Viajes: Valencia para las Fallas( 15 al 19 de marzo )

Lo que empezó siendo una cierta celebración de la primavera y el comienzo de los días más largos, en los que ya no eran necesarios los candiles que se colgaban de unos artefactos denominados "parots", que se quemaban la víspera de San José a la puerta de las casas, se ha convertido, para Skyscanner, en una de las manifestaciones festivas más importantes del mundo y que en España es Fiesta de Interés Turístico Internacional. Desde el 15 hasta el 19 de marzo los días y noches en Valencia son una fiesta continua.

Pero ya desde el 1 de marzo se hacen "mascletás", espectáculo de petardos y fuegos artificiales, en el que se obtienen composiciones musicales a través del ruido de los cañones de pólvora. La víspera del 19 de marzo, con la "cremá", Valencia se convierte en una auténtica bola de fuego. Verdaderas obras de arte en cartón-piedra arden de un extremo a otro. En 2011 serán más de 700, entre fallas mayores e infantiles, los monumentos que se planten y se quemen. La ciudad del Turia y de las paellas se convierte, por unos días, en la ciudad del fuego.

*Skyscanner es el portal viajes más potente y flexible de Europa. Permite comparar precios actualizados para vuelos de más de 600 compañías aéreas y alrededor de 670.000 rutas.

Shaped pulses make opaque film see-through

A NEW way of providing crystal clear vision through an opaque layer could one day lead to a non-invasive technique for targeting cancer cells.
Some opaque materials will allow small amounts of light through if they are in a thin enough layer. But as light passes through the layer it is scattered in both time and space, so an image projected on one side emerges blurry and unfocused on the other.
Now Jochen Aulbach at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues, have found a way to sharpen things up. They figured that it should be possible to manipulate light so that the scattering it experiences as it passes through the layer leaves it focused.
The team achieved this through a trial and error process. They used a liquid crystal device which allows precise control of light, called a spatial light modulator (SLM), to manipulate 64-femtosecond-long laser pulses being projected onto a layer of paint. A detector measured the intensity and duration of the pulses that emerged from the other side. This information was then passed to a computer program that used it to tweak the SLM to make the next pulse arriving at the detector both brighter and less spread out in time.
In a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters, the team reports that it took about 10 minutes of repetition for the system to refine the tweaks sufficiently to create a coherent, bright pulse that was still just 115 femtoseconds long despite its tortuous route through the paint. By modifying the light pulse to travel through skin instead of paint it might be possible to deliver short, intense laser pulses to destroy cancer cells but leave nearby healthy cells intact.
Sylvain Gigan of the Langevin Institute in Paris, France, calls the time resolution impressive. "It is both very elegant and very effective," he says.

**Published in "New Scientist"

Newborn mice can mend a broken heart

Why is a newborn mouse like a zebrafish? Because their hearts can heal – something impossible for adult mammals. The findings could lead to new treatments for heart disease in people.
Some fish and amphibians – zebrafish, for example – can regenerate heart tissue when it is damaged. They can do this throughout their life, whereas adult mammals can't: only mammalian embryos were known to have the ability. Intriguingly, before the heart of a developing mammalian embryo separates into four chambers, it looks similar to the two-chambered zebrafish heart.
To find out if mammals retain this heart-healing ability after birth, Enzo Porrello and colleagues at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas turned to newborn mice.
They cut out a chunk of heart tissue – around 15 per cent of the left ventricle – from 1-day-old mice. When the group removed the whole organ 21 days later, they found that 99 per cent of the hearts had completely regenerated.
To find out whether regenerated hearts work properly, the team compared other heart-damaged newborn mice with mice that had been given a sham operation that did not touch the heart. Two months after the surgery, an echocardiogram showed that the regenerated hearts were functioning as well as the undamaged ones.
Early loss
When the group repeated the surgery in 7-day-old mice, the hearts did not heal, suggesting that the regenerative ability was lost by this age.

**Published in "New Scientist"

Genzyme, Sanofi CEOs talk about finalized merger

Érase una vez... un trasplante

¿Qué es, cómo se hace y para qué sirve un trasplante? Un equipo de especialistas del Hospital Infantil Universitario Niño Jesús (Madrid) intenta dar respuesta a todas las preguntas que se puedan hacer aquellos niños que van a someterse a una intervención de este tipo. Y qué mejor manera de hacerlo que a través de un cuento.
'Me van a hacer un trasplante' consta de 16 páginas, repletas de dibujos y explicaciones adaptadas al lenguaje infantil. Así, por ejemplo, los pequeños pueden leer: "Cuando la médula ósea no funciona bien hay que cambiarla por otra que sea capaz de fabricar células sanas que se parezcan a las tuyas [...] Recibirás un tratamiento con quimioterapia que va a eliminar la médula enferma y va a preparar tu cuerpo para recibir la médula nueva".
Esta guía se centra, concretamente, en trasplantes de progenitores hematopéyicos, es decir, aquéllos que se emplean para tratar enfermedades que afectan directamente a las células de la sangre (leucemia, linfoma, aplasia medular, inmunodeficiencias...). "Cada vez se hacen más trasplantes de este tipo y, dado que es un procedimiento complejo y bastante duro para el niño (al menos estará ingresado tres semanas), esta guía pretende acompañarles, informarles y ayudarles a vivir con menos miedo y más seguridad todas las fases", señalan fuentes del hospital madrileño.
Para que entiendan y consigan llevar mejor su 'larga' estancia en el hospital, el cuento dice: "Mientras estés bajo de defensas no podrás salir de la habitación, para evitar infecciones. Es lo que llamamos 'estar aislado'. Pero no te preocupes, puedes leer, pintar, escuchar música, ver la tele, jugar con videojuegos... ¡Pueden venir a verte!". Y, para que no se asusten, les advierte: "Tendrán que lavarse bien las manos y ponerse mascarilla cuando pasen dentro de la habitación".
El cuento comienza con la presentación de los autores, del equipo de Onco-Hematología y de la Unidad de Trasplante Hematopoyético del Hospital Infantil Niño Jesús, sin olvidar el papel de la ilustradora: Soledad Maestre Martín-Ventas. Es ella quien da vida y color a las salas de hospitalización, las habitaciones y otras instalaciones. También es ella quien dibuja una sonrisa en cada una de sus ilustraciones y hace recomendaciones como: "comer bien, lavarse todos los días y cuidarse muy bien la piel (para evitar infecciones)". El resultado final será "volver a casa, jugar y pasártelo muy bien con tus amigos y familia".

**Publicado en "El Mundo"

HIV makes protein that may help virus's resurgence

New research enhances the current knowledge of how human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1), which causes AIDS, controls the cell cycle of cells that it infects. The new findings may shed light on how the virus reactivates after entering a dormant state, called latency. "As we better understand the biological events that revive HIV from latency, we hope to devise ways to eventually intervene in this process with better treatments for people with HIV infection," said study leader Terri H. Finkel, M.D., Ph.D., chief of Rheumatology at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Finkel is the senior author of a study published in the Jan. 27 issue of the journal Blood. The first author, also from Children's Hospital, is Jiangfang Wang, M.D., Ph.D.
Viral latency is one of the persistent problems in treating HIV infection. Current combinations of anti-HIV drugs can reduce HIV to undetectable levels, but the virus hides in latently infected cells in a sort of hibernation. If a patient stops taking medication, or is weakened by a different infection, HIV can make a resurgence out of its viral reservoirs, often becoming resistant to previously effective drugs.
The current study focused on a protein, Vif (for viral infectivity factor), that HIV-1 produces. Finkel and colleagues previously discovered that Vif causes HIV-infected cells to stop growing at one phase of the cell cycle, the G2 phase. The study team has now found that Vif also acts at an earlier stage in the cell cycle, driving cells out of the G1 phase and into the more active S phase.
This activity may be important, said Finkel, because G1 is a resting phase, and a biological interaction that "wakes up" a latent infected cell may reactivate the infection. Other viruses that have a latent infectious state, such as the herpes virus and the Epstein-Barr virus, also express proteins that drive a transition from G1 to S phase. "By regulating the cell cycle, viruses control their infectivity," said Finkel.
The researchers carried out their work in HeLa cells, a human cell line long used in cell studies, as well as in human T cells, immune cells found in the blood. They identified two proteins, Brd4 and Cdk9, which interact with Vif. This interaction was a new discovery, although the proteins were already known to regulate the progression of the cell cycle.
Identifying Vif's cellular partners may also implicate them as potential targets for therapy. "If we can interrupt the activity of Brd4 or Cdk9, we may be able to prevent latent infection from becoming active," said Finkel. "Alternatively, by harnessing Brd4 or Cdk9, we may be able to drive cells out of latency and make the virus susceptible to anti-HIV drugs." She added that early preclinical testing of inhibitors is getting under way for other conditions, but cautioned that it is too early to foresee whether, or how soon, her research findings will lead to clinical treatments for HIV.

*Source: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Erlotinib effective and with fewer side-effects after first-line treatment

The targeted cancer drug erlotinib has comparable efficacy to chemotherapy, and is better tolerated, in hard-to-treat cases where a patient's cancer has progressed quickly after treatment with first-line therapy, the results of a new phase III trial show. Dr Tudor Ciuleanu from the Institute of Oncology Ion Chiricuta, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, reported this finding from the international TITAN study at the European Multidisciplinary Conference in Thoracic Oncology (EMCTO), 24-26 February 2011, Lugano, Switzerland.
"The TITAN study is the first trial to evaluate whether erlotinib has comparable efficacy to chemotherapy for non-small cell lung cancer patients in general," Dr Ciuleanu said.
The study included only patients whose disease had progressed under first-line chemotherapy. In the clinic, around 30-40% of patients with lung cancer will see no benefit from first-line therapy and their disease will rapidly progress.
"These patients have an extremely poor prognosis and few treatment options. An effective alternative to chemotherapy is therefore very important, since chemo-related side-effects can result in further physical deterioration in patients who are already very sick," Dr Ciuleanu said.
Historically, data have shown that erlotinib was more tolerable than chemotherapy, but many physicians had assumed that erlotinib would not be as effective in this difficult-to-treat patient population compared to chemotherapy.
The open-label study included 424 patients whose lung cancer had progressed rapidly after treatment with first-line chemotherapy. Of these, 203 were treated with erlotinib, and 221 received chemotherapy with either docetaxel or pemetrexed.
No difference in overall survival was seen between the two groups, the researchers reported. Nor was there any significant difference in progression-free survival time.
"TITAN is important because it confirms that erlotinib has comparable efficacy to chemotherapy with better tolerability, even in this population of patients with poor prognosis," Dr Ciuleanu said. "The study included a broad, unselected population, showing that patients can benefit from erlotinib regardless of their EGFR mutation status. Erlotinib therefore gives doctors an effective alternative to chemotherapy after disease progression, without chemo-related side-effects."
Serious treatment-related adverse events were seen in only 1% of patients treated with erlotinib, the researchers said, compared to 6.6% of those in the chemotherapy arm of the study.
"The likelihood of side-effects is a serious consideration for patients who are already physically unwell due to the advanced stage of their disease," Dr Ciuleanu said. "The importance of this finding is that when safety data are considered they show that the benefits associated with erlotinib can be achieved with better tolerability than chemotherapy."
Commenting on the study, which he was not involved in, Professor Jean-Paul Sculier from Institut Jules Bordet, Belgium, noted that there are currently three drugs specifically registered for second-line single-agent treatment in advanced non-small cell lung cancer, all of which have the same impact on survival: erlotinib, pemetrexed (restricted to non-squamous histologies) and docetaxel.
"Docetaxel is no longer protected by patent, meaning it is cheaper and generics are available," he noted. "A potential advantage of erlotinib is administration in a targeted way for tumors with activating EGFR mutations, however more data are needed before the drug can be recommended with a good level of evidence in that indication."

*Source: European Society for Medical Oncology