Frostbite Forces Adventurer to Quit Antarctic Trek

Seasoned adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes has had to quit his attempt to be the first person to cross the South Pole on skis during the brutal Antarctic winter.

Fiennes, who has abundant experience in harsh environments, will be evacuated from the coldest continent after developing a case of frostbite, according to a blog post on the website of the expedition, called The Coldest Journey. Fiennes and his team made the decision to have him evacuated while it was still possible before the beginning of the formidable winter, with its near-permanent darkness and temperatures as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius).
"This decision has not been taken lightly and it is, naturally, a huge disappointment to Fiennes and his colleagues," the post said.
Fiennes will be driven by Ski-Doo, a type of snowmobile, some 40 miles (70 kilometers) from his team's current location to Belgium's Princess Elisabeth Station, located near the coast of East Antarctica, according to the blog post. From there, he will make his way by plane to Cape Town, South Africa.
The evacuation plan is currently being hampered by a blizzard at the team's location.
Once Fiennes is evacuated, the rest of the team has elected to carry on with the journey. They are still slated to begin their crossing on the originally planned date of March 21. The full crossing route will take them from Princess Elisabeth through the interior of the continent to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station (named for the two explorers that raced to be the first to the South Pole), then over the Transantarctic Mountains onto the Ross Ice Shelf and to the United States' McMurdo Station, situated on the shore of the Ross Sea. In total, the trek will cover more than 2,000 miles (3,200 km) and take six months.
Fiennes has gone on previous Antarctic and Arctic excursions, climbed to the summit of Mount Everest and run seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, according to his expedition biography.

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Brain Cells Can Outlive the Body

Brain cells can live at least twice as long as the organisms in which they reside, according to new research.

The study, published today (Feb. 25) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that mouse neurons, or brain cells, implanted into rats can survive with the rats into old age, twice as long as the life span of the original mice.
The findings are good news for life extension enthusiasts.
"We are slowly but continuously prolonging the life of humans," said study co-author Dr. Lorenzo Magrassi, a neurosurgeon at the University of Pavia in Italy.
So if the human life span could be stretched to 160 years, "then you are not going to lose your neurons, because your neurons do not have a fixed lifetime."
Long-lived cells
While most of the cells in the human body are being constantly replaced, humans are born with almost all the neurons they will ever have. [10 Odd Facts About the Brain]
Magrassi and his colleagues wanted to know whether neurons could outlive the organisms in which they live (barring degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's).
To do so, the researchers took neurons from mice and implanted them into the brains of about 60 rat fetuses.
The team then let the rats live their entire lives, euthanizing them when they were moribund and unlikely to survive for more than two days, and then inspected their brains. The life span of the mice was only about 18 months, while the rats typically lived twice as long.
The rats were found to be completely normal (though not any smarter), without any signs of neurological problems at the end of their lives.
And the neurons that had been transplanted from mice were still alive when the rats died. That means it's possible the cells could have survived even longer if they were transplanted into a longer-lived species.
Life extension
The findings suggest that our brain cells won't fail before our bodies do.
"Think what a terrible thing it could be if you survive your own brain," Magrassi told LiveScience.
While the findings were done in rats, not humans, they could also have implications for neuronal transplants that could be used for degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease, Magrassi said.
But just because brain cells may be able to live indefinitely doesn't mean humans could live forever.
Aging is dependent on more than the life span of all the individual parts in the body, and scientists still don't understand exactly what causes people to age, Magrassi said.

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Kids With Ear Infections May Not Need Antibiotics, New Guidelines Say

Young children with ear infections don't necessarily need antibiotic treatment right away. In fact, they may not need the medication at all, according to new guidelines from an influential group of doctors.

Children ages 6 months to 2 years with an infection in one ear who don't have a high fever, severe pain or other complications can be watched for 48 hours without antibiotic treatment to see if the infection gets worse, the guidelines say. The same watching period applies to older children with a mild infection in one or both ears.
The new guidelines, from the American Academy of Pediatrics, are intended to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics. While previous guidelines from the AAP proposed a watching period for older children with mild ear infections, the new guidelines are more specific about how to diagnose infections and include younger children.
The guidelines specifically discuss recommendations for acute otitis media, or infections or inflammation of the middle ear, the most common type of ear infection, and the most common reason U.S. kids receive antibiotics, the AAP says. The AAP also recommends against the use of antibiotics to prevent future ear infections in kids who frequently get such infections.
"We do believe there's overuse of antibiotics in the community," said Dr. Andres Orjuela, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Miami Children's Hospital, who was not involved in developing the new recommendations.  The new guidelines are a helpful tool for instructing physicians on how to go about diagnosing and treating ear infections, Orjuela said.
Studies show that often, kids with a mild ear infectios will get better without antibiotics within a few days, and delaying treatment doesn’t have repercussions for the child, Orjuela said. Painkillers such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen can help with pain.
However, some kids will need antibiotics, including young children who have an infection in both ears, and all kids whose symptoms persist for more than 48 hours. Doctors who take a "wait and see" approach to treating ear infections need to be sure the child can be reevaluated within a few days, and provide treatment if necessary, Orjuela said.

A 2007 study found that physicians were hesitant to delay the use of antibiotics for ear infections, most commonly because they said parents were reluctant to accept this approach. The new guidelines say the decision about whether or not to delay the use of antibiotics in kids with a mild ear infection should be made in partnership with the parents. The 2007 study suggested providing parents with antibiotics to give to their children only if their symptoms didn't go away, but noted that this strategy places more responsibility in the hands of parents and may not be suitable for everyone.

The new recommendations are published today (Feb. 25) in the journal Pediatrics.
Pass it on: Kids with mild ear infections may not need antibiotic treatment.

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Seals take scientists to Antarctic's ocean floor

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Elephant seals wearing head sensors and swimming deep beneath Antarctic ice have helped scientists better understand how the ocean's coldest, deepest waters are formed, providing vital clues to understanding its role in the world's climate.

The tagged seals, along with sophisticated satellite data and moorings in ocean canyons, all played a role in providing data from the extreme Antarctic environment, where observations are very rare and ships could not go, said researchers at the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystem CRC in Tasmania.
Scientists have long known of the existence of "Antarctic bottom water," a dense, deep layer of water near the ocean floor that has a significant impact on the movement of the world's oceans.
Three areas where this water is formed were known of, and the existence of a fourth suspected for decades, but the area was far too inaccessible, until now, thanks to the seals.
"The seals went to an area of the coastline that no ship was ever going to get to," said Guy Williams, ACE CRC Sea Ice specialist and co-author of the study.
"This is a particular form of Antarctic water called Antarctic bottom water production, one of the engines that drives ocean circulation," he told Reuters. "What we've done is found another piston in that engine."
Southern Ocean Elephant seals are the largest of all seals, with males growing up to six meters (20 feet) long and weighing up to 4,000 kilograms (8,800 lbs).
Twenty of the seals were deployed from Davis Station in east Antarctica in 2011 with a sensor, weighing about 100 to 200 grams, on their head. Each of the sensors had a small satellite relay which transmitted data on a daily basis during the five to 10 minute intervals when the seals surfaced.
"We get four dives worth of data a day but they're actually doing up to 60 dives," he said.
"The elephant seals ... went to the very source and found this very cold, very saline dense water in the middle of winter beneath a polynya, which is what we call an ice factory around the coast of Antarctica," Williams added.
Previous studies have shown that there are 50-year-long trends in the properties of the Antarctic bottom water, and Williams said the latest study will help better assess those changes, perhaps providing clues for climate change modeling.
"Several of the seals foraged on the continental slope as far down as 1,800 meters (1.1 miles), punching through into a layer of this dense water cascading down the abyss," he said in a statement. "They gave us very rare and valuable wintertime measurements of this process."
(Reporting by Pauline Askin, Editing by Elaine Lies and Michael Perry)

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Targeting CPR education in high-risk neighborhoods could save more lives

Targeting CPR education in high-risk neighborhoods could increase the number of bystanders giving CPR and decrease deaths from cardiac arrest, according to a new American Heart Association scientific statement published in its journal Circulation.
Survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest vary widely in the United States, from 0.2 percent in Detroit, Mich., to 16 percent in Seattle, Wash. The variance is due in part to whether a bystander does CPR. For every 30 bystanders who do, one life is saved, researchers said.
Yet according to the American Heart Association, bystanders provide CPR only 40 percent of the time — and rates vary widely by location.
The new statement calls for communities to determine which neighborhoods have a high incidence of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests and low rates of bystander CPR by using geographic information systems that map the latitude and longitude of each cardiac arrest. Then, they should focus public education efforts in the high-risk neighborhoods.
"We have always had a one-size-fits-all approach, blanketing a whole area with CPR training, and we assume that will get to everyone," said Comilla Sasson, M.D., M.S., the statement's lead author and assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver.
"We are now saying that we need to shift our thinking to target CPR training to the areas where it is most needed."
"You have to have that kind of data to understand there are going to be specific areas that need to be targeted to increase awareness of cardiac arrest symptoms and how to do bystander CPR," Sasson said.
Such data can engage community members — motivating them to learn hands-only CPR, she said.
Better geographic data can also help researchers learn more about why most bystanders don't perform CPR or call 9-1-1. Some people, unaware of laws that protect them, worry they will be sued if they do CPR wrong and cause harm.
"Most people don't know what a Good Samaritan law is," Sasson said. Others fear they or household members will have to show immigration papers before they can get help. And barriers to CPR training can be as simple as when and where the training is held, Sasson said.
Furthermore, charting addresses of everyone who receives CPR training can provide useful information, she said. "Are we hitting the same people who have always been trained and not really impacting these higher-risk neighborhoods?"
Predominantly African-American or Hispanic neighborhoods have higher rates of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest but lower rates of bystander CPR compared with whites, research shows.
Bystander CPR is also less likely to happen in low-income neighborhoods, independent of race, Sasson said.
The statement also recommends a standardized dispatcher-assisted telephone program for 9-1-1 operators to provide CPR instructions to willing bystanders. The survival rate from cardiac arrest — 9.5 percent — has been roughly the same for three decades. To increase it, new strategies to promote CPR are needed, Sasson said. "If we keep training the same people, we're not going to make a difference."

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Co-authors are Hendrika Meischke, Ph.D.; Benjamin S. Abella, M.D., M.P.H.; Frederick Masoudi, M.D., M.P.H.; Michael R. Sayre, M.D.; Robert A. Berg, M.D.; Bentley J. Bobrow, M.D.; Marcus Ong, M.D.; Elisabeth Dowling Root, Ph.D.; Paul S. Chan, M.D., M.Sc.; Michele Heisler, M.D., M.P.H.; Jerrold H. Levy, M.D.; Mark Link, M.D.; John S. Rumsfeld, M.D., Ph.D.; and Thomas D. Rea, M.D., M.P.H. Author disclosures and sources of funding are on the manuscript. The American Heart Association's Hands-Only™ CPR campaign uses entertainment and humor to deliver serious, lifesaving messages through TV and radio public service announcements, digital promotions, a one-minute animated "how to" video and a multi-city mobile CPR training tour. To learn more about the Hands-Only
CPR campaign and tour, visit heart.org/HandsOnlyCPR, facebook.com/AHACPR or youtube.com/HandsOnlyCPR. Read the association's 2008 scientific statement recommending Hands-Only CPR.
Follow @HeartNews on Twitter for the latest heart and stroke news.
Statements and conclusions of study authors published in American Heart Association scientific journals are solely those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect the association's policy or position. The association makes no representation or guarantee as to their accuracy or reliability. The association receives funding primarily from individuals; foundations and corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations and fund specific association programs and events. The association has strict policies to prevent these relationships from influencing the science content. Revenues from pharmaceutical and device corporations are available at www.heart.org/corporatefunding.

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Research to probe deep within a solar cell

Engineers and scientists from the University of Sheffield have pioneered a new technique to analyse PCBM, a material used in polymer photovoltaic cells, obtaining details of the structure of the material which will be vital to improving the cell's efficiency. The findings are published in Applied Physics Letters.
Working with the ISIS pulsed neutron and muon source at the Science and Technology Facilities Council Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the researchers are the first to use a cutting-edge neutron scattering technique called SERGIS to analyse PCBM. The technique – still very much in development – has so far only been tested on samples with well-known, regular structures, such as diffraction gratings.
The experiment focused on crystallites of PCBM which were on the surface of a thin film of the solar cell material as the researchers could then verify their findings using other analysis techniques, such as atomic force microscopy. But they believe the technique could in future be used to analyse the material's structure deep inside the active layers of a solar cell. This will enable them to understand how different fabrication methods impact on the cell's structure, and therefore its efficiency.
Dr Alan Dunbar from Sheffield's Faculty of Engineering explains: "The SERGIS technique uses polarised neutrons which are bounced off the sample being tested. Where the resulting neutrons end up and how their polarisation has changed tells us information about the structure within our samples. The advantage of this type of technique is that because neutrons only interact weakly with the sample we can probe much deeper where many microscopy techniques cannot see."
"This is the first time the technique has been used to look at this material which is of real interest to science. It enabled us to map the size of the PCBM crystallites and the distance between them, both properties which are key to improving efficiency."
Research into photovoltaics is one of many areas of energy research conducted at the University of Sheffield, including wind power, nuclear power, biofuels, district heating and carbon capture.
SERGIS – which stands for neutron spin echo resolved grazing incidence scattering – can only be conducted in a few places worldwide, among them the ISIS pulsed neutron and muon source in Oxfordshire.

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Researchers explore PKC role in lung disease

Study identifies possible therapeutic target to treat asthma and COPD

		IMAGE: A JGP study examines the role of PKC in airway smooth muscle contraction and raises the possibility that this enzyme could be a therapeutic target for treating asthma, COPD, and... Click here for more information.

New research examines the role of PKC in airway smooth muscle contraction and raises the possibility that this enzyme could be a therapeutic target for treating asthma, COPD, and other lung diseases.
In the lungs, pathological increases in the contraction of the smooth muscle cells (SMCs) lining airway walls—a process that decreases airflow—contribute to the chain of events leading to asthma and COPD, two common lung diseases. Jose Perez-Zoghbi and colleagues from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center designed a series of experiments to investigate the role of the enzyme PKC in this process. The results, which appear in The Journal of General Physiology, provide new insight into the mechanisms involved in regulating luminal diameter of small airways and reveal PKC as a potential target for drug therapies.
The researchers used phase-contrast video microscopy, confocal microscopy, Western blot analysis, and pharmacological activators and inhibitors to investigate the role of PKC in airway SMC contraction in mouse lung slices. Their results suggest that activation of PKC in small airways promotes an influx of calcium into SMC and subsequent intracellular release of calcium ions to generate low frequency SMC twitching. PKC activation also induces a strong calcium ion sensitization of contraction, eliciting a stronger contractile response to stimuli that increase free intracellular calcium. Consequently, PKC activation downstream of various molecules, such as thrombin, that are present in the airways in conjunction with inflammatory lung diseases, could sensitize the airway SMCs to contractile stimuli and contribute to the airway hyper responsiveness that is characteristic of asthma and COPD.

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About The Journal of General Physiology
Founded in 1918, The Journal of General Physiology (JGP) is published by The Rockefeller University Press. All editorial decisions on manuscripts submitted are made by active scientists in conjunction with our in-house scientific editor. JGP content is posted to PubMed Central, where it is available to the public for free six months after publication. Authors retain copyright of their published works and third parties may reuse the content for non-commercial purposes under a creative commons license. For more information, please visit www.jgp.org.
Dixon, R.E., and L.F. Santana. 2013. J. Gen. Physiol. 141:161 Mukherjee, S., et al. 2013. J. Gen. Physiol. 141:165-178

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