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Wherever it's buried in the body, a disease leaves traces in the blood—or so the thinking goes. But finding these biomarkers, which can help catch the disease early on, has been an exercise in futility, with one promising candidate after another losing its luster once it receives scrutiny. A team of chemists and other researchers now propose a new way to pick up biomarkers with a blood test: by screening for antibodies that the body makes in response to particular diseases. So far, the group has reported results for only a small number of Alzheimer's disease patients. But they are hopeful that the approach will hold up and could be used for everything from lupus to cancer.

There are two common strategies for finding biomarkers in the blood or elsewhere in the body. The first is to focus on what's known about a disease—for example, looking for deterioration in certain brain regions in Alzheimer's disease. The second is essentially a fishing expedition, in which researchers compare, say, protein patterns from patients who have a particular disease with patterns from people who don't have it. Both methods have run into roadblocks. In the case of Alzheimer's disease, PET scans, MRIs, and spinal taps that remove some of the fluid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord have had some success in early diagnosis, but they are expensive or invasive. Even though there's no treatment for Alzheimer's disease, researchers are keen to find easy-to-use and reliable biomarkers, which would help ensure that people in Alzheimer's clinical trials really do have the disease and would make early treatment possible if it eventually becomes available.

Chemist Thomas Kodadek of The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida, and his then-postdoc, M. Muralidhar Reddy, considered biomarkers that harness a classic feature of disease biology: antibodies, proteins that the immune system churns out in the presence of invaders. Scientists don't know that every disease elicits antibodies, but some diseases certainly do. "Antibodies are the rocks of the protein world," not easily damaged when studied in the lab, says Kodadek. This made the idea of measuring them in blood appealing.

Many other researchers had considered the value of antibodies as biomarkers, but they were stymied by the common strategy used to test for them. To know which antibodies to look for, you have to determine which molecules stimulate the immune system to produce the antibodies. This requires "a phenomenal understanding of early disease progression," says Kodadek, something we don't have for most diseases.

Kodadek, Reddy, and their colleagues took a different tack. They turned to "libraries" of thousands of peptoids, molecules that are developed into drugs that have myriad different structures. The thinking was that some peptoids, just by chance, would bind to whatever antibodies might be there—just as a few of several thousand randomly chosen shoes might fit your feet—allowing the researchers to determine whether people with a disease had an abundance of certain antibodies that healthy people lacked. In mice with a version of multiple sclerosis, a library of 4600 peptoids helped identify three antibodies, which the team used to diagnose the disease in other mice.

In six people with Alzheimer's disease, the same strategy, using 15,000 peptoids, picked up two antibodies found at high levels. The antibodies were also abundant in the blood from an additional 16 Alzheimer's patients. But these proteins were uncommon in the blood of a handful of people with Parkinson's disease or lupus.

The antibodies were also prevalent in two of the 16 healthy controls. Their presence could suggest that the biomarkers aren't specific to Alzheimer's disease. Or it could suggest that these two women—a 75-year-old and a 65-year-old—have early Alzheimer's disease. "We favor the latter hypothesis, but this cannot be concluded with certainty," the authors report in the 7 January issue of Cell .

"It's an innovative idea," says Norman Relkin, a neurologist and neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. "You're looking for immune responses which may be disease-specific." Still, Relkin says that for Alzheimer's disease at least, it will take a lot more work to make the test reliable, especially because even with healthy aging, "the immune system tends to produce more dysfunctional antibodies."

Although the findings need to be replicated in more people to make sure the antibodies are specific to Alzheimer's disease, the paper "looks like a very thorough job," says Kaj Blennow, a neurochemist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden. A blood test would have big advantages over current Alzheimer's diagnostics, he says.

Kodadek, Reddy, and others have formed a company, Opko Health Inc., to further develop the technology; Reddy is the chief scientific officer. "As you can tell, I'm pretty excited about this," says Kodadek. But he's trying to keep his enthusiasm in check. "There's a long history of biomarkers hitting the graveyard," and although he's hopeful that won't happen here, "the point is, you never know."

A small study of 30 people with the most common inherited form of mental ******ation has found encouraging evidence that some symptoms of the disorder can be alleviated with drugs. Some patients with Fragile X syndrome who received an experimental drug showed reductions in repetitive behaviors, hyperactivity, inappropriate speech, and social withdrawal. However, the drug affected only patients with a particular genetic alteration—a discouraging sign, perhaps, for those without that marker, but a potentially useful tool for identifying the patients most likely to respond to treatment.

As recently as 10 years ago, the idea of reversing mental ******ation was unthinkable. That's because many of these conditions result from genetic glitches that derail brain development even before birth. But recent studies with mice and other animals have given researchers hope that it may be possible to develop treatments that improve cognition and behavior in conditions like Fragile X syndrome, in which a mutation to a gene on the X chromosome makes part of the chromosome look unusually thin, and Rett syndrome, another common cause of mental ******ation.

One of the hottest prospects to emerge for treating Fragile X syndrome is a class of drugs that block a receptor in the brain called metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5). This receptor plays a role in protein synthesis at the junctions between nerve cells, and it becomes hyperactive as a result of the gene mutation that causes Fragile X. Blocking this receptor, the thinking goes, helps restore its activity to a normal level.

Other studies have reported that mGluR5-blocking drugs appear to have only moderate side effects, such as fatigue, in humans, but the new study is the first systematic report on behavioral changes in people with Fragile X. The 30 patients, all men between the ages of 18 and 35, were part of a phase II clinical trial sponsored by the pharmaceutical company Novartis, which makes the drug, called AFQ056. Half of the patients received AFQ056 for 4 weeks, then a placebo for 4 weeks. The other half took the placebo first, then the drug. Neither the patients, their caregivers, nor the researchers knew which group a patient had been assigned to until after the study.

To assess a patient's behavior before and after treatment, the researchers, led by Sébastien Jacquemont, a medical geneticist at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Baltazar Gomez-Mancilla, a neurologist at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, had his caregiver—typically a parent—fill out a battery of standardized questionnaires. At first, the drug seemed to have had no effect, says Gomez-Mancilla. "We were really puzzled," he says.

But when the team reexamined the data, they discovered that seven patients with a particular genetic signature had shown reduced repetitive behaviors, such as rocking back and forth and clapping, and other behavioral improvements after treatment. Some parents told the researchers they'd been more able to engage and interact with their children while they were taking the drug, Gomez-Mancilla says. Some reported fewer disruptive behaviors, such as tantrums. The researchers did not see any evidence of improvements in learning and memory, Gomez-Mancilla says, but he thinks such cognitive changes might require longer treatment times.

The Fragile X patients who responded to AFQ056 all had a "fully methylated" version of the control region of the FMR1 gene, the gene that is mutated in Fragile X. Methlyation is a chemical modification to DNA that turns a gene off, and the patients who responded to the drug appeared to have a completely inactive FMR1 gene. The others had a partially active FMR1 gene. Why this would make a difference in how people respond is still an open question, Gomez-Mancilla says. The researchers report their findings online 5 January in Science Translational Medicine.

"It's hopeful, but it's still very small numbers," says Stephen Warren, a geneticist and veteran Fragile X researcher at Emory University in Atlanta. The idea of using methylation as a biomarker to determine who might respond to this type of treatment is potentially exciting, says Ben Philpot, who studies neurodevelopmental disorders at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. But he shares Warren's sense of caution: "They really need to replicate this in a larger group."

That's precisely what researchers at Novartis are trying to do now. In November, they began recruiting for a larger clinical trial that will test the effects of AFQ056 in 160 people with Fragile X. This time, the researchers will test for methylation of the FMR1 gene at the outset, and patients will take the drug for 3 months.

Apollo astronauts may be garnering another prize from their exploits of more than 3 decades ago. They left seismometers across the face of the moon to probe its interior, but no one had been able to paint a clear picture from the data the sensors collected. Now, two independent groups have reanalyzed the Apollo data using modern but very different techniques, and both teams say they have detected lunar seismologists' prime target: a core of iron that is still molten 4.5 billion years after the moon's formation.

The Apollo seismic experiment was challenging from the start. Moonquakes are sparse and feeble, the moon's impact-shattered crust garbles any seismic signals, and computers of that era couldn't handle the complete data set. Today, computers are faster, and terrestrial seismologists have developed far more powerful analytical techniques, so lunar researchers have taken another crack at the Apollo seismic data, which were recorded by the five sensors and radioed back until the mid-1970s.

Like an earthquake, a moonquake sets off ripples of motion called seismic waves that speed through surrounding rock. Both groups combed the data for signs of quakes' waves that may have reflected off the core, but each group took a very different approach. Planetary scientist Renee Weber of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and her colleagues analyzed four types of seismic waves—which differ in the direction of vibration—from deep quakes clustered in 38 spots. They combined seismic records from each cluster to bring out any reflected signals and filtered the combined records to remove some of the noise. Seismologist Raphaël Garcia of the University of Toulouse in France and his colleagues, on the other hand, analyzed two wave types from three moonquakes after calibrating the seismic stations.

In back-to-back talks at last month's meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California, the groups reported that, like Earth, the moon has a molten core. Garcia and colleagues found a liquid core with a radius of 365 kilometers. Weber and her colleagues reported a core radius of 330 kilometers, which they also report online today in Science. Given the uncertainties, the two estimates are indistinguishable. In addition, Weber found seismic reflections from a solid inner core with a radius of 240 kilometers—a feature Earth has as well—and reflections from a layer of mostly rock with a bit of magma 150 kilometers thick lying above the liquid iron outer core.

"I'm surprised they could get this much information from this data," says planetary physicist David Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. If the seismic results hold up, he adds, they would be by far the strongest evidence yet for a liquid core. Then researchers could use the detailed seismic picture of the moon's interior to understand better the evolution of a planetary body assembled from the vaporous debris of a giant impact on the still-forming Earth. But they're not quite there yet. "The Apollo [seismic] data have all sorts of weirdness in them," says seismologist Jesse Lawrence of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. "As is so often the case, more work needs to be done."

It's back to the drawing board for astronomers and astrophysicists trying to explain why the supermassive black holes at the hearts of some galaxies pump out huge amounts of radiation. Such an "active galactic nucleus" (AGN) presumably arises when ultrahot gas falls into a galaxy's central black hole, and common wisdom held that the matter is tipped into the black hole when galaxies collide. However, a painstaking visual inspection of 1400 remote galaxies suggests that black hole activity is unrelated to galactic collisions and mergers, at least for the past 7.5 billion years of cosmic history.

Most major galaxies harbor supermassive central black holes. For instance, the black hole in our own Milky Way galaxy is 4.3 million times as massive as the sun. In other galaxies, black holes may weigh in at hundreds of millions or even a few billion solar masses. Most of these hungry monsters are quiet and fairly inconspicuous, but others spew out energetic particles, high-energy x-rays, and visible light. Such high-profile black holes are believed to be actively gobbling up huge loads of interstellar gas, which is heated to millions of degrees just before plunging over the edge.

But what fuels black holes in the first place? Many astronomers think galactic interactions play a major role in feeding the central gluttons. When two galaxies collide or merge, they become warped and distorted by tidal forces, and gas clouds—or even complete stars—can be funneled into the core.

That scenario sounds sensible, but it's wrong, according to a large team of astronomers led by Knud Jahnke and Mauricio Cisternas of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "There is no evidence that major merging plays a key role in the triggering of [black hole] activity," they claim in the 10 January issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

The researchers used a straightforward technique to arrive at their surprising conclusion. Using data from the European Space Agency's orbiting XMM-Newton x-ray observatory, they selected 140 galaxies with AGNs, indicating the presence of feasting black holes. Then they added a large control sample of 1264 nonactive galaxies at similar distances, between 3.5 billion and 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. Finally, 10 team members inspected Hubble Space Telescope optical images of the 1404 galaxies and sorted them into three categories: not distorted, mildly distorted, and strongly distorted. The "jury" didn't know which galaxies were active and which ones were quiet, as the Hubble images had been processed to hide the telltale bright cores.

Surprisingly, 85% of the active galaxies were classified as not being strongly distorted, suggesting that they hadn't experienced major collisions or mergers in their recent past. Moreover, the fraction of mildly and strongly distorted systems turned out to be more or less the same for the sample of 140 active galaxies as for the control sample of quiet galaxies. According to the authors, "mergers and interactions involving [active galaxies] occur no more frequently than for inactive galaxies."

"It's a nice piece of work," says astronomer Huub Röttgering of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, who specializes in active galaxies, "but it's not completely unexpected." Earlier studies had hinted at the same conclusion, says Röttgering. "There's a general consensus that the very brightest active galactic nuclei are the result of major mergers," he says, "but for the run-of-the-mill AGNs, other processes might be more important."

Those other processes include collisions of giant gas clouds within galaxies, internal instabilities, tidal interactions during flybys of smaller galaxies, and minor mergers that don't produce conspicuous distortions. Which process tops the list is unknown, says Röttgering: "This result indicates that we have to study much harder on the alternatives."

Link
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/01/collisions-cleared-as-cause-of-g.html?ref=hp

"SM" is a bit of an emotional anomaly. The 44-year-old mother, given those initials to preserve her anonymity, isn't scared of snakes. She doesn't shriek when she sees a scary movie. Even haunted houses don't give her chills. SM is pretty much fearless—and now scientists think they've figured out why.

The study's lead authors met SM, who has a rare genetic condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease, more than 2 decades ago. As a result of her illness, she has "two perfectly symmetrical black holes" where her amygdala should be, says Justin Feinstein, a graduate student in clinical psychology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. The amygdala is a pair of almond-shaped clusters of neurons in the brain that play a role in fear and anxiety. And indeed, when the researchers examined SM, they found that she could not recognize fear on others' faces.

In the new study, the researchers—who now included Feinstein—tested whether SM could experience fear. They took her to a pet store filled with snakes and spiders, showed her clips from horror films (including The Silence of the Lambs and The Shining), and brought her to the annual haunted house at the Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky, a notoriously scary place.

In each situation, SM failed to act fearful. Instead, she seemed excited and curious. In the pet store, for example, she held a snake and rubbed its scales despite telling the researchers that she "hates" snakes. In the haunted house, SM led the way, smiling and laughing. SM didn't report feeling scared. Throughout each experience, the researchers asked her to rate her fear on a scale of 1 to 10. In each case, she selected low values, 2 or lower. But SM isn't an unfeeling robot. She reports experiencing other emotions—surprise, happiness, disgust—and understands that scary movies might induce fear in others.

The researchers also gave SM an electronic diary. Three times each day, the diary displayed a list of 50 questions asking her to rate her current emotional state. The emotion that received the highest average rating during the 3 months SM had the diary was "fearless." She never reported being scared, fearful, or afraid. Similarly, SM's score was much lower than normal on a series of questionnaires aimed at assessing recent fear and how much fear she would feel in a series of hypothetical situations, such as talking to other people or getting lost.

When the researchers delved into SM's past, they found the same fearlessness. The woman says she is scared of snakes, but her son once saw her pick up a large snake and move it off the road. When SM was held at knifepoint in a dark park, she recalls remaining calm and not being scared. As an adult, SM has been the victim of numerous crimes, but the only fearful experiences she could recall happened when she was a child. The researchers posit that the bulk of the damage to SM's amygdala occurred at about the age of 10.

The results suggest that "the amygdala is a critical brain region for triggering a state of fear when an individual encounters threatening stimuli," Feinstein and his co-authors write today in Current Biology. It's the first human study to show that amygdala damage can wipe out fearful feeling, they say. It also contradicts a 2002 paper that showed that patients with damage to one or both halves of the amygdala had no deficit in their ability to feel fear.

The authors point out that the amygdala communicates with other regions of the brain to orchestrate the fear response. "Because SM is missing her amygdala, she doesn't have this cascade of responses that comprise a state of fear," Feinstein says. "And because of that, she's unable to feel fear."

"It's an important observation," says David Anderson, a neurobiologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who studies the neural circuits involved in fear. But he notes that there's no way to unequivocally prove that SM's responses are the result of damage to her amygdala. "One would like to have more subjects than just one," he says.

Elizabeth Phelps would also like to see evidence in more patients. "I don't believe you can make a general statement about what the amygdala does by a single case study," says the cognitive neuroscientist at New York University and author of the 2002 study that returned opposite results. The authors, she says, were too bold in their conclusions. "The data are mixed."

If confirmed, Feinstein says the findings might lead to new therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder, such as new forms of psychotherapy that hinder the amygdala's activity. Still, fear is an important emotion, notes Anderson. So "you would not want to advocate permanent destruction of the amygdala in soldiers as a way to protect against possible post-traumatic stress disorder," Anderson says.

As for Feinstein's own amygdala, it appears to be intact. "A lot of things scare me, including snakes and spiders," he says. "You couldn't pay me enough money in the world to touch these animals."

A 1998 paper linking autism to vaccines, which set off a panic about childhood vaccination that continues today, was based on data falsification, according to an investigation by a journalist at the British Medical Journal (BMJ) who has spent years examining the original research. In a harsh editorial that calls the paper "fraudulent," BMJ editors recommend that other publications by the senior author, gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, be scrutinized because "past experience tells us that research misconduct is rarely isolated behaviour."

The investigation, by journalist Brian Deer, focuses on alleged alterations of medical records for the 12 children in the study. Among other things, it charges that preexisting symptoms the children had were "played down" to build a case that they'd had a serious reaction to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. Medical "records cannot be reconciled with what was published" in The Lancet, the journal where the study appeared, Deer writes in what's billed as the first in a series in BMJ.

His report is another strike against the already-retracted research, which was led by Wakefield. A 2002 study failed to replicate the findings; the British General Medical Council spent 2.5 years investigating and a year ago concluded that Wakefield's conduct was "dishonest" and "misleading." The Lancet retracted the paper, and Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine in the United Kingdom.

While the latest allegations go even further, it's unclear what practical impact they'll have. An anti-vaccine activist who co-founded one of the most outspoken groups that links autism to vaccines, Generation Rescue, took to the airwaves of CNN yesterday, when the BMJ investigation was released, to defend the link and argue that other studies have reported one. "To represent that the science has been done on this and we should move on is simply untrue," said J.B. Handley. It looks as though for now, little may change.

SEOUL – Hackers have attacked North Korea's official Youtube and Twitter accounts, posting a cartoon showing Kim Jong-il's heir apparent driving a sports car into a crowd of starving countrymen.

The cyber attack on Saturday, believed to be leader-in-waiting Kim Jong-un's birthday, also called for an uprising against the communist nation's ruling dynasty.

The online embarrassment comes at a time when North Korea has called for dialogue with South Korea to defuse tensions aggravated by an exchange of artillery fire and the sinking of a South navy ship last year.

One of the messages posted on the North's official Twitter account said the ailing Kim Jong-il and his son were sworn enemies.

Another called for the removal of Kim Jong-il for hosting drinking parties at his lavish cottage while 3 million countrymen starved to death.

Several people on a South Korean internet forum, Dcinside, claimed responsibility for the attack.

A two-minute spoof posted on the North's official youtube account showed Kim Jong-un running over a group of starving people and a train, laden with birthday gifts for him, derailed after hitting children on the tracks.

The Youtube account is often used by the North to communicate with the outside world.

There was no immediate comment from the North on the cyber attack. The North Korea's official mouthpiece, KCNA news agency, also did not report any public events or festivals to mark Kim Jong-un's birthday.

Very little is known about Kim Jong-un outside North Korea, who is the youngest son of Kim Jong-il.

NEW YORK – The Egyptian government official charged with protecting his country's ancient monuments is threatening to take back an iconic obelisk in Central Park unless New York City takes steps to restore it.

The stone obelisk "has been severely weathered over the past century" with no effort made to conserve it, Zahi Hawass, secretary general for Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, wrote in a letter this week to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The obelisk, which commemorates King Thutmose III, has stood behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1881. At 71 feet tall, it is known as "Cleopatra's Needle" and is one of a pair. The other is in London.

The obelisk dates back roughly 3,500 years and was given to the United States in the 19th century by an official in Egypt.

"I have a duty to protect all Egyptian monuments whether they are inside or outside of Egypt," Hawass wrote in the letter.

"If the Central Park Conservancy and the City of New York cannot properly care for this obelisk, I will take the necessary steps to bring this precious artifact home and save it from ruin," he wrote.

The hieroglyphics have completely worn away in places, he said.

Jonathan Kuhn, director of art and antiquities for New York's Parks Department, told local news website DNAinfo that there was no evidence of "any significant ongoing erosion."

A Metropolitan Museum study in the 1980s found the granite was "largely inert" and that damage to the inscriptions and the base of the monument occurred in the distant past, Kuhn said.

"We have been working in recent years with the Metropolitan Museum and the Central Park Conservancy to further analyze the condition of the obelisk and monitor its condition," Kuhn told DNAinfo.

Representatives of the mayor declined to comment.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – Another don't in Dubai: keep the hand gestures clean or risk a one-way ticket home.

That's the message from Dubai's highest court in a ruling that upheld the deportation of a Pakistani man for a case of road rage that included one of the most familiar side effects — the widely known insult of a raised middle finger.

The Court of Cassation — the last stop in the appeal process — confirmed that the United Arab Emirates' strict indecency codes cover hand gestures and the deportation sentence would stand, media reports said Sunday.

It's no surprise for those familiar with the UAE's legal system, which is infused with traditional codes against public insults and other acts considered violations of customs in the native Gulf Arab society.

But in Dubai's cultural soup — dominated by foreign workers, visitors and sun-seeking vacationers — such rules can seem far removed from the skyscrapers, Western-style malls and lifestyle options that are much closer to California than Cairo.

The court ruling is the latest reminder of Dubai's split personalities as both ambitiously cosmopolitan and instinctively conservative.

The Pakistani man sought to challenge his one-month jail sentence and deportation for giving "the finger" during a traffic altercation. The court, headed by Judge Mohammed Nabil Riyadh, ruled that deportation was acceptable to all acts deemed indecent under UAE law.

The complication is that it's often hard to distinguish the red lines.

Malls feature signs appealing for "respectful" clothing by women, but miniskirts and skimpy tops are common among foreigners. Public displays of affection are officially banned, but the boundaries are unclear between a friendly kiss and romantic smooch.

In March, a British couple was sentenced to a month in jail and deportation for what was described as exchanging a provocative kiss in a restaurant. The couple insisted it was just a peck on the cheek.

Earlier last year, an unmarried Indian couple was sentenced to three months in jail for exchanging steamy text messages.

In 2008, two Britons accused of having sex on the beach got three months in jail, though their sentences were later suspended.

JUBA, Sudan – How do you get a long-suffering but little-known slice of Africa on the White House agenda and onto American TV screens? George Clooney knows how.

Humble, self-effacing and dressed for safari, the Hollywood star and former Sexiest Man Alive was in the scruffy, straw-hut capital of Southern Sudan on Saturday to draw attention to the region's weeklong independence referendum.

The vote, which begins Sunday, is likely to create the world's newest nation. Clooney is working to help the region avoid a backslide toward war.

In picking a cause and roughing it in a developing country, Clooney is hardly alone. Celebrities are shining their star power on the poor, the war-weary and the disaster-prone more than ever.

"Our job is trying to keep this on the front burner of the news," Clooney told The Associated Press. "I'm the son of newsman. I understand how hard it is to keep stories on the front of news, and sometimes entertainment and news can be meshed together if you do it properly."

Clooney has had two meetings with President Barack Obama on Sudan and has persuaded reporters from outlets like NBC, CNN and Newsweek to focus on the country. He says he doesn't know how much his efforts help, but that every bit counts.

"It's important as any other individual in the country or in the world to engage in life and in the world," he continued. "You know, a celebrity is absolutely no different. I wasn't a celebrity my whole life. I was an individual citizen for most of it, an unemployed citizen for a lot of it. ... I don't forfeit that just because I've happened to get lucky in my career."

Whether it's Sean Penn in Haiti, Ben Affleck in Congo, or Angelina Jolie's work in more than a dozen countries, stars are bringing attention to those in need. Bono, U2's lead singer, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his aid work in Africa.

There's even a website dedicated to the merger between Hollywood and helping. Look To The Stars lists more than 2,300 celebrities and 1,600 charities they support. Myrlia Purcell, who along with her husband began, said stars bring recognition to a cause, which can be a boon for non-profits with tight budgets.

"Just imagine someone comes up to you on the street and says, 'There's a man around the corner giving out food to homeless people. Come and help.' How many people are likely to stop what they are doing to go hand out food? Now imagine that the man helping out around the corner is George Clooney," Purcell said.

The aid organization World Vision has gotten celebrity endorsements from Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek, actor Hugh Jackman and former first lady Laura Bush. The group's Rachel Wolff said dramatic disasters like earthquakes can bring in quick donations, but that slowburn crises — like in Sudan — need help from celebrities like Clooney.

"He can do a lot of good just with his own celebrity, his own influence," she said. "And I think what differentiates Mr. Clooney and Angelina Jolie is they couple that with serious conversation with politicians and stakeholders, so they take it to the next level."

Affleck began going to Congo in 2007 and directed a short film called "Gimme Shelter" about the crisis. The director and actor told the AP after a trip there last year that he was insecure about getting involved at first because of how little he initially knew. He's since studied up, and in November appeared on a panel on Congo alongside Sen. John Kerry and the State Department's top official on Africa.

Clooney and Sudan activist John Prendergast helped launched the Satellite Sentinel Project, which will track troop movements in real time in Abyei, a north-south border region where the biggest threat of a return to conflict exists. The two wrote that they want to cast a spotlight on the hot spots on the border to help prevent Darfur-like atrocities.

"We are the anti-genocide paparazzi," Clooney told Time magazine this week in another attention-grabbing interview.

Clooney's meetings with Obama were a way for the actor to get Sudan on the front pages and for the White House — which has been deeply engaged on the independence referendum — to show it is active on the issue. And the 49-year-old actor hinted that he'll be back to Sudan.

He said there are two tricks to bringing attention to a cause. The first is to pick one.

"And the second thing is to create a constant drumbeat, to keep doing it," Clooney said. "You can't just dip your toe in it and get out, you have to constantly come back and do it.

"Bono sort of led the way in terms of really being informed on the specific issue. Brad and Angie do it well, Matt Damon, I have a lot of friends who do it pretty well and really get involved. I see Ben Affleck doing it in the Congo now more and more. I find that people who pick a cause and stick to it, get to know something about it."

NEW YORK – The actor badly hurt when he tumbled from the stage at the Broadway musical "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" returned to the theater for the first time since his accident, going backstage to wish the castmembers good luck and then watching Friday's performance from the safety of the orchestra seats.

"It's what I've been waiting for for the past two weeks — to see my friends and finally watch the show," Christopher Tierney told The Associated Press after the performance. Wearing a pea coat, a scarf and a back brace decorated with Spider-Man stickers, he said it was "awesome" to be back.

Tierney's appearance came 18 days after he fell 35 feet into the orchestra pit in front of a shocked preview audience when his safety harness failed. The 31-year-old suffered a fractured skull, a fractured shoulder blade, four broken ribs and three broken vertebrae during his Dec. 20 tumble.

The $65 million show officially opens Feb. 7 at the Foxwoods Theatre in Times Square and has been plagued by technical glitches, cancellations, money woes and injuries to three other actors. Last month, a lead actress bowed out.

Tierney has blamed his injuries on a freak accident and doesn't accuse the producers or the creative team of carelessness. The team is led by Tony Award-winning director and book co-writer Julie Taymor of "Lion King" fame.

Castmate Reeve Carney, who plays Peter Parker, called Tierney's return a "miracle" after Friday's performance, which was delayed twice for technical reasons. "He's got the most positive attitude of anyone I've ever met," said Carney. "It's definitely a morale booster."

Jennifer Damiano, who plays Mary Jane Watson, said she and Tierney met at a restaurant before the show and having him back was an emotional moment. "His presence surely propelled us through," she said.

Tierney, who was discharged Wednesday from The Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, arrived about 45 minutes before the start of the show to a scrum of reporters and two young women holding up a sign that read "Chris T. has Superpowers."

He slipped into the theater, greeted castmates before the curtain was raised and extended the traditional theatrical expression of wishing they "break a leg." He then settled into his seat about 10 rows from the stage.

The fall that left Tierney in a back brace and with eight screws in his back happened only seven minutes before the end of the Dec. 20 performance. Dressed as Spider-Man, Tierney, who that night had already swung multiple times at 40 mph and wrestled with the Green Goblin over the audience, simply jumped from a raised platform as the show was wrapping up. But he wasn't connected to anything.

Cell phone video captured the fall. "I had seen it on TV over and over and over again. People don't show it, they show it four times and then they show the super slow-Mo version," he said, laughing. "So I've seen it and I was cool."

After Friday's show, Tierney recalled watching from the orchestra seats the very same stunt that had so badly injured him. As an audience member, he realized how high the platform had lifted him when he was a performer.

"Tonight, as the thing's going up, and it keeps on going, keeps on going, I was like, 'Wow.' I kind of felt like a tang of pride. I was like, 'That's right — I fell from that!' And I'm going to see it two weeks later."

"Spider-Man" was Tierney's Broadway debut. He had previously worked with the Houston Ballet, Ballet New England and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, danced in the national tour of Twyla Tharp's "Movin' Out" and appeared in the North American premiere of "Dirty Dancing" in Toronto.

He had already worked with both Taymor and "Spider-Man" choreographer Daniel Ezralow in the film "Across the Universe" and was this time cast in a number of roles in addition to doing the main Spider-Man aerial stunts. He also played the part of a super villain, a bully who torments Peter Parker and a dancer.

For now, three different actors are combining to fill Tierney's vacancy, including Joshua Kobak and Ari Loeb. Eventually, producers hope only one performer will once again play all the parts until Tierney heals enough to return.

"He had so much stuff he was doing in the show that it took three guys to replace him," said Reeve.

As for Tierney, he said his rehabilitation is going well and that he wants to soon return to the Spider-Man stage, not just the seats.

"Hopefully, I'm back in a good amount of time," he said.

LONDON (AFP) – A former Miss England may be deployed in Afghanistan as early as next year after she returned to the Army following her term as a beauty queen.

Corporal Katrina Hodge, who has already served in Iraq, swapped active duty for the glitz and glamour of the catwalk when she took the title last January.

But she has now handed over her crown and is back on exercise in Army fatigues, preparing for a possible tour of war-torn Afghanistan.

The married soldier, decorated for her bravery in Basra, today insisted she was glad to be back in the forces and ready to take on the challenge.

"At the end of the day, it's my job. If that's what I've got to do, then that's what I've got to do," she said.

"It's hard to be excited about going to Afghanistan but it's the reality of our job. Our job is be out there, protecting our country."

Corporal Hodge, 24, tied the knot with husband Neil - a soldier whose surname cannot be disclosed for security reasons - in a secret ceremony in Sri Lanka in June.

Three months later, when her spell as Miss England came to an end, she joined a new regiment and was thrown back into Army life.

This involved a month on exercise and tough training to get her up to speed.

"I'm not going to lie, it was hard to come back," she said.

"It's definitely a change of lifestyle from having your hair and make-up done every day to being in your combats and having your hair scraped back. I was thrown in at the deep end and realised that this was reality.

"I went on exercise and it was hard because I was living in woods, having spent the last year living in amazing hotels around the world. To go straight back to this, it was definitely a culture shock."

She admitted she had been "apprehensive" about how she would be received by fellow servicemen and women.

"When people met me, they knew I had been Miss England and I think people had an opinion of me," she added.

"Then they realised that I'm just a normal squaddie. It's nice having a bit of banter at work and it's nice being back in the Army.

"There are days when I miss getting dressed up and going to an event but the Army is my life and the Army has made me who I am."

Corporal Hodge, from Brighton, joined the forces as a 17-year-old and served with 1st Battalion, Royal Anglian Regiment, in Iraq for seven months before becoming a beauty queen.

She has written a book about her experiences. Combat To Catwalk comes out on April 4 and is available to pre-order.

Jessica Linley, 21, a law student at the University of Nottingham, is the new Miss England.