VIENNA – The U.N. nuclear agency is dismissing reports of a major explosion at Iran's fortified underground nuclear facility.
International
Atomic Energy Agency spokeswoman Gill Tudor told The Associated Press
on Tuesday that Iran's denial of "an incident" at the Fordo uranium
enrichment plant is "consistent with our observations."
Nature and is the result of a continuing collaboration between Army scientists and industry partners.
In addition to Marbug virus, the drug known as BCX4430 from BioCryst
Pharmaceuticals, Inc., showed promise against a broad range of other RNA
viruses, including the emerging viral pathogen Middle East respiratory
syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), when tested in cell culture.
In the article “Protection against filovirus diseases by a novel
broad-spectrum nucleoside analog BCX4430,” the research revealed BCX4430
protected cynomolgous macaques (a nonhuman primate) from Marburg virus
infection when administered by injection up to 48 hours post-infection.
Also, the drug protected exposed guinea pigs from Marburg virus by the inhalation route.
The paper’s findings demonstrated how the drug interfered with the
internal “machinery” of Marburg virus, preventing it from replicating
its genetic material. Additional studies look to see whether that
48-hour therapeutic window can be extended.
With funding from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID), BioCryst plans to file investigational new drug (IND)
applications for intravenous and intramuscular BCX4430 for the treatment
of Marburg virus disease, as well as conducting Phase 1 human clinical
trials.
Top diplomats from the United States, European Union, Russia and Ukraine reached agreement after marathon talks Thursday on immediate steps to ease the crisis in Ukraine.
The tentative agreement puts on hold — for now at least — additional economic sanctions the West had prepared to impose on Russia if the talks were fruitless. And that will ease international pressure both on Moscow and nervous European Union nations that depend on Russia for their energy.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called the deal the result of a "good day's work"
“None of us, not the public health, security or agriculture sectors can accomplish global health security on our own—it is obvious that an interdisciplinary approach is the best way to make progress.”
HHS, DoS, USDA, and DoD will work closely with global partners to build countries’ global health security capacities in areas such as surveillance, detection and response.
This is in order to slow the spread of antimicrobial resistance, establish national biosecurity systems, reduce zoonotic disease transmission, increase routine immunization, establish and strengthen national infectious disease surveillance and laboratory systems, and develop public health electronic reporting systems and emergency operations centers.
“The Global Health Security Agenda set forth today establishes a roadmap for progress that ultimately depends on collaboration between the health and security communities,” said Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Fox.
“The
Department of Defe is committed to continuing our work, together with our national and international partners, to strengthen global health security.”Countries joining the United States to meet the Global Health Security goals at today’s launch were Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, and Vietnam. Story and information provided by the Department of Health and Human Services Follow Armed with Science on Facebook and Twitter!———- Disclaimer: The appearance of hyperlinks does not constitute endorsement by the Department of Defense of this website or the information, products or services contained therein. For other than authorized activities such as military exchanges and Morale, Welfare and Recreation sites, the Department of Defense does not exercise any editorial control over the information you may find at these locations. Such links are provided consistent with the stated purpose of this DOD website.
Full of potential. STAP cells can make all the cell types in a mouse fetus
Scientists have found a surprisingly simple way to turn mature cells back into a primitive state. Simply giving mouse blood cells an acid bath is enough to produce so-called pluripotent cells that can develop into any cell type in the body, they report in two new papers this week. The remarkable transformation contradicts many assumptions about cell biology and may ultimately lead to new ways to treat disease and injuries.
Scientists not involved in the work say the technique could be a game-changer if it pans out. "If this new approach is applicable to human cells, it would have great implications for regenerative medicine," says Hongkui Deng, a stem cell researcher at Peking University in Beijing. "It's quite surprising" that the technique "doesn't involve any genetic manipulation," says Rudolf Jaenisch, a developmental biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In contrast to previous methods that involve complex and challenging laboratory techniques, the Japanese-American team of researchers took blood cells from newborn mice, briefly bathed them in a moderately acidic solution, and then returned them to a standard cell culture medium. A week later, cells that had survived the treatment had reverted into a pluripotent state.
The scientists took a cue form the world of plants. It has long been known that environmental stresses, including insufficient water or excessive heat, can convert somatic—or differentiated—plant cells in plants into immature cells that, under the right conditions, can develop into entire new plants. In 2008, Haruko Obokata, a stem cell scientist now at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, set out to see if animal cells might harbor a similar mechanism. She started subjecting mouse cells to a variety of stresses—such as squeezing, heating, or starving them of nutrients—for short periods of time.
Some of the surviving cells showed telltale biochemical signs of returning to an immature state. The most efficient way of reprogramming these cells turned out to be soaking them in a solution slightly less acidic than vinegar for 25 minutes and then returning them to a normal cell culture. After a week, about 20% of the cells had survived, and 30% of those had reverted to a pluripotent state that could differentiate into a variety of cell types. If placed in a conducive environment, clusters of these cells even grew into whole embryos.
The group calls the phenomenon stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP). While STAP cells have many of the characteristics of embryonic stem (ES) cells, they did not initially grow and divide very well; they could be kept alive for only about 2 weeks. Further tweaking, however, produced STAP stem cells that can be kept alive and proliferating indefinitely.
While the scientists used white blood cells from newborn mice for most of the experiments, they showed that the technique also works on brain, skin, muscle, and other cells. Obokata says it can even produce STAP cells from adult mice, although the efficiency decreases with the age of the mouse. Obokata and her colleagues report the findings online today in two
Naturepapers."You just stress cells and [that changes] the state of pluripotentcy. It's a remarkable result," Jaenisch says. The method is so simple that it "will make reprogramming more accessible" to mainstream laboratories, adds Ernst Wolvetang, a stem cell scientist at the University of Queensland in St Lucia, Australia.
Previously, researchers have created pluripotent cell lines by isolating cells from early stage embryos; those cells are called ES cells. In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, showed that forcing the overexpression of proteins called transcription factors in differentiated cells can turn back the clock and make the cells behave like ES cells. Those cells are called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. If the new STAP method can be extended to humans, it would sidestep the ethical objections to the use of embryos and the genetic mutations that sometimes occur in iPS cells.
These advantages could be very important for applications in regenerative medicine, in which scientists try to grow replacement tissues and treatments for genetic conditions such as diabetes and for degenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
"I see this as a new approach to generate iPS-like cells," says Yamanaka, who won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2012 for developing iPS cells. But he cautions that if the STAP technique does work for human cells, it would still need to be compared to currently available methods.
Deng notes the results suggest that the natural reprogramming capability documented in plants "is somehow conserved between plant and mammalian cells." But it raises questions of how that capability is regulated in the body. The acids that digest food in mammalian stomachs are far stronger than the solution used in the STAP experiments. "I guess that our tissues have some mechanism to inhibit the reprogramming process in differentiated cells, but to prove that we need further studies," Obokata says.
Some animals are already known to have remarkable regenerative capabilities. In amphibians, such as newts and salamanders, cells at the site of an injury can de-differentiate to form entirely new limbs, eyes, and other body parts. Kuldip Sidhu, a stem cell specialist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, says that understanding and controlling the mechanism that blocks or enables de-differentiation in humans could, in the distant future, "perhaps under some controlled conditions bring about tissue regeneration," within the human body.
Resembling a scene from the 1960s sci-fi movie, “Fantastic Voyage,” a shrunken crew of researchers journeys through a human body using a miniature submarine to do battle from within. Sponsored by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) CB/ JSTO, researchers are using nanoswimmers to deliver life-saving countermeasures to protect against chemical and biological threats to warfighters.
A team of researchers led by Joseph Wang of the University of California at San Diego demonstrated a template electrosynthesis that allows for large-scale and low-cost preparation of magnetically driven tailored nanoswimmers that display efficient propulsion behavior and hold considerable promise for future miniature devices in the human body.
Representation of the template electrosynthesis of magnetically-driven helical nanoswimmers. (Image courtesy of Dr. Joseph Wang, University of California at San Diego)
In the article, Template electrosynthesis of tailored-made helical nanoswimmers, highlighted in Nanoscale, a scientific journal, the team revealed their method overcame a bottleneck in the development of nanoscale structures capable of controlled movement in liquids, which is a major current nanotechnological challenge.
Previous routes for fabricating helical micro/nanoswimmers required specialized and expensive instrumentation, and dimensions were commonly limited by the resolution of optical lithography.
This new synthesis employed a method, template-directed electrodeposition, which cost less, was more readily scalable to mass produce and was not limited by optical resolution.
It is possible that such disruptive approaches to medical countermeasures will impact, for example, DTRA’s Nanostructured Active Therapeutic Vehicles and Bioscavenger programs.
These nanoswimmers hold promise for advanced targeted drug delivery systems and biocompatible catalytic countermeasures to ensure the warfighter remains protected from within against biological and chemical attacks. Story and information by John Davis Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Chemical and Biological Technologies Department Follow Armed with Science on Facebook and Twitter!
———- Disclaimer: The appearance of hyperlinks does not constitute endorsement by the Department of Defense of this website or the information, products or services contained therein. For other than authorized activities such as military exchanges and Morale, Welfare and Recreation sites, the Department of Defense does not exercise any editorial control over the information you may find at these locations. Such links are provided consistent with the stated purpose of this DOD website.
Government scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have devised a way to turn algae into crude oil in less than an HOUR. That oil can then be refined into gasoline that can run engines! Read More
