滨州全国风湿性关节炎治疗的专业医院(淄博山东省治疗风湿专科医院) (今日更新中)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 (Xinhua) -- Controlling diabetes may someday involve mining stem cells from the lining of the uterus, Yale School of Medicine researchers report in a new study published Wednesday in the journal Molecular Therapy. The team treated diabetes in mice by converting cells from the uterine lining into insulin-producing cells.The endometrium or uterine lining, is a source of adult stem cells. These cells generate uterine tissue each month as part of the menstrual cycle. Like other stem cells, however, they can divide to form other kinds of cells.Led by Yale Professor Hugh Taylor, the researchers bathed endometrial stem cells in cultures containing special nutrients and growth factors. Responding to these substances, the endometrial stem cells adopted the characteristics of beta cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. Over the course of a three- week incubation process, the endometrial stem cells took on the shape of beta cells and began to make proteins typically made by beta cells. Some of these cells also produced insulin.After a meal, the body breaks food down into components like the sugar glucose, which then circulates in the blood. In response, beta cells release insulin, which allows the body's cells to take in the circulating glucose. In this study, Taylor and his team exposed the mature stem cells to glucose and found that, like typical beta cells, the cultured cells responded by producing insulin. The team then injected diabetic mice with the mature, insulin-making stem cells. The mice had few working beta cells and very high levels of blood glucose.Mice that did not receive the stem cell therapy continued having high blood sugar levels, developed cataracts and were lethargic. In contrast, mice that received the cell therapy were active and did not develop cataracts, but the animals' blood sugar levels remained higher than normal.The Yale team's findings suggest that endometrial stem cells could be used to develop insulin-producing islet cells, which are found in the pancreas. These islet cells could then be used to advance the study of islet cell transplantation to treat people with diabetes.Taylor said in a statement that the next step in the research will be to verify how long this treatment remains effective.

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 17 (Xinhua) -- Microsoft's cloud-based software Microsoft Office 365 on Wednesday experienced its first major outage since its introduction in late June."At approximately 11:30 a.m. PDT, Microsoft became aware of a networking issue affecting customers of some Microsoft services hosted out of one of our North American data centers," said Steven Gerri, general manager for Microsoft Global Foundation Services, in a statement"We apologize for the inconvenience that Office 365 outage has caused today. We are working on resolving the issue," the software giant said via Twitter.Outages were reported in Chicago, Denver and New York City among other locations. According to tweets from affected users, they were unable to access their email and managers were unable to manage accounts.The outage lasted approximately five hours and services have been restored for the moment.According to Microsoft service-level agreement, Microsoft guarantees a 99.9 percent level of uptime. If it fails to reach 99.9 percent uptime, users are eligible for 25 percent service credit.As more industry giants try to entice users to move to the "cloud," a term refers to the management and provision of applications and data over the Internet, the downtime again reminds cloud computing users that they must prepare to deal with outages and rethink their dependency on the service, analysts said.Amazon has suffered two major cloud outages earlier this month and back in April, impacting some of its high-profile users like movie streaming service Netflix and location-based social networking Foursquare.Analysts recommend cloud users to store data with multiple service providers to minimize the risk and limit their dependency on cloud services for business-critical processes.Available in 40 countries and regions since June 28, Office 365, which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said is "where Microsoft office meets the cloud," combines Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online into a single cloud-based package for business users.

BEIJING, Aug. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- Facebook said it is overhauling its privacy settings to give members easier, more precise control over who sees posts, photos and other content over the vast social network.Starting Thursday, Facebook is rolling out new privacy tools that are placed with each piece of content, replacing options that are now buried in overall account settings.Privacy has been a consistently sticky problem for the Palo Alto firm, which has felt the heat from privacy advocates and government regulators. And recently, Facebook faced stiffer competition from Google's new Google+ social network, which was hailed for including a "circles" feature with easy-to-use privacy settings.Instead of vague labels such as "everyone," which have been mistaken for a Facebook member's social network instead of anyone on the Internet, the new system will include more precise words such as "public.""You have told us that 'who can see this?' could be clearer across Facebook, so we have made changes to make this more visual and straightforward," Chris Cox, Facebook's vice president of product, said in blog post."The main change is moving most of your controls from a settings page to being inline, right next to the posts, photos and tags they affect. Plus there are several other updates here that will make it easier to understand who can see your stuff (or your friends') in any context," Cox said.While privacy advocates reserved judgment until the new settings are actually released, they were optimistic the changes will benefit consumers."These changes do make me feel very confident in the direction that Facebook is going and the way they are thinking about privacy," said Erica Newland, policy analyst for the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C.

LOS ANGELES, June 17 (Xinhua) -- The size of low-oxygen zones created by respiring bacteria is extremely sensitive to changes in depth caused by oscillations in climate, thus posing a distant threat to marine life, a new study suggests."The growth of low-oxygen regions is cause for concern because of the detrimental effects on marine populations -- entire ecosystems can die off when marine life cannot escape the low- oxygen water," said lead researcher Curtis Deutsch, assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at University of California, Los Angeles."There are widespread areas of the ocean where marine life has had to flee or develop very peculiar adaptations to survive in low- oxygen conditions," Deutsch said in the study to be published in an upcoming print edition of the journal Science.A team led byDeutsch used a specialized computer simulation to demonstrate for the first time that fluctuations in climate can drastically affect the habitability of marine ecosystems.The study also showed that in addition to consuming oxygen, marine bacteria are causing the depletion of nitrogen, an essential nutrient necessary for the survival of most types of algae."We found there is a mechanism that connects climate and its effect on oxygen to the removal of nitrogen from the ocean," Deutsch said. "Our climate acts to change the total amount of nutrients in the ocean over the timescale of decades."Low-oxygen zones are created by bacteria living in the deeper layers of the ocean that consume oxygen by feeding on dead algae that settle from the surface. Just as mountain climbers might feel adverse effects at high altitudes from a lack of air, marine animals that require oxygen to breathe find it difficult or impossible to live in these oxygen-depleted environments, Deutsch said.Sea surface temperatures vary over the course of decades through a climate pattern called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, during which small changes in depth occur for existing low-oxygen regions, Deutsch said. Low-oxygen regions that rise to warmer, shallower waters expand as bacteria become more active; regions that sink to colder, deeper waters shrink as the bacteria become more sluggish, as if placed in a refrigerator."We have shown for the first time that these low-oxygen regions are intrinsically very sensitive to small changes in climate," Deutsch said in remarks published Friday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science on its website. "That is what makes the growth and shrinkage of these low-oxygen regions so dramatic."Molecular oxygen from the atmosphere dissolves in sea water at the surface and is transported to deeper levels by ocean circulation currents, where it is consumed by bacteria, Deutsch said."The oxygen consumed by bacteria within the deeper layers of the ocean is replaced by water circulating through the ocean," he said. "The water is constantly stirring itself up, allowing the deeper parts to occasionally take a breath from the atmosphere."A lack of oxygen is not the only thing fish and other marine life must contend with, according to Deutsch. When oxygen is very low, the bacteria will begin to consume nitrogen, one of the most important nutrients that sustain marine life."Almost all algae, the very base of the food chain, use nitrogen to stay alive," Deutsch said. "As these low-oxygen regions expand and contract, the amount of nutrients available to keep the algae alive at the surface of the ocean goes up and down. "Understanding the causes of oxygen and nitrogen depletion in the ocean is important for determining the effect on fisheries and fish populations, he said.

BEIJING, Aug. 30 (Xinhuanet) -- The search giant Google admits it sees the new Google+ social network as an "identity service" or platform on which it can build other products, according to media reports.Google chariman Eric Schmidt said Google isn't interested in changing its policies to accommodate users such as political dissidents or others who prefer to remain anonymous: If people want to remain anonymous, then they shouldn't use Google+."Fundamentally, [Google+] depends on people using their real names if they're going to build future products that leverage that information," NPR's Andy Carvin wrote in a post on Google+ as he paraphrased Schmidt's remarks.Critics say the move is harmful to political activists, victims of harassment and numerous other groups for whom using a real name online might pose a safety risk, according to CNN reports."Regarding people who are concerned about their safety, [Schmidt] said G+ is completely optional," Carvin wrote.Meanwhile, according to Carvin, Schmidt also said "the Internet would be better if we knew you were a real person rather than a dog or a fake person. Some people are just evil and we should be able to ID them and rank them downward."

来源：资阳报