Fruit fly evolution gives way to new wasp species

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 31, 2015 Last Edited: October 31, 2015

Brian Galloway

It’s the evolutionary version of the domino effect: ongoing changes in one species of fruit fly have played a key role in the rise of three new types of predatory wasps, according to research published earlier this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the new study, biologists from Rice University, the University of Notre Dame, Michigan State University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Florida explained that they were looking at the “apple maggot,” a fruit fly species known as Rhagoletis pomonella, that previous work had found was becoming two different species due to feeding and mating habit changes.

That evolutionary split is driven by differently timed fruiting cycles between apple trees, which the study authors explained are preferred by some Rhagoletis, and the North American hawthorn, where the fruit flies had traditionally laid their eggs. The new study expands on that earlier work to investigate the impact of those changes on wasps known to be parasites for Rhagoletis.

Specimens from three different species of wasp were collected from various different fruit fly host plants in the wild. Analysis of those wasps revealed that just like Rhagoletis, they were in the process of diverging into different species, distinct both in terms of their genes and in terms of host-associated physiology and behavior.

One good evolutionary adaptation deserves another

Study co-author Scott Egan, an evolutionary biologist and assistant professor of biosciences at Rice, explained in a statement that the study “addresses one of the central questions in biology: How do new forms of life originate?” He added that it examines “sequential speciation,” a type of evolutionary process that recognizes that adaptation is not an isolated process.

When a new species appears, as is the case with the apple maggots, it can create a new niche opportunity that other species exploit, Egan added. That opportunity ultimately can lead to the evolution of an additional new species, as is happening with each of the three wasp species. The new fruit flies prove to be suitable targets for new kinds of parasites, the authors said.

These types of evolutionary changes, in which differentiation in one type of creature presents a new opportunity for adaptation in other species, are known as sequential or cascading events, and they help biologists explain why organisms such as insects tend to be more biodiverse than other groups of organisms. Such changes lead to the subsequent origin of new creatures, they noted.

In the case of the wasps and the fruit flies, Egan and his colleagues explained in their study that as the apple maggots “shift and adapt to new host plants, wasps follow suit and diverge in kind,” ultimately resulting in “a multiplicative increase of diversity as the effects of ecologically based divergent selection cascade through the ecosystem.”

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

The Witcher 3, Satoru Iwata honored at 2015 Golden Joysticks Video Game Awards

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 31, 2015 Last Edited: August 30, 2021

Brian Galloway

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt won five awards, including Ultimate Game of the Year, and the late Satoru Iwata, former CEO of Nintendo, was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Golden Joystick Awards, which were held Friday at the O2 in southeast London.

In addition to Ultimate Game of the Year, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt took home awards for the Best Visual Design, Best storytelling, and Best Gaming Moment, helping the game’s studio, CD Projekt RED, take home Studio of the Year.

According to BBC News, Satoru Iwata, passed away on July 11, 2015 due to a bile duct growth, was recognized for creating many of Nintendo’s most beloved games, including Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. He was also the driving force behind the Wii and Nintendo DS.

“A revered man of the gaming industry, Satoru… is credited for bringing gaming to the masses by making it family entertainment,” the Awards said in a statement. “He was renowned for first and foremost being a gamer and was described as ‘… having the brain of a game developer and the heart of a gamer.’ His contribution and impact on modern gaming is second to none.”

GTA5, Kerbal Space Program, Splatoon also big winners

Grand Theft Auto 5 was also among the big winners at this year’s awards, picking up honors for Innovation of the Year for introducing a first-person mode to the series as well as awards for the Best Multi-Player Game, the Best PC Game, and the PlayFire Most Played Award.

Steam was named the Best Gaming Platform, while Kerbal Space Program took home honors as the Best Indie Game and Bloodborne won Best Original Game and Best PlayStation Game. Best Xbox game went to Ori and the Blind Forest, as did the award for Best Audio, the BBC said.

Nintendo’s Splatoon won awards for Best Nintendo Game and Best Family Game, while Fallout Shelter won Best Mobile Game honors and the Critics’ Choice Award went to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Her Story won the Golden Joysticks’ Breakthrough Award and Fallout 4 was named the Most Wanted Game.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Parts of Greenland’s ice sheet melts more slowly, study says

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 31, 2015 Last Edited: October 31, 2015

Brian Galloway

While drastic increases in ice melt around Greenland have been detected in recent years, some parts of the region’s ice sheet have been found to be less vulnerable to climate change than was previously believed, claims new research published this week in the journal Nature.

The discovery, made by an international team of scientists including Edward Hanna, a professor of geography from the University of Sheffield in the UK, was made using computer models and satellite imagery. It could have a minor but positive impact on sea level forecasts, they said.

In some areas of the Greenland ice sheet, the speed of ice movement has actually slowed down instead of accelerating, the study authors explained. Large quantities of meltwater in the summer produces channels at the ice sheet’s base, efficiently draining away water and reducing the speed of the glacier’s movement the following winter.

“Our research underscores the complexity of the relation between climate change affecting Greenland and the response of its ice sheet to the ongoing warming,” said Hanna. “We need to understand these ice-climate interactions better in order to be able to make more reliable global sea-level predictions.”

Additional melting could slow down these areas even more

Contrary to what some may believe, more meltwater does not always necessarily result in ice flowing more quickly, Hanna explained. Observations made on a portion of the ice sheet that ends on land instead of on the water indicated that increased volume of icemelt does not necessarily speed up the entire sheet’s motion by causing it to slide more rapidly.

Instead, their study shows that over the past few decades, ice movement in select portions of the ice sheet that terminate on land have actually slowed down, not sped up. Furthermore, the study indicates that additional increases in ice melting resulting from warming temperatures may even further slow down the movement of these areas.

Hanna and his colleagues used satellite data to track the shift of crevasses and other ice features over a 30 year span, and found that even though meltwater had increased by 50 percent over the past few years, the overall movement during the last decade was slower than it was over the last few decades. More research is needed to fully understand the movement of parts of the ice sheet that terminate in the ocean and have experienced acceleration recently, they added.

“A large sector of the Greenland ice sheet has slowed down, despite sustained warming in the past decade,” said lead investigator Andrew Tedstone from the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences. “However, the ice sheet’s overall contribution to sea level rise continues to accelerate in two ways: through increases in surface melting and the movement of glaciers which terminate in the ocean.”

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Witches in 1660 America were ‘part of everyday life’

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 30, 2015 Last Edited: October 30, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Halloween is all about candy, monsters, and magic—which means witches get a good deal of the spotlight. But where did the notion of witches first come from? And how did beliefs in them lead to witch hunts? John Putnam Demos, professor emeritus of history at Yale University and the author of two books on witches, witchcraft, and witch hunts shared his expertise with Futurity.

First, he explained, the origins of witchcraft is fairly complex. “The belief in witchcraft and witch-hunting has been present in cultures all around the world, and there are many where it is still present today,” he explained.

It’s also an ancient idea; Circe, a witch, is a character in the Odyssey, which is around 2800 years old. Hekate, the Greek goddess of witchcraft, is an even older concept. And where there were witches, witch hunts seemed to inevitably follow: “There was witch-hunting in classical times in ancient Greece and Rome,” said Putnam Demos.

The hunts, however, only seemed to amplify over time.

“In the late middle ages and early modern times in Europe there was a very large ramping-up of witch hunting. That time period was what most historians refer to now as the European witch craze of early modern times. More witch-hunting took place during that time than ever before and on a much wider scale.”

Thank our heritage for witchcraft in America

“Almost all of the New Englanders were themselves English people so they brought with them all of their beliefs, including their beliefs in witchcraft,” he said. “If you compare trial records from this side of the ocean to trial records from the same time in England you would find very little difference. It was a pretty direct cultural transfer.”

In fact, according to Putnam Demos, the notion of witchcraft was a dominating cultural aspect of life in New England, tying into religion and community life. “If you stopped people on the street in New Haven in 1660, everyone would have things to say—and stories to tell—about witchcraft. It was a part of everyday life, no more and no less,” he explained.

At the time, witchcraft was viewed as a supernatural tool stemming from the devil that was used to causing harm, and those accused when the witch hunts began in earnest were often those who fit less comfortably into the society of the time.

“About 80 percent of accused witches were women… By far, the largest demographic category of accused witches were middle-aged women,” said Putnam Demos.

“This has something to do with the position of women in the community past their childbearing years, in that it was a difficult time of transition for them. Women who were unusually assertive and aggressive with their relationships with other people in the community and women who did not behave according to the peaceful standards of those communities also were especially likely to be targeted in witch-hunts.”

But witch-hunts did not end there; according to Putnam Demos, they merely mutated form, like the fear of communism in the McCarthy era.

“It would be hard to find any moment in the history of the whole world where there was not some kind of impulse toward witch-hunting,” he added.

—–

Feature Image: Rachel.Adams/Flickr

Health

Follow your heart, not the money, study says

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 30, 2015 Last Edited: October 30, 2015

Christopher Pilny

It’s a question that strikes fear into the heart of millennials: Should you pursue a job that will earn you a secure living, or should you pursue you passions? Well, thanks to a new study from Tel Aviv University, it seems that we finally have an answer: Passion.
“Given the economic reality today, people commonly face trade-offs as they make decisions that pit the two sides of careers — the ‘heart,’ or intrinsic side, and the ‘head,’ or extrinsic side — against one another,” said Dr. Daniel Heller of TAU’s Recanati School of Business in a statement. “We wanted to examine people who chose to follow more challenging career paths, such as those in the arts, and assess their chances of ‘making it.'”
Published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the study followed 450 high school music students who participated in two elite summer music programs in the US. For 11 years, they monitored their progress from teens to adults to professional musicians.
“We found that participants with stronger callings toward music in adolescence were likely to assess their musical abilities more favorably and were more likely to pursue music professionally as adults regardless of actual musical ability,” said Dr. Heller.
In other words, talent means little if one is passionate—because such a drive often led to a greater perceived ability that wasn’t reflected in natural ability. They also found that young people who felt a stronger sense of calling were more likely to take risks and less likely to give up, ultimately leading to jobs in their chosen field. Lastly, those who felt a passion for their interests while they were teenagers were more likely to be successful in their adulthood as compared to those who discovered their passion later.
Passion doesn’t guarantee stable job
This doesn’t mean that passion will guarantee you a stable job, however. Often, it may lead to a greater sense of satisfaction but will have less returns in the way of money.
“If you experience a strong calling, you need to be cognizant of your relative preferences for intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards and potential trade-offs between the two, then decide accordingly,” said Dr. Heller. “However, we found that, in certain fields, one’s drive or passion afforded a competitive advantage over others, even when unrelated to objective ability or talent.
“In general, society benefits from an excess of talented people competing for a limited number of positions in winner-take-all labor markets,” Dr. Heller added. “Individuals who ‘win’ in this market are exemplary. Although individuals entering this type of market eventually ‘lose’ in extrinsic terms by definition, they still benefit from intrinsic rewards and garner subjective value and well-being, such as the satisfaction derived from attempting to fulfil their calling, even for a short time.”
—–
Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

WHO: 2/3 of global population under 50 has herpes simplex virus

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: October 30, 2015 Last Edited: October 30, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A new report from the World Health Organization has revealed two-thirds of global population under the age of 50 is infected with herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1).

Herpes simplex virus is classified into 2 different types: HSV-1, and herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2). Both HSV-1 and HSV-2 are highly contagious and incurable. HSV-1 is mainly passed by oral-oral contact and usually causes cold sores around the mouth, while HSV-2 is almost solely sexually transmitted through skin-to-skin contact and causes genital herpes.

The report emphasizes that HSV-1 is also an important cause of genital herpes, the AHO said in a statement. Some 140 million people between the ages of 15 and 49 years have contracted genital HSV-1 infection. Fewer individuals in high-income countries have become infected with HSV-1 as children, probably due to better hygiene and living conditions, and are instead vulnerable to being infected with it genitally by means of oral sex after they become sexually active.

“Access to education and information on both types of herpes and sexually transmitted infections is critical to protect young people’s health before they become sexually active,” said Marleen Temmerman, the director of WHO’s Department of Reproductive Health and Research.

Earlier this year, the WHO found that nearly 420 million men and women between 15 or 49 years old have HSV-2, commonly known as genital herpes. Considered together, the estimates show that over 50 percent of a billion people between 15 and 49 years old have a genital infection due to either HSV-1 or HSV-2.

How do we prevent this?

“The new estimates highlight the crucial need for countries to improve data collection for both HSV types and sexually transmitted infections in general,” Temmerman said.

The WHO report revealed the greatest HSV-1 prevalence is in Africa, with 87 percent of both men and women being infected. The Americas were found to have the lowest prevalence, at 49 percent.

WHO said it is currently focusing on the development of a worldwide health industry strategy for sexually transmitted microbe infections (STIs), which includes for HSV-1 and HSV-2, and it is set to be completed for consideration at the 69th World Wellness Assembly in 2016.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

Study solves mystery of Voyager 1’s interstellar journey

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 30, 2015 Last Edited: October 30, 2015

Christopher Pilny

When NASA’s Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space back in 2012, it observed a magnetic field that was inconsistent with models created from observations by other probes, and now researchers believe that they’ve finally discovered why.

Nathan Schwadron, an astrophysicist with the University of New Hampshire Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space, and his colleagues reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters that they have resolved inconsistencies in the data sent back by Voyager 1 after it ended its 35-year voyage by punching through the heliosphere.

“There are still naysayers out there regarding Voyager 1 crossing through the heliopause–the edge of the heliosphere,” Schwadron said in a statement, “and the reason for this doubt is that when the spacecraft supposedly broke through the heliopause we should have seen some sort of distinctive shift in the magnetic field from one medium to the other.”

Specifically, when Voyager 1 exited the heliopause, (the boundary where the protective bubble created by the sun’s solar wind meets the interstellar medium) observations of the magnetic field direction in local interstellar space were off by an angle of more than 40 degrees versus expected readings, leading some to suggest that Voyager 1 was still embedded in solar wind.

Probe isn’t expected to fully escape the sun’s influence until 2025

However, using four different datasets gathered from other spacecraft, the UNH-led team found that Voyager 1 did in fact cross the heliopause in 2012, but was traveling through a special region of space where magnetic fields were rotated away from true magnetic north.

Schwadron and his colleagues found that the probe measured the magnetic field using cardinal directions provided by the IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) mission, which in 2009 found an unusual energy “ribbon” and particles believed to be associated with the interstellar magnetic field. Voyager 1 had been using cardinal directions based on this ribbon, they explained, and its center served as the “true magnetic north” for the pristine interstellar magnetic field.

The initial direction of the magnetic field observed by Voyager 1 had been deflected by the heliopause. So while the probe did exit the heliopause, it is now traveling through a “muddied” magnetic field region and is not expected to reach “pristine” interstellar space until at least 2025. In other words, scientists have to wait a decade or more before Voyager 1 travel fully escapes the reach of the sun’s solar winds.

“Our analysis confirms two things for the first time: that the center of the IBEX ribbon is the direction of the interstellar magnetic field and, secondly, that Voyager 1 is now beyond the heliopause,” said Schwadron, who is also the lead scientist for the IBEX Science Operations Center at UNH. “When Voyager 1 crosses that next boundary we will be poised to probe many longstanding mysteries.”

—–

Feature Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Technology

Yamaha’s awesome motorcycle-racing robot challenges real racers

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 30, 2015 Last Edited: October 30, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Japanese motorcycle giant Yamaha has unveiled an ambitious humanoid, chopper-riding robot that they hope will be able to ride an unmodified vehicle around a racetrack at speeds exceeding 200 km per hour—and it’s already called out a flesh-and-blood world champion.

The autonomous mechanical motorcycle rider is known as Motobot, and according to Mashable and the Verge, it was unveiled in a big way at the Tokyo Motor Show as the company showed a video of it turning, tapping the clutch, and twisting the throttle while remaining upright.

Of course, the robot currently uses stabilizers—training wheels, if you will—but that didn’t stop Yamaha from having it call out MotoGP world champion Valentino Rossi, with Motobot stating that it was “created to surpass” Rossi and was “improving [its] skills every day.” No word yet as to when (or even) if such a showdown would take place, but here’s hoping!

Motorbot could improve driver safety

For now, Yamaha is focused on improving its robotic driver with an eye towards that 200 km per hour goal. The company has not revealed exactly how quickly Motobot currently travels while it rides, but they emphasized the project was designed in part to help improve driver safety.

“Controlling the complex motions of a motorcycle at high speeds requires a variety of control systems that must function with a high degree of accuracy,” the company said in a statement. “We want to apply the fundamental technology and know-how gained in the process of this challenge to the creation of advanced rider safety and rider-support systems and put them to use in our current businesses, as well as using them to pioneer new lines of business.”

The Verge reported that Yamaha is moving slowly with Motobot, and that as is typically the case with high-concept technology, they intend to apply the data collected to improve their existing line of products. Ideally, Motorbot would make motorcycles safer, and officials at the company suggest that the robot could also one day provide an alternative to driverless cars.

“If a society where driverless cars are prevalent is happy and safe, then I want to make it happen quickly,” Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley, Inc. CEO Hiroshi Saijou said to Reuters on Thursday. “In order to make that happen quickly, tuning cars isn’t enough, because you need to repurchase everything. Our concept is that, if you put this robot in your car, your car will drive itself from tomorrow. That’s the kind of world I want to create.”

—–

Feature Image: Yamaha

Space

Here’s why Earth is so much bigger than Mars

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 30, 2015 Last Edited: October 30, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Earth and Mars are similar in many ways: Both have similar atmospheric chemistry, both have sustained polar caps, and both have strong seasonal variability due to similar rotational tilts. So why is Earth so much larger than Mars? Experts believe they have found the answer.

Why does Mars have only 10 percent of the mass of the Earth? The solution, according to Hal Levison from the Southwest Research Institute and his colleagues, lies in a new type of planetary formation modeling process in which planets can grow from smaller bodies called “pebbles.”

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Early Edition, Levison and his colleagues used this process, which was previously used to explain the rapid formation of gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, to reproduce the structure of the solar system’s inner planets.

“Understanding why Mars is smaller than expected has been a major problem that has frustrated our modeling efforts for several decades,” Levison, first author of the study and a scientist at the SwRI’s Planetary Science Directorate, explained in a statement earlier this week. “Here, we have a solution that arises directly from the planet formation process itself.”

Location is key when it comes to accumulating pebbles

As the researchers explain, the standard model of planetary formation states that objects of about the same size accumulate and assimilate through a process called accretion. Yet, while accretion models successfully produce planets roughly the same as Earth and Venus, they also indicate that Mars should be at least the same size as the Earth, if not larger.

However, new calculations performed by scientists at the SwRI’s Planetary Science Directorate demonstrate that the structure of the inner solar system is actually the result of a different kind of planetary growth. This new model is known as Viscously Stirred Pebble Accretion (VSPA).

In VSPA, cosmic dust grows to pebble-like objects a few inches in diameter, some of which end up gravitationally collapsing and forming primordial asteroid-sized objects. When conditions are right, these asteroids pull the remaining pebbles unto orbit, where they spiral down and fuse with the rest of the growing world and allow full-sized planets to form relatively quickly.

The new model also found that not all primordial asteroids are equal in terms of their ability to accumulate pebbles and grow. An object about the same size of Ceres (approximately 600 miles across) would have been able to grow quickly near the Earth’s current location, but not near the current location of Mars, they explained, because the aerodynamic drag would be too weak.

“This means that very few pebbles collide with objects near the current location of Mars. That provides a natural explanation for why it is so small,” said co-author Katherine Kretke. “Similarly, even fewer hit objects in the asteroid belt, keeping its net mass small as well. The only place that growth was efficient was near the current location of Earth and Venus.”

—–

Feature Image: NASA/JPL/MSSS

Health

Females are more promiscuous in colder climates, fruit fly study finds

Written By: Abbey Hull

Published Date: October 28, 2015 Last Edited: October 28, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Winter is coming: According to a new study published in the journal Behavioral Ecology, researchers at the University of Exeter have found that female insects have more sexual partners in colder climates, but prefer monogamous relationships when it is hotter.

As environmental temperature does have some influence, sexual behavior remains mostly determined by one’s genes. Who says summer lovin’ is only for Grease?

“This is a textbook example of the role of genes versus environment. Sexual behavior is really hardwired into females. It makes sense biologically for females to have a number of partners as they will produce more offspring that are more genetically diverse and survive better,” said Dr. Michelle Taylor, lead researcher on the study.

“What is interesting, and what needs further research, is the question of why some females stay with one partner. We don’t know what maintains monogamy.”

The birds and the bees…or just fruit flies

While some birds, reptiles, and fish are also known for their monogamous vs. promiscuous lifestyles, researchers studied the sexual behaviors of fruit flies this time. By collecting fruit flies from warmer climates like Arizona and colder climates like Montana, they preserved “snapshots” of the genes available in the population.

Forty generations of sexual behavior later, the inbred flies were then examined to see how many male partners each inbred female would accept when their environment became warmer or cooler than normal.

Through exposing these inbred females to varying environments, researchers were able to study the influences of genes vs. environment on female fly mating habits. The results showed that more females accepted more partners in colder conditions, while more remained monogamous when it became hot.

Genes are still most important

However, that’s not all: Some females, despite what climate they were in, were always more likely to have more partners, showing that while temperature can make an impact, genes remain the most important factor in flies’ behaviors and sexual partners.

“These results are an important step towards understanding how genes and environment contribute towards behavior and ultimately how behavior affects the success or failure of natural populations,” said Taylor.

“Mating with many different males can change the genetic make-up of a population because it increases the number of combinations of genes represented in each generation. Evolutionarily speaking, this could be one reason why some populations are able to adapt to changing environments while others go extinct.”

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Can’t touch this: Body map outlines where people like (or don’t like) to be touched

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: October 28, 2015 Last Edited: October 28, 2015

Christopher Pilny

While some of us can be described as “touchy feely”, others recoil from even the suggestion of being touched by someone else. A new body map created by European researchers outlines just where people say they don’t mind being touched, and what body parts are off limits.

The body map was created by asking more than 1,300 volunteers from the United Kingdom, Finland, France, Italy, and Russia to color in outlines of the human body with where they were and were not comfortable being touched by people of varying degrees of acquaintance—from a romantic partner to a complete stranger. Participants were also asked to say why they would allow someone to touch them.
The researchers found that British people are generally less comfortable with touching than men and women from the other countries, a sign that culture plays an important role in how we perceive touch. However, researchers found the closer the relationship, the more area is deemed acceptable to be touched–regardless of country of origin.
The study also visually revealed what many of us feel instinctively. Women are not comfortable being touched by unfamiliar men. Men do not like their genitals touched, even by relatives like brothers or aunts. (Well…this is awkward.)
“The results indicate that touching is an important means of maintaining social relationships,” study author Juulia Suvilehto, from Aalto University in Finland, said in a statement. “The touch space map is closely associated with the pleasure caused by touching. The greater the pleasure caused by touching a specific area of the body, the more selectively we allow others to touch it.”
Relationship between people determines where touching is acceptable
Study author and Oxford University professor Robin Dunbar said the relationship between individuals, rather than familiarity, is the primary factor at work here.
“A friend we haven’t seen for some time will still be able to touch areas where an acquaintance we see every day would not,” Dunbar said. “We also interpret touch depending on the context of the relationship – we may perceive a touch in a particular place from a relative or friend as a comforting gesture, while the same touch from a partner might be more pleasurable, and from a stranger it would be entirely unwelcome.”
“Touch is universal,” he added. “While culture does modulate how we experience it, generally we all respond to touching in the same ways. Even in an era of mobile communications and social media, touch is still important for establishing and maintaining the bonds between people.”
—–
Feature Image: Mitja Mavsar/Flickr
Story Image: Oxford University

Science

DNA of two ancient Alaskan infants reveal links to Native Americans

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 28, 2015 Last Edited: October 28, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Genetic analysis of two infants buried at an Alaskan campsite 11,500 years ago revealed that the DNA of the babies were the northernmost members of two separate Native American lineages, a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study published Monday reported.

The discovery of the infants, who had separate mothers, helps support the so-called “Beringian standstill model” which suggests that Native Americans originally descended from a people that migrated from Asia to Beringia (the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska), where they spent up 10,000 years before continuing on into the Americas starting 15,000 years ago.

“These infants are the earliest human remains in northern North America,” University of Utah anthropology professor Dennis O’Rourke, senior author of the paper, said in a statement, “and they carry distinctly Native American lineages. We see diversity that is not present in modern Native American populations of the north and we see it at a fairly early date.”

He added that the discovery provided “evidence there was substantial genetic variation in the Beringian population before any of them moved south,” and “supports the Beringian standstill theory in that if [the infants] represent a population that descended from the earlier Beringian population, it helps confirm the extent of genetic diversity in that source population.”

All five major Native American lineages now traced to Beringia

The fact that these distinctly Native American lineages have never been found anywhere in Asia, (not even in Siberia) indicates that there must have been a prolonged period where the group was isolated from their Asian ancestors, O’Rourke said. He believes this took place in Beringia.

One of the babies was between six and 12 weeks old, while the other was either a 30-week fetus or a stillborn infant. They were part of human remains found at eight North American sites older than 8,000 years from which scientists were able to obtain mitochondrial DNA—genes passed on exclusively by mothers. These rare buried infants were the northernmost of them all.

In their work at these eight sites, the researchers were able to find “all five of the major lineages of Native Americans,” said Justin Tackney, first author of the study and a anthropology doctoral student at the University of Utah. “That indicates that all were present in the early population in Beringia that gave rise to all modern Native Americans.”

“Studying the DNA of ancient individuals is important in researching how the Western Hemisphere was populated,” he added. “Studying the genetics of these infants who died 11,500 years ago in what is now central Alaska helps answer questions of who these people were and how they are related to modern native populations.”

—–

Feature Image: Ben Potter, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Technology

Europe rejects net neutrality amendments

Written By: John Hopton

Published Date: October 28, 2015 Last Edited: October 28, 2015

0

Christopher Pilny

The European Parliament has voted against a set of rules meant to protect “net neutrality” Europe, the BBC reports.

Campaigners for net neutrality—the principle that internet service providers shouldn’t be able to favor or block certain products or websites—argue that existing legislation makes it too easy for internet firms to make deals with content providers (in many cases for financial gain).

Rather than stifling the internet with regulation, government legislation in favor of net neutrality, (as was passed in the US in February), is intended to actually make the web freer because it prevents providers from effectively making their own rules. And it decides who does or doesn’t get an efficient service.

Without effective regulation and neutrality, concerns in Europe include “zero rating” agreements, in which customers can access certain sites and services for free, outside of their data plans. In Belgium, for example, some communications companies currently allow unlimited access to Twitter and Facebook while all other data usage is part of a monthly plan.

Big companies in favor of neutrality

Several tech companies, Netflix, Tumblr, Vimeo, Kickstarter, and Reddit, signed a letter to the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, asking that neutrality-improving amendments be adopted. A lack of neutrality is a concern for such companies because of the fees they may end up paying, just as it is for smaller projects who may be disadvantaged because they can’t pay the fees.

“I was contacted by a number of start-ups and investors because they were deeply concerned about the impact of the European Parliament’s network neutrality proposals on start-up innovation in Europe,” said Stanford professor Barbara van Schewick, who helped pen the letter.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, also joined the argument.

“If adopted as currently written, these rules will threaten innovation, free speech and privacy, and compromise Europe’s ability to lead in the digital economy,” he wrote in a blog.

Is neutrality fair?

On the flipside of the debate, it’s argued that service providers are shouldering a heavy burden in covering the substantial costs of a smoothly running internet.

“The fact is that what we use the internet for in 2015 is vastly different from those early days when Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the web,” said Chris Green of the business consultancy Lewis, pointing out that the rise of video streaming had placed extra burdens on network companies.

“Maintaining that information flow is an expensive process and the cost of running that infrastructure is falling on the shoulders of ISPs. For them, a two-tier internet makes much more sense.”

The European Union intends to soon abolish heavy data roaming charges within Europe, and some experts suggest that politicians may have voted against the net neutrality amendments because they thought doing otherwise might interfere with the data roaming proposals.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Here’s why you usually want a cigarette when you’re drinking

Written By: Brett Smith

Published Date: October 28, 2015 Last Edited: October 28, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Like chocolate and peanut butter, or alcohol and cigarettes, some things just go together.

According to new research published in the Journal of Neurochemistry, one reason people always seem to pair of pint of Budweiser with a drag of a Marlboro is because the stimulative effect of nicotine cancels out the sleepiness brought on by alcohol consumption.

“We know that many people who drink alcohol also use nicotine, but we don’t know why exactly that is,” study author Mahesh Thakkar, associate professor of neurology at University of Missouri, said in a statement. “We have found that nicotine weakens the sleep-inducing effects of alcohol by stimulating a response in an area of the brain known as the basal forebrain.

“By identifying the reactions that take place when people smoke and drink, we may be able to use this knowledge to help curb alcohol and nicotine addiction,” he added.

Thakkar has been investigating the sleep-inducing effects of alcohol and nicotine for more than five years. His previous study has revealed that when used in combination, nicotine and alcohol boost enjoyable feelings by activating a region of the brain referred to as the reward center, which can lead to greater alcohol intake.

Cigarettes are a main contributor to alcoholism

During the most recent study, rats were fitted with sleep-recording electrodes and given alcohol and nicotine. The scientists learned that nicotine acts via the basal forebrain to curb the sleep-inducing results of alcohol consumption.

“One of the adverse effects of drinking alcohol is sleepiness,” Thakkar said. “However, when used in conjunction with alcohol, nicotine acts as a stimulant to ward off sleep. If an individual smokes, then he or she is much more likely to consume more alcohol, and vice-versa. They feed off one another.”

Cigarette smoking is a main contributive aspect to the development of alcoholism. Based on the World Health Organization, greater than 7 million deaths annually are related to alcohol and nicotine use. This study has significance to enhance health, not only for heavy drinkers and smokers, but also for people with mental health problems such as schizophrenia, which often is connected with smoking.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

VISTA telescope discovers new young star disc in center of Milky Way

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 28, 2015 Last Edited: October 28, 2015

Christopher Pilny

While mapping out the location of a type of stars that vary in brightness, researchers using the VISTA telescope at the ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile have discovered a never-before-seen component of the Milky Way: a thin disc of young stars located in the central bulge.

As part of the Vista Variables in the Vía Láctea Survey, astronomers led by Istvan Dékány of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile were mapping out the locations of a class of star known as Cepheids when they spotted this previously unknown feature hidden behind thick dust clouds.

“The central bulge of the Milky Way is thought to consist of vast numbers of old stars. But the VISTA data has revealed something new – and very young by astronomical standards,” Dékány, lead author of the new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, said in a statement.

Survey found over 600 candidate variable stars

He and his fellow researchers used data collected by the VISTA telescope from 2010 to 2014 in their work, and found 655 candidate Celpheids—variable stars that expand and contract periodically and undergo significant changes in brightness during these periods.

Cepheids, the ESO explained, can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks to complete one of these cycles, and more time is needed for the more luminous ones to brighten and fade again than for the duller ones. These variable stars are said to be one of the best ways to measure the distances to and determine the positions of distant objects in the solar system.

However, there are actually two different classes of Cepheids, the study authors noted. One is far younger than the others. Among the new stars identified by the survey team were 35 identified as classical Cepheids—younger bright stars that are far different than older, more typical stars within the Milky Way’s central bulge. They collected data on the brightness and pulsation length of the stars, which helped determine their ages, and also calculated their distances.

“All of the 35 classical Cepheids discovered are less than 100 million years old,” second author Dante Minniti from the Universidad Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, explained. “The youngest Cepheid may even be only around 25 million years old, although we cannot exclude the possible presence of even younger and brighter Cepheids.”

Disc of young stars could shed new light on galactic evolution

By determining precisely how young these classical Cepheids actually are, Minniti, Dékány and their fellow astronomers collected evidence that a previously unconfirmed, steady supply of new stars have been produced in the central part of our galaxy over the past 100 million years.

Furthermore, by mapping the new Cepheids, they were able to trace a completely new kind of feature in the Milky Way—a thin disc of young stars across the galactic bulge. The disc went undetected for so long because it was obscured by thick clouds of dust, and the researchers noted that its discovery helps demonstrate the incredible power of the VISTA telescope.

Dékány called their work “a powerful demonstration of the unmatched capabilities of the VISTA telescope for probing extremely obscured galactic regions that cannot be reached by any other current or planned surveys,” while Minnitti added that this region of the galaxy was “completely unknown” before they observed it in five near-infrared bands as part of the VVV survey.

Additional research will be required to determine if these Cepheids were born near their current location, or if they originated from more distant regions of space, the authors said. Determining their fundamental properties, the way they interact with other objects, and how they evolve may shed new light on the evolution of the Milky Way (and other galaxies, for that matter).

—–

Feature Image: ESO/Microsoft WorldWide Telescope

Science

Half of African lions expected to die out by 2035

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 28, 2015 Last Edited: October 28, 2015

Christopher Pilny

The majority of African lion populations have been cut in half over the past 20 years, and the at-risk big cats likely face yet another 50 percent reduction over the next two decades, according to research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Luke Hunter, president of the conservation group Panthera and one of the new study’s authors, reviewed data from 47 of the 67 African lion populations, tracking more than 8,200 lions in all, the New York Times reported on Monday. They found significant reductions in West and Central African populations, and that lions had all but vanished from two parks.

Their population models found that there’s a 67 percent chance of a 50 percent decline in West and Central African populations by 2035, and a 37 percent chance that East African big cats will also experience a similar decline. Some smaller populations, Hunter told Scientific American, are all but doomed to disappear because, as he put it, “the human pressure is too great.”

The bushmeat trade in the region, he explained, has left lions without access to their traditional prey, forcing them to either starve or turn to livestock for sustenance. However, by doing so the big cats open themselves up to retaliatory killings by locals looking to protect their farms.

How can we prevent this?

Hunter’s group and others like it reportedly have had some success reducing retaliatory deaths by building lion-proof corrals where livestock could be left overnight, Scientific American said. This also reduced such lion deaths in one part of Namibia from 18 in 2013 to one in 2014, and none of the big cats have been killed by farmers in that region so far this year, Hunter said.

The study authors also point toward the successful measures utilized by the southern countries of Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, where most lion populations either stayed the same or actually increased over the same time region in most areas. Experts attribute this trend to a higher quantity of reserves and a much lower density of humans, the New York Times noted.

In their study, the authors wrote that they recommended separate regional assessments of lions in the area by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Since the big cats are already recognized as critically endangered in West Africa, they said that, based on these findings, they should also be listed as regionally endangered in Central and East Africa.

“These findings clearly indicate that the decline of lions can be halted, and indeed reversed as in southern Africa,” lead author Hans Bauer of the UK’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit said in a statement. “Unfortunately, lion conservation is not happening at larger scales,” a trend which could ultimately cause the creatures to “cease to exist in many countries” if not reversed.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

3500-year-old Greek tomb filled with treasures discovered

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 27, 2015 Last Edited: October 27, 2015

Christopher Pilny

It is the discovery of a lifetime: A fully intact Bronze Age shaft tomb—dating from the 15^th century BCE—has been discovered by a team from the University of Cincinnati in Pylos, Greece, near the famed Palace of Nestor.

The tomb contains the body of 30- to 35- year-old man who is informally known as the Griffin Warrior, along with a literal treasure trove. The body was stretched out on its back, with weapons on the left and jewelry on the right. Near the head rested a bronze sword, hilted in ivory, with a dagger underneath. Resting on the chest: a perfectly preserved gold necklace with two pendants. And between the legs, his namesake: An ivory plaque depicting a griffon with enormous wings.

One heck of a treasure trove

Other objects likewise were found inside the stone-lined tomb, all made of gold, silver, bronze, ivory, or semiprecious stones—not a single piece of pottery was found inside.

“It is truly amazing that no ceramic vessels were included among the grave gifts. All the cups, pitchers and basins we found were of metal: bronze, silver and gold. He clearly could afford to hold regular pots of ceramic in disdain,” said Shari Stocker, senior research associate in the Department of Classics, McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, in a statement.

“You can count of one hand the number of tombs as wealthy as this one,” Thomas M. Brogan, the director of the Institute for Aegean Prehistory Study Center for East Crete, told the New York Times.

Pylos, the location of the find, is renowned for other archaeologist-electrifying moments. Here, the first example of Linear B was discovered in 1939—a tablet holding the earliest known Greek writing. Pylos also is home to a famed Mycenaean palace, known as the Palace of Nestor. (For those of you who remember the Iliad, Nestor was one of the Greeks who waged war against the Trojans—a former Argonaut who served more as an advisor to younger warriors during the war.)

“This latest find is not the grave of the legendary King Nestor, who headed a contingent of Greek forces at Troy in Homer’s ‘Iliad,’” explained Stocker. “Nor is it the grave of his father, Neleus. This find may be even more important because the warrior pre-dates the time of Nestor and Neleus by, perhaps, 200 or 300 years. That means he was likely an important figure at a time when this part of Greece was being indelibly shaped by close contact with Crete, Europe’s first advanced civilization.”

In fact, the age of the tomb places it smack within this little-understood period. Before the rise of Greece, the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations ruled the Mediterranean. The Minoans came first, and were based off of Crete; the later Mycenaeans adapted many aspects of the Minoan civilization, but soon came to dominate them.

The tomb of the Griffon Warrior dates in the hazy period before the rise of Mycenae, which means it serves as a window into this previously obscured time. The warrior’s tomb is full of objects likely imported from the Minoans (as evidenced by the style of the craftsmanship) but it’s located in Mycenae, and thus serves to elucidate just how the two civilizations interacted before the Mycenaeans began their reign.

The man in the tomb himself may have been an important warrior, trader, raider, or king who personally helped lay the foundations of the Mycenaean civilization.

“Whoever he was, he seems to have been celebrated for his trading or fighting in nearby island of Crete and for his appreciation of the more-sophisticated and delicate are of the Minoan civilization (found on Crete), with which he was buried,” said Jack Davis, UC’s Carl W. Blegen Chair in Greek Archaeology.

Here’s a list of the goodies found:

GOLD

Four complete solid-gold seal rings (to be worn on the fingers)—more seal rings than found with any other single burial within Greece.
Two squashed gold cups, and a silver cup with a gold rim.
A necklace of square golden wires, more than 30 inches long, with two gold pendants decorated with ivy leaves.
Numerous gold beads (all in perfect condition).

SILVER

Six silver cups.

BRONZE

One three foot-long sword, with an ivory hilt that was overlaid with gold (in a rare technique imitating embroidery!).
A smaller dagger with a gold hilt employing the same technique.
Other bronze weapons.
Bronze cups, bowls, amphora, jugs, and a basin, some with gold, some with silver trim.

SEAL STONES

More than 50 seal stones (probably used to imprint designs on cloth), with intricate carvings in Minoan style. They show goddesses, altars, reeds, lions, and bulls (some with bull-jumpers leaping over the bulls’ horns). These were likely made in Crete.

IVORY

Several pieces of carved ivory, one with a griffon with large wings and another depicting a lion attacking a griffon.
Six decorated ivory combs.

PRECIOUS STONE BEADS

Over 1000 semiprecious stone beads, most with drill holes for stringing together. The beads are of carnelian, amethyst, jasper, and agate. Some beads appear to be decorations from a burial shroud of woven fabric, suggested by several square inches of cross woven threads which survived in the grave for 3,500 years.

—–

Feature Image: Department of Classics/University of Cincinnati

Story Images: Department of Classics/University of Cincinnati

Science

We think we know what’s killing these baby Southern Right Whales, now

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 27, 2015 Last Edited: October 27, 2015

Christopher Pilny

It’s CSI: Marine Mammal Edition, as an unprecedented series of deaths involving primarily young whale calves between 2005 and 2014 required scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) to get their sleuth on and investigate.

The deaths took place near Peninsula Valdes, a key calving ground for southern right whales on the coast of Argentina. During the nearly decade-long span the number of deaths spiked tenfold, from less than six per year prior to 2005 to 65 per year by 2014, the NOAA said.

Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of those deaths (90 percent) occurred in young whales less than three months old, suggesting that these relative newborns were being targeted. In some cases, more than 100 young southern right whales were lost in a single year.

Experts from NOAA Fisheries, NOAA Ocean Service, and colleagues from the US and Argentina investigated the deaths, and as they reported in a recent edition of Marine Mammal Science, they have at long last been able to pinpoint a possible culprit: toxic algae blooms similar to those that occasionally force clamming and selfish harvesting to be temporarily suspended.

Warming temperatures could ultimately make things worse

Specifically, they discovered that the frequency of the whale deaths correlated with the levels of a toxic algae known as Pseudo-nitzschia. The higher the density of Pseudo-nitzschia—some types of which can produce a powerful toxin known as domoic acid—the more young whale deaths had been reported. When the algae density decreased, so did the number of fatalities.

While this link does not definitively prove that the algae was responsible for the whale deaths, the statistics “hinge at the same point and have the same pattern.” This suggests that it likely played a role, NOAA oceanographer Cara Wilson, lead author of the new study, said in a statement. She added that it was unusual to see these events reoccur over such an extended period of time.

This discovery that this endangered whale species are vulnerable to these algal blooms could be bad news for marine mammal populations all over the world, as the researchers noted that these blooms are expected to become increasingly prevalent because of climate change. In fact, earlier this year the western US experienced large blooms due to unusually warm ocean temperatures.

“Given the lack of solid evidence,” the NOAA said, “the new study does not definitively prove that the toxic algae caused the spike in deaths of whale calves. But it does offer strong circumstantial evidence, and that puts researchers in a better position to understand the possible impacts of future algal blooms.”

—–

Feature Image: Andrea Chirife, Southern Right Whale Health Monitoring Program

Health

Adding snake venom to hydrogel stops bleeding in 6 seconds

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 27, 2015 Last Edited: October 27, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Add snake venom to the growing list of new ways to help stop bleeding, as a team of researchers from Rice University have found that adding batroxobin, a toxin produced by two kinds of South American pit viper, to a nanofiber hydrogel enhances its abilities as a coagulant.

As lead author Vivek Kumar from the Rice Departments of Chemistry and Bioengineering and his colleagues reported recently in the journal ACS Biomaterials Science and Engineering, they took a self-assembling peptide hydrogen capable of preventing blood loss on its own, then added 50 μg/mL of batroxobin in order to make it even more effective as a clotting agent.

The resulting hydrogen, which has been called SB50, is injected as a liquid but quickly becomes a gel that conforms to the site of a wound, thus keeping it closed. It can promote clotting in seconds, making it useful during surgical procedures – particularly when they involve patients using anti-coagulant drugs to thin their blood.

Hydrogel proves effective, even when anti-coagulants are present

Batroxobin’s value as a clotting agent has been known for decades, Rice chemist and study co-author Jeffrey Hartgerink said in a statement. Since 1936, it has been used to remove extra fibrin proteins from blood to treat thrombosis, as a topical hemostat, and to help determine how long it takes blood to clot in the presence the anti-coagulant drug heparin.

“From a clinical perspective, that’s far and away the most important issue here. There’s a lot of different things that can trigger blood coagulation, but when you’re on heparin, most of them don’t work, or they work slowly or poorly,” Hartgerink explained. “Heparin blocks the function of thrombin, an enzyme that begins a cascade of reactions that lead to the clotting of blood.”

He added that batroxobin is “an enzyme with similar function to thrombin, but its function is not blocked by heparin. This is important because surgical bleeding in patients taking heparin can be a serious problem” This type of snake venom, Hartgerink added, is able to “immediately start the clotting process, regardless of whether heparin is there or not.”

Latest clotting breakthrough still requires FDA approval

The Rice-led team used genetically modified and purified batroxobin to avoid contaminating it with other types of toxins, then combined it with synthetic, self-assembling nanofibers. Next, the substance can be loaded into a syringe and injected into a wound site, where they reassemble into a gel. Tests have demonstrated that it can stop bleeding in as little as six seconds.

Hartgerink said that he and his colleagues believe that SB50 “has great potential to stop surgical bleeding, particularly in difficult cases in which the patient is taking heparin or other anti-coagulants. [It] takes the powerful clotting ability of this snake venom and makes it far more effective by delivering it in an easily localized hydrogel that prevents possible unwanted systemic effects from using batroxobin alone.”

Before the substance can be used clinically, however, it must first be approved by the FDA. While Hartgerink noted that batroxobin on its own has already received such approval, their new hydrogel has not, and the process could require several more years worth of testing before SB50 can be used in hospitals and clinics.

It joins several other recent breakthroughs that could help stop wounds from bleeding faster and/or more effectively than currently available methods. For example, earlier this month, a team from the University of British Columbia created a self-propelled powder that could go against the flow of blood to treat severe bleeding, and a new gel made from algae was shown to effectively stop hemorrhaging in severe wounds far faster than ordinarily.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

Healthy compounds of wine mass produced using…tomatoes?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 27, 2015 Last Edited: October 27, 2015

Christopher Pilny

While some people might not find it as enjoyable as drinking copious amounts of wine for the sake of longevity and good health, scientists from the UK’s John Innes Centre have learned how to mass produce the beneficial compounds of the alcoholic beverage in tomatoes.

The compounds in question are phenylpropanoids such as Resveratrol, which has been found to increase the lifespan of creatures in animal studies, and Genistein, which is found in soybean and is said to help prevent steroid-hormone related cancers.

Now, Drs. Yang Zhang and Eugenio Butelli reported in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications that that they were able to create tomatoes containing as much Resveratrol as 50 bottles of red wine, and as much Genistein as is found in 2.5 kilograms of tofu.

The key to their discovery is a protein known as AtMYB12, which can be found in Arabidopsis thaliana, a common plant in the UK. The protein activates genes in the metabolic pathways that produce natural compounds and can increase or decrease production as needed by a plant.

Nutrients extracted after juicing the tomatoes

Drs. Zhang and Butelli, who completed their work in the lab of Professor Cathie Martin, found that by introducing AtMYB12 into a tomato plant, the plant’s ability to make natural compounds and activate phenylpropanoid production increased. It also influenced the amount of carbon and energy that the plant dedicated to producing these particular substances.

While under the influence of the protein, the tomato plants started producing higher amounts of both phenylpropanoids and flavanoids, and devoted more energy to doing to. Next, the authors encoded enzymes used to produce Resveratrol in grape and Genistein in legumes, thus creating tomatoes capable of producing up to as 80mg of novel compound per gram of dry weight.

Since tomatoes produce yields of up to 500 metric tons per hectare, this technique could allow valuable compounds such as these to be mass produced more economically than methods which require artificial synthesis in the labs, the researchers said. Once grown, the modified tomatoes could be harvested and juiced, then the key nutrients could be extracted from that juice.

“Our research provides a fantastic platform to quickly produce these valuable medicinal compounds in tomatoes,” Dr. Zang said. “Target compounds could be purified directly from tomato juice. We believe our design idea could also be applied to other compounds such as terpenoids and alkaloids, which are the major groups of medicinal compounds from plants.”

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

How clean is the ISS?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 27, 2015 Last Edited: October 27, 2015

Christopher Pilny

We know that bacteria are pretty much everywhere here on Earth, but what about onboard the International Space Station (ISS)?

Attempting to establish a baseline for monitoring the cleanliness of the orbiting laboratory, as well as determine how the microbe populations on the facility differ from those found on Earth, Dr. Kasthuri Venkateswaran of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and his colleagues took samples from the ISS as well as from two cleanrooms at their Pasadena-based campus.

As the authors explained in the latest edition of the journal Microbiome, they analyzed each of those samples using traditional microbiology techniques. These techniques culture bacteria and fungi in the lab, along with advanced DNA sequencing methods to quickly and precisely identify the types of microorganisms present on the space station and compare them to those found on Earth.

They found that a type of bacteria associated with human skin, Actinobacteria, made up a larger proportion of the microbial community on the ISS than in the cleanrooms, which the researchers believe could be due to stricter cleaning procedures used in the ground-based facilities.

Findings could improve cleaning practices, ensure astronaut health

Furthermore, they discovered that two different groups of potential infection-causing pathogens were present in air filter samples and vacuum bag dust from the ISS. These bacteria could result in skin irritation or inflammation, but since the basis of the study was genetic analysis, the study authors said that they could not determine if they posed a threat to astronaut health.

One of the key differences between the ISS and the Earth-based cleanrooms, Dr. Venkateswaran said, are that the cleanrooms constantly circulate fresh air while the air on the space station had to be filtered and recirculated. In addition, the ISS is continuously inhabited by six people, while the cleanrooms are used off-and-on by up to 50 scientists every day.

In a statement, Dr. Venkateswaran explained, “By using both traditional and state-of-the-art molecular analysis techniques we can build a clearer picture of the International Space Station’s microbial community, helping to spot bacterial agents that may damage equipment or threaten astronaut health, and identify areas in need of more stringent cleaning.”

“The results obtained will facilitate future studies to determine how stable the ISS environment is over time,” he and his fellow authors wrote. “This information can be used to identify sites that can be targeted for more stringent cleaning. Finally, the results will allow comparisons with other built sites and facilitate future improvements on the ISS that will ensure astronaut health.”

—–

Feature Image: NASA

Science

Amazing! Rare half-male, half-female butterfly emerges in UK

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 26, 2015 Last Edited: October 26, 2015

Christopher Pilny

An “extremely rare” gynandromorph butterfly has been discovered in the UK!

Found in an attraction known as Butterfly World—a center dedicated to pay tribute to and support conservation of the creatures—in Hertfordshire, UK, the butterfly is actually half male and half female, as evidenced by its coloring. With the split occurring directly down the center, one half is black (male) and the other is yellow with a spot of red (female).

Genes apparently are to be thanked for this amazing event. Lepidopterist Louise Hawkins told the Daily Mail that this outcome is fixed “very early on” as it’s a result of “sex chromosomes [that] don’t divide properly” during mitosis.

The butterfly itself is a Great Mormon, which occurs naturally from Australia up to India and Japan. Butterfly World is hoping to have it on display over the next few days, as it is rather rare—the chance of half-male, half-female butterflies being hatched is around 0.01 percent.

But unfortunately, it probably will not live long, as the incorrect division of sex chromosomes usually results in internal organs that are, according to Hawkins, “a bit mixed up”. This also means that the butterfly is infertile—so no others are likely to hatch any time soon.

In other words: Catch it while you can!

—–

Feature Image: Butterfly World

Health

Exercise your body to keep your brain young, study says

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 26, 2015 Last Edited: October 26, 2015

Christopher Pilny

It’s well-established that exercise has a great effect on your brain: It boosts brain function in those at risk for Alzheimer’s, boosts brainpower in children, and generally just improves memory. But how fitness affects mental activity has never been directly shown—until now, as a study from the University of Tsukuba in Japan has linked brain activation to mental and physical performance.

As reported in Neuroimage, the researchers discovered that older Japanese men who were fit not only performed better than less fit men. More exciting, though, is that we usually shift which parts of our brain we use to perform the same mental tasks with age—but the fit men also used their brain in the same way as young men.

The specific task given is what’s known as a Stroop test—which in this case involved the participants seeing something along the lines of this:

The test required that they report the color of the letters as opposed to the color spelled out in each word.

The time it takes an individual to determine the colors is a common measurement of brain function, and is a task completed by the prefrontal cortex (PFC). In young adults, this is done in the left PFC, but for aging adults, both the left and right sides activate.

This change is known as HAROLD (hemispheric asymmetry reduction in older adults), and reflects adaptations of the brain necessary to make up for reduced brain capacity and efficiency caused by age-related structural and physiological decline.

The participants—60 older men (aged 64-75 years)—had their brain activity measured while completing this task using functional near infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS. fNIRS measures blood oxygen concentration in surface blood vessels—a reflection of brain activity, as active brain cells require more oxygen.

Their reaction times were measured as well, and their aerobic fitness levels were tested by measuring their heart rates and ratings of perceived exertion while using an ergometer.

The results?

The men who were more fit had faster reaction times as compared to less fit men. But, more excitingly, they favored the left side of the PFC for performing the Stroop tests—like young adults do—indicating that exercise may play a role in keeping the brain “youthful”.

The exact reasoning behind how this happens isn’t yet clear, but study leader Dr. Hideaki Soya believes he may have an idea: “One possible explanation suggested by the research is that the volume and integrity of the white matter in the part of brain that links the two sides declines with age. There is some evidence to support the theory that fitter adults are able to better maintain this white matter than less fit adults, but further study is needed to confirm this theory,” he said in a statement.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Story Image: Stroop-interference-related cortical activation patterns are shown. Credit: University of Tsukuba

Health

Reality TV goes next-level with first-ever live brain surgery broadcast

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 26, 2015 Last Edited: October 26, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Surgeons from University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio made history on Sunday night as they preformed brain surgery on live national television and attempted to reduce the symptoms of a Parkinson’s disease patient through deep brain stimulation (DBS).

As cameras from National Geographic channel captured the action, neurosurgeons Dr. Jonathan Miller and Dr. Jennifer Sweet performed awake DBS on 49-year-old Greg Grindley in the hopes that it would alleviate some of his tremors, Digital Trends reported over the weekend.

The two-hour special, which aired in the US starting at 9pm on Sunday, showed live footage from inside the operating room at UH Case Medical Center as a fully-conscious Grindley gave instructions to the neurosurgeons regarding where to place a total of four electrodes. Placement is key, the doctors said, as it ensures the proper areas of the brain are being targeted.

Goal of the broadcast was to raise DBS awareness

DBS surgery was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat essential tremors in 1997, and then for Parkinson’s disease five years later. It is only performed at select hospitals across the US, and unsurprisingly, Sunday marked the first time that the operation was televised.

In awake DBS, neurosurgeons make an opening in the patient’s skull to gain access to his or her brain, all while the patient remains conscious to communicate with doctors. While the procedure is only performed at a limited number of facilities by high specialized surgeons utilizing cutting-edge equipment, it has been around for over 10 years and is done quite frequently.

In a statement, Dr. Miller said that his team agreed to participate in the broadcast in order to help “demystify brain surgery, diminishing the fear and stigma of this operation.” He also told Digital Trends that many Parkinson’s patients “aren’t aware that we have these therapies available and a lot of patients suffer needlessly. Our goal is to publicize the problem and the solution.”

Grindley concurred, telling the website that he and his family ultimately decided “to share this experience with the world to open other people’s eyes to the remarkable procedure, and to give hope to those who are also suffering from tremors and Parkinson’s.”

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Toss the toupée: Inhibiting specific enzymes effectively regrows hair

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 26, 2015 Last Edited: October 26, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Bye, Rogaine! Using drugs to inhibit a specific group of enzymes in hair follicles suspended in a resting state could help regrow the locks of those suffering from male pattern baldness or other types of hair loss, according to a new Columbia University Medical Center study.

In a series of experiments involving both mouse and human hair follicles, dermatology professor Dr. Angela M. Christiano and her colleagues found that medications designed to block activity in the Janus kinase (JAK) family of enzymes promoted hair growth when applied to the skin.

The study, which was published last week in the journal Scientific Advances, suggests that JAK inhibitors could be used to restore hair growth in any type of hair loss that results from a person’s follicles being trapped in a resting state, the authors explained.

To date, two JAK inhibitors have received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA): ruxolitinib to treat blood diseases and tofacitinib for rheumatoid arthritis. Both are being tested currently in clinical trials for alopecia areata, a condition that causes hair loss.

JAK inhibitors cause resting hair follicles to wake up

While Dr. Christiano’s team was studying alopecia areata, which is a form of hair loss caused by an autoimmune attack on hair follicles, they discovered that mice tended to grow more hair when JAK inhibitors were applied to the skin instead of being delivered systematically. This suggested that the drugs turn off the signals that cause the immune system to attack hair follicles.

They analyzed normal mouse hair follicles and discovered that the JAK inhibitors were suddenly waking up resting hair follicles out of the dormant stage of their growth cycles by activating their regular reawakening process. Mice treated with one of the two JAK inhibitors for five days grew new hair within 10 days, while no hair grew on untreated control mice over the same span.

The Columbia scientists also discovered that oral forms of the drugs restore hair growth in some people with alopecia areata. They believe that JAK inhibitors likely act on the same pathways in human hair follicles that they did in mice, which could lead to a new way to reverse hair loss.

“There aren’t many compounds that can push hair follicles into their growth cycle so quickly,” Dr. Christiano said in a statement Friday. “What we’ve found is promising, though we haven’t yet shown it’s a cure for pattern baldness. More work needs to be done to test if JAK inhibitors can induce hair growth in humans using formulations specially made for the scalp.”

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

DNA test reveals man’s unborn twin is actually his son’s father; no word on if he’s calling Maury next

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 26, 2015 Last Edited: October 26, 2015

Emily Bills

In a twist worthy of a soap opera, a DNA test revealed that a 34-year-old Washington man was not the father of his own child—but it was his unborn twin brother’s genes that were actually found in the man’s sperm.

According to Fox 8 Cleveland and Tribune Media Wire reports, the father and his spouse (both of whom wished to remain anonymous) had a healthy baby boy in June 2014. They soon realized that the boy’s blood type was different from either one of them, leading them to take the at-home paternity test which claimed that the man was not actually the boy’s father.

The couple visited a fertility clinic, but the results were pretty much the same—while the father was found not to be the genetic sire of the boy, the DNA tests did show that there was some kind of relationship. Puzzled, they went to Barry Starr, a Stanford University geneticist, for help.

“You can imagine the parents were pretty upset,” Starr told Buzzfeed. “They thought the clinic had used the wrong sperm.” He suggested that the father and son both be tested using an off-the-shelf genetic ancestry test sold by the 23andMe, and when the results suggested that the man was actually the boy’s uncle, Starr said it was “kind of a eureka moment.”

So how exactly did this happen?

As Starr and his colleagues explained in a case study, the man turned out to be a chimera—a type of organism that contains two distinct sets of DNA—because he absorbed the genetic material of his own unborn twin brother after that twin was lost early in pregnancy. As a result, the would-be father’s sperm contained a different set of genes than the rest of his body.

Buzzfeed explained that approximately one-eighth of all single childbirths are believed to started off as multiple pregnancies. When would-be siblings are miscarried, their cells can sometimes be absorbed by the surviving fetus, often going undetected—except in instances such as this one.

“To our knowledge,” the study authors wrote, “this is the first reported case in which paternity was initially excluded by standard DNA testing methods and later included as the result of the analysis of different tissues.” While they call the case “unusual,” they added that the “uptake of assisted reproductive technology, this outcome could occur with increasing frequency.”

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

WHO report: Burgers, bacon as cancer-causing as smoking cigarettes

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 26, 2015 Last Edited: October 26, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Are red and processed meats as bad for you as smoking cigarettes? That’s the argument officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) are apparently set to make, as reports indicate that the agency will add beef, bacon, and similar products to a list of cancer-causing agents.

According to BBC News and Daily Mail reports, sources indicate that the global wellness group plans to add processed meats such as ham, bacon, and hot dogs to a list of carcinogens that includes cigarettes, arsenic, and asbestos. Unprocessed red meats will be ranked as slightly less dangerous than their highly-preserved counterparts, they added.

The ruling, which is expected to be officially announced on Monday, follows a conference with scientists from the UK and nine other countries, who reviewed evidence and found that products such as these increase the risk of bowel and other forms of cancer. The move may cause changes in dietary guidelines and might force the inclusion of warning labels on some products.

Processed meats have previously been blamed for one out of every 30 deaths, and the Daily Mail said they’re viewed as harmful because the methods used to preserve them can cause increases in levels of cancer-causing chemicals. Meat in general is considered harmful due to its high amount of fat and the potential damage its coloring could cause to a person’s bowels.

Experts divided over the forthcoming recommendations

Dr. Louis Levy, the head of nutrition science at Public Health England, told BBC News that his agency would review the report after it was released, but advised that people should eat no more than 70 grams per day of processed or red meat. Other experts questioned the findings.

Dr. Ian Johnson of the Institute of Food Research told BBC News that while there is evidence of a link between processed meat consumption and bowel cancer, he said that “the size of the effect is relatively small” and that it was “inappropriate to suggest that any adverse effect of bacon and sausages on the risk of bowel cancer is comparable to the dangers of tobacco smoke.”

Robert Pickard, a professor at the University of Cardiff and a member of the Meat Advisory Panel (an organization backed by the meat industry) added that “no one food gives you cancer.” He added that the best ways to prevent cancer were to avoid smoking, refrain from excessive use of alcohol, and maintain a healthy body weight.

While advocates note that red meat is rich in vitamins, iron, zinc, and protein, the Daily Mail pointed out that previous research has shown that reducing consumption levels to just 20 grams per day would eliminate nearly 20,000 premature deaths in the UK annually. The World Cancer Research Fund recommends avoiding processed meat entirely, the newspaper added.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

Bacterial art can be incredibly beautiful

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 25, 2015 Last Edited: October 25, 2015

Brian Galloway

“Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move,” director Ossie Davis once said—although some might raise eyebrows when considering this quote in the context of the American Society for Microbiology’s first Agar Art contest. As in: They held a contest to see who could make the best arrangement of colonies of bacteria on agar plates.

However, despite what some may think, the results were surprisingly stunning.

Like this view of the night sky, made of Streptomyces coelicolor:

Or a very different rendition of the night sky, featuring brown Proteus mirabilis, white Acinetobacter baumanii, and blues of Enterococcus faecalis and Klebsiella pneumonia:

Someone even made a portrait of Louis Pasteur, featuring Chromobacterium violaceum:

However, the grand prize—a free ASM book of choice and $85 towards the scientific artwork of Michele Banks—went to Mehmet Berkmen of New England Biolabs and artist Maria Penil, for using yellow Nesterenkonia with orange Deinococcus and Sphingomonas to create their work “Neurons”:

In second place was a collaborative effort between scientists and artists at Genspace: New York City’s Community Biolab, the “NYC Biome MAP”, made of E. coli engineered with fluorescent proteins:

And in third, “Harvest Season” by Maria Eugenia Inda, a postdoctoral researcher from Argentina working at Cold Spring Harbor Labs, made of Saccharomyces cerevisiae:

In short, just another fun reminder that science, art, and beauty aren’t mutually exclusive.

—–

Image credit:

Science

Will global warming destroy the snow leopard’s habitat?

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 25, 2015 Last Edited: October 25, 2015

Brian Galloway

A new report from the World Wildlife Foundation brings grim news: Should global warming continue unchecked, snow leopards—already an endangered species—may lose up to a third of their natural habitat. Moreover, this environmental decline would also disrupt the delicate water cycle necessary to provide water for 330 million people in the area.

Warming environment, human encroachment

Between 4,000 and 6,400 snow leopards currently exist—a 20% drop in population size from 16 years ago, thanks to human encroachment on snow leopard territory, declines in natural prey, and poaching. But the snow leopard’s habitat, found in the highest areas of countries like China, Russia, Afghanistan, Nepal, and India, is set to decrease at an accelerated rate as a result of climate change.

“Increasing temperatures are expected to shift the tree line higher up the mountains, foster the growth of plant species that are less palatable for the snow leopard’s natural prey species and livestock, expand the area suitable for crops, increase aridity, alter the timing of water availability, and melt the glaciers and permafrost,” wrote the report’s authors.

The shift in tree line is especially devastating, as snow leopards hunt in the rocky terrain above the trees. Perhaps even worse, it makes it easier for humans to encroach on snow leopard territory for the purpose of farming and raising livestock. It may even drive humans to do this, because warm temperatures makes lower regions more arid and therefore less habitable.

Such contact increases competition for snow leopard prey, and greatly increases the likelihood that humans will kill snow leopards in retaliation for lost herds.

Other potential losses

But snow leopards aren’t the only species at stake: Humans, too, will likely suffer the consequences. Rising temperatures could reduce the amount of water available to the 330 million people living downstream of snow leopard territory.

“For example, rising temperatures will melt the snow, glaciers and permafrost in snow leopard territory, which will affect the timing and flow of the water downstream. The warmer climate could also encourage more plant and tree growth in higher parts of the big cat’s range, which would contribute to expected changes in patterns of evapotranspiration, since the plants would suck up more water, which would then evaporate into the atmosphere leaving less to run off into rivers and lakes,” wrote the WWF.

According to the report, the WWF is already taking some actions, but is calling for more to be done. The extremely critical snow leopard territory covers nearly 660,000 square miles, of which less than 14 percent has been studied or mapped.

“It is critical that additional research is conducted to fill these gaps,” wrote the WWF. “Effective snow leopard conservation is dependent on knowing more about this icon of the high mountains and of the mountain environments themselves.”

Conservation of humanity likely depends on the same thing.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

Meet Kerberos, the smallest of Pluto’s moons

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 24, 2015 Last Edited: October 24, 2015

Brian Galloway

The smallest member of the “Pluto family” has finally been captured in an image, as pictures of the tiny, two-lobed natural satellite taken by the New Horizons during the spacecraft’s July flyby of the system have been beamed back to Earth, NASA officials announced Thursday.

According to Mashable and BBC News reports, the moon known as Kerberos is actually smaller than scientists had expected, and appears to have two lobes, which may be due to two icy objects colliding with one another and merging. The larger of the lobes is approximately about five miles (eight kilometers) wide, while the other is about three miles (five kilometers) across.

Kerberos also has a surface reflectivity comparable to that of Pluto’s other smaller moons, which suggests that like the others, it has a coating of fairly clean water ice, the US space agency noted. Both discoveries came as a surprise to New Horizons scientists, who prior to July’s approach had predicted that the tiny moon would be larger, darker and more massive than it turned out to be.

“Once again, the Pluto system has surprised us,” Hal Weaver, a missions scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in a press release. His colleague, Mark Showalter of California’s SETI Institute, added that the team’s predictions were “nearly spot-on for the other small moons, but not for Kerberos.”

Scientists unsure why Kerberos is smaller than anticipated

Prior to the probe’s close encounter with the dwarf planet and his moons, NASA researchers had used images from the Hubble Space Telescope to “weigh” Kerberos by measuring the amount of gravitational influence it had on its neighboring satellites. The strength of that influence given its relative faintness led them to theorize that the moon was relatively large and massive.

As it turns out, those predictions turned out to be wrong, for reasons not yet fully understood, the agency said. Kerberos is comparable in size to Styx and smaller than Nix and Hydra, the medium sized moons (each some 25 miles across) orbiting the dwarf planet. Additional information yet to be sent back to Earth from New Horizons may help explain why the predictions were so off.

Kerberos is the second-outermost of Pluto’s five moons, and at a distance of 60,000 kilometers from the dwarf planet, it is located between Nix and Hydra and beyond the orbits of Charon and Styx, according to BBC News. The newly released photograph of the tiny moon was captured by New Horizons’ LORRI instrument from a distance of just under 400,000 kilometers.

—–

Image credit: NASA

Health

Think you’re addicted to cheese? You’re probably right!

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 24, 2015 Last Edited: October 24, 2015

Brian Galloway

If you’re the type of person who always puts a slice of pepper jack on your hamburger, or finds that you can’t get enough gooey mozzarella on a pizza, you might think that you have an addiction to cheese – and new research indicated that you might be right.
According to the New York Daily News and the Los Angeles Times, a University of Michigan-led study published this week in the US National Library of Medicine examined why certain types of food seem to be more addictive than others. The authors asked approximately 500 students to fill out a survey, the Yale Food Addiction Scale, to determine if they had such a habit.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, pizza topped the list, but perhaps surprisingly, the authors believe the supposed cause of this addiction is the pizza’s cheese. Specifically, the primary reason was one ingredient within that cheese: casein, a peptide (protein fragment) which is known to release a type of opiate (casomorphins) during the digestive process.
When released, the opiates activate dopamine receptors in the brain’s reward center, triggering the “addictive element” of cheese, registered dietitian Cameron Wells said, according to the Los Angeles Times. The chemical, combined with the sugar in the tomato sauce and the carbs found in the crust, is what helps make pizza so darn addictive, The Telegraph explained.
‘Dairy crack’
How addictive is cheese? According to The Telegraph, the average US resident consumes about 35 pounds worth of the processed dairy product every year, and one expert, Dr. Neal Barnard of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, even referred to it as “dairy crack.”
As the Daily Mail explained, milk actually only contains a tiny amount of casein. However, one pound of cheese requires nearly 10 pounds of milk, meaning that the chemical is present in large amounts and high concentrations in slices of cheddar, Gouda, and Swiss, enhancing the effect.
The problem becomes worse when the cheese products are highly processed, the UK newspaper added. Animal-based studies have found that highly-processed foods, or those with added fat or refined carbs, could trigger addictive eating behaviors. Furthermore, people suffering from food allergies or higher BMI have reported experiencing issues with such products.
Study co-author Nicole Avena, an assistant professor of pharmacology and systems therapeutics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, told the Daily Mail that the study was “a first step towards identifying specific foods, and properties of foods, which can trigger this addictive response” and could “change the way we approach obesity treatment.”
—–
Image credit: Thinkstock

Foster children three times more likely to have ADHD

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 24, 2015 Last Edited: August 30, 2018

John

Already identified by experts as the most common behavior health diagnosis among youngsters enrolled in Medicaid, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is even more prevalent in children in foster care, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found.

In fact, in research set to be presented Monday during the American Academy of Pediatrics 2015 National Conference & Exhibition in Washington, DC, the CDC reported that foster children are three times more likely than other kids to receive an ADHD diagnosis from their doctors.

An analysis of 2011 Medicaid outpatient and prescription drug claims from several US states has revealed than more than one-fourth of all children between the ages of 2 and 17 who were placed in foster care received such a diagnosis, compared to about one-in-14 of all others in Medicaid.

Furthermore, the study found that foster children with ADHD were also more likely to receive a diagnosis for another condition such as oppositional defiant disorder, depression, or anxiety, with nearly half receiving such a diagnosis versus one-third of non-foster children with ADHD.

Findings reveal a substantial need for treatment in foster care

Dr. Melissa Danielson, lead author of the study and a statistician with the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, said that these findings demonstrate a need for substantial medical and behavior services exists for ADHD children living in foster care.

The study also found that these youngsters were about as likely as non-foster care ADHD kids to be treated with medications, but were also more likely to have received psychological services, a finding that Dr. Danielson described as promising in light of the fact that experts recommend the use of behavior therapy in both pre-school and school-age children with the condition.

“As we work to improve the quality of care for children with ADHD, it will be important to consider the needs of special populations, including those in foster care,” she said in a statement. “Working together, primary care and specialty clinicians can best support the health and long-term well-being of children with ADHD.”

Previous CDC research found that 11 percent of school-aged children in the US had received an ADHD diagnosis, which works out to nearly 6.5 million youngsters. As of 2011, the percentage of health care providers to have given such a diagnosis had increased by 42 percent in less than a decade, and the percentage of kids taking ADHD medication spiked 28 percent since 2007.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Health

This woman can smell Parkinson’s disease, paving the way for new tests

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 24, 2015 Last Edited: October 24, 2015

Brian Galloway

Even though doctors diagnose up to 60,000 new cases of Parkinson’s disease each year, there is currently no definitive test for the disease– but one Scottish woman and her remarkable sense of smell could soon revolutionize how the condition is detected.

She is 65-year-old Joy Milne, and according to BBC News and The New York Times, she sensed an unusual “musky” odor on her late husband Les years before he was first diagnosed by doctors. Joy explained that his scent “changed” in a “difficult to describe” way, and that it was “subtle – a musky smell” that did not happen suddenly, but slowly and over the course of time.

It wasn’t until Joy joined the charity Parkinson’s UK, met others with the same distinct smell and mentioned the apparent coincidence to scientists that the link was first established. Experiments followed where the scientists decided to test her abilities.

Dr. Tilo Kunath, a Parkinson’s UK fellow from the Edinburgh University School of Biological Sciences, was one of the first scientists Milne had confided in, and he and his colleagues had the woman sniff t-shirts work by six people with Parkinson’s and six without with disease.

Perfect smell-test score spurs on search for molecular triggers

“The first time we tested Joy we recruited six people with Parkinson’s and six without,” he told the BBC on Thursday. “We had them wear a t-shirt for a day then retrieved the t-shirts, bagged them and coded them. Her job was to tell us who had Parkinson’s and who didn’t.”

She scored 11 out of 12 on the test, correctly detecting all six of the Parkinson’s patients, added Dr. Kunath. However, she was adamant that she could smell the odor on one of the control group members, even though he assured researchers that he was healthy and did not have the disease.

Eight months later, however, he contacted the university and told them that he had just received a Parkinson’s diagnosis, indicating that Milne was apparently correct in her olfactory diagnosis. It so impressed Dr. Kunath and his fellow researchers that they have launched an investigation into the phenomenon, hoping to find a reliable way to detect and diagnose Parkinson’s patients.

They believe that changes in the skin of people with early stage Parkinson’s could produce odd scents associated with the disease, BBC News said. They hope to discover the molecular signal associated with the odor, then devise a simple diagnostic test (such as a forehead swab) to see if a person has the ailment. Studies are currently underway in three UK cities, they added.

—–

Image credit: BBC

Science

Cleopatra probably didn’t die from a snakebite, says Egyptologists

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 24, 2015 Last Edited: October 24, 2015

Brian Galloway

Contrary to what is taught in many history courses, it couldn’t have been a bite from a venomous snake that did in the legendary Egyptian queen Cleopatra, experts from the University of Manchester have argued as part of a new, free online course on Egyptian history.

According to BBC News, the queen, who died in 30 BC at the age of 39 while in the midst of a power struggle within the Roman empire, is often reported to have ended her own life by having a poisonous snake or “asp” bite her. Egyptologist Dr. Joyce Tyldesley and Andrew Gray, curator of herpetology at Manchester Museum, however, dispute this claim in the new course.

Using six items from the museum’s collection, the duo demonstrate that ancient accounts which claim that a snake hid in a basked of figs carried in from the country could not have be accurate, as the venomous snakes in Egypt (cobras and vipers) would have been too large for this to work.

Cobras, Gray said, are typically five to six feet long but can grow up to eight feet, making them too difficult to hide. The accounts also indicate that one or two of Cleopatra’s maids were killed in this manner, but the slow nature of snake bite deaths suggests there was too little time for multiple people to die in this way, and the venom carries just a 10 percent chance of death.

If not snake bites, what was the cause of death?

“Snakes use venom to protect themselves and for hunting – so they conserve their venom and use it in times of need,” Gray said in a statement. Most snake bites are “dry bites,” meaning that they do not inject venom, he added in the course, A History of Ancient Egypt, which will be launched online next week and cover the pre-pharaoh period through Cleopatra’s life.

So if a snake bite wasn’t the cause of death, how exactly did Cleopatra die? Some experts are not even convinced that she committed suicide at all, and that she could actually have been murdered by Roman Emperor Octavian. Dr. Tyldesley does believe that she killed herself, however.

“We know very little about suicide in ancient Egypt – it is almost as if it was unheard of – but suicide in the Hellenistic or Roman world was seen as a totally acceptable means of dealing with an otherwise insoluble problem. And Cleopatra belongs to that world,” she told the Daily Mail.

“Mark Antony [Cleopatra’s lover] stabbed himself, and there are reports that Cleopatra had already attempted to stab herself, so maybe a knife or dagger wound of some kind – opening the veins in a bath, perhaps – was the easy solution,” Dr. Tyldesley added. “Alternatively, maybe she used snake venom that she had already prepared for the occasion: but not a live snake.”

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Australian ghost sharks’ fused necks help clarify how human necks developed

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 23, 2015 Last Edited: October 23, 2015

Christopher Pilny

An unusual source offers insight into human health problems, as researchers from Monash University used the naturally fused neck vertebrae of sharks to study neck development gone awry in humans.

As published in PLOS ONE, the study may bring new light to the development or disorders such as Klippel-Feil syndrome, in which the vertebrae of the neck harden together. However, in other animals, like sharks and rays, a neck encased in bone is the norm. And so the team studied the development of fused necks in elephant sharks (otherwise known as Australian ghost shark).

“In some animal species, part of the animal’s body mimics what we see in a human disease. These species are known as ‘evolutionary mutants,’ and analyzing them provides unprecedented access to information in a healthy individual,” said lead researcher Catherine Boisvert of Monash University’s Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute in a Futurity statement.

“We are gaining a better understanding on how these morphologies develop and what developmental pathways (genes and their networks) are involved in producing them. This knowledge may help us better understand the disease in humans.”

The team raised the elephant sharks themselves, hatching them from eggs laid in captivity in Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, Australia. They stained the sharks in order to visualize their cartilage and muscle development.

Necks fused after development

The common belief was that the individual vertebrae of the sharks failed to form in early development, leading to a long, fused chain of vertebrae. But, using microscopic imaging, the scientists discovered that the opposite actually holds true: The neck formed normally, and then fused.

In fact, the way the sharks’ necks formed appeared to be quite similar to another human disease known as fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, in which the soft tissues of the body turn into bone.

“Sharks don’t have true bone—instead they have a hard kind of cartilage called prismatic calcified cartilage—and we don’t fully understand yet if the vertebra fusion is due to overdevelopment of cartilage, or if the soft tissue between the vertebrae becomes transformed into cartilage, resulting in fusion,” said Boisvert.

“These sorts of ‘metaplastic’ transformations of the spine have been observed in farmed salmon, and exciting new research is beginning to unravel the genes involved in these transformations. Our goal is to do the same for elephant sharks, rays, and skates.

“All in all, we are coming closer to understanding how a fused neck develops normally or under stressful conditions (as is the case for farmed salmon) in a range of vertebrates at the base of our ancestry.”

—–

Feature Image: Wikimedia Commons

Health

Fine and coarse memories stored in different areas of hippocampus, study shows

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 23, 2015 Last Edited: October 23, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Memory has never been an easy subject to study in the brain, and it may have just gotten a bit more complicated, because researchers from Radboud University’s Donders Institute have just discovered that memories of the same events co-exist as different “resolutions” across the hippocampus.

“Memories, similar to the internal representation of space, can be recalled at different resolutions ranging from detailed events to more comprehensive, multi-event narratives,” wrote the authors in Nature Communications.

Or in more concrete terms, you could remember a general event like going out to dinner on a Friday, or a specific one like reading an article on a science website during dessert—because for any memory, there are “coarse” and “fine” details.

As it turns out, such memories of the same event aren’t stored in one location, but are dispersed across the hippocampus. The finest scale memories are distributed near the rear of the hippocampus, while the coarser ones exist near the front.

“We think that memories of these events are stored in different locations of the hippocampus to avoid interference when retrieving either coarse or detailed memories,” explained first author Silvy Collin in a statement.

The Sims help out

“We showed participants life-like events created with the videogame The Sims 3. These were integrated into multi-event narratives,” Collins said.

The participants—29 college students from the university—watched four approximately five-second clips, some of which were related together by two later clips. As the events in the Sims unfolded before them, and later when they were asked to recall what had happened, the participants rested in an MRI scanner in order to see where in the hippocampus activity was happening.

What’s next?

The researchers have expressed an interest in how memories are stored within brains other than those of young, healthy adults. The brains of dementia patients, for example, may have different memory storage if certain levels of detail don’t get placed in the hippocampus.

“We see that the various memory resolutions are formed automatically, but we believe that they can exist independent from each other,” explained Principal investigator Christian Doeller.

—–

Feature Image: Silvy Collin and colleagues

Science

How a simple orange peel sucks mercury from oceans

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 23, 2015 Last Edited: October 23, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Researchers from Flinders University have accidentally discovered a technique to remove toxic mercury from water using a material made entirely of industrial waste and orange peel, creating a special polymer that can cheaply and safely suck the metallic substance out of oceans.

According to Gizmodo, synthetic chemists at the South Australian university have dubbed their new polymer sulfur-limonene polysulfide, and as the name suggests, it’s made entirely of sulfur and limonene, industrial by-products that are widely available but go largely unused.

Those chemists, Max Worthington and Justin Chalker, explained to The New Daily that theirs is the first method to remove mercury—a pollutant that can damage food and water supplies as well as cause damage to the human nervous system—directly from H20 safely and affordably.

Worthington and Chalker, who report their discoveries in the latest edition of the German journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, added that the affordable nature of the materials used in the polymer makes it suitable for cleaning up large-scale environmental disasters, to coat pipes transporting domestic and waste water, and even to remove mercury directly from oceans.

Rubber-like material grabs mercury out of the oceans

Chalker explained to The New Daily that he and his colleagues initially intended to create a type of plastic or polymer from a readily-available substance, and decided on sulfur because it is mass produced by the petroleum industry as a by-product. They also decided on limonene because more than 7,000 tons of the relatively inexpensive substance is produced annually.

“We take sulfur, which is a by-product of the petroleum industry, and we take limonene, which is the main component of orange oil, so is produced in large quantities by the citrus industry, and we’re able to react them together to form a type of soft red rubber, and what this material does is that it can grab mercury out of the water,” he told the Australian news publication.

Toxicity studies have verified that the polymer itself is not harmful to the environment, so they are hopeful that they will be able to commercially produce their polymer for use in the real world. The breakthrough has the potential to significantly reduce mercury levels in the ocean, which have reportedly tripled since the start of the Industrial Revolution, according to a statement.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

Researchers find loudest howler monkeys have the smallest…well…

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 23, 2015 Last Edited: October 23, 2015

Christopher Pilny

It takes a lot of energy for an animal to “invest” in traits that’ll attract a mate including large teeth, colorful feathers, or in the case of the howler monkey, a loud and boisterous mating call. Sometimes it can be worth it, as impressive males are more likely to find the animal bride of their dreams. Other times these animals are losing some potency at the cost of some flair.

Research published in the journal Current Biology found an inverse correlation between the loudness of a male howler monkey’s calls and the size of his balls. Smaller monkey testes produce less sperm, meaning the tiny-testacled primates are less fertile.

According to CNET, the correlation is tied with the hyoid bone, which is a bone in the howler’s throat that allows for loud lower-pitch calls. Larger calls would be associated with larger monkeys, both scaring off competing males and attracting fertile females.

The discrepancy between organs was pretty huge at times—the largest hyoid bone found was ten times bigger than the smallest specimen. We really don’t want to see what kind of heat the smallest-hyoid monkey was packing!

Reasons unknown

Researchers commented that the study was very interesting, but the reason for the inverse relationship is not yet known.

“It may be that investment in developing a large vocal organ and roaring is so costly that there is simply not enough energy left to invest in testes. Alternatively, using a large vocal organ for roaring may be so effective at deterring rival males that there is no need to invest in large testes,” said Jacob Dunn, the study’s leading researcher from the University of Cambridge.

Although further testing is needed, this research might also provide an understanding as to why certain human males drive such large pickup trucks.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Get mammograms later, less frequently, according to new guidelines

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 23, 2015 Last Edited: October 23, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Long an advocate for early, frequent breast cancer screenings, the American Cancer Society has done an about-face and is now recommending that women begin getting mammograms later and do so less frequently than before, according to new guidelines published this week.

According to the New York Times and the San Jose Mercury News, the group is now suggesting that women start annual screenings with mammograms at age 45 instead of age 40, as previously suggested. In addition, the organization is advising women to shift from annual checks to biennial screenings (once every two years) beginning at age 55.

The American Cancer Society also said that it no longer recommended clinical breast exams, in which doctors or nurses feel for lumps, in women of any age who have experienced no previous symptoms or abnormalities in their breasts. The guidelines are based on increasing scientific evidence that mammograms are less useful in younger females, and that the screening process can result in false-positives requiring unneeded biopsies and testing.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” University of California, San Francisco professor of medicine Dr. Karla Kerlikowske, who also directs the Women Veterans Comprehensive Health Center at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, told the Mercury News. “They consider that there are harms to screening healthy people who aren’t going to get the disease.”

Confusion, controversy likely to continue

However, Dr. Therese B. Bevers, the medical director of the Cancer Prevention Center at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, told the Times that she believed the new guidelines had “the potential to create a lot of confusion amongst women and primary care providers.”

One of the reasons for such confusion is differing recommendations issued by different groups. The American College of Radiology recommends that women begin getting mammograms at the age of 40, but the US Preventive Services Task Force suggests holding off until age 50, and even then only getting a mammogram every other year through the age of 74.

The National Comprehensive Cancer Network, a coalition of leading American cancer centers, recommends mammograms every year starting at age 40, the Times indicated. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends them every year or two from ages 40 to 49 and every year after that, as well as annual clinical breast exams starting at age 19.

Officials from the Cancer Society and other groups have scheduled a meeting for January in the hopes that they will be able to develop a more consistent set of guidelines, reports indicate. In all instances, however, the Cancer Society emphasizes that none of its recommendations are written in stone, and that all such decisions should be made by women and their doctors.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Technology

Is Tesla’s self-drive mode putting users in danger?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 23, 2015 Last Edited: October 23, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Tesla Motor’s “autopilot” feature, a self-driving mode released by the automotive manufacturer earlier this month as part of a software update, could be causing the company’s electric vehicles to drive dangerously and at excessive speeds, according to published reports.

In a story published Thursday, BBC News explained that videos posted online appear to contain footage of the self-driving mode causing one car to suddenly veer off the road after taking an exit near Portland, and a second car swerve straight into the path of an oncoming vehicle.

Furthermore, the British news agency reported that one Miami driver said his car was pulled over by the Florida Highway Patrol for traveling 75 mph in a 60 mph zone while using autopilot in his car. The man has purportedly posted pictures of the tickets he received online.

Better keep both hands on the wheel

Tesla, which unveiled its autopilot feature as part of its version 7.0 software release on October 14, said that the self-driving system utilized feedback from the camera, radar, ultrasonic, and GPS systems, making it “the only fully integrated autopilot system” to do so. It also allows the Model S to speed up or slow down, and to change lanes by activating the turn signal.

In addition, the autopilot system allowed for digital control of the engine, brakes, and steering in order to help avoid front or side collisions, as well as to keep the car from swerving off the road. However, while the feature “relieves drivers of the most tedious and potentially dangerous” parts of travel, Tesla also warned that they are ultimately “still responsible for… the car.”

“The driver cannot abdicate responsibility for driving,” the firm stated, according to BBC News. “The latest autopilot release is a hands-on experience to give drivers more confidence behind the wheel, increase their safety on the road and make motorway driving more enjoyable.”

Likewise, chief executive Elon Musk warned that the autopilot feature was “very new” and still in test mode. He added that the company was “being especially cautious at this early stage” and was advising motorists to “keep their hands on the wheel just in case” something bad happened. Translation: Expect the unexpected until Tesla gets all of the bugs worked out.

—–

Feature Image: Tesla

Space

Real-life ‘Death Star’ is destroying this poor rocky planet

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 23, 2015 Last Edited: October 23, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A white dwarf star that some media outlets have taken to calling a real-life Star Wars “Death Star” has been caught cannibalizing the small, rocky remains of a planet that once inhabited its solar system, NASA officials announced on Wednesday.

The discovery, made by scientists using the US space agency’s Kepler space telescope (known as the K2 mission), confirms a long-held theory that white dwarfs are capable of consuming the asteroid-sized remains of a one-time planet, disintegrating it while it orbits nearby.

In research published in the latest edition of the journal Nature, the researchers reveal that this activity is occurring around a white dwarf approximately 570 light years away. The planet is in orbit around the dying star at a distance about twice that separating the Earth and the Moon.

It’s this proximity, The Washington Post explained, that is causing the rocky mass to be put in peril. The remnant planet was observed while it was transiting (passing in front of) its host star, and the pattern of dimming detected by Kepler revealed that the object was shaped like a comet with a tail—likely debris from the object being pulled apart by the dense star’s gravity.

The ‘smoking gun’ linking white dwarfs to planet destruction

The object and its star were originally detected by Kepler during its first observational campaign, which lasted from May 30, 2014 to Aug. 21, 2014. They discovered a significant decrease in the brightness that occurred once every 4 1/2 hours, as the transiting object blocked up to 40 percent of white dwarf’s light. Its pattern of transit, however, revealed its unusual shape.

The planetary remnant showed an asymmetric elongated slope pattern indicative of its comet-like tail. Their observations led them to conclude that there was a ring of debris encircling the star, as well as the telltale signs of a small rocky object being disintegrated. Ground-based observations conducted at the University of Arizona’s MMT Observatory later confirmed their findings.

“This is something no human has seen before. We’re watching a solar system get destroyed,” lead author, Andrew Vanderburg from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in a statement. He added that the discovery was the “smoking gun” linking white dwarfs polluted by heavy metals to “the destruction of rocky planets.”

“For the last decade we’ve suspected that white dwarf stars were feeding on the remains of rocky objects, and this result may be the smoking gun we’re looking for,” said K2 staff scientist Fergal Mullally from SETI and NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “However, there’s still a lot more work to be done figuring out the history of this system.”

—–

Feature Image: CfA/Mark A. Garlick

Fibromyalgia

What is Xyrem And Can It Help Treat Fibromyalgia?

Written By: Mandy Burkholder

Published Date: October 22, 2015 Last Edited: October 22, 2015

admin

Photo: Victor

Fibromyalgia sufferers live with constant aches, pains, and discomfort. Luckily there are plenty of medications, like Lyrica, that help patients deal with all of the troubles of fibromyalgia. Unfortunately however, not everyone responds well to these medications.

But there is a new drug that has shown promise to help many people who cannot take other fibromyalgia medicines. The only problem? Doctors do not prescribe it for fibromyalgia, and insurance companies try not to cover it. This new medication is called Xyrem, and it was originally made to help patients who have narcolepsy.

Recent studies have shown that Xyrem, which is meant to pull you into a deep sleep, has overwhelmingly positive results in patients with fibromyalgia. We all feel at our best when we get a full night’s sleep, but sufferers know that staying asleep all night is often impossible due to the constant pain.

That’s where Xyrem comes in. All you have to do it take it two times per night, which will allow you to fall into a deep sleep for around 9 hours. Can you imagine how well your body would respond to sleeping that deeply for months on end? Several doctors agree that this is a very effective way to treat fibromyalgia.

And the studies prove this theory to be true. According to one study, patients who took Xyrem for 3 – 4 weeks sensed improved energy and less pain.

So if Xyrem is a miracle drug for fibromyalgia, why aren’t doctors jumping all over it? Well, the answer is very tricky. You see, Xyrem’s root ingredients have a very bad reputation. Xyrem is made from Gamma Hydroxybutyrate, or “GHB.” You might have heard the name GHB on the news, because it is often linked to college partiers who use it to illegally drug other people into submission. The misuse of this narcolepsy medication is morally wrong, so doctors don’t want too much of it to get out into the public.

And that’s why you probably haven’t heard of Xyrem to help treat your fibromyalgia. But doctors are slowly clueing in to the fact that it can really help sufferers find deep, restful sleep, which gives their minds and bodies the healing they need.

Have you ever tried using Xyrem to treat fibromyalgia? If so, please let us know in the comments if it helped your symptoms.

Science

If you were rich in the Middle Ages, you were probably unhealthy, study finds

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 22, 2015 Last Edited: October 22, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Usually the wealthy of the Middle Ages are seen as having been healthier than their poorer counterparts, especially in terms of their eating habits. However, as a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports has found, all that glitters is not gold—because some of it was actually lead and mercury.

As it happens, the wealthy townspeople of the Middle Ages loved to eat and drink from cups and plates glazed in bright colors. These beautiful glazes, however, had an ugly secret: lead, which leeched from the glaze into certain foods and beverages.

“In those days lead oxide was used to glaze pottery. It was practical to clean the plates and looked beautiful, so it was understandably in high demand. But when they kept salty and acidic foods in glazed pots, the surface of the glaze would dissolve and the lead would leak into the food,” said Associate Professor Kaare Lund Rasmussen, Department of Physics and Chemistry, University of Southern Denmark (SDU), in a statement.

This naturally led to some deleterious side effects.

“Lead poisoning can be the consequence when ingesting lead, which is a heavy metal. In the Middle Ages you could almost not avoid ingesting lead, if you were wealthy or living in an urban environment. But what is perhaps more severe, is the fact that exposure to lead leads to lower intelligence of children,” said Rasmussen.

Rasmussen and other colleagues from SDU investigated the extent of this potential poisoning by analyzing the bones of 207 skeletons across northern Germany and Denmark.

“There really is a big difference in how much lead the individuals from the cemeteries had in their bodies. This depended on whether they lived in the country or in a town. We see almost no lead in the bones from rural individuals, while the levels of this toxic metal were high in urban individuals,” said Rasmussen.

The location of Danes and Germans of the time was an indication of status; wealthier people tended to live in towns, while the poor were much more isolated. However, even if a rich individual lived in the country, they had much less access to the glazed pottery—meaning less lead exposure. However, just because one lived in the country didn’t mean one was free from risk of contamination.

“The exposure was higher and more dangerous in the urban communities, but lead was not completely unknown in the country. We saw that 30 pct. of the rural individuals had been in contact with lead — although much less than the townspeople,” said Rasmussen.

Lead wasn’t just found in pottery, though. It was found in coins, stained glass windows, and lead tiles on the roofs of certain buildings—from which it often entered the water supply. And of course, lead wasn’t the only toxic chemical element poisoning the rich. Mercury was also found in the urban bones, thanks to its supposed medicinal properties.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

More frequent, extreme floods and droughts forecasted for California in 2100

Written By: Eric Hopton

Published Date: October 22, 2015 Last Edited: October 22, 2015

Christopher Pilny

The date is 2100 in California and the “Terrible Twins” El Nino and La Nina, the Spanish names for boy and girl, are more unruly than ever. Their behavior is still unpredictable, but the end result is a doubling in the number of drought and flooding for the poor state of California.

A new study published in Nature Communications shows that the combined effects of El Nino and La Nina will cause more frequent extreme events. A better understanding of what gives rise to El Nino and La Nina cycles, collectively known as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), might help California to be better prepared for potential threats in the coming century.

ENSO is the danger

“Wet and dry years in California are linked to El Nino and La Nina. That relationship is getting stronger,” said atmospheric scientist Jin-Ho Yoon of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). “Our study shows that ENSO will be exhibiting increasing control over California weather.”

As California is coping with one of the most severe droughts in its history, climate scientists still don’t know if a warmer world will make droughts worse, more frequent, or perhaps even improve the situation.

However, some research predicts future rain will be more in the form of light drizzles or heavy deluges rather than steady moderate rainfall. Yoon and colleagues from PNNL and Utah State University in Logan, Utah, wondered if droughts might follow a similar pattern.

So the researchers simulated two periods of time, 1920 to 2005 using historical measurements, and 2006 to 2080 using conditions in which little is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This future scenario is in effect an examination of the most extreme case.

Not looking so hot for California

Two tactics were used to check how well the simulations worked, and the all-important reproducibility. In one tactic, they used a compilation of 38 different models, while in the other, they re-ran a single model 30 times. The more similar the results, the more sure the researchers would be of the model’s predictions.

If emissions continue to increase, the model predicts that California seasons will experience more excessively wet and excessively dry events, meaning droughts could double and floods could triple in frequency between the early 20th century and late 21st century.

“By 2100, we see more – and more extreme – events. Flooding and droughts will be more severe than they are currently,” said Yoon.

Yoon suspected the El Nino-Southern Oscillation was causing the predicted increases. Every two to seven years, El Nino comes in and warms up the tropical Pacific Ocean a few degrees, increasing winter rain and snowpack in California. On a similar schedule, La Nina cools things off. Both disrupt regular weather in many regions around the globe.

Yoon and colleagues ran a climate model with and without El Nino to explore its connection to California precipitation. In both simulations, they ramped up the concentration of carbon dioxide by 1 percent every year for 150 years. In just one of the runs, they removed El Nino’s cyclical contribution by programming the sea surface temperatures to reflect only steady warming.

With El Nino and La Nina out of the model, the frequency of extreme precipitation in California stayed constant for the century and a half of the simulated period. When ENSO was factored in, California experienced wide swings in rainfall by the end of the period.

Even though the researchers expect rain and snowfall to increase as the climate warms, the way in which the precipitation affects California could be highly variable.

In a statement from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the El Nino-Southern Oscillation is still a bit of a mystery. Scientists can only forecast El Nino and La Nina years by studying sea surface temperatures and other weather hints, and studies that investigate what controls them could help scientists predict unruly weather in the future.

—–

Feature Image: On the left, La Nina cools off the ocean surface (greens and blues) in the winter of 1988. On the right, El Nino warms up it up (oranges and reds) in the winter of 1997. Credit: Jin-Ho Yoon/PNNL

Science

Groundbreaking study: Bacteria actually communicate like neurons in the brain

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 22, 2015 Last Edited: October 22, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Often dismissed as simple, solitary creatures, bacteria actually utilize complex communications mechanisms similar to the electrical signaling mechanisms used by neurons in the human brain, researchers from the University of California, San Diego have discovered.

As Gürol Süel, an associate professor of molecular biology at UCSD, and his colleagues reported in the latest edition of the journal Nature, when these microbes live together in communities, they communicate directly with each other through special proteins known as “ion channels.”

“Our discovery not only changes the way we think about bacteria, but also how we think about our brain,” Süel explained in a statement. “All of our senses, behavior and intelligence emerge from electrical communications among neurons in the brain mediated by ion channels. Now we find that bacteria use similar ion channels to communicate and resolve metabolic stress.”

The research, which builds on a previous study that determined that biofilms had the capability to resolve social conflicts within their own communities, also suggests that some neurological conditions triggered by metabolic stress could have at one point been bacterial in nature. If so, it may provide doctors with a new way to treat such disorders.

Similarities to migraine, seizure-inducing condition discovered

Previous analysis of bacterial ion channels served as the basis for much of what scientists know about the electrical signaling in our brains, Süel explained. However, exactly how microbes used those channels themselves remained unknown, so the researchers decided to study long-distance communication within organized communities of bacterial cells known as biofilms.

When biofilms comprised of hundreds of thousands of Bacillus subtilis cells grew to a specific size, they found that the protective outer edge of cells stopped growing so that nutrients such as glutamate could continue flowing to the protected center, thus ensuring those bacteria’s survival. They designed an experiment to find out how this apparent coordination was occurring.

In order to measure changes in bacterial cell membrane potential during metabolic oscillations, they found that ion channels were responsible for changes in oscillations related to the growth of the biofilm. The oscillations conducted long-range electrical signals throughout the biofilms via spatially propagating waves of charged potassium ions, thus coordinating metabolic activity.

Once the channel that allowed potassium to slow into and out of cells had been deleted from the bacteria, the biofilm could no longer transmit these electrical signals, Süel said. Not only did the bacteria communicate using electrical signals in a way similar to neurons, but the process that the microbes used was said to be similar to a “cortical spreading depression”, a condition believed to be linked to seizures and migraines in humans, the study authors discovered.

“The community of bacteria within biofilms appears to function much like a ‘microbial brain’,” Süel added. “What’s interesting is that both migraines and the electrical signaling in bacteria we discovered are triggered by metabolic stress. This suggests that many drugs originally developed for epilepsy and migraines may also be effective in attacking bacterial biofilms.”

—–

Feature Image: Suel lab

Technology

Awesome new polymer foam material works just like a heart

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 22, 2015 Last Edited: October 22, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A new, lightweight, stretchable polymer foam developed by scientists at Cornell University has connected pores to allow fluids to be pumped through it, meaning it could potentially be used as an synthetic human heart or another type of artificial organ.

The polymer foam, which starts out as a liquid, can be poured into a mold to create a variety of different shapes. It could be used to create prosthetic body parts or soft robotics, lead author Rob Shepherd, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the school, and his colleagues explained in the latest edition of the journal Advanced Materials.

Due to the fluid pathways present in this “elastomer foam”, air or liquids pumped through it can move and alter its length by up to 300 percent, the researchers said. While applications inside the human body will still require testing and approval from federal regulators, Shepherd said that his team might soon be able to use the material to develop a prosthetic hand.

Researchers use salt to make the elastomer porous

The material is made porous by mixing salt with the rubbery elastomer when it is still a liquid, the researchers explained. Once the elastomer cures and hardens, the salt is removed. When a prosthetic limb or organ needs to be sealed so that air or fluid pumped through cannot escape, a salt-free version of the same polymer is used to coat the outside.

In their paper, Shepherd and his colleagues explained that they used a combination of silicone and carbon fiber on the outside to create a structure with a surface that expands at different rates. This could be used to change a spherical shape into an egg shape.

“This paper was about exploring the effect of porosity on the actuator, but now we would like to make the foam actuators faster and with higher strength, so we can apply more force,” Shepherd, whose research was funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation and 3M, said. He added that his team is also “focusing on biocompatibility.”

The latest study builds on separate research published last month in which the Cornell team said that they had fabricated a 3D printed elastomer that could be used to create layers of duplicated octopus tentacle muscles. Those synthetic muscles had nearly the same kind of agility and range of motion as a real tentacle, something previously unachievable with 3D printing.

—–

Feature Image: Cornell University

Health

Kids who take antibiotics gain weight faster, study says

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 22, 2015 Last Edited: October 22, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Rushing your kids to the ER so that they can get antibiotics every time they get the sniffles can have an unexpected adverse impact on their health, according to new research from Johns Hopkins University that repeated use of the medications could cause kids to gain weight far more quickly than normal.

Researchers reported in Wednesday’s edition of the International Journal of Obesity that using antibiotics may have a compounding effect throughout childhood on body mass index (BMI), a metric typically used to determine if an individual is at a healthy weight, overweight, or obese.

In fact, lead investigator Dr. Brian S. Schwartz, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Bloomberg school, said that a person’s BMI “may be forever altered” by the antibiotics he or she takes while growing up. Data collected by his team suggests that “every time we give an antibiotic to kids they gain weight faster over time,” he added.

Between January 2011 and February 2012, the authors analyzed the electronic health records of more than 163,000 kids between the ages of 3 and 18. They also examined height and body weight (to determine BMI), and antibiotic use during the past year and previous years.

Overuse of antibiotics could harm the gut microbiota

They discovered that by age 15, approximately 21 percent of the children involved in the study (roughly 30,000 kids) had received seven or more prescriptions for antibiotics. Those who had taken the medications at least seven times during the course of their youth weighed three pounds more, on average, than those who had not used antibiotics at all.

“While the magnitude of the weight increase attributable to antibiotics may be modest by the end of childhood, our finding that the effects are cumulative raises the possibility that these effects continue and are compounded into adulthood,” Dr. Schwartz said. Given that scientists working with penicillin previously reported that it caused weight gain in animals, the link between use of the treatment and weight gain makes sense biologically, he added.

Furthermore, the Johns Hopkins team pointed out that there is other evidence suggesting the use of antibiotics could lead to weight gain due to their affect on the microorganisms that inhabit the human body (also known as the microbiota). While using antibiotics kills harmful bacteria, it can also destroy microbes essential to gastrointestinal health, permanently altering how the body breaks down food, increasing the calories of absorbed nutrients, and causing weight gain.

Previous research had suggested that antibiotic use in very young children could lead to weight gain, but this new study indicates that overreliance at any age can cause kids to pack on pounds, and that the effect only increases with age. Dr. Schwartz said that the findings show that the use of systematic antibiotics “should be avoided except when strongly indicated.”

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

Getcha popcorn: First-ever movie of stellar surface evolution captured on distant star

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 22, 2015 Last Edited: April 17, 2018

Christopher Pilny

For the first time, astronomers have recorded a video that shows the evolution of stellar spots on a star other than our sun, collecting footage using the STELLA robotic telescopes stationed at the Canary Islands over a six-year span to create the stunning footage released Tuesday.

The movie was the work of researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) in Germany. They collected highly-sampled, phase-resolved spectroscopic data, then compiled it into a film showing the growth and fade of giant stellar spots on XX Triangulum, an active giant star also known as HD 12545 or XX Tri, and is located about 1,500 light years from Earth.

Their research revealed that XX Tri, which is about 10 times larger and twice as massive as the sun, has an underlying magnetic cycle with a period similar to that of the solar system’s central star but much stronger. The star also has a rotation period of 24 days, which became a factor as the AIP astronomers were unable to directly observe spots on the surface of this distant star.

Doppler imaging, mathematical models used to capture spectra

Instead, they had to rely upon Doppler imaging and mathematical models in order to resolve the stellar surface of the XX Tri indirectly. To obtain a single image of the stellar surface, the researchers had to observe it using the STELLA telescopes every night during that 24-day period of rotation, collecting a total of 667 usable spectra from July 2006 through April 2012.

Those spectra were complied into a movie of the stellar surface, showing a total of 86 rotational periods of the star and capturing its surface in three different projection styles: spherical or “real view”, which is what it would look like to the human eye; a Mercator projection that shows all of the surface at once; and a “pole-on view” from the perspective of a visible rotation pole.

“The movie shows a star-spot distribution with ever changing morphology,” the AIP said in a statement, “such as spot fragmentation and spot merging, and with apparently a large range of variability timescales. The decay rate of (magnetic) star spots is of great interest as it is directly related to the magnetic diffusivity in the convective layer of the star, which itself is a key quantity for the length of a magnetic-activity cycle.”

“We can see our first application as a prototype for upcoming stellar cycle studies, as it enables the prediction of a magnetic-activity cycle on a dramatically shorter timescale than usual,” added Andreas Künstler, who worked on the project. A paper on his team’s findings has been published by the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

You can download and watch the movie here.

—–

Feature Image: A. Künstler, T. A. Carroll, and K. G. Strassmeier, Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP)

Technology

Dancing spider crickets can help build better robots

Written By: Shayne Jacopian

Published Date: October 21, 2015 Last Edited: October 21, 2015

Christopher Pilny

When it comes to designing better robots, engineering students from Johns Hopkins University have found inspiration in an unlikely source: spider crickets.

These insects can jump about 2.5 feet and land on their feet. It doesn’t necessarily sound all that impressive, until you consider that that’s almost 60 times the spider cricket’s body length. If a spider cricket were the same size as a human, then it’d be one hell of a football player, capable of a 100-yard long jump.

According to a release from the university, the team is unified by a belief that non-human creatures will be some of the best models for robots made to accomplish specialized tasks, citing potential examples like Mars rovers that move like caterpillars or drones with wings like hummingbirds.

Tiniest little ballerinas

The research team used three high-speed video cameras rolling at 400 frames per second to carefully study the movements of these bugs, hoping to find clues about how they can jump so far without losing their balance—clues that could possibly translate into robotics.

“Because they don’t have wings, the main things they use during their ‘flight’ to stabilize their posture is their limbs,” said Emily Palmer, a sophomore mechanical engineering major who did testing for the study. “We’re looking at the way the spider crickets move their bodies and move their limbs to stabilize their posture during a jump.”

“Ultimately, the application would be in really tiny robots,” she added.

The researchers noted that, when slowed down, the movements of the crickets’ legs resembled movements reminiscent of classical dance, and that the insects put a lot of work into streamlining their bodies.

In the early part of the jump, the insects streamline their bodies as much as possible to maximize the distance of their jump. In the “flight” portion of the jump, they carefully move their antennae and legs about in order to stabilize themselves and prepare for a safe and quick landing, should they have to jump again immediately afterward to avoid a predator.

“These videos have actually been quite eye-opening,” said Rajat Mittal, the mechanical engineering professor supervising the undergraduate research team. “[It’s] only when you slow these critters down that you really start to see the beauty and the intricacy of their movement. The analogy that comes to mind is of a ballerina performing a ballet. It’s a very beautiful, controlled, intricate motion.”

—–

Feature Image: Steve Fernie/Flickr

Health

How your kitchen counter reveals what you weigh

Written By: Shayne Jacopian

Published Date: October 21, 2015 Last Edited: October 21, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A new study from Cornell University has found that the mess on your kitchen counter may be an indicator of more than just your level of tidiness—it can also reveal information about your health, or more specifically, your weight.

The researchers photographed over 200 kitchens in Syracuse, New York, and recorded the weight of the homes’ inhabitants.

Focusing on adult women, the study, published in the journal Health Education and Behavior, showed that women who kept fresh fruit on the counter were the most likely to have a “normal” weight compared to their peers. Cereal and soda kept out in the open, however, correlated with a much-increased weight. Cereal on the counter correlated with a weight increase of 20 pounds above average, and soft drinks with a weight of 24 to 26 pounds more than women who kept sugary drinks off the counter, Futurity reports.

“It’s your basic See-Food Diet—you eat what you see,” said pun master Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and lead author of the study.

“As a cereal-lover, that shocked me,” he added. “Cereal has a health-halo, but if you eat a handful every time you walk by, it’s not going to make you skinny.”

So how can you curtail this? Simple: Put away the junk food. It’s okay to have it around, but if it’s the first thing you see when you enter the kitchen, you’re going to want to eat it. Instead, keep fruits out in the open. The study found that those who had a visible fruit bowl on the counter tended to weigh 13 pounds less than their neighbors who didn’t.

Our solution is to just get a fruit bowl, ya dingus!

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock