Breakthroughs Today

Using more than 200 samples collected from 17 deepwater sites between May 25 and June 2, scientists led by Terry Hazen reported on 24 August 2010 that they found a dominant microbe in the oil plume which turned out to be a new species, closely related to members of Oceanospirillales . It thrives in cold water, with temperatures in the deep recorded at 5 degrees Celsius (41 Fahrenheit). Scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory noticed this suddenly flourishing bacteria at the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Although still unknown and unnamed, the microbe consumed oil droplets found underwater without significantly depleting oxygen in the water. Oxygen saturation outside the oil plume was 67 percent, while that within the plume was still 59 percent. Oil-eating microbes that consume large amounts of oxygen in the water can potentially create a "dead zone," an area where no oxygen was available, which is dangerous to other life underwater. (Photo by Associated

WILBUR Lincoln Scoville may not be your normal hot guy with his keen interest in chemistry. (Still I haven’t met someone who loved chemistry other than those who are passionate about it. Like mathematics, chemistry is a love it or hate it thing. Few like it in high school and fewer still goes for it in college.) But in the quest for defining minute characteristics of chemicals that means something to ordinary human beings like most of us, Scoville certainly blazes the road he set for future generations. And providing a measure of hotness in chili was only one of many. Well, in 1912, while working for Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company, he devised the test and scale to measure piquancy (hotness) of chili peppers. But for this and his other achievements, he won the 1922 Ebert prize, the 1929 Remington Honor Medal, and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Columbia University in the same year. The test bore Scoville’s name, and he called it then the Scoville Organoleptic Test. Late

I WATCHED Ninja Assassin lately, and I am impressed with the discipline against physical pain that this film talks about. That makes me understand the wisdom in Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa’s words: “We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.” The approaches between these two schools of thought, however, differ. The ninjas (in the movie) believe in the stoic way of killing the pain, so the will can gain full control of the body. Miyazawa proposed the opposite—embrace pain and let it become an intense fuel to propel one’s life. Well, in healthcare both physical and mental, pain has its important role, too. Primarily pain warns a person about... ( Read more . )   This article appears in Sun-Star Cebu newspaper on 18 August 2010.

A RECENT study on macrophages (i.e. defensive cells in our body that engulf threatening substances inside our body) introduced me to a lethal, genetic disease that targets the male population. This disease is called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), named after the French neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne, who described it in 1861. While it has an incidence of one in 3,500 newborn males, health experts consider this as the most common lethal disease of childhood around the world. Mutation in the male (X) chromosome [dystrophin gene, locus Xp21] causes a rapid degeneration of the muscles, leading into an eventual loss of walking ability and then death. While females do not exhibit symptoms, they can be carriers of these defective genes, especially if the father had this condition or the mother is also a carrier. Symptoms usually appear before age five; at times visible in early infancy. These symptoms involve... ( Read more .)  This article appears in Sun-Star Cebu n

LIMITED options often lead to risky choices. Parents of children with Duchene muscular dystrophy (DMD) face the same difficult choices when looking for cure of what experts consider as the most common, lethal disease of childhood. As there is no cure yet for DMD, many parents seek natural food supplements (NFS) and hope for miracles to happen. One of the mainstay nutrients found in NFS is arginine, a natural amino acid first extracted from a lupin seedling in 1886 by... ( Read more. ) This article appears in Sun-Star Cebu newspaper on 4 August 2010.