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BEIJING - Chinese scientists have cloned three “super cows” able to produce 18,000 litres of milk per year and over 100,000 litres of milk in their lifetimes, a feat that may help reduce China’s dependency on imported dairy cows. The milk produced is no different from that produced by the clone’s originals, according to an expert involved in the experiment. Once the cloned calves reach two years of age, they can start producing milk for the market, he added. To clone the animals, scientists from the Northwest University of Agricultural and Forestry Science and Technology took somatic cells from the ears of highly productive Dutch Holstein Frisian cattle and placed them in surrogate cows, according to a news release from the university. The technique, known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, was the same used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996, the world’s first cloned mammal. The three calves were born in Lingwu city, Ningxia Hui autonomous region. The first calf was born on Dec 30 via caesarean section. It weighed 56.7kg and shared the same shape and patterning as the cow it was cloned from. After reaching maturity, the clone is expected to produce 18,000 litres of milk per year. In comparison, the average cow in the United States produces about 12,000 litres of milk annually, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture. Mr Jin Yaping, the project’s lead scientist, said that cloning “super cows” would allow China to preserve its best dairy breeds and avoid the biosecurity risk presented by importing live cows from other countries. China currently imports around 70 per cent of its dairy cows. https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/chinese-scientists-successfully-clone-super-cows

http://www.straitstimes.com/world/scientists-find-rich-and-poor-are-biologically-different Scientists find rich and poor are 'biologically different' A Cambodian woman offers money to beggars in Phnom Penh.PHOTO: AFP PUBLISHEDDEC 26, 2015, 4:16 AM SGT Hormones that are out-of-balance in poor and uneducated people may explain why they age faster and are more vulnerable to disease than their more affluent peers, a new study suggests. It has long been known that less affluent folk die earlier and are "biologically older" than the rich, with those in the most affluent areas expected to live around eight years longer than those in the poorest regions, according to a report in Britain's Daily Telegraph. Now, researchers at University College London (UCL) may have worked out why. After monitoring a cohort of 1,880 British men and women since 1946, they have discovered that hormones critical to healthy ageing are significantly out of balance in poorer people by the time they reach 60-64. Men with the lowest household income - defined by less than £6,000 (S$12,000) a year - had 10 per cent lower testosterone than men earning £30,000 a year or higher, reported the Telegraph. Low testosterone has been linked to weight gain, loss of muscle, osteoporosis and depression. In contrast, women whose parents were unskilled workers had testosterone levels 15 per cent higher than the daughters of professionals. In women, too much testosterone is linked to early puberty, infertility and polycystic ovaries. Those with the lowest education in both sexes also had depleted levels of insulin-like growth factor (IGF) which has been linked to poor cognitive function and an increased risk of cancer and cardiovascular mortality. Women with no qualifications had 16 per less IGF than women who had degrees. For men the difference was 8 per cent less IGF, the Telegraph reported. Low levels of cortisol, which can lead to heart palpitations, depression, pain and insomnia, was also seen in both men and women with the lowest education. Professor Diana Kuh, of the Medical Research Council’s Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing at UCL said the hormonal differences showed how societal factors literally "get under the skin" and affect health. “We found that socioeconomic disadvantage across life, based on father’s social class and on the study member’s education, social class and income, was associated with an adverse hormone profile," she said, according to the Telegraph. “These hormones are thought to work together to ensure healthy development and also have many different roles in regulating health in older age. “So our findings suggest that these socioeconomic differences in hormone systems may play a role in explaining social inequalities in health as we age. “Hormones may be affected by exposure across life to stress and adverse events, health problems and obesity, and unhealthy lifestyles such as physical inactivity, poor diet, and smoking.” It is already known that socio-economic status has a major impact on health, with studies showing that being poor is associated with increased risks of cardiovascular, respiratory, rheumatic and psychiatric diseases, low birth weight and infant mortality. Scientists believe psychological stresses of having a less secure future, being bossed around and having lower self-esteem and less access to social support networks cause an increased rate of molecular damage, said the Telegraph. Living in an area of high crime is also thought to accelerate ageing. Dr David Bann, of the Institute of Education at UCL said: “Our study shows that people from a disadvantaged background are biologically different which could explain health inequalities. “These hormone levels change with age, so it could potentially explain difference rates of ageing.” But if the damage is being driven by an out-of-kilter hormone system, it may be possible to fix the disparities through better education and raising the standard of living. Prof Di added: “We are examining the impact of these hormone differences in explaining inequalities in physical and mental functioning in older age. “We are also looking at whether socioeconomic differences in other biological systems could help explain social inequalities in how fast we age. “Our findings provide further evidence of the potentially harmful effects of social disadvantage on health, suggesting that reducing inequalities could have powerful benefits in improving the health of the population and reducing health-care expenditure.” The research, which was based on data from the MRC National Survey of Health and Development was published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, the Telegraph said.

With a high efficacy close to mRNA, it should be good news to poorer countries. Texas scientists’ new Covid-19 vaccine is cheaper, easier to make and patent-free Dr Maria Bottazzi says their vaccine, called Corbevax, is unique because they do not intend to patent it Erum Salam Sat 15 Jan 2022 10.00 GMT A new Covid-19 vaccine is being developed by Texas scientists using a decades-old conventional method that will make the production and distribution cheaper and more accessible for countries most affected by the pandemic and where new variants are likely to originate due to low inoculation rates. The team, led by Drs Peter Hotez and Maria Bottazzi from the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor College of Medicine, has been developing vaccine prototypes for Sars and Mers since 2011, which they reconstructed to create the new Covid vaccine, dubbed Corbevax, or “the world’s Covid-19 vaccine”. Although more than 60 other vaccines are in development using the same technology, Bottazzi said their vaccine is unique because they do not intend to patent it, allowing anyone with the capacity to reproduce it. “Pretty much anybody that can make hepatitis B vaccines or has the capacity to produce microbial-based protein like bacteria or yeast, can replicate what we do,” Bottazzi said. Patent wars over mRNA vaccines have recently heated up. Moderna and the National Institutes of Health are in a dispute over who should get credit for specific discoveries that led to a Covid-19 vaccine which has been delivered to more than 73 million Americans. If Moderna is found to have infringed on the federal government’s patent, it could be forced to pay more than $1bn. At the same time, activists have called for Pfizer and Moderna to share the technology and knowhow for producing their vaccines, including taking the fight to the World Trade Organization. Low-income countries, which have few vaccine research and production facilities, have vaccinated just one in nine people, according to the World Health Organization. The US has fully vaccinated 67% of the population and provided a third vaccine dose to more than one-third. Corbevax’s clinical trial data has yet to be released due to resource constraints, but Texas Children’s hospital said the vaccine was over 90% effective against the original Covid-19 strain and over 80% effective against the Delta variant. The vaccine’s efficacy against the Omicron variant is currently being tested. The process to create the vaccine involves the use of yeast – the same method by which hepatitis B vaccines are produced. The Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson vaccines currently authorized in the US use different technologies, or vaccine “platforms”. Moderna and Pfizer use messenger RNA (mRNA) technology. This platform introduces the immune system to Covid-19 by delivering instructions on how to produce its most recognizable feature, the spike proteins which coat its surface. This helps the immune system recognize and fight the virus later, if a person is exposed. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine introduces immune cells to the spike protein through an otherwise harmless cold virus, a technology called viral vector. The Corbevax vaccine uses a platform called recombinant protein sub-unit technology, which places an actual piece of Covid-19’s spike protein in yeast cells. The yeast cells then copy the vital protein and the protein is introduced to the immune system. “We make the protein, directly and synthetically, in the lab using the yeast system,” Bottazzi explained. “We ask the yeast to make a protein that looks just like a protein that is made by the virus. Then we immunize the protein and the body then processes this protein and presents it to the immune system. Therefore, you don’t ask your body to do any major manipulation of the coding.” Crucially, storing the Corbevax vaccine only requires standard refrigeration, unlike the Pfizer vaccine, which requires ultra-cold storage in transit. Biological E, an Indian pharmaceutical company accustomed to producing hepatitis B vaccines with whom Bottazzi’s team has a longstanding relationship, has already produced 150m doses of the new Corbevax vaccine and will soon be able to produce 100m doses every month. After being overlooked by government organizations for funding, Bottazzi said, the developers behind Corbevax relied on philanthropic donations to get them over the finish line. The Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development is an academic and scientific institution in nature, but Bottazzi said developing Corbevax had forced them to stretch their resources in order to gain visibility as a serious candidate for Covid vaccine development. “We ourselves are learning how to do work that is regulatory-enabling, that enables good quality, good reproduction, good record-keeping … we mimic as if we were a small biotech or manufacturing entity,” she said. “Every technology has pros and cons. Nobody is claiming one is the super-duper, only solution. All the [vaccines] are part of the solution. But when you have a situation of such gravity around the world, you don’t pick and choose a solution – you try to use all solutions,” Bottazzi said. Bottazzi said the reason she and her team did not patent the vaccine was because of her team’s shared philosophy of humanitarianism and to engage in collaboration with the wider scientific community. “We want to do good in the world. This was the right thing to do and this is what we morally had to do. We didn’t even blink. We didn’t think, ‘how can we take advantage of this?’ You see now that if more like us would have been more attuned to how the world is so inequitable and how we could have helped from the beginning so many places around the world without thinking ‘what’s going to be in it for me?’, we could have basically not even seen these variants arise.” Bottazzi hopes her move will incentivize others to follow suit and make affordable and accessible vaccines for other diseases and viruses, like hookworm. “We need to break these paradigms that it’s only driven by economic impact factors or return of economic investment. We have to look at the return in public health.”

NTU scientists discover a way to produce cheaper, more powerful solar cells (From right) Prof Subodh Mhaisalkar, Asst Prof Sum Tze Chien and Dr Nripan Mathews. The Straits Times Monday, Oct 21, 2013 Scientists from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have discovered a way to produce cheaper and more powerful solar cells. Get the full story from The Straits Times. Here is the full press release from NTU: In the near future, solar panels will not only be more efficient but also a lot cheaper and affordable for everyone, thanks to research by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) scientists. This next generation solar cell, made from organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite materials, is about five times cheaper than current silicon-based solar cells, due to a simpler solution-based manufacturing process. Perovskite is known to be a remarkable solar cell material as it can convert up to 15 per cent of sunlight to electricity, close to the efficiency of the current solar cells, but scientists did not know why or how, until now. In a paper published last Friday (18 Oct) in the world's most prestigious academic journal, Science, NTU's interdisciplinary research team was the first in the world to explain this phenomenon. The team of eight researchers led by Assistant Professor Sum Tze Chien and Dr Nripan Mathews had worked closely with NTU Visiting Professor Michael Grätzel, who currently holds the record for perovskite solar cell efficiency of 15 per cent, and is a co-author of the paper. Prof Grätzel, who is based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), has won multiple awards for his invention of dye-sensitised solar cells. The high sunlight-to-electricity efficiency of perovskite solar cells places it in direct competition with Silicon solar cells and thin film solar cells which are already in the market and have efficiencies close to 20 per cent. The new knowledge on how these solar cells work is now being applied by the Energy Research Institute @ NTU (ERI@N), which is developing a commercial prototype of the perovskite solar cell in collaboration with Australian clean-tech firm Dyesol Limited (ASX: DYE). Asst Prof Sum said the discovery of why perovskite worked so well as a solar cell material was made possible only through the use of cutting-edge equipment and in close collaboration with NTU engineers. "In our work, we utilise ultrafast lasers to study the perovskite materials. We tracked how fast these materials react to light in quadrillionths of a second (roughly 100 billion times faster than a camera flash)," said the Singaporean photophysics expert from NTU's School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. "We discovered that in these perovskite materials, the electrons generated in the material by sunlight can travel quite far. This will allow us to make thicker solar cells which absorb more light and in turn generate more electricity." The NTU physicist added that this unique characteristic of perovskite is quite remarkable since it is made from a simple solution method that normally produces low quality materials. His collaborator, Dr Nripan Mathews, a senior scientist at ERI@N, said that their discovery is a great example of how investment in fundamental research and an interdisciplinary effort, can lead to advances in knowledge and breakthroughs in applied science. "Now that we know exactly how perovskite materials behave and work, we will be able to tweak the performance of the new solar cells and improve its efficiency, hopefully reaching or even exceeding the performance of today's Silicon solar cells," said Dr Mathews, who is also the Singapore R&D Director of the Singapore-Berkeley Research Initiative for Sustainable Energy (SinBeRISE) NRF CREATE programme. "The excellent properties of these materials, allow us to make light weight, flexible solar cells on plastic using cheap processes without sacrificing the good sunlight conversion efficiency." Professor Subodh Mhaisalkar, the Executive Director of ERI@N said they are now looking into building prototype solar cell modules based on this exciting class of materials. "Perovskite-based solar cells have the potential to reach 20 per cent solar cell efficiencies and another great benefit of these materials is their amenability to yield different translucent colours, such as red, yellow or brown. Having such colourful solar glass will create new opportunities for architectural design," he added. The NTU team, consisting of six scientists, one postgraduate and one undergraduate, took six months to complete this fundamental research project, which was funded by NTU and the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister's Office, Singapore. [thumbsup]Up for these guys!!!

Apparently higgs has a bosum???? LINK Can a explain?

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/sugar-dumb-us-sci...-190918147.html Eating too much sugar can eat away at your brainpower, according to US scientists who published a study Tuesday showing how a steady diet of high-fructose corn syrup sapped lab rats' memories. Researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) fed two groups of rats a solution containing high-fructose corn syrup -- a common ingredient in processed foods -- as drinking water for six weeks. One group of rats was supplemented with brain-boosting omega-3 fatty acids in the form of flaxseed oil and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), while the other group was not. Before the sugar drinks began, the rats were enrolled in a five-day training session in a complicated maze. After six weeks on the sweet solution, the rats were then placed back in the maze to see how they fared. "The DHA-deprived animals were slower, and their brains showed a decline in synaptic activity," said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Their brain cells had trouble signaling each other, disrupting the rats' ability to think clearly and recall the route they'd learned six weeks earlier." A closer look at the rat brains revealed that those who were not fed DHA supplements had also developed signs of resistance to insulin, a hormone that controls blood sugar and regulates brain function. "Because insulin can penetrate the blood-brain barrier, the hormone may signal neurons to trigger reactions that disrupt learning and cause memory loss," Gomez-Pinilla said. In other words, eating too much fructose could interfere with insulin's ability to regulate how cells use and store sugar, which is necessary for processing thoughts and emotions. "Insulin is important in the body for controlling blood sugar, but it may play a different role in the brain, where insulin appears to disturb memory and learning," Gomez-Pinilla said. "Our study shows that a high-fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body. This is something new." High-fructose corn syrup is commonly found in soda, condiments, applesauce, baby food and other processed snacks. The average American consumes more than 40 pounds (18 kilograms) of high-fructose corn syrup per year, according to the US Department of Agriculture. While the study did not say what the equivalent might be for a human to consume as much high-fructose corn syrup as the rats did, researchers said it provides some evidence that metabolic syndrome can affect the mind as well as the body. "Our findings illustrate that what you eat affects how you think," said Gomez-Pinilla. "Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain's ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage." The study appeared in the Journal of Physiology.

All men watch porn, scientists find Scientists at the University of Montreal launched a search for men who had never looked at pornography - but couldn't find any. By Jonathan Liew Published: 1:22PM GMT 02 Dec 2009 Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users. But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been seen it.

Mon Dec 10, 2007 10:50am EST By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - Mutations in the BRCA1 breast cancer gene appear to be linked with the loss of a protein important for putting the brakes on cell growth, a finding that could lead to new therapies, researchers said on Sunday. The breakthrough could lead to more effective therapies for women with an aggressive and especially deadly cancer known as triple-negative that does not respond to current advanced drugs, the researchers said. "It doesn't have a good target for therapy at this point," said Dr. Ramon Parsons of Columbia University Medical Center in New York, who worked on the study. Scientists have known for more than a decade that women with certain alterations in the BRCA1 gene were at high risk for breast cancer. What they have not understood is exactly how a mutation in this gene leads to cancer. Researchers at Columbia, working with at team at Sweden's Lund University, now believe mutations in the BRCA1 gene can leave cells incapable of repairing routine DNA damage. When such damage occurs in a protein called PTEN, which regulates the growth of cells, cell growth is unchecked and tumors form. Women with faulty copies of BRCA1 or BRCA2 have a 50 to 85 percent chance of getting breast cancer. Mutations in these genes account for 5 to 10 percent of breast cancer cases. Most breast tumors are called estrogen-receptor positive, because they are fuelled by the hormone estrogen. About 20 percent are HER2-positive, because a protein called HER2 is involved. A third type is driven by the hormone progesterone. These types of cancer have good treatments. Then there are basal-like or triple-negative tumors, so named because they lack estrogen, progesterone or HER2 receptors needed for most breast cancer drugs to work. UNCHECKED GROWTH "The basic idea is that BRCA1 is a repair enzyme that is involved in coordinating the repair of double strand DNA breaks," said Parsons said in a telephone interview. "When it is mutated, it is no longer present in a cell. If a cut occurs in PTEN, there is no way for this cell to fix it," said Parsons, whose study was published in Nature Genetics. "It is like cutting the brake cable on a car," he said. "If PTEN is broken, you turn on a pathway that tells the cell to grow. It tells the cell to start dividing. It tells the cell, 'don't die.'" Parsons said loss of the protein PTEN is how breast cancer gets started in women who have inherited the BRCA1 gene mutation. His team made the connection between BRCA1 and PTEN by searching for chromosome breaks within the PTEN gene. They scanned 34 biopsies taken from women with BRCA1 tumors. The PTEN gene had been split in two, but inadequately repaired in about one-third of the cancers. In some cases, entire sections of the gene were missing. They said these chromosomal mistakes trace back to the tumor's lack of BRCA1, which is charged with cell repair. He estimates that about 50 percent of BRCA1 breast cancers harbor mutated PTEN. "These tumors have very high frequency loss of the PTEN protein," Parsons said. In breast cancers from women with normal BRCA1, they rarely found large mutations in PTEN. "A lot of drug companies are working on this. There is reasonably good hope that this approach will improve therapy for patients," Parsons said. Basal-like breast tumors are also found in 10 to 20 percent of women whose cancer was not caused by BRCA1 or another gene. The researchers found PTEN is lost in most of these breast tumors as well. (Editing by Jackie Frank)