Oltipraz

Oltipraz is a drug that was originally used to treat intestinal worms. It was later found to prevent a broad variety of cancers (1). This was attributed to its ability to upregulate cellular detoxification and repair mechanisms.

Researchers eventually discovered that oltipraz acts by activating Nrf2, the same transcription factor activated by ionizing radiation and polyphenols (2, 3, 4). Nrf2 activation mounts a broad cellular protective response that appears to reduce the risk of multiple health problems.

A recent paper in Diabetologia illustrates this (5). Investigators put mice on a long-term refined high-fat diet, with or without oltipraz. These carefully crafted diets are very unhealthy indeed, and when fed to rodents they rapidly induce fat gain and something that looks similar to human metabolic syndrome (insulin resistance, abdominal adiposity, blood lipid disturbances). Adding oltipraz to the diet prevented the fat gain, insulin resistance and inflammatory changes that occurred in the refined high-fat diet group.

The difference in fasting insulin was remarkable. The mice taking oltipraz had 1/7 the fasting insulin of the refined high-fat diet comparison group, and 1/3 the fasting insulin of the low-fat comparison group! Yet their glucose tolerance was normal, indicating that they were not low on insulin due to pancreatic damage. The low-fat diet they used in this study was also refined, which is why the two control groups (high-fat and low-fat) didn't diverge more in body fatness and other parameters. If they had used a group fed unrefined rodent chow as the comparator, the differences between groups would have been larger.

This shows that in addition to preventing cancer, Nrf2 activation can attenuate the metabolic damage caused by an unhealthy diet in rodents. Oltipraz illustrates the power of the cellular hormesis response. We can exploit this pathway naturally using polyphenols and other chemicals found in whole plant foods.

my next project....

so when we moved from charleston, i sold our china cabinet....now i need one b/c i have no where to store our china, wine glasses, or silver.  yesterday, walker and i were out hunting at a local "junk" store to see what options are out there (don't you love that sexy baby bjorn!!  ha!! it's the only way i can go through an antique store w/ a baby...strollers are just too big for the aisle...we snapped a pic to harass my husband w/ what i do w/ our son while he is working!!)

i don't want anything new b/c a) i am on a budget and b) i like the idea of creating something of my own.  i found tons of china cabinets that are in the $200 range and thanks to all my our blogging friends, i have lots of inspiration....
love how rachel did these two cabinets in her house!!  loving the stripes she painted!!

 and if you haven't seen the before of this beauty, you are missing out!!

bryn definitely caught my eye w/ her 10 minute makeover....using marbleized paper!

and who can get eddie's DIY project out of their head??!!

i found a piece that is going to work...it's heinous, seriously, but has lots of potential!
below, is what it resembles- only think china cabinet-1980, dark, knotty wood, and bad hardware!
i have a pic but i am scared to show y'all b/c you will think i have lost my mind!!  

i want to paint it and either add mirror or a turquoise pop like these two guys.....

now, i just need a truck to go and pick up the piece....hopefully, it's still there!!  my mother-in-law assured me no one would buy it b/c it was so ugly!! ha ha!  hopefully I can get it this weekend and will share pics!

Great Turnout at the Youth Ambassador Training!

Around 30 Buffalonians came out for the Youth Ambassador Training last Thursday at the Innovation Center on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. HKHC Buffalo and the Massachusetts Avenue Project worked with local high school students to plan and run a meeting that prepared young people in Buffalo to participate in the city's Green Code Process.

The training included land use planning activities, including a map activity that allowed the students to design their own city. Students were given a quick crash-course in land use and zoning - then given maps to design a city that they would want to live in.

Other activities included P/P/P - Policy, Program, Project. This activity helped students to understand the difference between the three, and narrowed their focus for what the Green Code meetings would be about.

Finally, students drafted their own talking points for the Green Code meetings. They asked themselves what is good about my neighborhood? What should change? Each student committed to going to at least one meeting, and found partners that were attending the same meeting. Students were able to create an accountability network to motivate and support each other at the meetings.

A big thank you to the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo for supporting the youth training. And thanks to all the great youth that came out! We hope to see all of Buffalo at the Green Code meetings!

Dangerous by Design

I recently read this article, which describes hundreds of infants (and adults) mistakenly being over-radiated in hospitals.

Like others who were interviewed in the article and those who commented on it, I too am shocked and outraged. But not for the reasons you might think.

The problem is the manufacturers of this machine violated one of the most central tenants of systems design, and that is:

The system should be designed to help the user prevent errors

These CT scanners are clearly not well-designed to help radiology technicians avoid making mistakes. It should be difficult, not easy, to overdose an infant. There should be a scale on the exam table - if the patient is below a certain weight the radiation level will be limited, and only by entering an override code can that the dose be increased.

The system should run through a step-by-step procedure with the technician, requiring them to verbally say, "Yes, I have properly positioned the infant." "Yes, I have shielded them." etc.

Really, very simple stuff - but could help prevent an avalanche of errors.

I agree that increased licensing / re-certification of techs is also a good idea, but they still need to be using  systems designed to help them make fewer errors in the first place.

The one about CERN

About a month ago I visited CERN, arguably the most famous research organization in Europe. It is the place where the World Wide Web has been invented, and the home of the Large Hadron Collider. I was very excited about the trip, much like Sheldon Cooper. Here are some facts which were new to me:

... about CERN:

• CERN was founded after the WWII by a bunch of European countries. They were exhausted by the war, and the only way to catch up with the USA and USSR in fundamental science was to join forces.
• The original name was Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), which abbreviated to CERN. Later the name has been officially changed to European laboratory for particle physics, which is both more relevant and less fearful for the locals, however the brand CERN is used now even in official documents.
• There are almost 3,000 full-time employees, but most of them are engineers and not scientists. There are a lot of visiting researchers though.
• There are 20 member states now (primarily EU states), and 6 observer states (such as Russia and the USA).
• CERN's annual budget is about € 1 billion, it is funded by the member states in proportion to their economical power, e.g. Germany gives 20% of the money.
• The budget money are spent to infrastructure and support, all the individual experiments are funded by research groups and their universities.
• In spite of the USA is not a member state, it leads on the number of researchers who work on CERN projects (more than thousand), second is Germany, third is Russia (yes, we still have a good shape in particle physics). It turned out that everybody at CERN spoke Russian, even the janitor. :)

... about the LHC:

• It is in fact a circular tunnel of 27 km in circumference lying 175 m beneath the ground.
• The tunnel was used before the LHC, it was build in 1983 for the Large Electron-Positron Collider. In 2008 it was upgraded to be able to accelerate heavy particles like protons to become the Large Hadron Collider (remind that proton and neutron are thousand times heavier than electron).
• The tunnel is about 4 meters in diameter, one can walk there or ride a bike.
• The tunnel encapsulates two small pipes for the particles that intersect at four points (to make the tracks' lengths equal, like in speed scating arenas). There are more then a thousand of electric magnet dipoles along the pipe. They are not that big as I imagined before.
• It is nearly vacuum and zero temperature inside the tubes.
• Proton beams are not generated inside the LHC. First, they are accelerated in the linear accelerator and almost reach the speed of light c. While the speed is rising, it becomes harder and harder to increase it since it cannot overcome the speed of light. Then they are accelerated in the small circular accelerator, and only after that they are injected into the LHC where during 40 minutes the beams are accelerated to speed as much close to c as possible.
• When accelerated, the beams are being observed during 10 hours. They suffer about 10,000 collisions per second, about 20 pairs of protons collide each time. Since the speed is large, the energy of that collisions is enormous.
• The collisions take place within special locations called detectors. We visited a control centre of one of them, ATLAS. A detector has multiple layers, each able to register certain kind of particles, like photons.
• Ten thousand collision per second would yield really big amount of data, so only few of them are selected to be logged. I don't know how they select those collisions, machine learning might be used. :)
• All the collected data are spread into servers all over the world. An authorized researcher may log in to the grid network and execute her script to analyse the data.

... about Higgs boson:

• Higgs boson is a hypothetical particle, existence of which would prove the standard model of particle physics.
• Higgs boson appears as a result of collision of two protons and large amount of energy. The protons in the LHC are accelerated enough to produce theoretically sufficient energy.
• Higgs boson is very heavy and thus unstable. In theory, it decays into either four muons or two photons. So, if there will be two counter-directed light beams registered by the detector, this will be an evidence of the boson. See the picture below for example of likely detector output in case of the boson shows up.
• Scientist say that if Higgs boson would not be detected, all the modern knowledge on particle physics will crush. They will be obliged to develop a new theory from scratch.
• There are no published results that report on Higgs boson detection so far...

Don't you want to be a theoretical physicist now? =)