News Articles

“Terra Firma -- A Journey from Migrant Farm Labor to Neurosurgery” chronicles Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Alfredo Quinones’ amazing journey from illegal immigrant, migrant farm worker to prominent Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon and brain cancer researcher. The compelling story will appear in the August 9 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Quinones’ remarkable odyssey began at a small family-owned gas station in a poor rural Mexican town. With more faith in his abilities than in his opportunities in his village, Quinones entered the United States illegally with almost no money or knowledge of English. Once inside the country, he managed to find employment pulling weeds in the cotton and tomato fields outside Fresno, Calif., and working as a welder for the railroads.

Scientists with the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Medicine at UCLA were able to produce from human embryonic stem cells a highly pure, large quantity of functioning neurons that will allow them to create models of and study diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, prefrontal dementia and schizophrenia.
Researchers previously had been able to produce neurons - the impulse-conducting cells in the brain and spinal cord - from human embryonic stem cells. However, the percentage of neurons in the cell culture was not high and the neurons were difficult to isolate from the other cells.

Extinctions happened in periodic cycles in Earth's history but approximately 250 million years ago vast numbers of species disappeared from Earth and life changed from simple to complex. According to Jonathan Payne, assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences at Stanford, a massive, rapid release of carbon may have triggered that extinction and it may tell us something about current global carbon cycle changes.
Payne studies the Permian-Triassic extinction and the following 4 million years of instability in the global carbon cycle.
"People point to the fossil record as a place where we can learn about how our actions today may affect the future course of evolution," Payne said.

Estrogen plays an important role in determining how sensitive a person is to pain, and the estrogen receptor known as ER-beta is particularly significant in this context. These are the conclusions of a study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet.
"This may mark the beginning of the production of a new class of analgesic drugs", says Professor Jan-Åke Gustafsson, Department of Biosciences and Nutrition.
Earlier studies have shown that estrogen affects how we experience pain, but the mechanisms behind this have been unclear. Estrogen can bind to two different receptors, known as ER-alpha and ER-beta, and the new study describes results obtained concerning the expression of these two receptors in the spinal cord.

Following World War II, the U.S. began increasing its commitment to publicly-funded science. The responsibility of the scientist was thought to be a straightforward process: if the scientists asked the “right” questions, their answers would help policy makers to make the “right” decisions.
However, the questions asked by researchers do not always translate easily into policy.

Which genes are passed on from mother to child is decided very early on during the maturation of the egg cell in the ovary. In a cell division process that is unique to egg cells, half of the chromosomes are eliminated from the egg before it is fertilised. Using a powerful microscope, researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) have now revealed how the molecular machinery functions that is responsible for chromosome reduction of egg cells in mice. In the current issue of Cell they report the assembly of this machinery, which is very different from what happens in all other cells in the body. The process is likely conserved across species and the new insights might help shed light on defects occurring in human egg cell development.

Oregon Health & Science University researchers have figured out how to turn a mouse into a factory for human liver cells that can be used to test how pharmaceuticals are metabolized.
The technique could soon become the gold standard not only for examining drug metabolism in the liver, which helps scientists determine a drug's toxicity.

The space shuttle Endeavour and its seven-member crew lifted off at 6:36 p.m. EDT Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The astronauts are on their way to the International Space Station for an assembly mission, designated STS-118.
"This is serious business we're in here," said Endeavour's Commander Scott Kelly to the shuttle launch director shortly before lift off. "I'm proud of your team for getting Endeavour ready to go fly. I'm also proud of my crew and the rest of the astronaut office for the competence and professionalism and consistently making something that is incredibly difficult look easy."
Kelly then added, "We'll see you in a couple of weeks, and thanks for loaning us your space shuttle."

A new WWF study tracking pygmy elephants by satellite shows that the remaining herds of these endangered elephants, which live only on the island of Borneo, are under threat from forest fragmentation and loss of habitat.
Borneo pygmy elephants depend for their survival on forests situated on flat, low lands and in river valleys, the study found. Unfortunately, it is also the type of terrain preferred for commercial plantations. Over the past four decades, 40 percent of the forest cover of the Malaysian State of Sabah, on the northeast of the Island of Borneo – where most of pygmy elephants are – has been lost to logging, conversion for plantations and human settlement.

Most people think of Sir Isaac Newton as the father of gravity but he also created one of the earliest observations of interference in his “dusty mirror” experiment.
In a darkened room, he used a prism and a small hole in a screen to form a quasi-monochromatic beam from sunlight, which he shone onto a back-quick silvered mirror. The mirror was angled to return the beam back through the hole and on the screen. Newton observed dark and light rings of light, which he found “strange and surprising.”
It was 100 years later when the British scientist Thomas Young determined the rings were caused by interference at the screen between two paths of light scattering from dust particles on the mirror's front surface.

Even small fossils, such as bones from the hand or foot can tell us much about our ancestor’s and their behavior. Such may be the case with an ape that lived more than nine million years ago.
A study published in the latest journal issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences reports on the structure of the hand of Hispanopithecus, a critically important fossil from an ape that lived during the late Miocene of Spain.
Ape hands are typically viewed as a compromise between the ‘true hands’ of humans and the ‘foot-hands’ of other primates. There are carpal and metacarpal differences, among other things, and significant differences in proportions.

The long-term risk of suicide is tripled for women who have undergone cosmetic breast implant surgery, according to a new study led by Loren Lipworth, Sc.D., of the International Epidemiology Institute in Rockville, Md, and the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tenn. This long-term study further confirms the link between breast implants and a strikingly high risk of suicide and other related causes of death.
The increased suicide risk, together with a similar increase in deaths from alcohol or drug dependence, suggests that plastic surgeons should consider mental health screening and follow-up for women who seek breast implants, according to the new study.