Researchers unearth tropical forest remains in Arctic Norway

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: November 20, 2015 Last Edited: November 20, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A new discovery made in the Svalbard archipelago has revealed that prehistoric Norway was a year-round sauna—and may have been partly responsible for one of the most radical shifts in the Earth’s climate within the past 400 million years.

As researchers from Cardiff University discovered, this part of Norway contains swaths of ancient fossil forests. But the trees found in Svalbard—which is situated in the Arctic Ocean—are not pine trees, but are actually the remains of tropical forests. According to their paper in Geology, these fossils have now been dated to 380 million years ago.

“Tropical” come as a bit of a surprise, but we can thank continental drift for that: 380 million years ago, during the late Devonian period, what would become Norway was situated right around the equator, allowing lush flora to take root. The area was dominated by lycopod trees, which could reach heights of about 12 feet.

And this newly-found flora may help explain an ancient mystery.

“During the Devonian Period, it is widely believed that there was a huge drop in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, from 15 times the present amount to something approaching current levels,” explained co-author Chris Berry, of Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Ocean Science, in a statement.

Why’d this change occur?

Of course, no one knew why this change occurred—but many guess it had to do with a sudden increase in plant size.

“The evolution of tree-sized vegetation is the most likely cause of this dramatic drop in carbon dioxide because the plants were absorbing carbon dioxide through photosynthesis to build their tissues, and also through the process of forming soils,” said Berry.

As carbon dioxide levels plummeted, the temperatures of the Earth dropped too, to levels close to what we have today. And plants at the equator probably contributed the most, thanks to the high temperatures and rainfall levels of the region—plants like those fossilized in Svalbard. These fossils now lend weight to the idea that an evolution in plant size changed the atmosphere.

“These fossil forests shows us what the vegetation and landscape were like on the equator 380 million years ago, as the first trees were beginning to appear on the Earth,” said Berry.

Interestingly, Svalbard—the keeper of these ancient tree remains—also hosts the Global Seed Vault. The Vault is a secure, underground, frozen seed bank, meant to provide a safety net in case a global crises leads to a sudden loss of plant diversity.

“It’s amazing that we’ve uncovered one of the very first forests in the very place that is now being used to preserve the Earth’s plant diversity,” said Berry.

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Feature Image: Dr. Chris Berry, Cardiff University

Health

Different people need different diets, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 20, 2015 Last Edited: November 20, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Curious as to why that diet that helped your friend lose 50 pounds and did next to nothing for you? The answer may lie in the way that your body metabolizes different types of food, according to new research touting the importance of personalized nutritional programs.
The study, led by Eran Segal and Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Cell, tracked the blood sugar levels of 800 patients over the span of one week to see how each person’s body would metabolize the same meals.
Blood sugar was chosen because of its association with conditions such as obesity and diabetes, the researchers explained. They found that the glycemic index (GI), the metric used to rank food based on how they affect blood sugar levels, is not a fixed value, but that it varies by person.
The high variability in response to identical meals suggests that universal dietary guidelines may not be as useful as previously believed, the authors said. Different people had different responses to identical meals, and those individual responses remained consistent from day to day.
Personalized diets could help control blood sugar levels
Segal, Elinav, and their colleagues collected data from each participant in the form of health-related surveys, body measurements, blood tests, glucose monitoring, and stool samples, as well as activity and food intake data (as provided by a mobile app). Nearly 47,000 total meals were measured—including some standardized breakfasts provided to volunteers.
The authors found a link between post-meal blood glucose levels and both age and body mass index (BMI), as well as the varied responses to the same types of foods. Next, the research team devised a machine-learning algorithm based on a variety of factors (including dietary habits and physical activity levels) that could accurately predict post-meal biological responses.
While most dietary recommendations are based on universally applied grading systems, Segal said, “there are profound differences between individuals” that are often overlooked. “In some cases,” he said, “individuals have opposite response to one another, and this is really a big hole in the literature.”
The findings “really enlightened us on how inaccurate we all were about one of the most basic concepts of our existence, which is what we eat and how we integrate nutrition into our daily life,” added Elinav. “In contrast to our current practices, tailoring diets to the individual may allow us to utilize nutrition as means of controlling elevated blood sugar levels and its associated medical conditions.”
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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Raisin test can predict how a toddler will do in school at age 8

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: November 20, 2015 Last Edited: November 20, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Researchers from the University of Warwick have created a simple test that can predict how well a toddler will perform in school by age eight, and this benefit children who may need to be helped at an earlier age.

“An easy, five-minute raisin game task represents a promising new tool for follow-up assessments to predict attention regulation and learning in preterm and term born children,” said co-author Dieter Wolke, a psychology professor at the University of Warwick and senior author of the study published in the Journal of Pediatrics, in a Futurity report.

“The results also point to potential innovative avenues to early intervention after preterm birth.”

Super simple test can lead to big results

The test goes like this: A raisin is placed under an opaque cup within arm’s reach of a toddler. Following three training runs, the toddler is asked to wait 60 seconds for permission to touch and eat the raisin. However, not all children can stand the wait, and some snatched the raisin before the time was up—showing a certain lack of self-control.

The team studied 558 children born after 25 to 41 weeks of gestation, with pre-term births running between 25 to 38 weeks. At the age of 20 months, each child was assessed for self-control using the raisin test, and then at age eight was evaluated by a team of psychologists and pediatricians using three different behavior ratings of attention and standardized tests to assess academic achievement.

It was here that a clear difference emerged between the two gestational groups: The prematurely born children in particular were more likely to grab the raisin before they were told, indicating lower self-inhibitive behavior. Later, researchers linked this inability while toddlers to later poorer performance in schools, as compared to their full-term peers.

This means that a cheap and simple test may help guide parents into taking extra early measures to help their children.

“This new finding is a key piece in the puzzle of long-term underachievement after preterm birth,” said Julia Jaekel, lead author of the study and honorary research fellow at the University of Warwick.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

These pigeons peck to detect breast cancer

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 20, 2015 Last Edited: November 20, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Despite having brains no larger than the tip of a person’s index finger, pigeons can be trained to become pathologists capable of distinguishing between normal and cancerous breast tissues, new research published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One and reported by Futurity has revealed.

In the study, experts from the University of California, Davis and the University of Iowa taught pigeons to discriminate between cancerous and non-cancerous images and slides using a method called operant conditioning, in which they were given a food reward for choosing correctly.

“With some training and selective food reinforcement, pigeons do just as well as humans in categorizing digitized slides and mammograms of benign and malignant human breast tissue,” lead author Richard Levenson, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UC Davis, said in a statement.

Over time, the pigeons were able to generalize what they had learned, meaning that when they were exposed to a additional sets of normal and cancerous tissues on digitized slides, the birds were still able to correctly identify them.

Birds demonstrated 85 percent accuracy after just two weeks

The pigeons were subjected to a few weeks of training using stained pathology slides, including many benign and cancerous samples from routine cases at UC Davis Medical Center. Some of the first started by recognizing differences between the samples in full color at low magnification (4X) before moving on to medium (10X), and high (20X).

They were also tested using monochrome samples to eliminate color and brightness as possible cues, as well as with multiple levels of image compression. The birds even performed well on a series of images they had never seen before—effectively demonstrating that they were learned the difference between the two types of tissue and were able to learn limited pathology.

According to Levenson, the birds “were remarkably adept at discriminating between benign and malignant breast cancer slides at all magnifications, a task that can perplex inexperienced human observers… Pigeons’ accuracy from day one of training at low magnification increased from 50 percent correct to nearly 85 percent correct at days 13 to 15.”

Like humans, the pigeons’ accuracy rating was “modestly affected by the presence or absence of color in the images, as well as by degrees of image compression,” the UC Davis professor added. “The pigeons also learned to correctly identify cancer-relevant microcalcifications on mammograms, but they had a tougher time classifying suspicious masses on mammograms – a task that is extremely difficult, even for skilled human observers.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Worried doctors warn we are nearing ‘the cusp of post-antibiotic era’

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 20, 2015 Last Edited: November 20, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A new study published this week in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases has doctors and health experts concerned that the world is about to enter a “post-antibiotic era”, as the authors of the paper found bacteria resistant to the drug of last resort in patients and livestock.

According to BBC News, a team of Chinese researchers explained that they had identified a new mutation known as the MCR-1 gene that prevented colistin—a medication that has been effective against most Gram-negative bacilli and is used as a polypeptide antibiotic, ineffective.

One-fifth of the animals they tested, as well as 15 percent of raw meat samples and 16 patients, demonstrated resistance to the antibiotic. Furthermore, the resistance was found in a wide range of different strains and species of bacteria, including E. coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Scientists said that the findings were “alarming,” according to Reuters, and it is likely that such resistance will ultimately spread across the globe, leading to completely untreatable infections. It is believed that the resistance emerged due to the overuse of colistin in farm animals.

Could the ‘antibiotic apocalypse’ soon be upon us?

Should bacteria become completely resistant to treatment, it could plunge the world into what the BBC refers to as “the antibiotic apocalypse”, a period in which common infections could be fatal because medicine proves ineffective, and surgeries and cancer treatments requiring antibiotic use would be placed in jeopardy.

There is also evidence that colistin resistance has also spread to Malaysia and Laos, and Reuters added that doctors are calling for restrictions on the use of polymyxins—the class of antibiotic that includes colistin and which is commonly used in livestock farming. In light of the new Chinese study, however, it may be a case of too little, too late.

“All the key players are now in place to make the post-antibiotic world a reality,” University of Cardiff professor Timothy Walsh, who collaborated on the study, told BBC News. “If MCR-1 becomes global, which is a case of when not if, and the gene aligns itself with other antibiotic resistance genes, which is inevitable, then we will have very likely reached the start of the post-antibiotic era. At that point if a patient is seriously ill… there is virtually nothing you can do.”

While this isn’t the first time that colistin resistance has been observed, this case is different in that is emerged in a way that can be easily shared between bacteria, Prof Mark Wilcox of Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust added. Wilcox said that the “transfer rate of this resistance gene is ridiculously high” and that his hospital is currently dealing with several cases for which they are “struggling to find an antibiotic.” It’s clear, he said, that “we’re losing the battle.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

Evidence shows earliest Americans arrived 6,000 years earlier than believed

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: November 19, 2015 Last Edited: November 19, 2015

Christopher Pilny

New evidence uncovered at the Monte Verde site in southern Chile has now provided further evidence that the earliest known Americans became established in South America even earlier than previously thought.
For many decades, it was believed that the Americas were first populated some 13,000 years ago by big-game hunters from Asia, known as the Clovis people. Evidence of their culture was especially apparent in their distinctly-shaped, pointed stone projectiles, known as Clovis points. However, in more recent decades, the Monte Verde site in Chile revealed that, in fact, some American human populations pre-dated the arrival of the Clovis people.
The evidence found there pushed back the 13,000-year estimation another 1,500 years, when the remains of settlements that used a different kind of stone tool technology were discovered at a Monte Verde site known as MVII. Further evidence at another nearby location, known as MVI, yielded then-inconclusive evidence that indicated the advent of humans was even younger.
Now, archaeologists from Vanderbilt University have taken another look at Monte Verde, in an attempt to find new insights and data on the mysterious humans who passed through—and they’ve already made some new discoveries, according to their paper in PLOS ONE.
“We began to find what appeared to be small features—little heating pits, cooking pits associated with burned and unburned bone, and some stone tools scattered very widely across an area about 500 meters long by about 30 or 40 meters wide,” said Tom Dillehay, a Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt, in a statement.
The stone tools were especially peculiar, featuring various styles of carving (both unifacial, or have one honed edge, and bifacial, having two) and unusual media.
“One of the curious things about it that is that unlike what we found before, a significant percentage, about 34 percent, were from non-local materials. Most of them probably come from the coast but some of them probably come from the Andes and maybe even the other side of the Andes,” said Dillehay.
Earliest Americans were highly mobile
This, taken with other discoveries such as the presence of plants from the Andes Mountains, indicates that the humans who camped in Monte Verde were highly mobile, traversing all across Chile.
The stone tools were part of a group of 39 total stone objects found, along with 12 fire pits; small, charred animal bones; and edible plant remains, like nuts and grasses. Akin to some of the plants, the animal remains recovered do not seem to have come from the Monte Verde area—they came from large animals, like mastodons, who likely would not have found enough vegetation to eat in the region—meaning the people at the site killed them elsewhere and cooked them onsite.
It now seems very likely that these people were nomadic hunter-gatherers, who camped at Monte Verde for perhaps a day or two before continuing forward.
“Where they’re going, we don’t know, and where they’re coming from, we don’t know, but this would have been a passageway from the coast to the foothills of the Andes,” Dillehay said.
Significantly older than Clovis people
The most exciting find, though, is the age of these new materials: According to radiocarbon dating, they range from 14,000 to nearly 19,000 years old—significantly older than the Clovis people.
These dates mean that the nomads lived in a challenging era. Monte Verde at that time was a sandur—a plain formed sediment deposited by glaciers—because the last Ice Age was in its death throes. The region was still quite cold year-round—and a volcano was active nearby.
Finally, around 15,000 years ago, the climate became warm enough to permit longer-term settlements, like those seen with the Clovis people.
But even now, knowing all these new facts, the researchers have found more questions than were answered.
“We now realize that the geology and the climate and the archaeology are much more complex than we ever calculated,” said Dillehay.
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Feature Image: A tool used for woodworking made 15,000-16,000 years ago. Credit: Tom Dillehay

Health

Couples who have sex once a week are happiest, study says

Written By: John Hopton

Published Date: November 19, 2015 Last Edited: November 19, 2015

Sam Savage

Claims that more sex equals more happiness are everywhere, but a new study has found that the correlation doesn’t necessarily continue beyond once-a-week sex.

The results were mainly concerned with people in relationships rather than single people and promiscuous sex, and suggest that what’s really important is the role sex plays as part of a healthy relationship.

“Although more frequent sex is associated with greater happiness, this link was no longer significant at a frequency of more than once a week,” said lead researcher Amy Muise, who’s also a social psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto-Mississauga. “Our findings suggest that it’s important to maintain an intimate connection with your partner, but you don’t need to have sex everyday as long as you’re maintaining that connection.”

The study—based on 30,000 Americans and on information collected over four decades—did not identify the causal process. It doesn’t conclude whether having sex up to once a week makes couples happier, or if being in a happy relationship causes people to have more frequent sex (up to once a week).

Gender, age, or length of relationship were not determining factors, suggesting that stereotypes about men wanting more sex, as well as older couples having less sex, are not entirely based in fact. “Our findings were consistent for men and women, younger and older people, and couples who had been married for a few years or decades,” Muise said in a statement.

None of this means that we should all be striving to hit a magical sweet spot of one ugly-bumping session a week, but simply that, according to Muise, “It’s important to maintain an intimate connection with your partner without putting too much pressure on engaging in sex as frequently as possible.”

Results were published online in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

Scientists spot red-hot baby planets being formed around an alien star

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 19, 2015 Last Edited: November 19, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Researchers from the US and Australia have for the first time captured images of baby planets being formed around a distant, sun-like star system, according to new research published in the November 18 online edition of the journal Nature.

Steph Sallum and Kate Follette from the University of Arizona, Professor Peter Tuthill from the University of Sydney, and their colleagues spotted the telltale signs of gas and dust accumulating into a new planet around LkCa 15—a star located 450 light years from Earth.

According to Mashable, the study authors discovered what appears to be at least one new planet (LkCa 15b) approximately the same size as Jupiter or Saturn forming around the star while using the Earth-based Large Binocular Telescope and the Magellan Adaptive Optics System.

Furthermore, it is likely that there are multiple worlds currently forming around the star, which would make them the first of the 1,900-plus confirmed exoplanets to be directly observed while they form, the study authors explained in a statement.

Red-hot baby planet making action

In an interview with Mashable, Sallum said that they had spotted at least two planets, adding that there may be a third as well. By studying these soon-to-be new exoplanets, her team hopes that they can solve some of the longstanding mysteries surrounding how worlds like Earth form.

“This is the first time we’ve imaged a planet that is definitely still in the process of forming,” co-author Professor Tuthill added, noting that the images provided unambiguous photographic proof of what they had witnessed. “The difficulty had been that when you have indirect evidence, there are always alternate explanations that might fit the data.”

Those pictures were obtained thanks largely to atmospheric turbulence—the mixing of hot and cold air that that causes stars to shimmer. The LBT, which was specifically built to use novel techniques to sharpen the image, first spotted the activity. The Magellan optics system later independently verified the discovery by finding the specific wavelength of light that planets such as LkCa 15 emit as they grow (its ‘hydrogen alpha’ spectral fingerprint).

Cosmic objects become extremely hot as they form, and since they form from hydrogen, each of them give off a deep red-colored glow known as hydrogen alpha. Both the forming planet and its star were found to be emitting that particular glow, Follette explained, allowing them “to see that they both growing and glowing in this very distinct shade of red.”

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Feature Image: NASA/JPL-CALTECH

Science

New, eyeless arachnid species named after Lord of the Rings’ Smeagol

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 19, 2015 Last Edited: November 19, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A new, eyeless, jaundiced-looking species of harvestman discovered in a humid Brazilian cave has been named Iandumoema smeagol in honor of Smeagol, the Lord of the Rings villain also known as Gollum who tries to hinder Frodo’s quest to destroy the One Ring.

Like JRR Tolkien’s version of Smeagol, the arachnid version was first discovered in the depth of a subterranean cave—but this one never leaves it home to go on a journey with a pair of hobbits. Instead, as the Washington Post explains, the harvestman spends its entire life hidden below the Earth’s surface— which explains the lack of eyes and the sickly yellow color.

For that reason, Smeagol underwent a series of adaptations where it lost its eyes because of the generations it spent living in total darkness, as well as most of its melanin, which was no longer needed to protect it from the sunlight. Unfortunately, this evolved inability to travel beyond its cave may have put the species at risk of extinction.

In a statement, Dr. Ricardo Pinto-da-Rocha from Instituto de Biociências da Universidade de São Paulo, Dr. Maria Elina Bichuette, and Rafael Fonseca-ferreira from the Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar) explained that additional research on the creatures is required to develop a conservation strategy to protect it from deforestation in the ecosystem around its caves.

Smeagol is the most highly modified species of its kind

The Brazillian researchers, who have published their findings in the journal ZooKeys, said that they had discovered a total of 14 adult and juvenile Smeagol specimens in the cave, and that all of them appeared to prefer staying close to wet cave walls and underground streams. The adults were found to be largely sedentary, while the younger ones seems far more active.

The harvestmen were found in a cave littered with deposits of organic matter—typical for this type or arachnid. Once, one member of the species was even spotted scavenging the carcasses of invertebrates in this waste, they added.

Smeagol is the “most highly modified” species in its genus, the authors wrote. In addition to its lack of eyes, it is distinguished by three other “exclusive characteristics – dorsal scutum areas with conspicuous tubercles, enlarged retrolateral spiniform tubercle on the distal third of femur IV… and the penial ventral process slender and of approximately the same length of the stylus.”

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Feature Image: MSc. Rafael Fonseca-Ferreira

Science

Ancient wisdom tooth reveals DNA from mysterious human cousin

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: November 18, 2015 Last Edited: November 18, 2015

Christopher Pilny

The recent DNA analysis of a tooth found in Siberia has revealed that Homo sapiens’ cousins, the Denisovans—who were discovered only five years ago and only exist in a total of three tiny bone fragments—actually lived for tens of thousands of years among modern humans and Neanderthals.

Previously, we knew that modern humans spent hundreds of thousands of years alongside Neanderthals, but the fact that Denisovans joined the party for as long as they did was a bit of a surprise, and means scientists have come even closer to understanding where Denisovans fit into the human family tree.

The original discovery, according to National Geographic, was in 2010, when three bone fragments from three different Denisovans were discovered in the remote Denisova cave, in Siberia’s Altai Mountains.

“It’s an amazing place,” Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology told National Geographic, “because it’s actually the only place in the world where we know that three different groups of humans with very different histories all lived.”

After drawing DNA from these samples, researchers discovered that the Denisovans did more than just coexist with modern humans: They interbred with them too, contributing about five percent of the genome of a modern people known as the Melanesians in Papua New Guinea and other nearby islands.

What did they look like?

But while we know a lot about their genes, we knew very little about them. Even their appearance is an unknown. The bones found included two large wisdom teeth, which were initially confused with the teeth of a cave bear thanks to their size and splayed roots. From this, the researchers posited that these large teeth would have required large jaws to fit them, giving us the only true clue to their physical appearance.

But now new discoveries are coming in, thanks to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers focused in on the mitochondrial DNA of the samples—which tends to handle the ravages of time better than regular DNA. After isolating and sequencing this genetic material, the team reconstructed the mitochondrial genome for the common ancestor of the three Denisovans found in the cave.

From this, the team was able to date the age of each bone fragment. This is because the older the bone, the “purer” the DNA within is, as DNA accumulates mutations over the course of years. A younger sample has more mutations; a more ancient one has less.

After comparing the mutations in each sample, they discovered that one tooth had about half the number of DNA mutations as the others, thus suggesting it was far older. In fact, the researchers believe the tooth belonged to someone who died 60,000 years before the other two Denisovans, meaning they were around for far longer than previously known.

“The world at that time must have been far more complex than previously thought,” said co-author Susanna Sawyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “Who knows what other hominids lived and what effects they had on us?”

Of course, we still don’t know how old any of these bone samples are—carbon dating can only guarantee that they’re more than 50,000 years old. And there are many other mysteries about them as well, like who they were, how they lived, and what they looked like.

Next step: Find more Denisovans

Finding more Denisovans, therefore, would be massively helpful in untangling these questions. And there is a good chance this could happen again sometime soon, as previous discoveries of ancient Homo sapiens remains may actually be misidentified Denisovans. Most promising are some recent finds of teeth in southern China.

“I would not be surprised if some of these were indeed Denisovans,” said María Martinón-Torres, an anthropologist at the University of College London.

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Feature Image: Bence Viola

Health

Expecting too much from your kids could actually make them perform poorly, study finds

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: November 18, 2015 Last Edited: November 18, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Experts typically suggest that parents set high expectations for their children’s academic performance, but what about so-called “Helicopter Parents” who push their kids to reach unrealistic expectations?
According to a new study in published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a parent setting expectations that are too high for their child can actually have a negative impact on the child’s academic performance.
“Our research revealed both positive and negative aspects of parents’ aspiration for their children’s academic performance. Although parental aspiration can help improve children’s academic performance, excessive parental aspiration can be poisonous,” study author Kou Murayama, a metacognition researcher at the University of Reading, said in a statement.
In the study, researchers examined information from a 2002 to 2007 survey of more than 3,500 secondary school students and their parents living in Germany. The study examined student math achievement along with parental aspiration, such as how much parents want their child to earn a certain grade. The study team also looked at how much the parents said they thought their child was capable of a particularly good grade.
The study showed that high parental aspiration led to raised academic success, but only when it did not overly surpass practical expectation. When aspiration surpassed expectation, the children’s results dropped proportionately.
To bolster the outcomes, the scientists attempted to replicate the primary findings of the study using information from a two-year study of more than 12,000 American students and their parents. The outcomes were very similar to the German study and supplied further evidence that parents’ overly high aspirations are connected with worse academic performance by their kids.
Have realistic expectations
Prior psychological studies have discovered the connection between aspiration and academic achievement, but this study illustrates a caveat, Murayama said.
“Much of the previous literature conveyed a simple, straightforward message to parents — aim high for your children and they will achieve more,” the Reading researcher noted.
However, the new study suggested getting parents to expect the highest grades from their kids may be counterproductive and should be tempered with realistic expectations based on a particular child’s skill set.
“Simply raising aspiration cannot be an effective solution to improve success in education,” Murayama said.
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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Technology

This box drains blue light from your TV, helping you magically drift off to sleep

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 18, 2015 Last Edited: November 18, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Even though researchers have established that exposure to the blue light given off by electronic devices at night can be harmful to your health and make it more difficult to get a quality night’s rest, some of us just can’t seem to fall asleep without watching television.

With that in mind, the folks at Saffron have come up with a new device that connects to a TV set and slowly adjusts the color of the display to remove as much as 50 percent of blue light over the span of an hour. The transition, the company claims, is “seamless and virtually unnoticeable.”

The device is known as the Drift TV box, and as Gizmodo explains, it connects between the TV and either an HDMI switch or an AV receiver. Users schedule their desired bedtimes, and up to 60 minutes before hand, the box begins removing blue spectrum light from the screen. Wake-up times can also be specified, at which time the entire color spectrum will be reinstated.

Saffron, who hopes to have the Drift TV box available in time for Christmas, said that the device supports TVs up to 4k in resolution, can remove up to 100 percent of blue light emissions (in 10 percent intervals), and works with universal remotes. The initial production run will be limited to just 150 devices, each of which will cost $99, according to Gizmodo.

So why would I even need something like this?

A Harvard Health Publication updated earlier this fall reported that exposure to light during the nighttime throws off the body’s circadian rhythm, and that this disruption to our internal clocks could not only impact sleep quality, but cause cancer, diabetes, and heart disease as well.

In particular, the researchers found that blue wavelengths were the most disruptive to a person’s system after sundown, and while they admitted that they were not certain exactly why late night exposure to blue light was so bad for us, they said that it is known to suppress production of the hormone melatonin. Harvard research also found that changes to circadian rhythms resulted in an increase in blood sugar levels and a decrease in leptin levels in study participants.

A UK study published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health also found a link between light-emitting device exposure prior to bed and reduced melatonin production. In that paper, the study authors recommended that all electronic gadgets should come with a special, built-in mode that removes blue light during late-night hours—a recommendation echoed by experts at the National Sleep Foundation.

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Feature Image: Drift

Technology

US Air Force successfully tests nuclear gravity bomb in Nevada

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 18, 2015 Last Edited: November 18, 2015

Christopher Pilny

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and United States Air Force announced on Tuesday that they had completed a third and final non-nuclear test of their new and improved B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb at a testing range in Nevada.

While the announcement comes against the backdrop of the weekend’s terror attacks in Paris, the test itself was actually conducted on October 20 at Tonopah Test Range, according to officials at the NNSA and USAF. The test was used to assess the weapon’s non-nuclear components, but the bomb itself contained no highly enriched uranium or plutonium.

“This demonstration of effective end-to-end system performance under representative delivery conditions marks another 2015 achievement in the development of the B61-12 Life Extension Program,” NNSA Deputy Administrator Madelyn Creedon said, calling the flight test “evidence” of “[our] commitment to our nation’s security and that of our allies and partners.”

During the test, an F-15E took from Nellis Air Force Base in southern Nevada released the B61-12 bomb and demonstrated it in “a realistic guided flight environment,” the joint NNSA and USAF announcement said. Initial reports were that everything went as planned, and that the telemetry, tracking, and video data were all collected without issue.

‘A lot of money to spend on an obsolete weapon’

The hardware featured in the flight test was co-designed by the Sandia National and Los Alamos National Laboratories, manufactured by the National Security Enterprise Plants, and attached to a tail-kit assembly designed by Boeing. While the tail-kit assembly guided the test unit, the NNSA and USAF noted that the actual nuclear weapons will not be guided by GPS.

The Life Extension Program launched in February 2012 as a way to extend the usability of older B61 nuclear weapons while making them safer and more reliable, officials said. The plan is to re-use or re-make existing components to replace and upgrade existing gravity bombs. Some critics have questioned the $8 billion program’s value, according to recent reports by the Guardian.

The program “has been widely condemned as an awful lot of money to spend on an obsolete weapon. As an old fashioned ‘dumb’ bomb it has no role in US or NATO nuclear doctrine, but the upgrade has gone ahead anyway, in large part as a result of lobbying by the nuclear weapons laboratories.”

The B61 upgrade replaces the previous, rigid tail with one that has moving fins, making it easier to accurately guide it to an intended target, the Guardian added. Adjustments to the yield of the bomb can also be made prior to launch, based on the intended target.

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Feature Image: National Nuclear Security Administration/Nevada Site Office

Health

Breakthrough drug combination cures hepatitis C in just 3 months

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 18, 2015 Last Edited: November 18, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Using a simple combination of two hepatitis C drugs over a 12-week period effectively cured the virus in 99 percent of patients participating in a recent clinical trials, according to new research by hepatologists at the Toronto Western Hospital (TWH) Liver Clinic.

The breakthrough, reported this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved a once daily combination of the medications sofosbuvir and velpatasvir over a three-month span. Study authors found the therapy was effective both in patients who had previously been treated as well as in those who had not, and eradicated several hepatitis C virus (HCV) genotypes.

In addition, the sofosbuvir-velpatasvir combination therapy even proved effective in those with compensated cirrhosis, a condition in which scarring of a patient’s liver has taken place, but they have yet to experience any symptoms as a result of the damage to the organ.

“This drug regimen changes the standard of care in treating patients with HCV,” said Dr. Jordan Feld, lead author of the study and a TWH hepatologist. “We can now cure almost everyone with a very simple treatment. It’s incredibly gratifying to be part of research where we not only cure a disease but can also think about eliminating HCV in Canada.”

Treatment eliminates the need to test for HCV genotype

Approximately 252,000 Canadians and 170 million men and women worldwide are infected with chronic HCV, the TWH researchers explained. Symptoms frequently do not appear until the liver becomes seriously damaged. Left undiagnosed, it can lead to cirrhosis, liver failure, or cancer.

The virus is typically spread through blood-to-blood contact, either through intravenous drug use or poorly sterilized medical equipment, they added. Currently approved treatments for HCV vary in effectiveness based on genotypes, but the sofosbuvir-velpatasvir combination appears to work on all strains of the virus, eliminating the need to test for the pathogen’s genotype.

Randomized, double-blind tests showed than 99 percent of the more than 600 patients taking part in the study experienced a sustained virologic response after 12 weeks of treatment with the drug combination, effectively meaning that they were cured of the disease. The patients remained free of HCV three months after completing treatment, Dr. Feld and his colleagues reported.

Dr. Feld called it “a one size fits all treatment that is very easy to administer and extremely well tolerated. Our challenge now is getting treatment to those who need it. Over half of people living with hepatitis C remain undiagnosed. Fortunately this regimen… will allow us to move treatment out of specialty clinics so that we can deliver care and ideally cure all infected Canadians.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

Mysterious ‘fourth strand’ of ancient European genomes discovered hidden in Caucasus mountains

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: November 17, 2015 Last Edited: November 17, 2015

Emily Bills

Several ancestral populations have been recognized as the originators of current European genomes, but now new research out of Cambridge University, Trinity College Dublin, and University College Dublin have discovered an entirely new ancient lineage that contributed as well—one that derives from a people who settled in the Caucasus region some 45,000 years ago.

Before now, three groups were recognized as the progenitors of modern Europeans. After the expansion of humans out of Africa, one group colonized a large part of Europe, from Spain to Hungary. Another group settled in the eastern Mediterranean and Levant.

The third group, known as the Yamnaya, migrated into Europe around 5,000 years ago from central Eurasia—and it was the Yamnaya who bore both the previously recognized third strand and this new genetic heritage.

“The question of where the Yamnaya come from has been something of a mystery up to now,” explained co-author Dr. Andrea Manica, from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, in a statement.

“We can now answer that as we’ve found that their genetic make-up is a mix of Eastern European hunter-gatherers and a population from this pocket of Caucasus hunter-gatherers who weathered much of the last Ice Age in apparent isolation. This Caucasus pocket is the fourth major strand of ancient European ancestry, one that we were unaware of until now,” he said.

The discovery was made after sequencing the genomes of human remains found in western Georgia—one over 13,000 years old, and another nearly 10,000 years old. Using this genome, the researchers determined that, following the expansion of humans from Africa, these hunter-gatherer ancestors settled where southern Russia meets Georgia, or the Caucasus region.

Caucasus mountains separated the population

But, unlike other populations, they did not expand into to the rest of Europe for thousands of years, but instead became trapped in the area during the “Glacial Maximum” era of the Ice Age. The Caucasus Mountains sheltered them from the worst weather of this period, but also sheltered them from other populations, leading to increasingly similar genes in the group as they interbred amongst themselves.

Finally, they were able to break free, bringing them into contact with other peoples, likely from further east. As this genetic mixing occurred, the Yamnaya culture developed: Horse-riding Steppe herders that swept through Europe around the start of the Bronze Age, thereby spreading their genes to the ancestors of nearly every modern European population.

“We knew that the Yamnaya had this big genetic component that we couldn’t place, and we can now see it was this ancient lineage hiding in the Caucasus during the last Ice Age,” said Manica.

Migration to Southeast Asia

Moreover, the Yamnaya appear to have migrated to Southeast Asia.

“India is a complete mix of Asian and European genetic components. The Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry is the best match we’ve found for the European genetic component found right across modern Indian populations,” said Eppie Jones, a PhD student from Trinity College who is the first author of the paper.

Which means a big genetic mystery across two continents seems to have just been solved.

“This is a major new piece in the human ancestry jigsaw, the influence of which is now present within almost all populations from the European continent and many beyond,” said Professor Daniel Bradley, leader of the Trinity team.

“The sequencing of genomes from this key region will have a major impact on the fields of palaeogeneomics and human evolution in Eurasia, as it bridges a major geographic gap in our knowledge,” added Professor Ron Pinhasi, a lead senior author from University College Dublin.

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Feature Image: Eppie Jones

Health

Transgender man finds out he’s pregnant halfway through transition

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: November 17, 2015 Last Edited: November 17, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Woah. A Philadelphia transgender man recently gave birth to a baby girl halfway through his gender transition, according to a new report by British tabloid, the Mirror.

Born female, Kayden Coleman had been living as a man for nearly a decade when he discovered he was pregnant.

“I never thought about getting pregnant. Because of the male hormones, I didn’t think it was a possibility,” he told the Mirror. “It was definitely a surprise.”

Coleman’s doctors had him discontinue his hormone regimen as a part of a preparation for a mastectomy, part of the gender reassignment process. Coleman the procedure requires taking a break for six weeks.

Coleman said a few months after quitting the regimen, he began to feel strange.

“One day my back was killing me,” he told the Mirror. “(Coleman’s partner) Elijah was going to give me a massage, so I lay on my front on the bed. It felt like there was a pillow under my stomach but there was no pillow.”

The two joked about taking a pregnancy test, but lo and behold, the test came up positive. Upon going to his physician’s office, Colman found out he was 21 weeks pregnant.

“I was shocked. It took a while to process it,” he said.

The development forced Colman to come out as transgender to many people around him, including his partner’s family.

“It was such a personal thing that I felt if Kayden wanted them to know he should tell them himself,” Elijah said. “But when we found out Kayden was pregnant we knew we had to tell them. How could we explain the baby when she popped up after a couple of months?”

By all accounts, Colman had a fairly conventional pregnancy and eventually gave birth to a daughter the couple named Azaelia.

“Even when I first held her it hadn’t sunk in that she was mine, so I didn’t really feel much. But I knew things would never be the same again. I was so happy to finally see her face,” Coleman said.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

Rosetta gears up for its grand finale: Reuniting with its Philae lander

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 17, 2015 Last Edited: November 17, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Having officially entered its second year of operations last week, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft is set to begin an extended mission in December before controllers send it on a controlled decent that will reunite it with its Philae lander on the surface of Comet 67P.

According to Spaceflight Now and Sky & Telescope, the history-making probe has enough fuel and funding to continue studying the comet through September 2016, at which point it will begin a slow descent that will eventually culminate with a “controlled crash landing” on the comet.

At one point, the notion of placing Rosetta in hibernation while 67P neared aphelion (the point at which it would be furthest from the sun), then waking it up again once the comet approached the sun again four years later, had been suggested. The ESA ultimately decided against this proposal, however, fearing that the spacecraft would not survive the extended period of downtime.

“Rosetta will, next year, continue the current wealth of scientific data from C/67P,” ESA Rosetta mission manager Patrick Martin said, according to Sky & Telescope, “and, in particular since the comet passed perihelion, will follow the comet’s activity to its complete end.”

Planning for the historic spacecraft’s final moments

Following a decade-long journey, Rosetta arrived at Comet 67P’s location in August 2014, and on November 12, its Philae probe touched-down on the comet’s surface. 67P’s orbit took Rosetta and Philae to perihelion—the point during which time it was closest to the sun—on August 13, and at one point the spacecraft was just five miles (eight kilometers) from the nucleus.

As of Thursday, Rosetta was 105 miles (170 km) from the comet’s nucleus, but according to the ESA, it will move much closer in the weeks to come, and it is their hope that it will continue to collect data right up until the moment when it makes contact with the comet and shuts down.

“We are looking forward to the scientific discoveries the next year will bring,” Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor said in a statement. “Next year, we plan to do another far excursion, this time through the comet’s tail and out to 2000 km. To complement that, we hope to make some very close flybys towards the end of the mission, as we prepare to put the orbiter down on the comet.”

Specifics of Rosetta’s grand finale are still being worked out, as the procedure is every bit as complex and the delivery of Philae, if not more so operations manager Sylvain Lodiot explained. Currently, the plan is to move the probe into a series of highly elliptical orbits in August, then move out to a more distant point for Rosetta’s final approach in September.

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Feature Image: ESA/ATG medialab/Rosetta/NAVCAM

Technology

Woah: New stealth material absorbs radars

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 17, 2015 Last Edited: November 17, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Chinese researchers have developed a new substance that could be used to coat airplanes and make them essentially undetectable by radar by detecting and adapting to different frequencies, according to research published last week in the Journal of Applied Physics.

The material is known as an “active frequency selecting surface” or AFSS, and as Ars Technica reported, it involves a substance currently used in printed circuit boards that can be tweaked to absorb microwaves at a range of different frequencies. If used on a stealth aircraft, it could make it more difficult for currently available radar technology to detect the plane.

Currently, most stealth aircraft hide from radars by either using unusual body geometry to reflect radio waves, or by using materials that convert waves to heat and then absorbing them, according to Popular Science. The technique described by the Chinese scientists is different in that it uses a material that tunes itself in order to protect against even ultra-high-frequency (UHF) radar.

Researchers reported that the AFSS makes it possible to absorb radio frequencies ranging from 0.7 to 1.9 gigahertz (GHz), reducing reflectivity by anywhere from 10 to 40dB, according to Ars Technica.

So how does it work?

The material has been “loaded with lumped elements” that allow it to tune the frequency range, the researchers explained. Reports indicate that it uses varactor diodes, which are semiconductor capacitors often used in electronic tuners, and PIN diodes, which are semiconductors capable of acting as resistors to electromagnetic radiation at radio and microwave frequencies.

Building upon previous research in the field, the authors of the new paper developed an ultra-thin material measuring less than eight millimeters in thickness—including an 0.8 millimeter layer of a circuit board material known as FR4, a 0.04 millimeter layer of copper-and-semiconductor AFSS underneath that, along with a 7.0 millimeter honeycomb material for support.

By publishing their findings, the authors remove “a major obstacle for other countries that may want to build their own stealth fighters,” while also making it “easier for anyone trying to break stealth protection like this, as they have the technique available publicly… to find flaws” in the system.

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Feature Image: Wikimedia Commons

Space

Yale astronomers discover M87: a distant galaxy with a pulse

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 16, 2015 Last Edited: November 16, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A team of astronomers from Harvard and Yale have not only discovered a galaxy which they claim has a “heartbeat” of sorts, but they’ve actually managed to take its “pulse” by using three months worth of images obtained using the Hubble Space Telescope, according to a Yale statement.

According to Pieter van Dokkum, the Sol Goldman Professor and chair of astronomy at Yale and co-author of a new paper published in the journal Nature, this marks the first time that the impact of pulsating, older red stars on the light of their surrounding galaxy has been effectively measured by scientists.

Van Dokkum and his colleagues used a series of images Hubble captured of Messier 87 (M87), a supergiant elliptical galaxy located in the constellation Virgo. The images used during their study were obtained by the NASA/ESA space telescope over a three month span in 2006. They learned that one-fourth of the pixels in those images changed in brightness at regular intervals.

“We tend to think of the stars in the sky as unchanging and constant,” he told redOrbit via email. “We’ve known for centuries that some individual stars change their brightness, but most stars in the sky do not change perceptively on human time scales. What we found is that, paradoxically, if you take all the stars together, the combined light of all the stars does vary.”

Findings could radically change how we view distant galaxies

Each of those pixels, the professor explained, contains roughly one million stars. By carefully comparing each pixel, they found that that individual, bright, pulsating stars amongst the many unchanging stars were causing the overall galaxy’s light to pulsate every 270 days or so.

“This is because the rare, pulsating stars emit so much light that their pulsations can be measured even though each of them is surrounded by a million stars that don’t change,” van Dokkum said. Since our sun will go through this same phase when it nears the of its life cycle, the study offers a sneak-peak to the future that awaits our own solar system, he added.

“In this pulsating phase the Sun will swell to the size of the orbit of the Earth,” the professor explained. “That is, it will fill the entire sky and burn Earth to a crisp. If the pulsating stars in M87 have solar systems like our own, we are seeing them at the time when their inner planets have been destroyed – a somewhat unsettling thought!

“In practical terms (as in, ‘what do we do with these observations’), the strength of the ‘heartbeat’ should depend on a galaxy’s age: younger galaxies should show stronger pulsations than older galaxies,” he added. “The heartbeat therefore is a ‘clock’ telling us how old a galaxy’s stars are. We are planning to take the pulse of other galaxies to measure how old they are.”

Based on our knowledge of the stars in the Milky Way, van Dokkum said that this effect should be measurable, but he admitted that he and his colleagues were amazed when they discovered the increasingly and decreasingly bright pixels. The findings could change the way that scientists view distant galaxies like M87, which they now realize are not static, unchanging objects, but are instead continuously “shimmering” on timescales that can actually be observed.

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Feature Image: NASA/Hubble

Health

It takes a lot of effort to be this lazy, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 16, 2015 Last Edited: November 16, 2015

Christopher Pilny

It takes more effort for your brain to do less and care less, according to neurologists at Oxford University who found people who are perceived as lazy or apathetic have looser, less efficient neural connections than those who tend to be more focused or motivated.

According to Gizmodo, lead researcher Masud Husain, a professor of neurology and cognitive neuroscience at Oxford, and his colleagues used a questionnaire to divide study participants into two groups based on their level of motivation, then used MRI to monitor brain activity while the subjects participated in a decision-making game.

During the game, each of the 40 volunteers were presented with a series of offers, each of which had a different level of reward and physical effort required to win said reward. While those who were dubbed to be more apathetic were less likely to accept high-effort tasks, the MRI found that one part of their brain showed surprisingly high levels of neural activity.

The part of the brain in question is the pre-motor cortex, which plays a key role in taking action. It activates just before the regions of the brain responsible for controlling movement, and much to the authors’ surprise, it was more active in the brains of apathetic people than it was in the brains of those deemed to be motivated.

It takes a lot of effort to not care about things

“We expected to see less activity because they were less likely to accept effortful choices but we found the opposite,” Husain, whose findings have been published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, noted in a statement. “We thought that this might be because their brain structure is less efficient, so it’s more of an effort for apathetic people to turn decisions into actions.”

Using the brain scanning techniques, he and his colleagues discovered that connections in the front part of an apathetic person’s brain are “less effective” than they are in motivated men and women. Typically, the brain is responsible for about 20 percent of an average person’s daily energy expenditure, but in apathetic people, more energy is needed to take action. In short, being lazy requires a surprising amount of effort in the pre-motor cortex.

“As far as we know, this is the first time that anyone has found a biological basis for apathy in healthy people. It doesn’t account for apathy in everyone but by giving us more information about the brain processes underlying normal motivation, it helps us understand better how we might find a treatment for those pathological conditions of extreme apathy,” said Husain.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Good news: Smoking in America is at an all-time low

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 16, 2015 Last Edited: November 16, 2015

Christopher Pilny

The percentage of American adults who smoke has reached an all-time low, but those who are on Medicaid or who are uninsured are twice as likely to regularly use cigarettes than those who have private health insurance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Friday.

According to UPI, the percentage of US adults using the tobacco products has dropped from 20.9 percent in 2005 to 16.8 percent in 2014—including a full percentage-point drop between 2013 and 2014. The CDC also discovered that the average number of cigarettes smoked everyday by daily users had decreased from 16.7 in 2005 to 13.8 in 2014.

“Smoking kills half a million Americans each year and costs more than $300 billion,” Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, said in a statement last Thursday. “This report shows real progress helping American smokers quit and that more progress is possible.”

The most significant decreases were reported in adults between the ages of 18 and 24. While intervention programs such as new laws and improved access to smoking cessation aids have been credited with the overall success, UPI pointed out that 18 to 24 years olds may be increasingly turning to e-cigarettes, hookahs, and other alternate smoking methods.

Despite successes, gaps remain among the poor, less educated

While the overall numbers are positive, the report still found gaps that need addressing, as the New York Times pointed out. The study found that about 43 percent of less educated Americans smoked in 2014, compared to just five percent of those who had earned a graduate degree.

Furthermore, nearly one-third (29.1 percent) of people on Medicaid and 27.9 percent of those without insurance smokes—compared to 12.9 percent for those with private health insurance and 12.5 percent of those receiving Medicare. In raw numbers, that means that nearly six million men and women on Medicaid and nine million uninsured Americans are regular smokers.

The CDC report also found that males were more likely to smoke than females (18.8 percent vs. 14.8 percent), that one-fifth of adults between the ages of 25 and 44 regularly used cigarettes, and that 23.9 percent of those who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual were smokers. More than 20 percent of those living in the Midwest smoked, as did nearly 28 percent of multiracial Americans.

“These findings underscore the importance of ensuring that proven strategies to prevent and reduce tobacco use reach the entire population, particularly vulnerable groups,” said Dr. Brian King, deputy director for research translation at the CDC Office on Smoking and Health.

“Comprehensive smoke-free laws, higher prices for tobacco products, high-impact mass media campaigns, and barrier-free access to quitting help are all important,” he added. “They work to reduce the enormous health and financial burden of tobacco use and secondhand smoke exposure among Americans.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

New electronic glasses are the first new lazy eye treatment in 50 years

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: November 15, 2015 Last Edited: November 15, 2015

Brian Galloway

Affecting two to three percent of all children in the U.S., amblyopia—commonly referred to as having a lazy eye—is the most common cause of visual impairment in kids. But now a new study out of the Glick Eye Institute at Indiana University has found a new and perhaps less stressful way to treat this issue: Glasses that function as a sort of digital eyepatch.

Amblyopia means that a child has one eye that does not develop as well as the other, resulting in an eye that is more nearsighted than the other or that strays inward. Interventions need to be taken by around the age of eight—the age at which the eyes and brain are still developing, and thus can still change—or else that eye can become permanently blind.

But the normal treatments—an eye patch, or eye drops made of atropine that blur the vision in the stronger eye, both of which force the weak eye to “learn” to see better—are often difficult for young children to handle. Eye patches can be a source of torment, and up to a quarter of these children feel anxiety before using the drops. In fact, nearly 15 percent of children flat-out refuse to use the drops—imagine trying to encourage a three-year-old to have something splashed in their eye—meaning that parents are usually between a rock and a hard place when trying to help their children.

The new glasses developed by the Glick Eye Institute, however, may be a new solution for these kids. The glasses, called Amblyz™ occlusion glasses, can be modified to correct a child’s vision and featuring LCD lenses. These lenses can turn opaque, obscuring a child’s vision in the strong eye so that the weak one can become stronger.

Testing effectiveness

To test whether these glasses would work as well as the previous methods, the Institute recruited 33 children between the ages of three and eight, all of whom had amblyopia and required glasses to correct their vision. Then, the kids were separated into two groups. The first wore an adhesive eyepatch for two hours a day. The second wore the glasses for four hours daily, with the glasses obscuring the vision of the stronger eye every 30 seconds.

The results, which will be presented at the 119th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, were that both groups showed the same amount of improvement in the lazy eye: After three months of treatment, they averaged two lines of improvement on a reading chart.

“When you talk to adults who underwent childhood treatment for amblyopia, they will tell you that wearing a patch was the worst thing ever,” said Daniel Neely, M.D., a pediatric ophthalmology professor at Indiana University who led the study, in a statement. “With these electronic occlusion glasses, the child learns that the lens will be clear again in just a few seconds so they may be more cooperative with the treatment. For parents who have struggled with drops and patching, this could be a great alternative.”

The Amblyz glasses have officially been approved by the FDA as a medical device, and are available throughout the U.S. for about $450.

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Image credit: American Academy of Ophthalmology

Science

This is your brain on art: Researchers record brain waves in art galleries

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: November 15, 2015 Last Edited: November 15, 2015

Brian Galloway

For the first time ever, scientists have captured a real-world demonstration of what happens inside your head when you look at art—which also helps to prove that brain data doesn’t need to be collected inside a lab to be usable.

“You can do testing in the lab, but it’s very artificial,” explained co-author Lillie Cranz Cullen–Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston, in a statement. “We were looking at how to measure brain activity in action and in context.”

The brain’s reaction to art

The researchers followed 431 individuals as they examined an exhibition of art by Dario Robleto at the Menil Collection in Houston. As reported in their paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, art deemed aesthetically pleasing led to increased functional connectivity in localized brain networks as compared to the baseline readings. Meanwhile, other differences were recognized between the sexes and between the oldest and youngest participants.

“The direction of signal flow showed early recruitment of broad posterior [visual] areas followed by focal anterior activation,” wrote the authors. “Significant differences in the strength of connections were also observed across age and gender. This work provides evidence that EEG [electroencephalogram], deployed on freely behaving subjects, can detect selective signal flow in neural networks, identify significant differences between subject groups, and report with greater-than-chance accuracy the complexity of a subject’s visual perception of aesthetically pleasing art.”

These differences were measured using EEG headsets, which allowed subjects to be completely mobile while their brains were scanned. The exhibit, “The Boundary of Life Is Quietly Crossed,” featured sculptures and recordings that represented the heart. The researchers deemed each piece to be either complex or moderate in meaning, and had participants face a blank wall for one minute to measure a baseline of brain activity before allowing them to enter.

Potential uses of these findings

In 20 people who wore a specific kind of EEG headset, a gel-based one, researchers were able to look at brain wave patterns to predict whether a participant was examining a blank wall, a complex piece of art, or a moderately complex piece with 55% accuracy—much better than the 33% accuracy that would result from random guessing. Much more data on this is to yet be crunched from the other kinds of headsets.

As to where this will lead, other researchers may now feel emboldened to study the brain in a non-laboratory setting, and it may lead to giving artists and museum curators the ability to understand how people will react and move through an exhibit. Further, it could have other applications related to daily life, according to Contreras-Vidal.

“We might find that there are people who are very attuned to visual art, or to music, or poetry, and there might be an underlying common neural network,” he said. “If we know that, we could optimize the delivery of art for therapy, for teaching.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

First gamma-ray pulsar discovered outside the Milky Way

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 14, 2015 Last Edited: November 14, 2015

Brian Galloway

A gamma-ray pulsar discovered on the edge of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud is the first celestial object of its kind ever found in a galaxy other than the Milky Way, NASA officials confirmed in a statement released earlier this week.

The object, which is located about 163,000 light-years from Earth, is also the most luminous gamma-ray pulsar to date, Pierrick Martin, an astrophysicist at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in France, reported in the latest edition of the journal Science.

The Tarantula Nebula is the largest, most active and most complex region of star formation in our little corner of the universe, and in the earliest stages of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope mission, it was identified as a bright source of these high-energy forms of light, they noted.

At first, this luminosity was attributed to subatomic particle collisions accelerated in the shock waves produced by exploding stars. However, Martin’s team has now discovered that about half of the gamma-ray brightness attributed to the nebula is caused by a lone pulsar, PSR J0540-6919 (J0540 for short). That, Martin said, was “a genuine surprise.”

Research could improve our understanding of pulsar physics

J0540 is one of two pulsars discovered to date in the Tarantula Nebula. While it spins at a rate of just under 20 times per second, the other pulsar, PSR J0537-6910 (J0537 for short), is the fastest rotating young pulsar discovered to date, spinning nearly 62 times per second. It took Martin and his colleagues more than six years of observations to detect J0540’s gamma rays.

“The gamma-ray pulses from J0540 have 20 times the intensity of the previous record-holder, the pulsar in the famous Crab Nebula, yet they have roughly similar levels of radio, optical and X-ray emission,” said study co-author Lucas Guillemot from the Laboratory for Physics and Chemistry of Environment and Space, said. “Accounting for these differences will guide us to a better understanding of the extreme physics at work in young pulsars.”

In addition, the researchers found that J0540 is approximately 1,700 years told, or twice the age of the Crab Nebula pulsar. For the sake of comparison, the majority of the 2,500 known pulsars range from 10,000 years old to hundreds of millions of years old., NASA said. Thus far, Fermi has increased the number of known gamma-ray pulsars from seven to more than 160.

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Image credit: NASA Goddard/YouTube

Health

Homeopathic remedies may soon be banned in the UK

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 14, 2015 Last Edited: November 14, 2015

Brian Galloway

Health officials in the UK are considering blacklisting homeopathic remedies, a move which would prohibit doctors there from prescribing alternative medicines found to be ineffective in several large-scale studies, BBC News and The Guardian reported on Friday.
The controversial practice, which is based on the principle that “like cures like” (i.e. substances that cause symptoms of a disease in healthy people would cure the same symptoms is somebody who is ill), but critics claim that the approach is a pseudoscience built around placebos.
For instance, diluting pollen or grass could, in theory at least, be used to create a homeopathic remedy for hay fever. One part of the substance is mixed with 99 parts water or alcohol, and the process repeated six times in a “6c” formula or 30 times in a “30c” one, said BBC News. Similar methods are used to “treat” asthma, ear infections, arthritis, allergies and depression.
However, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) said that there is “no good-quality evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition,” and now, lawmakers are reportedly considering banning general practitioners from prescribing such treatments.
Effectiveness of the treatments debated by experts
On Friday, health department officials announced that a consultation on the issue would occur sometime in 2016, and The Guardian noted that the move comes following threats of a judicial review. During the announcement, life sciences minister George Freeman said that due to rising medical costs, the government had an obligation to ensure NHS funds were spent wisely.
Science writer Simon Singh, founder of the Good Thinking Society, a group which threatened to pursue a judicial challenge the agency’s refusal to prohibit doctors from prescribing homeopathic remedies, welcomed the news. Singh said that his group had been pressuring officials to conduct such a review for more than a year, citing that they did not meet the proper criteria for use.
Those criteria, he explained, are whether or not a treatment is effective, whether or not it is cost-effective, whether or not there were cheaper alternatives, and whether or not it was so available that it did not need to be prescribed. “By any of those criteria,” Singh said, “homeopathy should be blacklisted. This is money that could be spent on drugs that do work. It’s not about being anti-homeopathy, it’s about being pro-patient and spending money on drugs that do work.”
However, Dr. Helen Beaumont, president of the Faculty of Homeopathy called it “disappointing” that health officials were “embarking on a costly consultation” that could prevent doctors from “prescribing a course of treatment that benefits thousands of patients each year.” She went on to tell the BBC, “homeopathy works, it’s widely used by doctors in Europe, and patients who are treated by homeopathy are really convinced of its benefits, as am I.”
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Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

New species is the ‘missing link’ of duckbill dinosaur evolution

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 14, 2015 Last Edited: November 14, 2015

Brian Galloway

A new type of duckbilled dinosaur discovered by researchers at Montana State University shows how the creatures transitioned from ancestral forms that lacked a crest to a descendant which had a larger crest, shedding new light on what was a poorly understood evolutionary process.

The new species, which is described in the latest edition of the journal PLOS One, was found by adjunct professor Elizabeth Freedman Fowler and MSU paleontologist Jack Horner. Identified as Probrachylophosaurus bergei, the new dinosaur is believed to be the missing link separating the 81 million year old Acristavus from its descendants, the Brachylophosaurus.

The bones in the skull of the new dinosaur are said to be similar to those of the Acristavus and the Brachylophosaurus, the study authors explained. However, Acristavus does not have a crest and the top of its skull is flat, while Brachylophosaurus has a large flat paddle-shaped crest that covers the back of the top of its skull and Probrachylophosaurus has a crest in the middle of the skull.

“The crest of Probrachylophosaurus is small and triangular, and would have only poked up a little bit on the top of the head, above the eyes,” explained Freedman Fowler, who received her doctorate in paleontology from MSU’s Earth Sciences Department earlier this year and is now the curator of paleontology at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum in Malta.

Findings underscore the importance of heterochrony

The fossils were originally discovered during the summer of 2007, as Freedman Fowler led an expedition to a site in north-central Montana that was home to duckbilled dinosaur remains. The team found what wound up being the skull and postcranial bones of the new species.

Thanks to dating techniques, the researchers determined that Probrachylophosaurus lived about 79 million years ago, placing it between Acristavus and Brachylophosaurus. Based on the age of the new creature, the MSU team expected its skull and crest to be a bridge between both of those dinosaurs – which, as it turns out, it was.

Probrachylophosaurus is “a perfect example of evolution within a single lineage of dinosaurs over millions of years,” Freedman Fowler said. A fragmented juvenile Probrachylophosaurus was also found at a nearby site, she added. That discovery suggests that each generation of the Brachylophosaurus lineage grew larger crests by changing the pace of crest development.

This change in the timing or rate of development is called heterochrony, the MSU researchers explained, and it is a process that is becoming more recognized as a driving evolutionary force. Freedman Fowler called heterochrony the “key to understanding how evolution actually occurs in these dinosaurs,” but added that a large amount of specimens from several different growth stages are required to develop “a really precise time framework” of such changes.

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Image credit: Montana State University/ Elizabeth Freedman Fowler

Space

5,400mph winds discovered on Hot Jupiter exoplanet

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 14, 2015 Last Edited: November 14, 2015

Brian Galloway

Astrophysicists from the University of Warwick have discovered a Hot Jupiter-type exoplanet where the winds travel at 5,400mph – more than two kilometers per second, and 20 times stronger than the fastest winds ever recorded on Earth, according to a new study.

The planet, HD 189733b, is the first world beyond the solar system to have its weather directly mapped and measured, explained lead author Tom Louden and his colleagues in the latest issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. While studying the planet, they found winds moving from the day side of the planet to its night side at a velocity seven times the speed of sound.

“This is the first ever weather map from outside of our solar system,” Louden, a Ph.D. student at the university, said in a statement. “Whilst we have previously known of wind on exoplanets, we have never before been able to directly measure and map a weather system.”

New technique used to map the distant planet’s weather system

Louden and co-author Dr. Peter Wheatley measured the object’s velocity by using high resolution spectroscopy of sodium absorption occurring in its atmosphere. As portions of HD 189733b’s atmosphere moved towards or away from Earth, this wavelength of this feature is altered by the Doppler effect, enabling measurements of its speed.

“The surface of the planet’s star is brighter at the center than it is at the edge, so as the planet moves in front of the star the relative amount of light blocked by different parts of the atmosphere changes,” Loudon said. “For the first time we’ve used this information to measure the velocities on opposite sides of the planet independently, which gives us our velocity map.”

The study authors used the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) in La Silla, Chile, to collect data on HD 189733b. The planet is approximately 10 percent bigger than Jupiter and 180 times closer to its star, giving it a surface temperature of roughly 1,200 degrees Celsius. Its relative closeness to our solar system has made it a popular research subject.

“We are tremendously excited to have found a way to map weather systems on distant planets,” Dr. Wheatley added. “As we develop the technique further we will be able to study wind flows in increasing detail and make weather maps of smaller planets. Ultimately this technique will allow us to image the weather systems on Earth-like planets.”

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Image credit: Mark A. Garlick/University of Warwick

Technology

Light-based ‘Li-Fi’ network has its first working prototype

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 14, 2015 Last Edited: November 14, 2015

Brian Galloway

Four years ago a Scottish professor came up with the concept for a new type of wireless Internet connection that worked using only LED light bulbs. He’s back, and this time with a working prototype that could change how we connect to the Internet.

The concept for this so-called “Li-Fi” connection was originally presented by Professor Harald Haas, Chair of Mobile Communications at The University of Edinburgh, during a TED Talk in 2011. In his presentation, he claimed that flickering light from an LED bulb could transmit more data than cell towers while doing so more securely, more efficiently, and over greater distances.

According to Digital Trends, however, Haas has turned the concept into reality, as the university’s Li-Fi R&D Center had joined forces with an offshoot company known as pureLiFi Ltd to come up with a working prototype for a Li-Fi router that functions using solar panels to gather enough energy to enable an LED light source to send and receive information.

Technology is faster, more secure than current wireless broadband

The website explains that, instead of using cables or radio waves that can be easily interrupted, Li-Fi transmits data using light flickering so fast as to be essentially undetectable to the human eye. This enables information to be send more quickly, and since a person has to have their device in the room with the router to use it, the connection cannot be “borrowed” by others.

The light-based system also makes it harder for others to spy on your online activity, and Haas and his colleagues believe that the technology could ultimately be used to power solar-powered smart homes, consumer gadgets, city-wide networks, and even Internet of Things devices.

“The wider opportunity is to transform global communications by speeding up the process of bringing Internet and other data communication functionality to remote and poorer regions in a way not previously thought achievable due to lack of infrastructure and investment,” Edinburgh Research & Innovation IP Project Manager Tom Higgison told Digital Trends on Friday.

Higginson’s company is the commercial arm of the university’s research team, and Higgison said that they are currently seeking commercial partners to help facilitate a widespread release for the Li-Fi routers. If they are successful, it could help bring cheap, secure, energy-efficient Internet to schools, homes and businesses all over the world.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Scientists use neutron beams to ‘un-burn’ bone samples

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: November 13, 2015 Last Edited: November 13, 2015

Emily Bills

When bones get hot, they shrivel. This gives archaeologists and forensic scientists major headaches, because this can make identifying the age, sex, and size of the deceased next to impossible. However, as reported by the BBC, researchers from Portugal are using neutron beams to explore this issue, with hopes of resolving it for good.

“The problem… is that when a skeleton is subjected to high temperatures, like in a plane crash or a bushfire, the bones are altered by the fire. One of those alterations is a change in dimensions,” explained David Gonçalves, a bone specialist from the University of Coimbra, to the BBC.

“We’re trying to see if those changes are quantifiable and if eventually, we can predict the amount of shrinkage – or sometimes there’s even an increase in size. It’s pretty random and we’re failing to understand that process.”

Bring in the neutron beams

That is where neutron beams come in: They allow researchers to probe the crystal structure of bone, burned or not. When neutrons hit a bone sample, they scatter, and scientists then measure how the neutrons have scattered to understand the arrangement of atoms within the bone.

“The reason neutrons are so helpful is that they allow us to see things that [lasers and other light beams] do not allow us to,” explained co-researcher Dr. Maria Marques.

“We are measuring the changes in vibrations within the atoms in the bone. So we are measuring structure.”

By comparing the scatter patterns of burned and unburned samples, they hope to develop a better understanding of how fire alters bones—which could then allow them to examine a burned bone and estimate how much it has deformed since the fire.

“Basically, it’s to return burned bone to its original dimensions, and then it will be possible to apply metric references, as we conventionally do in unburned remains,” said Gonçalves.

So far, Gonçalves and Marques have worked with samples from three previously unburned human skeletons. After examining the bones with the neutron beams, they were burned at 500, 700, or 900 degrees Celsius and tested again—and the results are exciting.

“We are at present quite confident,” said Marques. “[The spectra] look very promising.”

“Although we are still in a very early stage,” cautioned Gonçalves. “The sample is still small. To develop any kind of method that is reliable and has statistically significant support, we need a larger sample.

“We still have a lot of work to do in the next few years.”

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Feature Image: Science and Technology Facilities Counsel

Health

Revolutionary cancer test only requires a single drop of blood

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: November 13, 2015 Last Edited: November 13, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A new test developed by Umeå University in Sweden could revolutionize how cancer is detected—because it requires only a single drop of blood.

As reported in Cancer Cell, the test evaluates a component of the blood known as platelets—which are responsible for blood clotting. By assessing the genetic code of the RNA within platelets, the researchers were able to identify cancer in participants with 96 percent accuracy—meaning that someday, cancer might not ever be discovered too late.

“Being able to detect cancer at an early stage is vital,” said Jonas Nilsson, cancer researcher at Umeå University and co-author of the article, in a statement. “We have studied how a whole new blood-based method of biopsy can be used to detect cancer, which in the future renders an invasive cell tissue sample unnecessary in diagnosing lung cancer, for instance. In the study, nearly all forms of cancer were identified, which proves that blood-based biopsies have an immense potential to improve early detection of cancer.”

Exciting results could change cancer detection forever

The study builds upon recent research into using blood-based RNA tests to detect and classify cancer. As it turns out, some blood platelets take up protein and RNA molecules shed by tumors, turning them into tumor-educated platelets (TEPs). This alters the genetic material within the platelets, which the test can then detect.

The researchers drew blood samples from 283 individuals—228 of whom had cancer and 55 of whom showed no evidence of it. By examining the RNA within the participants’ platelets, they were able to detect the presence of cancer in 96 percent of all patients, and in 100 percent of patients with early-stage cancer.

But the results were even more exciting, because the same methods were also able to pinpoint the origin of the tumors in 71 percent of patients with diagnosed cancer in the lung, breast, pancreas, brain, liver, colon, or rectum.

“Our results indicate that blood platelets provide a valuable platform for pan-cancer, multiclass cancer, and companion diagnostics, possibly enabling clinical advances in blood-based ‘liquid biopsies,’” wrote the authors.

The future of cancer detection may be changed forever.

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Feature Image:

Health

No more overeating: Researchers use designer neurons to shut off food cravings

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 13, 2015 Last Edited: November 13, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Using a combination of synthetic drugs and designer neural receptors, Dartmouth University scientists have discovered a way to suppress cravings in a region of the brain responsible for triggering those desires.

As postdoctoral fellow Stephen Chang and his colleagues explained in the latest edition of the European Journal of Neuroscience, they used a new technology known as DREADDs (designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs) to inactivate the parts of the brain which have been linked to food-related stimulation.

This marks the first time that scientists have been able to demonstrate how designer receptors and designer drugs can work together to alter these cues, and the team believes that the findings could ultimately help fight addictions, overeating, and other unhealthy habits.

“Although we have a sense of what brain circuits mediate reward, less is known about the neural circuitry underlying the transfer of value to cues associated with rewards,” Chang explained in a statement on Wednesday. “We were primarily interested in whether the ventral pallidum, a brain region implicated in processing reward, is also involved in sign-tracking.”

Altering ventral pallidum activity could curb cravings

Consumers are subjected to cues in the form of advertisements on a daily basis, and these ads can trigger our brains into purchasing specific goods or rewards—thus making the cues attractive to us on their own. This phenomenon can even make us crave fast food without feeling hungry or even seeing the products, the study authors explained.

Scientists used an experimental conditioning technique known as sign-tracking or autoshaping to study this phenomenon, but it had previously been impossible to inactivate the brain areas linked to this behavior. But now, Chang and his colleagues were able to inject the DREADDs into neurons through viruses, and use a designer drug to switch off those neurons.

Using this approach, they were able to temporarily inactivate the ventral pallidum repeatedly in a series of experiments involving rats. During the trials, a lever was inserted in a test chamber for a 10 second span. When the level was withdrawn, a food pellet reward was presented regardless of behavior, but the rats pressed and bit the lever as if it were the treat nonetheless.

The results indicated that activating DREADDs in the ventral pallidum prior to each of the test sessions successfully blocked that behavior. Furthermore, recordings of neurons in the ventral pallidum following activation of the designer receptor-drug system revealed that activity in this part of the brain could be sped up or slowed down to varying degrees.

“These results are the first to show that the ventral pallidum is necessary for the attribution of value to cues that are paired with rewards,” said Chang. “In terms of clinical applications, the results carry the potential for stripping away value from reward-paired cues in cases such as addiction. The ventral pallidum is a novel target for such work.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

White dwarf tears apart unlucky asteroid, creates glowing rings

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 13, 2015 Last Edited: November 13, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Call it the interstellar version of The Walking Dead: Researchers from the University of Warwick in England have captured the first-ever image of a white dwarf tearing apart an asteroid that was unfortunate enough to have wandered too close to the dead (or is that undead?) star.

As the white dwarf rips apart the rocky object, it creates a glowing ring composed of debris and dust particles, Christopher Manser of the Warwick Astrophysics Group and colleagues explained in a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The asteroid’s proximity to the star results in it being shredded by the white dwarf’s gravity, and gases produced by collisions among debris within the ring are illuminated by ultraviolet rays from the star itself. This activity causes it to emit a dark, red glow, which Manser’s team detected and used to create the newly-released image of the ring.

“The image we get from the processed data shows us that these systems are truly disc-like, and reveal many structures that we cannot detect in a single snapshot,” said Manser, a Ph.D. student at the university. “The image shows a spiral-like structure which we think is related to collisions between dust grains in the debris disc.”

Detailed pictures were “worth the wait”

Manser and his fellow astronomers were investigating the remnants of a planetary system around the white dwarf star SDSS1228+1040, and while similar debris rings have been discovered around a handful of other dead stars, the imaging of this particular white dwarf provided new insights into the structure of these systems—in part because of the scale of the system.

In fact, as Manser pointed out, “The diameter of the gap inside of the debris ring is 700,000 kilometers, approximately half the size of the Sun, and the same space could fit both Saturn and its rings, which are only around 270,000 km across. At the same time, the white dwarf is seven times smaller than Saturn but weighs 2500 times more.”

While researchers have known about these debris disks for more than two decades, they only now have been able to obtain an image of one thanks to Doppler tomography, a technique that scans objects from multiple angles and combines them into a single image on a computer. The method is not unlike the CT scans frequently used in hospitals.

“When we discovered this debris disk orbiting the white dwarf SDSS1228+1040 back in 2006, we thought we saw some signs of an asymmetric shape. However, we could not have imagined the exquisite details that are now visible in this image constructed from twelve years of data,” said Warwick professor Boris Gänsicke. “It was definitely worth the wait.”

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Feature Image: Mark Garlick/University of Warwick

Health

World’s first blood cancer treatment trial reveals ‘life-changing results’

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: November 12, 2015 Last Edited: November 12, 2015

Christopher Pilny

According to a new study published in the journal Blood, researchers working at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom have successfully developed a drug capable of treating deadly blood cancers.

Used in clinical trials, the drug has changed patients’ lives, and some have gone from being desperate and tired to leading a normal and active life, the study team said in a statement.

The study included 90 chronic lymphocytic leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients not responding to existing chemotherapies.

“These patients were confronted with a cruel reality: they had failed multiple chemotherapy lines and there were no other treatment options available for them,” said study author Harriet Walter, an expert cancer researcher from the University of Leicester. “This drug has changed their lives; from desperate and tired they are now leading a normal and really active life. This is hugely rewarding and encouraging.”

Exciting progress in cancer research

Scientists looked at the effectiveness of an inhibitor called ONO/GS-4059, which targets a protein essential for the survival and spread of tumor cells. The researchers said the success of this study should lead to the successful development of more combination therapies that can effectively target cancer cells.

“After just 48 hours of taking this tablet is was like turning the lights on,” one of the study participants said about the novel therapy.

“We are dedicated to offer the best treatment options to our patients and the development of targeted therapies that increase the chance of therapeutic success and at the same time avoid toxicities generally observed in chemotherapies, is the most exciting progress in cancer research,” said Martin Dyer, an oncology professor at the university.

“We are delighted that these results are due to the establishment of our Hope Clinical Trials Facility,” said Nigel Rose, chief executive of the Leicestershire research charity Hope Against Cancer. “Improved, life-saving treatment for the people of Leicestershire is why our charity was set up here locally and is exactly what we are aiming to achieve.”

The study team said their future work will focus on improving their results by using their drug in combination with other anti-cancer agents. Another team of researchers is working to see if cancer cells will build up a resistance to the drug and how to overcome that resistance.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

Astronomers have just identified the most distant object in our solar system

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 12, 2015 Last Edited: November 12, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Astronomers have identified the most distant object ever discovered in our solar system: an object believed to be icy in nature and is located more than 15 billion kilometers (nearly 10 billion miles) from the sun, or three times more distant than Pluto.

According to BBC News, a team led by Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii found the object. Using the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru Telescope, it was identified as V774104. They presented their findings this week at the annual meeting of AAS Division for Planetary Sciences.

Early analysis of V774104 suggests that it is 500 to 1,000 km (310 to 620 miles) across and is currently 15.4 billion kilometers or 103 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, Science said on Tuesday. The previously recognized most distant object—the dwarf planet Eris—travels along a path that takes it between 5.7 billion km and 14.6 billion km from the Sun.

Additional research will be needed to discover the shape of the object and the exact path of its orbit through the solar system, but scientists think it may be a new member of an growing class of objects whose unusual orbits suggest they are influenced by nearby stars or other planets.

New object could join an exclusive club

As Science explained, if V774104’s orbit eventually brings it closer to the sun, it would be part of a more common group of icy worlds whose orbits are altered by gravitational interactions with Neptune. If its orbit never gets any closer to the sun, however, it would join dwarf planets Sedna and 2012 VP113 in never coming within 50 AU of the solar system’s central star.

The orbits of their planets are currently closer to the sun than Eris, but will ultimately take them further out into space (66 billion km and 140 billion km, respectively, according to BBC News). Sheppard refers to them as “inner Oort cloud objects,” telling Science that their orbits cannot be explained “from what we know about the solar system.”

Solar system formation models suggest that they were not likely created with these unorthodox orbits. Instead, scientists believe that they might have been perturbed gravitationally and forced out of their previous orbits due to a close encounter with a planet—perhaps one forcibly expelled from the solar system early on during its formation. Another theory is that they were taken from another star that formed in the same stellar nursery as our sun some 4.6 billion years ago.

Regardless of which category it falls into, “the discovery of V774104 is more proof that the solar system is bigger than we thought,” said Joseph Burns, an engineering and astronomy professor at Cornell University, according to the AFP. “We need a little more time to pin down the orbit and determine the object’s exact size, but it must be big to see it at this distance.”

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Feature Image: Artist’s impression: Dwarf planet Sedna’s orbit will take it 140 billion km from the Sun. Credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/R.HURT

Science

Researchers: Ancient global warming occurred at the same rate as today’s

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 12, 2015 Last Edited: November 12, 2015

Christopher Pilny

With 2015 standing as the hottest year to date—surpassing records less than 365 days old—one might think that global temperatures are rising at unprecedented rates, but research published in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications suggests otherwise.

The study, led by scientists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, reported that the temperature changes that took place millions of years ago likely occurred at the same rate as today’s warming, and that the speed of past warming tends to be underestimated.

As study authors Dr. Wolfgang Kießling, a paleobiologist from FAU, his colleague geosciences student Kilian Eichenseer and David B. Kemp from the Open University’s Environment, Earth and Ecosystems Department explained, climate scientists study the impact of historical climate change as a way to predict how modern ecosystems will react to similar warming.

Previously, the general consensus has been that modern-day climate change is happening more quickly than at any point in the past, but the researchers explained that this is a false assumption based on the comparison of shorter modern-day periods to longer historical time spans.

Like comparing apples to oranges

“Today we can measure the smallest fluctuations in climate whenever they occur. Yet when we look at geological history, we’re lucky if we can determine a change in climate over a period of ten thousand years,” Eichenseer explained in a statement.

Case in point: From 1960 through 2010, ocean temperatures increased by a rate of 0.007 degrees per year, Dr. Kießling said. That’s 42 times faster than it increased 250 million years ago during the Permian-Triassic boundary. The temperature of the ocean increased by 10 degrees during that time, he explained, but since scientists can only measure over a 6,000 year period, it equates to a seemingly low rate of just 0.00017 degrees per year.

In their new study, the authors reviewed about 200 analyses of climate changes from different eras in geological history, and found that the rate of warming (or cooling) appears to slow down in correlation with the length of the time period being evaluated. The reason for this, they said, is that rapid changes in climate do not consistently occur in the same direction over a long period of time, and that there are always times when temperatures remain constant.

“However, we are unable to prove such fast fluctuations during past periods of climate change with the available methods of analysis,” Dr. Kießling said. “As a consequence, the data leads us to believe that climate change was always much slower in geological history than it is today, even when the greatest catastrophes occurred. However, that is not the case.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

MESSENGER finds Mercury being pelted by meteors

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 12, 2015 Last Edited: November 12, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Seeing dust particles left behind by a passing comet burn up in a planet’s atmosphere is hardly a rare occurrence, as it occurs frequently on Earth and even happened on Mars last year, but a new study from NASA has found that even the largely airless planet Mercury experiences meteor showers.

In research presented at this week’s annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences, experts from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Morgan State University reported that they found evidence that the planet was being pelted by particles from Comet Encke.

According to Universe Today, the researchers analyzed data collected by the Mercury Surface Space Environment Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft, which orbited the planet until late April of this year—the first probe to ever do so. Their published their findings a recent edition of the bi-weekly science journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The researchers analyzed the MESSENGER data and uncovered a regular pattern of calcium variation that repeated at roughly the same time every year. They set out to determine what happened when Mercury travelled through the cloud of interplanetary dust surrounding the sun—called the zodiacal cloud—and was pelted by fast-moving meteoroids.

Determining how and why Comet Encke causes this calcium variation

Goddard’s Rosemary Killen, Morgan State’s Matthew Burger, and their colleagues determined that both the observed amounts of the element and its pattern of variation could be explained in terms of the material ejected from the planet’s surface by the impacts. However, they also found that the calcium emissions peaked right after Mercury’s closest approach to the sun.

A model developed by Killen’s team predicted that this peak would have occurred just before the planet’s perihelion, which indicated that they were still missing something.

That’s where Comet Encke enters the picture. Comet Encke has the shortest period of any known comet, returning to perihelion at a distance of 31 million miles (50 million kilometers) every 3.3 years.

Since its orbit is so stable, over the course of several millennia, any dust particles it gave off would have formed a dense dust stream. Killen and her colleagues proposed that the dust from this comet impacting Mercury would have caused more calcium to be lost from the surface, and explain MESSENGER’s observations. There were still some discrepancies, however.

As the study authors explained, Encke is actually closest to Mercury’s orbit about one week after the calcium peak. However, they explained that this is due to the dust stream spreading out along the comet’s current orbit over the course of several thousand years, then being affected by forces known as Poynting-Robertson drag, causing it to encounter Mercury at the observed location.

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Feature Image: NASA/Goddard

Science

There used to be a vast network of rivers beneath the Sahara Desert, satellites show

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 12, 2015 Last Edited: November 12, 2015

Christopher Pilny

One of the driest places on Earth was once home to a 300-plus mile long network of rivers that carried water over a larger distance than the Colorado and the Rio Grande combined, according to new research published this week in the journal Nature Communications.

Radar images taken by a observation satellite capable of peering underneath sand revealed the ancient river network along a 320-mile stretch of the Sahara Desert, according to the Guardian and USA Today. The now-buried waterway likely formed part of the Tamanrasett River thought to have once flowed across the western part of this now inhabitable region of North Africa.

Columbia University’s Peter deMenocal, who was not involved in the research, called the river network “monumental,” telling USA Today, “We have the smoking gun that this whole region,” which currently is “without rainfall at any time during the year,” was once the home of “a large, permanent system” that would have helped plants and animals thrive along its banks.

The ancient waterways were discovered under the sands of Mauritania by Charlotte Skonieczny of the University of Lille, along with French research center IFRMER. They used one of the Japanese Advanced Land Observing Satellite remote-sensing instruments, the Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) active microwave detector.

A great geological detective story

Skonieczny’s team believes that the river network was so big that, were it still around today, it would be 12th largest river network on Earth. The river network likely originated from sources located in the southern Atlas mountains and Hoggar highlands in modern-day Algeria, USA Today and The Guardian reported. The river network may have been active as recently as 5,000 years ago.

Images taken using the PALSAR radar revealed that the river beds line up almost perfectly with a massive underwater canyon extending from the coast of Mauritania to Algerian waters located to the east. This is the Cap Timiris Canyon, was originally mapped 12 years ago, and as Skonieczny told USA Today, she and her colleagues helped to “connect the dots” between it and the river previously identified by researchers as the Tamanrasett.

“It’s a great geological detective story,” Russell Wynn, a researcher the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton and one member of the team that created the first 3D map of the canyon, told The Guardian. “It confirms more directly what we had expected. This is more compelling evidence that in the past there was a very big river system feeding into this canyon.”

He added that the new discovery “tells us that as recently as five to six thousand years ago, the Sahara desert was a very vibrant, active river system,” and helps demonstrate just how quickly climate change can happen. “Within just a couple of thousand years, the Sahara went from being wet and humid… to something that’s arid and dry,” he told the Guardian.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

Mars is tearing apart its own moon, Phobos

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 11, 2015 Last Edited: November 11, 2015

Christopher Pilny

NASA scientists have discovered the first signs of structural failure on one of Mars’ moons, and new research presented Tuesday during the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society reveals that the planet is likely to blame.

Long, shallow grooves found on the surface of Phobos are evidence that the moon is being torn apart by the gravitational pull of the Red Planet, the study authors reported. Phobos is closer to its planet than any other moon in the solar system, and the gravitational pull of Mars is drawing it approximately 6.6 feet (2 meters) closer each century.

At this rate, experts believe that the moon will be pulled apart within 50 million years, and Terry Hurford of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland noted, NASA believes that Phobos “has already started to fail” and that the grooves are “the first sign of this.”

Fractures not caused by Stickney crater impactor, researchers find

Previously, it was believed that the grooves on Phobos were fractures caused by the same impact that formed Stickney crater—a collision so powerful that it nearly destroyed the moon. However, scientists ultimately determined that the grooves do not actually radiate outward from the crater, but instead originate in another, nearby location.

After dismissing that hypothesis, scientists suggested that the grooves may have been caused by a series of smaller impacts of material ejected from Mars. Now, however, Hurford and his fellow researchers have come up with models supporting a different view. They believe that the grooves are like “stretch marks” caused when Phobos is deformed by tidal forces.

These forces are produced by the gravitational pull between Mars and Phobos, much the same way that the ocean tides on Earth are the result of a shared gravitational pull with the moon. The same explanation for the grooves had previously been proposed, but dismissed due to the belief that beneath its surface, Phobos was believed to be largely solid all of the way through.

A calculation of the tidal forces indicated that the gravitational pull was not strong enough to cause fractures on a solid moon of that size. However, new thinking is that Phobos may actually be far less solid than previously believed, and thus more susceptible to interior distortion.

Models produce grooves similar to those actually found on Phobos

If, as scientists now believe, the interior of Phobos is a pile of rubble that is barely being held together by a 330-foot-thick layer of powdery regolith, it could easily be distorted because it has little interior strength. They also believe that the outer layer behaves elastically and builds stress, but is not strong enough to prevent those stresses from causing surface failures.

“The funny thing about the result,” explained study co-author Erik Asphaug of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, “is that it shows Phobos has a kind of mildly cohesive outer fabric. This makes sense when you think about powdery materials in microgravity, but it’s quite non-intuitive.”

In short, the research indicates that the tidal forces affecting Phobos are capable of producing enough stress to fracture the surface, and that the fractures produced in the model are very close in nature to the grooves found in images of the moon. Furthermore, this hypothesis explains why some of the grooves appear to be older than others because the process is ongoing.

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Feature Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Science

‘Thermal anomalies’ at the Great Pyramid of Giza may suggest secret tombs

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 11, 2015 Last Edited: November 11, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Researchers scanning the Great Pyramid of Giza with heat-detecting cameras have found several “thermal anomalies” in the ancient structures—hinting that there may be undiscovered treasures or secret tombs hidden within the monuments.

According to BBC News, the cameras detected elevated temperature readings in three adjacent stones at the bottom of the Great Pyramid as part of an ongoing search for hidden chambers. The possible causes include the existence of empty chambers inside the pyramid, the use of different building materials, or air currents, officials with Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities said.

The findings come just two weeks into Operation Scan Pyramids, a project that uses noninvasive visualization methods such as drones and 3D scanning to look inside the structures, and includes a “particularly impressive” anomaly on the eastern side of the Khufu pyramid, added CNN.

Additional anomalies were detected at the smaller Khafre pyramid of Giza and two pyramids in Dahshur, about 20 kilometers to the south, the antiquities officials said. Each of these signals and all of the data collected thus far will be subject to further analysis, and the next stage of the project will involve creating 3D models and simulations of the Giza plateau.

Not necessarily evidence of hidden chambers

Operation Scan Pyramids, which is being conducted by scientists and architects from Egypt, France, Canada, and Japan, involves using infrared thermography to analyze the pyramids during sunrise and sunset. As BBC News explains, the limestone structures are heated by the rising sun, while they cool down once the sun sets in the evening.

Of most interest is the one discovered at the 4,500 year old Khufu pyramid, the largest pyramid ever built and the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing, CNN said. In fact, according to ABC News, while the temperature of adjacent blocks can differ from 0.1 to 0.5 degrees Celsius, the anomaly was up to 6 degrees hotter than neighboring blocks.

Richard Enmarch, a senior lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, told ABC News that although it is “always interesting to hear new discoveries at Giza,” that the anomaly does not necessarily indicate the presence of a secret chamber. “A void could be one reason,” he said, “but it’s not necessarily the most probable. It could also be explained by quality of the stones, whether the stones were cracked and the air flow was able to travel around.”

“Behind any of the stones there may be gaps, rubble, solid mortar, large building stones, or bedrock. Each of these will have rather different capacities for conducting heat,” added Professor Kate Spence, senior lecturer in Egyptian archaeology. “It’s interesting to look at monuments in this way, but I think we’d need rather more evidence before we decide that it’s significant.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

Earliest Christian church discovered in heart of former African slave trade

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: November 11, 2015 Last Edited: November 11, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Archaeologists from the University of Cambridge have just uncovered the earliest known European Christian church in the tropics on an island that helped give rise to the African slave trade.

The Portuguese colonized a series of ten small, barren islands in 1456, where they established a stronghold for the sake of commerce with nearby parts of Africa. The islands—which they named Cabo Verde—soon evolved to become a hub of global African slave trade, serving as an important trans-shipment “sorting” center.

It was on these islands that they built the now-unearthed church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição in around 1470. This church is the oldest formal European colonial building that has ever been discovered in sub-Saharan Africa, found amongst the ruins of the island nation’s former capital, Cidade Velha.

At its height, Cidade Velha was the second richest city in the entire Portuguese empire, fed from the blood of countless slaves.

“It’s a profound social and political story to which these new archaeological investigations are making an invaluable contribution,” said Cambridge’s Professor Marie Louise Stig Sørensen in a statement.

The archaeologists have just completed the excavation and conservation of this building for public display, and have made many important discoveries.

But wait, there’s more!

“We’ve managed to recover the entire footprint-plan of the church, including its vestry, side-chapel and porch, and it now presents a really striking monument,” said Christopher Evans, Director of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit.

“Evidently constructed around 1500, the most complicated portion is the east-end’s chancel where the main altar stood, and which has seen much rebuilding due to seasonal flash-flood damage. Though the chancel’s sequence proved complicated to disentangle, under it all we exposed a gothic-style chapel.

“This had been built as a free-standing structure prior to the church itself and is now the earliest known building on the islands – the whole exercise has been a tremendous success.”

Further, over 1,000 skeletal remains have also been found in a cemetery dug into the floor of the church—roughly half of whom were African—along with several tombstones of local dignitaries.

“This is a place of immense cultural and heritage value. This excavation has revealed the tombs and graves of people that we only know from history books and always felt could be fiction,” Cidade Velha’s Mayor, Dr. Manuel Monteiro de Pina, said.

Major implications for residents on the island

But all these findings also have major implications for those who live on the Cabo Verde islands today.

“Cabo Verde is a young nation in many ways, and it needs its history to be unearthed and accessed so it can continue to build its national identity,” said Sørensen.

“I can see the importance the site has for Cabo Verde to understand our history and our identity,” added President Jorge Carlos Fonseca.

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Feature Image: Cambridge Archaeological Unit

Health

Are silicone breast implants actually safe?

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: November 11, 2015 Last Edited: November 11, 2015

Christopher Pilny

An enormous amount of time and money has been spent attempting to figure out if silicone breast implants are truly safe, but according to a new review out of Brown, there is no definitive evidence to show that these implants are actually harmless.

This is, of course, following a somewhat contentious history. In the U.S., silicone gel breast implants were suspended from use for 14 years, only to be allowed back on the market in 2006. Despite the studies that resulted because of the suspension, proof that these implants are or are not linked to health problems—like cancer and connective tissue disorders—has remained evasive.

And so, a team of scientists led by Dr. Ethan Balk, assistant professor of health services, policy, and practice at Brown University, reviewed 32 studies that compared the health of women who received or did not receive these implants.

Health effects up in the air

What they discovered: None of the 32 studies had enough statistical rigor to be conclusive about the potential health effects of silicone gel breast implants.

“Despite numerous studies reporting on the risk for many diseases and conditions, evidence was insufficient of an association between breast implants and any health outcome,” wrote the team in Annals of Internal Medicine. “No outcome had at least two adequately adjusted studies that yielded consistent estimates of associations. … There was a general lack of adequate accounting for possible confounders.”

One of the main difficulties, Balk explained, is that there are fundamental differences between women who get breast implants (for augmentation, restoration after a mastectomy, or otherwise) and women who don’t—making a direct comparison of the two difficult.

“Some of these differences are easily measurable,” explained Balk in a statement. “For example, they [who augment] are more likely to smoke, be thin, and white. But many are difficult to measure quantitatively. For example, they are more likely to have been teased about their appearance.”

These differences can be accounted for, if studies make sure to ask for such information—but many did not, meaning trends in their data (like incidence of cancer) could be a result of, say, smoking. Balk suggested that some studies would benefit from re-analyzing to introduce more confounders (things like smoking that can cause a false positive), or from new methods of research.

“We are hopeful that this study will serve as a guide to future researchers to improve analyses of currently available studies and of future studies,” he said.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

How do stars and galaxies get their magnetic fields?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 11, 2015 Last Edited: November 11, 2015

Christopher Pilny

One of the longstanding mysteries of astronomy—how stars and galaxies acquire their magnetic fields—may now be one step closer to being solved, thanks to the efforts of researchers from the US Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).

In a recent edition of the journal Physical Review Letters, PPPL researchers Jonathan Squire and Amitava Bhattacharjee reported that they found that small magnetic disturbances can combine to form larger-scale magnetic fields similar to those found around objects across the universe.

Squire and Bhattacharjee analyzed the behavior of dynamos, which occur when an electrically-charged fluid such as plasma swirls so that a magnetic field is created and then amplified. Experts knew that plasma turbulences could create multiple small magnetic fields, but how those fields combined to produce a larger one remained unknown.

“We can observe magnetic fields all over the universe, but we currently lack a sound theoretical explanation for how they are generated,” said Squire. At the heart of the puzzle was the unlikely concept of smaller disturbances combining to form something larger and more organized.

Simulations suggest that small magnetic fields can combine

The study authors explained that the phenomenon is like a tornado, which forms when several atmospheric disturbances occurring during a storm combine to form one giant vortex. In a like manner, large-scale magnetic fields around galaxies and stars seem to form from a multitude of smaller disturbances, but unlike tornados, they persist instead of disappearing.

“Something is holding up the universe’s magnetic fields for billions of years,” Bhattacharjee, head of PPPL’s Theory Department and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “But how exactly does the universe get these persistent magnetic properties?” To find out, he and Squire conducted a series of statistical and numerical simulations using computers at PPPL.

They found that, under certain conditions, small magnetic fields can combine into one larger one. Specifically, when this occurs, there is a large amount of velocity shear (which occurs when two areas of a fluid move at different speeds). Their simulations indicate that the larger fields are able to persist, but to confirm their findings, they would need to run simulations for very low levels of dissipation (a measure of energy loss).

“It is impossible to run simulations for dissipation as low as those of real astrophysical plasmas,” said Bhattacharjee, “but our analytical and computational results, in the range in which they are done, strongly suggest that such dynamo action is possible.”

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Feature Image: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory

Fibromyalgia

Can Vibration Exercises Cure Fibromyalgia?

Written By: Mandy Burkholder

Published Date: November 10, 2015 Last Edited: November 10, 2015

admin

Image: Lucy Jovanovic/Shutterstock

Can Vibration Exercises Cure Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia affects an estimated 1-3% of the US population. As a chronic disease that has left doctors and patients completely baffled as to how to treat it, many people have lost hope. Luckily, there are many researchers and scientists who have made it their priority to fight the battle against fibromyalgia.

Researchers at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, or IUPUI for short, have recently studied the effects of vibration therapy on patients suffering from fibromyalgia. To their surprise, many of the people in the study indeed recorded lower levels of pain and discomfort after participating in the vibration therapy treatment.

So how does vibration therapy work? And how does it help fibromyalgia symptoms?

First, the researchers wanted to explore the concept of increased exercise in patients. It’s well known that steady activity is a proven deterrent for fibromyalgia pain, even though it’s hard for some sufferers to start the process of exercising due to the fear of pain.

This is why the researchers at IUPUI decided to create a treatment that incorporates low-impact activity to help keep pain levels low. When a patient receives vibration therapy, they choose to either sit, stand, or lay down on a machine that has a vibrating platform. The vibrations cause muscles to contract and relax, which gives them a very subtle workout.

Patients recorded increased improvements in strength, muscle spasticity, and and pain.

More research needs to be done using vibration therapy, but the good news is that the machines are widely available. They were once used mostly for research, but now they are seen in fitness centers and are even sold commercially.

Have you ever participated in vibration therapy to help ease your fibromyalgia pain? If so, let us know in the comments!

Health

Doctors breach the blood-brain barrier for the first time

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: November 10, 2015 Last Edited: November 10, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A team of Toronto doctors has, for the first time, opened up the blood-brain barrier so that therapeutic drugs could be delivered, according to a statement from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
The blood-brain barrier is designed to allow only water, some gases, and lipid-soluble molecules to enter the brain from the blood. Its primary benefit is the prevent infections in the blood from entering vulnerable brain tissue. However, the barrier is also a hindrance to doctors trying to treat brain cancer and other diseases on the “wrong side” of the barrier.
“The blood-brain barrier has been a persistent obstacle to delivering valuable therapies to treat disease such as tumors,” said Dr. Todd Mainprize, a neurosurgeon and principal investigator of the cutting-edge endeavor. “We are encouraged that we were able to temporarily open this barrier in a patient to deliver chemotherapy directly to the brain tumor.”
To breach the barrier, researchers first injected a radiation treatment drug, then microbubbles, into the bloodstream of an individual with a deadly brain tumor. The microbubbles are smaller than red blood cells and are harmless to the body.
The scientists then used cutting-edge MRI-guided low-intensity ultrasound to target blood vessels in the brain near the tumor. Over and over again, the waves compressed and expanded the microbubbles, making them vibrate and loosen tight junctions of the cells, comprising the blood-brain barrier. Once the barrier was breached, the chemotherapy drug flowed into the targeted regions.
What this means for future treatments
“Some of the most exciting and novel therapeutics for the treatment of malignant brain tumors are not able to reach the tumor cells because of the blood brain barrier,” Mainprize said. “This technique will open up new opportunities to deliver potentially much more effective treatments to the targeted areas.”
The successful use of the technique is the culmination of around two decades of work, the study team said.
“The success of this case is gratifying,” said Dr. Kullervo Hynynen, Director of Physical Sciences at Sunnybrook Research Institute. “My hope now is that many patients will eventually benefit from it.”
“We are encouraged by the momentum building for the use of focused ultrasound to non-invasively deliver therapies for a number of brain disorders,” added Dr. Neal Kassell, chairman of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation.
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Feature Image: University of Alberta

Space

New Horizons may have just found two ice volcanoes on Pluto

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 10, 2015 Last Edited: November 10, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Images from NASA’s New Horizons probe show what appear to be ice-spewing volcanoes on the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto, and if confirmed, it would mark the first time this type of geological feature had ever been detected in our solar system.

According to Reuters and BBC News reports, the two mountains (provisionally named Wright Mons and Piccard Mons) are several miles high and more than 100 miles in diameter. Both mountains have what appears to be a depression at the top, NASA explained on Monday at an American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Maryland.

While additional research is needed to confirm the discovery, if these are volcanoes, it is likely that they will erupt an icy slush of water, nitrogen, ammonia and/or methane. Their presence also raises questions about how Pluto has managed to be so geologically active over its lifetime, and suggests that the dwarf planet once had an internal heat source, Science added.

That heat source likely would have triggered the melting of nitrogen, methane, and other volatile ices, which then would have erupted at the surface, the publication explained. They could also be a way that Pluto periodically replenished volatile ices lost to sublimation in its atmosphere.

Closer analysis needed to confirm their status

Wright Mons and Piccard Mons are located just beyond the southern tip of the dwarf planet’s so-called heart, Sputnik Planum, and have an unmistakably volcanolike shape, Oliver White, a New Horizons team member from the Ames Research Center in California, told Science. The textures of the surface appear to indicate that past eruptions involved plastic—not watery—ice.

Jeff Moore, also from Ames, said that the features “look very suspicious” and that the team was “looking at them closely.” White told BBC News that determining the composition of the terrain would give them “something to work with” in terms of “modeling how this particular ice would behave if it were to be erupted volcanically, and what sort of relief it might be able to sustain.”

New Horizons also reportedly discovered several deep fractures in Pluto’s surface, the largest of which is more than 200 miles long and twice as tall as the Grand Canyon at its highest point. The suspected cause of this feature is the decay of radioactive elements in Pluto’s core, NASA said.

The NASA researchers are presenting more than 50 research papers from the spacecraft’s flyby of the dwarf planet in July during the ongoing AAS meeting, and much more data is expected as only 20 percent of its observations have been downlinked back to Earth as of this point. The New Horizons mission continues, as the probe is currently on pace for an January 2019 flyby of 2014 MU69, an icy Kuiper Belt object roughly 30 miles (50 km) across.

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Feature Image: NASA/JPL-JHU/SWRI

Fibromyalgia

New AOL Player – Test Page

Written By: admin

Published Date: November 10, 2015 Last Edited: November 10, 2015

admin

This is a paged used to test the new AOL video player integration. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Health

So…female cardiologists earn on average $100K less than men

Written By: Shayne Jacopian

Published Date: November 10, 2015 Last Edited: November 10, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A new study from Duke University has found that women cardiologists earn around $100,000 less than men on average, Futurity reports.

For the study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, researchers looked at data from 161 different cardiology practices in the United States that were surveyed in 2013.

They made several key findings. First, men are more likely to be employed full time in this field than women, with men also dominating in subspecialties that they can charge more for. This means that in the billing process, men generate more relative value units (RVUs) than women—this is how the federal Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services reimburses doctors, and it is a measure of the value of a procedure based on complexity and time. Men generate a median of 9,301 RVUs, with women generating an average of 7,430.

That means that women cardiologists tend to make $100,000 less than men—as a result of men dominating in the higher-paying fields.

“The differences in sub-specialization and practice were striking and merit note,” said Reshma Jagsi, an associate professor at the University of Michigan and the lead author of the study.

Unexplained difference in compensation

“But it’s also important to note that the difference in compensation between men and women couldn’t fully be explained by differences in subspecialty, procedures, or the many other personal, job, and practice characteristics that we evaluated.”

Even adjusting for differences in the amount, type, and complexity of the work performed, women still earn about $32,000 less as cardiologists than men.

“These results recapitulate the salary differences that have been found among male and female physicians, lawyers, business executives, and others,” said Pamela Douglas, a professor at the Duke University Clinical Research Institute.

“Cardiology needs to be welcoming to women. One way to do this is to acknowledge these differences and work toward correcting them.

“This is the first study to show that although men and women cardiologists share the same specialty, they have markedly different job descriptions,” Douglas said. “Thirty-nine percent of men are interventionalists versus 11 percent of women, and this sets the stage for higher compensation.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

How the crap do you pronounce ‘Kuiper Belt’?

Written By: Emily Bills

Published Date: November 10, 2015 Last Edited: November 10, 2015

Christopher Pilny

The other day, the redOrbit team was sitting around and it suddenly dawned on us: We didn’t know how to pronounce the Kuiper part of the Kuiper Belt! How embarrassing. As New Horizons propels on towards the Kuiper Belt, we read it all the time, but just never say it out loud.

So we Googled it of course, and here’s how it’s pronounced:

In case you didn’t hear that, it’s pronounced a lot like the word “viper”. Now why on earth would it be pronounced this way, you ask? Good question!

The Kuiper Belt was named after the Dutch-American Gerard Kuiper, who many consider to be the father of modern planetary science. In 1951, he predicted the existence of a belt of icy objects located beyond Neptune’s orbit. Pluto is located in this icy belt, and so are hundreds of thousands of other icy objects bigger than 62 miles across.

The Dutch vowels of “ui” are actually pronounced like “œy”, which sounds more like “Koyper” to us. According to a Wikipedia page on the pronunciation, Kuiper probably changed the way he said his name when he came to the states just to make it a little easier on us all.

For now, the correct pronunciation is “Ky-per”, and we’re sticking to it!

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Feature Image: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon/STScI

Space

Origin study suggest the Moon may be ‘twice-baked’

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 10, 2015 Last Edited: November 10, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Like a twice-baked potato, the moon itself might have required a multi-part recipe, forming in two distinct stages that ultimately produced inner and outer layers with different compositions, BBC News and Astronomy Magazine explained. The study could explain why the moon, which is in other ways similar to the Earth, is depleted in volatiles like water and sodium.

The new model, which was developed by researchers at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado along with colleagues at universities in Iowa and Missouri, begins by building on an existing theory that an impact between the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized body approximately 4.5 billion years ago left a disk of vapor and molten material orbiting around the planet.

However, to address the issue of the missing volatiles, the study authors deviated from previous explanations and added models for how the temperature and chemical composition of these disk materials would have evolved over time into a computer simulation. The results suggest that the vaporized volatiles had not actually been lost prior to the moon’s formation.

Why the outer layers are volatile-poor

As lead author Dr. Robin Canup, associate VP at the SwRI’s Space Science and Engineering Division, explained in a statement, it is not likely that much of the missing water, sodium, and potassium were lost in this way due to the velocity needed to escape Earth’s gravity. Rather, as the moon grew, its volatile-rich melt was simply deposited onto the planet.

In the months and years immediately following the impact, roughly half of the moon’s mass was compressed into a ball at the edge of the disk, near the Earth, and just inside the initial orbit of the moon. As the moon’s orbit expanded over time, it became so distant that it was no longer able to efficiently accumulate inner disk melt, which instead wound up being assimilated by Earth.

Since the early material came from the fringe of the disk, it was cool and was higher in volatile element content. The outer half of the moon that was formed later, and the molten material from the inner portion of the disk, would have been too hot for the volatile elements to condense with it. As a result, the outer layers of the moon ended up being “volatile-poor”, the BBC said.

“What we find is that the initial half of the Moon, say 50 percent of its mass, may well have retained its volatile species. But for the last half, as that material accreted on to the Moon, it was consistently too hot to contain the volatile species,” Dr Canup told the BBC. After accumulating both layers, the moon ended up travelling further away from Earth.

“Thus, the portion of the Moon derived from the inner disk is expected to be volatile depleted,” she and her co-authors wrote. “We suggest that this mechanism may explain part or all of the moon’s volatile depletion, depending on the degree of mixing within the lunar interior.”

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Feature Image: JD Hancock/Flickr

Technology

Artist to unleash fake army of 18th century mercenaries on Facebook

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: November 10, 2015 Last Edited: November 10, 2015

Christopher Pilny

In an attempt to expose how easy it is to create a fake Facebook profile, a Dutch artist and his colleagues are unleashing an army of accounts on the social media platform named after British mercenaries who fought during the American Revolution.

The project is being called “The Possibility of an Army”, and according to BBC News and the Guardian, artist Constant Dullaart hopes that it will demonstrate just how easy it is to create fake identities on the Internet—even on sites like Facebook, which technically prohibits the practice.

Dullaart told the BBC than he and a team of volunteers are creating false accounts using the names of 18th-century men who were soldiers in the Revolutionary War, and plan to use them to add likes to various posts all across the social network in order to protest the “quantification of social capital”. He noted that he had not discussed his plans with Facebook.

“It might be that Facebook will notice and will start to kill them off,” he added. In the meantime, Dullaart said that he plans to recruit other artists and philosophers to decide what his virtual army (which currently numbers 1,000 but could ultimately become 20,000 strong) should do. He noted that he expect the project could last for as much as two months.

How easy is it to bypass online identity checks?

Dullaart’s project comes on the heels of a prior one in which the artist purchased fake Instagram accounts and had them follow 30 actual users from the art world, trying to boost each account up to 100,000 followers. It also follows a recent lawsuit filed by an online retailer against more than 1,000 Amazon review writers claiming that their reviews were “false” and “misleading.”

“There are already enormous armies of fake accounts,” Dullaart explained to The Guardian. “I get frustrated when I see social media quoted as validation of a cultural practice,” he said, noting that even museums have used false responses in improve their standing. Those offering this type of service, he said “make money by giving you big numbers. They generate random behavior so they look more real. And they’re all around.”

Dullaart said he and his colleagues are setting out to test how easy it is to bypass identity checks on a website like Facebook. They created phone-verified accounts using the names of actual but long-dead Hessian mercenaries who fought on the side of the British against the then-colonists during the American Revolutionary War.

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Feature Image: Constant Dullaart