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Friday, May 24, 2013

Coach Dave Gray?s ?Sports and Courts? Indoor Complex Coming to Area

A new indoor sports complex is in the works for the intersection of Franklin and Warrendale roads in Pine Township near the border with Cranberry.

Glenn and Carol Foglio are partnering up with Dave Gray, better known in the area as ?Coach Dave,? on the project, which will offer children and adults the opportunity to play a variety of sports, including basketball, flag football, volleyball and more.

There also are plans to add a concession stand as host wellness and nutritional seminars for the community.

?But what were really want to do is get kids playing,? Gray said.

A McCandless resident, Gray has been holding youth sports programs and events in the area since 1996. The outdoor sports camps, which can attract up to 200 participants from across the Pittsburgh region, are held at Blueberry Hill Park in Franklin Park.

Operating under the name Coach Dave Gray, Gray?s coaching philosophy is that life lessons, including good sportsmanship, confidence and teamwork, can be found in playing sports.

The new complex will be a place where kids can have fun playing sports in a pressure-free environment, Gray said.

?There really is a need for parents to take their kids to an environment where they?re nurtured without the aggression and competiveness of some of the leagues and the schools,? he said.

Gray said the new facility, which is located in a 6,000 square foot former warehouse once owned by Heurich Construction, would include a multi-purpose sports floor for basketball, football, dek hockey and other activities.?

?We really want it to be interchangeable,? he said.

For the second phase of the project, the owners plan to add a large field house with turf flooring for baseball, soccer and lacrosse training.

Gray said he met his business partners after giving private individual sports skill lessons to Glenn Foglio?s sons.

In a proposal to Pine Township officials outlining plans for Sports and Courts, Glenn Foglio, owner of Graciano Corporation in RIDC Park, said there is a need for an indoor sports facility in the area.

While there is is plenty of demand in the area for recreational sports, there is limited space for where to practice them, he said.?

?We reside in Pine Township in Woodside Estates and the feedback we already have received regarding the project from our immediate neighbors as well as friends and acquaintances within and around our school district, along with potential interested tenants, has been enormous, positive and really has people excited for such a place to be so readily available to their children,? the proposal said.

Pine Township planning officials are set to review plans for Sports and Courts at the June 10 planning commission meeting.

If the board recommends the plans, Sports and Courts will move before the Pine Township Supervisors for final approval at the June 17 meeting.

Gray said he hopes to have the complex open for business by mid to late August.

?We?re really excited,? he said. ?

Are you pleased an indoor sports facility is in the works for the area? Tell us in the comment section below.

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Source: http://cranberry.patch.com/articles/coach-dave-grays-sports-and-courts-indoor-complex-coming-to-area

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Reducing caloric intake delays nerve cell loss

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Activating an enzyme known to play a role in the anti-aging benefits of calorie restriction delays the loss of brain cells and preserves cognitive function in mice, according to a study published in the May 22 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The findings could one day guide researchers to discover drug alternatives that slow the progress of age-associated impairments in the brain.

Previous studies have shown that reducing calorie consumption extends the lifespan of a variety of species and decreases the brain changes that often accompany aging and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer?s. There is also evidence that caloric restriction activates an enzyme called Sirtuin 1 (SIRT1), which studies suggest offers some protection against age-associated impairments in the brain.

In the current study, Li-Huei Tsai, PhD, Johannes Gr?ff, PhD, and others at the Picower Institute For Learning and Memory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, tested whether reducing caloric intake would delay the onset of nerve cell loss that is common in neurodegenerative disease, and if so, whether SIRT1 activation was driving this effect. The group not only confirmed that caloric restriction delays nerve cell loss, but also found that a drug that activates SIRT1 produces the same effects.

?There has been great interest in finding compounds that mimic the benefits of caloric restriction that could be used to delay the onset of age-associated problems and/or diseases,? said Luigi Puglielli, MD, PhD, who studies aging at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was not involved in this study. ?If proven safe for humans, this study suggests such a drug could be used as a preventive tool to delay the onset of neurodegeneration associated with several diseases that affect the aging brain,? Puglielli added.

In the study, Tsai?s team first decreased by 30 percent the normal diets of mice genetically engineered to rapidly undergo changes in the brain associated with neurodegeneration. Following three months on the diet, the mice completed several learning and memory tests. ?We not only observed a delay in the onset of neurodegeneration in the calorie-restricted mice, but the animals were spared the learning and memory deficits of mice that did not consume reduced-calorie diets,? Tsai explained.

Curious if they could recreate the benefits of caloric restriction without changing the animals? diets, the scientists gave a separate group of mice a drug that activates SIRT1. Similar to what the researchers found in the mice exposed to reduced-calorie diets, the mice that received the drug had less cell loss and better cellular connectivity than the mice that did not receive the drug. Additionally, the mice that received the drug treatment performed as well as normal mice in learning and memory tests.

?The question now is whether this type of treatment will work in other animal models, whether it?s safe for use over time, and whether it only temporarily slows down the progression of neurodegeneration or stops it altogether,? Tsai said.

###

Society for Neuroscience: http://www.sfn.org

Thanks to Society for Neuroscience for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 26 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128338/Reducing_caloric_intake_delays_nerve_cell_loss

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Thursday, May 23, 2013

Campaigner against gay marriage in France kills himself in Notre Dame

The protests against the legalization of same-sex marriage in France has been surprisingly passionate and may have included yesterday's suicide in the symbolic heart of French Catholicism.

By Sara Miller Llana,?Staff writer / May 22, 2013

Tourists take pictures as police officers stand guard in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris, Tuesday. Notre Dame has been evacuated after a man committed suicide in the 850-year-old monument and tourist attraction.

Thibault Camus/AP

Enlarge

When French President Fran?ois Hollande set out to legalize gay marriage, he faced an unexpectedly virulent outcry. Protests, including one that was the largest of its kind in 30 years, drew religious leaders, conservatives fighting for the preservation of family values, and those simply looking for a way to express their discontent with the president.?

Skip to next paragraph Sara Miller Llana

Europe Bureau Chief

Sara Miller Llana?moved to Paris in April 2013 to become the Monitor's Europe Bureau?Chief. Previously she was the?paper's?Latin America Bureau Chief, based in Mexico City, from 2006 to 2013.

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Wednesday, May 22, 2013

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Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Iran acts to expand sensitive nuclear capacity: diplomats

By Fredrik Dahl

VIENNA (Reuters) - A U.N. nuclear agency report due this week is expected to show Iran further increasing its capacity to produce material that its adversaries fear could eventually be put to developing atomic bombs, Western diplomats said on Tuesday.

But they said it is also likely to indicate that growth in Iran's most sensitive nuclear stockpile has been held back because some of it has been used for reactor fuel, potentially providing more time for diplomacy between Iran and major powers.

Tehran's holding of medium-enriched uranium gas is closely watched in the West as Israel - which has threatened air strikes if diplomacy and sanctions do not stop Iran's atomic drive - says it must not amass enough for one bomb if further processed.

Critics say Iran is trying to achieve the capability to make atomic arms. Iran denies this, saying it needs nuclear power for energy generation and medical purposes and that it is Israel's reputed nuclear arsenal that threatens regional peace.

The next quarterly report on Iran's nuclear program by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), expected on Wednesday, is likely to show continued installation of the centrifuges used for enriching uranium, diplomats said.

That would include an advanced model known as IR-2m which, once operational, would enable Iran to speed up sharply its accumulation of refined uranium, which can have both civilian and military purposes.

The number of IR-2m centrifuges and empty centrifuge casings that have been put in place at Iran's main enrichment site near the town of Natanz is expected to have risen significantly since February, when it stood at 180, they said.

Iran has for years been trying to develop centrifuges more efficient than the erratic 1970s-vintage IR-1 machines it now uses, but introducing new models has been dogged by technical hurdles and difficulty in obtaining key parts abroad.

"We expect that they've continued to install more advanced centrifuges at Natanz," one diplomat said.

Another Western envoy said Iran was also believed to be pressing ahead in the construction of a research reactor, which experts say could offer it a second way of producing material for a nuclear bomb, if it decided to embark on such a course.

Nuclear analysts say the type of reactor that Iran is building near the town of Arak could yield plutonium for nuclear arms if the spent fuel is reprocessed, something Iran has said it has no intention of doing.

NUCLEAR STOCKPILE

Diplomats will also scrutinise the IAEA report for what it has to say about Iran's possession of medium-enriched uranium as this represents a technical threshold relatively close to the level required for nuclear bombs.

Since Iran in 2010 began processing uranium to a fissile concentration of 20 percent it has produced more than the 240-250 kg that would be needed for one bomb, if refined more.

But while the stockpile has expanded, Iran has still kept it below Israel's stated "red line" by converting a large part of the uranium gas into oxide powder in order, Tehran says, to yield fuel for a medical research reactor in the capital.

As a result, the increase in the holding of 20 percent gas has been less than the production. In February, the stockpile was 167 kg, a rise of roughly 18-19 kg since the previous report in December but a significant slowdown from a 50 percent jump in the previous three-month period.

"It seems that they are converting nearly all the material that they are producing," a Western official said.

But while the uranium conversion activity may postpone any decision by Israel on whether to strike Iranian nuclear sites, Western diplomats made clear Tehran must do much more in order to allay suspicions about its atomic program.

Turning uranium gas into oxide powder in order to make fuel plates may also be just a temporary positive development because the process is possible to reverse, Western experts say.

The six world powers involved in diplomacy with Iran - the United States, Russia, France, Britain, Germany and China - want it to stop refining uranium to 20 percent and suspend work at the underground Fordow site where most of this work is pursued.

(For an interactive timeline on Iran's nuclear program, click on http://link.reuters.com/gad76r )

(Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/iran-acts-expand-sensitive-nuclear-capacity-diplomats-135247584.html

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Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Advance in nanotech gene sequencing technique

May 20, 2013 ? The allure of personalized medicine has made new, more efficient ways of sequencing genes a top research priority. One promising technique involves reading DNA bases using changes in electrical current as they are threaded through a nanoscopic hole.

Now, a team led by University of Pennsylvania physicists has used solid-state nanopores to differentiate single-stranded DNA molecules containing sequences of a single repeating base.

The study was led by Marija Drndi?, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences, along with graduate students Kimberly Venta and Matthew Puster and post-doctoral researchers Gabriel Shemer, Julio A. Rodriguez-Manzo and Adrian Balan. They collaborated with assistant professor Jacob K. Rosenstein of Brown University and professor Kenneth L. Shepardof Columbia University.

Their results were published in the journal ACS Nano.

In this technique, known as DNA translocation measurements, strands of DNA in a salt solution are driven through an opening in a membrane by an applied electric field. As each base of the strand passes through the pore, it blocks some ions from passing through at the same time; amplifiers attached to the nanopore chip can register the resulting drop in electrical current. Because each base has a different size, researchers hope to use this data to infer the order of the bases as the strand passes through. The differences in base sizes are so small, however, that the proportions of both the nanopores and membranes need to be close those of the DNA strands themselves -- a major challenge.

The nanopore devices closest to being a commercially viable option for sequencing are made out of protein pores and lipid bilayers. Such protein pores have desirable proportions, but the lipid bilayer membranes in which they are inserted are akin to a film of soap, which leaves much to be desired in terms of durability and robustness.

Solid-state nanopore devices, which are made of thin solid-state membranes, offer advantages over their biological counterparts -- they can be more easily shipped and integrated with other electronics -- but the basic demonstrations of proof-of-principle sensitivity to different DNA bases have been slower.

"While biological nanopores have shown the ability to resolve single nucleotides, solid-state alternatives have lagged due to two challenges of actually manufacturing the right-sized pores and achieving high-signal, low-noise and high-bandwidth measurements," Drndi? said. "We're attacking those two challenges here."

Because the mechanism by which the nanopore differentiate between one type of base and another is by the amount of the pore's aperture that is blocked, the smaller a pore's diameter, the more accurate it is. For the nanopore to be effective at determining a sequence of bases, its diameter must approach the diameter of the DNA and its thickness must approach that of the space between one base and the next, or about 0.3 nanometers.

To get solid-state nanopores and membranes in these tiny proportions, researchers, including Drndi?'s group, are investigating cutting-edge materials, such as graphene. A single layer of carbon atoms in a hexagonal lattice, graphene membranes can be made a little as about 0.5 nanometers thick but have their own disadvantages to be addressed. For example, the material itself is hydrophobic, making it more difficult to pass strands of DNA through them.

In this experiment, Drndi? and her colleagues worked with a different material -- silicon nitride -- rather than attempting to craft single-atom-thick graphene membranes for nanopores. Treated silicon nitride is hydrophilic and has readily allowed DNA translocations, as measured by many other researchers during the last decade. And while their membrane is thicker, about 5 nanometers, silicon nitride pores can also approach graphene in terms of thinness due to the way they are manufactured.

"The way we make the nanopores in silicon nitride makes them taper off, so that the effective thickness is about a third of the rest of the membrane," Drndi? said.

Drndi? and her colleagues tested their silicon nitride nanopore on homopolymers, or single strands of DNA with sequences that consist of only one base repeated several times. The researchers were able to make distinct measurements for three of the four bases: adenine, cytosine and thymine. They did not attempt to measure guanine as homopolymers made with that base bind back on themselves, making it more difficult to pass them through the nanopores.

"We show that these small pores are sensitive to the base content," Drndi? said, "and we saw these results in pores with diameters between 1 and 2 nanometers, which is actually encouraging because it suggests some manufacturing variability may be okay."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/vAZh4aFM0Ds/130520133718.htm

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Women's reproductive ability may be related to immune system status

Monday, May 20, 2013

New research indicates that women's reproductive function may be tied to their immune status. Previous studies have found this association in human males, but not females.

The study appears in the American Journal of Human Biology.

An animal's energetic resources must be carefully allocated, said University of Illinois anthropology professor Kathryn Clancy, who led the new research. The body's first priority is maintenance, which includes tasks inherently related to survival, including immune function, she said. Any leftover energy is then dedicated to reproduction. There is a balance between resource allocation to maintenance and reproductive efforts, and environmental stressors can lessen available resources, said Clancy, who co-directs the Laboratory for Evolutionary Endocrinology at Illinois.

The study participants were a group of healthy, premenopausal, rural Polish women who participate in traditional farming practices. The researchers collected the women's urine and saliva samples during the harvest season, when physical activity levels are at their peak. This physical work constrains available energetic resources. In previous studies, the highest levels of ovarian suppression occurred during the harvest season.

Researchers measured participants' salivary ovarian hormone levels daily over one menstrual cycle. They also tested urine samples for levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a commonly used marker of inflammation.

"Depending on the other factors that you look at alongside it, CRP can tell you about immune function or it can tell you about psychosocial stress, because CRP has been correlated to both of those things in other populations," Clancy said.

The researchers observed a negative relationship between CRP and progesterone in the Polish women ? in women with high CRP, progesterone was low. Further, the researchers found that estradiol and the age of first menstruation were the strongest predictors of CRP levels.

Clancy noted that it is too early to tell whether these correlational relationships indicate a causal relationship in which inflammation suppresses ovarian hormones. However, she believes that there are two possible pathways that explain these results.

"One is that there is an internal mechanism, and this local inflammation drives higher levels of CRP, and that is what's correlating with the lower progesterone," she said. "The other possibility is that there is an external stressor like psychosocial or immune stress driving allocation to maintenance effort, which in turn is suppressing ovarian hormones."

Clancy believes that her research will help women "understand their bodies better."

"From an anthropological perspective, these trade-offs are really important because they help us understand the timing of different life events: Why does someone hit puberty when they do, why do they begin reproducing when they do, why do they space babies the way they do?" Clancy said.

"It's really interesting to see the interplay between a person's intentions about when and why to have children, and then their own body's allocations to reproduction or not," Clancy said.

###

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: http://www.uiuc.edu

Thanks to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for this article.

This press release has been viewed 44 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128305/Women_s_reproductive_ability_may_be_related_to_immune_system_status

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