It’s been right under our noses for years, and we never noticed it.
By Dan Nosowitz



Hello, Olinguito Mark Gurney



We don’t discover new mammals very often, let alone new mammals in well-known families like Procyonidae (which includes the raccoons, coatis, and ringtails). So we are very pleased to introduce you all to the newest member of the family. Everyone, say hello to the olinguito (pronounced oh-ling-GHEE-toe).


The olinguito, as its name suggests, is highly similar to another member of the raccoon family, the olingo, an arboreal, nocturnal animal that looks more like a combination of a possum and a monkey than a raccoon. In fact, says Smithsonian, there was actually an olinguito in American zoos in the 1960s, kept in cages with olingos. “Its keepers were mystified as to why it refused to breed with its peers,” writes Joseph Stromberg at Smithsonian. But now we have proof as to why: a new study published today in the journal ZooKeys has established through DNA and other anatomical evidence that the olinguito, Bassaricyon neblina, is a distinct species. No wonder it didn’t mate with an olingo!


The olinguito looks fairly similar to the olingo, but its fur is a totally different color; olingos have dull gray fur, but the olinguito has reddish-brown fur. Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and author of the paper, stumbled on some olinguito skins while researching the olingo, in South America. It’s slightly smaller than the olingo, about 14 inches long and weighing about two pounds, and eats mostly fruit, supplemented with insects. It lives in the high forest of Ecuador and Colombia–delightfully called “cloud forests”–and rarely comes down from the trees, adept as it is at leaping around the branches.


Researchers aren’t sure whether the species is at critical risk; Helgen estimates that 42 percent of its possible home territory has been deforested, so he says “there is reason to be concerned.”


Helgen thinks there may be up to four subspecies of olinguito roaming around the forest, which is pretty much unheard-of for a mammal discovery at this time in history. “I honestly think that this could be the last time in history that we will turn up this kind of situation—both a new carnivore, and one that’s widespread enough to have multiple kinds,” he said.

Read more about the olinguito over at Smithsonian.





Deterministic quantum teleportation of a photonic quantum bit. Each qubit that flies from the left into the teleporter leaves the teleporter on the right with a loss of quality of only around 20 percent, a value not achievable without entanglement. (Credit: Ill./©: University of Tokyo)







Entanglement ‘on demand’ using squeezed light






Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Universität Mainz.


Journal Reference:

  1. Shuntaro Takeda, Takahiro Mizuta, Maria Fuwa, Peter van Loock, Akira Furusawa. Deterministic quantum teleportation of photonic quantum bits by a hybrid technique. Nature, 2013; 500 (7462): 315 DOI: 10.1038/nature12366



Human Heart Patrick J. Lynch via Wikimedia Commons



A team of scientists from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has created lab-grown human heart tissue that can beat on its own, according to a new study in Nature Communications.

In 2008, a University of Minnesota study showed that the original cells from a rat heart could be completely flushed out of the heart’s external structure in a process called decellularization, then replaced by newborn rat cells to regenerate a working heart. A similar process has now allowed Pitt scientists to grow working human heart tissue within the decellurized structure of a mouse heart.

Using various enzymes and special cleansing detergents, the researchers stripped a mouse heart of all its cells to create a scaffold for induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), adult human cells that are reprogrammed to act like embryonic cells. They treated the iPS cells taken from a skin biopsy to become multipotential cardiovascular progenitor (MCP) cells, the precursor cells that can become any of the three types of cells found in the heart.



Decellularized Mouse Heart:  Lu et. al


“Nobody has tried using these MCPs for heart regeneration before,” said Lei Yang, an assistant professor of developmental biology at Pitt. After a period of a few weeks, the human cells had repopulated the mouse heart, and it began beating at a rate of 40 to 50 beats per minute. That’s a little slow, though not by much. A typical resting heart rate for an an adult is between 60 and 80 bpm, though anything above 50 bpm is still considered normal.

Watch it beat:



This could eventually lead to personalized organ transplants, or even just a great way to study in the lab the way they human heart develops or how it responds to drugs.

Next, Yang wants to try to make just a patch of human heart tissue, which could be used to replace only regions of the heart that have been damaged by something like a heart attack. He told via email that he hopes to test heart tissue patches in animals within the next few years.

The study came out in the Aug. 13 issue of Nature Communications.




Glacier Perito Moreno National Park, Argentina Patagonia. (Credit: iStockphoto)





Using computer simulations, a Japanese, Swiss and American team including Heinz Blatter, an emeritus professor of physical climatology at ETH Zurich, has now managed to demonstrate that the ice-age/warm-period interchange depends heavily on the alternating influence of continental ice sheets and climate.

“If an entire continent is covered in a layer of ice that is 2,000 to 3,000 metres thick, the topography is completely different,” says Blatter, explaining this feedback effect. “This and the different albedo of glacial ice compared to ice-free earth lead to considerable changes in the surface temperature and the air circulation in the atmosphere.” Moreover, large-scale glaciation also alters the sea level and therefore the ocean currents, which also affects the climate.

Weak effect with a strong impact

As the scientists from Tokyo University, ETH Zurich and Columbia University demonstrated in their paper published in the journal Nature, these feedback effects between Earth and the climate occur on top of other known mechanisms. It has long been clear that the climate is greatly influenced by insolation on long-term time scales. Because Earth’s rotation and its orbit around the sun periodically change slightly, the insolation also varies. If you examine this variation in detail, different overlapping cycles of around 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years are recognisable.

Given the fact that the 100,000-year insolation cycle is comparatively weak, scientists could not easily explain the prominent 100,000-year-cycle of the ice ages with this information alone. With the aid of the feedback effects, however, this is now possible.

Simulating the ice and climate

The researchers obtained their results from a comprehensive computer model, where they combined an ice-sheet simulation with an existing climate model, which enabled them to calculate the glaciation of the northern hemisphere for the last 400,000 years. The model not only takes the astronomical parameter values, ground topography and the physical flow properties of glacial ice into account but also especially the climate and feedback effects. “It’s the first time that the glaciation of the entire northern hemisphere has been simulated with a climate model that includes all the major aspects,” says Blatter.

Using the model, the researchers were also able to explain why ice ages always begin slowly and end relatively quickly. The ice-age ice masses accumulate over tens of thousands of years and recede within the space of a few thousand years. Now we know why: it is not only the surface temperature and precipitation that determine whether an ice sheet grows or shrinks. Due to the aforementioned feedback effects, its fate also depends on its size. “The larger the ice sheet, the colder the climate has to be to preserve it,” says Blatter. In the case of smaller continental ice sheets that are still forming, periods with a warmer climate are less likely to melt them. It is a different story with a large ice sheet that stretches into lower geographic latitudes: a comparatively brief warm spell of a few thousand years can be enough to cause an ice sheet to melt and herald the end of an ice age.

The Milankovitch cycles

The explanation for the cyclical alternation of ice and warm periods stems from Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch (1879-1958), who calculated the changes in Earth’s orbit and the resulting insolation on Earth, thus becoming the first to describe that the cyclical changes in insolation are the result of an overlapping of a whole series of cycles: the tilt of Earth’s axis fluctuates by around two degrees in a 41,000-year cycle. Moreover, Earth’s axis gyrates in a cycle of 26,000 years, much like a spinning top. Finally, Earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun changes in a cycle of around 100,000 years in two respects: on the one hand, it changes from a weaker elliptical (circular) form into a stronger one. On the other hand, the axis of this ellipsis turns in the plane of Earth’s orbit. The spinning of Earth’s axis and the elliptical rotation of the axes cause the day on which Earth is closest to the sun (perihelion) to migrate through the calendar year in a cycle of around 20,000 years: currently, it is at the beginning of January; in around 10,000 years, however, it will be at the beginning of July.

Based on his calculations, in 1941 Milankovitch postulated that insolation in the summer characterises the ice and warm periods at sixty-five degrees north, a theory that was rejected by the science community during his lifetime. From the 1970s, however, it gradually became clearer that it essentially coincides with the climate archives in marine sediments and ice cores. Nowadays, Milankovitch’s theory is widely accepted. “Milankovitch’s idea that insolation determines the ice ages was right in principle,” says Blatter. “However, science soon recognised that additional feedback effects in the climate system were necessary to explain ice ages. We are now able to name and identify these effects accurately.”



Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by ETH Zurich. The original article was written by Fabio Bergamin.


Journal Reference:

  1. Ayako Abe-Ouchi, Fuyuki Saito, Kenji Kawamura, Maureen E. Raymo, Jun’ichi Okuno, Kunio Takahashi, Heinz Blatter. Insolation-driven 100,000-year glacial cycles and hysteresis of ice-sheet volume. Nature, 2013; 500 (7461): 190 DOI: 10.1038/nature12374

And is it already too late?!
By Bjorn Carey


Brain Freeze Getty Images



We’ve all sucked down a milkshake so quickly that it causes a sudden headache—the dreaded brain freeze. But . . . milkshake. Tasty. Must. Drink. Could chugging the rest of that shake cause lasting brain damage?

First, let’s get one thing straight. “This condition is referred to as an ‘ice-cream headache,’ ” says Stacey Gray, a sinus surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston. “It’s a very technical term.” Although there’s no published paper saying as much, a milkshake slurped too quickly probably does not actually lower brain temperature. Besides, Gray says, the temporary pain can’t do any harm because it has nothing to do with the brain.

There are two schools of thought on what causes the ice-cream headache. The drink may chill the air in your sinuses and cause the blood vessels in the nasal cavity near your forehead to constrict, creating pain similar to a migraine. Or perhaps it touches off a branch of the trigeminal nerve in your mouth, triggering a pain response in the nerve that’s responsible for facial sensation.

The condition has not drawn research funding from the National Institutes of Health, so no one has performed the simple experiment that Gray says would settle things once and for all. “You could block the nerve with an injection of lidocaine, cool the area, and if it still happens it’s probably a circulatory-system thing,” she says. “But no one seems that interested.”

Even if a cold drink was able to temporarily chill your brain a few degrees, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Neurosurgeons including Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Rafael Tamargo often take the brain from its cozy resting range of between 98.6˚F and 100.4˚ all the way down to 64˚. “There are situations, particularly for correcting blood-vessel problems like an aneurysm, where we cool the brain in order to stop circulation to an area to perform our work safely,” he says. When the brain is chilled to 68˚, its metabolism and electrical activity drop to 15 percent; surgeons reduce it to 64˚for good measure.

“Even if the patient wasn’t anesthetized, at that temperature they would be in a noninteractive state, unable to sense stimuli or produce a response,” Tamargo says. “But once you warm the brain up, it picks right up from where it left off. It’s not harmful at all.” So whether your brain is frozen or not, if you can handle a little pain, slurp away.

This article originally appeared in the October 2010 issue of Popular Science magazine.





Atul Gwande MD


























































It started with a pilot project that set out to reach some sixty thousand women in six hundred villages. The logistics were daunting. Who, for instance, would do the teaching? How were those workers going to travel? How was their security to be assured? The brac leaders planned the best they could and then made adjustments on the fly.


















“What was the most difficult one?” I asked.


“What was the easiest?”






“Why?” I asked.


“She was nice?”

“She smiled a lot.”

“That was it?”






Healthy Heart



Published: Aug 7, 2013


By Michael Smith, North American Correspondent, MedPage Today



  • Note that this review of available literature suggests that communication skills are paramount to reducing errors in the cardiac operating room.
  • Be aware that while some of the recommendations have a strong evidence-base, some are grounded more in expert opinion.


A wide-ranging review of evidence, led by Joyce Wahr, MD, of the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, called for such things as checklists, preoperative and postoperative briefings, and team training in communication skills.

But the review, published online in Circulation, also cautioned that “research in this area is nascent but informative.”

The investigators noted that cardiac surgical operating rooms form “a complex environment” that includes many highly trained people working together and using sophisticated equipment to treat people with severe disease.

“Preventable errors are often not related to failure of technical skill, training, or knowledge,” they wrote, “but represent cognitive, system, or teamwork failures.”

Key to improvement of patient safety, they argued, are the “nontechnical skills” of communication, cooperation, coordination, and leadership.

Communication skills, in particular, “have been measured as the worst aspect of teamwork behavior in the [operating room],” they wrote.

To help improve matters, they recommended:

  • Using checklists and/or briefings in every cardiac surgery case, with postoperative debriefings “encouraged” by the cardiac OR leadership.
  • Training to improve communication, leadership, and situational awareness involving all members of the cardiac operative team.
  • Formal handoff protocols for transfer of cardiac surgical patients to new personnel.
  • Regular training for “significant and rare” events, such as emergency oxygenator change-out.

They also called for more research into such areas as the best communication models, team-training approaches, and the efficacy of formal training in teamwork and communication skills in improving patient outcomes.

It might also be “reasonable” to investigate setting up an “anonymous national multidisciplinary event-reporting system to obtain data about events and near-misses,” they wrote.

Also important are the physical design of the OR and the organizational culture of safety.

“Many, if not most, cardiac ORs” have poor ergonomics, resulting in hazards for both patients and staff, Wahr and colleagues found.

Studies have shown that many cardiac ORs are designed so that their doors open several times an hour, increasing the risk of infection in patients.

Also, noise levels — a combination of music, alarms, and multiple conversations — can be hazardous, and small, crowded rooms can increase the risk of tripping over equipment or power cords.

For those reasons, Wahr and colleagues suggested researchers should investigate better information systems in order to cut down on distractions and “improve clinicians’ ability to integrate knowledge from multiple sources.”

An “innovative area of future research, which may avoid expensive design errors” would be to test optimal OR design and layout, they argued.

The investigators also suggested that institutions develop policies that “define disruptive behaviors by medical professionals in all hospital settings, with transparent, formal procedures for addressing unacceptable behaviors.”

They also called for hospitals to establish an “institutional culture of safety” by setting up a quality improvement system, with input encouraged from all team members, to find and fix hazards.


The statement was supported by the American Heart Association. Wahr reported no conflicts of interest, but several authors reported financial links with the pharmaceutical industry.

From the American American Heart Association:


The prospect of reversing blindness has made a significant leap, according to scientists in the UK.



An animal study in the journal Nature Biotechnology showed the part of the eye which actually detects light can be repaired using stem cells.

The team at Moorfields Eye Hospital and University College London say human trials are now, for the first time, a realistic prospect.

Experts described it as a “significant breakthrough” and “huge leap” forward.

Photoreceptors are the cells in the retina which react to light and convert it into an electrical signal which can be sent to the brain.

However, these cells can die off in some causes of blindness such as Stargardt’s disease and age-related macular degeneration.

There are already trials in people to use stem cells to replace the “support” cells in the eye which keep the photoreceptors alive.

Blind mice

Now the London-based team have shown it is possible to replace the light-sensing cells themselves, raising the prospect of reversing blindness.

They have used a new technique for building retinas in the laboratory. It was used to collect thousands of stem cells, which were primed to transform into photoreceptors, and injected them into the eyes of blind mice.

The study showed that these cells could hook up with the existing architecture of the eye and begin to function.

However, the effectiveness is still low. Only about 1,000 cells out of a transplant of 200,000 actually hooked up with the rest of the eye.

Lead researcher Prof Robin Ali told the BBC News website: “This is a real proof of concept that photoreceptors can be transplanted from an embryonic stem cells source and it give us a route map to now do this in humans.

“That’s why we’re so excited, five years is a now a realistic aim for starting a clinical trial.”


Rods, blue, and cones, blue-green, detect light and create electrical signals which are sent to the brain.



The eye is one of the most advanced fields for stem cell research.

It is relatively simple as the light sensing cells only have to pass their electrical message on to one more cell in order to get their message to the brain, unlike an attempt to reverse dementia which would require cells to hook up with far more cells all across the brain.


Prof Chris Mason, from University College London, told the BBC: “I think they have made a major step forward here, but the efficiency is still too low for clinical uses.

“At the moment the numbers of tiny and it will take quite a bit of work to get the numbers up and then the next question is ‘Can you do it in man?’

“But I think it is a significant breakthrough which may lead to cell therapies and will give a much expanded knowledge on how to cure blindness.”

Dr Marcelo Rivolta, from the University of Sheffield, said the study was a “huge leap” forward for treating blindness and could have implications across stem cell research.

Good Sleep Plus Clean Living Cuts Heart Risk


By Chris Kaiser, Cardiology Editor, MedPage Today

20130806-2, Published: July/August 2013



The duration of sleep alone or in combination with physical activity, a healthy diet, limited alcohol intake, and no smoking significantly reduced the risk of heart disease.

Even achieving sufficient sleep duration of at least 7 hours per night without any of the four traditional lifestyle factors had a positive impact on risk reduction of CVD (23%) and fatal CVD (43%).



The duration of sleep alone or in combination with four traditional healthy lifestyle factors significantly reduced the risk of heart disease, researchers found.

Those who adhered to sufficient physical activity, a healthy diet, limited alcohol intake, and no smoking had a 57% reduced risk of a composite of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and a 67% reduced risk of fatal CVD compared with those who adhered to none or one lifestyle factor, according to W.M. Monique Verschuren, PhD, of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven, the Netherlands, and colleagues.

When a good night’s sleep (more than 7 hours) was added to those traditional factors, the risk of CVD and of fatal CVD decreased even further — 65% and 83%, respectively, researchers wrote in the July edition of the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.

However, even achieving sufficient sleep duration without any of the four traditional lifestyle factors had a positive impact on risk reduction — 22% reduced risk of CVD and 43% reduction in fatal CVD.

Also, not smoking alone carried significant weight, conferring a 43% reduced risk of CVD and of fatal CVD.

Thus, nonsmoking and sufficient sleep duration were both strongly and similarly inversely associated with fatal CVD, researchers said.

The composite CVD comprised fatal CVD, nonfatal myocardial infarction (MI), and stroke.

“If all participants adhered to all five healthy lifestyle factors, 36% of composite CVD and 57% of fatal CVD could theoretically be prevented or postponed,” the authors wrote. “The public health impact of sufficient sleep duration, in addition to the traditional healthy lifestyle factors, could be substantial.”

Verschuren and colleagues noted that only two studies have thus far included sleep duration as a lifestyle factor.

Both studies mirrored the current study by showing an independent association of sleep with CVD risk and a reduced risk of CVD when sleep duration was included with traditional lifestyle factors.

However, neither study separated out the protective benefit of sleep from the other healthy lifestyle benefits.

The investigators therefore decided to examine whether sufficient sleep duration further reduces risk of CVD on top of the traditional lifestyle factors.

Participant data came from the Monitoring Project on Risk Factors for Chronic Diseases (MORGEN), a prospective cohort study from 1993 to 1997. Follow-up was a mean of 12 years.

The study comprised 6,672 men and 7,967 women, with a mean age of 42 and 41, respectively.

A total of 12% of both men and women reported having all five healthy lifestyle factors at baseline, while 6%, reported having zero or one factor.

Rounding out the middle were 33% of both men and women who adhered to three lifestyle factors, and 32% and 29% of men and women, respectively, adhering to four factors.

In an analysis that adjusted for age, sex, educational level, and with and without mutual adjustments, nonsmoking was “strongly inversely” associated with composite CVD (hazard ratio 0.57), as were sleep duration (HR 0.78) and limited alcohol consumption (HR 0.79).

In terms of fatal CVD in the adjusted analysis, only nonsmoking (0.61) and sufficient sleep duration (0.57) were significant factors in reducing death.

As an explanation for the results, the investigators noted that short sleep duration has been associated with a higher incidence of overweight, obesity, and hypertension, along with higher levels of blood pressure, total cholesterol, hemoglobin A, and triglycerides, effects which are “consistent with the hypothesis that short sleep duration is directly associated with CVD risk.”

The importance of sufficient sleep “should now be mentioned as an additional way to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease,” Verschuren said in a statement. ” It is always important to confirm results, but the evidence is certainly growing that sleep should be added to our list of CVD risk factors.”

An earlier study from this group of researchers found that those who slept less than 7 hours and got up each morning not fully rested had a 63% higher risk of CVD than those sleeping sufficiently — although those who woke rested, even from less than 7 hours of sleep, did not have the increased risk (Sleep 2011; 34: 1487-1489).

A limitation of the current study includes the inability to know how or if depressive symptoms, sleep apnea, or psychological stress impacted the risk of CVD. Also, the potential for CVD to be misclassified “may have attenuated” the results, researchers said.

The Monitoring Project on Risk Factors for Chronic Diseases (MORGEN study) is supported by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport for the Netherlands and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment.



The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Primary source: European Journal of Preventive Cardiology
Source reference:
Verschuren MWM, et al “Sufficient sleep duration contributes to lower cardiovascular disease risk in addition to four traditional lifestyle factors: the MORGEN study” Eur J Prev Cardiol2013; DOI: 10.1177/2047487313493057.


Risk-Based Monitoring Videos From Applied Clinical Trials Are Going Viral


Target Health is pleased to share the video clips below which were recorded at the year’s DIA meeting and produced as part of the Applied Clinical Trials Risk-Based Network. Please share.


Target Health will again be presenting and sponsoring the CBINET Conference on “Risk-Based Monitoring in Clinical Studies, being held in Philadelphia on October 24 and 25. This meeting for sure will be a very productive experience for all.


Video Clips


Video 1

What are your views on risk-based monitoring?


Video 2

What is different now about risk-based monitoring vs. what companies may have been doing more innovatively about monitoring in the past?



YouTube Posting



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