(Article information from Reuters)

Italian researchers said on Thursday they were combining two new and experimental therapies -- using stem cells and gene therapy -- to try to treat muscular dystrophy.
Their early work has shown some success in mice but they warned any real progress is years away.

Writing in the journal Science, the team lead by Dr. Giulio Cossu of the Stem Cell Research Institute in Milan and the University of Rome said certain stem cells had been coaxed into strengthening the muscles of mice with muscular dystrophy.
There are nine forms of muscular dystrophy, which affect 300,000 people in the United States alone.

This group of genetic diseases is marked by progressive weakness and degeneration of the muscles that control movement, as well as, sometimes, the heart and other organs. There is no treatment or cure.

Cossu and colleagues, including Roberto Bottinelli from the University of Pavia, worked with cells called mesoangioblasts, a type of stem cell. Stem cells are master cells that can produce a whole range of cells and tissues.

Mesoangioblasts are called "adult" stem cells although this particular kind has so far been found only in fetuses.

The researchers injected mesoangioblasts into the arteries of mice genetically engineered to lack the alpha sarcoglycan gene -- in effect giving the mice a form of MD.

These mesoangioblasts turned up downstream. The team then genetically engineered the stem cells, putting in healthy versions of alpha sarcoglycan gene, and injected these into the mice. Three months later, they found healthy alpha sarcoglycan proteins in the muscles of the treated mice.

The experiment proves a theory but some real-world stumbling blocks remain. For instance, the approach would work best if a patient's own mesoangioblasts were used, but these cells have so far only been isolated from fetuses.

(Article information from CNN.com)

British scientists are lobbying to build the world's most powerful microscope, an instrument so advanced that it can see individual atoms moving. The price tag on this device would be one billion pounds (US$1.6 billion)

The European Spallation Source (ESS) -- a type of instrument known as a matterscope -- would allow them to look at the growth of protein molecules in living human tissue or at the stresses deep within the wheel of a train or the wing of an aircraft.

A disused World War II airfield in North Yorkshire has been earmarked for the matterscope's 0.62 mile-long concrete tunnel and neutron research laboratories.

Rather than using light to look at microscopic structures, matterscopes use neutrons -- bouncing them off the surface just as bats or dolphins use sound waves to create the image of an object.

The neutrons are created by using powerful magnets to propel protons down the concrete tunnel at nearly the speed of light. At the end, they hit a metal target, chipping off neutrons, which can be focused into a beam.

Meetings with Science Minister Lord Sainsbury this month have shifted the proposal up a level, said Professor Bob Cywinski of Leeds University, and it now looked like a real possibility.

Britain already has the world's most powerful matterscope, of 200 kilowatts, at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory in Oxfordshire, he said, but the United States and Japan are about to eclipse it.

It will be dwarfed by a 1.5 megawatt Spallation Neutron Source in Tennessee, and by Japan's one megawatt J-Parc, both of which should be ready around 2006.

Long before our Sun and Earth ever existed, a Jupiter-sized planet formed around a sun-like star. Now, 13 billion years later, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has precisely measured the mass of this farthest and oldest known planet. The ancient planet has had a remarkable history because it has wound up in an unlikely, rough neighborhood. It orbits a peculiar pair of burned-out stars in the crowded core of a globular star cluster.

The new Hubble findings close a decade of speculation and debate as to the true nature of this ancient world, which takes a century to complete each orbit. The planet is 2.5 times the mass of Jupiter. Its very existence provides tantalizing evidence that the first planets were formed rapidly, within a billion years of the Big Bang, leading astronomers to conclude that planets may be very abundant in the universe.

The planet now lies in the core of the ancient globular star cluster M4, located 5,600 light-years away in the summer constellation Scorpius. Globular clusters are deficient in heavier elements because they formed so early in the universe that heavier elements had not been cooked up in abundance in the nuclear furnaces of stars. Some astronomers have therefore argued that globular clusters cannot contain planets. This conclusion was bolstered in 1999 when Hubble failed to find close-orbiting "hot Jupiter"-type planets around the stars of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. Now, it seems that astronomers were just looking in the wrong place, and that gas-giant worlds orbiting at greater distances from their stars could be common in globular clusters.

The story of this planet's discovery began in 1988, when the pulsar, called PSR B1620-26, was discovered in M4. It is a neutron star spinning just under 100 times per second and emitting regular radio pulses like a lighthouse beam. The white dwarf was quickly found through its effect on the clock-like pulsar, as the two stars orbited each other twice per year. Sometime later, astronomers noticed further irregularities in the pulsar that implied that a third object was orbiting the others. This new object was suspected to be a planet, but it could also be a brown dwarf or a low-mass star. Debate over its true identity continued through the 1990s.

Steinn Sigurdsson of Pennsylvania State University, Harvey Richer of the University of British Columbia, and their co-investigators settled the debate by at last measuring the planet's actual mass through some ingenious celestial detective work. They had exquisite Hubble data from the mid-1990s, taken to study white dwarfs in M4. Sifting through these observations, they were able to detect the white dwarf orbiting the pulsar and measure its color and temperature. Using evolutionary models computed by Brad Hansen of the University of California, Los Angeles, the astronomers estimated the white dwarf's mass. This in turn was compared to the amount of wobble in the pulsar's signal, allowing the astronomers to calculate the tilt of the white dwarf's orbit as seen from Earth. When combined with the radio studies of the wobbling pulsar, this critical piece of evidence told them the tilt of the planet's orbit, too, and so the precise mass could at last be known. With a mass of only 2.5 Jupiters, the object is too small to be a star or brown dwarf, and must instead be a planet.

The planet has had a rough road over the last 13 billion years. When it was born, it probably orbited its youthful yellow sun at approximately the same distance Jupiter is from our Sun. The planet survived blistering ultraviolet radiation, supernova radiation, and shockwaves, which must have ravaged the young globular cluster in a furious firestorm of star birth in its early days. Around the time multi-celled life appeared on Earth, the planet and star were plunging into the core of M4. In this densely crowded region, the planet and its sun passed close to an ancient pulsar, formed in a supernova when the cluster was young, that had its own stellar companion. In a slow-motion gravitational dance, the sun and planet were captured by the pulsar, whose original companion was ejected into space and lost. The pulsar, sun, and planet were themselves flung by gravitational recoil into the less-dense outer regions of the cluster. Eventually, as the star aged it ballooned to a red giant and spilled matter onto the pulsar. The momentum carried with this matter caused the neutron star to "spin-up" and re-awaken as a millisecond pulsar. Meanwhile, the planet continued on its leisurely orbit at a distance of about 2 billion miles from the pair (approximately the same distance Uranus is from our Sun).

It is likely that the planet is a gas giant, without a solid surface like the Earth. Because it was formed so early in the life of the universe, it probably doesn't have abundant quantities of elements such as carbon and oxygen. For these reasons, it is very improbable the planet would host life. Even if life arose on, for example, a solid moon orbiting the planet, it is unlikely to have survived the intense X-ray blast that would have accompanied the spin-up of the pulsar. Regrettably, it is unlikely that any civilization witnessed and recorded the dramatic history of this planet, which began at nearly the beginning of time itself.

The full team involved in this discovery is composed of Brad Hansen (UCLA), Harvey Richer (UBC), Steinn Sigurdsson (Penn State), Ingrid Stairs (UBC), and Stephen Thorsett (UCSC).

(Article information from CNN.com)

Nine people at Dyess Air Force Base in Texas have been quarantined in their homes for possible severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) infection, according to a spokesman for the base approximately two miles outside Abilene.

Test results confirming whether they have SARS are expected early next week.

Six Air Force active duty personnel and three family members are in quarantine. They're ill with respiratory symptoms but are getting better, the spokesman said.

One of the nine recently returned from Canada, including a stop at the Toronto, Ontario, airport, and became ill with coldlike symptoms, said Lt. Saje Park, another base official. As a precaution, this person was put into quarantine, Park said.

The World Health Organization said this week that SARS had been contained after killing more than 800 people worldwide.

There have been 74 probable cases reported in the United States, but no deaths attributed to the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
SARS is thought to have originated in southern China, where the first known cases appeared in November.

From China, experts believe the flulike illness was carried to Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore, eventually traveling as far as South Africa and Canada and infecting at least 8,400 people.

However, due to the many questions remaining about SARS and the possibility that cases may have slipped through the surveillance net, WHO warns that continued global vigilance for SARS is crucial for the foreseeable future. The world is not yet SARS-free.

From the Guangdong province in China, the SARS virus traveled in humans to 30 countries and areas of the world but it became deeply embedded in just six. In these areas, the pattern of transmission was the same: An imported hospitalized SARS case infected health care workers and other patients; they infected their close contacts and then the disease moved into the larger community. In affected areas approximately 20% of all cases were in health care workers. To date, 8439 people have been affected, and 812 have died from SARS. Now, five months after SARS began its spread around the world, it is close to being driven out of humans.

SARS continues to threaten the world. Close to 200 people remain hospitalized with the disease. And, it is possible that undetected cases may have slipped through the surveillance network. Thus, while today we have no reports of local transmission, that may not be the case tomorrow.

SARS will continue to menace the global public health system. It is possible that new SARS cases will appear. SARS could be a seasonal disease and return later in the year - a possibility based on what we know about other members of the coronavirus family. Further, the original source of this SARS outbreak may still be in the environment and could ignite a new outbreak in the coming months. For example, it is possible the virus still circulates in an animal reservoir and may cross into humans again when conditions are right.

The public health research agenda for SARS is long and growing. At the top of the list is a early diagnostic test, which can detect the presence of the disease within days of disease onset. This will be needed to distinguish SARS patients from those suffering from other respiratory illnesses, especially when the flu season arrives. Without a diagnostic test, hospitals may be forced to isolate all persons with respiratory disease fitting the SARS case definition, and this will be enormously expensive and divert essential resources from other health needs. WHO is working with it's partners to develop case investigation, case management and surveillance protocols for SARS in the post outbreak environment. These will be living documents revised regularly as our knowledge expands.

Second, intense investigations into a possible animal reservoir are needed. Only by identifying the original source of this outbreak, and understanding the way the virus moves from the original source to humans, can future outbreaks be prevented. Third, a global database is required to give epidemiologists and clinicians the power of large numbers to better understand SARS. Also, we need a better understanding of the advantages of different therapeutic approaches in the treatment of SARS.

Preparing for the next outbreak requires restoring and strengthening the public health infrastructure. More epidemiologists and other public health specialists are needed. Better surveillance and response systems must be established which include strong national, regional and global linkages in reporting. And governments need to invest more in hospital infection control.