USPS Alzheimer’s Stamp

Rapid Alzheimer’s Improvement After New Immune-based Treatment

The open access journal BMC Neurology published research this week detailing some amazing results from the use of the anti-tumor necrosis factor-alpha [TNF-alpha] drug to treat symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease from a novel immune system approach. Researchers documented improvement in language function within minutes of administering the drug, tending to confirm preliminary evidence that disrupted neural communication in Alzheimer’s patients may be reversible.

This is a very hopeful development, as are results from clinical drug trials in recent years slowing the progression of the disease in elderly patients as well as ongoing research into substances that may help clear the beta amyloid placques in the brain tissue, characteristic of the disease. As the Baby Boomer generation ages, it is estimated that up to 10 million of them will get this awful disease.

Some doctors are expressing concern about unduly raising hopes in patients and their families on these very early findings. Dr. Sam Gandy, chairman of the Alzheimer’s Association’s medical and science council, has expressed suspicion due to the private nature of the research because the lead researcher has a financial interest in the drug. It is hoped that other laboratories and scientists will be able to duplicate the results, but that more rigorous clinical work remains to be done.

UCLA associate professor of neurology John Ringman and colleagues have reported in the journal Neurology that there may be a way to detect Alzheimer’s even before symptoms appear by measuring the level of certain proteins in the blood and spinal fluid. These proteins are potentially useful biomarkers to identify and track progression of the disease before the patient shows any signs of deteriorating mental acuity.

The amount of suffering for the families of those 10 million people could be reduced drastically if there were effective treatments, so there is a good deal of public and private research ongoing. Hopefully when the Boomers reach an age where they have ready access to medical care via Medicare, diagnosis and treatment will be available to them.

It was bound to happen. Science Daily reports that research from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil entitled The non-equilibrium nature of culinary evolution has established that regional cuisines don’t evolve much. Even in a small world.

The researchers examined historical food preferences for ‘national’ diets in Britain, France and Brazil, and found that certain staples as well as unique ingredients remain in the cuisines despite modern access to restaurants specializing in regional or ‘national’ foods. And despite the modern availability of regional foods in grocery stores.

In other words, the Irish still love potatoes, the French still eat snails and frogs’ legs, the Germans still love sausages and sauerkraut, the Japanese still rely on fish stock and Central and South Americans still choose tortillas over Wonder Bread. Mediterranean peoples still consume lots of olive oil, and still have longer lives, less heart disease and lower cholesterol than the average American.

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Most parents know very well how heart-warming their baby’s smile can be, to the point where just doing something silly to get that smile-fix becomes a regular way of life. I’ve heard all sorts of weird philosophies about baby smiles - “it’s just gas,” “they’ve got the intelligence of rats,” etc., etc., things that only non-parents would ever think of.

So it’s cool that researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine have finally demonstrated the addictive quality of baby smiles, as reported recently in the journal Pediatrics. Turns out that baby smiles actually ‘light up’ the reward centers of the human brain, particularly in Moms - it’s what they call a “Natural High.”

Baby’s Smile Is A Natural High

The researchers hope their work will help scientists understand the unique mother-infant bonding so critical for proper child development (and mothers’ mental health).

No doubt this is fine research, and it’s gratifying to know that science is actually looking at phenomena they could have known all along if they’d just asked a Mom. Oh, well. That famous scientific skepticism needs physical ‘proof’ of physical phenomena before it will believe anything most regular people know from direct empirical experience. Maybe they’ll now come up with a pill that mimics this high, which will no doubt be a big item on the black market for pharmaceuticals…

Bird-watching is one of the most popular pastimes in the world, for people from all walks of life. Our fascination with birds in all their sizes, colors and habitats thus makes for a ready field of study in biology, where bird evolution used to maintain a fairly rigorous tree-of-life.

Not so much any longer, since researchers with the Early Bird Assembling the Tree-of-Life Project centered on the Field Museum examined DNA from all major living groups of birds and discovered that phylogenics had it all wrong!

Huge Genome Phylogenic Study of Birds Re-Writes Bird Evolution

As an indicator of just how wrong it was, DNA analysis has determined that falcons - those swift and trainable birds of prey - are NOT closely related to hawks and eagles. Whoa. Spokespersons for the project say the entire understanding of bird evolution will need to be re-written with this new information, and that information itself raises some further questions about concurrent and repeated evolution of certain traits at different times in different families.

“We now have a robust evolutionary tree from which to study the evolution of birds and all their interesting features that have fascinated so many scientists and amateurs for centuries,” Reddy said. “Birds exhibit substantial diversity (largest of the tetrapod groups), and using this ‘family tree’ wwe can begin to understand how this diversity originated as well as how different bird groups are interrelated.”

[Photo Credit: Zina Deretsky, NSF]

Scientists at Indiana University Bloomington and Harvard published a report in Science June 20 describing a protein “clutch” that disengages the bacterial tail from the “tiny but powerful engine” that powers its rotation. The flagellum is the means that many bacterial cells - including Bacillus subtilis used in this research - use to ’swim’ in liquid environments where they live.

Microscopic ‘Clutch’ Puts Flagellum in Neutral

The clutch mechanism was discovered by accident when the researchers were studying the formation of bacterial “biofilm,” where the cells accumulate and become stationary, biofilms are involved in bacterial infections. It is hoped that the discovery will give nanotechnologists some ideas about how to regulate tiny engines they create in the lab.

“We think it’s pretty cool that evolving bacteria and human engineers arrived at a similar solution to the same problem,” says IU biologist Daniel Kearns, leader of the project.

Way back in 2005 researchers at Texas A&M determined that humor - an appreciation of the absurd hilarity of life - can significantly increase Hope, and that hopefulness helps people cope with stresses in daily life and during illnesses as well.

In January of this year a communications professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, demonstrated that in a medical setting, laughter is the best medicine. Humor helps both the doctors and the patients cope. The finding was extended to the workplace and to educational situations as well, eventually reaching the conclusion that regardless of the content, humor seems to be beneficial and productive. It helps to get the point across in almost any situation.

Then on June 12, 2008 Alastaire Clarke published his Pattern Recognition Theory of Humor, which purportedly explains the reason that humor is common to all human societies. In Humor Shown to be Fundamental to Our Success as a Species, Clarke claims that humor is fundamantal to the evolution of human beings, and continues to be important in the cognitive development of infants and children.

Alas, Clarke’s Pattern Recognition Theory can’t tell us what’s funny or why, so it probably won’t be used by comedy writers or clowns to formulate their skits any time soon. And while humor can progress from basic slapstick to childish jokes to ridicule to satire, he does not attempt to explain why slapstick still makes us laugh even if we’ve progressed all the way to dry British satire. A clown would have a handy explanation for that, but I don’t think Clarke asked one. Oh, well.

The articles do make a strong case for the survival value of humor to human beings, and that may be all we really need to know about it.

Links:

Humor Can Increase Hope, Research Shows
Laughter is the Best Medicine

Science Daily reported over the weekend that Keio University research has demonstrated that pigeons show superior self-recognition abilities to three year old humans.

Professor Shigeru Watanabe and graduate student Kohji Toda managed to train pigeons to recognize themselves in real-time using mirrors and videotape, then found that their pigeons can recognize themselves in video images with a 5 to 7 second delay. Human 3-year olds typically have trouble recognizing themselves with just a 2 second delay.

Thus pigeons now join chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins and elephants in having the ability to recognize themselves, which means that particularly large brains aren’t necessary to the ability. It seems that we are learning that the other forms of life we share our planet with are quite a bit smarter than we’ve traditionally given them credit for!

When I started college in the late 1960s in Oklahoma, I could buy gas for my Volkswagon Bug for 19.9¢ a gallon. That’s 5 gallons for a dollar, enough to drive home to visit the folks, drive around town to see friends, and get back to college without having to stop at a gas station. This past weekend I drove our little pickup to Gatlinburg, Tennessee to see an old Navy buddy, a round trip equivalent to that past Oklahoma weekend trek. Gas for the journey cost us right around $50. A dollar’s worth won’t get me to the grocery store and back any more, and it doesn’t look like the price is ever going to come down.

The going price per barrel of petroleum is pushing $150 hard and will probably go over $200 before the end of the year. Diesel fuel is a dollar more expensive than gasoline, and the price of everything grown on a farm and transported by ship, train or truck must go up accordingly.

The good news - or, at least the hopeful news is that progress is being made in deciding what replacement fuels we should be developing. Most people are skeptical of corn-based ethanol and the diversion of food crops as well as crop land to biofuels. And while new techniques can make biofuels from native vegetation like switchgrass or even algae, the fact is that plants aren’t very efficient at converting solar energy into the biomass required.

Biotech researchers are now turning to engineered microorganisms as both helpers in turning biomass into fuels and as fuel themselves - photosynthetic bacteria that can capture sunlight energy 100 times more efficiently than plants - that can be grown in massive amounts without competing for cropland.

It does appear that the time has finally come when human civilization must change its ways, the only questions being how much it’s going to hurt regular people and which nations and/or multinational corporations will corner the markets. Perhaps biotechnology can be put to good use creating new fuel sources instead of turning staple foods into pesticides. That would be a positive change of focus, help get the tarnish of public resistance off the biotech bus, and maybe even save the planet.

But you and I will probably be paying at least $5 a gallon to fill our tanks, no matter what kind of fuels are developed. Just something we’ll have to get used to.

Links:

New Source for Biofuels Discovered
Harnessing Microbes to Meet Future Energy Needs
Are microbes the answer to the energy crisis?

• Nearly 50% of the bacteria in your body (and humans harbor 3 times more bacterial cells than human cells) live on the surface of your tongue, which (by the way) is the strongest muscle in your body. Probably a good reason why Mommy-Kisses work better than Mommy-Licks on boo-boos.

• The incidence of immune system diseases has increased more than 200% in the last five years. Yikes! Is that environmental?

• By the time a person is 35 years old, s/he begins losing about 7,000 brain cells a day which are never replaced. Whoa. I’d say something profound about that, but I forgot what the subject was…

• A moderate sunburn damages blood vessels in the skin so seriously that it takes between four and fifteen months for them to heal. The reason I keep SPF 50 on hand all summer.

• Right-handed people live an average of nine years longer than left-handed people. Need I remind readers that correlation does NOT equal causation?

Go on over to One Big Health Nut and read the rest for yourself!

The 2007 Farm Bill - now the 2008 Farm Bill, was passed by both chambers of Congress, vetoed by President Bush, then the veto was overridden by both houses and is now the ‘Law of the Land’. Politically, the bill isn’t perfect, there is still too much pork and payments to rich agribusiness concerns for their poor farming practices, and not enough clarifying guidelines for biofuels production and organic farming.

But it’s a lot better than no bill at all, which would have kept the last support bill in place for the foreseeable future. The new bill has incentives to clean up residue discharges in important watersheds, and supports for best practices in crop rotations, cover crops and low-chemical input farming. It’s still strong on commodity production (corn, wheat, rice), but does put some real support into farmer’s market promotions and expansion of organic markets. It does somewhat limit subsidies to near-millionaire commodity farmers, requires more fresh fruit and vegetables to be available in schools, increases food stamp benefits as tied to the price of food, allots priority funding to research into the bee die-off situation, and supports rural enterprise and microenterprise investments.

Research into the “typical American diet” and its relationship to serious health issues and obesity informs us that Americans eat way too much junk and not nearly enough healthy food. Which, in a country that rations health care by income level and allows insurance companies to exclude people who actually need health care, would seem to be an important issue to address with education and real food availability in public institutions such as schools.
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