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Egg freezing enters clinical mainstream

Charlotte Schubert reveals in the News Blog that egg freezing is no longer an experimental procedure, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM). On 22nd October they issued new guidelines on the controversial practice:

The change in policy is expected to accelerate the growth of clinics that offer egg freezing to women who face fertility-damaging treatment for cancer or other conditions,  and to women wishing to delay having a baby — although the society stopped short of endorsing the procedure for that purpose.

Continue to Charlotte’s post to find out more.

Badger cull postponed

DETAIL FROM PHOTO BY JAYNEANDD VIA FLICKR UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS

Daniel Cressey reports in the News Blog that the UK government has pushed back to next year a controversial cull of badgers that has provoked heated debate among researchers and the public:

The cull, part of efforts to control bovine tuberculosis (bTB), which badgers can transmit to cattle, was scheduled to start imminently (see ‘Badger battle erupts in England’). But environment secretary Owen Paterson announced today that no badgers (Meles meles) would be shot until next summer.

Paterson said that after more badgers than expected were found in the two initial culling areas, it was doubtful that enough animals could be culled this year. A 70% reduction in numbers is believed by some researchers to be necessary to reduce bTB, he said.

Find out more about this decision in Daniel’s post.

Did the Solar System start with an extra planet?

The Solar System may have formed with an extra planet that ultimately got the boot explains Ron Cowen in the News Blog:

The sacrificed planet, the size of Uranus or Neptune, could have served to stabilize the rest of the Solar System, including Earth and the other terrestrial planets.

That scenario was presented 19 October at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Reno, Nevada, by two theorists who performed nearly 10,000 simulations of the evolution of the early Solar System. David Nesvorny of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and Alessandro Morbidelli of the Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur in Nice, France, began their simulations with the assumption that the Solar System was initially much more compact than it is now. That view of the youthful Solar System, known as the Nice model, can account for much of the present-day architecture of the outer Solar System.

Learn more about this research in Ron’s report. 

An Elevator Pitch for a Research Project

Can you condense your scientific research into a few short sentences? This week’s Soapbox Science guest blogger, Rena Katz explains why it’s an important skill to master:

Think of the positive impact if you could sell a research project with an elevator pitch – a description of an idea that is concise yet exciting enough for an entrepreneur to sell to a potential investor during a short elevator ride.  Condensing an entire research project into a few short sentences is a difficult challenge, but my firsthand experience with an extremely well-thought out explanation of a lab’s research has convinced me that the elevator pitch for science is a worthwhile goal to work towards.

Follow through to Rena’s contribution to find out more.

The buzz about pesticides

Bees, the most important pollinators of our crops, are in trouble. All over the world, their populations are decreasing and scientists want to know why. In the Nature Video team’s compilation below, Nigel Raine and Richard Gill introduce us to the bumblebees they study at Royal Holloway near London. Their experiments show that two commonly used pesticides affect foraging behaviour and brood development, making bumblebee colonies more likely to fail.

You can read the original research paper: Combined pesticide exposure severely affects individual- and colony-level traits in bees.

Article-level metrics

Article-level metrics are now available on 20 journals on nature.com, including Nature Chemistry, explains Stuart Cantrill in the Sceptical Chymist blog:

An example of one of our metrics pages can be found here. At the top of the page, there are citation counts from Web of Science, CrossRef and Scopus. Under that are more social metrics, from sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Google+, blog posts and news outlets. The box to the right then provides links out to the news and blog coverage. Here’s a screenshot:

Lupus antibodies may provide new option for cancer therapies

A new method promises to help cancer treatment become more effective, reveals Susan Matthews in the Spoonful of Medicine blog. The approach uses antibodies produced by the body when a person has lupus, an autoimmune disorder that can affect the skin, joints, and other organs:

These lupus antibodies can weaken cancerous cells by penetrating the cells’ nuclei and disrupting their DNA, priming the cells for destruction by radiation or chemotherapy, according to a preliminary studypublished in Science Translational Medicine on 24 October.

“It’s remarkable that an antibody could have this ability to penetrate a living cell,” says Jim Ford, an oncologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, who authored a commentary piece on the paper. “It’s a totally new therapeutic approach.”

You can learn more about this method in the post.

Sending DNA Messages Inside Viruses

Given the power of the cell, it is no surprise that synthetic biologists want to harness the power of intercellular communication, explains Eric Sawyer over at Scitable:

A recent paper opens up the possibility of designer intercellular messages that are more sophisticated than the on/off quorum sensing switch. Instead of using small molecule messages, they send entire genes packaged inside the M13 phage, a virus that infects E. coli. Viruses are great at shuttling messages from one cell to another: it’s how they make their living. All viruses carry the message “copy me,” allowing them to put their host cell to work churning out more viruses. To the authors’ benefit, M13 can package foreign DNA sequences inside itself, as long as they contain a unique marker sequence. Because of this property, the pieces of DNA are called phagemids (a play on “phage” and “plasmids.”) Another benefit of the M13 system is that only cells carrying F-plasmids can be infected, and only cells carrying a helper plasmid (M13K07, or just M) can send messages. F-plasmids (F for “fertility”) are spread through conjugation, where bacteria exchange DNA from cell to cell through a tube called a sex pilus. So, to sum up: genetic messages marked with a special sequence can be packed inside M13. These messages can only be sent from bacteria carrying helper M-plasmids (by “willing” senders) and taken up by bacteria carrying F-plasmids (by “willing” recipients). Thus, there is a great deal of control over who can send or receive, and the content of the DNA messages.

Find out more about this system in Eric’s post.

SciLogs New Bloggers

This week, SciLog’s Community Manager Khalil A. Cassimally announced 15 new science bloggers would be joining the SciLogs.com network:

Our new bloggers will complement our initial group of bloggers, inject even more enthusiasm, zest and quality to our network and broaden the scope of SciLogs.com, in terms of the science covered here and blogging style.

You can check out the list of new bloggers here and make sure you add them to your RSS reader!

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