Will lasers and GPS technology finally enable accurate measurement of snowfall?

Equipped with specialised lasers and GPS technology, scientists are working to address a critical wintertime weather challenge: how to measure the amount of snow on the ground accurately.

Transportation crews, water managers and others who make vital safety decisions need precise measurements of how snow depth varies across wide areas.

However, traditional measuring devices such as snow gauges and yardsticks are often inadequate for capturing snow totals that may vary even within a single field or neighbourhood.

Now scientists at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, in the US, and at other institutions are finding that prototype devices that use light pulses, satellite signals and other technologies offer the potential to almost instantly measure large areas of snow.

In time, such devices might provide a global picture of snow depth.

‘We’ve been measuring rain accurately for centuries, but snow is much harder because of the way it’s affected by wind and sun and other factors,’ says NCAR researcher Ethan Gutmann.

So why is it import to know how much snow is there on the ground?

‘It looks like new technology, however, will finally give us the ability to say exactly how much snow is on the ground.’

NCAR is conducting the effort with several collaborating organisations, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado Boulder.

The work is supported by NCAR’s sponsor, the National Science Foundation (NSF).

‘Snow represents both a hazard and a water resource in the western states,’ says Thomas Torgersen, NSF program director for hydrologic sciences. ‘Both require detailed assessments of snow amounts and depth. This technology will provide new and important guidance.’

Emergency managers rely on snowfall measurements when mobilising snow ploughs or deciding whether to shut down highways and airports during major storms.

They also use snow totals when determining whether a region qualifies for disaster assistance.

In mountainous areas, officials need accurate reports of snowpack depth to assess the threat of avalanches or floods, and to anticipate the amount of water available from spring and summer runoff.

However, traditional approaches to measuring snow can greatly underreport or over report snow totals, especially in severe conditions.

Snow gauges might produce inaccurate results

Snow gauges may miss almost a third of the snow in a windy storm, even when they are protected by specialised fencing designed to cut down on the wind’s effects.

Snow probes or yardsticks can reveal snow depth within limited areas. However, such tools require numerous in-person measurements at different locations, a method that may not keep up with totals during heavy snowfalls.

Weather experts also sometimes monitor the amount of snow that collects on flat, white pieces of wood known as snowboards, but this is a time-intensive approach that requires people to check the boards and clear them off every few hours.

The nation’s two largest volunteer efforts – the National Weather Service’s Cooperative Observer Program, and the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) – each involve thousands of participants nationwide using snow boards, but their reports are usually filed just once a day.

More recently, ultrasonic devices have been deployed in some of the world’s most wintry regions.

Much like radar, these devices measure the length of time needed for a pulse of ultrasonic energy to bounce off the surface of the snow and return to the transmitter.

However, the signal may be affected by shifting atmospheric conditions, including temperature, humidity and winds.

The specialised laser instruments under development at NCAR can correct for such problems.

Using light to measure

Once set up at a location, they can automatically measure snow depth across large areas. Unlike ultrasonic instruments, lasers rely on light pulses that are not affected by atmospheric conditions.

New tests by Gutmann indicate that a laser instrument installed high above tree line in the Rocky Mountains west of Boulder can measure 10 feet or more of snow with an accuracy as fine as half an inch or better.

In a little more than an hour, the instrument measures snow at more than 1 000 points across an area almost the size of a football field to produce a three-dimensional image of the snowpack and its variations in depth.

Gutmann’s next step will be to build and test a laser instrument that can measure snow over several square miles. Tracking such a large area would require a new instrument capable of taking more than 12 000 measurements per second.

‘If we’re successful, these types of instruments will reveal a continually-updated picture of snow across an entire basin,’ he says.

Networks or satellites

One limitation for the lasers, however, is that light pulses cannot penetrate through objects such as trees and buildings.

This could require development of networks of low-cost laser installations that would each record snow depths within a confined area.

Alternatively, future satellites equipped with such lasers might be capable of mapping the entire world from above.

Gutmann and Kristine Larson, a scientist at the University of Colorado, are also exploring how to use GPS sensors for snowfall measurements.

GPS sensors record satellite signals that reach them directly and signals that bounce off the ground.

When there is snow on the ground, the GPS signal bounces off the snow with a different frequency than when it bounces off bare soil, enabling scientists to determine how high the surface of the snow is above the ground.

Such units could be a cost-effective way of measuring snow totals; meteorologists could tap into the existing global network of ground-based GPS receivers.

However, researchers are seeking to understand fully how the density of the snow and the roughness of its surface alter GPS signals.

‘Our hope is to develop a set of high-tech tools that will enable officials to continually monitor snow depth, even during an intense storm,’ Larson says.

‘While we still have our work cut out for us, the technology is very promising.’

Stellar dendrite crystals are fairly large, 2-4mm, and easily seen with the naked eye. (Image: Kenneth Libbrecht, Caltech)

Source: NSF

First study to examine puzzle play in a naturalistic setting reveals surprising results about girls and boys

An important context for figuring out problems through reasoning is puzzle play, say researchers at University of Chicago.

Psychologist Susan Levine and colleagues recently conducted a study that found 2-4-year-old children, who play with puzzles, have better spatial skills when assessed at 4 1/2 years of age.

After controlling for differences in parents’ income, education and overall amount of parent language input, researchers say puzzle play proved to be a significant predictor of spatial skills – skills important in mathematics, science and technology and a key aspect of cognition.

‘As early as the preschool years and persisting into adulthood, there are individual and gender differences on certain spatial tasks, notably those involving mental rotation [of objects],’ the researchers write in their report, published in Developmental Science. ‘These variations are of considerable interest because of their reported relation to mathematics achievement.’

Improvements in math education are a point of emphasis for the National Science Foundation, which partly funded the study. ‘This study brings greater awareness of the learning opportunities for children in everyday activities,’ said Soo-Siang Lim, program director for the NSF’s Science of Learning Centres Program. ‘It is important because this and follow-up studies could potentially lead to relatively easy and inexpensive interventions to improve spatial skills important for STEM education.’

The potential of puzzle play

STEM education involves science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Activities such as early puzzle play may lay the groundwork for development in these areas. In particular, the ability to transform shapes mentally is an important predictor of STEM course taking, degrees and careers, say researchers.

‘The children who played with puzzles performed better than those who did not on tasks that assessed their ability to rotate and translate shapes,’ said Levine, a leading expert on mathematics development in young children.

The study was the first to look at puzzle play in a naturalistic setting. The researchers followed 53 child-parent pairs from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds for a two-year period. Researchers recorded parent-child interactions on video during 90-minute sessions that occurred every four months between 26 and 46 months of age.

The researchers asked the parents to interact with their children as they normally would and about half of the children in the sample played with puzzles at least one time. Higher income parents tended to engage children with puzzles more frequently. Both boys and girls who played with puzzles had better spatial skills, but boys played with more complicated puzzles than girls, and the parents of boys provided more spatial language during puzzle play and were more engaged in the play than the parents of girls.

Boys were better

The boys also performed better than the girls on a mental transformation task given at 54 months of age.

‘Further study is needed to determine if the puzzle play and the language children hear about spatial concepts actually causes the development of spatial skills and to examine why there is a sex difference in the difficulty of the puzzles played with and in the parents’ interactions with boys and girls,’ said Levine. ‘We are currently conducting a laboratory study in which parents are asked to play with puzzles with their preschool sons and daughters, and the same puzzles are provided to all participants.

‘We want to see whether parents provide the same input to boys and girls when the puzzles are of the same difficulty,’ Levine said. ‘In the naturalistic study, parents of boys may have used more spatial language in order to scaffold their ability to put more difficult puzzles together.’

Alternatively, the difference in parent spatial language and engagement may be related to a societal stereotype that males have better spatial skills. ‘Our findings suggest that engaging both boys and girls in puzzle play can support the development of an aspect of cognition that has been implicated in success in the STEM disciplines,’ Levine said.

Joining Levine in writing the paper are Kristin R. Ratliff and Janellen Huttenlocher of the University of Chicago and Joanna Cannon of the New York City Department of Education.

In addition to NSF, the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Child Health and Human Development provided funding for the study.

Activities such as early puzzle play may lay the groundwork for success in science, technology, engineering and mathematics course-taking, degrees and careers, a new University of Chicago study found. (Image: ©2012 Jupiter Images Corporation)

Source: National Science Foundation

Craters appear well defined on icy Rhea in front of the hazy orb of the much larger moon Titan in this Cassini spacecraft view of these two Saturn moons.

Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemispheres of Rhea and Titan. North on the moons is up and rotated 13° to the left. The limb, or edge of the visible disk, of Rhea is slightly overexposed in this view.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on 10 December 2011. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2 million kilometres from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 109°. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometres) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 109°.

Image scale is 12km per pixel on Titan and 8km per pixel on Rhea. (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

Source: NASA

With hardware from the Earth-orbiting International Space Station appearing in the near foreground, a nighttime European panorama reveals city lights from Belgium and the Netherlands at bottom centre.

The British Isles partially obscured by solar array panels at left, the North Sea at left centre, and Scandinavia at right centre beneath the end effector of the Space Station Remote Manipulator System or Canadarm2.

This image was taken by the station crew on 22 January 2012. (Image: NASA)

Source: NASA

If sensors are supposed to communicate with each other to compare the measured data and to secure them, then, in the future, a network of distributed sensor nodes will aid in that: the network ensures a problem-free communication between the sensors. For example, they can be used to monitor the watering of plants reliably.

A green thumb is required where plants are to grow abundantly – that also applies to watering them in dry areas. If they are watered too much, then the soil becomes saline; if the plants receive too little moisture, they let their leaves droop and, in the worst case, they wither. In the future, sensors in the soil, a central unit and an associated app will supplement the green thumb: one look at the smart phone and the farmer will know what moisture content the soil has. Which plants need water, which do not? If the plants get too dry, the farmer is alerted by SMS; the same applies if there is too much water flowing onto the fields.

Watering is one of the potential applications for the new technology developed by the researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications HHI in Berlin. ‘The basis is a central unit that connects all types of sensors securely and reliably with each other’, says Jens Krüger, scientist at the HHI. This unit records the data of all sensors and forwards them to an Internet browser or an app on an Android smart phone, where the user can call them up and enter limit values – in the case of the watering system they might be humidity values. If these threshold values are under or over, he will receive an SMS on his mobile phone.

‘We use existing technology and customise it so the user can access it’, says Krüger. This means: The sensors that the researchers connect to this central unit via sensor nodes are commercially available – what is new is the platform, via which they communicate with each other, and the language, or rather, the protocol that they use for their communication.

The special part…

The special part: the sensors need not be installed in a complex manner, they contact the central unit automatically. The required sensors simply need to be inserted and away we go. ‘The system we developed gets to know the sensors automatically. To achieve this, we developed our own protocol that the sensors and the base unit use to communicate’, says Krüger. Another benefit: the central unit does work similar to a computer, but it has an embedded system with micro-controls and an operating system and therefore is far more energy-efficient: it uses only 2 watts. In comparison, a PC would use roughly 150 watts.

A demonstrator comprising the central unit and several sensor nodes already exists. Currently, the sensors are connected via cable, in the future, however, they will radio their data wirelessly to the unit. If some of the sensors are no longer within radio range, they will first send their measurement results to other sensors that are closer to the central unit and which will transmit the signals to the unit. To illustrate the capabilities, the researchers connected to the demonstrator sensors that measure humidity, temperature and leakage. The system also works for any other type of sensor, such as noise sensors. For instance, they might also be used to protect critical infrastructures such as water mains, main electric lines of the electrical grid or railway lines and alert to thieves trying to steal the copper. In these cases, the sensor would detect, for example, noises made by digging. If one sensor detects such a respective noise, it connects via radio to the other sensors and compares the results. The system calculates the exact spot the digging takes place with the help of the data that is recorded by neighbouring sensors. The system will emit an alarm if there is an electricity cable or a water main.

Circular crop fields in Kansas, characteristic of centre pivot irrigation. (Image: NASA)

Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

Wileen Wong Kromhout

In the effort to convert sunlight into electricity, photovoltaic solar cells that use conductive organic polymers for light absorption and conversion have shown great potential. Organic polymers can be produced in high volumes at low cost, resulting in photovoltaic devices that are cheap, lightweight and flexible.

In the last few years, much work has been done to improve the efficiency with which these devices convert sunlight into power, including the development of new materials, device structures and processing techniques.

In a new study, available online in the journal Nature Photonics, researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and UCLA’s California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI) report that they have significantly enhanced polymer solar cells’ performance by building a device with a new ‘tandem’ structure that combines multiple cells with different absorption bands. The device had a certified power-conversion efficiency of 8.62% and set a world record in July 2011.

Further, after the researchers incorporated a new infrared-absorbing polymer material provided by Sumitomo Chemical of Japan into the device, the device’s architecture proved to be widely applicable and the power-conversion efficiency jumped to 10.6% – a new record – as certified by the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Tandem cells

By using cells with different absorption bands, tandem solar cells provide an effective way to harvest a broader spectrum of solar radiation. However, the efficiency doesn’t automatically increase by simply combining two cells. The materials for the tandem cells have to be compatible with each other for efficient light harvesting, the researchers said.

Until now, the performance of tandem devices lagged behind single-layer solar cells, mainly due to this lack of suitable polymer materials. UCLA Engineering researchers have demonstrated highly efficient single-layer and tandem polymer solar cells featuring a low-band-gap–conjugated polymer specially designed for the tandem structure. The band gap determines the portion of the solar spectrum a polymer absorbs.

‘Envision a double-decker bus,’ said Yang Yang, a professor of materials science and engineering at UCLA Engineering and principal investigator on the research. ‘The bus can carry a certain number of passengers on one deck, but if you were to add a second deck, you could hold many more people for the same amount of space. That’s what we’ve done here with the tandem polymer solar cell.’

To use solar radiation more effectively, Yang’s team stacked, in series, multiple photoactive layers with complementary absorption spectra to construct a tandem polymer solar cell. Their tandem structure consists of a front cell with a larger (or high) band gap material and a rear cell with a smaller (or low) band gap polymer, connected by a designed interlayer.

More efficient

When compared to a single-layer device, the tandem device is more efficient in utilising solar energy, particularly by minimising other energy losses. By using more than one absorption material, each capturing a different part of the solar spectrum, the tandem cell is able to maintain the current and increase the output voltage. These factors enable the increase in efficiency, the researchers said.

‘The solar spectra is very broad and covers the visible as well as the invisible, the infrared and the UV,’ said Shuji Doi, research group manager for Sumitomo Chemical. ‘We are very excited that Sumitomo’s low–band gap polymer has contributed to the new record efficiency.’

‘We have been doing research in tandem solar cells for a much shorter length of time than in the single-junction devices,’ said Gang Li, a member of the research faculty at UCLA Engineering and a co-author of the Nature Photonics paper. ‘For us to achieve such success in improving the efficiency in this short time period truly demonstrates the great potential of tandem solar cell technology.’

‘Everything is done by a very low-cost wet-coating process,’ Yang said. ‘As this process is compatible with current manufacturing, I anticipate this technology will become commercially viable in the near future.’

Opening up new options

This study opens up a new direction for polymer chemists to pursue designs of new materials for tandem polymer solar cells. Furthermore, it indicates an important step towards the commercialisation of polymer solar cells. Yang said his team hopes to reach 15% efficiency in the next few years.

Yang, who holds UCLA’s Carol and Lawrence E. Tannas Jr. Endowed Chair in Engineering, is also faculty director of the Nano Renewable Energy Centre at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the US Office of Naval Research and the US Department of Energy, together with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Sumitomo Chemical is one of Japan’s leading chemical companies, offering a diverse range of products globally in the fields of basic chemicals, petrochemicals, IT-related chemicals and materials, agricultural chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. The company’s consolidated net sales for fiscal year 2010 were $23.8 billion.

Tandem solar cell

Source: UCLA

Rachel Champeau

Cognitive loss and brain degeneration currently affect millions of adults, and the number will increase, given the population of aging baby boomers. Today, nearly 20% of people age 65 or older suffer from mild cognitive impairment and 10% have dementia.

UCLA scientists previously developed a brain-imaging tool to help assess the neurological changes associated with these conditions. The UCLA team now reports in the February issue of the journal Archives of Neurology that the brain-scan technique effectively tracked and predicted cognitive decline over a two-year period.

The team has created a chemical marker called FDDNP that binds to both plaque and tangle deposits – the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease – which can then be viewed using a positron emission tomography (PET) brain scan, providing a ‘window into the brain.’ Using this method, researchers are able to pinpoint where in the brain these abnormal protein deposits are accumulating.

‘We are finding that this may be a useful neuro-imaging marker that can detect changes early, before symptoms appear, and it may be helpful in tracking changes in the brain over time,’ said study author Dr. Gary Small, UCLA’s Parlow–Solomon Professor on Aging and a professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour at UCLA.

Brain scans

Small noted that FDDNP–PET scanning is the only available brain-imaging technique that can assess tau tangles. Autopsy findings have found that tangles correlate with Alzheimer’s disease progression much better than do plaques.

For the study, researchers performed brain scans and cognitive assessments on the subjects at baseline and then again two years later. The study involved 43 volunteer paricipants, with an average age of 64, who did not have dementia. At the start of the study, approximately half (22) of the participants had normal aging and the other half (21) had mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, a condition that increases a person’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers found that for both groups, increases in FDDNP binding in the frontal, posterior cingulate and global areas of the brain at the two-year follow-up correlated with progression of cognitive decline. These areas of the brain are involved in decision-making, complex reasoning, memory and emotions. Higher initial baseline FDDNP binding in both subject groups was associated with a decline in cognitive functioning in areas such as language and attention at the two-year follow-up.

‘We found that increases in FDDNP binding in key brain areas correlated with increases in clinical symptoms over time,’ said study author Dr. Jorge R. Barrio, who holds UCLA’s Plott Chair in Gerentology and is a professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. ‘Initial binding levels were also predictive of future cognitive decline.’

The next step…

Among the subjects with mild cognitive impairment, the level of initial binding in the frontal and parietal areas of the brain provided the greatest accuracy in identifying those who developed Alzheimer’s disease after two years. Of the 21 subjects with MCI, six were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at follow-up, and these six subjects had higher initial frontal and parietal binding values than the other subjects in the MCI group.

In the normal aging subjects, three developed mild cognitive impairment after two years. Two of these three participants had had the highest baseline binding values in the temporal, parietal and frontal brain regions among this group.

Researchers said the next step in research will involve a longer duration of follow-up with larger samples of subjects. In addition, the team is using this brain-imaging technique in clinical trials to help track novel therapeutics for brain aging, such as curcumin, a chemical found in turmeric spice.

‘Tracking the effectiveness of such treatments may help accelerate drug discovery efforts,’ Small, the author of the new book ‘The Alzheimer’s Prevention Program,’ said. ‘Because FDDNP appears to predict who will develop dementia, it may be particularly useful in tracking the effectiveness of interventions designed to delay the onset of dementia symptoms and eventually prevent the disease.’

Small recently received research approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to use FDDNP–PET to study people with mild cognitive impairment to determine whether a high-potency form of curcumin – a spice with anti-amyloid, anti-tau and anti-inflammatory properties – can prevent Alzheimer’s disease and the accumulation of plaques and tangles in the brain.

UCLA owns three US patents on the FDDNP chemical marker. The Office of Intellectual Property at UCLA is actively seeking a commercial partner to bring this promising technology to market.

Small and study authors Jorge R. Barrio and S. C. Huang are among the inventors. Disclosures are listed in the full study.

Additional authors included Prabha Siddarth, Linda M. Ercoli, Alison C. Burggren, Karen J. Miller, Dr. Helen Lavretsky and Dr. Susan Y. Bookheimer, all of the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioural Sciences, and Vladimir Kepe and S.C. Huang, who are part of the UCLA Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology.

Baseline and follow-up brain scans of a patient who developed Alzheimer’s disease after two years (images to right of white line) that shows high medial temporal binding at baseline (lower left) and follow-up (lower right), but also demonstrates more baseline binding in frontal (upper images) and lateral temporal regions. Warmer colours (yellows, reds indicate higher binding levels. A second patient (left) did not convert to Alzheimer’s after two years (images to left of white line); images show medial temporal (lower scans), but very mild frontal (upper scans) binding at baseline and follow-up. (Image: UCLA)

Source: UCLA

Kim Irwin

Breast cancer stem cells, thought to be the sole source of tumour recurrence, are known to be resistant to radiation therapy and don’t respond well to chemotherapy.

Now, researchers with the UCLA Department of Radiation Oncology at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Centre report for the first time that radiation treatment, despite killing half of all tumour cells during every treatment, transforms other cancer cells into treatment-resistant breast cancer stem cells.

The generating of these breast cancer stem cells counteracts the otherwise highly efficient radiation treatment. If scientists can uncover the mechanisms and prevent this transformation from occurring, radiation treatment for breast cancer could become even more effective, said study senior author Dr. Frank Pajonk, an associate professor of radiation oncology and Jonsson Cancer Centre researcher.

‘We found that these induced breast cancer stem cells (iBCSC) were generated by radiation-induced activation of the same cellular pathways used to reprogram normal cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) in regenerative medicine,’ said Pajonk, who also is a scientist with the Eli and Edythe Broad Centre of Regenerative Medicine at UCLA. ‘It was remarkable that these breast cancers used the same reprogramming pathways to fight back against the radiation treatment.’

The study was published on 13 February in the early online edition of the peer-reviewed journal Stem Cells.

Reduced long-term adverse effects

‘Controlling the radiation resistance of breast cancer stem cells and the generation of new iBCSC during radiation treatment may ultimately improve curability and may allow for de-escalation of the total radiation doses currently given to breast cancer patients, thereby reducing acute and long-term adverse effects,’ the study states.

Very few breast cancer stem cells are found among the larger pool of breast cancer cells. In this study, Pajonk and his team eliminated the smaller pool of breast cancer stem cells and then irradiated the remaining breast cancer cells and placed them into mice.

Using a unique imaging system, Pajonk and his team developed to visualise cancer stem cells, the researchers were able to observe the initial generation into iBCSC in response to the radiation treatment. The newly generated iBCSC were remarkably similar to breast cancer stem cells found in tumours that had not been irradiated, Pajonk said.

The team also found that the iBCSC had a more than 30-fold increased ability to form tumours, compared with the non-irradiated breast cancer cells from which they originated.

Pajonk said that the study unites the competing models of clonal evolution and the hierarchical organisation of breast cancers, as it suggests that undisturbed, growing tumours maintain a small number of cancer stem cells. However, if challenged by various stressors that threaten their numbers, including ionising radiation, the breast cancer cells generate iBCSC that may, together with the surviving cancer stem cells, repopulate the tumour.

Greater understanding

‘What is really exciting about this study is that it gives us a much more complex understanding of the interaction of radiation with cancer cells that goes far beyond DNA damage and cell killing,’ Pajonk said. ‘The study may carry enormous potential to make radiation even better.’

Pajonk stressed that breast cancer patients should not be alarmed by the study findings and should continue to undergo radiation if recommended by their oncologists.

‘Radiation is an extremely powerful tool in the fight against breast cancer,’ he said. ‘If we can uncover the mechanism driving this transformation, we may be able to stop it and make the therapy even more powerful.’

The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute, the California Breast Cancer Research Program and the US Department of Defence.

Dr. Frank Pajonk

Source: UCLA

Courtesy of Science Translational Medicine and World Science staff

Osteopororosis patients could soon replace their daily drug injection regime with an implanted microchip that releases medicine at the push of a remote-controlled button – the first device of its kind.

A clinical trial involving a group of women with osteopororosis in Denmark is the first to test a wirelessly controlled microchip that can release drugs into the body any time. The technology could allow doctors to adjust their patient’s medication by computer or smartphone, scientists say.

Patients with severe osteopororosis currently have to give themselves daily injections, sometimes for up to two years. That unpleasantness leads some disheartened patients to skip on treatments. This is especially true because the disease itself doesn’t feel bad until thinned-out bone structure, the malady’s characteristic feature, leads to a fracture.

The implant could help stop patients from giving up on their treatment and dramatically improve life for millions, its developers say. Designed by a team of academic and industry scientists, it holds daily doses of a drug inside tiny wells that pop open either on a pre-programmed schedule or via a wireless signal.

Treatment improved bone formation

An initial concern of scientists was that in animal tests, a fibrous collagen-based membrane tended to develop around the implanted device. The researchers worried this fibrous tissue might slow down the absorption of medication. In the human trial, the tissue did form, but it didn’t interfere enough to make the treatment less effective than daily injections, the group said.

The team, which included researchers from Harvard Medical School, implanted the pacemaker-sized microchip just below the waistline into seven women between the ages of 65 and 70. The procedure can be performed in a doctor’s office with local anaesthetic.

Tracking the women for a year, the researchers also found that treatment improved bone formation and reduced the risk of bone fracture, as judged by blood markers signalling bone formation, bone mass and other factors. The chip was removed from participants at the end of the treatment.

The findings are published in the 15 February issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine.

(Image: MicroCHIPS Inc, Mass.)

Source: World Science, http://www.world-science.net

Courtesy of Public Library of Science and World Science staff

Four new species of mini-lizards have been identified in Madagascar – highlighting the need for greater conservation efforts in that ecologically threatened island before such rare creatures vanish, researchers say.

The lizards, just centimetres from head to tail and some of them small enough to stand on the head of a match when young, rank among world’s smallest reptiles, scientists say. They report the finds in the 15 February issue of the research journal PLoS One.

The researchers, led by Frank Glaw of the Zoological State Collection of Munich in Germany, also conducted a genetic analysis to determine that the mini-lizards, though similar in appearance to others, are in fact distinct species.

The smallest of the new species, Brookesia micra, was found only on a very small islet called Nosy Hara, and the authors suggest that this species may represent an extreme case of a phenomenon called ‘island dwarfism.’

The road to dwarfism

Numerous animals evolve into dwarf forms on islands, and the same has happened to humans in at least one case, according to many scientists. One recent study has found that the road to dwarfism is relatively fast in evolutionary terms, about 10 times faster than equivalent increases in size.

A frog discovered in New Guinea recently represents the world’s smallest backboned animal, according to scientists, and is even smaller than the newfound lizards, though they come fairly close.

‘The extreme miniaturisation of these dwarf reptiles might be accompanied by numerous specialisations of the body plan, and this constitutes a promising field for future research,’ said Glaw. ‘But most urgent is to focus conservation efforts on these and other micro-endemic species in Madagascar which are heavily threatened by deforestation.’

Images of the lizard Brookesia micra from Nosy Hara, northern Madagascar. (A) adult male, about 2cm long. (B) A juvenile on a fingertip. (C) A juvenile on head of a match. (D) The area along a small creek on western flank of Nosy Hara, where some of the creatures were found. (Image: PLoS One)

Source: World Science, http://www.world-science.net