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Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, 9-17 (January 2010) | doi:10.1038/nrn2754

Elena Jazin1 & Larry Cahill2 About the authors

A plethora of discoveries relating to sex influences on brain function is rapidly moving this field into the spotlight for most areas of neuroscience. The domain of molecular or genetic neuroscience is no exception. The goal of this article is to highlight key developments concerning sex-based dimorphisms in molecular neuroscience, describe control mechanisms regulating these differences, address the implications of these dimorphisms for normal and abnormal brain function and discuss what these advances mean for future work in the field. The overriding conclusion is that, as for neuroscience in general, molecular neuroscience has to take into account potential sex influences that might modify signaling pathways.

By Stephanie Smith, CNN Medical Producer
December 8, 2009 4:18 p.m. EST

New York (CNN) — In the rare cases when the H1N1 virus kills, scientists have found, it penetrates deep into the lungs, creating widespread damage — a pattern similar to what killed millions during previous flu pandemics in 1918 and 1957.

The New York Office of Chief Medical Examiner examined medical records, autopsy reports and microscopic slides of 34 people with H1N1 who died between May 15 and July 9, 2009, during the early days of the pandemic.

The report found that among those deaths, inflammation and damage in the lungs extended all the way to the alveoli, tiny sacs at the farthest end of the lungs’ airways.

“Generally, flu stays in the upper airways,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “What this shows is clearly this virus has capability of infecting and causing inflammation and destruction of cells from the trachea, all the way down into smaller cells of the lungs.

“The cells of the lung get directly attacked by the virus,” said Fauci.

The damage appears in computerized scans as opaque patches that normally would not appear in the lungs, and which obstruct lung function.

Get complete coverage of H1N1 — Fighting the flu

Echoing previous reports, the study, published online in the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, also revealed that 91 percent of those who died were people with underlying health problems, and most occurred in people between 25 and 49 years old.

More than half of the deaths were caused by bacterial pneumonia.

“The secondary bacterial infection evokes inflammation,” said Dr. William Schaffner, professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “It socks it in the lung and all of a sudden the lung as an organ can’t do its principal job.”

Obesity was a factor in 72 percent of H1N1 deaths, a finding that has caused concern among infectious disease experts.

“That was a striking finding,” said Schaffner. “It contributes in a very material way to what we know about risks for a severe outcome with H1N1 infection. We are keeping an eye on obesity as a risk factor for H1N1 death.”

Track the H1N1 virus in your state

The study gives interesting insight into the mechanism behind H1N1 deaths, but will not change the current response to the virus, said Fauci.

Individually designed music therapy may help reduce the noise levels experienced by people who suffer from tinnitus, say German researchers.

They altered participants’ favourite music to remove notes which matched the frequency of the ringing in their ears.
After a year of listening to the modified music, individuals reported a drop in the loudness of their tinnitus.
The researchers said the “inexpensive” treatment could be used alongside other techniques to relieve the condition.

It is thought that around 1-3% of the population have chronic ringing in their ears which is significant enough to reduce their overall quality of life.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers said although the cause of tinnitus remains unknown, it has been shown that the part of the brain that processes sounds is frequently disrupted in people with the condition.

The theory behind the new technique is that removing the spectrum of noise associated with tinnitus from the music reduces activity in the brain relating to that frequency, alleviating the condition.

Therapy
The 39 patients who took part in the study all had chronic tinnitus for an average of five years but had no other hearing problems.

They were split into three groups and were offered either the modified music therapy, a dummy version of music therapy or usual treatment.

Participants listened to the music for an average of 12 hours a week and by the end of the study, those who had been given the tailored music reported a significant drop in the level of the ringing they heard compared with those listening to the dummy version.

Study leader Dr Christo Pantev, from Westphalian Wilhelms University in Munster, said the approach specifically targeted the part of the brain responsible for tinnitus.

“The notched music approach can be considered as enjoyable, low cost, and presumably causal treatment that is capable of specifically reducing tinnitus loudness.

“It could significantly complement widely-used and rather indirect psychological treatment strategies.”

Dr Ralph Holmes, director of biomedical research at deaf and hard of hearing charity, RNID, said he would look in detail at the findings.

“While we find it encouraging there is new investment in treatment for tinnitus, we know there is no proven ‘cure’.

“This seems to be similar to tinnitus retraining therapy which is one of the most common ways of managing the condition.”

By DENISE GRADY
Published: December 27, 2009

The plight of two kidney transplant patients who contracted a brain infection from an organ donor is prompting health officials to re-examine their policies on using people with certain neurological conditions as donors.

The organ donor, a child at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, had had seizures and a brain disorder initially thought to be an autoimmune disease and not transmissible. The real cause of his illness turned out to be a rare, usually fatal infection, but the mistake in diagnosis was not recognized until the transplants were done and the two recipients had become critically ill. The medical center disclosed the situation on Dec. 18.

The case highlights the lack of a national policy on whether to bar people with poorly defined neurological disorders as donors. For now, the decision is up to individual transplant centers, said Dr. Michael G. Ison, chairman of an advisory committee on infectious disease transmission for the United Network for Organ Sharing, which coordinates transplants in the United States.

While Dr. Ison declined to comment on the Mississippi case, he said, “The bigger issue is that in cases in which a patient has a neurologic condition that hasn’t been definitively diagnosed, that is associated with altered mental status, most experts would recommend against the use of organs from those donors.”

Dr. Ison, an assistant professor at Northwestern University and a specialist in infectious diseases, said the Mississippi case spurred his committee to begin looking at nationwide data to see how often such patients become donors.

Dr. Shirley Schlessinger, the medical director for the Mississippi Organ Recovery Agency and a transplant nephrologist at the university medical center, said that the university had done extra tests to see if the organs were safe to transplant.

“This will be discussed by a collaborative group of experts at a national level” to try to make the system safer, Dr. Schlessinger said. But she added: “I think it’s wrong to say we’re going to eliminate all these people we can’t be sure of. There will always be undetectable disease in the setting of solid organ donation. We have to stratify the risk and present it to recipients.”

Disease transmission from transplants occurs in 1 percent of cases involving deceased donors, according to data the organ network began collecting in 2005. But reports are increasing as centers become aware of the network’s database. Recipients have contracted West Nile virus, rabies, H.I.V., tuberculosis, a rodent virus, parasitic worms and other infections. In a few cases, donors have even transmitted cancers.

Transplant patients are especially vulnerable because the drugs needed to prevent organ rejection work by suppressing the immune system.

In October, a government report focused on the need for “biovigilance” in preventing infections from donors.

Dr. Eileen Farnon, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said, “This is a difficult topic, because organs are really scarce and patients who need a transplant are typically quite ill and need a transplant quickly, and sometimes it’s hard to do all the testing that one could possibly think of for all the infections out there.”

More than 100,000 people are on a waiting list for a transplant, and 9,000 die each year, the organ network says.

Experts at the disease centers are investigating the case and advising in the patients’ treatment.

Dr. Matthew J. Kuehnert, the director of the office of blood, organ and other tissue safety at the disease centers, said that transplant patients are sometimes an early warning system for new infectious diseases. He said the nation needed a “sentinel network” to collect information about donors and transplant patients and notify doctors when an organ or tissue recipient gets sick.

“That would both potentially help clinicians taking care of patients already transplanted,” Dr. Kuehnert said, “but also in the case of tissues, which sometimes take longer to be transplanted, because they can be stored, it would help clinicians before they transplanted them into a donor.”

He added, “I think organ safety has not been a priority in transplantation.”

Dr. Richard B. Freeman, who performs liver and kidney transplants at Tufts Medical Center, disagreed. Dr. Freeman said too much effort was being spent worrying about a small number of infections, while far more patients were being harmed by a lack of donors. He said that transplant centers should do a better job of recognizing risky situations and informing patients, so that they can decide whether to accept particular organs.

The organ donor in Mississippi was a boy who died in November at the university medical center. He was being treated for seizures. Doctors did not realize it at the time, but he had a brain infection caused by a type of amoeba. The infection is rare, and exceedingly difficult to detect.

The mistaken first diagnosis was acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, an inflammation of the brain and spinal cord that is thought to be caused by the patient’s own immune system. That condition is not contagious, but the diagnosis is not really definitive; it is made when everything else has been ruled out.

Given that there was an element of uncertainty, doctors tested the boy for many more infections than organ donors are routinely screened for, Dr. Schlessinger said. All the tests were negative, so his heart, liver and kidneys were transplanted into four patients. Afterward, an autopsy still missed the infection and seemed to support the mistaken diagnosis.

About three weeks after the transplants, both kidney recipients became severely ill, within hours of each other, with seizures, fever and changes in their mental status. They were taken back to the hospital in Jackson. A doctor there noted that both had had kidney transplants the same day. He suspected immediately that the kidneys had come from the same donor and that the donor might have had an undetected infection.

The hospital sent samples of the donor’s brain tissue to the disease centers, which found an amoeba called Balamuthia mandrillaris. One kidney patient was then given a biopsy, which also tested positive for the amoebas. Balamuthia lives in soil and water, and scientists suspect that people become infected through cuts or from ingesting the organism. Only about 70 cases have ever been identified in the United States, and nearly all have been fatal. These are the first known cases from transplants.

It was not clear why only the kidney patients had become ill. The kidneys may have harbored more amoebas than the other organs, Dr. Farnon said, or the particular anti-rejection drugs might have been a factor.

The patients are being treated with “a boatload of drugs,” Dr. Schlessinger said, but have not improved.

Dr. Kuehnert said he wondered whether there should be a registry for donors who have brain inflammation, or encephalitis, from an unknown cause.

“It would be difficult to say, ‘Don’t ever recover a donor with encephalitis,’ ” he said. “Some may be O.K. But we don’t know how many times it’s a successful operation, and how many times a tragic operation.”

For years, practitioners of alternative medicine have been touting the benefits of ginkgo, especially for maintaining brain health, but a new study finds that the centuries-old nostrum does little to slow the cognitive decline of aging.

Researchers at six universities across the U.S., led by Dr. Steven DeKosky at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, report that elderly people taking ginkgo supplements showed no notable differences in scores on brain-function tests from people taking placebo pills. The team, which published its results Tuesday, Dec. 29, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, tested volunteers on a range of tasks, including memory, attention, language, and visual and spatial constructions, and found that the extract from the ancient tree did little to slow the decline of these functions.
(See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2009.)

“For me, this kind of closes the book on whether or not, if you start taking ginkgo later in life, you are going to have cognitive benefit,” says DeKosky, vice dean of the School of Medicine. “We don’t have good evidence that it maintains good brain health.”

The study is the largest and, with a mean follow-up of six years, also the longest to investigate the effects of ginkgo on the brain. An earlier analysis, also led by DeKosky, reported in 2008 that ginkgo supplements do not prevent the development of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease in older people. Taken together, the two evaluations strongly suggest that ginkgo does little, if anything, to improve acuity in cognitive functions such as memory, language, and visual and spatial orientation.
Scientists had thought ginkgo extract might work as an anti-inflammatory agent to keep brain connections healthy and promote steady flow of nutrients to neurons. They also thought ginkgo, a strong antioxidant, helped inhibit oxidative damage to brain neurons caused by free radicals found in pollutants or made as a by-product of many metabolic processes. But if ginkgo were working in this way, says DeKosky, he and his team would almost certainly have detected a difference between the treatment and placebo groups.
(Read about a life-extending drug in the Year in Health 2009.)

As it was, the more than 3,000 elderly volunteers between the ages of 72 and 96 were tested repeatedly using crude screening measures as well as more detailed, computerized assessments of their mental function. Over the years, researchers saw overall cognitive decline in the study participants. The average rate of change in performance on the tests, which were initially given every six months and then yearly, was similar for both the ginkgo and placebo groups. “Quite frankly, one of the things that surprised us was that for an extract that has been around for this long, there ought to be a signal of some sort, or we ought to see some effect for it to have maintained its reputation for so long,” says DeKosky. “And we didn’t.”
DeKosky admits that the study has its limitations — the subjects were more than 70 years old, and it’s not clear whether ginkgo’s effect on the brain may be more profound if introduced earlier. Then there is the question of exactly how ginkgo is acting on the body; if the compound works by improving circulation not just in the brain but throughout the body, for example, then this study may not have been refined enough to pick up those subtle, more indirect effects. “What we would really like to see is additional research,” says Douglas MacKay, vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs for the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a leading trade organization of dietary-supplement makers. “What we would not like to see is this study closing the door on answering other questions or subsets of questions on ginkgo.” The bar, however, for those additional studies seems to be getting higher.

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: December 28, 2009

More than 1,000 people a year are hospitalized for aviation-related injuries, with only one-tenth of them passengers in commercial aircraft.

Researchers have analyzed data from 2000 through 2005, gathering information on crashes, parachuting accidents, airport maintenance worker injuries and passenger injuries sustained on the ground, among others. The report, which appears in the December issue of Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, uses a group of health care databases maintained by the federal government’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project.

Only 10.6 percent of those hospitalized were traveling in commercial aircraft. More than 32 percent were injured in private planes, and almost 11 percent in gliders or hang gliders. Unsurprisingly, jumping out of an airplane is quite dangerous: 28.9 percent of those injured were parachutists.

More than 28 percent of all injuries were to the lower limbs. And while burns were seen in just 2.5 percent of the patients, they accounted for 17 percent of deaths after hospitalization.

The military services have established effective surveillance systems to track aviation injuries, but the researchers write that the sources of information on nonmilitary injuries are not as complete.

Neither the National Transportation Safety Board nor the Federal Aviation Administration collects complete information on all injured aircraft passengers, and Susan P. Baker, the lead author of the study, believes this is a problem. “I think we have made good use of a valuable data source,” Ms. Baker said, “but the ideal information on injuries would come from the N.T.S.B., so that it could be correlated with data on the aircraft and the crash circumstances.”

Ms. Baker, a professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins, said that while the largest category of injuries and deaths had always been private planes, “it surprised me that there were so many parachutists among the injured.”

“There were almost as many parachute injuries as civil aviation injuries,” she said. NICHOLAS BAKALAR

High levels of leptin associated with lower dementia risk, research finds

By Ed Edelson
HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, Dec. 15 (HealthDay News) — High blood levels of leptin, a hormone that regulates appetite, may guard against Alzheimer’s disease, new research suggests.

“Hopefully, in 10 or 15 years this may be one of many agents that we use to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease,” said senior study author Dr. Sudha Seshadri, an associate professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine. “Or it may be one of many markers that we measure in combination to predict risk.”

But many more studies of different population groups are needed to determine whether leptin can play such a pivotal role in predicting the risk of Alzheimer’s, Seshadri said.

The research, which was reported in the Dec. 16 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, was done because “there has been some data relating body weight to the risk of Alzheimer’s disease,” Seshadri said. “When we looked at animal studies, we found some data to indicate that leptin not only produces a feeling of satiety but also has a beneficial effect on the hippocampus. It was important to see if that was true in humans.”

The hippocampus is a portion of the brain that plays a role in important aspects of memory.

Some human studies have shown that people with Alzheimer’s disease have lower levels of leptin, but those studies didn’t show which came first, the lower leptin levels or the decline in mental function, Seshadri said. So she and her colleagues turned to the Framingham Heart Study, which has followed residents of a Massachusetts community for decades.

Leptin levels had been measured in 785 Framingham participants in the early 1990s. For the new study, 198 of them had MRI scans that measured brain volume an average of 7.7 years after leptin was measured. The study authors also kept track of new Alzheimer’s diagnoses among the study participants.

The researchers found that higher leptin levels were associated with a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s and all other forms of dementia. The 25 percent of participants with the lowest leptin levels had a 25 percent risk of developing Alzheimer’s over a 12-year period; the incidence was only 6 percent for those with the highest leptin levels. And lower leptin levels were associated with a greater decrease in total brain size.

It’s not now possible to say what leptin might be doing to help the aging brain, and “we’re not recommending that anyone get leptin or increase leptin levels,” Seshadri said. For starters, animal studies are needed to better determine possible risks as well as benefits, she said.

“Other cohort studies are needed to substantiate our findings,” Seshadri said. Because the Framingham population is overwhelming white, “we need to look at people who are non-Caucasian,” she said. “We also need to look at younger people, in their 50s or 60s.”

Another report in the same issue of the journal described disappointing results in a trial of a once-promising drug to prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

The drug, tarenflurbil, was designed to reduce production of amyloid, a protein that forms plaques in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. The study of 1,684 people who began taking the drug in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease showed no benefit, the report said.

But the anti-amyloid strategy is far from dead, said Dr. Lon S. Schneider, a professor of psychiatry, neurology and gerontology at the University of Southern California, and a co-author of the journal report.

“This was one of the early anti-amyloid approaches,” Schneider said. “It was a definitive trial showing definitely that there was nothing here. But it doesn’t mean that anti-amyloid strategies will fail, just that this drug isn’t effective.”

A number of other therapies that target amyloid are now in human trials, Schneider said. They include monoclonal antibodies that bind to the protein and drugs that inhibit the production of the amyloid fragments that are believed to be toxic to the brain.

Those trials are still recruiting participants, and results are not expected for a few years, Schneider said. Even if the results are negative, the anti-amyloid strategy can live on, although with a different approach, in which the drugs are given earlier in life, he said.

Alzheimer’s drugs are being tried on people in the early stages of the disease, Schneider said. “But they are pathologically already well along,” he said. Starting therapy earlier might give some benefit, he noted, which would make a marker such as low leptin levels a useful indicator for preventive therapy.

More information

Latest news and basic facts about Alzheimer’s disease are available from the Alzheimer’s Association.

SOURCES: Sudha Seshadri, M.D., associate professor, neurology, Boston University School of Medicine; Lon S. Schneider, M.D., professor, psychiatry, neurology and gerontology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; Dec. 16, 2009, Journal of the American Medical Association

Last Updated: Dec. 15, 2009

Copyright © 2009 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

By Kate Mulgrew, Special to CNN
December 3, 2009 9:29 a.m. EST

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Kate Mulgrew says millions of Americans are affected by Alzheimer’s disease
• New research aims to prevent the brain process that leads to the disease, she says
• Mulgrew: Nation must commit money, attention to developing a promising treatment

RELATED TOPICS

• Alzheimer’s Disease
• Aging and the Elderly
• Federal Research Funding

Editor’s note: Kate Mulgrew is a stage, film and television actress who is best known for her TV role in “Star Trek: Voyager.” She is currently appearing in the NBC series “Mercy.”

New York (CNN) — After the Alzheimer’s came, my mother could not know how shadows fell across our once ebullient family: our solidarity fractured, our tempers flaring in furious incomprehension, hearts breaking in mute despair.

None of us knew how to watch this woman disappear, her features slowly masked with blankness, her supple body rigid and wooden, her absolute vividness obliterated by the heavy fog of her disease.

As those of us touched in some way by Alzheimer’s know too well, the emotional, social and economic burden of this disease is nearly unbearable — for individuals, for families and for our country:

• 5.3 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease; a new case develops every 70 seconds.

• One in eight people aged 65 and older has the disease, and the risk is even higher for those over 85.

• Today, 9.9 million people are caring for a family member with Alzheimer’s.

• Alzheimer’s and other dementias cost Medicare, Medicaid and businesses $148 billion annually, a number that will grow quickly and substantially as baby boomers reach age 65.

Prevention. Cure. Hope. These are words seldom associated with Alzheimer’s disease. But groundbreaking scientific research and an opportunity for powerful collaborations could lead to discovery of the ultimate cure for Alzheimer’s disease: its prevention.

I know this is so because my friend Dr. Karen Hsiao Ashe, an internationally renowned Alzheimer’s disease researcher at the University of Minnesota, has developed a research road map that calls for bringing together a group of the world’s foremost laboratory and clinical investigators in the field to make prevention a reality by 2020.

This achievable goal adds “hope” to the vocabulary of Alzheimer’s disease and holds the promise that my children and yours will never suffer its hardship.

My son, Alec, is an artist like his late grandmother. His paintings are large and uncompromising, stunning in texture, original in design. He’s got the real thing. He’s got “it,” just as she had. But what if he also has something else, like the APOE-e4 gene, known to increase the risk of Alzheimer’s? What if he is in line to inherit this devastating disease?

What I could barely endure happening to my mother, I know I could not possibly endure happening to my son. So, like my friend Karen, I embrace prevention as the ultimate cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Anything short of that is too risky.

Karen is identifying the biological processes that occur in the earliest stages of the disease — long before symptoms appear — to develop cost-effective, widely available interventions. She compares Alzheimer’s disease prevention to the polio vaccine: “Had a vaccine not been developed for polio, hospital wards today would be filled with people needing artificial ventilators to breathe. Similarly, not only is treatment of Alzheimer’s likely to be less effective than prevention, it’s also likely to be 10 to 10,000 times more expensive,” she recently told Twin Cities Business magazine.

Karen and her colleagues are homing in on a promising possibility: a pill containing the molecular compound that could block the chemical chain reaction in the brain that leads to Alzheimer’s.

So what’s the holdup? Well, money, of course, and attitude, perhaps. Finding a treatment within the next 10 years that will prevent Alzheimer’s disease will require a major national investment to bring together the scientists to develop an effective, safe and affordable way to block the disease.

According to Harry Johns, president and CEO of the Alzheimer’s Association, “No other disease causes so much suffering, is so certainly fatal, affects so many and drives so much cost with so little spent to overcome it.” Why is that? Johns names ignorance, age discrimination, stigma and denial as likely explanations.

My plea is deeply personal, but by 2050, Alzheimer’s will affect as many as 16 million Americans, and none of us will be able to deny the reality. We must fight mightily now to prevent the shadow of this disease from darkening the lives of our children and grandchildren. We must invest today in research that will most swiftly lead to the ultimate cure: prevention.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Kate Mulgrew.

Nikon Corporation
Dec 21, 2009

Nikon Corporation (Michio Kariya, President) is pleased to announce that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has placed an order for eleven D3S digital SLR cameras and seven AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED lenses to be used for photographic documentation.

The D3S digital SLR cameras and AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED lenses ordered by NASA will be carried on the Space Shuttle and used to photograph activities at the International Space Station (ISS) in the future.
No special modifications will be made to these products. They will be the same products available to end-users, confirming the incredible versatility of the D3S. This equipment will be used along with the Nikon D2XS digital SLR cameras, NIKKOR lenses, and Nikon Speedlights already in use at the International Space Station.

Nikon has spent many years contributing to NASA’s study of space through the development and manufacture of advanced and extremely durable cameras as well as of NIKKOR lenses that make the most of Nikon’s optical technologies, and of which production has recently reached fifty million units. To date, NASA has captured more than 700,000 images using Nikon equipment carried into space. Space, however, is not the only extreme environment in which Nikon equipment is used. Nikon also provides official observation equipment used in exploring the Antarctic. Nikon equipment contributes to observation and research of these little explored regions with durability, reliability and technical capabilities that stand up to even the most severe environments.

Nikon’s history with NASA
1971 – Nikon Photomic FTN* (NASA specifications) was used on Apollo 15

1980 = The “Small Camera”, based on the Nikon F3 and equipped with a motor drive, and the F3 “Big Camera”, which utilized long film, were delivered to NASA.
The “Small Camera” was used aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia launched the following year.

1991 – The Nikon F4 and F4S were delivered to NASA

1999 – The Nikon F5 and AF Nikkor lens were carried aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery to photograph extravehicular activities (EVA)

2008 – D2XS digital SLR cameras were delivered to NASA. Six D2XS cameras are used in space to document activities such as inspection and maintenance.

• In addition, already about 15 types of NIKKOR lenses (more than 35 lenses all together) are kept aboard the International Space Station for intravehicular and extravehicular photography to provide continued support for NASA’s space activities.
• Nikon F equipped with Photomic FTN viewfinder that supports TTL center-weighted metering

The D3S was released in November 2009 as the latest flagship model for Nikon FX-format digital SLR cameras. This camera is equipped with a new CMOS sensor (36.0 × 23.9 mm) developed by Nikon and supports standard ISO sensitivity settings of 200 to 12800. Sensitivity can also be set as high as Hi 3 (ISO 102400 equivalent) or as low as Lo 1 (ISO 100 equivalent). Image-degrading noise has been minimized to enable shooting at high sensitivities under even extremely dim lighting. In addition, the D3S is equipped with the D-Movie function, enabling HD video capture and includes high-sensitivity movie mode and movie editing functions for trimming start and ending footage or saving selected frames as JPEG stills. Naturally, the camera itself is representative of an all-round flagship model offering basic performance and operation that meet the strict demands (fast, support for high sensitivities, superior image quality) of professional and advanced amateur photographers in a number of fields, including the press, sports and nature photography.

The AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED is the world’s first ultra wide-angle, zoom lens to offer a focal length of 14mm with a maximum aperture of f/2.8. The performance of this lens has been extremely well received by the camera industry, and recognized by Europe’s Technical Image Press Association (TIPA), which awarded it The Best Professional Lens in Europe 2008, and the European Imaging and Sound Association (EISA), which awarded it European Professional Lens 2008-2009.

OSAKA, Japan & NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited (“Takeda”) and Pfizer Inc. (“Pfizer”) announced that they have entered into an agreement under which Pfizer in China will co-promote Takeda’s Actos® (pioglitazone HCl) with Tianjin Takeda Pharmaceuticals in China. The exclusive co-promotion agreement will build on the current sales capability for Actos in China by increasing the number of medical representatives supporting the sales and marketing of the product and expanding the product reach utilizing the territory coverage of Pfizer in China, the largest multinational pharmaceutical company in China. Pfizer’s Chinese affiliate will receive a fixed ratio of Actos net sales.

“Takeda has a significant opportunity to increase our presence in China, and we are pleased to be partnering with Pfizer to make Actos even more widely available to patients in China”

Actos, for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, has been sold in China since 2004 by Tianjin Takeda Pharmaceuticals, a joint venture of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited and Tianjin Lisheng Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., a Chinese company.

Currently the world’s fifth largest pharmaceutical market, China is expected to be the third largest market by 2011. According to the International Diabetes Federation, the diabetes epidemic has the greatest potential to increase in China, because of its population size, rapid urbanization and economic expansion.

“Takeda has a significant opportunity to increase our presence in China, and we are pleased to be partnering with Pfizer to make Actos even more widely available to patients in China,” said Alan MacKenzie, executive vice president, international operations, Takeda Pharmaceuticals International, Inc. “We are committed to contributing to the health of people in China through a strong sales and marketing framework that provides enhanced access to our products for patients and healthcare providers, and we look forward to further expanding our talent base in China to realize this goal.”

“The combination of Takeda’s industry leading product, backed by compelling clinical evidence and Pfizer’s strong capability and coverage in China creates a winning partnership”, said Ian Read, senior vice president and group president, Pfizer Worldwide Biopharmaceutical Businesses. “According to the International Diabetes Federation, China is estimated to have more than 50 million diabetics by 2025, and we are delighted to partner with Takeda to provide these people with the opportunity to live healthier lives. Pfizer is committed to helping the Chinese Government address its top public health priorities in an innovative, socially responsible and commercially viable manner.”