Tag Archives: Science

Some Antibiotics to Blame for Turning MRSA into a “Superbug”

According to a recent study published in Cell Host & Microbe, the first antibiotics used to usually treat MRSA could actually make the skin infection worse by triggering the body’s pathogen defense system.

The bacterium Staphylococcus aureus – also known as a “staph infection” – is carried on the skin or in the nose of most healthy people. Nature World Report states that 25% of the population is colonized with staph, but only 1% of the population is colonized with MRSA. MRSA is a form of Staphylococcus aureus, but it is resistant to methicillin along with other medicines.

“Individuals infected with MRSA who receive a beta-lactam antibiotic–one of the most common types of antibiotics–could end up being sicker than if they received no treatment at all,” George Liu of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and co-senior study author said in a press release.

“Our findings underscore the urgent need to improve awareness of MRSA and rapidly diagnose these infections to avoid prescribing antibiotics that could put patients’ lives at risk,” he added.

Tech Times reports that the study showed that MRSA not only responds to beta-lactam antibiotics, but it will also adapt to them, which makes the disease stronger. The antibiotics weaken the bacteria’s enzymes that produces cell walls. However, the study found that some antibiotics were less effective, allowing the bacteria to rebuild a weaker cell wall. When this happens, the body’s immune system goes into overdrive, trying to destroy the weak cell wall, according to the Huffington Post.

“In situations where there is a lot of infection, this highly aggressive response can cause extensive inflammation and tissue damage, effectively making the consequences of the infection worse,” Liu said.

The challenge for physicians lies in prescribing the right antibiotics for people who have staph infections, or worse, MRSA. It can take a few days to determine if a specific antibiotic is going to make the infection worse.

And while the study did find these disturbing results, the researchers only performed these tests on rats. They say that they will need to conduct trials on humans before they can nail down the correct antibiotics to use in the treatment of staph and MRSA.

Taurid Meteor Shower Coming Wednesday

If storms don’t block your view, you may get to see a beautiful spectacle from the heavens on Wednesday night as the Taurid meteor shower lights up the sky between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m. local time.

According to the International Business Times, Earth is still passing through the tail of Comet Encke, causing the meteor shower. And while Wednesday is the peak time to watch the meteor shower, NASA stated that Monday and Tuesday nights are also good for watching the shower.

The fireballs are expected to be as bright as Venus, and during the peak hours, observers will get to see approximately 7 to 10 meteors every hour, according to NASA.

Earth is currently passing through a stream of residual dust and debris in space that was left by the passing comet. Earth’s center of gravity pulls the debris in and it burns in the atmosphere, creating the falling stars.

According to the American Meteor Society, there were seven other meteor showers in 2015 in January, April, mid-April to mid-May, August, October, November, and another will take place in December.

28 Californians and Millions of Birds Killed by West Nile Virus

A study, released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that the West Nile virus is annihilating the native bird population in the United States. The study looked at the impact of the virus on 49 species from information collected at over 500 bird banding stations across the U.S. from 1992 to 2007.
UCLA’s Ryan Harrigan and his colleagues found significant declines in survival rates associated with West Nile virus for 23 out of 49 of the species examined.

Millions of birds can die in a single year when West Nile hits species with large populations. Among the estimated 130 million red-eyed vireos in the United States, researchers believe the virus killed 29 percent, or more than 37 million.

West Nile, a mosquito-borne virus, was introduced in North America in 1989. It has drawn the most attention for its impact on humans, with 1 in 5 people who are infected developing a fever with other symptoms, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. In rare cases, people develop a serious, sometimes fatal, neurologic illness.

According to the CDC, West Nile Virus which originated in birds, then spread to mammals and then humans killed 85 people last year with 2,122 cases reported. So far, 63 deaths have been reported, 28 in California alone, with 1,197 cases reported in the United States. The first deaths from West Nile Virus were reported in 1999.

The most deaths were reported in 2012 with 5674 cases reported and 286 deaths.

Volcanic Eruptions Reduce Flow of Major Rivers

Scientists have found that volcanic eruptions affect the flow of the world’s major rivers.

New research from the University of Edinburgh shows that aerosol particles ejected into the air following volcanic eruptions don’t just contaminate the atmosphere, they can often trigger rainfall shortages that ultimately affect river systems worldwide.

In the first study of its kind, University of Edinburgh scientists Carley Iles and Gabriele Hegerl compared annual water flow in 50 rivers around the world with the timing of major volcanic eruptions, notably Agug in 1963, El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991.

For some rivers, records went back into the 19th century, making it possible to take into account earlier eruptions too.

They discovered that a year or two after these volcanoes hurled massive amounts of debris into the upper atmosphere they created a partial sunscreen and the flows of tropical rivers decreased.

On the contrary, river flow increased in some regions, including the U.S. southwest and parts of South America. Researchers linked this to the disruption of atmospheric circulation patterns.

Dr. Carley Iles, from the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh, said in a statement. “Our findings reveal the indirect effect that volcanoes can have on rivers, and could be very valuable in the event of a major volcanic eruption in future,”

The study, published in Nature Geoscience, cautioned against so-called geo-engineering schemes that have been proposed as an answer for cooling down an overheated planet or global warming.

“As well as affecting river flow and rainfall, volcanic eruptions have a cooling effect on climate,” Dr Iles said.

“All of these impacts come about because volcanoes inject particles — sulfate aerosols — high up into the atmosphere, and these spread out and reflect sunlight back out into space.”

Unusual Weather Event in the Western Atlantic

It has been 101 years since this last happened.  And it is “blowing the minds” of meteorologists. Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center (NHC), commented on the lack of hurricanes west of 55 degrees longitude in the Atlantic basin so far this season. Blake said this marks the first time there have been no western Atlantic hurricanes through Sept. 22 since 1914.

At the anniversary of Hurricane Rita in 2005 the compared numbers from 10 years ago is astounding. In that year there were 31 Tropical Systems, 27 named storms and 15 hurricanes. While 2015 has had several named storms, there have been no hurricanes this year at all!  

Two factors working against hurricane development, wind shear and dry air, have been quite prevalent from the Gulf of Mexico into much of the Caribbean all summer long.

Hurricanes thrive off of rich, tropical moisture evaporating into the air from warm ocean water and cannot feed off of the dryer air.  Wind shear, or the change of wind direction and speed with height, creates a hostile environment for tropical systems, as it too disrupts the ability of clouds and thunderstorms to organize in a way that supports the formation or continuation of a hurricane.

El Niño can be partially to blame. This setup features warming of the Pacific Ocean and is generally associated with unfavorable wind patterns across the western Atlantic.

Meanwhile in the Pacific Ocean warm and active atmospheric moisture has also been well above average in that area. The result has been nine hurricanes in the eastern Pacific, but zero in the adjacent western Atlantic.

With El Niño continuing and no signs of any major changes, the western Atlantic hurricane drought may continue for a while.

Black Holes Set to Collide

Two black holes in Virgo are heading for a “massive collision,” Columbia University astronomer Zoltan Haiman said in a Columbia news release posted on Science Daily. Haiman and his colleagues believe the pair of black holes will collide in about 100,000 years, which is virtually tomorrow in cosmic time. The holes are incredibly large: combined, the size of a billion suns,

The pair of black holes orbiting each other in quasar PG 1302-102, about 3.5 billion light-years away are about a light-week or two apart — less than 200 billion miles. Understanding that a light-year is the distance light travels in a year, what astronomers are seeing in PG 1302-102 actually occurred when life had just emerged on Earth.

Black hole mergers are considered to be the most violent events in the universe. When they finally meet, they converge in a type of “death spiral.” Their merger, the astronomers calculated, could release as much energy as 100 million supernova explosions, mostly in the form of violent ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves that would blow the stars out of that hapless galaxy like leaves off a roof.

Poultry Producers Attempt Genetically Modified Chickens to Fight Bird Flu

A group of poultry producers are working with scientists to create a strain of genetically modified chickens that would be immune to bird flu.

The study is also being supported by funding from the British government.  So far, the scientists have created chickens that show “early promise” for fighting off the disease.

Over 48 million chicken and turkeys have been put down in the US because of bird flu since December.

“The public is obviously aware of these outbreaks when they’re reported and wondering why there’s not more done to control it,” said Laurence Tiley, a senior lecturer in molecular virology at the University of Cambridge who is involved in the experiments, told Reuters.

The chicks in the study, who have been injected with dye to glow in the dark and stand out from non-modified chicks, are showing an initial immunity to the virus and also have been unable to spread the virus to other animals.  The genetic codes of the birds are being changed to trick the virus into reproducing a decoy virus rather than itself.

GMO animals have been a source of concern for the Food and Drug Administration, who have been examining GMO salmon for the last 20 years.  The agency deemed the animals safe for human consumption in 2010 but continue to study them.

Opponents say that like GMO crops the animals would contribute to health and environmental problems.

Scientists Say Odds Good Seattle Will Be Destroyed By Earthquake

A group of scientists say that a long overdue earthquake for the Pacific Northwest will strike in the next 50 years and will completely wipe out the city of Seattle.

A new report in the New Yorker highlights the problems of the Cascadia subduction zone which runs for 700 miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest from Cape Mendocino, California through Vancouver Island.  The zone is named after the Cascade Range of volcanic mountains that runs much of the same course about 100 miles inland.

The amount of time between quakes averages 243 years and because the last major quake took place in 1700, the fault is 72 years past the average date for a major quake.

Katheryn Schulz of the New Yorker spoke with Kenneth Murphy who oversees FEMA’s Region X which encompasses Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington.  He said that when the “big one” hits…either a partial giving way of the southern part of the zone resulting in an 8.0-8.6 quake or a full-margin rupture between 8.7 and 9.2…there will no longer be a Pacific northwest.

“Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast,” Murphy told the New Yorker.  FEMA estimates say that 13,000 people will die in the quake and resulting tsunami.  At least 27,000 will suffer some kind of major injury.

Cities that are west of Interstate 5 include Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene and the capitals of Oregon (Salem) and Washington (Olympia).

“This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it won’t happen for another thousand years,” Murphy says.

Chris Goldfinger, a paleoseismologist at Oregon State University and one of the world’s leading experts, says that the chance of the “big one” taking place in the next 50 years is 1 in 3.

Herpes Virus Based Drug Treats Skin Cancer

A new drug that is based on the herpes virus has been shown to be effective in treatment of aggressive skin cancer.

The tests are in phase 3 trials for cancer virotherapy.  The idea of the therapy is to use one disease to attack a different disease.

The drug, T-VEC, could become more widely available for cancer patients next year.

The drug is a modified form of the herpes simplex virus type-1 with two genes removed that keeps the virus from replicating in healthy cells.  The virus can infect cancer cells where it multiplies and then explodes the cells.  It also creates a molecule that will allow immune systems to attack and destroy tumors.

Over one in four patients in the trial showed response to the treatment including 1 in 10 of those patients having their tumors completely disappear.  Another 16% had partial remission that lowered tumor size by half.

“There is increasing excitement over the use of viral treatments like T-VEC for cancer, because they can launch a two-pronged attack on tumors — both killing cancer cells directly and marshaling the immune system against them,” said Kevin Harrington, U.K. trial leader and professor of biological cancer therapies at the Institute of Cancer Research in London.

“It’s like an unmasking of the cancer,” said Harrington. “The patient’s immune system wakes up and attacks the cancer cells wherever they are in the body.”

The treatment has a major upside in that the side-effects are much less severe than chemotherapy.

Substantial El Nino Predicted

Scientists say that the El Nino effect is under way in the tropical Pacific.

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology says a “substantial” El Nino event could take place before the end of the year.  Forecasters say that the El Nino is in early stages but the potential for extreme weather is real.

U.S. scientists initially said that El Nino had arrived but characterized it as “weak.”  Australian officials countered their U.S. colleagues’ claims.

“This is a proper El Nino effect, it’s not a weak one,” David Jones, manager of climate monitoring and prediction at the Bureau of Meteorology, told reporters. He said that El Nino could bring much lower than normal rainfall and enhance the country’s drought conditions.

“You know, there’s always a little bit of doubt when it comes to intensity forecasts, but across the models as a whole we’d suggest that this will be quite a substantial El Nino event.”

After the Australian model was released, U.S. forecasters on Thursday revised their statements and said that El Nino could bring much needed rain to California.

“We’ve seen continued evolution toward a stronger event,” NOAA official Mike Halpert told TIME. “Last month we were calling it weak, now we’re calling it borderline weak to moderate.”

“Stronger El Niños interrupt tropical rainfalls. That rain fall shifts and Indonesia and Austrailia become drier than average,” explained Halpert. “They’re not looking forward to El Niño shutting the tap off.”