Young, bluish stars and dusty, reddish stellar nurseries appear in abundance in this portrait of dwarf galaxy NGC 4449, which is experiencing intense star formation.

A small galaxy ablaze with a burst of star formation appears in a Hubble Space Telescope image released. A merger with another galaxy may have triggered the colorful display.
The galaxy, called NGC 4449, lies 12.5 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici and is much smaller than our own Milky Way, NewScientist.com said.
Bluish-white clusters of massive, young stars and reddish patches where new stars are forming behind veils of dust suggest the dwarf galaxy is giving birth to stars at a tremendous rate. Watch an animation zooming in on the NGC 4449.
Astronomers calculate that if the dwarf galaxy were to continue forming stars at this rate, it would run out of the gas necessary to build new stars in about a billion years.
The current burst of star formation may have been triggered by a merger of NGC 4449 with another galaxy. Hubble has previously captured star birth triggered by gravitational interactions between galaxies in an image of the Antennae galaxies, while the Very Large Telescope in Paranal, Chile, has observed it in an image of distorted a galaxy called NGC 1427A.
The image was taken in November 2005 by a team led by Alessandra Aloisi of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, US. It was taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, which has since been hobbled by an electrical short. It may be fixed in a future Hubble servicing mission (see Astronomers call for repair of Hubble’s main camera).

Injecting stem cells into a developing fetus might sound risky, but it could prolong the lives of children with brittle bone disease.
Nicholas Fisk and colleagues at Imperial College London studied mouse models of human type III brittle bone disease, or osteogenesis imperfecta (OI). The genetic defect - detected in human fetuses by DNA testing or ultrasound - disrupts collagen production, leading to weak bones and stunted growth. Those with type III OI suffer fractures while in the womb and rarely survive beyond early adulthood, NewScientist.com SAID.
Fisk’s team injected human fetal mesenchymal stem cells through the wall of the uterus into 14-day mouse fetuses. At the age of 3 months, treated mice had suffered just one-third of the long-bone fractures compared with untreated mice. Their bones were also stronger and their leg bones longer.
While drugs exist to treat the disease, stem cell transplants seem to have extra benefits, such as this boost in limb length, says Fisk. In fact, the treatment has already been tried in the US on three children with OI whilst still in the womb, with promising early results seen after the babies were born. Fisk, who last week presented the work at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Cairns, Australia, believes the treatment should now be offered on a case-by-case basis. Other experts caution, however, that a full clinical trial in people is needed first.

Scientists may be one step closer to finding new drugs to fight MRSA, cancers and other diseases, after CABI, a leading bioservices organization announced that its fungal collection will be screened by the University of Strathclyde.
CABI houses one of the world’s largest genetic resource collections of fungi, numbered at over 28,000 strains, including Fleming’s original penicillin producing isolate. They will be supplying the University of Strathclyde’s Institute for Drug Research (SIDR) with extracts from filamentous fungi which will be screened to identify pharmaceutically active compounds, which could potentially be developed into drugs, Science Daily said.
Joan Kelley, Executive Director Bioservices, CABI said, “This is a really exciting collaboration and we are looking forward to working with the expertise of the scientists at SIDR. We are hopeful that our partnership will prove the winning formula for discovering new pharmaceutical drugs to fight cancers, diseases and resistant strains of infections such as MRSA.“
SIDR brings together scientists from different disciplines to focus on drug discovery. They have developed test systems to detect biological activity in samples of natural products that could lead to new medicinal products. Previous work at SIDR found activities from plant extracts against diabetes, obesity and psoriasis.
Professor Alan Harvey, Director of SIDR said, “We are delighted to be working with CABI and to have access to their fantastic source of fungal samples. We hope that this novel source of chemical diversity will contain new compounds that can be used to point the way to new drugs for serious diseases.“
CABI currently uses its fungal collection, along with the expertise of its scientists to offer a range of services to businesses, including fungal identification, sales, preservations, patenting, training and consultancy. The partnership with SIDR will see CABI’s collection taken one step further, with the fungi being exploited for natural products.
Although using biotechnology to develop new drugs is by no means simple, the industry has seen steady success over the past few years. Between 2000 and 2005, over 20 new drugs were released onto the market originating from natural sources. And although this is the first time SIDR has worked with fungal cultures, there are a number of prescription drugs deriving from metabolites produced by fungi that have been on the market for many years. These include immunosuppressive agents, antibiotics such as penicillin, lipid lowering agents and anti-fungal drugs.

Chocolate may be helpful for reducing blood pressure and therefore, the risk of heart attack and stroke.

A nibble a day of dark chocolate helped lower blood pressure without packing on the pounds, German researchers said.
Prior studies have shown foods rich in cocoa like dark chocolate offer heart benefits, but researchers have worried the added sugar, fat and calories would cancel out any good the chocolate might do.
Now it seems just a 30-calorie (0.126 kilo joule) bite of dark chocolate--equivalent to 6.8 grams or a quarter ounce--can lower blood pressure without weight gain or other negative side effects, Reuters reported.
“Regular intake of small amounts of dark chocolate can help to lower blood pressure,“ said Dr. Dirk Taubert of University Hospital of Cologne, Germany, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Dark chocolate contains polyphenols--a group of chemical substances that are believed to carry health benefits.
Taubert and colleagues studied 44 adults aged 56 to 73 with hypertension but no other health problems between January 2005 and December 2006.
Participants were randomly selected to receive a single, 30-calorie square of dark chocolate containing 30 mg of polyphenols or a 30-calorie square of white chocolate that had no polyphenols.
After 18 weeks, the dark chocolate group experienced a 3 point drop in systolic blood pressure--the top reading--and a 2 point drop in diastolic blood pressure--the bottom reading--without changes in body weight, cholesterol or blood sugar.
“At first glance, this reduction may seem very low, but on a population basis, that means if everyone would experience this blood pressure reduction, the risk of cardiovascular death would be reduced by about 5 percent,“ Taubert said in a telephone interview.
“Chocolate may be helpful for reducing blood pressure and therefore, the risk of heart attack and stroke,“ he said.
Taubert said the researchers weren’t fussy about the chocolate they used in the study. “It was the cheapest in the supermarket,“ he said.
The chocolate contained 50 percent cocoa, but he said a dark chocolate with 40 to 60 percent cocoa content would suffice. I think it makes no difference.“
Still, he cautions people to take it easy.
“One has to look at the whole picture,“ he said. “Dark chocolate may help as an addition to other lifestyle changes ... like more sports or changing dietary habits, more fruit and vegetables and less fat and sugar intake.“

The levels of potentially harmful waterborne microorganisms in rivers, lakes and other recreational waterways may be highest when the water is most crowded with swimmers. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health completed two studies at beach areas linked the number of swimmers using the water with the levels of microsporidian spores and the parasites Cryptosporidium parvum and Giardia lamblia.
Exposure to microorganisms like C. parvum and G. lamblia can cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. They can be particularly harmful to people with compromised immunity, Science Daily reported.
“Our research suggests it would be best to test the water when the beach is active to determine if it is safe for recreational use,“ said Thaddeus K. According to Graczyk, PhD, health officials typically conduct water sampling when there is little human activity.
For studies, researchers sampled the water at the beach areas for 11 weeks during the summer of 2006. Samples were taken on Wednesdays, when beach activity was typically low, and on Saturdays, when activity was usually high. The concentration of microsporidian spores; C. parvum and G. lamblia were highest during the weekends, when the beach was busiest. Water turbidity was also highest on the weekends. The findings indicate that the swimmers stir up pathogens resting in the sediment.

Next time you have to negotiate a deal with a male business contact, you might want to check his hormone levels first. A new study shows that men with high levels of testosterone are more likely to turn down low offers, even if they stand to gain money by accepting them.
According to researchers, the finding demonstrates that our hardwired biology can cause us to make irrational economic decisions, NewScientist.com says.
In what is known as the “low ultimatum game“, an anonymous individual can offer either a large or small chunk of cash to another person, without any opportunity for negotiation.
The player who receives the offer knows how much the other player has in total, and therefore knows the fraction they have been offered. If the deal is accepted, both players keep their split of the total. But if the deal is refused, neither gets anything.
Often, the person offered the free money rejects it if it represents too small a slice of the pie. The refusal to accept this money has puzzled economists because the cash comes with no strings attached.
To make sense of this decision, some experts have proposed that the person refusing the paltry payout wants to punish the other player for making an unfair offer.
But Terry Burnham at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, suspected that this irrational economic decision might have more to do with basic biology than moral convictions.
He recruited 26 male graduate school students to play the low ultimatum game. Each subject started out with $40 and could anonymously offer either $5 or $25 of this sum to another player.
Burnham also took saliva samples from all the volunteers and measured their levels of testosterone. This revealed considerable variability in the levels of the hormone. While the subject with the most testosterone had 497 picomoles per liter of saliva, the one with the least only had 30% of this amount--153 picomoles per liter.