SEATTLE
It's among the first questions asked after someone is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease: "What can we expect?" It's a tough question that has been difficult to answer. But a new study suggests that assessing several key clinical aspects of the disease soon after diagnosis could help families and physicians better predict long-term survival in individuals with AD. These insights also could help public health officials refine cost projections and plan services for the growing number of older Americans at risk for the disease.
"Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" Zoologist Konrad Lorenz once asked in postulating the "butterfly effect," the idea that the flapping of fragile wings could start a chain reaction in the atmosphere. In today's world of the Internet the question might be rephrased: Can a single e-mail from Brazil set off a torrent of action in Texas? Sociologists postulate that what a few influential leaders think and say can spread and grow and bring about big changes in the thinking of large numbers of people. But how do you find those influential people? Computer scientists at Cornell University have some suggestions. Their ideas could be applied to such diverse goals as selling a new product, promoting new agricultural techniques in developing countries, predicting the spread of a disease or identifying leaders of terrorist organizations.
A new vaccine, made with several proteins from the bacterium that causes tuberculosis (TB), will soon enter the first phase of human safety testing. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, has supported research on the candidate vaccine from its earliest stages. The trial will be conducted in the United States by Seattle biotechnology company Corixa and GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, a vaccine manufacturer headquartered in Belgium.
A clinical trial involving 371 patients in eight countries shows that linezolid, a new antibiotic, is at least as effective as two older therapies for treating diabetic foot infections. The drug may be an important new agent for doctors treating infections that are increasingly caused by bacteria resistant to standard antibiotics, and that in severe cases may require amputation.
Citizens of Chicago and Seattle shouldn't become alarmed if they see "space suit"-attired groups of people rushing around May 12. Such an event, Homeland Defense Secretary Tom Ridge noted here today, will just be part of a test of U.S. and Canadian federal, state and local government capabilities to meet a real-life terrorist radiological or biological weapons attack.
Researchers have identified a cell signaling system that may help the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa establish itself in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients. The researchers used a new technology to seek insights into an important and elusive enemy, and say the findings are important for biology and potentially important for therapy. The researchers identified the activation of this signaling system by the use of new quantitative proteomic technology that analyzed Pseudomonas samples from the lungs of children with cystic fibrosis. Proteomics is the method for analyzing and cataloguing a complete cellular complement of proteins, which are produced based on information encoded by genes and are the workhorses of all living cells.
Important disparities in breast-cancer diagnosis, treatment and survival among American women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds are documented in a new study by researchers in Seattle. The findings are based on the largest, most comprehensive study of its kind to evaluate the relationship between race/ethnicity and breast-cancer stage, treatment and survival. The study evaluated data from nearly 125,000 women representing all major racial/ethnic populations and subpopulations in the United States, the majority of which have only been tracked by national cancer registries since the late 1980s.
A team of California astronomers announced today that its robotic telescope has captured one of the earliest images ever of the visible afterglow of a gamma-ray burst. The telescope started its exposures 108 seconds after the burst was detected by the HETE-2 satellite and continued for more than 2.5 hours, until brightening of the dawn sky halted the observations. The unprecedented record of the fading glow, captured Dec. 11, will help theorists as they puzzle out the physics of these bizarre cataclysmic events, which are heralded by a brief burst of energetic gamma rays and X-rays emitted billions of years ago and followed by a fading optical light.
Astronomers have discovered three of the oldest, most distant quasars yet found -- quasars close to the Big Bang that began the universe. Xiaohui Fan of the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory in Tucson, Ariz., will present the results at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Seattle. Fan, leader of the team that discovered the objects, explained that these distant quasars -- compact but luminous objects thought to be powered by super-massive black holes -- reach back to a time when the universe was just 800 million years old. The highest redshift quasar is roughly 13 billion light years away and was discovered recently in the constellation Ursa Major.
A new study has uncovered more evidence that black holes form before the galaxies that contain them. The finding could help resolve a long-standing debate, says the study's lead scientist. Marianne Vestergaard, a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at Ohio State, came to this conclusion when she studied a collection of very energetic, active galaxies known as quasars as they appeared some 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only one billion years old. While the quasars were obviously young -- they contained large stellar nurseries in which new stars were forming -- each also contained a very massive, fully formed black hole.
A new type of star has been discovered lurking as a low mass component in a very compact binary star system. Astronomers announced today at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Seattle, Wash., that they have confirmed the existence of a new variety of stellar end-product. This previously unknown type of star has some properties similar to brown dwarf stars and may help astronomers understand some of the recently discovered extra-solar planets in close proximity to their suns.
Candian astronomers say that detecting microscopic meteors from other solar systems could provide clues about the formation of planets like Earth. Dust streams from our sun's stellar neighbours consist of tiny grains of pulverized rock ejected from a disk of dust and debris that commonly surrounds young stars, says Joseph Weingartner, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto's Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. According to Professor Norman Murray, associate director of CITA and co-author of the study, "if we can detect these grains and trace them back to the star system that they came from, we'd have very good evidence of planet formation going on in that system." Weingartner presented the study Jan. 6 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Wash.
All systems on NASA's Stardust spacecraft performed successfully when tested in a flyby of asteroid Annefrank on Friday, heightening anticipation for Stardust's encounter with its primary target, comet Wild 2, 14 months from now. As a bonus, Stardust discovered that Annefrank is about twice the size anticipated, but with a dimmer surface. The dimmer surface increased the challenge of sighting the object as the spacecraft approached.
Physicians have identified what they say is a promising new treatment for epilepsy that reduces the number of seizures while helping patients lead more productive lives.
The study is the first to show that an antiepileptic drug typically used in combination with other drugs, might be successful as a standalone. That's important; single-drug therapies are often more successful because patients find it easier to stay on the course of treatment compared to therapies involving multiple drugs.
Intel-rival Advanced Micro Devices got a nice science win Monday when Sandia National Laboratory and Cray Inc. said they would build a supercomputer capable 40 trillion calculations per second using AMD's forthcoming Opteron processor. Ten thousand of them, to be precise. Total cost: $90 million. Sandia says it will use the computing heavyweight for "modeling and simulation of complex problems that were only recently thought impractical, if not impossible."
