Science // Current

Stone-age nuclear family unearthed

A stone-age burial in central Germany has yielded the earliest evidence of people living together as a family. The... more

dissimulator
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4,600-year-old grave yields genetic evidence of family life (and death)

Not as barbaric as we thought we once were.

adrian86
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Extinction, is it Temporary?

This undated handout photo shows a creature called a pygmy tarsier, believed for Reuters – This undated handout photo shows... more

nobamajon
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Doctors transplant windpipe with stem cells

Doctors have given a woman a new windpipe with tissue grown from her own stem cells, eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs. "This technique has great promise," said Dr. Eric Genden, who did a similar transplant in 2005 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. That operation used both donor and recipient tissue. Only a handful of windpipe, or trachea, transplants have ever been done.

If successful, the procedure could become a new standard of treatment, said Genden, who was not involved in the research.

The results were published online Wednesday in the medical journal, The Lancet.

The transplant was given to Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old Colombian mother of two living in Barcelona, suffered from tuberculosis for years. After a severe collapse of her left lung in March, Castillo needed regular hospital visits to clear her airways and was unable to take care of her children.

Doctors initially thought the only solution was to remove the entire left lung. But Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, head of thoracic surgery at Barcelona's Hospital Clinic, proposed a windpipe transplant instead.

Once doctors had a donor windpipe, scientists at Italy's University of Padua stripped off all its cells, leaving only a tube of connective tissue.

Meanwhile, doctors at the University of Bristol took a sample of Castillo's bone marrow from her hip. They used the bone marrow's stem cells to create millions of cartilage and tissue cells to cover and line the windpipe.

Experts at the University of Milan then used a device to put the new cartilage and tissue onto the windpipe. The new windpipe was transplanted into Castillo in June.

"They have created a functional, biological structure that can't be rejected," said Dr. Allan Kirk of the American Society of Transplantation. "It's an important advance, but constructing an entire organ is still a long way off."

So far, Castillo has shown no signs of rejection and is not taking any immune-suppressing drugs, which can cause side effects like high blood pressure, kidney failure and cancer.

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Pretty amazing stuff, let's hope the the lady continues to remain healthy.Doctors have given a woman a new windpipe with tissue grown from her own stem cells, eliminating the need for anti-rejection... more

DonkeyPong
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5 hours ago

Transplant Aided by Stem Cells a Medical First

A Colombian woman has received the world's first tailor-made trachea transplant, grown by seeding a donor organ with her own... more

TravG73
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9 hours ago

NASA tests "deep space Internet"

The US space agency NASA said it successfuly conducted a first test of a deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.

TravG73
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9 hours ago

5 Toolbag Behaviors Explained by Science

There are men whose very appearance can compel you to turn your head in disgust, muttering the word "douche" in a long... more

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12 hours ago

Birth of the Universe

Like a science fiction fantasy, researchers re-created a state of the universe 0.000000000001 of a second after the universe was... more

majmok
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16 hours ago

The Bible as a parallel universe from the 63,779th dimension

All 1189 chapters of the Bible as a bar graph with the length of each bar proportional to the number of verses in the chapter.

majmok
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16 hours ago

X-Ray Discovery Sparked 19th-Century DIY Craze

Scientists have revealed microscopic life, nanoscale molecules and galaxies billions of light years away. These images have... more

bonemachine
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3 responses

16 hours ago

Earth seen from 4 billion miles away

Can you find the Earth in this image?

majmok
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16 hours ago

Personal Navigation System Pinpoints People

Discovery-News.com: GPS can only do so much when it comes to pegging a specific location. Tracy Staedter finds out about the new... more

DiscoveryNewsVideo
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16 hours ago

Cold light. Wonderful.

Bioluminescence, the emission of light from a living organism, is demonstrated by the comb jellyfish shown here. This emission... more

majmok
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16 hours ago

CDC Finds Nation's Unhealthiest City

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — As a portly woman plodded ahead of him on the sidewalk, the obese mayor of America's fattest and... more

justright
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17 hours ago

Mars exploration and the "magnetic bubble" that may make it possible

"Computer simulations done by a team in Lisbon with scientists at Rutherford Appleton last year showed that theoretically a very much smaller "magnetic bubble" of only several hundred meters across would be enough to protect a spacecraft."

ScienceDaily (Nov. 2008) — According to the international space agencies, "space weather" is the single greatest obstacle to deep space travel. Radiation from the sun and cosmic rays pose a deadly threat to astronauts in space. New research shows how knowledge gained from the pursuit of nuclear fusion research may reduce the threat to acceptable levels, making humanity's first mission to Mars a much greater possibility.

The solar energetic particles, although just part of the 'cosmic rays' spectrum, are of greatest concern because they are the most likely to cause deadly radiation damage to the astronauts.

Large numbers of these energetic particles occur intermittently as "storms" with little warning and are already known to pose the greatest threat to man. Nature helps protect the Earth by having a giant "magnetic bubble" around the planet called the magnetosphere.

The Apollo astronauts of the 1960's and 70's who walked upon the Moon are the only humans to have travelled beyond the Earth's natural "force field" – the Earth's magnetosphere. With typical journeys on the Apollo missions lasting only about 8 days, it was possible to miss an encounter with such a storm; a journey to Mars, however, would take about eighteen months, during which time it is almost certain that astronauts would be enveloped by such a "solar storm".

Space craft visiting the Moon or Mars could maintain some of this protection by taking along their very own portable "mini"-magnetosphere. The idea has been around since the 1960's but it was thought impractical because it was believed that only a very large (more than 100km wide) magnetic bubble could possibly work.

Researchers at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the Universities of York, Strathclyde and IST Lisbon, have undertaken experiments, using know-how from 50 years of research into nuclear fusion, to show that it is possible for astronauts to shield their spacecrafts with a portable magnetosphere - scattering the highly charged, ionised particles of the solar wind and flares away from their space craft.

Researchers at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the Universities of York, Strathclyde and IST Lisbon, have undertaken experiments, using know-how from 50 years of research into nuclear fusion, to show that it is possible for astronauts to shield their spacecrafts with a portable magnetosphere - scattering the highly charged, ionised particles of the solar wind and flares away from their space craft.

Computer simulations done by a team in Lisbon with scientists at Rutherford Appleton last year showed that theoretically a very much smaller "magnetic bubble" of only several hundred meters across would be enough to protect a spacecraft."Computer simulations done by a team in Lisbon with scientists at Rutherford Appleton last year showed that theoretically a... more