Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
While stereotypes suggest men tend to be “players,” looking to “hook up” with as many women as possible while avoiding serious commitment, new research indicates that the opposite tends to be true when there are fewer potential mates around.
The study, which was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and published in the journal Royal Society Open Science on Wednesday, looked at the Makushi people of Guyana and found that males tend to pursue long-term relationships when women are scarce.
“Commitment to a relationship is influenced by the availability of partners,” University of Utah anthropologist, postdoctoral student and first author Ryan Schacht said in a statement. “So we can think of the number of men and women in a population as a potential mating market where the principles of supply and demand hold sway.”
“When you belong to the sex that is abundant, you must cater to the preferences of the rare sex,” he added. “So the expectations are that men will be interested in short-term relationships when more women are available. But when women are difficult to find, they become valued resources, so men will attempt to attract and maintain a single partner because it is costly to lose a partner when partners are rare.”
The findings run counter to the conventional view that there tend to be more fights between males and increased rates of sexually transmitted disease when men outnumber women, Schacht said. While he said that the study only looks at one population, and that the findings may not apply to all peoples, he did expect to see some of the general observations to be universal.
In developed countries, “women are attracted to urban areas versus rural areas where construction, logging, farming and mining draw men,” Schacht said. The complex nature of industrialized societies challenging because they are more complex in nature, he added, but findings from small-scale societies can be used to infer things about western populations.
“Women in rural places may find it easier to find a partner ready to settle down and commit,” he said. Females in urban environments may find it “challenging” to find “a single, committed partner. In urban environments where there are more women, men are surrounded by many potential partners and in this way can pursue multiple short-term, uncommitted relationships.”
“But if they’re in boonies, men may be more likely to settle down. When women are hard to find, the best strategy is to find one and stick with her,” Schacht said. The bottom line, he noted, is that “it’s time to move away from stereotyped assumptions of men having certain behaviors and women having others in terms of relationships. Sex is one of many things that matter. Partner availability matters, socioeconomic status matters, the quality of available mates matters.”
As part of the study, Schacht and his wife, Jacque, interviewed 300 Makushi men and women between the ages of 18 and 45 in eight rural communities in 2010 and 2011. The sex ratios in these areas ranged from to 140 men for every 100 women.
Gold rush threatening South American tropical forests
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
An ongoing gold rush in the tropical forests of South America is putting one of the planet’s most biologically diverse landscapes in danger, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
In the study, researchers from the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras Departments of Biology and Environmental Sciences report that over 1,600 square kilometers of tropical forests were lost in South America due to gold mining from 2001 through 2013.
Furthermore, an increase of mining activity that saw the affected area increase from roughly 377 square kilometers to over 1,300 square kilometers since the 2007 global economic crisis resulted in significant losses within the confines of conservation areas, the authors noted.
“Although the loss of forest due to mining is smaller in extent compared to deforestation caused by other land uses, such as agriculture or grazing areas, deforestation due to mining is occurring in some of the most biologically diverse regions in the tropics,” lead author Nora L. Álvarez-Berríos said in a statement Tuesday. “For example, in the Madre de Dios Region in Perú, one hectare of forest can hold up to 300 species of trees.”
Due in part to uncertainty in global financial markets, global gold production has increased from approximately 2445 metric tons in 2000 to around 2770 metric tons in 2013. Also, rising demand for gold had led to a dramatic increase in the price of the precious metal, as it has spiked from $250 per ounce in 2000 to $1300 per ounce in 2013, the study authors noted.
This has served as the catalyst for increased mining activity globally, and made it possible for people to mine for gold in regions where it would not have previously been profitable to do so, including at deposits located beneath tropical forests.
However, doing so can lead to extensive forest loss and serious ecological damage caused by the removal of vegetation, the building of roads and railways for easy access, and the establishment of unorganized settlements in these regions. Some of the long-term environmental impacts could include failure of vegetation to regrow, the permanent loss of biovidersity and increases in the amount of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere.
Álvarez-Berríos and her colleagues set out to quantify the impact of gold mines in tropical forest regions by creating a geographical database highlighting the location of mines set up between the years of 2000 and 2013. They then cross-referenced this database with annual land cover maps that indicated the change of forest cover over that same period of time.
The study encompassed the tropical and subtropical forest biome below 1000 meters in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and French Guiana. It revealed that, over the 13-year period, 89 percent of forest loss occurred in just four regions: the Guianan moist forest ecoregion; the Southwest Amazon moist forest ecoregion; the Tapajós-Xingú moist forest ecoregion; and The Magdalena Valley-Urabá region.
While there was little deforestation inside strict protection areas, roughly one-third of the total deforestation took place within a 10 kilometer buffer zone around these areas, making the areas susceptible to the effects of chemical pollutants typically dispersed from mining areas.
“To decrease the amount of deforestation that is occurring as a result of gold mining in the tropical forests, it is important that awareness is raised among gold consumers to understand the environmental and social impacts of buying gold jeweler or investing in gold,” Álvarez-Berríos said. “It is important to also encourage more responsible ways of extracting gold by helping miners to extract in a more efficient way to reduce deeper encroachment into the forests.”
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
It’s pretty well documented that different smells can alter a person’s mood, cognitive function, and physical or psychological wellbeing–ask any woman who’s been dutch-ovened by her spouse.
But new research from Leiden University in the Netherlands has shown that the scent of lavender can something else: increase interpersonal trust.
(Which you’ll need after dutch-ovening your spouse.)
Psychologists Roberta Sellaro and Lorenza Colzato from the university’s Cognitive Psychology Unit and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition and their colleagues recruited 90 healthy adults with a mean age of 20, divided them up into three groups of 30, and had each of them play the Trust Game in one of three different locations.
One-third of the participants played the Trust Game in a lavender-scented room, while another one-third did so in a peppermint-scented room and the final 30 played the game in an unscented room. In each case, one individual (the trustor) was given five euros and was free to decide how much of the money he would give to another (the trustee) in each round of the game.
The trustor would receive extra money, but only if the trustee gave him enough money in return, the researchers explained. The money given to the trustee by the trustor served as an indicator of mutual trust. Those who played the game when exposed to the scent of lavender were found to have given significantly more to their comrades than those exposed to peppermint fragrance.
In fact, as Sellaro, Colzato and their co-authors reported in the January 13 online edition of the journal Frontiers in Psychology, participants in the lavender-scented room transferred a mean of 3.90 euros to the trustees, compared to 3.23 for the peppermint-scented room and 3.20 for the non-scented control room.
The researchers claim that their research is the first to analyze the impact that scent can have on interpersonal trust, and said that they believe that the fragrance of lavender “temporarily induces a more inclusive cognitive-control state that, in turn, influences the extent to which people trust others.”
“Interpersonal trust is an essential element for social co-operation bargaining and negotiation,” Sellaro said Tuesday in a statement. “Our results might have various serious implications for a broad range of situations in which interpersonal trust is an essential element.”
“Smelling the aroma of lavender may help a seller to establish more easily a trusting negotiation to sell a car, or in a grocery store it may induce consumers to spend more money buying products,” she added. “The smell of lavender may also be helpful in sport psychology to enhance trust and build team spirit, for example in the case of team games such as soccer and volleyball.”
The study authors explain that the lack of a similar effect in the peppermint group may be due to the that aroma’s inability to induce the same type of cognitive-control state as lavender, or that trust is affected selectively by a more inclusive cognitive-control state but not a more exclusive one. Future research could examine whether other scents to produce similar reactions.
Endangered Amazonian monkeys more diverse than thought
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Thanks to an extensive research effort by a large international team, endangered monkeys in the Amazon have been found to be much more diverse than previously thought.
The results of the large research campaign culminated in a more comprehensive picture of the evolution of South American monkeys, according to a number of papers published in a special edition of the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.
“This collection of papers is a major step toward understanding the evolutionary history and biogeographic history that have given rise to the species that we see in South American today, and it will play a key role in identifying conservation priorities for species,” said study author Michael Alfaro, a UCLA associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
One of the biggest finds was that a small population of black-headed squirrel monkeys is actually a subspecies of a different species, or possibly its own species. The study team based their conclusion on a genetic analysis that found the monkey branched off from a similar group called Saimiri ustus, about 500,000 years ago and a group called Saimiri boliviensis about 1.3 million years ago.
“We found strong evidence that it’s a distinct, separate species,” said study author Jessica Lynch Alfaro, an anthropologist at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. “It’s its own unique group.”
Lynch Alfaro went on to say the find was particularly important in light of the fact that these monkeys are believed to be under threat from climate change.
“They may lose all of their habitat,” she said. “This species has the smallest, most restricted habitat of any Amazonian primate, and it has been predicted that the habitat may be drastically altered due to changes in weather patterns as a result of global warming.”
Another study published in the journal’s special edition found that to primate groups, small-bodied tamarins and large-bodied tamarins, split geographically and genetically around 9 million years ago, evolved independently and came back together around 5 million years later. The study ultimately concluded that these groups are more distinct than scientists previously thought.
“They are unique and genetically distinct,” Lynch Alfaro said. “Humans are more closely related to chimpanzees than small tamarins are to large tamarins.”
In addition to being genetically distinct, the two primate groups have different behaviors from each other. For example, large tamarins stalk their insect prey, while small tamarins look for bugs under leaves and tree bark.
UCLA researchers who worked on the team noted that the large body of research expands on the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, an early 20th century anthropologist currently being celebrated by the California university.
“We’re following in his footsteps,” Alfaro said. “He’s overshadowed by Darwin, but if there were no Darwin, everyone would be talking about Wallace.”
Testing one of Wallace’s hypotheses directly, the UCLA scientists found that large rivers feeding the Amazon are a source of diversity by compared tissue samples from primates gathered on either side of Brazil’s Rio Negro. They saw they primates on either side of the river are indeed significantly genetically different.
“They’re distinctly different because the river isolated them on either side when it formed,” Lynch Alfaro said.
Bilingual children understand more about human nature
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Learning a second language could do more than help a child travel internationally: It could completely change the way they look at life—according to a new study from Concordia University in Montreal.
As psychology Professor Krista Byers-Heinlein and undergraduate student/co-author Bianca Garcia explain, most young children believe human and animal characteristics are innate, and that traits such as native language and clothing preference are intrinsic, not acquired.
However, their research indicates that many bilingual youngsters are more likely to believe psychological traits are learned, not inherent. Therefore, teaching children a second language while they’re still in preschool could help expand their views about the world around them.
Byers-Heinlein and Garcia tested a total of 48 monolingual, simultaneous bilingual (learned two languages at the same time) and sequential bilingual (learned one language, followed by another) five- and six-year-olds. They found that those who had been exposed to a second language after the age of three were more likely to believe that an individual’s traits arise from experience.
Each of the children were told stories about babies that had been born to English parents, but were adopted by Italian parents, as well as tales of ducks that had been raised by dogs. They were then asked if the fictional children would speak English or Italian when they grew up, and whether or not the ducks raised by dogs would quack or bark, and if they would have feathers or fur.
“We predicted that sequential bilinguals’ own experience of learning language would help them understand that human language is actually learned, but that all children would expect other traits such as animal vocalizations and physical characteristics to be innate,” Byers-Heinlein, who is also a member of the Centre for Research in Human Development, said in a statement about their study.
She said the results were surprising. While sequential bilinguals were able to tell that a child raised by Italian parents would speak Italian, they were also more likely to believe that a duck raised by dogs would bark and run rather than quack and fly. In other words, they believed that, like humans, animals could also learn through experience, and exhibited traits weren’t purely inherent.
“Both monolinguals and second language learners showed some errors in their thinking, but each group made different kinds of mistakes,” said Byers-Heinlein. “Monolinguals were more likely to think that everything is innate, while bilinguals were more likely to think that everything is learned.”
“Children’s systematic errors are really interesting to psychologists, because they help us understand the process of development,” she added. “Our results provide a striking demonstration that everyday experience in one domain – language learning – can alter children’s beliefs about a wide range of domains, reducing children’s essentialist biases.”
The authors said their research could have important sociological implications, because adults who believe characteristics are innate and not learned are more likely to have strongly held prejudices and to endorse stereotypes.
“Our finding that bilingualism reduces essentialist beliefs raises the possibility that early second language education could be used to promote the acceptance of human social and physical diversity,” Byers-Heinlein noted.
This bird protects its eggs with a bacterial secretion
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Think helicopter parents take extreme measures to protect their offspring? Think again.
Researchers from the University of Granada, along with along with colleagues from the Higher Council of Scientific Research (CSIC), have discovered the hoopoe (Upupa epops) coats its eggs with a bacterial secretion. The question was: Why, though?
The study authors concluded that the secretion must provide some type of barrier to prevent microbial pathogens from reaching the embryo in the egg’s interior. So far, female hoophoes are the only species in which this mechanism has been detected, they explained in a statement.
Manuel Martín-Vivaldi, a zoology professor at the university, analyzed the secretions with his team and found that it contained enterococci bacteria that produced small antimicrobial proteins known as bacteriocins. The more enterococci they found in the eggshells, the higher the odds were that the hoophoe offspring would successfully hatch.
Scientists have confirmed that the components of the hoophoe’s uropygial gland are different from other birds. This is largely due to the bacteria present in the gland. The new study has revealed that this type of bird also has a unique feature in its eggs – several small depressions which do not completely penetrate the shell, and whose purpose appears to be the retention of the mother’s bacterial secretion.
“With this experiment, we have been able to establish that if the females can use their secretion, towards the end of the incubation period, those tiny craters are full of a substance saturated with bacteria. If we preclude the use of this secretion, these tiny craters appear empty towards the end of the hatching process,” explained Martín-Vivaldi.
The findings, he added, also indicate that the reproductive strategy of this particular type of bird “had evolved hand in hand with the use of bacteria which may be beneficial for the production of antimicrobial substances, which they cultivate in their gland and then apply upon eggs which are particularly endowed to retain them.”
The researchers are currently attempting to determine the specific composition of the bacteria contained within the uropygial gland as well as which types of antimicrobial compounds synthesize these microbes. Future studies on this topic could help scientists better understand the interaction between animals and beneficial bacteria function, and this could lead to the discovery of new antimicrobial substances that could be used as medicine or to preserve food.
430-million-year-old aquatic scorpion fossil discovered in Canada
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
An astonishingly complete aquatic scorpion fossil was discovered in Ontario this week, and provides evidence that the ability to walk unsupported by water appeared far earlier in the fossil record than previously believed, according to a new study.
Janet Waddington and David Rudkin from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and Jason Dunlop of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany explain that the fossils, which were collected from the 430-million-year-old Eramosa Formation Konservat-Lagerstätte in Ontario, demonstrate that this key prerequisite from living on land was already evolving by this time.
Writing in the journal Biology Letters, the authors explain that the species, which are the oldest known scorpions in North America, exhibits a leg morphology that includes a short tarsus, which is a common feature of more modern scorpions. Because of this adaptation, the creatures likely had the ability to support its weight on a subterminal foot-like appendage, they noted.
Because of the intriguing similarities between the fossilized scorpions and the modern types of the creatures, the authors claim that the creature’s short foot could have been placed flat on the ground. That feature, along with the sturdy attachment of the legs to its body, would have made it possible for the scorpions to support their own weight without the buoyancy of water.
Based on their analysis of the remains, as well as the presence of fossils belonging to other animals that lived only in the sea, Waddington, Rudkin and Dunlop reported that the scorpions were most likely primarily aquatic creatures that only ventured into extremely shallow waters on rare occasions.
The fact that the fossils occur on rock surfaces that show ripples are indicative of brief exposure to air, the museum said, and since the scorpions are preserved in a splayed posture suggest that they present empty molted exoskeletons rather than carcasses of an animal that died.
One explanation is that the scorpions used their leg structure to make brief forays into a temporarily exposed area in order to molt, where they would be safe from predators such as large eurypterids and cephalopods. Afterwards, they returned to deeper water, the museum said.
The fossil scorpions range in size from approximately 29 millimeters to 165 millimeters in length and are representative of several different age categories. All of the specimens originated from the Bruce Peninsula, and found their way to the ROM in several different ways.
For instance, museum officials said that one of the specimens had been found by a young fossil hunter in a quarry spoil, while some were discovered by quarry workers. Others had been found in quarried stone delivered to landscaping projects located far away, they added.
“This extraordinary find contributes to our understanding of how scorpions moved from the sea onto land,” said Waddington, a departmental associate in the ROM’s Department of Natural History. “It is the enthusiasm and generosity of amateur fossil collectors that allows us to study and publish these findings, which are vital to the ROM’s collections and research.”
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Researchers may soon test new drugs and study diseases in functioning human muscles thanks to Duke University, where biomedical engineers have, for the first time, grown contracting human muscles in a laboratory.
The researchers explain in a statement that the lab-grown muscles respond to external stimuli such as electrical pulses, biochemical signals, and pharmaceuticals just like native tissue. The findings of the study have been published in the Tuesday edition of the open-access journal, eLife.
“The beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dish,” explained study author and associate professor of biomedical engineering, Nenad Bursac. “We are working to test drugs’ efficacy and safety without jeopardizing a patient’s health and also to reproduce the functional and biochemical signals of diseases – especially rare ones and those that make taking muscle biopsies difficult.”
Bursac, along with postdoctoral researcher Lauran Madden, started with a small sample of human cells that had already progressed beyond the stem cell stage, but had not yet formed into muscle tissue. They expanded these “myogenic precursors” by more than 1000-fold, and then placed them into supporting 3D scaffolding filled with a nourishing gel.
That gel, the study authors explained, allowed them to form aligned and functioning muscle fibers. The new muscles were then subjected to a series of tests to determine how closely they resemble native tissue inside a human body. The researchers found that they contracted in response to electrical stimuli – something that had never happened in lab-grown muscles before.
Furthermore, they also demonstrated that the signaling pathways allowing nerves to activate the muscles were intact and functional. To determine if it could be used as a proxy for medical tests, Bursac and Madden subjected it to several different drugs, including cholesterol-lowering statins and the performance-enhancing drug clenbuterol.
The effects of the drugs matched those observed in human patients, the researchers said. The statins had a dose-dependent response and caused abnormal fat accumulation at high doses. The clenbuterol displayed a narrow beneficial window for increased contraction. Both effects have been observed in actual patients, and unlike in the muscle tissue of laboratory mice, clenbuterol was found to be capable of harming rodents at specific doses.
“We have a lot of experience making bioartifical muscles from animal cells in the laboratory,” Madden said, “and it still took us a year of adjusting variables like cell and gel density and optimizing the culture matrix and media to make this work with human muscle cells.”
“One of our goals is to use this method to provide personalized medicine to patients,” Bursac added. “We can take a biopsy from each patient, grow many new muscles to use as test samples, and experiment to see which drugs would work best for each person.”
Bursac is reportedly working with clinical researchers to try and correlate drug efficacy in patients with the effects on the lab-grown muscles. The study authors are also trying to use using induced pluripotent stem cells to grow the contracting muscle tissue instead of biopsied cells.
“There are a some diseases, like Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy for example, that make taking muscle biopsies difficult. If we could grow working, testable muscles from induced pluripotent stem cells, we could take one skin or blood sample and never have to bother the patient again,” Bursac said.
A coolant pressure alarm and concerns over a possible ammonia leak on the US arm of the International Space Station (ISS) forced crew members to be evacuated to the Russian segment of the facility, NASA officials reported Tuesday morning.
According to the US space agency, the alarm went off in the US segment at approximately 4am EST, at which time flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston saw an increase in pressure for the station’s water loop for thermal control system B.
They later observed a cabin pressure increase believed to be indicative of an ammonia leak, at which time the crew was instructed to isolate themselves in the Russian portion of the ISS while teams on the ground monitored and evaluated the situation. Non-essential equipment in the US segment were also powered down as a safety precaution during this process.
Despite earlier reports from the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) which indicated that there had been “harmful emissions” detected, The Verge said that NASA has clarified that there is “no hard data” to suggest that there was actually an ammonia leak. The issue, according to NASA officials, is most likely due to “a faulty sensor or computer relay.”
The agency has also reported that all crew members, including two Americans, one Italian and three Russsians, followed normal safety procedures and donned gas masks during the incident. They relocated to the Russsian half of the orbiting laboratory and sealed the US portion behind them. All six crew members are said to be in “excellent shape” at this time.
“Canadian astronaut and former ISS crew member Chris Hadfield tweeted that a leaking coolant system was one of the ‘big three’ emergencies that astronauts train for on the station,” The Verge added. He added that the others were fire and/or smoke, and atmospheric contamination.
The crew members are not expected to return to the US module today, according to Florida Today reports. Instead, it is likely that they will remain in the Russian segment throughout the night, where they have access to as much as a week’s worth of provisions.
“The Expedition 42 crew had been awake for about two hours before the alarm sounded, and were working on unloading the SpaceX Dragon cargo carrier which arrived days ago with more than 2.5 tons of supplies and science experiments,” said ABC News in Australia.
Earlier this week, the ISS crew received much-needed supplies thanks to the arrival of a SpaceX Dragon capsule. Over 5,000 pounds worth of tools, provisions and experiments were loaded onto the spaceship, which had departed from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Friday.
Upon the capsule’s arrival, Expedition 42 Commander and NASA astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore used the space station’s robotic arm to capture the capsule and its more than 5,000 pounds of cargo. Supplies on the ISS were getting somewhat low, according to reports, because of the October launch-pad explosion of a supply ship.
The Dragon capsule was berthed to the space station’s Harmony module at 8:54 am EST, NASA reported on Monday. It is scheduled to remain attached to the ISS for four weeks. The hatch was expected to be opened by the end of the day on Tuesday.
Nanowire-coated fabric keeps you warm and your heater off
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
If you’re looking to save on energy bills this winter, researchers from Stanford University have developed a new type of nanowire-coated fabric designed to keep you warm and your heater on low.
According to Popular Science, this new fabric was specially designed to conserve thermal energy by trapping heat inside a person’s clothing, eliminating the need to heat empty parts of a house. In theory, it could reduce a household heating bill to almost nothing.
Lead scientist Yi Cui of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford told PopSci that the team started their research by looking for a wearable method of keeping infrared radiation in a person’s body. While metal can make clothing reflect heat, Cui pointed out that a person isn’t going to want to dress in an outfit made entirely of metal.
Instead, the researchers developed a coating of easily bendable silver nanowires that can be placed on top of regular clothing. The fabric heats up the body in two ways:
1. The metal coating reflects infrared radiation emitted by a person’s body.
2. The fabric can conducts electricity to further heat/cook the wearer. (We kid.)
“The movement of electricity from an electrical device across the cloth creates Joules heating, or heat generated while crossing a current,” Popular Science said. The cloth is, “breathable enough to allow sweat to pass through it,” so that it remains comfortable. Yet, it’s also inexpensive to use, claims Cui. The amount of silver used in one item of clothing costs roughly $1.
This should save enough energy to power 1,000 light bulbs for 10 hours, adds Cui. The only problem is, the cloth probably won’t be available for several years, as silver nanowire is still undergoing health testing.
For now, the research team, who describes their work in a recent edition of the journal Nano Letters, plans to begin work on similar material that can go over clothing and can help keep a person cool during the hot summer months. If successful, their research could help reduce the amount of energy needed to heat and cool buildings throughout the entire year.
Researchers to analyze depiction of slavery at plantation sites
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
As Martin Luther King Jr. day nears, and people all over the country flock to see the Golden Globe Award-winning motion picture Selma, a professor from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville is examining plantations to get a better perspective on the history of race in the US.
That professor, Derek Alderman, has received a $62,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study how the representation of slavery at tourism sites in the American south is changing. Alderman, head of the university’s geography department, will use his findings to understand the context of the ongoing debate on race and racism within the US.
“Plantations are one of the widely recognized symbols of the South and play an important role in the modern interpretation of Southern history,” he explained in a statement. “The sites have traditionally remained silent about the lives and struggles of the enslaved community. But, recent evidence indicates they are increasingly bringing the struggles front and center.”
Alderman believes that this information has not been adequately analyzed, adding that such information “provides a lens to explore the manner and extent to which Southern plantations are incorporating the history of slavery, the challenges they face in doing justice to that history, and how visitors interpret the information and respond.”
He and his colleagues plan to visit various plantation sites in Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. They will interview plantation owner/operators and docents. They will analyze the content of the guided tours, as well as survey, interview and observe tourists. Their study will be the first to look at multiple stakeholders, plantation sites and management styles.
“Achieving civil rights and racial reconciliation in America requires discussing the central but controversial place that slavery has in the nation’s history,” Alderman said. “Antebellum plantation tourism sites should play a key role in advancing those discussions rather than glossing over or whitewashing the past.”
The findings of the project, which is part of the multi-university Race, Ethnicity, and Social Equity in Tourism (RESET) initiative, will be disseminated through a website, he and colleagues from the University of Southern Mississippi, Texas Tech University, the University of Mary Washington and Louisiana State University explained.
The RESET initiative is seeking greater social responsibility in the representation of African American heritage in tourism, according to the researchers behind this new study. It is a joint project of the Center for Sustainable Tourism at East Carolina University, the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee, and the Department of Political Science, International Development, and International Affairs at the University of Southern Mississippi.
“One of the goals of RESET is to serve as a place for professional collaboration and exchange between scholars who are doing work in the areas of race, ethnicity, and social equity in tourism,” the initiative’s website said. “Establishing this network of like minded scholars will facilitate the holding of conferences, joint projects and publications, and the connection of research professionals with community and industry groups.”
Other projects currently being researched by members of RESET include a profile of African-American travelers, including their motivations for visiting different locations, their trip planning practices and their travel patterns; and an analysis of the historical narratives being presented at Civil Rights heritage tourism sites, as well as how they are interpreted by visitors.
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Best known for building complex machines to explore the far reaches of space, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is developing robots designed to explore something a little closer to home: the insides of a volcano.
According to Popular Science, JPL researchers recently announced that they had begun testing a two-wheeled, one-foot long robot known as VolcanoBot 1 in Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, which is still active. The seven-inch tall unit can transmit information about the currently-empty fissures that had once conducted magma up towards the surface, the website added.
During its initial voyage down into the volcano last May, VolcanoBot 1 reached depths of 82 feet below the surface, but researchers hope that future versions of the machine will be able to travel much further down. Mapping out inactive fissures, they explain, could help scientists learn how magma travels to the surface, as well as how eruptions themselves actually occur.
“We don’t know exactly how volcanoes erupt. We have models but they are all very, very simplified,” Carolyn Parcheta, a NASA postdoctoral fellow based at Pasadena, California-based JPL, said in a statement. “This project aims to help make those models more realistic.”
“In order to eventually understand how to predict eruptions and conduct hazard assessments, we need to understand how the magma is coming out of the ground,” she added. “This is the first time we have been able to measure it directly, from the inside, to centimeter-scale accuracy.”
Parcheta and her colleagues hope that they will be able to map the underground fissures well enough to create a 3D map of the fissure, something that up until now has only been estimated. The team has plans to test a smaller, lighter version known as VolcanoBot 2 in March, and that version will be able to turn its vision center to examine the features around it.
Of course, their work is not without its potential extraterrestrial applications as well. On both Earth and Mars, NASA explains, fissures are the most common physical features through which magma erupts. This is also likely true on the moon, Mercury, and other planetary bodies, though the exact mechanics of volcanic eruption (past and present) in these places remains unknown.
“In the last few years, NASA spacecraft have sent back incredible pictures of caves, fissures and what look like volcanic vents on Mars and the moon,” explained Aaron Parness, a robotics researcher at JPL and Parcheta’s co-advisor. “We don’t have the technology yet to explore them, but they are so tantalizing! With Carolyn, we’re trying to bridge that gap using volcanoes here on Earth for practice. We’re learning about how volcanoes erupt here on Earth, too, and that has a lot of benefits in its own right.”
“Having Carolyn in the lab has been a great opportunity for our robotics team to collaborate with someone focused on the geology,” he added. “Scientists and engineers working together on such a small team is pretty rare, but has generated lots of great ideas because our perspectives on the problems are so different.”
Reduce Fibromyalgia Symptoms with the Powerful Oil of an Emu
Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating
The power of the Emu is seen in many different natural skin products on the market. But pure emu oil will be the best product for you to try as a fibromyalgia sufferer.
Emu oil has properties that will help reduce inflammation, soreness and muscle pain. By using your emu oil on a daily basis you will find yourself better able to get up and participate in your daily living activities.
You will feel an overall reduction in muscle pain and your skin will be more moisturized and vibrant than ever before. Use emu oil on stretch marks, cuts and psoriasis also; because emu oil has great healing properties for your skin.
What is Emu Oil?
The Emu is a bird which natural health products are made from. The use of the layer of fat that is removed from the Emu is seen in cosmetic and health products. Emu oil comes in a variety of colors but is typically off-white. The oil contains up to 70% unsaturated fats and has a large amount of oleic acids and omega-9 fatty acid. Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are also found in emu oil. There are a wide variety of uses for emu oil but fibromyalgia patients have found applying the oil to their muscles helps to relieve aching and soreness.
Reducing Muscle Pain
Fibromyalgia muscle pain is often one of the biggest issues for people and one that they struggle with daily. The sore muscles and stiffness might go away for a short period of time, but often comes back within days. Emu oil can help reduce the feeling of sore muscles and make it easier to participate in daily activities. The more a fibromyalgia patient is able to move and participate in their daily living tasks, the better it is for their muscles. Using emu oil to reduce muscle pain is the perfect solution because emu oil will not interact with other medications and has no side effects.
When to Apply the Oil
Applying emu oil after a shower over your entire body is the perfect way to get your day started. Your skin will be moisturized and your muscles will start off with the healing power of the emu oil. As your day goes on and you feel tightness or pain in any of your muscles, you can add more emu oil to that area. Have a spouse or loved one apply emu oil to your back, feet and neck to help relieve the pain from your muscle aches.
Inflammation
The pain from inflamed tissue throughout your body is what drives your fibromyalgia symptoms. Emu oil can help reduce that inflammation and you can use it daily for this purpose. Even if you are not feeling extreme muscle soreness or pain, you can still apply emu oil to help your body keep the inflammation at a minimal level. Inflammation can happen anywhere in your body, not just your muscles. So to help inflammation in other parts of your body you can take an emu oil supplement from your local health food store. Emu oil taken as a supplement can also help to reduce your cholesterol levels, increase weight loss and fight infections.
Other Uses of Emu Oil
Other ailments that are common in people who have fibromyalgia can also be helped with emu oil. If you have shin splints, carpal tunnel syndrome, sciatica or even gout; you can use emu oil to help relieve your symptoms. Emu oil is rich in fatty acids and nutrients for your skin and the muscular tissue below your skin, try using emu oil for any ailment that is under the surface of your skin or on your skin. Other ailments which can be helped by emu oil include: stretch marks, cuts, burns, surgery scars, reduce redness, cuticle softener and chapped lips. The uses for emu oil for your skin are endless.
Massage and Emu Oil
Some people who have fibromyalgia find that getting a soft massage to increase their circulation is helpful to them. Ask your massage therapist if they have emu oil to use for you or bring some with you for them to try out. Having your emu oil massaged throughout your body will help in two ways; your muscles will be less tight from the massage as well as the emu oil. Plus your skin will be moisturized and feel wonderful long after your massage has ended.
Home use of Emu Oil
You can use emu oil in a variety of ways to treat your fibromyalgia as well as other ailments of your skin and muscles. Try purchasing different forms of emu oil to see which works best for you. You can purchase thicker versions of the oil that looks more like a buttery consistency, you can get actual oil consistency, or you can get the oil in a supplement to take as a pill.
Try a variety of brands of emu oil until you find the quality and consistency that works best for your fibromyalgia symptoms. Use emu oil on other skin conditions like psoriasis, wrinkles, age spots, dandruff and eczema and you will see a reduction in those problems too.
Emu oil is not a new oil on the market; it has been around for many years. In recent years the popularity of emu oil has grown and more people in the main stream market are starting to use it to help with a variety of ailments. You can start with just a small amount of oil and try it on your sore muscles, but you will quickly be using emu oil on your entire body.
The healing properties of emu oil are hard to ignore and you might even decide to start using your emu oil as a supplement to decrease your inflammation or cholesterol levels throughout your body. Discuss using emu oil with your doctor if you have any concerns or questions. Or you can visit with a dermatologist to discuss the benefits of using emu oil on your skin.
Further reading:
Fibromyalgia and Vulvodynia Sufferers Seek Relief with Emu Oil:
John Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Republican Senator and Tea Party poster boy Ted Cruz has been named chair of the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. Along with other science programs, he will be responsible for overseeing NASA, an agency he has not given a lot of love to in the past.
Cruz was highly influential in causing the 16-day government shutdown in 2013, during which time 97 percent of NASA employees were unable to go to work, and interns living in dorms were temporarily evicted from their accommodation. A skeleton staff was kindly enabled to stay on during the shutdown so that astronauts on the International Space Station were not left floating helplessly in space.
Tom Jones, a retired NASA astronaut, told Space.com at the time that that the delay of even a couple of weeks was disastrous to NASA.
“We have all of these vehicles in development like Orion and the Space Launch System [rocket], so that’s going to cost taxpayers big bucks to lose the momentum [and] to pick up the pieces from a stalled program where decisions should be being made every day,” Jones explained.
Space exploration was certainly not the only scientific work affect severely affected by the shutdown. Clinical trials had to be put on hold, and 90 percent of Environmental Protection Agency employees were on furlough.
Also in 2013, Cruz clashed with the Democrats over NASA funding, arguing that while there is a need to “protect the priority that space exploration and manned exploration should have,” that priority should be protected using a much lower budget. At least the Texas senator cannot be accused of favoring NASA because of its importance in his home state.
Perhaps preparing a scapegoat for the stalled progress that he knows is coming, Cruz criticized President Obama for NASA’s setbacks:
“One of the problems with the Obama administration is that it has degraded NASA,” the senator said in a statement, quoted by the Huffington Post. “It has degraded for space exploration, degraded manned exploration because the Obama administration has undervalued that and shifted to funding other priorities. It shifted the funding to global warming pursuits rather than carry out NASA’s core mission.”
Cruz’s phrasing makes it sound as if he thinks Obama has been designating funds to making the world hotter, but presumably his meaning is that the Obama administration has been focussing too much on that unnecessary distraction of climate change, which he told CNN in February is not supported by data and may not even exist.
“Contrary to all the theories that that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened,” Cruz said.
A deficit of concern for NASA and climate change would both be troubling in their own right, but they are not unrelated. Research on climate change is part of NASA’s job, and it recently began five projects to study how the earth’s atmosphere affects global warming.
NASA received a $530 million boost to its 2015 budget in December from Congress, in order to support its Space Launch System rocket and its planetary science program. Cruz has said some of the right words about NASA and science programs in the past, but taken some of the wrong actions. We can now rest easy knowing that climate change was probably not even a thing after all, but it remains to be seen what changes Cruz and the Republican-led Congress have in store for NASA.
New invisibility cloak could help surgeons, drivers
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Attempts to build a Harry Potter-style cloak of invisibility have come and gone, but the inventors of The Rochester Cloak continue to hone their craft, and this week released new video footage of what they are calling the world’s first known 3D continuous multidirectional cloaking device.
The device, which we first reported on back in September, was created by the team of University of Rochester physics professor John Howell and graduate student Joseph Choi and uses ordinary lenses to obscure objects from sight at a variety of different angles. It works by bending light and sending it through four lenses, which can keep objects hidden at multiple points of view.
In the new video, the university explained that the device could be used by surgeons to see through their hands while operating on a patient, or by drivers to help detect cars in their blind spots while behind the wheel. While the unit is called The Rochester Cloak, it actually looks more like the type of equipment you would expect to see in an optometrist’s office.
Choi spoke with MTV News about the device earlier this month, and explained that it was “very simple… it’s a little more than just putting a few magnifying glasses together.” He added that he and Howell were “surprised that people thought this was really cool,” and that they were waiting “for the patent application to come out” before going public with their invention.
In November, the duo published a paper detailing their work in the journal Optics Express, and explained that their technique uses “ray optics, albeit with some edge effects” and requires “no new materials,” utilizes “isotropic off-the-shelf optics” and is able to scale so that it can “easily… cloak arbitrarily large objects” and “is as broadband as the choice of optical material.”
All of those attributes, they wrote, “have been challenges for current cloaking schemes.” Their take on the invisibility cloak is also less complicated and less expensive than other such efforts. In September, the duo said that they used just over $1,000 worth of materials to build their unit, and that they believed that it could be accomplished even less expensively.
Furthermore, kits inspired by Howell and Choi’s work can be ordered online for just $49. Those kits include six cemented doublet achromats 33 millimeters in diameter and a mini optical bench to set they up with. Of course, the kit also comes with instructions, including details on the specific distances to separate each of the lenses and other information relevant to the project.
While the Rochester researchers have previously called their cloaking device an improvement over other efforts, they acknowledged that it is not perfect. Choi said that, since it bends light and sends it though the device’s center, the on-axis region cannot be cloaked or blocked. In short, the cloaked region is essentially limited to a doughnut-shaped region.
Choi told MTV News that he and Howell are currently working on a few new patents for devices that have larger lenses, which could even cloak a larger area than is currently possible. Also, they are looking at the use of plastics in a version of the device, which would further reduce the cost.
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Too late for Christmas, but just in time for any Super Bowl parties that might be in the works, SpaceX’s Dragon supply ship completed delivery of a batch of supplies, experiments and other goods to the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday.
According to the Associated Press, the spacecraft arrived at the orbiting laboratory two days after blasting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Saturday. Upon the capsule’s arrival, Expedition 42 Commander and NASA astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore used the space station’s robotic arm to capture the capsule and its more than 5,000 pounds of cargo.
The six astronauts currently living on the ISS were starting to get a little low on provisions, the wire service explained, because a vehicle that was to transport supplies to the station in October was destroyed in a launch-pad explosions. The SpaceX launch itself had been delayed by about a month due to rocket issues, delaying the delivery of those goods into the new year.
The AP said that Mission Control joked about the delivery not only missing Christmas, but Eastern Orthodox Christmas on January 7 as well. Wilmore, however, said that he and his fellow astronauts were “excited to have it on board,” adding that he was particularly excited to finally have more mustard, as the facility had completely run out of condiments.
The Dragon capsule was berthed to the space station’s Harmony module at 8:54 am EST, NASA reported on Monday, and it is scheduled to remain attached to the ISS for four weeks. The hatch was scheduled to be opened on Tuesday, but the space agency said that it could be sooner.
In addition to the much-needed supplies, the cargo delivery mission included the Cloud Aerosol Transport System (CATS) instrument, which will be mounted to the outside of the station. CATS will use laser sensors to evaluate clouds and particles in Earth’s atmosphere as it travels, looking for clues pertaining to climate change and helping improve weather forecasting quality.
“Clouds are one of the largest uncertainties in predicting climate change,” said Matt McGill, principal investigator and payload developer for CATS at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “For scientists to create more accurate models of Earth’s current and future climate, they’ll have to include more accurate representations of clouds.”
In addition, the spacecraft contains several biological experiments designed to take advantage of the facility’s microgravity environment. One of those projects will grow proteins inside a four inch cube to analyze a suspected cause of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological conditions in people. While the research is preliminary, future studies could build upon its findings.
Saturday’s liftoff was significant for another reason: it marked the first time that SpaceX attempted to land its Falcon 9 booster rocket on a floating barge at sea so that it could be reused by the company in future launches. The rocket successfully made it to the spaceport ship, but landed too hard and was damaged during the remote-controlled procedure, company officials said.
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The next time you call your spouse a “two-faced son-of-a-bitch,” just know that estimation is actually kind of realistic. Even for yourself.
A two-faced fish more than 400 million years old is likely the last common ancestor of all jawed vertebrates–including us–and provides additional evidence that sharks are not primitive creatures, as had long been assumed.
The skull of the creature, which was named Janusiscus after the two-faced Roman god Janus, possesses external features that led experts to believe that it had belonged in osteichthyans, the group that includes both bony fishes and all land-based creatures with backbones.
However, when scientists from Oxford University and Imperial College London used X-ray CT scanning to take a closer look inside the skull, they found that the structure surrounding its brain was actually closer to that of cartilaginous fishes (chondrichthyans) such as sharks and rays.
“This 415 million year-old fossil gives us an intriguing glimpse of the ‘Age of Fishes’, when modern groups of vertebrates were really beginning to take off in an evolutionary sense,” study author Dr. Matt Friedman of Oxford’s Department of Earth Sciences said in a statement. “It tells us that the ancestral jawed vertebrate probably doesn’t fit into our existing categories.”
Dr. Friedman and his colleagues, who have published their findings in the journal Nature, note that chondrichthyans have often been viewed as primitive and treated as proxies for what ancient jawed vertebrates might have looked like. One reason for this is their lack of a bony skeleton.
“The results from our analysis help to turn this view on its head: the earliest jawed vertebrates would have looked somewhat more like bony fishes, at least externally, with large dermal plates covering their skulls,” said first author Sam Giles, also of Oxford University.
“In fact,” he explained, these creatures would have actually had “a mix of what are now viewed as cartilaginous- and bony fish-like features,” and that this discovery supports the idea that both groups “became independently specialized later in their separate evolutionary histories.”
“This mix of features, some reminiscent of bony fishes and others cartilaginous fishes, suggests that humans may have just as many features that you might call ‘primitive’ as sharks,” added Dr. Friedman.
The fossilized skull was originally discovered in 1972 near the Sida River in Siberia, and it is currently in the possession of the Institute of Geology at the Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia. Study author Martin Brazeau of Imperial College London first found the specimen in an online catalogue, and he and his colleagues decided to take a closer look at it.
The study authors used X-ray CT to virtually dissect the fossil. Just like in hospital X-rays, different materials attenuate X-rays to different amounts, and bones appear to be brighter than either skin or muscles. These same principles can be applies to fossils, as fossilized bone and rock attenuate X-rays to different degrees, the researchers explained.
Using this technique, the team was able to construct a 3D virtual model of the fossil, allowing them to examine both its internal and external features in great detail. Trace amounts left behind by networks of nerves and blood vessels could then be compared to sharks, bony fishes and other jawed vertebrate groups.
“Losing your bony skeleton sounds like a pretty extreme adaptation, but with remarkable discoveries from China, Janusiscus strongly suggests that that the ancient ancestors of modern sharks and their kin started out just as ‘bony’ as our own ancestors,” said Dr Friedman.
John Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
People certainly disagree about whether being tickled is funny or just plain awful, and we have all met that person who challenges our whole ethical core with an enticing “I am serious, do not do it.” It appears that science has not entirely agreed on the phenomenon of ticklishness either, though there are some prominent theories.
For instance, being ticklish is an evolutionary tool designed to prepare us for attack. The most ticklish parts of the body are also the most vulnerable: under the chin, around the ribs and stomach, near the groin and under the armpits.
A SciShow video tells us that there are two kinds of ticklishness. One is knismesis, where we get a bit of a shudder if something brushes our skin. If an insect lands on us we do a quick jolt to get rid of it, in the same way that a horse swats it with its tail. This applies more to ticklish feet because there are a lot of nerve-endings there.
The second is more difficult to understand: gargalesis. This is the full on belly laugh and wriggling we get from a harder touch, particularly in those tickling hotspots mentioned before. While knismesis is widespread in mammals, gargalesis only exists in primates. Apes are ticklish in the same spots as we are.
SciShow explains the reason we laugh when tickled is because, despite the confusing mix of fun and pain, it is actually good for us. It teaches us to wriggle and get away from predators–and about which areas to protect. Laughing encourages the tickler to do it more, and in this way our vindictive sibling or playful parent can teach us survival skills. It is the same reason that puppies play fight. If we reacted, instead, with anger, we wouldn’t do it to each other as often, and our life skills would suffer.
While they also believed that gargalesis was an evolutionary mechanism, researchers in Germany took a slightly different view and identified the laughter as displaying submissiveness. Scientists at the University of Tuebingen, the Daily Mail reported, “theorize that parents would have tickled their offspring to train them to react to danger and that the laughter of tickling is an acknowledgement of defeat.” Tuebingen scientists also suggested that ticklish laughter is different to other kinds of laughter in terms of brain activity and social response.
It is interesting that we can’t tickle ourselves. This fits in with the fight/flight evolutionary tool theory. It can also tell us a lot about how our brain distinguishes the self from others, including distinguishing our own touch from that of others. This is something that robots have not been able to achieve yet, but a better understanding of it within ourselves will help with the development of artificial intelligence.
Scientists have gone to extreme and comical lengths to try and make people tickle themselves, from having lucid dreamers tickle each other, using self-tickling devices with time delays, using magnetic brain stimulation and even trying to give people out-of-body or body-swap experiences using a virtual reality device. Most of the experiments failed, but like the poor little brother whose big brother just found out that tickling him is doing him a favor, they learned something along the way.
The study authors identified five of the most common food allergens which cause a reaction in the roughly 10 percent of people who are sensitive to them: peanut, hazelnut, celery, shrimp and fish. They then analyzed data from 436 individuals, each of whom were given small doses of the food they were allergic to. The researchers then monitored their reactions.
“What we wanted was to find a level of allergen which would only produce a reaction in the most sensitive ten percent of people. This sort of data can then be used to apply a consistent level of warning to food products,” said lead investigator Professor Clare Mills.
“What we’d like to see are warnings which tell people with allergies to avoid certain products completely or just apply to those who are most sensitive,” she added. While allergic ingredients used in recipes need to be listed on food labels, the Mills and her colleagues said that in the UK, trace amounts that accidentally find their way into products are not regulated.
They added that precautionary labels that are currently used to warn of trace amounts – “produced in a factory which also handles peanuts,” for example – are applied inconsistently. As a result, allergy sufferers could be taking unnecessary risks, as different people can tolerable different amounts of an allergen than others.
Mills and her colleagues found that between 1.6 and 10.1 milligrams (1/1000 of a gram) of hazelnut, peanut and celery protein produced a reaction in the most sensitive 10 percent of those individuals studies. The amount was higher for fish (27.3 milligrams), and significantly higher with cooked shrimp (2.5 grams). They did not study raw shrimp, however.
According to the Integrated Approaches to Food Allergen and Allergy Management (iFAAM), the number of people who have food allergies is on the rise. Currently, an estimated five to seven percent of infants and one to two percent of adults are at risk, and iFAAM is looking to educate and inform health care workers and the general public throughout Europe about this risk.
“This single study is part of the background to rolling out new warning guidelines across Europe,” Mills added, “and alongside other work being carried out in Manchester and elsewhere we’re developing a strong evidence base to give consumers and industry confidence.”
Experts from the University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland, Hospital Clinico San Carlos in Spain, Charité University Medical Center in Germany, University College Cork in Ireland, University of Athens in Greece, the Institute of Food Research in the UK and other institutions were also involved in the study. Their work was supported by the European Union through the EuroPrevall project and the UK Food Standards Agency.
Scientists have long known that volcanoes can cool the atmosphere by releasing sulfur dioxide during eruptions, the study authors explained. When that gas combines with oxygen in the upper atmosphere, it can cause droplets of sulfuric acid to form and persist for months at a time.
As a result, sunlight is reflected away from the Earth, lowering temperatures both in the lower atmosphere and at the planet’s surface. Previous studies have suggested that eruptions that took place in the early 21st century could explain up to one-third of the recent warming hiatus.
The newly published research, the authors noted, further identifies observational climate signals caused by recent volcanic activity. The new paper complements one published in November that used a combination of ground, air and satellite measurements to demonstrate that several small 21st-century eruptions deflected significantly more solar radiation than was expected.
“This new work shows that the climate signals of late 20th- and early 21st-century volcanic activity can be detected in a variety of different observational data sets,” said Benjamin Santer, lead author of the study and a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The warmest year ever recorded was 1998, and in the years that followed, the trend of rising global surface temperatures observed throughout the 20th century appeared to start leveling off, the researchers explained. This hiatus has received a tremendous amount of attention, they said, even though the full observational record shows instances of varying warming rates.
Scientists had previously suggested that weak solar activity and increased heat uptake by oceans could be at least partially responsible for the recent slowdown in temperature increases. Research published in 2011, however, first suggested that increasing volcanic activity could also play a role, and that it very large eruptions weren’t the only ones contributing to the phenomenon.
The authors of that study found that the intersection of two atmospheric layers, the stratosphere and the troposphere, hold amounts of sulfuric acid often missed by satellite measurements. Since this region of the atmosphere is where whether occurs, that means that data used in simulations that were obtained from space could be missing a significant amount of this volcanic material.
By combining ground-, air- and space-based instruments, the authors of the 2011 study were able to get a clearer look at volcanic aerosols in the lower portion of the atmosphere. They used this information to improve estimates of volcanic aerosols in a simple climate model, and estimated that eruptions may have caused cooling of 0.05 degrees to 0.12 degrees Celsius since 2000.
The more recent study indicates that the signals of these late 20th and early 21st eruptions could be positively identified in atmospheric temperature, moisture and the reflected solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere. One of the primary reasons they were better able to detect these signals was the removal of “climate noise” caused by phenomena such as El Niños and La Niñas.
“The fact that these volcanic signatures are apparent in multiple independently measured climate variables really supports the idea that they are influencing climate in spite of their moderate size,” explained study author Mark Zelinka, also of the Livermore Lab. “If we wish to accurately simulate recent climate change in models, we cannot neglect the ability of these smaller eruptions to reflect sunlight away from Earth.”
When the news broke last week that more than 2,000 MS-DOS computer games had been added to the Internet Archive, we freaked out. The games that we grew up playing–Castle Wolfenstein, Prince of Persia, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?–were once again at our disposal, and FOR FREE.
For a few minutes, we attempted to do work that day, until we also noticed that The Oregon Trail was in the group. Then everything went out the door. We began fantasizing about hunting bears, dying of snake bites, losing your uncle while fording a river! We loved it all growing up.
So, noticing the newswire was slow anyways, we harnessed up our oxen, gathered the only group we’d consider making the journey with–Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, and Bill Nye–and began our 2000-mile trek to bring science to Oregon.
Ok, we went last names instead of first.
Along the way, though, we began wondering just how realistic the game was–even though that was MECC’s entire reasoning behind creating it. And what we found was pretty interesting.
What did they actually buy at Matt’s General Store?
Matt now creates handmade cocktails in Manhattan.
Our first stop: Matt’s general store. We also forgot that the game requires you to choose a career. It felt like a scene in Wedding Crashers: Were we either bankers from Boston, carpenters from Ohio, or farmers from Illinois. Being a banker gave us a ton of money, but we couldn’t shake the importance of carpentry skills on the trail–with broken wagon parts to fix and the need for quality shelving in Oregon. Thus, we went carpenter from Ohio. Above, you can see what we bought; but how does this compare to what emigrants actually bought for the trail–especially food?
An early guidebook suggested that for their four to five month journey, emigrants should set out with 200 pounds of flour, 150 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of coffee, 20 pounds of sugar and 10 pounds of salt. Dried fruit and pickled vegetables were also common. Because flour was such an integral and vital part of the food supply, a huge amount of attention was paid to which flours had what different qualities, and pioneers talked about the nuances of various flours like connoisseurs talk about wine.
For breakfast, trailers usually ate bacon, bread, and coffee, while for dinner it would be more coffee, cold beans and bacon or buffalo meat with boiled rice.
Some ambitious emigrants took cheeses, but the choice between comfort food and long past-its-best cheese became a tough one, with a female pioneer saying of one cheese that, “One mere taste took the skin off the end of my tongue.”
The least popular food was hardtack, sometimes called “sea biscuit” or “pilot bread.” It was a mixture of flour and water, baked for a long time in a slow oven.
Finally, of course, there were supplies for “medicinal purposes,” with whiskey and rum being drunk in enough quantities that the temperance movement had its origins on the trail. Molasses (black treacle) was sometimes added to make the wonderfully-awful sounding “skullvarnish.”
“Most emigrants took five to ten gallons of whiskey to a wagon under the notion that by mixing it with the bad water it becomes in some mysterious way, healthy and purified,” according to one pioneer named Addison Crane.
We shove off: May 1, 1848
Screen right: Daniel "Thunder Thighs" Boone
Surrounded by some of science’s most elite minds, we asked ourselves: What kinds of people actually crossed the country in a wagon?
The trail often carried entire families rather than rugged explorers. Most were seeking a better life or fleeing religious persecution. The trail was pioneered by fur trappers and traders from about 1811 to 1840, and as the numbers using it grew it saw many ranchers, farmers, miners, and businessmen looking to make a new start in the west with their families. The quality of the route improved year on year, with better roads and supply services, and eventually some more “luxury” emigrants made their way across America.
We reach our first river and decide to caulk and float. We watch with bated breath.
Huzzah!
We reach our second river–Big Blue River (May 13, 1848) and caulk it again. Newton pops champagne for the cruise.
Newton's 4th Law: Never order mimosas while floating a f***ing river.
Which got us thinking: Were river crossings really as dangerous as they appeared in the game?
River crossings were a major obstacle for the pioneers and a common cause of death or disaster. In terms of threats that people faced from the landscape, rather than from disease or accidents, river crossings were the most dangerous force of nature that they encountered. Swollen rivers could cause people and animals to fall and drown, or make the animals panic and take wagons over with them. Perhaps the game gave disproportionate attention to river crossings over disease – a hazardous river crossing does make for more exciting game play than a death in bed from measles – but river crossings were a major issue.
Ok, so what was the leading cause of death, then?
There were plenty of threats to people on the trail, but by far the most common cause of death was from disease. Diseases and serious illnesses caused the deaths of nine out of ten pioneers. Most of the main health risks, such cholera, small pox, flu, measles, mumps and tuberculosis, could spread through an entire wagon camp very quickly, killing in a variety of timescales but potentially, in the case of cholera, very rapidly. Healthy people could get sick in the morning and be dead by noon. Other causes of injury or death included attacks from within the communities, extreme weather, fires (including grassfires), gunpowder and weapons accidents, being trampled under stampeding animals or wagon wheels, snakebite and suicide. Attacks by Indians were rarely the cause of demise, being responsible for a few hundred among the 20,000 plus deaths on the trail.
Speaking of snakebites
Don’t worry, he survived
He experienced a swift recovery, though
Goddamnit.
It was at then that we came upon this glimmer of hope.
Aside from not being sure where to begin with this message, we wondered: Did people actually leave grave stones on the trail?
Many versions of the game encouraged players to leave grave stones and conduct funerals so as to maintain morale. In reality, bodies would be very quickly buried somewhere in the middle of the line, so that wagons could run over the graves and pack them down so as to avoid leaving a scent for wild animals. Sometimes, bodies would simply have to be left by the wayside, but if possible they would be buried with a simple marker, rather than a stone. The hurried process of saying goodbye to the dead was very unnerving for many travelers, a decent send-off was encouraged wherever possible, and the game was right to assert that having to deal quickly with the dead and move on would be distressing to the group. Some of the deceased may have been lucky enough to get a stony tombstone as made famous by the game, but big lumps of rock were not a good use of space for most pioneers.
We continued on unscathed, hunting game to maintain our food rations.
We actually forgot how difficult hunting was in this game. Especially this version. We also forgot that you could only carry back 100 pounds of meat to the wagon.
But how realistic was this?
The game involves a lot of hunting, and while the choice of game was correct for the geography, the reality for most pioneers when it came to meat was opening yet another packet of bacon.
We continued on unscathed, reaching the 3/4 mark
Then all hell broke loose
HOW DOES HE KEEP DOING THIS?!
Well, great. At least he can ride in the wagon.
Right?
The wagons were often completely full with supplies, so most people walked beside them. Even if there was room inside, most wagons were extremely uncomfortable to ride in because they lacked any kind of springs. Most were farm wagons made of hardwood and covered with canvas, but later in the trail’s history, richer people would have fancier wagons, some even including two stories and facilities such as stoves.
Surely this is it.
The final leg: Floating the Columbia River
We had the choice of taking the toll road or floating the river, but seeing as Einstein had one good leg and Hawking was armless, exhausted, and measly-ridden, we figured floating peacefully down a river was better.
It turned out to be pretty easy–dodging rocks that could ruin us–and we started feeling confident. We were reaching for a sip of coffee when we slipped and smashed into a rock.
NO BILL NO!! WE’LL NEVER MOVE ON!!
…
*SPACE BAR*
*SPACE BAR*
*SPACE BAR* AKA CONCLUSION
In true Stephen Hawking fashion, throw everything in the world at him (4 broken arms, a snakebite, measles, exhaustion, progressive neurodegenerative disease), and the man survives. He is, as best as we can put it, the Beyonce of the science world.
We’re also quite pleased Einstein survived. Who wouldn’t want this in the West?
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Researchers from the Medical University of Vienna have identified the mechanisms used by the spinal cord to trigger activity in leg muscles, marking the first time that the spinal cord activation patterns responsible for walking have been successfully decoded.
Previous research has demonstrated that this activity can be triggered in the leg muscles, even in patients suffering complete spinal paralysis, through the use of an implanted stimulator. Now, the new study identifies the mechanisms used by the spinal cord to control this activity, which still work even if the neural pathways from the brain are damaged due to an injury to the spinal cord.
Simon Danner of the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at the Medical University of Vienna (MedUni Vienna) and an international team of colleagues explain in the journal Brain that paraplegics still have neural connections (also known as locomotion centers) below the site of the injury and these can trigger rhythmic movements in the legs.
“Using statistical methods, we were able to identify a small number of basic patterns that underlie muscle activities in the legs and control periodic activation or deactivation of muscles to produce cyclical movements, such as those associated with walking,” Danner said in a statement. “Just like a set of building blocks, the neural network in the spinal cord is able to combine these basic patterns flexibly to suit the motor requirement.”
While the brain or brain stem serves at the command center of the body, complex motor patterns are actually generated by those neural networks in the spine in most vertebrates. One example of this phenomenon can be found in chickens that continue to running around, even after their heads have been cut off, the study authors explained. While the brain’s control has been lost, the spinal cord keeps sending out motor signals which are translated into movements of its wings and legs.
“These new findings relating to the basic patterns for triggering and coordinating muscle movements in the legs should also help in developing new approaches to rehabilitation aimed at utilizing those neural networks that are still functional following an accident and the resulting paralysis by stimulating them electrically,” the university said. “This opens the way to new therapeutic options for helping paraplegics to at least partially regain lost rhythmic movements.”
The specific method through which the neural networks need to be stimulated varies by patient and is based upon both his or her injury profile. This will be the topic of future research, Danner and his colleagues said. To assist with this they have developed a new, non-invasive method of stimulating the spinal cord that involves attaching electrodes to the surface of the skin.
“This method allows easy access to the neural connections in the spinal cord below a spinal injury and can therefore be offered to those suffering from paraplegia without exposing them to any particular medical risks or stresses,” said senior author Karen Minassian.
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Photonic booms could provide new insights about cosmos
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Sweeping a laser pointer across the surface of the moon or a passing asteroid can create spots that actually move faster than light, and doing so could reveal previously unknown information about those objects, according to a new study.
These flashes, named because they are directly comparable to sonic booms, could reveal three-dimensional information about the scattering object that was previously unknown. Photonic booms may be detectable on the moon or asteroids, as well as on fast-moving shadows that cast dust clouds near variable stars and on objects illuminated by a pulsar’s rapidly rotating beam.
Nemiroff said that this unusual, theoretical phenomenon could he put to a practical use in space, and that if it can be detected, it could provide unique information to observers. For example, a laser beam could be swept across the surface of an asteroid thousands of time per second. Those flashes could be recorded with a high-speed camera and reveal an asteroid’s surface features.
“The concept, although not proven in practice, is quite intriguing,” said Rosanne Di Stefano, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Nemiroff’s study is scheduled to appear in the journal PASA – Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
These photonic booms could also be visible much farther out in the universe, Nemiroff noted. For instance, shadows that are cast by clouds moving between the bright star “R Mon,” which is located in Hubble’s Variable Nebula in the constellation of Monoceros, move so fast that they are capable of creating photonic booms which remain visible for a period of days or even weeks.
The physics behind the photonic boom are linked to the faster-than-light sweep speeds of the illuminating spots and cast shadows, the MTU professor explained. A flash can be seen by an observed when the speed of the scattered spot towards that individual drops from above the speed of light to below it.
This can only happen because the spots contain no mass, meaning that they are capable of moving faster than light and decelerating past the speed of light without violating Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
The specifics of this effect depend upon the interaction that takes place during the time when the light beam travels through the depths of the object. As a result, measuring photonic booms can provide researchers with data on the depth of the scatterer, provided it is not just a flat object. In those cases, no photonic booms would occur.
“Photonic booms happen around us quite frequently – but they are always too brief to notice,” said Nemiroff. “Out in the cosmos they last long enough to notice – but nobody has thought to look for them!”
He added that the light flash from a photonic boom is far different from well-known Cherenkov radiation, which light emitted when a charged object moves faster than the speed of light inside of transparent matter.
Anonymous takes down jihadist website in Charlie Hebdo retaliation
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Just days after “declaring war” on al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other terror groups in retaliation for the attacks on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, hackers claiming to be affiliated with the Anonymous collective have reportedly taken down a jihadist website.
According to CNN, the French jihadist site ansar-alhaqq.net was re-directed to take visitors to the search engine Duck Duck Go. Hackers using the @OpCharlieHebdo Twitter handle claimed responsibility for the attacks, and Anonymous has also released dozens of social media accounts reportedly belonging to jihadists on the website Pastebin.
The attacks come after the hacking group posted a YouTube video in which they said that they would track down and target websites and social media accounts linked to terrorists, the website added. They also promised to avenge the deaths of last week’s terror attacks in France.
BBC News reported on Friday that the video was uploaded to the Anonymous YouTube account in Belgium, and that the short film featured a masked and hooded figure that spoke in French and with a distorted voice. In it, the person said, “We are declaring war against you, the terrorists.”
A total of 12 individuals, including the editor of the magazine and eight journalists, were killed in the attacks last Wednesday. Two days later, two brothers believed to have been responsible for the shooting were killed in an assault at a warehouse located north of Paris.
A hostage held by those two brothers was freed and was not harmed, but four hostages were killed at another hostage situation at a Jewish supermarket in eastern Paris at the same time, the British news organization added. A fifth person, identified as the captor, was also killed.
The three hostage-takers were said to be working together to some degree, and police are still on the lookout for a fourth individual – a 26-year-old woman identified as Hayat Boumeddiene – in connection with the attack. Media reports indicate that Boumeddiene has likely fled to Syria.
Now Anonymous has gotten involved, and according to The Telegraph, members of the group posted a Pastebin entitled “a message to the enemies of freedom of expression.” In the message, they offered condolences to “the families of the victims of this cowardly and despicable act” and said that it was their “duty” to respond to an “inhuman assault” against “freedom of expression.”
However, as BBC News pointed out, some critics believe that the attacks may do harm than good, since intelligence agencies often used online activity to monitor the activity of such groups. Forcing them offline could cause jihadists to use alternate forms of communication that cannot be so easily monitored by security officials.
“The attack on Charlie Hebdo has prompted an outpouring of solidarity, sparking some news organizations to republish the magazine’s most controversial cartoons – including of the Prophet Mohammed,” CNN’s David Goldman and Mark Thompson said.
On Sunday, millions of men and women, as well as more than 40 leaders from all over the world, marched in an anti-terrorism rally in Paris. The French Mission to the United Nations called the gathering was the largest in the country’s history.
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Ritual circumcision, a rite practiced by many cultures and religions, could increase the odds that boys will develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD) prior to the age of 10, claims new research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Undergoing the ritual, in which the foreskin or prepuce of the male penis is surgically removed, especially increased risk for infantile autism before the age of five, according to the results of a cohort study involving over 340,000 boys in Denmark from 1994 through 2013.
All of the subjects were born between 1994 and 2003 and followed through the age of nine, and during the course of the study, nearly 5,000 cases of ASD were diagnosed. The study discovered that, regardless of their cultural background, circumcised boys could be at greater risk of developing the condition.
“Our investigation was prompted by the combination of recent animal findings linking a single painful injury to lifelong deficits in stress response and a study showing a strong, positive correlation between a country’s neonatal male circumcision rate and its prevalence of ASD in boys,” lead investigator Morten Frisch, a professor in the Department of Epidemiology Research at Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen, explained in a statement.
Frisch, who is also affiliated with the Center for Sexology Research at Aalborg University, and co-author Jacob Simonsen also discovered that circumcision was linked to an increased risk of hyperactivity disorder among circumcised boys in non-Muslim families.
While these days, it is considered unacceptable medical practice to perform a circumcision without proper pain relief, none of the most common interventions used to reduce such pain is capable of completely eliminating it, the study authors said. Some boys, they add, will endure extremely painful circumcisions – especially those who are very young.
Painful experiences in neonates has previously been linked to long-term changes in pain perception in animal and human studies, the researchers explained. This characteristic is also frequently encountered in children who have been diagnosed with ASD.
“Possible mechanisms linking early life pain and stress to an increased risk of neurodevelopmental, behavioral or psychological problems in later life remain incompletely conceptualized,” Frisch said.
“Given the widespread practice of non-therapeutic circumcision in infancy and childhood around the world, our findings should prompt other researchers to examine the possibility that circumcision trauma in infancy or early childhood might carry an increased risk of serious neurodevelopmental and psychological consequences,” he added.
Some experts are urging caution with the findings, according to the Daily Mail.
Professor Jeremy Turk, an adolescent psychiatrist at Southwark Child & Adolescent Mental Health Neurodevelopmental Service, told the newspaper that while the findings of the study were “interesting,” they needed to be “considered carefully.”
“This is not a causal study, but instead compares data sets and looks for correlations. While this is a valid way of doing a study, it means that we must be careful about any implications,” he said. “For example, many cases of autism are missed until children are older and as there are relatively few cases of autism this could easily skew the data.”
“Furthermore, there are many potentially confounding variables which could explain raised ASD rates, which the authors do not explore or account for,” Turk continued. “Finally, I have some issues with the premise in that their speculations regarding early pain as a cause of autism are, to say the least, highly speculative.”
Dr Rosa Hoekstra, a lecturer in psychology at the Open University, agreed, calling the study “extremely speculative” and telling the Daily Mail that it “takes a registered autism diagnosis at face value, without considering cultural or social factors affecting the likelihood of an (early) autism diagnosis. Even in a high income country like Denmark not all children with autism are detected and given a suitable autism diagnosis at an early age.”
—–
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Strange paralysis illness gripping U.S. children
Written By: Eric Hopton
Christopher Pilny
Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
In August 2014, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), along with its partner organizations, began investigating reports of children across the U.S. falling sick with a mysterious illness. These children had developed sudden onsets of weakness in one or more of their arms or legs. Subsequent MRI scans revealed inflammation of the “gray matter” nerve cells in the spinal cord. The CDC is now referring to this as “acute flaccid myelitis”.
In its latest update on the situation, the CDC reported that, between August 2, 2014 and January 5, 2015, it had verified reports of 103 children in 34 states who developed acute flaccid myelitis (AFM).
The CDC is collaborating with its partners across the nation build up a picture of the outbreak and to identify the risk factors and possible causes of this condition. Testing of several types of specimens for various pathogens that can result in this syndrome is ongoing. So far, we know that:
• The median age of the children was about 7 years.
• Almost all of them were hospitalized; some were put on breathing machines.
• Most patients had fever and/or respiratory illness before onset of neurologic symptoms.
• About two thirds of the children who have been observed (median 19 days) after their illness reported some improvement in symptoms, while about one third showed no improvement. Only one of the children has fully recovered.
On January 9, the CDC issued Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) containing a detailed analysis of cases confirmed through November 13, 2014.
At this time, we still don’t know the specific causes of this illness and investigations continue. However, we do know that the cases identified so far are most similar to illnesses caused by viruses, including:
• Enteroviruses (polio and non-polio)
• Edenovirus
• West Nile virus and similar viruses
• Herpes viruses
One line of enquiry that the CDC is pursuing is a potential link to a 2014 US outbreak of severe respiratory illness caused by the enterovirus D68 (EV-D68). There is at this time no firm connection between the two outbreaks and the CDC said “We are aware of only two published reports of children with neurologic illnesses confirmed as EV-D68 infection from cerebrospinal fluid testing”. Enteroviruses rarely cause encephalitis and myelitis. In general, they cause mild illness, and sometimes aseptic meningitis.
It is not uncommon for children to develop neurologic illness with limb weakness where the cause remains unidentified, though we do know that these illnesses can result from, among other causes, viral infections, environmental toxins, and genetic disorders, and Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurologic disorder caused by an abnormal immune response that attacks the body’s nerves.
The CDC is actively investigating the outbreak and taking a number of measures including:
• requesting that healthcare professionals be vigilant for and report cases of acute flaccid myelitis to CDC through their state or local health department
• verifying reports of cases of acute flaccid myelitis using our case definition
• working with healthcare professionals and state and local health departments to investigate and better understand the cases of acute flaccid myelitis, including potential causes and how often the illness occurs
• testing specimens, including stool, respiratory and cerebrospinal fluid, from the children with acute flaccid myelitis
• providing information to healthcare professionals, policymakers, general public, and partners in various formats, such as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, health alerts, websites, social media, and presentations
CDC is also exploring the potential association of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) with enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) and other risk factors for AFM. This investigation includes planning a potential case control study as well as testing specimens from AFM cases for a wide range of viruses that may be associated with this clinical presentation, and testing to possibly detect previously unrecognized pathogens.
The following information has been provided for parents:
“If your child appears to have a sudden onset of weakness in arms or legs, parents should contact a healthcare provider to have their child assessed for possible neurologic illness.
Being up to date on all recommended vaccinations is the best way to protect yourself and your family from a number of diseases that can cause severe illness and death, including polio, measles, whooping cough, and acute respiratory illnesses such as influenza.
You can help protect yourselves from infections in general by
• Washing your hands often with soap and water
• Avoiding close contact with sick people
• Disinfecting frequently touched surfaces
You can protect yourself from mosquito-borne viruses, such as West Nile virus, by using mosquito repellent, and staying indoors at dusk and dawn, which is the prime period that mosquitoes bite.”
There are so many alternative therapies out there for people who are dealing with fibromyalgia. Because of that, it’s interesting to check out what some people are doing in order to try and cope with the pain that often comes with this disorder.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at a very unique, all natural fibromyalgia treatment known as flower essences. What are these flower essences? What ones actually help people who are fending off fibromyalgia symptoms? And do they work?
What is the Concept Behind Flower Essences?
If you know anything about holistic medicine, then you likely know that a lot of it revolves around what is going on in and around your body. The energy that your body has is pretty significant, and these sorts of treatments work around the idea that positive energy and negative energy are constantly warring with one another. Negative energy is what causes us to feel pain and suffering, and it may be part of the reason that we are dealing with fibromyalgia.
That being said, the concept behind flower essences is that they bring positive energy to the person that is coping with pain. The positive energy helps to cleanse the negative energy, which helps to reduce the pain that a person is in. Even though it may not totally eliminate the pain, it may end up giving you enough relief so that you can cope with it better.
Usually, you take flower essences while drinking water or you can just put a few drops on your tongue, and then it goes into your system. You get the scent of the flowers as you take it, and you also get it infused into your blood stream and such, giving you the proper results that you’re seeking.
The flower essences can vary. There are literally hundreds of them that are used in this type of treatment, and you will notice that all of them do something different for a person. They aren’t only from flowers, either – you will notice that some are from the flowers of fruits and vegetables, which come up before the fruit or veggie has developed fully. It’s quite interesting to see how the whole process works, and what the different essences do, and you can tell that the people do practice these types of therapy have put a lot of time and effort into their craft.
What Can Flower Essences Do for those who have Fibro?
So what can these flower essences do for people who are fending off fibromyalgia symptoms? It, obviously, differs with the types of flower essences that you are dealing with, but there are definitely more than a few that will directly deal with the issues that many people with fibromyalgia suffer from. Here are just a few of the ways that flower essences can reduce or eliminate particular symptoms that are associated with fibromyalgia.
Mental health issues
Red chestnut flower essence, olive essence, mimulus, cherry plum, gentian, and aspen are all known for helping a person to be able to deal with their mental health issues more readily. As you likely know, mental health is a big part of what happens with fibromyalgia, and you will need to do some things in order to keep your mental health in a good state. These flower essences help to reduce anxiety, they help to give you strength so that you can face certain health problems, they reduce the frequency and severity of anxiety and panic attacks, and they can also help to relieve some of the symptoms of depression and mood disorders that sometimes coincide with fibromyalgia symptoms.
Health and Balance
Balance is a really big part of our lives, whether we have fibromyalgia or not. Rock rose is an essence that is often used to help the body get back into balance, thus allowing you to feel a bit more in control and giving you the ability to see through fibro fog and other issues that can occur because of the fibromyalgia pain and other symptoms that you are coping with. Other flower essences can also help with mind and body balance as well.
Strength and Energy
With fibromyalgia, we are often exhausted and have a hard time getting motivated to do things. Sometimes, we’re in so much pain that moving around is difficult. With the help of a few flower essences, this can be greatly reduced and you can find some relief so that you can get through your day more easily. These include olive essence, mimulus, and centuary essences. Your strength is important to keep up, and these essences can play a significant role in helping you to do so.
Does it Work?
This is a good question, because many of us don’t want to invest time and money into something if it’s not actually going to work. And the answer to this question is, sometimes. For some people, it works excellently. They start to see a lot of improvement in their symptoms and they feel like they are more in control of their life and the pain that they are dealing with on a daily basis. They are generally more positive and are able to deal with mental health issues a little more effectively. Some people, it just doesn’t work for. But that’s how most treatments are, so it’s really not a surprise that it’s the same way with the flower essences.
It’s definitely something for those of us who want to try something natural and new as part of our treatment program. The good news is, it’s natural, so it’s not something that you have to be especially careful with unless you have a sensitivity to certain scents and tastes (which is a problem that sometimes happens with fibromyalgia, so it’s important to be aware of it). Consult with your doctor before adding anything to your treatment plan, but if nothing else, it will bring a little more joy and comfort into your life.
Why fibromyalgia and yeast infections seem to always go together
Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating
Many women who suffer from fibromyalgia and yeast infections can’t decide if the medication for one is causing the other, or if the other is a natural precursor to a flareup.
It very well could be a case of both. As we discover more and more about fibromyalgia, and learn more about managing yeast infections – it is becoming apparent that the treatment for either one can help prevent occurrence of the other.
What is fibromyalgia?
Fibromyalgia is a chronic physical condition that has a cluster of symptoms, and it can lead to psychological distress too. Many people who suffer from it experience pain in the major joints – including the neck, spine and hips, pain when the areas are pressed, stiffness in the morning, sleep disturbances, brain fog and confusion, depression, and recurrent yeast infection.
Who is at risk?
Fibromyalgia can develop in anyone, man or woman, 18 years of age and older. There are also instances when children have developed the disease too. It is not known what causes fibromyalgia, but there does appear to be a connection between having someone in your immediate family who has it, suffering severe physical trauma – such as a car accident, or major illness episodes that suppress the immune system.
Men and women can both get yeast infections in equal proportions. They are generally treated by introducing elements to suppress the yeast growth while allowing the healthy bacteria to grow again. Many probiotic supplements are aimed at promoting the healthy growth of bacteria in the intestine that helps to prevent yeast infections which are much more common in the digestive tract than in the reproductive organs too.
Does one cause the other, or is a yeast infection a symptom?
Yeast infections are caused by an imbalance between healthy bacteria in the digestive and reproductive system and yeast. Fibromyalgia has no known specific cause, but is considered to be a disorder of the immune system – which is why it has such an array of symptoms in its clusters. Not everyone who has continuous o recurring yeast infections will have fibromyalgia.
Almost all people with fibromyalgia will have yeast infections at some time. It is thought the yeast infections may be a symptom of fibromyalgia as it is a result of an imbalance in how the immune system is working. Yeast infections can also be a side effect of some of the medications used to treat fibromyalgia too.
How to manage treatment of fibromyalgia while preventing yeast infections?
Part of the standard treatment for fibromyalgia is medication for pain and inflammation. Unfortunately, some of this medication can cause yeast infections. If you are on an antibiotic for your fibro, then it will kill healthy bacteria too. That will allow yeast to overgrow in the body. The same is true if you are on a medication to control the IBS that is sometimes part of the cluster of symptoms for fibromyalgia, it can increase the amount of yeast in the body as well.
What if I am not on antibiotics?
If you aren’t on a course of antibiotics for your fibromyalgia, and you still have recurring or prevalent yeast infection then you have to look for other aggravating causes. Fibromyalgia is pervasive. It can be what is disrupting the balance in your body and leading to an increased susceptibility to infections. The best way to handle this is to look at your diet and exercise habits.
Diet and lifestyle are the key
With both fibromyalgia and yeast infections diet and exercise play key roles in controlling flareups and reducing the impact of symptoms on your life. Getting into new habits with the way you eat and how you move isn’t easy when you are suffering inflammation and infection. You should approach it in stages.
First get the pain and infection under control enough to allow you to begin making changes. Once you start making the changes you will find that your pain and other related symptoms will become better too. The key to managing fibromyalgia is to use the treatments and prevention methods in tandem. There isn’t any known cure, but there is a cluster of methods that used together can return you to a much fuller enjoyment of life.
Watch the additives
Here is a surprise for you, eating well isn’t as simple as making sure you are eating a balanced diet, you have to really watch what is in your food. While we all know to avoid MSG, sugars and nitrates; now we know that there is a connection between fibromyalgia and food additives too.
These same food additives can also aggravate yeast infections by disrupting the balance between yeast in the body and healthy bacteria. You should use caution when trying natural supplements that promise to treat yeast and make sure your general doctor and alternative treatment doctor are together on what each is prescribing to avoid any interactions.
Be honest with your doctor so they know what to consider when prescribing
Yeast infections are something we still believe only happen to women “down there,” and we don’t often mention them to our general physicians. Yeast is present throughout the body and men can have a yeast infection too. If you are really seeking to gain relief from your fibromyalgia and yeast infections, you need to get comfortable talking honestly about all of your symptoms with your doctor. If, for some reason, you feel like that is not a conversation you can have – you need to get a new doctor you are comfortable being open with about your health issues.
John Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Since the human race became aware that some cancers are caused by elements of lifestyle, there has been an understandably obsessive attempt to pinpoint which behaviors cause which cancers. In some cases this has been extremely useful, while other time we’ve found ourselves being told to do or not do the same thing intermittently until we begin to wonder if the powers that be actually have a clue what’s going on at all.
Colon cancer is high on the list of fatal cancers, and it is more prevalent in the West than in other parts of the world. A reasonable assumption is that it’s due to dietary difference. But another, more odd theory posits it’s our use of sitting toilets, as opposed to the squatting method preferred in developing countries. (*Don’t read over breakfast warning*): The suggestion is that sitting on Western, throne-style toilets leaves the colon restricted, causing some fecal matter to remain lodged inside, the toxins from which can increase the risk of cancer over time.
The simple, hole-in-the-floor squatting method used in countries with fewer luxury toilets (and also in developed countries such as Korea and Japan, although western style toilets are becoming more popular) is deemed to be more natural, and to work with the “design” of the body to allow full evacuation.
How realistic is the link between sitting toilets and colon cancer, though? The site toilet-related-ailments.com argues passionately that sitting as opposed to squatting toilets are responsible for high rates of colon cancer in America. They quote Science News from 2003 as saying: “Each year, about 150,000 people are diagnosed with colon cancer in the United States alone. Although the disease is the fourth-leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, few people living in developing nations contract the illness.” They then tell us that “by choosing to squat for waste elimination, you need not fear this disease.”
Having taken us through a long and graphic lesson about how our excretory system works, toilet-related-ailments.com finally suggests to us a product which can help us to use our existing toilet like a squat toilet. There is also a banner at the top of the site which we can click to get “the best toilet converter in the world today!” The people at this site may have been so convinced about the link between colon cancer and sitting toilets that they found a product to deal with it, or the chicken may have come before the egg.
In late 2014, WebMD reported that colon cancer rates are falling for the over-50 population and rising for younger people. Has anyone noticed people of a certain generation turning to squat toilets, whilst youngsters still stick to those trendy sitting toilets? Dr. Jules Garbus, an attending colorectal surgeon at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, NY, told WebMD that although the reasons for increased colon cancer in younger people are unclear, “Dietary and lifestyle factors in this age population need to be carefully examined.” Diets and other lifestyle patterns such as drinking certainly change between generations. The type of toilet we use does not.
The issue has been covered in the mainstream press. The Daily Mail asked if a modified toilet could make us healthier, but their main source was the product designer himself. Slate Magazine’s Daniel Lametti says that “Modern-day squat evangelists make money off the claim that a ‘more natural’ posture wards off all sorts of health problems, from Crohn’s disease to colon cancer,” but admits that “there’s now some empirical evidence for the claim that defecation posture affects your body.”
Lametti made reference to the time in 1978 when President Carter had to take a day off from work with a severe case of hemorrhoids. A few weeks later, Time Magazine asked a proctologist named Michael Freilich to explain the president’s ailment. “We were not meant to sit on toilets,” he said, “we were meant to squat in the field.”
But even if significant, to what extent can that effect on the body by linked to colon cancer? One reliable source is a study published on the US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health and the National Center for Biotechnology Information in 2012. The investigative starting point was: “The sitting position, rather than squatting, during defecation has been hypothesized to be a risk factor for colorectal cancer.” The conclusion? The study “did not support an appreciable role for using sitting toilets as risk factors for CRC (colorectal cancer).” The research says that: “There is indeed scientific evidence that squatting results in faster and more complete defecation. However, in our study, squatting was not associated with a lower risk of CRC.”
Related studies on the site suggested a decreased risk of colorectal cancer associated with coffee consumption, a decreased risk of distal colorectal cancer associated with rice consumption, and a decreased risk due to a high intake of fish, particularly of distal colon cancer. It was also found that “women who have ever used oral contraceptives are at lower risk of colon and rectal cancer.”
It appears that there are plenty of lifestyle and behavioral factors involved in colon cancer risk, but the extent to which our style of toilet is one of them is, at best, uncertain.
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Orangutan granted human-like rights by Argentine court
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
An orangutan held in an Argentine zoo is a “non-human person” who has been unlawfully deprived of her freedom, ruled an appeals court in that country in December.
As a result of the historic ruling, the 29-year-old female became the first animal other than a Homo sapiens to be legally recognized has having the rights to life, liberty and freedom from harm, according to a Scientific American article published on Friday.
The ruling, which was handed down on by a high-level Argentine criminal appeals court on December 18, declared that the ape has been unlawfully deprived of its freedom. The orangutan was ordered freed from the Buenos Aires Zoo.
It could also lead to future legal challenges to free other animals living in captivity, particularly 17 chimpanzees living in zoos throughout Argentina, the website noted. The case dates back to November, when a nongovernmental organization first filed for her habeas corpus.
According to Reuters, the organization representing the orangutan, the Association of Officials and Lawyers for Animal Rights (AFADA), argued that the ape had sufficient cognitive function and should not be treated like an object. The court agreed, and in a decision that could open the door for additional lawsuits, declared that it had the same rights as a “non-human person.”
“This opens the way not only for other Great Apes, but also for other sentient beings which are unfairly and arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in zoos, circuses, water parks and scientific laboratories,” AFADA lawyer Paul Buompadre was quoted as saying by the daily La Nacion newspaper, according to Reuters.
“Considering that they are very close to human primates, it is an absurdity that they are still in captivity in prison,” primatologist Aldo Giúdice of the University of Buenos Aires told Scientific American. “Seeing them in zoos today recalls human exhibits from other regions of the world in the World’s Fairs in Paris in the 19th century.”
“Studies such as those by Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall and other scientists helped to position the great apes as people,” Giúdice added. “Scientific research has shown that they are sentient beings with reason, self-consciousness and individuality. We cannot be accomplices and let them suffer in prison.”
Another hearing will be held soon to determine where the orangutan named Sandra should live out the rest of her days, according to UPI reports. Sandra has lived at the Buenos Aires Zoo, and will most likely wind up at an animal sanctuary, as it unlikely that she would be able to live in the wild since she was raised in captivity.
The Argentine court ruling is the first legal victory of its kind for animal rights activists who have pursued human-like rights for the creatures for decades. Activists and lawyers affiliated with the Nonhuman Rights Project have filed several such appeals in New York in recent years, but their attempts to grant a chimp named Kiko habeus corpus have proven unsuccessful.
“Judges in Kiko’s case says the right of habeus corpus does not apply when the distinction is not confinement versus freedom, but one form of confinement versus another,” the UPI said. “Lawyers working on behalf of Kiko say such logic ignores a long legal history of employing habeus corpus to transferring custody of child slaves or indentured servants from abusive owners to lawful guardians.”
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
While tracking a Nigerian poaching ship in the South Indian Ocean in late December, members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) captured what is being called the first video footage of rare Ecotype D Orcas ever recorded.
According to Scientific American, the Australian conservationists discovered a pod of 13 Type D orcas while passing between the Crozet and Kerguelen archipelagos. The creatures are said to be so rare that they’ve only ever been seen on 13 recorded occasions, the website added.
The encounter was photographed and filmed by the crew of the SSS Bob Barker, and images of the encounter were sent to Marine Ecologist and (Antarctic) Orca expert Robert L. Pitman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Southwest Fisheries Science Center for review, the conservation society said in a statement Monday.
”The crew watched in awe as the 13 killer whales, including a small juvenile and a large male, used the six-meter swell to surf across the bow,” said chief engineer Erwin Vermeulen, who was one of the crewmembers that took pictures of the encounter. “For almost an hour the surf-show continued and was accompanied by bow riding, tail-slaps and breaches.”
After receiving the images, Pitman confirmed that it was definitely a Type D orca sighting, adding that he did not believe that they creatures – which were first identified when a pod was found stranded on a beach in New Zealand in 1955 – had ever been filmed alive before.
The NOAA divides the killer whale population into four distinct ecotypes based on their behavior, morphology and prey preference, Scientific America explained. The first three, A, B and C, are by far the most common. Type A orcas feed on minke whales and have a medium-sized eyepatch, while Type Bs feed on seals and have an eyepatch twice the size of Type As.
Type Cs feed on Antarctic toothfish, is the smallest type of orca, and have a smaller eyepatch. The rare Type Ds, however, look vastly different than the other three. They have a round, blunt head and an extremely tiny eyepatch, and the fact that they have been spotted so infrequently led scientists to initially assume that they were just an odd type of genetic mutations.
Then in 1955, a team of scientists found a pod of Type D orca remains that had washed up on a beach in Paraparaumu, New Zealand. The remains wound up in a museum in Wellington until 2010, when Pitman analyzed the remains, obtained some DNA and sequenced its genome.
That DNA revealed that Ecotype D’s genetic differences suggest that it diverged from other types of killer whales approximately 390,000 years ago, according to Sea Shepherd. This means that this ecotype is the second oldest and second most genetically divergent type of orca.
“Determining how many species of Orcas there are is critically important to establishing conservation measures and to better understand the ecological role of this apex predator in the world’s oceans,” the organization added.
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
In an attempt to help bring water to those living in northeastern Ethiopia, engineers at one Italian design firm have developed a new type of tower that can harvest H2O from rain, fog and dew.
Known as WarkaWater towers, the 30-foot-tall, 13-foot-wide structure was developed by artist, architect and industrial designer Arturo Vittori and his colleagues Architecture and Vision (AV) as an environmentally-friendly and financially-sustainable solution to potable water.
Recent research indicates that just over one-third of Ethiopia’s population has access to a usable water supply, the company explains. That suggests that there are nearly 60 million people living in that country lack access to a safe water supply for drinking, showers or toilet-related uses.
As Wired pointed out in a Friday article, WarkaWater is hardly the first contraption to try and bring potable water to areas lacking it, and like many of them, it functions by gathering moisture from the air and funneling it into a hygienic holding tank where it is collected for use.
Its name stems from the 75-foot-tall Warka tree, but the tower itself is constructed from latticed bamboo lined with orange polyester mesh, the website said. AV unveiled a full-sized prototype model of it last year, and has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund work on an improved version scheduled to be field-tested in Ethiopia later this year.
“The new prototype has some key upgrades,” Wired said. “The exterior is of bamboo rather than juncus, the top of the tower has reflective pieces to deter birds, and the structure is larger (13 feet wide, up from 7). This doubled the surface area of its water-resistant polyester mesh netting – the orange material you see—so more water is collected as fog permeates the fine mesh.”
The WarkaWater will cost approximately $1,000 to produce, requires no electricity to use, and takes less than an hour to assemble, Vittori told the website. It is comprised of five modules than can be easily packed-up and moved as necessary, and the ultimate goal for the device is for it to become a efficient way to produce water on a 24/7 basis.
“But populating the landscape with alien towers is about more than just functionality, it’s about architecture,” Wired said. “You can tell Vittori wanted to design something iconic, but beyond that is the tower’s potential to the social nexus of a village. With fabric canopies that stretch out like a peplum skirt, the towers could be a place where people gather to socialize and seek shelter from the sun, just as they would beneath a leafy Warka tree.”
On the company’s website, AV officials said that the WarkaWater towers will be able to collect an estimated 26.4 gallons (100 liters) of drinking water every day. What makes this possible is the fact that air always contains a certain amount of water, regardless of local temperatures and humidity (though they said that areas of high humidity and aerosol rates work best).
AV’s ongoing Kickstarter campaign is seeking $100,000 in funding, and is scheduled to last until February 10. As of Saturday morning, with 31 days to go, the WarkaWater project had attracted a total of 76 supporters who had pledged a combined $17,597 dollars.
Are Fibromyalgia and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Connected?
Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating
In today’s world, we’re constantly dealing with our hands and wrists. We’re at the computer, we’re on our mobile devices, and we’re doing lots of things with our hands. Because of this, disorders like carpal tunnel have become a lot more common among people.
There are actually a lot of connections between carpal tunnel syndrome and fibromyalgia. If you are having issues with your hands and wrists and you’ve already been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, you will definitely want to consider this.
Looking at Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
So imagine that you’re sitting at your desk and you are typing up a report for your boss. You’ve been sitting there for awhile, going back and correcting errors and looking up information on the internet in order to have the most accurate report possible. Then, you start to get this odd feeling in your wrists, arms, and hands.
They start to tingle, and eventually, the whole area really starts to hurt! This is because there are nerves in your wrists and, if you put too much pressure on them for too long, the nerves start to pinch and it causes a lot of pain.
The median nerve, which is the main nerve in this area of the body, is the one that gets most affected by this. This nerve goes from right below your elbow, through your forearm, into your wrist, and ends in your hand. This long nerve does a lot of work, and because we lean on our wrists a lot (or do other types of work with them), carpal tunnel syndrome ends up occurring. If you didn’t know, the reason this is called carpal tunnel syndrome is because the area where the median nerve is located is called the “carpal tunnel.” Makes sense, doesn’t it?
Anyway, unlike most other diseases, there really isn’t a particular “type” of person who can end up getting carpal tunnel syndrome. Basically, if you do a lot of work with your hands, wrists, and/or arms, you’re going to end up being at risk for it. Granted, there are some risk factors that can come into play – pregnant women, diabetics, and those suffering from autoimmune diseases are, ultimately, more likely to get it. But the difference really isn’t that much. If you’re doing the same thing over and over with your wrists and hands, you have a chance of getting carpal tunnel syndrome.
The good news is, you can prevent carpal tunnel syndrome in a lot of ways. There are keyboards out there that are made so that your wrists have less pressure on them, thus making it so that your risk is less. You can make sure that you’re taking breaks regularly. You can also do exercises that help to stretch out your wrists and that help you to be more flexible, thus reducing your chances of compressing the nerve and, thus, ending up with carpal tunnel syndrome.
How Does Carpal Tunnel Relate to Fibromyalgia?
Now, fibromyalgia, even though we didn’t mention it above, is also a risk factor for carpal tunnel. Those who are dealing with fibromyalgia are a lot more likely (4 to 6 times more likely, in fact) to get carpal tunnel. And that’s when you compare it to everyone in the world who may have a chance of getting the disease. Some people even say it’s one of the biggest risk factors for carpal tunnel. In the case of fibromyalgia, it’s more common to see women who have carpal tunnel with it instead of men, even though both genders get it.
Of course, this begs the question – why is fibromyalgia such a big risk factor? As with many things that are related to fibromyalgia, there really isn’t a definitive answer, even though there are a number of answers that sound like they could make a bit of sense in there.
One of the most common explanations for the relationship between carpal tunnel syndrome and fibromyalgia is the fact that the body is already sensitive to pain.
Since carpal tunnel is when you are putting pressure on the median nerve, the pressure is already going to hurt more because of the fibromyalgia, meaning it needs less pressure to start giving you a problem. There are other theories as well, including ones related to poor posture, and others that are related to the fact that those with fibromyalgia are more likely to suffer injuries because they are doing so much to try and reduce the pain that they are dealing with.
So what can you do in order to reduce the issues from carpal tunnel syndrome and fibromyalgia? Along with all of the different tips that we mentioned above, there are some other things you can do. Your doctor may suggest that you use steroid shots in order to help and relieve the pain from your carpal tunnel syndrome, but that’s usually only in the worst cases where it has started to become debilitating.
Make sure that you rest your wrists regularly and don’t continue to do repetitive motions too often. Consider wearing braces on your wrists, and make sure that your chair is comfortable and encourages you to have good posture.
If none of those suggestions are working, your doctor may also suggest that you have some sort of surgery – but like the shots, this is a worst case scenario situation that we’re talking about here.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome isn’t really something to be nervous about, but it can cause a lot of pain and stress if you don’t get it taken care of properly. Like fibromyalgia, taking care of your symptoms is a vital part of the treatment program. There are lots of things that you can do to treat both disorders, and you should be able to do everything that you want to do. Talk to your specialist for more information and ask them any questions that you may have about both of these disorders – they can give you specialized advice for your particular situation.
Opportunity Rover reaches peak of Cape Tribulation
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Having reached its highest point in 40 months of exploring the western rim of Endeavour Crater, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity paused Thursday to capture a stunning image of the panoramic vista from atop the region known as Cape Tribulation.
Opportunity has spent more than a decade on the surface of the Red Planet, travelling over 25.8 miles since it first landed on January 25, 2004. While it has been having some issues with a part of its flash memory, the rover recovered enough to scale to an elevation of about 440 feet.
According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the rover has been operating without using its flash memory while engineers work on a software fix for the issue. Opportunity completed drives on January 5 and 6 without use of its flash memory, and those journeys brought the veteran rover the final 174 feet southeast towards the crest.
Cape Tribulation, the US space agency explained, is a reference to one of the locations visited by James Cook and the HMS Endeavour during his first voyage to Australia and New Zealand from 1769 through 1771. From this location, it will proceed southward along the crater rim to an area known as “Marathon Valley,” where water-related minerals have been detected from orbit.
Marathon Valley, NASA explained, was named from calculations that Opportunity will have travelled distance equal to a marathon race (26.2 miles) by the time it reaches that location. Its current odometry is 25.86 miles, and it is less than half a mile away.
However, as Discovery News points out, before it sets off for Marathon Valley, the flash memory issue must first be dealt with. Currently, data needs to be uploaded each night before Opportunity enters sleep mode during Mars night. The rover team is currently testing a software fix that would work around the damaged part and allow the rest of the flash memory to be used.
“The fix for the flash memory requires a change to the rover’s flight software, so we are conducting extensive testing to be sure it will not lead to any unintended consequences for rover operations,” JPL’s John Callas, project manager for Opportunity, explained in a statement.
Marathon Valley contains a variety of clay minerals dating back to a time when the Red Planet was hope to pH-neutral surface water. The geological features there could provide scientists with vital clue to the potential for the existence of life on ancient Mars.
Earlier this week, a researcher from Old Dominion University explained that rock formations pictured in images captured by NASA’s other rover, Curiosity, may contain evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars. That hypothesis was based on the similarities between ancient sedimentary rocks on the Red Planet and structures on Earth that has been shaped by microbes.
The pictures, which were taken by Curiosity as it drove through the Gillespie Lake outcrop in a dry lakebed known as Yellowknife Bay, belong to a group of microbial structures formed by the interaction of ground-based microbes with erosion in sand and other clastic deposits, study author and ODU associate professor Dr. Nora Noffke explained.
SpaceX rocket booster successfully lands on barge (kind of)
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A SpaceX resupply craft carrying over 5,000 pounds of experiments and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) successfully lifted off this morning. More importantly, though, it successfully landed its booster rocket on a barge at sea, something that’s never been done before.
The launch took place at 4:47am ET this morning, sending the Dragon module and the 5,108 pounds of food, water, clothing and research projects on a trajectory to the ISS, James Vincent and Arielle Duhaime-Ross of The Verge reported on Saturday. It is the fifth of SpaceX’s 12 cargo resupply missions under the company’s $1.6 billion contract with NASA.
However, the successful launch only tells half the story, as after the Falcon 9 booster jettisoned the cargo capsule, it returned to Earth, landing on a barge located in the waters 200 miles east of Jacksonville, Florida. This part wasn’t completely successful, though, as Elon Musk tweeted this morning.
Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho.
The rocket, which was 70 feet wide and 14 stories tall, was attempting to land on a target that was just 300 feet across and 100 feet wide, the website said. SpaceX had placed their chances of success at 50-50, but mission assurance chief Hans Koenigsmann told National Geographic that the remote-controlled landing attempt would be “extremely challenging” and said that he was not optimistic about the first attempt at the procedure being successful.
While Koenigsmann noted during a NASA briefing held last week that the landing attempt would be “pretty exciting,” he emphasized that the primary mission was “to get cargo to the space station.” Nonetheless, much of the talk about the mission has centered around the attempt to secure the Falcon 9 rocket so that it could be repaired and reused during future launches.
As Nat Geo pointed out, SpaceX had previously landed rocket stages on land, and had previously made a controlled landing on water following a launch (a maneuver which still led to the loss of the rocket stage). Musk has previously said that barge landings would enable easier recovery of the launch vehicles, thus allowing them to be used again and reducing the cost of sending them into space.
As for the Dragon spacecraft itself, NASA reports that it will now begin a two-day orbital pursuit of the space station, and is expected to rendezvous with the facility on Monday morning. NASA astronaut and Expedition 42 Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore will used the station’s robotic arm to capture the capsule at approximately 6am ET.
It will then be installed into the Earth-facing port of the Harmony module, where it will remain for the next four weeks before departing. The Dragon will be filled with nearly two tons of samples, experiments and equipment from the ISS, and will ultimately slash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, the US space agency said.
Beethoven may have literally “composed from the heart”
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Classical music is often described as metaphorically coming from the heart. But with Beethoven, that literally may have been the case.
According to a researchers from the University of Michigan and University of Washington–including a cardiologist, medical historian, and musicologist–the legendary composer may have been inspired by his own heartbeat when creating some of his greatest masterpieces.
Published in a recent edition of the journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, their research analyzed several of Beethoven’s compositions for clues for a heart condition that many have speculated he might have had, and found that some of the rhythms for certain parts of his compositions may indeed reflect the irregular rhythms of a cardiac arrhythmia.
“His music may have been both figuratively and physically heartfelt,” co-author Joel Howell, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, said in a statement.
“When your heart beats irregularly from heart disease, it does so in some predictable patterns. We think we hear some of those same patterns in his music,” he added. “The synergy between our minds and our bodies shapes how we experience the world. This is especially apparent in the world of arts and music, which reflects so much of people’s innermost experiences.”
Howell, along with University of Washington School of Medicine Zachary D. Goldberger and University of Michigan musicologist Steven Whiting, analyzed the rhythmic patterns of several compositions believed to reflect the fact that Beethoven had an arrhythmia (a condition which causes a person’s heart to beat too quickly, too slowly or with an irregular rhythm).
They found “sudden, unexpected changes in pace and keys” in his music that appear to match these types of asymmetrical patterns. In the final movement “Cavatina” of Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-flat Major, Opus 130, for example, there is a sudden key change to C-flat minor.
That key change, the researchers explain, involves “an unbalanced rhythm” which “evokes dark emotion, disorientation and what has even been described as a ‘shortness of breath.’” The section is marked “beklemmt” in the composer’s directions to music playing the piece.
Beklemmt is a German word that translates to “heavy of heart.” While the term is often used to convey sadness, it could also be used in a different context, to describe the sensation of pressure that is often associated with cardiac disease. Howell, Goldberger and Whiting write explained in their study that the “arrhythmic quality of this section is unquestionable.”
They also identified arrhythmic patterns in other pieces as well, including the opening of the “Les Adieux” Sonata (sonata opus 81a, in E-flat major) and the Piano Sonata in A-flat major, Opus 110. It has long been known that Beethoven struggled with several health-related issues, including deafness, inflammatory bowel disease, Paget’s disease, liver disease, alcohol abuse, and kidney disease, this new study suggested that he also had an irregular heartbeat.
“We can’t prove or disprove that Beethoven had many of the diseases he’s been supposedly afflicted with because almost all of today’s diagnostic medical tests didn’t exist in the 18th century, and we are interpreting centuries-old medical descriptions into the context of what we know now,” said Goldberger.
“However, the symptoms and common association of an abnormal heartbeat with so many diseases makes it a reasonable assumption that Beethoven experienced arrhythmia – and the works we describe may be ‘musical electrocardiograms,’” he added. “While these musical arrhythmias may simply manifest Beethoven’s genius, there is a possibility that in certain pieces his beating heart could literally be at the heart of some of the greatest masterpieces of all time.”
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Detailed analysis of different stellar populations in the disk of Andromeda suggests the galaxy may have had a far more violent history of mergers with smaller galaxies than the Milky Way, researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz report in a new study.
As UC Santa Cruz graduate student Claire Dorman and professor Puragra Guhathakurta explain, the structure and internal motions of a spiral galaxy’s stellar disk can hold vital clues to better understand how its formed. Andromeda, which is also known as M31, is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, as well as the largest one in the local group of galaxies.
“In the Andromeda Galaxy we have the unique combination of a global yet detailed view of a galaxy similar to our own,” explained Guhathakurta, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics. “We have lots of detail in our own Milky Way, but not the global, external perspective.”
The researchers combined data from two large-scale surveys of stars in Andromeda: the Spectroscopic and Photometric Landscape of Andromeda’s Stellar Halo (SPLASH) and the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT).
SPLASH, which was conducted at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, measured the radial velocities of over 10,000 individual bright stars in Andromeda using a multi-object spectrograph. PHAT, on the other hand, was obtained using the Hubble Space Telescope and provided high-resolution imaging at six different wavelengths for more than half of these stars.
“The high resolution of the Hubble images allows us to separate stars from one another in the crowded disk of Andromeda, and the wide wavelength coverage allows us to subdivide the stars into sub-groups according to their age,” said Dorman, who presented her findings Thursday at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.
The research presents the velocity dispersion of young, intermediate-age, and old stars in the disk of Andromeda, marking the first time such measurements were collected in another galaxy. In addition, it reveals a noticeable trend linked to stellar age.
Younger stars demonstrated relatively ordered movement around the center of the galaxy, while older stars display far more disordered motion, the study authors found. Stars in a well-ordered population all move coherently and at approximately the same velocity, while those in a disordered population have a wider range of velocities, suggesting greater spatial dispersion.
“If you could look at the disk edge on, the stars in the well-ordered, coherent population would lie in a very thin plane, whereas the stars in the disordered population would form a much puffier layer,” said Dorman. She and Guhathakurta considered different possible scenarios of galactic disk formation and evolution which could help explain their observations.
One such scenario centers around the gradual disturbance of a well-ordered disk of stars as a result of mergers with small satellite galaxies. Previous research uncovered evidence suggesting these types of mergers in tidal streams of stars occurred in the extended halo of Andromeda.
Stars there appear to be the remnants of cannibalized dwarf galaxies, the researchers explained, and stars from those galaxies can also accrete onto the disk. However, Dorman noted that accretion also cannot account for the observed increase in velocity dispersion with stellar age/
A second scenario suggests that the stellar disk formed as an initially thick and clumpy disk of gas gradually settled. The oldest starts there would have formed before the gas disk entered a thin, orderly configuration. After it settled down and its motion become more ordered, then the younger starts would have formed with the disk in a more ordered configuration.
Dorman suggested that a combination of these mechanisms could account for their observations, and that their findings should encourage theoretical researchers to conduct detailed simulations of these different scenarios.
Seahawks fans to help seismologists test new equipment
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Fans packing CenturyLink Field in Seattle this weekend won’t just be there to root on their beloved Seahawks during their NFL playoff game against the Carolina Panthers – they’ll also be helping seismologists test out an early warning system for earthquakes.
According to local news reports, the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network installed instruments throughout the stadium on Thursday in the event that the raucous fans in attendance on Saturday successfully manage to trigger another seismic event during the course of the game.
Yes, another, as the Seahawks’ infamous fanbase, known as “The 12th Man”, responded so enthusiastically to a 68-yard, game-winning touchdown run by Marshawn Lynch during a 2011 playoff game that the activity registered a small tremor at the stadium, then called Qwest Field. The play has since been dubbed the “Beast Quake” in honor of Lynch’s nickname.
“Through the response of the roar and stomping of the tens of thousands of feet, the ground shook enough that the vibrations were recorded” by a strong-motion station located roughly one block away, the seismologists wrote in 2012. “Recordings revealed a peak acceleration of about 1/20,000th of a g, and peak motion of about 1/100th of a mm.”
This year, in addition to the PNSN instruments, University of Washington researchers will be testing something known as the QuickShake tool. This instrument is said to provide a faster connection between the sensors and the organization’s website, and if it functions as planned, it will show vibrations within three seconds – up to 10 times faster than previously possible.
The seismologists are hoping that the new technology will be able to detect the shaking event likely to occur if and when the Seahawks score, according to Popular Science. Since people are expected to be monitoring the experiment from home, the PNSN believes that this will be a good test for the new equipment to see if it can handle large amounts of traffic in an emergency.
“We’re mostly interested in the speed and the reliability of the communications,” University of Washington professor John Vidale, director of the seismic network, explained in a statement. “It’s hard to simulate thousands of people using this tool all at once. When we can get a lot of people looking, we can see problems that we’d encounter during an actual earthquake.”
“The Seahawks experiment should provide us and the Internet-connected public with a feel for the minimum time early warning might provide,” added UW professor Steve Malone. “In this case it’s football fan activity that generates a signal as a warning for what shows up on TV some seconds later. In the future, it might be seconds to minutes of warning after an earthquake starts.”
The seismologists will also have additional staff monitoring social media during the course of Saturday’s game, and they are preparing their websites to handle the expected additional traffic without experiencing slow down or crashing. They also hope that the sensors, which are placed at different levels, can explain unusual patterns of shaking during commercial breaks.
“And there’s an added bonus,” according to Popular Science. “Because the game will be broadcast with a ten-second delay, Seahawks fans keeping an eye on PNSN’s data could know about a score several seconds before they see it on TV.”
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
While severe trauma can cause post-traumatic stress disorder, not everyone who experiences such events develop PTSD, and now UCLA scientists believe they know why.
The findings, they explained, could provide a biological basis for diagnosing and treating PTSD more effectively in the future. It could also lead to faster diagnoses for patients, they added.
“Many people suffer with post-traumatic stress disorder after surviving a life-threatening ordeal like war, rape or a natural disaster,” Dr. Goenjian explained. “But not everyone who experiences trauma suffers from PTSD. We investigated whether PTSD has genetic underpinnings that make some people more vulnerable to the syndrome than others.”
Dr. Goenjian, an Armenian American, travelled to that country after a 6.8 magnitude earthquake leveled towns and cities and killed over 25,000 people in 1988. He and his colleagues, with the assistance of the Armenian Relief Society, established a pair of psychiatric clinics that provided treatment to survivors of the earthquake for more than two decades.
Twelve multigenerational families in northern Armenia gave permission to have their blood samples sent to UCLA, where Dr. Goenjian and his colleagues analyzed the DNA of 200 men and women in search of genetic clues to psychiatric vulnerability.
COMT, the researchers explain, is an enzyme that degrades the neurotransmitter dopamine, which controls the reward and pleasure center of the brain and helps regulate mood. Too much or too little dopamine can influence various neurological and psychological disorders, they said.
TPH-2, on the other hand, controls the production of the brain hormone serotonin, which regulates mood, sleep and alertness. All three are affected by PTSD, and a type of antidepressant known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) target the hormone to treat depression. An increasing number of doctors are prescribing them to treat PTSD, the study authors noted.
“We found a significant association between variants of COMT and TPH-2 with PTSD symptoms, suggesting that these genes contribute to the onset and persistence of the disorder,” Dr. Goenjian explained. “Our results indicate that people who carry these genetic variants may be at higher risk of developing PTSD.”
Using the most latest criteria for PTSD from the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, they measured the role of these genes in predisposing a person to the condition. The new criteria increased estimates of a person’s predisposition for the anxiety disorder to 60 percent, while estimates using an older criteria for PTSD only reached 41 percent.
“Assessments of patients based upon the latest diagnostic criteria may boost the field’s chances of finding new genetic markers for PTSD,” Dr. Goenjian explained. “We hope our findings will lead to molecular methods for screening people at risk for this disorder and identify new drug therapies for prevention and treatment.”
However, he cautioned that post-traumatic stress disorder, which affects approximately seven percent of Americans, is likely caused by multiple genes. Continued research into the condition should be pursued in order to discover more of the genes involved, Dr. Goenjian added.
“A diagnostic tool based upon PTSD-linked genes would greatly help us in identifying people who are at high risk for developing the disorder,” he said. “Our findings may also help scientists uncover more refined treatments, such as gene therapy or new drugs that regulate the chemicals associated with PTSD symptoms.”
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Something seems to be missing in a new image captured by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) this week – there’s a large patch of darkness where there should be stars.
Not to worry, though – the stars didn’t vanish, or burn out, or get sucked through a tear in the space-time continuum. Instead, the ESO said that the darkened area in the picture is actually a home to a cloud of gas and dust known as Lynds Dark Nebula 483 (LDN 483).
Clouds like LDN 483, they explain, are the birthplaces of future stars. This particular one, which was captured using the Wide Field Imager at the ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, is located approximately 700 light years away in the constellation of Serpens (The Serpent).
LDN 483 “contains enough dusty material to completely block the visible light from background stars,” the ESO explained. This ability to obscure light has led astronomers to classify especially dense molecular clouds such as this one as dark nebulae, and despite the absence of stars in these areas, they are actually extremely fertile environments for eventual star formation.
Studying star formation in LDN 483 has resulted in the discovery that it contained some of the youngest observable kinds of baby stars. These stars are still in the first stage of development, and are currently just a ball of gas and dust that is contracting under the force of gravity. It is still relatively cool (-250 degrees Celsius) and only shines in long-wavelength submillimeter light.
“Yet temperature and pressure are beginning to increase in the fledgling star’s core,” ESO officials explained. “This earliest period of star growth lasts a mere thousands of years, an astonishingly short amount of time in astronomical terms, given that stars typically live for millions or billions of years.”
“In the following stages, over the course of several million years, the protostar will grow warmer and denser,” they added. “Its emission will increase in energy along the way, graduating from mainly cold, far-infrared light to near-infrared and finally to visible light. The once-dim protostar will have then become a fully luminous star.”
As more stars begin to emerge from the dark depths of LDN 483, the nebula itself will further disperse and ultimately lose its opacity, the researchers said. The background stars that currently are hidden from view with then become visible. However, the process will take millions of years, and by that time, the old stars will be outshined by the newer, brighter stars that have been born.
Currently, the forming stars are between several hundred thousand to a few million years old, the ESO’s Fernando Comeron told BBC News. That is “basically nothing,” he said, considering that stars live for hundreds of millions (and in some cases, billions) of years. In fact, our own Sun is already more than 4.6 billion years old.
Become a Teacher in the Specialty of Fibromyalgia for your Friends and Family
Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating
Your friends and family love you and want to support you and your fight against fibromyalgia, it is your responsibility to education them. Many people do not understand what fibromyalgia is, and therefore are skeptical of the syndrome.
You can act as their teacher and explain how the pain works, stress, exercise and eating right. Be compassionate to others and their lack of understanding about this chronic illness. It is a complex disorder which can manifest itself in many different ways for different people.
It is your job to explain to your friends and family how fibromyalgia works for you and answer any questions they might have. Try not to get defensive when they show skepticism, instead come back with understanding and information.
Explain How the Pain Works
The best way to explain the pain is to describe how someone feels when they get a headache. Each headache is different and each person handles the pain differently. Some people get headaches every single day and a couple ibuprofens will make them go away, while others might get one headache a month but it is so bad only a specific kind of headache medicine will make it go away.
Fibromyalgia pain works in a similar pattern, some individuals will have pain daily that seems steady, it might lessen with activities or medication but doesn’t go all the way away. While others may have several good days where they are not feeling any pain, followed by a bad day where they literally feel like they cannot get out of bed.
Teach about the Good Days and Bad Days
Explaining the good days and bad days of fibromyalgia may be the part where your friends and family become most skeptical. We are taught that people with chronic illness are always sick, so it is a difficult concept for people to understand that you might feel good on some days. You might have days where you want to go out with your friends or have fun with your family.
Everyone’s body is different and explaining this concept is the most difficult part of explaining fibromyalgia. Research shows that all people, men and women, have fluctuations in their hormones which can affect the pain associated with fibromyalgia. Just like these hormone changes can change how the body reacts with weight issues and blood pressure changes. Explaining these things may take time, but it may help your family and friends understand fibromyalgia better.
How does Stress Play a Role?
Stress is such an intricate issue in the world of fibromyalgia and eliminating it, or lessening it, can really make you feel better. Helping your friends and family understand this information can be very useful for you. If your loved ones understand the detrimental role that stress can play in your illness they can work to help you out more when high stress situations arise. Take your time and answer any questions that may come up and help your family and friends understand the things that tend to add stress to your life the most.
Why is Exercise Important?
You can use your friends and family as motivators to get you moving when you are not feeling like exercising. Explain the health benefits of exercise and why it is important to you feeling better. Stiff muscles will easily become sore and tender if they are not stretched and exercised. Plus moving is shown to reduce muscle stiffness and help eliminate toxins from your body. Work with your loved ones to plan activities that help relieve your muscle soreness and make a regular schedule of activities you can all do together.
Eating right and How Family Can Help
Since diet is such an important part of the triggers for fibromyalgia, it is essential that you discuss your necessary diet changes with your family. Discuss the foods that you cannot eat and see if your family will agree to keep them out of the home. If everyone agrees to eat healthy together it will be much easier for you to reach your dieting goals. Work with your loved ones to make a list of food items that trigger your symptoms and safe food items that you can have in abundance.
Friends Nights Out, How they can Become Your Partner in the Fight
Going out on the town with your friends is a great way to relieve stress, but it can be anxiety provoking if you do not know if you will feel well enough. Talk with your friends about how sometimes you might cancel because you are not feeling well, explain this does not mean you are trying to avoid them, it only means that you were ill. Ask them to keep inviting you to events and outings, even if you have turned down all their previous offers.
Friends may start to feel like you don’t like them because you are saying no to them so much, but if they keep offering, it is likely you will have a good day and want to go out with them. Make sure everyone understands you really do want time with your friends and make an effort to actually go out with them as much as you can.
Taking the time to explain your illness to your friends and family will give them the opportunity to support you. Without you taking the time to explain things, many of your friends and family are left with their skeptical ideas about your illness and no true fact. Fibromyalgia is a complex disorder that may confuse your loved ones; do not feel defensive if they continue to ask you questions whenever you are together. Family and friends asking you questions about your illness is actually showing you that they care about you.
Become a teacher on the subject of fibromyalgia and you might just notice that your friends and family become more supportive than you could have ever imagined. Take the time to re-explain things whenever needed and offer to discuss their concerns anytime they have them.
Further reading
What’s Going On? A Simple Explanation of Fibromyalgia:
Symptoms are a finicky thing, aren’t they? So many diseases have ones that overlap, so you really have to be mindful of any changes that may go on in your body as time progresses.
Exhaustion, which is common in fibromyalgia, is one symptom that is especially problematic, because so many other disorders have that same problem. One issue that has this symptom overlap (and others) is fibromyalgia. Let’s take a look at the two and compare them.
What Are the Symptoms of Anemia?
Before we really get into the symptoms of anemia, first, let’s take a look at what anemia actually is. Most of us know at least one person who struggles with anemia – it is estimated that it affects between 2 and 4 million people in the United States alone, with estimates of over 20 million people all over the world. What happens when you have anemia is that your body is not producing enough red blood cells for your blood stream to function appropriately.
Without enough of these red blood cells, it’s difficult for your body to get oxygen from place to place. Oxygen helps the different organs to be able to do their jobs, and if you aren’t getting enough, those organs are going to struggle in doing what they are supposed to do.
Many times, anemia occurs because of deficiencies in a person’s diet – most times, it’s associated with a lack of iron, but it could also be a lack of certain vitamins as well. Other causes of anemia could be genetics, chronic diseases (yes, including fibromyalgia), and particular medications that an individual may be taking for particular chronic illnesses.
It is also incredibly common for women who are pregnant to end up being anemic during their pregnancy, because the baby is taking some of their nutrients. There may be other causes as well, but these are the main ones.
So, now that we understand what it is and why it happens to certain people, how do you know if you have anemia? One of the most obvious symptoms that you may have to deal with is fatigue, which, as you know, is also a problem that people with fibromyalgia usually deal with as well. It’s hard to make your body work when it’s already in a lot of pain, and it can be exhausting.
Other symptoms can include an inability to stay warm, mental health struggles like anxiety and depression, difficulty breathing, weakness, and cognitive problems like trouble remembering and/or concentrating. And, if you’re familiar with all of the symptoms of fibromyalgia, you will notice that a lot of those symptoms overlap, which makes it difficult for doctors to notice if anemia is going on. The good news is, anemia can be discovered through blood tests, so if there seem to be any symptoms going on, the doctor can order the blood test and determine what exactly is going on with your body.
Why Do Those with Fibromyalgia Seem to Struggle with Anemia as Well?
So why do anemia and fibromyalgia overlap? One of the main reasons is because there are a lot of nutrition issues that come alongside fibromyalgia. Either we aren’t paying enough attention to our diet in order to make sure that we are getting sufficient amounts of vitamins and minerals, or we have digestive issues that make it difficult for our body to actually get all the nutrients out of the food that we’re eating. With disorders like irritable bowel syndrome, it can really end up messing up your body, so you have to be more aware of what you’re ingesting and how much of each nutrient you are getting on a regular basis.
That being said, treating your anemia can actually make a significant difference in your fibromyalgia. Anemia shouldn’t go untreated in the first place, because it could end up causing damage to your organs and could cause you to develop other chronic illnesses in the long run. But when you’ve got fibromyalgia and anemia together, it’s that much more vital. Many people who have fibromyalgia and anemia will work on treating their anemia, and then realize that their fibromyalgia symptoms are lessened and they are a lot more comfortable than they were before getting their anemia treated.
It begs the question – do most people with fibromyalgia have low iron? Should all people who have fibromyalgia also be treated as if they have anemia, so that they can see some relief from the symptoms that they are trying to overcome and deal with? These are important questions to consider, because if we can give people more relief from their fibromyalgia symptoms, it will be a lot better in the long run.
All in all, anemia isn’t a frightening thing, as long as you catch it in time and you treat it properly. And if you pay attention to your symptoms, you will be able to notice if things start to swing one way or another with your fibromyalgia symptoms. It can take some time and practice for you to be able to do so.
Use a journal or some other way of keeping track of the symptoms you deal with regularly. Overall, when you figure out that you have anemia, you need to start dealing with it as soon as you can. Your doctor will be able to help you out with all of that.
Anemia and fibromyalgia often go hand in hand, which is why it’s vital that we understand the symptoms of both in order to ensure that treatment is doing what it should. Getting on a regular sleep schedule, eating right, and taking supplements can all play a significant role in helping you to feel better and have more energy.
Your doctor can also give you other suggestions that should help you feel better and have a higher quality of life than you would have otherwise. Don’t change your diet and/or exercise routine without their agreement and consent, so that they can keep track of things as well.
Ancient life on Mars possibly found in rock structures
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Photos taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover may contain the first visual evidence that life could once have existed on Mars, a geobiologist from Old Dominion University in Virginia claims in research recently published online by the journal Astrobiology.
According to NBC News, Dr. Nora Noffke, an associate professor in the Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, found “intriguing similarities” between ancient sedimentary rocks on the Red Planet and structures on Earth that had been shaped by microbes. The findings suggest, but do not prove, that such life may also have existed on Mars.
The pictures were taken by Curiosity as it drove through the Gillespie Lake outcrop in a dry lakebed known as Yellowknife Bay. This region apparently underwent seasonal flooding several billion years ago, when the Red Planet was a far warmer and wetter planet, the explained.
“We can detect sedimentary structures in rocks on Mars using the rover images,” Dr. Noffke explained during an email interview with The Huffington Post. “The structures I describe belong to a group of microbial structures that form by the interaction of benthic (living on the ground) microbes with sediment dynamics (erosion) in clastic deposits such as sand.”
If these structures do exist on Mars, it would suggest that the planet could once have harbored microbial life, and that those microbes would have existed there less than 3.7 billion years ago. Noffke analyzed the structures, comparing them to the so-called microbial mats found on Earth, and detailed the similarities between the structures found on both Earth and Mars.
“The microbially induced sedimentary-like structures (MISS) identified in Curiosity rover mission images do not have a random distribution,” she wrote. “Rather, they were found to be arranged in spatial associations and temporal successions that indicate they changed over time.”
“On Earth, if such MISS occurred with this type of spatial association and temporal succession, they would be interpreted as having recorded the growth of a microbially dominated ecosystem that thrived in pools that later dried completely,” the researcher added, going on to propose “a strategy for detecting, identifying, confirming, and differentiating possible MISS during current and future Mars missions” in her recently-published study.
While Noffke’s proposes a hypothesis for the possible signs that life existed on ancient Mars, NBC News pointed out that her findings are not concrete evidence that those structures were formed an shaped by biological entities. Such confirmation would require collecting rock samples and bringing them back to earth for microscopic analysis.
No such mission is currently on the schedule in the foreseeable future
“The fact that she pointed out these structures is a great contribution to the field,” Penelope Boston, a geomicrobiologist at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, told NBC News. “Along with the recent reports of methane and organics on Mars, her findings add an intriguing piece to the puzzle of a possible history for life on our neighboring planet.”
Dr. Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and associate editor of Astrobiology, said that the research was promising, according to the Huffington Post.
“I’ve seen many papers that say ‘Look, here’s a pile of dirt on Mars, and here’s a pile of dirt on Earth, and because they look the same, the same mechanism must have made each pile on the two planets,’” he said. “That’s an easy argument to make, and it’s typically not very convincing. However, Noffke’s paper is the most carefully done analysis of the sort that I’ve seen.”
Taylor Swift helps kids “shake off” pain after surgery, study says
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
It’s long been said that music can help soothe the soul and ease a person’s pain, and new research from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine has found there’s some truth to the old adage – at least, when it comes to pediatric surgery patients.
Dr. Santhanam Suresh, a professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and his colleagues reported in the January 3 edition of the journal Pediatric Surgery International that children who were allowed to listen to music of their own choosing experienced a significant reduction in pain following major surgery.
The youngsters, all of whom were between the ages of nine and 14, selected from a playlist of top music, including Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and other artists in a number of different genres (including pop, rock, country and classical), as well as a short list of audiobooks. They then listened to the selected material for 30 minutes following their procedures.
According to Dr. Suresh and his fellow researchers, this is believed to be the first randomized study to evaluate and demonstrate the use of patient-preferred audio therapy as a potential way to control post-surgical pain in children. While previous research had analyzed the effectiveness of music for pain during short medical procedures, they did not use objective measures of pain, and did not show whether the music itself was responsible for altering pain perception.
“Audio therapy is an exciting opportunity and should be considered by hospitals as an important strategy to minimize pain in children undergoing major surgery,” Dr. Suresh, senior author on the study and the chair of pediatric anesthesiology at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, said in a statement. “This is inexpensive and doesn’t have any side effects.”
As the researchers explain, the search for a way to control post-surgical pain in children without the use of medication is important because the most commonly used type of treatment, opioid analgesics, can cause breathing problems in pediatric patients. For this reason, doctors often limit the amount of opiods prescribed, which means that their pain may not be well controlled.
Dr. Suresh believes the audio-therapy helped thwart a secondary pathway in the prefrontal cortex involved in the memory of pain. He explained that the idea is to help the patients to not focus on the pain by refocusing their mental channels onto something else, adding that it was important to let patients choose their own music or stories based on their individual preferences.
The treatment worked regardless of a patient’s initial pain score, Dr. Suresh said.
“It didn’t matter whether their pain score was lower or higher when they were first exposed to the audio therapy,” he explained. “It worked for everyone and can also be used in patients who have had ambulatory surgery and are less likely to receive opiods at home.”
“One of the most rewarding aspects of the study was the ability for patients to continue their own audio therapy,” added Sunitha Suresh, Dr. Suresh’s daughter and first author of the study. “After the study, several patients ended up bringing in their iPods and listening to their own music. They hadn’t thought of it before.”
Sunitha, who was abiomedical engineering student at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science with a minor in music cognition at the time of the study and is now a fourth-year medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, said that she was surprised that audiobooks also proved to be equally effective.
“Some parents commented that their young kids listening to audio books would calm down and fall asleep. It was a soothing and distracting voice,” she said. Sunitha designed the study with the assistance of Richard Ashley, an associate professor of music theory and cognition at the Bienen School of Music. The study was funded by a Northwestern undergraduate research grant.
Two supermassive black holes are on a violent collision course
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The stage has been set for a explosion of apocalyptic proportions, as two distant supermassive black holes just one light-year apart are on a collision course that could result in the destruction of their home galaxy and release as much energy as 100 million supernovas.
According to Gizmodo, if researchers have their calculations right, the collision will take place withsin the next one million years – a relatively short time, astronomically speaking. Fortunately for humanity, the black holes are located in a remote galaxy known as PG 1302-102.
Nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its core, explained Time, and when two galaxies merge, their central black holes orbit each other and eventually begin to come closer together. When that happens, they should create gravitational waves, or ripples in the very fabric of space-time, but no such events have ever been witnessed by astronomers.
The two supermassive black holes that are the subject this latest study are orbiting each other more closely than any others ever observed, the website said. While most twin black holes are not expected to merge for a few billion years, the authors of a new study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday said that these black holes will collide in a fraction of that time.
S. George Djorgovski of the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues, who were responsible for the discovery, report that, cosmically speaking, the two supermassive black holes are essentially right on top of one another. For comparison sake, they are as close to each other as the Sun is to the Oort Cloud of comets are at the side of the edge of our Solar System.
Most of the energy, the New York Times explained, would go into the gravitational waves, but there could also be other “electromagnetic fireworks” produced as well. Dr. Djorgovski told the newspaper that the interactions of the black hole would also forcibly eject nearby stars.
Avi Loeb, a cosmologist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved in the research, told the Times that this was “the most convincing evidence for a tight pair of black holes with a separation smaller than the solar system.” However, he said that the evidence was not yet concrete and that an apparent variation in quasar light could be a statistical effect from checking it too infrequently.
However, if the research proves to be accurate, that would make the PG 1302-102 system could provide a wealth of information in the growing field of gravitational wave astronomy, the Times noted. It could also give scientists a sneak-peak as to what will happen in our own galaxy a few billion years down the road, when it ultimately collides with the nearby Andromeda galaxy.
“What the astronomers are hoping for now is to find more examples like this,” Time said. “They have some 20 candidates already, and the more twin black holes they can find that are in tight orbits, the better they can understand what’s really going on. We may not be around to see PG 1302-102’s final collision – if it ever takes place – but somewhere out there, two black holes may be even closer to tangling.”
How much does cold weather actually affect football?
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
This week, much of the U.S. has been dealing with cold temperatures and wind chill warnings and advisories. And as the weekend and the second round of the NFL playoffs near, the teams playing in Green Bay and New England will find themselves dealing with similar conditions.
In Foxboro, Massachusetts, where the Patriots will be hosting the Baltimore Ravens on Saturday afternoon, highs are expected to be in the mid-20s, according to AccuWeather.com. Meanwhile, the National Weather Service is predicting a high temperature of 19 degrees during the day as the Packers play host to the Dallas Cowboys in the early game on Sunday.
Football players have a long history of competing in the harshest winter weather conditions. In fact, the 1967 NFL Championship game (ironically involving both the Packers and the Cowboys) was played in temperatures of -13 degrees with a wind chill of -48 below. That brutal contest, fittingly known as the Ice Bowl, was won by Green Bay, 21-17.
Even though they may be used to playing in the frigid cold, such conditions do have an impact on a football player’s performance, as by the ESPN Sport Science crew in a recent video. In the video, John Brenkus and his team start by collecting baseline measurements of his reaction time, his grip strength, and both his skin temperature and his core temperature.
Those baseline measurements revealed that Brenkus’s skin temperature was 72 degrees and that his core temperature was 99 degrees. He then entered an ice truck, where the temperature was 10 degrees, to simulate the cold-weather conditions faced by NFL football players.
After just 15 minutes, the skin temperature of his hands fell to approximately 35 degrees. This caused his grip strength to be reduced by more than half as his cardiovascular system began to pump less blood to his extremities.
Thirty minutes into the experiment, his core temperature remained unchanged, but at a cost. To maintain core temperatures, his body began to burn glucose five times faster than in warm weather, leaving less energy for performance and reducing his total reaction time by 45 percent.
So how do football players try to combat these problems? It varies from athlete to athlete. Some players have said they use petroleum jelly and muscular rubs for additional warmth, while others spray athlete’s foot medication on their hands and feet and wearing sterile glove. One player has even said he rubs cayenne pepper on his skin to keep its temperature from falling too much.
Many, however, rely on the more conventional method of running around, according to Jay Yarow of Business Insider. “Football is an active sport, and the more guys are running around, sweating, staying active, the less they notice the cold,” he explained.
Of course, the players aren’t the only one affected by the cold, Brenkus noted. Extreme cold temperatures can also have an impact on the football itself. In fact, a football exposed to 10 degree temperatures for just one hour got slightly smaller, and its air pressure reduced by one-fifth, and had a lower coefficient of restitution (in other words, it was less bouncy).
This causes the ball to come off the kicker’s foot more slowly. Overall, however, ESPN Sport Science noted that it did not have too much on an impact on the game. Punts travel an average of just three yards less in cold weather games, while passing completion percentage fell just two percent and the accuracy of field-goal kickers fell by a mere 1.7 percent.
Rare ancient Atlantis metal possibly found on shipwreck
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Orichalcum, the rare cast metal said to be found in Atlantis, may have been recovered from a 2,600-year-old shipwreck off the southern coast of Sicily.
According to Discovery News, 39 metal ingots were recovered, and were being transported from Greece or Asia Minor to Gela in southern Sicily. The ship being used to carry them was probably caught in a fierce storm and sunk just prior to entering the port there.
Sebastiano Tusa, Sicily’s superintendent of the Sea Office, told the website that the shipwreck dates to the first half of the sixth century, and was discovered approximately 1,000 feed from the coast at a depth of 10 feet. The ingots, he said, were a unique discovery.
“Nothing similar has ever been found,” Tusa said, adding that he and his colleagues knew of orachalcum “from ancient texts and a few ornamental objects” but had never seen the mysterious metal. The substance was allegedly invented by the mythological character Cadmus.
In the fourth century BC, Greek philosopher Plato mentioned it in the Critias dialogue, describing Atlantis as “with the red light of orichalcum,” the website said. Plato also wrote that the metal was second in value only to gold, was mined at the mythical lost island, and was used to cover Poseidon’s temple interior walls, columns and floors.
According to International Business Times, orichalcum is a gold-colored bronze alloy that was made through the reaction of zinc ore, charcoal and copper. The ingots were analyzed with x-ray fluorescence and found to contain approximately 75 percent and 80 percent copper, between 15 percent and 20 percent zinc and small amounts of nickel, lead and iron.
“The finding confirms that about a century after its foundation in 689 BC, Gela grew to become a wealthy city with artisan workshops specialized in the production of prized artifacts,” Tusa told Discovery News. The ingots recovered were en route to those workshops, where they were going to be used in high quality decorations, but not everyone believes they are orichalcum.
Enrico Mattievich, a retired professor of physics who taught at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), said that the ingots are actually “lumps of latone metal, an alloy of copper, zinc and lead.” He also disagrees that orichalcum has a brass-like nature, and said that he believes it can trace its roots back to the Chavín civilization of the Peruvian Andes (1200-200 BC).
The name metal’s name, orichalucum, traces its origins back to the Greek word oreikhalkos, which literally translates as “mountain copper” or “copper mountain,” according to Ancient Origins. It has also been referenced in Vigil’s epic poem Aeneid, which said that the breastplate of Turnus was “stiff with gold and white orachalc,” and the “Antiquities of the Jews.”
Atlantis, which was first mentioned in the works of Plato, was described as a utopia of sorts that displeased the Greek gods, resulting in it being sunk to the bottom of the ocean, The Inquisitr said. Explorers and researchers have trying to find its location ever since, searching everywhere from the Mediterranean Sea to the polar ice caps to the South Pacific, the website added.
Fibromyalgia is very frustrating to endure and even more frustrating to treat. For many days the pain may be so bad that you just want to shut the door to your room and don’t even think about coming out.
Nonetheless, life is still very much worth living even if you’re afflicted with fibromyalgia. You have to learn to manage and control the symptoms of it and to focus on the non-pain instead of the pain.
It is true that doctors and medical researchers have yet to come up with an official cure for fibromyalgia. Nonetheless, there’s still no reason why you shouldn’t do everything that you can to lessen the pain as much as you can. Taking a bath is actually a very healing way to reduce the pain of fibromyalgia. Warm water alone can increase blood flow which in turn will drastically reduce the stress that you feel.
There are also a variety of baths that you can take. Including oils and herbs in the bath is just one of the ways to increase the healing and decrease the pain that you feel. Here are a few benefits of taking a bath each day:
Aromatic Bath
The old saying goes that taking an aromatic bath every day is the path to healing. Beyond that, you have absolutely nothing to lose by taking an aromatic bath each day. A soothing, hot bath at night with candles and herbs, scents and even music will be very beneficial as it has both a physical and a mental benefit to healing your fibromyalgia.
Epsom Salts
If you want to take the calmest bath possible, try taking a bath with Epsom salts. These kinds of salts contain magnesium which is critical to having your nervous system work properly. The main reason to taking a bath with Epsom salts, therefore, is to calm the nervous system as much as possible. They can also relax your muscles and reduce swelling as much as possible. In order for this treatment to be successful, add a cup of Epsom salts to your bath as it runs. Once the tub is filled up, dim the lights and turn on some candles. The experience will be very soothing and heal your body both physically and mentally. For this reason, Epsom salts in a bath are sometimes called the ‘calming bath technique.’
Sleepy Bath
A sleepy bath refers to putting chamomile flowers in the bath to ensure good sleep. Place a handful of fresh chamomile flowers in a bowl of hot water and let them sit for twenty minutes before placing your face in the bowl. Inhale the steam for a few minutes, and then lay down in a warm bath while holding two chamomile tea bags over your faces. You can also drink a glass of chamomile tea for added effect. Focus on breathing and allow your body to relax. You’ll begin to feel very sleepy, but that’s the entire point of this bath. Fatigue is a killer when it comes to fibromyalgia, so this method is designed to overcome the tiredness and exhaustion you feel.
Cleansing Bath
In a cleansing bath, you’ll need to bath for a half hour everyday for a week. The purpose of this bath is not only to clean your body, but to eliminate any negative feelings or emotions you feel as well. Add a pound of baking soda and one cup of sea salt, and make sure it’s mixed in the bath thoroughly. Then place the most soothing and calm music that you can find. Fibromyalgia is difficult to overcome, and while physical exercise is definitely a good thing to lower the symptoms, with a cleansing bath you essentially wash away any grime that build up while exercising physically. This will further motivate you to manage the symptoms.
Traditional Bath
You also don’t have to add baking soda or sea salt to your bath if you don’t want to, sometimes a traditional bath is all that’s needed! Nonetheless, if you want to get the maximum effect for lowering the symptoms of fibromyalgia with a traditional bath, you should still perform some tasks beforehand. For example, make sure that the bath is not too hot or too cold. If it’s too hot, you’ll feel more fatigued, and the goal of a bath isn’t to make you fall asleep in the bath tub. If the bath is too cold, you probably won’t be staying in it very long for obvious reasons. Also play soothing music and make sure the bath is in a dimly lit room if at all possible.
The goal of a traditional bath is not just to cleanse you physically, but it’s to soothe you after a long day at work and of stress. Sometimes a warm bath is all that’s needed to get plenty of sleep afterwards.
You can also massage yourself while you bathe. Begin by massaging your temples, neck and upper arms. Then work your way down and massage your hands, legs, knees and feet. This technique is especially effective while listening to soothing music in a dark room, and with essential oils in the water as well.
Rose Bath
– Believe it or not, but adding a half dozen or so drops of rose oil to the bath tub will be very effective in reducing your fibromyalgia symptoms. For added effect, you can also place in rose petals. The rose bath has been found to work the best when listening to soothing music and while eating on a good dessert item, such as chocolate.
MRI reveals cerebellum’s possible role in bipolar disorder
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
By using a different type of MRI imaging scan, researchers have located previously undetected differences in the brains of patients suffering from bipolar disorder, a psychiatric conditions that affects approximately one percent of the population.
Writing in the January 6 edition of the journal Molecular Psychiatry, University of Iowa psychiatry professor John Wemmie and his colleagues explained that they were able to locate differences in the white matter of patients’ brains and in the cerebellum, a region of the brain that had not previously been associated with the disorder.
Their examinations, which involved 15 patients with bipolar disorder and 25 control subjects, also found that these cerebellar differences were not present in patients that were taking lithium, the most commonly prescribed treatment for bipolar disorder.
In a statement, Wemmie explained that the new imaging technique “appears to be sensitive to things that just have not been imaged effectively before. So it’s really providing a new picture and new insight into the composition and function of the brain [in bipolar disorder].”
Bipolar disorder is characterized from sudden mood shifts from normal (euthymic) to depressed or manic states. For the new study, the patients were all in normal mood state when their brains were scanned using an MRI approach known as quantitative high-resolution T1 rho mapping, a technique sensitive to some byproducts of cell metabolism such as acidity in the brain.
In comparison with the brains of control subjects, elevated MRI signals were found in the cerebral white matter and the cerebellar region of patients affected by bipolar disorder. This signal could be the result of either a reduction in pH or a reduction in glucose concentration, both of which are factors influenced by cell metabolism, the study authors noted.
While previous research has suggested that abnormal cell metabolism may play a role in bipolar disorder, investigation of these abnormities has been hampered by the lack of imaging tools that are capable of detecting them.
Most available methods are slow, low-resolution and force scientists to identify the region of interest prior to beginning the research process, they added. Quantitative high-resolution T1 rho mapping, on the other hand, can quickly acquire a quality image of the entire brain.
The newly published study marks the first time that this imaging approach has been used to investigate a psychiatric disease, the researchers said, and the whole-brain technique reveals that a portion of the brain that researchers had never selected as a area of study could actually play a key role in bipolar disorder.
Casey Johnson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Iowa and first author on the study, said that his team’s work “was essentially exploratory. We didn’t know what we would find. The majority of bipolar disorder research has found differences in the frontal region of the brain. We found focal differences in the cerebellum, which is a region that hasn’t really been highlighted in the bipolar literature before.”
On the heels of their discovery, the researchers extensively reviewed scientific literature pertaining to bipolar disorder, and found several pieces of evidence supporting the notion that the cerebellum may be functioning abnormally in these patients. Furthermore, they found that lithium could potentially target this part of the brain, altering glucose levels there.
“Our paper, with this new technique, starts to bring all these pieces of evidence together for the first time,” Johnson said. The study authors are hopeful that the information provided by the new imaging technique could ultimately improve their understanding of the underlying abnormalities responsible for bipolar disease, as well as the development of better treatment options.
“If lithium’s effect on the cerebellum is the key to its effectiveness as a mood stabilizer, then a more targeted treatment that causes the same change in the cerebellum without affecting other systems might be a better treatment for patients with bipolar disorder,” said Wemmie.
Keratin in baleen can help scientists monitor whale reproductive habits
Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
By measuring hormone in tissues comprised from keratin, researchers from the New England Aquarium in Boston and North Slope Borough in Alaska are hoping to find a way to study the physiological condition and reproductive activity of bowhead whales.
Doing so has proven difficult over the years, the researchers explain. Typically, if a scientist wants to analyze a creature and study the fluctuating hormone amounts in its body over a growth period, they conduct a one-time capture and sample removal. This technique can provide experts with a veritable treasure trove of information about a creature, they added.
However, as Dr. Kathleen Hunt, a scientist with the New England Aquarium, points out in a statement, there is no such capture method for live whales. As a result, when she first started working with the facility, she found that there was little information available about bowhead whales, including how often they give birth, when they mate, or even how long they live.
She and her colleagues are looking to change this by studying tissues made of keratin, the same substance that makes up hair and fingernails. Learning about animals by extracting steroid hormones out of keratinized tissues has become common for difficult to capture creatures, they explained, and the technique is now being applied to the massive marine mammals.
By using this method, Dr. Hunt’s team hopes to learn more about the current physiological condition of the bowhead whales, as well as a record of their reproductive activity over the past 15 to 20 years. This information will allow them to closely monitor the overall condition of the population, which can currently be legally hunted.
In right whales, a species that is a close relative of the bowheads, the interval between pregnancies can indicate whether or not the population is in trouble. For instance, if the period between calves becomes longer, it could serve as a warning sign that something is amiss. However, the normal birthing rate of bowheads is currently unknown. Without that information, it is impossible for scientists to tell when reproduction is altered, for better or worse.
Dr. Hunt, who presented her research at the 2015 annual conference of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in West Palm Beach, Florida, used baleen from the mouths of bowhead whales to obtain the keratin used in the study. Baleen plates help the whales filter water and collect food, and continually grow from the gum line at a rate of up to 20 cm per year.
While baleen cannot be extracted from live whales, the researchers were able to collect samples from those that have been hunted and harvested. Dr. Hunt and her colleagues collected baleen samples from several male and both pregnant and non-pregnant females and studied them to see if there were any hormones in the material, and if so, what the hormone profile could reveal.
Once the samples were collected, the investigators ground bits of them down and measured progesterone levels, a steroid hormone found in high amounts during pregnancy. They predicted that baleen closer to the gum line (which had grown most recently) would have higher levels of progesterone in currently pregnant females, lower levels in non-pregnant females, and the lowest levels in male whales.
As they expected, Dr. Hunt and her associates found that the steroids were present in the baleen, and followed the expected pattern, with levels highest in pregnant females and lowest in males. The findings confirmed that steroid hormones are deposited in whale baleen, and could provide scientists with a way to monitor the whale’s recent physiology, the study authors said.
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