An FDA advisory panel has proposed banning the prescription painkillers Vicodin and Percocet, which combine acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) with more powerful opiate painkillers. The panel says that patients may take the prescription drugs in combination with over-the-counter medicines like Tylenol or Excedrin, reaching a dose that can cause dangerous liver damage.

Scott Fishman, chief of pain medicine at UC Davis, says the proposed ban makes sense. The drugs contained in Vicodin and Percocet would still be available, but as separate pills, allowing better control, he says.

“The key is that the public needs to understand that they [the FDA] are not voting to ban the drugs [contained in the pill: the opiate and acetaminophen]. The drugs are fine. It’s the combination of the drugs in one pill. Each drug has its own problems but, used separately, can be used safely.”

Fishman also talked about acetaminophen on the PBS NewsHour last night (video here).

Disputed line calls are as much a part of the Wimbledon tennis tournament as rain and overpriced strawberries. Tuesday’s New York Times has a long article on research by David Whitney and his lab at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, which found that judges are far more likely to call a ball out when it was actually in, than the reverse.

Whitney’s team watched video of the 2007 Wimbledon tournament and identified 83 incorrect line calls. Of those, 70 (84 percent) were ruled out when they should have been in.

The problem is that the brain’s visual processing system isn’t fast enough to keep up with a fast-moving object like a tennis ball. There’s a lag of up to 150 milliseconds from the first perception of a moving object to the brain processing the information. So the brain covers the gap by making a guess about where the object actually is.  But in the case of an object that suddenly changes speed and direction — like a bouncing tennis ball — that guess can be wrong, or at least wrong enough to make a difference.

Perhaps tennis tournaments should screen umpires for those with the fastest possible processing times…but then they would probably be on the court playing, rather than watching.

A paper about the work was published in Current Biology last year.  For a longer writeup, see our story from last October.

Bye-bye, Larry; pioneering female winemakers; healing eyes in Peru; D. Kern Holoman passes the baton; and much more. Access to the full issue here.

One percent inspiration, 99 percent networking, as Thomas Edison might have said. Innovation only happens when a network is available to turn a great idea into a product, says UC Davis business professor Andrew Hargadon.

New ideas are cheap, he says:

Most great innovations are based on ideas already developed by others. The iPod was not the first MP3 player. Google was not the first search engine. Edison’s wasn’t the first light bulb. These and other innovations were successful because of the networks that were built around them. The particular network of founders, investors, developers, customers and distribution partners is what makes the difference between a good idea that goes nowhere and one that overthrows entire industries.

Hargadon is founding director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and the Energy Efficiency Center at UC Davis and the author of, most recently, How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate.

Andrew Hargadon’s blog.

Religious studies professor Flagg Miller was extensively quoted in this article from the New York Times Week in Review section on reaction to President Obama’s Cairo speech — especially the apparent attempt to upstage it with a new audio tape message from Osama bin Laden.

Miller noted that Obama’s speech was about consensus building, while bin Laden’s rhetoric was polarizing. But many in the West miss how effective bin Laden’s language can be, Miller says: he is a good poet in classical Arabic, using imagery of 12-century Muslim warriors fighting heroically against Crusaders.

Miller has been studying a cache of hundreds of audiotapes retrieved from bin Laden’s former compound in Afghanistan in 2001.  The tapes of sermons, poems and speeches give insight into the terrorist leader’s intellectual development in the years he was building his network and status.

Out on the great plains, UC Davis grad student Megan Wyman is trying to work out what makes a bison bellow sexy. Somewhat surprisingly, it seems that the males that bellow more quietly are more successful in mating. Listen to the whole NPR story, including bison bellows, here.

Original story here.

Meanwhile, Fox News Channel is out by the cow barns today, reporting live on research by Frank Mitloehner, who has been measuring the gases and other emissions created by cattle operations, by housing cattle in enclosed tents. Mitloehner was quoted in a New York Times story on Friday about farmers experimenting with new cattle feeds. The average cow emits 200 to 400 pounds of methane (a greenhouse gas) a year, Mitloehner told the Times.

Agricultural scientists who work with cows, pigs, chickens and sheep are hoping to get more federal dollars to support medical research in these animals. The laboratory mouse — cheap to keep, easy to breed, and available in thousands of inbred strains — is the mainstay of medical research in animals, but scientists like Russ Hovey of the UC Davis Department of Animal Science says traditional barnyard animals have something to offer as well. Hovey is studying the genes and hormones that control breast development in pigs, and hoping to get some insight into human breast cancer.

Kent Lloyd, associate dean of research at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, notes that mice breed much more quickly than cows and sheep, their DNA has been sequenced and there are well-established methods to manipulate their genes. These feats could be replicated in other species, given enough time and money, but “why do it?” he asks.

UC Davis economics senior Marilyn Murray (left) and Natasha Sandor of UC Santa Barbara happened to be in the Five Guys burger restaurant in Washington DC last Friday when President Obama dropped in for a cheeseburger with jalapenos. Murray and Sandor are both interns at the University of California’s Washington DC Center this quarter; Murray is taking Professor Larry Berman’s seminar on the presidency. “I carry my camera with me every where because you never know who you will meet or what you will see while living in Washington DC,” Murray says.

It might be hard to top this, though.

The President’s burger run was also captured by CSPAN; see the video here. You can see Murray and Sandor talking to Obama at about 4.25.

By Clifton B. Parker

North Korea’s nuclear testing and bellicose rhetoric are raising the stakes for the U.S. and its allies.

Rather than take the bait, the U.S. should act “unimpressed with the nuclear brinksmanship,” said Miroslav Nincic, an international relations scholar who studies war, U.S. foreign policy and national security.

“A minimal response,” Nincic said, “allows the ineffectiveness of attempts to play the nuclear card to sink in. This might, in a few months, lead Pyongyang to explore better ways of acquiring the assistance and respect it wants.”

It will not be easy—North Korea seems hell-bent on provoking someone. In the past two weeks, the authoritarian state has conducted an underground nuclear test, threatened to launch military strikes against the U.S. and South Korea, and renounced the truce that has kept the peace for more than 50 years in the Korean Peninsula. As a result, the U.S. and South Korea have put their military forces on high alert.

North Korea’s May 25 nuclear test came as a rude surprise to the international community, particularly after widespread condemnation for an earlier ballistic-missile launch in April.

So, why all the bizarre behavior?

“Pyongyang feels that it needs leverage with the international community to get the foreign assistance it badly needs. Nuclear weapons provide, in its eyes, the most effective form of leverage available,” Nincic said.

He explained that North Korea also recently discontinued a policy by which economic aid, especially food aid, was unconditionally given to it.

“Given the enormous economic disparity between the two Koreas, Pyongyang hopes that its nuclear capability will position it better when it comes to discussing (one day) terms of reunification with its far richer neighbor,” he added. “The nuclear blast and missile tests are partly intended to dispel any impression of vulnerability.”

On top of this, North Korea unilaterally withdrew from the armistice with South Korea on May 26. “The symbolic impact is considerable, particularly as support for a rapprochement with North Korea declines among the South Korean public,” said Nincic.

The two Koreas technically remain at war because they signed a truce, not a peace treaty, in 1953.

Little is known about internal politics inside North Korea’s capital of Pyongyang, but Nincic says that a power struggle is likely unfolding around its aging leader  Kim Jong-il. His eldest two sons are not considered plausible successors. Though his youngest son, Kim Jon-un, seems more credible, he is deemed too young.

This may be why Kim Jong-il’s brother in law, Jang Seong-taek, was recently appointed to a key strategic defense position, Nincic said. Along with the nuclear test, both moves send the message that the eventual succession of the younger son would not weaken the military—an important power broker inside that country.

As for China, North Korea, chief benefactor, it is more concerned with economic growth than in an arms race between both the Koreas and possibly Japan.

“China’s support for North Korea is, and has been, very qualified. The last thing China wants is a nuclear-capable North Korea,” he said.

And this is the last thing Japan wants as well. North Korea’s nuclear test and missile launches may have Japan confronting a topic long off-limits—acquiring atomic weapons of its own. But those days are not yet here, said Nincic, and the world’s second-largest economy sits squarely under U.S. protection. The U.S. has 28,500 troops in South Korea and another 50,000 in Japan.

“Japan has a reasonably good anti-aircraft capability,” he said, “but nothing that would defend it against a nuclear-tipped North Korean missile.”

The North Korea crisis comes as two Americans, journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling, remained in custody in Pyongyang. Accused of illegal entry and “hostile acts,” they are due to shortly face trial in North Korea after being jailed for two months. Ling attended Sacramento’s Del Campo High School.

Clifton Parker is the editor of Dateline, where this piece also appears. 

The most complete version to date of the mouse genome was published yesterday in the journal PLoS Biology. “Build 36,” from the C57 inbred strain of black mice, has 175,000 fewer gaps, 139 megabytes of new sequences and realigns genes that were incorrectly described in an earlier version of the mouse genome.

The new genome map predicts just over 20,000 protein-coding genes in the mouse. About 75 percent of these are 1:1 “orthologs” or counterparts of human genes. The authors note that about 5,000 of these genes can be studied in “knockout” mice.

Kent Lloyd, professor of veterinary medicine and at the UC Davis Mouse Biology Program and the Mutant Mouse Regional Resource Center at UC Davis, said that the new work underscores how important genetically-engineered mice now are for research on human health.

The genetically-altered mouse continues to prove its leading role as a human surrogate in biomedical research that reveals underlying pathophysiological causes and consequences of disease. Church et al’s recently published article in PloS Biology describes painstaking work to refine the genetic code for the mouse, reinforcing its value as an animal model. Build 36 uncovers sequence information specific to previously unknown mouse genes, many of which have orthologs in humans.

We now have the most refined, legible, and complete genetic sequence of the mouse, with which we can conduct key “knockout” and other genetic manipulations in the mouse in order to develop more and better models of human disease, development, and behavior.

UC Davis is one of three regional repositories in the MMRRC network, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health. The repository stores mice bred by NIH-funded researchers (mostly as eggs, sperm or stem cells) and makes them available to other scientists.