Health & Science

A breakthrough cancer treatment

Just eight months ago, 6-year-old Emma Whitehead was gravely ill with leukemia and running out of options. Two rounds of chemotherapy had already failed, and a bone marrow transplant was no longer possible, The New York Times reports. So her parents opted for an experimental therapy developed at the University of Pennsylvania that aimed to enlist Emma’s own immune system in the fight against cancer. In a radical technique that had never been tested on a child—or anyone with Emma’s type of leukemia—researchers removed millions of her T cells, a type of white blood cell that fights off infections. They then used a disabled form of HIV to insert new genetic material into the T cells, reprogramming them to attack malignant cells. When the new T cells were dripped back into Emma’s veins, they multiplied and began destroying the cancer. The ensuing “war” between T cells and malignant cells caused a high fever and a precipitous drop in blood pressure that nearly killed Emma, but she recovered—and has now been in total remission for seven months. By re-engineering the body’s own immune system to destroy cancer, the new technique achieves a goal long sought by cancer researchers. “Our goal is to have a cure, but we can’t say that word,” said Dr. Carl June, who leads the research team at the University of Pennsylvania. The technique hasn’t worked on all patients, but researchers believe it could revolutionize the treatment of leukemia, and eventually of tumor-forming cancers as well.

When heavier is healthier

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Being slightly overweight may actually reduce your risk of dying prematurely. A new analysis of nearly 100 studies shows that people who have a body mass index (BMI) that qualifies them as overweight are 6 percent less likely to die early than people considered to be of normal weight. Carrying “a few extra pounds is not as lethal as we’ve been led to believe,” Steven B. Heymsfield, director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, tells WebMD.com. Researchers say the results suggest that BMI, which takes into account only a person’s height and weight, is a very crude measure of health. Athletes in peak condition who pack on lots of muscle often have BMIs in the overweight category, and it’s also possible that a bit of extra fat, stored in the right place, might help people survive illnesses. “What is bad is a type of fat that is inside your belly,” says Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, a professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Non-belly fat, underneath your skin in your thigh and your butt area—these are not necessarily bad.” Unless you’re obese, researchers say, maintaining healthy cholesterol and blood pressure levels may be more important than having an “ideal” weight.

Antarctica’s warming shock

Western Antarctica is heating up faster than almost any other region on earth, increasing the risk that a huge ice sheet there could collapse and cause a drastic rise in sea levels. That’s the alarming conclusion of climate researchers who used data from a remote weather station combined with other temperature readings on the continent to show that West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees over the past half century—roughly twice as much as previously estimated. “What we’re seeing is one of the strongest warming signals on earth,” Andrew J. Monaghan, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, tells BBC.com. The West Antarctica ice sheet, which is about the size of Greenland, holds 10 percent of Antarctica’s ice, and its collapse could raise global sea levels by up to 10 feet. Climate concern has recently focused on the Arctic, where sea ice cover shrank to record lows last year. But though powerful winds—another effect of climate change—have recently increased Antarctica’s sea ice cover, the continent is still heating up fast, says study author David H. Bromwich. “The changes taking place in Antarctica are as big as what’s happening in the north,” he says.

Mapping the moon

Two NASA probes that spent last year orbiting the moon have returned stunning new geological maps that could help explain how it, Earth, and other planets in our solar system formed. The probes, named Ebb and Flow, flew identical orbits just miles above the moon’s surface to measure its gravity field. Slight disruptions in their paths—caused by the push and pull of mountains and craters, some of them below the surface—revealed that the moon’s crust is far thinner than was thought, and “was absolutely pulverized” by asteroids and comets in the distant past, MIT geophysicist Maria Zuber tells NPR.org. The findings suggest that Mars and Earth were also pummeled, and those bombardments could have opened fissures in Mars’s surface that drained its early oceans, and cracked Earth’s crust to allow gases to escape and form our atmosphere.