Three protein fragments are looking like the guilty parties in celiac disease, an intestinal ailment that affects as many as one in 133 people in the United States. These partial proteins, or peptides, are the part of gluten in wheat, rye and barley that triggers the immune systems of celiac patients, damaging the small intestine. An Australian research team reports the new findings in the July 21 Science Translational Medicine.

Pinpointing these peptides has opened the way for development of a therapeutic vaccine that might help celiac patients tolerate these foods. The research team is pursuing that line of work now, led by study coauthor Robert Anderson, a gastroenterologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Parkville, Australia.

As it is, celiac patients deal with their condition by avoiding wheat, rye and barley.

“This is an impressive and very comprehensive study,” says immunologist Ludvig Sollid of the University of Oslo. “The authors find that most celiac patients make a response to the three gluten peptides.”

That response lies at the heart of the problem. Most people digest these cereals effortlessly, but people with celiac disease have a genetic predisposition that causes an aberrant immune response to gluten. That in turn damages the walls of the small intestine and sabotages their ability to absorb food. Celiac disease can cause painful bloating, diarrhea, constipation, lethargy and other problems. Its genetic underpinnings are poorly understood.

In contrast, the cereal side of the equation is now becoming clearer. Scientists fingered gluten in the 1950s as the celiac trigger, but the gluten protein is complex, and the scanning technology needed to sort out its offending components has become available only recently.

The Australian team put that technology to use. First they gave more than 200 celiac patients in Australia and Britain wheat, barley and rye in foods for three days. This mobilized immune T cells to mount an attack on gluten. The researchers used these T cells to measure the patients’ immune reactions to 2,700 compounds found in gluten. Using the new scanning technology to narrow the field, they found that while dozens of peptides elicited some immune response, three stood apart from the rest. One appears in a type of wheat gluten. Another is found in rye gluten. And a third peptide shows up on certain gluten proteins in all three cereals.

The Australian team has begun an early-stage clinical trial using these peptides in a vaccine that aims to desensitize celiac patients and make them tolerant of the compounds. The group expects to report preliminary safety results later this year.

Zooming in on the most massive stars ever found. Star R136a1 (far right) is in a dense cluster of stars 165,000 light years from earth

By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

They are among the true monsters of space - colossal stars whose size and brightness go well beyond what many scientists thought was even possible.

One of the objects, known simply as R136a1, is the most massive ever found.

The star is seen to have a mass about 265 times that of our own Sun; but the latest modelling work suggests at birth it could have been bigger, still.

Perhaps as much as 320 times that of the Sun, says Professor Paul Crowther from Sheffield University, UK.

“If it replaced the Sun in our Solar System, it would outshine [it] by as much as the Sun currently outshines the full Moon,” the astronomer told BBC News.

The stars were identified by Crowther’s team using a combination of new observations on the Very Large Telescope facility in Chile and data gathered previously with the Hubble Space Telescope.

The group studied the NGC 3603 and RMC 136a clusters - regions of space where thick clouds of gas and dust are collapsing into even denser clumps.

In these places, huge stars ignite to burn brief but brilliant lives before exploding as supernovas to seed the Universe with heavy elements.

NGC 3603 is relatively close in cosmic terms - just 22,000 light-years distant. RMC 136a (more often nicknamed R136) is slightly further away, and is sited within one of our neighbouring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud, some 165,000 light-years away.

The team found several stars with surface temperatures over 40,000 degrees - more than seven times hotter than our Sun.

The research shows these young stellar objects to be unbelievably bright, truly massive and also extremely wide - perhaps 30 times the radius of our Sun in the case of R136a1.

How big is big? Star comparisons

Up close the stars would look a mess, however. Unlike our Sun which appears as a defined disc on the sky, the giants identified by Professor Crowther and colleagues would be losing so much material through powerful winds from their puffed up atmospheres that they would have a fuzzy look about them.

One thing seems for sure - no planets would exist in orbit about them.

“Planets take longer to form than these stars take to live and die. Even if there were planets, there would be no astronomers on them because the night sky would be almost as bright as the day in these clusters,” Professor Crowther joked.

Europe’s VLT facility is sited in Chile

“Some of these big stars are relatively close to each other, so even at ‘night’ you’d have another very bright star shining on you.”

Previously observed giants had been seen to get as big as 150 times the mass of our Sun. The latest findings raise interesting questions about what the upper limits on size might be.

Ordinarily, there should come a point where the pressure from all the radiation emitted by a stellar behemoth pushes back against any further infall of gas and dust. In other words, there ought to be a physical barrier to excessive star growth.

But Professor Crowther adds a second factor - that of resource. There may not exist in today’s Universe places that have sufficient supplies of gas and dust to feed ever more massive stars.

However, the new observations do give a tantalising glimpse of what the very early Universe might have been like. Many objects in the very first population of stars to shine shortly after the Big Bang are thought to have been monsters like R136a1.

When these objects blew apart, their cataclysmic demise was so violent they may not have left behind a remnant core of material as is often the case following a supernova; or even a black hole which is another common consequence, too.

Instead, these giants may simply have dumped all their contents back into space, dispersing heavy elements like iron equivalent to the mass of 10 of our Suns.

“The bigger picture to this research is that it gives us confidence that there were probably more of these really massive stars in much greater numbers early on in the Universe,” Professor Crowther told BBC News.

The new results appear in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

BILLINGS, Mont. – Tens of thousands of gray wolves would be returned to the woods of New England, the mountains of California, the wide open Great Plains and the desert West under a scientific petition filed Tuesday with the federal government.

The predators were poisoned and trapped to near-extermination in the United States last century, but have since clawed their way back to some of the most remote wilderness in the lower 48 states.

That recovery was boosted in the 1990s by the reintroduction of 66 wolves in Idaho and Yellowstone National Park. Yet as those first packs have flourished, increased livestock killings and declining big game herds have drawn sharp backlash from ranchers, hunters and officials in the Northern Rockies.

But biologists with the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity want to expand that recovery across the country. A few isolated pockets of wolves, they say, are not enough.

“If the gray wolf is listed as endangered, it should be recovered in all significant portions of its range, not just fragments,” said Michael Robinson, who authored the petition. Robinson said the animals occupy less than 5 percent of their historic range in the lower 48 states.

The federal Administrative Procedure Act allows outside parties to petition the government to act when species are in peril. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Chris Tollefson, whose agency received the petition, said there was no deadline by which the agency must respond to the one filed Tuesday, which was signed by Robinson and another biologist, Noah Greenwald.

Tollefson also said an internal review was under way to figure out where wolves once lived and where they might be returned.

“We need to look at what is realistic and where the suitable habitat would be,” Tollefson said.

The review will be completed by late 2010 or early 2011 and will contain recommendations but no final decision on whether to create new wolf populations, Tollefson said.

About 6,000 wolves live in the U.S. outside Alaska, with most of those in the Great Lakes and Northern Rockies, with only a few dozen in Arizona and New Mexico. They are listed as endangered except in Alaska, Idaho and Montana.

In early 2008, a similar petition was lodged by the Natural Resources Defense Council. In its rejection of that petition, the Fish and Wildlife Service said the Great Lakes and Northern Rockies programs had succeeded and any additional recovery efforts would be “discretionary.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service faces no deadline to respond to such petitions

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has pushed to end federal protections for wolves and return control over the animals to the states.

But both administrations have been rebuffed in the courts. Federal judges have ruled repeatedly that the government failed to prove existing wolf numbers will ensure the population’s long-term survival.

Last year, the Interior Department relented to pressure from environmentalists in the Great Lakes. The agency agreed to put wolves back on the endangered list at least temporarily — just months after they had been removed for the second time in recent years.

Wolves are notorious predators with a hunger for livestock, and experts say they could survive in most of the country if they were allowed.

Young adult wolves sometimes travel hundreds of miles when looking to establish a new territory. In the last several years, packs have gained a toehold in parts of Oregon and Washington. Others have been spotted in Colorado, Utah and northern New England.

But with wolves, more than just biology is at play. Politics serves the deciding role in where wolves are allowed, said David Mech, a wolf expert and senior scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

“In the areas where they are not acceptable, they will be killed out — illegally if nothing else, Mech said.

The Northern Rockies population has stirred the most rancor, largely because of sheep and cattle killings and wolves preying on big game herds that had swelled when the predators were absent.

Idaho and Montana initiated public wolf hunts last year, and both intend to increase their quotas on the animals this fall. The states want to put a dent in the animal’s population growth rate, which has been as high as 30 percent annually.

Wyoming, which has about 525 wolves, was blocked in its efforts to start a hunt after federal officials said state law was too hostile to wolves to ensure their survival. That ruling has been challenged in federal court.

Wyoming House Speaker Colin Simpson said Tuesday it should serve as a warning for other states that are asked to take wolves.

“Be careful,” Simpson said. “We don’t need more of that in the West.”

GALLE, Sri Lanka – A nocturnal, forest-dwelling primate with orb-like eyes and short limbs was photographed in central Sri Lanka late last year after being feared extinct, researchers said Monday.

A Horton Plains slender loris was caught on camera after lengthy surveys of the forest by researchers from the Zoological Society of London, the University of Colombo and the Open University of Sri Lanka.

Team leader Saman Gamage said the mammal was not sighted for more than 60 years until in 2002 a researcher reported spotting its eyes during a search - inspiring the effort to view it fully and photograph it to prove the primate existed.

“We are thrilled to have captured the first ever photographs and prove its continued existence,” said Craig Turner, a conservation biologist with the Zoological Society.

The primate’s population is thought to have begun dwindling in the mountain forest habitat after British colonial rulers from the 19th century cleared large tracts of forest for coffee and tea plantations, Gamage said.

Logging, agriculture and development made it hard for the lorises to find food, escape threats or meet mates.

Turner, a conservation biologist at the Zoological Society of London, said only one or two sightings occurred between 1937 and 2002. Despite repeated attempts to find it, there were no sightings between 2002 and 2009.

“People, including ourselves, had begun to think: ‘Yeah, maybe it has disappeared’,” he said.

Given its size and nocturnal habits, the eight-inch (20-centimer) beast was tough to find. But the giveaway was in its eerily large, night-vision eyes. Scientists combed the forest canopy with red-filtered flashlights - eventually catching sight of the loris.

“You get a very distinct red eyeshine reflecting from the loris,” Turner told The Associated Press. “That’s how we picked up on the initial presence of the species.”

Turner said scientists were then able to briefly capture the primate, taking measurements and genetic material before releasing it back into the wild. He said the critter’s orb-like peepers and gangly limbs made it an easy sell to the general population.

“It’s a very appealing species,” he said.

Gamage said more of the lorises are thought to live in small patches of forest in Sri Lanka’s hill country.

Jose David Figueroa Agosto’s salt-and-pepper hair was covered with a similarly colored long wig. He hadn’t been in the sun much and appeared younger and slimmer than the man in the old mugshots.

Still, the high-living alleged drug kingpin and prison escapee wasn’t coy when he was caught Saturday after a high-speed chase in Santurce, a neighborhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

“Everybody knows who I am,” he told federal agents when they asked him his name, according to Antonio Torres of the U.S. Marshals Service.

Better known in the region as Jr. Capsula, Figueroa Agosto, 46, was arrested with two others about noon Saturday after he tried to escape from officers conducting surveillance, DEA special Agent Waldo Santiago told CNN.

“Figueroa was the most-wanted fugitive by Puerto Rican and Dominican Republic authorities,” Santiago said.

“He has been described as the Pablo Escobar of the Caribbean,” he said, referring to the notorious Colombian druglord who was killed by Colombian police in a 1993 gunbattle.

According to federal authorities, Figueroa Agosto has a history of catch-and-escape.

He originally went to prison on murder charges, but escaped a San Juan jail in 1999, according to Harry Rodriguez of the San Juan FBI press office.

Figueroa Agosto fled to the Dominican Republic, where he continued drug trafficking, Rodriguez said. He was arrested “some time ago” but was released for an unknown reason. He was re-arrested in the Dominican Republic and was caught with close to $4 million in cash. He managed to escape and return to Puerto Rico, the FBI said.

Figueroa Agosto has been charged by U.S. authorities with passport fraud and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

Dominican authorities have sought Figueroa Agosto for multiple violations including kidnapping, money laundering, drug trafficking and murder. He also has been linked to criminal activity in Colombia and Venezuela, according to federal authorities.

“He appears to have been working out and exercising to lose weight, but (also) to gain muscle mass,” Santiago said. “He appears different from the mug shots. He looks younger and slimmer. He’s been taking care of himself. We have information that he’s been working out and trying to stay in shape, to endure the stress of being on the run.”

Santiago said Figueroa Agosto’s complexion also appeared lighter, possibly from staying out of the sun.

During his time in hiding, Figueroa Agosto had been accompanied by fugitive Sobeida Felix Morel, according to a U.S. Marshals Service poster. “They both love the high life, exclusive dining and living conditions.”

Felix Morel was not with Figueroa Agosto on Saturday. The two arrested with him have not been formally charged, Rodriguez said.

At least that’s the hope of researchers developing a new method of vaccine delivery that people could even use at home: a patch with microneedles.

Microneedles?

That’s right, tiny little needles so small you don’t even feel them. Attached to a patch like a Band-Aid, the little needles barely penetrate the skin before they dissolve and release their vaccine.

Researchers led by Mark Prausnitz of Georgia Institute of Technology reported their research on microneedles in Sunday’s edition of Nature Medicine.

The business side of the patch feels like fine sandpaper, he said. In tests of microneedles without vaccine, people rated the discomfort at one-tenth to one-twentieth that of getting a standard injection, he said. Nearly everyone said it was painless.

Some medications are already delivered by patches, such as nicotine patches for people trying to quit smoking. That’s simply absorbed through the skin. But attempts to develop patches with the flu vaccine absorbed through the skin have not been successful so far.

In the Georgia Tech work, the vaccine is still injected. But the needles are so small that they don’t hurt and it doesn’t take any special training to use this kind of patch.

So two problems are solved right away — fear of needles, and disposal of leftover hypodermic needles.

“The goal has been a means to administer the vaccine that is patient friendly,” Mark R. Prausnitz of Georgia Tech said in a telephone interview.

That means “not only not hurting or looking scary, but that patients could self-administer,” he said, and people would be more likely to get the flu vaccine.

By developing needles that dissolve, there are no leftover sharp needles, especially important for people who might give themselves the vaccine at home, he said.

The patch, which has been tested on mice, was developed in collaboration by researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University, Prausnitz said. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health. The researchers are now seeking funds to begin tests in people and, if all goes well, the patch could be in use in five years, he said.

Flu vaccination is recommended for nearly everyone, every year, and that’s a big burden on the public health network, Prausnitz noted. Many people don’t get the shot because it’s inconvenient, but if they could get in mail or at the pharmacy they might do so, he said.

The patch is placed on the skin and left for 5 minutes to 15 minutes, he said. It can remain longer without doing any damage, he said. In tests on mice, the miocroneedles delivered a correct dose of the flu vaccine.

The little needles are 650 microns (three-hundredths of an inch) in length and there are 100 on the patch used in the mouse study.

Asked if the term “microneedle” might still frighten some folks averse to shots, Prausnitz said he was confident that marketers would come up with a better term before any sales began.

PARIS – After tens of thousands of years under the Siberian frost, a baby woolly mammoth is taking a summer vacation in southeast France.

Baby Khroma, one of the oldest intact mammoths ever found, went on display in a French museum Friday - after it underwent special tests to ensure it was no longer bearing the anthrax believed to have killed it.

Khroma is on display at the Musee Crozatier in Puy-en-Velay in a special cryogenic chamber kept at -18 degrees C (-0.40 Fahrenheit).

The 80-centimeter-high, 1.6-meter-long (1-foot-high, 5-foot-long) prehistoric guest may be the oldest baby mammoth ever discovered. Carbon dating methods failed to determine its age, suggesting it is more than 50,000 years old, said French researchers and Sergei Gorbunov, project coordinator for the Geneva-based International Mammoth Committee. Russian news reports have said it is 32,000 years old.

It will undergo further isotope analysis in France to try to pin down its age - and its gender, up to now unclear.

“It’s a unique discovery,” Gorbunov told The Associated Press by telephone. “Any discovery of a new mammoth gives us new scientific information about prehistory.”

Similar enthusiasm was felt six months ago in the United States when a 42,000-year-old baby woolly mammoth named Lyuba arrived at the Field Museum in Chicago, where it is still on display. The practically intact specimen, discovered in 2007 in Siberia as well, is the best-preserved of her kind, according to researchers.

For Tom Skwerski, project manager for the Chicago exhibition, Khroma will be an important addition to the specimen pool.

“There is still a lot to learn about woolly mammoths, and the more specimens we find, the closer we get to answering those questions,” he told AP. Some aspects of those animals’ lives, like migration patterns, still challenge scientists.

Such mammoths offer scientists the opportunity to do analysis that they cannot carry out on skeletons, such as studying stomach contents and fur. Putting them on display gives a broader public a tangible link to the prehistoric past.

Khroma, dug out last year from the Yakutia region in Siberia, arrived in France on Sunday, as part of a year of Franco-Russian cross-cultural events.

The mammoth was delayed by three weeks after concerns surfaced about the transfer of an animal that might contain lethal bacteria. Russia’s chief epidemiologist, Gennady Onishchenko, said the mammoth died of anthrax, according to Russian news reports. Russian scientists carried out further study of the risks involved, and the trip was given the go-ahead, Gorbunov said.

After arriving in France, Khroma went to a special conservation facility in Grenoble, where it underwent gamma ray treatment for eliminating any potentially lethal bacteria. The presence of anthrax could not be totally confirmed from the first studies, but the treatment was used as a precaution, said the museum’s paleontologist, Frederic Lacombat.

The laboratory has used the same procedure in the past, when it treated the Ramses II mummy for parasites.

Researchers plan to take the animal in late August to a nearby medical facility for an autopsy and scanning.

The researchers hope to discover valuable information about the mammoth calf in time for the 5th International Conference on Mammoths in Puy-en-Velay in early September.

The exhibit, called “Mammoth and Co.,” will also display other attractions, such as life-size replicas of other mammoths discovered previously and the skull of a mammoth found in the Haute-Loire region of France in 2008.

The exhibit ends Nov. 15, when Khroma will go home to Russia.

The first group of sea turtles that are part of a sweeping effort to save threatened and endangered hatchlings from death in the oily Gulf of Mexico have been released into the Atlantic Ocean.

Fifty-six endangered Kemp’s ridley turtles were released on a beach at Florida’s Canaveral National Seashore this week, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said Thursday.

Sixty-seven eggs were collected from a nest along the Florida Panhandle on June 26 and brought to a temperature-controlled warehouse at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, but only the 56 hatched. State and federal officials plan to bring thousands more eggs for incubation in the coming months.

It is part of an overall plan to pluck some 70,000 eggs from sea turtle nests on beaches across Alabama and Florida before they hatch and swim out into the oil from the April 20 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion off Louisiana. NASA currently has about 1,100 eggs at the space center site incubating.

Scientists fear that if left alone, the hatchlings would most would likely die in the crude, killing off an entire generation of an already imperiled species.

Most of the turtle eggs being collected are threatened loggerheads, but some are also Kemps ridleys, which nest largely in Mexico and southern Texas. Some, however, lay their eggs along the northern Gulf Coast.

Scientists acknowledge the plan is risky and that many of the hatchlings may die anyway from the stress of being moved, but all agree there is no better option.

David Godfrey, executive director of the Florida-based Sea Turtle Conservancy, said the first successful release of hatchlings brings hope that more will survive.

“It definitely shows that we’re on the right track,” Godfrey said Thursday.

Florida wildlife officials are hopeful, but remain cautious.

“It’s just too early to tell,” said the FWC’s Patricia Behnke. “It gave them some hope, but it’s not enough data to make an overall assessment of how it’s going to go.”

After the 1979 Ixtoc oil spill in the Gulf, several hundred Kemp’s ridley hatchlings were ferried by helicopter to open ocean beyond the slick. But there has never been an effort to save so many sea turtle eggs.

Both the Tevatron and the LHC are engaged in a race to find the Higgs

Physicists have moved to quash rumours that the elusive Higgs boson - dubbed the God particle - has been detected by a US “atom smasher”.

A spokesman for the lab which operated the Tevatron accelerator denied scientists had made a discovery there.

The Tevatron, based at Fermilab in Illinois, is the US rival to Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The rumours were made public in a blog post by an Italian particle physicist.

But a spokesman for the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) told BBC News: “There is no merit to the rumours of a Higgs discovery.”

On Tuesday, the laboratory’s Twitter feed said: “Let’s settle this: the rumours spread by one fame-seeking blogger are just rumours. That’s it.”

Stefan Soldner-Rembold, a spokesperson for the DZero experiment at the Tevatron, told BBC News: “There is no evidence yet of a Standard Model Higgs signal; more data will be needed for that.

“The rumours started by the blog are not correct and blogs are not a reliable source of information.”

The Higgs boson is of huge importance to the widely accepted theory of physics, known as the Standard Model.

It is the sub-atomic particle which explains why all other particles have mass.

However, despite decades trying, no-one, so far, has detected it.

Last week, Tommaso Dorigo, who is a physicist at the University of Padua in Italy, wrote on his blog: “It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal.

“Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result.”

“Three-sigma” refers to the statistical certainty of the result - a 99.7% likelihood of an accurate measurement.

However, errors and fluctuations in the data mean that high energy physicists require an effect of five-sigma to produce convincing evidence of a discovery.

On Tuesday, physicist and blogger Lubos Motl published more detail on the Tevatron rumours. But he noted that the anonymous source for his information was sceptical of the observation.

Finding the Higgs is the primary aim of the £6bn ($10bn) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment near Geneva. But the giant particle smasher is not expected to be capable of searching for the signal from a Higgs boson until 2011 at the earliest.

So the possibility remains that the Tevatron could still make a discovery before the European machine.

Particle physicists are set to present new data from their experiments at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Paris from 22-28 July.

JERUSALEM – Archaeologists say a newly discovered clay fragment from the 14th century B.C. is the oldest example of writing ever found in antiquity-rich Jerusalem.

Dig director Eilat Mazar of Hebrew University says the 2-centimeter (0.8-inch) long fragment bears an ancient form of writing known as Akkadian wedge script.

The fragment includes a partial text including the words “you,” “them,” and “later.”

It predates the next-oldest example of writing found in Jerusalem by 600 years, and dates roughly four centuries before the Bible says King David ruled a Jewish kingdom from the city.

Mazar said Monday that the fragment likely came from a royal court and suggested more could be found in the most ancient part of Jerusalem, located in the city’s predominantly Palestinian eastern sector.