Sad news about Happiness !

Jo Forgas and Hui Bing Tan at the University of New South Wales, experimenting on 45 volunteers Australia has found that happiness seems to make people more selfish !  (Journal of Experimental Psychology DOI:10.16/j.jesp.2010.01.007) .  Forgas has found in addition that happy people are less persuasive, more influenced by stereotypes, more gullible and have worse memories than those of unhappier personality.  All rather sad....

Hope for deafness through gene therapy

Operation FIRST , Cambodia’s rehabilitation surgical wing of Chea Chumeas hospital, co-founded and supported by Rose Charities Canada and Australia is rapidly becoming one of Cambodia’s leading ear surgery centers.  Suppor in this area from IMPACT has been pivotal in moving this forward.  Many forms of deafness can be fully or partially treated or assisted but often in poor countries these factilities are not available to the poor.

One form of deafness is caused by damage to the ‘hair cells’ deep within the ear canal.  These specialized cells have hair-like structures which enable them to pick up sound vibrations.  Though necessary for hearing in mamals, these structures are easily damaged by loud noise. Such noise may be from the rifle shots, bombs or explosions of conflict situations experienced in all to many countries and these can cause such damage to the cells that deafness is the result.

Now, Dr David He at Nebraska University has shown that gene therapy can, if given early reverse damage to the har cells.  If the gene ‘Math1’ is injected linked to an appropriate virus to enable its penetration into the cells, function can be restored. At the moment, the treatment has only been tested in laboratory conditions and will only work up to 10 days after the damage. Work however continues in this promising area.

'Avatar' perhaps science-fact, not science-fiction...

The recent blockbuster film Avatar takes place on an imaginary world were all living things are interconnected forming making the whole planet a type of single intelligence.  This biological version of  the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis  James Lovelock may now actually exist on Earth, albeit in more limited way.  Peter Nielsen of Aarhus University (Denmark) has shown that certain bacteria living the seabed seem to be able to communicate with counterparts great distances away  in more shallow  water.   “The discovery has been almost magic” says Nielsen “ It goes against everything we have learned so far. Micro-organisms can live in electric symbiosis across great distances..”   Nielsen believes a network of  tiny conductive protein wires between the bacteria makes the communication possible.   Yuri Gorby of the J.Craig Venter Institute in San Diego have spotted such wires in the lab but not as yet in natural surroundings.  The colonies of bacteria thus effectively act as one super-organism.   Avatar just may have shown a glimpse into discoveries to science fact, not just science fiction.  But if there is universal linkage it is worrying to know that so many species are being lost yearly; is this akin to cutting pieces out of the whole biological organism, and if so, how long will it be until it can take no more.