Day: 04/25/2015

Know about the 10 youngest Nobel Laureates of the world

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Nobel Prize is regarded as one of the most honourable and prestigious awards in the world. From 1901 to 2014, 889 Nobel Laureates have come out. Among them 25 are organisations and 864 are individuals.

Here’s a list of the top 10 young Nobel laureates:

Malala Yousafzai

In 2014, Malala Yousafzai became the youngest Nobel laureate to win the Nobel Peace Prize, at the age of 17, for her resistance against the suppression of children and young people and also for the right to education for all. She fought for female education. She is the second Pakistani to receive a Nobel Prize.

Lawrence Bragg

At the age of 25, Lawrence Bragg was the youngest person to receive the Nobel Prize in 1915. He got the Nobel prize for his analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays. His record for the youngest Nobel Laureate remained unbroken for the next 99 years. At present, he is the second youngest person to be a Nobel laureate. This Austrian born scientist is the youngest Nobel Laureate in physics till date.

Werner Heisenberg

At the age of 31, German physicist Werner Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932 for the formation of quantum mechanics. He was the only Nobel Prize winner, that year. He also made significant contributions to the theories of hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles.

Paul A.M. Dirac

He received the Nobel Prize at the age of 31 for Physics, in 1933. His discoveries were pertaining to new productive forms of atomic theory. He is regarded as one of the ancestors of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics.

Carl D. Anderson

American Physicist Carl D. Anderson was the winner of Nobel Prize in the year 1936. He was just 31 years old for Physics. He discovered the positron.

Tsung-Dao Lee

Tsung-Dao Lee won the Nobel Prize in the year 1957, at the age of 31 years for Physics. He got the prize for his investigation of the parity laws, which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles. He is a Chinese born American Physicist.

Rudolf Mössbauer

German Physicist Rudolf Mössbauer won the Nobel Prize in the year 1961, at the age of 32 in Physics regarding his researches concerning the resonance absorption of gamma radiation.

Frederick G. Banting

He was a Canadian doctor who won the Nobel Physiology or Medicine Prize in the year 1923, for the discovery of insulin. He won the award when he was 32 years of age. He is also the person who implemented insulin on human beings.

Mairead Corrigan

Mairead Maguire won the Nobel Peace Prize in the year 1976, at the age of 32 years. Corrigan also won Norwegian People’s Peace Prize, Pacem in Terris and Carl von Ossietzky Medal.

Tawakkol Karman

The Yemeni journalist and politician Tawakkol Karman won Nobel Peace Prize in the year 2011. At the time of her win, she was 32 years old. She won the award for her non-violent struggle related to the safety of women and for women’s rights. She is the first Yemeni and the first Arab woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Are centrioles carriers of biological information?

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EPFL scientists discover that certain cell structures, the centrioles, could act as information carriers throughout cell generations. The discovery raises the possibility that transmission of biological information could involve more than just genes.

Centrioles are barrel-shaped structures inside cells, made up of multiple proteins. They are currently the focus of much research, since mutations in the proteins that make them up can cause a broad range of diseases, including developmental abnormalities, respiratory conditions, male sterility and cancer. Publishing in the Nature journal Cell Research, EPFL scientists show that the original centrioles of a fertilized egg, which only come from the father, persist across tens of cell divisions in the developing embryo. The surprising finding raises the possibility that centrioles may actually be carriers of information, with profound implications for biology and disease treatment.

Perhaps best known for their role in cell division, centrioles ensure that chromosomes are properly passed on to the new daughter cells. However, they are also found in cilia, the long eyelash-like structures that allow many cells in the body to signal to their neighbors and other cells to exhibit motility, e.g. in cells that line the respiratory tracts. During reproduction, both parents equally contribute genetic material, while the female egg donates most of the cell organelles, such as mitochondria. However, the centrioles of the newly fertilized embryo come exclusively from the male’s sperm, bringing with them any malfunctions to the first embryo cells.

Passing information across generations

The lab of Pierre Gönczy at EPFL’s Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research has found that centrioles can carry such information beyond the first cells to many of a developing embryo to several cell generations. The study focused on the worm C. elegans, which is commonly used as a model organism for embryonic development and human genetic diseases. As in other species, including humans, centrioles in C. elegans are only contributed by sperm cells. Gönczy’s team wanted to know how far do these “original” centrioles last across the cell divisions that turn a fertilized egg into a fully formed embryo.

In order to track the fate of the centrioles, the scientists used genetically modified versions of C. elegans, in which they could tag three different centriole proteins with a fluorescent signal. Tagged male worms were mated to untagged females, so that the scientists could specifically track centriole components that were contributed from the father during the course of embryogenesis.

Gönczy’s team imaged the fluorescent signals at different cell divisions of the developing embryos, and discovered that paternally contributed centriole proteins can actually persist up to ten cell generations. The data show for the first time that centrioles are remarkably persistent in the developing embryo.

Even more intriguing are the implications the study has for biology at large, as it raises the possibility that centrioles, persisting across several cell cycles, could effectively be a non-genetic information carrier. If this were confirmed, it could represent a paradigm shift in the way we think and understand the biology of an organelle that has been present across eukaryotic evolution.

Nonetheless, this does not detract from the value this study holds for medicine. Considering the number of diseases associated with centrioles, this could open the way for innovative treatment approaches. In particular, the study demonstrates how malfunctioning centrioles can pass directly from the father and well into the life of the embryo. This can have serious implications for the way we understand centriole diseases.

“Centrioles have always been seen as something that just jumpstarts the development of the embryo,” says Pierre Gönczy. “Here we show that centrioles could be the means of a unidirectional inheritance of information, with considerable impact in early development.” His team will next investigate if the exceptional persistence of centrioles extends to other systems, including human cells.

All in a day’s work.

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It began in the early afternoon of March 3 when the news was received that a liver was available for a patient who needed both a heart and a liver transplant. From there, it cascaded into the completion of five liver transplants within a span of 24 hours.

Charles Rosen, M.D., a Mayo transplant surgeon, tells us that each year, Mayo Clinic’s Rochester campus typically performs two or three transplant clusters, where more than one transplant is performed in a single day. “We do a little over 100 deceased donor transplants and around 20 living donor transplants a year,” he says.

“What was truly remarkable about that particular day is that this was the first time we have done five liver transplants within a 24-hour period, and this required a lot of communication and teamwork,” says Dr. Rosen. That communication happened not just among the Mayo Clinic employees but between donor hospitals several to coordinate travel arrangements for the various Mayo Clinic procurement teams to bring the donor organs to Rochester.

“We were challenged by the time constraints of transplantation, separation of our team with staffing of overlapping transplants at the Saint Marys and Methodist OR sites, and all of the uncertainties of timing that come with procurement procedures performed at four different donor hospitals, with two being out of our region,” says Dr. Rosen.

When Dr. Rosen received the call that the first liver had become available and determined it was viable for the patient, things were set in motion. He worked with LifeSource, the organ and tissue donation organization that serves Minnesota and the Dakotas, to coordinate the organ procurements and transportation. Teams were then dispatched to the states where the organs were located.

“We knew we had to get busy and we only had a few hours to prepare and call each other. Our anesthesia staff was able to step in and help one another. Our OR staff was able to do the same,” says Dr. Rosen. “My surgery and hepatology partners, and our fellows knew to stand by, ready to help, and they rescheduled clinics and other commitments so that they could be available.”

Dr. Rosen perhaps said it best in an email he sent to the entire team after the transplants had been completed. “At no time did I ever perceive that any of you thought it could not be done. Everyone – fellows, staff, nurses, and assistants – were extremely helpful and willing to support and relieve each other. Your teamwork was simply spectacular. Your skill and knowledge, your calm and caring demeanor, professionalism, and most of all – your dedication to our patients – are what enables us to achieve success and provide the best possible care to our patients. We are a great team, and I am very proud of you.”

Coordinate your support by leaving a comment below and while you’re here, share this story using our handy-dandy social media tools.

Decoding the Deadly Secret of Snake Venom .

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When he returned home to France after a stay in Costa Rica in 1983, Jean-Pierre Rosso carried back an unusual souvenir—a vial of deadly snake venom. Three decades later, after painstaking chemical and neurological analyses, Rosso and colleagues report that two toxins used by Costa Rican coral snakes act like no others, offering new insight into the astonishing array of chemical weapons that have evolved in the world’s animals.When Rosso’s team, led by Pierre Bougis, a biochemist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, identified the six toxins within the venom, four of them worked as expected, causing paralysis in rodents and other effects. But two were puzzling because they triggered seizures instead.

 The first step to understanding the mysterious toxins was to obtain more of the stuff to study in the lab. “I asked many times, ‘Can we get more venom?’” recalls Bougis. But his Costa Rican collaborators, who had initially milked the rare reptile, always replied: “We don’t have snakes.” So the team had to synthesize the toxins, which took a full decade.

The planet is home to more than 100,000 animals with venom, much of which is only now being characterized by scientists. There are not only snakes, spiders and scorpions, but also snails, fish, caterpillars, lizards, squid and even a few mammals, including the platypus, the short-tailed shrew and the slow loris, the world’s only venomous primate.

Because of the great variety, scientists suspect that the adaptation evolved not once but many times. A venomous jellyfish or sea anemone probably came first, maybe 500 million years ago, and venom arose in snakes some 65 million years ago, followed by monotremes (such as the platypus) 46 million years ago. “If we find complex life on other planets,” says Bryan Fry, head of the venom evolution laboratory at the University of Queensland in Australia, “I bet there’s going to be something venomous there.”

Especially if that alien life depends on amino acids. Venom toxins, it turns out, are strings of these basic biological molecules, called peptides or proteins, depending on their size. Scientists speculate that the toxins in venoms weren’t created by animals from scratch but are instead slightly altered versions of everyday peptides and proteins. A simple gene mutation can turn them into toxic weapons.

The French researchers don’t know where the coral snake toxins come from, but once they got hold of enough material, they figured out where the toxins go. The team radioactively tagged the synthetic toxins and applied them to isolated bits of rat brain. The compounds bound so tightly to receptors for a neurotransmitter called GABA that the neurons became overly excited.

Intriguingly, such receptors are involved in human disorders such as epilepsy and chronic pain. Bougis is determined to continue studying the toxins’ interactions with neurons, hoping it will lead to a new understanding of the disorders and perhaps treatments—even if the work takes another decade. “I am…in French, we say, tête dure,” he laughs, “hard-headed.”

 

 

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Systolic and Mean Pulmonary Artery Pressures: Are They Interchangeable in Patients With Pulmonary Hypertension?

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Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a common complication of numerous diseases, including left-sided heart diseases and chronic lung diseases and/or hypoxia, where PH is associated with exercise limitation and a worse prognosis. Other forms of PH include pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), chronic thromboembolic PH (CTEPH), and PH with unclear multifactorial mechanisms. Over the past decade, it has been documented that systolic pulmonary artery pressure (sPAP) may help estimate mean pulmonary artery pressure (mPAP) in adults with high accuracy and reasonably good precision (mPAP = 0.61 sPAP + 2 mm Hg). This strong linear relationship between sPAP and mPAP was unexpected from a classic physiologic point of view. Consistent results have been obtained from independent teams using either high-fidelity micromanometer-tipped PA catheters or fluid-filled catheters. Overall, the strong link between sPAP and mPAP has been documented over a wide range of PAPs, heart rate, cardiac output, wedge pressure, and causes of PH, during changes in posture and activity, and irrespective of patient’s sex, age, and BMI. A review of available invasive data confirms that patients with CTEPH and idiopathic PAH matched for their mPAP exhibit essentially similar sPAP. Pressure redundancy may be explained by the dependence of PA compliance upon mPAP. The 25 mm Hg threshold used to define PH accurately corresponds to an sPAP of 38 mm Hg. Although the limits of the echocardiographic estimation of sPAP are widely documented, results from invasive studies may furnish an evidence-based sPAP-derived mPAP value, potentially useful in the multiparameter echocardiographic approach currently used to diagnose and follow patients with PH.

Covering Your Health Special Report: The Pet Prescription | KIMT 3

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http://kimt.com/2015/04/22/covering-your-health-special-report-the-pet-prescription/?linkId=13728768

Pepsi Removes Aspartame From Diet Pepsi .

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Following the wave of corporations responding to consumer activism like never before, Pepsi has announced that it will be removing the artificial sweetener aspartame from its Diet Pepsi product.

pepsi-removes-aspartame

Aspartame, of course, is the artificial sweetener that has been linked to a number of conditions in a wide variety of studies — some of which mega food scientists argue are ‘unscientific.’

Now, instead of debating all of the specifics on these studies, I’m going to reveal to you the reality behind aspartame and why it’s such an amazing thing that it has been removed from Diet Pepsi. Again, this isn’t going to be a pasting debate of studies.

Instead, I’m going to bring you back to 1999. It was then that we learned the true origin of asprtame: genetically modified bacteria waste created by Monsanto. I wrote about this back in a October 2010 piece entitled ‘How is Aspartame Made? 1999 Investigation Finds Aspartame is Made with Genetically Modified Bacteria’, but at the time there was very little interest on the subject of aspartame’s creation in the general public.

Now, we stand at a point in history where consumers are finally starting to realize what they are eating. Or, to quote international best-selling author Bryant McGill:

“We believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed.”

And I think individuals around the globe are beginning to realize the validity of this quote in a very serious way. Even the senior vice president for PepsiCo recently admitted in an interview with The Salt that no one is buying their aspartame-laden Diet Pepsi brand:

“It’s literally the number-one complaint we’ve heard from diet-cola consumers as to why they’re drinking less and less diet cola…”

Aspartame Swapped for… Splenda?

In the past few months, we’ve seen McDonald’s announce that they will be reducing antibiotics in their livestock, Hershey chocolate company will begin phasing out high-fructose corn syrup, and now Pepsi is removing aspartame. But are these companies truly just concerned about your health?

Instead of changing out these ingredients decades ago when the science was beginning to emerge and these companies were seeing massive resistance throughout the population, they chose to stand their ground on behalf of the bottom dollar profit margins. Having a deep insider view of the manufacturing industry, I can tell you first hand how many major corporations will throw care to the wind over something as small as a 1 cent increased profit per bottle.

With Pepsi announcing that they will be replacing aspartame with Splenda, a sucralose-based artificial sweetener that isn’t much different, it shows their unwillingness to actually venture towards what consumers actually want. Could you imagine if they announced a total revamp of their product with organic-based ingredients replacing their cancer-causing junk chemicals?

 

Bowel cancers ‘spotted too late’

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bowel cancer cells

Thousands of people in England are dying from bowel cancer because their disease is not being spotted early enough, a charity has warned.

Beating Bowel Cancer found wide variation within the NHS in England in diagnosing the disease.

It says 3,200 lives could be saved each year if every NHS region did as well as the best performing areas.

In some regions, less than a third of cases are detected before the cancer has started to spread around the body.

Part of the problem is people not coming forward for checks.

A bowel-cancer screening programme was introduced in England in 2006, butfigures show that uptake among the eligible 60- to 74-year-old age group has been around the 60% mark.

Early detection is vital.

Those diagnosed with the disease in its advanced stages have a 7% chance of living another five years.

This compares with a 97% chance of survival if the cancer is detected at the earliest possible stage.

The regional diagnostic figures quoted by Beating Bowel Cancer come from the National Cancer Intelligence Network’s Cancer Commissioning Toolkit.

It captures data from more than 150 Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) caring for hundreds of thousands of NHS patients.

Mark Flannagan, chief executive of Beating Bowel Cancer, said: “It’s unacceptable that there are CCGs in England that diagnose less than one in three patients at an early stage.

“If they all performed as well as the best, thousands of lives could be saved and millions of pounds could be freed up to be used for other bowel cancer treatments, which patients are frequently told are unaffordable.

“This will require further improvements in screening, renewed efforts to raise awareness of signs and symptoms, and investment to support improvements in GP performance in investigating and referring patients appropriately.”

In the UK, about 41,000 people are diagnosed with bowel cancer each year and about 16,000 die of the disease.

Nick Ormiston-Smith of Cancer Research UK said: ” There are a number of reasons why cancer may be diagnosed at an advanced stage – for some cancers, symptoms are often only noticeable once the tumour has already started to spread. But for many others there are chances for the cancer to be picked up earlier.

“It’s vital that people are aware of their body and if they notice anything unusual they should visit their GP.”

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Bowel cancer

The main symptoms to look out for are:

  • bleeding from the bottom or blood in the stools (faeces)
  • a change in bowel habit (more frequent, looser stools)
  • abdominal pain
  • unexplained weight loss and/or tiredness

Exercise ‘not key to obesity fight’

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Physical activity has little role in tackling obesity – and instead public health messages should squarely focus on unhealthy eating, doctors say.

In an editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, three international experts said it was time to “bust the myth” about exercise.

They said while activity was a key part of staving off diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and dementia, its impact on obesity was minimal.

Instead excess sugar and carbohydrates were key.

The experts, including London cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, blamed the food industry for encouraging the belief that exercise could counteract the impact of unhealthy eating.

They even likened their tactics as “chillingly similar” to those of Big Tobacco on smoking and said celebrity endorsements of sugary drinks and the association of junk food and sport must end.

They said there was evidence that up to 40% of those within a normal weight range will still harbour harmful metabolic abnormalities typically associated with obesity.

But despite this public health messaging had “unhelpfully” focused on maintaining a healthy weight through calorie counting when it was the source of calories that mattered most – research has shown that diabetes increases 11-fold for every 150 additional sugar calories consumed compared to fat calories.

And they pointed to evidence from the Lancet global burden of disease programme which shows that unhealthy eating was linked to more ill health than physical activity, alcohol and smoking combined.

‘Unscientific’

Dr Malhotra said: “An obese person does not need to do one iota of exercise to lose weight, they just need to eat less. My biggest concern is that the messaging that is coming to the public suggests you can eat what you like as long as you exercise.

“That is unscientific and wrong. You cannot outrun a bad diet.”

But others said it was risky to play down the role of exercise. Prof Mark Baker, of the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence, which recommends “well-balanced diets combined with physical activity”, said it would be “idiotic” to rule out the importance of physical activity.

Ian Wright, director general at Food and Drink Federation, said: “The benefits of physical activity aren’t food industry hype or conspiracy, as suggested. A healthy lifestyle will include both a balanced diet and exercise.”

He said the industry was encouraging a balanced diet by voluntarily providing clear on-pack nutrition information and offering products with extra nutrients and less salt, sugar and fat.

“This article appears to undermine the origins of the evidence-based government public health advice, which must surely be confusing for consumers,” he said.

Falling men, failing neurons

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Most of us take standing up for granted. Only when we cannot stand for some reason are we reminded of its importance. Oliver Sacks, the legendary neurologist and author, addressed this rather poignantly in his story On standing on one leg, which documented his experiences after a fall in the Alps. The human species started ‘standing on two legs’ rather late in its evolution. As a consequence, body mechanisms that enable standing — for example ‘preventing all the blood from pooling in our feet, thanks to gravity’ — developed rather late. A complex neural network rich in chemicals and hormones controls postural changes in blood pressure, as it does heart rate, body temperature, digestion, urinary and sexual function… a host of human activities performed, often unthinkingly. This complex network — the autonomic nervous system or ANS — is ‘autonomic’ i.e. ‘independent’ of our conscious control, yet to some extent modifiable. For example, we can hold our urine until we reach the bathroom, well, most of the time!

V, a 64-year-old retired headmaster, came to us with a rather peculiar problem. For almost a year, he had been unable to stand up. He would collapse and transiently lose consciousness. Starting with giddiness on standing up, the problem had progressed to intolerable vertigo and eventually episodes of syncope (fainting), leaving him most comfortable when flat on his back. Not surprisingly, V had taken himself to bed, occupying supine repose, in which he was most comfortable. Not surprisingly also, this rendered him severely disabled, dependant on his wife of almost four decades, for all activities of daily life.

When we first met V, he was petrified of standing up, even with our persuasive encouragement and promise of medical support. We had to, therefore, admit him to a partner hospital, and begin attending to him there. Our detailed 360° evaluation confirmed that he had a rare but disabling condition — progressive autonomic failure — with the background of long-standing depression, under treatment with psychotropic medication and a history of generalised seizures (in remission). He had many symptoms of clinical autonomic dysfunction: his blood pressure when taken lying down was 90/50 mmHg; when he stood up, however, his blood pressure plummeted to 50/? — the diastolic so low that it was unrecordable. His postural vertigo, variable heart rate, altered patterns of sweating, pain in the neck and shoulders (coat hanger distribution), unpredictable bowel movements were all symptomatic of his underlying condition: Clinical Autonomic Dysfunction. In addition V had slurred speech and diminished swallowing ability without apparent neuromuscular weakness.

Following diagnosis, V was started on one of the few drugs that can help prevent postural fall in blood pressure. He also was enrolled into our interdisciplinary and integrative rehabilitation programme for autonomic dysfunction. Extended physiotherapy sessions including passive mobilisation, electrotherapy for pain, postural exercise paradigms, gait and balance training, and active exercise protocols delivered over three weeks. He also received acupuncture targeting his neurological symptoms and therapeutic mud for his gastro-intestinal symptoms. Sessions of Jacobson’s Progressive Muscle Relaxation as well as supportive counselling to build confidence and motivation and address caregiver distress were included. At the end of the treatment period, aided no doubt by both drug and alternative therapy approaches, V was back on his feet.

Clinical Autonomic Dysfunction with a plethora of systemic complaints often goes unrecognised as a medical diagnosis; so little being known about ANS and it being difficult to test. Many patients with autonomic symptoms are labelled as ‘psychosomatic’ and do not receive necessary medical attention, leading to avoidable delays in treatment. Indeed the ANS is perhaps one of the last frontiers of neuroscience, requiring significant research focus, as concluded in the recent TS Srinivasan-NIMHANS Conclave on the subject. Not just neurological and psychiatric, ANS symptoms can present with vertigo (ENT), cardiac (heart), respiratory (lungs), gastroenterological (abdomen), genitourinary (urinary and sexual), orthopaedic and rheumatology (bones, joints, musculoskeletal) complaints. A clinical diversity that can test the most accomplished physicians. While falling men like V could well have failing neurons, we also learn from him that people with a plethora of unexplained medical symptoms do deserve an ‘autonomic’ approach and may well benefit from therapy and rehabilitation.