Day: 03/16/2016

Can Meditation Change Your Genes?

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The study investigated the effects of a day of intensive mindfulness practice in a group of experienced meditators, compared to a group of untrained control subjects who engaged in quiet non-meditative activities. After eight hours of mindfulness practice, the meditators showed a range of genetic and molecular differences, including altered levels of gene-regulating machinery and reduced levels of pro-inflammatory genes, which in turn correlated with faster physical recovery from a stressful situation. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that shows rapid alterations in gene expression within subjects associated with mindfulness meditation practice,” says study author Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Cuba Has Made At Least 3 Major Medical Innovations That We Need

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The trade embargo is holding up research in some crucial areas.

By most measures, the United States’ business-friendly environment has proven to be fertile for medical innovation. Compared to other countries, America has filed the most patents in the life sciences, is conducting most of the world’s clinical trials and has published the most biomedical research.

That’s what makes the medical prominence of Cuba all the more surprising to those who view a free market as an essential driver of scientific discovery. Cuba is very poor, and yet the country has some of the healthiest, most long-lived residents in the world — as well as a medical invention or two that could run circles around U.S. therapies, thanks to government investment in scientific research and a preventive public health approach that views medical care as a birthright.

The island nation, hemmed in by a 54-year trade embargo with the U.S., can’t exchange goods with one of the world’s largest economies and the largest medical market. Still, the country is an unlikely global leader in public health and scientific investment.

“If people knew about these cutting-edge treatments coming out of Cuba, people would want to have them,” said Pierre LaRamée, executive director of the Oakland-based Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba, which advocates for Cuban medical inventions in the U.S. and publishes an international, peer-reviewed journal focusing on Cuban health and medicine.

“All of these arcane rules and restrictions related to the embargo that are designed to block commerce with Cuba are keeping Americans from having access to these treatment opportunities,” LaRamée said.

The White House is continuing to lift trade restrictions between the U.S. and Cuba. The most promising change yet came Tuesday, when the Obama administration announced that American dollars will now be usable in financial transactions in Cuba. The administration is also easing travel restrictions, allowing individuals to visit Cuba for “people to people” educational tours, whereas before Americans were only allowed to make such trips as part of a tour group. 

However, most transactions between Cuba and the U.S. are still prohibited, which is why Cuban drugs face additional regulatory hurdles for testing and marketing compared to other drugs developed overseas. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has authorized the importation of some Cuban medicines in the past, but only enough to conduct research and clinical trials, according to a spokeswoman for the Treasury.

Perhaps the most well-known Cuban innovation is the vaccine CimaVax. Invented by researchers at the Center of Molecular Immunology (CIM) in Havana, CimaVax targets a growth factor in cancer cells in a way that can arrest the spread of the disease. It can be used as both a treatment for lung cancer patients and a preventive measure for people at high risk of the disease.

A reported 5,000 patients worldwide have been treated with CimaVax. It has no known side effects, and the shot costs the Cuban government $1 to make.

The New York-based Roswell Park Cancer Institute is evaluating CimaVax for use in the U.S. It’s also trying to get clinical trials underway to replicate Cuban scientists’ findings, per U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations.

More Americans die from lung cancer than from any other type of cancer, which is why many people are eager for CimaVax to hit the U.S. market soon.

Here are three additional medical innovations that the U.S. could benefit from if relations between the U.S. and Cuba continue to thaw.

1. More cancer treatments

Cancer is not one disease, but a collection of hundreds of different illnesses. This makes finding one “cure” difficult, if not impossible. But over the years, scientists have developed a variety of different treatments that can transform cancer into a chronic, survivable condition.

About 1.7 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer this year, and about 600,000 are expected to die of it.

In addition to CimaVax, Roswell Park is also investigating Racotumomab andVSSP — two more promising cancer drugs invented by CIM. Racotumomab targets a molecule that scientists believe is found on all cancer cells, which means the drug could one day be effective against blood cancers as well as the solid tumors that accompany diseases like lung, breast, prostate and colon cancer. VSSP, originally designed as a compound to help boost the immune response to vaccines, also appears to enhance the anti-cancer immune response.

Racotumomab is in phase two and three trials in Cuba (these clinical trial stagesassess effectiveness, side effects and adverse reactions), while VSSP is in early clinical trials. The VSSP research is so preliminary that Cuban scientists’ documents still have to be translated from Spanish into English, says Dr. Kelvin Lee, chair of Roswell Park’s department of immunology.

These drugs aren’t as fully developed as CimaVax, says Lee, but they appear to have great potential. Roswell Park is preparing for a clinical trial to test Racotumomab in multiple myeloma, and it’s prepping VSSP for three trials — two in kidney cancer and one in breast cancer.

2. A treatment for diabetic foot ulcers

When uncontrolled diabetes causes nerve and blood vessel damage in a person’s foot, it can lead to one of the most debilitating complications of the disease: the development of foot ulcers — deep, red sores that can penetrate to the bone. These ulcers can become vulnerable to gangrene (tissue death), and in a worst-case scenario can result in toe, foot or leg amputations.

About 73,000 U.S. adults with diabetes had their lower limbs amputated in 2010, according to the American Diabetes Association. Multiple studies of different populations of people who have had their lower limbs amputated show that the procedure is linked to an increased risk of early death, suggesting either that surgery is a trauma many people don’t survive, or that people who submit to this kind of amputation are some of the most vulnerable and at-risk patients in care.

Since 2006, Cuba has had a drug for foot ulcers called Heberprot-P that prevents the need for amputations. Invented by scientists at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana, the treatment, which its creators describe as an “epidermal growth factor,” is injected near the affected area and can accelerate the skin’s healing process, closing a wound safely over the course of about three months. By 2013, Heberprot-P had been registered in 15 other countries and used to treat more than 100,000 patients.

Dr. David Armstrong, director of the Southern Arizona Limb Salvage Alliance and a professor of surgery at University of Arizona, says he’s excited about the treatment, though he emphasized that Heberprot-P would still have to go through trials in the States to demonstrate its effectiveness.

“What I want is for this to come to clinical trials in the U.S., to give it a fair shot and see whether or not it lives up to its current promise,” he said.

Armstrong also noted that besides amputation, the only treatment currently available to Americans with diabetic foot ulcers is a cream with a “black box warning,” indicating that the treatment has serious or life-threatening side effects.

3. Treatment for advanced head and neck tumors

Surgery is the primary way to treat most head and neck tumors, but these procedures can severely affect people’s ability to chew, swallow or talk.

Head and neck cancers make up approximately 3 percent of all cancers in the U.S., affecting about 52,000 Americans every year. Alcohol and tobacco use, as well as human papillomavirus, are major risk factors of the diseases.

Nimotuzumab, patented in the U.S. in 1999 by CIM scientists, is a treatment for various head and neck cancers, including squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (tumors that form on the mucosal surfaces of the mouth, throat and nose), glioma (brain tumors) and nasopharyngeal cancer. Monoclonal antibodies in the medicine attach to epidermal growth factor receptors on the surface of the cancer cell, thus preventing it from dividing and spreading the cancer.

Nimotuzumab has had orphan drug status in the U.S. for the treatment of glioma since 2004 and for pancreatic cancer since 2015. This designation is granted to promising drugs that are not yet licensed in the U.S. Researchers can test the drug for rare diseases in clinical trials, but it’s not available to the general public. In fact, Lee said, Roswell Park is preparing for another clinical trial of Nimotuzumab in combination with an FDA-approved treatment to see how effective it will be against lung cancer.

Dr. Eric Bouffet, director of the brain tumor program at Toronto’s Hospital For Sick Children, is the only investigator to date who has completed a Nimotuzumab trial in North America. He tested its efficacy in children against diffuse pontine glioma (aggressive and difficult-to-treat brain tumors) across multiple sites in Canada and the U.S., and found that the drug wasn’t effective. He published the results in 2014.

“As far as Nimotuzumab is concerned, at least in the pediatric oncology setting, there isn’t any study that has been successful enough to influence the FDA to allow it [to] be licensed or approved for pediatric use in North America,” Bouffet said.

But despite early disappointment in U.S. trials, Dr. Dimitrios Colevas, a medical oncologist who specializes in new drug development for head and neck cancer at Stanford, says that Nimotuzumab may be unique compared to other cancer medicines that also target epidermal growth factor receptors, in that it doesn’t seem to have the same toxic side effects.

The drugs Cetuximab and Panitumumab, which are in the same class as Nimotuzumab but are available in the U.S., can cause unsightly and unpleasant acne-like rashes, while international reports about Nimotuzumab suggest its incidence of rash is a lot lower. Indeed, an Italian study found that Nimotuzumab, in combination with another drug and radiation treatment, appeared to induce a response with few side effects.

However, Colevas can’t know for sure if Nimotuzumab has fewer side effects than other drugs in its class, or how effective Nimotuzumab is compared to related treatments, because Bouffet’s is the only trial of the drug that has been completed in the U.S. In contrast, China has completed or is currently conducting at least 25 Nimotuzumab trials. For any other drug that wasn’t made in Cuba, Colevas said, that ratio would probably be reversed.

“This drug is not some new drug, [and] it’s been around as long as the others,” Colevas said. “Wouldn’t it have been nice if they all could have been available for testing, and we could have allowed scientific and medical reasons to drive why one or the other came to the market in a particular place, rather than political embargoes?”

As economic and diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba continue to normalize, here’s hoping that these promising Cuban medical treatments can be investigated fully in the U.S. Americans have been waiting long enough.

300-year-old math question solved, professor wins $700k

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It was a problem that had baffled mathematicians for centuries — until British professor Andrew Wiles set his mind to it.

“There are no whole number solutions to the equation xn+ yn = zn when n is greater than 2.”
See the world through the eyes of a scientist

 
Otherwise known as “Fermat’s Last Theorem,” this equation was first posed by French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in 1637, and had stumped the world’s brightest minds for more than 300 years.
In the 1990s, Oxford professor Andrew Wiles finally solved the problem, and this week was awarded the hugely prestigious 2016 Abel Prize — including a $700,000 windfall.
Learning of the award, Wiles told the University of Oxford: “It is a tremendous honor … Fermat’s equation was my passion from an early age, and solving it gave me an overwhelming sense of fulfillment.
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“It has always been my hope that my solution of this age-old problem would inspire many young people to take up mathematics and to work on the many challenges of this beautiful and fascinating subject.”
The prize, often described as the Nobel of mathematics, was awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, with an official ceremony featuring Crown Prince Haakon of Norway to take place in May.
“Wiles is one of very few mathematicians — if not the only one — whose proof of a theorem has made international headline news,” said the Abel Committee.

Science Answers An Age-Old Question: How Can You Spot A Pregnant T. Rex?

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“We know next to nothing about sex-linked traits in extinct dinosaurs.”

Scientists have discovered what they believe is a pregnant Tyrannosaurus Rex — and it might even still contain dino DNA.

Tests conducted on the fossilized femur of a 68-million-year-old T. Rex revealed the presence of medullary bone, or a type of bone that forms only in female birds before or during egg-laying, according to a news release from North Carolina State University.

“It’s a dirty secret, but we know next to nothing about sex-linked traits in extinct dinosaurs,” Lindsay Zanno, assistant research professor of biological sciences at the university and co-author of the new study, said in the release.

“Dinosaurs weren’t shy about sexual signaling, all those bells and whistles, horns, crests, and frills, and yet we just haven’t had a reliable way to tell males from females,” Zanno said. “Just being able to identify a dinosaur definitively as a female opens up a whole new world of possibilities.”

N.C. state paleontologist Mary Schweitzer spotted what she believed to be the medullary bone in the T. Rex sample in 2005.

“All the evidence we had at the time pointed to this tissue being medullary bone,” Schweitzer, who is lead author of the new study, said in the release. “But there are some bone diseases that occur in birds, like osteopetrosis, that can mimic the appearance of medullary bone under the microscope. So to be sure we needed to do chemical analysis of the tissue.”

The new study focused on that analysis, comparing the dino bones to the medullary tissue of ostriches and chickens.

It was a match.

One test looked for a substance called keratan sulfate, which is found in medullary bone but not other types of bone.

Scientists thought this substance might not survive the passage of millions of years, but it turns out it did.

And if that can still be detected, there may be hope that a sample of dino DNA is still waiting to be found.

“Yes, it’s possible,” Lindsay Zanno told Discovery News. “We have some evidence that fragments of DNA may be preserved in dinosaur fossils, but this remains to be tested further.”

Johns Hopkins Study Finds Psilocybin’s Ideal Dose For Long-Term Positive Effects

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Groundbreaking research at Johns Hopkins University of Medicine has provided insight into the benefits of mediated doses of psilocyben, the active psychedelic compound found in “magic” mushrooms.

Though undeniable benefits are reported across the world from those that use mushrooms, there have also been many accounts of “bad trips,” or people having taken too much and experienced waking nightmares.  The researchers wanted to get to the bottom of this and so they began a study consisting of individuals between the ages of 29 and 62.  The team selected 18 of sound mind and body to undergo five sessions, each of which were eight hours in length and timed one month apart.  During four of the sessions, the volunteers would receive varying dosages of the psilocybin compound and a placebo at the remaining session to serve as a control.

In the study, participants were encouraged to lay down and wear head phones or eye masks to provide a comfortable environment.

No participants knew how much psilocyben they were ingesting.

Researchers noticed higher doses correlated with more positive effects and that at the highest dose, 30mg/70kg, 78 percent of the subjects reported having experienced on of the top five most spiritually significant events of their lives, though the reported moments of anxiety, fear, and stress increased by six times.

The second highest dose, 20 mg/70kg, resulted in only one of the volunteers reporting any negative experiences and all volunteers reporting positive experiences and the lowest dose used for the study, 5 mg/70 kg, demonstrated discernible and long-lasting positive effects on behavior, attitude and overall outlook. So much so that even friends and family members of the volunteers were able to notice the changes.

“We seem to have found levels of the substance and particular conditions for its use that give a high probability of a profound and beneficial experience, a low enough probability of psychological struggle, and very little risk of any actual harm,” says lead author Roland Griffiths, PhD.

A followup 14 months after the study showed that 94 percent of the subjects felt the experience was definitely within their top 5 most significant spiritual experiences.

These exciting studies at Johns Hopkins continue to unlocked the potential of psilocyben as a medicine that is helping people come to terms with death and other severe forms of stress, while allowing them a new awakening and spiritual perspective.

Cancer reversed in frogs by hacking cells’ electricity with light

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Reprogramming a cell’s electricity could provide an alternative to standard toxic cancer drugs and their unpleasant side effects

cancer cells
Don’t let them take charge

OUR bodies are electric. It’s not just our brains and hearts – almost every cell has an electrical charge, and hacking it might be a way to treat cancer. Researchers have used light to shift the charge of cancer cells in frogs, making them healthy again.

It’s some way off being a human therapy, but this is the first use of a technique called optogenetics to target cancer, opening up the possibility of treatments that don’t use toxic drugs. “This is just the beginning,” says Michael Levinat Tufts University, Massachusetts. “We hope we have a new strategy for reprogramming cell activity – we’re cracking the bioelectric code.”

Nerve cells use electricity to transmit signals. They do this by letting ions flow into or out of the cell through channels in their membranes, often triggering similar changes in neighbouring cells. Other cells also communicate in this way, using their ion channels to share information about their function or movement, says Levin.

This communication seems to be important when cells divide to repair damage. But uncontrolled cell division can lead to cancer, and when a cell loses some of its negative charge, it seems to help tumours to spread. These findings have raised a tantalising prospect: could we target these electrical signals to stop cancer?

Treatments that target ion channels are already being tested – one such drug seems to have kept a man’s brain tumour in remission for two months. However, the drug had toxic side effects, so he stopped taking it.

Instead of using drugs to target ion channels, Levin’s team is using optogenetics. This technique involves injecting a gene into cells that makes a light-sensitive protein. Shining a laser on these newly sensitive cells can then alter their behaviour in different ways, depending on the protein used.

“We hope we have a new strategy for cancer – we’re cracking the bioelectric code”

To see if optogenetics can change the flow of ions into a cell to revert it to a non-dividing state, Levin’s team have turned to frog embryos, which are particularly easy to work with. They inserted a gene that predisposes animals to cancer, adding a gene for a light-activated ion channel at the same time.

A week later, the tadpoles had hatched and developed tumours. While not exactly the same as human cancers, these tumours had many of the same properties, growing, spreading and forming their own blood supply in a similar way.

When the team pointed a laser at the tadpoles, around a third of the tumours stopped developing. This is an impressive result for a cancer treatment, says William Brackenbury at the University of York, UK, although he says it is hard to know how large the effect would be in humans.

In the tadpoles, cells that had been cancerous looked healthy again, and were absorbed back into other body tissues. “They’ve reprogrammed the cancer cells, by altering the electrical status of the cell,” says Saverio Gentile at Loyola University Chicago. “They are not cancer cells anymore.”

If the approach works in humans, breast and skin cancers might be targeted first, as they are easy to shine a laser on. Levin hopes his approach will eventually offer an alternative to standard cancer drugs. We might find that drug-free treatments have fewer side effects, he says.

Gentile agrees. Cancer drugs that kill dividing cells don’t work perfectly, and the side effects can be worse than the disease itself in some cases, he says. “Levin has shown that you don’t need to kill the cells – you can take them back to a normal state.”

Astronomers discover the most metal-poor galaxy in the local universe

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Astronomers discover the most metal-poor galaxy in the local universe
Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image of AGC 198691, created using 20 minute exposures obtained through the V (F606W) and I (F814W) filters. The galaxy is quite blue, indicating the presence of recently formed massive stars. The H II region observed as part of the current program is associated with the clump of bright stars located at the southwestern end of the galaxy.
Galaxies with low metallicity are of special importance for astronomers as they could provide crucial insights about chemical evolution of stars and astrophysical processes occurring in the early universe. Now, a team of researchers, led by Alec Hirschauer of Indiana University, has detected a galaxy that appears to be the most metal-poor gravitationally bound system of stars present in the local universe. The findings appear in a paper published online on Mar. 11 in the arXiv journal.

The newly discovered galaxy was designated AGC 198691. According to the findings, it is a blue compact dwarf galaxy located within the range of 23 to 52 million light years from the Earth, with a diameter of about 1,000 light years. The brightest stars in AGC 198691 are blue, which causes the galaxy itself to appear blue in color. The system exhibits a compact structure dominated by luminous blue stars presumably produced in recent star-formation processes.

The galaxy was discovered during the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA survey (ALFALFA). It is a blind extragalactic survey in neutral atomic hydrogen (HI) utilizing the Arecibo L-Band Feed Array (ALFA) at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The program, started in 2005, aims to find up to 25,000 galaxies, including dark galaxies, consisting largely of dark matter, and which are thus not visible with optical telescopes.

Hirschauer and his colleagues conducted spectroscopic observations to obtain spectra of AGC 198691. To accomplish this task, they employed two Arizona-based telescopes: the Mayall 4-meter telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) and the 6.5-meter Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT). Spectrographs mounted on these telescopes allowed them to derive the chemical composition of AGC 198691, revealing that this system is exceptionally metal-poor.

“We report of the dwarf galaxy AGC 198691 that have led to the recognition that it is an extremely metal-deficient galaxy with the lowest abundance ever reported for a gas-rich extragalactic source,” the paper reads.

The team’s observations revealed that AGC 198691 has a very high abundance of oxygen, thereby having very low metallicity. Moreover, the researchers argue that this level of metallicity makes it the most metal-poor galaxy known in the local universe. They estimate that AGC 198691 possesses a metallicity that is about 29 percent below that of SBS 0335-052W, the galaxy that had previously been recognized as the most metal-poor. It is worth observing that the most metal-poor known have measured nebular oxygen abundances of about three percent of the solar value.

However, the cause of the low metallicity and gas-rich nature of AGC 198691 is still being debated. One explanation offered by Hirschauer’s team is that this system has experienced recent gas infall that has reduced its observed metallicity. The scientists emphasize that in order to better understand this galaxy’s true nature, more precise measurements are required, such as determining its exact distance.

“The determination of an accurate distance to AGC 198691 would provide valuable insight into the possible mechanisms at play, since it would allow for a much better understanding of the environment within which this system resides,” the astronomers noted.

The team also disclosed its plans for future observations of this system. They would like to use a high-quality follow-up spectrum obtained with the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona to carry out an analysis of helium abundance of AGC 198691.

“While the spectra in the current study were not suitable for providing an estimate of the helium abundance in this galaxy, we suggest that future observations would very likely be fruitful in yielding an estimate of the primordial helium abundance,” the researchers write.

Abstract
We present spectroscopic observations of the nearby dwarf galaxy AGC 198691. This object is part of the Survey of HI in Extremely Low-Mass Dwarfs (SHIELD) project, which is a multi-wavelength study of galaxies with HI masses in the range of 106-107.2~M⊙ discovered by the ALFALFA survey. We have obtained spectra of the lone HII region in AGC 198691 with the new high-throughput KPNO Ohio State Multi-Object Spectrograph (KOSMOS) on the Mayall 4-m as well as with the Blue Channel spectrograph on the MMT 6.5-m telescope. These observations enable the measurement of the temperature-sensitive [OIII]λ4363 line and hence the determination of a “direct” oxygen abundance for AGC 198691. We find this system to be an extremely metal-deficient (XMD) system with an oxygen abundance of 12+log(O/H) = 7.02 ± 0.03, making AGC 198691 the lowest-abundance star-forming galaxy known in the local universe. Two of the five lowest-abundance galaxies known have been discovered by the ALFALFA blind HI survey; this high yield of XMD galaxies represents a paradigm shift in the search for extremely metal-poor galaxies.

Russian billionaire plans to attain immortality

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A 35-year-old Russian billionaire has embarked on an ambitious goal to make immortality a reality by using cutting-edge science that enables uploading of human brain to a computer.

Dmitry Itskov has brought together some of the world’s leading neuroscientists, robot builders and consciousness researchers to create a robot which is capable of uploading a person’s personality.

Itskov ‘2045 initiative’ is described as the next step in evolution, supporting research into artificial intelligence. The project aims to store a person’s thoughts and feelings in a robot, following the belief by experts that brains function in the same way as a computer.

“Within the next 30 years I am going to make sure that we can all live forever. I’m 100 per cent confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn’t have started it,” Itskov said.

The project’s first step is to create a robot that can be controlled using the mind. It would work by uploading a digital version of a human brain to an android – effectively rebooting a person’s mind – which would take the form of a robotic copy of a human body or, once technology has developed, a hologram with a full human personality.

Dmitry Itskov has brought together some of the world's leading neuroscientists, robot builders and consciousness researchers to create a robot which is capable of uploading a person's personality. Screen Grab

“If there is no immortality technology, I’ll be dead in the next 35 years. The ultimate goal of my plan is to transfer someone’s personality into a completely new body,” Itskov told BBC.

He has invested in the programme having amassed a fortune from his internet media firm New Media Stars.

Some scientists claim the project is “too stupid” and “cannot be done”.

“You cannot code intuition, you cannot code aesthetic beauty, you cannot code love or hate,” said Miguel Nicolelis, leading neuroscientist at Duke University.

“There is no way you will ever see a human brain reduced to a digital medium. It’s simply impossible to reduce that complexity to the kind of algorithmic process that you will have to have to do that,” Nicolelis said.

However, Itskov is more sanguine and believes he could indeed succeed in his goal of bringing about immortality.

“I will answer you to the question of ethics by the opinion which was given to me by his holiness the Dalai Llama when I visited him in 2013. His point was that you can do everything if your motivation is to help people,” Itskov said.

“For the next few centuries I envision having multiple bodies, one somewhere in space, another hologram-like, my consciousness just moving from one to another,” he said.

Glottic Cancer: History of the Procedure, Problem, Epidemiology

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http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/853055-overview?src=soc_fb_160316-am_mscpedt_oth_cancer

Why Science Needs to Publish Negative Results

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Emma Granqvist, a journal Publisher for Elsevier’s plant sciences, is behind the recent launch of the open access journal New Negatives in Plant Science, a platform for negative, unexpected or controversial results in the field. The journal is viewed as a pilot and may lead to New Negatives in… titles for other research disciplines. In this article, Granqvist explains why she believes scientists should move away from positive bias to ensure all research results are shared through peer review.

This article first appeared on Authors’ Update – our regularly updated news site for Elsevier journal authors. Click here for the original article or continue reading the full article below:

Many experimental results never see the light of publication day. For a large number of these, it comes down to the data being “negative”, i.e. the expected and/or wanted effect was not observed. A straightforward example might be the testing of a soil additive that is believed to help a plant grow. If the experiment outcome shows no difference between the standard soil and the soil with the additive, then the result will end up buried in the laboratory’s archive.

But is this really the best approach to scientific results?

PublishingNegativeResults

Ignoring the vast information source that is negative results is troublesome in several ways. Firstly, it skews the scientific literature by only including chosen pieces of information. Secondly, it causes a huge waste of time and resources, as other scientists considering the same questions may perform the same experiments.

Furthermore, given that positive results are published, whereas negative data will struggle, it is extremely difficult to correct the scientific record for false positives; controversial studies that conflict with or cannot reproduce previously published studies are seldom given space in peer-reviewed journals.

Sometimes the argument is given that negative data “cannot be trusted”. But as was pointed out in the 2013 article “Trouble at the Lab” in The Economist, negative data are statistically more trustworthy than positive data.

Given that restrictions in publication space is becoming outdated in today’s world of digital information, it would be more efficient and un-biased if all results were made available to the interested scientific community. For the funding bodies this holds an additional benefit: a grant funding research that resulted in negative data would then still result in publications and shared information.

New Negatives in Plant Science – a pilot journal

To raise this important issue, and put the spotlight on negative and controversial data, the journal New Negatives in Plant Science was launched in 2014. It is an open access journal that publishes both research articles and commentaries. While there are other journals that welcome negative results, New Negatives in Plant Science aims to encourage and drive scientific debate by giving these studies a place of their own.

The editors, Dr. Thomas W. Okita of Washington State University and Dr. José A. Olivares of Los Alamos National Laboratory, point out that this information can be valuable to the scientific community in a number of ways, for example, by helping others to avoid repeating the same experiments as well as encouraging new hypothesis building.

Currently two Special Issues of the journal are being prepared; one on Controversial issues in Plant Carbohydrate Metabolism and one on Negative Data on Nutrient Use Efficiency in Plants.

Positive reactions

There have been a great number of positive reactions from the community around the launch of the journal. In a recent quiz on the journal’s homepage, many scientists explained why they thought negative and controversial results should be published for public consumption. A few of their comments are shown below. The winner of the journal’s quiz was awarded a travel grant to the Elsevier Current Opinion conference on Plant Genome Evolution. Thanks to all quiz participants for your contributions!

“Be bold, and simply let the world know what you ‘negatively‘ know.” Jickerson P. Lado

“It will bring openness to the scientific community and stimulate innovation.” Leonard Rusinamhodzi

“I would prefer to read negative as well as positive results in a very well-balanced way so that I can receive as much information as possible …” Saudan Singh