A group of orcas was caught on video killing a gray whale calf last Friday – the latest fatality in what experts are calling an “unprecedented” series of attacks which were led by a group of nine related killer whales and which claimed a total of four victims over a seven-day span.

The attacks have taken place in Monterey Bay, California, and the most recent occurred on Wednesday and was filmed by Nancy Black, a marine biologist at Monterey Bay Whale Watch, according to reports published by The Guardian and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The video shows the group of nine orcas separating a gray whale calf from its mother and killing it over the span of just 20 minutes. Earlier attacks had involved as many as 33 killer whales, said Black, but the same group of nine orcas, related across four generations and led by a matriarch.

Orca attacks often take hours to complete and are unsuccessful, the biologist explained. But the efficiency of Wednesday’s kill was “like a record,” she told The Guardian. “I’ve been studying them for 30 years… [and] this has really never happened before… It’s pretty unprecedented just because the same group of killer whales has been feeding on them each time.”

Delayed start to hunting season likely to blame

In a typical killer whale attack, Black told the Chronicle, the mother gray whale uses her tail in an attempt to fight off the predators, and will also roll over, belly-up with her calf on top. But in Wednesday’s attack, she said, the mother and calf were skinnier and likely weaker than typical gray whales, making them easier prey for the hunting orcas.

While unfortunately for the gray whales, Black said told The Guardian that it has been “kind of exciting to see this group and how they’ve gotten really good at hunting.” The first attack, which was the one that involved a total of 33 whales, took place on April 20, the Huffington Post noted, and despite the fact that they have already claimed and consumed multiple victims, the biologist said that they do not appear to be slowing down in their hunting efforts.

“You’d think they’d already be full,” she told the Chronicle, “yet [they] continue to eat… I expect they will become… more social in upcoming days as they [usually] do after stuffing themselves.” Black believes that the killing spree may be due to the late arrival of the gray whales, who travel north from Mexico each year, and thus the delayed start of the orcas’ hunting season.

In addition to gray sharks, killer whale calves tend to prey on seals, sea lions, dolphins, tuna, and even great white sharks. Like wolves, the creatures work in packs, attempting to separate the calf from its mother so that they can pick off the smaller, weaker whale while attempting to avoid the massive tail of its much larger mother. They also attempt to hunt humpback whales, Black noted, but those creatures tend to band together in an attempt to fight off their predators.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

New research published online this week in the journal Nature is claiming that the first humans found their way to the Americas far earlier than previously believed –  more than 100,000 years earlier, to be precise – but not everyone seems to be on board with the study’s findings.

In the study, scientists from the Center for American Paleolithic Research in South Dakota and their colleagues examined animal bones and tools unearthed from the Cerutti Mastodon site near San Diego, California – a site initially discovered in 1992, according to BBC News reports.

Among their discoveries were potential stone tools and remains believed to be from a mastodon, the British news outlet added. However, the researchers were unable to use radiocarbon dating to analyze the remains, so instead they used a technique known as uranium-thorium dating.

Those tests, the study authors said, claimed that the artifacts were 130,000 years old – significant because most prior research has concluded that the Clovis people were the first people to come to the Americas across the Beringia land bridge some 13,000 years ago, Scientific American noted.

If the CAPR-led team is right, the publication added, “the find could call into question the long-held assumption that H. sapiens was the first and only member of the human family to reach the New World, because it hails from a time when multiple human species… roamed the planet.”

Study’s conclusions largely dismissed by other researchers

Furthermore, Scientific American said, it would indicate that archaeologists had somehow missed more than 100,000 years worth of human history in the New World. However, many members of the scientific community are skeptical of the researcher’s findings, to say the least.

In their study, lead author Steven R. Holen and his colleagues reported that rocks found near the purported mastodon remains appear to show signs of wear and tear suggesting that they were had been used as anvils and hammerstones, BBC News said. Furthermore, the bones and teeth bore a “characteristic breakage pattern” suggesting that the creatures were attacked with hard objects.

A researcher holds a mastodon molar fragment found under a rock anvil discovered at the California site.(Image credit: SDNHM)

“We have conducted two experiments breaking elephant bones with large rock hammers and anvils,” Dr. Holen told the UK media outlet. “We produced exactly the same kind of fracture patterns as we found on the Cerutti mastodon limb bones,” he said, adding that they were able to “eliminate all of the natural processes that break bones like this. These bones were not broken by carnivore chewing, or by other animals trampling on this bone.”

So the bones clearly must have been broken by human activity, then, right? Southern Methodist University anthropologist Dr. David Meltzer is unconvinced. “You can’t push human antiquity in the New World back 100,000 years based on evidence as inherently ambiguous as broken bones and nondescript stones – not when they are coming from a highway salvage excavation done 25 years ago, and you have none of the detailed taphonomic evidence demanded of such a grandiose claim,” he told Scientific American.

“It is one thing to show that broken bones and modified rocks could have been produced by people, which Holen and his colleagues have done,” University of Washington archaeologist Donald Grayson added. “It is quite another to show that people, and people alone, could have produced those modifications. This, Holen [and his colleagues] have most certainly not done, making this a very easy claim to dismiss.”

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Image credit: A. Rountrey, C. Abraczinskas and D. Fisher/Univ. Michigan

A species of caterpillar that typically consumes honey and the wax from beehives may be the answer to the growing problem of plastic waste, as new research has revealed that it can easily devour a commonly used type of the material and cause it to return to a useful compound.

As Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) scientist Federica Bertocchini and her colleagues reported Monday in the journal Current Biology, the larvae of the greater wax moth (or Galleria mellonella) is capable of causing polyethylene, a type of plastic used in shopping bags and food packaging, to biodegrade into a substance that can be used in various consumer products.

Bertocchini discovered that the caterpillars, which are also known as wax worms, had a taste for plastic while removing them from beehives, Sky News and the Los Angeles Times explained. As she extracted them, she placed them in plastic bags, and later found those bags full of holes.

Following that discovery, she and her colleagues observed wax worms placed on a polyethylene film and found that in as little as 40 minutes, the insects had already started boring holes through the plastic material. In fact, each worm was consuming it at a rate of roughly 2.2 holes/hour, and a team of 100 caterpillars consumed 92 milligrams of a plastic shopping bag in 12 hours.

To further test the wax moth larvae, they created a slurry of worms and placed it on polyethylene films, the Times said. Fourteen hours later, 13 percent of the plastic’s mass had degraded, and the research team discovered that the worms had left behind ethylene glycol – a compound used as a coolant, a heat transfer agent, and in the manufacturing of polyester fibers and plastic bottles.

Researchers hope to discover, replicate substance responsible

The discovery, which has been patented by the researchers, could prove to be an unexpected help in the battle against plastic refuse. Approximately 80 million metric tons of polyethylene is made globally every year, the CSIC said in a statement, and plastic bags made out of the substance can take up more than a century to decompose.

Each year, the average person uses well over 200 plastic bags, resulting in the creation of at least 100,000 tons of polyethylene waste annually, the research council explained. “New solutions for plastic degradation are urgently needed,” they wrote, according to the Times. With the new study, it appears as though they may have serendipitously discovered one in nature.

How does the wax moth larvae cause the plastic to biodegrade at such a rapid rate? As the scientists told the Times, the most likely explanation is because of the chemical similarity between plastics and the beeswax contained in the hives that the creatures normally consume. As study co-author Chris Howe from the University of Cambridge said, “the larvae have evolved to be able to break down the beeswax, and can break down plastic as well, given the chemical similarity.”

Howe’s Cambridge colleague and co-author Paolo Bombelli explained to Sky News that the wax worms were not just devouring the plastic, but were actually producing a substance which caused the chemical bonds to break. The next step, he said, is to discover what that substance is and find a way to reproduce it so that it could be used to degrade existing polyethylene waste.

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Image credit: Wayne Boo/USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab

This weekend, researchers and the scientifically-minded will converge on Washington DC and more than 450 locations around the world to show their support for the important work done by those in fields such as biology, ecology, astrophysics, epidemiology and nanotechnology.

They will be part of the March for Science, an event first announced in January in the wake of the election of current US President Donald Trump – a man who, prior to his election, claimed that “nobody really knows” if climate change is real and who in his short time in office already had ordered cuts to and placed a gag order on USDA and EPA scientists.

In February, the event was officially scheduled to take place on Earth Day (Saturday, April 22), and is being described as “a celebration of science… the very real role that science plays in each of our lives and the need to respect and encourage research that gives us insight into the world.”

“The march… was triggered by the Trump administration’s frontal assault on everything from actual facts to funding for climate, health and energy research,” Mashable explained. “But more broadly, there is a sense… that science’s central role in society is in jeopardy. Actual facts are giving way to, well, ‘alternative facts,’ and scientists are not going to stand for this any longer.”

‘Truly an important moment for all people’

According to the March for Science’s official website, the event has stirred up controversy, as some individuals believe that scientists should steer clear of becoming too heavily involved in politics. However, the organizers believe that researchers must speak up in the wake of policies that “ignore scientific evidence and endanger both human life and the future of our world.”

Applying science to policy is not inherently a partisan issue, they explained, but increasingly politicians in both parties have been advancing potentially harmful anti-science agendas. The March, they noted, is necessary because scientists can no longer afford to stay silent on such matters.

“Scientific discovery and innovation are a critical part of our nation and our future – science extends our lives, protects our planet, puts food on our table, contributes to the economy, and allows us to communicate and collaborate with people around the world,” Caroline Weinberg, National Co-Chair for the March for Science, said in a statement.

“Despite this fact, science and scientists, and evidence-based policies are under attack,” she continued. “Policymakers threaten our present and future by ignoring scientific evidence when crafting policy, threatening scientific advancement through budget cuts, and limiting the public’s knowledge by silencing scientists. On April 22, scientists and science supporters will unite worldwide to protest these actions. Thousands of people in almost 500 cities around the world will march together in support of science’s role in society and policy and to ensure our future.”

“The March for Science is an unprecedented call to action for everyone who knows that science is essential to public health, global and economic security, and the livelihood of communities around the world,” added Christine McEntee of the American Geophysical Union. “This moment is bigger than the scientific community. It is truly an important moment for all people… to make a strong statement in support of policy that is informed by evidence-based science.”

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Image credit: Steven Senne / Associated Press

Scientists have discovered a new “hotspot” of plastic pollution accumulating in the waters of the Arctic north of Norway, and they believe that the problem will only worsen in the years ahead as melting ice due to climate change leads to an increase in human activity in the region.

According to Newser and AFP reports, an international team of researchers studied 42 different Arctic sites aboard a French schooner in 2013, and found that plastic bags, bottles, and toys were accumulating in waters located to the east of Greenland and to the north of Scandinavia.

The scientists, who reported their findings Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, noted that around one-third of the sites had no plastic refuse. However, multiple locations in both the Greenland and Barents seas north of Norway contained between 100 and 1,200 tons of plastic.

While that figure only represents approximately 3 percent of the estimated 110 million tons of plastic polluting the planet’s oceans, the study authors emphasized that the figure is still rather high considering the relatively remote nature of the affected area. The reason for the pollution, they explained, is because of an ocean current known as the Thermohaline Circulation.

Plastics originate in Europe and the US, travel north via currents

Sometimes referred to as “the global ocean conveyer belt,” the Thermohaline Circulation is a deepwater current that is directly affected by global differences in temperature and salinity, the AFP and New York Times said. As the current brings warm surface water north to the Arctic, it also appears to be bringing plastic waste from more populated parts of the world.

Those plastic bits have become fragmented by the time they reach the Arctic, the media outlets added, and upon their arrival, they become trapped by landmasses and the polar ice cap. Most of the plastic is between 0.5 millimeters to 12.6 millimeters, and a few larger pieces were found, but the researchers are still concerned what impact this trash could ultimate have on the area.

“Even though the vast majority of the Arctic is fine, there’s this bullseye, there’s this hotspot of very, very polluted waters,” study author Erik van Sebille, who was at Imperial College London when the research occurred but is now with the University of Utrecht, told The Verge.

“If a plastic bottle or a plastic bag gets into the Atlantic from Europe or the East Coast of the US, that has a very good chance of ending up in the Arctic,” he told the website. “The problem with plastic specifically being in the Arctic is that it’s going to get into the food chain of animals that are very much under threat already, that are struggling to survive in a changing climate.”

Since the origin of the plastic waste is believed to have come from northwestern Europe, the UK and the east coast of the US, lead author Dr. Andrés Cózar from the University of Cádiz in Spain told the Times that dealing the plastic problem will “require international agreements.”

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Image credit: Photo collage by Andres Cozar

A giant, black, worm-like bivalve whose existence was only known from a few dead specimens and shell fragments has at long last been discovered and investigated by a team of scientists from the US and Philippines, the University of Utah announced Monday in a statement.

Known as the giant shipworm or Kuphus polythalamia, the creature is a mud-dwelling mollusk which appears to consume little food, instead choosing to gather its energy from a type of sulfur, the study authors explained in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The shipworm leaves behind three-foot-long tube-shaped shells that are “fairly common”, said lead investigator Dr. Daniel Distel, a professor, and director of the Ocean Genome Legacy Center at Northeastern University. Its shells led taxonomist Carl Linnaeus to include the creature in the book which led to the scientific naming system, Systema Naturae, the Washington Post said.

“But,” Dr. Distel added, “we have never had access to the animal living inside.” Its elusiveness led co-author and Utah microbiologist Margo Haygood to call it “the unicorn of mollusks” in an interview with the Post. Now, however, the seemingly mythical creature has been located.

Research leads to surprising findings about symbioses

Oddly enough, it was a documentary broadcast in the Philippines which ultimately led to the shipworm’s discovery. A film crew captured video of the mollusks growing, like they had been planted in a garden, in the mud of a shallow lagoon. An associate of Haygood’s stationed there learned of the report and contacted her, and she brought a team to investigate.

While at the lagoon, the study authors were able to locate a live shipworm, coax it into a PVC pipe (along with some seawater) and transport it to a laboratory for analysis. Since the creature had never been studied in depth, Haygood said, little was known about its biology, its habitat or its evolutionary history.

“We suspected the giant shipworm was radically different from other wood-eating shipworms,” she noted. “Finding the animal confirmed that.” For instance, while smaller shipworms tend to be pink, beige or white in color, the giant shipworm is “gunmetal black,” Distel told the Post. A full-grown specimen can be more than three foot long, the researchers added, and it has an odd digestive system that indicates that it does not feed using typical techniques.

While the creature has a mouth and a relatively tiny stomach, it also has extra large gills packed with bacteria. Although the researchers explained that this is not uncommon for shipworms, in most cases, these microbes help the mollusks digest wood. In the giant shipworm’s case, however, the bacteria in its gills feed off of sulfur-based compounds. Specifically, the microbes use hydrogen sulfide as energy, and in turn, produce organic carbon used by the shipworm as a food source.

The research “provides a fascinating example of symbiont displacement, phenomena we are only just beginning to observe more regularly in nature,” Nicole Dubilier, director of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (who was not involved in the study), told the Post. “What we are now seeing is unexpected: symbioses are not as stable as we previously assumed.”

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Image credit: Marvin Altamia

The recent discovery of 245-million-year-old fossils belonging to one of the earliest dinosaur relatives could drastically alter our understanding of these giants lizards’ origins, as the species turned out to be much larger than researchers anticipated and walked on four legs.

Known as a Teleocrater, the creature in question was classified as an archosaur – a group which included birds, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and crocodilians, according to the New York Times. While it was a cousin to the dinosaurs and not a direct ancestor, scientists nonetheless believed that it may shed new light on how these reptiles originally evolved during the Triassic period.

However, as the Chicago Tribune noted, a team of paleontologists working at a basin in southern Tanzania made a surprising discovery: they discovered Teleocrater rhadinus fossils that revealed that the species was not a small, bipedal reptile, but actually a seven-to-10-foot-long creature that walked on four legs and had a longer-than-expected tail and neck.

The discovery, which was reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, “goes to show that there’s a lot more out there that we just didn’t know, especially the early history of the larger group that dinosaurs belonged to: Archosauria,” lead author Sterling J. Nesbitt, a vertebrate paleontologist at Virginia Tech, told the Tribune. His team’s research could force scientists to reconsider what the first dinosaurs, and their ancestors, actually looked like, the newspaper noted.

Discovery could change our understanding of dinosaur evolution

As the Times explained, it was approximately 250 million years ago that the archosaurs split into two main branches: one that included birds and dinosaurs, and one which included crocodiles. In the case of the Teleocrater, it was an early member of the bird/dinosaur group and first appeared 10-15 million years before the appearance of the very first dinosaur.

Despite its link to the dinosaurs, Nesbitt’s team found that it bore little resemblance to dinosaurs as we know them. Not only did its size and long neck cause it to resemble a Komodo dragon, the creature has ankle bones that closely resembled those found in crocodiles. The discovery indicates that features previously believed to have developed only in one archosaur branch actually existed in a common ancestor of both groups, according to the Times.

“The ankle was really a big surprise with this animal, because all of the archosaurs on the bird side of the tree [including] dinosaurs all have what we call a bird-like ankle, which has a pretty simple hinge, and all the archosaurs on the croc side of the tree have what we call… a crocodile-like ankle,” Nesbitt told the Tribune. “That tells us that the crocodile ankle was primitive for the earliest archosaurs and that the bird ankle was derived from a crocodile-like ankle.”

The new study “changes our understanding of what that first step in the evolution of dinosaurs was like,” co-author Kenneth Angielczyk from the Field Museum in Chicago told the Tribune. “For the first time, we have a good idea of what the very first forms on the lineage leading to pterosaurs, dinosaurs, and birds looked like.” Randall B. Irmis, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Utah who was not involved in the study, added that the findings would likely “spark a lot of research into how and why pterosaurs and dinosaurs evolved into such different forms from their early relatives.”

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Image credit: Gabriel lio

The phrase “army ant” has been used to describe multiple species of these social insects, and based on the behavior of the Megaponera analis, it isn’t difficult to see why – these well-trained warriors are committed to ensuring that no man gets left behind, according to a new study.

As Erik Frank, a doctoral student at the University of Würzburg in Germany, and his colleagues reported this week in the journal Science Advances, hundreds of these large, black, termite-eating ants (which are native to sub-Saharan Africa) march into formation when hunting for food.

A total of 200 to 500 ants travel together in rows of three in a two-meter long column that “looks like a long snake walking on the ground,” Frank told NPR on Wednesday. “And after roughly 20 minutes the battle is over… and the ants start collecting the termites to return.”

However, he said that a few years ago, he first noticed that some of the ants returning home after engaging in combat were carrying other ants instead of termites. Curious as to what the ants were doing, he investigated further, and found that the ants were rescuing their injured colleagues.

“This is not an altruistic behavior. The ants do not help the injured out of the goodness of their hearts,” Frank explained to Reuters. “There is a clear benefit for the colony: these injured ants are able to participate again in future raids and remain a functioning member of the colony.”

‘Illogical’ behavior benefits the colony, say authors

While observing that some ants became injured during their battles with the termites, the study authors marked these wounded warriors with paint, and found that in nearly every instance, they were able to make a full recovery and return to action – sometimes within a matter of hours!

Frank’s team also conducted an experiment to see what would happen to the injured ants if they were not rescued. The results, NPR noted, were not good: the wounded ants were unable to move fast enough to keep up with the group, fell behind and were ultimately devoured by predators.

Similar behavior has been observed in primates and some other species of mammals (including dolphins and elephants), but Frank told Reuters that it had initially “sounded illogical” that ants would have developed such a behavior. However, “after a closer look, we realized that the good of the individual, saving the injured, can also be for the good of the colony,” he added.

An injured ant, as it turns out, will excrete a chemical signal to let its mates know that it has been hurt, said National Geographic. In fact, when the researchers isolated this chemical, then applied it to healthy ants, they discovered that the uninjured insects were also “saved,” indicating that the so-called rescuers may not even be fully aware that their kin had been wounded.

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Image credit: Erik Frank

Two-thirds of the Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – an estimated 900 mile (1,500 km) stretch of the UNESCO World Heritage Site – have been damaged by “unprecedented” bleaching over the past two years, researchers from James Cook University in Queensland have revealed.

Aerial surveys conducted by Professor Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at the university and his colleagues discovered bleaching in back-to-back years for the first time ever, according to BBC News and the Washington Post.

While last year, the northern part of the reef was hit hard by bleaching, this year the majority of the damage was suffered in the middle section, the climate scientists discovered. In light of their discovery, experts are concerned that there is little hope of recovery for the damaged coral.

“Last year we lost 67 percent… of the corals in the northern 700 kilometers (430 miles) of the barrier reef, between March and October. We’re likely to see something similar happen now in the middle third this year,” Hughes told the Post. “That’s obviously an enormous loss over two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef.”

“I wouldn’t say the barrier reef is dying. But clearly, we’re measuring serious losses here,” he added. “And the reason it’s happening is global warming.”

‘Window’ to deal with climate change ‘is rapidly closing’

That’s obviously bad news for a place that, according to BBC News, has been called the “most biodiverse” of the planet’s World Heritage sites and an area of “enormous scientific and intrinsic importance.” The 1,400 mile (2,250 km) reef is the largest structure of its kind on Earth.

Coral bleaching occurs as a result of unusual increases in water temperature – a naturally-occurring phenomenon that is believed to be made worse by human-caused climate change. An estimated 93 percent of all increases in the Earth’s heat are absorbed by oceans, and when that happens, it causes corals to become stressed, resulting in the loss of photosynthetic algae.

The loss of that algae, better known as zooxanthellae, causes the coral to lose their color and turn while, indicating that their metabolism has been disturbed. If conditions are returned to normal, then the corals can recover in a few decades but is the stress is not alleviated, the corals can die. With bleaching events recorded in consecutive years, scientists are concerned that the reef might not be able to recover.

“Bleached corals are not necessarily dead corals, but in the severe central region we anticipate high levels of coral loss,” Dr. James Kerry, who led the aerial surveys, told Sky News. “It takes at least a decade for a full recovery of even the fastest growing corals, so mass bleaching events 12 months apart offers zero prospect of recovery for reefs that were damaged in 2016.”

“Clearly the reef is struggling with multiple impacts. Without a doubt the most pressing of these is global warming. As temperatures continue to rise the corals will experience more and more of these events. Ultimately, we need to cut carbon emissions, and the window to do so is rapidly closing,” added Hughes, who went on to tell BBC News, “The sooner we take action on global greenhouse gas emissions and transition away from fossil fuels to renewables, the better.”

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Image credit: Ed Roberts/ARC

In addition to the threat it poses to polar ice, the sea level, countless species of animals and even the global food supply, climate change could also make flying a more harrowing experience than it already is, according to research published this week in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

The study, which was lead by University of Reading atmospheric scientist Paul Williams, found that increased amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide could cause changes to the jet streams that may cause severe turbulence to become twice as likely on any given flight by the 2050s.

As Quartz and Live Science explained, increased CO2 build up could cause differences between the jet stream (thin, high-altitude, high-speed air currents) and other regions of the atmosphere to become more pronounced, which in turn would cause airplanes to experience greater amounts of what is known as clean-air turbulence.

Clean-air turbulence occurs in the absence of clouds or other visual clues and takes place when bodies of air moving at different speeds come into contact. When airplanes encounter this kind of turbulence, they experience strong up-and-down movements that are stronger than gravity, which can jostle passengers, impair movement and cause unsecured objects to be flung around.

Now, Williams warns that such events will become more common because climate change will generate stronger wind shears within the jet stream. These wind shears, he warned, often become unstable and are one of the leading causes of clean-air turbulence of various strength levels.

Phenomenon could lead to increased airline-related hospitalizations

In fact, Williams examined five different severities of turbulence and found that each are likely to increase as a result of climate change. Light turbulence in the atmosphere will increase by 59 percent, while light-to-moderate turbulence would increase by 75 percent, moderate turbulence by 94 percent, moderate-to-severe by 127 percent and severe by 149 percent.

“Our new study paints the most detailed picture yet of how aircraft turbulence will respond to climate change,” Williams said in a statement. He and his colleagues used computer simulations of the atmosphere to determine how transatlantic clean-air turbulence will change at an altitude of approximately 39,000 feet (12 km) during the winter when CO2 levels are twice their current amounts – which, they said, is expected to happen within the next few decades.

So what do the findings mean? “For most passengers, light turbulence is nothing more than an annoying inconvenience that reduces their comfort levels,” he explained. “However, even the most seasoned frequent fliers may be alarmed at the prospect of a 149 percent increase in severe turbulence, which frequently hospitalizes air travelers and flight attendants around the world.”

“My top priority for the future is to investigate other flight routes around the world. We also need to investigate the altitude and seasonal dependence of the changes, and to analyze different climate models and warming scenarios to quantify the uncertainties,” Williams added.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

In what experts are calling a major advance towards creating stem cell banks, a Japanese sexagenarian has become the first patient ever to receive cells derived from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells donated by someone else, the journal Nature first reported last Tuesday.

The breakthrough, which was detailed in a New England Journal of Medicine paper, involved an anonymous individual who donated skin cells that were reprogrammed into iPS cells, then turned into a type of retinal cell. Those converted cells were then transplanted onto the eye of the patient – a man who lives in Japan’s Hyogo prefecture and has age-related macular degeneration.

According to Nature, doctors are optimistic that the donated cells will halt the progression of the disease, one of the leading causes of blindness. Furthermore, it could lead to the increased use of donated iPS cells, which are created by reprogramming mature cells into an embryonic state, and the creation of stockpiles that make medical procedures involving stem cells easier to perform.

A team of surgeons led by Dr. Yasuo Kurimoto performed the procedure at Kobe City Medical Center General Hospital as part of an ongoing trial that is being conducted under the auspices of Japan’s health ministry. The study, which will enroll a total of five patients, was approved back on February 1, according to the journal’s David Cyranoski.

Research could lead to the development of an iPS cell bank

This isn’t the first time that Dr. Kurimoto’s team has performed a procedure that involved the conversion of skin cells into iPS cells, then into retinal cells. In September 2014, they had been involved in a similar procedure in which a Japanese woman, but in that case, the skin cells that were converted were her own and not provided by a donor.

As Cyranoski explained, iPS cells converted from donor cells are not a perfect genetic match, and could potentially contain genetic anomalies. However, Nobel Prize-winning stem cell expert Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University told Nature that banked iPS cells should be close enough of a match for them to be used in most types of surgical procedures.

If the proposed stem cell bank can become a reality, Engadget explained, it could drastically cut how long patients would need to wait to be treated, allowing doctors to have immediate access to iPS cells instead of having to wait months for them to be cultivated. However, the website noted that this would only benefit between 30 and 50 percent of the Japanese population.

The iPS cell bank, Nature noted, would seek to match donors and recipients based on a trio of genes that code for human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), which are proteins on the surface of cells that help trigger immune system reactions. Currently, the system has cell lines from just a single donor, but the doctors hope to have lines from five to 10 donors by next March.

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Image credit: Thomas Deerinck, NCMIR/SPL

It should be good news when a creature is removed from the endangered species list, but in the case of the West Indian manatee, which was downgraded from “endangered” to “threatened” last week, conservationists are reacting with more concern than celebration, according to reports.

The move was officially announced by the US Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday, and as the Washington Post pointed out, the massive marine mammal has made a remarkable recovery over the past few decades, with the Florida manatee population rising from a few hundred when it was originally listed in 1973 to an estimated 6,620 today.

FWS spokesman Phil Kloer called the manatee “a success story” during a phone interview with Reuters, and in a statement, acting director Jim Kurth said, “While there is still more work to be done to fully recover manatee populations… manatee numbers are increasing and we are actively working with partners to address threats.”

However, not everyone sees it the same way, according to NPR. Florida Rep. Vern Buchanan (R) called the decision “HUGELY disappointing,” and told reporters that the move may harm his home state, where the creature known also known as the sea cow even has its own special license plate. Likewise, Patrick Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club, said “We believe this is a devastating blow to manatees.”

“A federal reclassification at this time will seriously undermine the chances of securing the manatee’s long- term survival,” he added in a statement. “With the new federal administration threatening to cut 75% of regulations, including those that protect our wildlife and air and water quality, the move to downlist manatees can only be seen as a political one.”

Officials insist the species will continue to be protected

Rose said that he believes that the FWS acted “prematurely” in downgrading the threat to the manatee, adding that the agency does not have a plan in place for reducing watercraft-related threats or the potential loss of warm weather habitat the creatures rely upon in the winter.

Frank Jackalone, director of the Florida chapter of the Sierra Club, also criticized the decision, telling Reuters that it will likely encourage local lawmakers to ease boating rules put in place to protect the species. State statistics indicate that 104 of the 520 manatees that died in Florida last year were killed by watercraft, while the Post reports that, based on statistics from the Center for Biological Diversity, at least 668 manatees were killed by boats from 2008 through 2014.

FWS officials emphasized that the manatee will “continue to be protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act” and told NPR that they do not believe that the reclassification would have any significant affect on their population. While an “endangered” species is believed to be in danger of becoming extinct, a “threatened” one is considered to become endangered in the foreseeable future, the media outlet explained.

As part of the review process, the agency said that it looked at the status of the West Indian manatee, including the Florida manatee subspecies throughout its range, as well as the Antillean manatee (which is found in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Central America, northern South America and the Greater and Lesser Antilles).

They added that while the downlisting “represents a milestone for the manatee” that “important challenges still remain to ensuring the species’ long-term future throughout its range. As such,” the FWS insists that the species would “continue to be protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act” and that the move would “not diminish any existing federal protections that will continue to play a vital role in the recovery of the species.”

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