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Study links sugary soft drinks to pancreas cancer

People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have a much higher risk of pancreatic cancer, an unusual but deadly cancer, researchers reported on Monday.

People who drank mostly fruit juice instead of sodas did not have the same risk, the study of 60,000 people in Singapore found.

Sugar may be to blame but people who drink sweetened sodas regularly often have other poor health habits, said Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota, who led the study.

“The high levels of sugar in soft drinks may be increasing the level of insulin in the body, which we think contributes to pancreatic cancer cell growth,” Pereira said in a statement.

Insulin, which helps the body metabolize sugar, is made in the pancreas.

Writing in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, Pereira and colleagues said they followed 60,524 men and women in the Singapore Chinese Health Study for 14 years.

Over that time, 140 of the volunteers developed pancreatic cancer. Those who drank two or more soft drinks a week had an 87 percent higher risk of being among those who got pancreatic cancer.

Pereira said he believed the findings would apply elsewhere.

“Singapore is a wealthy country with excellent healthcare. Favorite pastimes are eating and shopping, so the findings should apply to other western countries,” he said.

But Susan Mayne of the Yale Cancer Center at Yale University in Connecticut was cautious.

“Although this study found a risk, the finding was based on a relatively small number of cases and it remains unclear whether it is a causal association or not,” said Mayne, who serves on the board of the journal, which is published by the American Association for Cancer Research.

“Soft drink consumption in Singapore was associated with several other adverse health behaviors such as smoking and red meat intake, which we can’t accurately control for.”

Other studies have linked pancreatic cancer to red meat, especially burned or charred meat.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer, with 230,000 cases globally. In the United States, 37,680 people are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in a year and 34,290 die of it.

The American Cancer Society says the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer patients is about 5 percent.

via Study links sugary soft drinks to pancreas cancer | Reuters.

Study links sugary soft drinks to pancreas cancer

People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have a much higher risk of pancreatic cancer, an unusual but deadly cancer, researchers reported on Monday.

People who drank mostly fruit juice instead of sodas did not have the same risk, the study of 60,000 people in Singapore found.

Sugar may be to blame but people who drink sweetened sodas regularly often have other poor health habits, said Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota, who led the study.

“The high levels of sugar in soft drinks may be increasing the level of insulin in the body, which we think contributes to pancreatic cancer cell growth,” Pereira said in a statement.

Insulin, which helps the body metabolize sugar, is made in the pancreas.

Writing in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, Pereira and colleagues said they followed 60,524 men and women in the Singapore Chinese Health Study for 14 years.

Over that time, 140 of the volunteers developed pancreatic cancer. Those who drank two or more soft drinks a week had an 87 percent higher risk of being among those who got pancreatic cancer.

Pereira said he believed the findings would apply elsewhere.

“Singapore is a wealthy country with excellent healthcare. Favorite pastimes are eating and shopping, so the findings should apply to other western countries,” he said.

But Susan Mayne of the Yale Cancer Center at Yale University in Connecticut was cautious.

“Although this study found a risk, the finding was based on a relatively small number of cases and it remains unclear whether it is a causal association or not,” said Mayne, who serves on the board of the journal, which is published by the American Association for Cancer Research.

“Soft drink consumption in Singapore was associated with several other adverse health behaviors such as smoking and red meat intake, which we can’t accurately control for.”

Other studies have linked pancreatic cancer to red meat, especially burned or charred meat.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer, with 230,000 cases globally. In the United States, 37,680 people are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in a year and 34,290 die of it.

The American Cancer Society says the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer patients is about 5 percent.

via Study links sugary soft drinks to pancreas cancer | Reuters.

Screams in Italy as horror film terrifies the young

“Paranormal Activity”, a box-office hit in Italy, has caused terror among youngsters.

An Italian news agency reported that emergency services took dozens of calls, especially in southern Naples, from cinemagoers shocked by the film.

“Several panic attacks lasting more than half an hour took place,” an emergency response worker said.

“The most serious case is that of a 14-year-old girl who was brought to the hospital in a state of paralysis.”

The Italian parents’ association noted that admission to the movie is restricted in the United States, Britain, Germany and The Netherlands and asked for an age limit of 18 in Italy.

Defence minister Ignazio La Russa said: “For the past two weeks a trailer has been shown obsessively on TV, and is terrifying thousands of children.”

In the film Katie and Micah, haunted by paranormal phenomena, decide to tape their ordeal in the style of 1999 hit “The Blair Witch Project”.

“Paranormal Activity”, which cost a mere $15,000 (£9,600) to make, opened in Italian cinemas over the weekend and has already taken more per cinema than Hollywood blockbuster “Avatar” – the costliest movie of all time.

Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the Italian fascist dictator and head of a parliamentary committee on children, said the film had “highly distressing content” and was causing “panic attacks and psychological problems among youths.”

“I don’t think we can ban ‘Paranormal Activity’ now, but surely we need to study how to warn parents of the risks their children are incurring,” Mussolini said.

via Screams in Italy as horror film terrifies the young – Telegraph.

Australian sword swallower breaks world record

An Australian performance artist has set a Guinness world record by swallowing an amazing 18 swords at the same time.

Chayne Hultgren, also known as the Space Cowboy, beat his own 2008 record by swallowing the swords, each 28.35in long, at an event in Sydney.

The swords were all bound together with a steel clasp and Mr Hultgren held his head back to create a straight channel into his lower body

He said that while the stunt was not dangerous, he had spent many hours training for it.

He started with a garden hose, and trained himself not to gag.

After setting the record, Mr Hultgren, 31, described it as definitely one of his greatest achievements so far.

“Wow, I did it, it feels good, thank you very much, it feels really good actually,” he said.

Mr Hultgren started practising with swords at the age of 16 and says he has used different methods to perfect the art.

“I stretch my throat with hoses and use a few different techniques to basically enable me to do what, until now, has been impossible”.

“I don’t just straightaway grab 18 blades and shove them down my throat – you’ve got to practise a lot and build up to it,” he said.

via Australian sword swallower breaks world record – Telegraph.

Man Points Gun At Neighbor Over Snow Shoveling

New Castle County Police said a man pointed a gun at a neighbor who was shoveling snow on Saturday at the Hampton Walk Apartments. A man told police a neighbor came outside while he was shoveling, pointed a gun and threatened to shoot him if he didn’t stop shoveling snow onto his car.

A man, 43, was arrested and charged with aggravated menacing.

via Man Points Gun At Neighbor Over Snow Shoveling – CBS News.

Have you ever been the victim of an aggravated menacing?

Paleontology news: New theory on the origin of primates

… In this new approach to molecular phylogenetics, vicariance, and plate tectonics, Heads shows that the distribution ranges of primates and their nearest relatives, the tree shrews and the flying lemurs, conforms to a pattern that would be expected from their having evolved from a widespread ancestor. This ancestor could have evolved into the extinct Plesiadapiformes in north America and Eurasia, the primates in central-South America, Africa, India and south East Asia, and the tree shrews and flying lemurs in South East Asia.

Divergence between strepsirrhines (lemurs and lorises) and haplorhines (tarsiers and anthropoids) is correlated with intense volcanic activity on the Lebombo Monocline in Africa about 180 million years ago. The lemurs of Madagascar diverged from their African relatives with the opening of the Mozambique Channel (160 million years ago), while New and Old World monkeys diverged with the opening of the Atlantic about 120 million years ago.

“This model avoids the confusion created by the center of origin theories and the assumption of a recent origin for major primate groups due to a misrepresentation of the fossil record and molecular clock divergence estimates” said Michael from his New Zealand office. “These models have resulted in all sorts of contradictory centers of origin and imaginary migrations for primates that are biogeographically unnecessary and incompatible with ecological evidence”.

The tectonic model also addresses the otherwise insoluble problem of dispersal theories that enable primates to cross the Atlantic to America, and the Mozambique Channel to Madagascar although they have not been able to cross 25 km from Sulawesi to Moluccan islands and from there travel to New Guinea and Australia.

Heads acknowledged that the phylogenetic relationships of some groups such as tarsiers, are controversial, but the various alternatives do not obscure the patterns of diversity and distribution identified in this study.

Biogeographic evidence for the Jurassic origin for primates, and the pre-Cretaceous origin of major primate groups considerably extends their divergence before the fossil record, but Heads notes that fossils only provide minimal dates for the existence of particular groups, and there are many examples of the fossil record being extended for tens of millions of years through new fossil discoveries. …

via Paleontology news: New theory on the origin of primates.

At last we will know how bright the stars really are

LIGHT is the bedrock of astronomy, so it may come as a surprise that astronomers don’t have a very good handle on measurements of brightness. That is set to change, however, as the antiquated brightness scale undergoes a long-overdue upgrade that could help to reveal the true nature of dark energy.

More than 2000 years ago, the Greek astronomer Hipparchus devised a scale ranking the apparent brightness of different stars. Today, astronomers use much the same system, measuring brightness relative to a handful of standard reference stars. The trouble is, the reference stars’ brightness is not known very accurately, and measurements of it have not kept pace with developments in detector technology. For example, the most accurate measurements of the bright star Vega date back to the 1970s. “It’s surprising. There has been relatively little work on that in the past couple of decades,” says Gary Bernstein of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

To redress this, a team led by Mary Elizabeth Kaiser of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, is planning to launch a rocket-borne telescope to make the most accurate measurements yet of the reference stars’ brightness (arxiv.org/abs/1001.3925). Called the Absolute Color Calibration Experiment for Standard Stars (ACCESS), the NASA-funded mission will lift off in a year or two and make four suborbital flights, each taking it above Earth’s distorting atmosphere for a few minutes at a time.

During these brief jaunts, ACCESS will gauge the brightness of four common reference stars – the sky’s brightest star, Sirius; Vega; and a couple of much dimmer ones – to a precision of 1 per cent or better. That is twice the accuracy of current measurements, an advance that will be possible thanks to the calibration of the telescope’s sensors with artificial light sources before launch.

The measurements ACCESS makes will serve as a benchmark to calibrate the observations of other telescopes. This will allow the brightness of supernovae and other objects to be measured more accurately.

Such precision will be key to finding out the secrets of dark energy, a mysterious entity that is causing the universe to expand at an ever faster rate. The existence of dark energy was deduced in 1998 when astronomers noticed that distant supernovae were fainter – and thus farther away – than expected.

Astronomers still don’t know where dark energy comes from. It could spring from a fundamental new force, or it might point to a flaw in our understanding of gravity. To better understand it, researchers are examining the history of cosmic expansion, searching for slight variations in the expansion rate over time. This requires more accurate measurements of the brightness of supernovae at different cosmic epochs.

ACCESS team member Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University, one of dark energy’s discoverers, says subtle errors can crop up when combining brightness data from multiple telescopes, potentially misleading astronomers about the nature of the acceleration. “You could think that dark energy is changing with scale or time, but it’s only an artefact of the fact that your observatories have not all used the same reference point,” he told New Scientist.

The ACCESS mission will help astronomers avoid this pitfall, he says. “It doesn’t measure dark energy itself but it makes your scale more accurate.” …

via At last we will know how bright the stars really are – space – 09 February 2010 – New Scientist.

California Tree Carving Hints at Early Chumash Astronomy

The counterclockwise rotation of stars around Polaris as viewed from Painted Rock in Carrizo Plain, Calif. The glyph on the “scorpion tree” appears to portray Ursa Major in relation to Polaris. Rick Bury

Though local lore held that the so-called “scorpion tree” had been the work of cowboys, paleontologist Rex Saint Onge immediately knew that the tree was carved by Indians when he stumbled upon it in the fall of 2006. Located in a shady grove atop the Santa Lucia Mountains in San Luis Obispo County, the centuries-old gnarled oak had the image of a six-legged, lizard-like being meticulously scrawled into its trunk, the nearly three-foot-tall beast topped with a rectangular crown and two large spheres. “I was really the first one to come across it who understood that it was a Chumash motif,” says Saint Onge, referring to the native people who painted similar designs on rock formations from San Luis Obispo south through Santa Barbara and into Malibu.

Amazingly, Saint Onge had just identified the West Coast’s only known Native American arborglyph, one long hidden behind private property signs. But the discoveries didn’t stop there. After spending more time at the site, Saint Onge realized that the carved crown and its relation to one of the spheres was strikingly similar to the way the constellation Ursa Major — which includes the Big Dipper — related to the position of Polaris, the North Star. “But as a paleontologist, I live my life looking down at the ground,” says Saint Onge, who runs an archaeological-consulting firm out of nearby Arroyo Grande. “I didn’t know much about astronomy at all.” (See who were the first Americans.)

He quickly learned that the constellation rotates around the North Star every 24 hours, that its placement during sunset could be used to tell the seasons and that the Chumash people also revered this astronomical relationship in their language and cosmology. “It’s the third largest constellation in the sky and they saw it every single night for tens of thousands of years,” says Saint Onge. “It was like the TV being stuck on the same channel playing the same show nonstop.” It became increasingly obvious to Saint Onge that the arborglyph and related cave paintings weren’t just the work of wild-eyed, drug-induced shamans — which has been a leading theory for decades — but that the ancient images were deliberate studies of the stars and served as integral components of the Chumash people’s annual calendar. “This gives us an insight into what the indigenous people of Central California were doing,” says Saint Onge, who published his theory last fall in the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology. “It wasn’t just the daily simpleton tasks of hunter-gatherers. They were actually monitoring the stars.” …

via California Tree Carving Hints at Early Chumash Astronomy – TIME.

The iLimb

Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included | Danger Room | Wired.com

The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch:

Develop strategies to create a synthetic organism “self-destruct” option to be implemented upon nefarious removal of organism.

The project comes as Darpa also plans to throw $20 million into a new synthetic biology program, and $7.5 million into “increasing by several decades the speed with which we sequence, analyze and functionally edit cellular genomes.”

Of course, Darpa’s up against some vexing, fundamental laws of nature — not to mention bioethics — as they embark on the lab beast program. First, they might want to rethink the idea of evolution as a random series of events, says NYU biology professor David Fitch. “Evolution by selection is nota random process at all, and is actually a hugely efficient design algorithm used extensively in computation and engineering,” he e-mails Danger Room.

Even if Darpa manages to overcome the inherent intelligence of evolutionary processes, overcoming inevitable death can be tricky. Just ask all the other research teams who’ve made stabs at it, trying everything from cell starvation to hormone treatments. Gene therapy, where artificial genes are inserted into an organism to boost cell life, are the latest and greatest in life-extension science, but they’ve only been proven to extend lifespan by 20 percent in rats. …

via Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included | Danger Room | Wired.com.