Twice-a-Day Pill Could Cure Alopecia Hair Loss

Around one or two out of a thousand people in the UK suffered from alopecia areata, a kind of hair loss that results in patches of baldness and is very difficult to treat, according to the NHS .

Usually a person develops the disease when they are between the ages of 15 and 29, with 60% of these finding their first bald spot before they are 20. Although the hair tends to grow back after about a year, it can be a reoccurring problem.

Around a fifth of people with alopecia areata have been found to have a family history of the condition, so it is thought that a person’s genes might affect how susceptible they are of developing it.

There have been few studies of targeted treatment for the condition, largely because experts were uncertain of the exact reasons why a person might develop it. But scientists from Columbia University Medical Center may have found the answer - and possible treatment.

Alopecia areata is caused by an anomaly in the immune system that causes it to attack the hair follicles, and the US team had previously been able to identify the cells involved in the destruction of hair, conducting a number of trials of a drug on mice that proved successful.

Stepping up their research, the team gave a twice-daily dose of bone-marrow cancer drug ruxolitinib to three patients, all of whom had lost at least 30% of their hair, over a period of five months, and publishing the findings in Nature Medicine .

All of the patients saw dramatic regrowth of their hair in that time. The picture below, from left to right, shows one of the study participants at the start of the trial, three months into it and four months into the study.

Dr Raphael Clynes, who led the research, said that more testing is still needed to establish if there can be widespread use of the drug in alopecia areata patients. However, the use of ruxolitinib is unlikely to benefit patients with the more common condition of male-pattern baldness - affecting around 6.5 million men in the UK - as the two conditions are actually unrelated, regardless of their similarities. However, despite this, the team says the news is still very exciting.

Study co-author Professor Angela Christiano, who has had personal experience with the disease, added that people with the condition suffer profoundly, but the findings are a significant step forward that can give them some hope. “The team is fully committed to advancing new therapies for patients with a vast unmet need,” she said.

Professor David Bickers, also from the university and who has treated many patients with the conditions, said that there have been few treatments that have proven to be effective against alopecia areata. “This is a major step forward in improving the standard of care for patients suffering from this devastating disease,” he said.

“We have only begun testing the drug in patients,” explained Dr Clynes, “but if the drug continues to be successful and safe, it will have a dramatic impact on the lives of people with the disease.”

First Female “Mathematician’s Nobel Prize” Winner

Professor Maryam Mirzakhani has become the first person from Stanford University in the US to have won the Fields Medal since 1966. But more than that she has made history by becoming the first female recipient of the coveted award.

Otherwise known as the International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, or the Mathematician’s Nobel Prize, the Fields Medal is colloquially named after mathematician John Charles Fields, who was instrumental in its creation. The award is presented to between two and four maths experts at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) which takes place every four years.

This year, the event took place in Seoul and saw four medals given out: Professor Mirzakhani was awarded one for her work on complex geometry, while another medal went to UK mathematician Professor Martin Hairer for his work on randomness. The other two recipients were Dr Artur Avila from Brazil who earned a PhD at the tender age of 21 and Princeton University’s number theorist Professor Manjul Bhargava.

First awarded in 1936, the Fields Medal has been awarded to 56 winners in total, so it goes to show that Professor Mirzakhani’s accomplishment as the first woman to be honoured with the medal certainly has been a long time coming.

While growing up in Tehran, Iran, Professor Mirzakhani dreamt of becoming a writer until she realised her passion for solving maths problems. “It’s fun. It is like solving a puzzle or connecting the dots in a detective case,” she explained. “I felt that this was something I could do, and I wanted to pursue this path.”

Her work primarily focuses on dynamical systems and geometry, and although it is mostly theoretical and so considered pure mathematics, the work has implications for quantum field theory and physics.

One of the members of the medal selection committee was Professor Dame Frances Kirwan, who said that while 40% of UK maths undergraduates are female and despite women being major players in what is generally viewed as a male-dominated profession, the number of female mathematicians drops rapidly after PhD level and beyond. “I hope this award will inspire more girls and young women... to believe in their own abilities and aim to be Fields Medallists of the future.”

“This is a great honour,” said Professor Mirzakhani upon receiving the award. “I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians, [and] I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years.”

Duke the Dog Elected as Town Mayor

The title of this article is in no way misleading - a small town called Cormorant in Minnesota, in the US, has indeed elected a dog as its mayor, and in a landslide vote no less.

Well, landslide by this town’s standards anyway, with seven-year-old Duke receiving at least nine votes in his favour.

Cormorant is home to only twelve people who, over a period of five weeks, could pay one dollar to vote for whoever they wanted to be mayor.

Duke, a fluffy white Great Pyrenees, is known for guarding the small community and, according to David Rick, a local who voted for the dog, even enforces the speed limits for cars travelling through the town.

“What [Duke] does is when the cars are coming through town - they’re hitting town at 50mph [80.5kph] - and he slows them down,” Mr Rick explained.

Richard Sherbrook, who owns the Cormorant Store, was also in the running, but apparently didn’t even receive half the votes that Duke did. Mr Sherbrook, however, is not upset by this and admits that he voted for Duke himself.

“I’m going to back the dog 100%,” he said. “He is a sportsman and he likes to hunt. He’ll really protect the town. There is no question that he will do a good job representing the community.”

Duke was rewarded with five hours of grooming before being sworn in (after all, a mayor needs to look smart before addressing his town), and as he has no need for paper money, he is going to be paid for his services with a year’s supply of food from local store Tuffy’s Pet Food.

Another local resident, Tricia Maloney, said that Duke isn’t used to such publicity. “He is used to coming to the pub and getting some burgers and some fries or something,” she explained.

Funnily enough, Duke is not the first non-conventional mayor in the US - he isn’t even the first mayor who happens to be of the canine variety:

• Bosco, a black labrador-rottweiler cross was mayor of Californian town Sunrol from 1981 until 1994 (a statue of him now stands in front of the post office).


• Junior Cochran, a black labrador, was elected mayor of Rabbit Hash in Kentucky.


• After two years ‘in office’ in Dorset, Minnesota, five-year-old Bobby Tufts lost his re-election bid to a human 16-year-old.

It is wonderful that some smaller communities can show us the lighter side of politics and that it doesn’t always have to be so “ruff”... *groan*.

Self-Building Origami Robots…

Origami robots! Yes, that is what you think it says: Origami robots! Now, while these creations may not actually be made from colourful pieces of paper, they are certainly inspired by the ancient Japanese art of paper-folding.

The team from Harvard and MIT in the US wanted to demonstrate the power of folding by developing robots that could construct themselves and move away - all without human intervention. They have published details of their creation in the journal Science .

“I am sure people have seen an example of origami; you can use folding to create fantastically complex structures,” said lead researcher Professor Robert Wood from Harvard. “But once the complexity of these things exceeds a threshold, folding them by hand becomes painstaking.”

The robots are made of flat layers of material, some of which are rigid and so hold their shape, while others are made of a shape-memory polymer that changes shape when heated. Elements are embedded between some of the layers that when heated trigger self-folding hinges, allowing the robot to build itself. These then cool down so the robot is fixed in place and doesn’t collapse.

Professor Wood explained that motors and batteries had been incorporated into the design, which is what powers it to walk after it has assembled itself. A built-in timer also enables to robot to wait 10 seconds after its batteries have been inserted to start its construction process. And to fold itself into shape and scurry off only consumes the amount of energy stored in an AA battery.

Paper co-author and grad student Sam Felton said that the design could be adapted to send a robot into space that could assemble itself once it got to the desired destination. “We could easily modify this such that the folding is triggered by an environmental sensor,” he added, “such as temperature or pressure.”

Professor Wood said that engineering robots and devices in this origami-like way could help complex object be created more simply and cheaply. “Getting a robot to assemble itself autonomously and actually perform a function has been a milestone we’ve been chasing for many years,” he enthused.

Another author on the paper, Professor Daniela Rus from MIT, agrees, saying that the origami robots will help to expand on current manufacturing capabilities, meaning that vast amounts of time won’t have to be spent on manual assembling: “Our big dream is to really make the fabrication of robots fast and inexpensive.”

11-Year-Old Invents the IV Pediatric Backpack 4 Kids with Cancer

Kylie Simonds from Connecticut in the US is only eleven years old and has already overcome cancer and become an inventor to help other children just like her.

Around three years ago, Kylie had a kind of cancer of the connective tissue called rhabdomyosarcoma. She spent 46 weeks having chemotherapy, radiation and many surgeries, before finally being given a clean bill of health and has remained as such so far since.

“It was hard to walk around,” she remembered, “and I always had to have someone push [my IV] for me because I was kind of weak when I was in chemo.”

So when Kylie and her class were given a school assignment to design something that would be useful for everyday life, she used her personal experiences of cancer to come up with a brilliant tool for children battling debilitating conditions: the IV Pediatric Backpack 4 Kids with Cancer.

In the original design, a small metal pole stabilises an IV drip bag that is protected from compression or puncture with a cage, and altogether eliminating the big pole on wheels that Kylie found so big and cumbersome.

The backpack also holds the IV flow rate controller and battery pack. On top of this, Kylie thought about customisation, making a mock up in pink with Hello Kitty on it - but she said the backpack could be any colour with any picture on it to appeal to anyone.

Though the backpack could help a lot of children with a whole range of conditions, Kylie said she had two friends she made in the hospital, Brooke and Marik, in mind when coming up with the concept of the backpack.

“Marik, he had a prosthetic leg and he has crutches and he always has someone push [the IV] for him,” she explained. “But if he had something like [the backpack] he could just slip it on. [And Brooke] had to sometimes go home with it and she had to stay overnight in the hospital so I think she would have really liked something like this.”

The backpack has already earned Kylie the Patent Award at the Connecticut Invention Convention, which means that it has been sent to the US Patent and Trademark Office, “patent pending”.

“I think it is a wonderful idea,” said Dr Birte Wistinghausen, Division of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology clinical director at Mount Sinai Hospital. “The stigma would fall away from seeing an IV pole.” She added that cancer patients would be allowed more freedom of movement with the backpack, making it a very useful item.

Kylie is now trying to raise enough money on crowdsourcing website CrowdRise to have the backpack manufactured. If you would like to help this inspirational little girl help other children, you can donate here. And if you would like to learn more about Kylie and her journey through cancer, and beyond, then you can visit her website or check out her Facebook page .

Music Lessons Boost Children’s Learning

We already know that learning music as a child can help prevent cognitive decline as a person gets older, but now new research from Northwestern University working the Harmony Project in the US has found that children from disadvantaged areas are able to boost their reading and language skills by learning to sing or play a musical instrument, and these findings have been presented to the American Psychological Association .

Dr Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist from the university, led the study and her previous work focused on children from relatively affluent families, showing that children learning music could improve their focus, memory and concentration levels.

The Harmony Project is a nonprofit organisation that helps children from deprived areas in the US, helping them to develop by providing schools and youth centres with musical instruments and free music tuition.

In the latest study, Dr Kraus and her team studied the effects of five or more hours a week of music lessons - for a year or more - on children from more disadvantaged areas than her previous studies. At the beginning of this study, all of the children were recorded to have had similar IQ scores and reading abilities.

Whilst a decline in reading skill is often witnessed in children from poorer areas, when children in the study were able to enjoy regular music training, their reading levels held steadily and sometimes even rose slightly.

Another study group - school children in Chicago from similar backgrounds - took part in band or choir practice every day as part of a school music project, while their brainwaves were assessed to see how their brains responded to speech sounds.

It was found that after two years, the musical group had grown more accurate and faster at distinguishing one sound from another, compared with a non-musical control group, and particularly when background noise was integrated.

Dr Kraus explained that this means that music lessons might not be a 'quick fix' in helping to boost a child’s learning, it does show that learning music has a positive influence on their brain, affecting their ability to learn for the better.

“While more affluent students do better in school than children from lower income backgrounds,” she said, “we're finding that musical training can alter the nervous system to create a better learner and help offset this academic gap.”

It is thought that learning music remodels the brain in some way to improve the connection between sound and its meaning, in the same way as babies learning to speak. “Music automatically sharpens the nervous system’s response to sounds,” added Dr Kraus.

Of course, this research could apply to children from any background struggling with reading. So if your child is finding it hard to boost their reading skills, see how they get on after learning to play a musical instrument for a little while, or learning to sing, and they could come a long way.

Small Doses of Video Gaming are Good for Kids

We often worry about the impact playing computer games has on the development of children, but now new research suggests that gaming might not be as bad for them as we thought. In fact, not only was it found that young people who play video games for between one and three hours a day experience no effect whatsoever on how adjusted they are, but small doses of electronic gaming could actually be good for them.

The Oxford University study, published in the journal Pediatrics , asked almost 5,000 young people between the ages of 10 and 15 years old about their gaming habits. They found that 75% of those questioned play video games every day, who were then asked to describe how much gaming time they indulged in on a typical school day.

The young people were then asked to rate their satisfaction with their lives, how well they get on with their peers, how likely they are to help a person in difficulty and their levels of inattention and hyperactivity.

When compared with the group who didn’t play games at all and those who spent more than an hour, or more than three hours playing, those who reported spending less than an hour a day on video games were likely to be happier with their lives and socially interact in a positive way. This group also appeared to enjoy better relationships with their friends, fewer emotional problems and less hyperactivity than the other groups.

However, those who gamed for more than three hours a day reported lower life satisfaction and - confirming what parents have been saying to their kids for years - were the least well-adjusted group, showing that things truly are better in moderation.

Dr Andrew Przybylski, an experimental psychologist and study lead author, explained that the effects that video gaming have on young people can also be altered by other factors such as home life, relationships and the community in which they are a part of.

“High levels of video game playing appear to be only weakly linked to children’s behavioural problems in the real world,” Dr Przybylski added. “Likewise, the small, positive effects we observed for low levels of play on electronic games do not support the idea that video games on their own can help children develop in an increasingly digital world.”

He concluded that more research needs to be carried out to find out what it is about video games that make them more harmful or beneficial than others, while also investigating the influences of young people's social environments.

So, next time you are thinking about how much time to allow your child to spend on their games console, remember that up to three hours a day doesn’t have any negative (or positive) effect on them, but spending up to an hour engrossed in a video game could actually be good for them.

Garden Cities Construction to Curb Housing Shortage

In a bid to combat the housing shortage in England, it was confirmed in April that three new “garden cities” were going to be built by 2020.

Garden cities are new towns built specifically to incorporate a large number of new homes with as much open and green space as possible. The idea is that a garden city is self-sufficient, providing jobs for residents, with proportionate residential, industrial and agricultural areas.

After World War II, more than 25 new towns were built in the style of garden cities across the UK to help house families who had been displaced during the Blitz and the post-war baby boom, as well as provide work for the country’s weak construction industry. Some of those towns include the now well-established Corby, Stevenage and Milton Keynes.

More than 200,000 households are created each year in the UK, and yet last year a little over 100,000 homes were actually built. The three new developments - two of which are thought to be planned for the south-east of England - will hold around 15,000 houses each, to help fight the current “chronic” housing shortage.

A shortlist of where the new communities will be located should be published by the end of the year. But how will building the new towns affect current residents and their homes? There are worries that property values will fall for those who are already residing in the areas where construction will be planned.

Because of this, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has said that homeowners could be compensated, either with a reduction in the amount of council tax these residents have to pay or by the government buying their home outright and upfront.

“The bidding process is still open for communities with proposals for ambitious, locally led developments that have the backing of existing residents,” said Housing Minister Brandon Lewis in support of Mr Clegg’s proposals.

“We are actively looking at [ways] to show that we will go the extra mile to allay those concerns of people who feel their property or the price of their home might be affected,” Mr Clegg explained. “We don’t want people to lose out.”