Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

In stark contrast to long-held theories that the symptoms of menopause are short-lived, a new study has found that hot flashes and night sweats have an average duration of more than seven years, and in some cases can last for up to 14 years.

The study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, monitored over 3,000 women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds as they went through their menopausal transition periods from February 1996 to April 2013. They found that the more than 50 percent of women that had frequent symptoms in mid-life experienced those symptoms for a median of 7.4 years.

Furthermore, according to Bloomberg News, symptoms can go on much longer for black women and Hispanic women. Black women experienced symptoms the longest (a median of 10.1 years), followed by Hispanic women (8.9 years) and non-Hispanic white women (6.5 years). Chinese women (5.4 years) and Japanese (4.8 years) women had the shortest period of symptoms.

“The duration of the symptoms is much longer than traditionally thought,” said JoAnn Manson, chief of the Division of Preventive Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the author of an accompanying editorial. “Many women have moderate-to-severe hot flashes, night sweats that interrupt sleep and adversely affect their ability to function and work and their social life. This is a real problem for many women.”

Ways to help

Approximately 80 percent of women experience menopausal symptoms, and many of them say that their hot flashes and night sweats are moderate to severe, according to the study. Additional research is needed to better understand why some women have to endure menopausal symptoms than others, according to lead author and Wake Forest professor Nancy Avis.

Avis added that possible alternative treatments for women who experience such long-lasting symptoms is also required, and that she and her colleagues planned to continue monitoring the women. Manson advised women who experience night sweats and hot flashes to lower their thermostats, avoid spicy foods and hot drinks, do yoga and hypnosis and quit smoking.

More discouraging news (sorry again, ladies)

The study also found that women who began experiencing hot flashes when they were still having regular periods, or were in early perimenopause, experienced symptoms for a median of 11.8 years, the New York Times said. Approximately nine of those years occurred after the start of menopause,  roughly three times the median of women who did not experience hot flashes until after their periods stopped, the newspaper added.

“If you don’t have hot flashes until you’ve stopped menses, then you won’t have them as long,” Avis explained. “If you start later, it’s a shorter total duration and it’s shorter from the last period on.”

According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, menopause is the end of menstruation to follows the loss of ovarian activity. The average age of menopause in North America is 51, and previous estimates indicated that the symptoms of menopause lasted just six months to two years, the group claimed in a January 2014 Practice Bulletin, Bloomberg said.

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

Pot smokers are up to five times more likely to develop psychosis, according to the results of a new case-controlled study published Monday in the UK medical journal The Lancet.

In the study, Marta Di Forti from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London and her colleagues studied how the regular use of high-potency (skunk-like) cannabis affected the association between marijuana use and psychotic disorders.

A three-fold increase

According to AFP reports, they recruited a total of 780 people living in south London, including 410 who were being treated for conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Di Forti’s team found that 24 percent of all instances of psychosis in their study could be linked directly to the use of skunk-like cannabis.

“Compared with those who had never tried cannabis, users of high potency, skunk-like cannabis had a threefold increase in risk of psychosis,” she said. “The risk to those who use every day was even higher – a fivefold increase compared to people who never use.”

Furthermore, Di Forti and her colleagues found that the use of a milder form of the drug (hash) was not associated with increased risk of psychosis, a mental health issue marked by delusions or hallucinations. In the UK, an average of one new case is diagnosed per 2,000 people per year.

“This paper suggests that we could prevent almost one-quarter of cases of psychosis if no one smoked high potency cannabis,” said Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric research at King’s College London and a senior researcher for the study. “This could save young patients a lot of suffering and the NHS (National Health Service) a lot of money.”

London’s got a skunk problem

Skunk cannabis contains more of the main psychoactive ingredient of the substance, THC, than other forms of cannabis, BBC News explained on Monday. Hash, also known as cannabis resin, contains a substantial amount of another substance, cannabidiol (CBD), which researchers have shown can help counteract the psychotic side effects of THC.

However, as Di Forti told the BBC, it is “very difficult” to find anything but skunk cannabis in London. She added that there have been, “…lots of reports from police across the UK saying [they] have become a great producer of skunk. And not only do [they] use it locally but [they] export, so this is a Made in England product.”

The study, Di Forti explained, emphasizes the need for health officials to send “a clear public message” to pot users, similar to the medical advisories that have been issued for substances like tobacco and alcohol. She added that doctors should be encouraged to ask their patients about the frequency of their cannabis habit, as well as the type that they use.

It is the latest in a long line of scientific research linking cannabis use and psychosis in recent years, according to AFP. A 2010 survey of 3,800 young adults in Australia found an increased risk of psychosis in those who started smoking cannabis at an early age and used it for several years. A 2009 study, also published in The Lancet, cited UN Office on Drugs and Crime figures and claimed that nearly four percent of all adults worldwide used cannabis.

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

What makes people recall some memories in such detail that it is almost as if they have traveled back in time and are reliving the events being described? A new study from a team of Vanderbilt University researchers sheds light on the phenomenon known as “mental time travel.”

As an example, the researchers refer to Proust’s novel Recollection of Things Past, in which the narrator begins an in-depth tale of events from his past after being triggered by the unique smell of a lemon madeleine. The resulting story is so detailed that it fills seven chapters.

In the new paper, published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience, assistant psychology professor Sean Polyn and his colleagues set out to learn more about the mechanics that occur in the brain during such recall events. They did so by analyzing the brain activity of individuals as they performed a simple task involving memory recollection.

They found that the activity patterns in one specific region of the brain could be used to better predict the order in which people recalled information that they had only recently studied.

“It’s extremely important that we understand what different brain regions are doing as we search through our memories,” Polyn said. “Diseases like Alzheimer’s and epilepsy are devastating to memory, and this information can help us develop treatments to preserve patients’ memories, and identify adverse effects that new psychotropic drugs may have on people’s memory.”

Experts have long known that the brain’s medial temporal lobe (MTL) plays an important part in memory, because damage to this area can cause amnesia or other memory issues. However, they had not previously been able to determine how the mind governs how faithfully and accurately it can reproduce an individual memory.

Of course, as the researchers point out, not all memories are the same. High-fidelity memories such as the ones features in Proust’s novel are one extreme, and at the other end of the spectrum are the bits and pieces of memories that a person can recall clearly, but without supporting detail.

Memory model

Working alongside doctoral students James Kragel and Neal Morton, Polyn came up with a new model that can account for how the structures of the MTL support memory retrieval. Their model revealed that the anterior region of the lobe signals when a memory is being retrieved, but does not indicate the level of detail. The posterior region of the MTL, however, becomes active only when a person is experiencing a detailed, “time travel” type of memory.

In order to test their model, the Vanderbilt researchers recruited seven male and 13 female subjects between the ages of 18 and 35. Each individual was placed in an fMRI brain scanner and given a list of 24 names of common objects like horse, boat, and window.

They were then asked to decide if each object was large or small, as well as animate or inanimate, as a way to force them to focus on the words. Finally, following a short pause, the participants were asked to recall the words they had just studied in the correct order.

“The researchers found that when a participant’s brain scan indicated that they recalled an object with high fidelity, then their next response was likely to be the next item on the list,” the university said. “However, when the brain scan indicated that the object was an isolated recollection, then the next object the person recalled could come from anywhere on the list.”

Time travel to remember

For instance, if a participant was asked to study the words “horse, window, robot, and boat” in that order, he or she would be said to have experienced a “time travel” memory if recalling the word “horse” meant that they were able to immediately remember that “window” came right afterwards. On the other hand, if the person’s memory of “horse” was low fidelity, his or her next response would be the more distant word “boat,” the researchers explained.

“This model was much better than chance at predicting what a person would recall next,” Polyn said, “but when we told the model what a person’s brain activity was at the moment they recalled a particular item, the model became much better at predicting which item would be recalled next. This demonstrates that the brain stamps memories with a temporal code.”

“These time-travel recollections allow the brain to retrieve that temporal code, which makes memories for nearby things more accessible, in this case the next item in the list,” he added, explaining that the temporal code is similar to the time stamp placed on computer files.

When a person searched for files marked with a specific date and time, they search through all of the ones saved with at the time specified, the researchers explained. The process, in which time-travel memories are recalled, dubbed “reinstatement” by psychologists, is similar. However, it is also more flexible, as memories not just from the exact date and time but also those from around the same time can also be recollected.

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

John Hopton for redOrbit.com – @Johnfinitum
Changing social conditions in recent decades have led to more of us living alone, eating alone and generally living more solitary existences. People who live alone already make up 28 percent of all US households, which makes them more common than any other domestic unit, including the nuclear family. Several studies have found that loneliness is damaging to health, but Klinenberg believes that we can’t simply state the phenomenon of Going Solo, to quote his book title, is detrimental to people or society. In fact, quite the opposite may be true.
Alone but not lonely
For a start, we should differentiate between loneliness and domestic solitude, Klinenberg says. For many people, living alone is a choice, happily made, and one which comes with many benefits. We should also avoid assuming that connecting through technology does not count as a ‘real’ connection.
“Loneliness can be dangerous, but it’s not the same as living alone. We confuse them all the time,” Klinenberg explains. “The emergence of new communications technologies can make living alone a more social experience.”
In fact, while technology allows us to be connected to people even if physically alone, people who live alone are of course not the only people who are permanently connected, and living alone can give us a break from our connections, electronic and physical.
“These days most of us are over-connected,” says Klinenberg. “We are immersed in social media and constantly communicating on digitial devices. In this context, living alone can give people a chance to turn off and gain some productive solitude. Paradoxically, that might be exactly what they need to make deeper connections.”
Living alone but with technology at our fingertips, then, we can regulate the amount of social communication we have to be just as we like it.
Revitalizing cities by turning sidewalks into living rooms
“Going solo” does not only benefit the people living alone, and nor does it depend entirely on electronic communication. It has advantages for society in general, as well.
“The rise of cities give people a way to live alone, together, in neighborhoods designed for public life,” Klinenberg suggests. “Also, people tend to live alone in urban areas where they are surrounded by others who are also going solo. When they want to go out, they turn the local shops and sidewalks into their living rooms. They’re more likely than married people to spend time with friends, neighbors, and strangers in public areas. They’ve played a leading role in the revitalization of cities.”
Table for one – eating alone
And what about eating alone, does that have benefits, too? Not so many, according to Klinenberg, but more and more of us are doing it.
“Eating alone takes some getting used to, and cooking alone is even harder, especially when you have to do it often,” says Klinenberg. “These days, though, lots of people eat alone, regardless of their domestic status. We live in a free agent society, where a great number of people spend their days on their own. That includes getting lunch, and sometimes other meals, alone. Increasingly, restaurants are taking notice, and putting in communal tables rather than tables for one or two.”
A solo future?
So how did so many of us end up living alone, and what can we expect in the future?
“It requires some degree of affluence and security, so the market economy and the welfare state have been crucial,” Klinenberg explains. “But there are a bunch of additional factors: The rising status of women, who gained access to the paid labor market and greater control of their lives and bodies… and the aging of the population, which means a record number of people are outliving their spouses and living alone for long stretches in their final years.” These factors, plus the changes in technology which make being alone less lonely, help to explain the rise of solo living.
As for the future, Klinenberg says that currently: “The US is behind the times on this trend. Living alone is far more common in Europe, particularly in the Scandinavian nations, and even more prevalent in Japan.” However, he concludes: “I think it will increase in developing nations, places like India, China, and Brazil, but remain fairly steady in places where it has reached around 1/3 of all households.” A point which the US has almost reached already.
It appears that too much solitude, such as eating alone too often, is not good for us, but conversely when it comes to living alone there is a lot to be said for it. So much so, in fact, that Time Magazine featured the concept of “going solo” as their “#1 idea that is changing your life” with Klinenberg as their cover story.
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

Provided by Eloi Courchesne, University of Montreal

For decades, theories on the genetic advantage of sexual reproduction had been put forward, but none had ever been proven in humans, until now. Researchers at the University of Montreal and the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Centre in Montreal, Canada have shown how humanity’s predispositions to disease gradually decrease the more we mix our genetic material together. This discovery was finally made possible by the availability in recent years of repositories of biological samples and genetic data from different populations around the globe.

What we already knew

As humans procreate, generation after generation, the exchange of genetic material between man and woman causes our species to evolve little by little. Chromosomes from the mother and the father recombine to create the chromosomes of their child (chromosomes are the larger building blocks of genomes). Scientists have known for some time, however, that the parents’ genomes don’t mix together in a uniform way. Chromosomes recombine frequently in some segments of the genome, while recombination is less frequent in others. These segments of low-frequency recombination will eventually recombine like others do but it will take many, many generations.

The findings

More specifically, the team of Canadian researchers led by Dr. Philip Awadalla discovered the following: the segments of the human genome that don’t recombine as often as others also tend to carry a significantly greater proportion of the more disease-enabling genetic mutations*. Until chromosome recombination eventually occurs, these segments accumulate more and more bad mutations. In other words, as far as susceptibility to disease is concerned, our genetic material actually worsens, before it gets better. Thankfully, disease-enabling mutations are eventually shuffled off our genetic code through sexual reproduction. “But since these mutations rest on less dynamic segments of our genome, the process can potentially take many hundreds of generations,” explains Dr. Awadalla.

Why these findings are significant

“This discovery gives us a better understanding of how we, as humans, become more or less at risk of developing or contracting diseases,” says Dr. Awadalla. It also tells scientists more precisely where to look in the human genome to find disease-enabling mutations, he adds, which should speed up the discovery and identification of mutations associated with specific diseases. Researchers and health authorities will in turn be able to apply this new information to develop more effective treatments and prevention programs.

The science behind the findings

Dr. Awadalla and his team studied the sequenced genomes of hundreds of individuals from Canada’s CARTaGENE genetic data repository and the multinational 1000 Genomes Project. They found that the proportion of mutations associated with disease was significantly higher in low recombining segments known as “coldspots” relative to highly recombining regions, and that the bad mutations in these coldspots were generally more damaging than the mutations in the highly recombining segments.

Through the 1000 Genomes and CARTaGENE programs, the team was able to compare this phenomenon across four present-day population basins: Africans, Asians, Europeans and Canadians of French descent. Each of these genetic groups exhibit the above behaviour to varying degrees. African individuals showed the smallest relative proportion of disease-associated mutations on their genome’s coldspots, with Western Europeans showing the largest.

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
While couples typically find that they tend to have less active sex lives the longer they’ve been married, new research appearing in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior indicates that there’s new hope for men and women nearing their 50th wedding anniversary.
In the study, researchers from Louisiana State University, Florida State University and Baylor University report that there is a modest rebound in frequency of intercourse in marriages that last for more than half a century.
The researchers studied more than 1600 married adults between the ages of 57 and 85 in hopes of shedding some light on elderly hanky-panky.
Multiple hypotheses
The authors wrote that they “tested several hypotheses regarding the relationship between marital characteristics and sexual outcomes” and found that “individuals in their first marriage had more frequent sex than remarried individuals.” They also found that males typically had more frequent sex than women in younger marriages, and that relatively few couples can make it 50 years.
“Additionally, the study used a snapshot in time – and therefore cannot prove that length and order of marriage caused sexual frequency,” former Baylor researcher Dr. Samuel Stroope, who is now an assistant professor of sociology at LSU, said in a statement.
“Nevertheless, the study provided intriguing results for an age group whose sexual behavior has rarely been studied”, he added.
Length matters
He and his colleagues believe that sex tends to lose its appeal over time, leading to the decline in frequency, and that the permanency of the relationship might be responsible for the uptick later in life. As Dr. Stroope explained, the experience and knowledge that comes with couples growing old together could play a role in the phenomenon.
Longer relationships make it possible to “learn about your partner and build on that over time,” he explained. “You may have a higher level of trust when you feel that your spouse isn’t going to go anywhere. The expectation that the relationship will continue may give you more reason to invest in the relationship – including in sexual aspects of the relationship.”
What’s up with remarried people?
As for why people who have remarried have less frequent sex than those who remain with their first partners, Dr. Stroope said that it could be that they lack the sense of “permanence or lasting investment” that a husband or wife has when they spend their whole life with one partner.
Dr. Jeremy Uecker, an assistant professor of sociology at Baylor and a co-author of the study, said that the new study helps add to a small but growing amount of research on the sex practices and behaviors of seniors.
Dr. Strupe added that reduced marital conflict due to mellowing with age could also play a role in the increased sexual activity during the advanced years. We suggest that this concept applies to couples of all ages—spend less time fighting with each other and you’ll probably spend more time between the sheets.
While the researchers report that their findings could come as a surprise to many in today’s youth-oriented culture, they note that their findings echo those of other scientists that indicate that regular sexual activity remains a way of life for many older adults.
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

To their parents, teenagers may seem like the laziest, most foolish, and most self-centered beings on the planet, but according to one prominent UK cognitive neuroscience professor, adults shouldn’t hold such behaviors against them – that’s just how their brains are wired.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a professor at University College London and the deputy director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, recently told The Telegraph that when adolescents tell their elders that, “nobody understands them,” they might be right, neurologically speaking.

Over the past decade, Blakemore and her colleagues have been analyzing the development of the brain before and during the teenage years. Among their findings are changes to grey matter in the prefrontal cortex responsible for some of the drastic changes in attitude during this time of life.

Blakemore and the researchers working in her lab have regularly been reporting new discoveries of observable, measurable changes in the structure and function of adolescent brains, the British newspaper said. Not only is she working to learn how the mind of a teenager works, she wants to use that information to change education policy to better maximize their learning potential.

“We work with many schools all over London for research purposes, and I hope that in the next 20 years or so we will be applying more evidence-based science in education because at the moment there is not much,” she told the Telegraph on Saturday. “We know a lot about how the teenage brain learns and how it develops but it hasn’t filtered through yet.”

Changing school policies

Among some of the changes she would like to see made: the addition of neuroscience to teacher training courses, and a later start to the school day. Blakemore said that education is nothing if not the process of molding the brains of children, and that teens tend to release the sleep hormone melatonin later in the day than adults, meaning they need more sleep in the morning.

She also argues that adolescent brains have tremendous creative capabilities, and that secondary schools aren’t doing enough to tap into that potential. In 2011, she advised government officials to expand their focus from younger students to include middle schoolers, claiming that policy makers should consider the large amounts of new data of brain development at this age.

“Traditionally, policy has focused on the early years; the new research suggests that investment into adolescence is important too,” Blakemore said. “The teenage brain is very capable of learning, and this is absolutely the wrong time to stifle creativity. They can do amazing things, and yet schools haven’t changed that much for 400 years.”

“The more I learn about how plastic and changing the teenage brain is, the more I question whether [what we have] is the right learning environment for teenagers. One of the things I’ve often thought is that if teenagers were allowed to design schools, maybe they would look completely different,” she added, calling for “more peer-to-peer learning… less making them sit at a desk all day, and more self-initiated learning rather than being spoon-fed stuff all the time.”

So what exactly are these changes that go on inside a teenager’s brain?

What makes them more susceptible to peer influence and more willing to take risks? The answers, Blakemore explains, lie in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates emotional responses and inhibits risk-taking behavior. During adolescence, physiological changes are taking place there.

The prefrontal cortex of humans is larger than in any other species, she explained in June 2012 at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburg, and it plays a key role in several different types of high-level cognitive functions, including planning and decision-making. It also inhibits inappropriate behavior and is involved in both self-awareness and understanding others, she added.

The “grey matter volume” of the prefrontal cortex peaks early in adolescence then begins to decease, leading to a developmental process Blakemore calls “synaptic pruning.” In this process, the connections between cells of the prefrontal cortex that aren’t used are being “pruned” in order to allow those that remain to become stronger.

The process is not without its consequences, however. Side-effects of this whole “pruning” process include an increase in reckless risk-taking as well as changes to the medial prefrontal cortex that make it harder for a teenager to see any viewpoint other than his or her own – thus leading to the selfish, self-centered behavior often demonstrated at this age.

The brains of teenagers are also more aware of “social outcomes” and place more weight on social exclusion than adults, Blakemore added. They tend to focus entirely on their own personal surroundings and whether or not something has a positive or negative impact on them, even if it wouldn’t seem smart or moral to adults. Even with something like smoking, a teenage brain may weigh the social implications of the habit over the negative health outcomes of cigarettes.

Blakemore said that this is an example of “adaptive” behavior, adding, “You need, after puberty, to go out and explore your environment, and also you need to affiliate with your social group because you have to become more independent of your family… When I talk to parents and to teenagers about the research we do on the teenage brain, many times they say that it is useful for them to just know what is going on in there.”

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

From Moneyball to quantitative financial analysis, many industries mine vast amounts of data for their use and the medical field is no exception.

Recently, a group of London doctors announced that they have amassed 1,600 3D videos of beating hearts in hopes of finding new insights and medical treatments.

Declan O’Regan, a participating researcher from the Imperial College London, said that this new strategy is likely to expose much more than normal clinical trials, which usually convey fairly small amounts of health data over the span of many years.

“There is a really complicated relationship between people’s genes and heart disease, and we are still trying to unravel what that is,” O’Reagan told the BBC. “But by getting really clear 3D pictures of the heart we hope to be able to get a much better understanding of the cause and effect of heart disease and give the right patients the right treatment at the right time.”

The research program intends to gather data on so many hearts that commonalities emerge. O’Regan said this type of work will become standard practice in medicine relatively soon.

“There are often subtle signs of early disease that are really difficult to pick up even if you know what to look for,” he said. “A computer is very sensitive to picking up subtle signs of a disease before they become a problem.”

Other Big Data efforts

Another big data medical program is taking place at the European Bioinfomatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge, England. At the EBI, the genetic codes of tens of thousands of different plants and animals are recorded in hopes of furthering our understanding of genetics.

Ewan Birney, a researcher director at the EBI, said big data is already starting to change the way research is carried out.

“Suddenly, we don’t have to be afraid of measuring lots and lots of things – about humans, about oceans, about the Universe – because we know we can be confident that we can collect that data and extract some knowledge from it,” he said.

Two of the biggest challenges facing big data research efforts are devising an effective way to manage the data and how to analyze it. However, once scientists working on a project solve these challenges – groundbreaking discoveries can result, as evidenced by the recent discovery of the Higgs boson particle by researchers at CERN in Switzerland.

“(B)y using larger amounts of data, we can discover new things, and so what will be found? That is an open question,” said Paul Flicek of the EBI.

“We are not going to slow down generating new data,” Flicek continued. “The fact that we have demonstrated that we can generate a lot of this data; we can sequence these genomes. We are never going to stop doing that and so it opens up so many more exciting things.

“We can learn new things and we can see things we have never seen before,” he added.

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

A genetically modified apple that won’t turn brown after its been sliced has been approved by the US Department of Agriculture, reigniting the debate about the safety of GMO foods.

According to Gizmodo, the product is known as the Arctic apple and it is produced by a small Canadian firm known as Okanagan Specialty Fruits. Scientists there have used a technique called RNA interference (RNAi) to block the enzyme that normally causes browning to occur.

The USDA as declared that the Arctic apple carries no risk for other plants, and the company is in the process of undergoing voluntary testing with the FDA to prove that humans can safely consume the fruit. It would still be several years before its trees are able to bear fruit.

Two varieties of the genetically engineered apples have been approved by the USDA, according to The Guardian – Arctic Granny and Arctic Golden. The company claims that they are identical to their traditional counterparts in every way except for the lack of browning, but that hasn’t kept GMO critics and the organic food industry to try and block their eventual release.

“There is no place in the US or global market for genetically engineered apples,” Lisa Archer, director of the environmental group Friends of the Earth, told the Wall Street Journal. “Farmers don’t want to grow it, food companies don’t want to sell it, and consumers don’t want to eat it.”

Likewise, the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), which had petitioned the USDA to deny approval of the apples, said that the RNAi process used to keep them fresh could be harmful to human health. OCA Director Ronnie Cummins told The Guardian that the group planned to call upon food companies and restaurants not to use them, stating that the GMO apples were “just another big experiment on humans for no good reason.”

Would you take a bite of the apple?

“We think there are some possible risks that were not adequately considered,” added Doug Gurian-Sherman, a plant pathologist and senior scientist with the Centre for Food Safety. In a statement, however, Okanagan said that its apples had undergone a “rigorous review” process and were probably “the most tested apples on the planet,” the British newspaper added.

The company’s president, Neal Carter, called the USDA approval “a monumental occasion” and said that it was “the biggest milestone yet” for Okanagan. Carter added that he “can’t wait until they’re available for consumers,” but that is unlikely to happen until at least late 2016, and then only in small quantities. They will not likely be widely distributed for several years.

That delay will give consumers time to “get informed and decide whether they want to purchase them,” Wendy Brannen, a spokeswoman for the US Apple Association, told the WSJ. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 88 percent of scientists said that they believed that GMO foods were safe to eat. However, only 37 percent of the general public agreed.

Okanagan has stated that it plans to attach a snowflake logo to its Arctic apples in order to distinguish them from other, non-modified varieties. Furthermore, the FDA could require the company to disclose that the fruit has a non-browning trait or has been genetically modified. However, the agency has not yet required a food company to carry a special label, despite calls from consumer groups to pass new laws requiring such a label.

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

Provided by Daniel Brooks, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The appearance of infectious diseases in new places and new hosts, such as West Nile virus and Ebola, is a predictable result of climate change, says a noted zoologist affiliated with the Harold W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

In an article published online Sunday in conjunction with a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Daniel Brooks warns that humans can expect more such illnesses to emerge in the future, as climate change shifts habitats and brings wildlife, crops, livestock, and humans into contact with pathogens to which they are susceptible but to which they have never been exposed before.

“It’s not that there’s going to be one ‘Andromeda Strain’ that will wipe everybody out on the planet,” Brooks said, referring to the 1971 science fiction film about a deadly pathogen. “There are going to be a lot of localized outbreaks putting pressure on medical and veterinary health systems. It will be the death of a thousand cuts.”

Brooks and his co-author, Eric Hoberg, a zoologist with the U.S. National Parasite Collection of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, have personally observed how climate change has affected very different ecosystems. During his career, Brooks has focused primarily on parasites in the tropics, while Hoberg has worked primarily in Arctic regions.

Each has observed the arrival of species that hadn’t previously lived in that area and the departure of others, Brooks said.

“Over the last 30 years, the places we’ve been working have been heavily impacted by climate change,” Brooks said in an interview last week. “Even though I was in the tropics and he was in the Arctic, we could see something was happening.” Changes in habitat mean animals are exposed to new parasites and pathogens.

For example, Brooks said, after humans hunted capuchin and spider monkeys out of existence in some regions of Costa Rica, their parasites immediately switched to howler monkeys, where they persist today. Some lungworms in recent years have moved northward and shifted hosts from caribou to muskoxen in the Canadian Arctic.

But for more than 100 years, scientists have assumed parasites don’t quickly jump from one species to another because of the way parasites and hosts co-evolve.

Brooks calls it the “parasite paradox.” Over time, hosts and pathogens become more tightly adapted to one another. According to previous theories, this should make emerging diseases rare, because they have to wait for the right random mutation to occur.

However, such jumps happen more quickly than anticipated. Even pathogens that are highly adapted to one host are able to shift to new ones under the right circumstances.

Brooks and Hoberg call for a “fundamental conceptual shift” recognizing that pathogens retain ancestral genetic capabilities allowing them to acquire new hosts quickly.

“Even though a parasite might have a very specialized relationship with one particular host in one particular place, there are other hosts that may be as susceptible,” Brooks said.

In fact, the new hosts are more susceptible to infection and get sicker from it, Brooks said, because they haven’t yet developed resistance.

Though resistance can evolve fairly rapidly, this only changes the emergent pathogen from an acute to a chronic disease problem, Brooks adds.

“West Nile Virus is a good example – no longer an acute problem for humans or wildlife in North America, it nonetheless is hhere to stay,” he said.

The answer, Brooks said, is for greater collaboration between the public and veterinary health communities and the “museum” community – the biologists who study and classify life forms and how they evolve.

In addition to treating human cases of an emerging disease and developing a vaccine for it, he said, scientists need to learn which non-human species carry the pathogen.

Knowing the geographic distribution and the behavior of the non-human reservoirs of the pathogen could lead to public health strategies based on reducing risk of infection by minimizing human contact with infected animals, much likethose that reduced the incidence of malaria and yellow fever by reducing human contact with mosquitos.

Museum scientists versed in understanding the evolutionary relationships among species could use this knowledge to anticipate the risk of the pathogen becoming established outside of its native range.

Brooks, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was a zoology professor at the University of Toronto for 30 years until he retired early in 2011 to devote more time to his study of emerging infectious disease. In addition to being a senior research fellow with UNL’s Manter Laboratory, he is a visiting senior fellow at the Universidade Federal do Parana, Brazil, funded by the Ciencias sem Fronteiras (Sciences without Borders) of the Brazilian government, and a visiting scholar with Debrecen University in Hungary.

Brooks’ and Hoberg’s article, “Evolution in action: climate change, biodiversity dynamics and emerging infectious disease,” is part of a Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B issue on “Climate change and vector-borne diseases of humans,” edited by Paul Parham, a specialist in infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College in London.

“We have to admit we’re not winning the war against emerging diseases,” Brooks said. “We’re not anticipating them. We’re not paying attention to their basic biology, where they might come from and the potential for new pathogens to be introduced.”

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Google doesn’t just want your online life, your ad clicks, emails, and social network. It looks like the internet goliath wants to micro-manage your body odor, whether that is aromatic and heavenly or a pungent stink. We know this only because Google has lodged a patent for a proposed “fragrance emission” wearable device.

It’s a virtual nose

The device, if it ever sees the light of day, will incorporate sensors to monitor the wearer’s activity levels and their personal smell. When things get a little too pungent, the device will react by pumping out a fresher, cleaner, and less anti-social odor. Just the thing if you have ever been in that stress or exercise-induced “How are my armpits doing?” situation. You haven’t been there? Never suffered from the curse of filthy pheromones? OK— more for the rest of us.

It’s a people detector

Even Google can’t promise to kill the worst offending body odors, so our friendly internet giant has a back-up plan. The device will also search your social networks and let you know if there any of your contacts within stench-detection range so you can duck and dive to avoid embarrassment. How thoughtful of Google to give us a “route suggesting portion” which can “provide an alternate route to travel such that the predicted odor may not offend others that are socially connected to the user and that travel the same routes as the user.”

According to the patent, the device “includes an activity sensor, a communication portion, and a route suggesting portion. The activity sensor can detect physical activity of a user of a device. The communication portion may provide access one or more social networks via a communication network, in which the device may communicate with a social network of contacts.”

It’s a perfume pump and a camera
Apparently the planned device will consist of “a parameter detector configurable to select from a group consisting of an accelerometer, galvanic skin response monitor, a biometric sensor, an environmental sensor, a location-based sensor, context, and a camera.” It will have “a material dispenser operable to dispense a fragrant material at a future time based on a prediction signal.” In claim 6 of the patent, we learn that the “said material dispenser comprises one of a group consisting of a spraying device, a fan, and a heating device.”

It’s a medical record file and a sweat historian

Claim 6 tells us that the device will be able to dispense the replacement odor by using our “sweat history” and medical history. Users will be able to override the dispenser just in case you want to stay the way you are or possibly to deter someone from getting too up close and personal.

The future is Google and that future is perfumed.

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

John Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Posting revenge porn will become a specifically recognized crime in England and Wales, with the rest of the United Kingdom considering similar changes to the law. In recent years the issue of revenge porn has been taken much more seriously, and now people who post sexual images or videos online without the subject’s consent and with the intent to cause harm could face up to two years in prison.

How the “intent to cause harm” element will be proved is as yet unclear, but the most commonly understood definition of revenge porn is people posting explicit images or videos of former partners, usually with women as the victims.

The new law classes revenge porn as: “photographs or films which show people engaged in sexual activity or depicted in a sexual way or with their genitals exposed, where what is shown would not usually be seen in public.” It covers material shared on or offline, and even that which has been distributed physically.

According to the BBC, “The Criminal Justice and Courts Bill, which has a specific amendment dealing with such actions, will receive Royal Assent and become law later. The amendment covers images sent on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, and those sent by text.”

In case anyone is unsure what is meant by “royal assent,” the official site of the UK parliament explains that: “Once a bill has completed all the parliamentary stages in both Houses, it is ready to receive royal assent. This is when the Queen formally agrees to make the bill into an Act of Parliament (law).”

Most people are never quite sure what goes on between government and the Queen in these kinds of exchanges and in most cases it is a formality, but one can’t help imagining Her Majesty having revenge porn explained to her in detail over breakfast as she awkwardly pushes mushrooms around the plate and wonders what sort of trouble Henry VIII might have been in if the Internet had been around.

Existing law did not adequately cover revenge porn

Opponents of the law have claimed that revenge porn can be dealt with through existing law, but victims of revenge porn have found it difficult to have offending material removed from the internet, especially as host sites are located around the world, and requests to remove content are often ignored. In fact, the BBC suggests, asking for removal can result in more attention being brought to the images.

According to information from UK police, there were 149 allegations of revenge porn made between 1 January 2012 and 1 July 2014, with only 6 incidents resulting in police action. Victims have had to think laterally in order to use existing law, for example if an intimate picture has been taken as a “selfie,” then the image’s copyright belongs to the person who took it, that is to say the victim.

In the US, thirteen states currently have laws directly related to revenge porn: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Idaho, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin. According to Criminal Defense Lawyer: “In most states, it is not a crime to post people’s photos or personal information online without their permission. However, some prosecutors have used laws against distributing pornography to go after people who commit revenge porn.”

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

Puerto Rican lawmakers are considering a controversial new bill that would fine parents of obese children $800 for failing to keep their youngsters fit and healthy.

The bill was first introduced to the territory’s Senate on Monday and is scheduled to be debated in a public hearing on Friday, according to the Washington Post. Senator Gilberto Rodriquez, the bill’s sponsor, insists that parents must be held accountable for the childhood obesity epidemic.

The proposed law would identify school-age students who are obese, recommend that the take part in diet and exercise programs in order to lose weight, and levy fines against any parent that fails to follow the recommendations.

Once children are flagged by teachers or school officials, their parents would work be referred to officials within the Puerto Rico health department in order to determine the cause of the obesity and devise an individualized plan to help that child lose weight. Some will be asked to cut caloric intake while others may be instructed to spend more time exercising outdoors.

There would also be monthly follow-up appointments, as well as a check-up to gauge the progress of the child after a six-month period. During this check-up, doctors will determine if any progress has been made. If the child has not lost weight, or if the parents did not follow instructions, they would be referred to children’s services and could be fined up to $800.

Senator Jose Luis Dalmau, who supports the bill, told the newspaper that he believed that it was “necessary” to hold parents accountable for their children’s poor health. However, many experts are vehemently opposed to the bill.

Milly García, a nutritionist who is against the proposal, told local media that obesity is “not abuse. It’s a disease,” and that the new legislation would allow the government “into a private area” where it “does not belong.” Ricardo Fontanet, president of the local American Academy of Pediatrics chapter, added that the bill was “not the right way to address this problem.”

Rebecca Puhl, deputy director of the University of Connecticut’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, told ABC News that the proposal was “very unfair and inappropriately penalizes and stigmatizes parents. Childhood obesity is a highly complex issue, and while the home environment is important to address, much broader societal changes are required to effectively address obesity.”

Puhl explained that policies that penalize parents for their children’s obesity are less helpful than those that support them. Improving access to opportunities for physical activity or providing some type of incentive for buying healthier food has already proven to be effective in areas such as Philadelphia.

The fines “drastically oversimplify obesity and are more likely to be harmful than incur any benefit,” she noted. Nikhil Dhurandhar, who chairs the department of nutritional sciences at Texas Tech University, wondered, “What’s next? Will they be fining parents of children suffering from other diseases? Maybe diabetes? Maybe cancer? Maybe something else?”

According to the Washington Post, Puerto Rico had a higher rate of adult obesity that all but 12 US states as of 2013. Statistics for childhood obesity were even worse, as nearly 30 percent of youngsters living in the territory were obese compared to 18 percent in the mainland US.

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.

John Hopton for redOrbit.com – @Johnfinitum

NBC anchor Brian Williams claimed, now infamously, that his helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq in 2003 while reporting on the invasion. Having had his version of events challenged by veterans, he backtracked and said that he was in a helicopter following the one that was hit by an RPG, and that the “fog of memory” had been responsible for his mistake. The thought that he lied to increase his journalistic credentials is unavoidable, but memory expert Ed Cooke believes that the complexity of memory could give some credibility to the argument that error rather than deceit informed Williams’ behavior.

“We tend to think of our brains like computers, and our memories as copies of our experience exactly stored in some internal database,” Cooke told redOrbit. “So we expect memories to be the same every time we recall them, and accurately to reflect the real events that gave rise to them.

“But this isn’t how the brain works, for anyone. For instance, third person perspectives are very common in memory, when you see things you did in the past from outside of you, which obviously wasn’t your experience at the time. This isn’t normally grounds for saying the memory is wrong, just that it doesn’t literally reproduce the experience as you had it at the time.”

Intriguingly, Cooke says that imagination and memory are not entirely separate things.

“Remembering is an imaginative act, and every time we remember (i.e. re-imagine) a moment from the past, we do so differently based on context. Memories are also influenced by related experiences we have in the meantime, and they even change a little bit with each act of remembrance.”

Cooke is a Grandmaster of Memory and founder of the learning site Memrise, and believes that when it comes to learning, it is important to realize how memory can change, which is why “active recall and repetition are so critical for effective learning- these are our best tools for shaping memories.”

Memories are like compost, not computers

The psychologist WL Randall recently suggested that the computer metaphor for human memory -“encode, store, retrieve” – should be replaced by an “organic compost” metaphor of laying it on, breaking it down, stirring it up, and mixing it in, Cooke explains.

“This certainly seems to be what Brian Williams has been up to. He’s recalled the memory in one context (glorifying and bearing witness to the heroism of which he was a close witness of an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry). In this context, the specifics of his own witnessing may not have seemed very relevant, and the story’s certainly better with his proximity.

“But his comments were interpreted (somewhat ungenerously in my humble opinion) as an attempt to reflect glory on his own heroism, and so the absence of the relevant parts of the memory in that context (such as that he was in a different helicopter) stood out like lies, for which he’s been roundly hounded.”

Fallibility of memory played a part, but malleability is more significant

“My bet on this is that the problem of memory we’re talking about isn’t anything to do with gaps, confusions and distortions (even if they may also exist, a bit),” Cooke continued. “Instead, the memory problem here is more likely that the contents of a memory will differ depending on the social context of recall, and Williams remembered his story the wrong way given his audience, who therefore felt his intentions weren’t honest.”

So it seems that Williams did tailor his memory to his audience, but not as deliberately as we have assumed.

Williams has now been suspended from NBC for sixth months, but it will clearly take us a lot longer than that to get a full grasp on the science of memory, a subject that Ed Cooke says still needs a lot of work.

—–

Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.