Friday, November 3, 2006

On November 13, Torontonians will be heading to the polls to vote for their ward’s councillor and for mayor. Among Toronto’s ridings is Don Valley West (Ward 26). Four candidates responded to Wikinews’ requests for an interview. This ward’s candidates include Muhammad Alam, Bahar Aminvaziri, Orhan Aybars, Michele Carroll-Smith, Mohamed Dhanani, Abdul Ingar, Geoff Kettel, Debbie Lechter, Natalie Maniates, John Masterson, John Parker, David Thomas, Csaba Vegh, and Fred Williams.

For more information on the election, read Toronto municipal election, 2006.

Friday, September 1, 2006

Results of gene therapy trials at the US National Cancer Institute, Bethesda to fight cancer published online yesterday by the scientific journal Science show some levels of success. However experts have warned that despite the promise more work is needed for this to become a viable cure.

Dr Stephen Rosenberg, who lead the research team, said “It’s important to emphasize this is a highly experimental treatment that’s still in the course of development.”

The team treated 17 terminal skin cancer patients with modified cells from their immune systems. The technique uses genetically modified white blood cells (more specifically T cells) to attack and kill the cancer cells. Of the 17 subjects only 2 were cured of the disease (an aggressive form of skin cancer called a melanoma which is usually fatal in advanced stages). Before the treatment, which lasted 18 months, the patients were only expected to live for up to 6 months. The remaining 15 patients were not affected by the treatment.

One of the successful patients was Mark Origer (53) from Wisconsin. He has been fighting cancer since first being diagnosed in 1999. After finding out about the new trial on the internet he applied and, after interviews, was accepted along with 16 other candidates. The treatment removed Origer’s melanoma and also shrunk another tumor in his liver – to the extent it could be removed surgically. Doctors confirmed he was free of the disease last week, nearly 2 years after treatment began. A second man (39) was cleared of his cancer which had spread to the lungs, liver and lymph nodes. Cancer that progresses to the lymph nodes is usually untreatable and fatal.

T cells can attack and destroy bacteria and other harmful cells like cancer cells. However cancer cells sometimes reduce the signals on their outer surface by which they are recognised, so the immune system cannot affect them. Gene therapy involves modifying some of a patients T cells to contain a new receptor. (Receptors are what enable the immune cell to identify harmful cells, like those corrupted by viruses. The new receptor is inserted with the use of a viral vector, i.e. a virus made safe to insert the receptor in the cell.

In the trial, T Cells were removed from each patient and modified in the laboratory. Patients underwent chemotherapy to kill most of their current immune system, which was replaced by the mutated cells. The modified cells successfully survived after injection into the body – making up 10% of the subject’s T cell count during the first 2 months. The team is now looking for ways to enable the cells to survive longer and in greater numbers.

Experts have called this a significant technical advance but warn that more patients need testing and the technique refining before any conclusive results can be drawn. Dr Edel O’Toole, consultant dermatologist and British Skin Foundation spokesman, said: “I think that the success of this approach in two patients shows promise, however 15 patients did not respond to the treatment suggesting that further work is needed to optimise this approach for all patients, which could take many years.”

Rosenberg now hopes to run a new trial with possibly stronger gene therapy treatments, he is currently awaiting FDA approval.

Gene therapy was much hyped after it’s first successful application in so called “bubble boys” (patients with severe combined immunodeficiency). After follow-up, these trials were stopped when it was discovered that three of eleven patients in one trial had developed leukemia.

Monday, January 5, 2009

On Sunday afternoon, a Lafayette-based Petroleum Helicopters Inc. (PHI, Inc.) helicopter bound for the offshore oil fields crashed shortly after taking off from its Amelia base, into a marshy area near Bayou Penchant about 100 miles southwest of New Orleans. The helicopter had been carrying oilfield workers and 2 pilots. Eight people were killed and the Coast Guard helicopter rushed the lone survivor, a 28-year-old medevacted man, in critical condition, to Leonard J. Chabert Medical Center and then taken to Houma‘s Hebert Medical Center.

According to Pamela Norton, age 37, a Gretna woman, her ex-husband, Jorey A. Rivero Sr., age 35, of Westwego, was aboard the oil-services helicopter. “He got onto that chopper about noon Sunday,” she said. The largest helicopter company in the world, Petroleum Helicopters Inc. (PHI, Inc. – formerly Petroleum Helicopters International) has its home base in Lafayette Regional Airport. It provides helicopter services to oil and gas businesses and also flies medical helicopters. “Eight deceased passengers were recovered by the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Department,” Coast Guard spokeswoman Jaclyn Young said. According to Richard Ravinelli, PHI Director of Human Resources, the victims’ names would not be released until all family members concerned are duly notified.

According to Barbara Bryant, her son who worked for three years on oil rigs, was one of the fatalities. “He just spent 3 months offshore, just because he wanted to save up enough money for a down payment on his own house, and he’s been living with me to save his money to do that. He didn’t make it,” she said.

The New Orleans Eighth Coast Guard District Command Center received a distress signal from the Langley, Va. Air Force Rescue Coordination Center (AFRCC), at 3:30 p.m. Helicopter owner PHI earlier called the Coast Guard, informing about a distress call from its helicopter. Upon AFRCC request, Coast Guard’s Air Station New Orleans’ HH-65C and crew were dispatched to the site of the crash.

Rescue workers at Bob’s Bayou Black Marina in Gibson, Louisiana, an unincorporated community in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, arrived at boat launch to coordinate recovery efforts for the bodies in the wilderness. The Terrebonne Sheriff’s Office Water Patrol and a Coast Guard helicopter also cooperated in search of bodies in waters near Bayou Penchant, a soupy, grassy area which is only accessible by airboat.

Federal investigators led by the National Transportation Safety Board are scheduled to arrive to the crash site Monday to probe the tragedy.

In June, another PHI Air medical helicopter also crashed in Texas. The Sam Houston National Forest accident killed the pilot, paramedic, nurse and a patient who was being transferred from Huntsville to Houston.

Friday, January 12, 2007

The U.S. armed forces detained five Iranians working at a “liaison office” located in Erbil, Iraq before dawn on Friday. Sources said that the U.S. forces first landed their helicopters around the building, then broke through the office’s gate, disarmed the guards, confiscated some documents and certain objects, arrested five suspected terrorists, and then left for an undisclosed location.

However, there was no raid on the Iranian Consulate General as earlier reported. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told Agence France-Presse that the building raided was “not a consulate or a government building”, which appears to be confirmed by the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, who said the Iranians were working at an office that had government approval and was in the process of being approved as a consulate, but was not a Consulate nor the Iranian Consulate General. The US is strategically insisting that they raided a “liaison office” instead of a Consulate to avoid being found in violation of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.

Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Mikhail Kamynin said that the raid was absolutely unacceptable and was a violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The Kurdistan Regional Government also expressed their shock and disapproval of the raid.

On Thursday’s hearing on Iraq, Senator Joseph Biden (D-Delware), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the Bush Administration did not have the authority to send U.S. troops on cross-border raids. Biden said, “I believe the present authorization granted the president to use force in Iraq does not cover that, and he does need congressional authority to do that. I just want to set that marker.” After the meeting, Biden sent a follow-up letter to the White House asking for an explanation from the Bush Administration on the matter.

On Thursday morning, Iran’s foreign ministry official sent a letter to Iraq’s foreign ministry asking Iraq to stop the Bush Administration from interfering with Iraq-Iran relations, and has protested the raid on its liaison office. The official said, “We expect the Iraqi government to take immediate measures to set the aforesaid individuals free and to condemn the U.S. troopers for the measure. Following up on the case and releasing the arrestees is a responsibility of primarily the Iraqi government and then the local government and officials of the Iraqi Kurdistan.”

Monday, April 21, 2014

Scientists at Chicago’s Field Museum and New York’s American Museum of Natural History have discovered three new species of yellow-shouldered bats, genus Sturnira, in the Neotropics. On Wednesday open-access journal ZooKeys published their paper on two of the new species, Sturnira bakeri and Sturnira burtonlimi. The two new species were previously confused with S. ludovici, and S. lilium and S. luisi, respectively. With the discovery, genus Sturnira now has the most species of any genus in family Phyllostomidae, the leaf-nosed bats.

Species S. bakeri was named after Dr. Robert J. Baker, who “has made enormous contributions to our [Authors of the ZooKey paper] understanding of bats, particularly to the evolution of Neotropical phyllostomids”; and S. burtonlimi after Dr. Burton K. Lim, who “collected the type series of this species and has made many other important collections throughout the Neotropics and beyond”, the authors noted in the paper.

Within the New World tropics, the distribution range of the genus, the new species’ known living areas are in Costa Rica and Panama for S. burtonlimi, and Western Ecuador for S. bakeri. The researchers identified differences between different specimens, including those in their teeth, skull shapes, and DNA sequences.

Wikinews interviewed one of the chiropterologists, Paúl M. Velazco of the American Museum of Natural History, about the study.

((Wikinews)) The Sturnira genus now has 22 species, over 1.5 times larger than it was a year ago (14 species). Who contributed to this change? Did you participate throughout the entire process, or only the discovery of the last 2 species?

Paúl M. Velazco: The last Mammal Species of the World (Simmons, 2005) recognized 14 species for Sturnira. Since then three new species have been described [S. sorianoi Sánchez-Hernández et al., 2005; S. koopmanhilli McCarthy et al., 2006; and S. perla Jarrín-V. and Kunz, 2011] and one subspecies was elevated to the species level (S. hondurensis) by Gardner (2008). This brought the number of species of Sturnira to 18 by 2011. Along with my coauthor Bruce Patterson, we generated the most comprehensive phylogeny of the genus. For this we sequenced two nuclear and three mitochondrial genes from the liver or muscle tissue that had been frozen or preserved from each bat specimen, isolating nearly 5,000 base pairs of DNA. These sequences were obtained from specimens we have collected in the past (38) and from tissues we borrowed from different natural history collections. We published this phylogeny last year in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. Results of this study found that two subspecies of Sturnira lilium should be recognized as valid species (S. parvidens and S. paulsoni). Additionally we found three new species, two of them described in the ZooKeys paper. The third one hopefully will be published later this year.

((WN)) The genus is called Sturnira Gray in the paper. I’ve not seen extra adjectives in genus names, before. What is the context for such name?

PMV: Usually in papers that deal with taxonomy and nomenclature, the first time that a genus or species is mentioned in text is accompanied by the authority that describes that taxon. In the case of Sturnira, it was Gray in 1842 that named the genus.

((WN)) What caused your initial interest in the question in the genus? When did you become interested?

PMV: I have been studying bats for the past eighteen years and I am especially interested in the family Phyllostomidae that is endemic to the Neotropics. This family includes more than 160 species. It is the most diverse family of bats in the Neotropics, which together exhibits more variation in morphological features and feeding ecology than any other family-level group of mammals. Phyllostomid bats exploit an unusually diverse array of feeding habits including sanguivory, insectivory, carnivory, omnivory, nectarivory, pollennivory, and frugivory. Because of all mentioned before, phyllostomids are a really interesting group to work with. Sturnira and Platyrrhinus are members of this family.

((WN)) The paper mentions that the genus is now the most speciose genus in the Neotropical family Phyllostomidae. What genus did it beat? How many species does it include?

PMV: The other genus with the most species in the family is Platyrrhinus. Currently, it has 20 species, but soon it will increase to 21. Along with another colleague, Burton Lim, we have a paper in press describing a new species based on molecular and morphological data from the Guianan Shield.

((WN)) What equipment did you use?

PMV: For the ZooKeys paper, we examined several specimens under the stereoscope. The molecular phylogeny gave us the separation between species, from there our job was to focus on finding morphological differences between these groups.

((WN)) Did you conduct field study to identify the species’ habits? If so, where and how did you do that?

PMV: I have done fieldwork in Belize and Peru, and my coauthor did field work in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru, where we collected several specimens of Sturnira (including the third species that has not been described yet). But the two species that were described in the ZooKeys paper are based on specimens collected by our colleagues Dr. Robert Baker from Texas Tech University and Dr. Burton Lim from the Royal Ontario Museum.

((WN)) How do you isolate of the living area of the new species from the living area of the old species?

PMV: We used the phylogeny of Velazco and Patterson 2013 (Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution) as a framework for this.

((WN)) How long did the study take? What has been the most time-consuming activity?

PMV: It took almost a year. The most time consuming part was spending several hours behind the stereoscope looking for the diagnostic characters.

((WN)) Who participated in the study? What were their roles?

PMV: Dr. Bruce Patterson from the [American] Museum of Natural History and I. I was the one in charge of finding the diagnostic characters and together we both worked on the manuscript.

((WN)) Who do you collaborate with internationally about your study?

PMV: For this study I collaborated directly with Dr. Bruce Patterson from the Field Museum of Natural History, but studies like this cannot be completed without the contribution of scientific collections. We used specimens from the American Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Louisiana State University, Museum of Southwestern Biology, Museo de Historia Natural de la Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, Museo de Zoología of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley, Royal Ontario Museum, Texas Tech University, and the National Museum of Natural History.

((WN)) What future research do you plan?

PMV: To keep doing what I love, which is going to the field, working at collections, and collaborating with the wonderful collaborators I have, all of this is an effort to try to understand bat diversity and evolution in the Neotropics, especially why phyllostomid bats are so successful at this. There is still much to discover, and hopefully we could, in time, implement conservation actions for species that have small distributions.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005

The Dover, Pennsylvania school board became the first to mandate inclusion of Intelligent Design in a public school biology curriculum. For this year’s November 8 election, Republicans fielded a pro-Intelligent Design slate of candidates including some returning candidates who had previously voted to include a statement about Intelligent Design in the biology curriculum. A mixed slate of Democrat and Republican candidates came forward as an alternative group of school board candidates, the Dover CARES coalition. They proposed to remove Intelligent Design from the biology curriculum but allow discussion of Intelligent Design in courses dealing with philosophy and comparative religion.

All eight open school board seats were won by Dover CARES coalition candidates. Two candidates who had previously voted as school board members to include intelligent design in the public school science curriculum received the fewest votes in Tuesday’s election. One of the newly elected board members is Bryan Rehm, a parent of a Dover school student. Rehm, along with ten other parents, initiated a law suit against the school board for its decision to insert Intelligent Design into the science curriculum.

In October 2004, the Dover school board decided that Intelligent Design is a scientific theory that should be mentioned in biology classes that include discussion of biological evolution as part of the course content. The board mandated that a statement should be read in those classes stating “Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life,” and “The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families.”

The school board’s statement on Intelligent Design directs students to the book Of Pandas and People as a source of information “for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.” This book is published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, a non-profit organization founded for the purpose of “promoting and publishing textbooks presenting a Christian perspective.”

Parents of some Dover public school students filed a lawsuit against the school board, charging that including the school board’s statement on Intelligent Design was an attempt to introduce religion into the science curriculum. The book Of Pandas and People says, “Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency.” The original complaint in the law suit against the school board claimed that “Intelligent design is a non-scientific argument or assertion.”

The US District Court Judge John Jones, who heard the non-jury case, hopes to make his ruling by the end of the year. The evidence phase of the trial ended on November 4, 2005.

A local Dover newspaper, the York Daily Record, editorialized that Dover voters should take trial testimony into account during the general election when they could cast votes for school board members along with other elective offices.

Biology teachers in the Dover schools have refused to read the school board’s statement on Intelligent Design to students because the Pennsylvania state code for education states that “The professional educator may not knowingly and intentionally misrepresent subject matter.” In a letter to their administrator, the teachers stated their view that “Intelligent design is not science.” School administrators have been reading the school board’s Intelligent Design statement to students in Dover public schools.

Monday, March 24, 2008

File:Tenzin Gyatzo foto 1.jpg

The government of China has claimed that the Dalai Lama is cooperating with Islamic extremists as part of a plot to bring the country into crises before the Olympic Games, which are due to be half in Beijing this Summer. The official newspaper of the government of China claimed that “the Dalai Lama is scheming to take the Beijing Olympics hostage to force the Chinese government to make concessions to Tibet independence.”

This move comes after Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, vowed to step down from his position if things “get out of control” in Tibet, where violent demonstrations against China have killed anywhere from 13 to 100 people.

The protests, which began in Lhasa, have since spread to neighboring provinces. In Aba, Sichuan, one witness reported 17 deaths. “Earlier today, the whole town was teeming with police and soldiers,” he said. “All the shops have been closed. There are no arrests that I know of … People are anticipating that something big is going to happen.” Elsewhere in Sichuan, thousands of Tibetans turned out in the streets of Seda, according to the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

The international community has repeatedly urged China to use restraint in dealing with protesters, and to start talks with the Dalai Lama. United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Monday, “We have really urged the Chinese over several years to find a way to talk with the Dalai Lama, who is a figure of authority, who is not a separatist, and to find a way to engage him and bring his moral weight to a more sustainable and better solution of the Tibet issue.”