The deeper astronomers gaze into the cosmos they find violent universe

Astronomers Describe Violent Universe
The deeper astronomers gaze into the cosmos, the more they find it's a bizarre and violent universe. The research findings from this week's annual meeting of U.S. astronomers range from blue orphaned baby stars to menacing "rogue" black holes that roam our galaxy, devouring any planets unlucky enough to be within their limited reach.

"It's an odd universe we live in," said Vanderbilt University astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann. She presented her theory on rogue black holes at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Austin, Texas, earlier this week.

It should be noted that she's not worried and you shouldn't be either. The odds of one of these black holes swallowing up Earth or the sun or wreaking other havoc is somewhere around 1 in 10 quadrillion in any given year.

This is the glory of the universe," added J. Craig Wheeler, president of the astronomy association. "What is odd and what is normal is changing."

Just five years ago, astronomers were gazing at a few thousand galaxies where stars formed in a bizarre and violent manner. Now the number is in the millions, thanks to more powerful telescopes and supercomputers to crunch the crucial numbers streaming in from space, said Wheeler, a University of Texas astronomer.

Scientists are finding that not only are they improving their understanding of the basic questions of the universe -- such as how did it all start and where is it all going -- they also keep stumbling upon unexpected, hard-to-explain cosmic quirks and the potential, but comfortably distant, dangers.

Much of what they keep finding plays out like a stellar version of a violent Quentin Tarantino movie. The violence surrounds and approaches Earth, even though our planet is safe and "in a pretty quiet neighborhood," said Wheeler, author of the book "Cosmic Catastrophes."

One example is an approaching gas cloud discussed at the meeting Friday. The cloud has a mass 1 million times that of the sun. It is 47 quadrillion miles away. But it's heading toward our Milky Way galaxy at 150 miles per second. And when it hits, there will be fireworks that form new stars and "really light up the neighborhood," said astronomer Jay Lockman at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia.

But don't worry. It will hit a part of the Milky Way far from Earth and the biggest collision will be 40 million years in the future.

The giant cloud has been known for more than 40 years, but only now have scientists realized how fast it's moving. So fast, Lockman said, that "we can see it sort of plowing up a wave of galactic material in front of it."

When astronomers this week unveiled a giant map of mysterious dark matter in a supercluster of galaxies, they explained that the violence of the cramped-together galaxies is so great that there is now an accepted vocabulary for various types of cosmic brutal behavior.

The gravitational force between the clashing galaxies can cause "slow strangulation," in which crucial gas is gradually removed from the victim galaxy. "Stripping" is a more violent process in which the larger galaxy rips gas from the smaller one. And then there's "harassment," which is a quick fly-by encounter, said astronomer Meghan Gray of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.

Gray's presentation essentially showed the victims of galaxy-on-galaxy violence. She and her colleagues are trying to figure out the how the dirty deeds were done.

In the past few days, scientists have unveiled plenty to ooh and aah over:

* Photos of "blue blobs" that astronomers figure are orphaned baby stars. They're called orphans because they were "born in the middle of nowhere" instead of within gas clouds, said Catholic University of America astronomer Duilia F. de Mello.

* A strange quadruplet of four hugging stars, which may eventually help astronomers understand better how stars form.

* A young star surrounded by dust, that may eventually become a planet. It's nicknamed "the moth," because the interaction of star and dust are shaped like one.

* A spiral galaxy with two pairs of arms spinning in opposite directions, like a double pinwheel. It defies what astronomers believe should happen. It is akin to one of those spinning-armed flamingo lawn ornaments, said astronomer Gene Byrd of the University of Alabama.

* The equivalent of post-menopausal stars giving unlikely birth to new planets. Most planets form soon after a sun, but astronomers found two older stars, one at least 400 million years old, with new planets.

"Intellectually and spiritually, if I can use that word with a lower case 's,' it's awe-inspiring," Wheeler said. "It's a great universe."

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The Violent Universe

It s a bizarre and violent universe
The deeper astronomers gaze into the cosmos, the more they find it's a bizarre and violent universe. The research findings from this week's annual meeting of U.S. astronomers range from blue orphaned baby stars to menacing "rogue" black holes that roam our galaxy, devouring any planets unlucky enough to be within their limited reach.

Researchers seeking new treatments for heart disease

Researchers Restart Rat Heart

Researchers seeking new treatments for heart disease managed to grow a rat heart in the lab and start it beating.

"While it still sounds like science fiction, we've hopefully opened a new door in the notion that we can build these tissues and one day provide options for patients with end-stage disease," said Dr. Doris Taylor, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota. "We're not there yet, but at least now we have another tool in our tool belt."

Taylor led the team whose research appeared in Sunday's online edition of the journal Nature Medicine.

Scientists have worked for years for ways to grow body parts. Many efforts have focused on heart valves as an alternative to the plastic or animal valves that wear out after being implanted in humans.

An estimated 5 million people live with heart failure and about 550,000 new cases are diagnosed each year in the United States. Approximately 50,000 die annually waiting for a heart donor.

Taylor said in a telephone interview that her team began by trying to determine if it were possible to transplant rat heart cells. They took the hearts from eight newborn rats and removed all the cells. Left behind was a gelatin-like matrix shaped like a heart and containing conduits where the blood vessels had been. Scientists then injected cells back into this scaffold -- muscle cells and endothelial cells, which line blood vessels.

The muscle cells covered the matrix walls and lined up together, while the endothelial cells found their way inside to coat the blood vessels, she said. Then the hearts were stimulated electrically.

"By two days we saw tiny, microscopic contractions, and by seven to eight days there were contractions large enough to see with the naked eye," she said. The tiny hearts could pump liquid at about one-fourth the rate of a normal fetal rat's heart.

"Obviously we have a long way to go," Taylor said. But the long-term hope, she said, is that a similar process could work with either human hearts from cadavers or pig hearts, with their cells stripped off and replaced by cells from the person needing a heart transplant to avoid rejection.

The next step is to take a pig heart, strip away the cells and repopulate it with cells from a pig to see if it will work in the larger heart.

Dr. John Mayer Jr., a heart specialist and researcher at Children's Hospital in Boston, said the report was an "important paper that advances the ball down the road." But, he added, "It's pretty long road."

Mayer, who was not part of Taylor's research team, noted that this was done in a small animal and it remains to be seen whether the same can be done in larger ones. He also wondered whether blood would flow freely, without clotting, through the reconstructed blood vessels.

"I think this is an important contribution, with more work to be done," Mayer said in a telephone interview.

In her research paper, Taylor also reports that the researchers are working on reseeding cells into other organs, including lungs, liver and kidneys.

The research was funded by the University of Minnesota and the Medtronic Foundation, the charitable arm of a medical company that makes heart devices such as stents and defibrillators.

New treatment for heart attacks
A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has developed a potential new treatment for heart attacks. The therapy inhibits fluid leakage from cardiac blood vessels following a heart attack and thereby significantly prevents long-term heart damage and improves survival.

"Immediately following a heart attack, blood vessels near the site of injury become leaky, causing fluid accumulation in the healthy area of the heart surrounding the injured site," says Immunology Professor David A. Cheresh, Ph.D., who led the research with postdoctoral fellow Sara Weis, Ph.D at The Scripps Research Institute. This permeability response is devastating to normal heart tissue.

"Until now," continues Cheresh, "nobody has realized the extent to which this leak response damages heart tissue and causes long-term tissue injury. We discovered a way to block this process and thus save heart tissue from irreversible damage."

Using laboratory models that are designed to mimic the pathology of heart attacks in humans, Cheresh, Weis, and their colleagues found that a single dose of a compound designed to block this fluid leakage (which is called edema) can, even if given as late as six hours after the event, drastically reduce tissue injury and increase long-term survival following a heart attack.

A biopharmaceutical company, TargeGen Inc. in San Diego, is finalizing preclinical studies to translate these initial research findings into practical human therapies. Using extensive preclinical models that mirror human heart attacks, TargeGen scientists report that 40 to 60 percent reductions in infarct (tissue injury) size with a small molecule drug that inhibits vascular leak and edema. Based on the encouraging preclinical efficacy and safety studies, TargeGen plans to initiate a combined Phase I/II human clinical trial in the second half of 2004 for patients undergoing an acute heart attack.

In addition to Cheresh and Weis, the team included scientists from St. Elizabeth's Medical Center at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts; the Department of Radiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston; and the private company TargeGen, Inc. of San Diego, California.