Saturday, 9 February 2013

Veterans with mild traumatic brain injury have brain abnormalities

Friday, February 8, 2013

Mild traumatic brain injury (TBI), including concussion, is one of the most common types of neurological disorder, affecting approximately 1.3 million Americans annually. It has received more attention recently because of its frequency and impact among two groups of patients: professional athletes, especially football players; and soldiers returning from mid-east conflicts with blast-related TBI. An estimated 10 to 20 percent of the more than 2 million U.S. soldiers deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan have experienced TBI.

A recent study by psychiatrists with the Iowa City VA Medical Center and University of Iowa Health Care finds that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with mild TBI have measurable abnormalities in the white matter of their brains when compared to returning veterans who have not experienced TBI. These abnormalities appear to be related to the severity of the injury and are related to cognitive deficits. The findings were published online in December in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

"In the military population we studied, patients with TBI have more alterations, sometimes called 'potholes,' in the white matter of their brains than patients without a history of TBI," says senior study author Ricardo Jorge, M.D., UI professor of psychiatry. "The more severe the injury, the more white matter abnormalities occur. There is also a correlation between increased numbers of potholes and increased severity of cognitive alterations in executive functions -- the ability to make a plan or a decision, for example."

Despite its prevalence, diagnosing mild TBI is difficult, often relying on a patient's recollection of a possible past head injury. In addition, symptoms of mild TBI tend to be wide-ranging and non-specific, including problems with vision, hearing, balance, emotions, and thinking. There are currently few good tools available to identify the condition or monitor the brain's recovery or deterioration.

Jorge and his colleagues used an MRI-based brain-scanning technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to study the brains of 72 veterans with mild TBI and 21 veterans without mild TBI. DTI measures the diffusion of water along thin fibers known as axons that form connections between brain cells. When axons are intact, water flow (diffusion) follows the axon boundaries and has a well-defined directionality. When the axon is damaged, water diffuses in many directions, a situation referred to as low fractional anisotropy.

"Decreased directionality of the water diffusion is a measure of lower integrity in the white matter," Jorge says.

Analysis of the DTI data allowed the researchers to detect areas of lower integrity in the patients' white matter even though these so-called potholes are scattered randomly throughout the brain and occur in different places in different patients.

Veterans with mild TBI had a significantly more potholes than veterans without TBI. The difference in the number of potholes was not influenced by age, time since trauma, a history of mild TBI unrelated to deployment, or coexisting psychological problems like depression, anxiety, or PTSD. The number of potholes did, however, correlate with poorer performance on cognitive tests measuring decision-making and planning skills.

The team also examined the brains of civilians with non-combat-related mild TBI who were assessed early after the injury. These patients have even more white matter potholes than the military group.

Although the results suggest that DTI measurements might hold promise as a tool for detecting and tracking mild TBI in the brain, Jorge cautions that the current study is not large or specific enough to confirm that DTI-detected potholes are a biomarker for TBI brain damage.

"To establish if this DTI approach is a useful technique for diagnosing mild TBI, we need to replicate these findings in a larger study and with patients who have mild TBI from other causes," he says.

###

University of Iowa Health Care: http://www.uihealthcare.com/index.html

Thanks to University of Iowa Health Care for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/126689/Veterans_with_mild_traumatic_brain_injury_have_brain_abnormalities

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Polish transsexual lawmaker loses shot at top post

Lawmaker Anna Grodzka speaks to The Associated Press during an interview in the Polish Parliament, Warsaw, Poland, Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013. Grodzka attracted huge attention when she was elected in 2011, and as a vote in Parliament comes Friday that could make her a deputy speaker she is earning even more. Whether or not the 58-year-old wins the post, she has already had a huge impact on the political scene, becoming perhaps the most prominent symbol of liberal change in a country that has traditionally been deeply conservative and overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. Grodzka had sex change surgery in 2010 in Thailand after a lifetime of feeling she was born the wrong sex. Before the change her name was Krzysztof Begowski, and she had a wife and a son. (AP Photo/Alik Keplicz)

Lawmaker Anna Grodzka speaks to The Associated Press during an interview in the Polish Parliament, Warsaw, Poland, Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013. Grodzka attracted huge attention when she was elected in 2011, and as a vote in Parliament comes Friday that could make her a deputy speaker she is earning even more. Whether or not the 58-year-old wins the post, she has already had a huge impact on the political scene, becoming perhaps the most prominent symbol of liberal change in a country that has traditionally been deeply conservative and overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. Grodzka had sex change surgery in 2010 in Thailand after a lifetime of feeling she was born the wrong sex. Before the change her name was Krzysztof Begowski, and she had a wife and a son. (AP Photo/Alik Keplicz)

Lawmaker Anna Grodzka speaks to The Associated Press during an interview in the Polish Parliament, Warsaw, Poland, Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013. Grodzka attracted huge attention when she was elected in 2011, and as a vote in Parliament comes Friday that could make her a deputy speaker she is earning even more. Whether or not the 58-year-old wins the post, she has already had a huge impact on the political scene, becoming perhaps the most prominent symbol of liberal change in a country that has traditionally been deeply conservative and overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. Grodzka had sex change surgery in 2010 in Thailand after a lifetime of feeling she was born the wrong sex. Before the change her name was Krzysztof Begowski, and she had a wife and a son. (AP Photo/Alik Keplicz)

WARSAW, Poland (AP) ? The before and after photos of Anna Grodzka show how much she ? and her country ? have transformed.

As a man, she once wore a thick beard. Now, Poland's first transsexual lawmaker favors big dangly earrings, her hair in a bob.

Grodzka attracted huge attention when she was elected in 2011, and earned even more recently when she became a candidate to be a deputy speaker for her leftwing party.

She lost that chance on Friday when lawmakers voted overwhelming to keep the incumbent in the job. Even so, the 58-year-old has already had a huge impact on the political scene, becoming perhaps the most prominent symbol of liberal change in a country that has traditionally been deeply conservative and overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.

"Certain taboos are being dismantled," said Jacek Kucharczyk, a political analyst and the president of the Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw.

Serious news magazines have featured Grodzka on their front covers, with analytical pieces examining the role of gays and other sexual minorities in society. The tabloids zero in on more frivolous things, like the difficulty the nearly 6-foot-2 (nearly 1.9-meter) Grodzka faces finding pretty clothes. Or how she freezes in panty hose in the frigid Polish winters, but still refuses to wear pants.

Grodzka said she herself is still sometimes surprised that she garnered 20,000 votes in her conservative home city, Krakow, to win a seat in Parliament. People have attacked her office, throwing things at the windows or ripping her rainbow flags. But all in all, she feels a growing acceptance from society, she told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday.

She is aware she is a symbol of historic change in Poland, she said, and is trying to meet that challenge by doing the best work possible as a lawmaker.

"I am above all trying to be a normal politician, like any other person, but maybe even better. I am really trying so that people who observe me will know that transgender people are no worse in any way than any others," Grodzka said.

The social transformation has been visible in other areas too, including growing support for the state to fund in vitro fertilization, despite conservative Catholic opposition. But it is particularly notable for the new attention given to the rights of sexual minorities, an issue suppressed in communist times and after the fall of communism in 1989, as many Poles looked to the powerful Catholic church for guidance through the economic and social turmoil.

The church's role was long bolstered by its reputation for standing up to the communists and because of the authority of the late Polish Pope John Paul II. But its influence has waned since John Paul's death in 2005 and as Poland joined the EU in 2004 and became more closely integrated with the West.

A key turning point came when a new progressive party ? Palikot's Movement ? swept into power in 2011 as Parliament's third-largest force, one fighting for gay rights and against the church's traditional influence over public life. Its representatives include Grodzka and Poland's first openly gay lawmaker, Robert Biedron.

It can be an uphill battle. Last month lawmakers tackled the issue of civil partnerships, but rejected legislation that would have given unmarried couples ? gay or straight ? any legal rights.

The rise of the liberals "doesn't mean that we have suddenly become a very progressive country or that we are already on the level of West European countries in recognizing the rights of sexual minorities," Kucharczyk said. "There is still a long, long way to go and we see ... a backlash against Grodzka" getting a leadership role in Parliament, he said. "But what has changed is that we are discussing this openly and people have become visible."

Grodzka had sex change surgery in 2010 in Thailand after a lifetime of feeling she was born the wrong sex. Before the change her name was Krzysztof Begowski, and she had a wife and a son. Grodzka's son has been supportive of her through her change but the wife could not accept it and the two are now estranged.

The ruling party ? currently Prime Minister Donald Tusk's Civic Platform ? automatically gets the position of speaker of Oarliament, with other parties each allotted one deputy speaker post each. Grodzka appeared to have a shot at it after the lawmaker currently holding the post for her party, Wanda Nowicka, drew the ire of its founder and leader, Janusz Palikot, for accepting a bonus of 40,000 zlotys ($13,000), along with the other deputy speakers. The bonuses have been controversial because they come as Poland's economy faces a slowdown and the government is raising taxes and forcing other austerity measures on the public.

Lawmakers, however, voted overwhelmingly Friday against a proposition put forward by Palikot to dismiss Nowicka, a prominent activist who has worked for women's causes for many years.

Nowicka then addressed the assembly, saying she was encouraged by their support and that she would not resign. Nowicka said there was no merit to the case against her and that she still had work to do for women and her constituents.

Grodzka, who has expressed admiration for Nowicka's work, was among those who voted to keep Nowicka in place. After the vote, she said she was not upset by the outcome.

"I don't regret it ? believe me," she said.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-02-08-Poland-Transsexual%20Lawmaker/id-a8699e1ac3c9419498d03322b76deba2

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Friday, 8 February 2013

Paratroopers mutiny in Mali capital Bamako, gunfire heard

BAMAKO, Mali (Reuters) - Heavy gunfire erupted in the west of Mali's capital Bamako on Friday, as government forces exchanged fire with mutinous paratroopers, military sources and witnesses said.

Government forces sealed off the area around the paratroopers' base, as reinforcements arrived to quell the mutiny which was protesting disciplinary measures against some of the unit's members. Smoke was seen rising from the camp.

Since a military coup in March last year that plunged Mali into chaos and led to the occupation of the north by Tuareg and Islamist rebels, paratroopers loyal to former President Amadou Toumani Toure had been largely sidelined and some arrested.

"The Chief of Staff had taken a disciplinary measure against some of the paratroopers, and some of them were not happy with the decision so they woke up this morning and started shooting," a Malian defense ministry official told Reuters.

The shooting in the southern capital Bamako occurred while French and Chadian troops hunted Islamist rebels hundreds of kilometers (miles) to the north in the second phase of a French-led military operation against al Qaeda-allied insurgents.

North of Gao, a Saharan town recently recaptured from the Islamists, a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up on Friday, injuring one Malian soldier, a Mali military officer said.

It was the first reported suicide bombing since the French-led military intervention launched on January 11 drove the Islamist rebels from their desert strongholds of Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal in northern Mali.

"A kamikaze on a motorbike just blew himself up at the Bourem checkpoint at 6:30 am (1:30 a.m. ET). One lightly wounded soldier from Gao," the officer told Reuters by text message.

In Bamako, groups of the paratroopers, who wear red berets, had been staging protests to demand that commanders send them to the front to join the offensive against the Islamists.

The French-led military operation involving 4,000 French troops backed by warplanes successfully pushed the Islamist rebels out of the main towns of northern Mali, but driving them from their mountain bases could prove a tougher task.

France and its western allies are pushing for a national political settlement and democratic elections to stabilize the situation in the West Africa state, where interim civilian leaders have faced interference from March coup leader Captain Amadou Sanogo and other junta officers.

In May, Sanogo's troops said they put down a counter-coup attempt led by paratroopers which led to several days of fighting in the riverside capital in which at least 27 people were killed.

(Reporting by Tiemoko Diallo and Adama Diarra in Bamako; Writing by Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Daniel Flynn)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/suicide-bomber-injures-soldier-mali-checkpoint-source-092822260.html

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3-D printing on the micrometer scale

Feb. 8, 2013 ? At the Photonics West, the leading international fair for photonics taking place in San Francisco (USA) this week, Nanoscribe GmbH, a spin-off of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), presents the world's fastest 3D printer of micro- and nanostructures. With this printer, smallest three-dimensional objects, often smaller than the diameter of a human hair, can be manufactured with minimum time consumption and maximum resolution. The printer is based on a novel laser lithography method.

The 3D laser litho-graphy systems developed by Nanoscribe -- the spin-off can still be found on KIT's Campus North -- are used for research by KIT and scientists worldwide. Work in the area of photonics concentrates on replacing conventional electronics by optical circuits of higher performance. For this purpose, Nanoscribe systems are used to print polymer waveguides reaching data transfer rates of more than 5 terabits per second.

Biosciences produce tailored scaffolds for cell growth studies among others. In materials research, functional materials of enhanced performance are developed for lightweight construction to reduce the consumption of resources.

Increased Speed: Hours Turn into Minutes

By means of the new laser lithography method, printing speed is increased by factor of about 100. This increase in speed results from the use of a galvo mirror system, a technology that is also applied in laser show devices or scanning units of CD and DVD drives. Reflecting a laser beam off the rotating galvo mirrors facilitates rapid and precise laser focus positioning. "We are revolutionizing 3D printing on the micrometer scale. Precision and speed are achieved by the industrially established galvo technology. Our product benefits from more than one decade of experience in photonics, the key technology of the 21st century," says Martin Hermatschweiler, the managing director of Nanoscribe GmbH.

Mechanism: Two-photon Polymerization

The direct laser writing technique underlying the 3D printing method is based on two-photon polymerization. Just as paper ignites when exposed to sunlight focused through a magnifying glass, ultra-short laser pulses polymerize photosensitive materials in the laser focus. Depending on the photosensitive material chosen, the exposed or unexposed volume only is dissolved. After a developer bath, these written areas remain as self-supporting micro- and nanostructures.

Removing Barriers

By means of the galvo technology, three-dimensional micro- and nanostructures can be printed rapidly and, hence, on large areas in principle. At highest resolution, however, the scanning field is limited physically to a few 100 ?m due to the optical properties of the focusing objective. Just as floor tiles must be joined precisely, the respective scanning fields have to be connected seamlessly and accurately. By the so-called stitching, areas can be extended nearly arbitrarily.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

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


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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/6UP-fbgozJM/130208105901.htm

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High-energy X-rays shine light on mystery of Picasso's paints

Feb. 6, 2013 ? The Art Institute of Chicago teamed up with Argonne National Laboratory to help unravel a decades-long debate among art scholars about what kind of paint Picasso used to create his masterpieces.

The results published last month in the journal Applied Physics A: Materials Science & Processing add significant weight to the widely held theory that Picasso was one of the first master painters to use common house paint rather than traditional artists' paint. That switch in painting material gave birth to a new style of art marked by canvasses covered in glossy images with marbling, muted edges, and occasional errant paint drips, but devoid of brush marks. Fast-drying enamel house paint enabled this dramatic departure from the slow-drying, heavily blended oil paintings that dominated the art world up until Picasso's time.

The key to decoding this long-standing mystery was the development of a unique high-energy X-ray instrument, called the hard X-ray nanoprobe, at the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Photon Source (APS) X-ray facility and the Center for Nanoscale Materials, both housed at Argonne. The nanoprobe is designed to advance the development of high-performance materials and sustainable energies by giving scientists a close-up view of the type and arrangement of chemical elements in material.

At that submicroscopic level is where science and art crossed paths.

Volker Rose, a physicist at Argonne, uses the nanoprobe at the APS/CNM to study zinc oxide, a key chemical used in wide-band-gap semiconductors. White paint contains the same chemical in varying amounts, depending on the type and brand of paint, which makes it a valuable clue for learning about Picasso's work.

By comparing decades-old paint samples collected through e-Bay purchases with samples from Picasso paintings, scientists were able to learn that the chemical makeup of paint used by Picasso matched the chemical makeup of the first commercial house paint, Ripolin. Scientists also learned about the correlation of the spacing of impurities at the nanoscale in zinc oxide, offering important clues to how zinc oxide could be modified to improve performance in a variety of products, including sensors for radiation detection, LEDs and energy-saving windows as well as liquid-crystal displays for computers, TVs and instrument panels.

"Everything that we learn about how materials are structured and how chemicals react at the nanolevel can help us in our quest to design a better and more sustainable future," Rose said.

Many art conservators and historians have tried over the years to use traditional optical and electron microscopes to determine whether Picasso or one of his contemporaries was the first to break with the cultural tradition of professional painters using expensive paints designed specifically for their craft. Those art world detectives all failed, because traditional tools wouldn't let them see deeply enough into the layers of paint or with enough resolution to distinguish between store-bought enamel paint and techniques designed to mimic its appearance.

"Appearances can deceive, so this is where art can benefit from scientific research," said Francesca Casadio, senior conservator scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago, and co-lead author on the result publication. "We needed to reverse-engineer the paint so that we could figure out if there was a fingerprint that we could then go look for in the pictures around the world that are suspected to be painted with Ripolin, the first commercial brand of house paint."

Just as criminals leave a signature at a crime scene, each batch of paint has a chemical signature determined by its ingredients and impurities from the area and time period it was made. These signatures can't be imitated and lie in the nanoscale range.

Yet until now, it was difficult to differentiate the chemical components of the paint pigments from the chemical components in the binders, fillers, other additives and contaminates that were mixed in with the pigments or layered on top of them. Only the nanoprobe at the APS/CNM can distinguish that level of detail: elemental composition and nanoscale distribution of elements within individualized submicrometeric pigment particles.

"The nanoprobe at the APS and CNM allowed unprecedented visualization of information about chemical composition within a singe grain of paint pigment, significantly reducing doubt that Picasso used common house paint in some of his most famous works," said Rose, co-lead author on the result publication titled "High-Resolution Fluorescence Mapping of Impurities in the Historical Zinc Oxide Pigments: Hard X-ray Nanoprobe Applications to the Paints of Pablo Picasso."

The nanoprobe's high spatial resolution and micro-focusing abilities gave it the unique ability to identify individual chemical elements and distinguish between the size of paint particles crushed by hand in artists' studios and those crushed even smaller by manufacturing equipment. The nanoprobe peered deeper than previous similar paint studies limited to a one-micrometer viewing resolution. The nanoprobe gave scientists an unprecedented look at 30-nanometer-wide particles of paint and impurities from the paint manufacturing process. For comparison, a typical sheet of copier paper is 100,000 nanometers thick.

Using the nanoprobe, scientists were able to determine that Picasso used enamel paint to create in 1931 The Red Armchair, on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. They were also able to determine the paint brand and from what manufacturing region the paint originated.

X-ray analysis of white paints produced under the Ripolin brand and used in artists' traditional tube paints revealed that both contained nearly contaminate-free zinc oxide pigment. However, artists' tube paints contained more fillers of other white-colored pigments than did the Ripolin, which was mostly pure zinc oxide.

Casaido views this type of chemical characterization of paints as a having a much wider application than just the study of Picasso's paintings. By studying the chemical composition of art materials, she said, historians can learn about trade movements in ancient times, better determine the time period a piece was created, and even learn about the artist themselves through their choice of materials.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/Argonne National Laboratory. The original article was written by Tona Kunz.

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Journal Reference:

  1. Francesca Casadio, Volker Rose. High-resolution fluorescence mapping of impurities in historical zinc oxide pigments: hard X-ray nanoprobe applications to the paints of Pablo Picasso. Applied Physics A, 2013; DOI: 10.1007/s00339-012-7534-x

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/A0iy437y6tk/130207093110.htm

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