UPI NewsTrack Health and Science News

New dinosaur-like species is discovered

SALT LAKE CITY, March 3 (UPI) -- An international team of paleontologists says it has discovered a new species of dinosaur-like animals called Asilisaurus kongwe.

The first bones of the new species -- part of a newly recognized group known as silesaurs -- came from the Triassic Period in Africa and were found in 2007, scientists said.

The team -- including included Randall Irmis, curator of paleontology at the Utah Museum of Nature History -- said Asilisaurus falls just outside of the dinosaur family tree. The species lived approximately 10 million years earlier than the oldest known dinosaurs.

Fossil bones of at least 14 individuals were recovered from a single bone bed in southern Tanzania. The researchers said the species stood about 1.5 to 3 feet tall at the hips, were 3 to 10 feet long and weighed about 22 to 66 pounds. They walked on four legs and most likely ate plants or a combination of plants and meat.

"The crazy thing about this new dinosaur discovery is that it is so very different from what we all were expecting, especially the fact that it is herbivorous and walked on four legs, Irmis said.

The discovery that involved scientists from the University of Texas at Austin, the Burke Museum and the University of Washington in Seattle, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Iziko South African Museum and Germany's Humboldt University appears in the journal Nature.

Drug cuts bone marrow nausea, vomiting

ORLANDO, Fla., March 3 (UPI) -- A drug can dramatically reduce both nausea and vomiting when combined with other anti-nausea drugs in bone marrow transplant patients, U.S. researchers say.

Researchers at Loyola University Health System report bone marrow transplant patients say two of the most debilitating side effects of the treatment are nausea and vomiting caused by chemotherapy and radiation.

Dr. Patrick Stiff said 73 percent of patients receiving the drug aprepitant experienced no vomiting during the study period, compared with 23 percent of patients who received a placebo. Both groups also received a standard anti-nausea drug.

Forty-nine percent of aprepitant patients experienced no vomiting and little or no nausea, compared with 15 percent of the placebo group.

Aprepitant, or Emend, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2003 to help prevent and control vomiting and nausea from chemotherapy, Stiff said.

However, there previously had been only a few small studies on the benefit of aprepitant in bone marrow transplant patients, who receive higher doses of chemotherapy than most other cancer patients.

"We did not know how effective aprepitant would be for bone marrow transplant patients," Stiff said in a statement. "We now believe this should become a standard part of patients' care."

The findings were presented in the BMT Tandem Meetings in Orlando, Fla.

Thick masses of buried ice found on Mars

PASADENA, Calif., March 3 (UPI) -- NASA scientists say they've identified thick masses of buried ice in the middle latitudes of Mars and radar mapping suggests the ice is commonplace.

The radar images were provided by the space agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is charting the hidden glaciers and ice-filled valleys that were first confirmed by radar two years ago.

NASA said the subsurface ice deposits extend for hundreds of miles in a region about halfway from the equator to the martian north pole.

"We have mapped the whole area with a high density of coverage," said Jeffrey Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. "These are not isolated features. In this area, the radar is detecting thick subsurface ice in many locations. The hypothesis is the whole area was covered with an ice sheet during a different climate period, and when the climate dried out, these deposits remained only where they had been covered by a layer of debris protecting the ice from the atmosphere."

The researchers said the ice could contain a record of environmental conditions at the time of its deposition and flow, making the ice masses a possible target for a future mission with digging capability.

Plaut and colleagues presented the research this week near Houston during the 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

Sea squirt may be good Alzheimer's model

SAN DIEGO, March 3 (UPI) -- U.S. medical researchers say they've determined the sea squirt might become a good animal model with which to test new Alzheimer's disease medications.

Alzheimer's disease affects an estimated 27 million people worldwide and is the most common form of age-related dementia, researchers said. There is no cure and available drugs only help to relieve symptoms.

One problem in rapidly screening potentially useful drugs has been the lack of a good model system in which Alzheimer's plaques and tangles appear quickly.

But in the study, scientists Mike Virata and Bob Zeller at San Diego State University say they've found the sea squirt (Ciona intestinalis) -- in their immature, tadpole form -- resemble proper vertebrates, and they share about 80 percent of their genes with humans.

The researchers reported dosing sea squirt tadpoles with a mutant protein found in humans with hereditary Alzheimer's resulted in aggressive development of plaques in the tadpoles' brains in only a day, and those, along with the accompanying behavioral defects seen in the tadpoles, could be reversed by treating with an experimental anti-plaque forming drug.

Virata and Zeller said their findings represent an important breakthrough, since all other invertebrates tested have been unable to process the plaque-forming protein, and vertebrates take months or years to make plaques.

The study is reported in the journal Disease Models & Mechanisms.