Month: July 2017

Scientists have found an extra charming new subatomic particle that they hope will help further explain a key force that binds matter together. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe announced Thursday the fleeting discovery of a long theorized but never-before-seen type of baryon. Baryons are subatomic particles made up of quarks. Protons and neutrons are the most common baryons. Quarks are even smaller particles that come in six types, two common types that are light and four heavier types. The high-speed collisions at the world’s biggest atom smasher created for a fraction of a second a baryon particle called Xi cc, said Oxford physicist Guy Wilkinson, who is part of the experiment. The particle has two heavy quarks – both of a type that are called “charm”- and a light one. In the natural world, baryons have at most one heavy quark. It may have been brief, but in particle physics it lived for “an appreciably long time,” he said. The two heavy quarks are in a dance that’s just like the interaction of a star system with two suns and the third lighter quark circles the dancing pair, Wilkinson said. “People have looked for it for a long time,” Wilkinson said. He said this opens up a whole new “family” of baryons for physicists to find and study. “It gives us a very unique and interesting laboratory to give us an interesting new angle on the behavior of the strong interaction (between particles), which is one of …

Canada is attacking its expanding opioid crisis with an unusual measure: It’s giving addicts a safe place to shoot up.   The government has allowed seven “safe injection sites” to open and a score of others are being considered across the country.   The storefront sites give addicts clean syringes, medical supervision and freedom from arrest. They don’t get help in kicking their problem unless they ask for it, but the program dramatically reduces the chance of a fatal overdose or the transmission of blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis or HIV.    The effort, inspired by some in Europe, is being closely watched in the U.S., where officials are struggling to cope with a surge in overdose deaths from opioid use. Several cities say they are considering similar measures despite fears that they may encourage drug use. First center in Vancouver   Dozens of people a day have been coming to three new centers in Montreal, where users are given a small kit to safely inject drugs they bring with them and then an opportunity to relax for a half hour on couches listening to music, according to a 30-year-old addict who would only give his first name, Francois. The center operators denied access to the media once the center opened.   “They give you everything you need,” Francois said as he left a center in the gentrifying downtown neighborhood around Sainte-Catherine Street after injecting heroin. “Everyone is pretty relaxed.”   A single injection site opened in 2003, run by …

Using only baker’s yeast, researchers at Columbia University have designed an inexpensive, on-the-spot test to detect major fungal pathogens. Faith Lapidus has details of the new biosensor, described in the journal Science Advances. …

One of Africa’s driest regions — the Sahel — could turn greener if the planet warms more than 2 degrees Celsius and triggers more frequent heavy rainfall, scientists said on Wednesday. The Sahel stretches coast to coast from Mauritania and Mali in the west to Sudan and Eritrea in the east, and skirts the southern edge of the Sahara desert. It is home to more than 100 million people. The region has seen worsening extreme weather — including more frequent droughts — in recent years. But if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, the resulting global warming — of more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — could change major weather patterns in the Sahel, and in many different parts of the world, scientists say. Rainfall models vary Some weather models predict a small increase in rainfall for the Sahel, but there is a risk that the entire weather pattern will change by the end of the century, researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) said. “The sheer size of the possible change is mindboggling — this is one of the very few elements in the Earth system that we might witness tipping soon,” said co-author Anders Levermann from PIK and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of New York’s Columbia University. If the Sahel becomes much rainier, it will mean more water for agriculture, industry and domestic use. But in the first few years of the transition, people are likely to experience very erratic weather — extreme droughts …

A novel class of personalized cancer vaccines, tailored to the tumors of individual patients, kept disease in check in two early-stage clinical trials, pointing to a new way to help the immune system fight back. Although so-called immunotherapy drugs from the likes of Merck & Co, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Roche are starting to revolutionize cancer care, they still only work for a limited number of patients. By adding a personalized cancer vaccine, scientists believe it should be possible to improve substantially the effectiveness of such immune-boosting medicines. Twelve skin cancer patients, out of a total of 19 across both the trials, avoided relapses for two years after receiving different vaccines developed by German and U.S. teams, researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday. Larger studies are next The small Phase I trials now need to be followed by larger studies, but the impressive early results suggest the new shots work far better than first-generation cancer vaccines that typically targeted a single cancer characteristic. The new treatments contain between 10 and 20 different mutated proteins, or “neoantigens,” that are specific to an individual’s tumour. These proteins are not found on healthy cells and they look foreign to the immune system, prompting specialist T-cells to step up their attack on cancer cells. One vaccine was developed at the U.S.-based Dana-Farber Institute and Broad Institute and the other by privately-owned German biotech firm BioNTech, which uses so-called messenger RNA to carry the code for making its therapeutic proteins. Roche, the world’s largest cancer …

Stem cell tourism involving patients who travel to developing countries for treatment with unproven and potentially risky therapies should be more tightly regulated, international health experts said Wednesday. With hundreds of medical centers around the world claiming to be able to repair damaged tissue in conditions such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, tackling unscrupulous advertising of such procedures is crucial, the experts said. These therapies are advertised directly to patients with the promise of a cure, but there is often little or no evidence to show they will help, or that they will not cause harm, the 15 experts wrote in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Some types of stem cell transplant — mainly using blood and skin stem cells — have been approved by regulators after full clinical trials found they could treat certain types of cancer and grow skin grafts for burns patients. But many other potential therapies are only in the earliest stages of development and have not been approved by international regulators. “Stem cell therapies hold a lot of promise, but we need rigorous clinical trials and regulatory processes to determine whether a proposed treatment is safe, effective and better than existing treatments,” said one of the 15, Sarah Chan of Britain’s University of Edinburgh. The experts called for global action, led by the World Health Organization, to introduce controls on advertising and agree on international standards for the manufacture and testing of cell- and tissue-based therapies. “The globalization of health markets and the specific …

The Trump administration will soon begin a review that will question the veracity of the climate change science used by President Barack Obama’s administration as the basis for environmental regulations. The move by the Environmental Protection Agency to launch public debates between scientists on climate research, known as red-team, blue-team exercises, would be the first major effort by the Republican administration to challenge the long-standing scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. Advocates who have petitioned the EPA to reverse the scientific finding underlying U.S. regulations governing greenhouse gas emissions see the proposal to scrutinize mainstream climate science as a first step in that direction. “It’s a way to survey the landscape before reopening the endangerment finding,” said Myron Ebell, head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the groups that filed a petition with the agency to undo the 2009 scientific determination that formed the basis for the Democratic Obama administration’s regulation of greenhouse gases. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA had authority under the federal Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases from cars if the agency determined they endangered human health. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has spoken several times about the merits of opening the climate change debate up to the public. The website Climatewire on Friday cited a senior administration official, who said Pruitt plans to launch the back-and-forth scientific critiques formally. Francis Menton, a lawyer who filed an endangerment finding petition in January on behalf of the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council, said …

A team of teenage Gambian students are upset and mystified at being denied visas to attend a major global robotics contest in Washington later this month. This comes days after an Afghan girls team was also turned down by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Neither team was given any reason. “It’s very disappointing, knowing that we are the only two countries that aren’t going to take part in the competition,” Gambian student Fatoumata Ceesay said. The two teams will instead enter the competition via Skype. But the video link is no substitute after the youngsters worked for months perfecting their projects and dreamed of the thrill of visiting Washington. “It would be an experience to see and discover other robots and ask questions and exchange ideas with others. It’s more than 160 countries, so we’d have the chance to mingle,” Ceesay said. The Gambian and Afghan students are especially puzzled because teams from Iran and Sudan, and a group of Syrian refugees were given visas. All three Muslim-majority countries are on President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Afghanistan and Gambia are not. Lida Azizi, a 17-year old from Herat, calls the visa rejection “a clear insult for the people of Afghanistan.” The U.S. embassies in Afghanistan and Gambia and the State Department say they cannot discuss visa requests. WATCH: Robotics contest for youth promotes innovation A group called FIRST Global Challenge holds the yearly robotics competition to build interest in science, technology, engineering and math around the world. The group says …

Hundreds of environmentalists protested in Kraków Tuesday against widespread logging in Europe’s last primeval forest as a conference of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee got underway in the historic city in southern Poland. The environmentalists demanded that the Polish government stop felling trees in the Białowieża forest, a UNESCO World Heritage site that straddles the border with Belarus. The forest of nearly 142,000 hectares is one of the last and largest remaining parts of an immense primeval forest that stretched across the European Plain 10,000 years ago. Separated by a police cordon, forest rangers held a counterdemonstration in Kraków. They support the government’s explanation that selective logging will help save the forest, which is north of Brest, the Belarusian capital, and Białystok in Poland. The forest is home to many rare species of birds and plants as well as hundreds of European bison, the continent’s largest mammals. It contains a number of large, ancient oak trees, survivors of the wars in Eastern Europe during the 20th century and many earlier conflicts; the biggest trees, named after historical figures in many cases, have circumferences of over 600 centimeters (20 feet) and stand over 30 meters (98 feet) tall. The government said it increased logging to fight an infestation of bark beetles that has affected many spruce trees. Ecologists claim authorities have been felling not only infected trees but also healthy ones. They contend the government’s stand is a pretext to increase timber production for profit. Scientists and the European Union, which …

Lawyers from around Africa gathered in Cameroon this week to call for tougher legislation against counterfeit medicine.   Sixty tons of counterfeit medicine was burned after being seized by customs officials in Cameroon, who say the stockpile had an estimated value of $80,000. Customs official Marcel Kamgaing said the imitation medicine was being used to treat everything from diabetes and hypertension to cancer and erectile dysfunction. He said the forged drugs were destined for sale at shops and roadside pharmacies. He says illicit drugs are very dangerous to the health of consumers and may even kill due to poor packaging and preservation. He says importers should be informed that Cameroon’s customs laws give them the authority to destroy all fake drugs. Counterfeit drugs conference The burning was scheduled to coincide with an international conference this week in Yaounde on the problem of phony drugs in Africa. Jackson Ngnie Kamga, president of the Cameroon Bar Association, says the current penalties are not enough of a deterrent. He said traffickers should face jail time. He says because of its deadly consequences, it is high time for Cameroon to join African states to start considering the transportation and commercialization of bogus drugs as a major crime, not a simple offense punishable by fines and seizure of the illicit goods. He says the number of people who die because of such drugs makes them consider it another form of homicide, which the international community should help Africa tackle. The World Health Organization says falsified …

The U.N. children’s fund warns tens of thousands of malnourished children are at great risk in Yemen, Somalia and South Sudan, which are on the brink of famine. UNICEF reports an estimated 4.7 million children in the three cholera-stricken countries are malnourished. Of these, UNICEF spokesman Christophe Boulierac tells VOA, more than one million are suffering from severe acute malnutrition. “Let me remind you that a child who is suffering from severe acute malnutrition are nine times more likely to die of disease than a well-nourished child,” he said. “So, having cholera and diarrhea in countries where so many children are so fragile because of malnutrition among other things because of such a bad access to safe water is extremely worrying.” Sudan outbreak UNICEF says it also is extremely worried about an outbreak of acute watery diarrhea in Sudan, where the Federal Ministry of Health reports more than 20,000 cases of the disease, including over 400 deaths. Boulierac says the disease has spread to 14 of 18 states and children account for more than 20 percent of the affected population. “The situation in White Nile State, which is in central Sudan, is deeply worrying, since it is the most affected with 7,200 reported cases and since it has almost 100,000 refugees living in camps,” he said. UNICEF says it needs access, security and more money to contain cholera and acute watery diarrhea in all four countries. It says aid operations must be scaled up. Malnourished children must receive special life-saving …

Dairy farmers want U.S. regulators to banish the term “soy milk,” but documents show even government agencies haven’t always agreed on what to call such drinks. The U.S. Department of Agriculture “fervently” wanted to use the term “soy milk” in educational materials for the public, according to emails recently released in response to a lawsuit. That irked the Food and Drug Administration, the agency that oversees the rule defining milk as coming from healthy cows. It’s “not a trivial decision,” the FDA warned in one of the 2011 emails about the USDA’s desire to use the term. The sour history over who gets to use “milk” reaches back to at least 1997, when a soy foods group petitioned the FDA to recognize the term “soymilk.” A couple of years later, the group pointed out that the FDA itself had used the term. Even now, the National Milk Producers Federation says it’s working to build support for legislation directing the FDA to enforce the federal standard. The dairy group says both “soy milk” and “soymilk” are inappropriate ways to describe non-dairy drinks made from soybeans, and that the one-word version is just an attempt to get around the definition. There are plenty of other food names at issue. A European Union court recently ruled that a company named TofuTown can’t describe its products as “cheese.” U.S. rice producers have railed against “pretenders ” like diced cauliflower and said they may take the issue to the FDA. But the FDA hasn’t even …