Health

Mediterranean diet helps ward off stroke and cancer

The so-called Mediterranean diet cuts the risk of heart diseases, cancer and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer`s, according to a research.

Piecemeal evidence over the last three decades has shown that a diet rich in grains, fruit, vegetables and olive oil, but stingy on meat and dairy — promotes health.

But a meta-study published in the British Medical Journal is the first to sift through all this data in an attempt to quantify the overall benefits.“Our findings support a simple recommendation eat in a more Mediterranean way because it reduces the incidence of chronic disease,” the lead researcher, Francesco Sofi of the University of Florence, told.

Pouring over a dozen scientific surveys conducted since 1966 and involving more than 1.5 million people, Sofi and a team of researchers in Italy created a scale of one to nine, corresponding to different food groups. The study found that a bump of two points anywhere in the scale — moving, say, from zero to two, or from six to eight, corresponded to a “significant reduction in overall mortality,” Sofi said.

When broken down by disease, such a shift in dietary habits lowered the risk of death from cardiovascular disease by nine percent and from cancer by six per cent. The study also evaluated a recent set of findings on the impact of diet on neurodegenerative disease, and concluded that going Mediterranean decreased the incidence of Alzheimers and Parkinsons by 13 per cent.

These results are “clinically relevant for public health,” and suggest that getting ones daily calorie intake from these food groups could play an important role in preventing major chronic diseases, Sofi said.

Historically, more than half the fat calories in a Mediterranean diet come from monounsaturated fats — mainly olive oil, that do not raise blood cholesterol levels the way saturated fats do.

Sofi hopes that his scoring system might help people improve their eating habits.

—APP/AFP

Brushing teeth may help avoid heart diseases

Here is another reason to brush your teeth poor dental hygiene boosts the risk of heart attacks and strokes, studies reported.

Smoking, obesity and high cholesterol are the most common culprits, but the new research shows that neglected gums can also be added to the list. “We now recognise that bacterial infections are an independent risk factor for heart diseases,” said Howard Jenkins of the University of Bristol in Britain, at a meeting of the Society for General Microbiology in Dublin. There are up to 700 different bacteria in the human mouth, and failing to scrub one`s pearly whites helps those germs to flourish.

Most are benign, and some are essential to good health. But a few can trigger a biological cascade leading to diseases of the arteries linked to heart attacks and stroke, according to the new research.

“The mouth is probably the dirtiest place in the human body,” Steve Kerrigan of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin said.

“If you have an open blood vessel from bleeding gums, bacteria will gain entry to your bloodstream.” Once inside the blood, certain bacteria stick onto cells called platelets, causing them to clot inside the vessel and thus decreasing blood flow to the heart.

“We mimicked the pressure inside the blood vessels and in the heart, and demonstrated that bacteria useing different mechanisms to cause platelets to clump together, allowing them to completely encase the bacteria,” he said.

This not only created conditions that can provoke heart attacks and strokes, it also shielded the bacteria from both, immune system cells and antibiotics. “These findings suggest why antibiotics do not always work in the treatment of infectious heart disease,” Jenkins said.

In separate research, a team, led by Greg Seymour of the University of Otago Dunedin in New Zealand, showed how other bacteria from the mouth can provoke atherosclerosis, a disease that causes hardening of the arteries.                —AFP

Space

Nasa warns Hubble mission brings greater space debris risk

The US shuttle Atlantis faces nearly twice the risk of being struck by debris on a mission next month to the Hubble telescope, due to the high levels of space litter floating at the altitude of Hubble`s orbit, Nasa said.

“It`s a very challenging mission. We have hazards we don`t typically have for an ISS (International Space Station) mission,” Nasa space shuttle programme manager John Shannon told a news conference.

“We have a one-in-180 chance of g etting some type of catastrophic damage from micro-meteorites/orbiting debris (MMOD) compared to an ISS mission, which is typically a one-in-300 chance,” he said.

Hubble is orbiting some 600 kilometres (360 miles) above earth, compared with 240 kilometres (144 miles) for the ISS. When the risk faced by a shuttle mission is greater than one-in-200, the decision to go ahead with the flight has to come from the highest authorities in Nasa, said Shannon.

But he expected they would give the green light for the Atlantis mission to lift off on what will be its final mission to conduct maintenance work on Hubble.

Space has become more littered and dangerous in the past year due to mishaps, tests and aborted missions involving American, Chinese and Russian satellites and rockets, he said.

Nasa developed new methods to inspect and repair damage to the space shuttle after heat tiles on the Columbia shuttle were damaged on lift-off in 2003, causing the vehicle to disintegrate as it re-entered the earth`s atmosphere, killing everyone on board.

The US space agency has plans to replace the aging shuttle fleet with a new space vehicle Orion, set to launch in 2014.         ---AFP

Palaeontology

Lucky break allowed dinosaurs to rule the earth

Thanks to a big stroke of luck 200 million years ago, dinosaurs beat out a fearsome group of creatures competing for the right to rule the earth, scientists said.

Dinosaurs appeared about 230 million years ago, during the Triassic Period, and competed for 30 million years with a group of reptiles called crurotarsans, cousins of today`s crocodiles that grew to huge sizes and looked a lot like dinosaurs.

Many scientists believed dinosaurs were simply superior to crurotarsans and fared better because the earliest dinosaurs walked on two legs, not four, and because they may have been warm-blooded.

But scientists led by Steve Brusatte of Columbia University and American Museum of Natural History in New York, conducted an extensive review of fossils and found that the two groups were evolving at roughly the same pace and the crurotarsans actually had a larger range of body types, diets and lifestyles.

The dinosaurs won out, Brusatte concluded, because some type of planetary calamity 200 million years ago — dramatic climate change, or maybe a large meteorite impact, nearly wiped out the crurotarsans while sparing the dinosaurs.

“The fundamental question is why were the dinosaurs able to become so dominant,” Brusatte, whose study is in the journal Science, said in a telephone interview. “Evolution on a big scale oftentimes is a matter of luck.”

The event that toppled the crurotarsans 200 million years ago enabled dinosaurs to become the reigning form of land animals for a long time, until their luck ran out too. An asteroid struck earth 65 million years ago and doomed the dinosaurs.

The crurotarsans were a fabulous bunch of monsters. Some called phytosaurs looked and lived a lot like todays crocodiles, staying submerged in rivers or lakes until attacking a victim.

The plant eating dinosaur of the time like Plateosaurus, were getting big, but were less varied than the plant-eating crurotarsans such as the heavily armored aetosaurs.

“If we were standing around in the late Triassic period 210 million years ago and were asked what group is going to go on and take over the world, I think a reasonable gambler would say the crurotarsans. It`s not that the dinosaurs weren`t doing well. The crurotarsans were doing more,” Brusatte said.    —Reuters

Agriculture

New technology to grow crops using salty water

Technology under development at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) could offer new hope to farmers in drought-affected and marginal areas by enabling crops to grow using salty groundwater.

The technology is being developed by Associate Professor Greg Leslie, a chemical engineer at UNSWs UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology, who is working along with the University of Sydney, BBC reported.

The technology uses reverse-osmosis membranes to turn previously useless, brackish groundwater into a valuable agricultural resource.

“We are looking at ways to grow plants on very salty water without damaging soil,” Professor Leslie said. The irrigation system relies on the roots of the plant drawing salty groundwater through the membrane — in doing so, removing the salt which would otherwise degrade the soil and make continued cropping unsustainable.

Desalination such as this requires a pressure gradient to draw clean water through the membrane. Professor Leslie has demonstrated that, by running irrigation lines under the ground beneath the plants, the root systems of the plants provide enough of a pressure gradient to draw up water without the high energy consumption usually required for desalination.

“Were going to provide agriculture with a tool to grow crops in drought years when there is limited access to run-off and surface water,” he said.                      —APP

Technology

Google phone won`t be an immediate game changer

Anyone expecting the soon-to-be-launched Google phone to change the market like Apple`s iPhone has over the past year will likely be disappointed — for now.

Industry insiders who have worked on Google Inc`s Android mobile operating system that say the phone will struggle in the near term to match the consumer enthusiasm generated by Apple Inc, when its iPhone redefined the touch-screen phone market and greatly improved mobile web-surfing.

Google sees Android as an open-source platform for designing mobile devices, saying it will encourage innovation by allowing outside software developers to tinker with the system and create better mobile programmes and services.

But these things take time and the first phone using Android, code-named the Google `Dream` phone is unlikely to wow consumers. The device is made by Taiwans HTC Corp. Sources familiar with the plan say Deutsche Telekom AG`s T-Mobile plans to introduce it in New York on September 23.

Google, its partner carriers and application developers hope the Android platform will drive even more mobile web-surfing than the iPhone, which has helped web-usage rocket in comparison to other smartphones.

Google`s engineering-led culture appears content to launch the first Android phones as a kind of science project that will be rapidly improved afterwards.

Yet, Google will not have the kind of leverage in mobile that it is used to in the PC world, where it dominates search. Android could offer real promise in terms of technology and usability — particularly because it is an open platform — it is unlikely to single-handedly change the restrictive nature of the mobile industry, said John Poisson, founder of Tiny Pictures, a developer partner of Android.

From a developer`s perspective, Android`s advantages over the iPhone or Nokia`s Symbian operating system, is that it is open source, which means Google is sharing its software code and making it easier for third parties to develop compatible applications.

“Android promises to be the most open platform for building mobile phone applications that we`ve seen to date because it`s based on very familiar tools and technologies,” said Jason Devitt, co-founder of Skydeck.   —Reuters

Neurology

Satellite navigation in our brains

The human brain possesses a unique navigation system, much like satellite navigation, with in-built maps, grids and compasses, according to neuroscientist Hugo Spiers.

This mechanism resides in the brain`s hippocampus area, which is responsible for learning and memory, famously shown to be different in a London taxi drivers` study carried out by Eleanor Maguire at University College, London.

The study showed that a region of the hippocampus was enlarged in London taxi drivers compared to the general population. Even bus drivers do not have the same enlarged area, suggesting that the difference is linked to `knowledge` of the city`s 250,000 streets built up by taxi drivers over many years. In a follow-up study, Spiers and Maguire used the Playstation2 video game The Getaway, to examine how taxi drivers use their hippocampus and other brain areas when they navigate.

Taxi drivers used the virtual reality simulation to navigate the streets of London whilst lying in an fMRI brain scanner. The researchers found that the hippocampus is most active when the drivers first think about their route and plan ahead.

In contrast, activity in a diverse network of other brain areas increases as they encounter road blocks, spot expected landmarks, look at the view and worry about the thoughts of their customers and other drivers.

Inside the hippocampus and neighbouring brain areas scientists have identified three types of cells which, said Spiers, make up the sat-nav. These are called place cells, head direction cells and grid cells.   —PPI

At a glance

Scientists race to crack the potato`s genetic code

Scientists around the world have teamed up to sequence the genome of the potato, hoping to crack the genetic code of one of the world`s most important crops at a time of surging population growth and high food prices. Solanum tuberosum, the scientific name of the humble white potato, looks simple. But it is actually chock full of mysteries hidden in its 12 chromosomes and 840 million DNA base pairs.

Greece unearths treasures at Alexanders birthplace

Archaeologists have unearthed gold jewellery, weapons and pottery at an ancient burial site near Pella in northern Greece, the birthplace of Alexander the Great, the culture ministry said. The excavations at the vast cemetery uncovered 43 graves dating from 650-279 BC which shed light on the early development of the Macedonian kingdom, which had an empire that stretched as far as India under Alexander`s conquests.

Colourful bacteria could spot oil spills

A new technique using bacteria that lights up, and makes it easy to spot, could help better detect pollution from oil spills and other environmental leakage, researchers in Switzerland said. The colour-coded bacteria are cheap and can alert scientists to low level leaks from underground pipes, storage pipes and other substances that spill into the soil or sea, said Jan Van der Meer of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Scientists get images of planet with sun-like star

Scientists have snapped the first images of a planet outside our solar system that is orbiting a star very much like the sun. Nearly all of the roughly 300 so-called extrasolar planets discovered to date have been detected using indirect methods such as changes observed in a star when a planet orbits directly in front of it from the perspective of the earth.

All-electric vehicles no magic bullet

A future of all-electric cars coasting along streets and highways may be illusory, given that their range may be cut in half by aggressive drivers speeding along with the air conditioning blasting, the US scientists said. That may not be a bad thing, as it will persuade consumers to choose the best blend of electric- and gas-powered hybrid vehicle to suit the type of driving they do.

Self-flying helicopter gets off the ground

CalifA four-foot-long helicopter flew itself over the Stanford University campus in a test of artificial intelligence that researchers say could be used to scout wildfires or on military missions. The autonomous helicopter performed flips, rolls, pirouettes, stall-turns, knife-edges, and an inverted hover over a field.

Lithium battery for vehicles to rescue

Vast improvements are needed to extend the life and lower the cost of lithium batteries before they can efficiently power vehicles, a US government official who tracks high-power battery development said. Lithium-ion batteries are widely predicted to replace nickel metal-hydride batteries currently used in most hybrid vehicles, such as Toyota Co`s hot-selling Prius.

Allergy tests useful before implanting devices

Patients with an allergy to metal, often first revealed when wearing certain jewelry, are also at risk for reactions to implanted medical devices made of metal, such as pacemakers and orthopedic prostheses. Patch testing, which involves placing some of the suspected allergen on the skin, can be helpful in detecting medical device reactions. However, doctors need to wait longer than usual when looking to see if a skin reaction has occurred, researchers report in the Archives of dermatology.

Estrogen cream flunks sun damage test

Estrogen creams do not help reduce wrinkles, especially those caused by the sun, researchers reported. The creams do help skin that is protected from the sun to produce more collagen — the substance that makes skin appear smooth. But this skin is usually far less wrinkled than skin that has seen the light of day, the team at the University of Michigan reported.         

—Reuters