Perimeter Information Reduce Brand new Light about Renaissance Body Masterpiece

When the Renaissance physician and expert dissector Andreas Vesalius first published "De humani corporis fabrica" in 1543, he provided the most detailed look inside the human body of his time. A previously unknown copy of the impressive anatomy textbook resurfaced a few years ago, and it apparently contains more than a thousand hand-written notes and corrections by the author himself. The annotations reveal that Vesalius was meticulously planning a third edition of the book that never made it to print, researchers say. "This book is his work bench as much as the dissecting table," Vivian Nutton, a University College London professor emeritus, writes in a recently published analysis of the text in the journal Medical History. Some edits show that Vesalius wanted to correct mistakes of grammar and syntax and to make his Latin more elegant. Other markings show that he wanted to draw attention to misshapen or illegible letters for his block-cutter. Vesalius also intended to add new information to the text as he learned more about the human body, including what may be one of the oldest references to the practice of female genital mutilation. In his discussion of circumcision, Vesalius scrawled at the bottom of the page that Ethiopians "cut off the fleshy processes from new born girls in accordance with their religion in the same way as they remove the foreskins of boys, 'although in their religious ceremonies they are otherwise generally similar to those of us Christians,'" Nutton writes. "This is arguably the first reference in a medical text to female genital mutilation for non-medical purposes." The copy of the book, on loan from an unnamed German collector, is currently available for study at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. "He is seen constantly attempting to improve his text both scientifically, and stylistically, and to make it clearer and more accessible to his readers," Philip Oldfield, science and medicine librarian at the University of Toronto, said in a statement this week. "All the evidence points to the conclusion that Vesalius was preparing a new edition of De fabrica that unfortunately never materialized." The book will be featured as part of an exhibition next year in Toronto to mark the 500th anniversary of Vesalius's birth. Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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How ancient life could possibly have return concerning

Loved ones tree unites a diverse group of people that each one carry genetic vestiges issued from a only common ancestor along at the base of one's tree. however this organizational structure falls apart if genetic data could be a communal resource as opposed to actually loved ones possession.

Some evidence suggests that early evolution may have been based on a collective sharing of genes. A group of researchers are now searching for clear genetic vestiges from this communal ancestry.

But it's hard to shake our fascination with family trees.

My father used to travel for work, and when he arrived in a new city, he'd open up the phone book and check for anyone listed with our uncommon last name. Occasionally he'd get a hit and brazenly call them up to ask: "Are we related?"

The answer was always yes, with the common link often being my great grandfather.

Like my father, biologists are curious about family ties, but they go about it in a more systematic way. Rather than phone books, they sift through genetic codes from humans to bacteria and a lot in between. The main question is: Are the commonly held genes similar enough to point to a common origin?

The answer has always been yes. The implication is that we all belong to some universal tree of life. And at the base of this tree — some have imagined — there sits a mild-mannered microbe that lived more than 3 billion years ago, unaware that its genes would be the starting point of an entire planet's worth of highly differentiated life.

However, this organism, the so-called last universal common ancestor (or LUCA), may be just a fantasy.

"Our perspective is that life emerged from a collective state, and so it is not at all obvious that there is one single organism which was ancestral," said Nigel Goldenfeld from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The organisms belonging to this collective state would have shared genetic information from neighbor to neighbor, rather than solely from parent to offspring. Goldenfeld is leading a new NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) team that aims to provide a clearer understanding of this early stage of evolution.

"We are hoping to find fossils of the collective state in the genomes of organisms," Goldenfeld said.

Goldenfeld's team will be performing genetic studies that will try to tease out signatures of community-based evolution. They will complement this field and laboratory work with theoretical modeling and computer simulations.

"The ultimate goal is to understand how our planet's biochemistry is an instantiation of the universal laws of life, thus addressing the question of whether life is an inevitable and thus widespread outcome of the laws of physics," Goldenfeld said.

A time before Darwinism

It might sound strange that an organism's genetic code could be the result of "crowdsourcing." We are more familiar with traditional reproduction, as practiced by the birds and the bees.

In so-called "vertical gene transfer," an organism inherits its genome from its parents, but it does not receive an exact copy. Small changes enter the code through reproductive mixing and mutations. This "descent with modification," as Darwin put it, eventually allows a population of interbreeding organisms (or species) to evolve.

If every snippet of DNA was solely the product of descent with modification, then every organism could be placed on a tree of life stemming from a single ancestor. But as it turns out, "different genes go back to different ancestors," said Peter Gogarten of the University of Connecticut, who has done extensive work on comparative genetics.

How is that possible? It can happen if organisms share genes. Imagine a gene belonging to members of a specific family tree. One day, this gene becomes isolated and gets picked up by another organism with a different family tree. No reproduction between partners takes place — only an "adoption" of a specific gene.

This so-called "horizontal gene transfer" is quite common among bacteria and archaea, as exemplified by antibiotic resistance. When a specific bacterium develops a defense against some drug, the corresponding gene can pass horizontally to others in the same colony.

A 2008 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that 80 percent of the genes in bacteria were horizontally transferred at some point in the past.

Complex organisms also exhibit evidence of horizontal (or lateral) gene transfer, albeit to a lesser extent. Researchers have shown that ancient ancestors of plants and animals "swallowed up" other bacteria to form symbiotic relationships, which eventually resulted in specialized cellular components, such as mitochondria and chloroplasts.

In his work, Gogarten has shown that horizontal gene transfer turns the tree of life into a thick bush of branches that interweave with each other. Many of these branches terminated long ago due to extinction, but some of their genes live on in us, thanks to horizontal gene transfer.

Several studies suggest that horizontal gene transfer was more prevalent in the past when nothing but single-celled organisms inhabited the Earth.

"I like to think of early life as being more like an undifferentiated slime mold," Goldenfeld said. "Such a communal form of life would have no meaningful family tree, because it is the community that varies in descent, not individual organismal lineages."

Evolving evolution

The late Carl Woese, a colleague of Goldenfeld, was one of the first scientists to propose that early life leaned heavily on horizontal gene transfer. Woese passed away in December of last year. He is perhaps best-remembered for classifying life into the now-well-accepted domains of bacteria, eukaryotes (plants, animals, fungi and protists) and archaea.

In 1987, Woese wrote about the consequences of rampant horizontal gene transfer. In such a scenario, "a bacterium would not actually have a history in its own right: It would be an evolutionary chimera."

A "chimera" is the name of a creature from Greek mythology that mixed together features of a lion, a goat and a snake. This hybridization presumably gave the chimera an advantage over its "competitors."

In a 2006 PNAS paper, Kalin Vetsigian, Woese and Goldenfeld showed that microbial chimeras may also have an advantage over their biological counterparts. The researchers used computer models to demonstrate that the genetic code could evolve more efficiently if organisms shared their genes collectively. Horizontal gene transfer turned out to be a better "innovation-sharing protocol" than vertical (Darwinian) transfer.

Now, with his NAI team, Goldenfeld wants to confirm these simulations with genetic studies. Specifically, they will target archaea, whose genes have yet to be scrutinized as closely as those from the other domains, Goldenfeld said.

The group is particularly interested in the question of how the ability to evolve originally developed. The "evolution of evolution" sounds like a chicken-and-egg problem — especially if you think, as Goldenfeld does, that life is by definition something capable of evolving.

However, evolution can utilize different mechanisms to achieve the same goal. Goldenfeld's team will try to recover some of life's former evolutionary phases by stressing cells and then seeing how their genomes rearrange in response.

Universal biology

However, DNA evidence is just one aspect of this five-year research project.

"We want to understand how evolution works before there were species or maybe even genes," Goldenfeld said. "So this is going beyond 'origin of species' approaches to evolution, such as population genetics."

How does one study evolution without genetics? One considers the "rules of the game" that the genetic code is just one manifestation of. Goldenfeld calls this "universal biology." It is an attempt to distill from our specific biochemistry the general physical laws that animate matter.

Being a physicist, Goldenfeld gives the example of thermodynamics. Life must obey conservation of energy and the law of increasing entropy, which will certainly influence how organisms optimize their use of resources.

Other rules involve how to control the amount of variation in the genome from one generation to the next. Too little variation, and organisms can't adapt to changes in the environment. Too much variation, and organisms can't retain useful traits.

The team can place different sets of rules into a computer simulation and see what sort of artificial life appears. Goldenfeld believes that formulating the principles of universal biology may help answer one of the biggest questions of all.

"We would like to have a better understanding of why life exists at all." Goldenfeld said. "Is it a phenomenon that should be generic, like the formation of a crystalline solid, or is it something rare and bizarre?"

This is of special interest to astrobiologists, who wonder about the likelihood that we are not alone. If life is eventually found elsewhere, Goldenfeld thinks we'll have a few things in common.

"The principles of universal biology should be applicable to all life irrespective of whether it is carbon chemistry-based or something stranger," he said.

Something stranger? Okay, so maybe that means they won't be in the phone book.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Seasons on 'Game of Thrones' Planet: How They Work

Winter is coming on the HBO series "Game of Thrones," but no one seems to be able to predict when. The planet's last summer persisted for seven years, while winter has been known to last a generation on the show. Understanding when the seasons will change is just one of the many issues plaguing the characters of the fantasy series based on the books by George R.R. Martin. Although science doesn't play much of a role in the fictional world — which comes complete with dragons, magic and a red comet that serves as an omen — planetary science could help explain the odd seasonal changes on the three continents in the TV show's universe. "Yes, seasons can last arbitrarily long times," Geoff Marcy, a veteran planet hunter at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an email to SPACE.com. Seasons are for the most part controlled by the way a planet leans toward or away from its sun. For example, the Earth's axis does not run straight through the planet. Instead, it has a slight tilt that points the Northern Hemisphere toward the sun during part of the planet's orbit (causing summer) and away for another part (causing winter). Other planets experience similar — and more extreme — seasonal changes. "The planet Uranus in our solar system has its North Pole spin axis pointed toward the sun during some 42 years, and then it points away from the Sun for another 42 years," wrote Marcy. "If you lived anywhere in the northern hemisphere, summer would last 42 years and then winter would last 42 years.  So the spin axis orientation makes all the difference." Although Uranus' winter and summer might be extremely long, they are still predictable. On "Game of Thrones," no one knows when summer will end and winter will begin. It is possible that a "wobbly" axis could create variable seasonal length, said Greg Laughlin, an astrophysicist at the University of California Santa Cruz, but not necessarily on the timeline that show presents. A wobbly tilt will not create rapid seasonal changes over the course of years or even decades, Laughlin said. Variability in the length of season happens after thousands of years. In other words, the characters on the television show would not be alive to see a distinct change in the length of any of the seasons. Mars has a wobbly axis, according to Marcy. However, the Red Planet's seasons don't change from one year to the next. Instead, it takes thousands of years for the planet's axis to wobble enough to change the length of a season. Seasons are also dependent upon the kind of planetary system the exoplanet finds itself in, Laughlin said. "One situation that will lead to wildly variable seasons over long periods of time is if the planet in question is a member of a strongly interacting multiple planet system," Laughlin said, describing how a planet's orbit could be pulled out of whack by another planet. These changes would also happen over the course of thousands or millions of years, Laughlin added. But this also might be a good explanation for the seasonal issues on the "Game of Thrones." The books and TV show make mention of a second moon that disintegrated when it flew too close to its sun. Of course, in the book's lore that moon was actually an egg full of dragons … so maybe it would be best not to apply too much real science to this kind of fiction. The newest season of "Game of Thrones" premieres Sunday (March 31) at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO. Check local listings. Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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Why You Are Paying for Everyone's Flood Insurance

There are many, many compelling and urgent reasons to take decisive action to combat climate change. Here's one that's measurable by dollars added to our budget deficit. Actually by tens of billions of dollars. The soaring cost of private flood insurance is pricing so many coastal homeowners out of the market that the rest of the American taxpayers are having to bail them out – to the tune of $30 billion under the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). With over $139 billion in storm, wildfire, drought, tornado and flood damages taking nearly 1 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2012, the insurance industry is referring to last year as the second costliest year on record for U.S. climate-related disasters. And while insurers do include $12 billion worth of flood-related damages in their estimates, they aren't the ones getting stuck with most of the bill. It's us, the taxpayer. On a global basis, the insurance company Munich Re estimates that flooding represented 16 percent of total climate-related damages over the past decade, or $25 billion, on average, per year. Over that same period, insurers paid out on $3.75 billion per year, on average, or less than 15 percent of total flood-related costs. That percentage seems to be fairly representative as the total losses from floods along the Mississippi in 2011 were estimated at $4.6 billion with only $500 million (11 percent) covered by private insurers. So if insurers are only paying 10-15 percent of the bill, who actually does pay the cost of flood-related damage? The not-so-surprising answer is you and me, largely through the National Flood Insurance Program, which has nearly $1.3 trillion in policies outstanding. This program includes several state programs, such as the one for Florida (which has over 2 million policy holders and a face value of $475 billion) that had to be created as the rising cost of flooding was not being covered by private insurers. This massive federal program has nearly doubled in size over the past decade as private insurers have continued to shy away from making bets against Mother Nature when it comes to floods. And while the federal government has picked up the slack in terms of coverage, it has had a tough time balancing the premiums that are paid in with the heavy losses it has sustained from recent climate related events. In fact, following an estimated $12 billion in payout to 140,000 policy holders from Superstorm Sandy, the program is over $30 billion in debt and has Congress scratching its head about what to do about it since the private insurers have made it very clear this is not a business that they wish to be in. NFIP is insolvent because premiums don't reflect actual risks; and it's hard to make a case that climate-change-charged storms are not a big part of the reason why. In sum, the U.S. taxpayer is currently down $30 billion trying to provide insurance for coastal landowners that no longer have access to affordable private flood insurance. And that figure does not include the costs weathered by the state-based programs that have been set up due to a lack of private alternatives available to their residents. Taken together, these programs constitute a climate disruption tax that the U.S. consumer is being forced to pay to cover risks that the insurance industry, the true score-keepers on climate, won't touch.  As the costs of climate change continue to mount, it is becoming increasingly obvious that we can't afford not to act to rein in the carbon pollution that is supercharging storms and floods. Fortunately President Obama has a big opportunity to reduce emissions from power plants, America's biggest carbon polluters. Under a plan NRDC put forward in December, we could cut these emissions by 26 percent by 2020 and 34 percent by 2025 compared to 2005 levels. The plan provides great flexibility to states and utilities, and offers benefits to every American. Its benefits—worth between $25 and $60 billion in 2020 — far outweigh the plan's costs — about $4 billion. Implementing it will save tens of thousands of lives through reductions in air pollution. And it will drive investments in energy efficiency and clean energy that will create thousands of new jobs across the nation. Now that's an insurance premium worth paying. Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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It Pays to Shop Around for Prescription Drugs, Study Finds

The next time your doctor writes you a prescription for a new generic drug, channel your inner bargain hunter and shop around, as it could save you a lot of money, a new survey from Consumer Reports has found. When secret shoppers called more than 200 pharmacies around the United States to check the total price for a month's supply of five top-selling prescription drugs that recently went generic, they discovered an overall 447 percent difference — or $749 — between the highest- and lowest-priced stores. "When blockbuster drugs go generic, a lot of irrational pricing happens," said Lisa Gill, editor of prescription drugs at Consumer Reports. For the survey, secret shoppers gathered pricing information for five blockbuster drugs that had recently gone off patent, which allowed generic versions to enter the marketplace: Actos (pioglitazone), prescribed for diabetes; Lexapro (escitalopram), an antidepressant; Lipitor (atorvastatin), prescribed for high cholesterol; Plavix (clopidogrel), a blood thinner; and Singulair (montelukast), an asthma medication. Pharmacies surveyed included big-box stores, like Costco and Walmart; national chain pharmacies, such as CVS and Walgreens; online retailers HealthWarehouse.com and FamilyMeds.com; supermarket pharmacies; and smaller, independent pharmacies. Overall, Costco had the lowest prices for each of the generic drugs checked. What's more, people didn't have to join the club to use the pharmacy, Gill said. Some of the smaller, independent pharmacies also offered affordable prescriptions. "That was the real shocker," Gill said. "Prices at independent pharmacies were all over the map for these drugs."  Among the national chain stores, CVS, Rite Aid and Target were the priciest, according to the survey. For example, a month's supply of Actos (30 mg dose) was $101 at Costco, compared with $160 at Walmart and $295 at CVS. Prices at independent pharmacies and supermarkets ranged from $37 to $393. The cost was $141 and $140, respectively, at HealthWarehouse.com and FamilyMeds.com. At Costco, a month's supply of Singulair (10 mg dose) was $27, compared with $57 at Walmart and $165 at CVS. Prices at independent pharmacies and supermarkets ranged from $10 to $193. Both HealthWarehouse.com and FamilyMeds.com charged $29. Location also affected pricing, with urban pharmacies tending to have higher prices than rural ones. For instance, an independent pharmacy in Raleigh, N.C., charged $203 for a 30-day supply of Actos, while a rural North Carolina store charged just $37, Gill said. Why prices vary One reason for the lower costs at big-box stores is that their pharmacies are intended to "build traffic," said Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, professor of pharmacy economics at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who was not involved in the survey. In those stores, pharmacy sales account for less than 5 percent of total revenues, he added. By contrast, big chains like CVS and Walgreens, as well as independent pharmacies, rely on prescription sales to make up a bigger chunk of their revenues — in turn, bumping up prices at those stores, Schondelmeyer explained. However, consumers may be willing to pay more at other stores because they offer convenience or other perks, Gill said. For example, Costco pharmacies are generally open from 10 a.m. until 7:00 or 8:30 p.m. and are often closed on Sundays, the survey found. By contrast, CVS has a 24-hour pharmacy service, automated prescription refills and drive-through windows. Also, stores like CVS and Rite Aid have more locations than Costco, allowing consumers to save time and gas. Money-saving strategies The wide range of prices found in the survey is not the norm for generic drugs that have been on the market for more than a year, Schondelmeyer said. Therefore, the time to comparison-shop is when a popular drug first goes off patent. Typically, the prescription price will drop to about one-tenth of its name-brand price during the first year it is on the market, and then stabilize. Gill gave the following tips for keeping prescription drug costs down: Go generic, if possible. Generic drugs usually cost less than brand-name drugs. Request the lowest price. Don't assume the first price quoted is the lowest, Gill said. Some of Gill's secret shoppers told pharmacy employees they were paying out of pocket and asked if a better price were available. In some cases, it was. Also, ask about student and senior discounts. Visit smaller towns. Urban areas are generally pricier than rural areas. Ask for a 90-day supply instead of a 30-day refill. Discounts on three-month supplies are common. Consider paying the retail price. The survey found that Costco, drugstore websites and some independent pharmacies charged less than the co-pay of some insurance companies. Check out additional discounts. Many chain pharmacies, big-box stores, club stores and large supermarkets have discount prescription programs, Gill said. For example, Walmart charges $4 for a 30-day supply of some generic medications, but $10 for a 90-day supply. She noted that the programs may not include every dosage of a drug, and many do not allow people to use insurance to pay for the drugs. Schondelmeyer cautioned against pharmacy-hopping, no matter how tempting the deal is. "I am all for consumers being wise shoppers, but it is important that people get all their medications from one pharmacy," he said. That way, the pharmacist can check for possible drug interactions and make sure one drug doesn't cancel out the benefits of another. Pass It On: Shoping around for prescription drugs can save you money. Copyright 2013 MyHealthNewsDaily, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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No Link Between 'Too Many Vaccines' and Autism Risk

Despite concerns by some parents that their children receive "too many vaccines too soon," a new study finds that many shots, even on the same day, do not increase the risk of autism. In the first six months of life, children receive as many as 19 vaccine doses of six different vaccines, and by the time they are 6 years old, a total of 25 doses from 10 vaccines. In a 2011 survey, about a third of parents expressed concerns that their child received too many vaccines before age 2, and too many vaccines on a single day. Previous studies have found no link between the number of vaccines a child receives and their risk of several neurological conditions (though these studies did not specifically consider autism). The new study went a step further by looking at the link between a child's total exposure to antigens — the proteins in vaccines that stimulate the body's immune system — and his or her risk of autism. The researchers looked at total antigen exposure rather than the total number of vaccines kids received because, at the root of parents' concerns is the idea that "somehow they provide too much immunological stimulation, more so than a young child's immune system can handle," said study researcher Dr. Frank DeStefano, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The sheer number of vaccines would not be as good a measure of immunological response because vaccines contain different numbers of antigens, and some protect against more than one disease, DeStefano said.) DeStefano and colleagues analyzed information from about 250 children with autism and 750 children without autism, born between 1994 and 1999. Children with autism were exposed to about same total number of antigens as children without autism at ages 3 months, 7 months and 2 years. There was also no difference between the two groups in terms of the total number of antigens they were exposed to on a single day. "Parental concerns that their children are receiving too many vaccines in the first two years of life, or too many vaccines at a single doctor visit are not supported in terms of an increased risk of autism," the researchers write in the March 29 issue of the Journal of Pediatrics. Kids are exposed to many viruses and other pathogens that stimulate their immune systems in the same way vaccines do, and it's been estimated that kids could theoretically receive thousands of vaccines at once, the researchers said. Although children today receive more vaccines than children in the mid-90s, the vaccines used today contain fewer antigens. So while children in the mid-90s were exposed to between 3,000 and 15,250 antigens in the first two years of life, children today are exposed to about 315 antigens, the researchers said. Pass it on: The multiple vaccine doses kids receive early in life do not increase their risk of autism. Copyright 2013 MyHealthNewsDaily, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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Mysterious Pond Circles in NY Spur Talk of Aliens

In the small town of Eden, N.Y., the recent appearance of mysterious circles in a frozen pond has residents baffled. Last Friday, during an early spring snowstorm, Eden resident Peggy Gervase was looking at the pond near her home when she noticed an unusual pattern in the snow covering the water's surface: large circles that resembled giant polka dots. "I've never seen this before in our pond," Gervase told local TV station WGRZ. "It's eerie in a way, but cool in a way." After Gervase posted a photograph of the pond circles to the station's Facebook page, respondents offered a number of explanations for the strange circles, including elephant footprints, fish flatulence and aliens. Though aliens sometimes get the blame for crop circles and other unusual phenomenon, with no real evidence, Gervase isn't buying it. "I'm not that far gone yet," she told WGRZ. There are more rational explanations: Natural springs often feed ponds with slightly warmer water than the water freezing at the pond's surface during cold weather. As the warmer spring water rises, it would melt the snow and ice on the pond's surface. Additionally, decaying vegetation on the bottom of the pond could release gases that slowly rise to the surface, creating the polka-dot effect. Intriguing circular formations are known to occur throughout the natural world during seasonal freeze and thaw cycles. In areas of permafrost (like the northern Canadian tundra), the expansion of ice beneath the soil surface — a process called frost heaving — creates raised landforms called lithalsas. Lithalsas often form circular or ring-shaped patterns on the surface. Frost heaving also creates a related landform called a pingo. Over many years, pingos can grow into small, circular hills: The tallest known pingo is the Kadleroshilik Pingo in Alaska, which reaches 178 feet (54 meters) in height. Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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Massive Extinction Fueled Rise of Crocodiles

A massive extinction between the Triassic and Jurassic eras paved the way for the rise of the crocodiles, new research suggests. The researchers, who detail their work today (March 26) in the journal Biology Letters, found that although nearly all the crocodilelike archosaurs, known as pseudosuchia, died off about 201 million years ago, the one lineage that survived soon diversified to occupy land and sea. The lineage included the ancestors of all modern crocodiles and alligators. "Even though almost all the lineages except for one was extinct, the remaining survivors still did well in terms of morphology and body plans and the whole morphological diversity," said study co-author Olja Toljagi?, an evolutionary biology researcher who was at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich at the time of the study. Understanding the traits that allowed certain lineages to thrive could one day help paleontologists untangle one of the greatest mysteries: how dinosaurs survived the extinction unscathed and took over Earth. Dinosaur counterparts During the Triassic period, two lines of archosaurs lived in the same environment, which included dinosaurs, and the pseudosuchians, a large group of crocodilelike creatures that had short necks, long snouts and massive skulls. But around 201 million years ago, volcanic activity or a meteor killed off half the known species on Earth. Just one lineage of pseudosuchians, called the crocodylomorphs, survived. That branch would ultimately give rise to modern-day crocodiles and alligators. Crocodile line In order to find out what happened to the pseudosuchians during the mass extinction, Toljagi? and her colleague Richard Butler analyzed previous research data on pseudosuchians' skull characteristics, which could provide details about species diversity. After doing a systematic analysis, the team found that the single surviving branch not only survived the extinction, but showed great diversity within a few million years after the extinction. These diversified crocodilelike creatures fanned out into different environments ? such as swamps, rivers and oceans ? during the Triassic period. Ecological opportunity The findings suggest that the extinction allowed crocodiles to flourish, said Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study. "That extinction seems to have had a major effect by knocking off many species and then giving new species a chance," Brusatte told LiveScience. The next step is to try to piece together a similarly detailed picture for dinosaurs around the same time in order to understand how dinosaurs survived the extinction, he said. Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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Private SpaceX Cargo Capsule's Return to Earth Delayed One Day

A private cargo capsule's trip home to Earth from the International Space Station has been delayed by one day to Tuesday because of weather concerns near its targeted splashdown site. SpaceX's unmanned Dragon spacecraft is now scheduled to splash down at 12:36 p.m. EDT (1636 GMT) on Tuesday (March 26) in the Pacific Ocean, 246 miles (396 kilometers) off the coast of Baja California, NASA officials announced Friday (March 22). Dragon will be carrying about 2,670 pounds (1,210 kilograms) of equipment, hardware and scientific experiments, none of which should be affected by the slight delay, officials said. "The additional day spent attached to the orbiting laboratory will not affect science samples scheduled to return aboard the spacecraft," NASA officials wrote in a Friday update. Dragon launched toward the space station on March 1 and arrived two days later with about 1,200 pounds (544 kg) of supplies. The capsule's current mission is the second of 12 cargo deliveries California-based SpaceX is making under a $1.6 billion deal with NASA. Dragon is slated to be released from the orbiting lab at 7:06 a.m. EDT (1106 GMT) on Tuesday. Its deorbit burn will take place 4 1/2 hours later, setting the stage for its Pacific Ocean splashdown. SpaceX personnel will retrieve the capsule with a crane-equipped boat and return it to shore about 30 hours later, NASA officials said. SpaceX is one of two companies that hold a commercial cargo deal with NASA. The other is Virginia-based Orbital Sciences, which scored a $1.9 billion contract to make eight unmanned flights with its Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule. Antares is slated to make its first test flight in the middle of April, and a demonstration mission to the space station should follow later this year if all goes well. Dragon, for its part, first visited the orbiting lab on a demonstration flight in May of last year and made its first contracted cargo run in October. Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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Weird Way Lyme Disease Bugs Avoid Immune System

The bacterium that causes Lyme Disease substitutes manganese for iron in its diet, a new study finds. The pathogen is the first known organism to live without iron.   This talent helps the pathogen evade the immune system, which often acts against foreign invaders by starving them of iron. Lyme disease is transmitted by tick bites and can cause fever, fatigue, headaches and rashes. If not treated promptly with antibiotics, the disease can start to attack the circulatory and central nervous systems, causing shooting pains and numbness as well as cognitive difficulties. Now, researchers have found that to cause Lyme disease, the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi requires a large supply of manganese, which it uses instead of iron to make an important enzyme. The discovery could open new doors for the treatment of Lyme disease, said study researcher Valeria Culotta, a molecular biologist at the John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. "The only therapy for Lyme Disease right now are antibiotics like penicillin, which are effective if the disease is detected early enough," Culotta said in a statement. Penicillin acts by attacking the bacteria's cell walls, she said, but some forms of the bacteria don't have cell walls. "We'd like to find targets inside pathogenic cells that could thwart their growth," Culotta said. Researchers have known since 2000 that Borrelia doesn't have the genes it would need to make iron-containing proteins. But no one knew what they were using instead. Culotta and her colleagues used specialized equipment to measure metal-containing proteins in Borrelia, detecting metal content down to parts per trillion. They found that the bacterium substitutes manganese for iron, particularly in defensive proteins that help protect the pathogen against the immune system. The researchers now plan to map out all of the metal-containing proteins in Borrelia and plan to learn how the bacteria acquire manganese from their environment. The manganese mechanism may be a chink in the bacterium's armor that humans can exploit, Culotta said. "The best targets are enzymes that pathogens have, but people do not, so they would kill the pathogens but not harm people," she said. The researchers reported their findings today (March 22) in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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Camo Bugs & Gorgeous Genitalia Dominate Ecology Photo Contest

Fighting elephant seals, camouflaged bugs and "riotously colored flower genitalia" are among the subjects of the winners of the 2013 BMC Ecology image competition. The contest, run by the journal BMC Ecology and open to anyone affiliated with a research institution, focused on entries depicting ecological interactions. Those interactions ranged from the stress penguins feel when watched by humans to the death of a caterpillar destroyed by wasp larvae. Of course, there were less-destructive interactions as well: insects and hummingbirds pollinating flowers, for example, and an odd shot of a fake flock of birds set up to try to lure real birds back to their habitat. "From a purely visual point of view, the picture is striking: an almost geometrical arrangement whose two-toned green stripes stand in stark contrast to the pitch-black background," the judges wrote. The photo also captures the millennia of adaptive changes that took place to make the insect look like a redwood twig, they said. The overall runner-up in the contest was a multihued splash of subalpine flowers in Colorado — those colorful flower genitalia, in the words of the judges. "Composing a photograph of this nature is surprisingly difficult, and Benjamin Blonder, a PhD student from [the] University of Arizona, deserves congratulation for such a captivating portrayal of what it means to be biodiverse," the judges wrote. Category winners included a photo of two scarred and bloody Southern elephant seals battling it out for access to mates. Another winning image shows a butterfly alighting on a flower as a wasp sneaks in behind attempting to attack. "Although I didn't witness predation, I later saw a wasp dismembering a skipper [butterfly] in the same area," photographer Michael Siva-Jothy of the University of Sheffield wrote of this photograph. In one photograph that didn't make the winners' circle, but was rated as "highly commended" by the judges, a hoverfly appears frozen in mid-air, its wings a blur as it hovers. Another commended image shows two ants in a face-to-face moment of communication. "Looking through the entries was a fascinating journey into a thriving jungle of ecological research — all the more enjoyable because many of the images submitted were visually stunning," judge and evolutionary biologist Yan Wong said in a statement. "This wasn't simply a search for an amazing picture, however. Just as important were the ecological processes depicted. Ideally, images should immediately hint at one or more ecological processes, yet leave some hidden depths which open up on closer inspection." Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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Weather Channel Explores Rogue Planet Doomsday Scenario

What if a rogue planet swept through the solar system, altering Earth's orbit? Potentially, the death of all life on the planet, according to a new Weather Channel special. "Forecasting the End," a new Weather Channel series, premieres March 21, exploring the possible results of a rogue planet fly-by. Rogue planets, or planets not linked to stars, may outnumber actual stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Myths about "Planet X" or "Nibiru" hold that a stealth rogue planet is headed this way (actually, it was supposed to hit on the Mayan apocalypse on Dec. 21, 2012). In fact, the likelihood of a rogue planet swinging by is slim. Astronomers have yet to find any evidence that any of the planets in our own solar system are captured rogues. And the average space between rogue planets and other bodies in our galaxy is quite expansive, Bad Astronomy blogger Phil Plait has calculated. In other words, a collision isn't likely. The first episode of "Forecasting the End" focuses on what might happen in this very unlikely scenario. Potentially, scientists say, a planet passing by could alter the orbits of the planets in the solar system, making Earth's orbit more elliptical.   A more elliptical orbit would be bad news for life. Earth orbits in a relatively thin habitable zone around the sun, which allows for temperatures where water can be a solid, liquid or gas. This more elliptical orbit might not push Earth out of this zone, but could bring the planet close enough to the sun to create short, extremely intense summers and then far enough away for very long winters. This would create a shorter growing period and mass food shortages, even human extinction. "Life on Earth is very much dependent on the orbit we are in around the sun," said David Bennett, a University of Notre Dame astrophysicist. To make the series, complete with simulations of the world-ending scenario, Weather Channel director Brea Tisdale and crew filmed real people "reacting" to disasters, which they added later using computer graphics. In one shot of a volcanic disaster, the crew sprinkled flour from above to look like ash. "The actors have to pretend that something terrible is happening in the sky above them, when actually it's a really sunny, nice day," said director of photography Doug Cheney. Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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Bezos expedition retrieves Apollo rocket engines from ocean floor

A recovery team funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has plucked two rocket engines from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean that were used to send astronauts to the moon more than 40 years ago, he wrote on the project's website on Wednesday. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, last year announced plans to search the sea floor for rocket motors shed during Saturn 5 launches to the moon during the 1969-1972 Apollo program. Bezos Expeditions found and retrieved two Saturn 5 first-stage engines from three miles beneath the Atlantic Ocean. "We've seen an underwater wonderland - an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program," Bezos wrote. "Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible," he added. NASA sent seven missions to the moon, six of which successfully carried astronauts to the lunar surface. Bezos said because the serial numbers on the retrieved engines are missing or partially missing, identifying which mission they were used for will be difficult. "We might see more during restoration. The objects themselves are gorgeous," he added. "This is a historic find and I congratulate the team for its determination and perseverance in the recovery of these important artifacts of our first efforts to send humans beyond Earth orbit," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. The engines, which remain the property of the U.S. government, will be restored and put on public display. The recovery ship, called Seabed Worker, is due to dock at Port Canaveral, Fla., on Thursday after three weeks at sea. Bezos also is founder and chief executive of a small privately owned startup space company called Blue Origin, based in Kent, Wash., which is working on developing low-cost, reusable suborbital and orbital spaceships to carry people and experiments.

 

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Mystery of Vanishing Dwarf Galaxies Explained?

Some dwarf galaxies in the early universe travelled so fast that their gas was stripped from them, according to a new computer simulation. This cosmic vanishing act could help explain a long-standing mystery: astronomers observe fewer dwarf galaxies in the "Local Group" — the collection of galaxies near the Milky Way — than what models of the universe's formation predict. But if these galaxies are losing gas, that could explain why they don't appear as plentiful as they should. Because these dwarf galaxies were so small when they formed, they don't have large reserves of gas to begin with. Stripping any gas away would leave these galaxies so small and dim that they would be all but invisible from Earth. "This is something that came out of the simulations, and had not been anticipated, and had not been seen before. It was an interesting discovery," said Julio Navarro, a University of Victoria astronomer and co-author of a paper describing the discovery. The study, published in the Feb. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, was led by graduate studentAlejandro Benitez-Llambay from the University of Cordoba in Argentina. Courting CLUES Past supercomputer simulations show there should be a huge number of dwarf galaxies, together making up one one-thousandth of the Milky Way's mass, scattered around the local environment. But a 1999 study pointed out that the dwarf galaxies we see are not representative of the calculated mass. In the past, astronomers suggested that the energy from supernovas, as well as ultraviolet rays permeating the universe, might alter the dwarf galaxies as they form. There were weaknesses with these models, however. Observed supernova energy is too low to affect dwarf galaxy formation, and the ultraviolet rays only shrink the smallest of dwarf galaxies. To better examine the issue, the new study focused on how dwarf galaxies evolved in the early stages of the universe. Astronomers ran a simulation tracking dark matter halos that duplicate the positions of the three largest galaxies in the Local Group: the Milky Way, Andromeda (M31) and Triangulum (M33). Next, they re-ran the simulation to focus on one small area in much higher resolution. This allowed them to examine dwarf galaxy evolution in detail. "We constrained and controlled the numbers to resemble our local environment," Navarro said. The tool they used was called Constrained Local UniversE Simulations, or CLUES for short. The project, led by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics, can simulate the positions and speeds of galaxies within 10 million light years of the Milky Way. Passing the cosmic speed limit CLUES revealed that the farthest dwarf galaxies in the Local Group are flying very quickly through the cosmic web of dark matter and ordinary matter that makes up our universe. When the galaxies pass a given speed, the ram pressure between the dwarf galaxies and this cosmic web strips the galaxies' gas away. It's similar to how the matter gets stripped away from a meteor as it rams through the Earth's atmosphere. "The galaxy moves at high speed, and the gas strips out and stays behind the galaxy," said Stefan Gottlöber, a Leibniz astronomer who leads CLUES. He was also a co-author on the new paper. While the gas is all but invisible, we might be able to see the effects gas stripping has had on the galaxies. The astronomers noted that dwarf galaxies are a diverse bunch, with some looking like gas clouds and others filled with stars. Gas stripping could explain why star formation stopped, the scientists suggested. Navarro, Gottloeber and their collaborators plan another run with CLUES to simulate a larger area to test whether the dwarf galaxy stripping in the Local Group is representative of the entire universe.  Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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First Canadian takes command of International Space Station

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield took the helm of the International Space Station on Wednesday, only the second time in the outpost's 12-year history that command has been turned over to someone who is not American or Russian. "It's a huge honor and a privilege for me, but also for all the people at the Canadian Space Agency and for my entire country," Hadfield, 53, said during a change of command ceremony aboard the station broadcast on NASA Television. "Thank you very much for giving me the keys to the family car," Hadfield told outgoing station commander Kevin Ford, who is due to depart on Thursday along with Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin. "We're going to put some miles on it, but we'll bring it back in good shape," Hadfield said. Ford, Novitskiy and Tarelkin have been aboard the station, a $100 billion research laboratory that flies about 250 miles above Earth, since October. Command of the station, a project of 15 nations that has been permanently staffed since November 2000, normally rotates between primary partners United States and Russia. But in May 2009, Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne became the first station commander from the European Space Agency. Hadfield, a veteran of two space shuttle missions, is the station's first Canadian commander. Hadfield will be part of a three-man skeleton crew until NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin arrive later this month. Hadfield, astronaut Thomas Marshburn and cosmonaut Roman Romanenko have been aboard the station since December 21. They are due to return to Earth on May 13. Among Hadfield's first duties as commander is overseeing the packing and release of the visiting Space Exploration Technologies' Dragon cargo capsule. The capsule, making a second resupply run for NASA, is due to depart the station on March 25. Hadfield has taken to Twitter to share his experiences in orbit with short messages and pictures dispatched several times a day. His followers now number more than 512,000. "My heartfelt congratulations to Commander Hadfield and his family on what is an important milestone for all Canadians," Canada's Industry Minister Christian Paradis said in a statement.

 

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Best Baby Name for a Future Pope?

When Jorge Mario Bergoglio won the papal conclave's vote for new pope today (March 13), he also announced his new name: Francis I, or Francesco I in Latin. The name is a reference to Saint Francis of Assisi, a venerated Catholic friar who lived in the 13th century. Saint Francis is patron saint of animals and the environment. He was known for his dedication to poverty and reform, which may send a signal about the new pope's concerns. But popes didn't always pick a papal moniker, also known as a regnal name. And today, they rarely get overly creative with the choice. In other words, while Americans are increasingly in search of unique baby names, don't expect to see a Pope Jayden or Pope Phoenix anytime soon. "In one sense, this is the most tradition-bound of naming decisions," wrote Laura Wattenberg, a baby-naming expert, on her blog Baby Name Wizard. "The name must be a deep and pure reflection of Catholic history and values." A history of papal names The first pope to rename himself was Pope John II, who headed the Catholic Church from A.D. 533 to A.D. 535. John II was born Mercurius, a name that honored the Roman god Mercury. The new pope felt that a name derived from Roman mythology wasn't appropriate for the head of Christianity, so he decreed that he would henceforth be the appropriately Biblical John II. [Papal Primer: History's 10 Most Intriguing Popes] Not every pope followed suit, but most popes began picking regnal names for themselves by the 10th century. Pope Marcellus II was an exception to the rule — elected in 1555, he kept his birth name, more or less. (Marcellus II was born Marcello Cervini degli Spannochi.) No pope since has kept his birth name. Naming today's popes Want to raise a pope? While a baby name may not do the trick, if you wanted to stick with pope-ly ways, you'd be smart not to get creative with naming choices. According to Wattenberg, four names (John, Benedict, Gregory and Clement) have accounted for 55 of the 129 popes who have ruled since re-naming became the norm. Nevertheless, names send strong signals, Wattenberg wrote. Cardinal Albino Luciani named himself John Paul I after the two popes before him, a choice widely seen as a statement of continuity. Sometimes popes aim for a moniker more humble than their birth name. Pope Sergius IV (1009-1012) was born Pietro, or Peter, a name that harkened back to the Church's first Pope, Saint Peter.  In other cases, naming conventions get a bit odd. There has been a Martin I, Martin IV and a Martin V, but no Martin II or III. That's because two popes named Marinus were mistakenly recorded as Martins by some sources, mixing up the numbering system. Popularity of pope names Pope naming conventions don't track well with American naming trends, which skew toward increasingly less popular (yet still trendy sounding) names. In the 1880s, John was the No. 1 boy's name in the United States. By 2011, it had slid to No. 27. Even popular baby names no longer account for the same proportion of names as they used to; about 40 percent of boys in the 1880s bore one of the top 10 names. Today, fewer than 10 percent do, according to a 2010 study.   Gregory ranked as the 279th most-popular boy's name in 2011; neither Clement nor Benedict made the top 1,000. The new pope's name, Francesco in Latin or Francis I, is a first for papal names. The name Francesco did not rank above 1,000 before 1960 or after 2000 for baby boys born in the United States, but it did reach the rank of 863 in the 1980s. Francis peaked in popularity in the United States in 1910, when it ranked 31st for boys. As of 2011, the name ranked No. 618 in names for baby boys.   Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

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Carlyle Group cuts minimum investment to $50,000 in new buyout fund

Carlyle Group LP will now allow people to invest as little as $50,000 in its new buyout fund, a regulatory filing showed, as private equity firms look to widen their customer base in search of new sources of funding. The lowered entry point is down from Carlyle's earlier minimum investment of between $5 million and $20 million, according to a filing made with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in January. The opportunity to invest in the new Carlyle buyout fund will be available to "accredited investors," who are defined as having a net worth in excess of $1 million, or income in excess of $200,000 in each of the two preceding years prior to the investment. The new closed-end fund - known as CPG Carlyle Private Equity Fund LLC - has signed up Central Park Advisers LLC as investment adviser, which means Carlyle will not directly deal with individual investors. Carlyle's competitors, KKR & Co, Blackstone and Apollo Global Management LLC have already launched mutual funds targeting retail investors through their institutional asset management platforms. Those funds will invest in credit products. Carlyle, however, will be the first big private equity firm to allow relatively small investors to invest directly in buyout funds. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal late on Tuesday. (Reporting by Sakthi Prasad; Additional reporting by Sagarika Jaisinghani in Bangalore; Editing by Matt Driskill)

 

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Icahn signs confidentiality agreement with Dell

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who is fighting Dell Inc. founder Michael Dell's plan to take the struggling company private, has entered a confidentiality agreement that would give him access to the computer maker's financial records. Michael Dell, who is also Dell's CEO, is planning a $24.4 billion buyout that would make the Round Rock, Texas, company a privately owned business. But Icahn and other investors say the price of $13.65 per share is too low. Icahn's company, Icahn Enterprises, has said it holds a substantial stake in the company. Icahn wants the company to pay a special dividend of $9 per share, financed with existing cash and new debt, if shareholders reject the buyout offer. The investor told Dell executives in a recent letter that if they decline to promise this one-time payout, then he wants the company to combine a shareholder vote on the buyout with its annual election of directors, In that case, Icahn would nominate candidates who would implement the special dividend if they are elected, and Icahn and his company could provide more than $5 billion in loans to ensure prompt payment of the dividend. Icahn wrote in his letter to Dell last week that the PC maker's future is bright, and all shareholders should benefit from that, not just Michael Dell. Icahn is known for buying out-of-favor stocks and boosting them by pressuring or replacing boards of directors, installing new management and other bare-knuckle tactics. Analysts say Icahn's entry into the debate over the deal makes it less likely that shareholders will accept Dell's current buyout offer. Shareholder Forum, a group that fights for shareholder rights, plans to demand copies of the same records that Icahn is getting, according to Gary Lutin, a former investment banker who runs the group. The Shareholder Forum last week sent a letter to Dell's board seeking access to the information that influenced the decision to sell the company at $13.65 per share. The forum wants to bring in independent experts to review whether the proposed buyout is the best choice for the company and its shareholders. Dell appointed a special committee of directors last August after Michael Dell notified the company that he was exploring a buyout bid in partnership with other investors. Michael Dell has agreed to contribute 273 million shares of the company stock that he controls and $750 million in cash to help finance the buyout, which relies primarily on loans from PC software maker Microsoft Corp. and an assortment of banks. Dell's special committee has said it already considered a special dividend during a "rigorous" five-month review that culminated with the buyout plan. It said last week that it is conducting a search for better alternatives to the proposed buyout, and Icahn and others are welcome to participate. Dell shares rose 21 cents to close at $14.37 Monday. Shares of Icahn Enterprises rose 40 cents to $61.20.

 

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Edwards heart valve system good as surgery at three years: trial

Patients who received the original version of Edwards Lifesciences Corp's non-invasive heart valve replacement system had a nearly identical death rate after three years as those who had open-heart surgery, with no increased risk of stroke, according to results from a clinical trial. The data, presented on Monday at the American College of Cardiology scientific meeting in San Francisco, should provide doctors with some reassurance about the durability of the Edwards transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), known as Sapien. Three years after implantation, the death rates for any reason in high-risk patients deemed eligible for surgery was nearly identical at 44.2 percent for Sapien and 44.8 percent for those who got new valves via standard open-heart surgery. Heart related death rates also mirrored each other at three years - 30.1 percent for Sapien versus 30.2 percent for surgery. "It gives me a level of comfort that ... the late mortality is largely associated not with the device implanted, but with the intrinsic patient co-morbidities," said Dr. Martin Leon, a co-lead investigator of the trial. TAVR allow surgeons to replace diseased heart valves by threading the new valve into place through an artery, sparing patients the chest cracking, open-heart surgery. The Sapien and newer generations of the valve system is widely considered to be Edwards' most important product line. Edwards' shares, which had been down nearly 3 percent prior to release of the data, were off $1.72, or 1.9 percent, at $88.58 on the New York Stock Exchange. Because it is relatively new and there were concerns about a high number of strokes seen shortly after the procedure early in the 699-patient study, the big unanswered questions around Sapien were how it would hold up long after implantation and whether a higher stroke rate would persist after 30 days. The three-year follow-up data should help to answer those questions. "There seems to be no structural deterioration thus far," said Dr. Vinod Thourani, co-lead researcher of the Partner study, who presented the findings at the meeting. The stroke data was also encouraging. At three years, the Sapien stroke rate was 8.2 percent compared with 9.3 percent for the surgical group. The stroke rate with Sapien had been higher at two years. But between two and three years there were nine strokes in the surgical arm and only one in the Sapien arm. "So whatever early tendency that was observed that indicated a higher stroke frequency with TAVR has been more than negated with the late follow-up," Leon, director of the Center for Interventional Vascular Therapy at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, said in an interview. "The main message is there really is no constant hazard related to TAVR that suggests that stroke rates will be higher over time," said Leon, who earlier at the meeting presented data that compared a newer, smaller and easier-to-use version of the Sapien already available in Europe with the original. A problem of blood leakage around the valve was overwhelmingly higher with Sapien than with the surgical group, researchers said. Thourani, co-director of the Structural Heart and Valve Center at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, said even mild leakage is associated with higher death rates after valve replacement. However, Leon said, "If you look at sub group of patients who had none or trace valvular leak, they had an extraordinarily low mortality - half that of surgery." Edwards is attempting to address the problem with newer valves in its developmental pipeline that include a skirt or cuff around the valve designed to prevent leakage. The Sapien, which has been supplanted in Europe and elsewhere by the newer Sapien XT, was first approved in the United States in late 2011, only for patients considered too frail to survive open-heart surgery. That was expanded last autumn for a wider group of high-risk patients of the type included in this study. But for U.S. approval to be expanded into younger and lower-risk patients, Edwards much continue to demonstrate the long-term safety and durability of the system. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has asked for five years of follow-up data and Edwards plans to follow these patients forever, Leon explained. Of the latest findings, Leon said: "From as much as you can determine from an additional year of follow-up, these are all encouraging signs.

 

 

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