HONG KONG | Thu Dec 20, 2012 7:55am EST

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Scientists in Hong Kong appear to have mapped out a formula that can delay the aging process in mice, a discovery they hope to replicate in people.

Their finding, published in the December issue of Cell Metabolism, builds on their work in 2005 which shed light on premature aging, or progeria, a rare genetic disease that affects one in four million babies.

Progeria is obvious in the appearance of a child before it is a year old. Although their mental faculties are normal, they stop growing, lose body fat and suffer from wrinkled skin and hair loss. Like old people, they suffer stiff joints and a buildup of plaque in arteries which can lead to heart disease and stroke. Most die before they are 20 years old.

In that research, the team at the University of Hong Kong found that a mutation in the Lamin A protein, which lines the nucleus in human cells, disrupted the repair process in cells, thus resulting in accelerated aging.

Conversely, in their latest work using both mice and experiments in petri dishes, they found that normal and healthy Lamin A binds to and activates the gene SIRT1, which experts have long associated with longevity.

"We can develop drugs that mimic Lamin A or increase the binding between Lamin A and SIRT1," Liu Baohua, research assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Hong Kong, told a news conference on Thursday.

The team went further to see if the binding efficiency between Lamin A and SIRTI would be boosted with resveratrol, a compound found in the skin of red grapes and other fruits which has been touted by some scientists and companies as a way to slow aging or remain healthy as people get older.

Associate professor Zhou Zhongjun, who led the study, said healthy mice fed with concentrated resveratrol fared significantly better than healthy mice not given the compound.

"We actually delayed the onset of aging and extended the healthy lifespan," Zhou said of the mice.

Mice with progeria lived 30 percent longer when fed with resveratrol compared with progerial mice not given the compound.

Asked if their study supported the notion that drinking red wine delays aging and reduces the risk of heart disease, Zhou said the alcohol content in wine would cause harm before any benefit could be derived.

"The amount of resveratrol in red wine is very low and it may not be beneficial. But the alcohol will cause damage to the body," Zhou said.

(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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LONDON | Fri Dec 14, 2012 11:20am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - International climate scientists are more certain than ever that humans are responsible for global warming, rising sea levels and extreme weather events, according to a leaked draft report by an influential panel of experts.

The early draft, which is still subject to change before a final version is released in late 2013, showed that a rise in global average temperatures since pre-industrial times was set to exceed 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, and may reach 4.8 Celsius.

"It is extremely likely that human activities have caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperatures since the 1950s," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report said.

"Extremely likely" in the IPCC's language means a level of certainty of at least 95 percent. The next level is "virtually certain", or 99 percent, the greatest possible certainty for the scientists.

The IPCC's previous report, in 2007, said it was at least 90 percent certain that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, were the cause of rising temperatures.

The draft was shown on a climate change skeptic blog.

The IPCC said the unauthorized, premature posting of the draft may lead to confusion because the report was still work in progress and was likely to change before it is released.

A United Nations conference last week aimed at curbing emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warning yielded no progress and three countries - Canada, Russia and Japan - have abandoned the Kyoto Protocol limiting the emissions.

The United States never ratified it in the first place, and it excludes developing countries where emissions are growing most quickly.

Countries agreed to extend Kyoto to 2020, but only those covering less than 15 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions signed up. Developing nations said they would push next year for a radical U.N. mechanism to compensate them for the impact of climate change.

The IPCC said it had "high confidence" that human activity had caused large-scale changes in oceans, in ice sheets or mountain glaciers, and in sea levels in the second half of the twentieth century, according to the draft.

It said some extreme weather events had also changed due to human influences.

THREAT TO CITIES

The draft's scenarios forecast a rise in temperatures of between 0.2 and 4.8 Celsius this century - a narrower band than in 2007. But in almost all of the scenarios, the rise would exceed 2 degrees Celsius.

Governments pledged in 2010 to try to stop global temperatures rising by more than 2 degrees, a threshold seen by scientists as the maximum to avoid more extreme weather, droughts, floods, and other climate change impacts.

Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were the highest in 800,000 years, according to the draft report.

The draft also said that sea levels were likely to rise by between 29 and 82 centimeters by the end of the century - compared to 18-59 centimeters projected in the 2007 report.

Rising sea levels are a threat to people living in low-lying areas, from Bangladesh to the cities of New York, London and Buenos Aires. They open up the risk of storm surges, coastal erosion and, in the worst case scenario, the complete swamping of large areas of land.

The IPCC carries weight because it brings together all scientific research on climate change and informs policymakers.

Many countries want to study the final IPCC report before signing up to a new global pact to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The draft included a possible future acceleration of ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland, which was omitted in 2007. It stopped short of including some research carried out since 2007 that suggested seas may rise by up to 2 meters by 2100.

(Editing by Tom Pfeiffer)

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A computer screen is pictured before a scientific seminar to deliver the latest update in the search for the Higgs boson at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Meyrin, near Geneva July 4, 2012.

GENEVA | Wed Dec 19, 2012 3:07pm EST

GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists at Europe's CERN research center said on Wednesday they may be able to definitively announce at a conference next March that they had discovered the elusive Higgs boson.

But they dismissed suggestions circulating widely on blogs and even in some science journals that instead of just one type of the elementary particle they might have found a pair.

CERN researchers said in July they had found what appeared to be the particle that gives mass to matter, as imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. But they stopped short of saying for sure it was the Higgs boson, pending further research.

"The latest data we have on this thing we have been watching for the past few months show that it is not simply 'like a Higgs' but is very like a Higgs," said Oliver Buechmuller of the CMS team at CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

"The way things are going, by the Moriond meeting we may be able to stop calling it Higgs-like and finally say it is the Higgs," he told Reuters, referring to the annual gathering which will take place at the Italian Alpine resort of La Thuile, 120 kilometers (75 miles) from CERN, on March 2-9.

Suggestions that there may be two Higgs, a particle that made formation of the universe possible after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, emerged after a progress report by CERN scientists last week. Its definitive discovery that would almost certainly win a Nobel Prize.

Commentators, including one in the journal Scientific American, said differing measurements - so far unexplained - of the new boson's mass that were recorded by ATLAS - a parallel but separate research team to CMS at CERN, indicated there might be twin particles.

"That is quite an exaggeration," said Pauline Gagnon, a scientist with ATLAS. "The facts are so much simpler: we measure one quantity in two different ways and obtain two slightly different answers.

"However, when we combine all the information, we clearly get only one value. Since we have checked all other possibilities, it really looks like a statistical fluctuation. Such things happen."

Buechmueller, whose CMS team found no such variation in their measurements, said he agreed there was no special relevance in the ATLAS discrepancy. "It will probably disappear when more data is in and analyzed," he added.

The $10-billion Large Hadron Collider, a 27-km (17-mile) circular construct deep under the Franco-Swiss border, will shut down for some two years in February to allow a doubling of its power and its capacity to probe cosmic mysteries

(Reported by Robert Evans; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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HONG KONG | Fri Dec 21, 2012 4:42am EST

HONG KONG (Reuters) - The bat, a reservoir for viruses like Ebola, SARS and Nipah, has for decades stumped scientists trying to figure out how it is immune to many deadly bugs but a recent study into its genes may finally shed some light, scientists said on Friday.

Studying the DNA of two distant bat species, the scientists discovered how genes dealing with the bats' immune system had undergone the most rapid change.

This may explain why they are relatively free of disease and live exceptionally long lives compared with other mammals of similar size, such as the rat, said Professor Lin-Fa Wang, an infectious disease expert at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore who led the multi-centre study.

"We are not saying bats never get sick or never get infections. What we are saying is they handle infections a lot better," Wang said in a telephone interview.

What was missing from both species of bats was a gene segment known to trigger extreme, and potentially fatal, immune reactions to infections, called the cytokine storm.

Cytokine storms end up killing not only offending viruses in the body, but the host's own cells and tissues too.

"Viruses rarely kill the host. The killing comes from the host's immune response. So it looks like what bats are doing is depress the inflammation (cytokine storm). If we can learn that, we can design drugs to minimize the inflammation damage and control viral infection," Wang said.

The study, which saw the participation of researchers from China, Denmark, Australia and the United States, was published on Friday in the journal Science.

Compared with other mammals of similar size, bats live a long time, with lifespans of between 20 and 40 years. Rats live between 2 and 3 years, on average.

IMMUNE GENES LINKED TO FLIGHT

Interestingly, Wang and his colleagues found that the highly evolved genes that give bats their superior immune system also enable them to fly.

Out of more than 5,000 types of mammals on the planet, bats are the only one capable of sustained flight and some species can fly more than 1,000 km in a single night.

Such intense physical exertion is known to produce toxic "free radicals" that cause tissue damage and it is these same genes that give the bat the ability to repair itself, Wang said.

"What we found was the genes that evolved fastest were genes involved in repairing DNA damage. That makes sense ... because when you fly, metabolism goes up and it generates free radicals that are toxic to cells," Wang said.

"Because bats fly, they (would have had) to evolve and adapt ... to get genes that can repair DNA damage."

Wang said we have much to learn from the bat, which has evolved to avoid disease and live exceptionally long lives.

"Cancer, ageing and infectious disease, these are the three major areas of concern for people," he said.

"We have studied rats for 150 years to understand how to do better in these three areas. Now we have a system, the bat, that has done very well in evolution. We can learn from the bat. With modern techniques, we can design new drugs to slow down the ageing process, treat cancer, fight infections."

(Editing by Robert Birsel)

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An undated photo shows a 52 year-old woman, paralysed from the neck down, demonstrating the use of a new mind-controlled prosthetic arm with intuitive control to help her eat a chocolate bar at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre in Pittsburgh.

LONDON | Mon Dec 17, 2012 12:25pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - A paralyzed woman has been able to feed herself chocolate and move everyday items using a robotic arm directly controlled by thought, showing a level of agility and control approaching that of a human limb.

Jan Scheuermann, 53, from Pittsburgh, was diagnosed with a degenerative brain disorder 13 years ago and is paralyzed from the neck down.

"It's so cool," said Scheuermann during a news conference. "I'm moving things. I have not moved things for about 10 years ... It's not a matter of thinking which direction anymore it's just a matter of thinking ‘I want to do that'."

She was shown feeding herself string cheese and chocolate unaided as well as moving a series of objects in tests designed for recovering stroke victims, and she was able to do it with speeds comparable to the able bodied.

Experts are calling it a remarkable step forward for prosthetics controlled directly by the brain. Other systems have already allowed paralyzed patients to type or write in freehand simply by thinking about the letters they want.

In the past month, researchers in Switzerland also used electrodes implanted directly on the retina to enable a blind patient to read.

The development of brain-machine interfaces is moving quickly and scientists predict the technology could eventually be used to bypass nerve damage and re-awaken a person's own paralyzed muscles.

In the meantime, they say, systems like the one developed by the U.S. researchers could be paired with robotic "exoskeletons" that allow paraplegics and quadriplegics to walk.

For Scheuermann, the experience has already been transforming.

"It's given her a renewed purpose," Michael Boninger, who worked on the study published in The Lancet, told Reuters. "On the first day that we had her move the arm, there was this amazing smile of joy. She could think about moving her wrist and something happened."

COMPLEX ALGORITHM

The research team from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center implanted two microelectrode devices into the woman's left motor cortex, the part of the brain that initiates movement.

The medics used a real-time brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging to find the exact part of the brain that lit up after the patient was asked to think about moving her now unresponsive arms.

The electrodes were connected to the robotic hand via a computer running a complex algorithm to translate the signals that mimics the way an unimpaired brain controls healthy limbs.

"These electrodes are remarkable devices in that they are very small," Boninger said. "You can't buy them in Radio Shack."

But Boninger said the way the algorithm operates is the main advance. Accurately translating brain signals has been one of the biggest challenges in mind-controlled prosthetics.

"There is no limit now to decoding human motion," he said. "It gets more complex when you work on parts like the hand, but I think that, once you can tap into desired motion in the brain, then how that motion is effected has a wide range of possibilities."

It took weeks of training for Scheuermann to master control of the hand, but she was able to move it after just two days, and over time she completed tasks - such as picking up objects, orientating them, and moving them to a target position - with a 91.6 percent success rate. Her speed increased with practice.

The researchers plan to incorporate wireless technology to remove the need for a wired connection between the patient's head and the prosthesis.

They also believe a sensory loop could be added that gives feedback to the brain, allowing the user to tell the difference between hot and cold, or smooth and rough surfaces.

Grégoire Courtine, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, hailed the project. "This bioinspired brain-machine interface is a remarkable technological and biomedical achievement."

"Though plenty of challenges lie ahead, these sorts of systems are rapidly approaching the point of clinical fruition," Courtine, who was not involved in the study, said in a comment piece in the Lancet linked to the study.

ETHICAL QUESTIONS

Although using technology to restore movement, sight or hearing in the disabled would for many seem uncontroversial, some disability rights groups and ethicists are wary.

They argue that restoring hearing, for instance, could fuel a prejudice that a deaf life is less rich, or less well lived.

Andy Miah, a professor at the University of the West of Scotland who has written extensively about human enhancement in the context of the Paralympics, says it is far from straightforward.

"For instance, a few years ago, there was a case of a deaf lesbian couple who sought to use in vitro fertilization to select for deafness," he said.

"They argued that absence of hearing is precisely not an impairment, but allows access to a rich community."

The ethics become more complex with the prospect of using these technologies to enhance the able-bodied.

"It's quite likely that therapy is the back door to enhancement in these kinds of technological interventions," says Miah. "People will question whether this is desirable, but we already live in a society that tolerates such modifications.

"Laser eye surgery interventions have grown astronomically over the last decade and nobody complains that it is making people superhuman."

(Editing by Alison Williams)

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A family of Osprey are seen outside the NASA Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Thursday May 13, 2010.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Fri Dec 21, 2012 2:12am EST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA is so sure there will be a December 22, 2012, it has already posted a YouTube video titled "Why the World Didn't End Yesterday."

Scientists say rumors on social media and the Internet of Earth's premature demise have been prompted by a misunderstanding of the ancient Maya calendar, which runs through December 21, 2012.

"It's just the end of the cycle and the beginning of the new one. It's just like on December 31, our calendar comes to an end, but a new calendar for the next year begins on January 1," Don Yeomans, head of NASA's Near-Earth Object program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a separate YouTube video.

According to the story circulating on the Internet, an enormous rogue planet called Niburu is on a collision course with Earth.

"If it were, we would have seen it long ago and it if were invisible somehow, we would have seen its effects on the neighboring planets. Thousands of astronomers who scan the night skies on a daily basis have not seen this," Yeomans said.

Still, thousands of mystics and New Age dreamers have descended on ancient Maya temples across Mexico and Central America hoping to witness the birth of a new era when the day dubbed "end of the world" dawns on Friday.

So is NASA covering up to prevent panic?

"Can you imagine thousands of astronomers keeping the same secret from the public for several years?" Yeomans said.

Initially, Niburu, also known as Planet X, was to impact in May 2003, but when that didn't happen the doomsday date was moved to coincide with the end of one of the cycles of the ancient calendar at winter solstice -- December 21, 2012.

Other celestial events that will not be happening: a planetary alignment causing a massive tidal surge or a total blackout of Earth; a reversal in Earth's rotation; an impact by a giant asteroid; a giant solar storm.

"Since the beginning of recorded time, there have been literally hundreds of thousands of predictions for the end of the world," Yeomans said. "We're still here."

(Editing by Kevin Gray and M.D. Golan)

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