Biologists on Guam are trying to find out if mildly toxic dead mice can help eradicate an invasive species of snake that has caused millions of dollars in damages by creating power outages on the island.

Crews on Monday distributed mice packed with 80 milligrams of acetaminophen on two plots in a test to kill brown tree snakes, which were accidentally introduced to the island about 60 years ago.

Representatives from several federal agencies watched the aerial bait drop, Pacific Daily News reported.

The mice should not affect other species, said U.S. Department of Agriculture wildlife services biologist Dan Vice, who has worked on snake eradication for more than a decade.

"The risk to nontargets is slight," Vice said. "It would take 500 baits to kill a pig (or dog and) 15 baits to kill a cat."

A pilot project with 280 mice in 2010 led to more aerial bait drops that began in September. Research and the drops have cost $8 million annually with funding from the Interior and Defense departments.

An estimated 1 to 2 million snakes live on the island. Aerial bait drops might be the most efficient way to control the population without affecting deer or pigs, Vice said.

"If it proves to be successful, then we may potentially start ramping up the efforts and doing this on a larger basis across more of Guam," Vice said.

Mice were dropped Monday on two 136-acre plots, a combined area about the size of 210 football fields. Some mice were implanted with tiny radios to allow the USDA to determine whether mice were eaten.

Biologists are also tracking populations of small animals, which will increase with fewer snakes.

The mice drops are only for area where humans don't live, Vice said.

No deaths from the venomous bite of a brown tree snake have been recorded, Vice said. Most bites cause no more damage to an adult than a bee sting, he said. But Brown tree snakes cause problems by creating outages on the Guam Power Authority power grid with damage reaching $1 million to $4 million annually, according USDA documents.

Major substations use special fences to keep snakes out. Traps on fences catch about 8,000 snakes per year, Vice said.

A stable population of brown tree snakes could be disastrous to Hawaii, Vice said, and the threat of them spreading is real. Guam ports use snake-sniffing dogs to detect invasive species.

Reactivating expression of the RNA-binding protein Lin28a in mice leads to improved regrowth of hair follicles, as well as of cartilage, bone, and mesenchyme after ear and digit injuries, according to a study published in Cell Magazine last week (November 7). Harvard Medical School’s George Daley and his colleagues have shown in several models of tissue injury that “Lin28a enhances tissue repair in some adult tissues by reprogramming cellular bioenergetics,” as they wrote in their paper.

“It sounds like science fiction, but Lin28a could be part of a healing cocktail that gives adults the superior tissue repair seen in juveniles,” Daley said in a statement.

However, not every tissue injury model showed improved healing with increased expression of Lin28a. “The fact that it doesn't work sometimes is even more interesting because it raises the question why,” the University of Michigan’s Daniel Goldman, who was not a part of the study, told Nature.

Study coauthor Shyh-Chang Ng added that the perceived renewing effects of Lin28a are particularly interesting because of the RNA-binding protein’s prevalence. “Most biologists would think that you need a special factor to generate the healing pathway, but this is a thing that every cell has,” Ng told Nature.

Miniature "human brains" were grown in a laboratory and scientists hope that this will change the understanding of neurological diseases.

Structures with dimensions of pea achieved the same level of growth as in fetal nine weeks, but are not mental abilities.

Research scientists published in the journal "Nature" is already used for the understanding of rare diseases.

Neurologists defined discovery as amazing and wonderful. The human brain is one of the most complex structures in the universe. But scientists from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences were able to reproduce some of the earliest stages of development of the body in a laboratory.

They used or embryonic stem cells, or cells from the skin of adults to produce part of the embryo that develops into the brain and spinal cord - neuroectoderm. It was placed in the gel droplets to create a scaffold for the development of the tissue, and then in a rotating bioreactor, "food bath", which supplies nutrients and oxygen.

Cells were able to develop and organize in specific areas of the brain such as the cortex, retina and rarely in primary hippocampus, which is closely related to memory in a fully developed brain of an adult. Scientists are convinced that this is similar to a nearby extent (but far from perfect) brain development of an embryo until the ninth week. Tissues reached a maximum of about 4 mm after two months.

"Mini brains" survived nearly one year and not more increased because no blood flow and brain tissue only, so that the nutrients and oxygen can not penetrate to the center of the structure resembling the brain.

"Our organelles are useful for showing the pattern of brain development and to study the causes of the problem in development. Want to move on to the more common disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. They usually occur only in adults, but it was shown that hidden defects occur during brain development, "said one of the researchers, Dr Juergen Noblih.

The technique can be used to replace the mouse and rat in the study of drugs, since the new drugs can be tested on an actual brain tissue. Scientists have managed to create brain cells in a lab before, but this is the closest model to which one is reached in the creation of a human brain.

Medical research aimed at animal testing of therapies for the treatment of brain diseases are often skewed and show positive results, which are confirmed in humans - this according to a poll released Tuesday. The results of the study conducted by John Ioannidis and colleagues at Stanford University, explains why a large number of seemingly effective treatments for animals are not effective in humans.

The authors have examined 160 publications 1411 developments involving more than 4000 test animals, associated with the treatment of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease or multiple sclerosis. Only eight of the developments show noticeable results, but only two of them allow to achieve satisfactory results in the last administration when people try therapy, say researchers from Stanford. The rest of the studies were skewed by a number of problems such as no good conduct, very little amount of attempts or publishing only studies with "positive results."

Literature on studies of neurological diseases is probably very biased, according to a study published in the journal PLoS Biology. "Biased results from animal experiments may lead to ineffective or even harmful to human clinical trials or loss of money for research," the authors add. According to them, a possible explanation for this failure is in the biological and physiological differences between animals and humans, and these errors can be explained by abnormalities in research or publications for them.

Researchers prefer to publish their research in prestigious scientific journals, but they tend to emphasize only studies with positive results, which may also explain biased results.

Scientists in Japan cloned a mouse from a drop of blood. Moving blood cells taken from the tail of the mouse donor were used to create the clone, said researchers from the center Ricken Bioresources. Some time ago the same scientists have created nearly 600 exact genetic copies of a mouse.

Mice were cloned from different sources of donor cells, including white blood cells of the lymph nodes, bone marrow and liver. Japanese researchers studied whether the moving blood cells can be used for cloning. Their goal was to find an easy source of donor cells for cloning valuable scientifically types of laboratory mice.

Scientists led by Atsuo Ogura of Bioresources Rikes center in Tsukuba, blood taken from the tail of a mouse donor, isolated white blood cells and used kernel cloning experiments using the same technique as for the cloning of Dolly the sheep in Edinburgh.

The process, known as somatic cell nuclear transfer involving transfer of the nucleus from a cell in the adult body as blood cells or skin unfertilized egg, which was removed the nucleus. Scientists, whose research was published in the journal Biology of Reproduction, said that it shows for the first time that mice can be cloned using the nucleus of peripheral blood cells.

"These cells can be used to clone immediately after isolation, without requiring euthanasia of donor" complemented researchers.

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