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Science Daily — Early-stage research has found that a new gene therapy can nearly eliminate arthritis pain, and significantly reduce long-term damage to the affected joints, according to a study published today in the journal Arthritis and Rheumatism. While the study was done in mice, they are the first genetically engineered to develop osteoarthritis like humans, with the same genetic predisposition that makes some more likely to develop the disease, the authors said. If all goes well with a follow-up study currently underway, researchers will apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for permission to begin human trials next year.

Nearly everyone aged 65 or older suffers from the pain, swelling and permanent joint damage of osteoarthritis. The most common form of arthritis, it develops over time following initial joint injuries or just as a result of aging. In the current study, researchers found that one injection of a newly designed gene therapy relieved 100 percent of osteoarthritic pain in the study model. In addition, researchers were surprised to find that the therapy also brought about a nearly 35 percent reduction in permanent structural to joints caused by round and after round of osteoarthritic inflammation.

To date, treatment of arthritis is dominated by drug treatments like non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drugs, COX-2 inhibitors and acetaminophen which if it interests you, you can read more here. Morphine and its derivatives are still in common use as well, but can depress breathing and lead to addiction. Taken together, current treatments deliver inconsistent results and new approaches are needed, researcher said. Gene therapy has been attempted in the past, but older, invasive techniques required that therapeutic genes be injected directly into nerve cells. Strong pain relief resulted, but in some cases the injections caused nerve damage.

“Our publication represents the first proof that gene therapy can work in a way that is clinically applicable,” said Stephanos Kyrkanides, D.D.S., Ph.D., associate professor of Dentistry at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “This therapy can simply be injected anywhere in an injured joint, and the treatment will find the nerve endings,” said Kyrkanides, whose work on genetics in dentistry led to broader applications. The common ground between arthritis and dentistry: a common site of arthritic pain is the jaw joint.

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Paintings of Buddha dating back at least to the 12th century have been discovered in a cave in a remote area of Nepal’s north-central region.

Researchers made the find after being tipped off by a local sheep herder. They discovered a mural with 55 panels showing the story of Buddha’s life.

The mural was uncovered in March, with the team using ice axes to break through a snow path to reach the cave.

The find was in the Mustang area, 250km (160 miles) north-west of Kathmandu.

Sheer cliffs

“What we found is fantastically rich in culture and heritage and goes to the 12th century or earlier,” American writer and conservationist Broughton Coburn told the AP news agency.

Mr Coburn said the main mural measured around 8m (25ft) wide, and each panel was about 35cm (14in) by 43cm (17in).

It was set in sheer 14,000ft (4,300m) cliffs in Nepal’s remote Himalayan north.

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Science Daily — When it comes to studying energy transfer in photosynthesis, it’s good to think “outside the bun.” That’s what Robert Blankenship, Ph.D., professor of biology and chemistry in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, did when he contributed a protein to a study performed by his collaborators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley.

Taco shell protein

It’s called bacteriochlorophyl (BChl) a protein, but Blankenship fondly calls it the taco shell protein because of its structure: its ribbon-like backbone wraps around three clusters of seven chlorophylls, just like a taco shell around ground beef. The structure also is referred to as trimeric because of the three clusters.

The protein, which comes from a photosynthetic bacterium that lives in extremely high temperatures, enabled the researches to discover that quantum mechanical effects appear to play a role in photosynthesis.

The taco shell protein is arguably the most studied and understood protein in a complex photosynthesis researchers refer to as the antenna system, molecules that efficiently transfer energy from light in a cascade.

Photosynthesis transforms light, carbon dioxide and water into chemical energy in plants and some bacteria. The wavelike characteristic of this energy transfer process can explain its extreme efficiency, in that vast areas of phase space can be sampled effectively to find the most efficient path for energy transfer.

“We have a very detailed molecular structure of this protein and we understand the electronic properties of it very well, too,” said Blankenship. “It’s taught us a lot about how chlorophylls interact with proteins. It was ideal for this study.”

Blankenship’s colleague, Graham R. Fleming, Ph.D., deputy director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and professor of chemistry at the University of California, and colleagues used 2-D spectroscopy to study what happens inside a bacteriochlorophyll complex, and detected a ‘quantum beating.”

The effect, described in the April 12, 2007, issue of Nature, occurs when light-induced excitations in the complex meet and interfere constructively, much like the interactions that occur between the ripples formed by throwing stones into a pond.

The collaboration is a good illustration of interdisciplinary science. The Washington University group’s expertise is in photosynthesis, especially antenna systems, and the West Coast group’s specialty is advanced laser techniques. The quantum finding would have been impossible without collaboration.

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Cosmic rays produced at the edge of our galaxy have devastated life on Earth every 62 million years, researchers say.

The finding suggests that biodiversity has been strongly influenced by the motion of the solar system through the Milky Way and of the galaxy’s movement through intergalactic space.

Mikhail Medvedev and Adrian Melott, both of the University of Kansas, presented their new theory at a meeting of the American Physical Society earlier this month.

The theory offers the first explanation for a mysterious pattern previously noted in the fossil record.

“There are 62-million-year ups and downs in the number of marine animals over the last 550 million years,” Melott said.

Until now, however, even the scientists who first discovered the cyclical pattern had not been able to explain it. (Read related story: “Mystery Undersea Extinction Cycle Discovered” [March 9, 2005].)

A number of possible explanations had been considered—including volcanic activity, comet impacts, and changes in sea level—but none could account for the phenomenon’s regularity.

The Kansas researchers discovered that high rates of extinction in the cycle coincide almost perfectly with periodic “excursions” of the solar system outside the central plane of the Milky Way galaxy.

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The long, challenging technological march from the low-power light bulb Thomas Edison invented to the ultimate in a bright and energy-efficient lighting device may reach fruition in work led by the two ASU researchers.

A recent cover story in the journal Advanced Materials, a leading materials and device engineering research publication, details advances in the use of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) by Ghassan Jabbour and Jian Li, with help from graduate students Evan Williams and Kirsi Haavisto, a Fulbright scholar from Finland.

Jabbour is a professor and Li is an assistant professor in the new ASU School of Materials, which is jointly administered by the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Jabbour also is director of optoelectronics research and development at the Flexible Display Center at ASU.

The two have developed an organic lighting device with “100 percent internal quantum efficiency” by employing newly designed host materials coupled with optimized device architecture.

Internal quantum efficiency involves the number of photons generated inside the device per each electron from the electricity source – such as a battery.

What’s particularly significant about the researchers’ work is that their optimized device adopts an even simpler structure than any yet reported by other research groups.

“There is no waste of electricity,” Jabbour says. “All the current you are putting into the device is being used to produce light. It’s the first time something like this has been demonstrated. Nobody else has shown a 100 percent internal quantum efficiency for lighting devices using a single molecular dopant to emit white light.”

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– This is some amazing stuff. Folks at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have done work that indicates that photosynthesis’ high efficiency is due to its use of quantum mechanical effects. It’s puzzled scientists of years how photosynthesis can operate with efficiency as high as 90% while their very best solar cells struggle to exceed 30%. Here’s a possible explanation and it’s a mind bender.

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BERKELEY, CA —Through photosynthesis, green plants and cyanobacteria are able to transfer sunlight energy to molecular reaction centers for conversion into chemical energy with nearly 100-percent efficiency. Speed is the key – the transfer of the solar energy takes place almost instantaneously so little energy is wasted as heat. How photosynthesis achieves this near instantaneous energy transfer is a long-standing mystery that may have finally been solved.A study led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) at Berkeley reports that the answer lies in quantum mechanical effects. Results of the study are presented in the April 12, 2007 issue of the journal Nature.

“We have obtained the first direct evidence that remarkably long-lived wavelike electronic quantum coherence plays an important part in energy transfer processes during photosynthesis,” said Graham Fleming, the principal investigator for the study. “This wavelike characteristic can explain the extreme efficiency of the energy transfer because it enables the system to simultaneously sample all the potential energy pathways and choose the most efficient one.”

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– The relatively new science of Complexity is one of the most exciting ideas around and Kauffman has always been involved near the cutting edge of what’s known and suspected about Complexity through his work with the Santa Fe Institute. Here he argues for business to take a page from biology if it wants to better understand how to adapt to changing markets.

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by Stuart A. Kauffman

When the world changes unpredictably over the course of centuries, no one is shocked: Who blames the Roman centurions for not foreseeing the invention of rocket launchers? Yet monumental and surprising transformations occur on much shorter timescales, too. Even in the early 1980s you would have been hard-pressed to find people confidently predicting the rise of the Internet or the fall of the U.S.S.R. Unexpected change bedevils the business community endlessly, despite all best efforts to anticipate and adapt to it–witness the frequent failure of companies’ five-year plans.

Economists have so far not been able to offer much help to firms trying to be more adaptive. Although economists have been slow to realize it, the problem is that their attempts to model economic systems focus on those in market equilibrium or moving toward it. They have drawn their inspiration predominantly from the work of physicists in this respect (often with good results, of course). For instance, the Black-Scholes model used since the 1970s to predict the volatility of stock prices was developed by trained physicists and is related to the thermodynamic equation that describes heat.

As economics attempts to model increasingly complicated phenomena, however, it would do well to shift its attention from physics to biology, because the biosphere and the living things in it represent the most complex systems known in nature. In particular, a deeper understanding of how species adapt and evolve may bring profound–even revolutionary–insights into business adaptability and the engines of economic growth.

One of the key ideas in modern evolutionary theory is that of preadaptation. The term may sound oxymoronic but its significance is perfectly logical: every feature of an organism, in addition to its obvious functional characteristics, has others that could become useful in totally novel ways under the right circumstances. The forerunners of air-breathing lungs, for example, were swim bladders with which fish maintained their equilibrium; as some fish began to move onto the margins of land, those bladders acquired a new utility as reservoirs of oxygen. Biologists say that those bladders were preadapted to become lungs. Evolution can innovate in ways that cannot be prestated and is nonalgorithmic by drafting and recombining existing entities for new purposes–shifting them from their existing function to some adjacent novel function–rather than inventing features from scratch.

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