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A.M. Costa Rica's Second news page |
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San
José, Costa Rica, Friday, Feb. 13, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 31
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Puntarenas
carnival OK expected
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Anyone trying to follow the on-again, off-again Carnavales Puntarenas 2015 is sure to get motion sickness. There is a good chance, but not certain, that the carnival is on. Organizers began the event last weekend without approval from the health ministry. The regional health inspectors closed the carnival and applied the appropriate seals. Meanwhile, the Ministerio de Seguridad Público has a separate issue. Just 50 private security guards had been hired for a major concert Saturday. That issue was resolved Thursday when two security companies promised 150 guards would be on duty. That approval from the security ministry is expected to carry weight with the health ministry in a meeting today. Carnival organizers are expecting to be allowed to function, but they still face possible sanctions for beginning the event last weekend without approval. Maritime zone meeting today at 2 p.m. By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Playas del Coco development association has a meeting scheduled today at 2 p.m. in the communal hall in Filadelfia to study, hear opinions and to consider adjustments to a proposed plan to regulate the maritime zone in the Municipalidad de Carrillo. The maritime zone is that 150-meter strip along the mean high tide line that is closely regulated by the government. An approved zone is necessary for future maritime zone concessions. The association said that its opinions on the proposed plan will be presented to a committee next week. The committee is to be composed of representatives from the Instituto Costarricense de Turismo, the municipality and the Instituto Nacional de Vivienda y Urbanismo. Officials want to raise the marriage age By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Casa Presidencial said that it will try to expedite two bills that are designed to provide protection for children. One raises the marriage age to 18. Melvin Jiménez, minister of the Presidencia, said one measure reformed the criminal code and family code to provide harsher punishments for those who harm children if the criminal is a family member or someone in a position of confidence or authority. Casa Presidencial was acting in response to a Feb. 2 case in which a 2 year old died from injuries investigators say were inflicted by a stepfather. The young mother is just 16. Marriage in Costa Rica is possible with parental approvals of women as young as 15. Jiménez said that during the month of January, the Hospital de Niños attended an average of eight youngsters a day who had suffered from physical aggression. The Feb. 2 case also has generated outrage, and a march is planned for 9 a.m. Sunday against injuries to children.  Readers who forgot a card can print out and
customize
this St. Valentine's Day message. We'll never tell. Concerts
planned for St. Valentine's Day
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Municipalidad de Montes de Oca will mark St. Valentine's Day Saturday with a free concert in the Barrio Pinto Catholic church. This is the XV Recital de Música de Cámara. The 7 p.m. chamber music recital has been offered since 2000 with professional musicians Among those performing will be John Miailovich of the United States on his saxophone. Elsewhere, the Banda de Conciertos de Guanacaste performs in Playa del Coco at 10 a.m. and the Banda de Conciertos de San José performs at 5 p.m. in the Plaza de la Democracia. Being fat can be genetic! Honest! By the University of Michigan news service
There are many reasons why people gain different amounts of weight and why fat becomes stored in different parts of their bodies. Now, researchers point to a genetic reason for a tendency to put on weight. Their findings, part of the largest genome wide study, were published in two papers in the journal Nature. By analyzing genetic samples for over half a million individuals as part of the research project, which aims to identify genes that regulate human body and size, researchers found more than 100 locations across the genome that play roles in various obesity traits. Learning more about the genes and biological processes may guide the development of weight-loss therapies, and help doctors tailor the health advice they give to patients. “Our work clearly shows that predisposition to obesity and increased body mass index is not due to a single gene or genetic change,” says senior study author Elizabeth Speliotes, assistant professor of internal medicine and computational medicine and bioinformatics at the University of Michigan Health System. “The large number of genes makes it less likely that one solution to beat obesity will work for everyone and opens the door to possible ways we could use genetic clues to help defeat obesity,” she says. Speliotes and colleagues investigated the genetic basis of body mass index, a common measure of overall obesity, in up to 339,224 individuals. Across the genome, which is the full set of a person’s genes, they found 97 sites associated with obesity. The number triples the previously known regions. Once better understood, these genetic mechanisms may not only help to explain why not all of those who are obese develop related metabolic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol, but could lead to possible ways to treat obesity or prevent metabolic diseases in those who are already obese.
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A.M. Costa Rica Third News Page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Feb. 13, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 31 | |
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| New dock and grain-handling facility goes into operation at
Caldera |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Since 2001 the government has been working steadily to improve the condition of the port at Caldera. The success there is in contrast to strikes, walkouts and continual unpleasantness that have marked the ports at Limón and Moín during this time. At Caldera on the Pacific government workers agreed to a buyout to allow a private consortium to take over the docks and make improvements. The success of these policies could be seen in the inauguration of a new terminal at the docks Thursday. This was a job that took three years. The project includes an investment of $36.5 million and a dock 180 meters long, nearly 600 feet. The project is expected to reduce the expensive waiting time for cargo ships at the dock. The new terminal is 6,000 square meters. The dock is operated by the Sociedad Portuaria Granelera de Caldera S.A. The new facility doubles the size of dock space. Although the dock is primarily for grain ships, there is equipment to handle other types of cargo including a 450-ton mobil crane. Workers on the Caribbean also were offered a buyout, but the union there rejected the plan. |
 Sociedad
Portuaria Granelera de Caldera S.A. photo
The new dock at CalderaAPM Terminals is about to start work on a new $1 billion container handling facility at Moín, a concession project that has been opposed vigorously by union workers. The government has agreed to make an investment in the public docks, too. Another firm also says it will put in a port facility at Moín. In both sides of the country, the ports are considered key elements in the economic health of the areas. |
| Lawmakers want to change canton name to that of Sarchí |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
There is another name-change movement in the legislature. This time lawmakers are seeking to change the name of the canton of Valverde Vega to that of its principal town, Sarchí. That change has been proposed by Franklin Corella Vargas, Javier Cambronero Arguedas and Nidia Jiménez Vásquez, all of the Partido Acción Ciudadana. Lawmakers recently took final action on changing the name of the Canton of Aguirre to Quepos on the central Pacific coast. The argument is about the same for Sarchí: More recognition from tourists. |
The town of
Sarchí is famous for it furniture and oxcarts. Many of the
nation's provinces and cantons bear the name of the principal
administrative center. San José is the central canton of the province of San José. Limón is the administrative center of the province of Limón. And Alajuela is the central canton of the province of Alajuela, not to mention Heredia, Cartago and Puntarenas. The one problem is that lawmakers are in a period when the executive branch sets the agenda, so Corella Vargas said in a statement he would like Casa Presidencial to put the name-change bill on the list. |
| You need to see Costa Rican tourism information HERE! |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's Fourth News page | |||||
| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Feb. 13, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 31 | |||||
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| Researchers show that dogs can recognize human moods from
faces |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Can the dog tell by simply looking at someone whether the person has a happy or an angry expression? Researchers have taught pet dogs to know the difference. Dogs are very attuned to sound. When they yell or speak harshly, many owners claim their dogs act guilty and slink away. But researchers in Austria have discovered that dogs can look at faces, and tell the difference between a smile and a scowl. In a series of experiments, researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna taught dogs to recognize facial expressions by training them with two pictures of either the upper or lower half of a person's face, one happy, the other angry. Then, the canines were shown images of the eyes or mouths of people they had never seen before, as well as the left half of the faces used in training. Corsin Muller led the study. “We were asking essentially, do they realize that smiling eyes have the same meaning as a smiling mouth, or angry eyes have the same meaning as an angry mouth? And it turned out that they really did perform very well in these probe trials. So, once they had learned the initial discrimination, they could spontaneously, immediately choose the correct one in the probe trials with the normal stimuli," said Muller. In other words, once the dogs learned to recognize which image was happy or angry, they could easily identify the same expressions in pictures of any faces. Muller says future work will try to determine whether dogs can learn the meaning of certain expressions, for example, whether a scowl indicates a person is angry. |
 Messerli Research Institute/ Anjuli Barber
A dog considers which face is
happy, and which is angry.“What we can say with our
study is that they can discriminate
them, that they can tell these ones are different. What we cannot
be
sure of at this point is what exact meaning they are associating with
these different expressions. It seems of course likely that they would
associate some positive meaning with the smiley face and they would
associate some rather negative meaning with the angry face. But
what
exactly they are associating with these expressions we cannot know at
this point," he said.
In the training trials, researchers found the dogs were slower to associate a reward with recognition of the angry face, suggesting they had an idea people with angry faces were best avoided. Muller says canine investigators are also interested in finding out whether wild wolves can be trained to recognize human facial expressions. The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, provide the first solid evidence that humans are not the only species that can read another species' body language. |
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2015 and may
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Death of Muslim trio called hate crime in North Carolina By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Police continued to investigate the slaying of three Muslims in North Carolina Thursday. The victims' family and friends insist it was a hate crime and are urging police to fully investigate. A neighbor, Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, has been charged with first-degree murder in connection with the killings of Deah Barakat, 23, his wife, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister, 19-year-old Razan Abu-Salha. Chapel Hill Police Chief Chris Blue issued a statement saying investigators are exploring what could have motivated Hicks to commit such a "senseless and tragic act." "We understand the concerns about the possibility that this was hate-motivated and we will exhaust every lead to determine if that is the case," Blue said. Police said Wednesday they believe a long-simmering dispute over a parking space at the complex sparked the shootings, but Mohammad Abu-Salha, the father of the slain women, said he believed the shootings to be a hate crime. He said Hicks had confronted his daughter and her husband a few times while carrying a gun on his belt. Thursday the FBI said it was opening its own preliminary inquiry, separate from local police investigations. A statement by FBI spokeswoman Shelley Lynch did not specify if the inquiry would include whether the shooting was a hate crime. The case has garnered international attention and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan criticized President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry Thursday for not speaking about the incident. "If you stay silent when faced with an incident like this, and don't make a statement, the world will stay silent toward you," Erdogan said during a visit to Mexico. The Turkish president, a devout Muslim who has been outspoken about what he sees as rising Islamophobia in the West, has strained relations with Obama on issues such as the war in Syria. The White House said Wednesday that it would wait for the results of the police investigation before commenting on the killings in North Carolina. A Twitter campaign, #MuslimLivesMatter, launched to draw national media attention to the tragedy, has attracted supporters from across the globe, many angrily claiming it was being ignored because the victims were Muslim. One poster tweeted, "Muslims only newsworthy when behind the gun, not in front." The triple homicide has rocked the nearby University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where one of the victims, Barakat, was a student. A spokesman for the school, Rick White, said there was pain and worry on campus. "As I talk to Muslim students and as I speak with leaders, as I have over the past few days from the Muslim community, I realize there is concern, there is fear about this, 'Could this attack happen again? Could this happen to me and my family?' " he said. Thousands of people gathered for a candlelight memorial at the university on Wednesday night to honor the victims. "It was a good experience for people to be able to mourn, and to be able to share their stories, and then to be able to say, 'OK, move on. How can we make this a better place,?' " White added. "Because one of the things that came through loudly and very clearly during the vigil last night was: Don’t fight fire with fire. Don’t fight ignorance with ignorance. Go out and make the world a better place. That’s what we try to do every day here on campus. And, I think that’s what we’re taking away from this right now." Groups including the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Raleigh-based Muslims for Social Justice have called for a federal investigation into possible hate crimes. "I hope this terrible tragedy will be a turning point that brings the reality home that if we keep demonizing Muslims and equating their religion to terrorism, it will lead to more attacks," Manzoor Cheema, co-founder of Muslims for Social Justice, said. Ripley Rand, a federal prosecutor whose district includes Chapel Hill, said Wednesday the shootings appeared to be an isolated incident, and not part of a campaign against the Muslim community. Hicks, who was studying to become a paralegal, had posted anti-religious statements on his Facebook page, and recently posted a picture of a handgun. But his wife, Karen, insisted during a news conference Wednesday the killings had nothing to do with religion or the victims’ faith, adding that her husband was a strong supporter of gay and abortion rights. Barakat, 23, was a second-year dentistry student at the university, while his wife was scheduled to join her husband as a dental student in the fall. The sister was a student at North Carolina State University in Raleigh and was visiting the newlywed couple. Liban Abdikarim, a Somali-American student who attended school with Barakat, said the trio were leaders in the Chapel Hill and Raleigh communities. Barakat worked with a charity that provided dental supplies to the poor, and had launched a campaign to raise money for a humanitarian trip to Turkey to provide dental care to refugees from the civil war in Syria. Liban H. Abdikarim, a Somali-American who knew Bakarat well and attended school with him, said news of the slayings came as a surprise. "We were all shocked to hear the news of the passing of him and his wife and her sister — not only because they are innocent people and Muslims as well in the community but also because they were leaders in the community and they did a lot for Chapel Hill and Raleigh and the surrounding areas," Abdikarim said. "So it came as a shock to us because they were our leaders and now we have to look for someone else to look up to." Tiny worm may help NASA learn about zero gravity By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Astronauts on future missions to Mars may stay healthier thanks to experiments on Earth with a tiny, almost microscopic worm. Long-term space travel in low or zero gravity changes how the blood circulates, weakens the immune system, and causes motion sickness, muscle loss and fatigue. It can also trigger bone loss. So scientists at the University of Delaware’s Biotechnology Institute are testing the effects of weightlessness on C. elegans, a transparent invertebrate that is often used in biomedical studies because of its short two-week lifespan. Plus, 70 percent of the worm's DNA is the same as humans. With funding from NASA, the U.S. space agency, Chandran Sabanayagam and his team built a microgravity simulator in their lab to see how C. elegans would perform in the actual zero gravity of space. The worms are placed in a container of liquid, and as they start to sink to the bottom, the container is flipped upside down, again and again, and the worms never hit the bottom. "So essentially it’s in free fall, similar to a satellite orbiting the Earth,” Sabanayagam said. As the worms are spun in free fall, scientists observe them under a microscope. “After about a week of rotation in that environment," Sabanayagam said, "we’ll take the animals out, and what you see us doing with the test tubes is basically biochemical preparation to analyze its genetic material.” The scientists are looking for changes in the worms' epigenome, the chemical markers that tell the DNA in the cells how to behave. The epigenome can be altered by the environment, and the changes can be passed from one generation to the next. “When the worms are in a liquid environment, some epigenomic marks persist even when we take the animal out of the liquid environment and put it back into normal ground conditions. So its offspring retains this epigenomic memory of the parents’ liquid environment or microgravity environment,” Sabanayagam said. So far, the data suggest that the epigenomic marks passed on to future generations are acquired during embryo development. Sabanayagam said identifying that genetic marker is critical to human studies in the future. “Our work with the worm speeds up this process," he said. "We think that we can find similar genes that responded to microgravity in the worms. We think that we can find them in the human genome and possibly closely monitor those when astronauts go in the space station, travel to the moon or potentially Mars.” Sabanayagam expects C. elegans to fly on the International Space Station within two years. He hopes in the long term the data can be used to develop simple, cheap and quick tests to assess an astronaut's health. The work was presented this week at the annual meeting of the Biophysical Society in Baltimore, Maryland. Farmers are in the forefront seeking more Cuban trade By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A Pew Research poll conducted in January shows that more than 60 percent of Americans support President Barack Obama’s decision in December to establish full diplomatic relations with Cuba and move towards ending the economic embargo in place since the Kennedy Administration in the 1960s. Among the strongest supporters for ending the embargo are American farmers, who see Cuba as a relatively new market for exports. The planting season is still several months away for Illinois farmer Thomas Marten, but he’s excited about the future… a future that could see more of his products available to the once off-limits island nation of Cuba. “Here on our farm, we actually grow a lot of specialty corn, a lot of non-GMO and hard endosperm corn, which goes almost exclusively into export markets. So we would see a benefit for our own operation in additional exports to Cuba," said Marten. Lifting the embargo, Marten says, could help him increase his profits by 15 percent. Sending his products to Cuba, which imports about 80 percent of its food, would have been unheard of for his father. “The entire time my father and my uncles would have been farming we’ve actually had an embargo in place. It’s been over 54 years that we’ve had that market not open to us in the United States," said Marten. Marten is among a group of farmers pushing lawmakers to lift the embargo. But even before President Obama announced the opening to Cuba, products from Illinois fields were already reaching the Cuban people. Mark Albertson is with the Illinois Soybean Association. “Agriculture’s been exempt from the trade embargo thanks to the Trade Sanctions and Reform Act under President Clinton. But we still have to jump through a lot of hoops," said Albertson. One of the hoops is that the U.S. can not extend credit to Cuba. The Cubans have to pay in cash, up front. “And that makes us very un-competitive, and we’ve seen a dramatic decline in our ag exports to Cuba in recent years," said Albertson. “We feel that economic development is freedom," said Paul Johnson. Johnson is the vice chairman of the U.S. Agricultural Coalition for Cuba. “What we do is represent U.S. agriculture in our trade relations with Cuba," he said. Johnson says by ending the embargo and extending credit to Cuba, the United States becomes more competitive, especially because of its proximity to the island. “I think businesses are excited about those opportunities," he said. So excited in fact that spaces on a trip to Cuba Johnson is leading filled up quickly. Farmer Thomas Marten is one of about 75 agriculture and business representatives traveling with Johnson to the island nation in March. It will be Marten’s second trip to Cuba, and while he is optimistic about future trade, he is also realistic about the challenges. “There’s definitely a lot of issues we have to work through with human rights. As both a farmer and a Catholic, I definitely saw that there are a lot of churches closed there, and that’s something that definitely concerns me in Cuba, their human rights record. That said, 54 years of our embargo has done very, very little in improving the human rights conditions in Cuba," he said. In his State of the Union Address, President Obama called on Congress to begin the work of ending the embargo, and Marten hopes when it comes time to drive his corn and soy to grain elevators next year, more of it will eventually find its way to Cuba. Deaths linked to smoking might be underreported By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Nearly a half million Americans die every year from diseases directly attributable to cigarette smoking, such as lung cancer and heart disease, but a new study indicates thousands more deaths should be included in the annual tally. "We think, if our results stand up, that we should add about 60,000 extra deaths a year," said Brian Carter, an American Cancer Society epidemiologist and lead author of the study. "For perspective, that's more than deaths that come from other common causes of death, like influenza or motor vehicle accidents." The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, were based on a new, 10-year study that followed nearly 1 million people. An analysis of data collected between 2000 and 2011 found that smokers, compared with people who had never smoked, were two times more likely to die of a number of diseases not usually thought to be related to cigarettes. Carter said the diseases included infections, kidney disease, and prostate and breast cancer. "There's one good hypothesis that women that start smoking when they are young, before their first birth, that might affect the breast more adversely than people that smoke after their first birth, because the breast doesn't fully mature until pregnancy," he said. "With prostate cancer, there's also a lot of good evidence that smoking might increase the proliferation of cancer in the prostate." The study also found that smokers were six times more likely to die of blood insufficiency to the intestines, a rare cause of mortality. Researchers were careful to caution that the findings were based on observations and did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship between cigarette smoking and previously unreported diseases. Percentage of U.S. liberals is up a point, Gallup says By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
They still trail their conservative-minded counterparts but a record number of Americans now consider themselves to be liberals. Conservatives outnumber liberals 38 percent to 24 percent, but, according to Gallup, the 14 percent gap between the two is the smallest it’s been since 1992. The percentage of U.S. adults who consider themselves liberal rose one percentage point for the third straight year, while the percentage for people who consider themselves politically conservative or moderate remained unchanged from 2013 to 2014. The increase in the number of liberals could be the natural settling of the electorate after the high-point of conservatism in the 1990s, which included the Reagan-Bush era and the 1994 Republican Revolution, when the GOP picked up 54 seats in the House of Representatives and eight seats in the Senate during the 1994 midterm elections. But George Mason University political analyst Mark Rozell thinks there’s more going on. “Young people today are overwhelmingly socially liberal and tolerant,” he said. “As you have generational replacement, the older generations who are more socially conservative leaving the population, and then younger people are much more socially progressive than their parents and grandparents, you’re naturally going to see some shifting in the overall numbers.” Meanwhile, a record number of Americans now see themselves as political independents. The percentage of political independents climbed from 35 percent in 2008 to 43 percent in 2014. Yet, even Americans who self-identify as independents tend to be partisan voters. “Even though there are more independents in the electorate, there are more people who are voting predominantly for one political party in elections,” Rozell said. “So it raises the question of whether the rising percentage of independents is all that important when we look at the actually voting patterns of Americans which seem to be separating out as either, almost exclusively Democrat or exclusively Republican for most people.” This suggests that the political middle is disappearing in the United States, which threatens the American tradition of political adversaries sitting together to reach a compromise for the good of the nation. “Now it seems the ethic is more to defeat and vanquish one’s enemies on the other side of the aisle and there’s little ground for negotiation or compromise,” Rozell said. “I don’t know at what point the American public understands how damaging these developments have been to democratic processes in the country and begins to demand that political leaders shift back to a different method of operation where it was OK to sit down with opponents on the other side and work out reasonable compromises and make good public policies.” Resistant malaria seen defeating all treatments By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Options are running out in the race to eliminate malaria before the parasite responsible for the deadly disease completely outsmarts man's last line of resistance, an herbal drug known as artemisinin. “There are very few options and indeed there are very few drugs in the pipeline. So, really, we have one shot eliminating this disease," said Benjamin Rolfe, executive secretary of the Asia Pacific Leaders Malaria Alliance. "If we don’t eliminate in the next 15 years we will lose our tools, lose our armory and we are very likely indeed, almost certain, to see a resurgence of this disease in the Asia Pacific region and then, subsequently, in the African region.” Rolfe called the situation a global public health emergency. He spoke during a break in the two-day meeting in Bangkok of his alliance and the Emergency Response to Artemisinin Resistance. Public health officials are alarmed that the drugs most utilized to combat the most dangerous form of malaria are becoming ineffective in the Greater Mekong sub-region. "We saw this happen with previous drugs, chloroquine," explains Rolfe. "The resistance spread from this region through India into Africa. And we’re very concerned that that may happen again.” An area of particular concern is the long India-Myanmar border. "India has its own very high burden of malaria that has been stubborn in recent years," said Rolfe. "And if resistance spreads through India to Africa we risk seeing many millions of deaths.” The governments of Australia and Vietnam, in particular, were praised by participants of the Bangkok meeting for showing leadership in the battle to eliminate malaria, but there is concern of a lack of a similar level of commitment from other heads of state. "Without the investment, without the cash to make this happen, we will fail," Rolfe warned. The alliance was formed during the East Asia Summit held in Brunei in 2013 amid concern among leaders about the risks of malaria's resurgence, in particular due to increasing drug-resistance in the Greater Mekong area. Isolated from the sweet wormwood plant, artemisinin and its derivatives have been able to swiftly reduce the number of Plasmodium parasites in the blood of malaria patients. But the parasite has been found to be resistant to the drug, considered the last line of defense against malaria, in parts of five Southeast Asian countries: Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar (also known as Burma). In one area of western Cambodia, near the Thai border, three distinct groups of malaria falciparum parasites resistant to artemisinin have been identified, according to research published in 2013 in the journal Nature Genetics. There were an estimated 198 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2013, and an estimated 584,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Ninety percent of all malaria deaths occur in Africa where an estimated 437,000 African children died before their fifth birthday due to malaria in 2013. Between 2000 and 2013 (the latest year for which figures are available) the incidences of malaria were cut by 30 percent globally. And during the same period, malaria mortality rates decreased by an estimated 47 percent worldwide and by 54 percent in Africa. |
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2015 and may
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| A.M. Costa Rica's sixth news page |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Researchers have developed a smart insulin that automatically regulates the amount of blood sugar in people with type 1 diabetes. This would be a breakthrough for patients, who struggle every day to maintain healthy blood glucose levels. Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body’s immune system attacks and destroys its own insulin-producing pancreatic cells. Insulin is a hormone that helps metabolize glucose from food, which cells use for fuel. People with type 1 diabetes must frequently check their glucose levels and inject themselves with insulin, sometimes many times a day. But the routine is imprecise. Too little insulin causes a rise in blood sugar levels that over time can lead to serious complications, including heart disease, kidney failure and blindness. But if type 1 diabetics accidentally take too much insulin, they risk falling into a dangerous coma. “The idea, I think, the kind of the pie in the sky vision so to speak, would be to have something that is completely autonomous. So, if a patient didn’t have to check their blood glucose level, if they could take a shot in the morning and know that they are covered for the day, that would be the best case scenario. I don’t think what we have now is there yet. But I think that’s where the generation of a truly smart glucose response insulin would go," said Matthew Webber. Webber is a biomedical engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who helped develop a smart insulin that self-activates when blood sugar levels rise. A single injection of the long-acting agent binds to glucose molecules circulating in the blood, automatically bringing blood sugar levels down when they soar. Webber says researchers conducted tests using laboratory animals. “We can inject it in mice and when we simulate a meal three hours following insulin administration, blood glucose levels in our treated group goes up and comes right back down the way you would expect in a healthy animal. If we give the animals regular insulin, the kind of stuff a diabetic patient might take, the blood glucose level goes up and stays up. So, it has a longer lasting effect and it also has a very rapid reversal of blood glucose," he said. The test showed that the smart insulin worked for at least 14 hours, repeatedly and automatically lowering blood sugar levels in the mice. The work was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers are hoping next to conduct human clinical trials of what would be the first glucose-response insulin. |
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Page 7: Bus depreciation rules may be revised By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Ever notice that some buses appear to be well worn. The nation's regulating agency says that after seven years, a bus is paid off fully, but the vehicle may remain in service for 15 more years. And after that it can still be used for what is called transporte especial. That is why the Autoridad Reguladora de los Servicios Públicos is considering making some changes. The age and value of buses enters into computations of bus fares. Some consideration is being given to accelerated depreciation schedules that will spread the value of a bus out over more years. This was one of the topics discussed at a forum the agency held at the Colegio de Profesionales en Ciencias Económicas in Mercedes de Montes de Oca. |
