This undated handout artist rendering provided by Xijun Ni, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences shows a reconstruction of Archicebus achilles in its natural habitat of trees. One of our earliest primate relatives was a hyperactive wide-eyed creature so small you could fit a few of them in your hand, if they would just stay still long enough, new fossil evidence shows. (AP Photo/Xijun Ni, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
This undated handout artist rendering provided by Xijun Ni, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences shows a reconstruction of Archicebus achilles in its natural habitat of trees. One of our earliest primate relatives was a hyperactive wide-eyed creature so small you could fit a few of them in your hand, if they would just stay still long enough, new fossil evidence shows. (AP Photo/Xijun Ni, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? New fossil evidence of the earliest complete skeleton of an ancient primate suggests it was a hyperactive, wide-eyed creature so small you could hold a couple of them in your hand ? if only they would stay still long enough.
The 55-million-year-old fossil dug up in central China is one of our first primate relatives and it gives scientists a better understanding of the complex evolution that eventually led to us. This tiny monkey-like creature weighed an ounce or less and wasn't a direct ancestor. Because it's so far back on the family tree it offers the best clues yet of what our earliest direct relatives would have been like at that time, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"It's a close cousin in fact," said study author Christopher Beard, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. He said it is "the closest thing we have to an ancestor of humans" so long ago.
Primate is the order of life that includes humans along with apes, monkeys, and lemurs. Humans and other primates are set apart from other mammals because of our grasping five fingers and toes, nails, and forward-facing eyes. And this new species called Archicebus achilles fits right in, Beard said.
Among primates there are three suborders: anthropoids, which include apes, monkeys and us; and two other suborders that include lemurs and the lesser known tarsiers. This new species is in the same grouping as tarsiers, but close to the offshoot branch in the family tree where humans come from. The fossil includes anthropoid-like features.
"It's a cute little thing; it's ridiculously little," Beard said. "That's one of the more important scientific aspects of the whole story."
With a trunk only 2.8 inches long, the furry creature was about as small as you can get and still be a mammal, Beard said. Just like elephants and horses, the farther back in time you get for some of today's bigger mammals, the smaller they get, Beard said.
Because it was so small and warm-blooded, it had to eat bugs and move constantly to keep from losing internal heat, Beard said.
That means, Beard said, our earliest primate relatives were "very frenetic creatures, anxious, highly caffeinated animals running around looking for their next meal." They lived in a tree-lined area near a Chinese lake, swinging around trees in a hotter climate, Beard said.
Outside experts praised the study as significant, confirming what some thought about our primate ancestors. Rick Potts, director of the human origins program at the Smithsonian Institution, said this fossil's mix of different features illustrate the fascinating and crucial changes that occur around major evolutionary branch points in our family tree.
The study also bolstered another theory that early primates first developed in Asia, even though humans evolved nearly 50 million years later in Africa, Beard said.
___
Seth Borenstein can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears .
NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy recently demonstrated the fine art of shaving your head in space. It's more complicated than you might think.
By Mike Wall,?Space.com / June 4, 2013
Astronaut Chris Cassidy shaved his head while on the International Space Station to welcome his new crewmate Luca Parmitano.
Courtesy of Chris Cassidy / NASA / Space.com
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Shaving your head is the simplest of haircuts here on Earth, but it presents some special challenges in space, as NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy recently demonstrated.
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Cassidy shaved his head in orbit late last month to welcome chrome-domed Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, who arrived at the?International Space Station?on May 28 along with NASA's Karen Nyberg and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin.
"I'm going to go out on a limb here and get the full-on Luca Parmitano look for the hatch-opening ceremony," Cassidy said in a NASA?video showing the head-shaving process. "So please join me [at] Chris' Barber Shop."
Cassidy held a hair trimmer up to the camera, then connected it to a vacuum cleaner using a long tube.
"Otherwise, the hair would get all over the place," he explained.
Then Cassidy commenced buzzing his hair, which was pretty short to begin with. He stopped halfway through the process and smiled at the camera, showing off a temporary mohawk.
"I don't think I've looked like this since Plebe Summer," the former Navy SEAL said as he shaved off the mohawk, referring to the training program the United States Naval Academy puts all of its incoming freshmen through.
After finishing with the clippers, Cassidy reached for a razor to give himself Parmitano's sleek, smooth-pated look.
"I wonder if he does this every day," Cassidy said before wiping his newly shorn scalp down with a small white towel. "It kinda hurts."
While head-shaving may not have been filmed in space before, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield demonstrated how he?shaved his face in microgravity?in April.
Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin and Pavel Vinogradov launched toward the orbiting lab aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on March 28. Along with Parmitano, Nyberg and Yurchikhin, they make up the crew of the space station's current Expedition 36.
Cassidy, Misurkin and Vinogradov are slated to return to Earth in September. Their three crewmates will remain in orbit a few more months, coming home in November.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter?@michaeldwall?and?Google+.?Follow us?@Spacedotcom,?Facebook?or?Google+. Originally published on?SPACE.com.
Copyright 2013?SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Surgeons at Duke University Hospital implant bioengineered veinPublic release date: 6-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sarah Avery sarah.avery@duke.edu 919-660-1306 Duke University Medical Center
Kidney dialysis patient first in US to receive blood vessel grown in laboratory
DURHAM, N.C. In a first-of-its-kind operation in the United States, a team of doctors at Duke University Hospital helped create a bioengineered blood vessel and implanted it into the arm of a patient with end-stage kidney disease.
The procedure, the first U.S. clinical trial to test the safety and effectiveness of the bioengineered blood vessel, is a milestone in the field of tissue engineering. The new vein is an off-the-shelf, human cell-based product with no biological properties that would cause organ rejection.
Using technology developed at Duke and at a spin-off company it started called Humacyte, the vein is engineered by cultivating donated human cells on a tubular scaffold to form a vessel. The vessel is then cleansed of the qualities that might trigger an immune response. In pre-clinical tests, the veins have performed better than other synthetic and animal-based implants.
"This is a pioneering event in medicine," said Jeffrey H. Lawson, M.D., PhD, a vascular surgeon and vascular biologist at Duke Medicine who helped develop the technology and performed the implantation. "It's exciting to see something you've worked on for so long become a reality. We talk about translational technology developing ideas from the laboratory to clinical practice and this only happens where there is the multi-disciplinary support and collaboration to cultivate it."
Clinical trials to test the new veins began in Poland in December with the first human implantations. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved a phase 1 trial involving 20 kidney dialysis patients in the United States, followed by a safety review. Duke researchers enrolled the first U.S. patient and serve as study leaders.
The initial trial focuses on implanting the vessels in an easily accessible site in the arms of kidney hemodialysis patients. More than 320,000 people in the United States require hemodialysis, which often necessitates a graft to connect an artery to a vein to speed blood flow during treatments. Current options have drawbacks. Synthetic vascular grafts are prone to clotting, leading to frequent hospitalizations, and harvesting veins from the patient's own body involves a separate procedure, with the risk of infection and other complications.
If the bioengineered veins prove beneficial for hemodialysis patients, the researchers ultimately aim to develop a readily available and durable graft for heart bypass surgeries, which are performed on nearly 400,000 people in the United States a year, and to treat blocked blood vessels in the limbs.
"We hope this sets the groundwork for how these things can be grown, how they can incorporate into the host, and how they can avoid being rejected immunologically," Lawson said. "A blood vessel is really an organ it's complex tissue. We start with this, and one day we may be able to engineer a liver or a kidney or an eye."
The bioengineered vein is the product of a 15-year collaboration between Lawson and Laura Niklason, M.D., PhD, co-founder of Humacyte and a former faculty member at Duke who is now at Yale. Lawson and Niklason teamed up in the late 1990s after discovering they shared an interest in engineering blood vessels.
Building on work Niklason began as a bioengineering post-doctoral student, the duo worked to perfect the technology in animal models and eventually moved to develop veins for human implantation.
"The bioengineered blood vessel technology is a new paradigm in tissue engineering," said Niklason, professor and vice chair of anesthesia, professor of biomedical engineering, Yale University, and founder of Humacyte. "This technology is a key step for patients with end-stage renal disease and can potentially avoid surgical interventions and hospitalizations. The fact that these vessels contain no living cells enables simple storage onsite at hospitals, making them the first off-the-shelf engineered grafts that have transitioned into clinical evaluation."
Overcoming setbacks and frustrations, the researchers notched numerous advancements, starting with the biodegradable mesh as the scaffolding for the veins. The mesh, easily manipulated into any shape, is formed into a blood vessel of varying lengths and widths.
When seeded with smooth muscle cells, the mesh gradually dissolves as the cells grow in a special medium of amino acids, vitamins and other nutrients. One key improvement, which strengthens the bioengineered tissue, is a pulsing force introduced during the growth process, in which the nutrients are pumped through the tube in a heartbeat rhythm to build the physical properties that are similar to native blood vessels.
After a couple of months, a life-like vein results.
Originally, the researchers sought to develop veins using a person's own cells to seed the scaffolding, reducing the risk that the patient's body would reject the implanted tissue. But growing personalized veins took too much time and ruled out mass production, so the researchers changed tack to develop a universal product.
Using donated human tissue to grow on the tubular matrix, they wash the resulting vein in a special solution to rinse out the cellular properties, leaving a collagen structure that does not trigger an immune response.
"At the end of the process, we have a non-living, immunologically silent graft that can be stored on the shelf and used in patients whenever they need it," Niklason said. "Unlike other synthetic replacements made of Teflon or Dacron, which tend to be stiff, our blood vessels mechanically match the arteries and veins they are being sewn to. We think this is an advantage."
When implanted in animals, the vein grafts actually adopt the cellular properties of a blood vessel. They don't just elude rejection; they become indistinguishable from living tissue as cells grow into the implant.
"They are functionally alive," Lawson said. "We won't know until we test it if it works this way in humans, but we know from the animal models that the blood travels through the blood vessels and they have the natural properties that keep the blood cells healthy."
Lawson's first patient, a 62-year-old man from Danville, Va., who has required kidney dialysis for years, received the bioengineered vein graft in a two-hour procedure on June 5, 2013.
###
Note to editors: B-roll and photos of the bioengineered vessel and the implantation procedure are available by contacting (919) 660-1306 or sarah.avery@duke.edu.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Surgeons at Duke University Hospital implant bioengineered veinPublic release date: 6-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sarah Avery sarah.avery@duke.edu 919-660-1306 Duke University Medical Center
Kidney dialysis patient first in US to receive blood vessel grown in laboratory
DURHAM, N.C. In a first-of-its-kind operation in the United States, a team of doctors at Duke University Hospital helped create a bioengineered blood vessel and implanted it into the arm of a patient with end-stage kidney disease.
The procedure, the first U.S. clinical trial to test the safety and effectiveness of the bioengineered blood vessel, is a milestone in the field of tissue engineering. The new vein is an off-the-shelf, human cell-based product with no biological properties that would cause organ rejection.
Using technology developed at Duke and at a spin-off company it started called Humacyte, the vein is engineered by cultivating donated human cells on a tubular scaffold to form a vessel. The vessel is then cleansed of the qualities that might trigger an immune response. In pre-clinical tests, the veins have performed better than other synthetic and animal-based implants.
"This is a pioneering event in medicine," said Jeffrey H. Lawson, M.D., PhD, a vascular surgeon and vascular biologist at Duke Medicine who helped develop the technology and performed the implantation. "It's exciting to see something you've worked on for so long become a reality. We talk about translational technology developing ideas from the laboratory to clinical practice and this only happens where there is the multi-disciplinary support and collaboration to cultivate it."
Clinical trials to test the new veins began in Poland in December with the first human implantations. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved a phase 1 trial involving 20 kidney dialysis patients in the United States, followed by a safety review. Duke researchers enrolled the first U.S. patient and serve as study leaders.
The initial trial focuses on implanting the vessels in an easily accessible site in the arms of kidney hemodialysis patients. More than 320,000 people in the United States require hemodialysis, which often necessitates a graft to connect an artery to a vein to speed blood flow during treatments. Current options have drawbacks. Synthetic vascular grafts are prone to clotting, leading to frequent hospitalizations, and harvesting veins from the patient's own body involves a separate procedure, with the risk of infection and other complications.
If the bioengineered veins prove beneficial for hemodialysis patients, the researchers ultimately aim to develop a readily available and durable graft for heart bypass surgeries, which are performed on nearly 400,000 people in the United States a year, and to treat blocked blood vessels in the limbs.
"We hope this sets the groundwork for how these things can be grown, how they can incorporate into the host, and how they can avoid being rejected immunologically," Lawson said. "A blood vessel is really an organ it's complex tissue. We start with this, and one day we may be able to engineer a liver or a kidney or an eye."
The bioengineered vein is the product of a 15-year collaboration between Lawson and Laura Niklason, M.D., PhD, co-founder of Humacyte and a former faculty member at Duke who is now at Yale. Lawson and Niklason teamed up in the late 1990s after discovering they shared an interest in engineering blood vessels.
Building on work Niklason began as a bioengineering post-doctoral student, the duo worked to perfect the technology in animal models and eventually moved to develop veins for human implantation.
"The bioengineered blood vessel technology is a new paradigm in tissue engineering," said Niklason, professor and vice chair of anesthesia, professor of biomedical engineering, Yale University, and founder of Humacyte. "This technology is a key step for patients with end-stage renal disease and can potentially avoid surgical interventions and hospitalizations. The fact that these vessels contain no living cells enables simple storage onsite at hospitals, making them the first off-the-shelf engineered grafts that have transitioned into clinical evaluation."
Overcoming setbacks and frustrations, the researchers notched numerous advancements, starting with the biodegradable mesh as the scaffolding for the veins. The mesh, easily manipulated into any shape, is formed into a blood vessel of varying lengths and widths.
When seeded with smooth muscle cells, the mesh gradually dissolves as the cells grow in a special medium of amino acids, vitamins and other nutrients. One key improvement, which strengthens the bioengineered tissue, is a pulsing force introduced during the growth process, in which the nutrients are pumped through the tube in a heartbeat rhythm to build the physical properties that are similar to native blood vessels.
After a couple of months, a life-like vein results.
Originally, the researchers sought to develop veins using a person's own cells to seed the scaffolding, reducing the risk that the patient's body would reject the implanted tissue. But growing personalized veins took too much time and ruled out mass production, so the researchers changed tack to develop a universal product.
Using donated human tissue to grow on the tubular matrix, they wash the resulting vein in a special solution to rinse out the cellular properties, leaving a collagen structure that does not trigger an immune response.
"At the end of the process, we have a non-living, immunologically silent graft that can be stored on the shelf and used in patients whenever they need it," Niklason said. "Unlike other synthetic replacements made of Teflon or Dacron, which tend to be stiff, our blood vessels mechanically match the arteries and veins they are being sewn to. We think this is an advantage."
When implanted in animals, the vein grafts actually adopt the cellular properties of a blood vessel. They don't just elude rejection; they become indistinguishable from living tissue as cells grow into the implant.
"They are functionally alive," Lawson said. "We won't know until we test it if it works this way in humans, but we know from the animal models that the blood travels through the blood vessels and they have the natural properties that keep the blood cells healthy."
Lawson's first patient, a 62-year-old man from Danville, Va., who has required kidney dialysis for years, received the bioengineered vein graft in a two-hour procedure on June 5, 2013.
###
Note to editors: B-roll and photos of the bioengineered vessel and the implantation procedure are available by contacting (919) 660-1306 or sarah.avery@duke.edu.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Federal Housing Administration may need as much as a $1 billion rescue package before the end of the year to bolster its reserves despite efforts to shore up its finances with higher mortgage insurance premiums, a Senate subcommittee was told Tuesday.
FHA Commissioner Carol Galante said her agency, which insures some 40 million home mortgages, is struggling with more than $5 billion in losses on reverse mortgages that allow people over 62 to borrow against their home equity and use the money for living expenses. Galante said the FHA played a crucial role in bringing the housing market back from the brink of collapse, but at a heavy financial price to itself.
The FHA is required by law to maintain reserves equal to 2 percent of the total amount of home mortgages it insures. It currently has about $32 billion in reserves.
The agency, created during the Great Depression to create more affordable home ownership opportunities, insures more than $1 trillion in mortgage loans to primarily low-to-moderate-income families and first-time homebuyers.
The Obama administration said in its fiscal 2014 budget request six weeks ago that FHA would probably need $943 million in taxpayer assistance to bolster its reserves to cover losses from loans it insures. The government's mortgage insurer has until Sept. 30 to decide whether or not it will need the cash infusion from the Treasury, which does not require congressional approval and would be the first in the agency's 79-year history.
"It's of great concern to us," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.
Galante told the Senate Appropriations transportation and housing and urban development subcommittee it's still possible FHA could see "significant improvements in recoveries on defaulted loans" that could lessen the need for a bailout. She said the agency now has sufficient cash to pay insurance claims against mortgage defaults.
The 2 percent capital reserve ratio is aimed at covering projected losses over the next 30 years in the agency's Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund.
During the financial crisis, the FHA's share of the mortgage market grew as private capital left the market. The FHA was hit with defaults on many single-family loans it insured from 2007 to 2009. The agency has projected that covering those losses will cost $70 billion.
The FHA's reverse mortgage programs suffered big losses when many homeowners took large payments up front and then later ran into financial problems, often exacerbated by falling home values. The FHA was stuck paying out claims for those defaulted loans. Galante said the FHA has sought to curb such large up-front payments in reverse mortgages.
There were red flags about the FHA's finances last November when an independent audit showed an estimated $16 billion in losses. But the agency's finances have since improved due to changes the FHA has made, including premium increases and changes to the reverse mortgage program.
The FHA has raised annual mortgage insurance premiums five times since 2009, including in April when premiums on new loans were boosted an average $13 a month. Galante said the premium increases since 2009 have yielded more than $10 billion for the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund.
For most FHA mortgages, borrowers can put 3.5 percent down and the annual mortgage insurance premium they pay is 1.35 percent of the loan balance. Borrowers also pay an up-front mortgage insurance premium of 1.75 percent of the loan balance. A borrower with a $200,000 mortgage, for example, pays about $2,700 a year in annual mortgage insurance premiums for most FHA loans, the agency said.
Also, FHA this week began requiring most new borrowers to pay for annual mortgage insurance for the life of their mortgages. Since 2001, FHA had dropped the mortgage insurance requirement for most borrowers once their equity in their home reached 22 percent of its assessed value.
Under the new policy, new FHA borrowers who put less than 10 percent down will be required to pay for mortgage insurance for the life of the loan.
FHA has also begun requiring that borrowers put down at least 5 percent on home loans of $625,000 or more. That's up from 3.5 percent, but is less than the 10 percent down that most other lenders require.
Geoffrey Miller's tweetA New York University visiting professor, Geoffrey Miller, seems to believe overweight students thinking about a Ph.D. need not apply.
Miller, who specializes in evolutionary psychology and is teaching at NYU?s Stern School of Business, tweeted on Sunday: ?Dear obese PhD applicants: if you didn't have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation #truth.?
Miller, a tenured professor at the University of New Mexico, quickly deleted his tweet?but not before others had the chance to take screenshots of the message and circulate those images on various social media platforms.
Accused of fat-shaming, Miller has since backtracked on his statement. He reportedly claims the tweet was ?part of a research project.?
According to the New York Observer, Miller won?t lose his post at NYU. But his future at UNM is less certain.
?We are deeply concerned about the impact of the statement, which in no way reflects the policies or admission standards of UNM,? UNM said in an official statement issued on Monday. ?We are investigating every aspect of this incident and will take appropriate action.?
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