Scientists investigate how rice bran can reduce cancer incidence

By Sola Ogundipe

A recent University of Colorado Cancer Center review in the journal Advances in Nutrition shows that rice bran offers promising cancer prevention properties just as an ongoing clinical trial is testing the effectiveness of rice bran in preventing the recurrence of colon cancer.

Assistant professor in the Department of Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences at the CSU Animal Cancer Center, Dr. Elizabeth P. Ryan says there?s a delicate balance of bioactive components in rice bran that together show anti-cancer activity including the ability to inhibit cell proliferation, alter cell cycle progression and initiate the programmed cell death in malignant cells.

Ryan, a trained molecular toxicologist is excited about the opportunities to deliver bioactive, cancer fighting compounds with food, and this has led to her focus on the multiple drug-like characteristics of rice bran.

Ryan and colleagues are collaborating to evaluate how rice bran may also help to promote an anti-cancer immune response and modulate gut microbiota metabolism for protection against cancer.

?We?re working now to tease apart the ratios of these active molecules required for bioactivity and mechanisms. Previous attempts to isolate one or another compound have been largely unsuccessful and so it looks now as if rather than any one compound giving rice bran its chemopreventive powers, it?s the synergistic activity of multiple components in the whole food that should be studied, she observed.

Work with cancer cell lines and animal models shows that the bioactive components of rice bran act not only within cancer cells but around the cells to create conditions in the surrounding tissues that promote the function of healthy cells while inhibiting the function of cancer cells. This tissue microenvironment activity includes mediating chronic inflammation that provides a ripe landscape for cancer.

There are over 100,000 varieties of rice in the world, many with their own unique mix of bioactive components and so one major challenge is to discover the optimal composition for chemoprevention. Another challenge is ensuring that people consistently receive the required daily intake amount or ?dose? needed to demonstrate these chemo-protective effects.

Ryan has taken the next step in the evolution of rice bran from diet to prescription, in the form of an ongoing clinical trial testing its chemopreventive effectiveness in a population of colon cancer survivors.

Comments are moderated. Please keep them clean and brief.

Source: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/12/scientists-investigate-how-rice-bran-can-reduce-cancer-incidence/

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Brain study shows why some people are more in tune with what they want

[ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 9-Dec-2012
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Contact: Jen Middleton
j.middleton@wellcome.ac.uk
44-761-17262
Wellcome Trust

Wellcome Trust researchers have discovered how the brain assesses confidence in its decisions. The findings explain why some people have better insight into their choices than others.

Throughout life, we're constantly evaluating our options and making decisions based on the information we have available. How confident we are in those decisions has clear consequences. For example, investment bankers have to be confident that they're making the right choice when deciding where to put their clients' money.

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL led by Professor Ray Dolan have pinpointed the specific areas of the brain that interact to compute both the value of the choices we have in front of us and our confidence in those choices, giving us the ability to know what we want.

The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure activity in the brains of twenty hungry volunteers while they made choices between food items that they would later eat. To determine the subjective value of the snack options, the participants were asked to indicate how much they would be willing to pay for each snack. Then after making their choice, they were asked to report how confident they were that they had made the right decision and selected the best snack.

It has previously been shown that a region at the front of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, is important for working out the value of decision options. The new findings reveal that the level of activity in this area is also linked to the level of confidence participants placed on choosing the best option. The study also shows that the interaction between this area of the brain and an adjacent area reflects participants' ability to access and report their level of confidence in their choices.

Dr Steve Fleming, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow now based at New York University, explains: "We found that people's confidence varied from decision to decision. While we knew where to look for signals of value computation, it was very interesting to also observe neural signals of confidence in the same brain region."

Dr Benedetto De Martino, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL, added: "Overall, we think our results provide an initial account both of how people make choices, and also their insight into the decision process."

###

The findings are published online today in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Reference

B. De Martino et al. Confidence in value-based choice. Nature Neuroscience, 2012. [Epub ahead of print]



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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.


[ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 9-Dec-2012
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Jen Middleton
j.middleton@wellcome.ac.uk
44-761-17262
Wellcome Trust

Wellcome Trust researchers have discovered how the brain assesses confidence in its decisions. The findings explain why some people have better insight into their choices than others.

Throughout life, we're constantly evaluating our options and making decisions based on the information we have available. How confident we are in those decisions has clear consequences. For example, investment bankers have to be confident that they're making the right choice when deciding where to put their clients' money.

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL led by Professor Ray Dolan have pinpointed the specific areas of the brain that interact to compute both the value of the choices we have in front of us and our confidence in those choices, giving us the ability to know what we want.

The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure activity in the brains of twenty hungry volunteers while they made choices between food items that they would later eat. To determine the subjective value of the snack options, the participants were asked to indicate how much they would be willing to pay for each snack. Then after making their choice, they were asked to report how confident they were that they had made the right decision and selected the best snack.

It has previously been shown that a region at the front of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, is important for working out the value of decision options. The new findings reveal that the level of activity in this area is also linked to the level of confidence participants placed on choosing the best option. The study also shows that the interaction between this area of the brain and an adjacent area reflects participants' ability to access and report their level of confidence in their choices.

Dr Steve Fleming, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow now based at New York University, explains: "We found that people's confidence varied from decision to decision. While we knew where to look for signals of value computation, it was very interesting to also observe neural signals of confidence in the same brain region."

Dr Benedetto De Martino, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL, added: "Overall, we think our results provide an initial account both of how people make choices, and also their insight into the decision process."

###

The findings are published online today in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Reference

B. De Martino et al. Confidence in value-based choice. Nature Neuroscience, 2012. [Epub ahead of print]



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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.


Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/wt-bss120712.php

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Penguins help out Father Christmas in Japan

Everyone knows that Father Christmas is traditionally helped by elves, but as they are presumably very busy getting ready in the North Pole, a flock of penguins are helping out at an aquarium near the Japanese capital Tokyo.

Visitors to Yokohama's Sea Paradise are treated to a daily "Penguin Christmas Parade" in which six cape penguins, wrapped up in their best Christmas outfits, waddle alongside Father Christmas.

The aquarium's caretaker Shingo Sato said: "We hope combining the normal joy of seeing animals with Christmas gives visitors extra pleasure."

After the parade, the penguins have one more special task to complete when darkness falls, as they are the ones who get to turn on the aquarium's Christmas lights.

Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/579330/s/26665b2f/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Ctopics0Cchristmas0Cchristmas0Evideos0C9731770A0CPenguins0Ehelp0Eout0EFather0EChristmas0Ein0EJapan0Bhtml/story01.htm

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NASA's Van Allen Probes reveal new dynamics of Earth's radiation belts

ScienceDaily (Dec. 7, 2012) ? Just 96 days since their launch, NASA's twin Van Allen Probes have already provided new insights into the structure and behavior of the radiation belts that surround Earth, giving scientists a clearer understanding about the fundamental physical properties of these regions more than half a century after their discovery.

In a press conference on Tuesday, Dec. 4 at the American Geophysical Union's 2012 Fall Meeting in San Francisco, members of the Van Allen Probes science team discussed current findings made in unlocking the mysteries of the radiation belts. These two donut-shaped regions of high-energy and hazardous particles -- named for their discoverer and the mission's namesake, American physicist James Van Allen of the University of Iowa -- are created by our planet's magnetosphere, and can harm space technologies such as satellites, as well as affect human space travel.

Throughout the brief early life of the two-year mission, energetic events and ejections of plasma from the sun caused dramatic changes in the radiation belts that, for the first time, were observed by twin spacecraft within the belts. "The sun has been a driver of these systems more than we had any right to expect," says Daniel Baker, Principal Investigator, Van Allen Probes Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope (REPT, which is part of the Energetic Particle, Composition, and Thermal Plasma Suite, or ECT), from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "We're seeing brand new features we hadn't expected."

The twin probes, built and managed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., contain identical sets of five instrument suites. These suites have confirmed previous hypotheses about the belts' behavior, while also revealing that the belts are a far more dynamic and changing environment than previously thought. "We expected to see a fairly placid radiation belt system," Baker says. "Instead, we see that the belts have been extraordinarily active and dynamic during the first few weeks. We're looking in the right places at the right times."

Our planet's magnetosphere captures particles from the billions of tons of plasma ejected by the sun and from other sources; fields and waves of electricity and magnetism control and guide the charged particles within the belts, with the particles "surfing" on the waves, losing or gaining large amounts of energy along the way as they enter and leave the region. Measurements made by instruments like the Electric Fields and Waves Suite (EFW) and the Electric and Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science (EMFISIS) are helping scientists understand how those fields and waves affect the particles. "The electric field and magnetic field measurements on the Van Allen Probes are the best ever made in the radiation belts," says the University of Iowa's Craig Kletzing, Principal Investigator for EMFISIS. "For the first time, we've been able to see how long intense low frequency electric fields and waves at the edge of the radiation belts can last -- sometimes for over five hours during geomagnetic storms. Before, it was like we could see a car zoom past, but not see anything about the details. Now, we can see what color the upholstery is."

The inner belt, where many satellites must operate, is home to the most hazardous and energized particles, mostly protons. "A staggering number of the spacecraft we rely upon daily have to spend a part of their orbit in the harshest area of Earth's radiation environment," says Joseph Mazur of the Aerospace Corporation, Principal Investigator of the probes' Relativistic Proton Spectrometer (RPS). The Van Allen Probes are providing researchers with detailed views of how the populations of those particles vary with altitude, which should help engineers more effectively protect satellites. "This is the first time we've been able to measure the high energy particles in the heart of the radiation belts," Mazur said. "We're able to measure at the one billion electron volt level; particles at that energy are virtually impossible to shield against. They will easily penetrate half-inch thick aluminum plate." Particles at that energy level are known to cause a range of damages to spacecraft, from physical degradation to instrument malfunctions and false readings.

"NASA built these spacecraft to be super tough, and thank goodness we did," says APL's Nicky Fox, Van Allen Probes deputy project scientist. "The instruments are seeing the exact sorts of damaging effects we designed the spacecraft to survive."

The Van Allen Probes are part of NASA's Living With a Star Program to explore aspects of the connected sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. LWS is managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. APL built the twin spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121207100912.htm

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Chinese officials punished for deadly demolition

Chinese state media say 17 officials and workers have been punished after two people died during the forced demolition of a building.

The official Xinhua News Agency says a cement board fell from the illegally constructed building as It was being demolished Friday in Renhuai city in southwest China's Guizhou province, killing two workers and injuring three others.

Xinhua said Saturday that local residents carried the bodies to the city government building, causing a disturbance.

It said three officials were criminally detained for dereliction of duty, five others were suspended, and nine workers involved in the demolition were detained.

Forced demolition is common in China, as local governments try to remake their cities. But it is rare for officials or demolition workers to be punished.

Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/12/08/3132895/chinese-officials-punished-for.html

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Claims against dispersant company used in BP oil spill dismissed

wwltv.com

Posted on December 4, 2012 at 11:23 AM

Updated Tuesday, Dec 4 at 11:53 AM

David Hammer / Eyewitness News
Email: dhammer@wwltv.com | Twitter: @davidhammerWWL

NEW?ORLEANS - Even as the National Academy of Sciences warns about the dangers of chemical dispersants to clean oil spills, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier has dismissed all claims in the BP oil spill case against Nalco, the maker of the dispersant that was used in unprecedented quantities to combat the 2010 BP spill.

BP recommended, and the U.S. government approved, the use of 1.8 million gallons of Nalco?s Corexit dispersant to break up the oil, both at the source of the leak a mile under the sea, and at the water?s surface. Cleanup workers filed hundreds of claims against the company in federal court claiming that exposure to the chemical made them sick.

The way Nalco got out of the civil case is interesting. Barbier?s order granting summary judgment says Nalco is not liable because its use was part of a national spill response plan that mandates oil companies to clean up the oil as fast as possible.

But the judge also noted that plaintiffs? lawyers on a committee he selected, called the Plaintiffs Steering Committee, failed to conduct witness interviews and seek documents and other information to challenge the defenses presented by Nalco and stipulated to by the U.S. government.

Later, when the plaintiffs? lawyers tried to argue for maintaining the claims against Nalco, they admitted that they didn?t produce any evidence by an April court deadline because they were focusing instead on settling economic and medical claims against BP. They said in court filings that they did so for ?strategic reasons.?

They ended up getting a settlement with BP to pay economic and medical damage claims estimated at $7.8 billion.

One major argument against Corexit has focused on the U.S. government?s wishy-washy initial response to the volumes of Corexit BP was using. But government lawyers have subsequently produced evidence that the United States approved of the use of Corexit in those amounts at every step. The plaintiffs later said that they didn?t accept those claims and wanted to examine the government?s witnesses, but the judge said that by then, they had missed their chance.

?The (Plaintiffs Steering Committee)?s failure to avail itself of the opportunity to test the veracity of the United States? stipulations provides no reason for the Court to disregard these stipulations,? Barbier wrote.

Steve Herman, the co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs' committee said they were fine with dismissing Nalco because BP?stepped up to the plate and admitted liability for medical claims as a part of their settlement.

"As we said in our original Motion to dismiss Nalco, BP is responsible, both as a matter of law and by virtue of contractual indemnity agreements,"?Herman said. "Indeed, BP has formally assumed the responsibility for compensating the clean-up workers and other Gulf Coast residents in the medical benefits settlement.

?

Source: http://www.wwltv.com/news/local/orleans/Claims-against-dispersant-company-used-in-BP-oil-spill-dismmissed-182031341.html

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Barber?s office collecting holiday cards for U.S. troops

U.S. Rep. Ron Barber announced yesterday that his Southern Arizona offices will be collecting holiday cards to be sent to members of the armed forces and veterans.

?This is a challenging time of year for our veterans being treated at the VA and our brave troops who are away from their families as they serve our nation,? said Barber, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, in a recent news release. ?I ask Southern Arizonans to join me in sending a holiday message to each of these men and women to let them know that our thoughts and good wishes are with them.?

Barber is asking schools across Southern Arizona as well as individuals to drop off holiday cards at his offices in Tucson and Sierra Vista. The cards then will be sent to troops from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and Fort Huachuca who are stationed in Arizona and deployed overseas. Cards also will be distributed to veterans at the Southern Arizona VA Medical Center.

A brief message of thanks should be written inside each card. Envelopes are not necessary, but if they are included, should be unaddressed and unsealed.?

Members of the military who receive cards from school groups often like to respond. So cards from schools should have a school address and teacher?s name on each card.

This will be the fourth year that the District 8 congressional office has collected holiday cards for troops and veterans. For the last three years, Barber oversaw the program as district director for then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Cards can be brought to either the Tucson office, 3945 E. Fort Lowell Road, Suite 211 at the northeast corner of East Fort Lowell Road and North Alvernon Way, or to the Sierra Vista Office at 77 Calle Portal, Suite B-160.

The deadline for dropping off cards is Friday, December 14 at 5 p.m.

Source: http://sierravista-fthuachuca.tucsonnewsnow.com/news/community-spirit/95289-barbers-office-collecting-holiday-cards-us-troops

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Seeing in color at the nanoscale: Scientists develop a new nanotech tool to probe solar-energy conversion

ScienceDaily (Dec. 6, 2012) ? If nanoscience were television, we'd be in the 1950s. Although scientists can make and manipulate nanoscale objects with increasingly awesome control, they are limited to black-and-white imagery for examining those objects. Information about nanoscale chemistry and interactions with light -- the atomic-microscopy equivalent to color -- is tantalizingly out of reach to all but the most persistent researchers.

But that may all change with the introduction of a new microscopy tool from researchers at the Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) that delivers exquisite chemical details with a resolution once thought impossible. The team developed their tool to investigate solar-to-electric energy conversion at its most fundamental level, but their invention promises to reveal new worlds of data to researchers in all walks of nanoscience.

"We've found a way to combine the advantages of scan/probe microscopy with the advantages of optical spectroscopy," says Alex Weber-Bargioni, a scientist at the Molecular Foundry, a DOE nanoscience center at Berkeley Lab. "Now we have a means to actually look at chemical and optical processes on the nanoscale where they are happening."

Weber-Bargioni is corresponding author of a paper reporting this research, published in Science. The paper is titled, "Mapping local charge recombination heterogeneity by multidimensional nanospectroscopic imaging." Co-authoring the paper are Wei Bao, Mauro Meli, Frank Ogletree, Shaul Aloni, Jeffrey Bokor, Stephano Cabrini, Miquel Salmeron, Eli Yablonovitch, and James Schuck of Berkeley Lab; Marco Staffaroni of the University of California, Berkeley; Hyuck Choo of Caltech; and their colleagues in Italy, Niccolo Caselli, Francesco Riboli, Diederik Wiersma, and Francesca Intoni.

"If you want to characterize materials, particularly nanomaterials, the way it's traditionally been done is with electron microscopies and scan/probe microscopies because those give you really high, sub-atomic spatial resolution," says co-author James Schuck, a nano-optics researcher at the Molecular Foundry. "Unfortunately, what they don't give you is chemical, molecular-level information."

For chemical information, researchers typically turn to optical or vibrational spectroscopy. The way a material interacts with light is dictated to large part by its chemical composition, but for nanoscience the problem with doing optical spectroscopy at relevant scales is the diffraction limit, which says you can't focus light down to a spot smaller than approximately half its wavelength, due to the wave-nature of light.

To get around the diffraction limit, scientists employ "near-field" light. Unlike the light we can see, near-field light decays exponentially away from an object, making it hard to measure, but it contains very high resolution -- much higher than normal, far-field light.

Says Schuck, "The real challenge to near-field optics, and one of the big achievements in this paper, is to create a device that acts as a transducer of far-field light to near-field light. We can squeeze it down and get very enhanced local fields that can interact with matter. We can then collect any photons that are scattered or emitted due to this interaction, collect in the near field with all this spatial frequency information and turn it back into propagating, far-field light."

The trick for that conversion is to use surface plasmons: collective oscillations of electrons that can interact with photons. Plasmons on two surfaces separated by a small gap can collect and amplify the optical field in the gap, making a stronger signal for scientists to measure.

Researchers have exploited these effects to make near-field probes with a variety of geometries, but the experiments typically require painstaking optical alignment, suffer from background noise, only work for narrow frequency ranges of light and are limited to very thin samples.

In this latest work, however, the Berkeley Lab researchers transcended these limitations with a cleverly designed near-field probe. Fabricated on the end of an optical fiber, the probe has a tapered, four-sided tip. The researchers named their new tool after the campanile church tower it resembles, inspired by the landmark clock tower on the UC Berkeley campus. Two of the campanile's sides are coated with gold and the two gold layers are separated by just a few nanometers at the tip. The three-dimensional taper enables the device to channel light of all wavelengths down into an enhanced field at the tip. The size of the gap determines the resolution.

In a regular atomic force microscope (AFM), a sharp metal tip is essentially dragged across a sample to generate a topological map with sub-nanoscale resolution. The results can be exquisite but only contain spatial information and nothing about the composition or chemistry of the sample.

Replacing the usual AFM tip with a campanile tip is like going from black-and-white to full color. You can still get the spatial map but now there's a wealth of optical data for every pixel on that map. From optical spectra, scientists can identify atom and molecule species, and extract details about electronic structure.

"That's the beauty of these tips," says Schuck. "You can just put them on the end of an optical fiber and then it's just like using a regular AFM. You don't have to be a super near-field jock anymore to get this type of data."

The team developed their new tool to study indium-phosphide nanowires. These nanowires, with the nearly ideal band gap of 1.4 electron-volts, are well-suited to converting solar energy to electricity. The researchers found that the nanowires were not the homogeneous objects previously thought, but instead had varying optoelectronic properties along their length, which could radically alter how sunlight is converted to electricity. They also found that photoluminescence, an indication of the relationship between light and electricity, was seven-times stronger in some parts of a nanowire than others. This is the first time anyone has measured these events on such a small scale.

Weber-Bargioni says: "Details like this about indium-phosphide nanowires are important because if you want to use these suckers for photocatalysis or a photovoltaic material then the length scale at which we're measuring is where everything happens. This information is really important to understand how, for example, the fabrication and surface treatment of nanowires influences these charge recombination velocities. These determine how efficiently a solar device can convert photons into usable electrons."

Adds Schuck: "We realized that this is really the optimal way to do any kind of optical experiment one might want to do at the nano scale. So we use it for imaging and spectroscopy but we anticipate many other uses also."

This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The original article was written by Alison Hatt.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Wei Bao, M. Melli, N. Caselli, F. Riboli, D. S. Wiersma, M. Staffaroni, H. Choo, D. F. Ogletree, S. Aloni, J. Bokor, S. Cabrini, F. Intonti, M. B. Salmeron, E. Yablonovitch, P. J. Schuck, A. Weber-Bargioni. Mapping local charge recombination heterogeneity by multidimensional nanospectroscopic imaging. Science, December 7, 2012 DOI: 10.1126/science.1227977

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/OhX5q6TMmHI/121206153640.htm

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