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| Chinese red yeast rice significantly reduces repeat heart attacks and mortality rates [Think Gene] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 06:01 PM CDT A clinical study on patients who have suffered a heart attack found that a partially purified extract of Chinese red yeast rice, Xuezhikang (XZK), reduced the risk of repeat heart attacks by 45%, revascularization (bypass surgery/angioplasty), cardiovascular mortality and total mortality by one-third and cancer mortality by two-thirds. The multicenter, randomized, double-blind study, was conducted on almost 5,000 patients, ranging in age from 18-70 over a five-year period at over 60 hospitals in the People’s Republic of China. Corresponding author David M. Capuzzi, M.D., Ph.D, director of the Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Program at Jefferson’s Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine and Zonliang Lu, M.D., Ph.D, from the Fuwai Hospital at the Chinese Academy of Medical Science report their findings in the June 15th edition of the American Journal of Cardiology. “It’s very exciting because this is a natural product and had very few adverse side effects including no abnormal blood changes,” said Capuzzi. “People in the Far East have been taking Chinese red yeast rice as food for thousands of years, but no one has ever studied it clinically in a double-blind manner with a purified product against a placebo group until now and we are pleased with the results. However, people in the United States should know that the commercially available over-the-counter supplement found in your average health food store is not what was studied here. Those over-the-counter supplements are not regulated, so exact amounts of active ingredient are unknown and their efficacy has not been studied yet.” The study looked at patients who had suffered a heart attack in the previous year. Study participants were given two-300-milligram XZK capsules or a placebo and tracked over a five-year period. The XZK capsules contained a combination of lovastatin, lovastatin hydroxyl acid, ergosterol and other components. “I think it is surprising that a natural product like XZK would have this great an effect,” said Capuzzi. “If further testing and study prove true, my hope is that XZK becomes an important therapeutic agent to treat cardiovascular disorders and in the prevention of disease whether someone has had a heart attack or not. But it is important to recognize the fact we do not know exactly how Chinese red yeast rice works. The exact ingredients from the XZK capsules have not been isolated and studied yet. Still the results were so profound, even out performing statins prescribed in numerous western populations, that further study should certainly be investigated.” Source: Thomas Jefferson University Kevin says: Many Westerners dismiss Chinese/Eastern medicine because it is not a replacement for Western medicine. While it can’t replace Western medicine, there is much to be learned and it is great to see large studies like this showing significant results. Chinese medicine also has the benefit of being much, much more affordable to the world’s populations because patents and intellectual property and usually nil. |
| 23andMe in Second Life! [ScienceRoll] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 04:58 PM CDT After months of e-mails and talks, now it is official: 23andMe, one of the (if not the) most famous company focusing on personalized genetics, will present a slideshow in Second Life in the next session of the Scifoo Lives On series on the 24th of June at 10:00 AM Pacific Time (= 17:00 GMT). I’m really happy because they have the potential to prove the advantages of Second Life in global communication. And 23andMe will be the first genetic company to give a talk in the virtual world. They seem to be quite open to the web 2.0 world as they will be one of the sponsors for the BioBarCamp that is a more than interesting unconference organized be Attila Csordás (unfortunately, I live in the other side of the world…).
If you would like to participate:
That’s all. If you can’t have access to Second Life (due to graphic card problems, e.g.), don’t worry, I will blog live about the whole event. The Scifoo Lives On series is a continuation of the SciFoo conference in Second Life.
A screenshot of one of our past events focusing on web 2.0 and medicine Some past events:
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| Posted: 09 Jun 2008 04:07 PM CDT |
| SurgyTec: Surgical Skills, Tips and Tricks [ScienceRoll] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 04:04 PM CDT SurgyTec, at heart a YouTube for surgeons, is a privately held company based in Rotterdam, Netherlands. It aims to become a global community and video-sharing site for surgeons to show off their newly minted skills. It makes it easy for medical professionals to upload videos or slideshows and share those with the community. We can search for videos by specialty, organ/region, tissue, etiology, operation type, or technique. According to their mission statement:
This seems like the space where Medgadget’s only original surgical video, showing off the novel closure method known as the “Chopstick Technique“, would have been featured.
More at SurgyTec… This is a cross-post with Medgadget.         |
| Water, Water, Everywhere [Sciencebase Science Blog] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 10:00 AM CDT
So, what’s the answer? Solar-powered desalination certainly, or perhaps the extraction of the hydrate component of abundant desert minerals such as gypsum (calcium sulfate dihydrate, 20% water by weight)? In a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Global Environmental Issues (2008, 8, 224-232), M. Whisson of Subiaco, in Western Australia, discusses two serious alternatives for providing even the most parched lands with unlimited fresh water. Both approaches are reminiscent of ancient, old world technologies, but could provide a modern solution. Whisson explains the problem: The world Storage and redistribution of rain water, of course requires processing plants while those suffering debilitating and ultimately fatal arsenic poisoning on the Indian sub-continent are all too familiar with the effects of the desiccation of aquifers. “There are two, and only two, unlimited sources of water: the sea and the air,” says Whisson. The Earth has 1.26 x 1021 litres of water, of which 98% is seawater. The surface is acted on by solar radiation, turbulence and wind, which liberates water into the atmosphere ensuring that the lower 1 kilometre of the atmosphere (volume of 5 x 107 cubic kilometres contains 1 x 1015 kg of water, which turns over with a half life of a few days. Harvesting of water from the air on a very small but socially important scale has a long history, as does desalination of seawater but, says Whisson, in the context of current and growing world needs, these approaches will provide nothing but a short delay in the onset of global life-threatening water scarcity. This is especially so, given their small, centralised scaling as industrial units. Instead, Whisson suggests two fresh water collecting systems and argues that they have no ultimate limitations, either because of the availability of water or because of environmental constraints. The first system is the Water Road, a macro-engineering concept, which produces fresh water from seawater without the energy and processing demands of conventional desalination. It also offers a distributed network system that precludes many of the issues facing an industrial-style desalination plant. This system uses a large surface area to allow a non-fresh water supply to be distilled by solar and wind energy and trapped as fresh clean water. The distillation would occur during the transfer of seawater inland (essentially given a kickstart by tidal surges) to the area of need, explains Whisson. This seems counter-intuitive, but immediately provides a high surface area, while the slow flow rate through a wide pipeline under a transparent heat-insulating cover means a large surface area of water is exposed to the sun over several days, with wind turbulence on the seawater surface acting like the natural process of transfer of surface water to the air over the open sea. This system of evaporation also avoids the inhibitory effect of water vapour saturation of the evaporating air. The concentrated seawater formed as a byproduct could be used to produce common sea salt at much lower cost and efficiencies than traditional drying pools. The second system is a Water from Air system that uses a wind turbine to extract moisture from the wind. Whisson points out that at a relative humidity of 60%, a temperature fall from 20 to 5 Celsius would only require 10 grams of water per cubic metre of air. However, once it is recognised that a wind-driven turbine with an aperture of 10 square metres facing into a moderate breeze of 10 kilometres per hour would acquire 100000 cubic metres of air containing 1000 kg water every hour. Even with an efficiency of just 20% that would be a useful system, especially given that thousands of turbines could be installed in dry regionsthousands of turbines could be installed in dry regions. The two systems are seen as complementary,” explains Whisson, the Water Road providing water to large arid geographic areas, such as Western Australia, and the Water From Air units providing dispersed multiple water collection from the air wherever it is needed, whether on high industrial buildings, farm buildings, coastal cliff-tops, remote sand hills or small isolated communities. A post from David Bradley Science Writer |
| Global Warming & Vinegar [Bayblab] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 09:36 AM CDT FYI. The retreating glaciers are not going to mean an abundance of the purest form of vinegar or acetic acid, commonly called glacial acetic acid. Glacial acetic acid is simply water-free acetic acid and is named such for the ice-crystals that will form at 16.7C. Perhaps everyone already knew this, not surprisingly I did not have a clue. |
| New skills for a new era [business|bytes|genes|molecules] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 08:47 AM CDT
She goes on to say that this new literacy requires, in addition to writing, a knowledge of “computer software, 3d printing, virtual worlds, synthetic biology and visual storytelling”. While I don’t completely agree with that list, it is clear that our education is not adequate for a world that is changing very fast. Take something like The Bug. Right now, it is something for a select few, but I remember my childhood, playing with mechano sets, DIY gliders, etc. The Bug is today’s mechano set. The other day I talked about peope doing molecular modeling at home, as a hobby. Technology is changing so fast these days that we can essentially never catch up, so what do we do? How do we encourage and deliver this new literacy. While our education system(s) needs to change to accommodate technology, and not simply pay it lip service, the real impact will come outside of the classroom. Summer camps emphasizing knowledge and technology, an exposure to new ways of communicating, etc. That’s where we, as early adopters can really help. It is also why I am optimistic about the future. For a while there was a big gap in the technological awareness between generations, but that is not likely to be true with the generation that I belong to, or indeed those a little older. Will there be a generation of geeks? Highly unlikely. Human society is not going to change overnight, but if we get more people involved from a young age and make them appreciate, embrace, and respect science and technology, and how they enable us to communicate and explore, then we’ll all be in a better place. All of this sounds fairly Utopian, and if you catch me in more cynical moments you’re likely to get a much more grumbly response, but even then I don’t see why we can’t get there. Perhaps we will need to just because our video games will force us to :). On a related note, a lot of us have wondered about the future of libraries. I believe that they should be the gatekeepers of information, providing expertise in tools that help us find and manage information in a virtual world (these libraries will inherently be virtual). I wonder what role they could/should play in helping people with this new literacy. Image via Wikipedia  |
| Newborn Screening for Alzheimer's Disease? [The Gene Sherpa: Personalized Medicine and You] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 06:30 AM CDT Don't Forget that Gene Genie is up at Neurophilosophy so check it out! I want to thank the Connecticut Geriatric Socitey for inviting me to speak at their wonderful group's Annual Meeting. It was a... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] |
| HEALTH Highlights - June 9th, 2008 [Highlight HEALTH] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 06:00 AM CDT
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| Keynote talk on coalescent hidden Markov models and great ape speciation [Mailund on the Internet] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 05:25 AM CDT Wednesday this week I’m giving a talk at the Danish Society for Computer Science. I was asked to give the keynote talk at this years general assembly before they hand out this year’s Best Thesis Award. I’m tired of talking about my main project — association mapping — so I decided to give a talk on our CoalHMM work (although I am only working on that a small percentage of my time). The slides file is too big to upload to slideshare, but if my flash hack works you should see them below: You can also get it as a PDF file, a PowerPoint file or a Keynote file, if you want. The last couple of presentations I’ve made I have been using the Keynote program on my Mac. I’m really happy with the program. It makes it very easy to put together pretty presentations (if I say so myself) with very little work. Especially its handling of graphics impresses me. Compared to using OpenOffice, as I usually did before getting the Mac, there’s essentially no work involved in including graphics. Automatic masking and alpha channels beats modifying images in Gimp any day! I couldn’t really figure out how to put presentations on my homepage, though. Keynote files are really directories, so you cannot just copy them to the homepage directory. I found out, though, that if a Mac downloads a zip’ed Keynote file it will just open it in Keynote, so I guess that is the way to do that. |
| Transferable Job Skills in Science [Bitesize Bio] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 05:07 AM CDT Relating to my post last week on jobs in industry, concerning the slight disconnect between jobs in academia versus industry — the NatureJobs podcast has a special episode this past week from NatureJobs: From Academia to Industry [mp3]. In it, Pfizer’s Anthony Harrison talks about transferable skills that could help you move from a university-based PhD to Big Pharma. About twelve and a half minutes into the podcast, the specific transferable skills that they’re talking about begin to be discussed. These are very good points for the academic to stress on his or her CV as they prepare for a job interview in Big Pharma. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| It must be hell, sequencing the Neanderthal [Mailund on the Internet] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 02:55 AM CDT Reading through a page at Nature about metagenomics (probably requires subscription…) I saw this sentence:
Sequencing the Neanderthal must be quite some challenge! Of course, contamination by bacteria should be fairly easy to discover and get rid of compared to contamination by the humans doing the sequences. We are just too closely related to the Neanderthal for that to be a simple task. Of course, the Neanderthal specimens are handled carefully, but some contamination is unavoidable. How much of a problem it is, I do not know, though. I tried googling for it, but didn’t really find any consistent answers. I look forward to getting my hands on the Neanderthal sequence, though. I would love running it through our CoalHMM analysis! |
| Gene Genie #33 at Neurophilosophy [ScienceRoll] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 12:18 AM CDT The 33rd edition is up at Neurophilosophy. A great compilation of articles and blogposts about human genetics and personalized medicine. Thank you, MC, for hosting Gene Genie. Gene Genie is the blog carnival of genes and gene-related diseases. Our plan is to cover the whole genome before 2082 (it means 14-15 genes every two weeks). We accept articles on the news of genomics and clinical genetics. The news and articles of personalized genetics are also included. Check out Gene Genie for more about this unique field of medicine.
Next edition is due to be published on the 8th of June. Don't forget to submit your articles via the official page. Let me know if you would like to host an edition. Here are all the issues of Gene genie:
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| Oh shit! [Mailund on the Internet] Posted: 09 Jun 2008 12:00 AM CDT With the music festival season coming up, I just have to share today’s Wulfmorgenthaler:
In case you are not familiar with this comic strip, I suggest you go read a few strips. Crazy humour at its best! It’s a pair of Danish comedians, Mikael Wulf and Anders Morgenthaler. Well, Mikael Wulf is a comedian, I guess Anders Morgenthaler is more all-round artist. They had a few shows on Danish television. The first was great, but after that the quality dropped. Their comic strips are still very funny, though. |
| Visiting a time capsule [Omics! Omics!] Posted: 08 Jun 2008 10:10 PM CDT The Next Generation & I went to the Boston Museum of Science today (we're members this year) and one of the exhibits where he lingered was the one of biotechnology. I was a bit surprised to find that it dated to 1993; I didn't remember it always being in the spot it's in, so either my memory is flaky (not an unreasonable idea) or it was moved or in storage at some time. But it has been out for a while. Simply looking at the list of sponsors is a bit of a memory jogger. While some are unchanged (BASF, Genencor), some simply went bust (Alpha-Beta), some were absorbed in corporate actions (Genetics Institute, Perseptive Biosystems) while others remain but under somewhat different names (lawyers Hale & Dorr have several more '&' in the name now; Biogen is now Biogen Idec). Reading the text is interesting too. For example, we can learn that the human genome maybe, possibly might be sequenced one day. One of the displays proposes that the dye indigo might one day be synthesized by bacteria (which had been demonstrated) instead of synthesized from petroleum (which had supplanted the original natural source about a century ago); that process has apparently not (yet?) become commercially feasible. One of the games involves performing gene therapy for cystic fibrosis using a cold virus. That's certainly still a dream, but not for lack of trying. Another game has you adding an antifreeze gene to tomatoes to prevent their freezing; this was once an active pursuit, but I haven't heard anything lately. Certainly the no-soften tomato was a commercial flop; I'm still eagerly awaiting some tomasil seeds. This isn't meant to ridicule the display; in general I think it was well done & carefully thought out (Aspirin has been misspelled on the display all these years, but oh well!). Making interesting, interactive exhibits on molecular biology themes remains challenging. Perhaps what has aged the least on the displays was the addressing of ethical concerns -- when does gene therapy go too far, what privacy rights do we have to our genes, etc. |
Fresh, clean water is going to be increasingly in short supply. Despite the recent heavy rains across Southern Europe, the building of desalination plants in such regions, and the shipping in of water supplies from elsewhere is likely to increase in coming years, while desertification will maintain its dehydrating crawl and some regions of the developing world will continue to die of thirst in hotter dry season, while squandering the precious harvest of the rainy season.
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