The special U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled that vaccines could not have caused the autism of an Oregon boy, William Mead, ending his family’s quest for reimbursement.

“The Meads believe that thimerosal-containing vaccines caused William’s regressive autism. As explained below, the undersigned finds that the Meads have not presented a scientifically sound theory,” Special Master George Hastings, a former tax claims expert at the Department of Justice, wrote in his ruling.

In February 2009, the court ruled against three families who claimed vaccines caused their children’s autism, saying they had been “misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment”.

The families sought payment under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a no-fault system that has a $2.5 billion fund built up from a 75-cent-per-dose tax on vaccines.

Instead of judges, three “special masters” heard the three test cases representing thousands of other petitioners.

They asked whether a combination vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, plus a mercury-containing preservative called thimerosal, caused the children’s symptoms.

MYSTERIOUS CONDITION

More than 5,300 cases were filed by parents who believed vaccines may have caused autism in their children. The no-fault payout system is meant to protect vaccine makers from costly lawsuits that drove many out of the vaccine-making business.

Autism is a mysterious condition that affects as many as one in 110 U.S. children. The so-called spectrum ranges from mild Asperger’s Syndrome to severe mental retardation and social disability, and there is no cure or good treatment.

The U.S. Institute of Medicine has reported several times that no link can be found between vaccines and autism.

Supporters of the scientific community welcomed the ruling.

“It’s time to move forward and look for the real causes of autism,” said Alison Singer, president of the Autism Science Foundation. “There is not a bottomless pit of money with which to fund autism science. We have to use our scarce resources wisely.”

But advocates for the idea that vaccines are dangerous said they would not give up. “We hope that Congress will intervene in what is clearly a miscarriage of justice to vaccine-injured children,” said Jim Moody of the Coalition for Vaccine Safety.

Autism Speaks, another advocacy group, said it would also not completely abandon the theory that vaccines might cause autism.

The organization said it would invest “in research to determine whether subsets of individuals might be at increased risk for developing autism symptoms following vaccination.”

But the group also said it was clear that if such a link did exist, it would be rare.

“While we have great empathy for all parents of children with autism, it is important to keep in mind that, given the present state of the science, the proven benefits of vaccinating a child to protect them against serious diseases far outweigh the hypothesized risk that vaccinations might cause autism,” Autism Speaks said in a statement.

Source

The device is already on sale in Europe, and its maker, Abbott Laboratories, hopes to win approval to sell it in the United States next year. Elizabeth Taylor reportedly got one last fall — the 77-year-old actress told fans about it on Twitter.

About 8 million people in the U.S. and Europe have leaky mitral valves — the valve between the heart’s left upper and lower chambers. Not all are so bad they need treatment, but the worst cases can lead to heart failure over time.

In the study, six times more people who had surgery suffered complications during the next month than those who got Abbott’s MitraClip. Deaths, strokes and blood transfusions were less common with the device. The clip was not dramatically less effective than surgery after one year.

Doctors called the study a watershed — the first big test of repairing or replacing heart valves through arteries rather than drastic surgery.

The MitraClip is only for the mitral valve. Other devices for other heart valves are in late-stage testing, and many doctors believe they will transform how these conditions are treated in the near future.

“We have opened the door for a new therapeutic option for patients,” said Dr. Ted Feldman of NorthShore University Health System in Evanston, Ill.

He led the new study and gave results Sunday at an American College of Cardiology conference. The study was sponsored by Evalve Inc., which developed the device. Evalve was sold last year to North Chicago, Ill.-based Abbott, and Feldman consults for the firm.

Some surgeons were not convinced the device is close to surgery’s effectiveness, and said patients need to be studied for more than one year.

“It’s a partial victory for the device,” Dr. James McClurken, a surgeon at Temple University in Philadelphia, said of the result. McClurken also is the conference chairman.

The study used an outdated method of surgery that minimizes its true benefit, said Dr. J. Scott Millikan, a surgeon at the Billings Clinic in Montana.

“Clearly this is a very exciting technology,” but the study’s leaders “set the bar for success way too low” for the device, he said.

The mitral valve is like a saloon door that opens to let blood flow into the heart’s main pumping chamber. When the flaps of the door don’t swing completely shut, blood flows back into an upper chamber of the heart.

Medicines can ease symptoms but do not keep the valve problem from getting worse. Bad cases are treated with open-heart surgery: Doctors partly stitch the flaps together in the middle, allowing blood to flow on either side but keeping them aligned during each heartbeat.

The MitraClip imitates those stitches. With the patient under general anesthesia, doctors push a tube into a blood vessel in the groin and guide it into the heart. The device, a fabric-covered metal clothespin, is mounted on the end of the tube and clips the two flaps of the valve together.

In the study, 184 people were assigned to get the clip and the procedure was successful in 136. Major complications occurred in 10 percent of people treated with the clip compared with 57 percent of 79 other patients treated with surgery. Two surgery patients died, two suffered major strokes, and four needed emergency heart surgery; none of the clip patients had those problems.

That made the device much safer than surgery, researchers said.

As for effectiveness, the study was only designed to see if the device was not substantially inferior to surgery and by that measure, it passed.

After one year, valve problems were sufficiently resolved in 72 percent of device patients and 88 percent of surgery patients.

Surgery is better, “but it’s not so much better that patients, given the choice, want to undergo the open-heart procedure,” especially given the difference in safety, Feldman said. “Part of what makes this attractive is that when the clip doesn’t work, surgery remains an option,” so the less drastic treatment could be tried first, he added.

The results are “very enticing and very exciting,” although longer-term study is needed, said Dr. Robert Bonow, a former American Heart Association president and chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

“The surgeons would argue this is less good of a result. But from the patient’s point of view, this might be exactly what you need” to turn a big problem into a mild one that does not need further treatment, Bonow said.

Dr. Donald Glower, a Duke University cardiac surgeon who co-led the study, agreed.

“This is part of the trade-off we have” with many treatments that avoid surgery. “It’s probably not realistic” to expect it to be as good, he said.

No price for the device has been set in the U.S., but it sells for about $27,000 in Europe, plus whatever doctors and hospitals charge to implant it — as yet unknown.

“You have to look at it always in comparison to the alternative” — valve surgery costs $50,000 or more, including a longer hospital stay, said John Capek, executive vice president of Abbott’s medical devices division.

Source – AP

The new technique, which uses a “warhead” molecule capable of inactivating nearby proteins when triggered by light, could help to accelerate the development of new therapies by providing researchers with a new set of research tools and options.

The study was published March 14, 2010 in an advanced, online edition of the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

“High-throughput screening can produce a synthetic ligand [peptoid] capable of binding to just about any protein you want,” said Thomas Kodadek, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Institute’s Jupiter, Florida, campus, who led the study. “The problem is, they almost always have modest potency – which makes them less than ideal research tools. By attaching this ‘warhead’ molecule to a peptoid, we’ve shown that we can increase that protein-killing potency by a thousand fold without going through an expensive and time-consuming optimization process.”

The new technique offers researchers rapid access to some very potent, very selective light activated compounds that can knock out specific protein function, an important strategy in research into diseases such as cancer. Since light can be focused with high spatial resolution, this technology may open the door for knocking out proteins in only one region of a single cell, but not another, allowing, for example, the inactivation of a target protein in the nucleus, but not in the cytoplasm that surrounds it.

A Choice of Warheads

The technique is known as a CALI, which stands for chromophore-assisted light inactivation; chromophores are molecules that can absorb visible or ultraviolet light. While other researchers have made CALI reagents previously, they suffered from poor efficiency, largely due to self-inactivation. The new warhead used by the Scripps Florida team represents a significant advance.

They used a derivative of ruthenium, a metallic element that produces what is known as singlet oxygen, the well known oxygen molecule, O2.

“When the ruthenium absorbs visible light,” Kodadek said, “it has to dump that energy to return to a normal state. In the process, it produces an extremely reactive form of oxygen that rips apart whatever proteins it happens to encounter. Basically, it destroys those proteins forever.”

While there have been reports of other “warhead”-carrying peptoids, the study said, the ruthenium derivative used by Kodadek and his colleagues is an important technical advance, one that allows scientists to target both extracellular and intracellular protein targets. Unlike organic singlet oxygen generators, the Ru complex is itself insensitive to singlet oxygen, greatly increasing the efficiency of CALI.

The other important point, the study noted, is that these new peptoids have no effect on any cellular components until they are activated by light.

Simple synthetic compounds like peptoids have many advantages over other ligands – molecules that bind to proteins and alter their function – such as antibodies, Kodadek pointed out. They can be modified easily for attachment to surfaces and can be produced relatively quickly in large amounts – a multi-million member peptoid library, for example, can be created in about three days.

This makes them ideal building tools for biomedical research, the study said.

Kodadek became interested in developing this new technique when he and Benjamin Cravatt, chair of the Scripps Research Department of Chemical Physiology, decided to combine separate technologies – a peptoid library synthesis and screening platform developed in the Kodadek laboratory in Florida and activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) developed in Cravatt’s laboratory in California. The combination offered a powerful new method of screening and identifying more high quality lead drug candidates.

“But when we first had this idea to collaborate to identify hundreds of protein ligands simultaneously, my enthusiasm was diminished by the fact that I knew they would all be modest potency compounds and the numbers would overwhelm our ability to optimize them all by traditional means,” Kodadek said. “Our new ‘warhead’ technique solves that problem.”

Researchers say the 25 patients in the study did not experience adverse side effects such as abnormally low blood pressure or slow heart beat when regadenoson was used during the stress test.

Additionally, patients showed no signs of heart block, a condition in which the signal from the heart’s upper chamber is impaired or doesn’t transmit.

Adenosine, the conventional drug used during a cardiac nuclear stress test, is known to cause lightheadedness, fainting and heart palpitations in patients, as well as high incidence of heart blocks.

“We believe regadenoson to be a safe and well tolerated medication for this specialized group of patients without causing any significant adverse heart issues,” says Karthik Ananth, M.D., a Henry Ford cardiologist and the study’s senior author.

The study will be presented Sunday at the 59th annual American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions in Atlanta.

More than 2,000 heart transplants are performed annually in the United States. In Michigan, 90 patients are currently waiting for a heart transplant. Henry Ford Hospital is one of only three hospitals in Michigan that perform heart transplants.

The Henry Ford study is the first to date to specifically examine the safety profile of regadenoson in heart transplant patients to see whether it would prove to be a better alternative to adenosine, which long has been used during a nuclear stress test to assess a patient’s blood vessels for blockages after a heart transplant.

Prior research in the general population has shown regadenoson to be safe and cause few side effects for use in evaluating coronary artery disease, which led to its approval for use in stress testing in 2008.

Move, adapt or die. Those are the options marine plants and animals have in the face of climate change, said Stanford biologist Steve Palumbi, who has been exploring how to help them go with the first two options, rather than the third. He’s come up with some surprising answers.

Palumbi discussed the results of his research in two talks at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

How to design marine protected areas to best benefit a wide variety of plant and animal species was the focus of a talk he gave on Feb. 20. The most practical kind of natural reserve is one that benefits species and local human populations, but Palumbi said striking that balance isn’t always easy. Many people have argued that bigger is better when it comes to marine reserves, but Palumbi has data suggesting that is not always the case.

In a separate Topical Lecture he delivered on Feb. 21, Palumbi presented his findings on how marine species are reacting to climate change, including new work on coral species in the Pacific that have poor powers of dispersal but a surprising ability to cope with higher temperatures.

Palumbi is director of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station and a senior fellow at the university’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

If you can’t move, then you’d better adjust

Many species, such as those along the west coast of California, can simply migrate north to colder waters. But other animals, such as the coral that Palumbi’s team has studied in Fiji and American Samoa, won’t be moving anytime soon.

“Each coral population is trapped on its own island, and as global climate changes around them, the populations are essentially stuck where they are. They have to go to the second stage, which is to adapt,” Palumbi said.

Marine scientists have predicted that coral reefs will be at risk of extinction due to high ocean temperatures caused by climate change, but Palumbi has found a species of coral that may have a better chance of adapting.

Palumbi’s team studied corals growing in shallow lagoons that face intense heat during noontime summer low tides. The team knew these corals were resistant to brief heating but were surprised to find that the corals survived five to six days of high water temperatures. Baking in the tropical summer sun at low tide for 4 to 6 hours a day seems to have better prepared these corals for global warming temperatures.

“When we tested these corals against high temperatures for extended periods of time, they showed all the evidence of having higher resilience,” Palumbi said. “It looks like the corals have adapted or acclimated to that stress and have a better chance of resisting high global warming temperatures.” How long this resilience will last, and whether all corals can do this, are remaining questions.

Does size matter for marine reserves

A major response to climate change is to protect reefs from other human-caused stresses such as overfishing. And as a result, a large number of Marine Protected Areas have been implemented in the Pacific. Some are the size of a football field. Some are the size of California. Is bigger better?

To determine how much difference the size of a protected area might make, Palumbi analyzed data from a set of small reserves in Fiji, from the Phoenix Islands and from the Papahanaumokuakea Reserve in Hawaii, the largest marine reserve in the world. All three areas are set aside by government agencies.

The Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument covers 360,000 square kilometers (139,000 square miles) in Northwest Hawaii and is a “no-take” reserve, which means nothing may be removed, including fish.

The Phoenix Islands Protected Area, which lies in the central Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Fiji, is over 408,000 square kilometers (158,000 square miles). There are seven no-take reserves in this area, each about 39 kilometers (24 miles) across.

However, in densely populated areas, smaller reserves are more common. Fiji has 246 such protected areas, each averaging about 2 to 3 square kilometers (about a square mile).

“Small sets of marine protected areas are much more convenient: People can fish in between them or go around them easily. Species found within the marine protected areas easily spill out into the surrounding areas, potentially increasing fishing productivity,” Palumbi said.

However, wide stretches of protected ocean allow species to spread more easily than small areas, where they risk being caught by fishermen between the reserves. Therefore, small reserves must be well matched to the plants and animals they are protecting because each species spreads at different rates, Palumbi said.

“Species have lots of different dispersal abilities, so it’s very hard to have a marine protected area network that works equally well for all different species. You have to tailor the network of reserves to the species,” he said.

Though small reserves meet the needs of fewer species than those of larger reserves, setting aside enormous areas of ocean is not that simple. Scientists and policymakers must consider local residents who depend on fisheries for their well-being.

“With heavy human populations, the political, social and economic problems of a big marine protected area are paramount and you’ve got to go to another strategy. But it’s a strategy with limitations because it’s hard to design an area perfectly for all species that need protection,” Palumbi said. The most effective reserve is one that balances preservation of species with human needs, he said. Finding that balance is the challenge.

Source – Stanford University

While the technology is still new, Cui’s team has envisioned numerous functional uses for their inventions. Homes of the future could one day be lined with energy-storing wallpaper. Gadget lovers would be able to charge their portable appliances on the go, simply plugging them into an outlet woven into their T-shirts. Energy textiles might also be used to create moving-display apparel, reactive high-performance sportswear and wearable power for a soldier’s battle gear.

The key ingredients in developing these high-tech products are not visible to the human eye. Nanostructures, which can be assembled in patterns that allow them to transport electricity, may provide the solutions to a number of problems encountered with electrical storage devices currently available on the market.

The type of nanoparticle used in the Cui group’s experimental devices varies according to the intended function of the product — lithium cobalt oxide is a common compound used for batteries, while single-walled carbon nanotubes, or SWNTs, are used for supercapacitors.

Cui, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, leads a research group that investigates new applications of nanoscale materials. The objective, said Cui, is not only to supply answers to theoretical inquiries but also to pursue projects with practical value. Recently, his team has focused on ways to integrate nanotechnology into the realm of energy development.

“Energy storage is a pretty old research field,” said Cui. “Supercapacitors, batteries — those things are old. How do you really make a revolutionary impact in this field? It requires quite a dramatic difference of thinking.”

While electrical energy storage devices have come a long way since Alessandro Volta debuted the world’s first electrical cell in 1800, the technology is facing yet another revolution. Current methods of manufacturing energy storage devices can be capital intensive and environmentally hazardous, and the end products have noticeable performance constraints — conventional lithium ion batteries have a limited storage capacity and are costly to manufacture, while traditional capacitors provide high power but at the expense of energy storage capacity.

With a little help from new science, the batteries of the future may not look anything like the bulky metal units we’ve grown accustomed to. Nanotechnology is favored as a remedy both for its economic appeal and its capability to improve energy performance in devices that integrate it. Replacing the carbon (graphite) anodes found in lithium ion batteries with anodes of silicon nanowires, for example, has the potential to increase their storage capacity by 10 times, according to experiments conducted by Cui’s team.

Silicon had previously been recognized as a favorable anode material because it can hold a larger amount of lithium than carbon. But applications of silicon were limited by its inability to sustain physical stress — namely, the fourfold volume increase that silicon undergoes when lithium ions attach themselves to a silicon anode in the process of charging a battery, as well as the shrinkage that occurs when lithium ions are drawn out as it discharges. The result was that silicon structures would disintegrate, causing anodes of this material to lose much if not all of their storage capacity.

Cui and collaborators demonstrated in previous publications in Nature, Nanotechnology and Nano Letters that the use of silicon nanowire battery electrodes, mechanically capable of withstanding the absorption and discharge of lithium ions, was one way to sidestep the problem.

The findings hold promise for the development of rechargeable lithium batteries offering a longer life cycle and higher energy capacity than their contemporaries. Silicon nanowire technology may one day find a home in electric cars, portable electronic devices and implantable medical appliances.

Cui now hopes to direct his research toward studying both the “hard science” behind the electrical properties of nanomaterials and designing real-world applications.

“This is the right time to really see what we learn from nanoscience and do practical applications that are extremely promising,” said Cui. “The beauty of this is, it combines the lowest cost technology that you can find to the highest tech nanotechnology to produce something great. I think this is a very exciting idea … a huge impact for society.”

The Cui group’s latest research on energy storage devices was detailed in papers published in the online editions of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December 2009 (“Highly Conductive Paper for Energy-Storage Devices”) and Nano Letters in January 2010 (“Stretchable, Porous and Conductive Energy Textiles”).

Cui’s presented his talk at the symposium “Nanotechnology: Will Nanomaterials Revolutionize Energy Applications?” at the San Diego Convention Center.

Source – Stanford University

Their study is scheduled for publication in the journal Nature on Feb. 24.

Now, for the first time, science has a solid grasp of what those relationships are, and a framework upon which to build. The new study makes a major contribution to our understanding of the nature and origins of the planet’s biodiversity. The paper’s other researchers are Jerome C. Regier, Andreas Zwick and April Hussey from the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute; Jeffrey W. Shultz of the University of Maryland’s Department of Entomology; and Bernard Ball and Clifford W. Cunningham from Duke University’s Department of Biology.

There are millions of distinct species of arthropods, including all the insects, crustaceans, millipedes, centipedes, spiders, and a host of other animals, all united by having a hard external shell and jointed legs. They are by far the most numerous, and most diverse, of all creatures on Earth — in terms of the sheer number of species, no other group comes close. They make up perhaps 1.6 million of the estimated 1.8 to 1.9 million described species, dominating the planet in number, biomass, and diversity.

The economic aspects of arthropods are also overwhelming. From seafood industries worth billions of dollars annually to the world’s economy, to the importance of insects as pollinators of ornamental and agriculturally important crops, to the medical role played by arthropods (e.g. as disease vectors and parasites), to biological control of introduced species, to their role in every known food web, to toxicology and biopharmaceuticals, arthropods are by far the planet’s most important group of animals.

“We’ve never really known how arthropods, the most successful animals on Earth, evolved into the diversity we see today,” said research scientist and co-author Dr. Regina Wetzer. “For me, what makes this study really exciting is getting such a solid understanding of how these animals are related, so that now we can better understand how they evolved.”

Because of their amazing diversity, deciphering the evolutionary history and relationships among the major subgroups of arthropods has proven difficult. Scientists have tried using various combination of features, in recent years including DNA sequences, to try to understand which groups are related through common ancestors. To date, those attempts have been stymied by the sheer number of species and wild shape variations between the various groups.

One of the most important results of this new study is support for the hypothesis that the insects evolved from a group of crustaceans. So flies, honeybees, ants, and crickets all branched off the arthropod family tree from within the lineage that gave rise to today’s crabs, shrimp, and lobsters. Another important finding is that the “Chelicerata” (a group that includes the spiders, scorpions, ticks, and mites) branched off very early, earlier than the millipedes, centipedes, crustaceans, and insects. That means that the spiders, for example, are more distantly related to the insects than many researchers previously thought.

This team approached the problem of illuminating the arthropod family tree by using genetic data (DNA sequences) obtained from 75 species carefully selected to sample the range of arthropod diversity. Many previous analyses were based on the sequences of a handful of genes. The researchers in this study, knowing the daunting diversity they faced, used DNA sequence information from as many genes as they could. In the end, they were able to apply data from 62 protein-coding genes to the problem, leading to an extremely well-supported analysis.

“The Museum’s collection of arthropods, and in particular its collection of crustaceans, are what made a study like this possible in the first place,” says Dr. Joel W. Martin, NHM Curator of Crustacea and one of the authors who designed the study nearly eight years ago. “The wealth of stored biodiversity information contained in it, both in terms of specimens and in terms of the data, theories, and research related to those specimens, are why natural history museums exist, and why they play such a critical role in explaining the world’s diversity. Studies like this confirm the incredible value, not only of existing natural history museum collections, but of continuing to add to these collections every year.”

A key problem that the research team had to solve was obtaining specimens of some of rare and obscure organisms whose DNA was needed for the analysis. Because of their extensive experience in field biology, this was a major contribution to the project from NHM scientists. Dr. Wetzer recalls lying on the beach with a microscope at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. She was hunting for specimens of a tiny, little-known crustacean that lives between grains of sand. “I got the mystacocarids we needed, but I think I also provided pretty good entertainment to the families at the beach that day,” Dr. Wetzer said.

Source – Natural History Museum

The study, to be published the week of February 22 in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds new insight to a highly controversial question: What is intelligence, and how can we measure it?

The research team included Jan Gläscher, first author on the paper and a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, and Ralph Adolphs, the Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of biology. The Caltech scientists teamed up with researchers at the University of Iowa and USC to examine a uniquely large data set of 241 brain-lesion patients who all had taken IQ tests. The researchers mapped the location of each patient’s lesion in their brains, and correlated that with each patient’s IQ score to produce a map of the brain regions that influence intelligence.

“General intelligence, often referred to as Spearman’s g-factor, has been a highly contentious concept,” says Adolphs. “But the basic idea underlying it is undisputed: on average, people’s scores across many different kinds of tests are correlated. Some people just get generally high scores, whereas others get generally low scores. So it is an obvious next question to ask whether such a general ability might depend on specific brain regions.”

The researchers found that, rather than residing in a single structure, general intelligence is determined by a network of regions across both sides of the brain.

“One of the main findings that really struck us was that there was a distributed system here. Several brain regions, and the connections between them, were what was most important to general intelligence,” explains Gläscher.

“It might have turned out that general intelligence doesn’t depend on specific brain areas at all, and just has to do with how the whole brain functions,” adds Adolphs. “But that’s not what we found. In fact, the particular regions and connections we found are quite in line with an existing theory about intelligence called the ‘parieto-frontal integration theory.’ It says that general intelligence depends on the brain’s ability to integrate — to pull together — several different kinds of processing, such as working memory.”

The researchers say the findings will open the door to further investigations about how the brain, intelligence, and environment all interact.

The work at Caltech was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Simons Foundation, the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, and a Global Center of Excellence grant from the Japanese government.

Link

“This is the first time cortisol reactivity has been identified as a mediator between depressed mood and obesity in girls,” said Elizabeth J. Susman, the Jean Phillips Shibley professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State. “We really haven’t seen this connection in kids before, but it tells us that there are biological risk factors that are similar for obesity and depression.”

Cortisol, a hormone, regulates various metabolic functions in the body and is released as a reaction to stress. Researchers have long known that depression and cortisol are related to obesity, but they had not figured out the exact biological mechanism.

Although it is not clear why high cortisol reactions translate into obesity only for girls, scientists believe it may be due to physiological and behavioral differences — estrogen release and stress eating in girls — in the way the two genders cope with anxiety.

“The implications are to start treating depression early because we know that depression, cortisol and obesity are related in adults,” said Susman.

If depression were to be treated earlier, she noted, it could help reduce the level of cortisol, and thereby help reduce obesity.

“We know stress is a critical factor in many mental and physical health problems,” said Susman. “We are putting together the biology of stress, emotions and a clinical disorder to better understand a major public health problem.”

Susman and her colleagues Lorah D. Dorn, professor of pediatrics, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and Samantha Dockray, postdoctoral fellow, University College London, used a child behavior checklist to assess 111 boys and girls ages 8 to 13 for symptoms of depression. Next they measured the children’s obesity and the level of cortisol in their saliva before and after various stress tests.

“We had the children tell a story, make up a story, and do a mental arithmetic test,” said Susman. “The children were also told that judges would evaluate the test results with those of other children.”

Statistical analyses of the data suggest that depression is associated with spikes in cortisol levels for boys and girls after the stress tests, but higher cortisol reactions to stress are associated with obesity only in girls. The team reported its findings in a recent issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.

“In these children, it was mainly the peak in cortisol that was related to obesity,” Susman explained. “It was how they reacted to an immediate stress.”

This relationship is pretty well known. But why it is so remains mysterious. Now physicists at Brown University have documented for the first time a quantum-level phenomenon that occurs to electrons subjected to magnetism in a superconducting material. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, Vesna Mitrovic, joined by other researchers at Brown and in France, report that at under certain conditions, electrons in a superconducting material form odd, fluctuating magnetic waves. Apply a little more magnetic force, and those fluctuations cease: The electronic magnets form repeated wave-like patterns promoted by superconductivity.

The discovery may help scientists understand more fully the relationship between magnetism and superconductivity at the quantum level. The insight also may help advance research into superconducting magnets, which are used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and a host of other applications. “If you don’t understand [what is happening at] the quantum [level], how can you design a more powerful magnet?” asked Mitrovic, assistant professor of physics.

When a magnetic field is applied to a superconducting material, vortices measured in nanometers (1 billionth of a meter) pop up. These vortices, like super-miniature tornadoes, are areas where the magnetic field has overpowered the superconducting field state, essentially suppressing it. Crank up the magnetic field and more vortices appear. At some point, the vortices are so widespread the material loses its superconducting ability altogether.

At an even more basic level, sets of electrons called Cooper pairs (named for Brown physicist Leon Cooper, who shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery) form superconductivity. But scientists believe there also are other electrons that are magnetically oriented and spin on their own axes like little globes; these electrons are tilted at various angles on their imaginary axes and move in a repeating, linear pattern that resembles waves, Mitrovic and her colleagues have observed.

“These funny waves most likely appear because of superconductivity, but the reason why is still unsettled,” Mitrovic said.

Adding to the mystery, Mitrovic and fellow researchers, including Brown graduate student Georgios Koutroulakis and former Brown postdoctoral associate Michael Stewart, saw that the waves fluctuated under certain conditions. After nearly three years of experiments at Brown and at the national magnetic field laboratory in Grenoble, France, Mitrovic’s team was able to produce the odd waves consistently when testing a superconducting material — cerium-cobalt-indium5 (CeCoIn5) — at temperatures close to absolute zero and at about 10 Tesla of magnetic force.

The waves appeared to be sliding, Mitrovic said. “It’s as if people are yanking on the wave,” she added. Mitrovic and her colleagues also observed that when more magnetic energy is added, the fluctuations disappear and the waves resume their repeating, linear patterns.

The researchers next want to understand why these fluctuations occur and whether they crop up in other superconducting material.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and a European Community grant, as well as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.