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PepsiCo Pursues Ancient Leaf as Cola ‘Breakthrough’

By Matthew Craze and Duane D. Stanford

Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) — A leaf the Guarani Indians of Paraguay’s jungles used to sweeten drinks for centuries may help Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. revive flagging sales in the $320 billion-a-year global soft-drink industry.

The Food and Drug Administration is poised to act on allowing a zero-calorie sweetener derived from the stevia plant grown in Paraguay and China. Approval may allow the world’s two largest soda makers to reverse three years of U.S. soft-drink sales declines with beverages containing the natural extract, according to Mariann Montagne, an analyst at Minneapolis-based Thrivent Asset Management.

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Breathe in deeply, please

From The Economist print edition

Stem-cell medicine takes a step forward

IN THE hierarchy of transplant surgery, replacing a bronchus (the passage from the main windpipe, the trachea, into a lung) does not sound difficult compared with, say, plumbing in a new heart. In fact, until a few months ago, it had never been attempted. The reason was not that the surgery itself would be hard, but that the tissue in question, which is the first line of defence against the bacteria and viruses that come with every lungful of air, has a remarkably active immune response. So active, indeed, that if you transferred part of an airway from one person to another, the resulting immunological conflict would probably kill the recipient. Since a weak bronchus, though debilitating, is seldom life-threatening, transplant surgeons have left well-enough alone.

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Nanotunes

The Economist print edition

Nanotubes made of carbon find an unexpected use

CARBON nanotubes have been all the rage in chemistry over the past decade, but actual applications are thin on the ground. The tubes (cylinders a few billionths of a metre across, whose walls are made of carbon atoms) have found their way into tennis racquets and bicycles’ handlebars, where they provide strength and stiffness. But Lilliputian nanoradios, nanomotors and the like have, so far, been confined to the laboratory.

With luck, that fate will be avoided by the latest addition to the list. Carbon nanotubes, it turns out, can be used to make paper-thin loudspeakers. As they report in a forthcoming issue of Nano Letters, a group of researchers led by Jiang Kaili of Tsinghua University in Beijing have developed a transparent film made of nanotubes. When electrodes are attached to the ends of this film, and a signal-carrying current is passed through it, the result is a sound that matches the signal. Carbon-nanotube speakers play music with a fidelity similar to that of conventional loudspeakers. What is more, they continue to play even while they are being bent and stretched.

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Second Life affair ends in divorce

LONDON, England (CNN) — A British couple who married in a lavish Second Life wedding ceremony are to divorce after one of them had an alleged “affair” in the online world.

Amy Taylor, 28, said she had caught husband David Pollard, 40, having sex with an animated woman. The couple, who met in an Internet chatroom in 2003, are now separated.

“I went mad — I was so hurt. I just couldn’t believe what he’d done,” Taylor told the Western Morning News. “It may have started online, but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much now it is over.”

Second Life allows users to create alter egos known as “avatars” and interact with other players, forming relationships, holding down jobs and trading products and services for a virtual currency convertible into real life dollars.

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Not the cure for AIDS

By Miriam Falco, CNN Medical Managing Editor

A German hospital announced this week that a 42-year old American living in Berlin who did not want to be identified had come to them three years ago for treatment. It was determined that he had acute leukemia (blood cancer) and was HIV positive too.

After a bone marrow transplant, it appears that not only did the man’s cancer go away, so did the virus that causes AIDS. This has been reported worldwide as a “cure” for AIDS. But even the doctors involved in this case say they don’t know if they cured this man of HIV. So what’s all the fuss about? Should HIV patients be treated with a bone marrow transplant?

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Scientists hope to clone extinct species

TOKYO, Japan (CNN) — Japanese scientists have produced clones of mice that have been dead and frozen for 16 years — a feat that could lead researchers to one day resurrect long-extinct species, such as the mammoth.

Until now, scientists have only been able to produce clones using cells from live animals. This is how researchers created Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult animal.

Researchers had thought that frozen cells were unusable because ice crystals would have damaged the DNA. That belief would rule out the possibility of resurrecting extinct animals from their frozen remains.

But the latest research — published in the journal, Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences — shows that scientists may have overcome the obstacle.

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Brain injury gives local mom a “foreign” accent

By Marc Ramirez, Seattle Times

At the hospital, all the doctors and nurses asked her the same questions: Where are you from?

Port Angeles, she said.

No — we mean, where were you born?

Well — Crescent City, California.

But you have an accent.

That’s why I’m here.

After a serious accident in 1981, life had become fairly normal for CindyLou Romberg, a caregiver and motorcycle enthusiast living in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. All that changed last year, when out of nowhere, she began talking like someone who’d grown up on the European continent.

Ever since, Romberg, 51, who has never studied a foreign language or been to any other country but Canada, has spoken in markedly accented English that sounds to some like German, French or Russian. On the phone, she’s had to convince family and friends of her identity; in person, she’s stopped trying to convince strangers who find her accent adorable that she’s not from elsewhere.

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Spacecraft to probe edge of solar system

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — A small NASA spacecraft embarks on a two-year mission this weekend to give scientists their first view of the happenings at the edge of the solar system.

NASA hopes its new Ibex probe will help explain why the sun’s protective heliosphere is shrinking.

The Ibex probe, short for Interstellar Boundary Explorer, will study a chaotic region in space where the solar wind from the sun clashes with cold gases from interstellar space.

The solar wind, a stream of charged particles spewing from the sun at 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) per hour, carves out a protective bubble around the solar system. This bubble known as the heliosphere shields against most dangerous cosmic radiation that would otherwise interfere with human spaceflight.

Scientists recently discovered that the solar wind pressure is at its weakest level in 50 years, although the exact reason remains a mystery. Ibex could help confirm whether the heliosphere is shrinking.

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