independent - Scientists have developed a new kind of "antisense" drug that has produced promising results in laboratory trials involving the Ebola and Marburg viruses, two of the most lethal known. The drug works by blocking the critical genes that the viruses use to replicate quickly inside the body to give patients valuable time to mount their own immune defence against the viral haemorrhagic fevers.Tests on laboratory animals have shown that the antisense drugs are effective at fending off Ebola and Marburg, which cause rapid and intense fever and internal bleeding fatal in about 90 per cent of cases.
There are at present no effective treatments or vaccines against either of the viruses, which are highly infectious and have caused particular concern because of the possibility of them being used in biowarfare or as a terrorist weapon. The antisense drugs are composed of short strands of nucleic acids which form a sequence that is complementary or opposite to the nucleic acid sequence found in the genes of the viruses. They work by binding to the viral genes and blocking their action, giving time for the immune defences of the patients to launch an attack on the invading viruses, the scientists said.
The researchers, from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (Usamriid), report in the journal Nature Medicine that an antisense drug called AVI-6002 resulted in a survival rate of better than 90 per cent in laboratory mice and guinea pigs exposed to the Ebola virus. When the scientists tested the drug on laboratory monkeys, three out of five survived.
A similar antisense drug, called AVI-6003, proved even more successful against the Marburg virus, with every one of the treated monkeys surviving a viral attack, the study showed.
Ebola and Marburg are considered so dangerous that the research had to be done in special laboratories with the highest security classification, known as biosafety level 4, where the scientists had to wear space-suits and breathe filtered air to protect them as they did their experiments.
The scientists, led by Travis Warren of the Usamriid, believe the results are good enough to warrant clinical trials in humans and the US Food and Drug Administration has given permission to proceed.
The scientists said they have developed "human-grade" antisense drugs that could be used on people after an emergency in 2004, when a laboratory worker in the Usamriid was accidentally pricked in the thumb with a needle while treating Ebola-infected mice. The female worker was isolated, but found to be uninfected, so the human-grade antisense drug was not used on her. But the facility has worked with biotechnology company AVI BioPharma to develop antisense drugs to be used in human clinical trials.
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Does the Past Exist Yet? Evidence Suggests Your Past Isn't Set in Stone
HP - Recent discoveries require us to rethink our understanding of history. "The histories of the universe," said renowned physicist Stephen Hawking "depend on what is being measured, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has an objective observer-independent history."
Is it possible we live and die in a world of illusions? Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed, when they collapse in to just one outcome. Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future -- and may even depend on actions that you haven't taken yet.
In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment, which showed that particles of light "photons" knew -- in advance −- what their distant twins would do in the future. They tested the communication between pairs of photons -- whether to be either a wave or a particle. Researchers stretched the distance one of the photons had to take to reach its detector, so that the other photon would hit its own detector first. The photons taking this path already finished their journeys -− they either collapse into a particle or don't before their twin encounters a scrambling device. Somehow, the particles acted on this information before it happened, and across distances instantaneously as if there was no space or time between them. They decided not to become particles before their twin ever encountered the scrambler. It doesn't matter how we set up the experiment. Our mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how they behave. Experiments consistently confirm these observer-dependent effects.
More recently (Science 315, 966, 2007), scientists in France shot photons into an apparatus, and showed that what they did could retroactively change something that had already happened. As the photons passed a fork in the apparatus, they had to decide whether to behave like particles or waves when they hit a beam splitter. Later on - well after the photons passed the fork - the experimenter could randomly switch a second beam splitter on and off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle actually did at the fork in the past. At that moment, the experimenter chose his history.
Of course, we live in the same world. Particles have a range of possible states, and it's not until observed that they take on properties. So until the present is determined, how can there be a past? According to visionary physicist John Wheeler (who coined the word "black hole"), "The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what an observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past." Part of the past is locked in when you observe things and the "probability waves collapse." But there's still uncertainty, for instance, as to what's underneath your feet. If you dig a hole, there's a probability you'll find a boulder. Say you hit a boulder, the glacial movements of the past that account for the rock being in exactly that spot will change as described in the Science experiment.
But what about dinosaur fossils? Fossils are really no different than anything else in nature. For instance, the carbon atoms in your body are "fossils" created in the heart of exploding supernova stars. Bottom line: reality begins and ends with the observer. "We are participators," Wheeler said "in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past." Before his death, he stated that when observing light from a quasar, we set up a quantum observation on an enormously large scale. It means, he said, the measurements made on the light now, determines the path it took billions of years ago.
Like the light from Wheeler's quasar, historical events such as who killed JFK, might also depend on events that haven't occurred yet. There's enough uncertainty that it could be one person in one set of circumstances, or another person in another. Although JFK was assassinated, you only possess fragments of information about the event. But as you investigate, you collapse more and more reality. According to biocentrism, space and time are relative to the individual observer - we each carry them around like turtles with shells.
History is a biological phenomenon − it's the logic of what you, the animal observer experiences. You have multiple possible futures, each with a different history like in the Science experiment. Consider the JFK example: say two gunmen shot at JFK, and there was an equal chance one or the other killed him. This would be a situation much like the famous Schrödinger's cat experiment, in which the cat is both alive and dead − both possibilities exist until you open the box and investigate.
"We must re-think all that we have ever learned about the past, human evolution and the nature of reality, if we are ever to find our true place in the cosmos," says Constance Hilliard, a historian of science at UNT. Choices you haven't made yet might determine which of your childhood friends are still alive, or whether your dog got hit by a car yesterday. In fact, you might even collapse realities that determine whether Noah's Ark sank. "The universe," said John Haldane, "is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
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Paralyzed By Love
telegraph - Matt Frerking, 39, from Portland, Oregon, is left immobile if he even has a romantic thought or sees others showing displays of affection.
The affliction has been diagnosed as a combination of the chronic sleeping disorder narcolepsy with cataplexy, a sudden weakening of the muscles which renders the person temporarily immobile but still aware of their surroundings and able to hear.
For Mr Frerking the feeling that sparks an attack is love and being around his family can send him into a state of physical paralysis.
He is unable to put his arm around Trish, his wife of 13 years, and suffers attacks on anniversaries. He can suffer attacks several times a day
“Holding hands in public is something that we can do for a few seconds at most, and that’s about it,” Mr Frerking said.
“Putting my arm around her is something that I don’t do unless we’re sitting down and I know that it won’t matter that much if I just flop over. I have to limit those things very carefully.” During an interview with ABC News, he described having to avoid “warm and fuzzy” feelings before passing out after looking at photos in his wedding album.
Attacks are also triggered by trailers for romantic films and Mr Frerking said he tries to stave them off by thinking about scientific research.
Carol Ash, a sleep specialist at the Sleep for Life Center in New Jersey, said: “In someone like Matt strong emotions are flipping a switch.”
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Wild Pigs Going On The Pill
MNN - Hog hunting is a popular pastime in Alabama, where feral pigs roam the better part of the state – but even the irrepressible Southern appetite for pork isn't enough to keep populations under control. After a $44 million loss in hog-damaged crops in 2009, authorities are looking toward an unconventional solution: birth control.
AL.com reports that Auburn University, backed by the Alabama Farmers Federation, hopes to get feral hog populations down to a manageable level using birth control. Not that they expect these puckish pigs to pop pills; the contraceptives would be delivered with baited food.
There's just one problem: keeping other animals from taking the bait and ending up sterile.
“No species-specific oral contraceptive has been developed,” Steve Ditchkoff, associate professor in the School of Forestry and Wildlife, told AL.com. “But we're working on it.”
Though not originally native to Alabama, wild hogs first appeared in only a handful of counties before spreading to nearly the entire state, possibly due to trappers re-releasing live animals into new habitats. They breed quickly, reaching sexual maturity as early as four months of age with females giving birth to litters with as many as 12 piglets up to twice per year.
Auburn University's solution is not your average hormonal contraceptive. To make it pig-specific, researchers hope to initiate an immune reaction in the reproductive system, essentially making the pigs allergic to getting pregnant.
NOTE: the wild hog explosion has advanced into several U.S. states...especially in the south and the upper midwest. I have posted on this previously...please use the blog search tool. Lon
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Prime Example of Selective Breeding in America
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NOTE: For our friends overseas...OH Napier is what we Americans refer to as a REDNECK. The most blatant examples of this hybrid species congregate in the mountains and foothills of Appalachia but can be found anywhere in these United States...to the chagrin of most citizens. Lon
Fortean / Oddball News - 8/23/2010
