Feb. 25, 2013 — Particles from the upper atmosphere trapped in a deep pile of Antarctic snow hold clear chemical traces of global meteorological events, a team from the University of California, San Diego and a colleague from France have found.
The chemical signature of global El Niño events opens a window to reconstructing paleoclimate cycles. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California – San Diego)
Anomalies in oxygen found in sulfate particles coincide with several episodes of the world-wide disruption of weather known as El Niño and can be distinguished from similar signals left by the eruption of huge volcanoes, the team reports in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the week of February 25.
“Our ability to link of reliable chemical signatures to well-known events will make it possible to reconstruct similar short-term fluctuations in atmospheric conditions from the paleohistory preserved in polar ice,” said Mark Thiemens, Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences and professor of chemistry and biochemistry, who directed the research and dug up much of the snow.
Thiemens, graduate student Justin McCabe and colleague Joel Savarino of Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l’Environnment in Grenoble, France, excavated a pit 6 meters deep in the snow near the South Pole, with shovels.
“At an elevation of 10,000 feet and 55 degrees below zero, this was quite a task,” Thiemens said. Their efforts exposed a 22 year record of snowfall, a pileup of individual flakes, some of which crystallized around particles of sulfate that formed in the tropics.
Atmospheric sulfates form when sulfur dioxide — one sulfur and two oxygen molecules — mixes with air and gains two more oxygen molecules. This can happen a number of different ways, some of which favor the addition of variant forms of oxygen, or isotopes, with and extra neutron or two, previous work by Thiemens’s group has shown.
Unlike polar ice, which compresses months of precipitation so tightly that resolution is measured in years, relatively fluffy snow allowed the team to resolve this record of atmospheric chemistry on a much finer scale.
A study led by researchers from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine has found a correlation between vitamin D3 serum levels and subsequent incidence of Type 1 diabetes. The six-year study of blood levels of nearly 2,000 individuals suggests a preventive role for vitamin D3 in this disease. The research appears the December issue of Diabetologia, a publication of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD).
“Previous studies proposed the existence of an association between vitamin D deficiency and risk of and Type 1 diabetes, but this is the first time that the theory has been tested in a way that provides the dose-response relationship,” said Cedric Garland, DrPH, FACE, professor in UCSD’s Department of Family and Preventive Medicine.
This study used samples from millions of blood serum specimens frozen by the Department of Defense Serum Registry for disease surveillance. The researchers thawed and analyzed 1000 samples of serum from healthy people who later developed type 1 diabetes and 1000 healthy controls whose blood was drawn on or near the same date but who did not develop type 1 diabetes. By comparing the serum concentrations of the predominant circulating form of vitamin D — 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) — investigators were able to determine the optimal serum level needed to lower an individual’s risk of developing type 1 diabetes.
Based mainly on results of this study, Garland estimates that the level of 25(OH)D needed to prevent half the cases of type 1 diabetes is 50 ng/ml. A consensus of all available data indicates no known risk associated with this dosage.
“While there are a few conditions that influence vitamin D metabolism, for most people, 4000 IU per day of vitamin D3 will be needed to achieve the effective levels,” Garland suggested. He urges interested patients to ask their health care provider to measure their serum 25(OH)D before increasing vitamin D3 intake.
“This beneficial effect is present at these intakes only for vitamin D3,” cautioned Garland. “Reliance should not be placed on different forms of vitamin D and mega doses should be avoided, as most of the benefits for prevention of disease are for doses less than 10,000 IU/day.”
Garland’s co-authors from UC San Diego School of Medicine and the Naval Health Research Center include Edward Gorham, PhD; Sharif Mohr, PhD; and Heather Hofflich, DO; Alina Burgi and Kenneth Zeng of the Naval Health Research Center, and Camillo Ricordi MD, of the University of Miami Diabetes Research Institute.
The study was supported by a Congressional allocation to the Diabetes Research Institute of the University of Miami through the Naval Health Research Center, San Diego, California.
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Journal Reference:
E. D. Gorham, C. F. Garland, A. A. Burgi, S. B. Mohr, K. Zeng, H. Hofflich, J. J. Kim, C. Ricordi. Lower prediagnostic serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentration is associated with higher risk of insulin-requiring diabetes: a nested case–control study. Diabetologia, 2012; 55 (12): 3224 DOI: 10.1007/s00125-012-2709-8
James Holmes brilliant? Not according to his Salk Institute supervisor John Jacobson: “His grades were mediocre. I’ve heard him described as brilliant. This is extremely inaccurate.”
Accused movie shooter James Holmes wasn’t always the whip-smart whiz kid he’s being made out to be, at least according to one former supervisor.
John Jacobson helped guide Holmes during a 2006 summer internship at UC San Diego’s prestigious Salk Institute and said the suspected gunman in the Colorado movie theater massacre was thick-headed, uncommunicative and irresponsible.
“He should not have gotten into the summer program,” Jacobson, 37, told the Los Angeles Times. “His grades were mediocre. I’ve heard him described as brilliant. This is extremely inaccurate.”
Holmes’ high school transcripts showed Bs and B+s, and no Advanced Placement classes, Jacobson told The Times.
He was accepted because his resume indicated he had done some computer programming, Jacobson said.
Holmes had just graduated from Westview High School in San Diego and had not yet started his undergraduate studies at UC Riverside. He was assigned to work with Jacobson writing computer code for an experiment but refused to follow the graduate student’s instructions, Jacobson said.
“My experience with him was quite bad,” said Jacobson, who’s now a Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego in philosophy and cognitive sciences.
The experiment — involving a game of rock-paper-scissors — was in Flash, a multimedia computer platform, but Holmes wouldn’t use it and insisted on an older method.
“He just refused,” Jacobson said. “Finally, I said, ‘Do it any way you can.’”
For the next six weeks, Jacobson dropped by the lab each day to make sure Holmes was present. He determined that Holmes was extremely receptive to compliments, and that was “how I got him to do the little that he did,” Jacobson said.
Ultimately, Holmes failed to finish the task, he said.
“He never completed the project. What he gave me was a complete mess,” Jacobson told The Times. “I basically fired him.”
He described Holmes as “a shy, pretty socially inept person,” and said he tried at one point to introduce Holmes around, taking him to another floor where a high-school girl was working.
“He just had no interest,” Jacobson recalled. “I’m trying to introduce him to the other high-school students, and he’s incredibly uncommunicative. … I attributed all this to adolescent shyness, maybe feeling intimidated to people around him.”
In a now widely distributed video presentation from the end of that summer — one that shows an awkward but seemingly confident Holmes discussing temporal illusions — Holmes named Jacobson as his mentor.
“That is not true. That’s almost slanderous,” Jacobson told The Times. “I was never his mentor.”
Seven-year-old Serenity Brydon visits a makeshift memorial to the vicitims of the mass shooting in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater.
The military-style assault rifle that James Holmes used to massacre moviegoers Friday malfunctioned inside the theater — a stroke of luck amid the horror that may have saved numerous lives, officials revealed Sunday.
The AR-15 assault rifle police say Holmes was toting was capable of firing 50 to 60 rounds a minute.
The Batman-obsessed suspect could have stood in the front of the cinema and raked the rows of seated filmgoers had the gun not jammed.
Sources told the Daily News that the nearly 200 pounds of ammo were shipped to his apartment by FedEx and UPS.
Holmes apparently was forced to switch to his 12-gauge shotgun: many of the 58 people wounded in the attack were hit with buckshot, according to surgeons. Holmes also had two Glock pistols.
Veronica Moser, the youngest victim, was only 6.
Coloradans mourned the 12 victims and sought comfort at Sunday services and at a prayer vigil at the Aurora municipal center, and President Obama flew to the grief-stricken town to comfort victims — all as Holmes remained in solitary confinement in the women’s wing of the Arapahoe Detention Center, awaiting his first court appearance Monday to answer multiple murder charges.
Cameras will be allowed in the courtroom.
New details emerged Sunday about Holmes’ appearance when he was brought to the jail, where he has since been kept on 23-hour-a-day lockdown.
Tasha Taylor, who said a relative of hers is in the jail two cells down from the accused killer, described him when he first came into the lockup restrained to a wheelchair.
“He was brought in wearing his body armor,” Taylor said. “Once they got his armor off, his body was painted red. They had to shower him right away.”
Cops were probing the suspect’s past — and his computers — trying to find a reason why the 24-year-old grad student would meticulously plan a mass murder at the midnight premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises.”
More evidence of Holmes’ fixation with Batman emerged. Sources told The News a Batman poster hung in his apartment and The Associated Press reported a Batman mask was also found there. Cops discovered the items after bomb techs defused and safely removed a complicated series of explosive booby traps.
Holmes, who offered no resistance to arresting officers early Friday, reportedly told them “I am the Joker” — Batman’s sadistic nemesis.
Another poster in the apartment — visible through his window until cops put up shields — advertised “Soldiers of Misfortune,” a DVD about professional paintball players.
Holmes WHEELCHAIRED INTO JAIL- scrubbed from news!!!
unconscious. LIKE SHARE REVOLUTION. Just to confirm how big a deal this is, the New York Daily News removed it the next day! Love the official story on this one. Check out the other videos for more crazy shit like gas cans exploding in a theater he wasn’t even in, injuring people. – Thomas Brinkley
People are noticing that he was witnessed being brought into the jail wearing body armor, and if true, it means all that staged body armor strewn out back wasn’t actually stripped off him. Obviously, it wouldn’t be easy to strip off an unconscious 6’3 man.
