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SCIENCE UPDATE
Scientists create the world’s first BSE-immune cow
Scientists of Japan and US say they have produced a cow that will be immune to mad cow disease, also known as BSE. The joint effort have resulted in developing the world’s first technology to breed cows that are immune to mad cow disease.
A cow was already carrying the first such foetus and the calf would be born early next year, the company said.
“It is a big breakthrough and the world’s first,” said Kumi Nakano, a spokeswoman for Kirin, which has a pharmaceutical division that pursues research in potentially promising areas of biotechnology.
Kirin’s US partner is Hematech LLC., which specializes in creating anti-bodies to prevent infectious diseases.
Kirin and Hematech were able to eliminate prion proteins through genetically modifying a cow’s cell. Abnormal prion proteins are believed to cause the fatal brain-wasting condition mad cow disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy ( BSE).
Nakano said the first cow with no prion proteins would be born in the United States early next year, but the company had no plan to use the technology to allow BSE risk-free beef consumption on a mass scale.
“Although a prion-free cow sounds safe, it is basically the same as genetically-modified food,” she said. Genetic modification is still widely distrusted by the Japanese public although GM maize, soybeans, potatoes and cotton have been imported.
Instead, Kirin and Hematech would use the technology to develop new drugs for diseases like hepatitis-C and pneumonia, Nakano said.
“We are aiming to make new drugs and sell them in the US market in 2013 or 2014,” the Kirin spokeswoman said.
Details of the research are published on the Nature Genetics website of the US scientific journal Nature.
New stem-cell method
German scientists claimed to have developed a "pioneering" method of extracting stem cells from the human body that could render obsolete the controversial practice of harvesting the cells from embryos.
Researchers at the Frauenhofer Institute and the University of Luebeck succeeded in extracting cells from human and rat glandular tissue that have similar properties to embryonic stem cells, the institute said in a statement. Researchers said they took cells from a 74-year-old person and a rat that were extremely stable, and easily multiplied them and conserved them by freezing.
"An easily accessible source for the extraction of highly potent stem cells has been discovered, in almost any vertebrate but also in the human body, regardless of sex and age," the institute said.
Stem cells are master cells in the body that have the capability to transform into new cells or tissue.
They can be taken from adults and discarded umbilical cords but those from embryos are considered especially valuable as each one has the potential to become any sort of cell or tissue.
Researchers believe they may offer a revolutionary way to repair diseased and damaged body tissues and could be used in the treatment of diseases such as cancer and Parkinson's.
But anti-abortion groups and other opponents who believe life begins at conception argue that the harvesting of cells from embryos violates the unborn baby's human rights.
Measuring the Universe
The Universe is at least 156 billion light-years wide, say astronomers. The estimate comes from data obtained by a space probe that is examining the so-called Cosmic Background Radiation — often called the echo of the Big Bang.
The echo contains information of what the cosmos was like when it was young and how it might develop. The cosmos is 13.7bn years old but the stretching of space with its expansion after the Big Bang means that simple distance measurements do not apply.
This age estimate comes from two independent lines of investigation, the age of stars and the expansion of the Universe. This means that radiation reaching us from the earliest Universe has been travelling for more than 13 billion years.
But the assumption that flows from this, that the radius of the Universe is 13.7bn light-years and that it is 27.4bn light-years wide does not follow. Astronomers realise the Universe is more complex. It has been expanding ever since the Big Bang when energy, space and time itself began.
To get the picture try to imagine the Universe a million years after the Big Bang. Light travels for a year, covering one light-year. But at that time, the Universe was about a thousand times smaller than it is today meaning that one light-year has now become stretched to about a thousand light-years.
The new estimate comes from analysing data obtained by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMap) which has been studying the Cosmic Background Radiation which formed about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
The researchers looked for evidence that multiple images of the same object could show up in different locations in space-time. The predicted pattern in the CMB that would have shown the effect was not observed.
According to the researchers the latest work provides no evidence that the Universe is finite and no evidence that it is infinite either.
Clue to dark matter
As galaxies go, Andromeda IX is a mighty dim bulb. In fact, it is dimmest galaxy ever detected, which means it could give clues to the mysterious dark matter that appears to be pushing regular matter around. And it’s right in our cosmic back yard.
Andromeda IX is a small satellite of the Andromeda galaxy, the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbor at a distance of about 2 million light-years from Earth. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.
Astronomers making a map of one-quarter of the sky found it by concentrating on a diffuse clump of stars that turned out to be the tiny galaxy. The discovery was the subject of a presentation at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Denver.
How dim is Andromeda IX? At least twice as faint as the previous record holder, and so diffuse that it appears 100 times dimmer than the night sky. Astronomers spotted it with instruments involved in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the sky-mapping project.
These little galaxies have never been detected before, but Andromeda IX might be one, and could help uncover more information about how dark matter behaves, Zucker said by telephone from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. — Sci-tech World Report
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