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DER BLOGGER
Are the Boomers Are Heading for the Barn?
When the April figures on unemployment were released May 4, they were more than disappointing. They were deeply disturbing. While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market. Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working age population is now in thelabor force, the lowest level since December 1981.
WANDERLUST
Eurostar Eyes Frankfurt Link
Eurostar is to extend its high speed rail service to link Frankfurt and Cologne via the Channel Tunnel to London within the next five years, according to a British newspaper report on Monday.
GERMERICANA
Digging into German Culture in Pennsylvania
By Chris Sholley
During the past year, a group of Lebanon Valley College students poured over German documents at the Lebanon County Historical Society of Pennsylvania as part of an advanced course in the language. They made interesting discoveries about the lives of German immigrants.
AKADEMIA
Learning and Teaching German
With the free German courses from Deutsche Welle, you can choose the learning style that suits you best: e-learning at the computer, with short videos, audio courses or podcasts, or with texts and worksheets you can print out. For DW's website, please click HERE
GERMERICA LINKS
RSS FEED
The Stem Cell Stall
Wed, 11/26/2008 - 17:17 — Walter
Mice, those despised pests that cause palpitations when they appear in kitchens, may hold the key to healing if a heart attack ensues. Researchers are using human stem cells to repair heart damage in mice.
If this latest attempt to repair damaged hearts in lab mice is as promising as researchers at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh believe, some day stem cells may be injected in humans to heal the devastation left by heart attacks.
While stem cells are widely-viewed as interchangeable, the researchers led by Johnny Huard, PhD, used a “novel population†of stem cells they discovered that is derived from human skeletal muscle tissue.
His team purified the special stem cells and transplanted them into mice with heart damage similar to that in human heart attack victims.
Dr. Huard claims remarkable healing properties for the transplanted “myoendothelial cells.†They repaired the injured muscle, stimulated the growth of new blood vessels in the heart and reduced scar tissue from the injury. This dramatically improving the function of the injured left ventricle.
Dr. Huard directs stem cell work at the John G. Rangos Sr. Research Center, a unit of the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, PA.
"This confirms our belief that this novel population of stem cells discovered in our laboratory holds tremendous promise for the future of regenerative medicine...
“The important benefit of our approach is that as a therapy, it would be an autologous transplant.
This means that for a patient who suffers a heart attack, we would take a muscle biopsy from his or her muscle, isolate and purify the myoendothelial cells, and re-inject them into the injured heart muscle, thereby avoiding any risk of rejection by introducing foreign cells."
The myoendothelial cells used in this study were more effective at repairing the injured cardiac muscle and reducing scar tissue than previous approaches that have used muscle cells known as myoblasts, according to Dr. Huard.
At six weeks after injection, the myoendothelial cell-injected hearts functioned at 40 to 50 percent more effectively compared with hearts that had been injected with myogenic cells (myoblasts). Source: Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.
Results of this study are published in the Dec. 2 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. See Phyorg.com for details, click HERE
WAS IST LOS?
KULTUR
Celebrating Gustav Klimt
Vienna's art trade will be marking the 150th anniversary of Gustav Klimt’s birth in style. A series of special events in 2012 will pay tribute to the artist, who was a leading light in the Vienna Secession movement and a pioneer of modernism.
DAS KINO
Portrait of Wally - The Movie
A documentary about Austrian painter Egon Schiele's famous portrait of his mistress "Wally" opens Friday, in New York's Quad Cinema III. It traces the legal and emotional drama surrounding the oil painting. The following review is by Chuck Bowen of Slant.
DER STAMMTISCH
Gertrude Stein's Strange Views
By Mark Weber
Scholars of the life of Gertrude Stein were recently startled to learn that in 1938 the prominent American writer Gertrude Stein had spearheaded a campaign urging the Nobel committee to award its Peace Prize to Adolf Hitler.
FUSSBALL
