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Gizmorama - May 12, 2014
Good Morning, A new study has revealed that dinosaurs were able to heal quite well from bone-crushing injuries. I guess Jurassic healthcare was pretty good back then.
Learn about this interesting story and more from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
ErinP.S. Did you miss an issue? You can read every issue from the Gophercentral library of newsletters on our exhaustive archives page. Thousands of issues, all of your favorite publications in chronological order. You can read AND comment. Just click
GopherArchives****-- Dinosaurs were able to heal significant bone injuries, new study reveals --*MANCHESTER, England (UPI) - A new study reveals that dinosaurs were able to withstand and heal from bone-crushing injuries -- the equivalent of which would surely kill humans and other mammals, absent immediate medical care. Of course, it's no surprise that the rough and tumble world of the Jurassic period featured grisly injuries. But until now, scientists hadn't been able to study those injuries in detail. As described in a new study published in the Royal Society journal Interface, paleontologists at Manchester University, in England, have employed a new type of imaging technology to reveal evidence of trauma and sickness, as well as subsequent signs of healing, preserved within dinosaur bones. "Using synchrotron imaging, we were able to detect astoundingly dilute traces of chemical signatures that reveal not only the difference between normal and healed bone, but also how the damaged bone healed," explained Dr. Phil Manning, a researcher at Manchester's School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences and co-author of the new study. "It seems dinosaurs evolved a splendid suite of defense mechanisms to help regulate the healing and repair of injuries," Manning added. "The ability to diagnose such processes some 150 million years later might well shed new light on how we can use Jurassic chemistry in the 21st Century." Co-author Jennifer Anné says the synchrotron-based imaging, which focuses a light 10 billion times brighter than the sun, has helped scientists understand new things about the way bones heal. Previously, scientists could only record morphological bone observations by physically slicing out a thin section, thus limiting a researcher's perspective and blurring the broader picture. "It's exciting to realize how little we know about bone, even after hundreds of years of research," Anné said. "The fact that information on how our own skeleton works can be explored using a 150-million-year-old dinosaur just shows how interlaced science can be."
*-- Newly discovered bacterium blocks salmonella from colonizing raw tomatoes --*WASHINGTON (UPI) - Salmonella -- the foodborne illness that, according to the CDC, is responsible for some 23,000 hospitalizations and 450 deaths every year -- doesn't just arrive via undercooked meats. Just as often, it travels with crates of contaminated fruits and vegetables: lettuce, melons, tomatoes, you name it. That's why scientists with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are excited about a newly identified benign bacterium that shows real promise in thwarting salmonella as it attempts to colonize raw tomatoes. Since 2000, more than 2,000 people in the U.S. have fallen ill as result salmonella-infected tomatoes. "The conditions in which tomatoes thrive are also the conditions in which Salmonella thrives," FDA researcher Eric W. Brown recently explained. "But we knew that if we could block salmonella from infecting the tomato plant, we could reduce its risk of infecting the person who eats the tomato." Luckily for scientists -- and tomato lovers -- the same conditions that allow salmonella to thrive also enable the growth of many kinds of benign bacterium, those that aren't harmful to human health. Researchers knew they just need to find a strain that outcompeted salmonella for real estate. They succeeded, having isolated Paenibacillus alvei. "We hypothesized that such an organism could be found that possessed the ability to outcompete or chemically destroy Salmonella," says co-researcher Jie Zheng. "After screening many hundreds of potential biocontrol strains of bacteria that were isolated from farms and natural environments in the Mid-Atlantic region, we found about 10 isolates of bacteria representing very different genera and species that could curb the growth and/or destroy Salmonella in our test assays." Brown and Zheng's important research will be detailed in the July edition of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. A manuscript is currently available online.
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