Susanna Pilny for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Let’s get right down to it.
Mitochondria are intelligent, microscopic organisms that live inside the cells of all things. When present in high numbers, they allow their host to sense the Force. Jedi—
Mitochondria are similar, though. The most common explanation you hear is that mitochondria are “cellular power plants,” which is true, but isn’t extremely scientific. To be more scientific, we’ll say: Mitochondria are microscopic components of almost every cell in your body, known as organelles. They take oxygen and sugar from the cell and, through a complicated series of steps that tend to cause nervous breakdowns in biochemistry students, create water, carbon dioxide, and energy in return—otherwise known as the Krebs Cycle and oxidative phosphorylation, or “Why didn’t I take anatomy instead?”
In humans, the energy made is contained in the form of ATP and GTP, which can be used to power more or less anything that needs an input of energy in the cell. (Hence the “powerhouse” explanation, or in midi-chlorians, the Force.)
Mitochondria are their own beast
But mitochondria go way beyond being just another bit of cell machinery, because scientists think they used to be their own organisms. The prevailing theory is that originally they lived as bacteria inside eukaryotic cells (the type of cells animals are made of). They received food from their hosts in exchange for energy from themselves—otherwise known as symbiosis. Over the years, the two cells became a single cell, and mitochondria became relegated to a sub-structure of eukaryotic cells.
Scientists think this because, unlike anything else in our cells, mitochondria have their own DNA completely separate from what we consider generally consider normal DNA. “Normal” DNA comes from both of our parents, forming double helices in our cells. Mitochondrial DNA comes only from one parent: the mother. In fact, all the mitochondrial DNA in the world can be traced back around 100,000 years to one woman, whom scientists like to call “Mitochondrial Eve”. This woman, out of the probable thousands of others alive at the time, produced the only unbroken chain of female heirs to survive to today. In every other case, somewhere between now and 100,000 years ago, the other lines died out or only males were left in the line—meaning their children wouldn’t inherit their female-passed DNA.
All this being said, it’s easy to see why mitochondrial disease can be so devastating—you can’t survive without energy. Beyond that, mitochondrial issues have been linked to many other diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and some cancers as well as aging. But there is hope on the horizon, especially for women with mitochondrial diseases who are looking to have children: Researchers have created a way to substitute in mitochondrial DNA from other women into your own eggs. This means that the child will still have your “normal” DNA, but will just have different mitochondria.
“It must be a full moon” is a common refrain when things appear more hectic than usual.
The moon is even blamed when things get crazy at hospital emergency rooms or birth wards. “Some nurses ascribe the apparent chaos to the moon, but dozens of studies show that the belief is unfounded,” said Jean-Luc Margot, a UCLA professor of planetary astronomy.
Of course, the moon does not influence the timing of human births or hospital admissions, according to new research by Margot that confirms what scientists have known for decades. The study illustrates how intelligent and otherwise reasonable people develop strong beliefs that, to put it politely, are not aligned with reality.
The absence of a lunar influence on human affairs has been demonstrated in the areas of automobile accidents, hospital admissions, surgery outcomes, cancer survival rates, menstruation, births, birth complications, depression, violent behavior, and even criminal activity, Margot writes. His study was published online by the journal Nursing Research.
Even though a 40-year-old UCLA study demonstrated that the timing of births does not correlate in any way with the lunar cycle, the belief in a lunar effect has persisted. A 2004 study in a nursing journal, for example, suggested that the full moon influenced the number of hospital admissions in a medical unit in Barcelona, Spain.
But Margot identified multiple flaws in the data collection and analysis of the 2004 research. By re-analyzing the data, he showed that the number of admissions was unrelated to the lunar cycle.
“The moon is innocent,” Margot said.
So why do the erroneous beliefs live on in spite of the evidence?
Margot cited what scientists refer to as the “confirmation bias” — people’s tendency to interpret information in a way that confirms their beliefs and ignore data that contradict them. When life is hectic on the day of a full moon, many people remember the association because it confirms their belief. But hectic days that do not correspond with a full moon are promptly ignored and forgotten because they do not reinforce the belief.
Margot said the societal costs of flawed beliefs can be enormous.
In just one current example, the recent measles outbreak appears to have been triggered by parents’ questionable beliefs about the safety of the measles vaccine.
“Vaccines are widely and correctly regarded as one of the greatest public health achievements, yet vaccine-preventable diseases are killing people because of beliefs that are out of step with scientific facts,” Margot said.
Last December, news reports described the imminent extinction of the northern white rhinoceros because of high demand for rhinoceros horns driven by human superstition. Polar bears and other species are in danger of becoming extinct because of incorrect beliefs about the reality of climate change.
“The evidence for climate change caused by human activity is irrefutable, yet lawmakers continue to delay taking corrective action and cite, for instance, the presence of snow in winter to support their unfounded beliefs,” Margot said.
A willingness to engage in evidence-based reasoning and admit that one’s beliefs may be incorrect will produce a more accurate view of the world and result in better decision-making, Margot said.
Urban exercise still healthy despite air pollution
Written By: Brett Smith
Emily Bills
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
People thinking about running, jogging, or otherwise exercising in an urban environment may be put off by the idea of inhaling air pollution, but a new study has found that the benefits of exercise outweigh the negative impacts of pollution.
Published in the Environmental Health Perspectives journal, the new study compared the effects of air pollution to exercise as that relate to mortality.
“Air pollution is often perceived as a barrier to exercise in urban areas. In the face of an increasing health burden due to rising physical inactivity and obesity in modern societies, our findings provide support for efforts in promoting exercise, even in urban areas with high pollution,” said Zorana Jovanovic Andersen, an epidemiologist from the University of Copenhagen. “However, we would still advise people to exercise and cycle in green areas, parks, and woods, with low air pollution and away from busy roads, when possible.”
In the study, researchers looked at data for over 52,000 individuals, ages 50 to 65 years old, from two major Danish cities: Aarhus and Copenhagen. From 1993 to 97, participants documented their physical activities, including everything from sports to gardening and walking. The scientists then calculated air pollution levels from traffic at their home addresses.
The study team saw that 5,500 participants died before 2010, with about 20 percent fewer deaths among those who exercised compared to those who didn’t. The relationship even held for participants who lived in the most polluted areas of Copenhagen and Aarhus.
“Even for those living in the most polluted areas of Copenhagen, it is healthier to go for a run, a walk, or to cycle to work than it is to stay inactive,” Andersen said.
“It is also important to note that these results pertain to Denmark and sites with similar air pollution levels, and may not necessary be true in cities with several fold higher air pollution levels, as seen in other parts of the world,” she added.
One study published in February found that people living in certain parts of India are inundated with deadly levels of air pollution on a daily basis. Indians living in the most polluted areas lose an average of 3.2 years from their life compared to those living in non-polluted areas, the study found.
Drawing inspiration from a squid’s ability to blend seamlessly into the background to hide from their prey, researchers at the University of California at Irvine have developed a new “invisibility sticker” that could prevent soldiers from being spotted with infrared cameras.
According to Discovery News, UCI’s Dr. Alon Gorodetsky and his colleagues developed new camouflage designs based on iridocytes, an unusual type of cell found in squid skin that contains layers made up of a protein called reflectin. They coaxed bacteria to produce reflectin, and then used it to coat a hard substrate similar to packing tape in order to create the “invisibility sticker.”
“Soldiers wear uniforms with the familiar green and brown camouflage patterns to blend into foliage during the day, but under low light and at night, they’re still vulnerable to infrared detection,” Dr. Gorodetsky explained. “We’ve developed stickers for use as a thin, flexible layer of camo with the potential to take on a pattern that will better match the soldiers’ infrared reflectance to their background and hide them from active infrared visualization.”
He explained that a squid uses a biochemical cascade to change the thickness and spacing of the reflectin layers, which in turn alters how the cells reflect light and the coloration of the skin. By exposing the coated substrate to acetic acid vapors, they found that the film began swelling and then disappeared when viewed with an infrared camera.
“What we were doing was the equivalent of bathing the film in acetic acid vapors — essentially exposing it to concentrated vinegar. That is not practical for real-life use,” Dr. Gorodetsky said. That’s where the sticky-tape like substance comes in, since it provided a mechanical trigger that could be realistically used in military operations – though it is not yet ready for field use.
The UCI researcher said that he envisions soldiers or security personnel one day being able to carry a roll of invisibility stickers in their packs, using them to cover their uniforms as needed. He added that his team was looking to create something that was “inexpensive and completely disposable. You take out this protein-coated tape, you use it quickly to make an appropriate camouflage pattern on the fly, then you take it off and throw it away.”
A work in progress
Before that can become a reality, however, Dr. Gorodetsky and his fellow researchers have several issues to overcome. For instance, they have to figure out a way to increase the brightness of the stickers. In addition, to make a truly adaptive camouflage system, they will need to make it so that several stickers respond in exactly the same way at exactly the same time.
They are also working on ways to make the stickers more versatile. While the current version of the stickers can reflect near-infrared light, the UCI team is looking to enhance the materials so that they can also work at mid- and far-infrared wavelengths, allowing them to be used to thwart thermal infrared imaging. They may also have non-military uses, such as in clothing capable of trapping or releasing body heat as needed to help keep people comfortable at all times.
A bizarre bulge approximately half as tall as Mount Kilimanjaro has been found on Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, and the unusual feature may have something to do with the subsurface ocean recently discovered on the Jovian satellite, according to reports.
The bulge is approximately 375 miles wide and nearly two miles tall, io9 said on Friday, and its cause and purpose currently have astronomers puzzled. Paul Schenk, a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said he came across the feature by accident.
Woah, Ganymede. Do you have a thick crust or are you just happy to see us?
Schenk, who reported his findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference on March 20, explained to National Geographic that he was attempting to complete the global mapping of the moon’s surface when he spotted the lump, which appears to be made out of thick ice.
The feature suggests that at one time, Ganymede’s icy shell rotated atop the rest of the moon. Schenk believes that the bulge began growing at one of the poles, and then moved into a different position once its mass grew large enough. The shell slid atop the ocean, while the interior of the moon stayed in the same orientation, causing it to wind up at the equator.
“The only place you can get a large mass like that – that’s not related to geology that we know of – is at the cold poles,” he explained. Since the poles are “permanently cold,” it would result in a “significant amount of thickening of the ice shell,” the planetary scientist added.
The phenomenon is known as true polar wander and is comparable to the Earth’s Arctic region moving to the Equator while everything beneath the crust stayed in place, Nat Geo said. It can only occur when a fluid body such as a global ocean separates the rind of a moon from its inner parts, or else the crust would be unable to slide atop the rest of the moon.
If the bulge formed at one of Ganymede’s poles, and if polar wander explains why it is currently located at the moon’s equator, scientists expect that there will be a similar feature opposite this one. Schenk said that they hope to confirm that when the next spacecraft arrives at the moon, but he and his colleagues remain uncertain exactly why the bulge still exists at all.
“Any ideas about how you support a three-kilometer-high [two-mile] ice bulge, hundreds of kilometers wide, over the long term on Ganymede are welcome,” Bill McKinnon of Washington University in St. Louis, who worked with Schenk on the observations, told Nat Geo. “We’ve never seen anything like it before; we don’t know what it is.”
Schenk and McKinnon first spotted the bulge in images taken by the Galileo spacecraft while searching for a different type of feature – “crop circles,” or deep, concentric grooves in icy shells that are created by the strain of the shell rotating. Crop circles found on Europa suggests that that moon also experienced true polar wander occurred there, and that just like on Ganymede, the poles of the moon are approximately 90 degrees offset from their original location.
Both Jovian moons have subsurface global oceans, which Nat Geo explains is a prerequisite for a wandering icy shell. If Ganymede’s crust actually did move, Robert Pappalardo of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that it could help explain what has controlled the orientations of all of the moon’s grooves.
“If they all shifted and flipped over by 90 degrees, then we’ve been looking at the wrong orientation to try to understand what formed the grooves. So that’s exciting,” he said. The discovery comes just a few weeks after researchers confirmed the presence of buried ocean on Ganymede by studying auroras on the moon.
Just two years after the creation of the world’s first 3D-printed handgun, a design team has come up with a rifle crafted using additive manufacturing that is capable of firing a larger caliber round than any of the weapons that came before it, according to various media reports.
Back in 2013, a company called Defense Distributed created the first-ever 3D-printed handgun, the the .38-caliber Liberator, and followed that up with an AR-15 receiver that can fire hundreds of 5.56mm rounds, Engadget reported on Thursday. Now, a group called FOSSCAD has upped the bar by creating the AR-15’s “badass big brother,” the Colt CM901 modular battle rifle.
The website went on to explain that the CM901 is larger and heavier than the AR-15, and also was built to fire a larger-caliber round, the 7.62 x 51mm NATO. The 7.62mm rounds are capable of travelling father and striking with more force than the 5.56mm bullets used by the AR-15. In order to accommodate them, the weapon’s lower receiver needed to weigh more and be sturdier so that it was capable of handing the increased mechanical stress and recoil.
Where’s the government in all this?
According to the website War Is Boring, the makers of the CM901 conducted and created an animated gif of a live-fire test involving the 3D-printer rifle. The modular design of the lower receiver was reportedly crafted using an XYZ Da Vinci printer, which can be purchased for approximately $500 – relatively inexpensive when it comes to 3D printing technology.
Meanwhile, WT Vox reports that Defense Distributed is in the process of experimenting with 3D printed guns made out of carbon fiber, which can be used for parts of a manufactured weapon in order to make it more durable. High-caliber barrels, however, must be built out of metal in order to keep them from breaking. Only the lower receiver can be made from carbon fiber.
The website noted that “desktop weapons focus on printing lower receivers because they’re subject to federal regulations. You can’t make a working gun without a lower receiver and they usually come with a serial number stamped on them. As far as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) is concerned, a gun’s lower receiver is the gun. Everything else, including the barrel, you can buy over the counter with no questions asked.”
While using 3D printers to make guns might cause some people to cock an eyebrow and wonder about the legality of such activity, WT Vox states that private citizens of the US “have the right to make their own firearms… without any oversight from the federal government.” While the process is usually “complicated,” using a 3D printer “simplifies” thing and “could allow citizens to build their own rifles without registering them” or going through background checks.
On its website, FOSSCAD describes itself as a community that creates and releases open source computer aided designs, including many of the designs included in ‘megapacks’ offered through the DEFCAD search engine for 3D printable models. Machinists in the community make new 3D printer and filament hardware while those that own printers test out their creations.
The coldest continent on Earth may have just set an all-time record for its hottest day ever, as an Argentinean-operated reportedly recorded temperatures of 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit (17.5 degrees Celsius) on March 24, according to various media outlets.
The temperature reported last Tuesday at Base Esperanza came one day after Base Marambia, a second Argentinean facility located roughly 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Esperanza, reported a reading of 63.3 degrees Fahrenheit (17.4 degrees Celsius), Weather Underground said. Both figures surpass any previously record temperature at their respective locations.
Esperanza’s previous record high of 62.7 degrees Fahrenheit (17.1 degrees Celsius) was recorded back on April 24, 1961, while the previous record high at Marambia was 61.7 degrees Fahrenheit (16.5 degrees Celsium) was on December 7, 1992, the website added.
Indian summer?
If the reports are investigated and verified by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), it would become the highest temperature on record for the entire continent of Antarctica, according to Mashable. The previous record high of 59 degree Fahrenheit (15 degree Celsius) was recorded at Vanda Station, a now-automated facility located near 77 degrees south latitude, in 1974.
“Despite the fact that the temperature record from Vanda appears on the list of world weather extremes maintained by the WMO, the WMO has not yet investigated all-time weather records for Antarctica,” Weather Underground said.
“One surprising aspect of the temperatures measured recently at Esperanza and Marambio are that they occurred in autumn, nearly three months past the usual warmest time of the year in the Antarctic Peninsula,” the website added. December is typically the warmest month in Esperanza.
The average high temperatures in March there are typically just 31.3 degrees Fahrenheit (-0.4 degrees Celsius), meaning that the records were over 30 degrees Fahrenheit (17 degrees Celsius) above average.
We’ll have to wait for verification
To verify the records, the WMO will need to make sure that the equipment was functioning properly when the temperatures were recorded. That process could take several months, but it could be complicated by the very definition of what Antarctica really is.
If the WMO opts to use only observations south of the Antarctic Circle for temperature records in the region, it would exclude the Esperanza reading, even though it is connected to areas that are south of the circle. If they used the landmass of Antarctica, though, the temperatures recorded at Esperanza would likely stand up as the warmest ever recorded, Mashable said.
Weather Underground said that the records “were made possible by an unusually extreme jet stream contortion that brought a strong ridge of high pressure over the Antarctic Peninsula, allowing warm air from South America to push southwards over Antarctica. At the surface, west to east blowing winds over the Antarctic Peninsula rose up over the 1,000-foot high mountains just to the west of Esperanza Base, then descended and warmed via adiabatic compression.”
Thus far, five countries and territories have tied or hit all-time high temperature records so far this year, according to CNBC. The website also states that the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming places on Earth.
Mere hours after a NASA astronaut and a Roscosmos cosmonaut blasted off on a mission that will see the international colleagues spend a year on the International Space Station, rumors that their two countries were collaborating on the station’s successor surfaced on Saturday.
According to AFP reports published by Discovery News on Saturday, Russian space program officials apparently revealed plans to build a new orbiting space base to replace the ISS after 2024, and claimed that the US space agency would be working with Roscosmos on that facility.
Russian news agency TASS noted that the announcement was made by Russian space chief Igor Komarov at a news conference over the weekend, with his American counterpart Charles Bolden also in attendance at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
“We have agreed that Roscosmos and NASA will be working together on the program of a future space station. We agreed that the group of countries taking part in the ISS project will work on the future project of a new orbital station,” he reportedly said, adding that the new station project would be “open” and could involve countries not involved with the current space station.
Russia and the US recently agreed to continue operating and financing the ISS until 2024, and Komarov said that the current priority was to keep it operational through that period. He added that the new announcement “do not rule out that the station’s flight could be extended. Its term of existence will depend on the implementation of our joint projects.”
So does this mean that ISS 2.0 is officially a go?
Well, not exactly.
The AFP goes on to note that Russian deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin, who is in charge of the country’s space program, appeared to downplay the apparent commitment to a successor to the ISS. “The Russian government will study the results of the talks between Roscosmos and NASA. The decisions will be taken later,” Rogozin reportedly wrote on Twitter.
Similarly, Engadget reached out to NASA for comments on the media reports, and the US space agency said that “no new partnerships” had been announced. NASA went on to say that while it had “interest in continuing international cooperation,” but stopped short of confirming that there were any new projects in the works with Roscosmos or any other current ISS partners.
“We are pleased Roscomos wants to continue full use of the International Space Station through 2024 – a priority of ours – and expressed interest in continuing international cooperation for human space exploration beyond that,” agency officials told the website in a statement.
“The United States is planning to lead a human mission to Mars in the 2030s, and we have advanced that effort farther than at any point in NASA’s history. We welcome international support for this ambitious undertaking,” they added. “Today we remain focused on full use of our current science laboratory in orbit and research from the exciting one-year mission astronaut Scott Kelly just began, which will help prepare us for longer duration spaceflight.”
Drinking coffee could undo alcohol’s damage to liver
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Consuming three alcoholic beverages per day is enough to cause liver cancer, but regularly drinking coffee could offset the effects of the disease, a team of scientists affiliated with the World Cancer Research Fund International revealed last week in a new report.
As part of the organization’s ongoing “continuous update project” program, which analyzes global research of how factors such as nutrition, physical activity and weight affect cancer risk and survival, the report set to identify factors that increase and decrease that risk. Blame it on the aflatoxins
The scientists reviewed 34 studies from around the world involving more than eight million men and women and 24,600 cases of liver cancer. Among the findings were that being overweight or obese was a cause of liver cancer, as were inappropriately-stored foods that are contaminated by aflatoxins, a substance produced by a fungus that contaminates such items.
Aflatoxins, the authors of the new report explained, are generally an issue related to foods from warmer parts of the world, especially developing countries. Foods that may be affected by these substance are cereals, spices, peanuts, pistachios, chillies, black pepper, dried fruit and figs. [STORY: Coffee drinkers have cleaner arteries]
Also, as Dr. Anne McTiernan, an epidemiologist at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center told The Columbus Dispatch, the study also provided “the clearest indication to date of how many drinks actually cause liver cancer.” She and her colleagues found that consuming over 45 grams a day of alcohol, or about three drinks, is a “convincing cause” of liver cancer. And here’s the part about coffee
The study also found that drinking at least one cup of coffee per day actually decreased the risk that a person will develop liver cancer. However, the London-based group said that additional research was required to determine exactly how much and what type of coffee a person should be consuming before any concrete scientific advice is offered related to this discovery.
“Mechanisms that support a protective effect of coffee on liver cancer relate largely to studies in animals, although some human studies contribute to the evidence,” the authors wrote, according to UPI. “Both coffee and coffee extracts have also been shown to reduce the expression of genes involved in inflammation, and the effects appear to be most pronounced in the liver.” [STORY: The science behind a great cup of coffee: Mold toxins]
In a blog post discussing the findings of the research, Ricardo Uauy, a professor of public health nutrition at the University of Chile and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, as well as one of the scientists involved in the project, explained that compounds in the caffeinated beverage triggers the body’s defenses and could reduce inflammation.
Furthermore, it may prevent damage to DNA, increase the capacity for DNA to repair itself and improve our sensitivity to insulin, which protects against type-2 diabetes and obesity, he added. He also reiterated that there were many unanswered questions surrounding the findings.
“For example, we don’t know how many cups should be consumed and how regularly, what effect adding milk and/or sugar has, and whether the coffee drinking reported in the research was caffeinated or decaffeinated, instant or filter,” Uauy wrote.
“We also need to ensure that there are no harmful effects for other health conditions before offering advice,” he added. “But it’s a future area of research World Cancer Research Fund International is interested in, especially as its report on womb (endometrial) cancer shows strong evidence that coffee consumption also reduces the risk of womb cancer.”
Growing a long, elaborate beard may be about more than just wanting sweet facial hair or trying to look like those Duck Dynastyguys: It may be one way for male humans to show dominance in an increasingly competitive world, new research from Swiss and Australian claims.
In research published online earlier this month in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, Dr. Cyril Grueter, a professor from the University of Western Australia, and his colleagues suggest that one reason that flamboyant facial hair is in again right now is that guys are feeling perceived pressure from increased competition and are responding by growing ornamental beards.
We’re all just bearded apes
The researchers investigated their hypothesis in primates, and found that in larger societies with multiple levels, male primates went on to develop ever more ostentatious features that essentially served as badges of honor. Some examples include the elongated noses of proboscis monkeys, the cheek flanges of orangutans, the capes of white and silvery hair in hamadryas baboons, the reddened chests of in geladas and the upper-lip warts in golden snub-nosed monkeys.
Human beards could fall into the same category, they explained. At least some of these types of features appear to enhance the sexual attractiveness of males to females, and the competition amongst male members of the species may also be responsible for the evolution of badges such as facial hair. Men with beards may be seen as more aggressive and dominant than those without them, attracting females that are drawn to males that appear to be more powerful.
“In general, our new research shows that body ornaments appear to be more elaborate in larger groups of primates (where signaling quality and status to strangers is of great importance) and the same may apply to humans which live in fairly large societies,” Dr. Grueter, lead author of the study and an associate professor of biological anthropology, told The Huffington Post.
“When you live in a small group where everyone knows everyone… there is no need to signal quality and competitiveness via ornaments,” he added. “In large groups where individuals are surrounded by strangers, we need a quick reliable tool to evaluate someone’s strength and quality, and that’s where these elaborate ornaments come in. In the case of humans, this may also include phenotypic extensions such as body decoration, jeweler and prestige items.”
Size matters
Dr. Grueter and his fellow researchers investigated a total of 154 different primate species and found more conspicuous badges in the male members of species in multilevel social groups with limited individual recognition and regular social and physical conflict. They suggested that these badges were of benefit to males in those societies to signal their rank and identity, as well as to demonstrate their degree of dominance and their level of attractiveness to potential mates.
Conversely, species that live in smaller groups had less need of such ornaments, as individual recognition and an increased frequency of interactions allowed their fellow creatures to better assess the social status, strength and quality of their contemporaries. They went on to argue that the popularity of moustaches and beards among UK men from 1842 to 1971 increased when the number of males in the marriage pool increased and facial hair was deemed more attractive.
“Our analysis suggests that among primates with larger group sizes and multilevel social organizations, males have more developed visually conspicuous secondary sexual traits,” the authors wrote. “This may reflect selection for amplified signals of individual identity, rank, dominance, or attractiveness in large and complex social organizations wherein social and physical conflict may arise frequently and individual recognition is limited.”
A harsh winter cold spell that affected much of the Eastern US last month may have shattered record low temperatures that had stood for decades, but it was not the result of climate change, according to researchers from ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology.
In fact, events experienced in that part of the country over the past two winters may have caused part of Niagara Falls to freeze and ice floes to form on the Great Lakes, but incidents like this are actually becoming increasingly rare in recent years due to reduced temperature variability.
It has been argued that the amplified warming of the Arctic relative to lower latitudes which has taken place over the past few decades has weakened the polar jet stream, including a hypothesis that suggests that the strong atmospheric wind current has become increasingly wavy, leading to an increase in temperature fluctuations in the middle latitudes due to global warming.
As a result of this wavier jet stream, amplified Arctic warming may have contributed to the cold snaps that hit the eastern US, the hypothesis claims. However, in a recent issue of the Journal of Climate, the authors of the new study come to a drastically different conclusion.
Using climate simulations and theoretical arguments, they demonstrated that in most places the range of temperature fluctuations will decrease as the climate warms. This means that these cold spells will become fewer and further between due to the warming climate, and that the frequency of such events will be reduced as fluctuations of mean temperatures is also reduced.
In the study, the ETH Zurich and Caltech scientists report that higher latitudes are warming more quickly than lower latitudes, meaning that the temperature difference between the equator and the poles is decreasing. If this temperature variation disappeared entirely, air masses would have the same temperature regardless of whether or not the flowed from the north or south.
Theoretically, this would completely eliminate temperature variability altogether, and while this scenario will never happen, it helped guide the study author’s approach. They used a simplified climate model to verify their hypothesis using various scenarios, and found that the mid-latitude temperature variability decreased as differences between the poles and equator diminished.
Climate model simulations by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed similar results, the researchers noted: as the climate warms, temperature differences in the mid-latitudes decrease, as does temperature variability, particularly during the winter. However, this does not mean that there will be no extreme temperatures in the future, they added.
Get ready: hotter summers are coming
“Despite lower temperature variance, there will be more extreme warm periods in the future because the Earth is warming,” explained lead author Tapio Schneider. Schneider’s team limited their work to temperature trends, however, meaning that as other studies have indicated, severe storms and other extreme events could still become more common due to global warming.
The researchers said that they want to further investigate the potential implications of these findings in future studies.
One of the reasons lettuce is so healthy is because it is rich in antioxidants, which protect our bodies from molecules that cause cell damage and create a variety of diseases. But a new study indicates that not all types of lettuce are created equal.
According to researchers from the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country, the color of the leafy vegetable determines how quickly their antioxidant compounds work in limited the impact of free radicals, which can cause aging, lead to serious illness, or otherwise harm our health.
In a recent edition of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, lead investigator Usue Pérez-López of the Department of Plant Biology and Ecology of the UPV/EHU’s Faculty of Science and Technology and her colleagues report that the antioxidants found in lettuce with green leaves react more slowly that versions of the vegetable with red leaves.
Starting in 2011, Pérez-López and her team began analyzing the compounds of three different varieties of lettuce: green-leafed “Batavia,” semi-red-leafed “Marvel of Four Seasons,” and red-leafed “Oak Leaf” using Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) techniques.
By monitoring their decay kinetics, they found that the green-leaf lettuce contained water-soluble, antioxidant compounds which act at slow and intermediate speeds, while the red-leaf lettuce had compounds that act at intermediate and rapid speeds, and the semi-red-leaf one had three kinds of compounds that act at slow, rapid, and intermediate speeds.
“The results showed that as long as lettuce had higher red pigmentation, the hydrophilic antioxidant capacity increased together with the contents in free and conjugated phenolic acids, free and conjugated flavonoids, and anthocyanins,” Pérez-López and her co-authors wrote.
At this time, they cannot tell for sure which antioxidants are responsible for which of these kinetic behaviors, but they suggest that the flavonoid quercetin accounted for the majority of the intermediate-rate antioxidants, while anthocyanins accounted for most of the fast-rate ones.
“The fact that there are compounds that act at different speeds does not mean that some are better or worse than others,” Pérez-López said. “If we eat foods that can generate free-radical activity, there will be some compounds that act to eliminate them more quickly.”
“But at the same time, it is also important that our bodies should acquire foods with antioxidants that have slower kinetics so that the latter will continue to act over a longer period of time,” she added. “That is why people say that it is very interesting to mix different types of lettuce because they have different, complementary characteristics.”
The next step is to find a way to improve the nutritional and pharmaceutical properties of all three varieties of lettuce, the researchers said. They are currently attempting to find a way to up the effects of specific compounds in each variety by subjecting the plants to short stresses. Since these compounds have a defense-related function in plants, subjecting them to conditions other than what they are used to could boost their antioxidant qualities.
“What matters in this process is not to lose productivity, and that is why we apply short-intensity stresses,” Pérez-López explained. “With excessive stress, we could reach a point in which plant growth is reduced, and we are not interested in achieving greater quality at the cost of a reduction in size. The aim is to maintain production and achieve greater quality in this production.”
If you have a chronic sinus infection it could mean many things. The question becomes whether that symptom is fibromyalgia or sinusitis. It can be either. Sinusitis that is related to fibromyalgia may be one of the earliest detectable symptoms of the disease.
Ruling out fibromyalgia is also necessary for the successful treatment and relief of sinusitis. What may surprise you to learn is that the reason that they are so closely intertwined is that sinusitis is a yeast infection, and fibromyalgia can make yeast infections a fact of life for men and women.
Controlling the balance of yeast in the body is essential for relieving the symptoms of fibromyalgia. It is also one of the first lines of defence against sinusitis.
What is sinusitis?
Sinusitis is a chronic infection of the sinus cavity which extends behind and around the eyes, the hose and down towards the throat. It is a form of yeast infection. Suffers complain of having a stuffy head, runny nose, may experience fatigue, frequent illness and headaches.
While it is known to be a yeast infection, the cause of the yeast infection can vary. Some people also have blockages or deformities in their nasal cavity that promote sinusitis. It is associated with fibromyalgia and food allergies.
Someone with a chronic yeast infection may not make the connection between it and their stuffy nose and head pain, but it may very well be there. Eliminating fibromyalgia becomes important as chronic sinus infection is an early warning symptom of that disease.
What is fibromyalgia?
Fibromyalgia is a chronic disease that is characterized by a cluster of symptoms, the most prevalent being chronic pain and fatigue. Persons with fibromyalgia may experience pain in their joints, muscles, morning stiffness, sleep disturbances, fatigue, foggy brain and gastric issues.
There is no known cure for fibromyalgia, although many women do experience a lessening in its severity after menopause. Men and women can develop fibromyalgia. The risk factors include having someone in your family with it, traumatic brain injury, immune disorders, major illness and surgery.
Recent studies have shown that fibromyalgia appears to affect the amygdala center of the brain and it can be detectable by a blood test if it is developed enough within the body.
How can you tell which is which?
Telling which is which is going to take medical testing. Your doctor can examine your sinus cavity to see if there is a blockage or deformity that makes you susceptible to infection. For a diagnosis of fibromyalgia to be made you have to have a cluster of symptoms present.
New advances are being made in detecting fibromyalgia using blood tests and brain scans, but they are not always capable of detecting it during the development of the disease. Chronic sinusitis may be a clue that fibromyalgia is present. Fibromyalgia can also be the reason you may be experiencing sinusitis as well.
Does one cause the other?
It is not known if one causes the other to happen, but it is accepted that one of the common core clusters of symptoms for fibromyalgia is chronic sinusitis. Your doctor can help determine if there is a structural issue with your sinus cavity causing the repeated infection, but very often the common symptom of recurring yeast infections is the culprit.
Fibromyalgia causes a dysfunction in the sympathetic nervous system and immune system that can lead to chronic yeast infection. Chronic yeast infection can occur throughout the body, but are the cause of sinusitis too.
Who has an increased risk?
Persons with any kind of immune disorder such as arthritis or asthma can be at risk for both fibromyalgia and sinusitis. It is not uncommon in those who are morbidly obese as well to see the development of both of these diseases as the body’s natural systems become impaired in that condition.
Fibromyalgia may have a genetic cause, so if you have someone in your family who has been diagnosed with the disease you have a higher risk too. Chronic illness, trauma, brain injury, major surgery and traumatic events can also put you at a higher risk for fibromyalgia or sinusitis too.
What should you do?
The first thing you should do is work with your doctor to see if any of the medications you are on may be increasing your risk of sinusitis by disrupting the balance of the yeast in the body. The most obvious culprit will be an antibiotic. The next thing you should do is be tested for yeast infections.
Yeast infections happen in both men and women. Yeast is in any area where there is a mucous membrane, as well as the digestive system. Look into fibromyalgia dieting to reduce your symptoms and make changes too. Very often an underlying problem is an unknown food sensitivity that causes a reaction that upsets the balance of yeast.
After you have taken these steps, if you still don’t have relief you may want to talk to your doctor about medications and/or surgery to correct the problems with your sinusitis. That doesn’t mean that you are excused from changing your diet, sinusitis and yeast infections can return. If surgery does correct the problem with the chronic infection in your sinuses, you do not want a yeast imbalance starting anywhere else in your body.
Finding out more
If you are wondering if you have fibromyalgia or sinusitis, you need to start by eliminating certain foods from your diet and talking to your doctor. They may recommend switching medications, or suggest a sinus medication to address the issue. Chronic sinusitis is a very common symptom of fibromyalgia.
If it isn’t getting better no matter what you do, you may want to speak to your doctor about evaluating and testing for fibromyalgia. There is much being discovered about how to treat and test for fibromyalgia that is giving many people back their lives. Educate yourself about the disease and its related symptom diseases and disorders so that you can be proactive in seeking relief from your symptoms.
Understanding Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Fibromyalgia
Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating
New findings are helping doctors and patients to understand the relationship and connection between post-traumatic stress disorder and fibromyalgia. PTSD can come on at any time in life as a response to a wide variety of situations.
Fibromyalgia can come on in anyone over the age of 18. They share many of the same symptoms, which can make cleanly diagnosing one or the other difficult. With the new awareness that many people with one will have the other, there is an increased ability to make sure that there is a proper diagnosis made that will lead to effective treatment. While the symptoms are similar, there are some core differences that have to be addressed.
What is PTSD?
Post-traumatic stress disorder has only been recently recognized as a mental illness. It is not like depression or schizophrenia as it is wholly accepted that the reasons for developing the illness are external. Exposure to trauma can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder.
That trauma may come on the battlefield, in an abusive relationship, a bad employment position and so on – in other words, as it is now recognized that a huge component of post-traumatic stress disorder originates in the body’s stress reaction in response to a stimulus the trauma that can cause it is seen as anything.
Every person has a different capacity for stress and will respond to varying trauma differently too. In PTSD, the person exists in a constant state of hyper-vigilance that results in an imbalance in stress hormones and cortisol levels in the body. They may be subject to flashbacks, nightmare or general anxiety as a result of the initiating event.
Who is at risk?
Any one from a young child to a senior adult can develop PTSD. It is not uncommon for people to develop and recover from PTSD, but this then puts them at a higher risk of developing the disorder in response to a new event.
Anyone suffering a trauma – such as a traumatic event, surgery, illness or high levels of stress is also at risk. As are persons who live with chronic pain or who have an impaired immune system.
Those in high stress and high emotion environments are also considered to be at risk. The new diagnostic criteria now recognizes that there are several levels of post-traumatic stress disorder and offers appropriate treatments for each level of severity.
What is fibromyalgia?
Fibromyalgia is a chronic disease that is characterized by a cluster of symptoms. The most common are chronic pain, stiffness, brain fog, depression and disturbed sleep. There is no specific known cause or cure for fibromyalgia, but there are very many treatments that have shown to be effective in controlling symptoms.
Fibromyalgia often sets the stage for other disorders to occur because of how the immune system is affected. Irritable bowel syndrome and migraine syndromes are common as well. There are now tests that can help determine if you are suffering from fibromyalgia.
Who is at risk?
Originally considered a woman’s disease, there is more awareness now that men develop fibromyalgia as well. It can come on any time after the 18th year, but children have been diagnosed with it as well. The suspected causes of fibromyalgia are many.
There may be a gene component, which means if someone in your family has the disease you are at a higher risk. Traumatic brain injury has been related to it, as has major illness, disease and surgery. Emotional and mental trauma is also thought to play a key role in activating fibromyalgia in the body too.
Which is the cause of what?
As more is becoming known about how fibromyalgia affects your sympathetic nervous system, the easier it is to see how it relates to post traumatic stress disorder. It isn’t so much that one will cause the other, but that the presence of one may increase the risk of the other.
The action of PTSD on the immune system may very well set up the environment that welcomes fibromyalgia. Vice versa, fibromyalgia may create an amplified body syndrome that can then escalate into post-traumatic stress disorder given the right circumstances.
One thing that a recent study in Israel may have identified is that post-traumatic stress disorder and fibromyalgia may be very prevalent in men. This is key as though past thinking has held that fibromyalgia is primarily a woman’s disease, new thinking is that we don’t recognize the male cluster of symptoms as readily. This could mean more relief for men, and a better understanding for how to treat women too.
How to treat both
If you look at each disorder separately and then compare their common recommended treatments, you can see that there is a great deal of overlap. Both are treated with anti-depressants to help control serotonin levels in the body, and they may also be treated with anti-anxiety agents.
Both also recommend life style changes as a long term management system such as diet, exercise, meditation and other habits. While if you have one and suspect you have the other you can be proactive in seeking control of your symptoms, there is something you should watch out for.
What to watch out for
The problem with post-traumatic stress disorder and fibromyalgia is that there symptoms are very similar. They are different in a very important way – which is the post-traumatic psychiatric effect which can lead to flashbacks and anxiety.
You need a diagnosis, not just to self-treat, because the effects of PTSD, and the depression commonly caused by fibromyalgia are two very different things that need to be addressed professionally for you to gain relief.
Treatment for both combine medication, alternative treatments and lifestyle changes to give you the most relief. Remain open to trying new things as no one solution will work to relieve all of your symptoms. It is important to remember that post-traumatic stress disorder and fibromyalgia are both disorders that can be successfully managed.
Fossils of an ancient, lobster-like creature that is the forerunner of a diverse group of creatures including lobsters, butterflies, and spiders have been identified by paleontologists at the University of Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum, and Pomona College in California.
The species, Yawunik kootenayi, is described as a marine predator that had two pairs of eyes and prominent frontal appendages that could have been used for grasping. They believe that it lived more than 508 million years ago, or 250 million years before the first dinosaurs.
Yawunik kootenayi is believed to be the first new species to be described from Toronto’s Marble Canyon site, part of the renowned Canadian Burgess Shale fossil deposit, the researchers said. A paper describing the discovery was published this week in the journal Palaeontology.
Claws with…teeth?
The frontal appendages of the creature are said to resemble those found on modern-day shrimp or beetles, but they were actually made up of three long claws, two of which had opposing rows of teeth that could be used by the creature to make sure its prey did not get away.
“This creature is expanding our perspective on the anatomy and predatory habits of the first arthropods, the group to which spiders and lobsters belong,” said lead author Cedric Aria, a Ph. D. candidate in the University of Toronto Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
“It has the signature features of an arthropod with its external skeleton, segmented body, and jointed appendages, but lacks certain advanced traits present in groups that survived until the present day. We say that it belongs to the ‘stem’ of arthropods,” he added.
Versatile and complex appendages
Aria and his colleagues found evidence indicating that Yawunik was able to move forwards and backwards using those frontal appendages, and could also spread them out when attacking and retract them beneath its body when swimming. When combined with the long, sensing whip-like flagella extending from the claw tips, it meant that the creature’s front appendages were some of the most versatile and most complex ever seen in an arthropod species.
“Unlike insects or crustaceans, Yawunik did not possess additional appendages in the head that were specifically modified to process food,” Aria explained. “Evolution resulted here in a combination of adaptations onto the frontal-most appendage of this creature, maybe because such modifications were easier to acquire.”
“We know that the larvae of certain crustaceans can use their antennae to both swim and gather food,” he added. “But a large active predator such as a mantis shrimp has its sensory and grasping functions split up between appendages. Yawunik and its relatives tell us about the condition existing before such a division of tasks among parts of the organism took place.”
“Yawunik is the most abundant of the large new species of the Marble Canyon site, and so, as a predator, it held a key position in the food network and had an important impact on this past ecosystem,” said Caron, a co-author on the study. “This animal… shows how the site increases the significance of the Burgess Shale in understanding the dawn of animals.”
Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
It’s mom’s apple pie, backyard BBQ, mashed potatoes, or spaghetti. It could even be Elvis’s favorite breakfast sandwich, complete with butter, peanut butter, bacon, and bananas. Comfort food – we all have our own version, and our attraction to it is probably based on having a good relationship with the person who first made it. Research by the University at Buffalo says so.
“Comfort foods are often the foods that our caregivers gave us when we were children. As long we have positive association with the person who made that food, then there’s a good chance that you will be drawn to that food during times of rejection or isolation,” says UB psychologist Shira Gabriel. “It can be understood as straight-up classical conditioning.” These findings should improve our understanding of how social factors influence our food preferences and eating behavior.
Previous research has shown that comfort food can reduce feelings of rejection and isolation. The latest study, ‘Threatened belonging and preference for comfort food among the securely attached’, published in the journal Appetite, investigates why certain foods are attractive when we are feeling down.
Comfort food won’t break your heart
The Buffalo team wanted to see if “securely attached individuals prefer comfort food because of its “social utility” (i.e., its capacity to fulfill belongingness needs).”
The study was in two parts – one experiment and one daily diary study using two samples of university students from the United States. In the Study 1 experiment of 77 students, the results of a ‘belongingness threat essay’ showed that securely attached participants preferred the taste of a comfort food more after the belongingness threat. In Study 2, with 86 participants, a 14-day daily diary program found that “securely attached individuals consumed more comfort food in response to naturally occurring feelings of isolation.”
The main findings were that comfort food is associated with relationships (it has “social utility”), feeling isolated predicted how much people enjoy comfort food, and that threatening belonging led those with secure attachment to enjoy comfort food more.
“Because comfort food has a social function,” says Gabriel, “it is especially appealing to us when we are feeling lonely or rejected. The current study helps us understand why we might be eating comfort foods even when we’re dieting or not particularly hungry.”
The choice of food
Everyone has their own go-to goodies when they need comfort food. Some of the study participants made healthy food choices. But, for many others, it was the starchy, fatty, gooey grub that they turned to. For a lot of people, says Gabriel, the choice of comfort food was the food they grew up eating.
“In a previous study, we gave all of the participants chicken noodle soup,” says Gabriel. “But only those who had a social connection to that soup identified it as a comfort food and felt socially accepted after eating it.”
This research gives insight into a unique method by which people can feel socially connected and safe – through eating comfort foods. Because a threatened sense of belonging is related to mental and physical health risks, the researchers say it’s important to learn how that vulnerability can be managed.
However, this method of filling social needs is not without risks. As Gabriel says, “Although comfort food will never break your heart, it might destroy your diet.” And remember – as one of Elvis’s friends liked to say “It wasn’t drugs that killed Elvis. It was breakfast.”
While other imaging tests, including CT scans and mammograms, can be used to detect tumors, the Johns Hopkins researchers point out that a biopsy is typically required to directly study cells and determine whether a growth is malignant or benign. However, their new MRI technique may make those biopsies more effective, or even replace them completely.
The method, which is described in a paper currently available online Friday in the journal Nature Communications, noninvasively detects sugar molecules that are shed by the outer membranes of cancerous cells. Thus far, the technique has only been tested in mice and in cells grown in a test tube, but the authors believe that it shows promise as a non-invasive diagnostic tool.
Imaging cellular slime
“We think this is the first time scientists have found a use in imaging cellular slime,” explained Dr. Jeff Bulte, a radiology and radiological science professor at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering. “As cells become cancerous, some proteins on their outer membranes shed sugar molecules and become less slimy, perhaps because they’re crowded closer together.”
He added that if he and his colleagues are able to program the MRI to detect sugars attached to a specific protein, they might be able to tell the difference between regular cells and cancerous ones. Their work builds on recent research indicating that fine-tuned imaging techniques are able to detect glucose without using dyes based on how it interacts with surrounding water molecules.
Other scientists have used MRI to image proteins on the outside of cells that had lost their sugar, but those techniques require injectable dyes. Dr. Bulte’s team, however, compared MRI readings from a type of protein known as mucins both with and without sugars attached to find out what changes happened to the signal.
They then looked for that altered signal in four types of lab-grown cancer, and found drastically reduced levels of mucin-attached sugars when compared to normal cells. Lead author Dr. Xiaolei Song said that this was the first time that a property integral to cancer cells was used instead of an injected dye to detect cancer cells.
Advantages of this method
“The advantage of detecting a molecule already inside the body is that we can potentially image the entire tumor,” she explained in a statement. “This often isn’t possible with injected dyes because they only reach part of the tumor. Plus, the dyes are expensive.”
While Bulte cautions that more testing is required to prove that the technique could be used to help diagnose cancer in humans, it does show promise. He and his colleagues now plan to see if they can distinguish more types of cancerous tumors from benign masses in live mice using the MRI technique.
Provided additional testing is successful, Bulte and Song believe that the method could be used to detect cancer at an early stage, as well as to monitor response to chemotherapy and to guide biopsies to ensure sampling of the most malignant part of a tumor. Eventually, they hope that the MRI technique could make at least some biopsies unnecessary.
As a food, egg whites are high in protein and low in fat, and they are also used in the preparation of vaccines such as those used for influenza. But now researchers from the University of Georgia have found another way where the albumen may be beneficial to your health.
Writing in a recent edition of the Journal of Applied Polymer Science, the researchers report that bioplastics made from protein sources such as egg whites have antibacterial properties and could be useful in medical implements such as sutures, wound dressings, and catheter tubes.
Alex Jones, a doctoral student in the department of textiles, merchandising and interiors at UGA, and his colleagues tested three nontraditional bioplastic materials (egg whites, whey protein, and soy proteins) as alternatives to conventional petroleum-based plastics. Albumin in particular was found to demonstrate significant antibacterial properties when mixed with a plasticizing agent.
“It was found that it had complete inhibition, as in no bacteria would grow on the plastic once applied. The bacteria wouldn’t be able to live on it,” said Jones. In addition to reducing the risk of potential contamination, the bioplastic material could also be used for food packaging.
“Albumin and whey bioplastics exhibited similar thermal and viscoelastic properties, whereas soy bioplastics had varied viscoelastic properties based on the plasticizer used,” the study authors added. “ In terms of antibacterial activity, the albumin–glycerol and whey–glycerol were the best bioplastics, as no bacterial growth was observed on the plastics” after a 24-hour period.
Plus it’s fully biodegradable!
Jones and his fellow researchers set out with the goal of finding a way to lower the amount of petroleum used in traditional plastic production and to develop a fully biodegradable bioplastic. The albumin-glycerol blended material meets both criteria, according to the researchers.
“If you put it in a landfill, this being pure protein, it will break down. If you put it in soil for a month – at most two months – these plastics will disappear,” Jones said. He added that the next step will be to further analyze the albumin-based bioplastic’s potential for use in the biomedical and food packaging fields, including as a possible drug-delivery method.
As the authors reported in their study, nearly five percent of all US hospital admissions in 2002 resulted in a hospital-acquired infection. Jones and his colleagues said that they are encouraged by the results of the study, and particularly with the antimicrobial properties of albumin-based bioplastics.
While previous studies have found that listening to music (especially classical music) has a positive impact on a person’s cognitive ability and brain function, the molecular mechanisms responsible for these benefits had remained unclear – until now.
Researchers from the Haartman Institute Department of Medical Genetics at the University of Helsinki in Finland, the University of the Arts’ Sibelius Academy (a music institution) and the Aalto University Department of Information and Computer Science investigated the effect of a musical performance on the gene expression profiles of professional musicians.
“Several neuroscientific studies have demonstrated that the brains of professional musicians and non-musicians differ structurally and functionally and that musical training enhances cognition,” the authors wrote in a recent edition of the journal Scientific Reports. “However, the molecules and molecular mechanisms involved in music performance remain largely unexplored.”
They investigated the effect that music has on the genome-wide peripheral blood transcriptome of professional musicians. The research team analyzed the gene expression profiles of members of a professional orchestra (Tapiola Sinfonietta) and the Sibelius-Academy after a two-hour long concert performance, and then again following a “music-free” control session.
Playing music enhances activity in the brain
The researchers discovered that playing music enhanced the activity of genes involved in motor function, dopaminergic neurotransmission, neuronal plasticity, and neurocognitive functions including learning and memory. In particular, some of the genes involved in song perception and production in songbirds (including SNCA, FOS, and DUSP1) were identified, suggesting there is a potential link to the biological processes related to sound perception and performance.
“Additionally, modulation of genes related to calcium ion homeostasis, iron ion homeostasis, glutathione metabolism, and several neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases implied that music performance may affect the biological pathways that are otherwise essential for the proper maintenance of neuronal function and survival,” the study authors wrote.
“The findings provide a valuable background for molecular studies of music perception and evolution, and music therapy,” said lead investigator Dr. Irma Järvelä from the University of Helsinki. She and her colleagues said that their work provides the first evidence for the candidate genes and molecular mechanisms believed to be associated with performing music.
Music is more important than you think
A similar study conducted by researchers from Boston’s Children Hospital last summer revealed that musical training can help determine a person’s academic success while also having a lasting benefit to their executive brain functions throughout the rest of their lives.
In that study, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to establish a possible biological link between formal musical training and a boost in brainpower. Their work, which was published online in the journal PLOS One, demonstrated how the fMRI of brain areas known to be linked to executive function were more active in musicians than in non-musicians.
“Since executive functioning is a strong predictor of academic achievement, even more than IQ, we think our findings have strong educational implications,” said senior investigator Dr. Nadine Gaab of the hospital’s Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience. “While many schools are cutting music programs and spending more and more time on test preparation, our findings suggest that musical training may actually help to set up children for a better academic future.”
Who wouldn’t be fascinated with the giant pandas of the Chinese forests? To learn more about these reclusive animals, a team of researchers at Michigan State University electronically stalked five pandas in the wild via rare GPS collars from 2010 to 2012. And let me tell you, there were some surprises.
Published in the Journal of Mammalogy, MSU followed five pandas—three female adults named Mei Mei, Pan Pan, and Zhong Zhong, a young female Long Long, and a male named Chuan Chuan. While China has been very protective of their endangered pandas and had banned GPS collar use for over a decade, the researchers at MSU were able to safely capture, collar, and track these pandas and their interactions in the Wolong Nature Reserve in southwest China.
“Pandas are such an elusive species and it’s very hard to observe them in wild, so we haven’t had a good picture of where they are from one day to the next,” said Vanessa Hull, research associate at MSU’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS). “Once we got all the data in the computer we could see where they go and map it. It was so fascinating to sit down and watch their whole year unfold before you like a little window into their world.”
Jindong Zhang, a co-author on the paper and postdoctoral researcher at CSIS, stated that “this was a great opportunity to get a peek into the panda’s secretive society that has been closed off to us in the past.”
Pandas hang out together
Known as solitary animals, the giant pandas gave way to a big surprise—they seemed to occasionally group together. Chuan Chuan, Mei Mei, and Long Long were all found in the same part of the forest at the same time, most surprisingly for several weeks in the fall and outside of the typical spring mating season.
“This might be evidence that pandas are not as solitary as once widely believed,” Zhang stated.
The MSU team also noted that the male panda ventured across a big territory than any of the females, suggesting that he was checking in on the surrounding ladies and presenting himself with scent marking—rubbing smelly glands on trees. Seems he wants them to remember him for the spring, if you know what I mean.
Pandas have favorite restaurants and frequent them regularly
Also, they learned more about the panda’s feeding strategy, noting their apparent home range, where the panda will return and defend his or her 20 to 30 core areas in which to eat.
Giant pandas follow their main food source—bamboo—moving from one patch to the next and returning up to six months later. It suggests they remember successful dining areas and return with the hope of regrowth, as well as the possibility of returning to communicate with other pandas in that specific area.
This study comes at a crucial time for giant pandas. The Chinese government recently issued the state of the panda conservation report, happily noting that the wild panda population has increased nearly 17 percent to 1,864 pandas, and that their habitat has improved as well. However, Jianguo “Jack” Liu, co-author and MSU Rachel Carson Chair in sustainability, notes that habitat fragmentation, climate change, and human impacts still are a threat to the panda’s future. We can only hope the panda population can continue to grow.
While scientists have long believed that male birds have brighter colored plumage in order to attract mates, new research from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee throws cold water on this theory by indicating that males and females aren’t so different after all.
A team of researchers led by UW-Milwaukee biological sciences professors Peter Dunn and Linda Whittingham examined nearly 1,000 different species of birds and found that while males still do typically have brighter feathers than females, the gap between the two sexes is closing as both evolve over time to blend into their surroundings and hide from predators.
In a recent edition of the journal Science Advances, the authors wrote, “the bright colors of birds are often attributed to sexual selection on males, but in many species both sexes are colorful, and it has been long debated whether sexual selection can also explain this variation.”
“We show that most evolutionary transitions in color have been toward similar plumage in both sexes, and the color of both sexes (for example, bright or dull) was associated with indices of natural selection (for example, habitat type), whereas sexual differences in color were primarily associated with indices of sexual selection on males,” they added.
In short, they concluded that both natural selection and sexual selection were influential to bird coloration, but that each of those factors have been involved in different ways. Sexual selection led to reproductive differences, while natural selection caused color changes in both sexes, and there have been as many similarities as differences in male and female birds.
“Although most studies of bird plumage focus on dichromatism, evolutionary change has most often led to similar, rather than different, plumage in males and females,” Dunn, Whittingham and former UW-Milwaukee grad student Jessica Armenta wrote. “Our study shows that ecology and behavior are driving the color of both sexes, and it is not due to sexual selection.”
Birds of a feather
Armenta, who is now a teacher at Austin Community College in Texas, gathered data from 977 species of birds from museums in Australia and the US over a four-year period. She looked at six birds (three males and three females) from each species, and the data she gathered was examined by Dunn and Whittingham, who assigned each a color score based on brightness and hue.
They examined plumage color in relation to 10 measures of natural and sexual selection, finding that when the sexes became closer in color, they did so for reasons of natural selection, and when the color gap increased, it was due to reasons related to sexual selection. The study is said to be the first to examine the color of both sexes in terms of both natural and sexual selection in birds.
“A lot of research has focused on how plumage color is related to mating success, especially in males,” Dunn explained, “so this should hopefully get researchers to think more about how color affects survival, especially predation and foraging success, in both sexes.”
Drawing inspiration from the cooperative behavior displayed by ants at work, a German firm has developed 3D-printed versions of the highly organized insects that can collaborate on tasks.
With their new line of BionicANTs, the staff at Esslingen am Neckar-based automation company Festo have combined complex control algorithms, sensors, and wireless control systems to create 3D printed ants that Gizmodo claims “scuttle around much like the real thing.”
These aren’t tiny robots, either – each of them is approximately the same size as a human hand, according to New Scientist. They feature a body made from plastic and have a stereo camera in the head of each ant’s head that allow it to determine its location and to identify different objects that could be seized using gripping devices located beneath its chin.
The body of these ant drones in constructed entirely through additive manufacturing, while circuits are overlaid on top using a machine. Their grippers, as well as all six legs on each drone, were built using ceramic actuators capable of bending quickly and precisely using little energy. Finally, a series of floor sensors help them detect their terrain.
Our role model the ant
“For the BionicANTs, Festo has not only taken the delicate anatomy of the natural ant as a role model,” Festo said on its website. “For the first time, the cooperative behavior of the creatures is also transferred to the world of technology using complex control algorithms.”
“Like their natural role models, the BionicANTs work together under clear rules,” the company added. “They communicate with each other and coordinate their actions and movements among each other. The artificial ants thus demonstrate how autonomous individual components can solve a complex task together working as an overall networked system.”
The company said that the production technique used to create the cooperative drones is “unique” and features laser-sintered components that are embellished with visible conductor structures in the 3D printing process, thus serving as both design and electrical components.
For the legs, Festo said that they built the machines using leg actuator technology that takes advantage of piezo technology, meaning that the electrical charge is accumulated in response to applied mechanical stress. The BionicANTs were designed to mimic the behavior of real ants by making individual decisions based on the common goal of the entire drone swarm.
“The goal of the project is to create intelligent agents that can work efficiently in factories of the future by adapting to different production requirements,” New Scientist noted.
“Like their natural role models, the BionicANTs work together under clear rules,” Dr.-Ing. Heinrich Frontzek, the company’s head of corporate communication and future concepts, added in a statement. “They communicate with each other and coordinate both their actions and movements. Each ant makes its decisions autonomously, but in doing so is always subordinate to the common objective and thereby plays its part towards solving the task at hand.”
And we have liftoff! A Soyuz TMA-16M rocket carrying NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka is en route to the International Space Station, marking the beginning of the Year in Space mission.
The spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:42 pm ET Friday afternoon, embarking on a roughly six-hour journey to the space station. Once they arrive, they will join American commander Terry Virts, Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos and Italian flight engineer Samantha Cristoforetti as members of the Expedition 43 crew.
Padalka will remain on the space station for six months, while Kelly and Kornienko will spend an entire calendar year there, returning to Earth on the Soyuz TMA-18M in March 2016, NASA explained earlier this week. The length of the their stay will help scientists better understand how the human body and mind will react to long-term spaceflight.
“This knowledge is critical as NASA looks toward human journeys deeper into the solar system, including to and from Mars, which could last 500 days or longer,” the agency said. While Scott Kelly is on the ISS, his twin brother Mark will be monitored by researchers on Earth, and each of them will undergo a series of tests to track their physical and psychological health.
As the US space agency noted on Thursday, those tests “will track any degeneration or evolution that occurs in the human body from extended exposure to a zero-gravity environment.” The data will be shared between both NASA and Roscosmos in what has been called “an important step in reducing cost and improving efficiency for all future space station research.”
Important stepping stone in the #JourneyToMars
NASA said that the One Year Mission and Twin Study project will include 400 experiments designed to benefit both Earth and the space agency’s proposed mission to Mars. Among the topics that will be covered include sleep monitoring, cognitive performance assessments, and studies on how spending an extended amount of time in a weightless environment have on a person’s immune system, vision, bone density, muscle mass and metabolism.
In an op-ed piece penned for Space.com on Friday, NASA administrator Charles Bolden wrote, “Today, we launch an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut to live and work in space for an entire year… It’s an important stepping-stone on our journey to Mars, and will give us detailed medical data recorded throughout the one-year expedition.”
“This mission is part of the critical road map we’ve been undertaking with bipartisan support since the president challenged us five years ago to plan for a human mission to an asteroid and later to Mars,” Bolden continued, adding that Kelly “is helping us reach higher and take those next great leaps in exploration. His historic mission is one more sign that our nation’s space program is thriving and continues to lead the world.”
Settting records
The 51-year-old Kelly will spend 342 days off the planet as part of the mission, twice as long as any previous US astronaut (the previous record of seven months was set by NASA’s Michael Lopez-Alegria from September 2006 to April 2007). When added to his previous service, Kelly’s combined 522 days in space will also set a new American record, according to CNN.com.
Despite being a veteran of three space flights, Kelly admitted back in January that this mission would be “a significantly different experience. Being aboard the International Space Station more than twice the duration of my previous flights will not be easy, but I am looking forward to the challenge.”
His Year In Space colleague Padalka will establish a new world record for most cumulative time in space for a human. He has already logged more than 710 days in space, which includes a prior mission on the Russian Mir space station and three prior stints on the ISS, CNN added.
If you’ve always wanted to have night vision, but walking around with an electronic scope or tactical goggles just seemed a little too safe or normal; today is your lucky day. Maybe.
According to the website Science.Mic, a group of “biohackers” has successfully given a man night vision by injecting his eyeballs with a chlorophyll analog called Chlorin e6, which found in the eyeballs of many deep sea fish.
The compound had been used clinically to treat a condition called night blindness, so you know, it isn’t completely crazy. Just a little mad scientist-y.
“Going off that research, we thought this would be something to move ahead with,” Jeffrey Tibbetts, medical officer at the biohacker group Science for the Masses, told Science Mic. “There are a fair amount of papers talking about having it injected in models like rats, and it’s been used intravenously since the ’60s as a treatment for different cancers. After doing the research, you have to take the next step.”
The article didn’t say if Tibbetts was speaking from a dimly-lit underground lair, surrounded by henchmen, or if he cackled regularly after speaking, but it did note that team member Gabriel Licina volunteered for the injections.
Hmmmm
Using what was described as a “really fine turkey baster,” Tibbetts gradually leaked 50 microliters of Ce6 into Licina’s eyes, which were stretched open by a speculum. Tibbetts’ objective was to aim for the eyes’ conjunctival sac, which would transfer the compound to the retina.
“To me, it was a quick, greenish-black blur across my vision, and then it dissolved into my eyes,” Licina told Science Mic.
Rigid clinical methodologies would have dictated that the researcher perform a series of standardized assessments of their subject’s vision. But, the dudes at Science for the Masses ain’t got time for all that.
“We had people go stand in the woods,” Licina said. “At 50 meters, we could figure out where they were, even if they were standing up against a tree.”
According to Science Mic, Licina had 100 percent accuracy when it came to spotting people in the dark, in the woods standing in front of a tree. Other control participants were said to only have “a third” of that success rate.
Ehhhhh
The whole thing sounded a little like an episode of Duck Dynasty to us, so we contacted Dr. James Reynolds, professor and chair of the Department of Ophthalmology in the University at Buffalo, who said we were right to be wary.
“Night vision is a property of rod photoreceptor sensitivity,” Reynolds wrote via email. “Rods are designed to detect shape, movement, shadows, etc. but not form vision. Cones detect form vision and that is dependent on the visible light that reflects from the object into the eye. A chemical could not increase the actual light entering the pupil. Even dilating the pupil chemically does not allow significantly more photoreceptor light capture.”
The discovery of a particular class of Type Ia supernovae could help astronomers learn more about dark energy, the phenomenon behind the acceleration of the cosmos, according to new research published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.
As researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California explained, astronomers have long been using Type Ia supernovae (the explosions of dead stars) to determine the distance to galaxies and to calculate the rate at which the universe is expanding.
The method isn’t perfect, and astronomers are constantly looking for ways to improve the data obtained using these techniques. Now, University of California, Berkeley postdoc Patrick Kelly and his colleagues have identified the best type of supernovae in such measurements.
Using archived data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), Kelly’s team showed that there is one specific class of Type Ia supernovae that occur near younger stars, and they improve cosmic distance measurements with a precision over twice what was previously possible.
“We have discovered a population of Type Ia supernovae whose light output depends very precisely on how quickly they fade, making it possible to measure very exact distances to them,” Kelly said. “These supernovae are found close to populations of bright, hot young stars.”
New light on dark energy
In addition to improving measurements, the discovery could shed new light on dark energy, which is believed to be the primary culprit for the acceleration of the cosmos. This acceleration was originally discovered in 1998 as astronomers noticed that galaxies were moving away from each other at increasing speeds. However, the phenomenon itself is shrouded in mystery.
Type Ia supernovae are the key to measuring this acceleration, and thus using the nature of dark energy, according to JPL. The researchers compare them to a series of 60-watt light bulbs lined up along a field. If a person stand at one end of the light bulbs, the one at the opposite end would not appear as bright as the closest one due to its distance, and by knowing how bright that far off light bulb actually is, a person can use the degree of dimming to figure out its distance.
In much the same way, Type Ia supernovae consistently shine with roughly the same amount of light. These explosions occur when the burnt-out core of a white dwarf star explodes, causing its host galaxy to briefly become brighter. However, the explosions can differ considerably based on a variety of different factors, throwing off distance measurements.
Kelly and his colleagues examined the reliability of this method by analyzing the surroundings of nearly 100 previous Type Ia explosions using data from GALEX, which detects ultraviolet light and can be used to differentiate between young and old star-forming communities. They learned that those supernovae more closely affiliated with the younger, hotter stars were far more reliable at determining distances than the older, cooler types.
By using primarily this specific type of Type Ia supernova in the future, astronomers could be able to make more precise measurements of the size and scale of the universe. In fact, Kelly and his colleagues believe that these supernovae could be accurate to distances of at least six billion light years away, and perhaps even farther than that.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have developed a material that could lead to the next generation of bulletproof vests: a nanofiber-based structure that is tougher than Kevlar and can be stretched to seven times its original length.
According to Gizmodo, the new fiber absorbs energy using its electromechanical properties, and while Kevlar can absorb up to 80 joules per gram before it breaks, the UT Dallas team’s material is capable of withstanding up to 98 joules per gram. The team hopes that their structures will one day be used in military aircraft, body armor, or other defense-related applications.
The new material, which is described in a new ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces paper, could be used to form material that is capable of reinforcing itself at points of high stress, the researchers said. To create it, they twisted nanofibers into coils and yarns, which generated enough electricity to create a bond 10 times stronger than that of a hydrogen bond.
Drawing inspiration from the piezoelectric action observed in collagen fibers found in human bones, they spun polyvinylidene fluoride and polyvinvylidene fluoride trifluoroethylene (both piezoelectric materials) into nanofibers, then twisted them into yards, Gizmodo said. Couldn’t they have simpler names?
The electrical charge created when the polymer-based yards are stretched causes the strands to attract back in on themselves, resulting in a material that can absorb tremendous amounts of energy before failing, the website added. The UT Texas team now hopes to find a way to mass-produce the nanofibers so that they can be used to create higher-quality armor in the future.
“We reproduced this process in nanofibers by manipulating the creation of electric charges to result in a lightweight, flexible, yet strong material,” said senior author Dr. Majid Minary, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the university’s Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. “Our country needs such materials on a large scale for industrial and defense applications.”
“It’s literally twisting, the same basic process used in making conventional cable,” he added. “Our experiment is proof of the concept that our structures can absorb more energy before failure than the materials conventionally used in bulletproof armors. We believe, modeled after the human bone, that this flexibility and strength comes from the electricity that occurs when these nanofibers are twisted.”
Alzheimer’s disease affects a reported five million people in the US alone, and a new person is diagnosed with the neurodegenerative condition every 67 seconds. However, help may soon be on the way from the unlikeliest of sources: the International Space Station.
According to Space.com, research currently being conducted on the orbiting laboratory could help scientists better understand the origins of the disease. Experts believe that Alzheimer’s is the result of specific proteins assembling themselves into long fibers that eventually grow and strangle nerve cells in the brain, but research has thus far been unable to prove that.
Microgravity could be the answer
In terrestrial laboratories, the fibers collapse under their own weight before they are able to grow large enough to be studied, the website explained. However, the microgravity environment at the ISS prevents this from happening. So in January, NASA officials sent a new experiment known as the Self-Assembly in Biology and the Origin of Life (SABOL) to the space station.
As NASA explained back in December 2014, SABOL will look to decipher how those proteins construct themselves into the long, linear fibers that choke off nerve and brain cells, causing the onset of brain and nervous system disorders such as Alzheimer’s. The goal is to understand more about neurodegenerative diseases and ultimately find a way to stop them from progressing.
“Everybody wants a cure, but without knowing the actual cause of the disease, you’re basically shooting in the dark,” explained Dan Woodard, a research consultant from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, said in a statement. “We don’t understand the true mechanism of the disease.”
“If we’re lucky, then we’ll find out whether proteins will aggregate in space,” he added. “Only in weightlessness can you produce an environment free of convection so you can see whether they form on their own. We expect to learn incrementally from this.”
Typically, these protein fibers take decades to form in the human body, but scientists believe that they will form far more quickly in the weightless conditions on the space station. Additionally, with no gravity to pull them to the bottom of a container, they are expected to grow in a way that simulates how they grow and wrap around one another to form the offending long fibers.
“We want to see if maybe we can get the proteins to form larger structures in weightlessness. It’s not going to find the cure for Alzheimer’s, but it’s one of many areas that are under study to try to advance our knowledge toward that cure,” Woodward said.
Scientists won’t get a look at the samples until they return to Earth and are scanned using an atomic force microscope capable of detecting fine detail in the protein fiber. Once they analyze the experiment, the NASA researchers hope to conduct a series of follow-up studies that will further refine their knowledge of fiber growth, and then find a way to stop it from happening.
“We’ve got to understand why some people get these conditions and others don’t,” Woodard said. “There have to be chemicals or processes that hinder or encourage the growth of protein fibers. It may be something as simple as temperature or salt concentration of the fluid in the brain.”
A landmark DNA study in Iceland has resulted in an unprecedented look at an entire country’s genetic makeup, discovering several previously unknown mutations that could cause a vast array of different health problems, but regulations prevent some of that data from being used.
According to the New York Times, scientists from Reykjavík-based DeCode Genetics were able to sequence the complete genomes of thousands of Icelanders, the largest group ever analyzed in a single population. The research helped them identify genetic mutations that could play a role in the development of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease and gallstones.
The results of their work have been published in the journal Nature. Daniel G. MacArthur, a Massachusetts General Hospital geneticist who was not involved in the project, said that it was “amazing work” and told the newspaper that DeCode has “managed to get more genetic data on a much larger chunk of the population than in any other country in the world.”
Valuable, un-shareable information
Using the information from the study, the scientists said they were able to infer the genomes of at least one third of the country’s population, and DeCode founder and CEO Kári Stefánsson told MIT Technology Review that using the data, he was able to identify all of the people living in Iceland who are at risk of developing a deadly cancer.
The only problem is: He can’t do anything about it.
Stefánsson said that DeCode’s data can currently identify about 2,000 people that have the gene BRCA, which is susceptible to mutations that can drastically increase breast and ovarian cancer risk. He added that the company is currently in negotiations with health authorities in regards to whether or not those members of the public can or should be informed of the risk.
“We could save these people from dying prematurely, but we are not, because we as a society haven’t agreed on that,” Stefánsson said. “I personally think that not saving people with these mutations is a crime. This is an enormous risk to a large number of people.”
Why so much red tape?
The ethical issues arise from the fact that at least some of the people identified as being at risk did not participate in the study and never gave their consent to any research. Officials at the Icelandic Ministry of Welfare told MIT that it had formed a special committee to oversee these types of “incidental” findings, and that new regulations would be proposed by year’s end.
The techniques used by DeCode to predict people’s genes could be applied to any country, and could similarly be used to infer the genes of anyone, whether or not they had agreed to be part of such research, Stefánsson explained. Iceland was chosen because of their detailed genealogical, but similar questions about reporting health hazards could arise in the US, UK or elsewhere.
“Various legal and ethical obstacles currently prevent DeCode from warning people who are at risk,” MIT reported. “Volunteers who signed up for DeCode’s studies were promised anonymity, and also that they wouldn’t learn of research findings. Bioethicists recognize that people have a right ‘not to know’ of genetic hazards, which means they can’t simply be told.”
“The rule is that you can only use and expose genetic data if you have the permission from the individual in question,” explained University of Iceland anthropologist Gísli Pálsson. “But this is beyond informed consent. People are not even in the studies, they haven’t submitted any consent or even a sample, yet the company claims to have knowledge about these people and that there is a health risk.”
Finding BRCA2 with the click of a button
Women that possess the BRCA2 mutation have a life expectancy of 12 years less than those who lack the mutation, because roughly 86 percent of those that have it will develop cancer, noted MIT. Men can also be affected by the mutation, which can increase their risk of prostate cancer, and DeCode noted that many of those deaths could be avoided by preventive surgery.
Stefánsson said that they could find all of the women with the BRCA2 mutation “at the push of a button,” and that the data could also predict which members of the population could be most at risk of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s or learning disabilities.
By taking the data they have collected, generating rough gene maps known as genotypes and combining it with genealogical tables, the company was able to “impute” the genomes of nearly all people of Icelandic decent – with or without their permission. Sean Harper, the head of R&D at DeCode’s parent company Amgen, said that this ability presents a “conundrum.”
“It’s a gray area from a bioethics perspective, but we would be inclined to provide the data or at least a notice,” he explained, adding that Amgen, which uses information from DeCode to guide its pharmaceutical research, had no intention of charging anybody for the risk information it had developed. “It would not be appropriate [to] try to make it a commercial process,” he said.
The March 2011 earthquake off the coast of Japan was reportedly responsible for at least 15,000 deaths and damage to more than one million buildings, and new research indicates that effects of the catastrophic event are still being felt in the climate today.
The 9.0 earthquake, which took place in the waters off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku, also had an unseen impact on the country (and indeed, much of the world), claim the authors of a new paper published in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.
In fact, they report that the earthquake and ensuing tsunami released 7,275 tons (6,600 metric tons) of harmful greenhouse gases known as halocarbons into the atmosphere. Halocarbons can destroy the ozone layer and are stored in things like insulation and appliances, and emissions of them increased by as much as 91 percent following the earthquake, the authors wrote.
New mechanism of halocarbon emissions
According to Gizmodo, the chemicals were released from refrigerators, electrical equipment and old insulation damaged by the earthquake. Included among the halocarbons released after the incident were chlorofluorocarbons like CFC-11, a powerful ozone-depleting chemical previously used in foam insulation, and hydrochlorofluorocarbons like HCFC-22, a refrigerant that is also a powerful greenhouse gas which is reportedly in the process of being phased out.
Lead author Takuya Saito, a senior researcher at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan and his colleagues claim that their study is the first to examine how the quake impacted the release of halocarbons into the atmosphere, and is that it is believed to be one of the first to examine emissions of these gases following any type of natural disaster.
“What we found is a new mechanism of halocarbon emissions coming from the earthquake,” Saito said. He and his colleagues also found that the disaster also released hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and sulfur hexafluoride, both of which potent greenhouse gases.
Furthermore, they found that the emissions of the six halocarbons released from Japan in 2011 were equivalent to the discharge of over 1,400 tons (1,300 metric tons) of CFC-11 alone. That is equal to the amount of chlorofluorocarbons found in 2.9 million refrigerators made prior to the chemical being banned. In all, the emissions of the chemicals were equivalent to the release of 21.2 million tons (19.2 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Embarking on a study
Saito’s team decided to study halocarbon emissions and their relationship to the earthquake after ground-based air monitoring stations in Japan recorded unexpectedly high levels of the gases. By combining measurements from those stations with an atmospheric model and other mathematical methods, they were able to determine how much of those emissions were the result of the quake and how the emissions compared to those recorded in previous years.
They discovered that the emissions of all six halocarbons measured by the researchers were higher following the March 2011 earthquake to February 2012 than had been during the same period both before the event and after it. Nearly half of those emissions were of HCFC-22, most likely due to damage to refrigerators and air conditioners.
They found that emissions of that gas were 38 percent higher than the years before and after the earthquake, and that emissions of CFC-11 were 72 percent higher than those recorded before and after the earthquake – likely because insulation foams used in appliances and buildings had been damaged. Emissions of two types of HFCs (HFC-134a and HFC-32) increased by 49 percent and 63 percent, respectively, compared to the years before and after the disaster.
The researchers also calculated the total impact of the increased emissions on ozone depletion and global warming, and found that the earthquake-triggered increase in halocarbons increased ozone loss from Japanese emissions of those gases by 38 percent during the one-year period following the earthquake compared to the years before and after the event, and the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere due to those gases increased by 36 percent.
NASA and the ESA are hoping that a pair of satellites currently in development will solve some of the longstanding mysteries of the sun by getting up close and personal with our solar system’s host star, provided they can survive the extreme heat and harsh conditions.
One of the satellites, the ESA’s Solar Orbiter, is designed to perform close-up, high-resolution studies of our Sun and inner heliosphere. It will be the first probe to provide up-close views of the sun’s polar regions, and will travel to a distance just one-fifth that separating Earth and the sun, bringing it closer to our closest star and any other spacecraft in history.
NASA’s Solar Probe Plus, on the other hand, will be the first satellite to fly into the sun’s corona (or atmosphere). Using a combination of in situ measurements and imaging, the mission’s goal is to understand how the corona is heated and how the solar wind is accelerated. On its final three orbits, it will slow to within about 3.7 million miles of the sun, the US space agency said.
Givin’ em hell
BBC News science correspondent Jonathan Amos called Solar Orbiter and Solar Probe Plus “the two most audacious space missions currently in development,” noting that the spacecraft will be exposed to temperatures “into the high hundreds of degrees Celsius, and beyond.”
“You could say they are the missions to Hell,” he said, noting that engineers have been working hard to make sure that the instruments used by the two probes will be well-protected. The Solar Orbiter (SolO) will have a titanium-based heat shield, while NASA’s Solar Probe Plus (SP+) will be outfitted be using a carbon-composite material to protect it from the temperatures.
Both mission are progressing well, according to the latest reports. American officials recently selected a Delta-IV Heavy rocket to carry SP+ into space and towards the sun in 2018, while a European company, Airbus Defense and Space, has announced that it has produced a structural and thermal model of SolO for testing and to validate the design of the satellite.
The SolO model will be exposed to extreme heat and sound waves, and will be shaken to show that it can handle the rigors of the voyage. If it is able to survive the simulation, engineers will known that the actual flight model should be able to handle its mission as well, Amos said.
Three measurements
Tim Horbury, a SolO principal investigator from Imperial College London, explained that the two missions will combine to perform a series of three measurements. He told BBC News that Solar Orbiter will use its telescopes to conduct a remote measurement of the sun and a second once something emerges from the star’s atmosphere. The third comes from SP+, “which whams through the field of view very quickly, every so often, to sense what’s going on as well.”
By keeping some distance between itself and the sun, SolO will be able to deploy telescopes and capture images that should depict solar features and higher-than-ever resolutions, while SP+ will travel far closer to the surface of the sun to collect data on the processes that heat the corona and cause the solar winds to accelerate, providing new insight into the sun and stars like it.
The two missions are costing taxpayers more than $2.5 billion, according to BBC News, but as Horbury pointed out, the investment is a clear indicator of how important it is to scientists to study the sun. The research conducted by these two probes will benefit day-to-day life as well, as they shed new light on solar storms that can disrupt satellites and communications on Earth.
“The fact that we’re getting both Solar Orbiter and Solar Probe tells you that this community of solar and heliospheric scientists have made a compelling case,” he said, “and we’ve persuaded both space agencies – ESA and NASA – that going close to the Sun to see what the Sun does is very important. And it’s much better to run those two missions at the same time so they can complement each other.”
You’re scrolling through Instagram, seeing pictures of funny cats, stylish coffees, and oh, another engagement ring. Does that make four friends now? Five? As many friends as the number of carats in that ring?
It’s easy to lose track. I know I have. Since February alone I’ve watched six of my friends get engaged–and five more are planning to be engaged by June. That’s 11 friends in 6 months. ELEVEN FRIENDS.
So it leaves me to wonder: Is ring by spring still a thing? And if so, is it simply the result of attending a Christian university? Or are there other motivations behind getting engaged before you graduate?
Curious, I turned to a few experts across the country.
But first, a quick definition of ‘ring by spring’
For those who read the above paragraph and wondered, “What the h*ll is ring by spring?” Let me offer some clarification.
Ring by spring is the (arguably 13th century) notion of college senior couples getting engaged between the months of January and June, thinking their next step after a diploma is a marriage certificate.
“Chastity, if I don’t get my ring by spring, the $100,000 I spent to go to this school will be a total waste!”
When people are still unclear of what I’m talking about, I just show them this image:
That pretty much sums it up.
But…maybe ring by spring is…not a thing…?
Looking at American social trends since the 1960s, the median marriage age has increased, with women’s marriage age increasing from 20 to 24 years old and men increasing from 22 to 28 years old.
Studying this increase in age, America’s historical cultural changes have only spurred this difference. For some researchers, like Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, PhD, a psychologist studying the ring by spring phenomenon, the new age trend comes not only from an increase in the number of young people who attend college, thus deferring their transition into adulthood, but also from cultural changes in views towards sexuality and women’s rights.
“Moreover, women now make up a majority of college undergraduates, and many want to build a career before they marry and have children,” said Arnett. He continues to link this change with the development of the birth control pill. “Decades ago, young people got married rather then face the risks of pregnancy outside marriage. Now, sexual relationships outside of marriage are accepted as natural by many people.”
Don’t think it’s culture alone—the economy also plays a part in this engaging season. And we can all blame (you guessed it, graduating seniors): student loans.
Melanie Stanley-Soulen, a licensed professional counselor for premarital young couples, especially took note of this trend. “It’s different than it was 10 to 20 years ago,” she said. “If something doesn’t happen with our student loan programs, couples will continue to simply cohabit…Before it was considered somewhat taboo, but people understand it’s necessary now, especially with the rate of divorce.”
Let’s compare the two costs: the impending wedding costs of today, where The Knot, a notable wedding planning company, finds the American cost of a wedding averages around almost $29,858, and the average student loan debt is settling around $29,400. Given the numbers, it’s understandable why students would be reluctant to basically double their debt and stress about when they can pay it back.
With all the points of how ring by spring has declined over the past 50 years, it would seem as though ring by spring is on its way out of the chapel doors. But then why are engagement and proposal photos of college seniors continuing to pop up when I refresh my feed?
Ring by spring is not extinct everywhere
There may be cultural reasons why ring by spring may be disappearing, but there’s still reasons that it is here to stay. Why some college students may see it more than others can relate to the college in which they attend. While most all schools, private and public, have heard of ring by spring at least to some degree, private Christian universities hold it as a more prominent tradition surrounding their values about marriage…a reason that explains the increased number of relationship status changes from February to June.
Charlie D. Pruett, PhD., associate professor of Gerontology and Introduction to Sociology professor at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, and director of the Pruett Gerontology Center, felt the same at his university.
“My thought is that ring by spring (RBS) is a phenomenon known to Christian universities,” Pruett said. He continues to believe that it is a “social behavior brought into the universities and practice by subgroups within the universities and not officially promoted by the institution.”
While the change in culture is more accepting towards sexual relationships outside of marriage, the Christian subcultures at private universities hold marriage as an important value. Pruett’s Introduction to Sociology class felt similar, continuing to say that while ring by spring may not have a religious motivation, there is a strong religious motivation to getting married.
“My observation is that [RBS] has become a value and norm of the social clubs at ACU,” Pruett continued. “Each new cohort that enters the clubs goes through a socialization process that transfers the values and norms to the next.”
Students around ACU feel the same way, noting in Pruett’s class that many of their friends at state universities did not know about RBS, while friends at other Christian universities find the practice running in full swing. As they get older, his students reported that friends and social club members ask them, “so when are you getting engaged?” Add that to the list of questions that stress seniors out along with “what do you plan on doing after college?” and, “where are you going to live when you turn the tassel?” And to those who are seniors and reading these questions, sorry about the stressful reminders…
USA Today also points out that military deployment may have a factor in it.
“During my first week of my senior fall semester, I got a call from my then-fiance saying he got orders to Hawaii,” said Kaydi Carrington, a senior at Bowling Green State University.
So, what did they do? Moved up their wedding date and made it happen.
“The planning was a little stressful,” Carrington said. “But honestly, I was so focused on getting to marry my best friend, that I was so happy and remained semi worry-free.”
But is ring by spring a good thing to still practice?
For anyone that has been around the ring by spring phenomenon, it’s easy to see how it has both its good sides and bad sides.
“From a functional perspective, the practice is functional because it does promote marriage, which is a good for individuals, churches, and families,” Pruett stated.
Pruett might not see a decline happening for ring by spring anytime soon to match the national marriage decline, and warns about the risks involved with ring by spring, stating that “it could promote weakened marriages due to an unhealthy motivation for marriage,” as well as “promote lower self-worth among individuals who have ‘failed’ to achieve the social value of success when RBS is not achieved.”
So whether you hear wedding bells or the bell towers at graduation, know that it’s okay whatever relationship path you choose. While ring by spring may be a thing at private Christian universities, it doesn’t mean anything. Say your congratulations to the happy couple, and scroll on past their photo, my friend. Scroll on.
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is preparing to begin his long-anticipated Year In Space mission, as he and Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka are scheduled to depart for the International Space Station on at 3:42pm Eastern on Friday afternoon.
Kelly and Kornienko will each remain on the orbiting research facility until March 2016, and each of them will set records during the mission, according to CNN.com reports. But the main reason for the study is to learn what kind of impact spending such an extended period of time in space will have on a person’s anatomy, physiology and mental wellbeing.
Breaking records
The 51-year-old Kelly will remain on the ISS for nearly twice as long as any previous American astronaut, breaking the former record held by NASA’s Michael Lopez-Alegria, who spent seven months on the station from September 18, 2006, to April 21, 2007.
He will also spend 342 days off the planet during the mission, and when added to his previous service, his combined 522 days in space will also be a US record, shattering Mike Fincke’s old record of 381 days, 15 hours and 11 minutes combined time spent in space, CNN said.
Padalka, on the other hand, will set a new world record for most total time in space for a human. He has already logged over 710 days in space, including stays on Russia’s Mir space station and three previous stints on the International Space Station, the website added.
#Twinning
The journey will also allow NASA to study how identical twins will change over the course of a year spent in to vastly different environments. Scott’s brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, will be monitored by researchers on Earth while his twin is in space, and both will undergo a series of experiments that include blood tests and both physical and psychological exams.
As the US space agency said on Thursday, those tests “will track any degeneration or evolution that occurs in the human body from extended exposure to a zero-gravity environment.” The data will be shared between both NASA and Roscosmos in what is being called “an important step in reducing cost and improving efficiency for all future space station research.”
In an interview with ABC News, Scott admitted that he expected it would be difficult. In his previous six-month stint on the space station, he said that he started feeling “like I have accomplished everything I need to,” that there was “a lot of stuff” he missed on Earth, and that he was ready to go home at approximately the four-month mark. He added that he hoped that feeling would not hit until about “two-thirds of the way into the mission” this time around.
NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly is seen inside a Soyuz simulator at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC), Wednesday, Mar. 4, 2105 in Star City, Russia. (Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
Dr. Stevan Gilmore, who is heading up the year-in-space research is being led by flight surgeon, told ABC that he was well aware how tough living in microgravity is on a person’s body. But the information gained from the study will be essential to NASA as they move forward to a future manned mission to Mars – a mission that will require three years of space travel, round trip.
“We want to understand, is there anything that pops up between the six- and twelve-month duration so that we know if there are any large barriers out there for new missions,” Dr. Gilmore said.
In a statement, Dr. Michael Barratt, program manager for NASA’s Human Research Program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, added that the mission “will build on the rich experience of long-duration flights, including four flights of a year or more conducted by our Russian colleagues on the Mir station.”
“We have progressed considerably in our understanding of the human physiology in space and in countermeasures to preserve bone, muscle and fitness since then,” he continued. “The space station program provides us a robust framework for international collaboration that enables us to realize tremendous returns from such an experience.”
Say you’re out shopping for basic household goods — perhaps orange juice and soup. Or light bulbs. Or diapers for your young child. How do you choose the products you buy? Is it a complicated decision, or a simple one?
It could be complex: Factors like price, quality, and brand loyalty may run through your mind. Indeed, some scholars have developed complicated models of consumer decision-making, in which people accumulate substantial product knowledge, then weigh that knowledge against the opportunity to explore less-known products.
But in a new paper, MIT researchers suggest that your brain is making a simpler calculation when you shop: You are most likely deploying an “index strategy,” a straightforward ranking of products. It may not be an absolutely perfect calculation, given all the available information, but the study suggests that an index strategy comes very close to being optimal, and is a far easier way for consumers to make their choices.
“The advantage of making a slightly better decision wouldn’t be worth it,” says John Hauser, the Kirin Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a co-author of the new study. Rather, he asserts, a simple index strategy “is going to get you really pretty close to an optimal decision at a much lower cost — both search cost and cognitive cost.” Basic rankings help you make quick decisions, and leave room to think about things other than your weekend shopping choices.
Typical models of consumer thought often treat the brain like an always-running computer, and hold that consumers constantly worry about the ways in which their choices interact. For instance: When considering one diaper brand, these models posit that consumers are worried they will lose opportunities to learn more about other brands. The MIT team also believes that consumers accumulate information, but in a simpler, more intuitive way.
“When we look at our options, we normally evaluate them one by one,” says Juanjuan Zhang, an associate professor of marketing at MIT Sloan and another co-author of the study. “We would argue that that is the way we think, and that is different from how other models in marketing work.”
No space for PSPACE
The paper — titled “Learning from Experience, Simply” — is published in the journal Marketing Science. The co-authors are MIT doctoral candidate Song Lin, Zhang, and Hauser.
The study described in the paper is explicitly intended to bridge the gap between empirical studies of consumer decision-making and mathematical models in the field. Hauser, Lin, and Zhang suggest that some models of consumer thought are “PSPACE-hard” — that is, so mathematically difficult as to be virtually unsolvable even with the fastest computer, where the number of steps needed to find a solution is a direct function of the problem’s size.
“They’re assuming consumers can make decisions that computers can’t solve,” Hauser says. “And they’re assuming consumers make these in seconds as they walk down the aisle in the supermarket.” Besides, he notes, “Even a computer uses simple heuristics to solve these problems.”
To test whether an index strategy reasonably describes how consumers think, Lin, Zhang, and Hauser conducted an empirical study of consumers who purchase diapers, using a commercial data set of 262 households and almost 3,400 purchases, which turned up several relevant patterns, such as the fact that consumers are more likely to change diaper brands within their first 13 purchases.
To the researchers, this suggests that consumers are learning, and valuing the opportunity to switch — while the data fits the concept of the index strategy. It explains product choices as well as other models, while showing how consumers may be inclined to reduce their thinking costs in terms of time.
“If we assume consumers are using this heuristic, it explains the data just as well as the optimal [models] do,” Hauser says.
A place where you’d expect learning
At the same time, the idea of the index strategy does not rule out consumer reassessment of brands. Studying a product like diapers, the researchers note, shows that people do learn some new information about products, and sometimes flip their index rankings as a consequence.
Thus the results of index strategies resemble those of complex models, but arrive there in a much more direct way.
“Two things about diapers make it a good category,” Hauser says. “One is that we can identify people who are new, or haven’t been in the category for a while. … It’s a place where you’d expect learning. The other thing is, learning about diapers is probably pretty important to new parents. There are incentives to learn.”
For their part, the researchers say they are open to further studies, and hope to get empiricists and theorists of consumer cognition to “talk to one another” to an increasing extent. The supermarket aisle, after all, is not the only spot where we can expect learning to take place.
Repeated use of some antibiotics could increase a person’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to research published online Tuesday in the European Journal of Endocrinology.
In the study, scientists from the University of Pennsylvania found that men and women who had ever been prescribed with at least two courses of specific types of antibiotics were more likely to eventually be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes than those who had taken no more than one.
The antibiotics used in the research came from one of four categories, according to LiveScience: penicillins, cephalosporins, quinolones and macrolides. The authors reviewed a database of UK patients, looking at the number of antibiotic prescriptions given to over 200,000 diabetic patients at least one year before those individuals were diagnosed with the condition.
They then compared those figures with the number of antibiotics prescribed for roughly 800,000 men and women who did not have diabetes, but were the same average age as the patients in the other group. They found that the more courses of antibiotics that were prescribed to a person, the greater the risk that he or she would go on to develop the disease.
Results
Patients who had been prescribed between two and five courses of penicillin increased their risk of diabetes, according to the Daily Mail, and the risk increased by 23 percent for those receiving more than five courses of the frequently used antibiotic versus the one- or no-course group.
Those who were given between two and five courses of quinolones, which are used to treat respiratory and urinary tract infections, had an increased diabetes risk of 15 percent, and those receiving more than five courses saw that risk shoot up by 37 percent. The risk remained even when other factors, including obesity and heart disease, were accounted for.
Those who were given just one course of antibiotics showed no such increase in diabetes risk, the researchers reported. Nor was there any link found between exposure to anti-virals and anti-fungals and diabetes risk. The reason for the association between frequent antibiotic use and the risk of diabetes is not unclear, but may be related to a gut bacteria imbalance, they wrote.
“While our study does not show cause and effect, we think changing levels and diversity of gut bacteria could explain the link between antibiotics and diabetes risk,” co-author Dr. Yu-Xiao Yang, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, explained in a statement, according to LiveScience.
“Gut bacteria have been suggested to influence the mechanisms behind obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes in both animal and human models. Previous studies have shown that antibiotics can alter the digestive ecosystem,” added lead author Dr. Ben Boursi.
“Over-prescription of antibiotics is already a problem around the world as bacteria become increasingly resistant to their effects,” he continued. “Our findings are important, not only for understanding how diabetes may develop, but as a warning to reduce unnecessary antibiotic treatments that might do more harm than good.”
The instrument, known as NIROSETI (Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), was developed by current UCSD assistant professor of physics Shelley Wright and colleagues while she was at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Wright explains that infrared light “would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” as pulses from a powerful enough infrared laser could shine brighter than a star for a fraction of a second. Since interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, such a signal would be visible from a far greater distance, and sending a signal using infrared light would require less energy than sending the same amount of information using visible light, she added.
Meet NIROSETI
As Discovery News explained on Wednesday, the search for intelligent alien life forms “is a highly speculative affair,” as astronomers and researchers hunting for evidence of otherworldly creatures aren’t even sure exactly what they’re supposed to be looking for. NIROSETI provides a complement to the radio antennae and other technologies currently being used in the hunt.
Over the years, SETI has advanced from exclusively seeking out radio transmissions to probing optical wavelengths for signs of otherworldly intelligence, but attempting to detect artificial pulses of infrared radiation has only recently become possible, the website said. In fact, Wright said that she had to wait eight years for the technology to catch up with the concept.
Three years ago while at the Dunlap Institute, she purchased newly-released detectors and ran a series of test to ensure that they worked well enough to equip onto a telescope. Once they passed the test, development of NIROSETI kicked into high gear. NIROSETI has been installed at the University of California’s Lick Observatory near San Jose, and saw first light on March 15.
According to UCSD, the instrument will gather more information than previous optical detectors by recording light levels over an extended period of time so that researchers can analyze them in search of patterns that could be signs of other civilizations. That record could also be reviewed as new concepts about what form communication from extraterrestrials could take emerge.
“Because infrared light penetrates farther through gas and dust than visible light, this new search will extend to stars thousands rather than merely hundreds of light years away,” UCSD noted, adding that the ongoing success of NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission in finding new habitable worlds “has prompted the new search to look for signals from a wider variety of stars.”
UC Berkeley’s Dan Werthimer, who designed the first optical instrument used in SETI searches at Lick Observatory, added that NIROSETI could also reveal new information about the physical universe. “This is the first time Earthlings have looked at the universe at infrared wavelengths with nanosecond time scales,” he explained. “The instrument could discover new astrophysical phenomena, or perhaps answer the question of whether we are alone.”
The real-world location that served as the backdrop for the barren planet Tatooine in the Star Wars universe is reportedly at the heart of an ongoing struggle between good and evil, but this time, lightsabers, Jedi knights, and the Force are not involved.
Instead, the real town of Tatouine (Yes, that’s where George Lucas got the inspiration for the name) and surrounding areas in southern Tunisia (where portions of A New Hope, The Phantom Menace, and Attack of the Clones were shot in 1976, 1999 and 2002, respectively) has become a hotbed in the battle against ISIS, according to CNN.
We’ll let Chewbacca react on our behalf:
Tatouine is a dangerous place to be
Sixty miles to the east lies the Libyan border, and Tatouine’s proximity to it has made the town “a way-station for jihadists” crossing over to join up with the Islamic State, the website reported. In addition, prior to last week’s attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, three men were arrested there as they planned to cross into Libya to join up with terrorists.
In light of those incidents, “there’s far greater scrutiny on networks linking militants operating in Libya with cells across the border,” The Washington Post said. Authorities have recently found a series of weapon caches purportedly looted from arsenals in Libya, including 20,000 rounds of ammunition and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, the newspaper added.
The conflict going on in the region has already forced filming of the next Star Wars movie to be relocated, as director J.J. Abrams has shifted filming of scenes on Tatooine to Abu Dhabi. Fans of the iconic movie franchise are also being warned not to visit Tatouine or surrounding area of Tunisia due to ongoing jihadist activity there, the Huffington Post noted on Wednesday.
Sorry, spring breakers
Devoted followers of the franchise often make pilgrimages to Tunisia to visit locations where filming occurred, including the sites that served as home of Anakin Skywalker and his mother in Episode I, and nearby Nefta, which served as the exterior of the Lars Family Homestead where young Luke Skywalker was raised during the original Star Wars film, Episode IV.
Yet, the terrorist activity going on there has forced several countries to issue warnings about travelling there. The US Embassy is urging travelers to avoid the border area due to what they are calling “periodic security incidents,” and the UK government is warning against “all but essential travel” to a large swath of the country – including both Tatouine and Nefta.
“The developments are further bad news for Tunisia’s vital tourism sector, which is already reeling from last week’s attack,” The Washington Post said, noting that the government filmed a YouTube video set to the Pharrell song “Happy” which featured “ actors dressed up as ‘Star Wars’ character prancing around parts of Tunisia, including the sets where the films were shot.”
Some residents of Tunisia “rely on tourism to make a living, and fear that ISIS will – as it has threatened – launch further attacks against foreigners visiting Libya,” CNN added. “Others, mainly in the capital Tunis, are apprehensive that the democratic gains of four years ago may be eroded or lost in a new security clampdown.”
Methuselah, a date palm tree successfully sprouted from a 2,000-year-old seed in 2005, has reached maturation and pollinated another palm, scientists at the laboratory responsible for originally germinating the ancient seed told National Geographic this week.
Dr. Elaine Solowey of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura in Israel, and her colleagues germinated the seed nearly a decade ago after it was donated to them by the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center of the Hadassah Medical Organization.
The seed, along with several others, was originally discovered during excavations of the ancient fortification of Masada in the 1960s, the Institue explained. Dr. Solowey’s team germinated one of the seeds, which went on to sprout into a young – and now, fully grown – date palm.
There’s just too many puns we could use
The tree, which was named Methuselah in honor of the oldest person named in the Bible, was the subject of a 2005 Nat Geo article, and when that story resurfaced online earlier this week, the site decided to check in with Dr. Solowey and the Arava Institute to see how the palm was doing.
“He is a big boy now,” said Dr. Solowey, an expert in desert agriculture and the director of the facility. “He is over three meters tall, he’s got a few offshoots, he has flowers, and his pollen is good. We pollinated a female with his pollen, a wild female, and yeah, he can make dates.”
After the seed was discovered during the Masada excavation, it wound up in a researcher’s desk drawer in Tel Aviv for several years, the website said. Experts believed that germinating the seed was “botanically impossible,” the Institute noted, but scientists there were able to successfully do so, and now Methuselah has “a permanent home” at the research facility.
Date grove
Since Methuselah first sprouted, Dr. Solowey has successfully germinated a handful of other palm seeds recovered from ancient sites in the Dead Sea region. She and her fellow researchers are hoping to breed Methuselah, a male tree, with a similar female in order to produce the same type of date that was prized as both food and medicine in ancient Judea.
“I’m trying to figure out how to plant an ancient date grove,” the doctor said, telling Nat Geo that thus far, at least two of the other ancient seeds that have sprouted are female. If successful, “we would know what kind of dates they ate in those days and what they were like,” she added. “That would be very exciting.”
Genetic tests conducted on the 2,000-year-old date palm indicate that its closest relatives are an ancient type of date palm from Egypt known as Hayany, which would match with a legend that claims that dates came to Israel along with those escaping Egypt as part of the Exodus.
“It is pretty clear that Methuselah is a western date from North Africa rather than from Iraq, Iran, Babylon, [but] you can’t confirm a legend, of course,” Dr. Solowey said. She added that her team is hoping to establish an ancient date orchard to study the plants, including to evaluate whether or not they actually do possess any unique medicinal properties.
The doctor also told Nat Geo that the other plants sprouted from ancient seeds are similar in appearance to Methuselah, with a sharp angle between the fronds and spine among their distinguishing features. She added that, over the past decade, “a lot of people have kind of forgotten about Methuselah,” and that it “is actually a really pretty tree.”
Russian authorities are reportedly considering an ambitious superhighway project that would connect the UK to the US, allowing people to travel over land from Europe across Asia and all the way to Alaska – a distance of more than 12,000 miles.
According to the Siberian Times, the route would use roads and a high-speed network to connect Asia with Europe and would see the construction of a new rail network to operate alongside the Trans-Siberian Railway. In addition, the Trans-Eurasian Belt Development (TEPR) project would include the construction of major roads, oil and gas pipelines and energy and water facilities.
Inter-state/inter-civilization
Russian Railways chief Vladimir Yakunin presented the proposal at a recent Russian Academy of Science meeting, noting that the new roads and railways would connect with existing travel networks in Europe and other parts of the world. It may also be extended from the Chukotka area of Russia across the Bering Strait and into North America, with the goal of boosting tourism and establishing Russia as a global transportation hub, according to The Telegraph.
When combined with the use of the Channel Tunnel in the UK, it could make land-based trips from London and surrounding areas to North America a possibility, the newspaper noted. The project would run the entire length of Russia while also connecting with pre-existing networks throughout Europe and Asia, making it the first modern transportation route to ever connect the Pacific Ocean in the east with the Atlantic Ocean in the West.
“This is an inter-state, inter-civilization, project,” Yakunin said. “It should be an alternative to the current (neo-liberal) model, which has caused a systemic crisis. The project should be turned into a world ‘future zone’, and it must be based on leading, not catching, technologies.”
Vladimir Fortov, the Head of the Russian Academy of Science, called the project “ambitious and expensive,” but added that it “will solve many problems in the development of the vast region. It is connected with social programs, and new fields, new energy resources, and so on.”
Waxing poetic
Rough estimates of the project indicate that it could require millions of dollars (No, really?), but officials are confident that the economic gains it produces would offset these costs. If the concept proves to be a success, it could create 10 to 15 new industries, as well as several new cities throughout the country, more jobs and further development of Siberia and the Far East, they claim.
“The principal attraction of the journey is, of course, the Russian landscape,” said Telegraph Travel rail expert Anthony Lambert, “the vast panoramas and sense of immensity so vividly captured by such artists as Isaac Levitan and Ivan Shishkin. The taiga is mesmerizing.”
“Looking out at the panorama of larch, silver fir, pine and birch induces the kind of reverie that is one of the pleasures of train travel, a random stream of thoughts and images that drifts on like the forest,” he added. “In clearings, villages that could have come from a Levitan or Shishkin painting break the spell and make one wonder what life must be like in such a remote land.”
For insight into what this journey might look like, check out Ewan McGregor’s 2004 TV documentary Long Way Round.
Get Hot to Fight Against your Fibromyalgia Symptoms
Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating
Staying healthy in the fight against fibromyalgia symptoms might need to include some heat. Although everyone is different and some individuals will prefer the cold to heat, trying a variety of heating options may help alleviate your symptoms.
Deep heat and superficial heat can both be effective, so test out a couple different heating techniques to see which one works best for you. There are so many tools, exercises, water wraps, pads and waxes to choose from; you will surely find one type of heat that works well for your fibromyalgia symptoms.
Heat therapy has long been associated with helping muscle soreness, now use those same techniques to help with your pain.
Tools and Gadgets to Make Life Hot
Massagers and other gadgets that heat up may be a first choice when you are looking for a heating option to help with your fibromyalgia. Although this type of massage and heat seems like it would be extremely helpful, many people find that the massagers with the heat is actually painful.
If you can find a back massager with a variety of settings, so you can put it on a light massage, you may find it more useful than a back massager without adjustable settings. Make sure to try these gadgets out in the store before purchasing one and bringing it home. Take your time when buying one of these devices so you can find the one that works best for you without increasing your pain and tenderness.
Exercise to Warm Yourself Up
Staying active is an important part of keeping your body healthy and fighting your fibromyalgia symptoms. Warming up your muscles by increasing your cardiovascular activities may help you find some relief from your muscle pain.
Walking, bike riding and swimming are all ways you can internally warm up your muscles and see some relief from your fibromyalgia symptoms. Low impact exercises will work best and you can combine this muscle warming with other heat therapy such as heating pads, hot tubs and heat wraps.
Water and Heat work Together
A hot bath is known as one of the best ways to relax your muscles, no matter what health issues you may have. You can instantly feel the relief in your muscles as you soak into a deep warm bath at the end of a long day. If you have access to a hot tub at your gym or local fitness center you can find even more relaxation with one of these deep tubs.
Stay away from the massaging jets though, as they may cause increased muscle tenderness. If your gym has a sauna, with steam, you might enjoy giving this a try as well. Saunas are another great resource in providing heat therapy to your muscles and your joints. Make sure to abide by the time limits so you do not over do it in the saunas.
Wrap it Up with Some Warm Towels
Warm towel wraps are popular in spas and massage therapy businesses. But you can make your own warm towel wrap right in the comfort of your home. Simply dip a hand towel into some water and wring out the excess fluid. Then put it into the microwave for a short period of time to heat the towel up.
It should only take 15 to 30 seconds to get the towel feeling nice and warm. Be careful when removing it from the microwave as it could be extremely hot, test out different times to get the towel at just the perfect temperature for you. You can use small and large towels for this heat therapy and wrap them around any part of your body that is feeling sore.
Heat Packs and Heating Pads
Heating pads are the devices that you plug into the wall and can set to a variety of temperatures. Typically these are used on your back or other area that you can press up against. Heating pads come in a variety of sizes and styles so you are sure to find one that works well for you.
A heating pack is a gel filled pack that can be put into the microwave. Heat packs look similar to ice packs, but you heat them up instead of freezing them. Heat packs will lose their heat over time and need to be re-heated, while heating pads will stay warm as long as they are plugged in. At the first signs of an increase in your fibromyalgia symptoms you should try a heating pad or heat pack to see if you can ward off an increase in your pain.
Wax, Not just for Your Legs
If you are having pain in your hands or feet, try doing some paraffin wax treatments. These treatments will ease your fibromyalgia symptoms while also giving you smoother skin. You can get a paraffin wax treatment at your local nail salon or purchase a machine to do it at home.
Simply warm the wax up and dip your hands or feet into the wax. Let it sit on you for a few minutes and then you can remove the wax easily by sliding it off. Some people find putting their hands or feet into plastic bags after applying the wax makes their joints feel even better, and it makes the warmth last longer.
Stay Safe around the Heat
If you are using a heating device that plugs in, it is important that you are not using any other liquid heating methods. Keep electrical heat separate from water and other fluids at all times to keep yourself and your family safe. Never use wet towels while using a heating pad.
Finding the right heat therapy for you might take a few tries, or perhaps you will find that all these methods are useful to you. Heat is a great way to keep your fibromyalgia symptoms away and also a great way to relax after a long day. Take the time to use heat therapy before you feel your symptoms getting out of control.
Mirapex is the Parkinson’s Drug for fibromyalgia pain relief that is most commonly prescribed. It is approved by the FDA only for the use with relieving the symptoms of idiopathic Parkinson’s disease, which may mean that you have to appeal a rejection of coverage for the medication before your insurance will cover the prescription.
The association between Parkinson’s and fibromyalgia is only just beginning to be understood, but as more becomes known, there is a greater understanding of both.
What is Parkinson’s?
Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system that is considered to be fatal. It is characterized by tremors and rigidity, but also includes late stage dementia and prevalent depression. The presence of Lewy Bodies and associated proteins in the brain is also an indicator of the development of the disorder.
It is considered to be a movement disorder, with degenerative movement experienced first before cognitive and behavioral changes, including associated dementia, sets in during the late stages. As yet, there is no cure for Parkinson’s disease. Mirapex is an approved medication for Parkinson’s that has shown remarkable ability to reduce tremors and improve gait and motor control.
What is fibromyalgia?
Fibromyalgia is a chronic and non-fatal disorder that comes with a cluster of symptoms, the most common of which is pervasive pain and pressure point pain, fatigue, brain fog, and difficult moving. It is not known what causes fibromyalgia, but it is most often seen in women between the ages of 18 and 65.
There is some relief from symptoms after the onset of menopause, but men also can develop the disorder too. Other cluster symptoms associated with fibromyalgia re depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, IBS and other gastrointestinal disturbances.
Why does a dopamine receptor work to relieve symptoms of both?
Both of the conditions do have a connection to a dysregulation of certain brain chemicals including that of the dopamine 2 and dopamine 3 receptors. These receptors are not only associated with mood balance, but also with pain reception and motor control.
Drugs, such as Mirapex, are designed to inhibit the dopamine in the brain, which then reduces the symptoms associated with their disruption. Mirapex has proven successful in the reduction of pain symptomology in both Parkinson’s and fibromyalgia.
Who is at risk for either?
There is no known cause for either Parkinson’s or fibromyalgia, but there are several known risk factors. For both, genetics may play a role and having a family member with either disease indicates an increased risk. With fibromyalgia, there is an associated risk factor with traumatic brain injury, immune disorders, serious illness, surgery and gender.
Women are more likely to develop fibromyalgia than men. With Parkinson’s the genetic factor is high, but there is also an associated risk for those who are exposed to certain pesticides, and a reduced risk for those who smoke tobacco as well. It should also be noted that there is a correlation between the ability to handle stress and childhood trauma in both too.
Is having one a guarantee you get the other?
Having either disease is not a guarantee that you will develop the other, but the two may often be mistaken for each other. The pain, stiffness and sometimes tremors associated with fibromyalgia may be associated with Parkinson’s first. A part of the reason for this is that there is more medical recognition of the symptoms of Parkinson’s.
There are tests developed that can identify and detect the telltale protein and other indicators of each disorder to decrease instances of misdiagnosis. It can be worth it to have tests for both conditions done to eliminate the risk of misdiagnosis so you can get the care that you need.
Other effective medications for fibromyalgia
Fibromyalgia has also proven to be very responsive to other medications that are used for the management of associated symptoms of Parkinson’s patients too. In addition to the Parkinson’s specific medication of Mirapex, fibromyalgia pain has also been commonly relieved with the use of Cymbalta and Lyrica.
It is not fully understood why the pain of fibromyalgia responds so well to these drugs, but there is increasing evidence that their ability to disrupt the many chemicals of the brain that are associated with pain transmission is at play. Talk to your doctor about your different options, and also explore the lifestyle and diet therapies that have shown great promise in helping relieve fibromyalgia pain too.
Lifestyle and diet therapies also show promise
There are many different techniques that can ease fibromyalgia symptoms that focus on diet and lifestyle changes. Fibromyalgia is considered to be a holistic disease, which means it affects almost all the facets of healthy functioning of the mind and body.
It has a huge stress related component as well, which is why meditation and other stress reducing methods have proven to be so successful with the management of the symptoms. With its chronic inflammatory symptoms and associated disorders, such as IBS, diet changes are also high on the list of lifestyle changes you will have to make to improve the quality of your life.
The changing ideas behind front-line treatment for fibromyalgia
In America, the front-line treatment for fibromyalgia remains medication. Given that the average time for diagnosis is 5 years from the onset of symptoms, this may always remain the case. It is no longer thought that medication is the best treatment for symptoms alone. Medication is now used at much lower levels to prevent interference from associated side effects and to allow the person to develop lifestyle changes to manage their symptoms without a dependence on medication.
It is typical that person’s with fibromyalgia will have to take medications to make some of their symptoms manageable, but that the emphasis on secondary treatment on diet and exercise has gained wider approval. If you suspect you may have fibromyalgia, you should begin to adopt the diet and lifestyle changes while waiting clinical diagnosis to gain relief from you symptoms, improve the quality of life, and reduce the amount of medication you may need in the future.
The venerable F-16 Fighting Falcon is getting second life as an unmanned vehicle. Boeing is repurposing the retired single-engine aircraft into remote-controlled drone that the US Air Force will use to test newly developed weapons and to train pilots.
The program has been underway for a while, but according to Engadget, the first of the renamed QF-16 target drones were delivered to Florida’s Tyndall Air Force Base last week. A total of 126 of the unmanned drones are scheduled to be provided by Boeing to the Air Force.
Five of those are in the process of being outfitted as part of a pre-production run and should be ready for service by October, the website added. They will be used as stand-ins for the MiG-29 Fulcrum and Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker fighter jets by the 82nd Aerial Targets Squadron.
Gareth Jennings of IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly said that the first of the drones, aircraft QF-007, was delivered to Tyndall AFB on March 11. Jennings added that Boeing has delivered six pre-production QF-16s, and that under the terms of its deal with the Air Force, it will deliver a total of 13 low-rate initial production (LRIP) platforms, of which QF-007 is the first.
The USAF expects to receive all of the LRIP drones by October 9, and will used the 126 QF-16s to replace the BAE Systems QF-4, IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly added. The new drone is required because of dwindling numbers of the QF-4s, and the unmanned McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II no longer represents the type of air-to-air threats that American pilots are expected to encounter on future operations.
“It was a little different to see it without anyone in it, but it was a great flight all the way around,” said Lt. Col. Ryan Inman, Commander of the 82nd Aerial Targets Squadron, according to the Daily Mail. “It’s a replication of current, real world situations and aircraft platforms they can shoot as a target. Now we have a 9G capable, highly sustainable aerial target.”
World’s most capable fighter jet
The F-16 Fighting Falcon has earned a reputation as one of the world’s most capable fighter jets, and was used predominantly in the fleets of more than two dozen customers globally. It featured an innovating “fly-by-wire” control system and was capable of maneuvering at speeds of up to nine G’s, allowing it to have a tighter turning radius and giving it a tremendous advantage in a dogfight.
Due to the force experienced by the pilots when performing such maneuvers, the F-16 was outfitted with a small side-mounted control stick on an armrest. Rather than needing to be moved back and forth, the joystick responds to hand pressure. In a tight turn, the otherwise immobilized pilot was able to fly his plane with the mere twitch of a figure, the UK newspaper said.
“Boeing is converting retired F-16s into full-scale, remote-controlled manned and unmanned aerial targets that will replace the QF-4 fleet,” the company explained in its website. “The QF-16 full-scale aerial targets will be used to test newly developed weapons and train pilots for the rapidly changing nature of warfare in a safe and controlled environment.”
Provided by Alexis Blue, University of Arizona
Archaeologists working in Guatemala have unearthed new information about the Maya civilization’s transition from a mobile, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary way of life.
Led by University of Arizona archaeologists Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, the team’s excavations of the ancient Maya lowlands site of Ceibal suggest that as the society transitioned from a heavy reliance on foraging to farming, mobile communities and settled groups co-existed and may have come together to collaborate on construction projects and participate in public ceremonies.
Archaeologists excavate an early residential structure at Ceibal, from about 500 B.C. (Credit: Takeshi Inomata/University of Arizona)
The findings, to be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge two common assumptions: that mobile and sedentary groups maintained separate communities, and that public buildings were constructed only after a society had fully put down roots.
“There has been the theory that sedentary and mobile groups co-existed in various parts of the world, but most people thought the sedentary and mobile communities were separate, even though they were in relatively close areas,” said Inomata, a UA professor of anthropology and lead author of the PNAS study. “Our study presents the first relatively concrete evidence that mobile and sedentary people came together to build a ceremonial center.” [STORY: Lost city discovered in Honduras]
A public plaza uncovered at Ceibal dates to about 950 B.C., with surrounding ceremonial buildings growing to monumental sizes by about 800 B.C. Yet, evidence of permanent residential dwellings in the area during that time is scarce. Most people were still living a traditional hunter-gatherer-like lifestyle, moving from place to place throughout the rainforest, as they would continue to do for five or six more centuries.
The area’s few permanent residents could not have built the plaza alone, Inomata said.
“The construction of ceremonial buildings is pretty substantial, so there had to be more people working on that construction,” he said.
Inomata and his colleagues theorize that groups with varying degrees of mobility came together to construct the buildings and to participate in public ceremonies over the next several hundred years. That process likely helped them to bond socially and eventually make the transition to a fully sedentary society.
This is an early elite residence at Ceibal, about 750 B.C. (Credit Takeshi Inomata/University of Arizona)
“This tells us something about the importance of ritual and construction. People tend to think that you have a developed society and then building comes. I think in many cases it’s the other way around,” Inomata said.
“For those people living the traditional way of life, ceremony, ritual and construction became major forces for them to adapt a new way of life and build a new society. The process of gathering for ritual and gathering for construction helped bring together different people who were doing different things, and eventually that contributed to the later development of Mayan civilization.” [STORY: Ancient tsunami shaped Mexico’s luxury coast]
The transition was gradual, with the Maya making the shift to a fully sedentary agrarian society, reliant on maize, by about 400 or 300 B.C., Inomata said.
“The most fascinating finding is that different peoples with diverse ways of life co-existed in apparent harmony for generations before establishing a more uniform society,” said Melissa Burham, a study co-author and a graduate student in the UA School of Anthropology. “Discovering an ancient ‘melting pot’ is definitely the unexpected highlight of this research.”
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Mitochondrial ‘smart bomb’ could treat brain tumors
Researchers from Houston Methodist Hospital have developed a so-called mitochondrial smart bomb that can be used to treat brain tumors by attacking the cell’s energy source, according to a new study appearing in the April edition of the journal ChemMedChem.
In the study, Dr. David S. Baskin, director of the Houston Methodist Kenneth R. Peak Brain & Pituitary Tumor Center, Dr. Martyn Sharpe, Peak Center Head of Research, and their colleagues describe how an experimental drug treated brain tumor tissue by targeting mitochondria in early laboratory tests involving animal models and human tissue cultures.
The drug, MP-MUS, was designed by Drs. Baskin and Sharpe and destroyed between 90 and 95 percent of malignant glioma cells (a type of tumor that starts in the brain or spine and arises from glial cells) without appearing to have any adverse affect on healthy human brain cells.
Selective mitochondrial chemotherapy
The finding compliments soon-to-be published research showing that the same drug can be used to treat brain cancer grown in the brains of mice. They hope that they will be able to begin testing the drug in human clinical trials in the near future, possibly in 2016.
“We are very optimistic that we’ll get there,” Dr. Baskin said. “Our past work has shown that MP-MUS has very low toxicity until it gets into tumor cells. Once it arrives, it is changed to its active form, doing a lot of damage where we want it to, leaving healthy brain cells alone – a bit like a ‘smart bomb.’ To our knowledge, this is the first known example of selective mitochondrial chemotherapy, which we believe represents a powerful new approach to brain cancer.”
“Because of where the tumors are located, and because of the way they can infiltrate healthy tissue, surgery is often not helpful long term. The most effective chemotherapy drug available right now, temozolomide, only extends life from 9 to 15 months, and patients’ quality of life during that period isn’t very good.”
How does it work?
Dr. Baskin and Dr. Sharpe have been searching for some way to treat gliomas, which account for up to 30 percent of all tumors of the brain and central nervous system. One of the areas they have focused on is treating the cancer by targeting the mitochondrial that provide tumor cells with energy.
In cancer cells, they explain, part of this feature is deactivated, causing cells to rely upon other system that generate energy – but even so, tumor cells cannot grow and divide unless these pill-shaped powerhouses are healthy. By targeting an enzyme (MAO-B) that is over-expressed in brain tumor cells, MP-MUS reduces the negative impact on healthy cells while the drug becomes trapped inside tumor cells, where it attacks the mitochondrial DNA.
“We found that we could achieve profound effects with MP-MUS at very low concentrations, around 75 micromolar,” said Dr. Baskin. “By contrast, temozolomide must be used at concentrations two to three times that to be of any use to patients. Our approach is designed to capitalize on what is going inside the cells. Tumor cells have much more MAO-B, and when challenged, make even more MAO-B as a sort of defensive response. We hope that we are one step ahead of the cancer cells, as we are using that very fact to kill them.”
The study authors reported that the toxicity of the drug to healthy cells remained low even when administered at concentrations of up to 180 micromolar. This information will help scientists as they evaluate safety and efficacy trials in human patients. The Houston Methodist team has already signed a deal with Virtici, LLC to develop MP-MUS, and is currently in the process of preparing toxicology studies, which are required prior to clinical trials.
Researchers from the University of Antwerp in Belgium have identified an unusual fish that forms a tongue-like structure out of water so that it can feed on land, and the discovery could shed new light on how vertebrates originally emerged out of the water.
Lead author and biomechanist Krijn Michel and his colleagues, who reported their findings in the March 18 online edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, reported on the unusual feeding behaviors of the mudskipper (Periophthalmus barbarus), which uses water held in its mouth like a hydrodynamic tongue in order to capture and manipulate prey.
Not to be confused with Genus simmonis
According to Discovery News, the point at which a handful of fish left the water and took to the land some 350 to 400 million years ago was “one of the most pivotal moments” in evolution, as those creatures developed into the first tetrapods (four-legged land animals) and ultimately went on to become amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
To determine how this transition took place, scientists typically research how the limbs of those early tetrapods evolved over time, the website said. However, Michel and his co-authors took a different approach: studying how these first land animals developed the ability to eat on land.
“To capture and swallow food on land, a sticky tongue… has evolved in land vertebrates from aquatic ancestors that used mouth-cavity-expanding actions of the hyoid to suck food into the mouth,” the study authors wrote. “However, the evolutionary pathway bridging this drastic shift in feeding mechanism and associated hyoid motions remains unknown.”
“Modern fish that feed on land may help to unravel the physical constraints and biomechanical solutions that led to terrestrialization of fish-feeding systems,” they added. “Here, we show that the mudskipper emerges onto land with its mouth cavity filled with water, which it uses as a protruding and retracting ‘hydrodynamic tongue’ during the initial capture and subsequent intra-oral transport of food.”
We bet they are really good at French kissing
Fish generate suction with their mouths when in the water, drawing in food with the help of a neck bone called the hyoid. On land, however, it proved impractical to suck in air to swallow food. In response, tetrapods evolved tongues supported by the hyoid that helps food make it down the throat, but little is known about exactly how these tongues developed.
Michel’s team conducted experiments using five Nigerian mudskippers, hoping to learn more about the process through which tongues evolved. Using high-speed video cameras and X-ray scanners, they captured footage of the fish eating and showed how they used the water in their mouths like a tongue to reach out, capture the prey, and then quickly swallow it.
“First it spews out the water, then very rapidly… it’s sucking the water back up again. They’re using the water that is in their mouth as a substitute for a tongue,” Michel told Nature. “They’re very good at feeding on land. We put the food there and within a fraction of a second it’s gone. They’re remarkably bad at feeding underwater. They miss the food completely sometimes.”
“Our analyses link this hydrodynamic action of the intra-oral water to a sequence of compressive and expansive cranial motions that diverge from the general pattern known for suction feeding in fishes,” he and his co-authors wrote. The hyoid motion had “a remarkable resemblance” to that of newts “during tongue prehension” and that “hydrodynamic tongue usage may be a transitional step” in the evolutionary processes required for terrestrial foraging, they added.
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago have created a robotic germ by placing a humidity sensor on a bacterial spore. This is what they are calling the first-ever example of nanoscale bioengineering involving these minute, one-celled reproductive units.
Here, the spore reacts actively to humidity; and the reaction is translated to an electronic response from the interfaced graphene quantum dots. (Credit: Berry Research Laboratory at UIC)
The research is the latest entry in the first generation of bio-electromechanical devices designed to combine living organism with nonliving technology to conduct research and solve a variety of different problems by using miniature machines too small for the naked eye to see. [STORY: ‘Warhead’ molecule hunts down deadly bacteria]
The UIC researchers, who described their work in a recent issue of the journal Scientific Reports, believe that their discovery could ultimately “lead to the evolution of next-generation bio-derived microarchitectures, probes for cellular/biochemical processes, biomicrorobotic-mechanisms, and membranes for micromechanical actuation.” NERD alert!
Their nanobot, the Nano-Electro-Robotic Device (NERD), and lead investigator/UIC associate professor of chemical engineering Vikas Berry explained that he and his colleagues created it by taking “a spore from a bacterium,” placing “graphene quantum dots on its surface” and attaching “two electrodes on either side of the spore. Then we changed the humidity around the spore.”
Once the humidity drops, the spore shrinks as water is forced out. While it shrinks, the quantum dots on the organism come closer together, increasing their conductivity as measured by the electrodes. Berry said that there is a drastic change once the humidity changes – a response that he describes as being 10 times faster than sensors made of advanced synthetic water-absorbing polymers. NERD was also more sensitive in extreme low-pressure, low-humidity situations. [STORY: Nanobots travel inside animals for first time]
“We get a very clean response–a very sharp change the moment we change humidity, [and] we can go all the way down to a vacuum and see a response,” the professor explained. This is vital to applications in which humidity must be kept low to prevent corrosion or food spoilage, as well as in space applications, when changes in humidity could indicate the presence of a leak. More sensitive at low humidity
Furthermore, unlike current sensors that increase in sensitivity as humidity rises, NERD is actually more sensitive at low humidity, Berry and lead co-authors T. S. Sreeprasad and Phong Nguyen (who were also with UIC at the time of the research) discovered.
“The work provides an avenue for leveraging the unique biomolecular structure of the biological entities to achieve controlled nanoscale architecture and membrane transport for micromechanical actuation for a wide range of applications in microbotics, cellular actuation, single-cell biochemical analysis, cellular homeostasis, specific molecular or ionic detection, and implants for muscle, heart and cancer monitoring,” the study authors wrote. [STORY: Non-stick coating keeps bacteria off medical implants]
“This is a fascinating device,” added Berry. “Here we have a biological entity. We’ve made the sensor on the surface of these spores, with the spore a very active complement to this device. The biological complement is actually working towards responding to stimuli and providing information.”
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Researchers from the University of Michigan have cooked-up the perfect recipe for growing miniature, three-dimensional human lungs from stem cells, but you won’t find this recipe in a cookbook – it appears in the latest edition of the journal eLife.
Lead author Dr. Jason Spence, a professor at the UM Medical School in Ann Arbor, and colleagues from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Seattle Children’s Hospital and the University of Washington reported in their paper how they converted human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) into mini lungs.
Their work compliments with other recent research in the field (including building lung tissue from the scaffold of donated organs), the publishers of eLife said, and their method produces an organ that is more similar to the human lung than previous efforts because it can grow structures that closely resemble both the large proximal airways and the small distal airways.
The process
They took hPSCs (both embryonic and induced) and added a protein known as ActivinA, which is involved in lung development. They left the stem cells for four days, and during this period, a type of tissue known as endoderm formed. Found in early embryos, forms several internal organ types, including the lung and the liver.
Next, they added a second protein – a growth factor called Noggin – and again left the growing tissues for four days. The endoderm was then induced to form 3D spherical structures known as the foregut spheroids. At this point, the scientists worked to make these structures expand and form into lung tissue by exposing the cells to proteins involved in lung development.
Once the spheroids were transferred into the protein mixture, they were allowed to incubate at room temperature for 10 minutes until the mixture solidified. They were treated with additional proteins every four days and transferred into a new protein mixture every 10 to 15 days.
The process is used to create lung organoids that should survive in culture for over 100 days and develop into well-organized structures containing cell types found in the lung, the study authors explained. The mini-lungs are essentially self-organizing, and once they are formed, they require no additional manipulation to generate three-dimensional tissues, they added.
Connective synergy
Unlike previous methods, which focused on forming the outer tissue of the lung (the epithelium), this new technique allows scientists to create connective tissues (mesenchyme). In addition, their method allows cells of the large proximal airways to form along with those of the small airways, which allows for a more complete study of the development of lung tissues and diseases.
Alternatively, the researchers said that their method can be altered to have the foregut spheroids added to a lung scaffold from a human lung declared unsuitable for transplantation in order to make the organoids mature more quickly. Furthermore, stem cell lines from patients with genetic disorders that impact lung development can be produced (or mutations induced) in order to study how mutations affect cell differentiation, tissue organization, and tissue growth.
Since the structured were developed in a laboratory dish, however, they lack several key parts of an actual lung, including blood vessels. Dr. Spence and his colleagues hope to build upon their findings and create more complex mini-lungs by adding these missing components, with the goal of ultimately creating organoids that capable of performing functions related to respiration.
Our solar system might have been a vastly different place before Jupiter arrived, according to a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that suggests that the gas giant may have destroyed an entire generation of inner planets before entering its current orbit.
In the study, researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz propose that Jupiter may have “swept through the early solar system like a wrecking ball,” destroying an entire generation of inner planets and causing many of our solar system’s quirks before finally settling in.
As co-author and UCSC astronomy professor Gregory Laughlin explained, “Now that we can look at our own solar system in the context of all these other planetary systems, one of the most interesting features is the absence of planets inside the orbit of Mercury. The standard issue planetary system in our galaxy seems to be a set of super-Earths with alarmingly short orbital periods. Our solar system is looking increasingly like an oddball.”
A grand attack
Laughlin and co-author Konstantin Batygin explore what Discovery News refers to as the Grand Tack theory of our solar system’s formation. This theory suggests that during its infancy, Jupiter was swept up in the gravitational wake of its own buildup and spiraled inward, colliding with the would-be planets and asteroids unlucky enough to get in its way.
The result would not be unlike a break shot in a game of pool, scattering these objects all over the place and causing a chain reaction that could have easily destroyed any planet in the area, the study authors explained. It wasn’t until Saturn formed and evolved that the rampage stopped, due to the newer gas giant’s counteracting Jupiter’s inward spiral, allowing it to settle into position beyond Mars and clearing the way for a second-generation of planets (including Earth) to form.
The planets destroyed as a result of Jupiter’s activity and the resulting debris would have been recently-formed super-Earths that were likely driven into the sun, the UCSC researchers added. In contrast, the second-generation worlds that formed from material that had been left behind, would have less mass and thinner atmospheres than would have otherwise been anticipated.
“This kind of theory, where first this happened and then that happened, is almost always wrong, so I was initially skeptical,” Laughlin said. “But it actually involves generic processes that have been extensively studied by other researchers. There is a lot of evidence that supports the idea of Jupiter’s inward and then outward migration. Our work looks at the consequences of that. Jupiter’s ‘Grand Tack’ may well have been a ‘Grand Attack’ on the original inner solar system.”
Pretty. Violent. (Girl punk rock duo?)
The computer models used by Laughlin and Batygin indicated that conditions during the early solar system would have been ideal for multiple, high-speed collisions, Discovery News noted. Those collisions would have been “pretty violent,” Laughlin explained, taking place at speeds of five kilometers per second and involving 100-kilometer objects. The events would have been “energetic and damaging,” with one set of collisions causing a domino effect that led to others.
“If our solar system had started out as a normal, standard-issue solar system, it shows that the Grand Tack could have very handily kind of wiped the slate clean and destroyed any planets that originally were interior to Mercury’s orbit,” the UCSC professor told the website.
Automotive systems manufacturer Delphi is putting self-driving technology to its toughest test yet, sending an autonomous car on a cross-country road trip from San Francisco to New York to gather key information about the performance of the vehicle’s sensors and software.
The company is calling the 3,500-mile voyage, which officially got underway on Sunday, “the longest automated drive ever attempted in North America” and is hoping that it will demonstrate that the technology is able to handle a vast array of different situations, including things such as traffic jams, cruising at highway speeds, inclement weather and even parking.
Delphi is hoping that its 2015 Audi SQ5 will be able to make it to the Big Apple in time for next week’s New York Auto Show, and three engineers/drivers are on board in case they need to take control of the vehicle for any reason, according to PC Magazine. The road trip is designed to test the technology’s performance in real-world conditions, the company explained.
“Delphi had great success testing its car in California and on the streets of Las Vegas. Now it’s time to put our vehicle to the ultimate test by broadening the range of driving conditions,” chief technology officer, Jeff Owens, said in a statement. “This drive will help us collect invaluable data in our quest to deliver the best automotive grade technologies on the market.”
The vehicle has been outfitted with a full suite of technology designed to make the cross-country trip possible, Delphi officials said, including: radar and driving assist systems, wireless vehicle communication technology, software that can make “human-like decisions” and systems that can assist the car with traffic jams, city and highway driving, lane changes and parking.
The company said that it’s taking measures to make sure that neither the car nor the on-board human handlers will be overtaxed. John Absmeier, director of Delphi’s global automated vehicle business development, told PC Magazine that the vehicle will not drive on its own at night and that the would-be drivers will rotate shifts behind the wheel to ensure that they are “rested and attentive” at all times.
Absmeier added that while their technology is “capable of handling most weather conditions,” that testing would be halted “during heavy snow and heavy rain” for the safety of the drivers. In light rain and snow flurries, however, the road trip will continue as planned. The car will take a southerly route to try to avoid the harsher conditions of the north, however, Delphi said.
Currently, only four states (California, Nevada, Michigan, and Florida) and Washington DC have passed laws explicitly permitting the use of driverless vehicles, the company noted. The rest have no legislation either allowing or banning their use, but Absmeier noted that Delphi officials are “taking every precaution” and have already contacted states through which the car is set to travel.
For those who are interested, the self-driving Audi’s voyage can be followed (complete with pics and videos of the journey) online at the official Delphi Drive website or via Twitter.
NASA astronomers have for the first time detected an outburst from a star believed to be in the earliest stages of its development – an eruption that they believe reveals a sudden accumulation of gas and dust by an exceptionally young star also known as a protostar.
Using data obtained from the Spitzer Space Telescope and other orbiting instruments, as well as from ground-based observatories, an international team of researchers discovered the activity in an object known as HOPS 383, an short-lived star categorized as a “Class 0” protostar.
Stars form inside of collapsing fragments of cold gas clouds, scientists at the US space agency explained. As the cloud contracts under its own gravity, its center becomes increasingly dense and hotter. By the end of this process, the collapsing fragment has transformed into a “Class 0” protostar that is surrounded by a dusty disk roughly equal in mass.
First outburst we’ve ever seen
The Class 0 phase, which is also embedded in a dense envelope of gas and dust, is a short-lived phase of stellar development that lasts approximately 150,000 years. It is considered to be the first stage of development for sun-like stars, and at this point it has not yet developed the ability to produce energy by fusing hydrogen into helium at its core, the researchers added.
Instead, protostars shine from the heat energy given off by its contraction and the accumulation of material from the gas-and-dust disk that surrounds it. Since these infant suns are surrounded by such thick material, their visible light cannot escape. However, the light warms dust around the protostar, which reradiates the energy in the form of heat that can be detected using infrared sensitive instruments on both ground-based and orbiting telescopes and instruments.
HOPS 383, which is located approximately 1,400 light years from Earth near NGC 1977 in the constellation Orion, “is the first outburst we’ve ever seen from a Class 0 object, and it appears to be the youngest protostellar eruption ever recorded,” William Fischer, a Postdoctoral Program Fellow at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in a statement.
Lurking the whole time
Thomas Megeath at the University of Toledo in Ohio and his colleagues used Spitzer to identify over 300 protostars in a star-forming complex in Orion, and an associated project that used the ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory, called the Herschel Orion Protostar Survey (HOPS), studied several of those objects in greater detail. The eruption of HOPS 383 was first recognized in 2014 by astronomer Emily Safron shortly following graduation from the University of Toledo.
With Megeath and Fischer guiding her, Safron had recently completed a senior thesis comparing the several-decade-old Spitzer Orion survey with more recent 2010 observations made using the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite. Safron has used computer software to look at the data several times during her thesis, but upon its completion decided to compare images of the objects with the naked eye. That’s when she first noticed HOPS 383’s eruption.
“This beautiful outburst was lurking in our sample the whole time,” she said, noting that the protostar was so deeply blanketed by dust that it had not been seen at all prior to the outburst at the shortest Spitzer wavelength. Furthermore, an oversight in a version of the catalog produced before Safron’s involvement masked the increase at the longest wavelengths.
“As a result, her software saw a rise in brightness in only one wavelength out of three, which failed to meet her criteria for the changes she was hoping to find,” NASA said. “Once they realized what had happened, Safron, Fischer and their colleagues gathered additional Spitzer data, Herschel observations, and images from ground-based infrared telescopes.”
You might think that LOLCats, those funny and often grammatically incorrect images of felines doing and saying funny things, is a recent phenomenon, but a 19th century Japanese woodcut currently on display in New York reveals otherwise.
As Gizmodo reported on Monday, the woodcut is entitled “Popular Hotspring Spa (of Cats)” and was created by artist Utagawa Yoshifuji in 1880 and is currently on display of New York’s Japan Society as part of an exhibition called “Life of Cats.” It is one of about 100 Edo Period woodcuts at the exhibit, many of which wouldn’t seem out of place on I Can Has Cheezburger?
“Since arriving in Japan aboard Japanese ships transporting sacred Buddhist scriptures from China in the mid-sixth century, cats have proceeded to purr and paw their way into the heart of Japanese life, folklore, and art,” the Japan Society website said. “Life of Cats: Selections from the Hiraki Ukiyo-e Collection illustrates the depth of this mutual attraction by mining the wealth of bravura depictions of cats to be found in ukiyo-e woodblock prints of the Edo Period.”
Ninety featured ukiyo-e prints are on loan from the Hiraki Ukiyo-e Foundation, and that those prints are complemented with prints, paintings, sculptures, and other works borrowed from US-based collections. “With cross-cultural and multi-generational appeal,” the exhibit “takes viewers on a wild ride through Japan’s love affair with our feline friends,” the group added.
The exhibition is divided into five sections (Cats and People, Cats as People, Cats versus People, Cats Transformed and Cats and Play) and some pieces can be viewed online. The event will run through June 7, but there will be two rotations, as roughly 50 of the featured pieces are slated to be removed and replaced on the weekend of April 27 and 28, the Japan Society noted.
Animals in party hats
Japanese artists aren’t the only ones who created early precursors to LOLcats, however. In the 1870s, UK photographer Harry Pointer created a series of images featuring his pet cats in several humorous poses in which they mimicked human activities such as riding a tricycle, roller skating and even taking a picture using a camera. He also added captions to make the images funnier or more appealing, and had created more than 100 of them as of 1872.
While Pointer was a trailbazer in the field of funny feline fotography – sorry, photography – a man by the name of Harry Whittier Frees “took things to the next level,” according to an April 2012 article by io9. “His foray into bizarro animal photography began in 1906, when he put a party hat on the family cat during dinner.”
“The hilarity was so overwhelming that Frees expanded his portfolio to include other fauna,” including dogs and rabbits, the website noted. The American-born photographer and author of the book Animal Land on the Air “attributed his success as a photographer to his gentle rapport with his animal subjects,” they added.
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