According to Holt, this shows that flies in poultry houses are not only a nuisance, but also a threat to the safety of poultry products.

Adapted from materials provided by US Department of Agriculture.

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An estimated 260,000 carpal tunnel surgeries are performed annually in the United States, and of those, more than 35,000 were performed in 2006 by neurosurgeons, according to AANS statistics. A neurosurgeon’s primary role in the treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome is diagnosis, interpretation of test results, and when necessary, surgery. There are frequently other medical professionals involved in the treatment process, such as physical therapists.

Carpal tunnel syndrome most often occurs when the median nerve in the wrist becomes inflamed, caused by a combination of thickened ligaments over the nerve and repetitive movements. “Carpal tunnel syndrome is most prevalent in women ages 40 to 60, and also tends to affect people more frequently who use their hands excessively, such as pianists, concert violinists, hairdressers, computer operators, manual laborers, artists, sculptors, dentists, and even neurosurgeons,” says James R. Bean, MD, AANS president-elect.

Any repetitive motions that cause significant swelling, thickening or irritation of membranes around the tendons in the carpal tunnel can result in pressure on the median nerve, disrupting transmission of sensations from the hand up to the arm and to the central nervous system.

Diseases or conditions that may increase your chances of developing carpal tunnel syndrome include pregnancy, diabetes, menopause, broken or dislocated bones in the wrist, and obesity. Additional causes include repetitive and forceful grasping with the hands, bending of the wrist, and arthritis.

It is important to seek medical advice when you first notice persistent symptoms. Do not wait for your pain to become intolerable. Before your doctor can recommend a course of treatment, he or she will perform a thorough evaluation, including a medical history, physical examination and diagnostic tests. Your doctor will ask about the extent to which your symptoms affect daily living. Sometimes a case turns out to be tendonitis and not carpal tunnel, but only a doctor can make a proper diagnosis.

The main purpose of conservative treatment is to reduce or eliminate repetitive injury to the median nerve. In some cases, carpal tunnel syndrome can be treated by immobilizing the wrist in a splint to minimize or stop pressure on the nerves. If that does not work, patients are sometimes prescribed anti-inflammatory medications or cortisone injections in the wrist to reduce swelling. Your doctor may suggest specific types of hand and wrist exercises, which may be helpful. Treatment for carpal tunnel syndrome may include rest, the use of a wrist splint during sleep, or physical therapy. Conservative treatment methods may continue for up to eight weeks.

If conservative treatment methods do not provide sufficient relief, your doctor may perform diagnostic studies to determine if surgery is an effective option. These diagnostic tests include x-rays and electromyogram and nerve conduction studies. X-rays can help determine if any abnormalities in bones of the wrist may be contributing factors. Electromyogram and nerve conduction studies can reveal significant compression on the median nerve in the carpal tunnel.

If patients suffer from severe pain that cannot be relieved through rest, rehabilitation or nonsurgical treatment, there are several surgical procedures that can be performed to relieve pressure on the median nerve. The most common procedure is called a carpal tunnel release, which can be performed using an open incision or with endoscopic techniques. The open incision procedure or carpal tunnel release, involves the neurosurgeon making an incision in the wrist or palm and then releasing the ligament that is compressing and placing pressure on the median nerve. The endoscopic carpal tunnel release procedure involves making a smaller incision and using a miniaturized camera to assist the neurosurgeon in viewing the carpal tunnel.

Risks of carpal tunnel surgery are minimal. The majority of individuals recover completely. “The results of surgery are usually excellent, with most patients receiving nearly full relief of their symptoms. The earlier you get diagnosis and treatment, generally the better the outcome,” states Dr. Bean.

Adapted from materials provided by American Association of Neurological Surgeons, via Newswise.

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Frigid and bone-dry, with six straight months of night each year, the South Pole is a forbidding place to live or work. But for largely the same reasons, it’s one of the best spots on the planet for surveying the faint cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation left over from the Big Bang. The 10-meter microwave South Pole Telescope (SPT), which began operating in February 2007, is studying the CMB to gather clues about the birth, evolution and eventual fate of the universe.

The SPT project, led by researchers at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, aims to help solve one cosmological mystery in particular – that of dark energy. Little is known about this force, other than that it works against gravity and appears to have sped up the expansion of the universe. Unlike energy as we know it (and measure it), dark energy does not seem to act through any of the fundamental forces of nature other than gravity.

It can’t be detected directly, for instance, through light or other manifestations of the electromagnetic force. The evidence for dark energy is indirect. Its existence was first posited in 1998 by scientists seeking to explain unexpected data from distant supernovae. Since then, research using the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments has traced the impact of dark energy to about nine billion years ago, when the universe was five billion years old and galaxies started flying away from one another at a faster pace.

Understand the Past; Predicting the Future

From studying the CMB and what it tells them about the geometry of the universe, scientists estimate that dark energy makes up 70% to 75% of the universe’s entire mass and energy combined. This is about three times as much as dark matter, which cannot be detected by light or other electromagnetic radiation but exerts a powerful gravitational pull on galaxies. Only about 4% of the cosmos is ordinary matter, the stuff we are made of and the stuff we can see.

So whatever dark energy is, its effect is stronger than anything else on large scales. It also may determine the future of the universe. It might gain strength and end the universe by pulling all matter apart – even atomic nuclei (cosmologists call this the “big rip”). Or it might weaken and allow gravity to re-pack the universe, in a so-called “big crunch,” resulting in something like the infinitely dense condition at the point of the Big Bang. Or perhaps it will simply let the current expansion continue until most stars and galaxies are too distant to be seen.

What can the SPT tell us about the past and future of dark energy? John E. Carlstrom, director of KICP and the S. Chandrasekhar Distinguished Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, says the telescope is examining clusters of galaxies to learn what role dark energy played in their evolution. “One of the important things we need to learn about dark energy is what influence it has had on structure,” Carlstrom says. If scientists can learn how the density of clusters changed over time, he says they can determine “constraints on the equation of state of dark energy.” That is, they can get a more precise idea of whether dark energy is taking us toward a big rip, a big crunch or something in between.

The telescope is looking specifically for the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) effect, a distortion of the CMB radiation caused by the highly energized gas of galaxy clusters. When photons originating from the CMB traverse the clusters, they interact with electrons and tend to scatter, creating slight variations in temperature -- shadows against the microwave background – that the SPT detects with a battery of 1,000 sensors chilled to near absolute zero.

The SPT will survey about a fifth of the entire southern sky and is expected to detect thousands of clusters. Analyzing follow-up data from optical telescopes, the scientists will determine the mass, distance and age of the clusters. They will then map the clusters in space and time to see how their density and structure evolved over billions of years under the competing pulls of gravity and dark energy. They hope to learn how much power dark energy exerted in the early universe, how it evolved to dominate the universe now, and by extension, how much power it may wield in the future.

Back to the Big Bang

The SPT’s activity will not end with this survey of galaxy clusters. Another project in the works will use the telescope to scan the CMB for tiny fluctuations in its polarization. Like visible light, the microwave radiation from the Big Bang has waves moving in electromagnetic fields at different angles, some up-and-down and other side-to-side. Observations with another South Pole instrument, the degree angular scale interferometer (DASI), have confirmed that the CMB is polarized as expected from prevailing theories about the physics of the Big Bang. Researchers now want to use the more sensitive SPT to look for minute variations in the CMB polarization that mark the presence of huge gravity waves.

Stephan Meyer, associate director of KICP and Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, says these waves are “a reasonable fraction of the size of the universe” in length and would have been generated in the “inflationary epoch” of the Big Bang. This was the time when the universe was just 10-50 seconds old and matter had not yet coalesced into neutrons and protons. “We don’t really understand the physics of that era,” Meyer says. A new set of sensors, able to detect polarization as well as heat, is being built by the University of Chicago and should be ready for installation on the SPT by the austral summer (the northern winter) of 2009-10.

Carlstrom and Meyer have both made multiple trips to the South Pole since the mid-1990s. Meyer calls it “somewhat monotonic … there are no bugs, no kids” but he says there is “a brutal and stark beauty about it all.” Carlstrom points out that, as remote as the Pole is, it has “very well-developed infrastructure” thanks to the National Science Foundation and its Office of Polar Programs. Still, installing a 75-foot-tall, 280-ton telescope at the South Pole is a major logistical feat. Carlstrom notes with some pride that he and his team (he is principal investigator on the SPT project) took just three months in the austral summer of 2006-07 to assemble the SPT, insulate it and get it up and running.

The SPT was funded with $18.7 million from the NSF, along with additional support from the Kavli Foundation the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation of San Francisco. The project manager is Steve Padin, Senior Scientist in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.. Senior members of the SPT team include William Hozapfel, Adrian Lee and Helmuth Spieler of UC Berkeley; Joe Mohr of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; John Ruhl of Case Western Reserve University; Antony Stark of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory; Matt Dobbs of McGill University, and Erik Leitch of Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Chicago.

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This new information about bisphenol A (BPA) is timely because the State of California is currently considering placing BPA on the Prop 65 list of hazardous chemicals, and State Senator Fiona Ma has proposed legislation that would ban BPA in products used by children.

The study was done by researchers at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, in collaboration with the Stanford Genome Technology Center.

The findings are significant because BPA is found in many plastic water bottles, in plastic baby bottles, in the lining in food cans, as well as in sealants used by dentists to protect teeth.

“This is a very common compound that most of us are exposed to on a regular basis, often without even being aware of it,” says William Goodson, M.D., Senior Clinical Research Scientist at the Institute and lead researcher on the study. “If it’s true that exposure to BPA can cause normal, non-cancerous human breast cells to behave in ways that are more characteristic of aggressive breast cancer cells, this is very worrying.”

The researchers did needle aspirations on eight consented women at high risk of breast cancer, or its recurrence, to remove a small sample of non-cancerous cells. The cells were exposed to BPA in the lab and then analyzed to see if the exposure had altered, in any way, the gene expression of the cells.

“We screened 40,000 genes in normal human cells that had been exposed to BPA and found a striking increase in the sets of genes that promote cell division, increase cell metabolism, and increase resistance to drugs that usually kill cancer cells, and prevent cells from developing to their normal mature forms,” says says Shanaz Dairkee, Ph.D., the Principal Investigator of this California State-funded project at CPMCRI, and the co-author of the study. “Breast cancer patients with this kind of gene expression tend to have a higher recurrence than other patients, and they have a worse survival rate.”

The researchers chose to focus on BPA because it is a common compound with a controversial reputation. BPA acts like an estrogen, and in animal studies has been shown to have carcinogenic effects including increasing the risk of breast and prostate cancer, as well as reducing sperm-count and impacting the immune system. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2004 found that 95 percent of people tested had traces of BPA in their urine, with women having higher blood concentrations of BPA then men, and children having higher concentrations than adults.

“Our use of fresh cells for short term cultures in this research is unusual in medical research,” emphasizes Dr. Goodson, “which makes the results especially useful because this is the closest we can ethically get to studying the effects of giving BPA directly to living people. Our cells are much closer to normal tissue than usual cell culture techniques which use cells that have been growing in laboratories for months or even years.”

"Although the study itself does not prove that BPA causes malignancy, the observation that exposure to BPA altered the expression of genes in human breast cells deserves further investigation," says Wenzhong Xiao, Ph.D., a senior researcher at Stanford Genome Technology Center and a co-author of the study.

The concentration of BPA that the researchers tested was very low (less than one tenth of a millionth of a gram per milliliter), but this concentration of BPA has been found in blood from pregnant women in both the United States and Germany.

Adapted from materials provided by California Pacific Medical Center, via Newswise

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The solar wind consists of electrically charged particles that flow out from the Sun in all directions. Even at their slowest, the particles race along at 200 km per second, taking less than 10 days to travel from the Sun to the Earth. When stronger gusts of the wind run into the magnetic field of the Earth there can be dramatic consequences, from creating beautiful displays of the northern and southern lights (aurorae) to interfering with electronic systems on satellites and sometimes even overloading electrical power grids on the ground.

From its launch in the autumn of 2006, scientists have used the Hinode mission to study the Sun in unprecedented detail. One of the instruments on the probe, the UK-built Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) measures the speed at which material flows out from the Sun.

The Sun is a cauldron of hot gas shaped by magnetic fields, which create bright regions of activity on the solar surface. Using EIS, the scientists found that at the edges of these bright regions hot gas spurts out at high speeds. Magnetic fields connect the regions together, even when they are widely separated. For example, in the Hinode images that Prof Harra will present on Wednesday, magnetic fields linked two regions almost 500000 km apart – a distance equivalent to 40 Earths placed side by side in space. When magnetic fields from two regions collide they allow hot gas to escape from the Sun – this material flows out as the solar wind.

Professor Louise Harra of UCL-Mullard Space Science Laboratory says, “It is fantastic to finally be able to pinpoint the source of the solar wind – it has been debated for many years and now we have the final piece of the jigsaw. In the future we want to be able to work out how the wind is transported through the solar system”.

Adapted from materials provided by Royal Astronomical Society.

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The project has discovered extrasolar planets (artist's impression)

Astronomers from Queen's University Belfast have helped to discover 10 new planets.

The discovery will be announced later at the Royal Astronomical Society's largest ever National Astronomy Meeting, taking place at Queen's.

The extrasolar planets - which orbit around other stars - were found by an international team using cameras in the Canary Islands and South Africa.

Queen's astronomers designed and built the camera used in the find.

The Wide Area Search for Planets (SuperWasp) project uses two sets of cameras to watch for events known as transits, where a planet passes directly in front of a star and blocks out some of its light, so from the earth, the star temporarily appears a little fainter.

The cameras work as robots, surveying a large area of the sky at once.

Each night, astronomers have data from millions of stars which they check for transits. The transit method also allows scientists to deduce the size and mass of each planet.

Dr Don Pollacco from Queen's University will announce discoveries

Forty-five planets have now been discovered using the transit method, and since they were set up in 2004, the SuperWasp cameras have found 15 of them - making them the most successful discovery instruments in the world.

Announcing the latest results on Tuesday will be QUB's Dr Don Pollacco.

Speaking ahead of the meeting, he said: "SuperWasp is now a planet-finding production line and will revolutionise the detection of large planets and our understanding of how they were formed.

"It's a great triumph for European astronomers.

"Queen's and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council funded the first SuperWasp on La Palma, the camera was designed and built at Queen's."

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INDIANAPOLIS - Warning lights hover over the snoozing patients in Riley Hospital for Children's neonatal intensive care unit, ready to flash whenever sound levels creep beyond normal conversation.

As decibels rise, the colors on the new monitoring system change from green to yellow to red, hushing chatty parents or doctors so the babies get the rest they need to develop.

Noise louder than roughly the level of conversation can cause premature or sick babies' hearts to beat too fast or too slowly, said Dr. William Engle, a neonatologist at Riley. And interfering with babies' vital signs or sleep can slow development and healing because their bodies do most of that work while they sleep.

"The function of babies is to grow and develop, and in between they eat," he said.

Preemies also need quiet so they can learn their mother's voice and their brains can figure out how to process sound, things that normally happen in the last trimester before birth.

"It's definitely a great idea," Dr. Bob White, a neonatologist at South Bend's Memorial Hospital, said of the monitoring system in Riley's neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU.

White, who is not involved in creating or distributing the system, helped write national noise standards for NICUs that have been adopted by the American Institute of Architects and are used in most hospital design.

Inventor Chris Smith hopes doctors around the country agree with White. He has sold his Sonicu system to several Indiana hospitals and wants to expand nationally.

Smith, 43, had no training as a sound engineer and no plans to become an entrepreneur when his son Sean was born five weeks premature in 2000. But he noticed Sean flinch in response to bright light in the NICU of St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital, and he wound up designing a system to soften the unit's lighting.

Then the nurses asked him what he could do about sound.

"That's really when I realized that there was no good way out there to measure sound, other than your standard, hand-held meter," he said.

Babies born too soon lose the muffling effect of the womb before their ears can filter sound, White said.

"The sounds ... come from all different directions and all different sources, and they're often associated with unpleasant sensations for the baby," White said.

NICUs are rife with noise pollution created by employees, equipment and excited family members.

"There's no good way for the nurses or doctors to walk up to a parent, tap them on the shoulder and say, 'You're being too loud,'" Smith said. "That's confrontational."

The former car mechanic filled hours of spare time in the evenings and on weekends researching sound standards and building a system.

Smith, who tinkered in radio and TV electronics in high school, hired an acoustical engineer to help. They created a ceiling-mounted system of microphones that picked up sound and funneled data back to a large control panel.

"There was a lot of wiring, a lot of labor, a lot of programming," he said.

St. Vincent paid around $100,000 for the system, which it installed about five years ago. Smith had no interest in shopping his invention to other hospitals because the work took so much time.

Then Riley Hospital, also in Indianapolis, called a few months later.

"They basically said, 'I want that,'" he said.

The latest version of Sonicu can feed a stream of both sound and light data digitally to a computer. It offers the cone-shaped warning lights and can quickly dim the lighting in a room that gets too noisy. It also can make lighting mimic the sun by brightening toward noon and then fading, which also helps babies sleep well.

White, the neonatologist who helped write the national standards, said he knows of no other NICU monitoring system that sophisticated.

Smith has sold systems to a handful of Indiana hospitals, so far to good reviews. He said the systems can cost anywhere from $40,000 to $400,000, depending on each hospital's needs.

The monitors have taught hospital staff to limit the number of groups making rounds at the same time because having more than one group in a room raises noise levels dramatically.

Most NICUs are filled with noise that can't be helped, White said. Fans in the heating and ventilation system have to operate almost constantly, and the monitors need to beep.

The Sonicu system reins in the main noise maker that can be controlled.

"People think, 'Oh gosh, I didn't realize, I'll go over here so I won't have to talk so loud,'" White said. "It really is something that addresses the human factors that we do have some control over."

Google's YouTube announced a tool, called YouTube Insight, but it doesn't seem all that great. The company says it can "give a lot of context around the performance of video over time, where are your audience coming from, and how your message is connecting to your audience." It's gotten a ton of coverage from the media.

But while the information you get is interesting, it's so broad that it strikes me as underwhelming. I tried it out on the most popular video I ever uploaded -- popular, I should add, for reasons that are unfathomable to me. Its title is "Loudest Car at CES," and I posted it from the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2007. It has since had 46,833 views.

The Insight tool shows me that it first broke 100 views a day on May 19, 2007 -- five months after the video was posted. I can follow a timeline and see that it passed 300 views a day on October 26, and even now gets nearly 200 views a day. I can also see that almost every viewer comes from the U.S.

I can see some other geographic oddities -- like, on Oct. 30, it was a very popular video in Namibia! (Like...huh??)

But that's about it. That's all I get from Insight. No idea why this video got popular when it did or where. I suppose a band might be able to find out that its music videos are extremely popular in some far-flung nation, and could make decisions to market or tour there. I'm sure there are other ways this is useful to marketers and potential YouTube advertisers. But hopefully YouTube will eventually give us more refined ways to slice and dice this stuff.

Seriously concerning information was made public this week, as researchers in the United States, Britain and Taiwan released images of large blocks of ice shearing away from the shelf along the West Antarctic Peninsula.

”In 1993, we predicted that this was going to be a vulnerable ice shelf,” Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey recently said about the Wilkins Ice Shelf. ”But we got the time scales completely wrong. We were saying 30 years at that time, and now it's happened within 15.” The first proof of this prediction was recorded in February, when a 26-mile-long iceberg broke away from the ice mass.

Since it started being monitored, the shelf has lost three percent of its total extent. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning. The rest of the Wilkins Ice Shelf is kept in place by a narrow portion of thin ice and things aren’t looking up.

"Climate warming in the Antarctic Peninsula has pushed the limit of viability for ice shelves further south – setting some of them that used to be stable on a course of retreat and eventual loss. The Wilkins breakout won't have any effect on sea-level because it is floating already, but it is another indication of the impact that climate change is having on the region," said Vaughan.

Scientists all over the world are monitoring these sensitive areas with the use of satellites and on-site studies, gathering data on snowfall, ice loss, air and water temperatures, populations of animals and others.

The breakout is the latest drama in a region of Antarctica that has experienced unprecedented warming over the last 50 years. Several ice shelves have retreated in the past 30 years - six of them collapsing completely (Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf.)

However, no immediate solution for global warming, which is considered to be the cause of these ice breaks, was found. The effort must be done globally and the major industial players must become fully aware of the very delicate state Earth’s vulnerable environment is in and take action.

"This approach reveals that, using existing imaging techniques, we can identify the molecular properties of tumors," said Michael Kuo, M.D., assistant professor of interventional radiology at UCSD School of Medicine. Kuo and colleagues analyzed more than 2,000 genes that had previously been shown to have altered expression in Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) tumors. They then mapped the correlations between gene expression and MRI features.

The researchers also identified characteristic imaging features associated with overall survival of patients with GBM, the most common and lethal type of primary brain tumor.

The researchers discovered five distinct MRI features that were significantly linked with particular gene expression patterns. For example, one specific characteristic seen in some images is associated with proliferation of the tumor, and another with growth and formation of new blood vessels within the tumor--both of which are susceptible to treatment with specific drugs.

These physiological changes seen in the images are caused by genetic programs, or patterns of gene activation within the tumor cells. Some of these programs are tightly associated with drug targets, so when they are detected, they could indicate which patients would respond to a particular anti-cancer therapy, according to the researchers.

"For the first time, we have shown that the activity of specific molecular programs in these tumors can be determined based on MRI scans alone," said Kuo. "We were also able to link the MRI with a group of genes that appear to be involved in tumor cell invasion--a phenotype associated with a reduced rate of patient survival."

Laboratory work that relies on tissue samples is routinely used to diagnose and guide treatment for GBM. However, the biological activity shown may depend on the portion of the tumor from which the tissue sample is obtained. The researchers have shown that MRI could be used to identify differences in gene expression programs within the same tumor.

"Gene expression results in the production of proteins, which largely determine a tumor's characteristics and behavior. This non-invasive MRI method could, for example, detect which part of a tumor expresses genes related to blood vessel formation and growth or tumor cell invasion," said Kuo. "Understanding the genetic activity could prove to be a very strong predictor of survival in patients, and help explain why some patients have better outcomes than others."

Kuo also led an earlier study, published in Nature Biotechnology in May 2007, correlating CT images of cancerous tissue with gene expression patterns in liver tumors. "In the new study, we were able to take a different imaging technology, MRI, and apply it to a totally different tumor type," he said, noting that the studies open up promising new avenues for non-invasive diagnoses and classification of cancer.

The new study will be published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science the week of March 24.

Contributors to the paper include first author Maximilian Diehn, UCSD Department of Radiology and Department of Radiation Oncology at Stanford University School of Medicine; Christine Nardini and David S. Wang, UCSD Department of Radiology; Susan McGovern and Kenneth Aldape, Department of Neuropathology, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston; Mahesh Jayaraman, Department of Radiology, Brown University; Yu Liang, UCSF Brain Tumor Research Center, and Soonmee Cha, Department of Radiology, UCSF Medical Center.

The research was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.

Adapted from materials provided by University of California - San Diego.

Schizophrenia, a debilitating psychiatric disorder, affects approximately 1 percent of the population. People with schizophrenia suffer from hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking, and are at risk for unusual or bizarre behaviors. The illness greatly impacts social and occupational functioning and has enormous public health costs.

The team of investigators, led by Tom Walsh, Jon McClellan, and Mary-Claire King at the UW, and Shane McCarthy and Jonathan Sebat at Cold Spring Harbor, examined whether the genetic errors, which are individually rare DNA deletions and duplications, contribute to the development of schizophrenia. The findings, which were replicated by a team at the National Institute of Mental Health, appear in the March 27 online edition of the journal Science.

Some deletions and duplications are common and found in all humans. The researchers studied such mutations that were found only in individuals with the illness, and compared them to mutations found only in healthy persons. They theorized that rare mutations found only in schizophrenic patients would be more likely to disrupt genes related to brain functioning and thus may cause schizophrenia.

The study was conducted using DNA from 150 people with schizophrenia and 268 healthy individuals. The investigators found rare deletions and duplications of genes present in 15 percent of those with schizophrenia, versus only 5 percent in the healthy controls. The rate was even higher in patients whose schizophrenia first presented at a younger age, with 20 percent of those patients having a rare mutation.

The results were replicated by a second research team, led by Anjene Addington and Judith Rapoport at the National Institutes of Mental Health. They found a higher rate of rare duplications or deletions in patients whose schizophrenia began before age 12 years, a very rare and severe form of the disorder.

In individuals with schizophrenia, mutations were more likely to disrupt signaling genes that help organize brain development. Each mutation was different, and impacted different genes. However, several of the disrupted genes function in related neurobiological pathways.

The findings suggest that schizophrenia is caused by many different mutations in many different genes, with each mutation leading to a disruption in key pathways important to a developing brain. Once a disease-causing mutation is identified, other different disease-causing mutations may be found in the same gene in different people with the illness.

Thus, for most cases of schizophrenia, the genetic causes may be different. This observation has important implications for schizophrenia research. Currently, most genetic studies examine for mutations that are shared among different individuals with the illness. These approaches will not work if most patients have different mutations causing their condition.

Fortunately, there are now genomic technologies available that allow researchers to discover rare mutations within each individual with a disorder. As these technologies improve, it will be possible to detect other types of disease-causing mutations. Eventually, the identification of genes disrupted in individuals with schizophrenia will allow the development of new treatments more specifically targeted to disrupted pathways.

The research team included many other scientists at a variety of institutions, including Evan Eichler and his colleagues at the University of Washington, and investigators at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Case Medical Center in Cleveland, the University of North Carolina, the University of California Los Angeles, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute on Aging.

This work was supported by many different grants from several foundations and agencies, including the Forrest C. and Frances H. Lattner Foundation, NARSAD, the Simons Foundation, the Stanley Medical Research Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Mental Health Division of the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services.

Adapted from materials provided by University of Washington.

The research, led by SIUC zoologist Karen R. Lips, and SIUC zoologist Michael W. Sears, underscores the dire circumstances facing up to 43 percent of known amphibian species in the world and points up the need for more regulations, conservation efforts and quarantines to prevent the fungus’ spread.

An associate professor of zoology in the College of Science at SIUC, Lips is at the forefront of in research in catastrophic decline of frog species brought on by the Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis fungus. The fungus, known to researchers as “Bd,” wipes out frog populations essentially by completely blocking their skin. Amphibians such as frogs depend on their skin to provide oxygen and moisture. Bd infections cause electrolyte imbalance, which can lead to cardiac arrest.

Lips has studied the issue since the early 1990s, becoming a recognized expert on the subject. She, along with her graduate and doctoral students, regularly visit the high jungles of Central America, roughing it in the wild while collecting data on the ecological systems before, during and after the fungus arrives.

This latest study, conducted with Sears, an assistant professor of zoology at SIUC, and two other colleagues at the Illinois Natural History Survey and Zoo Atlanta, expands upon that work by seeking better understanding of the spread of the fungus, its triggers and how it might be spread.

Specifically, the researchers examined data from South American amphibian declines to see whether the wave-like spread seen in Central America, typical of an emerging infectious disease, was evident.

One previous theory, for instance, blamed the fungus on global climate change. Lips and Sears, however, found climate change doesn’t appear to trigger outbreaks of the fungus, but that it instead spreads in wave-like patterns often seen in exotic species and emerging infectious diseases. They call their theory the “spreading pathogen hypothesis.”

Using modeling, the researchers found evidence of four different introductions of Bd into South America. They found that the fungus spread through the population at a rate similar to that seen in Central America and in a manner that best explains amphibian population declines in Central and South America.

“What makes the study really relevant is we can now generalize how the fungus is spread,” Lips said. “We know from our research, that if we start looking in the right time and place in an area where the fungus is, we’re probably going to see it affecting frog populations. This helps us understand what’s going on, and it can potentially help us get out in front of it.”

The study could help governments and environmental agencies focus on ways to prevent the fungus’ spread through more regulation of potential infection routes, such as the ornamental plant and aquarium wildlife trade. The fungus can easily hitch a ride to other regions through such trade, Lips said.

“If you go and buy an ornamental plant from one of these regions and plant it in your yard, or you buy a frog at a pet shop, think about it. If the fungus is there and still alive, it’s now introduced into the environment. Then it can get into your pond or streams.”

Lips said simple testing of such products and organisms before importing them could reveal the fungus’ presence. Once discovered, simple anti-fungal drugs will kill the fungus before it can contaminate an area.

“Our research has shown that once the fungus gets somewhere new it spreads like wildfire,” Lips said. “So the key is preventing it from spreading.”

The fungus is present in North America, including Illinois, but little is known so far about its impact here. With funding from the Illinois Department Natural Resources, Lips in the coming months will survey the extent of the fungus and its impact in Illinois.

Among the study’s key points:

• Climate change, while having some negative impacts on amphibian biodiversity, does not appear to have triggered the disease in Central America and the Andes of South America, as suggested by previous studies.
• The fungus appears to have spread in a wave-like manner, in a typical pattern of disease spread.
• The fungus was introduced in South America in the late 1970s or early 1980s. After introduction, the disease spread along the Andes, infecting native amphibians and often causing the extinction of entire populations and species.
• There is robust evidence supporting the “spreading pathogen hypothesis,” which holds the disease was and continues to be spread in a wave-like pattern seen in Central America. It is likely this same pattern will emerge in other places where Bd has been detected, including North America and Europe.

Lips said the study increases understanding of the disease, which should allow humans to take steps to limit its spread.

“We need to get into areas ahead of the spreading wave — such as eastern Panama and the southern Andes — to conduct intensive surveys and monitoring for both native amphibians and the … fungus,” Lips said. Environmental agencies also should immediately begin conservation programs aimed at conserving rare and endangered amphibian species that might be wiped out by the fungus.

“At this time, the fungus cannot be controlled or managed in wild amphibians nor their habitats,” Sears added.

The island of Madagascar, which is home to a large number of plants and animals found nowhere else in the world, so far appears free of the deadly fungus. The researchers said governments should take steps to maintain that status.

In the future, Lips believes that researchers should study treatment options for wild amphibians and possibly their habitats to prevent or minimize the fungus while establishing a global network of disease surveillance. They should increase communication and monitoring of global trade and increase outreach communication with researchers and policy makers to raise awareness on its potential impacts in other geographic locations.

Researchers also should survey museum specimens to better determine the location, timing and possible sources of the fungus and its introduction into the environment in various locations. They also should study fungus samples for genetic clues as to its origins and the different strains involved.

This research was published March 25 in the journal PLoS Biology.

Adapted from materials provided by Southern Illinois University Carbondale, via Newswise.