Second Opinion

New Material Provides Constant Light For 12 Years Without a Power Source

MPK, a company that has made a name producing glow-in-the-dark paint, has developed self-luminous micro particles called Litrospheres. The new material is said to be inexpensive (Rs 15 to light up a 8 ½ x 11 piece of plastic that is 1/8" thick), non-toxic, and capable of staying constantly lit for over 12 years thanks to a betavoltaic technology that uses a radioactive gas.

Fortunately, the gas is involves a "soft" emission of electrons that cannot penetrate the glass or polymer wall of the microspheres. So theoretically, you don't have to worry about brain tumors or taking on super powers when using it.

The Litrospheres, which can be injected molded or added to paint, are not affected by the heat or cold and they can withstand up to 5000 pounds of pressure. They can also give off light that is equivalent of a 20-watt incandescent bulb in almost any color imaginable. As you might expect, the first applications of the technology will most likely involve safety equipment—or the clothing and accessories of frequent clubgoers.

Glow-in-the-Dark Cats Could Make For a Unique Home Lighting Solution

Scientists at the Gyeongsang National University in South Korea have cloned cats that have the ability to glow-in-the dark when exposed to ultraviolet light. By inserting a virus into the skin cells of a mother cat and placing those contaminated cells into the womb, scientists were able to prove that it was possible to clone an animal with a manipulated gene. Apparently, this development could allow for a better understanding of human genetic diseases in the future. But what about the benefits of glowing cats?
If you ask me, cats that could truly glow-in-the-dark would make for an unique and styilsh night-light. And, much like the new Litrospheres, they last for about 12 years (I will talk about this tomorrow). The only downside is that the latter requires no power source while cats require a steady diet. Still, the crazy cat lady down the street could have the most power efficient house in town.

Future Consequences of Egg Donation

A recent report in the journal Nature investigated the ethics and economics of donating eggs for stem-cell research. Helen Pearson In 1989, a healthy 32-year-old woman offered her infertile younger sister some of her healthy eggs, and with them the chance to have a baby. Doctors at the Cromwell IVF and Fertility Centre in London gave the donor hormones that made a batch of eggs in her ovary mature, and collected six eggs for fertilization. Three embryos were transferred to the younger sister and two were frozen. One baby girl was born. Five years later, the doctors contacted the egg donor to ask whether to discard her frozen embryos. They discovered that she had been diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer that spread to her skull. She died just before her thirty-ninth birthday. Doctors don't know if the fertility drugs caused or accelerated the woman's cancer. But the possibility prompted Cromwell infertility specialist Kamal Ahuja to report the case as a reminder of how little is known about the risks of donating eggs (K. E. Ahuja and E. G. Simons, Hum. Reprod. 1998;13, 227-231; 1998). "It shook us all up," he says. Specialists in reproductive medicine say there is insufficient information about the long-term risks of drugs used to stimulate ovulation, a practice that has become more common in the past 25 years, with the proliferation of in vitrofertilization (IVF) and assisted reproduction. But some studies have suggested the drugs may be linked to the development of certain cancers.The question is receiving renewed scrutiny now that scientists are asking healthy women to donate their eggs forstem-cell research and exposing them to the potential risks of ovulation stimulation without the end result of a baby . The uncertainty makes it even more difficult to reach a consensus on whether women who donate eggs should be compensated, and if so by how much. "This discussion should emphasize long-term risk assessment rather than money," Ahuja says.During ovulation stimulation for IVF or egg donation, women are given drugs that encourage the ovary to ripen several eggs simultaneously, rather than the one egg normally ovulated each month. Doctors know that this can have side effects ranging from moodiness to infection. The most serious is ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which seriously affects about 6% of women receiving the drugs. Thirty or more eggs start to develop at once and fluid leaks out of blood vessels and collects in the abdomen, causing nausea, bloating and very occasionally kidney failure or even death.There is little information on how frequently ovarian stimulation has tragic side effects, says obstetrics and gynaecology professor Didi Braat of Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, because doctors are often reluctant to report such cases and rarely have to. But deaths are thought exceptional: in a study reported at this year's meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology, Braat and her colleagues found only six deaths clearly linked to IVF from the medical records of some 100,000 women who underwent the procedure between 1984 and 2006.So some specialists are more worried about the long-term risks of fertility drugs. In the 1990s, for example, studies pointed to a link between fertility drugs and breast or ovarian cancer, although it's not clear how cancer would be promoted. One study suggested that women who took an ovulation-stimulating drug called clomiphene citrate for more than a year had 11 times the risk of developing ovarian tumours compared with the general population (M. A. Rossing et al. N. Engl. J. Med. 1994;331, 771-776).But these studies are controversial. It might be infertility, not fertility drugs, that predisposes women to disease. Other aspects of women's reproductive lives influence ovarian and breast cancer whilst pregnancy is thought to protect against tumours, for example. And ovarian cancer is so rare that it's hard to get a large enough sample to spot any connection.Louise Brinton at the US National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and her colleagues tried to control for these factors in one of the most comprehensive studies so far. They collected the medical records of more than 12,000 women who received ovulation-stimulating drugs between 1965 and 1988. The team did not find statistically significant increases in breast and ovarian cancer, but did find that the women were around 1.8 times more likely to develop uterine cancer (M. D. Althuis et al. Am. J. Epidemiol. 2005;161, 607-615).Such studies have reassured many specialists that the risks of ovulation stimulation are insignificant. But Brinton and others studying the issue say the picture is still incomplete. Brinton's study involved mainly women who took clomiphene citrate, rather than the gonadotropin hormones introduced for IVF in the 1980s. Researchers have only had a decade or so to study significant numbers of women taking the newer drugs, but extra cancers may not appear until the women reach 50 or 60. Researchers also don't know whether studies on infertile women can be generalized to egg donors, who are typically younger and healthier. Epidemiologist Mary Croughan at the University of California, San Francisco, has unpublished data suggesting donors are at lower risk of cancer. But "it's important to follow these women into the future", she says.She and other experts want more extensive studies to follow up women who have had IVF treatment or donated eggs. There is at least one large study of the long-term effects of ovarian stimulation under way in the Netherlands. But it's unclear who will drive the effort, particularly when private fertility clinics may have little interest in finding out the potential risks of the drugs they use. Ahuja suggests that an authority such as Britain's HFEA could coordinate such an investigation.Some argue that the researchers asking women for eggs should help pin down the health risks. Kevin Eggan of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, for example, says that his group tells egg donors of the risks, and that they cancel the procedure if women show signs of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome.If the risks aren't made clear upfront, one well-publicized tragedy could kill efforts to find donors, adds John Buster, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. "If a woman has a cardiac arrest while giving eggs for stem-cell research, it won't go down too well.

If Christmas was run by Commonwealth Public Servants

Life After 40

The Indian Transfer Student to an American School

It was the first day of school and a new student named Chandrashekhar Subrahmanyam entered the fourth grade.

The teacher said, "Let's begin by reviewing some American History. Who said "Give me Liberty , or give me Death"? She saw a sea of blank faces, except for Chandrashekhar, who had his hand up: "Patrick Henry, 1775" he said. "Very good! Said the teacher.

Who said "Government of the People, by the People, for the People, shall not perish from the Earth?" Again there was no response except from Chandrashekhar. "Abraham Lincoln, 1863" said Chandrashekhar.

The teacher snapped at the class, "Class, you should be ashamed. Chandrashekhar, who is new to our country, knows more! About its history than you do."

She heard a loud whisper: "F**k the Indians". "Who said that?" she demanded. Chandrashekhar put his hand up. "General Custer, 1862." At that point, a student in the back said, "I'm gonna puke" The teacher glares around and asks "All right! Now, who said that?" Again, Chandrashekhar says, "George Bush Sr to the Japanese Prime Minister in 1991"

Now furious, another student yells, "Oh yeah? S*ck this!" Chandrashekhar jumps out of his chair waving his hand and shouts to the teacher, "Bill Clinton, to Monica Lewinsky, 1997!" Now with almost mob hysteria someone said "You little shit, if you say anything else, I'll kill you." Chandrashekhar frantically yells at the top of his voice, "Gary Condit to Chandra Levy, 2001."

The teacher Fainted, and as the class gathered around the teacher on the floor, someone said, "Oh shit, we're f**ked!" And, Chandrashekhar said quietly, "George Bush, Iraq , 2005."