MS therapy shows promise, nationwide flu epidemic underway, and fabric may allow for first 'power suit'

Every weekday, Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society, picks the raddest articles from the mainstream media so we don't have to. Open wide: Today's Science in the News is piping hot.

MS Therapy Shows Promise in Test

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): An experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis that targets a portion of the immune system not previously subjected to therapy reduced damaging lesions of the nervous system by 91 percent and relapses of the disease by 58 percent, researchers report today. A single course of the drug, called rituximab, helped patients for the full 48 weeks of the trial and suggests a new way to treat relapsing-remitting MS, the most common form of the disabling disease. Researchers said they were still concerned about potential long-term side effects of the drug, which is used under the brand name Rituxan to treat non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and rheumatoid arthritis, like MS an autoimmune disease.

Flu Epidemic Under Way Nationwide

from Newsday: An influenza epidemic is under way nationwide, complicated by concerns involving the vaccine and a key medication used to fight the illness. "We call it a seasonal epidemic," said Dr. Joseph Bresee, chief of the epidemiology and prevention branch in the influenza division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In New York, Nassau and Suffolk counties are among those reporting high levels of flu activity to the state Health Department. Bresee said it is impossible to tell whether this winter's bout with the infection will be worse -- or milder -- than previous years because it takes the CDC months to calculate the number of hospitalizations and deaths. Few corners of the country have been left unscathed by the highly contagious respiratory illness ...

Fabric May Make the First Real Power Suit

from Nature News: Mobile phone battery running out mid-conversation? One day you might be able to make a few vigorous arm movements while wearing a nanowire electricity-generating shirt to keep the battery going. This is power-dressing in the real sense: nothing to do with shoulder pads or 1980s office dramas. Zhong Lin Wang and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have made a yarn out of nanofibres that produce charge when they are rubbed against one another. Materials woven from these yarns could be used for self-powering clothes, shoes or biological implants such as pacemakers. The work is published in Nature. Wang became frustrated by the number of nanodevices being invented without the concurrent development of similarly sized powering technology.

Two Reports at Odds on Biotech Crops

from the Washington Post (Registration Required): Take your pick: The widening adoption of genetically engineered crops by farmers around the world is reducing global pesticide use, increasing agricultural yields and bringing unprecedented prosperity and food security to millions of the world's poorest citizens. Or, it is fueling greater use of pesticides, putting crop yields at risk, driving small farmers out of business and decreasing global food security by giving a single company control over much of the world's seed supply. Dueling reports released yesterday -- one by a consortium largely funded by the biotech industry and the other by a pair of environmental and consumer groups -- came to those diametrically different conclusions. The assessments highlight the controversy that still envelops agricultural biotechnology 12 years after the first gene-altered crops debuted commercially.

New Dinos May Have Killed Like Sharks, Eaten Like Hyenas

from National Geographic News: Two 110-million-year-old fossils of meat-eating dinosaurs that once ruled the southern continents have been found in Africa, scientists announced. First discovered in 2000, the new species are theropods - two-legged carnivores - that lived in the same habitat and grew to about 25 feet long. Eocarcharia dinops, or "fierce-eyed dawn shark," was likely an ambush predator armed with massive, shark-like teeth. Kryptops palaios, or "old hidden face," is thought have been a hyena-like scavenger that feasted on carcasses. The dinosaurs were discovered in Africa's Sahara Desert by Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and a National Geographic Society Explorer-in-Residence. The bizarre-looking dinosaurs are described in the latest issue of the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

Aggressive Diabetes Treatment Affirmed in New Study

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required): Contradicting unexpected findings released last week by American researchers, an Australian team Wednesday said it found no evidence that aggressive treatment of diabetes in patients with heart disease increased their risk of death. Physicians and patients were shocked by last week's announcement because it seemed to contradict a long-held tenet of diabetes treatment: that reducing blood glucose levels as much as possible improves health. The new study, with nearly twice as much data as the American one and a longer follow-up time, provides some reassurance that the paradigm has not been overturned. But there are enough differences between the two studies to cloud the source of the discrepancy, experts said.

Bat Fossil Solves Evolution Poser

from BBC News Online: A fossil found in Wyoming has resolved a long-standing question about when bats gained their sonar-like ability to navigate and locate food. They found that flight came first, and only then did bats develop echolocation to track and trap their prey. A large number of experts had previously thought this happened the other way around. Details of the work by an international team of researchers is published in the prestigious journal Nature. Echolocation - the ability to emit high-pitched squeaks and hear, for example, the echo bouncing off flying insects as small as a mosquito - is one of the defining features of bats as a group.

"Junk" RNA May Have Played Role in Vertebrate Evolution

from Scientific American: Genetic material once dismissed as mere "junk" may in fact be responsible to the evolution of simple invertebrates into more complex organisms sporting backbones, according to a new study. Tiny snippets of the genome known as microRNA were long thought to be genomic refuse because they were transcribed from so-called "junk DNA," sections of the genome that do not carry information for making proteins responsible for various cellular functions. ... Now, researchers from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and the University of Bristol in England report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that these tiny genetic segments could be responsible for the evolution of animals with backbones ...

Sandpiper Sighting on Myanmar Coast Offers Sliver of Hope

from the Seattle Times: BANGKOK, Thailand (Associated Press) - Eighty-four spoon-billed sandpipers have been discovered in a coastal stretch of Myanmar, offering hope for saving the endangered birds, a conservation group said Wednesday. The discovery in early February comes only months after Russian researchers reported that numbers of the tiny birds - with speckled brow feathers and a distinctive spoon-shaped bill - had dropped 70 percent in the past few years in their breeding sites in Siberia and none had been seen this year in their traditional wintering sites in Bangladesh, Britain-based conservation group BirdLife International said. The World Conservation Union lists the bird as endangered with only 200 to 300 pairs left in the wild.

Delaying Prostate Care OK for Some Men

from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required): (Associated Press) - Older men with early-stage prostate cancer are not taking a big risk if they keep an eye on the disease instead of treating it right away, suggests the largest study to look at this issue since PSA tests became popular. Only 10 percent of the 9,000 men in the study who chose to delay or skip treatment had died of prostate cancer a decade later. The vast majority were alive without significantly worsening symptoms or had died of other causes. Even the 30 percent who eventually sought treatment were able to delay it for an average of 11 years.