MEMORY OF BANGKOK 2008

The city of Bangkok is the capital, largest urban area and primary city of Thailand. Known in Thai as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon (pronounced [krūŋtʰêːp máhǎːnákʰɔn], กรุงเทพมหานคร or Krung Thep (กรุงเทพฯ (help·info)) for short, it was a small trading post at the mouth of the Chao Phraya River during the Ayutthaya Kingdom and came to the forefront of Thailand when it was given the status as the capital city in 1768 after the burning of Ayudhya, the former kingdom seat and capital of the Ayuthaya province.

However, the current Rattanakosin Kingdom did not begin until 1782 when the capital was moved across the river after being sacked by the Burmese. The Rattanakosin capital is now more formally called "Phra Nakorn", pertaining to the ancient boundaries in the metropolis' core and the name Bangkok now incorporates the urban build-up since the 18th century which has its own public administration and governor.

In the span of over two hundred years, Bangkok has been the political, social and economic center of not only Thailand but for much of South East Asia and Indochina as well. Its influence in the arts, politics, fashion, education and entertainment as well as being a business, financial and cultural center of Asia has given Bangkok the status of a global city.

Bangkok is the world's 22nd largest city by population with approximately 8,160,522 registered residents (July 2007), but due to large unregistered influxes of migrants from the North East of Thailand and of many nations across Asia, the population of greater Bangkok is estimated at nearly 15 million people.[citation needed] This has in turn shifted the country from being a rather homogenous Thai population to increasingly a more vibrant mix of Western, Indian and Chinese people. The capital is part of the heavily urbanized triangle of central and eastern region of Thailand which stretches from Nakhon Ratchasima along Bangkok to the industrialized eastern seaboard.

The Bangkok Province borders six other provinces: Nonthaburi, Pathum Thani, Samut Prakan, Samut Sakhon and Nakhon Pathom, and all five provinces are joined in the conurbation of the Bangkok Metropolitan Area.

The town of Bangkok (บางกอก (help·info)) began as a small Khmer trading center and port community on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River before the establishment of the Ayutthaya Kingdom, the precursor of modern Thailand which existed from 1350 to 1767. The etymology of the town's name is unclear. Bang is the Central Thai name for a town situated on the bank of a river. It is believed that "Bangkok" derived from either Bang Kok, kok (กอก) being the Thai name for one or more olive-bearing fruits (olive in Thai is makok [มะกอก]); or Bang Koh, koh meaning "island," a reference to the area's landscape which was carved by rivers and canals.
Wat Phra Kaew was constructed as part of the Grand Palace complex at the founding of the capital.

After the fall of Ayutthaya to the Burmese Kingdom in 1767, the newly declared King Taksin established a new capital in the area of then-Bangkok, which became known as Thonburi. When Taksin's reign ended in 1782, King Buddha Yodfa Chulaloke reconstructed the capital on the east bank of the river and gave the city a ceremonial name (see below) which became shortened to its current official name, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon (which, like "Los Angeles", means "city of angels"). The new city, however, also inherited the name Bangkok, which continued to be used by foreigners to refer to the entire city and became its official English name, while in Thai the name still refers only to the old district on the west bank of the river. The city has since vastly modernized and undergone numerous changes, including the introduction of transportation and utility infrastructure in the reigns of King Mongkut and King Chulalongkorn, and quickly developed into the economic center of Thailand.

From Wikipedia

COUGHING AND AEROSOLS

When a healthy volunterer cough, he expels a turbulent jet of air with density changes that distort a projected schlieren light beam (Panel A). A velocity map early in the cough (Panel B) was obtained from image analysis. Sequential schlieren images during the cough (Panel C and video) were recorded at 3000 frames per second. A maximum airspeed of 8 m per second (18 mph) was observed, averaged during the half-second cough. Several phases of cough airflow are revealed in the figure. The cough plume may project infectious aerosols into the surrounding air. There is an increasing interest in visualizing such expelled airflows without the use of intrusive methods because of concern regarding the transmission of various airborne pathogens, such as viruses that cause influenza and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

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WORLD'S OLDEST MOM GIVES BIRTH TO TWINS

A 72-year-old woman who has two children and five grandchildren has given birth to twins, making her the world's oldest mother. Omkari Panwar delivered twins, a boy and a girl, by Caesarean section last week.

"I am very happy," Charam Singh, 75, the father of the twins, told ABC News through an interpreter. Singh was reluctant to speak because he has received negative publicity for his wife's having children at such an advanced age. Even many people of his village in India's state of Uttar Pradesh haven't supported the decision. Still, he and his wife are happy. "The desire for a male child has always been there, but God did not bless us with a male child," he said of the son who is a product of in vitro fertilization. "Now, we are very grateful to God, who has answered our prayers."

Panwar, also known as Rajkali, and her husband, a retired farmer, were desperate to have a male heir. Boys are highly valued in India, particularly in rural areas. Traditionally, many Hindus believe that death rites must be performed by the closest male relatives, making the need for a male heir especially important. In addition, although the dowry system is officially banned in India, many Indians still practice it, making daughters a more expensive proposition. In India, it's common to abort female fetuses, although it is illegal for doctors to reveal the sex of a fetus to pregnant parents. In some Indian states where female abortion rates are high, the government will pay parents to raise and educate daughters to create a more balanced male-to-female ratio. The septuagenarian couple spent their life savings and took out a loan from the bank for Panwar to undergo in vitro treatments. For the couple, the desire to have a son was most important because they wanted to carry on the family name. They know that their son may never be able to care for them in the traditional way because of the age gap.

Panwar had a difficult pregnancy. Singh said that he never thought his wife would make it through the pregnancy and that the in vitro treatments were painful. But she survived. "It is a miracle," he said. "Now, she is very happy." The frail woman was in serious condition when she arrived at the hospital. Her blood pressure was high and she was bleeding. "I arranged to have blood transfusions and made lots of preparations to save her babies and her life," said Dr. Nisha Malik, who performed the emergency Caesarean section.

Malik told ABC News that Panwar had a difficult pregnancy, suffering from back pain and was on bed rest for eight months. She said that Panwar looked about 65 years old. "I was really shocked," Malik said of hearing that Panwar was older, a fact based on the woman's own estimates as she doesn't have a birth certificate. Although the babies were born a month premature and had a low birth weight, the twins' doctor at Sushila Jaswant rai Hospital located near New Delhi told ABC News that the babies are doing well.

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EVERY FIFTH ADOLESCENT SMOKES

As a number of as 20% of adolescents from 11 to 17 years of age smoke. This was the result of the nationwide German Health Interview and Examination Survey for Children and Adolescents (KiGGS), performed by the Robert Koch Institute and presented by the sociologist Thomas Lampert in the current edition of Deutsches rzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2008; 105[15]: 265-71).

The analysis of tobacco consumption by children and adolescents covered almost 7,000 girls and boys aged 11 to 17. Data on the current smoking status and on exposure to passive smoking were collected for the years 2003 to 2006. Possible factors influencing the findings were examined, including the social status of the family, the type of school attended by the adolescents, and the smoking status of parents and friends.

Thomas Lampert's study shows that friends and the type of school have greater influence on smoking behavior than the parents do. The probability that an adolescent starts smoking is markedly greater when his or her friends smoke. The risk is hardly increased if the parents smoke. Conversely, students at general secondary schools (Hauptschule), intermediate schools (Realschule) or comprehensive schools (Gesamtschule) smoke much more frequently than do pupils at high school (Gymnasium).

Vitamin D Deficiency Makes Breast Cancer More Deadly

Women with low levels of vitamin D when they’re diagnosed with breast cancer are more likely to die from the disease than those who have higher levels of the vitamin, doctors are reporting.

The finding — part of a growing body of evidence that connects vitamin D to several types of cancer — was just published, ahead of the upcoming American Society of Clinical Oncology conference. It was based on a University of Toronto study of 512 women diagnosed with breast cancer between 1989 and 1995. Researchers kept track of the women’s health through 2006.

Vitamin D levels were broken into three categories: “deficient” (192 of the women were in this group) “insufficient” (197 women) and “sufficient” (124 women). (Even among healthy women, high rates of vitamin D deficiency are common.)

Those with deficient levels were 73% more likely to die than those with sufficient levels. Cancer was also significantly more likely to spread to other parts of the body in women with vitamin D deficiency, the researchers found.

Previous studies have connected low vitamin D levels with higher risk of colon, prostate and breast cancer, as well as higher mortality from the cancers, according to this NEJM article.

The link is still poorly understood, but vitamin D may bind with cancer cells and slow the growth of cells or cause them to die.

Sunlight is an important source of vitamin D. Some foods, such oily fish, are also sources, as are dietary supplements. For more on vitamin D in foods and supplements, along with info on recommended daily intake by age and gender, see this page from the NIH.

How body size is regulated?

Researchers are beginning to unravel the question why people distinctly vary in size. In cooperation with researchers of the Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen, an international genome-wide study has discovered ten new genes that influence body height and thus provides new insights into biological pathways that are important for human growth.

This meta-analysis, reported in the latest issue of Nature Genetics, is based on data from more than 26,000 study participants. It verifies two already known genes, but also discovered ten new genes. Altogether they explain a difference in body size of about 3.5 centimeters.

The analysis produced some biologically insightful findings. Several of the identified genes are targeted by the microRNA let-7, which affects the regulation of other genes. This connection was completely unknown until now. Several other SNPs may affect the structure of chromatin, the chromosome-surrounding proteins. Moreover, the results could have relevance for patients with inherited growth problems, or with problems in bone development, because some of the newly discovered genes have rare mutations, known to be linked to anomalous skeletal growth. Further functional studies are necessary to completely elucidate the biological mechanisms behind this growing list of genes correlation to height.

As German contribution to the meta-analysis, data from about 5,600 participants of the KORA study were analyzed by the HelmholtzZentrum scientists, Dr. Christian Gieger, Dr. Susana Eyheramendy, PD Dr. Thomas Illig, Dr. Iris M. Heid and Prof. Dr. Dr. H.-Erich Wichmann. In order to genotype 500,000 of the most frequent variants in the human genome, DNA chips were analyzed at the Institute for Human Genetics and the Institute of Epidemiology of the Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen under the direction of Prof. Dr. Thomas Meitinger. The coordinator of the study was Dr. Guillaume Lettre; Prof. Joel Hirschhorn acted as the principal investigator. Both researchers work at the Broad Institute of the MIT and the Harvard University, Cambridge. All researchers are part of the recently formed international consortium to study height and obesity-related traits (GIANT, Genetic Investigation of ANthropometric Traits).

Along with the results of a British study that was published simultaneously in Nature Genetics, the total number of known "height genes" now amounts to 26.

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How Neurons Generate Movement

When the eye tracks a bird's flight across the sky, the visual experience is normally smooth, without interruption. But underlying this behavior is a complex coordination of neurons that has remained mysterious to scientists. Now, UCSF scientists have broken ground in understanding how the brain generates this tracking motion, a finding that offers a window, they say, into how neurons orchestrate all of the body's movements.

The study, published in the April 24 issue of Neuron, reveals that individual neurons do not fire independently across the entire duration of a motor function as traditionally thought. Rather, they coordinate their activity with other neurons, each firing at a particular moment in time.

"Researchers have known that neurons that connect to muscles initiate movement in a coordinated fashion. But they have not known how the neurons we are studying - which coordinate these front-line neurons -- commit the brain to move the eyes,"says co-lead author David Schoppik, PhD, who conducted the study while a doctoral candidate in the laboratory of senior author Stephen Lisberger, PhD, at the University of California, San Francisco.

"For decades, researchers have been asking, 'Do the signals involve a handful of neurons or thousands? What is the nature of the commands?' The classical understanding has been that one class of neuron is responsible for one movement, such as generating eye movement to the left, and that it remains active across the entire duration of a behavior," he says.

"The new findings suggest a totally different way of looking at how movement is controlled across time," says Lisberger, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at UCSF, where he is professor of physiology, director of the W.M. Keck Foundation Center for Integrative Neuroscience, and co-director of the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology.

The findings, the scientists say, could inform efforts to develop neural prosthetics to treat paralysis and motor dysfunctions, such as those resulting from stroke. "The brain's messages don't reach the muscles in these conditions," says Schoppik, "so it's critical that the drive to these prosthetics reflect what the brain is trying to do to move muscles. Understanding how multiple neurons work together could influence the type of software created to drive these devices".

The investigation of how neurons give rise to motor behaviorshas been stymied until now, says Schoppik, by the difficulties inherent in studying more than one neuron in action at a time during the course of a behavior. In the current study, the researchers overcame this obstacle in a study of macaque monkeys that had been trained to track a moving object with their eyes.

Basing their approach on two key pieces of information -- first, that when a neuron responds to a stimulus there is always a slight variation in its performance, a phenomenon that neuroresearchers traditionally refer to as "noise," and, second, that each attempt of the eye to pursue a moving target is also unique - they proposed that some aspects of neural variation may reflect behavioral variation.

They used this inherent variability as a probe. Using a formula from financial securities market analysis that looks at how individual stocks behave at a given time within the context of fluctuations in the larger financial market, they explored how individual neurons would behave relative to their neighbors.

They compared the deviations from the average spiking activity of single neurons and simultaneous deviations from the mean eye velocity. They also measured the degree to which variation shared across two pairs of concurrently active neurons.

The data demonstrated that individual neurons encode different aspects of behavior, controlling eye velocity fluctuations at particular moments during the course of eye movement, while the population of neurons collectively tiles the entire duration of the movement.

The analysis also revealed the strength of correlations in the eye movement predictions derived from pairs of simultaneously recorded neurons, and suggests, the researcher say, either that a small number of neurons are sufficient to drive the behavior at any given time or that a number of neurons operate collectively at each moment.

The finding, says Lisberger, underscores the importance of recording for more than one neuron at a time. "There is a lot that we can learn from how multiple neurons interact."

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New Treatment Target for Asthma

An enzyme released by mast cells in the lungs appears to play a key role in the tightening of airways that is a hallmark of asthma - pointing to a potential new target for therapy against the illness.

Reporting in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team at Weill Cornell Medical College explains that during an immune response, mast cells release the enzyme - called renin - which in turn produces angiotensin, a potent constrictor of the smooth muscle that lines airways.

Mast cells are normally present in small numbers in all organs, and are best known for their role in allergy, shock, wound healing and defense against pathogens.

"Back in 2005, our team was the first to discover that mast cells in the heart released renin locally, which elicited heart arrhythmias by triggering angiotensin production within the heart," explained co-senior author Dr. Roberto Levi, professor of pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medical College.

"Now, we've expanded those findings to the lungs, where similar mechanisms appear to work locally to help trigger constriction in the airway," he says.

Renin is no stranger to medical research - for decades, doctors have known that the enzyme is produced by the kidney in relatively large quantities for systemic use throughout the body. But the Weill Cornell team was the first to discover that mast cells also produced their own "local" supply of the enzyme, at a variety of body sites.

"In the heart and now the lungs, this localized production of renin appears to have a profound effect on nearby tissues," says co-senior author Dr. Randi Silver, associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell.

"More study is needed, of course, but our finding suggests that drugs that target renin might prove effective agents in dampening asthma or other respiratory diseases," she says. "These types of 'renin inhibitors' are, in fact, currently being developed by the pharmaceutical industry right now".

The genesis of the new study came through the efforts of the study's lead author, Arul Veerappan, now a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Silver's laboratory. He looked closely at rings of bronchial tissue from rodents, discovering that mast cells in these rings released renin along with other substances.

"You ended up getting the same biochemical cascade that we had seen elsewhere - newly produced renin bringing about a local rise in angiotensin in tissues," Veerappan says.

Research led by co-author Alicia Reid, also a postdoctoral associate in Dr. Silver's lab, led to another first. Using a technology Reid developed, the scientists confirmed for the first time that mast cells from human lung tissue release a form of renin that is nearly identical to renin found in human mast cells grown in culture or human kidney renin.

"That's a big achievement, because it supports the notion that the mechanism we have discovered is not just a laboratory phenomenon - it's actually occurring in the living human lung," Dr. Levi notes.

New research suggests that local renin production may also be crucial in diseases marked by tissue fibrosis (stiffening). In fact, Dr. Silver's lab is now looking at the role locally produced renin might play in a rare, deadly illness called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), where lung tissue becomes increasingly inflexible over time.

"We're interested in any disease in which we can also detect local renin/angiotensin production because it appears to be associated with fibrosis, vasoconstriction, and now bronchoconstriction," Dr. Silver explains.

The goal of all this research: new therapy targets for a range of illnesses.

"Of course, we already have antihypertensive medicines - such as ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers -- that focus on curbing angiotensin in a more systemic way," says Dr. Levi. "But if we could find agents that dampen this renin-angiotensin cascade locally - in the heart or the lung, for example - that could prove to be a formidable new weapon against disease".

This work was funded by grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

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