Imagine a contraceptive that could, with one or two painless 15-minute non-surgical treatments, provide months of protection from pregnancy. And imagine that the equipment needed were already in physical therapists’ offices around the world.

Sound too good to be true? For years, scientists thought so too. But new research headed by Dr. James Tsuruta in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, published Monday in the journal Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology, is gaining the contraceptive method increased respect. The kicker: This treatment would be for men—giving them the first new option since condoms and vasectomy were introduced more than a century ago.

HOW IT WORKS

The testes need to be slightly cooler than the rest of the body to properly produce sperm—the subject of countless jokes and warnings about hot tubs, laptops, and tight pants. But although hot tub or laptop use can push a man’s sperm count over the edge if he’s already low, it’s not reliable enough for contraception. What if this heat effect could be enhanced?

That’s where ultrasound comes in. Relatively inexpensive and already in use in physical therapists’ offices around the world, therapeutic ultrasound (as opposed to diagnostic ultrasound) heats deeply and increases circulation to injured joints. The physical therapist applies lubricating gel to the joint, turns on the machine, and runs the wand back and forth over the joint for 5 or 10 minutes, creating a pleasant warming sensation.

It turns out, though, that ultrasound can be used on other body parts as well. That includes the testes, and it would be for contraception rather than healing. In the current study, researchers got more than 2 1/2 months—and possibly long-lasting—contraception in rats with two 15-minute sessions of ultrasound, two days apart. And their study is the first to provide detailed insight into how ultrasound might be working, using modern equipment. But the published evidence that it works has been in plain sight for more than 35 years—not taken seriously until recently.

Via Medical Xpress. Continue HERE

Image above taken from the film “Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex” by Woody Allen.

Scientist Ian Wilmut with Dolly, the worlds first cloned sheep, at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in 2001. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

The news that Edinburgh scientists had created the world’s first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, at the university’s Roslin Institute made headlines around the world 16 years ago. Her birth raised hopes of the creation of a new generation of medicines – with a host of these breakthroughs occurring at laboratories in the university over the following decade.

And now one of the most spectacular has taken place at Edinburgh’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine, where scientists have continued to develop the technology used to make Dolly. In a series of remarkable experiments, they have created brain tissue from patients suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar depression and other mental illnesses.

The work offers spectacular rewards for doctors. From a scrap of skin taken from a patient, they can make neurones genetically identical to those in that person’s brain. These brain cells, grown in the laboratory, can then be studied to reveal the neurological secrets of their condition.

“A patient’s neurones can tell us a great deal about the psychological conditions that affect them, but you cannot stick a needle in someone’s brain and take out its cells,” said Professor Charles french-Constant, the centre’s director.

Written by Robin McKie, The Observer. Continue HERE

Adam Rutherford meets a new creature created by American scientists – the spider-goat. It is part goat, part spider, and its milk can be used to create artificial spider’s web.

It is part of a new field of research, synthetic biology, with a radical aim: to break down nature into spare parts so that we can rebuild it however we please.

This technology is already being used to make bio-diesel to power cars. Other researchers are looking at how we might, one day, control human emotions by sending ‘biological machines’ into our brains.

Seven years after a motorcycle accident damaged his spinal cord and left him paralyzed, 30-year-old Tim Hemmes reached up to touch hands with his girlfriend in a painstaking and tender high-five. For more information about the trial, visit UPMC.com/BCI

Lawrence Bonassar, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, describes a cutting-edge process he has developed in which he uses a 3D Printer and “ink” composed of living cells to create body parts such as ears.

This product, called Helius, will include “sensor-enabled tablets” to monitor patients’ medication use. Compliance with doctors’ instructions has been identified as a problem area in medicine, especially when patients are prescribed multiple drugs that may need to be taken at different times.

“The most important and basic thing we can monitor is the actual physical use of the medicine,” says Andrew Thompson, chief executive of Proteus. “We have tested the system in hundreds of patients in many different therapeutic areas. It’s been tested in tuberculosis, in mental health, in heart failure, in hypertension and in diabetes.”

Via Nature. Continue HERE

The mechanical design of Philips Research’s intelligent capsule (iPill)

From SparkFun:

Botanicalls Kits let plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love. It comes as a kit so that you can hone your soldering skills (or teach someone else) while you build a line of communication between you and your houseplant!

This kit comes with everything you need to get your plant tweeting in no time. The ATmega328 comes pre-programmed, but you can customize it with your own messages. The only thing you need to provide is a plant, network connection (and Ethernet cable), and a power outlet.

Via ScienceBlogs

A study that looked at biomarkers in the blood to correlate vitamins and brain function found very clear links between nutrition and brain health.

A new study goes deeper in understanding the connection between good nutrition and a healthy brain. Previous studies have linked individual vitamin deficiencies to cognitive decline. But new research looks at a wider range of vitamins, and even better, it uses biomarkers in the blood to correlate vitamins with brain health, both good and bad.

Many studies exploring the relationship between nutrition and cognitive health rely on people’s personal reports of their diets — a notoriously unreliable way to gather personal nutritional information. For this reason, the researchers behind the current study decided to use a more objective means of studying the nutrition-brain link: they looked at biomarkers in the blood to measure the vitamin levels in 104 participants. They also had participants take tests to measure thinking and memory function, and 42 participants had MRI scans to measure their brain volume.

The researchers found some striking connections between nutrition and brain health. People who had higher levels of B family vitamins, as well as vitamins C, D, and E had higher scores on cognitive tests than people with lower levels. The same positive relationship was found for omega-3 fatty acids, which have previously been linked to better brain health.

Written by Alice G. Walton. Via The Atlantic. Continue HERE

“The smell of a body is the (bacteria themselves) which we breathe in with our nose and mouth, which we suddenly possess as though (they) were (the body’s) most secret substance and, to put the matter in a nutshell, its nature. The smell which is in me is the fusion of the (bacteria) with my body…”

Adulterated, in the interest of good science, from Sartre 1967, p. 174.

A man can live many lives. Paul Ehrlich has. Once, he was a butterfly biologist. Another time, he wrote the book called The Population Bomb, a book that triggered global conversations about the fate of humanity. Still another, he described the relationship between plants and the animals that eat them. A plant evolves, he says, to escape its herbivores and then the herbivores evolve, in response. This war goes on, he found, forever.

All of these and others of the lives of Paul Ehrlich have been lauded. I want to talk about the life of Ehrlich no one ever seems to mention at the award ceremonies, Ehrlich’s life as the guy at the party with the one good liner, the one that everyone laughs at even though it crosses, some say tramples, unspoken social lines.

The specific one liner I am talking about here is one I heard when Ehrlich visited North Carolina State University, where I work. I was helping to host his visit and he and I were talking at the back of a large conference room. We were both looking at the backs of a crowd of hundreds gathered in front of us and, of all things, discussing back pain. We agreed—back pain is terrible. He told me to take care of my back and then, as he looked to the audience and stepped forward through the crowd to give his talk, he left me with a sentence somewhere between punch line and universal truth…“ back problems all started when we began walking upright. The other bad thing about walking upright is that it made it hard to sniff each other…1” With that, he strode, upright, to the stage and began to speak.

Sometimes, when I think of Paul Ehrlich, I think of people sniffing each other. And as several new studies reveal, when it comes to sniffing each other, men are like dogs. Women are too.

Written by Rob Dunn for Scientific American. Continue HERE

The claim by Ion Torrent on Tuesday that a reasonably affordable machine capable of mapping an individual’s complete genetic makeup for $1,000 will be ready by the end of the year has technology geeks in a tizzy.

The $1,000 genome has been hotly sought ever since a crude map of the human genome was first published in 2001. The Carlsbad, Calif. biotech company, part of Life Technologies, will sell its device to research labs and medical clinics for $99,000 to $149,000, compared to the current price of about $750,000 for existing sequencers, Reuters reported on its website Tuesday. According to Reuters, a doctor will be able to sequence a patient’s entire genome for $1,000, compared to the current rate of $3,000 just to test for breast cancer gene mutations, for example. And the company says its new machine can complete the genome analysis within a day, rather than the two months previously needed.

It’s widely believed this type of genetic analysis will revolutionize medicine, that patients will learn their risk profile for potential diseases by having their DNA read right in the doctor’s office. Drugs and vaccines will be designed to fit our genes, in order to maximize efficacy and minimize any side-effects. Newborn babies would have someone peek at their genes so parents could take steps to prevent genetic risks from becoming realities.

Text by Art Caplan, Ph.D. Continue HERE

UC San Diego: In an example of life imitating art, biologists and bioengineers at UC San Diego have created a living neon sign composed of millions of bacterial cells that periodically fluoresce in unison like blinking light bulbs.

Their achievement, detailed in this week’s advance online issue of the journal Nature, involved attaching a fluorescent protein to the biological clocks of the bacteria, synchronizing the clocks of the thousands of bacteria within a colony, then synchronizing thousands of the blinking bacterial colonies to glow on and off in unison.

A little bit of art with a lot more bioengineering, the flashing bacterial signs are not only a visual display of how researchers in the new field of synthetic biology can engineer living cells like machines, but will likely lead to some real-life applications. Continue HERE

Something is very wrong with the bees. Since 2006, the mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder has wiped out countless honeybee colonies throughout Europe and North America, and nobody knows why. But a weird parasite may hold the answer.

Honeybees are a natural target of a parasitic fly species called Apocephalus borealis. These tiny insects actually deposit their eggs in the bee’s abdomen, and after seven days the newly hatched larvae push their way out of the bee through the space between the bee’s head and thorax. This, of course, kills the bees.

It’s what happens between those two events that is capturing the attention of scientists. The bees, seemingly aware in some way of their impending doom, abandon their colony and fly around aimlessly, spending most of their time buzzing around the nearest bright lights. Researchers at San Francisco State who have observed this phenomenon say the bees simply walked around aimlessly, as though the parasites inside them had transformed them into the bee equivalent of zombies.

According to researcher Andrew Core, that connection became particularly strong as the parasitized bees tried desperately to keep moving. Like a normal bee at the point of death, these bees would sit in one place and curl up in a ball. But the zombie bees kept trying to move despite their deathlike pose, repeatedly stretching out their legs and trying to stand up before falling down once again.

Text by Alasdair Wilkins. Continue HERE

Fertility researchers created sperm-producing germ cells in a lab and transferred them into infertile mice, which after the treatment were able to produce healthy offspring.

The development, which was described by experts as “hugely exciting”, could help thousands of infertile men become fathers if the method proves similarly effective in humans.

Japanese scientists at Kyoto University used stem cells from mouse embryos to create primordial germ cells, which drive the production of sperm in men.

When transplanted into the testicles of infertile mice, the cells produced normal-looking sperm.

Researchers led by Dr Katsuhiko Hayashi injected the sperm into mouse eggs and implanted them into female mice, which give birth to healthy pups.

The babies, when they grew up, were capable of reproducing naturally, according to a study in the Cell journal.

Previous experiments to make sperm from embryonic stem cells have not been so successful, and in most cases led to unhealthy offspring which soon died.

Fertility expert Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said: “This is quite a step forward in developing a process by which sperm could be made for infertile men, perhaps by taking as a starting point a cell from their skin or from something like bone marrow.

“Clearly more work needs to be done to refine this process, but it’s hugely exciting.”

The technique may not fall foul of British laws which ban the use of lab-made mature sperm in fertility treatments because the scientists only created germ cells which produced sperm naturally.

Dr Pacey said: “The philosophy of the law is to stop that kind of thing happening. But in this case you’re not technically creating sperm, so it might be that you can sidestep this regulation. It all depends on definition.”

Dr Jane Stewart, British Fertility Society spokesperson and consultant gynaecologist at Newcastle Fertility Centre said the ability to create human sperm-producing cells in the lab would be a “landmark achievement” in fertility treatments.

She said: “This publication in an animal model marks a further step towards this goal, however as the authors clearly point out much work remains to be done.”

Text by Nick Collins. Via The Telegraph

Dr Philip Harris introduces neuromarketing.

Wiki: Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in activity in parts of the brain, electroencephalography (EEG) and Steady state topography (SST) to measure activity in specific regional spectra of the brain response, and/or sensors to measure changes in one’s physiological state (heart rate, respiratory rate, galvanic skin response) to learn why consumers make the decisions they do, and what part of the brain is telling them to do it.

Companies such as Google, CBS, and Frito-Lay amongst others that have used neuromarketing services to measure consumer thoughts on their advertisements or products.

The word “neuromarketing” was coined by Ale Smidts in 2002.

Adam Rogers at Wired: The air outside a distillery warehouse smells like witch hazel and spices, with notes of candied fruit and vanilla—warm and tangy- mellow. It’s the aroma of fresh cookies cooling in the kitchen while a fancy cocktail party gets out of hand in the living room.

James Scott encountered that scent for the first time a decade ago in a town called Lakeshore, Ontario. Just across the river from Detroit, Lakeshore is where barrels of Canadian Club whiskey age in blocky, windowless warehouses. Scott, who had recently completed his PhD in mycology at the University of Toronto, had launched a business called Sporometrics. Run out of his apartment, it was a sort of consulting detective agency for companies that needed help dealing with weird fungal infestations. The first call he got after putting up his website was from a director of research at Hiram Walker Distillery named David Doyle.

Doyle had a problem. In the neighborhood surrounding his Lakeshore warehouses, homeowners were complaining about a mysterious black mold coating their houses. And the residents, following their noses, blamed the whiskey. Doyle wanted to know what the mold was and whether it was the company’s fault. Scott headed up to Lakeshore to take a look.

When he arrived at the warehouse, the first thing he noticed (after “the beautiful, sweet, mellow smell of aging Canadian whiskey,” he says) was the black stuff. It was everywhere—on the walls of buildings, on chain-link fences, on metal street signs, as if a battalion of Dickensian chimney sweeps had careened through town. “In the back of the property, there was an old stainless steel fermenter tank,” Scott says. “It was lying on its side, and it had this fungus growing all over it. Stainless steel!” The whole point of stainless steel is that things don’t grow on it.