It took Shanghai just 20 years to go from nice city to megalopolis. For the City of Angels, it took a bit longer to evolve from the 1908 flickery twinkle town (top) to the 2002 sea of lights (bottom) More »
Los Angeles - United States - California - Counties - Business and Economy
Not quite a headphone, which sits on top of your ear, and not quite an earbud which burrows into your canal, these Medis 'phones clip onto your ear in a way you would never guess: More »
Headphones - Audio - Shopping - Consumer Electronics - Electronics
Between the Motorola Backflip and the HTC Aria, AT&T hasn't exactly been leading the charge on Android phones. But the Samsung Captivate, coming in the next few months, signals that the carrier is finally getting serious about Android. More »
Android - AT&T - Handhelds - HTC Corporation - HTC Aria
Sticking to their word about not giving up unlimited data plans, Clearwire's new 4G/3G dongle is compatible with Macs for the first time, and dances out alongside two more new modems offering up 4G unlimited data/Wi-Fi. More »
Clearwire - Modem - WiMAX - Sprint Nextel - Data Communications
It's not June 23 yet, but Verizon has lifted the veil off the "next generation of Droid." The Droid X—apparently boasting a 4.3", 720p screen(?) and HDMI out—has an official Verizon site and is "coming soon." [Verizon] More »
Droid - Verizon - Motorola - Android - Smartphone
On the left is a picture of a region globular cluster M92 taken by Hubble. On the right, that same cluster as captured by Arizona's Large Binocular Telescope. That's three times sharper. And we're not even at full capacity yet. More »
Hubble Space Telescope - Earth - Astronomy - Star cluster - Space
There are no pictures of the invisible mouse, because the mouse itself doesn't exist. It's just an infrared laser beam and an infrared camera tracking your hand from the side of a laptop. Could this be the next Apple mouse? More »
MightyMouse - MagicMouse - Apple - Mouse - Rodent
Can't vinyl and CDs get along? That's the reasonable question posed by electronic/techno musician Jeff Mills, who has released his latest album on a two-for-one hybrid format. Thoughtful mediation, or sixth sign of the apocalypse? Check out the flip side: More »
Compact Disc - Shopping - Entertainment - Recordings - Audio
From The Oil Drum, where they found something good to say about BP:
With the tragic Gulf of Mexico oil spill now focusing President Obama’s and the American people’s minds on where their energy comes from, and what some of the collateral costs might be, its an opportune moment to look at how renewable energy may help supply our future energy needs.   Somewhat ironically, it is BP that provides the energy world with a priceless service through their annual review of world energy that was published last week (with little fanfare) which this year, for the first time, includes data on renewable energy.
Exponential growth in wind energy over the past 15 years has boosted energy from renewables to near 50 million tonnes oil equivalent per annum.
At least BP is good for something.  If they know so much about renewables, why aren’t they investing more in them? Oh well, it’s all academic for them at this point, because they might not be around much longer. It’s nice they can put out a report like this as they are destroying the ocean south of the United States, east of Mexico and north of South America. Unfortunately this Gulf of Mexico water is connected to other oceans and the currents will carry the oil into the Atlantic. Maybe even up to England.
Every American needs to know how serious the leak in the Gulf might be, (and probably is). It’s doubtful that BP as a corporation will survive this disaster and the U.S. economy might not, either. The damage done to the seafloor at the site of the BP oil leak might be irreversible and unstoppable by conventional means.
About a week ago, a post appeared, by Doug R at The Oil Drum. You can read it here. Essentially what his very long, detailed article there says is that this is a massive oil field, and there may be no stopping this oil leak at all because of the damage that has occurred to the well, and that damage is getting worse as time goes on.  I don’t know if his article is correct or accurate, but it seems to be plausible, and it’s vouched for by many people in the comment section there, and it’s been widely re-published by a lot of publications with good reputations, including Mother Jones.
We also know that BP will lie about this oil leak and how the “cleanup” is going until they turn purple. It could very well be the case that there is no way to stop this leak, which is now many leaks, but BP would never admit that. See the video a couple of posts down from this one; the video from one of the BP cameras showing that the sea floor itself is leaking oil at a large rate. Oil is not just seeping from the sea floor as happens naturally, but puffing out bursts of oil that obscure the [...]
By BRADLEY J. FIKES - bfikes@nctimes.com | Posted: June 15, 2010 3:21 pm |
OCEANSIDE ---- For the first time in years, International Stem Cell Corp. has cleared its balance sheet of debt and has enough cash to last for "another year or so," the company's chairman said in a conference call Tuesday.
The improved finances means International Stem Cell can focus more attention on advancing its technology to create stem cells from unfertilized, or "parthenogenetic," human egg cells, said chairman Kenneth Aldrich.
"We've not had that kind of financial security of knowing we could see forward for 12 months without having to go back to the markets since probably the summer of '07, so it's a most welcome change for us," Aldrich said in the conference call.
The company said in a June 14 filing that it struck debt-reduction deals with investors Socius CG II Ltd. and Optimus Capital Partners LLC. The deals exchanged stock previously issued to the investors for promissory notes, with no cash changing hands.
Aldrich said the company reached another important milestone earlier this month when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted it a patent for its parthenogenetic stem cell technology. The patent is the first of several pending, Aldrich said.
Stem cells are the "ancestral" cells that turn in the various kinds of cells in the body. Companies are studying how to use them for disease treatments, or to screen drugs before they're tested in humans.
International Stem Cell says its stem cells have the advantage of being immune-matched to large segments of the population. That means any replacement tissues or organs created from them will be less likely to be rejected after transplant, the company says.
Also, because they are not derived from human embryos, the cells don't raise the ethical issues that concern many about embryonic stem cells, taken from days-old embryos.
The patent, number 7,732,202, applies to the company's method of creating its parthenogenetic stem cells. Other pending patents concern how to make stem cells that can be immune-matched.
International Stem Cell trades over the counter under the ticker ISCO.
Visit http://www.internationstemcell.com or call 760-940-6383.
Call staff writer Bradley J. Fikes at 760-739-6641. Read his blogs at bizblogs.nctimes.com.
SOURCE: http://www.nctimes.com/business/article_7c49ef56-a04f-5cad-98cc-1b99790dc223.html
According to the website, AccessDermatology is a multimedia educational platform aimed at delivering continuing education to dermatology professionals that follows a yearly academic syllabus.
The Scientific Skills section includes:
- Webcasts of congress and other scientific meetings sessions
- Breaking News - drug development, diagnosis and treatment, congress highlights, symposia webcasts, keynote speaker interviews
- Core Papers - series of articles on disease, treatment and novel therapeutic approaches
- Clinical Trials - a guide to key clinical trials in dermatology
This is the link to the Advisory Board of the website. The project is sponsored by Prous Science S.A.U., a part of Thomson Reuters.
The access to most of the resources requires free registration.
References:
Dermatology – breaking news
Clinical Trials in Dermatology
Dermatology Full Congress Reports
Posted at Clinical Cases and Images. Stay updated and subscribe, follow us on Twitter and connect on Facebook.
For e-prescribing adopters, error rates decreased nearly sevenfold, from 42.5 per 100 prescriptions at baseline to 6.6 per 100 prescriptions one year after adoption.
For non-adopters, error rates remained high at 37 per 100 prescriptions at baseline and 38 per 100 prescriptions at one year.
Illegibility errors were very high at baseline, and not surprisingly, were completely eliminated by e-prescribing (87.6 per 100 prescriptions at baseline for e-prescribing adopters, 0 at one year).
Prescribing errors may occur much more frequently in community-based practices than previously reported. This study findings suggest that stand-alone e-prescribing with clinical decision support may significantly improve ambulatory medication safety.
References:
Electronic Prescribing Improves Medication Safety in Community-Based Office Practices. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2010.
Posted at Clinical Cases and Images. Stay updated and subscribe, follow us on Twitter and connect on Facebook.
Friend of Morbid Anatomy, frequent Boing Boing contributer, innovative cultural theorist and all around bon vivant Mark Dery will be giving an illustrated lecture this Friday night, June 18th, at Observatory. Come witness the linguistic pyrotechnics as Dery traces the connections betweeb wax anatomical models, pornographic x-ray fantasies of the 1950s, and x-ray fears of the post-terrorist society in his inimitable fashion. People: I have seen this man speak and it is, I promise, not to be missed!
Full info follows; hope very much to see you there!
The Anatomical Unconscious: X-Ray Specs, Visible Women, and the Eros of the Unseen
An illustrated lecture with cult author and cultural critic Mark Dery
Date: Friday, June 18th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $7
Presented by Morbid AnatomyWhat do 18th-century wax “anatomical Venuses” doing a striptease in which they expose their internal organs; cutaway views of the imaginary anatomy of Loony Tunes characters; the X-Ray Specs and Visible Woman toys familiar to boomers; and artist Wim Delvoye’s X-rated X-rays of people performing sex acts have in common?
Mark Dery makes these and other provocative connections in his lecture “The Anatomical Unconscious: X-Ray Specs, Visible Women, and the Eros of the Unseen,” a cultural critique of the eroticizing of the scientific gaze. In his hour-long lecture/slideshow, Dery will touch on the pornographic fantasies that swirled around the X-ray from its inception; adolescent dreams, fueled by comic-book ads for X-Ray Specs, of the potential uses for Superman’s X-ray vision; current fears of the potential for abusive use of airport scanners that penetrate clothing; and the artist Wim Delvoye’s series of pornographic X-rays. He’ll theorize the eros of the X-ray, with digressions into the weird cartoon subgenre of imaginary anatomies (of everything from Star Wars At-Ats to Loony Tunes characters) and premonitions of X-rated X-rays inherent in the baroque medical mannequins on display at the Museum La Specola in Florence, Italy.
Mark Dery (http://www.markdery.com) is a cultural critic. He is best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. Dery is widely associated with the concept of “culture jamming,” the guerrilla media criticism movement he popularized through his 1993 essay “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs,” and “Afrofuturism,” a term he coined and theorized in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future” (included in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, which he edited). He has been a professor in the Department of Journalism at New York University, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, and, most proudly, a guest blogger at Boing Boing. He writes the Doom Patrol column of cultural commentary at True/Slant (http://trueslant.com/markdery)
You can find out more about these presentation here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.
Image: Tweety Bird skull: Copyright Hyungkoo Lee, all rights reserved.
BACKGROUND
Sperm DNA damage shows great promise as a biomarker of infertility. The study aim is to determine the usefulness of DNA fragmentation (DF), including modified bases (MB), to predict assisted reproduction treatment (ART) outcomes.
METHODS
DF in 360 couples (230 IVF and 130 ICSI) was measured by the alkaline Comet assay in semen and in sperm following density gradient centrifugation (DGC) and compared with fertilization rate (FR), embryo cumulative scores (ECS1) for the total number of embryos/treatment, embryos transferred (ECS2), clinical pregnancy (CP) and spontaneous pregnancy loss. MB were also measured using formamidopyrimidine DNA glycosylase to convert them into strand breaks.
RESULTS
In IVF, FR and ECS decreased as DF increased in both semen and DGC sperm, and couples who failed to achieve a CP had higher DF than successful couples (+12.2% semen, P = 0.004; +9.9% DGC sperm, P = 0.010). When MB were added to existing strand breaks, total DF was markedly higher (+17.1% semen, P = 0.009 and +13.8% DGC sperm, P = 0.045). DF was not associated with FR, ECS or CP in either semen or DGC sperm following ISCI. In contrast, by including MB, there was significantly more DNA damage (+16.8% semen, P = 0.008 and +15.5% DGC sperm, P = 0.024) in the group who did not achieve CP.
CONCLUSIONS
DF can predict ART outcome for IVF. Converting MB into further DNA strand breaks increased the test sensitivity, giving negative correlations between DF and CP for ICSI as well as IVF.
BACKGROUND
There is considerable uncertainty as to the significance of a high sperm DNA fragmentation index (DFI) for achieving a successful pregnancy.
METHODS
The sperm DFI of 124 patients undergoing 192 IVF cycles and of 96 patients undergoing 155 ICSI cycles was determined using the sperm chromatin structure assay on neat sperm.
RESULTS
The rate of continuing pregnancies in ICSI cycles (but not in IVF cycles) showed significant negative correlation (r = –0.184, P = 0.022) with the DFI value. A threshold value of DFI which showed a significant difference (P = 0.005) in rate of continuing pregnancies between higher and lower DFI levels was found for ICSI cycles to be ≥19%, but no such threshold was found for IVF cycles. However, if the threshold of ≥30% was used for IVF cycles there was a non-significant lowering of the rates of continuing pregnancy and implantation at the higher DFI levels. DFI level had no effect on fertilization rate or on the percentage of embryos having more than 4 cells at Day 3 after fertilization. A high DFI level had a marked significant effect (P = 0.001) on implantation rate in ICSI cycles but not in IVF cycles. A significant positive correlation (r = 0.268, P = 0.001) between DFI and sperm midpiece defects was also noted in the ICSI patients.
CONCLUSIONS
These observations may help to resolve the issues about how, and to what extent, sperm DNA damage impacts upon the success of IVF and ICSI procedures.
BACKGROUND
Semenogelin (Sg), the main protein of human semen coagulum, prevents sperm capacitation. The objective of this study was to examine the role of Sg and its mechanism of action.
METHODS AND RESULTS
Sg blocked sperm capacitation triggered by various stimuli, via inhibition of superoxide anion (O2•–; luminescence assay) and nitric oxide (NO•; tested using diaminofluorescein) generation. Triton-soluble and -insoluble sperm fractions contained Sg and Sg peptides (immunoblotting), the level of which decreased with initiation of capacitation. This drop was prevented by superoxide dismutase and NO• synthase inhibitor and was reproduced by addition of O2•– and NO•. Zinc (Zn2+) blocked and a zinc chelator (TPEN) promoted the decline in Sg levels. There was a decreased labelling of Sg on the head in capacitating spermatozoa with the two fixation techniques tested (immunocytochemistry). Reactive oxygen species (ROS) (O2•– and NO•) caused, these changes, and zinc prevented them. Spermatozoa quickly internalized Sg upon incubation and Sg was then rapidly degraded in a zinc-inhibitable manner.
CONCLUSIONS
Sg blocked capacitation mainly via inhibition of ROS generation. Spermatozoa appeared permeable to Sg and processed Sg in a zinc-inhibitable fashion. ROS themselves could promote sperm disposal of Sg which maybe one of the mechanisms that allows initiation of capacitation.
BACKGROUND
To better understand the infertility of patients with Robertsonian translocation, the biochemical and ultrastructural apoptotic characteristics of apoptosis in the sperm of patients and fertile donors were studied.
METHODS
Ejaculated sperm samples of seven Robertsonian translocation carriers and seven fertile donors were analyzed after cryopreservation. The proportion of both viable and dead spermatozoa expressing activated caspases was detected by flow cytometry through the use of different specific carboxyfluorescein-labeled caspase inhibitors. Sperm DNA fragmentation was evaluated by the TUNEL method. The percentages of intact spermatozoa or spermatozoa with ultrastructural features of apoptosis, immaturity or necrosis were estimated by electron microscopy. Meiotic segregation analysis was performed by FISH.
RESULTS
Significantly lower concentration, forward motility and normal morphology of spermatozoa were found in ejaculated samples of the Robertsonian patients than fertile donors. Compared with the control group, in Robertsonian translocation carriers: (i) the caspase assays showed a significantly increased (P < 0.05) proportion of viable spermatozoa with activated poly-caspases (57.4 versus 25.8%), caspase-3 (43.5 versus 13.4%), caspase-8 (44.4 versus 17.1%) and caspase-9 (42.4 versus 10.0%); (ii) the rate of DNA fragmentation was higher (26.3 versus 12.8%); and (iii) sperm ultrastructural examination highlighted a higher percentage of immature (28.0 versus 10.0%) and apoptotic (24.5 versus 18.5%) spermatozoa. FISH study showed predominant normal/balanced spermatozoa (78.34–85.53%).
CONCLUSIONS
These results show a predominant proportion of balanced and normal gametes and higher numbers of spermatozoa showing apoptosis and immaturity features in oligoasthenozoospermic Robertsonian translocation carriers than in fertile donors. This suggests defects in spermatogenesis and especially spermiogenesis of these infertile patients.
BACKGROUND
It has been suggested that the zona pellucida (ZP) may mediate species-specific fertilization. In human the ZP is composed of four glycoproteins: ZP1, ZP2, ZP3 and ZP4. In the present study, the expression profile of ZP1 in human oocytes and ovaries, and its role during fertilization, is presented.
METHODS
Human ZP1 (amino acid residues 26–551) was cloned and expressed in both non-glycosylated and glycosylated forms and its ability to bind to the capacitated human spermatozoa and to induce acrosomal exocytosis was studied. Monoclonal antibodies (MAbs), specific for human ZP1 and devoid of reactivity with ZP2, ZP3 and ZP4 were generated and used to localize native ZP1 in oocytes and ovarian tissues.
RESULTS
The MAbs generated against ZP1 recognized specifically the zona matrix of secondary and antral follicles, ovulated oocytes, atretic follicles and degenerating intravascular oocytes, but failed to react with the Fallopian tube, endometrium, ectocervix and kidney. Escherichia coli and baculovirus-expressed recombinant human ZP1 revealed bands of ~75 and ~85 kDa, respectively, in western blot. Lectin binding studies revealed the presence of both N- and O-linked glycosylation in baculovirus-expressed ZP1. Fluorescein isothiocyanate-labelled E. coli- and baculovirus-expressed recombinant ZP1 bound to the anterior head of capacitated spermatozoa, however, only baculovirus-expressed ZP1 induced acrosomal exocytosis in capacitated sperm suggesting the importance of glycosylation in mediating the acrosome reaction. The human ZP1-mediated acrosome reaction involved the activation of both T- and L-type voltage-operated calcium channels, but does not activate the Gi-coupled receptor pathway. Inhibition of protein kinase A and C significantly also reduced the ZP1-mediated induction of the acrosome reaction.
CONCLUSION
These studies revealed for the first time that in humans ZP1, in addition to ZP3 and ZP4, binds to capacitated spermatozoa and induces acrosomal exocytosis.
