Snake's blood makes the heart grow

Snake oil might be best avoided but snake blood may be just what the doctor ordered. Injecting snake-blood plasma into mice increased the size of their heart. The discovery could prove key in the treatment of heart damage.

In humans, an enlarged heart is normally a sign that the body is in trouble. Heart attacks, high blood pressure and defects in heart valves all force the heart to work harder and grow to manage the extra load. Growth can scar the heart and decrease the efficiency of nutrient absorption in heart cells.

The heart of the Burmese python, a subspecies of Indian python, also grows. After eating a large meal, the organ nearly doubles in size to pump recently digested nutrients around its body. This growth, however, has no negative side effects and is reversible.

Similarly, heart growth in humans is not always negative. A hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), produced during exercise, causes the heart to swell in order to meet increased bodily demand for oxygen. When growth occurs in this way, there is no scarring.

After eating, a snake's blood contains a cocktail of fatty acids, some of which Leslie Leinwand from the University of Colorado at Boulder, suspected were causing the heart to grow.

To see if this enriched blood could have the same effect on other animals' cells, Leinwand coated in vitro rat heart-muscle cells with the blood plasma of recently fed snakes and found that they produced a greater volume of IGF-1 while also increasing in size. The cells were able to process fats more effectively and had a faster metabolism. The snake plasma also caused the rat cells to produce less NFAT – a protein created when hearts are stressed.

The team next identified three fatty acids that appeared key to these helpful effects. They injected these fatty acids into healthy mice. After one week, the hearts of these mice had increased in size and showed no sign of scar tissue.

Leinwand believes that the discovery could lead to new treatments to strengthen hearts damaged by heart attack. She now plans to test the fatty acids on mice with heart disease to see if cell death in the heart can be slowed or even reversed.

 by "environment clean generations"

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NASA Will Send Probe Into Sun

Nasa is to fire a space probe directly at the Sun to answer some of the most important questions about our solar system.

A small car-sized spacecraft will plunge into the sun's atmosphere approximately four million miles from its surface, exploring a region no other spacecraft has ever visited before.

The unprecedented project, named Solar Probe Plus, is scheduled to launch by 2018.

Nasa has selected five science investigations that will unlock the Sun's biggest mysteries as the probe repeatedly passes through its atmosphere.

‘This project allows humanity's ingenuity to go where no spacecraft has ever gone before,' said Lika Guhathakurta, Solar Probe Plus program scientist at NASA Headquarters, in Washington.

'For the very first time, we'll be able to touch, taste and smell our sun.' 

As the spacecraft approaches the sun, its revolutionary carbon-composite heat shield must withstand temperatures exceeding about 1,400 degrees Celsius (2,550 degrees Fahrenheit) and blasts of intense radiation.

The spacecraft will have an up-close and personal view of the sun, enabling scientists to better understand and forecast the radiation environment for future space explorers. 

‘The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics - why is the sun's outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun's visible surface and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system? ' said Dick Fisher, director of NASA's Heliophysics Division in Washington.

'We've been struggling with these questions for decades and this mission should finally provide those answers'

NASA invited researchers in 2009 to submit science proposals. Thirteen were reviewed by a panel of NASA and outside scientists and the five selected investigations are receiving approximately $180 million for preliminary analysis, design, development and tests. 

The Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons Investigation will specifically count the most abundant particles in the solar wind - electrons, protons and helium ions - and measure their properties.

The investigation also is designed to catch some of the particles in a special cup for direct analysis. 

A telescope on board will make 3-D images of the sun's corona, or atmosphere. The experiment actually will see the solar wind and provide 3-D images of clouds and shocks as they approach and pass the spacecraft.

Another will make direct measurements of electric and magnetic fields, radio emissions, and shock waves that course through the sun's atmospheric plasma.

The experiment also serves as a giant dust detector, registering voltage signatures when specks of space dust hit the spacecraft's antenna.

Another experiment from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio will look at elements in the sun's atmosphere using a mas  spectrometer to weigh and sort ions in the vicinity of the spacecraft. 

 by "environment clean generations"

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