Crowdfunding for research dollars: a cure for science’s ills? - from Scientific American blog

Scientists – and science generally – are in a moment of crisis on multiple fronts. The gap between science and society has grown to a chasm, with disastrous consequences for issue after issue. For example, just last month, Tennessee passed legislation permitting creation “science” into classrooms. On another front, the concern of Americans about global warming has dramatically declined over the past decade, despite the scientific consensus on the clear and present danger caused by climate change.



But science illiteracy in the general public isn’t the only crisis in science. Funding for research is becoming increasingly unattainable, with funding rates at their lowest levels in a decade at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the two most important American science agencies (see here and here for details). The situation in many other nations is no better. In Spain, for example, science spending by the central government has fallen by 20% since 2009. Even worse, research funding from traditional sources will likely be even harder to come by in the years to come due to ongoing economic instability around the world.

The solution
The public disengagement with science and the difficulty of funding research are very different problems. Unexpectedly though...

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/05/23/crowdfunding-for-research-dollars-a-cure-for-sciences-ills/

India’s City Dwellers at Greater Risk than Americans for Heart Disease, from Scientific American Blog

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/JeremyRichards

Diabetes, heart disease, stroke and other afflictions that once primarily plagued wealthier, western countries are now accelerating in poorer nations.

A new study reveals that risk factors for heart disease in Indian cities are now more prevalent than they are in the U.S. or Western Europe per capita. And with a population of more than 1.1 billion, India’s health is a major global concern.

Cardiovascular disease is still the leading killer in the U.S., but it has been on steady decline for decades. In India and other countries, such as China and Brazil, this and other diseases linked to an unhealthier lifestyle, are on the rise.

“India has the dubious distinction of being known as the coronary and diabetes capital of the world,” Prakash Deedwania, of the University of California, San Francisco and co-author of the report, said in a prepared statement.

For the study, the researchers assessed the health of 6,198 adults who lived in 11 cities in various parts of India. Across the country about 79 percent of men and 83 percent of women didn’t get much exercise, and 41 percent of men and 45 percent of women were overweight or obese, the team found. And high-fat, low-fruit-and-vegetable diets were common. All of these trends put people at higher odds for developing—and dying from—cardiovascular disease. The findings were presented April 20 in Dubai at the World Congress of Cardiology.

for more of the article...

About the Author: Katherine Harmon is an associate editor for Scientific American covering health, medicine and life sciences. Follow on Twitter @katherineharmon.

 

The Future of Epidemiology: Next-Gen Sequencing

By Amr Abouelleil | April 13, 2012| 

Over four thousand people infected, nine hundred of them suffering hemolytic-uremic syndrome, a disorder whose first symptoms are vomiting and diarrhea. For fifty individuals, it ended in death. Such is the grim toll that the 2011 E. coli epidemic wrought upon Europe, and in particular France and Germany.

The Broad Institute/Amr Abouelleil

When Yonatan Grad, an infectious disease physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), first read of the outbreak in the New York Times, he thought he and his colleague, Bill Hanage, could contribute to the understanding of the outbreak.
Grad was right. For Hanage had taken the Francis Crick’s ‘gossip test and combined his knowledge of infection disease with his interest in evolution to pursue a career in infectious disease epidemiology. As a result, Hanage’s career crossed paths with the world of genomic sequencing.
Speaking of the E. coli O104:H4 strain responsible for the outbreak, Hanage says, “It’s often not clear exactly how virulent an emerging infection is. But that said, it was pretty plain that this was a fairly vicious strain. My first reaction was that this would be a really interesting project for sequencing.”
Hanage, also an associate professor at HSPH, knew that conventional molecular epidemiology methods wouldn’t do for the scale of the project he had in mind. He also knew that the Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom had been using next-generation technologies to sequence large pathogen samples consisting of hundreds of strains for several years.

“This sort of work represents a basic shift in the way we think about sequencing, from thinking about one representative isolate, to thinking about many. In an outbreak like the one we are talking about here, if you sequence just one isolate you can find out useful things like how the outbreak relates to the rest of the species. However if you sequence more than one isolate from an outbreak you can define things like the diversity of the outbreak, and any individual lineages within it. Using this information, you can say things about transmission, or how things relate to one another.”

Together, Grad and Hanage devised an epidemiological study to sequence sixteen isolates of E. coli 0104:H4. This study would’ve been impossible a decade ago. In 2001, the cost to sequence a human-sized genome was $100,000,000. In a feat that would leave Moore’s Law in the dust, companies like Roche and Illumina helped bring that cost to below $10,000 in 2010. Now consider that the E. coli genome is a seventh of one percent the size of the human genome.

more... http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/04/13/the-future-of-epidemiology-next-gen-sequencing/

High school students design device to keep astronauts’ hearts healthy in space

Three high school seniors from Texas have designed an external pacemaker that may help reduce heart atrophy  in astronauts as they orbit the Earth. “After 180 days in space, astronauts’ muscles lose 40% of their capacity for physical work,” writes Camilo Ruiz, a senior at Cinco Ranch High School in Katy, Texas, who designed the “SPacemaker” along with two other Cinco Ranch students.
Ruiz’s team, The Moonwalking Manakins, is one of four that grabbed top honors at the annual Spirit of Innovation Challenge, sponsored by the Conrad Foundation, a non-profit aimed at sparking student interest in science, engineering and entrepreneurship.

for details, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/budding-scientist/2012/04/04/high-school-students-design-device-to-keep-astronauts-hearts-healthy-in-space/

Programmable Nanomedicine Cancer Treatment Shrinks Human Tumors

Scientists have spent the past few decades tinkering with nanopaticles, and recently they have been able to cover them with cancer-seeking proteins and load them with a tumor-busting drug. But these tiny particles, hundreds of which could fit across the width of a human hair, have so far failed to perform in humans.

A new tumor-targeting, nanoparticle-based compound called BIND-014 is now in clinical trials in people, after showing promise in both mice and monkeys. Although this first trial is small, with only 17 patients, and still ongoing, researchers are reporting some positive results, and no obvious major safety setbacks, according to a paper published online April 4 in Science Translational Medicine.

for complete article in Scientific American Blog:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/04/04/programmable-nanomedicine-cancer-treatment-shrinks-human-tumors/

Psychological ‘Growth’ Through War and Disease: Sometimes It’s Just a Cruel Delusion

Psychological ‘Growth’ Through War and Disease: Sometimes It’s Just a Cruel Delusion

Gary Stix at Scientific American Blogs Posts 

A week ago, The New York Times magazine ran an article on what psychologists call “post-traumatic growth.” An experience that can purportedly occur subsequent to PTSD, it might be best titled “The Oprah Moment” for non-clinicians. It entails an arduous life experience—combat, cancer—that, once confronted, is said to engender psychological transformation that affords a [...]