A Yale University-led team of scientists reports that they have achieved an important first step in regenerating fully functional lung tissue that can exchange gas, which is the key role of the lungs. Their paper appears in Thursday’s issue of Science Express.
Lung disease accounts for around 400,000 deaths each year in the United States. Lung tissue is difficult to regenerate because it does not generally repair or regenerate beyond the microscopic level. The only current way to replace damaged adult lung tissue is to perform lung transplantation, which is highly susceptible to organ rejection and infection and achieves only 10 percent to 20 percent survival at 10 years.
The Yale team’s goal was to see if it was possible to successfully implant tissue-engineered lungs, cultured in vitro, that could serve the lung’s primary function of exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide. They took adult rat lungs and first removed their existing cellular components, preserving the extracellular matrix and hierarchical branching structures of the airways and vascular system to use later as scaffolds for the growth of new lung cells.
They then cultured a combination of lung-specific cells on the extracellular matrix, using a novel bioreactor designed to mimic some aspects of the fetal lung environment. Under the fetal-like conditions of the bioreactor, the cells repopulated the decellularized matrix with functional lung cells. When implanted into rats for short intervals of time (45-120 minutes), the engineered lungs exchanged oxygen and carbon dioxide similarly to natural lungs.
Lead author Laura Niklason, professor and vice-chair of the Departments of Anesthesiology and Biomedical Engineering at Yale University and a member of Yale Medical Group, said, “We succeeded in engineering an implantable lung in our rat model that could efficiently exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, and could oxygenate hemoglobin in the blood. This is an early step in the regeneration of entire lungs for larger animals and, eventually, for humans.”
The Yale team says this is an important first step, but a great deal more research must be done to see if fully functional lungs can be regenerated in vitro, implanted and sustained in their functioning.
Asbestos, which causes serious illnesses in human, was still present in more than a million Australian homes as well as many schools and workplaces, Australian union said on Monday.
Cancer Council CEO Professor Ian Olver said mesothelioma, the cancer caused by exposure to asbestos, has been expected to kill up to 18,000 Australians by 2020.
“Australia has the highest per capita incidence of this disease in the world and we need to do more to reduce Australia’s exposure to asbestos,” Olver told reporters.
A national asbestos summit will be held in Sydney on Tuesday, convened by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU) and the Cancer Council.
The councils want to form a coalition with asbestos disease experts, support groups and regulatory bodies to ensure Australia is free of asbestos within 20 years.
AMWU president Paul Bastian said the coalition would lobby the federal government to establish a dedicated and independent National Asbestos Unit.
“This would act as an information hub and coordinate national action on asbestos removal and education across all jurisdictions, ” Bastian said in a statement on Monday.
“This problem is compounded by poor community awareness and a disjointed approach from the three levels of government,” Bastian said.
Asbestos victims, their families and supporters will also attend the summit.
Asbestos is a set of six naturally occurring silicate minerals exploited commercially for their desirable physical properties. The inhalation of asbestos fibers can cause serious illnesses, including malignant lung cancer, mesothelioma, and asbestosis.
Since January 1, 2005, the European Union has banned all use of asbestos and extraction, manufacture and processing of asbestos products.
India heatwave kills 80
A severe heatwave sweeping India, with temperatures of almost 44ºC, the highest in 52 years, has killed at least 80 people this month, officials said on Sunday.
The scorching weather, which officials say would continue over northern, north-western and central India in the next 48 hours, also may have some impact on wheat production, exporters and flour-mill associations said.
New Delhi recorded a maximum temperature of 43.7ºC on Saturday, presaging a hot summer in the next two months in the nation’s capital and other parts of northern and eastern India.
The highest temperature in the past 24 hours was 47ºC at Ganganagar city, in Rajasthan state.
Summer temperatures have been 4ºC-6ºC above normal over most parts of northern and central India since March, weather officials said.
Schools closed
In the eastern state of Orissa, authorities have decided to shut down schools from next Tuesday, advancing the annual summer holiday.
Authorities said they were investigating reports of 53 deaths from various parts of the state.
“District collectors have been asked to investigate and submit reports on other deaths,” Bhimsen Gochhayat, a government official, said.
Other deaths were reported from northern state of Uttar Pradesh and central Madhya Pradesh states.
India is expected to produce about 82 million tons of wheat in 2009-2010, but there could be a shortage of 1-1.5 million tons due to the heatwave, said Veena Sharma, Secretary General of the Roller Flour Millers Federation of India.
Monsoon
“Most of the harvesting is over, but there definitely will be a slight shortage of 1-1.5 million tons due to the extreme weather conditions,” she told Reuters.
India is relying on a bumper wheat crop to make up for a 14.2% drop in rice output, the major summer-sown food grain, marred by the worst monsoon in 37 years last year.
“The time it (wheat) normally takes to get ripe has been shortened and as a result the size of the grain could be smaller with a marginal effect on production,” D P Singh, president of the All India Grain Exporters Association, said on Sunday.
Weather officials say with summer temperatures in India set to remain above average, there were hopes of heavy rains at the start of the monsoon season that will help early sowing of rice, soybeans and lentils.
Surviving the apocalypse — in comfort
Worried about where to take refuge in case of an asteroid hitting the Earth, a nuclear attack or some other apocalyptic event?
An American business has the answer: an underground bunker equipped with all the modern comforts.
“You can’t predict, but you can prepare,” says the website of Vivos, which plans to sell 4,000 places in 20 nuclear-proof shelters, all on US territory.
The cost of admission is 50,000 dollars, and children get half-off. Pets are free.
“Sooner or later something is going to cause us to seek shelter,” the company’s owner, Robert Vicino, told AFP. “The threats are all around us.”
His business project merely offers a practical option, he said. “We are not promoting the fear, we are providing the solution, at least a viable one.”
The company’s website features a countdown to the apocalypse supposedly forecast by Nostradamus and the Mayan calendar, noting the time left until December 21, 2012.
And even if the world does not end according to prophesy, Vivos carefully lists a myriad of other dire scenarios for prospective customers: solar flares, nuclear terrorism, volcanic eruptions, killer comets, magnetic pole shifts, global tsunamis, and chemical or biological attacks.
“It’s really not about 2012, something could happen tomorrow or 20 years from now,” Vicino said.
He said the threat he fears the most is an American meltdown, “social and economic anarchy.”
Despite the potential dangers, both natural and man-made, only government leaders had a way of staying safe, he said.
“The government has a solution and they’ve been preparing, for the last ten years or so, very large underground shelters for the government and the elite,” he said. “If you’re not connected and you’re not the elite, you’re not going to get in.”
A portion of the bunkers for sale include Cold War-era nuclear shelters that will be refurbished.
The bunkers will be designed to withstand outdoor temperatures of 700 degrees Celsius, winds of 700 kilometers an hour, flooding for 500 hours or a wave of earthquakes over 10 on the Richter scale.
And the company promises the bunkers will be outfitted with exercise equipment and an extensive wardrobe supplied with footwear “in all sizes.”
“As a co-owner of one of the Vivos shelters, you will only need to get there,” the website promises.
“Everything else is provided, including food, water, fuel, clothing, medical supplies, communications devices, security measures, as well as extremely comfortable accommodations”.
The first shelter, located in the California desert near Barstow, will be ready in September.
And Vicino said “hundreds” of applications have already poured in, including inquiries from Europe.
But having the financial means will not be enough to win a place in the shelters. Vicino said the company is looking for a range of backgrounds and skills, to ensure a “self-sufficient” community.
He said “we want a little bit of everything in there, like on Noah’s ark, so that they can assist each other.”
As for maintaining order, that should not present a problem, as about a third of the applicants come from police departments, private security firms or the US military.
“I got a call yesterday from a special forces service member in Afghanistan wanting to sign up. He is very enthusiastic,” he said.
Despite his enthusiastic arguments in favor of preparing for the worst, Vicino himself has not yet reserved a spot.
“I don’t know if I can afford it!”
Human Activity and the Earth
There is no doubt that human activity has an effect on the planet. We see the evidence of mankind’s endeavors all around us. While some of man’s accomplishments, such as the building of transportation systems and the consistent supply of potable water, have made Earth a better place for people to live, they have not come without cost. Overall, it seems that human activity harms the Earth more than it benefits it.
For example, the transportation systems that benefit mankind also create pollution and use up valuable energy resources. While we cannot do without transportation these days, we cannot ignore the fact that it has an adverse effect on the planet. Furthermore, those advances that benefit people do not benefit all the life on Earth. Deforestation endangers many animals, and mankind’s great thirst for water and other resources leads to the extinction of many plant forms. In addition, accomplishments such as the supply of potable water to a community are only responses to problems that mankind created in the past. It was man that made the water unfit to drink in the first place. Finally, the damage that human activity causes will eventually have a negative effect on people. They will also suffer the effects of pollution and diminishing natural resources.
In conclusion, it seems apparent that man’s activity benefits primarily himself, not the Earth. Moreover, those benefits are only short-term advantages, and man will also suffer the negative effects of his activity in the future. The Earth does not have an inexhaustible supply of resources, so every effort should be made to conserve resources and limit the impact of human activity on the planet.
the history of computer
During the 1940s, as newer and more powerful computing machines were developed, the term computer came to refer to the machines rather than their human predecessors. As it became clear that computers could be used for more than just mathematical calculations, the field of computer science broadened to study computation in general. Computer science began to be established as a distinct academic discipline in the 1950s and early 1960s, with the creation of the first computer science departments and degree programs. Since practical computers became available, many applications of computing have become distinct areas of study in their own right.
Although many initially believed it impossible that computers themselves could actually be a scientific field of study, in the late fifties it gradually became accepted among the greater academic population. It is the now well-known IBM brand that formed part of the computer science revolution during this time. IBM (short for International Business Machines) released the IBM 704 and later the IBM 709 computers, which were widely used during the exploration period of such devices. “Still, working with the IBM [computer] was frustrating…if you had misplaced as much as one letter in one instruction, the program would crash, and you would have to start the whole process over again”. During the late 1950s, the computer science discipline was very much in its developmental stages, and such issues were commonplace.
Time has seen significant improvements in the usability and effectiveness of computer science technology. Modern society has seen a significant shift from computers being used solely by experts or professionals to a more widespread user base.
Mount Huangshan
Of all the notable mountains in China, Mount Huangshan, to be found in the south of Anhui province, is probably the most famous. Originally known as Mt. Yishan it was renamed Mt. Huangshan in 747 AD in recognition of the legendary Huang Di, who was the reputed ancestor of the Chinese people and who made magic pills for immortality here.
Wu yue is the collective name given to China’s most important mountains, namely Mt. Taishan in Shandong Province, Mt. Huashan in Shaanxi Province, Mt. Hengshan in Shanxi Province, Mt. Songshan in Henan Province and Mt. Hengshan in Hunan Province. It is said that you won’t want to visit any other mountains after seeing wu yue but you won’t wish to see even wu yue after returning from Mt. Huangshan. This saying may give you some idea of the beauty and uniqueness of Mt. Huangshan. Together with the Yellow River, the Yangtze River and the Great Wall, Mt. Huangshan has become one of the great symbols of China.
Mt. Huangshan can boast not only of its magnificence but also its abundant resources and great variety of zoological species, for which it has been listed as a World Natural and Cultural Heritage Site
The way of sloving high price of hourse
The ever-rising price of property in China has become cause of worry for an increasing number of people, shows a survey.
Despite the measures taken last year to cool down the overheatedreal estate market, fewer people now believe that the prices would stabilize in the near future.
Only one-fifth of the 2,582 people polled by China Youth Daily’s social research centre, sina.com and ePanel Marketing Research Consulting Co were confident that the government’s steps would check the trend. Their percentage was 60 in a similar survey conducted only two years ago.
The poll results announced yesterday showed another significant change: instead of blaming real estate investors for raising the prices to earn huge profits, as respondents had done two years ago, more people now blame the government’s vulnerability in macro-control measures for the malaise.
The rising demand and the concurrent raising of prices by investors are to blame, said Bao Zonghua, president of China Real Estate and Housing Research Association. And the macro-control measures need time to take effect.
Almost all the respondents said there was a bubble in the real estate market, with nearly half being certain that it would burst in 10 years. But almost 40 percent believe that the bubble would never burst.
A whopping 80 percent believe that real estate prices would continue to rise this year, and 30 percent fear it would do so at a greater pace.
How Poor Are You!
Do you want to know your poverty graph? You are poor if you:
- do not have a firm commitment with yourself to succeed
- do no set goals and follow them through
- do not put your best efforts at work
- do not keep yourself updated on new information and technologies
- do not adopt a positive attitude and get rid of negative thinking
- are not strong enough to accept the challenges of day-to-day life
- are not ready to take any risk due to fear of failure
- lack self respect and respect for others
- discriminate people on the basis of religion, belief, cast, creed, nationality, etc.
- do not appreciate the good work done by others
- do not apologize to others for your misdeeds
- do not help the people in need
- do not thank God for all that you have
The list goes on and on. Let me leave it unfinished and ask you a simple question. Do you really want to get rid of your poverty? The answer, you know the better! .
I recently found someone’s list of the top ten mental mistakes golfers make and how to correct them instantly. As I disagree with much of the “how to correct them instantly” advice, I’ve included his first 10 mental mistakes below with my suggestions as to how address them with NLP and Golf Hypnosis.
Number 1: Letting your internal dialogue run wild
Get a good hypnotist to install a post-hypnotic suggestion that you go into a trance as you step into each shot or use self-hypnosis to achieve the same result. Whichever way, you’re allowing your unconscious mind to get on with playing the shot to the best of your technical ability while keeping your chattering conscious mind out of the action. That seems to work for Tiger Woods.
Number 2: Tightening up on your difficult shots
Learn to use hypnosis or an NLP anchoring technique to relax before planning any shot. Then control the inevitable internal dialogue with a post-hypnotic suggestion, as in number 1 above.
Number 3: Worrying about the Yips
This is basically a mental tightening up on a specific difficult shot, so I‘d handle it the same as Number 2.
Number 4: Telling yourself what NOT to do
Don’t go in the bunker, trees, water, etc! Your unconscious mind doesn’t know how to not do something. If I ask you to think of a blue elephant read more…
