Children who acquire four kinds of gut bacteria in the first three months of their lives can be protected from developing asthma, according to new research.

The four bacteria, called FLVR (Faecalibacterium, Lachnospira, Veillonella, and Rothia), are naturally acquired by most babies through exposure in their home surroundings. However, some infants miss out, and it’s those children who are at most risk of developing asthma, according to researchers from the University of British Columbia in Canada.
This research supports the hygiene hypothesis that we’re making our environment too clean. It shows that gut bacteria play a role in asthma, but it is early in life when the baby’s immune system is being established.
The researchers looked at faecal samples from 319 children who took part in the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development Study. The samples revealed that the three-month-old infants at high risk of developing asthma – determined by allergy tests to see if the children demonstrated wheezing – had lower amounts of FLVR bacteria than the kids who didn’t show such signs of developing the disease.

The researchers also found that by one year of age, the differences in gut bacteria between the high-risk and low-risk children had significantly lessened, suggesting that early exposure to FLVR bacteria in those first three months of life could be crucial in warding off asthma later on. The study emphasises that in that first 100 days the structure of the gut microbiome seems to be very important in influencing the immune responses that cause or protect us from asthma.
" Early infancy microbial and metabolic alterations affect risk of childhood asthma"
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/7/307/307ra152

http://allergen-nce.ca/research/strategy/child/

Good News: India Pledges to Curb Greenhouse Gas Growth
India has pledged to slash its emissions intensity relative to economic growth and make a massive push on clean energy by 2030 as part of its formal submission to the United Nations ahead of landmark global warming negotiations in Paris.

India’s vow to unconditionally cut emissions intensity 33 to 35 percent below 2005 levels and boost the share of non-fossil-fuel energy sources more than threefold as long as it receives assistance from Western countries was widely praised by the environmental community.

Jennifer Doudna, who invented a gene-editing tool that has taken the research world by storm, was named one of five laureates of the 2016 L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Awards in the field of life sciences.
The awards, given annually to one female scientist from each of five continents, were announced Oct. 2 in Paris by the L’Oréal Foundation and the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, which partner on the award.
Doudna and the other laureates will be honored at a ceremony on March 24, 2016, at the Sorbonne University’s Grand Amphitheatre in Paris. Each laureate will receive €100,000.

Doudna, the laureate from North America, is joined by European laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier. Doudna and Charpentier together discovered a unique technique used by bacteria to cut and kill viral DNA, and reengineered this system to cut any type of DNA, including human. First reported in 2012, the technology is being used worldwide to create potential genetic therapies for inherited disease, and in basic research to discover the causes of disease.
In the 18 years since the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards were founded, 92 women have been recognized and two have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, including Blackburn, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for work conducted at UC Berkeley.
http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/10/02/doudna-receives-women-in-scienc...

A diet high in processed fructose sabotages rats’ brains’ ability to heal after head trauma, UCLA neuroscientists report. Revealing a link between nutrition and brain health, the finding offers implications for the 5.3 million Americans living with a traumatic brain injury, or TBI.
Americans consume most of their fructose from processed foods sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup. The researchers found that processed fructose inflicts surprisingly harmful effects on the brain’s ability to repair itself after a head trauma.

Fructose also occurs naturally in fruit, which contains antioxidants, fiber and other nutrients that prevent the same damage.
The UCLA team found that fructose altered a wealth of biological processes in the animals’ brains after trauma. The sweetener interfered with the ability of neurons to communicate with each other, rewire connections after injury, record memories and produce enough energy to fuel basic functions. The findings suggest that fructose disrupts plasticity — the creation of fresh pathways between brain cells that occurs when we learn or experience something new.
Earlier research has revealed how fructose harms the body through its role in contributing to cancer, diabetes, obesity and fatty liver.
Sources of fructose in the western diet include honey, cane sugar (sucrose) and high-fructose corn syrup, an inexpensive liquid sweetener. Made from cornstarch, the liquid syrup is widely added as a sweetener and preservative to processed foods, including soft drinks, condiments, applesauce and baby food.
source: University of California Los Angeles

In the UCLA study, is published on 2nd Oct., 2015, in the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism.

Medicine Nobel 2015 prizes were given to William Campbell (Ireland), Satoshi Omura (Japan) and  Youyou Tu (China) for their discoveries of treatments against parasites.

In the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was given to Youyou Tu, who consulted traditional texts on herbs to help isolate and purify the malaria drug artemisinin. The medication saves some 100,000 lives each year in Africa as well as restoring the health of countless others around the world. The other half of the Nobel prize was awarded to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura for their discovery of Avermectin, whose many derivatives were first used as veterinary treatments before being developed into a drug that has stopped the spread of river blindness in many parts of western Africa.

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Discoverers of Shape-Shifting Particles Win the Nobel Physics Prize

Malaria in pregnancy linked to brain damage in babies
Babies whose mothers contract malaria during pregnancy could suffer later problems, including depression and learning difficulties, according to a study done in mice.

The study found that unborn babies whose mothers were infected with malaria had lower levels of the substances needed for normal brain development and function. It was published in the journal PLOS Pathogens last week (24 September). This still has to be confirmed in human beings.

These neurocognitive impairments were associated with decreased tissue levels of neurotransmitters in regions of the brain linked to the observed deficits. Disruption of maternal C5a complement receptor signaling restored the levels of neurotransmitters and rescued the associated cognitive phenotype observed in malaria-exposed offspring.
The reduction was thought to be caused by excess activation of an immune response in the mother that is used to tackle malaria, but that also appears to interfere with the production of these substances, the researchers say.

As a result of their mothers’ malaria infection, the mice developed symptoms of depression and cognitive impairment after birth, such as memory problems and reduced social interaction, the study says.
The research was carried out to investigate how malaria might affect unborn children. This is particularly important as pregnant women have a higher risk than other women of being infected with the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and of developing a severe form of the infection. This is because pregnancy reduces their immunity to malaria.
The research team also tried to stop malaria from harming unborn baby mice by blocking the immune response that had become excessively activated. This restored the key brain substances to their normal levels, so the baby mice no longer developed symptoms of depression and mental impairments after birth.

This treatment would be too expensive to roll out on a large scale in humans.
http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.p...

DNA Repair Methods gets 2015 Chemistry Nobel Prize

Three scientists who found ways that cells fix damaged DNA—staving off cancer and other diseases—have won this year's prize
The coveted prize has gone to Tomas Lindahl from the Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory in Hertfordshire, England; Paul Modrich from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University School of Medicine in North Carolina in the United States; and Aziz Sancar from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, also in the U.S.
All the researchers, working independently over the last 40 years, described three different mechanisms that create errors in DNA—the molecule that controls cell behavior—and the different ways that chemical and biological processes fix many of these problems.

All forms of cancer start with DNA damage. If you do not have DNA repair, we would have a lot more cancer. That’s how important this is.
The understanding that we have of these mechanisms help us design drugs to repair all sorts of DNA errors. There are also several genetic diseases caused by the inability of cells to fix DNA properly, for instance, and work on the repair methods aids understanding of these ailments and how to treat them.
Scientists used to believe that DNA molecules were extremely stable. After all, they had to reliably transmit genetic information from generation down to generation. Then in the 1970s Lindahl demonstrated that the neat double helix and its components constantly decays. Every day, hundreds of those components, the DNA building block chemicals abbreviated as A, T, C, and G, get knocked out of their places. If the process continued unabated, the development of life on Earth would have been impossible. This insight led Lindahl to discover a series of enzymes and reactions, called base excision repair, which constantly works to fight this decay. The C building block, for instance, is repeatedly broken down into another molecule that should not be in DNA. The enzymes Lindahl found identify that broken molecule and rebuild it into a C.

Sancar found that cells use another technique to repair damage to DNA caused by ultraviolet light, the same thing that gives you a sunburn. This DNA fix is called nucleotide excision repair. People born with defects in this repair system will develop skin cancer if they are exposed to sunlight. Excision enzymes cut out the DNA lesions. The cell also uses this repair system to correct DNA damage people get after they are born, when they encounter mutagenic substances.

Finally, Modrich found out how a cell corrects errors that occur during a vital biological process: Cell division, when DNA is replicated. This copying process is supposed to produce identical strands of DNA but often there are stretches of the new stand that do not match up. The set of cellular chemicals that Modrich found, a complex called mismatch repair, scans the strands and fixes them, reducing the error frequency during replication by about a thousand times during each replication cycle.

Without all of these repair mechanisms, we would not be long-lived.

This year’s prize is about the cell’s toolbox for repairing DNA.

Researchers modify more than 60 genes with gene editing techniques in an effort to enable organ transplants from pigs into humans.
A steady supply of human organs for transplantation by growing them in pigs is what scientists always wanted to do. But concerns about rejection by the human immune system and infection by viruses embedded in the pig genome have put breaks on this research. Bymodifying more than 60 genes from pig embryos—ten times more than have been edited in any other animal—researchers believe they may have produced a suitable non-human organ donor now.
The work was presented on 5 October at a meeting of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington DC on human gene editing. Geneticist George Church of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, announced that he and colleagues had used the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology to inactivate 62 porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) in pig embryos. These viruses are embedded in all pigs’ genomes and cannot be treated or neutralized. It is feared that they could cause disease in human transplant recipients.
Church’s group also modified more than 20 genes in a separate set of pig embryos, including genes that encode proteins that sit on the surface of pig cells and are known to trigger a human immune response or cause blood clotting. Church declined to reveal the exact genes, however, because the work is as yet unpublished. Eventually, pigs intended for organ transplants would need both these modifications and the PERV deletions.
Cutting multiple genes will also be useful for human therapies because many diseases with a genetic component involve more than one gene.
http://www.nature.com/news/gene-editing-record-smashed-in-pigs-1.18525

Do you know that elephants rarely get cancer? And science may have found a part of the answer to this question 'why'!

According to a pair of papers independently published this week. Elephants have 20 copies of a gene called p53 (or, more properly, TP53), in their genome, where humans and other mammals have only one. The gene is known as a tumour suppressor, and it snaps to action when cells suffer DNA damage, churning out copies of its associated p53 protein and either repairing the damage or killing off the cell.

Joshua Schiffman, a paediatric oncologist and scientist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, first heard about Peto’s paradox three years ago at an evolution conference, when Carlo Maley, an evolutionary biologist now at Arizona State University in Tempe, revealed he had found multiple copies of TP53 in the African elephant's genome.

The researchers found that elephants produce extra copies of the p53 protein, and that elephant blood cells seem exquisitely sensitive to DNA damage from ionizing radiation. The animals' cells carry out a controlled self-destruction called apoptosis in response to DNA damage at much higher rates than do human cells. Schiffman suggests that, instead of repairing the DNA damage, compromised elephant cells have evolved to kill themselves to nip nascent tumours in the bud. “This is a brilliant solution to Peto’s paradox,” he says.

http://www.nature.com/news/how-elephants-avoid-cancer-1.18534

Schiffman and Lynch’s teams have now independently revealed their findings — Schiffman's in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Lynch's in a paper posted to the bioRxiv.org preprint site, but which is in review at the journal eLife.

Laos is facing again vaccine-derived polio, the World Health Organization said on 12th Oct., 2015.
The WHO said an 8-year-old boy died of the disease on Sept. 11, and genetic sequencing suggested the virus strain has been circulating in the area of Bolikhamxay province, which has low immunization rates, for more than two years.
A global vaccination campaign has all but beaten the wild polio virus, with only Pakistan and Afghanistan reporting cases of wild polio virus infection this year.

Specialists have warned that vaccine-derived cases - such as this one in Laos and previous ones in Ukraine and Mali - could hamper progress towards global eradication.
Ending polio requires eliminating both wild and vaccine-derived polio.

It added, however, that because of relatively limited travel to and from this area, and because of extra immunization campaigns planned in response, the risk of international spread of this polio strain from Laos is low.

Laos has been free of the wild polio virus since 1993, but poor immunization rates mean people are at risk of infection with strains of the virus that can mutate in sewage after being excreted by immunized children.

The risk of vaccine-derived polio cases can be avoided by switching from using live oral polio vaccines (OPV) - which are highly effective, cheap, easy to deliver but contain live virus, - to "inactivated" vaccines (IPV), which are not effective for fighting endemic disease but contain no live virus.

The WHO said the use of OPV is being scaled down in a phased manner as countries eliminate circulating wild polio virus strains.
- Reuters

Update on Ebola: 15th Oct., 2015

U.K. Ebola “Relapse” Case Takes Virus Specialists to Uncharted Waters according to Reuters

Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey is in critical condition following "totally unprecedented" return of symptoms
The case of Pauline Cafferkey, the first person known to have recovered from Ebola and then suffer an apparently life-threatening relapse, is taking scientists into uncharted territory.

The Scottish nurse's critically ill situation, described as "staggering" by one British virologist, signals just how complex and formidable a foe the Ebola virus may turn out to be now that scientists have the chance to study its survivors.

Previous studies and preliminary data from research in survivors of the vast West African outbreak have detected Ebola virus in semen, breast milk, vaginal secretions, spinal fluid and fluids around the eyes.

But scientific literature has never documented an Ebola relapse case before, meaning Cafferkey's is likely to generate great fear and anxiety for the 17,000 or so other Ebola survivors across West Africa.
This has never been observed before. Is this a one off? A very rare event? Or is this going to be quite common? The honest answer is we don't know!
Until researchers can study in detail and in large numbers of people the virus's long-term effects, each survivor, be they healthy or sickly, will be able to teach virologists more.
Preliminary data published this week has already forced a re-think on how long male survivors should be advised to abstain from sex or use condoms, with a study showing traces of Ebola can be found in semen of some men at least nine months after they first became ill.

Even if you don't have the virus in your bloodstream it can be hiding out. And we need to be aware of that because it's setting up the stage for potentially new outbreaks.

Dietary supplements send 23,000 people, many of them children, to the emergency room in the U.S. each year, according to a new estimate reported in a new study based on a federal database of adverse events reported at 63 hospitals over a 10-year period., released online October 14 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Just over 9% require hospitalization. Many patients report heart symptoms.
According to doctors who treated them the supplements include herbal products, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and other complementary nutrition products hawked for a wide range of uses, often with little or no testing to back up claims.

The new study illustrates the idea that something that's 'natural' is not necessarily safe, and these products do not come without risk.
At these hospitals, the research team identified 3,667 emergency room visits linked to the supplements. That extrapolates to 23,005 adverse events nationwide each year, including an estimated 2,154 hospitalizations.

Unsupervised children under age 5 accounted for 21.6% of the visits.
Adults ages 20 to 34 made up an even bigger proportion of victims - 28%.

Weight-loss products accounted for an estimated 3,339 emergency room visits each year by women, nearly three times the number for men.

Among males, an estimated 567 visits were attributed to products designed for sexual enhancement and 368 were for body-building products. Comparable numbers for women were so small the researchers couldn't come up with a reliable estimate.

Heart symptoms were the chief complaint in 43% of people taking weight-loss products, 46% of patients taking energy products, 50% taking body-building products, and 37% taking sexual-enhancement products.

What's most concerning is the age of people coming in with cardiovascular complications or symptoms. They are in their 20s to 30s, which shows there are risks to these products.
Among older adults, swallowing problems caused nearly 40% of emergency department visits for supplement-related adverse events, with micronutrients implicated in more than 80% of these visits, the researchers said.

A person’s brain activity appears to be as unique as his or her fingerprints, a new Yale-led imaging study shows. These brain “connectivity profiles” alone allow researchers to identify individuals from the fMRI images of brain activity of more than 100 people, according to the study published Oct. 12 in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Finn and co-first author Xilin Shen, under the direction of R. Todd Constable, professor of diagnostic radiology and neurosurgery at Yale, compiled fMRI data from 126 subjects who underwent six scan sessions over two days. Subjects performed different cognitive tasks during four of the sessions. In the other two, they simply rested. Researchers looked at activity in 268 brain regions: specifically, coordinated activity between pairs of regions. Highly coordinated activity implies two regions are functionally connected. Using the strength of these connections across the whole brain, the researchers were able to identify individuals from fMRI data alone, whether the subject was at rest or engaged in a task. They were also able to predict how subjects would perform on tasks.

Finn said she hopes that this ability might one day help clinicians predict or even treat neuropsychiatric diseases based on individual brain connectivity profiles.

Functional connectome fingerprinting: identifying individuals using patterns of brain connectivity
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.4135.html

Do you think you are getting less sleep because of modern day lifestyles? But did you know you are not getting lesser sleep than hunter-gatherers, I mean our ancestors?

New evidence reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on October 15 shows that three ancient groups of hunter-gatherers--living in different parts of the world without any of those trappings of modern life--don't get any more sleep than we do.

Those traditional people sleep a little under 6.5 hours a night on average. They don't take regular naps. They don't go to sleep at dark, either. In other words, their sleep habits don't look so different from ours, although they usually do wake up before the sun rises.

The short sleep in these populations challenges the belief that sleep has been greatly reduced in the 'modern world. This has important implications for the idea that we need to take sleeping pills because sleep has been reduced from its 'natural level' by the widespread use of electricity, TV, the Internet, and so on.

To get a handle on how people slept before the modern era, Siegel and his colleagues looked to three traditional human hunter-gatherer societies: the Hadza of Tanzania, the San of Namibia, and the Tsimane of Bolivia. The researchers recorded the sleeping habits of 94 individuals around the clock to collect data representing 1,165 days in all.

What they found was a surprising similarity across those three groups. "Despite varying genetics, histories, and environments, we find that all three groups show a similar sleep organization, suggesting that they express core human sleep patterns, probably characteristic of pre-modern-era Homo sapiens.

Group sleep time averaged between 5.7 and 7.1 hours, with between 6.9 and 8.5 hours between the beginning and end of the sleep period. Those amounts are at the low end of durations reported in "industrial societies."

Hunter-gatherers sleep an hour more in the winter than they do in the summer. Although they lack electric lights, none of the groups went to sleep with the sun. On average, they stayed up a little over three hours after the sun went down and woke up before sunrise.

It appears that their sleep time may have more to do with temperature than with light. Those ancient groups all went to sleep as the temperature fell and slept through the coldest part of the night.

There is one important way in which hunter-gatherers aren't like us: very few of them suffer from chronic insomnia.

Natural Sleep and Its Seasonal Variations in Three Pre-industrial Societies. Yetish et al. Current Biology, 2015.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2815%2901157-4

Sunscreen Is Killing Coral Reefs Around The World
Sunscreen may protect against skin cancer and sunburn, but it is killing coral reefs across the world, according to a team of international scientists based out of the University of Central Florida.
The researchers found high concentrations of oxybenzone, a common UV-filtering compound, in the waters around popular coral reefs in Hawaii and the Caribbean. In addition to killing the coral, the chemical also damages the DNA in adults and deforms the DNA in corals that are in the larval stage, which reduces corals' chances of proper development, according to a news release.
The use of oxybenzone-containing products needs to be seriously deliberated in islands and areas where coral reef conservation is a critical issue. We have lost at least 80 percent of the coral reefs in the Caribbean. Any small effort to reduce oxybenzone pollution could mean that a coral reef survives a long, hot summer, or that a degraded area recovers. Everyone wants to build coral nurseries for reef restoration, but this will achieve little if the factors that originally killed off the reef remain or intensify in the environment.
The use of oxybenzone-containing products needs to be seriously deliberated in islands and areas where coral reef conservation is a critical issue. We have lost at least 80 percent of the coral reefs in the Caribbean.  Any small effort to reduce oxybenzone pollution could mean that a coral reef survives a long, hot summer, or that a degraded area recovers. Everyone wants to build coral nurseries for reef restoration, but this will achieve little if the factors that originally killed off the reef remain or intensify in the environment.

Deep-sea bacteria could help neutralize greenhouse gas

Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) founder-director P M Bhargava on Wednesday became the first Indian scientist to join the bandwagon of writers and filmmakers returning their awards when he told TOI that he will return his Padma Bhushan to protest against "the government's attack on rationalism, reasoning and science".

Bhargava's decision came hours after 107 senior scientists signed an online statement on Wednesday to join the chorus of protests by other scientists, artists and writers.

"The Padma Bhushan had a special place in my collection of more than 100 awards for science. Now I feel no sentimental attachment to it when the government tries to institutionalise religion and curtail freedom and scientific spirit," said Bhargava, who received the Padma award in 1986. He said it was a personal decision and that he had no idea if other scientists would return their awards.

The Indian Constitution in Article 51 A (h) demands ... that we develop scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform. Unfortunately, what we are witnessing instead is the active promotion of irrational and sectarian thought.

Declaring solidarity with writers who returned their Sahitya Akademi awards, the statement said, "We scientists now join our voices to theirs, to assert that the Indian people will not accept such attacks on reason, science and our plural culture."We appeal to all other sections of society to raise their voice against the assault on reason and scientific temper we are witnessing in India today. The scientists have not sent their statement to any government agency or minister. Rather, they want the government to take note of their protest after reading what the scientist community feels about the state of affairs. Many of the scientists, who are working in the government institutions, including the Delhi-based Indian National Science Academy (INSA), have similar views.

"We are very much with the fellow scientists who have raised the issue of growing intolerance," said a senior scientist of the INSA .

-Times of India

All our fears are coming true! Yes, now we hear about Plastic Contamination of Table Salt in China. Supermarket products have tiny plastic particles, probably from ocean pollution attached to sea salt.

People in China who season their meals with sea salt may be unwittingly consuming microscopic pieces of plastic pollution.

When researchers analyzed fifteen brands of common table salt bought at supermarkets across China, they found among the grains of seasoning micro-sized particles of the common water bottle plastic polyethylene terephthalate, as well as polyethylene, cellophane, and a wide variety of other plastics (Env. Sci.& Tech. 2015, DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.5b03163).

The highest level of plastic contamination was found in salt sourced from the ocean: The researchers measured more than 1,200 particles of plastic per lb of sea salt. The team, led by Huahong Shi of East China Normal University also found tiny particles of plastic in salt sourced from briny lakes, briny wells, and salt mines, although at lower levels—between 15 and 800 particles/ lb.

Shi and colleagues argue that plastic contamination originates from the vast amount of plastic pollution floating around marine environments where sea salt is sourced. For instance, bits of plastics might abrade from larger objects, such as water bottles, dumped in the water or they might come from cosmetic products, such as face washes, that use plastic microbeads as exfoliants. The researchers add that other points of entry for plastic contamination are also possible, including during salt processing, drying, and packaging.

Given that manufacturers typically extract sea salt from ocean water by evaporation—a process that leaves everything behind but water—microplastic contamination of sea salt is likely prevalent outside China as well.

Feeling Scary? Then stop using plastic and products made from it as much as possible.

A new study from scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) helps explain why cancer metastasis is so hard to stop. The researchers found an additional mechanism explaining how a molecule long linked to cancer progression appears to “seed” the body with metastatic cells long before doctors would typically detect a primary tumor. The molecule, known as epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), encourages blood vessel growth early in tumor development—not only feeding the primary tumor, but also providing vehicles for cancer to escape the primary tumor site and travel throughout the body.

“When cancer cells have high levels of EGFR, the tumor has a lot of new, angiogenic blood vessels,” said TSRI Assistant Professor Elena Deryugina, senior author of the new study. “And these vessels are very welcoming for tumor cells and facilitate their dissemination from the very early stages of tumor development.”

The study was published recently in the journal Neoplasia.
When we downregulated EGFR so it wasn’t expressed anymore, the tumor cells were not able to disseminate efficiently,” said TSRI Research Associate Petra Minder, who was first author of the new study. “This gave us a hint that EGFR plays a role in intravasation [an early step of metastatic dissemination during which tumor cells enter angiogenic blood vessels]—we were just not sure how.

The new study shows how EGFR levels make a difference. In experiments using chick embryos, the researchers found that EGFR signaling starts a chain reaction inside tumor cells, ultimately resulting in the release of a molecule called vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), known to be active in almost all forms of solid tumors. Released VEGF then binds to endothelial cells, inducing the growth of new blood capillaries and vessels within a developing tumor.

For many years, scientists had seen small blood vessels growing in early-stage tumors, but it was thought these vessels were mostly for supplying tumors with oxygen and nutrients.

“Now we have learned that these newly formed vessels are used by tumor cells for dissemination because of their certain structural properties,” added Deryugina.

The new study shows that these vessels are actually useful for tumors because they are dilated and unusually permeable. Tumor cells can slip into the vessels, escape the primary tumor site and lodge throughout the body. Escaped cells often lie dormant or grow very slowly, not appearing as metastases until after the primary tumor is detected.

The results could also explain why EGFR-inhibiting drugs have had limited success in human patients. While these drugs target EGFR’s effects in primary tumor growth, they don’t address EGFR’s role in blood vessel growth and early metastatic seeding.
The researchers said the findings highlight the urgent need for new methods to diagnose cancers early and new treatments to fight growing metastases.
- http://www.neoplasia.com/article/S1476-5586%2815%2900098-6/abstract

Specialized Cells Help Each Other Survive During Times of Stress
A team led by scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the University of Pittsburgh has shown for the first time how one set of specialized cells survives under stress by manipulating the behavior of key immune system cells.

The new study, published recently in the journal Nature Communications, involved mesenchymal stem cells—which live in bone marrow and can differentiate into several different cell types used in bone and connective tissue—and macrophages—immune cells that usually respond to infectious agents or damaged cells by engulfing and devouring them.

“This is the first time anyone has shown how mesenchymal stem cells provide for their own survival by recruiting and then suppressing normal macrophage activity,” said TSRI Professor Donald G. Phinney, who led the study with University of Pittsburgh Associate Professor Luis A. Ortiz. “This finally puts the crosstalk between these cells into the context of cell survival.”

The team’s experiments showed that, like all other cells, mesenchymal stem cells experience stress due to tissue injury and inflammation. When this stress results in damage to the mitochondria (the power houses of the cell), the mesenchymal stem cells recruit the immune system’s macrophages—but in an unusual way.

By reengineering macrophage action with secreted microRNA, the stem cells protect themselves from being targeted and instead package their damaged mitochondria into small sacs known as vesicles and send them out to be engulfed by the macrophage.

Once macrophages subsume the damaged mitochondria, the macrophages are able to repurpose the mitochondria for their own use, replenishing their own energy supplies. Blocking the exchange of damaged mitochondrial to macrophages causes death of the stem cells. Therefore, the process is mutually beneficial.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151007/ncomms9472/full/ncomms9472...

In direct current electrons flow in one and only one direction (zero frequency). So if you happen to close the circuit by any kind of physical contact forming a low resistance path, the current would start flowing through you. In other words you will be stuck to the conductor as if you just held onto a super.... duper glue. In the meanwhile all your muscles would contract and the heart would stop beating because of the contraction plus there would be other major burns. Eventually you'll die!!
In DC the body just contracts once touched, but in AC the power is made up of frequencies of currents with highs and lows. Thus the body if touched would experience series of contractions depending on the frequency of power. That is like multiple dc shocks in a small gap, and that too the current flows in both directions alternatively. So yes, this kind of shock would totally destroy your muscles. But yeah, if you are lucky enough you can detach yourself from the circuit when the current reaches its 0 and changes direction.

But both AC and DC are lethal.

Effects of an AC or DC Currents on the Human Body

The three basic factors that determine what kind of shock you experience are the amplitude of the current, the duration of the current passing through the body, and the frequency.
Direct Currents actually have zero frequency, as the current is constant. However, there are physiological effects during electrocution no matter what type of current.
The factor deciding the effects of the AC and DC current is the path the current takes through the body. If it is from the hand to the foot, it does not pass through the heart, and then the effects are not so lethal.
However DC current will make a single continuous contraction of the muscles compared to AC current, which will make a series of contractions depending on the frequency it is supplied at. In terms of fatalities, both kill but more milliamps are required of DC current than AC current at the same voltage.
If the current takes the path from hand to hand thus passing through the heart it can result in fibrillation of the heart. Fibrillation is a condition when all the heart muscles start moving independently in a disorganized manner rather than in a state of coordination. It affects the ability of the heart to pump blood, resulting in brain damage and eventual cardiac arrest.
Either AC or DC currents can cause fibrillation of the heart at high enough levels. This typically takes place at 30 mA of AC (rms, 60 Hz) or 300 – 500 mA of DC.
Though both AC and DC currents and shock are lethal, more DC current is required to have the same effect as AC current. For example, if you are being electrocuted or shocked 0.5 to 1.5 milliamps of AC 60 Hz current is required and up to 4 mA of DC current is required. For the let-go threshold in AC a current of 3 to 22 mA is required against 15 to 88 of DC current.

Controlling mosquitoes the natural way: Insect-control experts are now hoping that deploying the laboratory mosquitoes will eventually slash the number of wild mosquitoes in people’s neighbourhoods.
A new plan to release thousands of mosquitoes in people's backyards in Los Angeles is underway. The bugs—all males—would not bite humans like females do, and area officials hoped these particular insects would block further reproduction of their kind. To some local residents the approach seemed a bit counterintuitive at first. Yet they were told the method would help curb pesticide use while simultaneously beating back their mosquito population.

The bugs to be released were not genetically modified. But they were not exactly garden-variety mosquitoes, either. The male mosquitoes were raised in a laboratory where they were infected with Wolbachia, a natural bacterium that would effectively sterilize them. When the males are released into people’s backyards and mate with wild females, the resulting eggs—for reasons not yet fully understood—simply will not hatch, leading to fewer mosquitoes.
The biology of how Wolbachia interact with their hosts is a bit complex. If a male mosquito with Wolbachia mates with an uninfected female, then their eggs will not hatch. That is the key to Dobson’s approach. Yet if two mosquitoes that both have Wolbachia mate, then their resulting eggs will hatch as normal, although the offspring will potentially harbor Wolbachia. Basically, their lives will go on as usual and they will be able to reproduce. Similarly, if an infected female mates with an uninfected male, then their resulting eggs will also hatch as normal—although again, the offspring will potentially also be infected.

This is not the first time Wolbachia has been auditioned as a way to hamper the spread of mosquito-borne diseases—scientists have previously used a strain of the bacterium to curb the spread of dengue.
- Scientific American

183 scientists sign letter asking BMJ to retract its bogus nutrition investigation

The investigation has 'no place in the pages of a prominent scientific journal'
More than 180 scientists from around the world have signed a letter urging the British Medical Journal to retract its bogus investigation of the 2015 US dietary guidelines report. As The Verge previously reported, the investigation contains multiple misleading statements and factual inaccuracies. But today's letter, which was sent to the BMJ this morning, doesn't mince words. It outlines the many problems with the article, and states that the investigation is "so riddled with errors" that it has "no place in the pages of a prominent scientific journal."
The US government publishes a revised set of dietary guidelines every five years. These guidelines are very important; they affect how companies label food, what scientists focus on in their research, and what students eat in school. But in September, the BMJ published an investigation that went after the report that informs those guidelines; it was written by Nina Teicholz, author of a book entitled The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. The article suggested that the committee responsible for the report "abandoned established methods for most of its analyses," overlooking a number of important studies in the process. The article also stated that the committee had "deleted meat" from its list of recommended foods. However, both these statements are untrue.

Unless the BMJ retracts the investigation, many of these errors will likely still be used by the meat industry to suppress the committee's advice on lowering the consumption of red meat.
A number of scientists have told me that it's mind-boggling that the BMJ would publish this article critiquing a report by a panel by well-respected scientists without even asking the panel to respond," says Bonnie Liebman, the director of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the person spearheading the effort to get the journal to retract the investigation. It took the BMJ two days to publish a response from the panel.
In September, a number of news outlets — including Time, Newsweek, and Mother Jones — reported the story without questioning the investigation's faulty reporting. The fact that both the BMJ and Teicholz said that they stood by the article surely did not help.
http://cspinet.org/bmj-retraction-letter.html
http://www.theverge.com/science/2015/11/5/9675598/bmj-183-scientist...

Scientists tinker with evolution to save Hawaii coral reefs
Hawaii researchers accelerate evolution in attempt to save Hawaii's coral reefs
Scientists at a research center on Hawaii's Coconut Island have embarked on an experiment to grow "super coral" that they hope can withstand the hotter and more acidic oceans that are expected with global warming.
When coral is stressed by changing environmental conditions, it expels the symbiotic algae that live within it and the animal turns white or bright yellow, a process called bleaching.
If the organisms are unable to recover from these bleaching events, especially when they recur over several consecutive years, the coral will die.
The researchers are taking the coral to their center on the 29-acre isle, once a retreat for the rich and famous and home to television's Gilligan's Island, and slowly exposing them to slightly more stressful water.

They bathe chunks of coral that they've already identified as having strong genes in water that mimics the warmer and more acidic oceans. They are also taking resilient strains and breeding them with one another, helping perpetuate those stronger traits. They have given them experiences that we think are going to raise their ability to survive stress.

The theory they are testing is called assisted evolution, and while it has been used for thousands of years on other plants and animals, the concept has not been applied to coral living in the wild.
-AP

A parasite's cancerous cells can give human beings cancer! Yes, true. This really has happened!
In a rare case, a patient’s weakened immune system may have let tapeworm spread disease
A 41-year-old man in Medellín, Columbia, went to the doctor complaining of fever, cough, fatigue and weight loss that had lasted several months. He had been already infected with AIDS and had a very weak immune system by then. Scans revealed tumors in his lungs, liver, adrenal glands, lymph nodes and other spots in his body. The disease looked like cancer, but it puzzled doctors: the small cells in the growths weren’t human cancer cells. They were much smaller!

DNA analysis revealed a shock: The cancer cells came from dwarf tapeworms (Hymenolepiasis nana), pathologist Atis Muehlenbachs of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and colleagues report in the Nov. 5 New England Journal of Medicine. Contagious cancers affect dogs, Tasmanian devils and clams, but this is the first time researchers have found a parasite living in him giving a person cancer.

HIV infection had weakened the man’s immune system so that tapeworm stem cells could grow unchecked, the researchers speculate. Mutations then turned the stem cells into cancer. The case raises concerns that people with weakened immune systems may be in danger of contracting similar tapeworm cancers. “This is a rare disease,” Muehlenbachs says, but “we don’t know how rare.”

A new confinement state for plasma was discovered

The National Institutes of Natural Sciences National Institute for Fusion Science applied the "Momentary Heating Propagation Method" to the DIII-D tokamak device operated for the United States Office of Science, Department of Energy, by the General Atomics and made the important discovery of a new plasma confinement state. This discovery was introduced in the November 4, 2015, issue of Scientific Reports, a journal of the British science journal Nature group, in an article titled "Self-regulated oscillation of transport and topology of magnetic islands in toroidal plasmas." Seeking to achieve fusion energy, research on high-temperature and high-density plasma confinement by magnetic fields is being conducted around the world. In a magnetically confined plasma, as the core temperature of the plasma increases, the flow of disturbed plasma called turbulence emerges. Turbulence does not stop at the place of its generation, and moves circumferentially like a surge of waves.

In magnetically confined plasmas twofold confinement areas called magnetic islands exist. In these areas there is no temperature gradient that results in the source of turbulence. For that reason turbulence generated outside the magnetic island where a temperature gradient exists enters into the magnetic island, and the confinement state inside the magnetic island will be determined depending upon the intensity of turbulence. In future fusion plasma, too, it will be extremely important to improve the magnetic island's confinement state. Further, even in solar plasmas, it has been indicated from solar flare emissions that magnetic islands may exist. Thus, research on turbulence in magnetic islands is an extremely important topic.

Professor Katsumi Ida, Assistant professor Tatsuya Kobayashi, and the LHD experiment group, together with Professor Shigeru Inagaki at Kyushu University, have, together with Dr. T. Evans, a DIII-D senior researcher, discovered for the first time in the world a new confinement state inside a magnetic island by applying the "momentary heating propagation method" to the DIII-D plasma. The "momentary heating propagation method" allows the plasma confinement performance (adiabaticity) to be diagnosed from the amplitude of temperature variations and the propagation speed caused by the momentary heating.

This discovery, because it is essential for improving the confinement of the fusion reactor plasma, will be an important compass pointing in the direction of future fusion research.

These research results were published in the British academic science journal Scientific Reports (online edition) of the Nature group on November 4, 2015, and is widely available.

Brain Too Can Get Fossilised

Scientists have long maintained that brains do not fossilise but new research has provided the strongest evidence yet that it is possible. In fact, the brains of a set of 520-million-year-old arthropods did just that.

The species, Fuxianhuia protensa, is an extinct arthropod that roamed the seafloor about 520 million years ago. It would have looked something like a very simple shrimp.

“Each of the fossils found at Chengjiang Shales fossil-rich sites in southwest China revealed F protensa’s ancient brain looked a lot like a modern crustacean’s,” said Nicholas Strausfeld, a Regents’ professor in the department of neuroscience at the University of Arizona.

He and his team found that the brains were preserved as flattened carbon films.

This led the research team to a convincing explanation as to how and why neural tissue fossilises.

The only way for an object to be fossilised is for it to be rapidly buried.

Hungry scavengers cannot eat a carcass if the brain is buried faster and as long as the water lacks in oxygen so a buried creature’s tissues escapes being consumed by bacteria as well.

Strausfeld and his collaborators suspect F. protensa was buried by rapid, underwater mudslides a scenario they experimentally recreated by burying sandworms and cockroaches in mud.

According to Strausfeld, the brain withstood the pressure from being rapidly buried under thick mud because the nervous system must have been remarkably dense.

In fact, tissues of nervous systems, including brains, are densest in living arthropods.

In the paper, Strausfeld and Xiaoya Ma from China’s Yunnan University and Gregory Edgecombe from the Natural History Museum in London analysed seven newly discovered fossils of the same species to find, in each, traces of what was undoubtedly a brain.

Strausfeld is now working to elucidate the origin and evolution of brains over half a billion years in the past.

“People, especially scientists, make assumptions. The fun thing about science, actually, is to demolish them,” Strausfeld noted in the paper published in the journal Current Biology.

Scientists breach brain barrier to treat sick patient
For the first time, doctors have breached the human brain's protective layer to deliver cancer-fighting drugs.

The Canadian team used tiny gas-filled bubbles, injected into the bloodstream of a patient, to punch temporary holes in the blood-brain barrier.

A beam of focused ultrasound waves applied to the skull made the bubbles vibrate and push their way through, along with chemotherapy drugs.

Six to 10 more patients will undergo the same procedure as part of a trial.

Experts said the experimental technique used at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre was exciting because it meant doctors might be able to give cancer patients potent drugs that otherwise would not work.
The same non-invasive method could also be used for other brain diseases, such as dementia and Parkinson's.
Blood-brain barrier

The blood-brain barrier keeps pathogens and toxins away from the central nervous system. But this tightly packed layer of cells, which separates the brain from its blood vessels, can be a hindrance if you want to deliver drugs into the brain.

The Sunnybrook team temporarily ripped holes in the barrier to allow chemotherapy a safe passage through.
The patient was given an intravenous infusion of chemotherapy followed by a small dose of the micro-bubbles that would punch a way through once they reached the target area of the brain and the ultrasound beam was switched on.

Brain scans suggest the treatment went to plan, and the researchers will soon examine a small part Ms Hall's tumour (removed surgically the day after the therapy) to confirm how much of the chemotherapy penetrated.
"Opening the blood-brain barrier using focused ultrasound beams has been a goal of researchers for about a decade, with the Toronto group being at its forefront, and it is exciting to see this reaching the clinic at last.

"The use of ultrasound for enhancing the local delivery of drugs to a number of different targets in the body is being investigated by a number of centres around the world, including the UK, and shows particular promise in the field of cancer chemotherapy."

Turning the tide ... using the worst thing happened to your work to do your best... How scientists use out of control satellites to test a theory...

Two satellites that were accidentally launched into the wrong orbit will be repurposed to make the most stringent test to date of a prediction made by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity—that clocks run more slowly the closer they are to heavy objects.

The satellites, operated by the European Space Agency (ESA), were mislaunched last year by a Russian Soyuz rocket that put them into elliptical, rather than circular, orbits. This left them unfit for their intended use as part of a European global-navigation system called Galileo.

But the two crafts still have atomic clocks on board. According to general relativity, the clocks' 'ticking' should slow down as the satellites move closer to Earth in their wonky orbits, because the heavy planet’s gravity bends the fabric of space-time. The clocks should then speed up as the crafts recede.

On November 9, ESA announced that teams at Germany's Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) in Bremen and the department of Time–Space Reference Systems at the Paris Observatory will now track this rise and fall. By comparing the speed of the clocks’ ticking with the crafts’ known altitudes—pinpointed within a few centimetres by monitoring stations on the ground, which bounce lasers off the satellites—the teams can test the accuracy of Einstein's theory.

http://www.nature.com/news/wayward-satellites-repurposed-to-test-ge...

Truth here and now...1

Q: What Really Causes Autism?

The human brain facts:
The human brain has 86 billion neurons in all: 69 billion in the cerebellum, a dense lump at the back of the brain that helps orchestrate basic bodily functions and movement; 16 billion in the cerebral cortex, the brain’s thick corona and the seat of our most sophisticated mental talents, such as self-awareness, language, problem solving and abstract thought; and 1 billion in the brain stem and its extensions into the core of the brain.
The human brain is also unique in its unsurpassed gluttony. Although it makes up only 2 percent of body weight, the human brain consumes a whopping 20 percent of the body’s total energy at rest.

Human brain evolution likely required a metabolic trade-off. In order for the brain to grow, other organs, namely the gut, had to shrink, and energy that would typically have gone to the latter was redirected to the former. For evidence, they pointed to data showing that primates with larger brains have smaller intestines. The invention of cooking was crucial to human brain evolution. Soft, cooked foods are much easier to digest than tough raw ones, yielding more calories for less gastrointestinal work. Perhaps, then, learning to cook permitted a bloating of the human brain at the expense of the gut. Other researchers have proposed that similar trade-offs might have occurred between brain and muscle, given how much stronger chimps are than humans.

Again and again, researchers have cited the evolutionary surge in human brain size as the key reason for our exceptionally high degree of intelligence compared to other animals. Yes, a large brain packed with neurons is essential to what we consider high intelligence.

For the first time scientists correctly predicted the trajectory of space junk
WT1190F, which burned up in Earth's atmosphere Friday, November 13 off the coast of Sri Lanka, as imaged by scientists measuring the re-entry from an airplane. Measuring 3 to 6 feet, the junk was believed to be man-made spacecraft that could have gone off course and turned into space junk orbiting the earth before it entered the atmosphere. In 2013, WT1190F was initially observed by the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey. This event is also an ideal opportunity to test the readiness of space agencies for a possible atmospheric entry and even strong impacts in the future that involve the asteroids and comets which is the highly similar to this WT1190F event. This is the first time that experts have calculated the exact time and location a piece of space junk will collide with Earth. The object's mass was not substantial enough to present a risk to the area, especially given its trajectory into the Indian Ocean. "A piece of a solar panel, for instance, would behave differently than a booster tank", Lowell Observatory planetary astronomer Nick Moskovitz said in a statement before the object's re-entry. The scientists who orchestrated a rapid response to the recently discovered object declared their effort to be a smashing success. NASA scientists were able to forecast the accurate date and time for the re-entry of the space debris. A team from the worldwide Astronomy Center and the UAE Space Agency may be the only people to have seen its final moments in real time. Astronomers had speculated it could be a spent Apollo rocket stage from 1960's or part of a more recent lunar mission. According to EarthSky.org, it was the "first-ever precisely predicted fall of space debris".

Special eye drops raise the hopes for nearsightedness cure
In a five-year clinical trial conducted in Singapore, drops of a drug called atropine seemed to slow the progression of nearsightedness in children. Intriguingly, researchers found that a lower dose of the drug was more effective than higher dosages, in addition to risking fewer side effects. The research was presented Nov. 16, 2015 at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology in Las Vegas and will appear in the February 2016 edition of the journal Ophthalmology.
In high myopia — where the eyeball stretches and becomes too long — isn’t just an inconvenience: It raises the raises the risk of other, more serious eye conditions, such as retinal detachment, macular degeneration, premature cataracts and glaucoma. So the scientists have been trying to find out if there’s any way to reduce the progression of myopia.
tropine drops are approved for use in the United States at a higher concentration than that used in the study. The drops (which are currently used to treat lazy eye in children) can cause light sensitivity and blurry vision up close at higher doses, so researchers set out to determine whether a smaller dose could still be effective without producing side effects. And it did!

Scientists at the Children’s Medical Center Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) have determined how the body responds during times of emergency when it needs more blood cells. In a study published in Nature, researchers report that when tissue damage occurs, in times of excessive bleeding, or during pregnancy, a secondary, emergency blood-formation system is activated in the spleen.

“Hematopoietic, or blood-forming, stem cells reside mainly in the bone marrow, and most newblood cell formation occurs within the bone marrow under normal circumstances. But when there is hematopoietic stress, blood cell formation expands to thespleen,” said Dr. Sean Morrison, CRI Director and Mary McDermott Cook Chair in Pediatric Genetics at UT Southwestern Medical Center. “Blood-forming stem cells migrate from the bone marrow to the spleen, which becomes a hematopoietic organ where blood formation then occurs.”

Normally, there are very few blood-forming stem cells in the spleen. But the cells that create the supporting environment for these stem cells are present in the spleen, ready to respond during times of hematopoietic stress and to receive an influx of blood-forming stem cells from the bone marrow.

In characterizing the microenvironment, or niche, which supports blood formation in the spleen, the CRI research team used mouse models to examine the expression patterns of two known niche cell factors, stem cell factor (SCF) and CXCL12. The researchers found that the blood-forming microenvironment in the spleen is found near sinusoidal blood vessels and is created by endothelialcells and perivascular stromal cells – just like the microenvironment in the bone marrow.

“Under emergency conditions, the endothelial cells and perivascular stromal cells that reside in the spleen are induced to proliferate, so they can sustain all the new blood-forming stem cells that migrate into the spleen,” said Dr. Morrison, who is also a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. “We determined that this process in the spleen is physiologically important for responding to hematopoietic stress; without it, the mice we studied could not maintain normal blood cell counts during pregnancy or quickly regenerate blood cell counts after bleeding or chemotherapy.”

Based on this new information about the spleen’s emergency backup role for blood cell formation, therapeutic interventions could be developed in the future to enhance blood formation following chemotherapy or bone marrow transplantation and thus accelerate the recovery of blood cell counts.

What makes life impossible on exoplanets?

A team of scientists has suggested that vast amounts of radiation may be making life impossible on some of them like Kepler-438b planet.

As per the University of Warwick research, the atmosphere of the planet, Kepler-438b, is thought to have been stripped away as a result of radiation emitted from a superflaring Red Dwarf star, Kepler-438.

Regularly occurring every few hundred days, the superflares are approximately ten times more powerful than those ever recorded on the Sun and equivalent to the same energy as 100 billion megatons of TNT.

While superflares themselves are unlikely to have a significant impact on Kepler-438b’s atmosphere, a dangerous phenomenon associated with powerful flares, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), has the potential to strip away any atmosphere and render it uninhabitable.

The planet Kepler-438b, to date the exoplanet with the highest recorded Earth Similarity Index, is both similar in size and temperature to the Earth but is in closer proximity to the Red Dwarf than the Earth is to the Sun.

Lead researcher David Armstrong explained that if the planet, Kepler-438b, has a magnetic field like the Earth, it may be shielded from some of the effects, but if it does not, or the flares are strong enough, it could have lost its atmosphere, be irradiated by extra dangerous radiation and be a much harsher place for life to exist.

The study appears in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Truffles are not dangerously radioactive now after Chernobyl disaster.

After analyzing 82 specimens of Burgundy truffle (Tuber aestivum) from across Europe, researchers report online November 10 in Biogeosciences Discussions that all of the sought-after delicacies contained insignificant concentrations of radioactive cesium-137.

Some fungi species, including certain mushrooms, sop up radioactive elements from dirt. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster contaminated large swaths of European soils with cesium-137 and prompted concerns that truffles could become radioactive.

The work provides an all clear for Burgundy truffle hunters and connoisseurs around the world, the researchers write. While not radioactive, at more than $400 per kilogram, Burgundy truffles still may not be safe.