Ridiculous Planking Moments

Some of these ideas are crazy and ridiculous. How do people get so creative and fearless?

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Window Help: How to Cut and Paste? David Lim, Auckland, New Zealand

Right click on the image and save it to your computer. It is a GIF animated file, really cool to be used with your email attachment!

How Swine Flue Outbreak Emerged? (Mexico, Auckland, New Zealand)

Flu viruses mutate over time causing small changes to proteins on their surface called antigens. If the immune system has met a particular strain of the virus before, it is likely to have some immunity; but if the antigens are new to the immune system, it will be weakened.

The influenza A virus can mutate in two different ways; antigenic drift, in which existing antigens are subtly altered, and antigenic shift, in which two or more strains combine. Antigenic drift causes slight flu mutations year on year, from which humans have partial, but not complete, immunity. By contrast, the new strain of H1N1 appears to have originated via antigenic shift in Mexican pigs

The name "swine flu" is a slight misnomer as it is believed pigs acted as a mixing pot for several flu strains, containing genetic material from pigs, birds and humans. Most humans have never been exposed to some of the antigens involved in the new strain of flu, giving it the potential to cause a pandemic.

The new virus has made the jump from pigs to humans and has demonstrated it can also pass from human to human. This is why it is demanding so much attention from health authorities. The virus passes from human to human like other types of flu, either through coughing, sneezing, or by touching infected surfaces, although little is known about how the virus acts on humans.

Swine Flue the Baics (Auckland, New Zealand, Mexico) Facts

Symptoms usually similar to seasonal flu - but deaths recorded in Mexico

It is a new version of the H1N1 strain which caused the 1918 flu pandemic

Too early to say whether it will lead to a pandemic

Current treatments do work, but there is no vaccine

Good personal hygiene, such as washing hands, covering nose when sneezing advised

FLU PANDEMICS

1918: The Spanish flu pandemic remains the most devastating outbreak of modern times. Caused by a form of the H1N1 strain of flu, it is estimated that up to 40% of the world's population were infected, and more than 50 million people died, with young adults particularly badly affected

1957: Asian flu killed two million people. Caused by a human form of the virus, H2N2, combining with a mutated strain found in wild ducks. The impact of the pandemic was minimised by rapid action by health authorities, who identified the virus, and made vaccine available speedily. The elderly were particularly vulnerable

Health Science News: em cell study gives hope for delaying menopause

4:00AM Tuesday Apr 14, 2009

Women may one day be able to delay the menopause, after a study showing that it is possible to prolong the working life of ovaries by transplanting female stem cells that develop into mature eggs.

The findings also raise the prospect of treating some female infertility where the ovaries do not produce eggs. The hope is that one day stem cell transplants could replenish the fresh eggs in infertile women.

The accepted dogma in reproductive biology was that female mammals are born with a finite lifetime store of about two million egg-producing follicles. In humans, this number has fallen to about 400,000 by puberty, and at menopause too few eggs remain to permit fertility.

Four years ago United States scientists showed it was possible to obtain stem cells from the ovaries of adult women and grow them into mature egg cells.

Now scientists in China have shown that it is possible to isolate stem cells from immature and mature ovaries of mice, store the cells in the laboratory, and transplant them into sterile females to enable them to give birth to healthy offspring.

Research by Professor Ji Wu and colleagues at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, published in the journal Nature Cell Biology, showed that it is possible to separate special cells in mice ovaries that seem to function as stem cells for the female germ-line cells in the eggs. These cells have the potential to divide indefinitely and can be stored for years.

The scientists isolated female germ-line stem cells of newborn mice and adult females. They cultured them for up to 15 months and six months respectively before transplanting into sterile mice, which gave birth to healthy offspring.

Professor Azim Surani, of the Gurdon Institute at Cambridge University, said the results have important implications for women who do not produce mature eggs. It might be possible, he said, to isolate these stem cells from a woman earlier in life so that she could have children later.

Coming soon to New Zealand...