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MP’s ‘horror’ at getting £4.2bn to digitise NHS with no plan
Former NHS Digital minister George Freeman says there was a “horror story” behind the huge scheme.
Health24.com | Colds especially bad? It may be the bacteria in your nose
For people suffering from a cold, the severity of their symptoms may be linked to the mix of bacteria that inhabit their nose.
New research suggests the amount and type of organisms residing in the nose might explain why some people’s symptoms are worse than others – even if they are infected with the same strain of virus.
For the study, researchers analyzed the nasal bacteria of 152 people before and after they were infected with the same cold virus. People whose noses have a lot of Staphylococcus bacteria had more severe nasal symptoms than those with less of this type of bacteria.
The bacteria inside the noses of the participants followed one of six different patterns, which were associated with variations in the severity of their symptoms. The mix of nasal bacteria was also linked with their viral load, or the amount of the virus in their body.
“There were effects on virus load and how much virus you shed in your nasal secretions. So the background microbiome, the background bacterial pattern in your nose, had influences on the way that you reacted to the virus and how sick you got,” said researcher Dr. Ronald Turner, who’s with the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
But the researchers added that their findings don’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship.
“What we’re reporting is an association, so it’s entirely possible that the fact that you have staph in your nose and you have more symptoms is not directly related,” Turner explained in a university news release. “It may well be that there’s some underlying host characteristic that makes you likely to have staph in your nose and also makes you more likely to become ill.”
The researchers noted that the composition of nasal bacteria and the severity of people’s symptoms could boil down to genetics.
“Whether there are environmental characteristics that also influence it – whether you’re exposed to pollution or whether you’re allergic or whether any number of things might impact it – I don’t know,” Turner said. “But I suspect there is some interaction among the host and the environment and the pathogen that determines what you end up with.”
The study participants were also treated with probiotics to determine if beneficial bacteria would ease their symptoms or affect the composition of their nasal bacteria. Neither happened. It also didn’t affect the microbiomes in their stomachs, Turner’s team reported.
The researchers, who received funding from DuPont, the probiotic’s manufacturer, suggested that a more direct approach, such as a probiotic nasal spray, could possibly have a more noticeable effect.
“One of the things that would be interesting to ask, and this would be a completely different study, is, what happens if you give antibiotics?” Turner said. “Can you change the nasal flora by giving antibiotic? And is that a good thing or is that a bad thing? Those are all unknowns.”
The findings were published recently in the journal Scientific Reports.
Antidepressant withdrawal ‘hits millions’
Nearly two million people in England experience bad side-effects when coming off the tablets, experts say.
Health24.com | More evidence video games may trigger aggression in kids
Can violent video games push some kids to act violently in real life? A new research review suggests the answer is “yes.”
The analysis combined the results of 24 past studies, involving more than 17 000 children and teenagers. Overall, researchers found, kids who played video games featuring fighting, attacks and killing were somewhat more likely than their peers to become more aggressive over time.
‘Reliable’ link
The controversial findings are the latest entry into a long-standing debate over the real-world impact of video game violence.
Over the years, some studies have found a connection between the games and kids’ aggression, while others have not.
The authors of the new review said their results show a “reliable” link. They also said they were able to address the main criticisms that have been leveled at such research in the past.
“My characterisation would be that the effects [of violent video games] were relatively small, but reliable – and not inconsequential in their implications for aggressive behavior,” said researcher Jay Hull, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
According to Hull’s team, most researchers in the field believe there is a connection between video game violence and kids’ aggression.
But, the study authors added, a “vocal minority” has cited flaws in the research. For example, some studies have asked kids about “non-serious” issues like irritability, rather than strictly measuring overt aggression. Still others have failed to account for other factors in kids’ lives that could feed aggressive behaviour.
Video game mayhem
So the Dartmouth researchers said they analysed studies that measured actual physical aggression.
Overall, they found, there was an association between exposure to game violence and increases in kids’ aggressive behaviour – based on reports from kids themselves, or from parents or teachers.
And the connection was not diminished even when studies did account for other factors in kids’ lives, the researchers said.
The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
According to Hull, video game mayhem might feed some kids’ aggression because it “rewards” violence and hostile thoughts, while reducing empathy toward victims.
Hull had this advice for parents: “Encourage [your kids] to pursue other, more productive spare-time activities.”
‘Itty-bitty effect’
Not everyone was convinced by the study, however.
Patrick Markey, a professor of psychology at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, has studied the potential link between video games and real-life violence.
He said the new findings point to, at most, a minor influence of video games.
“This suggests that less than 1% of the variance in aggression [among kids] is explained by exposure to video game violence,” Markey said. “That’s an itty-bitty effect.”
Markey also disputed the claim that most researchers agree that video game violence begets real-world violence. He pointed to a 2017 survey of psychology and media researchers that found only 15% believed the games contribute to serious physical aggression in kids.
“The research, to me, is clear that video games don’t cause serious acts of violence,” Markey said.
No evidence for ‘real effect‘
Even so, he added, parents might have other reasons they want to limit their kids’ exposure to violent games. They might want to “shield them from scary things,” for example, and that’s their call.
Christopher Ferguson is a psychology professor at Stetson University in DeLand, Fla. He led several of the studies included in the new analysis – studies that found no evidence implicating violent video games.
He, too, stressed the small effect seen in this analysis.
As a predictor of kids’ violent behavior, Ferguson said, exposure to video games “was almost no better than a coin toss.”
“I think this is actually evidence against any real effect,” he said.
At this point, Ferguson said, many parents probably already have an opinion on whether they want their kids playing violent video games. And this study is unlikely to change their minds, he said.
“Every parent knows their kid best,” Ferguson said. “They have to use their best judgment.
Image credit: iStock
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Health24.com | US, Japanese scientists win Nobel for pioneering cancer research
Stockholm – James Allison of the University of Texas and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University have won Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that help the body marshal its cellular troops to attack invading cancers. Their parallel work concerned proteins that act as brakes on the body’s immune system.
The research, which has led to drugs that release the brakes on the immune system, constitutes “a landmark in our fight against cancer,” said the Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, which selects the winners of the prestigious award.
The discoveries by Allison, 70, and Honjo, 76, “absolutely paved the way for a new approach to cancer treatment”, Dr Jedd Wolchok, chief of the melanoma and immunotherapeutics service at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, told The Associated Press.
One cancer doctor said “an untold number of lives… have been saved by the science that they pioneered”.
‘Spacesuits’ protect microbes destined to live in space
Just as spacesuits help astronauts survive in inhospitable environments, newly developed “spacesuits” for bacteria allow them to survive in environments that would otherwise kill them.
University of California, Berkeley, chemists developed the protective suits to extend the bacteria’s lifespan in a unique system that pairs live bacteria with light-absorbing semiconductors in order to capture carbon dioxide and convert it into chemicals that can be used by industry or, someday, in space colonies.
The system mimics photosynthesis in plants. But while plants capture carbon dioxide and, with the energy from sunlight, convert it to carbohydrates that we often eat, the hybrid system captures CO2 and light to make a variety of carbon compounds, depending on the type of bacteria.
The bacteria used in the experiment are anaerobic, which means they are adapted to live in environments without oxygen. The suit — a patchwork of mesh-like pieces called a metal-organic framework, or MOF — is impermeable to oxygen and reactive oxygen molecules, like peroxide, which shorten their lifespan.
The hybrid system could be a win-win for industry and the environment: It can capture carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and turn it into useful products. It also provides a biological way to produce needed chemicals in artificial environments such as spaceships and habitats on other planets.
“We are using our biohybrid to fix CO2 to make fuels, pharmaceuticals and chemicals, and also nitrogen fixation to make fertilizer,” said Peidong Yang, the S. K. and Angela Chan Distinguished Chair in Energy in UC Berkeley’s Department of Chemistry. “If Matt Damon wants to grow potatoes on Mars, he needs fertilizer.”
Yang, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a co-director of the Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute, was referring to the actor who played the protagonist in the movie The Martian. Damon’s character was marooned on Mars and had to use his own waste as fertilizer to grow potatoes for food.
The research, funded by NASA through UC Berkeley’s Center for the Utilization of Biological Engineering in Space, will be posted online this week in advance of publication in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A hybrid of bacteria and semiconductor
Yang and his colleagues developed the hybrid bacterial system over the past five years based on their work on light-absorbing semiconductors such as nanowires: solid wires of silicon a few hundred nanometers across, where a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. Arrays of nanowires can be used to capture light and generate electricity, promising cheap solar cells.
The hybrid system takes advantage of efficient light capture by semiconductors to feed electrons to anaerobic bacteria, which normally scavenge electrons from their environment to live. The goal is to boost carbon capture by the bacteria to churn out useful carbon compounds.
“We are interfacing these bugs with a semiconductor that overwhelms them with electrons, so they can do more chemistry,” Yang said. “But at the same time this process also generates all these reactive oxygen species, which are detrimental to the bugs. We are putting these bacteria in a shell so that if any of these oxidative species comes in, this first defense, the shell, decomposes them.”
The suit is made of a MOF mesh that wraps around the bacteria, covering it in patches. Wearing these MOF suits, the bacteria live five times longer at normal oxygen concentrations — 21 percent by volume — than without the suits, and often longer than in their natural environment, Yang said. Their normal lifespan ranges from weeks to months, after which they can be flushed from the system and replaced with a fresh batch.
In this experiment, the researchers used bacteria called Morella thermoacetica, which produce acetate (acetic acid, or vinegar), a common precursor in the chemical industry. Another one of their test bacteria, Sporomusa ovata, also produces acetate.
“We picked these anaerobic bacteria because their selectivity toward one chemical product is always 100 percent,” he said. “In our case, we picked a bug that gives us acetate. But you could select another bug to give you methane or alcohol.”
In fact, the bacteria that ferment the alcohol in beer and wine and turn milk into cheese and yoghurt are all anaerobic.
While Yang’s first experiments with the hybrid system paired bacteria with a bristle of silicon nanowires, in 2016 he discovered that feeding the bacteria cadmium encouraged them to decorate themselves with a natural semiconductor, cadmium sulfide, that acts as an efficient light absorber feeding the bacteria electrons.
In the current experiment, the researchers took bacteria decorated with cadmium sulfide and enshrouded them with a flexible, one nanometer thick layer of MOF. While a rigid MOF interfered with the bacteria’s normal process of growth and splitting, a zirconium-based MOF patch turned out to be soft enough to allow the bacteria to swell and divide while still clothed with MOF, after which new MOF in the solution re-clothed them.
“You can think of the 2D MOF like a sheet of graphene: a one-layer-thick cloak that covers the bacteria,” said co-author Omar Yaghi, a pioneer of MOFs and the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair in the Department of Chemistry. “The 2D MOF is floating in solution with the bacteria, and as the bacteria replicate they are covered further with the 2D MOF layer, so it protects the bacteria from oxygen.”
Yang and his colleagues are also working to improve the hybrid system’s efficiency of light capture, electron transfer and production of specific compounds. They envision combining these optimized capabilities with new metabolic pathways in these bacteria to produce ever more complex molecules.
“Once you fix or activate CO2 — and that is the most difficult part — you can use many existing chemical and biological approaches to upgrade them to fuels, pharmaceuticals and commodity chemicals,” he said.
130-year-old brain coral reveals encouraging news for open ocean
When nitrogen-based fertilizers flow into water bodies, the result can be deadly for marine life near shore, but what is the effect of nitrogen pollution far out in the open ocean?
A 130-year-old brain coral has provided the answer, at least for the North Atlantic Ocean off the East Coast of the United States. By measuring the nitrogen in the coral’s skeleton, a team of researchers led by Princeton University found significantly less nitrogen pollution than previously estimated. The study was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“To our surprise, we did not see evidence of increased nitrogen pollution in the North Atlantic Ocean over the past several decades,” said Xingchen (Tony) Wang, who conducted the work as part of his doctorate in geosciences at Princeton and is now a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology.
Earlier work by the Princeton-based team, however, did find elevated nitrogen pollution in another open ocean site in the South China Sea, coinciding with the dramatic increase in coal production and fertilizer usage in China over the past two decades.
In the new study, the researchers looked at coral skeleton samples collected in the open ocean about 620 miles east of the North American continent near the island of Bermuda, a region thought to be strongly influenced by airborne nitrogen released from U.S. mainland sources such as vehicle exhaust and power plants.
Although the team found no evidence that human-made nitrogen was on the rise, the researchers noted variations in nitrogen that corresponded to levels expected from a natural climate phenomenon called the North Atlantic Oscillation, Wang said.
The result is in contrast to previously published computer models that predicted a significant increase in human-made nitrogen pollution in the North Atlantic.
The work may indicate that U.S. pollution control measures are successfully limiting the amount of human-generated nitrogen emissions that enter the ocean.
“Our finding has important implications for the future of human nitrogen impact on the North Atlantic Ocean,” said Wang. “Largely due to advances in pollution technology, human nitrogen emissions from the U.S. have held steady or even declined in recent decades,” he said. “If emissions continue at this level, our results imply that the open North Atlantic will remain minimally affected by nitrogen pollution in coming decades.”
Nitrogen, when in its biologically available form and supplied in excess, can cause overgrowth of plants and algae and lead to severe ecosystem harm, including marine “dead zones” that form when microorganisms consume all the oxygen in the water, leaving none for fish. Fertilizer production and fossil fuel burning have greatly increased the production of biologically available, or “fixed,” nitrogen since the early 20th century.
When emitted to the atmosphere, fixed nitrogen can influence the ocean far from land. However, the impacts on the ocean are difficult to study because of the challenges involved in making long-term observations in the open ocean.
Corals can help. Stony or “Scleractinian” corals are long-lived organisms that build a calcium carbonate skeleton as they grow. The corals soak up nitrogen from the surrounding water and deposit a small portion in their skeletons. The skeletons provide a natural record of nitrogen emissions.
To distinguish human-made, or anthropogenic, nitrogen from the naturally occurring kind, the researchers take advantage of the fact that nitrogen comes in two weights. The heavier version, known as 15N, contains one more neutron than the lighter 14N. Anthropogenic nitrogen has a lower ratio of 15N to 14N than does the nitrogen in the ocean.
“It has long been my dream to use the nitrogen in coral skeletons to reconstruct past environmental changes; thanks to Tony, we are now doing it,” said Daniel Sigman, the Dusenbury Professor of Geological and Geophysical Sciences at Princeton.
While a graduate student at Princeton, Wang developed a sensitive and precise method to measure the 15N-to-14N ratio using a mass spectrometer, which is like a bathroom scale for weighing molecules.
To collect coral samples in the North Atlantic Ocean, Wang and Anne Cohen, an associate scientist in geology and geophysics at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, led a team in 2014 to Bermuda. The investigators removed a 23-inch-long core from a living brain coral (Diploria labyrinthiformis) about 10 feet below the surface on Hog Reef, about six miles from the main island. The researchers confirmed that Bermuda’s nitrogen run-off was not a factor at the site by measuring nitrogen levels in plankton floating nearby.
In addition to Wang, Cohen and Sigman, the research featured contributions from Princeton graduate student in geosciences Victoria Luu, Haojia Ren of National Taiwan University, Zhan Su of Caltech, and Gerald Haug of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and Princeton University’s Grand Challenges Program.
The study, “Natural forcing of the North Atlantic nitrogen cycle in the Anthropocene,” by Xingchen Tony Wang, Anne Cohen, Victoria Luu, Haojia Ren, Zhan Su, Gerald Haug and Daniel Sigman, was published online the week of October 1, 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Nearly the entire sky in the early universe is glowing with Lyman-alpha emission
An unexpected abundance of Lyman-alpha emission in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) region was discovered by an international team of astronomers using the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT. The discovered emission covers nearly the entire field of view — leading the team to extrapolate that almost all of the sky is invisibly glowing with Lyman-alpha emission from the early Universe [1].
Astronomers have long been accustomed to the sky looking wildly different at different wavelengths, but the extent of the observed Lyman-alpha emission was still surprising. “Realising that the whole sky glows in optical when observing the Lyman-alpha emission from distant clouds of hydrogen was a literally eye-opening surprise,” explained Kasper Borello Schmidt, a member of the team of astronomers behind this result.
“This is a great discovery!” added team member Themiya Nanayakkara. “Next time you look at the moonless night sky and see the stars, imagine the unseen glow of hydrogen: the first building block of the universe, illuminating the whole night sky.”
The HUDF region the team observed is an otherwise unremarkable area in the constellation of Fornax (the Furnace), which was famously mapped by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in 2004, when Hubble spent more than 270 hours of precious observing time looking deeper than ever before into this region of space.
The HUDF observations revealed thousands of galaxies scattered across what appeared to be a dark patch of sky, giving us a humbling view of the scale of the Universe. Now, the outstanding capabilities of MUSE have allowed us to peer even deeper. The detection of Lyman-alpha emission in the HUDF is the first time astronomers have been able to see this faint emission from the gaseous envelopes of the earliest galaxies. This composite image shows the Lyman-alpha radiation in blue superimposed on the iconic HUDF image.
MUSE, the instrument behind these latest observations, is a state-of-the-art integral field spectrograph installed on Unit Telescope 4 of the VLT at ESO’s Paranal Observatory [2]. When MUSE observes the sky, it sees the distribution of wavelengths in the light striking every pixel in its detector. Looking at the full spectrum of light from astronomical objects provides us with deep insights into the astrophysical processes occurring in the Universe [3].
“With these MUSE observations, we get a completely new view on the diffuse gas ‘cocoons’ that surround galaxies in the early Universe,” commented Philipp Richter, another member of the team.
The international team of astronomers who made these observations have tentatively identified what is causing these distant clouds of hydrogen to emit Lyman-alpha, but the precise cause remains a mystery. However, as this faint omnipresent glow is thought to be ubiquitous in the night sky, future research is expected to shed light on its origin.
“In the future, we plan to make even more sensitive measurements,” concluded Lutz Wisotzki, leader of the team. “We want to find out the details of how these vast cosmic reservoirs of atomic hydrogen are distributed in space.”
Notes:
[1] Light travels astonishingly quickly, but at a finite speed, meaning that the light reaching Earth from extremely distant galaxies took a long time to travel, giving us a window to the past, when the Universe was much younger.
[2] Unit Telescope 4 of the VLT, Yepun, hosts a suite of exceptional scientific instruments and technologically advanced systems, including the Adaptive Optics Facility, which was recently awarded the 2018 Paul F. Forman Team Engineering Excellence Award by the American Optical Society.
[3] The Lyman-alpha radiation that MUSE observed originates from atomic electron transitions in hydrogen atoms which radiate light with a wavelength of around 122 nanometres. As such, this radiation is fully absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere. Only red-shifted Lyman-alpha emission from extremely distant galaxies has a long enough wavelength to pass through Earth’s atmosphere unimpeded and be detected using ESO’s ground-based telescopes.
Health24.com | Brushing up on dental hygiene
Sarah Masina is an unemployed single mother of four who has gone most of her life without ever going to the dentist.
“I never thought by neglecting my teeth all those years could have serious health consequences,” the 45-year-old woman told Health-e News. “I was embarrassment of my appearance – a lot of my teeth had fallen out – I was ashamed to seek treatment.”
Keep your teeth clean
But recently Masina put her feelings of shame aside and went to her local clinic to seek help.
“I was diagnosed with gum disease. The dentist told me the reason my teeth had fallen out over the years was because of the gum disease.”
Masina said her family was poor and they couldn’t afford toothpaste and toothbrushes so dental hygiene wasn’t a priority.
According to dentist Dr Innocentia Mbatha, oral hygiene is the regular practice of keeping your mouth and teeth clean to prevent dental problems such as cavities, gingivitis, gum disease and bad breath.
Damage to soft tissue and bone
Gum disease is a condition caused by bacteria and food debris that build up on teeth and form a sticky film known as plaque. As the plaque hardens, it forms tartar and more plaque continues to form. Ultimately, this results in the gums becoming swollen and red. As it worsens it can cause teeth to become loose because of the damage it causes to the soft issue and bone underneath the teeth.
Mbatha said gum disease can be prevented by brushing your teeth at least twice a day and flossing, changing your toothbrush regularly and visiting a dentist every six months for a check-up and cleaning. – Health-e News
Image credit: iStock
