NASA outlines plan for trip to Mars

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Brian Galloway

More and more Mars related news seems to come out every day: Liquid water exists on the surface, and now we have confirmation that lakes and streams once crisscrossed over the planet. The next big step for Mars (outside of extraterrestrial life) is actually getting there, and luckily for us NASA just released a 36-page plan detailing just how they plan to do that.

“NASA is closer to sending American astronauts to Mars than at any point in our history,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in a press release. “Today, we are publishing additional details about our journey to Mars plan and how we are aligning all of our work in support of this goal. In the coming weeks, I look forward to continuing to discuss the details of our plan with members of Congress, as well as our commercial and our international and partners, many of whom will be attending the International Astronautical Congress next week.”

What’s the game plan?

According to this plan, NASA has broken the lead-up to leaving for Mars into three steps. First, the current Earth Reliant step, in which NASA uses the International Space Station’s microgravity lab to test new technology and to test how space affects human health and performance.

The next step, the Proving Ground, is set to begin in 2018. NASA plans to launch a new deep space capsule named Orion using the Space Launch System, the most powerful rocket ever built. Orion will orbit around the moon in cislunar space to help NASA test what is necessary for humans to live and work at further and further distances from Earth.

The Proving Ground step will be especially key to ensuring the transportation and habitation capacities created will be suitable for the journey to Mars. Further, this step will help NASA better understand the health risks associated with deep space travel—astronauts who make the journey to Mars will spend 1,100 days exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation.

Finally, Earth Independent activities will combine what was learned in the previous two steps in order to enable human missions to areas near Mars, or maybe even into orbit around Mars or one of its moons, with the eventual goal of landing on the surface of the red planet.

Missing from this report are a lot of important pieces of information. For example, no detailed timeline or budget has been given for this plan. (However, one graphic estimates the date of Mars launch to be around 2030 or later, and NASA merely mentions its plans “are affordable within NASA’s current budget”.) It is important to remember, however, that most of the missing items—like how astronauts will grow food in space—are still being researched.

NASA seems confident those fine details will be worked out in the end.

“NASA’s strategy connects near-term activities and capability development to the journey to Mars and a future with a sustainable human presence in deep space,” explained William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA Headquarters. “This strategy charts a course toward horizon goals, while delivering near-term benefits, and defining a resilient architecture that can accommodate budgetary changes, political priorities, new scientific discoveries, technological breakthroughs, and evolving partnerships.”

—–

Pictured is an artist’s concept of the SLS launchpad. Image credit: NASA

Science

First ancient African genome sequenced, finding surprising migration pattern

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Brian Galloway

Some 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens arose in Africa, and began spreading across the globe some 100 to 150 thousand years later. Naturally, Africa should be one of the most-studied continents in regards to tracing our genetic history, but no one has been able to reconstruct ancient African DNA—until now, as researchers across the United Kingdom and Ireland have managed to do just that.

The main problem has been the climate: Scientists were able to compile DNA fragments from European Neanderthals, prehistoric Asian herders, and Paleoindians from the Americas, but the heat and humidity of Africa degraded DNA to the point where too little was left to compose a genome.

Researchers were able to sequence the degraded DNA from a 4,500 year-old skeleton and detailed their findings in the journal Science. The researchers applied an interesting theory to extract the DNA found in the Ethiopian Mota Cave: Some bones, being more contained, are better able to protect DNA from a harsh environment and ravaging bacteria.

The best bone, it seemed, was the petrous bone of the inner ear—it has been used successfully before with ancient skeletons, but never in African skeletons. Indeed, the skeleton (now called Mota, after the cave) had DNA within this bone—enough to fully sequence Mota’s genome.

Researchers were able to sequence each individual DNA base over 12.5 times on average, leading to a very high-quality genome. From this DNA, the researchers have discovered that he had brown eyes and dark skin, along with genes linked to high-altitude adaptations.

Shifts in the world population

Besides the enormous breakthrough in ability to sequence ancient African DNA, the team also made a fascinating discovery about migrations into Africa. Usually, we tend to think of the African populations expanding elsewhere, but a common theory is that some populations of the Near East returned some 3,000 years ago.

So Mota’s 4,500-year-old genome was compared to genomes of modern Ethiopians from the same region, the Ari—who are the most genetically related to him—along with 39 other African populations and 81 European populations. It now appears that Mota lacks between 4% and 7% of the DNA found in the Ari and other African populations.

This 4% to 7% of new DNA is actually closest to that of modern Sardinians and a prehistoric farmer found in Germany, and Mota helps to pinpoint when this new genetic information entered into the populations—sometime after 4,500 years ago.

This could mean that Sardinians immigrated to Africa around that time, but co-author and population geneticist Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge has a different idea.

It’s more likely, according to her, that such European farmers and Africans got this new DNA from the same source—a population in the Middle East, perhaps from Anatolia or Mesopotamia. Around 3,000 to 3,500 years ago, farmers from those regions migrated into Eastern Africa, a notion that fits with archeological evidence: Traces of Middle Eastern grains of the same age have been found in Africa.

But this new DNA didn’t just stay in the east; it spread all throughout the continent, even to extremely isolated groups. For example, the Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo share it.

“It must have been lots of people coming in or maybe they had new crops that were very successful,” Manica said in a press release.

Of course, Mota may have belonged to an extremely isolated group, and thus never added the new DNA to his genome, but many are leaning towards a migration 3,500 years ago. And regardless of migration patterns, this advance is an enormous game-changer for geneticists and antropologists alike.

—–

Image credit:

Space

Curiosity rover confirms Mars once had long-lived lakes

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Less than two weeks after confirming the existence of water on Mars, NASA announced on Thursday that the Curiosity rover proved that the Red Planet could have stored H2O in lakes and streams over extended periods of time billions of years ago.

Members of the US space agency’s Mars Science Laboratory team, including researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), analyzed data obtained by Curiosity and found that water once helped deposit sediment into the rover’s original landing site, Gale Crater.

The sediment deposited as layers, ultimately forming the foundation of Mount Sharp, the large mountain found in the middle of Gale Crater today, the researchers explained in a statement. A paper detailing the team’s findings was published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

“Observations from the rover suggest that a series of long-lived streams and lakes existed at some point between about 3.8 to 3.3 billion years ago, delivering sediment that slowly built up the lower layers of Mount Sharp,” explained MSL project scientist and study co-author Ashwin Vasavada. “However, this series of long-lived lakes is not predicted by existing models of the ancient climate of Mars, which struggle to get temperatures above freezing.”

Mudstone provides clues about Mount Sharp’s formation

Billions of years ago, Mars appeared to have a more massive atmosphere, contributing to an active hydrosphere capable of storing water in these basins, the study authors explained. The new findings build upon previous research that also suggested that the Red Planet was likely home to ancient bodies of water, NASA said.

“What we thought we knew about water on Mars is constantly being put to the test,” Michael Meyer, lead scientist with NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, said. “It’s clear that the Mars of billions of years ago more closely resembled Earth than it does today. Our challenge is to figure out how this more clement Mars was even possible, and what happened to that wetter Mars.”

After landing in Gale Crater and beginning its journey, Curiosity stopped at several points along the way to image different targets, collect soil samples, and, on occasion, drill into rocks in order to obtain samples. These samples were placed in the rover’s onboard laboratories, then examined using various instruments to help the MSL team discover how this area of Mars evolved.

Prior to Curiosity’s arrival, scientists proposed different hypotheses to explain how Gale Crater became filled with sediment layers. Some scientists suggested that the that sediment accumulated from wind-blown dust and sand, while others suggested the layers had been deposited in ancient lakes. The new findings indicate that at least the bottom layers of Mount Sharp occurred via the so-called “wet” method over a period of no more than 500 million years.

“During the traverse of Gale, we have noticed patterns in the geology where we saw evidence of ancient fast-moving streams with coarser gravel, as well as places where streams appear to have emptied out into bodies of standing water,” said Vasavada. “The prediction was that we should start seeing water-deposited, fine-grained rocks closer to Mount Sharp. Now that we’ve arrived, we’re seeing finely laminated mudstones in abundance that look like lake deposits.”

—–

Image credit: NASA

Health

‘Leukemia in a dish’ research could lead to new treatments

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

By using stem cells to create laboratory models of an uncommon type of blood cancer which typically affects children under the age of six, researchers are hoping to learn more about the mechanisms behind the disease as well as the factors that influence its severity.

As part of their “leukemia in a dish” research, doctors from the Mount Sinai Hospital and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine engineered stem cells to investigate juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML), which is often triggered by inherited changes in the DNA code for the gene PTPN11 and the resulting development of a genetic disease called Noonan syndrome.

Currently, the only treatment for JMML involves replacing the hematopoietic stem cells that become blood cells through a bone marrow transplant. However, the procedure only works about half of the time, and the Mount Sinai team was hoping that by finding out more about the disease, how it develops and how it grows, they could discover better treatments for it.

“Our study clarified early events in the development of one kind of leukemia,” corresponding author Dr. Bruce D. Gelb, Director of The Mindich Child Health and Development Institute in the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, explained Thursday in a statement.

“More than just creating a model of a disease, we were able to prove that mechanisms seen in our model also happen in the bone marrow of people with this kind of leukemia. The work also provided new targets for the field to develop new drugs against in JMML,” he added.

Severity of JMML linked to degree of genetic changes

Often when researchers are hoping to gain new insight into genetic diseases, they take skin cells from patients with the condition, then use enzymes to coax cells back along the differentiation pathway to become induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), the authors claimed.

These stem cells can be programmed to mature into cells, including hematopoietic (blood) cells, which are used to recreate a unique version of each patient’s genetic disease in a petri dish for further analysis. In the new study, which was published in the journal Cell Reports, Dr. Gelb and his team used this technique to create blood cells from iPSCs with PTPN11 mutations.

They found that these cells actually do behave like the actual cells found in the JMLL patients themselves, and that the “gain of function” genetic changes which cause this protein’s expression to increase were capable of causing leukemia-related changes in the cells. By doing so, they were able to determine that not all forms of JMML are identical, which could help treatment.

“Going into the current study, experts in the field had tended to lump all forms of JMML together, but the new study was able to isolate biological changes specific to hematopoietic cells with PTPN11 mutations, which causes more severe JMML,” Dr. Gelb said. “These findings provide a toe-hold in efforts to design specific treatments for this form of the disease.”

“Our results provide further evidence that the severity of this form of leukemia arises from the degree of changes in the gene PTPN11, altering the protein it codes for, SHP-2, and biologic pathways related to it,” he added. “These proteins promise to become a focus of future drug design efforts.”

—–

Image credit:

Space

So just how DO you actually pronounce ‘Uranus’?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

On Sunday Uranus will be at opposition– during that time, it will be at its closest approach to the Earth and its face will be fully illuminated by the Sun.

As a result, the blue-green planet will appear to be brighter than at any other point during the calendar year, making this weekend the best time to view it in all its glory. However, due to its distance, it will only appear as a tiny speck in all but the most powerful telescopes, making it extremely difficult to see. In fact, the only thing harder than seeing the the celestial body is knowing how to pronounce the planet’s name.

It’s Uranus. But is it pronounced “your anus” or “urine us”? We at redOrbit set out to do our best to try and solve the mystery (and put an end to the jokes told at the expense of this poor little part of the cosmos) once and for all.

Either way is correct, but which do astronauts prefer?

First, we consulted Merriam Webster, Dictionary.com and Cambridge Dictionaries online, all of which had handy audio pronunciations of the planet’s name (and, in the case of the Cambridge one, both American English and British English versions). In every case, the pronunciation of the planet’s name was the same – “urine us,” not “your anus.”

According to Space.com, the “urine us” version of the pronunciation is the one preferred by the folks at NASA. So that’s that, right? Well, not so fast. Start digging around and you’ll find many of the Web’s top astronomy experts, including About.com’s Dr. John P. Mills and Fraser Cain of Universe Today believe either pronunciation is technically correct.

Dr. Mills writes the version that places the emphasis on the long “u” while replacing the “a” sound with a short “e” is preferred over the “classic, potty mouth version” due largely because it “most closely resembles where the emphasis is placed in the Latin from which it is derived” (not to mention that it “saves some slight embarrassment and stops the students snickering.”)

“The standard way to pronounce Uranus among astronomers is to put the emphasis on the first syllable ‘ur’ and then say the second part ‘unus,’ This is the standard literary pronunciation… The truth is that all the different ways of pronouncing Uranus are perfectly fine, even the way that sounds a little dirty,” Cain added.

—–

Image credit: NASA

Vaginal bacteria could actually protect women from HIV

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 10, 2015 Last Edited: September 7, 2018

John

The microbiota found within female reproductive mucus could help protect women from sexually transmitted diseases including HIV, researchers from the University of North Carolina reported in the latest edition of the open-access journal mBio.
Sam Lai, senior author of the study and an assistant professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, and his colleagues found that some women had a stronger, or at least more effective, natural barrier against the virus that causes AIDS and other types of STDs.
As the UNC team explained in a statement, vaginal microbiota is considered to be healthy if it is dominated by any species of lactobacillus. Now they’ve discovered that one specific type of this bacteria, lactobacillus crispatus, appears to play a key role in sustaining the mucus barrier against HIV. The discovery, Lai said, could lead to new ways to protect women from the virus.
“What we discovered is that a woman’s risk of being infected by HIV can be affected by the type of helpful bacteria present in vaginal mucus,” the UNC professor explained. “We found that vaginal microorganisms, including specific species of lactobacillus bacteria, can directly alter the protective properties of cervicovaginal mucus.”
Elevated levels of D-lactic acid proved to be the key
As part of their research, Lai’s team examined mucus from more than 30 reproductive-age women. They utilized high-resolution time-lapse microscopy to investigate whether fluorescent HIV pseudovirus particles would become trapped in the mucus or move about freely.
They discovered that there were essentially two different types of mucus samples– those that trapped HIV well, and those that didn’t. Further analysis showed that the ability to trap the virus was not linked to the pH balance of the mucus, its total lactic acid content, or its Nugent score (a measurement of how much lactobacillus bacteria it contains compared to other microbes).
There was one distinct difference between the two groups, however: the group that did a better job of trapping HIV contained higher levels of D-lactic acid. Since humans are unable to produce D-lactic acid on their own, the study authors believed that bacteria living within the mucus layer may have been responsible for this difference.
As it turned out, the HIV-trapping mucus contained a great deal of lactobacillus crispatus while those that did not trap the virus were either dominated by another species, lactobacillus iners, or contained several different types of bacteria, including gardnerella vaginalis. Both latter types of bacteria are often associated with bacterial vaginosis, a disease caused by excessive vaginal bacteria.
Lai’s team is working on a way to reinforce the mucus barrier against disease-causing agents, as well as a technique to use antibodies, delivered either directly to the mucosal surfaces or through a vaccination, that is capable of immobilizing pathogens in the mucus layer, they said.
—–
Pictured is lactobacillus crispatus. Image credit: UNSW Embryology Wiki

Science

Fuzzy venomous Canadian caterpillar spotted in the US

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

It may look like a cute and cuddly little white insect, but it’s actually an invasive and venomous larvae that can cause an unpleasant skin rash. While it’s typically found only in Canada, the creature has recently been spotted in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Known as the white hickory tussock moth, the mostly-white insect has fuzzy black spines which contain venom in order to ward off predators. However, the Associated Press (AP) pointed out that that toxin can also irritate human skin, causing a rash on contact.

While the spines can become embedded into your skin, leading to the rash, pest control experts state that in most cases the condition can be treated with conventional anti-rash medication and ice. If symptoms persist, however, they recommend going to the doctor for treatment. If you see this fuzzy little critter– turn and run.

The white hickory tussock moth caterpillars have been spotted in Akron, Ohio, as well as in the cities of Pittsburgh and State Colleague, Pennsylvania, reports indicate. The good news, KDKA TV in Pittsburgh said, is that their caterpillar cycle is almost over, meaning that they should soon no longer be a threat, and by next spring, they will have all transformed into moths.

More about the white hickory tussock moth

White hickory tussock moths (Lophocampa caryae) are members of the Arctiidae family, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee explained, and while they typically can be found in Nova Scotia and Ontario, they also have been spotted as far south as Texas. They tend to be active in the daytime, and produce vocalizations to attract mates and ward off predators.

Like other poisonous creatures, it advertises the fact that it is toxic through aposematic coloration, warning potential predators that they’d be better off finding a meal elsewhere. Apparently, that’s true for other reasons as well, as white hickory tussock moths can bite and taste terrible (though this has not been independently verified).

These caterpillars pupate in late summer and spend the winter months in an silk cocoon shaped like an egg. They tend to spin their cocoons either on the ground or under tree bark, according to the university, and shed their skin five or six times during their development cycle. Near the end of this phase, they grow a layer of tiny hairs on the outside of the cocoon for protection.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Did you know elephants rarely get cancer? Here’s why

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 9, 2015 Last Edited: October 9, 2015

Christopher Pilny

It has long been a scientific mystery: Why do elephants, who have more cells than humans, get significantly less cancer than we do? Well, thanks to a research team from the Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah, Arizona State University, and the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation, we may now know why.

According to the study, which is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, elephants’ DNA contains at least 40 modified copies (known as alleles) of the same tumor-suppressing gene, p53. Us humans only have two copies of this gene. Moreover, elephants seem to have a more powerful mechanism for destroying cells that may become cancerous, as compared to humans.

“Nature has already figured out how to prevent cancer. It’s up to us to learn how different animals tackle the problem so we can adapt those strategies to prevent cancer in people,” co-senior author Joshua Schiffman, M.D., pediatric oncologist at Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah School of Medicine, and Primary Children’s Hospital, said in a statement.

Elephants’ risk of cancer should be 100 times higher than ours

These natural cancer-fighters are very good for elephants, as they have 100 times more cells than humans—meaning their risk of cancer should also be 100 times higher than in humans, according to Schiffman.

However, an analysis of a database documenting 664 elephant deaths has found that elephants, in the course of their 50 to 70 years, have a cancer mortality rate of less than 5 percent; the mortality rate for humans ranges between 11 and 25 percent.

To figure out this difference, the researchers dug through the elephant genome and discovered the extra copies of the p53 gene—which code for a protein that inhibits cancers. An analysis of elephant DNA determined that these extra copies are actually retrogenes, meaning they’re modified duplicates created from RNA “copies” of DNA. These p53 retrogenes weren’t all created at once, but rather accumulated over time.

Knowing the elephants had extra copies of p53 wasn’t enough, though, to show this was the mechanism through which they avoided cancer. And so the scientists extracted white blood cells from the pachyderms and exposed them to ionizing radiation and doxorubicin, or the two agents which cause damage to DNA. DNA damage often triggers cancer, an in response to this damage, the cells destroyed themselves—a characteristic response of p53.

“It’s as if the elephants said, ‘It’s so important that we don’t get cancer, we’re going to kill this cell and start over fresh,'” said Schiffman. “If you kill the damaged cell, it’s gone, and it can’t turn into cancer. This may be more effective of an approach to cancer prevention than trying to stop a mutated cell from dividing and not being able to completely repair itself.”

In one final test, the team extracted cells from 8 elephants, 10 healthy humans, and 10 humans with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, a syndrome in which individuals only have one copy of p53 as compared to the normal level of two, and have a lifetime cancer risk of 90%.

All cells were then exposed to radiation. The cells of those with Li-Fraumeni Syndrome self-destructed around 2.7% of the time, while healthy humans were about twice as self-destructive (7.2%), and elephants were five times more destructive (14.6%). Once again, it appears that p53 offers additional protection against cancer for the elephants.

“By all logical reasoning, elephants should be developing a tremendous amount of cancer, and in fact, should be extinct by now due to such a high risk for cancer,” says Schiffman. “We think that making more p53 is nature’s way of keeping this species alive.”

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

What’s the deal with fire ants building rafts?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 9, 2015 Last Edited: October 9, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Odds are if you’ve watched the news at all over the past week, you’ve seen that video of fire ants forming giant rafts in order to survive the flooding going on in South Carolina. (If you have yet to see the footage, check out this video captured by WSAV’s Chris Murray).

According to Mashable, fire ants can assemble these rafts in ridiculously short periods of time–even in as little as 100 seconds–and a 2011 study published by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) indicates that this can keep thousands of them from drowning for several days, possibly for even up to a week or longer!

The authors of that study explained that they used time-lapse photography to track a group of fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) to study how the creatures were able to link their bodies together so that they could form a waterproof raft. They discovered that the ants could significantly enhance their ability to repel water by linking their bodies together for an unusual survival mechanism.

Grab my tarsi, bro

The research website eXtension explains things in a little more detail. Once the ants’ colony is flooded, the insects gather together on the highest ground to form the raft. They then tip the raft into the water, and the worker ants keep it together by holding tarsi (their version of hands).

The queen is kept safely in the center of the raft, and workers keep the smallest larvae safe by carrying them in her mouth. As for their own safety, workers collect bubble from submerged materials, using them to break surface tension and lift themselves up when necessary. They also constantly move around to keep from being underwater for extended periods of time.

As amazing as it may be to see these ants come together to build a living float, it isn’t really that rare, and it may even pose a health hazard to you and your family. Experts advise to avoid touching these floating fire ant rafts at all costs, as they can bite or sting you if they come into contact with your skin. Be sure to wear gloves, boots, and rain gear when working in flood waters!

—–

Feature Image: Maggie/Flickr Creative Commons

Science

Australian court: Sorry, but you can’t patent genes

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 9, 2015 Last Edited: October 9, 2015

Christopher Pilny

An Australian high court has struck down a pharmaceutical company’s claims that it held patents to the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 cancer genes, siding with a patient who had argued that because the genes existed in nature, they could not be considered an invention.

According to BBC News, US-based Myriad Genetics had been awarded a patent for the genes—which if present, significantly increase a woman’s risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers—in the 1990s after finding and isolating them. However, 69-year-old Yvonne D’Arcy, a two-time cancer survivor, challenged the company’s right to claim ownership of the genes.

Myriad, whose ownership of BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 had previously been overturned by the US Supreme Court, successfully won the case twice in Australian Federal Courts. However, earlier this week, the High Court overturned those decisions, ruling unanimously that the biotech group had only discovered the genes, not invented them, and thus could not obtain a patent.

While detecting the genes “might be, in a formal sense, a product of human action,” the court ruled that “it was the existence of the information stored in the relevant sequences that was an essential element of the invention as claimed.” As such, it was not officially an invention.

Research failed to pass the “manufacture test”

Myriad argued that the patents were to make sure that they could make their work commercially available to everybody, according to ABC News Australia, and would thus encourage additional analysis of the genes. D’Arcy and cancer campaigners believed that doing away with the patents would make testing for these genes more accessible, BBC News added.

In their 2013 ruing, the US Supreme Court determined that DNA was a product of nature, and as such was not patentable. However, the justices did determine that synthetic, lab-made DNA was not a product of nature, meaning someone could claim ownership of it. Attorneys for Myriad had said that the US ruling did not reflect regulations in Australia, where a different standard is used.

As ABC News explained, Australian inventions are subject to something called the “manufacture test”, in which the differences in structure and function of genetic substances is emphasized, not the similarities as is the case in the States. The company argued that the US decision had actually strengthened their case by determining the materials they used were isolated from the genes and represented a “non-naturally occurring molecule.”

On Wednesday, the High Court determined that Myriad’s work did not fall within the concept of “manufacture.” D’Arcy called that ruling “a win” for patients that “have the genetic footprint for breast cancer or any cancer basically.” She added that the decision would make testing cheaper and more available, and that she hoped “other countries will see sense and follow us.”

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Toddler’s head reattached to spine after ‘internal decapitation’

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 9, 2015 Last Edited: October 9, 2015

Christopher Pilny

An Australian toddler who was internally decapitated during a near-fatal car accident is expected to survive after doctors successfully reattach his head to his spine in what some have been calling a miracle procedure.

According to BBC News, 16-month-old Jaxon Taylor and his family were involved in a head-on collision in New South Wales. The impact broke his C1 and C2 vertebrae, causing his head to be separated from his neck. Doctors used a part of his rib to graft the vertebrae together as part of an operation that the New York Daily News said took roughly six hours to perform.

His mother, Rylea Taylor, explained that she was driving with Jaxon and his nine-year-old sister Shane in the car and going about 70 mph when they crashed head-on with another vehicle in September. Rylea was unharmed thanks to the car’s airbags, and Shane emerged with serious but not life threatening abdominal injuries. Jaxon was not so fortunate, however.

“The second I pulled him out, I knew that his neck was broken,” Rylea told the Daily News. He was airlifted to a Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital in Brisbane, where spinal surgeon Dr. Geoff Askin discovered that the boy suffered an internal decapitation (an injury in which his head was forcibly removed from the neck). Luckily, his spinal cord was not damaged.

A rare recovery, but not the only one of its kind

Dr. Askin and his colleagues were able to reattach Jaxon’s vertebrae using wire and a bone graft fashioned from his ribs. While the toddler will have to wear a medical halo as his neck heals over the next two months, the medical team anticipates that he will make a complete recovery.

Rylea called it “a miracle”, and Dr. Askin told the Daily News that most children “wouldn’t survive that injury in the first place, and if they did and they were resuscitated then they may never move or breathe again.” The spinal surgeon also told Australian media that Jaxon’s injury was the worst of its kind he had ever seen, so it’s just that much more amazing that he is expected to be sent home from the hospital within the next few days.

While rare, internal decapitations such as the one suffered by Jaxon are not unprecedented. Back in 2011, a 20-year-old woman from River Oaks, Texas suffered similar injuries when the vehicle she was riding in went airborne and crashed into a culver six days before Christmas. The woman, Amber McKinney, had her head separated from her spine and was not expect to survive.

McKinney spent two weeks in a coma, and then had to relearn how to walk, talk and used the left side of her body, according to local media reports. Just over one month after the accident, she was able to walk without assistance and regained the use of her left arm.

—–

Feature Image: BBC/YouTube

Space

Israel could launch first private moon mission in 2017

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 9, 2015 Last Edited: October 9, 2015

Christopher Pilny

SpaceIL, a private aerospace group from Israel competing for the Google Lunar XPrize, is looking to become the first non-governmental organization to attempt to land on the moon when they lift off for the lunar surface in 2017.

The team has signed a contract with California-based Spaceflight Industries which will enable them to launch their rover aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher, according to Gizmodo and NBC News. They are among the first XPrize teams to secure such a contract, the media outlets added, making them among the favorites to capture the contest’s $20 million first prize.

“We are proud to officially confirm receipt and verification of SpaceIL’s launch contract,” Bob Weiss, president and vice chairman of XPrize, said in a statement, “positioning them as the first and only Google Lunar XPRIZE team to demonstrate this important achievement, thus far.”

“The magnitude of this achievement cannot be overstated, representing an unprecedented and monumental commitment for a privately-funded organization, and kicks off an exciting phase of the competition in which the other 15 teams now have until the end of 2016 to produce their own verified launch contracts,” he added.

Success would allow Israel to join an elite club

If SpaceIL’s efforts are successful, it would make Israel only the fourth nation to have landed a rover on the moon, joining the US, Russia, and China. The non-profit group is primarily funded by private donors, Gizmodo said, and has raised $50 million towards their work thus far.

“Only three countries have ‘soft-landed’ a rover on the surface of the moon,” SpaceIL CEO Eran Privman said during a Wednesday press conference announcing the deal. “Now the notion of the small state of Israel being added to this exclusive list look more promising than ever.”

“Last year we made significant strides toward landing on the moon, both in terms of project financing and in terms of the engineering design and now, we are thrilled to finally secure our launch agreement,” Privman added. “This takes us one huge step closer to realize our vision of recreating an ‘Apollo effect’ in Israel: to inspire a new generation to pursue Science, Engineering, Technology, and Math (STEM).”

While the Israeli group is not the only XPrize team to have signed a deal to hitch a ride to the moon, as California-based Moon Express and Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic also have signed such contracts, NBC News noted that they are the first to begin the verification process – a process in which contest organizers will review and assess the contracts and related paperwork.

—–

Feature Image: SpaceIL

Technology

Instagram: Talk to Apple if you want us to #FreeTheNipple

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 8, 2015 Last Edited: October 8, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Got a problem with Instagram’s censoring of women’s nipples, even in photographs that aren’t even sexual in nature? Take it up with Apple, whose age ratings are keeping the photo sharing service from permitting exposed female breasts, the company’s CEO said on Wednesday.

According to Engadget and People.com, Instagram wants to maintain its current 12+ age rating on the iPhone and iPad maker’s App Store in order to maintain access to a wider audience. The consequences of showing nudity, the Facebook-owned social media website claims, would be a 17+ rating that would prevent anyone 16 or younger from downloading their app.

As the websites point out, however, photographs showing male nipples are not instantly deleted, something that chief executive and co-founder Kevyn Systrom reportedly did not address during his talk with those in attendance at a London-based event hosted by Dazed Media. While female nipples are censored, Instagram allows pics of breastfeeding and post-mastectomy scars.

The policy has led many members of the service, as well as celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Chrissy Teigen, and Naomi Campbell, to put up topless pictures of themselves using the “#freethenipple” hashtag in protest. Television personality Chelsea Handler also posted a photo of herself riding a horse topless, ala Russian president Vladimir Putin, that was removed by Instagram.

Is Instagram considering an R-rated version?

The #freethenipple campaign has certainly got the photo sharing service’s attention, as Mashable reported earlier this week that Instagram has considered releasing an R-rated version of their app that would allow users to share more risqué and/or explicit content with the world.

Speaking at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday, Systrom said the company had discussed a more adult version of the social network, telling event MC Katie Couric that there “have been discussions” about it. However, he emphasized that Instagram was “not in the business of hosting porn,” adding, “who decides what’s R-rated?”

A spokesperson later told Mashable that a separate version of the service was not actually being considered, and Systrom later said that Instagram had “invested heavily” in keeping their service suitable for all ages. He also said that nudity itself is not explicitly banned, but according to the website, he did not clarify exactly what types of content users can or can’t post.

—–

Feature Image: Niccolo Caranti/Flickr

Health

Having sex alters immune system so you’re more likely to get pregnant

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 8, 2015 Last Edited: October 8, 2015

Christopher Pilny

If you’re struggling to conceive—or if you don’t want to just yet—a new study out of the Indiana University Bloomington has some important news for you: Having frequent sex appears to alter the female immune system, improving chances of conceiving—even outside of ovulation.

“It’s a common recommendation that partners trying to have a baby should engage in regular intercourse to increase the woman’s changes of getting pregnant—even during so-called ‘non-fertile’ periods— although it’s unclear how this works,” said Tierney Lorenz, lead author of two new papers on the subject and visiting research scientist at the Kinsey Institute, in a statement. “This research is the first to show that the sexual activity may cause the body to promote types of immunity that support conception.

“It’s a new answer to an old riddle: How does sex that doesn’t happen during the fertile window still improve fertility?”

Previous studies have shown that the immune system alters its function during pregnancy, at various stages in the menstrual cycle, and following childbirth, but these studies are the first to show that sex also can make key changes in immune regulation.

Immune changes

The data for both papers came from participants in the Kinsey Institute’s WISH Study (Women, Immunity and Sexual Health). The Institute collected information about 30 women—roughly half sexually active and half not—for the full span of their menstrual cycles.

The first of the papers, published in Fertility and Sterility, discovered that the sexually active women demonstrated a great change in immune system components known as helper T cells, along with the proteins that support them. The second paper, which can be found in Physiology and Behavior, found key differences in antibody levels between the two groups of women.

Helper T cells are responsible for recognizing threats to the body and activating other immune cells to combat them, and there are two general kinds. Type 1 focuses on augmenting the body’s defense systems against foreign threats. Meanwhile, type 2 helps the body in accepting what may be seen as foreign invaders, like sperm or an emerging embryo.

The antibodies (also called immunoglobulins) are created by white blood cells, and also work to fight off foreign invaders. There are many kinds of immunoglobulins, but the study focused on immunoglobulins A (IgA) and G (IgG). IgA is usually found in the mucous of the female reproductive tract, and can interfere with fertilization; IgG is usually found in the blood and fight off invaders without interfering with the uterus.

A careful balance

“The female body needs to navigate a tricky dilemma,” Lorenz said. “In order to protect itself, the body needs to defend against foreign invaders. But if it applies that logic to sperm or a fetus, then pregnancy can’t occur. The shifts in immunity that women experience may be a response to this problem.”

For the sexually active women, they detected significantly higher levels of type 2 helper T cells and IgG—the immune system components that aid in accepting certain aspects needed for pregnancy and for regulating the immune system outside of the uterus—during the phase of the menstrual cycle in which the uterine lining thickens in preparation for pregnancy and which follows ovulation.

During the phase in which the ovaries’ follicles are maturing, which happens right after menstruation, the sexually active women showed higher levels of type 1 helper T cells and IgA.

The sexually abstinent women, however, showed none of these changes.

“We’re actually seeing the immune system responding to a social behavior: sexual activity,” Lorenz explained. “The sexually active women’s immune systems were preparing in advance to the mere possibility of pregnancy.”

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

Why is there more matter than anti-matter? Germanium detector solves mystery

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 8, 2015 Last Edited: October 8, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Why did the Big Bang produce more matter than it did anti-matter, and are the neutrino and the anti-neutrino identical particles? A new germanium detector developed by researchers from the US Department of Energy may hold the key to answering those questions.

According to the DOE’s Office of Science, an experiment currently running in a clean-room lab located more than 4,800 feet beneath the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota is now online and searching for neutrinoless double beta decay in germanium-76.

If it is can observe this phenomenon, it would significantly change our understanding of the field of physics by proving that the neutrino is its own antiparticle, providing new data on the absolute mass scale of the neutrino and demonstrating that the lepton number is not conserved, the authors of a paper published recently in the journal Advances in High Energy Physics explained.

The experiment is known as Majorana Demonstrator (MJD), and the first of two modules, which contain more than 22 kilograms of high purity germanium detectors, were activated in May. The module contains 29 germanium detectors, and a second module with another 30 detectors will be installed into the MJD’s lead/copper shield later on this year, they added.

Why is the lab so deep underground?

The reason that the MJD has to be located so deep underground and in an ultra-clean laboratory is to eliminate “background” events which could be mistaken for the extremely rare 0νββ decays, the DOE team said. The project team members hope achieve very low background rates in order to prove that a larger, more sensitive future version of the experiment is feasible.

“Double-beta decay is… possible and has been observed in a dozen different isotopes since 1986, but it happens at a really low rate, and not too many nuclei can do it.” Alan Poon of the Nuclear Science Division at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) said in a 2012 statement, when he was executive-committee chair of the Majorana Collaboration.

Poon added that germanium-76 is not the only element capable of undergoing double-beta decay, as other detectors use isotopes of tellurium, xenon, neodymium or other elements. He said that it’s important to establish that any instance of neutrinoless double-beta decay accurately reflects the property of the neutrino, and that if the process is observed in multiple elements, it would be “very strong evidence that the neutrino is indeed its own antiparticle.”

—–

Feature Image: Sanford Underground Research Facility

Health

Hospitals doing better, but not good enough at supporting breastfeeding

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 8, 2015 Last Edited: October 8, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Women who breastfeed their babies while in the hospital are getting more support from those medical centers, but more could still be done to ensure that new mothers are receiving optimal support, claims a new US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report.

According to Live Science and National Public Radio, more than half of hospitals in America were meeting at least five of the CDC’s 10 common recommendations for hospitals to support breastfeeding. Just 29 percent of hospitals met that many recommendations in 2007, the report said, but 75 percent still give formula to healthy babies against the mother’s wishes.

“We’ve seen significant progress in recent years, but there’s still more to be done… Hospitals really need to support women before, during and after their hospital stay,” CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden said during a press conference. “Even a little bit of formula may undermine a strong start to breastfeeding.”

Of the nearly four million children born each year in the US, only 14 percent were delivered in a hospital that met all 10 of the recommendations, which were originally established by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, Dr. Frieden said. While that is three times as many as in recent years, he said that it indicates that there is still room for improvement.

Only one-fourth of hospitals had model breastfeeding policies

Among the WHO/UNICEF recommendations is educating pregnant women on the benefits and management of breastfeeding, and helping them begin using the method to feed their newborns within one hour post-birth, Live Science said. The CDC study found that 93 percent of hospitals offered prenatal breastfeeding education in 2013 (up from 91 percent in 2007).

Furthermore, the percentage offering to teach new moms how to breastfeed was up four percent from 88 percent in 2007 to 92 percent in 2013, and the number of clinics helping women quickly initiate breastfeeding following birth increased from 44 percent to 65 percent during that span.

However, the CDC said that just 26 percent of hospitals had a model breastfeeding policy, and 74 percent routinely fed formula to healthy, breastfed infants when there was no medical reason to do so. Only 45 percent of hospitals kept mothers and babies together for the duration of their stays, which provided them with opportunities to breastfeed, the agency report found.

Less than one-third of hospitals provided enough support for breastfeeding mothers when they left the hospital, and only 22 percent of infants are breastfed exclusively for a six month period as recommended by healthcare experts. Only 29 percent are breastfed, at least in part, for a 12 month period, which can reduce the risk of infection, asthma, and other illnesses.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Technology

US military’s new TALOS suit is one step away from Iron Man

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 8, 2015 Last Edited: October 8, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Pretty soon, you won’t need to be Tony Stark to have your own badass, high-tech suit of armor to use in combat, as the US military’s soon-to-be-unveiled Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) promises to make soldiers stronger, safer, and more agile on the battlefield.

According to the folks at Digital Trends, the US Department of Defense has announced that the TALOS armor, which will be used by Special Forces operatives and Navy SEALs, will make its debut in 2018. Sadly, while the website calls the suit “one of the most technologically advanced pieces of military equipment ever conceived,” it unfortunately cannot fly. Bummer.

Flying is one of the few capabilities that this liquid armor body suit doesn’t have, however. Back in 2013, the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) teamed up with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create a “super-solider style suit”, and early blueprints of the project indicated that its features included full-body ballistic protection, temperature controls, oxygen and anti-hemorrhaging fail-safes, 3D audio, and integrated sensors.

The battery powered exoskeleton will be able to solidify on command, according to CNN, and will also help to reduce strain on the soldier’s body. Furthermore, the helmet will be outfitted with visual and communications aids. The cost of the tech is uncertain at this point, but in a 2014 book, former Sen. Tom Coburn cites reports that TALOS will cost an estimated $80 million.

One soldier’s sacrifice inspired better protection

As CNN pointed out, many of the technologies that the suit will utilize already exist, but TALOS team members will have to adapt those systems into the exoskeleton to ensure that the product is maneuverable and works efficiently. The goal, SOCOM head Gen. Joseph Votel told CNN, is to give the suit’s operator “the advantage when he is most vulnerable.”

“This is a program that we started after we lost an operator on a mission. The first guy coming into a particular building was engaged and unfortunately was mortally wounded,” he added. “In the wake of that, we asked ourselves, ‘Couldn’t we do better in terms of protecting him, of giving him a better advantage when he’s at the most vulnerable point that we put our operators?’”

Gen. Votel, who took over the TALOS project from former SOCOM commander Adm. William McRaven, said that research on the suit has also been beneficial in other areas. For instance, their work has helped the DOD improve upon lightweight armor and communication technology.

—–

Feature Image: US Army

Fibromyalgia

Is There A Link Between Food Additives And Fibromyalgia?

Written By: Mandy Burkholder

Published Date: October 7, 2015 Last Edited: October 7, 2015

admin

Photo: Steve Snodgrass

Recent studies have shown that food additives may increase symptoms of fibromyalgia. Although there is no proof of a complete cure for fibromyalgia, the foods you eat might just help your symptoms. But what are food additives and how do they affect fibromyalgia sufferers?

You might know food additives by the names of MSG or aspartame. Those are just common examples seen in everyday foods like diet sodas. These food additives are in the category of “excitotoxins,” which is also a naturally occurring substance in the brain. The normal function of these excitotoxins is to get your brain firing quickly, which helps you learn and retain information. In fact, you’re using them right now! But what happens when we add artificial excitotoxins to our body?

Artificial excitotoxins affect our neurons by overstimulating them, which can in turn overwhelm the brain. They can potentially even excite your brain cells to death.

Here are a few examples of what high levels of excitotoxins do to the body:

Mental misfires
Amplified pain
Uncontrollable anxiety and irritability

These symptoms are consistent with the pain that fibromyalgia sufferers go through each and every day. There might be a chance that avoiding foods with these excitotoxins will help reduce the amount of painful symptoms you feel.

The only way to know if you’re eating excitotoxins is to read the labels of your food. Here are a few things to avoid if you are trying to eliminate excitotoxins from your diet:

MSG; can be labeled as: natural flavor(s), flavoring, plant protein, carrageenan, yeast extract, anything with glutamate
Aspartate; can be labeled as: aspartame (brand names are Equal, NutraSweet, and AminoSweet)

Even though there isn’t a cure for fibromyalgia, we do know there are certain things you can do to help yourself feel better. With the support of your family and friends, it’s easier to try new ways to deal with your symptoms. The great thing is, simply trying to cut down on excitotoxins is a free to try. And it doesn’t involve trying new medicines either, which might have negative side effects. And who knows? It just might work for you and your symptoms.

Health

Does marijuana really cause erectile dysfunction?

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 7, 2015 Last Edited: October 7, 2015

Christopher Pilny

It’s been a source of debate for some years now—whether weed improves sexual performance or harms it in men. But a new article by Justin Lehmiller, PhD and sex educator and researcher at Ball State University (LOL), has helped clear the air somewhat by taking a, ahem, hard look at the evidence we have thus far.

According to Lehmiller, previous studies involving self-reports often found that men consider their sexual stamina to increase—in one particular 1982 study, 75% of men found this to be the case. However, there is one major issue with this research: Consuming marijuana shifts the mind’s perspective of the world, including the conceptions of time. Which means that the men may very well have thought they gained stamina, when in reality they spent the same amount of real time as normal, or maybe even shorter than when they were sober.
To circumvent this issue in perception, scientists took to using animals to find the direct effects of cannabis. Several studies have found that (in animals), weed worked to inhibit receptors within the erectile tissue of penises—which could easily translate to humans as well, although it has not yet been shown.
Although, a small 2010 study discovered that male penile tissue within rhesus monkeys and humans actually has receptors for the active ingredient of marijuana, THC. The receptors were found in the smooth muscle in particular—which makes up 70 to 80 percent of the penis and grants erections. Coupled with previous data suggesting that THC has a negative effect on smooth muscle, and data showing that marijuana smokers have a three times higher occurrence of erectile dysfunction, it seems highly likely weed will lay you low.
Different strokes for different folks
But of course, there are some caveats to these findings. For example, marijuana has different strains that affect the body differently. According to Lehmiller, the indica strain is more relaxing, while sativa seems to be stimulating—meaning the studies could be skewed if participants came from an area where a specific strain dominated. So if a study happens in a region where the indica strain is popular, they could find more incidents of sexual performance lapses.
There are many individual differences that could affect personal outcomes as well. Body chemistry can change how marijuana works on a person, along with the amount consumed, tolerance levels, and personal expectations; believing you’ll become Casanova or fearing you might become cooked spaghetti could also change your evening.
So, in short: The evidence seems to indicate that yes, cannabis leads to problems with male sexual performance, but nothing is conclusive yet. More human studies and focus on the effects of different strains will serve to point us in a more definite direction.
—–
Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Oldest woman alive: I eat bacon every day

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 7, 2015 Last Edited: October 7, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Susannah Mushatt Jones, aged 116, of Brooklyn, is the oldest person alive today—and one of two still living who were born before 1900. And she’s offering fresh hope to all bacon-o-philes in the world, because as Page Six just discovered, she eats bacon at every single breakfast… and beyond.

“She’ll eat bacon all day long,” said her aide at the facility in which she lives.

Miss Susannah doesn’t splurge much in the way of other things though. “I never drink or smoke,” she explained, according to Guinness World Records. “I surround myself with love and positive energy. That’s the key to long life and happiness.”

Moreover, her daily meals consist of eggs, grits, and bacon for breakfast; fruit for lunch; and meat, vegetables, and potatoes for dinner (she “eats the meat first,” said her aide)—she’s not a glutton, by any standards. Her few vices seem to be bacon, chewing gum, and cussing.

If Miss Susannah hasn’t won you over yet, she credits sleeping as the secret to her longevity; she apparently sleeps 10 hours every night, and takes regular naps, according to Huffington Post.

She’s also in pretty good health: She only takes two medications a day, and while she is hard of hearing and has lost her eyesight, she’s cognizant of the world around her.

“What the hell you doing?” she asked after someone adjusted her quilt.

And she’s still politically involved. “She voted for Obama twice, but her last birthday he never sent anything. We’ll have to remind him,” the aide said.

We’re big fans, Miss Susannah. Keep on doing you.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

New US marine sanctuaries will be the first since 2000

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 7, 2015 Last Edited: October 7, 2015

Christopher Pilny

In a video message to those attending the second-annual Our Ocean conference in Chile, US president Barack Obama announced the establishment of the first new marine sanctuaries in the country since 2000, while also promising to do more to combat illegal fishing.

According to Reuters and The Washington Post, the president said that the US was “committed to working with our international partners to protect our oceans and protect our planet, because I refuse to leave our children a planet that’s beyond their capacity to repair.”

One of the two proposed marine sanctuaries will be established at a 14 square mile (36 square kilometer) section of the Mallows Bay-Potomac River region in Maryland, while the other will be an 875 square mile (2,265 square kilometer) area of Lake Michigan off the cost of Wisconsin. They will be the first new national marine sanctuaries in the US since 2000.

The Lake Michigan site is known for a collection of nearly 40 known shipwrecks, some of which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, the other site is home to bald eagles, herons, beavers, river otters, and several types of fish, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

US to crack down on illegal fishing; Chile also establishes new sanctuary

The two regions were originally nominated for sanctuary status last year after officials with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reopened the public nomination process for the first time in more than two decades. A total of seven nominations were submitted, and additional potential sanctuary sites are currently being reviewed.

Secretary of State John Kerry also told the conference that the US was in negotiations to create a new marine-protected area agreement with Cuba to share research data on sites located between the two former Cold War rivals. He also claims the US is planning to launch the global Sea Scout initiative in order to help crack down on illegal or unregulated fishing networks.

The Sea Scout initiative “provides a real opportunity to improve coordination and information sharing around the world as a way to combat illegal fishing,” Beth Lowell, the senior campaign director for the conservation group Oceana, told The Washington Post. She said that the group “applauds” the move, but said that “full-chain traceability” was required “for all US seafood to ensure that it’s safe, legally caught, and honestly labeled.”

Also at the Our Ocean conference, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet announced the formation of one of the largest marine sanctuaries in the world – a protected area that includes Easter Island and more than 114,000 square miles (297,000 square kilometers) in the part of the Pacific Ocean surrounding the San Ambrosio and San Felix islands, published reports indicate.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

About to die? Head to the UK to receive the best care

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 7, 2015 Last Edited: October 7, 2015

Emily Bills

If you’re preparing to leave this mortal coil and are searching for the best possible end-of-life care, you might want to head for Great Britain or Northern Ireland, as a recent study has found that the UK is the home to the best hospice services on Earth.

According to BBC News and The Guardian, researchers from the Economist Intelligence Unit measured palliative care in 80 countries throughout the world and found that the UK topped the list, earning a score of 93.9 out of 100 in the EIU’s 2015 Quality of Death Index.

The UK earned points for its “comprehensive national policies,” which included “the extensive integration of palliative care into the National Health Service, a strong hospice movement, and deep community engagement on the issue,” the EIU said. The UK also topped the 2010 Quality of Death Index, which is based on research and interviews with over 120 experts in the field.

“A very strong marker in our index is the availability of specialized palliative care workers and this is where the UK scores particularly well,” the EIU’s Annie Pannelay told The Guardian on Tuesday. “The UK has a long history of providing treatment in palliative care.”

Who ranked the worst?

Australia was second with a score of 91.6, followed by New Zealand with a score of 87.6 and Ireland with a score of 85.8. Belgium (84.5), Taiwan (83.1), Germany (82.0), the Netherlands (80.9), the US (80.8), and France (79.4) rounded out the top 10. Iraq (12.5), Bangladesh (14.1), and the Philippines (15.3) ranked lowest in terms of end-of-life care.

While wealthier countries tended to perform the best, the EIU report did recognize some of the progress made in poorer countries, according to BBC News. For example, 28th-ranked Mongolia was lauded for investing in hospice facilities, while 35th-ranked Uganda was praised for offering improved access to opioid painkillers through a public-private partnership.

“Since the first Quality of Death Index was published this issue has certainly risen up the global agenda, as shown by the World Health Assembly resolution last year calling for improved standards of palliative care across the world,” EIU managing editor David Line said in statement. “But much more can be done, even in countries that rank highly in the Index. It is an issue that will affect us all – a good quality of death should be regarded as a human right.”

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Technology

Blame eBay for global spread of invasive plants

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 7, 2015 Last Edited: October 7, 2015

Christopher Pilny

In addition to being a popular marketplace for collectables and rare memorabilia, eBay may also be one of the reasons that invasive flora are spreading globally, according to research published in the latest edition of the journal Conservation Biology.

In the study, Christoph Kueffer, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Integrative Biology at ETH Zurich and his colleagues monitored eBay and nine other e-commerce outlets to see which plant species were offered for sale in various countries and for how often. Their goal was to determine how much of the worldwide trade in potentially invasive plants occurs online.

Kueffer’s team monitored which plant species were offered for sale in various nations over a 50 day span, and reviewed lists of invasive plants from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other organizations to see whether the plants up for sale were classified as invasive somewhere in the world.

While the researchers emphasized that they could only monitor offerings and could not prove that transactions were actually finalized, they reported finding 2,625 different plant species for sale on eBay. Of those, 510 were known to be invasive in some part of the world, and 35 were found on the IUCN’s list of the top 100 most invasive plant species on Earth.

A big and easy market for invasive species

The invasive species most often found available for sale was the passionfruit (Passiflora edulis), a species which is highly invasive in the tropics and was found on eBay about 90 times per day. It was offered by dealers from 17 different countries over five major geographic regions, Kueffer’s team discovered.

Second on the list was the cornflower Centaurea cyanus, which was listed an average of 80 times per day by dealers in 10 countries in five regions. While it deemed invasive in some parts of the US, the plant that is listed for sale most frequently, the desert rose Adenium obesum, has not yet been found to be an invasive species. It was put up for sale more than 3,100 times per day.

“We didn’t expect the global trade in plants that are known to be invasive to be so extensive,” said lead author Franziska Humair, also from ETH Zurich. “To put it briefly, the vast majority of invasive species can be easily obtained with just a click of the mouse.”

Regulations governing the buying and selling of these plants are poorly enforced, and it is virtually impossible for dealers themselves to monitor all of the laws used by different countries to prevent the spread of invasive flora. Even Australia, which has a strict set of laws preventing the influx of invasive species, was found to be a sizable source of plants being exported to parts of the world where they could be invasive, they found.

“That was unexpected, since the Australians don’t allow you to bring any invasive plants across their borders. But surprisingly, there are apparently no controls in place to make sure potentially harmful plants don’t leave the continent,” Kueffer said. “The only way to contain invasions is by limiting the trade in potential invaders,” he added, noting that it was “urgent for the authorities to take action” to prevent the spread of potentially harmful plant species.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

And the 2015 Nobel Prize winners in chemistry are…

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 7, 2015 Last Edited: October 7, 2015

Christopher Pilny

For their work in mapping how cells repair damaged DNA and protect genetic information at a molecular level, Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2015, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Wednesday.

Lindahl, a Swedish scientist at the Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory, Modrich, a professor of biochemistry at Duke University, and Sancar, a biochemistry and biophysics teacher at the University of North Carolina, were honored for work which has provided new insights into how living cells function. Their work could aid in the development of new cancer treatments.

Every day, human DNA is damaged by UV radiation, free radicals, and other potentially cancer-causing agents, the Nobel selection committee explained in a statement. However, even without those external factors, a person’s genetic molecules are “inherently unstable,” they noted, with a genome experiencing thousands of random, spontaneous changes on a daily basis.

A group of molecular systems that monitor and repair DNA is essentially the only thing keeping our cells from breaking down into “complete chemical chaos,” the Nobel committee added. The recipients of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry were recognized for their efforts in mapping and analyzing how some of these genetic maintenance systems function at the molecular level.

Research centered around nucleotide excision, mismatch repair mechanisms

Lindahl, a former professor of medical and physiological chemistry at University of Gothenburg, demonstrated that DNA decayed at a rate that should have prevented the development of life on Earth. Because of this discovery, Lindahl went on to discover base excision repair, a mechanism that repairs genes when a nucleotide’s base becomes damaged, preventing DNA collapse.

Sancar mapped nucleotide excision repair, the mechanism used by cells to repair damage done to DNA by UV radiation, and discovered that people born with defects to this system could develop skin cancer. Modrich, on the other hand, demonstrated how cells correct errors that happen when DNA is replicated through cell division with a mechanism known as mismatch repair.

In a statement, the Royal Swedish Academy said that the research conducted by Lindahl, Sancar, and Modrich has “not only deepened our knowledge of how we function, but could also lead to the development of lifesaving treatments.” The trio of scientists will split a prize of eight million Swedish Krona, or approximately $970,000, for their efforts.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Psychologist: There are 16 reasons why people invest in religion

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 6, 2015 Last Edited: October 6, 2015

Emily Bills

Religion has dominated the social and political landscape of the world for millennia—but why? What separates a believer from a non-believer? Steven Reiss, a professor emeritus of psychology at The Ohio State University, believes he knows what separates different kinds of believers.

After more than 20 years of studying human motivation, he has determined that the motivation to seek religion is not thanks to a fear of death or a desire to be moral, but rather to something much broader—our basic human desires.

“It’s not just about fear of death. Religion couldn’t achieve mass acceptance if it only fulfilled one or two basic desires,” said Reiss in an Ohio State University statement. “People are attracted to religion because it provides believers the opportunity to satisfy all their basic desires over and over again. You can’t boil religion down to one essence.”

As detailed in his new book, The 16 Strivings for God, there are—surprise!—16 basic desires found in humans. These goals are based on research he conducted in the 1990s on motivation, when he asked thousands of people to rate the degree to which they sought hundreds of different possible goals via survey.

After collecting the data, the team was able to draw forth 16 basic desires shared amongst our kind: acceptance, curiosity, eating, family, honor, idealism, independence, order, physical activity, power, romance, saving, social contact, status, tranquility, and vengeance.

Following this, Reiss developed a questionnaire to measure how much different people valued these 16 goals, and over 100,000 people have filled it out since then.

“We all share the same 16 goals, but what makes us different is how much we value each one,” Reiss said. “How much an individual values each of those 16 desires corresponds closely to what he or she likes and dislikes about religion.”

According to Reiss, all religious beliefs and practices meet one or more of these 16 goals. But, as he pointed out, any successful religion must fulfill these desires in ways that satisfy all different kinds of personality types.

Take, for example, the desire for social contact: For extroverts, religions may offer festivals, or teach that gods favor fellowship. For introverts, the same religion may encourage meditation or private retreats, with extra blessings associated with solitude.

Or, in the desire for vengeance, some religions preach of a god who is peaceful and who generally encourages pacifism—but the other side of that coin is a wrathful god and holy wars. “Religion attracts all kinds, including peacemakers and those who want a vengeful God,” added Reiss.

But what about atheists?

Not everyone needs to turn to religion to fulfill their 16 desires, said Reiss. Secular society also offers alternatives that can achieve that end. “Religion competes with secular society to meet those 16 needs and can gain or lose popularity based on how well people believe it does compared to secular society,” he explained.

The biggest desire found fulfilled within secular society is independence, which appears to be the driving force separating religious and non-religious people. In a study from 2000, Reiss discovered that religious people (the majority of whom were Christian) strongly favored dependence on one another within their faith, while non-religious types showed a greater need to be self-reliant and independent.

However, despite all these claims, Reiss emphasized he is not trying to say anything about the truth of religious convictions.

“I’m not trying to answer theological questions about the existence or nature of God,” Reiss said. “What I’m trying to answer is the nature of why people embrace religion and God.”

—–

Feature Image:

Space

NASA joins forces with the Navy to prepare for Mars mission

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 6, 2015 Last Edited: October 6, 2015

Emily Bills

NASA officials are working with members of the US Navy submarine force to learn more about how people cope with month-long simulations of transportation into non-terrestrial environments such as space or the deep sea, according to media reports published on Monday.

According to The Washington Post, NASA and the Navy are collaborating at a Naval base in Groton, Connecticut in order to measure how personnel deal with stress during four-week mock space flights. Astronauts, like sailors traveling through ocean depths, are isolated for long periods of time and have to rely on their crew mates to survive.

Brandon Vessey, a scientist with NASA’s human research program, told the Associated Press that the organization has “a shared interest with the Navy in team resilience. The agencies started working together about five years ago when the submarine force extended an invitation to NASA to search for ways to help tactical team members work together better.

While working at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory in Groton, Navy scientists developed a way to evaluate the performance of those tactical teams. Their method focused on a series of essential team practices, including dialogue, critical thinking skills, and decision-making capabilities, and they devised a way to measure how well they were able to deal with setbacks.

New experiments scheduled to begin early next year

In January or February, NASA and the Navy will begin a new experiment designed to shed light on the potential behavior issues that crew members will experience while traveling on upcoming missions to an asteroid in 2025 and to Mars sometime in the 2030s, according to AP reports.

Using a capsule roughly the same size as a two-bedroom apartment, NASA will be monitoring the performance and behavior of astronauts participating in longer-term space missions during a series of experiments conducted at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Four volunteers are to live and work in the habitat for 30 day periods at any given time.

The habitat, which is called the Human Exploration Research Analog, will also feature a model airlock and will be supported by a miniature version of mission control. Audio and video records of the subjects will be kept and sent to Navy scientists at the Groton lab for analysis.

Former submarine commander Ronald Steed said that traveling on a space ship would be similar to being a member of a submarine crew. In particular, he said, just as a sub commander “can’t always call to shore, you can’t just call back to Earth for advice… [he/she must] have a set of tools that let him or her look at the crew and make a determination about where they are.”

—–

Feature Image: Bill Stafford/NASA/JSC

Technology

Disney’s new augmented reality app turns child’s art into 3D characters

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 6, 2015 Last Edited: October 6, 2015

Christopher Pilny

What a time to be alive! The humble coloring book is getting a high-tech makeover for the 21st century thanks to the folks at Disney Research, who have developed an augmented reality app that can turn a child’s artwork into a 3D character – and while it’s still being colored, no less!

According to Engadget and Gizmodo, the application was built using the Unity game engine. It tracks and captures real-time images from the camera on a smartphone or tablet, then maps them onto any 3D deformable surface, retaining the original texture of the artwork in the process.

While your child (or you – we don’t judge here at redOrbit) color in a 2D picture, the character created by the AR app moves around and is slowly colored in, and since it’s impossible to color a picture in 3D, the software itself fills in the rest in a style that resembles the user’s work.

In footage released by Disney Research, the app is shown in action as an artist colors in a picture of an elephant while a 3D, AR version of the creature dances on top of the drawing on the mobile device. As the creature’s pants are colored, the changes appear on the virtual version as well.

Now for the bad news…

Unfortunately, the technology is not yet commercially available. The app is still in the research phase, according to Gizmodo, so it cannot be downloaded just yet, and there is no word on just how long it might be before this technology finds its way into our hands. Gimme!

In the meantime, Engadget is hopeful that the technology will be tweaked and adapted for use in other applications, such as for characters in interactive video games. Earlier this year, the website ran a report discussing Disney’s desire to make video games more interactive, including using the actions of the player to create truly open-world gaming with free-form narrative experiences.

For example, imagine there was a scene where two bears were supposed to have a beach ball, but the person playing the game removed the prop from that part of the game. In that case, one of the bears would ask the player for a ball so that the story could proceed as normal. The player would then have to decide whether to just give them a ball, create a beach ball shop, or withhold it.

—–

Feature Image: Disney Research

Space

Scientists reveal a new way to weigh a star

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 6, 2015 Last Edited: October 6, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A new method of measuring the mass of pulsars developed by scientists from the University of Southampton allows researchers to determine the mass of these highly magnetized neutron stars formed following supernovae, even if the object exists alone in outer space.

Typically, the mass of a pulsar (or any star, planet or moon) is determined by studying its motion in relation to other nearby objects, based on the gravitational pull between the entities, Dr. Wynn Ho and his colleagues explained. However, as the authors reported in Scientific Advances, their new method does not require the presence of a second object.

“For pulsars, we have been able to use principles of nuclear physics, rather than gravity, to work out what their mass is,” Dr. Ho said, calling their discovery “an exciting breakthrough which has the potential to revolutionize the way we make this kind of calculation.”

“All previous precise measurements of pulsar masses have been made for stars that orbit another object, using the same techniques that were used to measure the mass of the Earth or Moon, or discover the first extrasolar planets,” added Dr. Cristobal Espinoza of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. “Our technique is very different and can be used for pulsars in isolation.”

Superfluid-caused glitches used to calculate star weight

Pulsars, the study authors explained, emit a rotating bean of electromagnetic radiation that tends to be extremely stable. However, sometimes these beams experience “glitches” that causes them to speed up for brief periods of time. This is likely due to rotational energy transfer from quick-spinning superfluid within the star to the star crust that can be tracked using telescopes.

In their paper, they explained that the examined a model to test a variety of different superfluid-based glitch models against recently collected data from actual pulsar glitch events. They found that one model sufficiently explained up to 45 years worth of observational data, then developed a new technique to measure pulsar masses using a combination of radio and x-ray data.

The magnitude and frequency of the pulsar glitches depend on the amount of superfluid in the star, as well as the mobility of the superfluid vortices within, Dr. Ho’s team explained. Using a combination of observational data combined with the principles of nuclear physics, they were able to device a way to determine the star’s mass—a discovery which they believe could have a profound impact on the development of next-generation radio telescopes.

“Imagine the pulsar as a bowl of soup, with the bowl spinning at one speed and the soup spinning faster,” said research team member Nils Andersson, a professor of applied mathematics at Southampton. “Friction between the inside of the bowl and its contents, the soup, will cause the bowl to speed up. The more soup there is, the faster the bowl will be made to rotate.”

“Our results provide an exciting new link between the study of distant astronomical objects and laboratory work in both high-energy and low-temperature physics.” the professor added. “It is a great example of interdisciplinary science.”

—–

Feature Image: University of Southampton

Science

And the 2015 Nobel Prize winners in physics and medicine are…

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 6, 2015 Last Edited: October 6, 2015

Christopher Pilny

University of Tokyo researcher Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald of Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada have been awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of neutrino oscillations—proving that the electrically-neutral particles have mass.

Their experiments, members of the Nobel Prize committee said in a statement, “demonstrated that neutrinos change identities.” This metamorphosis “requires that neutrinos have mass,” they added, and the duo’s work has not only “changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter” but could ultimately be crucial for how we see the universe.

Kajita originally presented the discovery that atmospheric neutrinos shift between two identities en route to the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan around the turn of the century. Meanwhile, McDonald and his colleagues in Canada demonstrated that neutrinos from the sun did not vanish on their way to Earth. Instead, observatories captured them with different identities.

The discovery solved a longstanding puzzle for physicists, the Nobel committee said. As many as two-third of the neutrinos found in theoretical calculations appeared to be missing by the time measurements could be performed on the ground. Kajita’s and McDonald’s experiments revealed that the neutrinos had not disappeared after all—they had only changed form.

Based on those findings, the scientists were able to conclude that the particles, which were long believed to be massless, must possess at least a minute amount of mass—a “historic discovery,” according to the Nobel committee, because it revealed that the Standard Model of physics on its own could not adequately explain the fundamental components of the universe.

Anti-parasite researchers share Nobel Prize for medicine

On Monday, the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to the team of William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura for their discovery of a new drug to treat infections caused by roundworm parasites, and to Youyou Tu for her research on a new therapy which has significantly reduced the mortality rates for malaria patients.

Campbell and Ōmura discovered a new medication known as Avermectin, which the Nobel Prize committee said led to derivatives which have drastically lowered the incidence rates of both river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, both of which are caused by parasitic worms that are prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Central and South America.

River blindness, also called Onchocerciasis, causes chronic inflammation in the cornea, which ultimately can rob patients of their sight. Lymphatic Filariasis afflicts more than 100 million men and women, causing chronic swelling. Ōmura, a microbiologist, isolated new antibacterial agents from a type of soil bacteria, and Campbell, a parasite biologist, explored their efficacy and found a component in one type that proved particularly effective against parasites in animals.

Malaria, which kills 450,000 people (mostly children) each year, is typically treated using either chloroquine or quinine, but the success rates of both therapies are falling. To find a new way to treat the ailment, Tu turned to traditional Chinese herbal remedies, ultimately finding that active compounds from the plant Artemisia annua were effective against the malaria parasite.

“These two discoveries have provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these debilitating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people annually,” representatives of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet said in a statement. “The consequences in terms of improved human health and reduced suffering are immeasurable.”

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Better cool it on the Kool-Aid: High-fructose consumption slows brain’s processes

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 5, 2015 Last Edited: October 5, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Rats given a diet high in processed fructose fare worse after receiving a head trauma—and show other slowed brain processes too, according to a new study out of UCLA.

This research could have major implications for the 5.3 million Americans living with traumatic brain injury (TBI), and by adding a further link between diet and brain health, could help the additional 1.7 million people each year who suffer trauma—52,000 of whom will die.

Harmful effects on rat brains

“Americans consume most of their fructose from processed foods sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup,” said Fernando Gomez-Pinilla, a professor of neurosurgery and integrative biology and physiology at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, in a press release. “We found that processed fructose inflicts surprisingly harmful effects on the brain’s ability to repair itself after a head trauma.”

The study, which was published in the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, first trained rats for five days to solve a maze. After that, the rats were randomly chosen to be fed plain water or to be fed fructose-infused water for six weeks. The fructose used in this case was crystals derived from corn, simulating a high-fructose diets in humans.

A week after the two groups were formed, and all rats were anesthetized before receiving a pulse of fluid to the head—a simulation of human TBI. Six weeks after that, the rats were placed in the maze again to test how well they could recall the correct path and escape.

As compared to the plain water rats, the fructose rats took 30% longer to find the exit to the maze.

What’s more, the fructose actually altered multiple biological processes inside their brains. It interfered with communication between neurons, with neurons’ ability to rewire their connections after the injury, with the rats’ ability to record memories, and with the ability of neurons to produce enough energy to power their base functions.

“Our findings suggest that fructose disrupts plasticity—the creation of fresh pathways between brain cells that occurs when we learn or experience something new,” said Gomez-Pinilla. “That’s a huge obstacle for anyone to overcome—but especially for a TBI patient, who is often struggling to relearn daily routines and how to care for himself or herself.”

So what should you do?

This isn’t the first time a diet high in fructose has been linked to negative health consequences; according to the authors, previous studies have made ties between a consumption of fructose and cancer, obesity, diabetes, and fatty liver.

Smug mother in this commercial promoting high-fructose corn syrup, eat your heart out.

Especially because while the notion of “everything in moderation” is grand, the reality is the average American consumed about 27 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup last year—or about eight teaspoons every day. Dang.

Of course, if you’re concerned, avoiding high-fructose corn syrup alone won’t rid fructose from your diet; it occurs naturally in fruit, but according to the authors fruit also contains antioxidants, fiber, and various nutrients that prevent such damage.

However, fructose also comes from regular cane sugar (sucrose, which is made of glucose and fructose molecules)—so people avoiding it may be onto something.

Unfortunately though, people who substitute honey for sugar aren’t better off in terms of this study; honey is high in fructose as well. “Our take-home message can be boiled down to this: reduce fructose in your diet if you want to protect your brain,” Gomez-Pinilla stressed.

—–

Feature Image: Jonathan Cohen/Flickr

Health

These days, a baby before marriage doesn’t mean your relationship’s toast

Written By: Abbey Hull

Published Date: October 5, 2015 Last Edited: October 5, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A new study published in the journal Demography marks that in only two decades, society’s behaviors towards sex and marriage can significantly change. The study shows that premarital births no longer predict breakups, so long as couples marry after the child is born.
For those who doubt times have changed, note this from the study: In the 1990s, cohabited couples with premarital births that later married were 60 percent more likely to divorce than couples who married prior to having kids. However, a decade later, the statistics flat-lined as those same types of pre vs. post marriage couples had no increased chances of breaking up in relation to each other.
“Results support the notion that cohabitation has become a more normative part of the family formation process,” said Kelly Musick, associate professor of policy analysis and management in the Cornell University College of Human Ecology.
First comes love, then comes a baby in a baby carriage, then comes marriage
Using data from the National Survey of Family Growth, researchers examined the stability of married and unmarried couples who had a child between 1985 and 1995, and similar couples later between 1997 and 2010.
Between those periods of time, there was no change in the stability of couples with children, with estimations that out of all pre and post marriage couples with children, 17 percent separated within five years.
Based on society’s behavioral changes, Musick notes that when it comes to marriage and children, couples are tending to think differently.
“The increasing stability of cohabiting couples and the declining importance of marriage timing—relative to parenthood—suggests that many parents may be jointly planning marriage and childbirth as the quality and commitment of their relationships grow,” Musick stated. “And that is with little regard to which comes first.”
The importance of tying the knot
Unlike the rising seniors seeking their engagement rings as quickly as possible, researchers said timing did not matter in a couples’ stability so long as they eventually got married down the road.
“Cohabiting couples tend to have less education and income than married couples, and it may be that those who do not marry are a particularly disadvantaged group,” explained Musick.
In the study, coauthored by Katherine Michelmore, postdoctoral fellow with the Ford School’s Education Policy Initiative at the University of Michigan, the results showed how unmarried cohabiting parents had a 30 percent breakup rate within five years—nearly twice as high as couples who did marry.
“Marriage is less a silver bullet than it is an outcome of a whole set of factors linked to stability and security that help parents stay together,” said Musick.
—–
Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Awesome powder drives itself to stop severe bleeding

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 5, 2015 Last Edited: October 5, 2015

Emily Bills

Researchers from the University of British Columbia have invented the first-ever powder that stops severe bleeding and propels itself to the area of the bleed—a potentially huge advancement in trauma care.
“Bleeding is the number one killer of young people, and maternal death from postpartum hemorrhage can be as high as one in 50 births in low resource settings, so these are extreme problems,” explained co-author Christian Kastrup, an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Michael Smith Laboratories at the University of British Columbia, in a press release.
Such internal bleeding is especially difficult to stop, as blood loss that occurs within the body can be impossible to reach and treat, and external clotting agents often get washed away if the blood flow is too strong.
“People have developed hundreds of agents that can clot blood but the issue is that it’s hard to push these therapies against severe blood flow, especially far enough upstream to reach the leaking vessels,” said Katstrup. “Here, for the first time, we’ve come up with an agent that can do that.”
How it works
Katstrup worked with a team of researchers, biochemical engineers, and emergency medicine practitioners to develop the substance. The powder itself is fairly simple—it consists of calcium carbonate particles and coagulants (blood clotting agents).
The calcium carbonate generates carbon dioxide gas that propels the coagulants forward. The carbonate particles are bound with a synthetic clotting agent known as tranexamic acid or a natural one known as thrombin, and so the coagulant is transported through the wound deep into damaged tissues.
As reported in Science Advances, the proof-of-concept was shown in two different animal models after being studied in vitro. Even when the animals were given wounds that mimicked a gunshot to the femoral artery—the one in the leg that can bleed out in under a minute—the particles were highly effective in stopping the bleeding.
Of course, like anything else, the jump to humans won’t be immediate, and much more testing has to be done first. But the applications could be widespread; the calcium carbonate could possibly carry medications besides just coagulants, and if it’s cleared, it could save many trauma victims or soldiers in the field.
It could also really help this guy.

“The area we’re really focusing on is postpartum hemorrhage: in the uterus, after childbirth where you can’t see the damaged vessels but you can put the powder into that area and the particles can propel and find those damaged vessels,” said Kastrup.
You can watch a video from the University on the powder below!

—–
Feature Image: Christian Kastrup and James Baylis

Science

An ancient volcano once caused an 800-foot tsunami, and it could happen again

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 5, 2015 Last Edited: October 5, 2015

Christopher Pilny

The sudden collapse of a volcano off the coast of Cape Verde in Africa roughly 73,000 years ago caused a tsunami wave larger than anything ever witnessed by humans – a massive, 800-foot-tall wave that swallowed up an island located 30 miles away, researchers have discovered.

The tsunami, which took place when the eastern flank of the Fogo volcano collapsed into the sea, would have been roughly two-thirds as tall as the Empire State Building, according to Gizmodo. If such a massive wave were to hit a coastal city in this day and age (which scientists claim could be a distinct possibility), the results would most likely not be pretty.

“Flank collapses can happen extremely fast and catastrophically, and therefore are capable of triggering giant tsunamis,” lead author Ricardo Ramalho at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory explained in a statement Friday. “They probably don’t happen very often. But we need to take this into account when we think about the hazard potential of these kinds of volcanic features.”

At least eight smaller volcanic flanks have collapsed worldwide over the past several hundred years, Ramalho and his colleagues said, and some of them have generated dangerous tsunamis. While many studies question whether or not a larger volcano can collapse suddenly, as the new study suggests, the authors assert that “flank collapses may indeed catastrophically happen and are capable of triggering tsunamis of enormous height and energy.”

Sudden, destructive mega-tsunamis may not be rare after all

Writing in the journal Science Advances, Ramalho’s team explained that their deductions were based on the recent discovery and dating of rock deposits discovered on Cape Verde’s Santiago Island. These deposits are evidence that 40 cubic miles (160 cubic kilometers) that Fogo lost in the collapse came down all at once, resulting in the generation of the giant tsunami.

Several years ago, Ramalho and colleagues spotted unusual boulders located as far as 2,000 feet inland and upwards of 650 feet above sea level. Some of the massive rocks were the size of vans, and their composition more closely matched marine-type rocks along the island’s shoreline than the volcanic terrain where they were found, suggesting that they were deposited by a giant wave.

They determined how large the wave was by calculating how much energy would have been needed to carry the rocks to their current location, and then dated the event by measuring helium isotopes embedded near the boulders’ surfaces. That revealed that the date of origin was about 73,000 years ago, which matched-up with prior estimates suggesting a smaller event occurred.

The analysis “provides the link between the collapse and impact, which you can make only if you have both dates,” said co-author and Columbia geochemist Gisela Winckler. While experts indicate that the discovery provides evidence that volcanoes can collapse suddenly, causing these massive mega-tsunamis to occur, Ramalho said there is no immediate cause for concern.

“It doesn’t mean every collapse happens catastrophically,” he said, “but it’s maybe not as rare as we thought.”

—–

Feature Image: NASA

Health

Who cheats more: men or women?

Written By: John Hopton

Published Date: October 5, 2015 Last Edited: October 5, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Who is more likely to cheat on their significant other: men or women?
The easy, perhaps stereotypical assumption is that men cheat more than women, and some findings do draw predictable conclusions. Earlier this year, University of Connecticut professor Christin Munsch told the Wall Street Journal that financially independent men (who, of course, constitute a significant percentage of the male population) are more likely to cheat.
“These men are aware that their wives are truly dependent and may think that, as a result, their wives will not leave them even if they cheat,” she said.
The conclusion was based on a study of 2,757 heterosexual people aged 18 to 32, in the same relationship for at least a year, as gathered by the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth between 2001 and 2011.
Regardless of financial independence, the 2006 American General Social Survey found that nearly twice as many married men as women admitted to having had sexual relations with someone other than their spouse, the BBC reported.
Women cheat smarter
However, things may not be as simple as they seem. Other recent studies have pointed to a female majority when it comes to infidelity.
YourTango reported a study of 3,000 people by British dating firm Coffee & Company, which showed that while nine percent of men were certain they’d be unfaithful if they fell for somebody else, a much higher 25 percent of female respondents said they would definitely have an affair if they were attracted to a new person.
The discrepancy may be explained by the fact that some women say they would cheat, but when it comes down to it, they will not. But other investigations also suggest the difference could be down to women simply being more capable of keeping affairs under wraps.
According to Dr. David Holmes, a psychologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, men and women behave very differently when they cheat.
“The biggest difference is that women are much better at keeping their affairs secret,” he told the Daily Mail. “If you look at the studies into paternity, even conservative figures show that between eight and 15 per cent of children haven’t been fathered by the man who thinks he’s the biological parent.”
“Men may well exaggerate and women underplay it,” sex and relationships psychologist Petra Boynton told the BBC. “Historically, it was sometimes dangerous for women to admit being unfaithful.”
If you’re gonna lie, lie well
Whether women are less willing than men to admit infidelity in anonymous studies is difficult to assess. However, when a range of studies are considered, along with paternity tests, there is an indication that women may cheat at least as much as men, while simply hiding it better.
This may sound like an indictment of women as being sneakier, but the reality is that cheating of any kind is sneaky to begin with. If someone is going to do it, they may as well do it smart.

Space

You can now see thousands of his-res Apollo program photos online!

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 5, 2015 Last Edited: October 5, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Thousands of pictures taken during NASA’s Apollo moon missions have been uploaded to Flickr courtesy of the Project Apollo Archive, meaning that the general public can now view images of these historic space missions – and in stunning 1800 dpi resolution, no less!

According to The Washington Post and The Verge, between 8,400 and 9,000 photographs were recently posted to the online media-hosting archive by Kipp Teague, who established the Project Apollo Archives back in 1999. The uploaded versions are rescanned, unprocessed versions of the original Apollo Hasseelblad camera film magazines, the media outlets noted.

Technological advances achieved since the Apollo photos were originally scanned left many of them looking fuzzy and pixilated, so in 2004, officials at the NASA Johnson Space Center began the tiresome, tedious tasks of obtaining better quality images, improving the quality of the moon mission photographs by obtaining uncompressed, high-resolution TIFF scans on DVD.

The images were originally processed for use on the Project Apollo Archive websites, Teague told The Planetary Society. However, due to the demand for the higher-resolution versions of the pictures, Teague and his colleagues decided to reprocess them and upload them to Flickr.

“An old family photo album” from outer space

Teague told The Planetary Society that every photo taken by astronauts using the Hasselblad cameras mounted to their chests has been uploaded to the account, as well as several more taken from orbit around the Earth and moon, and still others captured en route from one to the other.

The images have not been processed in any way, meaning that there will be some blurring and wash out in the images, and currently only photographs from the original Johnson Space Center scans are included. As such, the archive currently has no high-resolution images from Apollo 8 or Apollo 13 yet, The Planetary Society said, and looks like “an old family photo album.”

Teague added that he has requested additional images from NASA, but is not certain that the US space agency currently has enough the funding to provide more scans. However, he also pointed out that he has obtained processed versions of film magazines from Apollo 7, Apollo 9, Apollo 10, and Apollo 13 that he plans to upload in the near future.

As for the photos that are currently available, they speak for themselves. Since Hasseblads use film that is more than three times larger than a standard 35mm frame, these photos show craters in greater detail than ever before, and bits of propellant can even be seen in pictures of the lunar landing module’s separation from the orbiter, the website said.

—–

Feature Image: Project Apollo Archive

Health

Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, study says

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 5, 2015 Last Edited: October 5, 2015

Christopher Pilny

If you’ve ever wondered why so many people find a specific actor so handsome or puzzled as to why others didn’t share your viewpoint that a certain leading lady was a total hottie, a new study published last week in the journal Current Biology has the answer.

As it turns out, that old saying about beauty being in the eye of the beholder is true, according to Laura Germine, a psychiatric researcher at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, and her co-authors. By conducting an in-depth analysis of twins, they discovered that an individual perceives attractiveness depending upon his or her own personal experiences.

Essentially, CBS News and The Telegraph reported, a person’s environment plays a larger role than their genes in determining which men or women he or she will find attractive—meaning that not even identical twins share exactly the same opinion about who’s hot and who’s not.

The authors note that some aspects of attractiveness tend to be universal, and may be coded into our DNA. For example, they note that as a general rule people tend to have a preference for faces that are symmetrical. Beyond that, however, people do have different “types,” they found.

“We estimate that an individual’s aesthetic preferences for faces agree about 50 percent, and disagree about 50 percent, with others,” the authors explained. “This fits with the common intuition that on the one hand, fashion models can make a fortune with their good looks, while on the other hand, friends can endlessly debate about who is attractive and who is not.”

Why you think Benedict Cumberbatch is hot, but your friend doesn’t

Germine, along with fellow investigator Jeremy Wilmer of Wellesley College, said that previous research on how people responded to faces focused primarily on things universally viewed to be attractive. They decided instead to focus their studies on those features that cause disagreements in order to learn more about why people differ in what they find beautiful.

They studied the results of an online quiz to develop a test of the uniqueness of a person’s face preferences, and then recruited 547 pairs of identical twins and 214 pairs of same-sex, non-identical twins and had them rate the attractiveness of 200 faces. They used these rating to develop what they referred to as “individual preference scores” that measured the degree to which a person’s ratings differed from the averages of all of the study participants, CBS News said.

Germine and Wilmer went on to compare the results of the identical twins to one another as a way to determine whether genes or environmental factors were a larger influence on how people perceived attractiveness. Using calculations frequently used in twin studies, they determined that a person’s environment accounted for 78 percent of perceived differences in attractiveness.

“The types of environments that are important are not those that are shared by those who grow up in the same family, but are much more subtle and individual, potentially including things such as one’s unique, highly personal experiences with friends or peers, as well as social and popular media,” said Germine. In other words, attractiveness depends not on where you went to school or who your next door neighbor was, but your own personal, unique social interactions.

“The discovery that personal experiences have such a significant impact on a person’s individual face preferences provides a novel window into the evolution and architecture of the social brain.” They added that future research could more closely examine which aspects of the environment play the greatest role in determining what each of us finds beautiful.

—–

Feature Image: Wikimedia Commons

Science

‘Primeval beaver’ fossil shows how mammals out-survived dinos

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 5, 2015 Last Edited: October 5, 2015

Emily Bills

Fossils discovered by scientists in New Mexico belong to a previously identified type of small, furry mammal resembling modern-day rodents that were scrappy enough to thrive after the dinosaurs died out.

Originally discovered in 2014, researchers from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Nebraska, and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science reported in the latest edition of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society that the creatures had strange, complex teeth, including sharp incisors and pointed molars well-suited for eating leaves and plants.

This type of mammal, known as a multituberculate, first arose roughly 100 million years prior to the extinction of the dinosaurs, and somehow managed to survive the events which killed off the once dominant creatures. These mammals ultimately spread through much of what is now North America and Asia, and studying them may shed new light on mass extinctions.

Despite appearances, this guy was not closely related to beavers

The fossil was discovered by a University of Nebraska student named Carissa Raymond during an annual expedition to northwestern New Mexico, which Dr. Stephen Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh School of GeoSciences called “one of the best places in the world” to find remains from these mammals.

The new species, which has been named Kimbetopsalis simmonsae, lived no more than a few hundred thousand years after the extinction of the dinosaurs, Dr. Brusatte told redOrbit via email. In a statement, he referred to the creature as a “primeval beaver” of sorts, and when asked to elaborate, he explained that it “would have looked and behaved quite a bit like a beaver. It was about the same size, had big incisor teeth at the front of its snout, and ate plants.”

Despite appearances, however, it was not a particularly close relative of beavers. It was a member of the multituberculate group of mammals, a group which eventually grew to be quite large (perhaps up to 100 kilograms in size) before ultimately going extinct when they were superseded by modern rodents approximately 35 million years ago.

Their story is our story

The discovery of the Kimbetopsalis simmonsae has helped scientists update the family tree of these mammals, the researchers said in a statement. This work reveals that the new fossil dates back to approximately 500,000 years after the mass extinction, and that this so-called “primeval beaver” was likely a forebear to the largest multituberculates.

“This gives us a glimpse of how these big multituberculates got started after the dinosaurs went extinct: they rapidly evolved right after the asteroid hit,” Dr. Brusatte told redOrbit, adding that it reveals much about the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous and the subsequent recovery from what he calls “one of the worst mass extinctions in earth history.”

“An asteroid fell out of the sky one day and the world changed in an instant,” he said. “Dinosaurs had been dominant for over 100 million years and they quickly disappeared. Mammals – which had been living in the shadows of the dinosaurs for many tens of millions of years – made it through the extinction and suddenly had the opportunity to diversify in the brave new world. And they did this quickly, very quickly.”

“This new species lived only a few hundred thousand years after the dinosaur extinction. It ate plants and was the size of a beaver,” Dr. Brusatte added. “There weren’t any mammals like this that lived with the dinosaurs… so it looks like mammals rapidly began to get bigger, evolve new diets, and colonize new environments very, very soon after the dinosaurs bit the dust. That’s a neat story, because that is the story of how we got here. That explosive diversification of mammals led to primates, which led to us.”

—–

Feature Image: Sarah Shelley, University of Edinburgh

Health

Can’t picture things in your mind? You’re not alone.

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 4, 2015 Last Edited: October 4, 2015

Brian Galloway

Researchers have discovered that some people can’t see images inside their heads—for instance, they can’t count sheep or picture the faces of loved ones. It’s a condition called aphantasia, and it appears to affect up to 2.5% of the population—myself included, as I’ve just found out.

It’s similar to synesthesia: For many, it’s a normal experience—we’ve never lived in a world where the mind’s eye can see, so we aren’t aware of the difference. But for others, the change can happen drastically, like in a patient known as MX—who lost his mind’s eye after a minor heart surgery.

“Patient Zero” in a way

MX, lead Adam Zeman, a cognitive neurologist at the University of Exeter Medical School, to the subject. After publishing a paper about MX, Discover magazine covered it—leading 21 individuals to come forward claiming to have the condition.

Zeman interviewed these individuals and published the results in Cortex. There were many common threads tying these people together—like problems remembering faces of people they meet and issues with imagining architecture or design. Some cannot comprehend descriptive writing in books, as their brains cannot translate the words into something it can see.

In the case of Tom Ebeyer, 25, from Ontario, Canada, he cannot recall sounds, textures, tastes, smells, or any other kinds of imagery—but wasn’t aware of this fact until age 21, when he realized his girlfriend could see things in her mind’s eye.

“It had a serious emotional impact,” he said. “I began to feel isolated – unable to do something so central to the average human experience. The ability to recall memories and experiences, the smell of flowers or the sound of a loved one’s voice; before I discovered that recalling these things was humanly possible, I wasn’t even aware of what I was missing out on. The realization did help me to understand why I am a slow at reading text, and why I perform poorly on memorization tests, despite my best efforts.”

Personal effect

For myself, I have a very hard time remembering people’s faces—which has led to some pretty embarrassing situations where people inevitably get offended and yell something like, “Susanna, you know me!” I have no way to construct a mental map and I can’t picture how a room will look with different furniture or paint, because I can’t see the room. (Also, people can recall smells and textures in their minds?!)

Apparently this all comes down to networks across the brain which work together in concert to create the mind’s eye. For example, the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain are responsible for organizing the entire process of creating mental images; the temporal and occipital lobes are responsible for representing the item to be remembered and give us the “visual feel” of an image.

Aphantasia could arise from alterations in many points in these networks, and these alterations could arise from genes, environmental changes while developing in the womb, brain damage, or in the context of a mood disorder.

Interestingly, however, many people with aphantasia can still see their dreams. “Our participants mostly have some first-hand knowledge of imagery through their dreams: our study revealed an interesting dissociation between voluntary imagery, which is absent or much reduced in these individuals, and involuntary imagery, for example in dreams, which is usually preserved,” said Zerman.

—–

If you think you have aphantasia, Dr. Zerman indicated he is interested in talking with you. He can be reached at the following email address: [email protected].

Image credit: Thinkstock

Technology

Can cell phone use ruin a relationship?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 4, 2015 Last Edited: October 4, 2015

Brian Galloway

We’ve all encountered them: people who can’t seem to put their smartphones down, constantly checking social media and text messaging when you’re trying to have a conversation and holding onto the damn devices as if they’re Gorilla Glued to their hands.

Now, at long last, there’s actual scientific evidence to prove that this type of behavior could actually damage relationships, courtesy of a recently-published Computers in Human Behavior study by Baylor University marketing professors Dr. James Roberts and Dr. Meredith David.

Dr. Roberts and Dr. David call the phenomenon partner phone snubbing or “pphubbing” and explain that it is the degree to which people use or are distracted by their mobile devices while spending time with their significant others. To examine its impact on romantic relationships, the authors conducted two separate surveys involving a total of 453 US adults.

“What we discovered,” Dr. Roberts said, “was that when someone perceived that their partner phubbed them, this created conflict and led to lower levels of reported relationship satisfaction. These lower levels of relationship satisfaction, in turn, led to lower levels of life satisfaction and, ultimately, higher levels of depression.”

Nearly one-in-four said phubbing caused relationship conflict

In the first of the two surveys, the researchers developed a nine-item “Partner Phubbing Scale” of common smartphone behaviors associated with snubbing, including whether or not partners kept their phones in their hands when couples were together, or if they would occasionally take a look at the device when there was a lull in the conversation.

The second survey used this scale and asked 145 adults about these pphubbing-related behaviors. A total of 145 adults were presented with the nine-items on the “Partner Phubbing Scale” as well as questions regarding cellphone-related conflicts, satisfaction with the relationship and life as a whole, depression levels and interpersonal attachment styles.

Nearly half (46.3 percent) of the respondents said that they had been pphubbed by their partner, while 22.6 percent said that this pphubbing caused conflict in their relationships and 36.6 percent reported feeling depressed at least some of the times, the study authors reported. Less than one-third (32 percent) said that they were very satisfied with their relationship, they added.

“In everyday interactions with significant others, people often assume that momentary distractions by their cell phones are not a big deal,” explained Dr. David. “However, our findings suggest that the more often a couple’s time spent together is interrupted by one individual attending to his/her cellphone, the less likely it is that the other individual is satisfied in the overall relationship.”

“Specifically, momentary distractions by one’s cellphone during time spent with a significant other likely lowers the significant other’s satisfaction with their relationship, and could lead to enhanced feelings of depression and lower well-being of that individual,” she added. “Thus, when spending time with one’s significant other, we encourage individuals to be cognizant of the interruptions caused by their cellphones, as these may well be harmful to their relationship.”

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Michigan farmer uncovers Mammoth skeleton

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 4, 2015 Last Edited: October 4, 2015

Brian Galloway

On Monday, a farmer named James Bristle made a “mammoth” of a find while he was was digging in a soybean field with a friend– and we don’t mean that figuratively. They discovered what they thought was an old wooden fence post—but it actually turned out to be a mammoth rib.

Although they didn’t figure that much out until later, after contacting the University of Michigan and being directed to Professor Dan Fisher, the director of the Museum of Paleontology. The university sent Fisher who confirmed the discovery.

“We get calls once or twice a year about new specimens like this,” Fisher told The Washington Post. However, most of those calls relate to mastodon fossils—to date, only 30 mammoths have been found in Michigan.

A rare discovery

This find was quite unusual. Adding to its peculiarity, Fisher and his team was given only one day to excavate the bones; Bristle had just recently purchased the farm, and was running on a tight schedule thanks to the harvest.

Which means the dig became a mad dash to complete the work all on Thursday.

“We didn’t stop to eat or drink,” Fisher told the Detroit Free Press. “It was a hard, hard day of work, but every bit worth it.”

“We don’t just want to pull the bones and tug everything out of the dirt,” Fisher added. “We want to get the context for how everything was placed at the site.” Context—like where the bones are relative to each other and what layer of sediment they are in—yield mounds of data researchers couldn’t get otherwise.

Apparently the effort was very much worthwhile, because these fossils were amongst the rarest ever found in Michigan—around 20% of the skeleton was recovered, including the skull, the tusks, ribs, the pelvis, and vertebrae. While this seems like a low number, it is in fact one of the most complete skeletons found to date.

We might learn more about humans, too

Other parts, like the hind limbs, are missing, probably eaten by ancient human hunters.

“We think we’re dealing with an animal that was at least butchered by humans,” Fisher said. He added that the humans might not have killed it, seemed to have preserved it.

According to Fisher, it appears that ancient humans in the area used ponds to preserve meat like a refrigerator—the carcasses were weighed down with boulders until they sank underwater.

“It was essentially stored meat,” he added. In this mammoth’s case, three large boulders were found onsite, along with stone tool fragments, pointing to this method.

The mammoth itself might be a wooly mammoth, but it could also be a Jeffersonian mammoth—which is a cross between a wooly and Columbian mammoth. Either way, it died around age 45 sometime between 11 and 15 thousand years ago, which—if humans are definitively shown to have been involved with the carcass—can shed new light on when the first humans first arrived in Michigan.

But as of now, with the bones freshly freed from the earth for the first time in thousands of years, few things are known for certain. The University of Michigan team doesn’t even know if they will be able to examine the bones fully, because they are actually Bristle’s property. As of Friday, Bristle hadn’t decided what he will do with them.

“To really make conclusions about these bones and what they mean, we have to make the evidence available for other scientists to study, too,” Fisher said. “And we can’t do that without long-term access to the material.”

—–

Image credit: YouTube/University of Michigan

Health

Does being tall increase your cancer risk?

Written By: Abbey Hull

Published Date: October 4, 2015 Last Edited: October 4, 2015

Brian Galloway

Height is now being linked to a higher risk of cancer, especially for women, according to researchers who studied physical and health data from not one hundred, not one thousand, but five million people in Sweden.

Presented at the European Society for Pediatric Endocrinology medical conference in Barcelona, researchers stated that for every 10 centimeters (or four inches) over one meters in height, the odds of developing cancer increased 10 percent in men and 18 percent in women.

For example, a 1.72 meters (6 foot) tall Swedish woman has a third higher cancer risk than a 1.52 meter tall woman.

It sounds like an odd relationship at first glance, but it’s actually very plausible, as the risk of cancer should be related to the number of cells in a person’s body. This determines the number of cells ‘at risk’,” said Dorothy Bennett, a scientist at the University of London.

“A cancer arises by mutations from a single normal cell. Bigger people have more cells.”

How they accomplished their research

Looking at the birth, health, and military records of 5.5 million Swedish people born between 1938 and 1991, the large-scale study supported the links between height and cancer found in other studies with smaller test groups.

However, bigger is not always better, as skeptical experts question the study’s methodology. They also argue stress factors like obesity and genetics are more strongly linked to cancer risk than a person’s height.

Still, being the largest test group of men and women yet, the links between height and contracting cancer couldn’t be dismissed. The study found that for every extra 10 cm, a woman’s breast cancer risk increased by 20 percent, while in both men and women the extra 10 cm increased their melanoma risk by 30 percent.

It is important to note that the study, while detailed, does not clarify if their findings translate into other cultures with diverse diets and genetic backgrounds.

For example, in 2013 a United States study with only women stated for each 10 cm height increase there is a 13 percent increased risk in developing certain cancers. The difference between 13 and 20 percent could begin to uncover the differences between cultures.

Why there’s no need to panic

Tall people reading all of this don’t need to panic.

In the study, researchers pointed out that rather than simply height “causing” the increased cancer risks, factors like growth hormones may also be playing a role in influencing both traits.

There’s no need to panic. “Tall people shouldn’t worry that they are destined to get cancer,” said Mel Greaves, a researcher at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. Though the link between height and cancer risk is enlightening, there are still other sometimes stronger factors playing a role.

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Your fingerprint can reveal your ancestry

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 3, 2015 Last Edited: October 3, 2015

Brian Galloway

Forget all of those expensive DNA tests that claim to reveal your ancestry because a new proof-of-concept study by researchers at North Carolina State University and Washington State University demonstrates how a person’s background can be identified using his/her fingerprints.

As part of the study, which was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, lead author Nichole Fournier, a former graduate student at NC State who is now as WSU, and her colleagues conducted a very detailed fingerprint analysis, going beyond the Level 1 details typically studied by anthropologists and examining Level 2 details as well.

Level 1 details, the authors explained, include such things as pattern types and ridge counts. Level 2 details include more specific variations, including bifurcations– where a fingerprint ridge splits. These minutiae, they said, are often used in forensic fingerprint analysis, but in this case were used to hunt for patterns specific to sex or ancestral background.

While Fournier’s team found no significant differences in the fingerprints of men and women, they did discover significant differences between people of European American ancestry and those of African American descent in the Level 2 details of those individuals’ fingerprints.

Discovery beneficial to anthropologists, forensic scientists

The research involved analysis of the right index-finger fingerprints of 243 men and women (61 African American men and 61 African Americans women, plus 60 European American men and 61 European American women). It revealed minutiae variation among ancestral groups that the authors believe will be beneficial to both forensic research and anthropology.

“This is the first study to look at this issue at this level of detail, and the findings are extremely promising,” said Ann Ross, a professor of anthropology at North Carolina State University and senior author the September 23 paper. “But more work needs to be done. We need to look at a much larger sample size and evaluate individuals from more diverse ancestral backgrounds.”

While Ross cautions that “a lot of additional work needs to be done,” she believes that this discovery “holds promise for helping law enforcement.” She added that the research found “a level of variation in fingerprints that is of interest to anthropologists, particularly in the area of global population structures – we just need to start looking at the Level 2 fingerprint details.”

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Volcanos might have helped kill the dinosaurs

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 3, 2015 Last Edited: October 3, 2015

Brian Galloway

The asteroid that collided with the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago may have had an accomplice in the form of volcanic activity, according to research published in the October 2 edition of the journal Science.

According to Engadget, the paper’s authors believe the Chicxulub impact event could have accelerated volcanic eruptions in India, causing the release of toxic gas from a massive lava lake known as the Deccan Traps. The impact wouldn’t have caused the geologic activity at the 200,000 square mile lake, but it would have made it more intense.

Their findings indicate that the ongoing, slower-placed eruptions at the Deccan Traps doubled in output within 50,000 years of the Chicxulub impact. The impact and the volcanic activity would have been a one-two punch that lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs (and many other creatures) by covering the planet with noxious fumes and by radically changing the climate.

“Based on our dating of the lava, we can be pretty certain that the volcanism and the impact occurred within 50,000 years of the extinction, so it becomes somewhat artificial to distinguish between them as killing mechanisms: both phenomena were clearly at work at the same time,” lead researcher Paul Renne of the University of California-Berkeley said in a statement.

Okay, but which one really caused the mass extinction?

Renne, a professor-in-residence of earth and planetary science at the university and the director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, added it would be “basically impossible” to pinpoint which of the two events was most responsible for the atmospheric effects that killed the dinosaurs, as both events “happened at the same time.”

He and his colleagues believe that the Chicxulub impact caused drastic changes to the volcano’s so-called plumbing system. Those changes resulted in widespread changes in both the chemistry and the frequency of the eruptions, resulting in a 500,000 year delay in the recovery of life after the end of the Cretaceous and the start of the Tertiary period.

Co-author Mark Richards, a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science and the man who first proposed the link between the impact and activity at the Deccan Traps, said that he is uncertain which event is most responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. However, he noted that the link between all three events is becoming too strong to dismiss.

“If our high-precision dates continue to pin these three events – the impact, the extinction and the major pulse of volcanism – closer and closer together, people are going to have to accept the likelihood of a connection among them,” Richards explained. “The scenario we are suggesting – that the impact triggered the volcanism – does in fact reconcile what had previously appeared to be an unimaginable coincidence.”

—–

Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

Can Curiosity study the Martian water flows?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 3, 2015 Last Edited: October 3, 2015

Brian Galloway

When NASA broke the news Monday that it had found evidence of liquid water on Mars, it was a major announcement that implies the Red Planet might harbor some form of life. Unfortunately, in-depth analysis will have to wait.

As reported by CNET and The Guardian, scientists are unable to send the Curiosity rover to the location of the flowing H2O due to possible contamination of the water source with Earth-born microbes. The rover is not considered to be sterile, meaning that a terrestrial organism that hitched a ride with it to Mars could still be alive.

The Outer Space Treaty, a United Nations document originally written in 1967, established a set of regulations for space exploration mandating that investigations on other planets have to be conducted in a way to avoid the risk of contamination in so-called “special regions”.

Those regions include any area where liquid water appears to be present, Rich Zurek, a scientist on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter team, confirmed in Reddit AMA session. These areas require “extra precautions… to prevent contamination by earth life,” Zurek explained.

In-depth RSL analysis may have to wait until 2018

That doesn’t necessarily mean Curiosity won’t be able to study the dark streaks, also known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), from afar, Andrew Coates of University College London said to The Guardian. The rover will be able to conduct measurements of the RSLs from a safe distance using its ChemCam instrument and lasers to analyze the composition.

Coates said that there will be “heated discussions” in the weeks ahead about how close Curiosity will be allowed to get to the RSLs, and that there was “increasing pressure from the science side” to permit such exploration. Ultimately, The Guardian said, the decision will be up to a Cospar, a group that oversees the planetary protection rules to prevent extraterrestrial contamination.

Landers that are searching for life, the UK newspaper explained, have to meet strict standards and be classified as category IVb. Those entering special regions, however, must be even cleaner and meet IVc standards. Curiosity was designed as a category IVb rover, and as such is currently not permitted to enter areas where water could be flowing.

NASA officials argue, however, that the intense radiation on the Red Planet, and the ultraviolet rays in particular, likely killed off any microbes carried into space on Curiosity. If so, it could be determined that the rover is clean enough to travel to the RSLs after all – but not all scientists are in agreement that the UV light would make the rover sterile. In fact, a recent ESA study reported that exposure to UV rays could actually make some microbes more of a problem.

If Curiosity cannot do the job, the next rover scheduled to make the journey to the Red Planet is the ExoMars mission, a joint project of the ESA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos set to launch in 2018, The Guardian said. Coates, who is leading the camera team on that rover, told reporters that “the planetary protection is being very carefully looked at” to ensure that it will be able to “make the best possible life-searching measurements in the regions it can get to.”

—–

Image credit: NASA

Space

Mystery of Ceres’ weird bright spots solved! (Maybe)

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 2, 2015 Last Edited: October 2, 2015

Emily Bills

NASA has been examining the images Ceres from the spacecraft Dawn since May in order to figure out just what in the heck was causing the dwarf planet’s mysterious bright spots. In June, the scientists discovered that Ceres had even more spots than they had seen before, and were still puzzled as to what caused the reflection.

Now, NASA finally has an answer, which they announced at the European Planetary Science Congress in Nantes, France.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s—

“We believe this is a huge salt deposit,” Dawn’s principal investigator Chris Russell told a crowd of scientists Monday at the Congress, as reported by CNET. “We know it’s not ice and we’re pretty sure it’s salt, but we don’t know exactly what salt at the present time.”

Wait. What?

Up until this point, the leading theory was that the bright spots were the result of sunlight reflecting off of ice. Even the principal investigator of the Dawn mission, Chris Russell, considered this likely enough to mention. “Dawn scientists can now conclude that the intense brightness of these spots is due to the reflection of sunlight by highly reflective material on the surface, possibly ice,” he had said in May.

This notion was strengthened by the fact that Ceres is believed to contain an ocean under its surface. Asteroid collisions could have easily exposed the ocean on the surface of the planet.

However, thanks to visible and infrared mapping spectrometry of the reflections, the scientists were able discern that the spots weren’t made of ice, but most likely salt. Moreover, the salt seems to be indigenous to the dwarf planet—no asteroids involved there, either.

“[Salt] tells me that this is an active surface,” Russel said. “Some comet or asteroid did not come in carrying salt, this is derived from the interior somehow.”

Salt also seems to be responsible for the streaks on Ceres’ weird lonely mountain. How the mountain got there, NASA has no idea—so they’ve just turned to the public for help with ideas. NASA also isn’t sure how the salt got from the interior of the planet to the surface, as the surface seems to be entirely dry—so they probably would take advice on that, too.

Watch the full talk below!

—–

Feature Image: NASA

Health

8 boob facts you probably didn’t know

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: October 2, 2015 Last Edited: October 2, 2015

Emily Bills

It’s breast cancer awareness month, and there are a lot of exciting advancements coming out in that area—like urine tests that can detect breast cancer and gene tests that determine if you need chemo. But that sort of news is almost normal now, so we here at redOrbit have decided to highlight some more unusual facts about tatas that might just… jiggle your world.

1. Women having breasts is weird in the first place.

As far as we know, Homo sapiens is the only species in the primate world that has plump breasts following puberty. In other species, breasts only grow large in order to breastfeed, and reduce in size afterwards. Meanwhile, humans stay busty even after menopause. There are plenty of theories why, but no general consensus just yet.

2. The Guinness Book of World Records’ largest natural breasts are 70 inches around.

That’s nearly six feet around! This translates roughly to a size 48V bra—which doesn’t exist. The current record-holder, Annie Hawkins, wears a U.S. size 52I instead.

3. Men have nipples because everyone starts out as a woman.

Every single human on earth started out as one sex: female. This is because the blueprint of fetuses is designed this way, and in fact it takes six weeks for fetuses with Y chromosomes to begin producing the testosterone that leads to the development of male characteristics. Because it takes this long, everyone develops nipples.

4. Hungry and less-financially secure men prefer large breasts.

This is at least according to a 2013 study of 266 Malaysian men of varying socioeconomic statuses and 124 hungry and full men. Likewise, wealthier men preferred smaller breasts.

5. The bra is a pretty recent invention.

Up until World War I, corsets were all the rage. The problem, though, was that corsets often relied of steel inserts to create their shape—which the army needed. So, women were asked to give them up. Happily, an alternative was found in the invention of Mary Phelps Jacob in 1913: the modern bra.

6. The first breast implants used some weird fillers.

In the early- to mid- 1900s, surgeons used ivory, glass balls, ground rubber, and ox cartilage (among a lot of other bad ideas) in attempts to plump up breasts. Unsurprisingly, they weren’t successful.

7. Men get mastectomies and breast reductions, too.

In a similar vein, men also can develop breast cancer, regardless of the size of their chest. In fact, more male patients opt for double mastectomies than female ones, according to a recent study.

Men also receive another surgery typically associated with chesty women: Breast reductions. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 22,939 men had this kind of surgery in 2013.

And lastly, and most importantly:

8. Boobs can (accidentally) kill you dead.

In 2010, UK resident Claire Smedley nearly smothered her boyfriend to death while they were doing the dirty. Smedley, who has size 40 LL breasts, apparently misinterpreted his flailing for excitement, and finally realized something was wrong after she noticed he wasn’t moving or breathing.

What a way to go, though.

—–

Feature Image: Jenni Konrad/Flickr

Technology

This device harnesses radio waves to charge your gadgets

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 2, 2015 Last Edited: October 2, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Generate power from thin air! An innovative new device developed by a former UK science minister can theoretically charge a mobile device or other electronics hardware constantly—and at no additional cost—simply by taking unused radio waves out of the air and converting them to a usable power source.

As Engadget and The Telegraph reported earlier this week, the device is known as Freevolt, and it was created by Drayson Technologies, a company that was founded by Lord Paul Drayson. It converts ambient radio frequency (RF) signals into energy that is sufficient for powering smaller electronic devices, including smart-home sensors and wearable devices such as Fitbits.

Lord Drayson, who served as science minister from 2008 to 2010, explained to The Telegraph that companies have been trying for many years to develop a means to harvest energy from WiFi or cellular network signals, but the fact that RF signals provide a minute amount of energy made it difficult to produce a charge efficient enough to power electronics.

So how does Freevolt work?

Freevolt is the first commercially available technology that successfully harnesses radio waves without the need for a dedicated transmitter, he explained. It functions using a three-part process. First, a multi-band antenna collects RF energy from sources within the 0.5-5GHz range.

It then feeds that energy through a highly-efficient rectifier that converts it into DC electricity. Finally, this power is boosted, stored, and delivered through a power management model. While the method does not produce enough juice to keep your smartphone or tablet charged yet, if placed in a location where there are lots of radio waves, it can generate up to 100 microwatts of power.

As Engadget noted, this could be useful for things like a smart smoke alarm that would never need to have its batteries changed, or a low-power security system that would not have to be plugged in to a wall outlet. Potentially, smart homes (or even smart cities) could take these RF waves to power sensors which would be self-sufficient and come with no monthly cost.

“It is the nature of broadcast transmissions that, when you broadcast, only some of the energy is received and used,” Lord Drayson explained to The Telegraph. “The energy that is not received goes to waste. What we’re doing is using that fact to power very small low-energy devices.”

“The radio frequency transmissions come from wireless networks, and as our hunger for information goes up, the amount of data that we want to transmit is going up exponentially, and therefore this is growing all the time,” he said, adding that the first commercial use of Freevolt is in the CleanSpace Tag, a sensor used to monitor carbon monoxide in the air.

—–

Feature Image: Freevolt

Science

Teleportation isn’t just stuff of science fiction anymore

Written By: John Hopton

Published Date: October 2, 2015 Last Edited: October 2, 2015

Christopher Pilny

Beam us up, Scotty! Quantum computing in any widespread form is still a long way off, but it’s coming. (And quantum Internet!) First, however, scientists need to master the art of quantum teleportation–transferring the quantum structure of an object from one place to another without physical transmission.

Currently, a range of theories relating to quantum teleportation exist, however, none of them are perfect.

A recent study, published in Nature Photonics and reported by Futurity, weighed up the advantages and disadvantages of various possibilities, concluding that a mixture of all may be necessary to move forward.

“We don’t have an ideal or universal technology for quantum teleportation,” said Stefano Pirandola of the computer science department at the University of York, UK. “The field has developed a lot but we seem to need to rely on a hybrid approach to get the best from each available technology.”

An example of problems and combined solutions is that systems using photonic qubits work over distances up to 143 kilometers, but only 50 percent of the information can be transported. However, it may be possible to use them in conjunction with continuous variable systems, which are 100 percent effective in terms of transmission, yet currently limited to short distances.

The backbone of a quantum Internet

Quantum networks would rely on solid, matter-based quantum memories, where quantum information can be stored and further processed.

“The use of quantum teleportation as a building block for a quantum network depends on its integration with quantum memories,” Pirandola said. “The development of good quantum memories would allow us to build quantum repeaters, therefore extending the range of teleportation. They would also give us the ability to store and process the transmitted quantum information at local quantum computers.”

“This could ultimately form the backbone of a quantum Internet. The revised hybrid architecture will likely rely on teleportation-based long-distance quantum optical communication, interfaced with solid state devices for quantum information processing,” he added.

The human race is likely to require so much computing power in years to come that traditional systems will not be able to keep up. Quantum computing could deal with that problem, and advance our knowledge of teleportation at the same time.

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

UK approves first-ever womb transplants

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 2, 2015 Last Edited: October 2, 2015

Emily Bills

Following the success of a similar procedure in Sweden, British health regulators have given their permission for doctors to produce the first 10 womb transplants in the UK, with the first currently scheduled to take place as part of a clinical trial next spring.

According to Mashable and BBC News, the transplants were approved by the Health Research Authority earlier this week. The wombs will be taken from “brain dead” donors whose hearts are still beating, explained Dr. Richard Smith, a consultant gynecologist at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London who has been involved in the project for nearly two decades.

The operation will cost approximately $60,000 (£40,000) and will take around six hours. Recipients will need to take immunosuppressant drugs while the womb is inside their bodies, but once the baby is born, the womb can be removed. If successful, the first baby to be born using this method in the UK could arrive by early 2018.

Last October, a Swedish woman made history when she was the first person ever to give birth to a child using a transplanted womb from a living mother. That child, Baby Vincent, was born to a 36-year-old mother who received a transplanted womb donated by a friend in her 60s. Since then, three additional infants have been born using similar techniques.

Procedure requires one-year wait before embryo can be implanted

More than 5,000 women in the UK are born without wombs each year, and approximately 300 of them signed up to be candidates for the surgery, Mashable said. Of them, 104 were found to meet the criteria to be selected for the trial – no more than 38 years old, with a healthy bodyweight and in a relationship with a long-term partner.

If a woman is chosen, doctors would monitor her health for a period of one year while she received immunosuppressant drugs in order to prevent her body from rejecting the donor organ, BBC News explained. If she remains in good health, only then will an embryo will be implanted in the womb.

That embryo would arise from a combination of the woman’s own eggs and the partners’ sperm, created using IVF procedures, and barring complications, the baby will be delivered eight months later by caesarean section. Couples will be allowed to try up to two pregnancies before the womb will be removed from the mother.

British Fertility Society chairman Professor Adam Balen said that the decision “opens up the possibility for these women to carry their own pregnancy rather than rely upon IVF with their eggs and surrogacy. The UK team have been working on this for many years and so it is very exciting that they have been given the go ahead to move into clinical practice.”

—–

Feature Image: Thinkstock

Technology

Inventors remind customers, ‘Don’t have sex with humanoid robots’

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: October 2, 2015 Last Edited: October 2, 2015

Emily Bills

And now for something completely different: The company behind a four-foot tall, humanoid robot said to be capable of reading people’s emotions are warning people who purchase the unit not to have inappropriate physical relations with the machine.

Yes, as AFP and USA Today reported, Japanese mobile device manufactured SoftBank, which manufactures and distributes the humanoid robot known as Pepper, has reminded people not to have sex with their robots. Their manual states that owners “must not perform any sexual act” or any other “indecent behavior” on the droid – which thankfully is not, ahem, equipped for such behavior.

Of course, the terms of use also emphasize that the $1,600 machine cannot be used outdoors or to inflict harm on another human being, but it’s the prohibition of hot robot lovin’ that has garnered much of the attention. Violation of the ban on lewd acts could result in punishment, reports indicate, but exactly what that punishment would be remains unclear.

Exactly how far a customer has to go to cross the line into “indecent behavior” is also uncertain, and personally, we at redOrbit would rather not know how far some people would consider pushing the envelope. One thing that is definitely a no-no, however, is tampering with Pepper’s OS to give it a seductive voice. There goes our plans for the weekend. Thanks, SoftBank.

Japan loves the robot, even if they can’t love the robot

All kidding aside, Pepper has been a big hit in Japan, primarily for wholesome purposes such as customer service workers and office assistants in banks, hotels, and retail stores, explained USA Today. One thousand units of the robot went on sale during the months of June, July, and August last year, and in each month, all of them sold out in about one minute.

Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son has stated in the past that the robots can move autonomously and are capable of holding basic conversations with humans. They can also detect emotions and have been programmed to understand feelings and provide an appropriate response. According to Son, Pepper is the first robot ever to be equipped to deal with emotions and to have “a heart.”

USA Today said that it is not clear why Softbank “found it necessary to include the prohibition against sexual acts in the lengthy user agreement,” noting that the company did not reply to their requests for comment on the issue. Perhaps we’re all better off not knowing why such a ban was deemed necessary.

—–

Feature Image: SoftBank