Eideard

The world’s biggest food group Nestle has launched an online program inviting pet owners to team up with their furry friends to lose weight.

Nestle’s pet and people weight management units Purina and Jenny Craig worked together on “Project: Pet Slim Down,” an online program available in the United States…Pet owners who sign up can obtain tips for exercising with their pet, record exercise taken, track weight loss and share photos with other users…

On the website, users can follow five overweight cats and three dogs on their weight-loss journey via small movies and before-and-after pictures…

“The obesity epidemic is not limited to people,” said Lisa Talamini, Vice President of research and program innovation at Jenny Craig…”Two thirds of adults in the US are overweight or obese, and more than half of all pets in the country are also battling the bulge,” she said…

Nestle’s U.S.-based pet food company Purina makes a range of veterinary diet products for cats and dogs with health problems, while its Jenny Craig brand offers human customers in North America, Oceania, France and Britain a personalized program for weight loss.

Always heartwarming to see a global corporation “stick to the knitting“.

For the first time ever, scientists from the University of Montreal and Mount Sinai Hospital have generated pluripotent stem cells from horses. Pluripotency refers to a cell’s ability to become any of the various other types of cells found within the body, and the ability to be able to grow such cells in a laboratory setting has great implications for the field of regenerative medicine. Not only does this latest accomplishment potentially mean big things for sick or injured horses, but it could also pave the way for lab-based human stem cell treatments.

“Equine iPS cells bring new therapeutic potential to the veterinary field, and open up the opportunity to validate stem-cell based therapies before clinical studies in humans,” said study co-leader Dr. Andras Nagy…”As well, stem-cell based studies using the horse as a model more closely replicate human illnesses, when compared with studies in mice.”

“The horse is an excellent model for a range of human degenerative diseases, especially those involving joints, bones, tendons and ligaments, such as arthritis,” added Dr. Sheila Laverty, a professor in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at U Montreal. “Bone fracture, as well as damaged cartilage, tendons and ligaments heal poorly in horses. Therefore, the use of iPS cells in these animals may help enhance long-term tissue repair.”

The University of Montreal’s Dr. Lawrence Smith was the other leader of the study.

The research was published today in the journal Stem Cell Reviews and Reports.

As you can see by the photo, first use of this research is to aid in the rehabilitation of politicians. One of the better examples of a degenerate.

Science News. When pigeons sniff their way home, the right nostril comes in much handier than the left, a team reports January 27 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. Previous evidence of this asymmetry led an international team of researchers to investigate using 28 homing pigeons outfitted with GPS devices. The team plugged either a bird’s left or the right nostril and then released the birds about 40 kilometers from home. While all birds headed out in the right direction, pigeons with a blocked right nostril took a more circuitous path, stopping and exploring more en route, suggesting that the right nostril is important for processing navigation-related odors. The team notes that humans also favor the right nostril when detecting and evaluating the intensity of odors, hinting at a broader olfactory asymmetry.

What a relief to have this question settled.

Who had the room before you checked in?

Philip Tierno doesn’t feel comfortable staying in hotels. He knows too much.

The microbiologist travels with an impervious mattress and pillow cover to protect against the unseen debris that guests leave behind in what he compares to the lost Roman civilization, particles “literally buried over time” in the bed.

“What I’m saying is it’s not just you in bed, it’s who comes after you,” said Tierno, director of microbiology and immunology at New York University’s Langone Medical Center.

More disturbingly, it’s who comes before you, too.

When it comes to hotel bedding, allergens are the biggest problem for guests, Tierno said. Evidence of bedbugs is an immediate dealbreaker for Tierno, but we’ll leave them out of the picture here since that problem is closely related to the presence of guests, not germs.

You can probably imagine what might be lurking in the mattress, but here’s a sampling for those who hesitated: skin cells (when humans sleep they shed about 1.5 million cells or cell clusters an hour), human hair, bodily secretions, fungi, bacteria, dust, dust mites, lint, insect parts, pollen, cosmetics … and more…

Tierno has conducted a number of scientific hotel room studies over the years and is the author of “The Secret Life of Germs…”

“When you have people, unfortunately you have transmission of germs,” Tierno said.

RTFA. You’ll never want to leave home and travel again.

Some of the tales are so disgusting they’re hilarious. Har!

Three pigs on exhibit at the Minnesota State Fair’s swine barn this year may have had H1N1…potentially marking the first time that the pandemic flu has been found in U.S. hogs.

It’s not clear what became of the pigs — they may have been slaughtered after the fair and sent into the food chain — but health officials downplayed any dangers from the sick pigs.

“This is a people virus,” said Jeff Bender, co-director of the University of Minnesota Center for Animal Health and Food Safety. “A person cannot get flu from eating pork, or pork products.”

Still, the timing couldn’t be worse for the pork industry, which has struggled this year to make a profit. As news broke Friday that the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were conducting tests, the National Pork Producers issued an e-mail reiterating that pork is safe to eat…

The suspect pigs were discovered by researchers carrying out a CDC project studying the spread of flu viruses at places where people and pigs come into close contact — such as state fairs. The pigs, from three separate farms, appeared healthy at the time samples were taken, but preliminary tests at the U of M this week found evidence that they might have had H1N1.

I’ll let my wife know that pork prices should be coming down before we go grocery shopping next weekend.

Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, holds out a dog biscuit.

“Henry!” he says. Henry is a big black schnauzer-poodle mix–a schnoodle, in the words of his owner, Tracy Kivell, another Duke anthropologist. Kivell holds on to Henry’s collar so that he can only gaze at the biscuit.

“You got it?” Hare asks Henry. Hare then steps back until he’s standing between a pair of inverted plastic cups on the floor. He quickly puts the hand holding the biscuit under one cup, then the other, and holds up both empty hands. Hare could run a very profitable shell game. No one in the room–neither dog nor human–can tell which cup hides the biscuit.

Henry could find the biscuit by sniffing the cups or knocking them over. But Hare does not plan to let him have it so easy. Instead, he simply points at the cup on the right. Henry looks at Hare’s hand and follows the pointed finger. Kivell then releases the leash, and Henry walks over to the cup that Hare is pointing to. Hare lifts it to reveal the biscuit reward.

Henry the schnoodle just did a remarkable thing. Understanding a pointed finger may seem easy, but consider this: while humans and canines can do it naturally, no other known species in the animal kingdom can.

Har! I won’t even suggest the political implications of such a study.

The new pandemic H1N1 influenza was circulating undetected in pigs for at least a decade before it jumped to people, and much better surveillance is needed among both pigs and people.

Molecular tests show the swine flu virus made a mutational jump as it passed from pigs to humans, which apparently happened recently, Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona told a meeting of flu experts sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Medicine.

“This virus most likely has been circulating under the radar in pigs for the better part of 10 years,” Worobey, who specializes in tracking viruses using a so-called molecular clock, told the meeting.

“Once it jumped into humans it probably circulated for months under the radar. There is lots of room for improvement of our surveillance of swine flu in pigs…”

Influenza viruses mutate regularly and are easy to trace using their rate of change, Worobey said. He collaborated with researchers around the world who dug out samples from freezers.

By comparing recent gene sequences to older samples, Worobey was able to track the evolution of the pandemic…

The new strain has some bird-like genetic sequences but jumped from birds to pigs a long time ago, Worobey said.

Once it made the jump into people, the genes changed quickly. “They seemed to be evolving at something like 1.5 times the rate they evolved in swine,” he said.

Right now, the version of pandemic H1N1 circulating is not mutating — a relief to doctors and companies preparing for a global vaccination campaign. But experts expect it eventually will begin to change.

Ready for yet another remake of the Andromeda Strain?

A new species of giant rat has been discovered deep in the jungle of Papua New Guinea.

The rat, which has no fear of humans, measures 82cm long, placing it among the largest species of rat known anywhere in the world.

The creature, which has not yet been formally described, was discovered by an expedition team filming the BBC programme Lost Land of the Volcano…

Like the other exotic species, the rat is believed to live within the Mount Bosavi crater, and nowhere else…

“This is one of the world’s largest rats. It is a true rat, the same kind you find in the city sewers,” says Dr Kristofer Helgen, a mammalogist based at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who accompanied the BBC expedition team.

Initially, the giant rat was first captured on film by an infrared camera trap, which BBC wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan set up in the forest on the slopes of the volcano.//

Then trackers accompanying the team managed to trap a live specimen…The trapped rat measured 82cm in length from its nose to its tail, and weighed approximately 1.5kg.

It had a silver-brown coat of thick long fur, which the scientists who examined it believe may help it survive the wet and cold conditions that can occur within the high volcano crater. The location where the rat was discovered lies at an elevation of over 1,000m…

Probably tastes like rabbit.

Health and agricultural officials agree, pigs have much more to fear from people humans than the other way around. Pigs, it turns out, can contract the virus from infected humans.

“We’re trying to minimize human traffic into our hog operation so our hogs do not get the disease from humans, which is probably a little bit of a twist from what most people have heard about,” said Elwyn Fitzke, a pork producer in Glenvil, Neb.

“This is a very big concern for us,” he added.

The National Pork Board sent an advisory counseling pork producers to implement what it called “biosecurity practices” — not to protect visitors, but to protect pigs.

Among the recommendations: Ban or limit outside visitors, double-check facilities’ ventilation and vaccinate all workers against seasonal flu viruses, so they don’t get sick and potentially weaken the pigs’ immune systems.

Let’s keep our priorities straight.

Thanks, Helen

The second-oldest human footprints ever found show that mankind’s ancestors walked out of Africa on feet indistinguishable from our own.

The 1.5 million-year-old footprints, found in sediment deposits in northern Kenya, are the oldest identified since Mary Leakey found 3.75 million-year-old tracks preserved in volcanic ash in northern Tanzania. Those prints belonged to Australopithecus afarensis, and provided clear evidence of bipedalism.

Though the short-legged, long-trunked A. Afarensis was able to walk upright, its feet were still apelike, possessing a telltale splayed-out big toe. Because the early fossil record contains no foot bones, scientists didn’t know when modern feet — a defining human characteristic necessary for long-distance running — evolved.

The new footprints, described in Science, apparently belong to Homo erectus. Maker of the first stone tools, H. erectus was also the first hominid to leave Africa, migrating to Asia about two million years ago.

I wonder if the dweebs who believe humankind was magically squirted from a wand waved by some omnipotent deity 6,000 years ago ever read any of this news? It’s striking stuff for me. Paleontology is one of those 17 other careers I wish I had time for.

What do the bible-thumpers research? Are they still stuck on how many angels fit on a pinhead?