Tag Archives: biology

Elephant at Oregon Zoo diagnosed with tuberculosis

The Oregon Zoo has quarantined an elephant that tested positive for tuberculosis. “Rama,” an Asian elephant that was born at the Portland-based zoo in 1983, tested positive on Friday. He shows no symptoms of the disease, poses no threat to visitors and is expected to make a complete recovery, zoo staff said. “We're confident Rama is going to be fine,” zoo director Kim Smith told The Oregonian newspaper. “It's a very treatable disease. We've caught it early with Rama. We feel very good about this.” Treatment with drugs, however, is expensive, costing more than $50,000, the newspaper reported. None of the other elephants in the zoo's heard of eight Asian elephants are showing signs of tuberculosis, but they will be retested. The zoo tested some staff members Friday and will continue this week. It's unknown how Rama contracted the disease. Tuberculosis spreads among people and between people and animals through airborne bacteria carried in droplets. To become infected, you must be directly exposed to the bacteria while it's airborne. “In order to contact TB, you have to be in really close contact for hours at a stretch,” Smith said. The zoo has tested the herd annually for TB since 1999, based on guidelines developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Those guidelines stemmed from the 1996 deaths of two circus elephants touring in California. An estimated 3 percent of the elephants in the United States have the disease, according to a 2000 study published in the journal Zoo Biology. The zoo gets 1.6 million visitors a year and the elephant herd is a popular attraction. Rama is the smallest of its adult bull elephants, weighing 9,000 pounds.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/03/elephant-at-portland-zoo-has-tuberculosis/

Simple vision test may predicts IQ

A simple visual test is surprisingly accurate at predicting IQ, according to new research. The study, published May 23 in the journal Current Biology, found that people's ability to efficiently filter out visual information in the background and focus on the foreground is strongly linked to IQ. The findings could help scientists identify the brain processes responsible for intelligence. That doesn't mean snappy, efficient visual processing leads to smarts, said study co-author Duje Tadin, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester in New York. Instead, common brain processes may underlie both intelligence and efficient visual processing. IQ hunting Since the 1800s, the forefathers ofIQ testing, including Sir Francis Galton (who also pioneered the science of fingerprinting), suspected that highly intelligent people also have supersensory discrimination. But studies in the subsequent decades have found only a modest connection between IQ-test scores and peoples ability to quickly or accurately spot motion in images. Tadin and his colleagues were studying a separate question on visual perception in 12 participants when they found something striking: IQ seemed to be correlated strongly with performance on a visual task. The test asked users to spot the direction of motion on a series of black-and-white stripes on a screen. Sometimes, the lines formed inside a small central circle, and other times, they were large stripes that took up the entire screen. Participants also completed a short IQ test. [Watch Video of Motion and Test Your Smarts] The team noticed that people with higher IQs were good at spotting motion in the small circles, but terrible at detecting motion in the larger black-and-white stripes. Because they had looked at so few people, Tadin and his colleagues wondered if their results were a fluke. They repeated the experiment with 53 people, who also took a full IQ test. The ability to visually filter the motion strongly predicted IQ in fact, motion suppression (the ability to focus on the action and ignore background movements) was as predictive of total IQ as individual subsections of the IQ test itself. Relevant information As people walk, the background scenery is always changing, so efficient brains may be better at filtering out this irrelevant visual information. And that efficiency could be operating across a wide range of tasks, Tadin said. “What happens in brains of high-IQ people is, they're automatically processing motion of small moving objects efficiently, whereas they're suppressing the background,” Tadin said. The findings reshape the conventional view that quick thinking leads to smarts. “Speedy processing does matter, but it's only half the story. It's how you filter out things that are less relevant and focus your speedy resources on what is important,” Tadin said. Big variation The study reveals new insights into brain efficiency and smarts, said Kevin McGrew, director of the Institute for Applied Psychometrics and owner of www.themindhub.com. Even though the link between IQ and visual filtering was very strong, IQ tests won't be replaced by motion tracking anytime soon, said McGrew, who was not involved in the study. “Their task accounts for or explains about 50 percent of the IQ scores,” McGrew told LiveScience. “That is impressive in psychology, but it still means there is 50 percent of the scores that they're not explaining.” Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/24/simple-vision-test-predicts-iq/

New screening approach uncovers potential alternative drug therapies for neuroblastoma

"New treatment approaches are very much needed for children with high-risk childhood cancers; that is, those that are metastatic at diagnosis and likely to recur," says senior study author Kimberly Stegmaier of the Dana-Farber/Children’s Hospital Cancer Center and the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. "By focusing on an alternative strategy to treating neuroblastoma tumors, we identified a compound class that in early testing in neuroblastoma cells in the laboratory shows promise for treating children with this disease." Beyond the standard approach of using drugs that kill tumor cells, another promising strategy is to identify compounds that promote differentiation, which causes tumor cells to stop dividing and growing. But the benefits of differentiation therapy had not been fully explored. …

Timing of cancer radiation therapy may minimize hair loss

The study, which appears in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that mice lost 85 percent of their hair if they received radiation therapy in the morning, compared to a 17 percent loss when treatment occurred in the evening. The researchers, from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), worked out the precise timing of the hair circadian clock, and also uncovered the biology behind the clockwork — the molecules that tells hair when to grow and when to repair damage. They then tested the clock using radiotherapy. …

Link between tumor suppressors and starvation survival suggested

CU-Boulder Professor Min Han said the research team was interested in how a common tumor suppressor gene known as Retinoblastoma 1, or Rb, behaved under conditions of starvation. The question is important, said Han, because it may help researchers understand why many cancer cells are more susceptible to starvation or fasting than ordinary cells. Han and his team studied a popular lab organism called C. elegans, a translucent nematode smaller than an eyelash…

Potential therapeutic target for Cushing’s disease

The protein, called TR4 (testicular orphan nuclear receptor 4), is one of the human body’s 48 nuclear receptors, a class of proteins found in cells that are responsible for sensing hormones and, in response, regulating the expression of specific genes. Using a genome scan, the Salk team discovered that TR4 regulates a gene that produces adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which is overproduced by pituitary tumors in Cushing’s disease (CD). …