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A Colombian woman has received the world’s first tailor-made trachea transplant, grown by seeding a donor organ with her own stem cells to prevent her body rejecting it, an international research team reported on Wednesday.The success of the operation, performed in June using tissue generated from the woman’s own bone marrow, raises the prospect that transplanting other organs may be possible without drugs to dampen the immune system, they said.

Doctors work hard to match tissue type when transplanting organs so that the body does not completely reject the new organ, but patients usually have to take immunosuppressants for the rest of their lives.

“The probability this lady will have a rejection is almost zero percent,” Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, head of thoracic surgery at the Hospital Clinic, Barcelona who performed the transplant, told a news conference.

“The patient is enjoying a normal life with no signs of rejection after four months.”

Claudia Castillo sought help after a case of tuberculosis destroyed part of her trachea — the windpipe connected to the lungs — and left her with breathing difficulties, prone to infections and unable to care for her two children.

The 30-year-old’s only option other than the experimental surgery was for doctors to remove part of her lung — a choice that would have seriously degraded her quality of life, the researchers said.

“It isn’t just an issue of life, it is an issue of quality of life,” said Martin Birchall, a surgeon at the University of Bristol, who helped treat Castillo.

‘HYBRID ORGAN’

After finding a donor, the researchers first depleted the transplanted trachea of the donor’s cells and then obtained bone marrow stem cells from Castillo they grew into cartilage cells.

Next, the team seeded these cells on the outside of the donor trachea using a device developed at Milan Polytechnic in Italy that incubated the cells. The researchers used the same device to make epithelial cells to construct the lining of the trachea.

This created a hybrid organ in a lab that Castillo’s body would identify as its own and make immunosupressant drugs unnecessary, the researchers said.

Finally, the team grafted a 5 cm (1.97 inch) piece of the trachea onto Castillo’s damaged left main bronchus, which connects the main windpipe to the left lung.

Castillo, who lives in Spain, had no complications from the surgery and left the hospital after 10 days. She is returning to normal activities and even called her doctors from a night club to say she had been out dancing all night, the researchers said.

“We believe this success has proved we are on the verge of a new age in surgical care,” said Birchall, who predicted the technique could be applied to other hollow organs similar in structure, such as the bowel, bladder and reproductive tract.

In the pursuit to create a more ‘life-like’ robot, researchers have created a realistic robot head that can mimic human facial expressions, thus making communication more human-like.Robotics engineers at the University of Bristol, UK, actually made a copycat robotic head, called Jules, which can mimic the facial expressions and lip movements of a human being.

Jules is an animatronic head produced by US roboticist David Hanson, New Scientist reports.

Honson builds uniquely expressive, disembodied heads with flexible rubber skin that is moved by 34 servo motors.

A video camera picks human face movements, and then maps them onto the tiny electronic motors in Jules’ skin.

The researchers developed their own software to transfer expressions recorded by the video camera into commands so that the servos produce similarly realistic facial movements.

But, as the robot’s motors are not similar to human facial muscles, the researchers filmed an actor making a variety of expressions indicating, say, “happiness.”

Then, an expert animator selected 10 frames showing different variations of the expression and manually set the servos in Jules’s face to match.

Later, the researchers created software that can translate what it sees on video into equivalent settings of Jules’s facial motors. Now, the robot can do this in real time, at 25 frames per second.

This the first copycat robot heads with realistic human-looking faces. As human communication is very much dependent on facial expressions, robots that can mimic them well can find much wider application.

He has speculated that this would make them useful in healthcare settings, such as nursing homes.

The big blue ocean is getting noisier, thanks to carbon emissions that have made the oceans more acidic.

Researchers have known for some time that acidity can influence the distance traveled by sound in seawater. In the 1970s, acoustic measurements showed that the reach of low-frequency sounds varies between oceans.

A whale’s call, for example, travels further in the north Pacific than in the north Atlantic, due to differences in pH.

Exactly how the process works is unclear, especially at frequencies below 1 kilohertz, which include whale calls, crashing waves and whirring ship engines.

“At these frequencies the exact molecular mechanism is still a bit fuzzy,” said Peter Brewer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.

Some suggest that “ion pairs” of carbonate, bicarbonate, boric acid and borate are naturally “tuned” to absorb sound wave energy of 1 kHz and below.

The acidity of the water affects the balance between these chemicals.

Oceans are becoming more acidic because of rising levels of CO2 (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, which dissolves in seawater to form carbonic acid.

According to a report in New Scientist, Brewer and his colleagues wanted to find out if these changes could be enough to affect sound transport.

They analyzed a database of ocean acidity during the 20th century, which showed that, on average, ocean pH levels dropped by 0.12.

Using previous experimental data and field observations of how pH affects sound, they calculated how much this drop would affect the absorption of sound waves at 0.44 kHz - the note “A” used to tune an orchestra.

They found that by the early 1990s, sound was being absorbed 15 percent less than in the late 19th century.

Some studies predict ocean pH could drop by an average of 0.3 before the end of this century.

The team calculates that this would cause a 40 percent decrease in the absorption of sounds below 1 kHz.

“The ocean will have higher levels of ambient noise, marine mammals will communicate at greater range, and military or industrial sounds will travel further,” said Brewer.

According to Tim Leighton of the University of Southampton, UK, the changes so far are relatively small, so the effect may be significant only in deep, quiet waters.

“Whether or not the differences will affect animal communication or military operations will require further study,” said Brewer.

Crucial Arctic sea ice this summer shrank to its second lowest level on record, continuing an alarming trend, scientists said Tuesday.

The ice covered 1.74 million square miles on Friday, marking a low point for this summer, according to NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. Last summer, the sea ice covered only 1.59 million square miles, the lowest since record-keeping began in 1979.

Arctic sea ice, which floats on the ocean, expands in winter and retreats in summer. In recent years it hasn’t been as thick in winter.

Sea ice is crucial to worldwide weather patterns, both serving as a kind of refrigerator and reflecting the sun’s heat. Given recent trends, triggered by man-made global warming, scientists warn that within five to 10 years the Arctic could be free of sea ice in the summer.

Even though the sea ice didn’t retreat this year as much as last summer, “there was no real sign of recovery,” said Walt Meier of the snow and ice data center. This year was cooler and other weather conditions weren’t as bad, he said.

“We’re kind of in a new state of the Arctic basically, and it’s not a good one,” Meier said. “We’re definitely sliding towards a point where the summer sea ice will be gone.”

Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people communicate, according to a web guru.Bill Tancer, a self-described “data geek”, has analyzed information for over 10 million web users to conclude that we are, in fact, what we click, with Internet searches giving an up-to-date view of how society and people are changing.

Some of his findings are great trivia, such as the fact that elbows, belly button lint and ceiling fans are on the list of people’s top fears alongside social intimacy and rejection.

Our planet is not at risk from the world’s most powerful particle physics experiment, a report has concluded.

The document addresses fears that the Large Hadron Collider is so energetic, it could have unforeseen consequences.

Critics are worried that mini-black holes made at the soon-to-open facility on the French-Swiss border might threaten the Earth’s very existence.

But the report, issued by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, says there is “no conceivable danger”.

The organization- known better by its French acronym, Cern -will operate the collider underground in a 27km-long tunnel near Geneva.

This Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a powerful and complicated machine, which will smash together protons at super-fast speeds in a bid to unlock the secrets of the Universe.

Six “detectors”- individual experiments- will count, trace and analyse the particles that emerge from the collisions.

Most physicists believe the risk of a cataclysm lies in the realms of science fiction. But there have been fears about the possibility of a mini-black hole- produced in the collider- swelling so that it gobbles up the Earth.

Critics have previously raised concerns that the production of weird hypothetical particles called strangelets in the LHC could trigger the mass conversion of nuclei in ordinary atoms into more strange matter- transforming the Earth into a hot, dead lump.

The lay language summary of the report, which has been written by Cern’s top theorists, states: “Over the past billions of years, nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments - and the planet still exists.”

The report added, “There is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be produced by the LHC.”

The new document is an update of the analysis carried out in 2003 into the safety of the collider by an independent team of scientists.

The authors of the latest report, including theoretical physicist John Ellis, confirmed that black holes could be made by the collider. But they said: “If microscopic black holes were to be singly produced by colliding the quarks and gluons inside protons, they would also be able to decay into the same types of particles that produced them.”

The report added, “The expected lifetime [of a mini-black hole] would be very short.”

On the strangelet issue, the report says that these particles are even less likely to be produced at the LHC than in the lower-energy Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York, which has been operating since 2000.

A previous battle over particle accelerator safety was fought over the US machine.

It’s now a fact. The North Pole has become an “island” for the first time in history, courtesy global warming.

NASA’s satellite images have revealed that the melting ice has facilitated the opening up of both the north-west and north-east passages, making it possible for marine vessels to circumnavigate the Arctic ice cap.

In fact, the images suggest the north-west passage opened last weekend while the final blockage on the east side of the ice cap, an area of sea ice stretching to as far as Siberia, dissolved a few days later.

“The passages are open. It’s an historic event. We are going to see this more and more as the years go by,” according to Professor Mark Serreze, a sea ice specialist at National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in the US.

However, he has warned that the images indicated that the Arctic may have entered a “death spiral” caused by global warming, British newspaper ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported.

But shipping companies are smiling all the way to the bank as they plan to exploit the first simultaneous opening of the routes since the beginning of the last Ice Age 125,000 years ago.

According to the Beluga Group in Germany, it will send the first ship through the north-east passage, around Russia, next year, cutting 4,000 miles off the voyage from Germany to all the way to Japan.

It may be mentioned that last year, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic had reached a record low, that also prompted scientists to caution that the ice cap could vanish altogether during summer in years’ time.

New greenhouse gases emitted in making flat-screen televisions or some refrigerants might be capped under a planned U.N. treaty to combat global warming, delegates at U.N. talks in Ghana said on Friday.Emissions of the recently developed industrial gases, including nitrogen trifluoride and fluorinated ethers, are estimated at just 0.3 percent of emissions of conventional greenhouse gases by rich nations. But the emissions are surging.

“I think it’s a good idea” to add new gases to a group of six already capped by the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol for slowing global warming, Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, told Reuters.

“It makes sense to address all gases that lead to climate change,” he said on the sidelines of the August 21-27 talks in Ghana meant to help work out details of a new treaty to combat global warming due to be agreed at the end of 2009.

“The more gases you cover, the greater flexibility countries have” to work out how best to cut back, he said. He added that it was up to governments to decide.

More than 190 nations have agreed to work out a broad new pact to succeed Kyoto as part of a drive to avert rising temperatures likely to bring more heatwaves, floods, desertification and rising seas.

De Boer said the European Union had originally, in negotiations more than a decade ago that led to Kyoto, favored limiting the treaty to carbon dioxide, emitted by burning fossil fuels in factories, power plants and cars.

But the addition of five other gases, such as industrial nitrous oxide or methane, emitted by livestock or rotting vegetation in landfills, had bolstered Kyoto, he said. Carbon dioxide is the main gas, accounting for 80 percent of emissions.

Among new gases, nitrogen trifluoride is used in making semiconductors such as in flat-screen televisions. Fluorinated ethers have been used in some refrigerants in recent years as replacements for another group of gases found to damage the earth’s protective ozone layer.

Other new gases, such as iodotrifluoromethane or methyl chloroform, are used in the electronics industry or occur as by-products of industry.

“Very little is known about sources, current and future emissions and atmospheric abundance of these gases,” according to a technical report presented to delegates.

“Emissions in 1990 are assumed to have been close to zero but are increasing exponentially,” it said.

It estimated that current annual emissions were below the equivalent of 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide — or 0.3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities in rich nations.

For carbon markets, the impact of adding new gases was unknown but would “in principle, increase the demand for tradable units under the Kyoto Protocol,” it said.

Disadvantages were that it could cost a lot to set up new monitoring and could distract focus from more important gases.

“I’m pushing this issue to get more clarity,” said Harald Dovland, a Norwegian official who chairs a group in Accra looking into new commitments by backers of Kyoto.

Kyoto obliges 37 rich nations to cut emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. “There are not big amounts of these new gases emitted now. But many parties want to ensure that there are no increases,” he said.

Where ever I’m reading about environment and climate change
I mostly found the big-big reports,charts and studies.

But can somebody help me to simplify this by creating some basic guidelines to follow in our day to day life and help to conserve our mother nature from the ground level?

Do you mean desktop - as in PC power consumption ?

Well, if you are considering purchase of a new PC, there are some being made with very low power consumption.

Failing that, Ditch your power hungry monitor - and go for an LCD model. Only 20W - compared to 150W of a CRT.
Change your power settings set- up on your PC.
Go to Start menu - Control panel , Performance and maintenance , Power settings.
There you can tell your PC to go into a screensaver after 2 minutes of non-use. - Set your screensaver to be a black screen - or something very minimal. You can also set it to turn-off the screen after 5 minutes of non-use. This will still automatically start back up as soon as you move a mouse.

If you feel loke modding your PC - Add a fan speed controller. This senses when your PC needs cooling - and turns the fan on only if it’s needed. - Seems sensible doesn’t it ?

If you have a wireless router network - this is constantly sending out the equivalent of a constant mobile phone call - all the time. As it is in the microwave region - this is not only wasteful - it’s also a health hazard! - Look up how to turn it off when you don’t need it - lots of help online for this - just google it.

I’ve got a wooden workstation, and I’ve mounted a standard 1gang switched socket on the left behind te monitor. This is supplied by a 13A lead to the inaccesable wall socket in the wall. I plugged my Mains surge protector into this for all computer and peripheral power.
When I’m done with the PC I just turn this mainswitch off and it isolates the lot. - A lot easier than grovelling around behind everything.

I’ve found if you make access easier to switches - people use them.

For TV - video etc - use an eco-adaptor. This senses when the TV is off - and switches everything else off too - no more stand-by’s.

For a few pounds you can get a device that tells you how much current your devices use. You set your electricity costs - and can see how much it’s costing you! Maybe you’ll decide to change those expencive items.