Steve Jobs’s Obituary, As Run By Bloomberg

The Bloomberg financial newswire decided to update its 17-page Steve Jobs obituary today — and inadvertently published it in the process. Some investors were undoubtedly rattled to see, as our tipster did late this afternoon, the Apple CEO's obit cross the wire and then suddenly disappear. Jobs's battle with pancreatic cancer, and speculation over his health, jarred Wall Street earlier this year and continues to be the subject of speculation. The Times weighed in on the matter as recently as last month, when columnist Joe Nocera spoke with the secretive tech executive. But news organizations routinely prepare obituaries in advance, even for the healthy. And if Bloomberg readers had seen the internal story slug, "testjobs," their jitters might have abated. The obit, which we've obtained and reprinted after the jump, is a bit macabre to read but should not scare you out of your Apple shares. (UPDATE: Bloomberg has "retracted" its obituary, and the retraction is also after the jump.) More interesting are the accompanying notes for Bloomberg reporters!

The obituary contains nothing to indicate Bloomberg has new information on Jobs's health, at least in our quick skim.

But the reporting notes do reveal that near the top of Bloomberg's list of people to call in event of his death is Jobs's ex girlfriend Heidi Roizen (quite the Valley switchboard, apparently) and California attorney general and (like Jobs) cranky aging hippie Jerry Brown. Also, Bloomberg doesn't seem to have many people's cell phone numbers.

—Editor: Joe Winski, Cesca Antonelli

Apple I, 1976

Apple Computer was founded on April 1, 1976 by a small group headed by Jobs, engineer Steve Wozniak and industry vet Ronald Wayne, who was brought in to provide "adult supervision."

Priced at $666.66, Apple's first computer was little more than a circuit board. Once you bought one, you still had to hook up your own keyboard, monitor and power supply. As such, the Apple appealed mostly to the DIY hardware hackers of the day, who had these things on hand already.

Jobs' Greatest Jobs

Apple I, 1976

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and Pixar Animation addresses the 2005 Graduates of Stanford University. His structure – sharing three stories – each relating to the audience – with lightheartedness sprinkled throughout a heart-centered message.

He spoke candidly speaks about his life, rise to fame, and death…
Steve Jobs, on life’s experiences, “You have to trust that the dots will connect somewhere down the road…”

On creating Macintosh:
… Steve mentioned stumbling into a calligraphy class, learning about fonts, serif and sans serif … designing his first Macintosh computers, “And since Windows just copied the Mac…”

Philosophy on careers:
“You’ve got to find what you love. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet – keep looking – and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Advice on Life:
“Your time is limited – so don’t waste it – living someone else’s life.”
“Don’t let the opinion of others drown out your own inner voice… and most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly what to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Jobs had been teaching us to say goodbye to all that for decades — we just didn’t know it. Some of us said goodbye to typewriters in the 1980s when we finished term papers using MacWrite on a Macintosh Plus for the first time. Some of us said goodbye when we made PTA fliers and “Lost Dog” posters that were far and away better than their Sharpie-scrawled predecessors. Let it go, let it go: Take your CDs to Goodwill; give your books to the library sale.

Pumice Proposed as Home to the First Life Forms

Pumice. (Credit: © Jakub Cejpek / Fotolia)

Science Daily  — The glassy, porous, and once gas-rich rock called pumice may have given rise to early life forms, according to a provocative new hypothesis on the origin of life published in Astrobiology.

To validate their hypothesis, the authors call for laboratory research to test the ability of pumice rock to adsorb organic compounds from water and create catalysts and new compounds by simulating the thermal cycles, UV light, and other conditions that existed when the first organic polymers and microbes co-existed.

Martin Brasier, Richard Matthewman, and Sean McMahon, University of Oxford (U.K.), and David Wacey, University of Western Australia (Crawley), contend that pumice has "four remarkable properties" that would enable it to have had "a significant role in the origin of life and provided an important habitat for the earliest communities of microorganisms." They describe those four properties in detail in the article "Pumice as a Remarkable Substrate for the Origin of Life."

"The hypothesis that pumice provided a unique physical substrate in which life got its start is exciting and testable," says Sherry L. Cady, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Astrobiology and Professor in the Department of Geology at Portland State University. "Key for astrobiology is whether such rock types preserved evidence of pre-biotic reactions or ancient life forms in the rock record."

Astrobiology is a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.

Sociability May Depend Upon Brain Cells Generated in Adolescence

The social behavior of mice seems to be dictated by creation of new neurons in adolescence. (Credit: Courtesy of Yale University)

Science Daily  — Mice become profoundly anti-social when the creation of new brain cells is interrupted in adolescence, a surprising finding that may help researchers understand schizophrenia and other mental disorders, Yale researchers report.

"This has important implications in understanding social development at the molecular level," said Arie Kaffman, assistant professor of psychiatry and senior author of the study.

When the same process is interrupted in adults, no such behavioral changes were noted, according to research published in the Oct. 4 issue of the journalNeuroscience.

Scientists have known for quite some time that new brain cells are continually generated in specific brain regions after birth. This process, called neurogenesis, occurs at a significantly greater rate during childhood and adolescence than in adulthood, yet most research has focused upon the function of these neurons in older brains.

The Yale team decided to explore the function of these new brain cells in mice of different ages. Normal adult mice tend to spend a lot of time exploring and interacting with unfamiliar mice. However, adult mice that had neurogenesis blocked during adolescence showed no interest in exploring other adult mice and even evaded attempts made by other mice to engage in social behavior.

"These mice acted like they did not recognize other mice as mice," Kaffman said.

Blocking adult neurogenesis had no effect on social behavior, suggesting that brain cells generated during adolescence make a very different contribution to brain function and behavior in adulthood, note the scientists.

Intriguingly, schizophrenics have a deficit in generating new neurons in the hippocampus, one of the brain areas where new neurons are created. Given that symptoms of schizophrenia first emerge in adolescence, it is possible that deficits in generating new neurons during adolescence or even in childhood holds new insights into the development of some of the social and cognitive deficits seen in this illness, Kaffman said.

Other Yale authors include Lan Wei and Ronald S. Duman.

Last Universal Common Ancestor More Complex Than Previously Thought

What might have been in Earth's ancient 'chemical soup'? Scientists don't know much about LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, the great-grandparent of all living things. Many believe LUCA was little more than a crude assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical soup out of which evolution gradually constructed more complex forms. New evidence suggests that LUCA was a sophisticated organism, with a complex structure recognizable as a cell. (Credit: © Dave / Fotolia)

Science Daily  — Scientists call it LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, but they don't know much about this great-grandparent of all living things. Many believe LUCA was little more than a crude assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical soup out of which evolution gradually constructed more complex forms. Some scientists still debate whether it was even a cell.

The study builds on several years of research into a once-overlooked feature of microbial cells, a region with a high concentration of polyphosphate, a type of energy currency in cells. Researchers report that this polyphosphate storage site actually represents the first known universal organelle, a structure once thought to be absent from bacteria and their distantly related microbial cousins, the archaea. This organelle, the evidence indicates, is present in the three domains of life: bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes (plants, animals, fungi, algae and everything else).New evidence suggests that LUCA was a sophisticated organism after all, with a complex structure recognizable as a cell, researchers report. Their study appears in the journal Biology Direct.

The existence of an organelle in bacteria goes against the traditional definition of these organisms, said University of Illinois crop sciences professor Manfredo Seufferheld, who led the study.

"It was a dogma of microbiology that organelles weren't present in bacteria," he said. But in 2003 in a paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Seufferheld and colleagues showed that the polyphosphate storage structure in bacteria (they analyzed an agrobacterium) was physically, chemically and functionally the same as an organelle called an acidocalcisome (uh-SID-oh-KAL-sih-zohm) found in many single-celled eukaryotes.

Their findings, the authors wrote, "suggest that acidocalcisomes arose before the prokaryotic (bacterial) and eukaryotic lineages diverged." The new study suggests that the origins of the organelle are even more ancient.

The study tracks the evolutionary history of a protein enzyme (called a vacuolar proton pyrophosphatase, or V-H+PPase) that is common in the acidocalcisomes of eukaryotic and bacterial cells. (Archaea also contain the enzyme and a structure with the same physical and chemical properties as an acidocalcisome, the researchers report.)

By comparing the sequences of the V-H+PPase genes from hundreds of organisms representing the three domains of life, the team constructed a "family tree" that showed how different versions of the enzyme in different organisms were related. That tree was similar in broad detail to the universal tree of life created from an analysis of hundreds of genes. This indicates, the researchers said, that the V-H+PPase enzyme and the acidocalcisome it serves are very ancient, dating back to the LUCA, before the three main branches of the tree of life appeared.

"There are many possible scenarios that could explain this, but the best, the most parsimonious, the most likely would be that you had already the enzyme even before diversification started on Earth," said study co-author Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, a professor of crop sciences and an affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois. "The protein was there to begin with and was then inherited into all emerging lineages."

"This is the only organelle to our knowledge now that is common to eukaryotes, that is common to bacteria and that is most likely common to archaea," Seufferheld said. "It is the only one that is universal."

The study lends support to a hypothesis that LUCA may have been more complex even than the simplest organisms alive today, said James Whitfield, a professor of entomology at Illinois and a co-author on the study.

"You can't assume that the whole story of life is just building and assembling things," Whitfield said. "Some have argued that the reason that bacteria are so simple is because they have to live in extreme environments and they have to reproduce extremely quickly. So they may actually be reduced versions of what was there originally. According to this view, they've become streamlined genetically and structurally from what they originally were like. We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was."

The study team also included Kyung Mo Kim, of the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology; and Alejandro Valerio, of the Museum of Biological Diversity in Columbus, Ohio.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Science Foundation provided funding for this study.

Kepler Spacecraft Discovers New Multi-Planet Solar System

The top graphic shows the orbits of the three known planets orbiting Kepler-18 as compared to Mercury's orbit around the Sun. The bottom graphic shows the relative sizes of the Kepler-18 and its known planets to the Sun and Earth. (Credit: Tim Jones/McDonald Obs./UT-Austin)

Science Daily  — A team of researchers led by Bill Cochran of The University of Texas at Austin has used NASA's Kepler spacecraft to discover an unusual multiple-planet system containing a super-Earth and two Neptune-sized planets orbiting in resonance with each other.

They are announcing the find in Nantes, France at a joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Conference and the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science. The research will be published in a special Kepler issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series in November.

Cochran's team is announcing three planets orbiting Kepler-18, a star similar to the Sun. Kepler 18 is just 10 percent larger than the Sun and contains 97 percent of the Sun's mass. It may host more planets than the three just announced.

The planets are designated b, c, and d. All three planets orbit much closer to Kepler-18 than Mercury does to the Sun. Orbiting closest to Kepler-18 with a 3.5-day period, planet b weighs in at about 6.9 times the mass of Earth, and twice Earth's size. Planet b is considered a "super-Earth." Planet c has a mass of about 17 Earths, is about 5.5 times Earth's size, and orbits Kepler-18 in 7.6 days. Planet d weighs in at 16 Earths, at 7 times Earth's size, and has a 14.9-day orbit. The masses and sizes of c and d qualify them as low-density 2Neptune-class" planets.

Planet c orbits the star twice for every one orbit d makes. But the times that each of these planets transit the face of Kepler-18 "are not staying exactly on that orbital period," Cochran says. "One is slightly early when the other one is slightly late, [then] both are on time at the same time, and then vice-versa."

Scientifically speaking, c and d are orbiting in a 2:1 resonance. "It means they're interacting with each other," Cochran explains. "When they are close to each other ... they exchange energy, pull and tug on each other."

Kepler uses the "transit method" to look for planets. It monitors a star's brightness over time, looking for periodic dips that could indicate a planet passing in front of the star. A large part of the Kepler science team's work is proving that potential planets they find aren't something else that mimics the transit signature (such as a perfectly aligned background star, specifically either an eclipsing binary star or a single star orbited by a giant planet).

That follow-up work to Kepler is done by scores of scientists using ground-based telescopes the world over (including several at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory) as well as Spitzer Space Telescope.

Kepler-18's planets c and d did astronomers a favour by proving their planet credentials up front via their orbital resonance; they had to be in the same planetary system as each other for the resonance to occur.

Confirming the planetary bona fides of planet b, the super-Earth, was much more complicated, Cochran says. His team used a technique called "validation," instead of verification. They set out to figure out the probability that it could be something other than a planet.

First, they used the Palomar 5-meter (200-inch) Hale Telescope with adaptive optics to take an extremely high-resolution look at the space around Kepler-18. They wanted to see if anything close to the star could be positively identified as a background object that would cause the transit signal they had attributed to a super-Earth.

"We successively went through every possible type of object that could be there," Cochran says. "There are limits on the sort of objects that can be there at different distances from the star." Astronomers know how many of different types of objects (various kinds of stars, background galaxies, and more) are seen on average in the sky. They didn't find anything in the Palomar image.

"There's a small possibility that [planet b] is due to a background object, but we're very confident that it's probably a planet," Cochran says. His team calculated that the likelihood the object is a planet is 700 times more likely than the likelihood that it's a background object.

The process is called "planet validation," rather than the usual "planet verification." Cochran says it's important to understand the difference -- not just for this system, but for future discoveries from Kepler and other missions.

"We're trying to prepare the astronomical community and the public for the concept of validation," he says. "The goal of Kepler is to find an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone [where life could arise], with a one-year orbit. Proving that such an object really is a planet is very difficult [with current technology]. When we find what looks to be a habitable Earth, we'll have to use a validation process, rather than a confirmation process. We're going to have to make statistical arguments."

Kepler was selected as the tenth NASA Discovery mission. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., is the home organization of the science principal investigator, and is responsible for the ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., managed the Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts, and distributes the Kepler science data. For more information about the Kepler mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler.

Physicists Move One Step Closer to Quantum Computer

Science Daily  — Rice University physicists have created a tiny "electron superhighway" that could one day be useful for building a quantum computer, a new type of computer that will use quantum particles in place of the digital transistors found in today's microchips.

Today's computers use binary bits of data that are either ones or zeros. Quantum computers would use quantum bits, or "qubits," which can be both ones and zeros at the same time, thanks to the quirks of quantum mechanics.

In a recent paper in Physical Review Letters, Rice physicists Rui-Rui Du and Ivan Knez describe a new method for making a tiny device called a "quantum spin Hall topological insulator." The device, which acts as an electron superhighway, is one of the building blocks needed to create quantum particles that store and manipulate data.

This quirk gives quantum computers a huge edge in performing particular types of calculations, said Du, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice. For example, intense computing tasks like code-breaking, climate modeling and biomedical simulation could be completed thousands of times faster with quantum computers.

"In principle, we don't need many qubits to create a powerful computer," he said. "In terms of information density, a silicon microprocessor with 1 billion transistors would be roughly equal to a quantum processor with 30 qubits."

In the race to build quantum computers, researchers are taking a number of approaches to creating qubits. Regardless of the approach, a common problem is making certain that information encoded into qubits isn't lost over time due to quantum fluctuations. This is known as "fault tolerance."

The approach Du and Knez are following is called "topological quantum computing." Topological designs are expected to be more fault-tolerant than other types of quantum computers because each qubit in a topological quantum computer will be made from a pair of quantum particles that have a virtually immutable shared identity. The catch to the topological approach is that physicists have yet to create or observe one of these stable pairs of particles, which are called "Majorana fermions" (pronounced MAH-yor-ah-na FUR-mee-ons).

The elusive Majorana fermions were first proposed in 1937, although the race to create them in a chip has just begun. In particular, physicists believe the particles can be made by marrying a two-dimensional topological insulator -- like the one created by Du and Knez -- to a superconductor.

Topological insulators are oddities; although electricity cannot flow through them, it can flow around their narrow outer edges. If a small square of a topological insulator is attached to a superconductor, Knez said, the elusive Majorana fermions are expected to appear precisely where the materials meet. If this proves true, the devices could potentially be used to generate qubits for quantum computing, he said.

Knez spent more than a year refining the techniques to create Rice's topological insulator. The device is made from a commercial-grade semiconductor that's commonly used in making night-vision goggles. Du said it is the first 2-D topological insulator made from a material that physicists already know how to attach to a superconductor.

"We are well-positioned for the next step," Du said. "Meanwhile, only experiments can tell whether we can find Majorana fermions and whether they are good candidates for creating stable qubits."

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Rice University, the Hackerman Advanced Research Program, the Welch Foundation and the Keck Foundation.

2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: 'Quasicrystals' Once Thought Impossible Have Changed Understanding of Solid Matter

Aperiodic mosaics, such as those found in the medieval Islamic mosaics of the Alhambra Palace in Spain (shown above), have helped scientists understand what quasicrystals look like at the atomic level. In those mosaics, as in quasicrystals, the patterns are regular -- they follow mathematical rules -- but they never repeat themselves. (Credit: © cbomers / Fotolia)

Science Daily  — The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2011 to Daniel Shechtman of the Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, for the discovery of quasicrystals: non-repeating regular patterns of atoms that were once thought to be impossible.

A remarkable mosaic of atoms

In quasicrystals, we find the fascinating mosaics of the Arabic world reproduced at the level of atoms: regular patterns that never repeat themselves. However, the configuration found in quasicrystals was considered impossible, and Daniel Shechtman had to fight a fierce battle against established science. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 recognizes a breakthrough that has fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter.

On the morning of April 8, 1982, an image counter to the laws of nature appeared in Daniel Shechtman's electron microscope. In all solid matter, atoms were believed to be packed inside crystals in symmetrical patterns that were repeated periodically over and over again. For scientists, this repetition was required in order to obtain a crystal.

Shechtman's image, however, showed that the atoms in his crystal were packed in a pattern that could not be repeated. Such a pattern was considered just as impossible as creating a football using only six-cornered polygons, when a sphere needs both five- and six-cornered polygons. His discovery was extremely controversial. In the course of defending his findings, he was asked to leave his research group. However, his battle eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.

Aperiodic mosaics, such as those found in the medieval Islamic mosaics of the Alhambra Palace in Spain and the Darb-i Imam Shrine in Iran, have helped scientists understand what quasicrystals look like at the atomic level. In those mosaics, as in quasicrystals, the patterns are regular -- they follow mathematical rules -- but they never repeat themselves.

When scientists describe Shechtman's quasicrystals, they use a concept that comes from mathematics and art: the golden ratio. This number had already caught the interest of mathematicians in Ancient Greece, as it often appeared in geometry. In quasicrystals, for instance, the ratio of various distances between atoms is related to the golden mean.

Following Shechtman's discovery, scientists have produced other kinds of quasicrystals in the lab and discovered naturally occurring quasicrystals in mineral samples from a Russian river. A Swedish company has also found quasicrystals in a certain form of steel, where the crystals reinforce the material like armor. Scientists are currently experimenting with using quasicrystals in different products such as frying pans and diesel engines.

Daniel Shechtman, Israeli citizen. Born 1941 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Ph.D. 1972 from Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. Distinguished Professor, The Philip Tobias Chair, Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.

The Prize amount: SEK 10 million.

For further information, including backgrounders for the public and scientists and links for further reading, see:http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2011

Follow the Odor and CO2: Flight Patterns Reveal How Mosquitoes Find Hosts to Transmit Deadly Diseases

An Aedes aegypti mosquito prepares to bite a human. (Credit: Image courtesy of USDA.)

Science Daily  — The carbon dioxide we exhale and the odors our skins emanate serve as crucial cues to female mosquitoes on the hunt for human hosts to bite and spread diseases such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever.

The researchers report in the Oct. 15 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology that puffs of exhaled carbon dioxide first attract these mosquitoes, which then proceed to follow a broad skin odor plume, eventually landing on a human host.Two entomologists at the University of California, Riverside have now performed experiments to study how female Aedes aegypti -- mosquitoes that transmit yellow fever and dengue -- respond to plumes of carbon dioxide and human odor.

The results from the study by Ring Cardé, a distinguished professor of entomology at the University of California, Riverside, and Teun Dekker, formerly a graduate student in Cardé's lab and now an assistant professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Research, could clue scientists on how odors can be used in traps for intercepting and capturing host-seeking mosquitoes.

Yellow fever is a viral disease that causes 30,000 deaths worldwide each year. Dengue, another viral disease, infects 50 to 100 million people worldwide a year, leading to half a million hospitalizations, and 12,500,000 deaths.

In the lab, the researchers released female yellow fever mosquitoes into a wind tunnel they built, and filmed their flight paths. They found that:

• Mosquitoes head upwind only briefly when they encounter just a whiff of carbon dioxide but proceed continuously upwind when the carbon dioxide plume is turbulent, fluctuating in concentration and mimicking the presence of a live host.
• Mosquitoes' orientation to human skin odor, in contrast, is optimal when the plume of skin odor is broad and unvarying in its intensity, as would occur when a mosquito closes in on a potential host.

"Carbon dioxide induces a faster and more direct upwind orientation than skin odor," said Cardé, who holds the Alfred M. Boyce Chair in Entomology. "Our experiments show that the response of yellow fever mosquitoes to skin odor requires an exposure longer than that of carbon dioxide to induce upwind flight."

Dekker and Cardé also report that the dynamics -- response time, duration and speed -- of carbon dioxide-induced upwind surging were very similar across a wide range of carbon dioxide concentrations, from 100 to 0.05 percent (barely above atmospheric levels).

"The mosquitoes' carbon dioxide receptors allow the insects to respond almost instantly to even the slightest amount of the gas," Cardé said. "Carbon dioxide alone attracts these mosquitoes and does not require assistance from other odors. Skin odors, however, become important when the mosquito is near the host, selecting biting sites. Further, the mosquitoes' sensitivity to skin odors increases 5- to 25-fold after 'priming' with a whiff of carbon dioxide."

The research project was supported by grants to Cardé from the University of California Systemwide Mosquito Research Program and the Office of Naval Research -- DARPA Plume Tracing Program; to Dekker, the research paper's first author, from Insect Chemical Ecology, Ethology and Evolution (ICE³) Linnaeus and the Swedish Research Council FORMAS.

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Regular exercise improves health of people with long-term kidney disease

 by Biomechanism 

There are many reasons why people with chronic kidney disease (CKD) often lose fitness and have increasing difficulty performing normal daily tasks, but new research shows scientific evidence for the benefits of regular exercise for people with CKD, including those with a kidney transplant. They can improve their physical fitness, walk further, have healthier blood pressures, healthier heart rates, higher health-related quality of life scores and better nutritional characteristics compared to those who don’t exercise. So concludes a systematic review published in The Cochrane Library.

CKD is a worldwide public health problem and a person is said to have CKD if they have damaged or poorly performing kidneys where the effects last for more than three months. There are many causes of damage, including high blood pressure, diabetes and rheumatic diseases. “Their muscles tend to tire quickly, which reduces the amount of exercise they do, but this then further reduces their fitness,” explains Susanne Heiwe from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

During the last 30 years there have been many studies into the way that exercise affects people with CKD, but very few evidence-based guidelines have been drawn up. To fill this gap Heiwe and her colleague, Stefan Jacobson, studied the data and results in forty-five studies that met specific inclusion criteria. Together these involved a total of 1,863 participants.

Heiwe’s team discovered adults with CKD but who do not yet need dialysis, patients on dialysis and kidney transplant recipients all benefitted from exercise, but different types of exercise produced different types of benefit.

For example, when compared with controls, people who performed supervised, high intensity, cardiovascular training for four to six months had significantly improved aerobic capacity Other studies showed that three months of regular, high intensity resistance training or yoga, whether supervised or not, increases muscular strength and, when supervised, the high intensity resistance training also increases walking capacity over a three month period.

“More research is needed so we can discover how to set up exercise programs that get the desired outcome as efficiently as possible,” says Heiwe, who believes that the Cochrane review will help renal health-care providers prescribe exercise training more often and make evidence-based choices about which type of exercise to recommend.

So far most of the studies have looked at the effects of cardiovascular exercise programmes. “We now need to know more about the effects of resistance training or mixed cardiovascular and resistance training,” says Heiwe.

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A new leaf turns in carbon science

o by Biomechanism 

“A new insight into global photosynthesis. The chemical process governing how ocean and land plants absorb and release carbon dioxide, has been revealed in research that will assist scientists to more accurately assess future climate change.”

In a paper published in Nature, a team of US, Dutch and Australian scientists have estimated that the global rate of photosynthesis, the chemical process governing the way ocean and land plants absorb and release CO2, occurs 25% faster than previously thought.

Understanding the exchange of gases, including CO2 and water vapour is especially significant to science because of its relevance to global management of carbon emissions. Photo: UMCES

From analysing more than 30 years of data collected by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego including air samples collected and analysed by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology from the Cape Grim Air Pollution Monitoring Station, scientists have deduced the mean rate of photosynthesis over several decades and identified the El Nino-Southern Oscillation phenomenon as a regulator of the type of oxygen atoms found in CO2 from the far north to the south pole.

“Our analysis suggests that current estimates of global primary production are too low and the refinements we propose represent a new benchmark for models to simulate carbon cycling through plants,” says co-author, Dr Colin Allison, an atmospheric chemist at CSIRO’s Aspendale laboratories.

The study, led by Dr Lisa Welp from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, California, traced the path of oxygen atoms in CO2 molecules, which tells researchers how long the CO2 has been in the atmosphere and how fast it had passed through plants. From this, they estimated that the global rate of photosynthesis is about 25 percent faster than previously thought.

“It’s difficult to measure the rate of photosynthesis for forests, let alone the entire globe. For a single leaf it’s straightforward, you just put it in an instrument chamber and measure the CO2 decreasing in the chamber air,” said Dr Welp.

“But you cannot do that for an entire forest. What we have done is to use a naturally occurring marker, an oxygen isotope, in atmospheric CO2 that allows us to track how often it ended up inside a plant leaf, and from oxygen isotopic CO2 data collected around the world we can estimate the mean global rate of photosynthesis over the last few decades.”

In other studies, analysis of water and oxygen components found in ocean sediments and ice cores have provided scientists with a ‘big picture’ insight into carbon cycling over millions of years, but the search for the finer details of exchanges or uptake through ocean algae and terrestrial plant leaves has been out of reach.

The authors said that their new estimate of the rate of global photosynthesis will help guide other estimates of plant activity, such as the capacity of forests and crops to grow and fix carbon, and help re-define how scientists measure and model the cycling of CO2 between the atmosphere and plants on land and in the ocean.

Dr Allison said understanding the exchange of gases, including CO2 and water vapour, in the biosphere – oceans, land and atmosphere – is especially significant to climate science, and to policymakers, because of its relevance to global management of carbon emissions.

“Quantifying this global production, centred on the exchange of growth-promoting CO2 and water vapour, has been historically difficult because there are no direct measurements at scales greater than leaf levels.

“Inferences drawn from atmospheric measurements provide an estimate of ecosystem exchanges and satellite-based observations can be used to estimate overall primary production, but as a result of this new research we have re-defined the rate of biospheric carbon exchange between atmosphere, land and ocean.

“These results can be used to validate the biospheric components included in carbon cycle models and, although still tentative, may be useful in predicting future climate change,” Dr Allison said.

CSIRO’s Dr Roger Francey was a co-author on the project, led by Scripps’ Drs Welp and Ralph Keeling. Other co-authors of the study are Harro Meijer from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands; Alane Bollenbacher, Stephen Piper and Martin Wahlen from Scripps; and Kei Yoshimura from the University of Tokyo, Japan.

Dr Allison said a critical element of the research was access to long data sets at multiple locations, such as Cape Grim, Mauna Loa and South Pole, extending back to 1977 when Cape Grim was established in Tasmania’s north-west, together with more recent samples from facilities such as Christmas Island, Samoa, California and Alaska. The Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station provides vital information about changes to the atmospheric composition of the Southern Hemisphere.

“Dr Allison said understanding the exchange of gases, including CO2 and water vapour, in the biosphere – oceans, land and atmosphere – is especially significant to climate science, and to policymakers, because of its relevance to global management of carbon emissions.”