Research not so passive when it comes to smoke damage

Scientists in the US have produced strong evidence for the harmful effects of passive smoke inhalation.

Chengbo Wang and his colleagues at the children's hospital of Philadelphia made the discovery by using a new imaging technique called global helium-3 diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to test the lungs of 60 volunteers aged between 41 and 79 years, including 15 current or former smokers and 45 lifelong non-smokers, half of whom had been exposed to high levels of passive smoking in the past (indicated by living with a smoker for more than 10 years). The subjects breathed in a small amount of a form of helium called helium-3, and the MRI scanner was used to monitor how the atoms moved around inside the subjects' airways, a measure called the ADC or apparent diffusion coefficient.

In healthy non-smokers the air spaces in the lungs are small and compact, which helps the blood to efficiently collect oxygen and shed carbon dioxide. This also means that the helium atoms don't tend to move very far.  But smoking causes lung tissue to break down, which is known as emphysematous change, and makes the air spaces larger.

When these changes are present the helium atoms can move much greater distances, and this can be picked up by the scanner. Indeed the researchers found that almost one third of the non-smokers with high exposure to secondhand smoke had structural changes in their lungs similar to the smokers, suggesting that damage was present.

"To our knowledge, this is the first imaging study to find lung damage in non-smokers heavily exposed to secondhand smoke," said Wang. "We hope our work strengthens the efforts of legislators and policymakers to limit public exposure to secondhand smoke.

25th Nov 2007

Our moon could be rare

Our moon is thought to have been created by a planet the size of Mars smashing into the proto-earth. The resulting debris is then thought to have formed the moon.  It is possible something similar happened to form Pluto's moon Charon.

Nadya Grolova and colleagues from the University of Florida has been looking for evidence of this sort of collision in other solar systems.  The technology to detect the planets directly doesn't exist but they are looking from the immense amounts of warm dust that such collisions would create, and the infra red radiation this dust would produce.  They have looked at 400 stars that are only only about 30 million years old, which is when most of these collisions are predicted to occur.  From their results they think that only 1 in 10-20 solar systems have these collisions and only some of the collisions will produce moons.

This is important because the moon is thought to have stabilised the orientation of the earth's axis thus making the earth's climate much more stable, and giving complex life enough time to develop.

25th Nov 2007

"How mice "pee-ceive" who they're related to

Scientists have uncovered how mice identify their relatives and so choose not to mate with them - by the smell of their urine!

Previous studies in mice and in humans, such as the smelly T-shirt test, had suggested that animals try to choose mates with a selection of immune system "MHC" genes that are as different as possible to their own.  But now Liverpool University's Janet Hurst and her colleagues have found that this is not true and instead mice rely on a diverse set of smelly chemicals in their urine called MUPs - major urinary proteins - which are encoded by the animal's DNA.  These give a mouse a chemical barcode, which it can compare against a potential mate.  If the smells match then the two animals are probably closely related, so they avoid mating with each other.  The scientists made the discovery by studying wild mice which were allowed to mate over several generations in a large outdoor enclosure.  After 15 weeks the researchers studied the parentage of the animals to work out which mice had mated.  They were surprised to find that the immune system genes previously believed to be the key to the process seemed to play no part whatsoever.

"Instead, another specialised set of proteins, which are produced at high concentration in mouse urine, signal relatedness through their scent.  It is these proteins that allow animals to avoid mating with their close kin," says Janet Hurst. The key to the breakthrough was the use in the study of wild as opposed to laboratory-bred mice.  Lab mice are all in-bred, so they carry the same urine proteins; as a result, researchers had focused instead on immune system genes.

25th Nov 2007

Opals are thanks to Uranium

Opals are precious stones in which you can see vibrant colours which change as you move and look at them from different directions, in a similar way to how the colours you can see in a CD change and move as you look at them. The colour is produced by their structure not by pigments, opals are made of silica - the same thing as most sand, but it is in the form of billions of tiny spheres smaller than the wavelength of light.

Each sphere will reflect and scatter light from a slightly different place, all of these small reflections interfere with each other so in some directions for some colours they add together and in others they cancel each other out forming the beautiful colours.

Opals can be found in many types of rock and until now we didn't know what triggered them to form. Geologist Brian Senior and physicist Lewis Chatterton have studied opals very carefully using equipment such as electron microscopes and have discovered that the opal spheres seem to form in areas where silica is crystalising out of water. Normally this process cannot start in the centre of the water because there is nothing for the crystal to start to form on, so crystals grow out form the walls. But if there is Uranium decaying in the water the radiation it produces can from a nucleation point and start a crystal. All these small crystals form the centres of the spheres in the opal.

This is not just interesting science though because it means that opals are associated with radioactivity and so if you look for the radioactivity you may well find the opals.

25th Nov 2007

Life in Soweto

South Africa is a country of contrasts – Johannesburg no less so. It’s easy to see all the new cars, expensive houses, high-rise offices but just ten minutes south of the centre lies the township of Soweto where many people live in a shack. This is little more than a simple shed. To get an idea of what life is really like for the poor in Johannesburg, we spoke to one of the residents there.

Zareda - Hello my name is Zareda Shodwe and we are living in Soweto. We live in a shack, we don’t have electricity or water yet. We have to go – maybe we pass five houses – to get water. We use gas stoves to cook and we light with candles in the house. We sometimes use the television and radio.

Chris - How many people live here?

Zareda - Five, six with my son.

Chris - Who are those people you live with?

Zareda - My sisters. One is older and three are younger than me.

Chris - What do you do for money? You’re not able to go to work, you’re looking after your son so how do you live?

Zareda - We sell vegetables. My older sister sells vegetables.

Chris - And are they vegetables you buy from someone else or do you grow them?

Zareda - We grow them, down there on the other side.

Chris - So tell us a bit about life for you here. What’s it actually like to live here because this is pretty basic as a means of accommodation.

Zareda - Yes. When we live here people judge us for living here. When people pass the street they look at us in a different way. They don’t think of us as people. They just think of us as people within the shack. It’s not nice.

Chris - You’ve got a television here. You haven’t got any electricity so how do you run your television?

Zareda - We use a car battery.

Chris - How long does that last?

Zareda - It lasts about six or seven days.

Chris - So television and radio must be quite important for you to get information.

Zareda - Yes it is important, it is important for us.

Chris - If you could change things here, what would be the most immediate thing that would make life better?

Zareda - Electricity. We don’t mind not having houses but we just want electricity and running water in the house.

Chris - It’s pretty draughty in here. There’s holes in the roof.

Zareda - When it’s hot outside the house becomes very, very hot. When it’s cold the house is cold and when it rains it leaks.

Chris - What do you think is the prospects for your son? How will you make sure things go well for him?

Zareda - I don’t know. If I can find a job I can make sure things go well for him.

Chris - Have you any plans of how you might make that happen?

Zareda - Yes, I do interviews. Sometimes I go for interviews but sometimes I don’t get the job. Since I went for interviews I didn’t get a job. I’m still sending CVs.

Chris - Were you born here?

Zareda - No, we were born in KwaZulu-Natal. My parents came here looking for a job.

Chris - And they brought you with them.

Zareda - Yes.

Chris - Do you wish in some respects they hadn’t brought you here?

Zareda - No, I don’t because in KwaZulu-Natal it is worse than here. The situation is worse than the one is here.

Chris - What do you think will be the situation in five years’ time for you and your family?

Zareda - The government promises to change things so we hope things will have changed by then.

Chris - Now although five people and a baby living together in a corrugated metal shack not much bigger than my garage, with no electricity and no running water may sound very extreme to us. In many places the quality of life is a lot worse. Also with us in Soweto was Diran Onifade. He’s a television journalist based in Nigeria. I asked him how the conditions we experienced compared with other parts of Africa.

Diran - To be honest with you, I will not describe these as very bad. I’m not measuring just by Nigeria but my fairly extensive knowledge of other African countries – because if you look at it they don’t have electricity in their homes but there’s still a situation where there is some illumination in the night.

Chris - Street lights and so on?

Diran - Street lights. And there is community water supply there for them 24 hours a day. They even have provisions for toilets. By African standards this is not how a squatter settlement is treated.

Chris - You’re saying these people are fortunate?

Diran - In a way, yes.

Chris - It’s hard to imagine worse though.

Diran - Well, you go to villages or even see who constitutes the urban poor in many African cities. It’s far worse, much more people living in the same room without running water or food; toilets and, much the same way, without electricity. It’s not good but it’s not the worst that can happen on this continent.

Chris - How do you see places like this changing in the next five years? Do you think if we come back in five years’ time we’ll still be looking at the same sort of scene, a worse scene or will things have got markedly better?

Diran - This is easy to change in the sense that they already have spaces well cut out for them. In many African cities people like them are thought of as squatters, to be flushed out. I think the most important things for them to have electricity, to work out for them to have some concrete structure. If that happens, I think their fortune is easy to turn around. Theirs is better than people who still live in mud huts with thatched roofs and things like that. There is no prospect of even getting electricity to them and there is no other pipe anywhere close by. I think it’s easy to change their lot.

Chris - It’s a bizarre environment because we drove in the car for ten minutes out of five star hotels, beautiful radio studios in the middle of Johannesburg and then we’re here and it couldn’t be more different.

Diran - It’s what some analysts have been calling the five minute factor. Most cities, you see it in Nigeria; you see it in Ghana – wherever – most cities you just need to drive five minutes out of these cities and you’ll see the flip-side of civilisation.

Ben - The trappings of cities were still actually there because when we were in that shack, Chris pointed out that she had a better DVD player than Chris has got at home.

November 2007

HIV and AIDS in South Africa

The conditions we saw in Soweto were a breeding ground for infectious diseases. Things like HIV and TB are no exception. This week the UN reduced its estimates for how many people are actually infected and affected by HIV. They also announced that South Africa is officially the country with the world’s highest prevalence (in other words cases of the disease) anywhere.

There is one benefit to being a country with the most HIV and AIDS and also being relatively connected to the First World and that is that the scientists and doctors working there have some of the best statistics on disease that the world has to offer. I met up with some of those scientists working to try and understand this condition and to try and break the back of this epidemic.

Helen - My name is Helen Reese. I’m the executive director of the Reproductive Health and HIV Research Unit at the University of Witwatersrand, based in Johannesburg. The scale of the HIV epidemic is something that hasn’t been known in the world ever before. We can say that 5 million people out of the 41 million people in South Africa are infected. What that really means is that 1 in 8 of every adult in this country are infected with HIV. It means that when we see pregnant women in clinics, between 1 in 3 and up to 1 in 2 are infected with HIV with a very high risk that they’ll transmit the virus to their infant. In young girls aged between 15 and 24 about 1 in 4 of those young women are infected with HIV. If these were the statistics that we saw in a developing country a state of emergency would be declared.

Chris - If you look at who those people are, is there any particular group- a subset of the population who are affected or is this everybody?

Helen - HIV can affect everybody and if you look in South Africa, indeed it affects all various groups. It affects rich and poor. However, if you look at the way that the epidemic is now spreading it is disproportionately affecting black South Africans and we do think that it’s affecting young people much more than older people.

Chris - Do you have any ideas as to why it’s affecting the people that it’s affecting? Is it an educational thing? Is there something else going on?

Helen - I think there’s a lot of something else that goes on. There’s a whole mixture of issues here. There is the issue of poverty that as a background affects all infectious diseases. There is a historical issue that apartheid created the migrant labour system that’s both destroyed the social structure of families but has also pulled men from their families and made them single male individuals living in urban settings where they take often second partners. There are other things as well. There are issues about other sexually transmitted infections and possibly just the virus that you’ve got and possibly receptivity of the population. It could be right down to basic science as an influencing factor as well and why we have such a bad epidemic.

If, indeed, there is some sort of scientific and basic biological explanation to this then we need to understand that if we’re going to stand a change to make a vaccine.

Chris - Francois Venter – you work with Helen. What have we learned so far about how people actually pass this on and when they’re most infectious and when, therefore, most of the transmissions occur?

Francois - It’s only in the first few months that people harbour infections. They’re still infectious after that but the scale of infectiousness is so much greater during those first few months. It’s starting to explain some of the frustration as to why large scale provincial programmes in our country in particular but throughout southern Africa have not had the impact we’d hoped they would. Condom provision, for instance, in this country’s actually very, very good. Education processes – if you measure it against people’s understandings of HIV and the spellings of most, people understand what’s going on. It hasn’t changed the dynamics of the epidemic on the face of it.

Chris - Why are they still getting it then if they know all that?

Francois - I think what we haven’t understood is when transmission actually occurs. It seems to be very concentrated in the first few months, immediately after infection. If you do not intervene in those first few months you actually lose the overall public health benefit of dealing with transmission.

Chris - So what you’re saying is if everyone stopped having sex for three months, which is when you’re most infectious when you first catch it then potentially, you could stop it in its tracks because people’s infectivity falls so much after that period?

Francois - I guess you could probably break the back of the entire epidemic if you could just alter sexual behaviours for a very brief period of time.

Chris - What about drugs? That’s the thing at the moment. It’s the mainstay of how we’re trying to deal with HIV. There’s no vaccine so we’ve got to treat people that have got it rather than trying to prevent people getting it in the first place because, as we’ve shown it’s part of the argument but not the whole solution. How do the drugs work and have you got access to them here in South Africa?

Francois - The drugs are very, very effective. They essentially switch off the manufacture of the virus and allow the body’s immune system to regenerate. They are available in South Africa and have been relatively freely for the last 3 - 3½ years. In the rest of southern Africa it varies from country to country. Even in our own country from region to region. In some rural areas people battle to get access to these drugs. In urban areas access is relatively free and available.

Chris - We’ve heard about drugs and other behavioural education to try and cut this down. Jocelyn Moyes, you’re working on another way to try and deal with this problem.

Jocelyn - It’s an area that we’re doing quite a lot of work in is vaginal microbicides. The two present products that are about to come the end of clinical trials will lock HIV from attaching to the body cells. They’re a very large molecule which will sit on the HIV receptor of the cell and form almost like a key into the keyhole. When HIV comes along it can’t get through the keyhole into the body’s cells. The present microbicides we are testing come in a gel formulation which is applied vaginally to prevent HIV either attaching to the cells or replicating.

Chris - Just for women or can men get some benefit from this?

Jocelyn - Well, it’s topically applied and controlled by a woman but there is a chance that there will be protection for the male partner as well.

Chris - Have you any feel for how effective this is? It’s a lot to put your faith in. How do you know that you’re going to get complete coverage or how do you know that you’re going to get enough concentration to do away with the virus?

Jocelyn - We’ve got two candidates in phase 3 testing which is the efficacy testing – does it work or doesn’t it work? We’ll have one set of results early in next year and the other results probably early in 2010. So then I think we will have some proof of concept. Will it work or can’t it work?

At the moment our basis is that these compounds are active against HIV in the lab. They’ve been active at preventing infection in animal models and they are safe to use in humans. That’s our assumption to this point. Our efficacy in humans will be proved early next year and then again in 2010.

Chris - Just returning to you, briefly Helen. A lot of people are probably thinking, why should the rest of the world worry about what’s happening in one other country? There are lots of problems in the world. Why should HIV in South Africa be such a big international issue?

Helen - It’s not just HIV in South Africa. HIV globally is not going away. In fact in many countries it’s re-emerging as a problem. The other thing that we know is with a disease that’s as devastating as this that seeing life expectancy drop by ten year aliquots, almost year-on-year, that’s going to have a profound impact on the social fabric in many African countries and on many other countries in the Far East that are affected. You must then think what that will do to the economies of those countries or what it will do to political stability and once again we are a global family. If we have instability and poverty and growing problems in one part of the world inevitably they will relate to what happens in other parts of the world. That’s one argument. The other basic argument is the argument that I hope we never lose touch with is that we are one common human family and we cannot ever look at the level of suffering that we’re seeing as an epidemic in this part of the world and just turn our back on it because it’s not directly affecting us.

Chris - Pretty scary, aren’t they, those statistics? One person in two who’s pregnant, turning up at antenatal clinics and they’re HIV positive. South Africa, the country as the UN’s put it, ‘with the world’s worst prevalence of HIV.’

November 2007

Our Story: Human Ancestor Fossils

One of the fantastic opportunities we had in South Africa was to visit the collection of fossils at Witwatersrand University. They have a collection of about 30% of the fossils found in Africa that tell us about how we evolved from ape-like creatures into modern humans.  Professor Lee Berger took us though some of the highlights of the collection, piecing together three million years of evolution in the process.  One of the most interesting things that the fossil record reveals is that we went through a period of extreme giantism. These were people routinely over 7ft tall, they were huge.  This was before we turned into the modern humans of today.

Lee - You’ve probably heard the myth that ancient humans were tiny and some of them were tiny.  But, as we moved through the period of 0.5 million to 300,000 years ago in Africa we move into the sort of mystery period where there’s just a tiny handful of fossils.  The ones we find from that part are incredibly intriguing.  By this time you’re going to begin seeing Neanderthals in Europe.  Inside of Africa they go through one of the most incredible things that we’ve only just begun to realise.  They go through a period of giantism.  What I’m pulling out of this bag may shock you!

Chris - Oooh!

Lee - Hahaha.

Chris - What we’re looking at is the most enormous femur: the bit that forms your hip joint. That’s huge.  As a doctor I know how big they normally are, that’s huge.

Lee - They are huge.  That’s so big we can’t even calculate how big this individual was. You would need an NBA basketball player to get someone of the height someone like this would have been.  Something like over 7 feet tall.

Chris - You don’t think this one’s just an abnormality?

Lee - No because we found a lot of them.  Everywhere we find them we find them enormous.  These are what we call archaic Homo sapiens.  Some people refer to them as Homo heidelbergensis.  These individuals are extraordinary, they are giants.

Chris - Does it coincide with a time when there was enormous amounts of resources, lots of food which meant they could afford a huge body size like that?

Lee - Actually it might have been just the opposite.  That is, it was a period when there were larger amounts of grassland evolving and there were lots of giants adapting to that grassland.  Giant buffalo with horns three metres across if you can imagine that.  These individuals in that very rugged environment, that tough environment, seemingly were using their body size to enforce themselves into what was a very dry and tough period.

Chris - So when would he have been around?

Lee - This particular individual existed probably about 350,000-400,000 years ago.

Chris - How long did people with this giant stature exist for before they started to shrink again?

Lee - We have no idea but we do know that the next time we start getting a good window in is 100-150,000 years ago when we’re here.  People of our stature, our body size.  This experiment was relatively short-lived (a couple of hundred thousand years).

Chris - So that was all happening about 300,000 years ago but what about if we wind the clock back now to almost the very beginning?  To the earliest human ancestors who walked around on two legs.  These were the Australopithecines and they emerged about 3 million years ago.  The first ever example was unearthed by the famous palaeoanthropologist, Raymond Dart.  In the early 1920s he was working with his students in the Taung limestone works which is in the Harts Valley in the Bechaunaland, South Africa.  There, he discovered what turned out to be one of the most important fossils of all time.

Lee - This little brown box I’m opening up is the actual box Raymond Dart had built, back in 1925 to hold, arguably, the most important single human ancestor fossil on the planet.  You’re about to join a really exclusive club of people who’ve actually seen and touched it.  This is the one that defines what it is to be an early African ape-man.

Chris - This is 3 million years old?

Lee -   This is about 2 ½ million years old.  We’ve actually largely dated it by comparing it to other fossils that have been found since.  It is an awe inspiring fossil but, remarkably still, the only fossil that was ever found at the Taung site.  It just happened to be this little child which is the first fossil of an early human found in Africa.  This started the entire science.  In fact, you can even argue that things like genetics and the study of our own origins came out with this fossil.  Discovered in the Taung lime quarry, it was sent in a box full of baboons to Raymond Dart and if it had arrived on almost anyone else’s desk at that particular time they might not have recognised it.  What he pulled out of that box, the first thing he saw – if I pull out this little plastic bag – is that remarkable little thing:  half an endocast of a brain of a little child.  Immediately, Raymond Dart recognised that he wasn’t holding a baboon brain in his hand.  It wasn’t even a brain of a chimpanzee.  It was far too big. He was holding something that no one had ever seen before.  He probably would have used the term, ‘a missing link.’

Chris - That’s totally extraordinary.  How does something so soft and blancmange-y as a brain actually get preserved?

Lee - Well, because it doesn’t.  That’s not actually the brain.  What that is, is a cast of the interior of the skull.  very time your heart beats, as your head is forming as a child, it beats am impression of the surface of the brain onto effectively the inside of your skull.  When a skull is up in these remarkable fossilisation situations there’s a perfect impression – a perfect image of your brain on the inside of that skull. When it fills with fine sediments we then have a perfect cast of the brain.

Chris - You can literally, looking at that from the side, see the three major parts of the brain.  I can see what’s going to be the cerebellum, the hind brain at the back, there’s the temporal lobe – which is us is adjacent to our ear and then the frontal lobes where I’d be thinking and planning – I don’t know whether this would have done much thinking and planning.  That’s an incredible fossil.

Lee - It is one of the most remarkable fossils in of itself, that you’ll ever see.  Look at the veins on the surface!  The blood supply to the brain is actually preserved on the surface of that.  Raymond Dart turned this little thing over just like I’m doing right now and looked down and saw this was not a rearward facing point of attachment facing this skull in the spinal cord.  It was vertically positioned.

Chris - That says it was not ape-like.  That’s homo.

Lee - ‘I walk on two legs,’ that’s what it spoke to him as clearly as if it were written on the fossil itself.  If that had been all he found it would have been fantastic but it wasn’t all he found.  Inside of another block he saw this little mushroom-shaped attachment and in it he saw the back of a mushroom-shaped …

Chris - Oh my god!

Lee - Yes, oh my god!

Chris - I’ve just got a glimpse of what’s going to come out of this bag.

Lee - He took his wife’s knitting needles and started chipping away at it.  On December the 21st, 1924 that rock broke away and he saw that.

Chris - It’s a face.  I’m looking at a face.  It’s phenomenal.

Lee - You’re looking at maybe the most famous face in all of palaeontology.

Chris - It’s perfect.

Lee - It’s absolutely perfect because it doesn’t have just the top, it has the bottom.

Chris - It’s got a jaw and a face to go with it.  It’s still quite monkey-like though isn’t it?

Lee - A little bit.  It doesn’t have quite the prognathism that a young monkey would have and what it certainly doesn’t have is a big canine.  We’re going back to something that’s transitional.  It’s a bit of the way between us and them.  It’s our link.  This little child met a tragic, tragic end and about 3 ½ years of age.  I’ll do something for you.  I’ll put it all together, the whole Taung child.  Reunited, after being  2 ½ million years underground.

Chris - I think that probably is the most awe-inspiring experience, or one of them, I’ve ever had.

Lee - It is, it’s about our experience.  Do you want to touch it?

Chris - Go on then.  So if I touch this, how many other people will have had the opportunity apart from Raymond Dart to have done that?

Lee - No more than a few hundred scientists and a few dozen people who aren’t scientists.

Chris - That is absolutely incredible.  To say I’m blown away would be an understatement actually.  It’s when I saw the face staring out at me through that plastic bag, it’s almost moving me to tears.  It’s just so incredible and delicate and perfect.

Lee - Yep, and 2 ½ million years old.  And it’s our story.

Ben - The emotions were running quite high in that room and it was an honour to see that skull.  But if you’re wondering what happened to that child, it was actually snatched away and killed by an eagle.  The fossilised bones of the skull have preserved the scratches from the bird’s talons.  They compared it to baboons and they could see that that’s what it was.  That was Professor Lee Berger showing us some of the most important human ancestor fossils ever found.

November 2007