Archaeologists have basically just discovered Stonehenge on steroids

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Christopher Pilny

Archaeologists have discovered the hidden remains of a massive series of prehistoric monoliths, some of which are up to 15 feet large, roughly one mile from the site of Stonehenge in the UK.

According to BBC News, the 4,500-year-old stones may have been part of the largest Neolithic monument ever built in the country, and were found beneath three feet of soil at the Durrington Walls “superhenge” near the site of the iconic monument in Witshire, England.

Researchers working with the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes team, which has been creating an underground map of the area as part of an ongoing five-year project, told the British news outlet that the monument was unique and on “an extraordinary scale.”

Geophysical imaging technology and remote sensing equipment have been used to located more than 90 stones without the need to excavate them, and experts believe that the site had been used for Neolithic rituals. The stones are believed to have been fashioned from sarsen blocks.

Exact purpose of the stones remains unclear

“It’s truly remarkable,” lead researcher Vince Gaffney from the University of Bradford said to NBC News. “We don’t think there’s anything quite like this anywhere else in the world. This is completely new and the scale is extraordinary.” Fellow archaeologist Nick Snashall added that the discovery “adds a whole new chapter to the Stonehenge story.”

Gaffney and his colleagues believe that the monoliths may have been used for religious rites or for rituals associated with the solstice. The stones are located in a circular enclosed surrounded by a ditch and bank, and at nearly a mile across, it is believed to be the largest earthwork of its kind in the UK. Some of the stones appear to have been pushed over to be preserved.

“These things are theatrical. They’re designed to impress and impose; to give the idea of authority to the living and the dead. It really does create a massive impression,” Gaffney said. He added that the monoliths “had significance. These are special places. Societies are mobilized, as with the great cathedrals, to create these things”

While the research team is unsure exactly why the stones were placed, part of Durrington Walls is aligned with the rising sun on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. This may be of some significance, the archaeologists said. Furthermore, this discovery suggests that there may be other, similarly-sized buried stones may be found nearby, Snashall told NBC News.

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Feature Image: A digital simulation of the Durrington Walls site. (Credit: LBI ArchPro, Juan Torrejón Valdelomar, Joachim Brandtner)

Science

Genetic markers link Stone Age farmers to modern Basques

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Modern-day Basques are most closely related to Iberian Stone-Age farmers, not pre-agricultural groups as suggested by previous hypotheses, according to a new genome analysis conducted by an international team led by researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden.

The findings, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reached that conclusion after analyzing DNA obtained from eight early Iberian farmers, the authors explained. In addition, they believe that their findings could also demonstrate that the practice of farming was brought to Iberia by people similar to those migrating to the northern and central parts of Europe, and those farmers mixed with local hunter-gatherer groups.

“The genetic variation observed in modern day Basques is significantly closer to the newly sequenced early farmers than to older Iberian hunter-gatherer samples,” Dr. Torsten Günther, one of the lead authors and a researcher in the Uppsala University Department of Ecology and Genetics, told redOrbit via email.

“Previous studies on such hunter-gatherers have already suggested that Basques are unlikely their direct descendants and that some mixing with other incoming groups would be required,” he added. “The surprising result was that these individuals were quite similar to modern day Basques. Parts of that early farmer population probably remained relatively isolated since then (which we can still see in the distinct culture and language of Basques) while other modern Iberians show signals of later historic events which makes them different from Basques.”

Iberian, European farmers share similar backgrounds

According to the researchers, most of the previous work investigating the transition from small, mobile hunter-gatherer groups to larger, more sedentary agricultural societies have focused on central and northern Europe. Far less is known about how this transition took place in Iberia, they added. As part of their research, the Uppsala-led team looked at the remains of eight people associated with archaeological remains from El Portalón cave in Spain.

El Portalón, which is located in the renowned anthropological site Atapuerca, is “a fantastic site with amazing preservation of artifact material,” study co-lead author Dr. Cristina Valdiosera of Uppsala University and La Trobe University said in a statement. “Every year we find human and animal bones and artifacts, including stone tools, ceramics, bone artifacts and metal objects.”

She said that the site is “like a detailed book of the last 10,000 years, providing a wonderful understanding of this period,” and added that “the preservation of organic remains is great and this has enabled us to study the genetic material complementing the archaeology.”

Thanks to the remains found there, Dr. Günther, Dr. Valdiosera and their colleagues were able to complete the first ever genome-wide sequence data from Iberian ancient farmers, and found that like those found in central and northern Europe, they originated due to expansion from the south then mixed with local hunter-gatherer groups, spreading farming through population expansions.

They also found that later farmers were more genetically similar to the original hunter-gatherers than their predecessors, and by comparing the El Portalón individuals to all modern populations in Spain, they discovered that they are genetically most similar to modern-day Basques. In short, the results show that Basques trace their ancestry to early farming groups from Iberia, according to lead investigator and Uppsala University professor Mattias Jakobsson.

Enabling a look at the genetic landscape of the distant past

The samples they analyzed, Dr. Günther told redOrbit, were about 4,000 to 5,000 years old. The Atapuerca site they were taken from is less than 100 kilometers from today’s Basque country– this allowed them to obtain an idea of the land’s genetic landscape from a few thousand years in the past.

“I think the most exciting signal is the admixture among early farmers and European hunter-gatherers,” he said. “Parts of all farmers’ genomes originate from hunter-gatherer communities they met on their way across Europe. Part of this mixing probably happened in the Balkan region since we see signals shared among farmers all across Europe.”

“We see, however, some local signals in later farmers, which means that Scandinavian farmers mixed with Scandinavian hunter-gatherers while Iberian farmers mixed with Iberian hunter-gatherers,” the Uppsala researcher noted. “The genomic data shows that this process continued over several millennia – in some parts of Europe longer than archaeological records of hunter-gatherer communities exist.”

“This work is part of our general research program utilizing ancient DNA to look into the human past,” Dr. Günther added. “Studying the genome from a single ancient individual, from whom we know when and where he or she lived, can sometimes give us so much more information than sequencing a number of modern individuals. Excavations in the El Portalon cave are continuing and we are expecting to analyze additional and older samples in the near future.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Health

In a committed relationship? Thank grandma!

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Consider them nature’s version of eHarmony: grandmas may be responsible for the formation of pair bonds between men and women, according to research published online in Monday’s edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The study was led by University of Utah anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, who previously came up with the “grandmother hypothesis” to credit grandmothering for our long human lifespan, and used computer simulations to show that it also results in greater number of older, fertile males.

This, in turn, led to the tendency among males to guard a female mate from potential competition and to form a “pair bond” with her instead of mating with a multitude of partners. Grandmothers, she and her colleagues concluded, played an essential role in the development of pair bonds.

“We have much longer lifespans than to our closest evolutionary cousins (great apes) although female fertility ends at about the same age in us and them,” Hawkes told redOrbit via email. “The grandmother hypothesis proposes that human postmenopausal longevity evolved when our ancestors began depending on foods that youngsters couldn’t manage for themselves.”

“With kids dependent after weaning, grandmothers’ help feeding them allowed mothers to have next babies sooner. If a grandmother lived longer, they could help more so their descendants lived longer, “she added. “Longer survival swelled the numbers of old males competing to mate with the still fertile females. That male bias in the fertile ages makes guarding a female a more successful way to father offspring than continually seeking another mate.”

Findings contradict theory based on males providing food

This proposed link between grandmothers and pair bonding contradicts the traditional view that pair bonding was the result of male hunters providing food to females and their children, and that in return they received paternity over offspring so that they could have descendants, she said.

According to Hawkes, the grandma hypothesis counters that the reason that females are able to have babies earlier is not because of the male providing for them, but because the grandmothers help feed weaned children, which helped increase longevity. Thus, her findings suggest that not only do prehistoric grandmas deserve credit for longevity, but committed relationships also.

“This connects human habits of mate guarding and pair bonding (different from our closest evolutionary cousins) with our grandmothering life history,” she told redOrbit. “Most mammals have female-biased sex ratios in the fertile ages because mortality is higher in males.”

“Mortality is higher in men than women too, but that difference is more than overwhelmed by fertility continuing in old men,” Hawkes added. “Mate guarding is found in other animals when mating sex ratios are male-biased. Explanations are the same: when the number of competitors increases, males do better to guard a current mate than continually seek new ones.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Health

‘Shocking’ new treatment for motion sickness relies on electricity

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Researchers from Imperial College London have come up with a new way of curing motion sickness that people are sure to get a “charge” out of: administering a mild electrical current to the scalp to dampen the parts of the brain that processes movement-related signals.

Writing in the journal Neurology, Dr. Qadeer Arshad and his colleagues explained that the root causes of seasickness and other forms of the condition called “kinetosis” remain unknown. One theory is that it has to do with confusing messages sent from the eyes and ears to the brain while a person is in motion, resulting in dizziness, nausea and other symptoms.

Motion sickness complaints are common, and nearly one-third of all people experience extreme symptoms, the researchers reported in a statement. Their new therapy, however, could provide a safe and effective way to treat the condition within the next decade or so, they added.

“We are confident that within five to ten years people will be able to walk into the chemist and buy an anti-seasickness device,” Dr. Arshad explained. “It may be something like a tens machine that is used for back pain. We hope it might even integrate with a mobile phone, which would be able to deliver the small amount of electricity required via the headphone jack.”

“We are really excited about the potential of this new treatment to provide an effective measure to prevent motion sickness with no apparent side effects. The benefits that we saw are very close to the effects we see with the best travel sickness medications available,” he added.

Current helps reduce risk of sickness, speeds recovery

According to United Press International (UPI), the Dr. Arshad’s team recruited volunteers and had them wear electrodes on their scalp for 10 minutes before being exposed to conditions likely to induce motion sickness through a motorized rotating chair. Not only were the participants less likely to get sick than they were without the electrodes, but they also recovered faster.

“The problem with treatments for motion sickness is that the effective ones are usually tablets that also make people drowsy,” explained co-author Professor Michael Gresty. “That’s all very good if you are on a short journey or a passenger, but what about if you work on a cruise ship and need to deal with motion sickness while continuing to work?”

“We are really excited about the potential of this new treatment to provide an effective measure to prevent motion sickness with no apparent side effects. The benefits that we saw are very close to the effects we see with the best travel sickness medications available,” he added.

Dr. Arshad, Professor Gresty and their colleagues are said to be in negotiations with potential industrial partners about developing the device, and they said that the military was particularly interested in the units for dealing with various aspects of their operations. Since the current used in the shock is so small, they are confident that there is little to no risk of harmful side effects.

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Pictured is a volunteer trying out the system. Image credit: Imperial College London

Health

Genetic scoring method could find early Alzheimer’s and dementia risk

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

A newly-discovered genetic signature could help doctors predict the onset of age-related diseases such as dementia or Alzheimer’s years earlier than current methods, researchers from King’s College London report in Monday’s edition of the journal Genome Biology.

In the study, lead author James Timmons, a professor of precision medicine at the university and his colleagues reported the discovery of a set of genes linked to healthy aging in men and women who were 65 years of age. This molecular profile could be used to distinguish those people at the earliest risk of age-related diseases while complementing traditional indicators, they said.

“This signature is a set of 150 molecules that we can measure in any tissue sample from a person, and the results of that test give a measure of how well they are aging,” Timmons told redOrbit via email. “We discovered the 150 markers by studying people who are fit and healthy, aged 65 years, and not doing anything ‘special’ (i.e. they did not exercise, etc.).”

“We measured this in the muscle tissue of the older people and compared their profile with young people. We then looked at the same 150 RNA molecules in skin, brain, blood, etc., and found the same changes as in muscle,” he added. In a statement, he called this “the first robust molecular ‘signature’ of biological age in humans.”

New blood test enables doctors to gauge overall health of seniors

Using this new test to determine the underlying “biological age” of people at or near the same chronological age could enable doctors to change how they make medical decisions for individual patients, Timmonds’ team said. Catching those with the highest risk of developing age-related diseases early is essential to evaluating potential treatments, they added.

The study authors analyzed the RNA of healthy 65-year-olds, then used that information find their group of 150 RNA genes associated with healthy aging. The signature turned out to be a reliable predictor for age-related disease risk when testing RNA from tissues such as human muscles, brain and skin. Combined, they can be used to come up with a “healthy age gene score” which could be used to gauge the overall health of older men and women.

“This is a very new way to think about aging,” Timmonds said. “It is no longer just a number you can tell from your birth certificate. Rather we have a diagnostic for each person’s biological age. This can help them better plan their long term medical care, identify when they should go for health screening and perhaps even how much or little to pay into their pension schemes!”

“This is the first blood test of its kind that has shown that the same set of molecules are regulated in both the blood and the brain regions associated with dementia, and it can help contribute to a dementia diagnosis,” he added in a statement. “This also provides strong evidence that dementia in humans could be called a type of ‘accelerated aging’ or ‘failure to activate the healthy aging program’.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

Researchers discover most distant galaxy ever observed

Written By: Shayne Jacopian

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

Brian Galloway

A team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology has detected what may be the most distant galaxy ever discovered, according to a release from the institution.

Publishing their findings in Astrophysical Journal Letters, Adi Zitrin, a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Scholar in Astronomy, and Richard Ellis, a professor of astrophysics at University College London (and who was formerly a professor at Caltech for 15 years) presented evidence of a galaxy called EGS8p7 that is over 13.2 billion years old.

Earlier this year, NASA made EGS8p7 a candidate for further investigation based on data gathered by the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes. They used the multi-object spectrometer for infrared exploration (MOSFIRE) at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to perform a spectrographic analysis of the galaxy to determine its redshift—how the galaxy’s light changes based on its movement in space.

Redshift is difficult to determine when studying the most distant objects in the universe, due to the way light behaved in the universe’s first half-billion years. As the first galaxies “turned on”, some of their light would have been muffled by clouds of neutral hydrogen atoms—eventually, however, those hydrogen atoms were reionized by the ultraviolet emissions that they previously filtered out. EGS8p7 is so old, however, that theoretically, the researchers should not have been able to observe a Lyman-alpha line from the galaxy.

“If you look at the galaxies in the early universe, there is a lot of neutral hydrogen that is not transparent to this emission,” said Zitrin. “We expect that most of the radiation from this galaxy would be absorbed by the hydrogen in the intervening space. Yet still we see Lyman-alpha from this galaxy.”

“The surprising aspect about the present discovery is that we have detected this Lyman-alpha line in an apparently faint galaxy at a redshift of 8.68, corresponding to a time when the universe should be full of absorbing hydrogen clouds,” Ellis added.

Other possibilities

Of course, other evidence offers a possible explanation.

“Evidence from several observations indicate that the reionization process probably is patchy,” Zitrin said. “Some objects are so bright that they form a bubble of ionized hydrogen. But the process is not coherent in all directions.”

“The galaxy we have observed, EGS8p7, which is unusually luminous, may be powered by a population of unusually hot stars, and it may have special properties that enabled it to create a large bubble of ionized hydrogen much earlier than is possible for more typical galaxies at these times,” adds Caltech graduate student Sirio Belli.

Zitrin notes that these findings may change how we look at the timeline of reionization in the early universe’s hydrogen clouds.

“We are currently calculating more thoroughly the exact chances of finding this galaxy and seeing this emission from it, and to understand whether we need to revise the timeline of the reionization, which is one of the major key questions to answer in our understanding of the evolution of the universe.”

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Image credit: I. Labbé (Leiden University), NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/Eurekalert

Science

US particle collider produces post-Big Bang matter droplets

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Experiments being conducted at the US Department of Energy Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York have produced tiny droplets of primordial state of matter that existed in the moments immediately following the Big Bang, according to published reports.

The matter is known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), Discovery News said, and is predicted to exist in temperatures and densities too extreme for regular matter. Instead, a “perfect liquid” can exist for a very brief period of time before cooling and condensing into ordinary matter.

Physicists using the Brookhaven Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) recreated QGP and demonstrated that it flows like a nearly friction-free liquid. Furthermore, their work confirmed that collisions of smaller particles can also create droplets of this so-called primordial soup when they collide with larger nuclei (only on a much smaller scale).

“These tiny droplets of quark-gluon plasma were at first an intriguing surprise,” Berndt Mueller, associate director for nuclear and particle physics at Brookhaven, said in a statement. “Physicists initially thought that only the nuclei of large atoms such as gold would have enough matter and energy to free the quark and gluon building blocks that make up protons and neutrons.”

However, Mueller added, “the flow patterns detected by RHIC’s PHENIX (Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment) collaboration in collisions of helium-3 nuclei with gold ions now confirm that these smaller particles are creating tiny samples of perfect liquid QGP.”

New results build on previous findings from LHC

Researchers working at RHIC, as well as physicists at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, have been working to recreate the formation of this primordial state of matter for a long time, Discovery News said. Two years ago, LHC physicists also announced the discovery of these quark-gluon plasma droplets after slamming protons into lead ions.

However, the website added, the Brookhaven experiments mark the first time that helium-3, a light ion, has been collided with heavy ions (gold) to produce QGP signatures. This indicated that the substance could be produced at lower energies, giving physicists the opportunity to study this primordial plasma, which has not existed naturally in nearly 14 billion years.

“The idea that collisions of small particles with larger nuclei might create minute droplets of primordial quark-gluon plasma has guided a series of experiments to test this idea and alternative explanations, and stimulated a rich debate about the implications of these findings,” said Jamie Nagle, a physicist at the University of Colorado and co-spokesperson for the PHENIX team.

“These experiments are revealing the key elements required for creating quark-gluon plasma and could also offer insight into the initial state characteristics of the colliding particles,” he added. A paper detailing the team’s findings will be published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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Pictured is the PHENIX detector used to find this special state of matter. Credit: Brookhaven Lab RHIC.

Science

How did ‘harmless’ bacteria kill thousands of antelopes?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Ordinarily harmless microbes are being blamed for the recent mass deaths of between 120,000 and 200,000 antelope in recent months, but the exact reason why these bacteria suddenly became virulent has scientists puzzled, according to recently-published media reports.

At one point, more than 60,000 of a critically endangered type of antelope known as saigas were killed by the bacteria in Kazakhstan over a four-day span, Live Science explained. Those saigas were all part of a single herd, the website said, and as veterinarians and conservationists worked to help those antelope, they heard reports similar population crashes all over the countries.

Geoecologist Steffen Zuther, international coordinator of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative, told Live Science “at first we were not really alarmed” since there had been limited die-offs over the past few years – but that changed when more and more of the creatures started to succumb to the pathogens. The “extent” and “speed” of the diet off is “unheard of,” he said.

According to the Daily Mail, scientists believe that the bacteria, which normally live harmlessly in the animals’ bodies, have wiped up as much as 80 percent of the saiga antelope populations in Kazakhstan in a matter of weeks. Tissue samples taken from the carcasses of the creatures show that the microbes somehow caused extensive bleeding in many of their organs.

Deaths too fast for disease-causing strains of the bacteria

Specifically, necropsies of the antelopes found that toxins produced by Pasteurella and possibly Clostridia bacteria caused the bleeding. Pasteurella, Live Science said, is normally found in the bodies of ruminants such as the saigas and is normally harmless to the creatures. Furthermore, a genetic analysis of the microbes revealed that they had not mutated significantly.

As Zuther said, “There is nothing so special about it. The question is why it developed so rapidly and spread to all the animals.” The bacteria should not have causes diseases in the animals unless they had weakened immune systems, experts said, and if there was a disease-causing strain of the microbe spreading through the herds, the deaths would not have happened so quickly.

“The most likely primary disease appears to be haemolytic septicaemia, caused by an opportunistic infection with the bacterium Pasteurella multocida serotype B, which is naturally found as a latent infection in the upper respiratory tract of saigas and other mammals,” Carlyn Samuel of the Saiga Conservation Alliance told the Daily Mail on Friday.

“Another opportunistic super-infection with the bacteria Clostridium perfringens was also identified in some cases – perhaps a half – and this infection results in the release of massive amounts of lethal toxins into the intestine, which are absorbed into the bloodstream and contribute to a rapid death,” she added. “However, it is not clear what triggered these bacteria suddenly to become virulent.”

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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Space

Secrets of star formation uncovered in nearby Andromeda galaxy

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

In work that will help scientists better understand the formation history of stars in the universe, researchers analyzed images from the nearby Andromeda galaxy and found that it contains roughly the same percentage of newborn stars based on mass as our own Milky Way galaxy.

As part of their research, which was published earlier this summer in the Astrophysical Journal, Daniel Weisz from the University of Washington and his colleagues reviewed more than 2,700 images of young blue star clusters in Andromeda that had been captured using the Hubble Space Telescope. The pictures were assembled from 414 mosaic photographs of the galaxy.

The project, which NASA described as “a unique collaboration between astronomers and ‘citizen scientists,’” determined what percentage of stars has a specific mass within a cluster – also called the Initial Mass Function (IMF). This was the main reason for Hubble’s recent panoramic survey of Andromeda, called the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program.

As part of the PHAT program, nearly 8,000 images of 117 million stars in the galaxy’s disk were taken in near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths, the US space agency said. These observations provided scientists with the first IMF measurements from beyond our galaxy’s own local stellar neighborhood, and enabled them to compare the masses of the different groups.

Heavy elements likely limited in the early universe

By comparing data from a larger-than-ever sample size of star clusters, all of which were about the same distance from Earth (2.5 million light-years), Weisz and his co-authors found that each of the clusters surveyed had similar IMF readings. In addition, much to the researchers’ surprise, the distribution was consistent across types of stars, from blue supergiants to red dwarfs.

The survey also revealed that the brightest, most massive stars in these clusters were about 25 percent less abundant than previous research had predicted. The light from these stars are used by astronomers to weigh distant star clusters and galaxies, as well as to measure how rapidly the clusters are forming stars. The findings suggest that previous mass estimates incorrectly assumed that there were too few faint low-mass stars forming with the brighter, more massive ones.

“This evidence also implies that the early universe did not have as many heavy elements for making planets, because there would be fewer supernovae from massive stars to manufacture heavy elements for planet building,” NASA explained. “It is critical to know the star-formation rate in the early universe – about 10 billion years ago – because that was the time when most of the universe’s stars formed.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Technology

This robot will defend coral reefs in the Australian Starfish War

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Researchers developing robots designed to combat killer starfish and protect an important World Heritage site might sound like the plot of the next SyFy channel movie, but actually it’s the latest attempt by Australian experts to keep the Great Barrier Reef from dying off completely.

According to NBC News and Mashable, one of the greatest threats facing the Great Barrier Reef is a creature known as the crown-of-thorns starfish. The starfish feed on coral, the websites said, and an outbreak may have a “devastating” impact on the health of the heritage site. In fact, some estimates suggest they are responsible for 40 percent of the reef’s recent decline.

To keep things from getting worse, researchers from the Queensland University of Technology have developed the anti-crown-of-thorns starfish robot (COTSbot), which will fight back against the starfish by injecting them with a lethal dose of bile salts. Previously, this task had to be done by humans, but the COTSbot will use a pneumatic injection arm to inject the starfish.

“Human divers are doing an incredible job of eradicating this starfish from targeted sites, but there just aren’t enough divers to cover all the COTS hotspots across the Great Barrier Reef,” Dr. Matthew Dunbabin of the QUT’s Institute for Future Environments said in a statement.

Dunbabin, who created the COTSbot with postdoctoral research fellow Feras Dayoub, said that he sees it as “a first responder for ongoing eradication programs – deployed to eliminate the bulk of COTS in any area, with divers following a few days later to hit the remaining COTS.”

Autonomous robot to begin its hunt this December

The COTSbot, which is said to resemble a tiny sub, is equipped with stereoscopic cameras that give it depth perception, five thrusters to maintain stability, a GPS unit and pitch-and-roll sensors – not to mention the injection arm that will deliver the fatal doses of bile salts to the starfish.

Over the past week, it successfully completed its first sea-based tests of its mechanical parts and navigation system, the developers said. COTSbot was designed to search the reef for up to eight hours at a time completely autonomously and deliver more than 200 injections. By using machine learning, it has been trained to recognize the starfish over the past six months.

“Its computer system is backed by some serious computational power so COTSbot can think for itself in the water,” said Dayoub, a member of the QUT Science and Engineering Faculty. “If the robot is unsure that something is actually a COTS, it takes a photo of the object to be later verified by a human, and that human feedback is incorporated into the robot’s memory bank.”

“We’ve now trained the robot using thousands of images of COTS collected on the reef and the system is proving itself incredibly robust at detecting the COTS,” the researcher added. “That in itself is quite an accomplishment given the complexity of underwater environments, which are subject to varying visibility as well as depth-dependent color changes.”

COTSbot is believed to be the first autonomous underwater vehicle to come equipped with an injection system, and they said that it was designed to operate exclusively within one meter of the seafloor. It will begin policing the reef autonomously in December, the roboticists added.

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Image credit: Queensland University of Technology/NBC News

Science

Is world peace impossible?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

Following an analysis of more than five decades worth on international conflict, researchers from Ohio State University have come to a rather sobering conclusion: the theory that democracies are less likely to go to war with each other than other types of government may be false.

In the study, OSU political science professor Skyler Cranmer and his colleagues investigated the theory first put forth by philosopher Immanuel Kant back in 1795 that the world would be able to enjoy a “perpetual peace” if nations became increasingly interconnected in three ways.

The modern interpretation of those three ways, the researchers explained, are through the spread of democratic states, more joint membership in international governmental organizations (IGOs), and increased economic interdependence through trade. They used a new statistical technique to analyze all three components collectively, as well as how they connected to each other.

They found that while economic trade and participation in IGOs helped keep the peace between countries, democracy did not. Cranmer called the findings “startling… because the value of joint democracy in preventing war is what we thought was the closest thing to a law in international politics. There’s been empirical research supporting this theory for the past 50 years.”

Using Kant’s theory to better predict future international conflict

The study, which appeared in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also developed a new method that the authors claim is 47 percent more accurate than current models at predicting global conflict as much as five or 10 years into the future.

Using their statistical measure, which is known as “multislice community detection”, they looked at all three components of the Kant theory “holistically,” Cranmer said. By doing so, they found “communities of countries that are similar not only in terms of their IGO memberships, or trade agreements, or in their democratic governments, but in terms of all… three elements together.”

The separation between each of these communities, which the authors referred to as “Kantian Fractionalization,” helped predict how many violent conflicts would take place one-to-ten years down the road. The deeper the separation between these communities at any one time, the more dangerous the world becomes and the greater the odds of war.

“You might think of it as the number of cliques the world is split up into and how easy it is to isolate those cliques from one another,” Cranmer said, noting that the association between the higher levels of Kantian fractionalization and more future conflict was so strong that he “threw up my hands in frustration when I first saw the results.”

“I thought we surely must have made a mistake because you almost never see the kind of clean, linear relationship that we found outside of textbooks. But we confirmed that there is this strong relationship,” the OSU professor continued, adding that “being able to have a sense of the global climate in five or 10 years would be extremely helpful from a policy and planning perspective.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Health

Researchers discover possible cause of ‘Stone Man Syndrome’

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Brian Galloway

A team of geneticists believe they may have discovered the reason that people suffering from an unusual condition known as fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP) see their muscles turn to bone, and the breakthrough could lead to a cure for the so-called “Stone Man Syndrome”.
According to Science, Aris Economides, a functional geneticist who heads up the skeletal disease program at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in New York discovered that the painful process happens when a defective gene causes abnormal behavior in some parts of the cell membrane, causing the body’s soft tissue to occasionally and abruptly transform into unneeded bones.
Economides and his colleagues, who published their findings in the latest edition of the journal Science Transitional Medicine, found that the genetic mutation is shared by 97 percent of those with FOP, and as it so happened, the geneticist happened to have a treatment for this previously undiscovered molecular target sitting in a freezer in his laboratory.
Regeneron tested that potential therapy, a type of protein known as a monoclonal antibody, on mice suffering their own version of Stone Man Syndrome. They found that the rodent stopped growing unwanted new bones, and while it remains uncertain that the antibody will be effective on humans, the company is continuing to test it in the hopes of conducting clinical trials.
Unclear if the treatment will be effective on humans
FOP affects approximately two million people worldwide, according to the Huffington Post, and since it can change tissues and ligaments into bone anywhere in a person’s body, it can make the simplest of tasks (such as eating or breathing) exceptionally difficult. Stopping interactions at the cell membrane could provide new hope for treatment for this debilitating disease.
The genetic defect behind Stone Man Syndrome, a mutated version of the gene ACVR1 in which patients produce an overactive form on cell surface protein called a transmembrane receptor, was first discovered in 2006, Science explained. Normally, it responds to a partner molecule called a ligand by sending signals into cells to encourage bone growth.
Six years later, Economides and his colleagues at Regeneron attempted to find out exactly how the defective gene caused such excessive bone growth in FOP. They found that ligands were needed for excess bone to form. through blocking the ligand-receptor interaction in mice. Since there are multiple possible ligands, and not all of them could be blocked in humans, however, they had to find the right one.
They ultimately found that activins, a type of ligand that had not previously been linked to FOP, were responsible for activating the mutant form of ACVR1. Their findings, combined with work conducted at the University of Pennsylvania, ultimately revealed that activin A works differently in people with FOP. While it inhibits ACVR1 receptor activation in healthy people, it spurs bone growth in people with Stone Man Syndrome, according to the study authors.
Using an antibody blocking activin A that was stored in Regeneron’s freezer, the research team was able to prevent an FOP-like disease in mice. However, Frederick Kaplan, of the Penn study, cautioned that it is not clear what the significance of this will be for humans. He added that his team is attempting to verify the findings in both FOP patients and health men and women.
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Image credit: Thinkstock

Space

NASA to use hoverboard tech to build Star Trek-quality tractor beam

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

The tractor beam technology so often depicted in science-fiction movies could soon become a reality thanks to a new partnership between NASA and Arx Pax, a California-based firm that has developed a working hoverboard that functions using magnetic field technology.

The collaboration, the company revealed in a statement, looks to use the same Arx Pax Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA) technology featured in their hoverboards in a proposed micro-satellite capture device that could manipulate and couple cubesats from a distance by creating a magnetic tether between itself and the target object.

Arx Pax officials explained that the capture device they were working on with NASA would draw in and repel satellites at the same time, meaning that it will be able to hold a cubesat at a distance and keep it from moving closer or further away. By doing so, the device can capture and collect a micro-satellite or another object without making physical contact with them.

According to Space.com, the same technology that enables the company’s hoverboards to create and manipulate magnetic fields, thus floating over conductive surfaces, can theoretically be used to manipulate cubesats. Unfortunately, this “space-based hover engine” could not draw in any far off spacecraft like the tractor beams from Star Trek.

What is this witchcraft?

So how does the MFA technology work? According to Ars Pax, it is essentially “the design of more useful magnetic fields.” By combining relatively weak fields in a specific way, it generates a primary electrical field which induces electrical currents in a conductive surface.

These currents create a second magnetic field that repels the first, essentially creating opposing electromagnets in the surface material that provide lift. In addition, objects using MFA are able to move in multiple directions, brake, and rotate without making contact with the surface.

Arx Pax founder Greg Henderson told The Verge that the system has “some limitations,” but “all satellites and spacecraft are made of aluminum, which works just fine.” Also, given the size of the average cubesat and the limitations of the hover engine, the site suggested that the unit would be small, but effective, since small pushes are more effective in the vacuum of space.

The Verge said that the prototype would be developed over the next couple of years. In addition, Henderson said his company expected to be granted an official patent for their hover engine technology in the near future, and that he hoped it would also be used for its original purpose – to help protect buildings against floods and earthquakes.

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Feature Image: Arx Pax

Science

Lost, overgrown sheep ‘Chris’ sets unofficial world record

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

A lost sheep found in the Australian scrubland has set a new unofficial world record after it five shearers teamed up to remove 89 pounds (40 kilograms) worth of wool—equal to about half of its body weight and enough for 30 sweaters—from the overgrown wild merino ram.

According to BBC News and Associated Press (AP) reports, the sheep, affectionately known as Chris, was rescued by officials from the Canberra chapter of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), who determined that the creature faced serious health issues or even death because it had become so excessively wooly during its time in the wild. He was named in honor of a sheep in the “Father Ted” TV sitcom, the AP said.

Canberra RSPCA chief executive Tammy Ven Dange told reporters that she hoped to register the fleece with the Guinness Book of World Records as the heaviest wool haul ever collected as part of a single sheering. The current record of 60.5 pounds (27 kilograms) is held by a New Zealand ram named Shrek, which had spent six years in hiding before being clipped in 2004.

Removing the massive amounts of wool was said to be a delicate operation that required Chris to be sedated, but Ven Dange told the AP that the ram was doing well. “He’s looking really good, he looks like a new man,” she said. “For one thing, he’s only half the weight he used to be.”

Chris is feeling better

Chris was discovered near the Mulligans Flat Woodland Sanctuary outside Canberra by a group of bushwalkers who said they were afraid he would not be able to survive the upcoming summer heat.

On Wednesday, Chris was rescued by the RSPCA transported to Canberra, where he was shorn under anesthetic due to his stress over exposure to humans and the potential pain caused by the heavy wool tearing skin as it was cut off. Ven Dange said that urine trapped in his fleece led to skin burns, and that the ram could have died in weeks had it not been found.

“When we first brought him in yesterday, he was really shy, he was shaking, he would move his head away from people and he could barely get up and walk,” the RSPCA official said to the AP. “The drugs might be wearing off right now, but he’s actually coming to you and actually wants a pat. He’s certainly moving a heck of a lot better,” she added.

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Feature Image: CNN/YouTube

Technology

How a porn site could help you pay for college

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

The next time someone catches you looking at pornographic websites on the Internet, just tell them you’re trying to find a college scholarship – you may accidentally wind up telling the truth, provided you’re visiting the right pages.

Yes, as The Washington Post, the New York Daily News and other media outlets reported this week, Pornhub.com, one of the most visited purveyors of pornographic pictures on the Web, has announced that they will provide one lucky student with a $25,000 scholarship based largely on a homemade video – and no, they don’t mean that kind of homemade video.

The video in question requires the application to discuss what they do to try and make people happy – and no, they don’t mean make people happy (at least, we don’t think so). In addition, they will have to be at least 18 years of age (a typical requirement for Pornhub-related activities, we believe), have a verified 3.2 GPA, and write an essay to be judged by site staffers.

The scholarship is said to be part of the website’s new philanthropic arm, Pornhub Cares, and while officials at the page said that videos containing nudity will be accepted, any scholar who submits a video involving any sexually-explicit acts “will not be seriously considered.”

‘Deceptive marketing tactic’ or legitimate scholarship?

Many feminist groups were not amused by the announcement, quickly expressing concerns that it is nothing more than a ploy to exploit young women who are having a difficult time trying to pay for higher education and calling it “an amazing and deceptive marketing tactic.”

“A lot of younger people don’t realize the consequences and harm of pornography. These videos follow them the rest of their lives and affect their jobs and relationships in the future to have this out there,” National Center on Sexual Exploitation executive director Dawn Hawkins said to the Post. “It’s really unfortunate we’re forcing our kids to sell their bodies to get an education.”

Corey Price, vice president of Pornhub, admitted to the newspaper that the scholarship could be considered controversial given the nature of his website’s business and the debate over the role of pornography in society. He also said that the competition is open to students of any discipline, including “medicine, botany, paranormal psychology, or anything in between.”

Price said that students “don’t have to film a porn to be a winner” but noted that the website was hopeful that applicants would share Pornhub’s “sex positive belief system,” or at very least have a “neutral stance” on the issue of pornography as a whole. “If you’re against pornography and an anti-pornography crusader,” he said, “this is probably not the scholarship for you.”

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Feature Image: Pornhub/Twitter

Health

More male breast cancer patients opt for double mastectomies

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

When actress Angelina Jolie announced that she had a preventative double mastectomy, she “inspired countless women,” according to E! Online. Now, doctors are reporting that men are also increasingly undergoing the procedure, and the trend has them concerned.

New research, published in Wednesday’s edition of JAMA Surgery, examined 6,332 men who had breast cancer and were undergoing surgery and discovered that the number of male patients having both affected and unaffected breast tissue removed had nearly doubled—from 3.0 percent in 2004-2005 to 5.6 percent in 2010-2011.

According to ABC News and The Washington Post, the statistics mirror those reported recently in a study which found that the number of female breast cancer patients undergoing contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) increased from 4.5 percent in 2003 to 11 percent in 2011, and that those trends were especially true in younger, white, privately insured women.

‘No evidence’ to support double mastectomies in males

Ahmedin Jemal, vice president of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the study, told ABC News he was uncertain why there was such a dramatic increase in CPM among men. He added that the findings were “concerning” because “there is no really good evidence” to indicate that undergoing double mastectomies is beneficial to men.

For some women with the BRCA gene mutation, which makes them predisposed to contracting breast cancer, removal of the breasts prophylactically is recommended, Jamal explained. Males that have the BRCA 2 gene, however, have just a seven percent chance of developing cancer in their lifetimes, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) claims.

“I think the increase we see is in the general population is not only high risk people but other women and men are getting the mastectomy,” said Jemal said. He added that the increase may be related to genetic testing, a family history of the disease, or fear than the cancer may return.

Jemal and his colleagues argue that healthcare providers should be aware that the trend to have CPM procedures on unaffected breast tissue is not limited to women, explaining to the Post that doctors should discuss all of the potential benefits, risks, and costs of the surgery with their male patients in order to make sure that they make informed decisions about their care.

“The increase in the rate of this costly, serious procedure with no evidence of survival benefit comes, paradoxically, at a time of greater emphasis on quality and value in cancer care,” he told the newspaper.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

Aside from being hunted by MN dentists: Why are there less lions?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Christopher Pilny

Curious as to why there weren’t more lions and other predators at dozens of wildlife parks in eastern and southern Africa, McGill University PhD student Ian Hatton set out to discover the reasons behind this phenomenon – and came up with some rather startling revelations.

The lack of predators, Hatton and his colleagues learned, had nothing to do with human hunters, and prey was bountiful enough to be able to support a larger lion population. In reality, the team found that even as the quantity of prey increased significantly, the amount of food produced for predators failed to keep pace, causing their populations to only increase slightly.

The discovery suggests that ecosystems possess a previously unrecognized level of structure and function, the study authors explained in a statement. Furthermore, while biologists already knew that regular, mathematical laws governed body functions, this study is the first to suggest that the same types of laws could also exist and govern ecosystems all over the world.

Van Savage, an associate professor of biomathematics at UCLA who was not involved in the study, called the findings “compelling and mysterious… because it is rare to find such strong, systematic patterns in biology, especially at such a large scale as an ecosystem.” The research was published in the September 4 online edition of the journal Science.

Reduced herbivore reproduction rates limits carnivore abundance

In a statement, Hatton explained that the discovery happened by chance during vacations spent at national parks while he was a high school student in Zimbabwe. After beginning his PhD studies at McGill, he returned there to compare communities of African animals in protected ecosystems to investigate the relationship between carnivore numbers and available prey.

He gathered as much animal census data as possible, and when he and his fellow investigators started analyzing the numbers, they found a regular but unexpected pattern: in each park, there appeared to be a consistent but complex predator to prey relationship, and that surprisingly, the number of predators did not directly correspond to the size of the herbivore populations.

Previously, Hatton said, “the assumption has been that when there is a lot more prey, you’d expect correspondingly more predators.” However, as he looked at their figures, he discovered that the ratio of predators to their prey was “greatly reduced” in the lushest ecosystems all over the world, and that the increased crowding resulted in a reduced rate of reproduction amongst prey species, which in turn limited the abundance of their predators.

“These results are striking because they indicate that the quantity of harvestable predators, for example, commercial fisheries that feed on marine prey, increase little despite large increases in prey,” Dr. Just Cebrian, a professor in marine sciences at the University of South Alabama and a senior marine scientist at Dauphin Island Sea Lab said in a statement emailed to redOrbit.

“Clearly more productive ecosystems are inefficient when it comes to transferring energy up the food chain,” he continued, adding that the authors of the paper “generalize this for all ecosystems on Earth and quantify the inefficient rate at which energy is transferred up the food chain.”

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Feature Image: When they started looking at the relation between predators and prey in a range of ecosystems around the world, McGill researchers discovered a predator-prey power law that seems to be consistent across a range of ecosystems. (Credit: Amoury Laporte)

Health

Is ‘gaydar’ real?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Christopher Pilny

Research published in 2008 seemed to confirm what many people already believed was true: that a person has an innate ability to determine if someone else is homosexual or heterosexual simply by looking at photographs of their faces.

On the surface, the paper seems to scientifically confirm the existence of a “gaydar”, right? Not so fast, says William Cox, a University of Wisconsin-Madison psychologist and lead author of a new study which found that gaydar is not only inaccurate, but promotes harmful stereotypes.

“Most people think of stereotyping as inappropriate,” Cox explained in a statement Thursday. “But if you’re not calling it ‘stereotyping’, if you’re giving it this other label and camouflaging it as ‘gaydar’, it appears to be more socially and personally acceptable.”

He and his colleagues challenged the validity of the 2008 study, noting that gay men and women features in the study had higher quality pictures than their straight counterparts. When the quality differences were accounted for, participants were unable to discern the sexual orientations of the people depicted in the image, they wrote in the Journal of Sex Research.

Believing gaydar is real reinforces stereotypes, authors claim

Furthermore, Cox, professors Patricia Devine and Janet Hyde and UW-Madison graduate Alyssa Bischmann explained that another reason that people’s judgments of sexual orientation often end up being wrong is that only a fraction of the population (five percent) is actually gay.

“Imagine that 100 percent of gay men wear pink shirts all the time, and 10 percent of straight men wear pink shirts all the time,” the UW psychologist explained. “Even though all gay men wear pink shirts, there would still be twice as many straight men wearing pink shirts. So, even in this extreme example, people who rely on pink shirts as a stereotypic cue to assume men are gay will be wrong two-thirds of the time.”

In one of their experiments, the research team provided different explanations of gaydar to each of three different groups. One was told that it was real, one that it was a stereotype and one was not given a definition at all. The group that believed it was real tended to assume that men were gay based on stereotypical cues than the other groups, they discovered.

“If you tell people they have gaydar, it legitimizes the use of those stereotypes,” Cox explained, noting that he hoped his research counteracted the gaydar myth and exposed it as something that is more harmful than many people realize. “Recognizing when a stereotype is activated can help you overcome it and make sure that it doesn’t influence your actions.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

NASA: We want to tether a spacecraft to a comet and fly through space

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Christopher Pilny

NASA is reportedly working on a new spacecraft that borrows a page from Spider-Man’s book, using a harpoon and a long tether to swing from one asteroid or comet to another and using the kinetic energy of those objects to enter orbit and complete landing maneuvers.

The project, known as Comet Hitchhiker, is being funded through the US space agency’s NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts) program and would use its harpoon to secure a foothold on a comet or asteroid. Once it is attached, it would release some of its tether while applying the brake in order to capture kinetic energy from its target, according to Space.com.

Next, the Comet Hitchhiker would land by reeling in the line, which would be approximately 62 miles to 620 miles (100 to 1,000 kilometers) long. Using the harvested kinetic energy to quickly collect the tether would propel the probe away from the object and towards its next target. Most importantly, this would enable the spacecraft to travel without using propellant.

In a statement, Masahiro Ono, principal investigator of the project from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, explained that, “This kind of hitchhiking could be used for multiple targets in the main asteroid belt or the Kuiper Belt, even five to 10 in a single mission.”

Comet-catching concept similar to reeling in a fish

The technique, the agency explained, is similar to fishing: Once you get a bite from a big fish, you initially release some of the fishing line with moderate tension instead of keeping it tight. Provided you have enough line, the boat you are on will ultimately catch up with the fish.

Similarly, once the Comet Hitchhiker hooks its “fish” and matches velocity to that asteroid or comet, it lands by reeling in its tether and descending gently. Once its ready to move on, it uses its harvested energy to quickly retrieve its tether, which accelerates it away from the object it is currently on. This technique could help it reach distant objects fairly quickly, Ono said.

In fact, the research team calculated that using zylon and kevlar, the spacecraft would be capable of executing a velocity change of nearly one mile per hour (1.5 kilometers per hour), which Ono explained is “like going from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under seven minutes.” A 6.2 mile per second (10 km per second) speed is possible, but would require advanced materials such as a carbon nanotube tether and a diamond harpoon, the Comet Hitchhiker team noted.

Of course, as Space.com pointed out, this is all merely speculation at this point. The project is in Phase I NIAC study at this point, having received a grant of about $100,000 to begin initial work over a nine-month period. The next steps for the Comet Hitchhiker team, NASA said, are to run additional simulations and attempt to cast a mini-harpoon at a simulated comet or asteroid.

Health

Can fitness boost testosterone levels?

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Emily Bills

Testosterone is often associated with aggression and all things male (wrongly), but it actually plays a lot of important roles in the bodies of men and women besides those things—like maintaining bone density and cognitive ability. Low testosterone is associated with a host of problems, ranging from insomnia to depression, but luckily there may be an easy fix: exercise.

There are many studies linking exercise to testosterone increases, but especially in cases of exercise for weight loss. For example, in a 2009 study of 32 men with low testosterone, 52 weeks of diet and exercise improved testosterone levels in all men—both those who were and those who weren’t undergoing testosterone replacement therapy.

In terms of exercise, resistance training is especially associated with boosts in testosterone levels. In one study, 23- and 63-year-old men underwent a progressive 12-week resistance strength-training program. Both groups showed significantly increased testosterone levels by the end (although it was more prevalent in the young men). Further, a 2003 study found that, in 18 untrained males, after three bouts of resistance exercise, their testosterone significantly increased after each round.

There’s always a catch

Exercise too much, or go at too high an intensity, and you could end up lowering your testosterone by accident. Like in one study, which found that running a marathon nearly halves testosterone levels. So it’s best to exercise in moderation—and to consult your doctor first.

If you’re having sexual performance issues and don’t know if testosterone is to blame, a recent study discovered that getting regular exercise could help. For every additional 30 minutes a day the men in the study spent in moderate exercise, their odds of developing erectile dysfunction dropped 43 percent. But in either case, whether it’s low testosterone or erectile dysfunction, supplementing testosterone has not been shown to help.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

How your brain handles multitasking

Written By: Brett Smith

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

Emily Bills

By examining the brain’s various neural networks, a team of American and German researchers has shed new light on the neurological underpinnings of our ability to multitask, according to a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study focused on processes in the brain’s frontal cortex, an area linked with control over thoughts and decisions. The scientists revealed the degree to which frontal cortex networks reconfigure while alternating from task to task surmises people’s cognitive flexibility.

The study team said they focused on the interconnections between the networks indicated by synchronized activity, as opposed to examining a single region in the brain. Using fMRI to image the brain, the team can gauge which elements of the brain are “talking” to one another as their volunteers execute various tasks. This mapping of the neural network reconfigurations supplies a more holistic view of the way the brain functions.

“We tried to understand how dynamic flexibility of brain networks can predict cognitive flexibility, or the ability to switch from task to task,” study author Danielle Bassett, a bioengineering expert at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a news release. “Rather than being driven by the activity of single brain areas, we believe executive function is a network-level process.”

In an earlier study, Bassett and her colleagues found that those who could more rapidly “disconnect” their frontal cortices performed better on a task that involved pushing keys associated with color-coded notes on a screen. The high level decision-making linked with the frontal cortex wasn’t valuable in playing the brief sequences of notes for this study, so those who employed this part of the brain were basically overthinking a straightforward problem.

Reconfiguration only one step in switching tasks

In the new study, researchers had participants switch between a working memory task intended to engage the frontal cortex and a control task. The easy task included pushing the corresponding button as a series of numbers showed up on a screen one by one. The hard task also included a series of numbers on a screen, but volunteers had to press the button that corresponded to the number that showed up two places back in the series every time they saw a new one.

As participants performed their task, the team map how volunteers’ brain activities changed during each part of the working memory task, each part of the control task, and parts in between where volunteers switched gears.

“The nodes in the network that are most involved in reconfigurations are cognitive control areas in the frontal cortex,” Bassett said. “More flexibility within the frontal cortex meant more accuracy on the memory task, and more consistent connectivity between the frontal cortex and other regions was even more predictive.”

The study team said their findings suggest reconfiguration is only one of many processes involved in successful task switching.

“It doesn’t account for a huge amount variance,” Bassett said, “but it suggests that this kind of reconfiguration is a fundamental aspect of cognitive flexibility.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

Why does bacon smell so good?

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Emily Bills

Mmmmm. Sizzling bacon. Just the name conjures up that thick, sweet and salty aroma. You make it for breakfast and the whole house smells like bacon-y goodness until lunch. But why is this?

The main reason why bacon smells so good is thanks to something known as the Maillard Reaction. In simple terms, this reaction happens when sugar and protein are mixed together in a temperature over 285 degrees Fahrenheit—and it’s responsible for some of the tastiest foods around, because the reaction causes foods to brown. Meat, marshmallows, toast, and even chocolate rely on it.

Bacon contains sugars used for flavor, so it too undergoes the Maillard reaction. When it does, the delicious browning-meat scent mixes with the melting-fat aroma and is released into the air, probably flying straight past your nose and into your stomach. The aroma consists of a lot of organic chemical compounds, but apparently the ones that are responsible for the scent of meat are pyrazines, pyridines, and furans.

This scent plays right into our biology. Bacon has some protein, but is mostly high in fat and salt—two things ancient humans needed to survive. They needed to crave these things, to savor them, because otherwise they might not seek out enough of them to survive. Further, our ancestors learned to cook their meat—which reduced the number of deathly parasites and pathogens in the meat, breaking down food to a point where their bodies didn’t have to expend as much energy to digest it. So at some point in the past, the human body evolved to seek the smell of cooked meat, associating it with being safe (and delicious).

Of course, a lot of people worry about eating too much bacon, so there is a new alternative coming down the line—bacon-flavored seaweed, which is reportedly twice as healthy as kale, and vegan. Of course, it’s genetically modified, but even if that is harmful, sometimes bacon is just worth it.

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Feature image: Thinkstock

Health

Nutritionist: What’s the real deal with carbs?

Written By: Christopher Pilny

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

Christopher Pilny

Carbohydrates are a mysterious subject. They come into and out of food fashion just as any good ’80s outfit would. Fashion aside, how does a registered nutritionist and dietitian feel about carbohydrates? Should we forever banish the bread bowl and turn away the creamy goodness of mac-and-cheese? Here is the simple argument from the expert.
A good place to start on the hefty subject is to understand the chemical makeup of all carbohydrates. A carb is any type of food component that is composed of sugar molecules. The single sugar molecule can be in the form of glucose (the most abundant form), fructose (found in fruits and the sweetest form), or galactose (found in milk). These three single molecules bond to form larger compounds: starch, glycogen (the animal form on starch), and fiber.
Most individuals think that a carbohydrate is only those food items that contain flour or sugar. These foods only make up about half of the carbohydrate list. Carbs comprised 75% of all of the food groups. Here are the carbohydrate food groups:

Fruits
Starchy Vegetables
Dairy
Grains
Sweets

The main role of carbohydrates in our body is the creation and storage of energy. When carbs are consumed, the beta cells in the pancreas release insulin in order to carry out one of four functions: promote uptake of glucose to muscle and adipose tissue, convert glucose into the glycogen and store in the liver or muscle cells, promote building of protein, or conversion to fat in adipose tissue.
The Carb Good Side
Glucose molecules (carbohydrate molecules) are extremely efficient in providing our bodies with energy. The nervous system and red blood cells generally use glucose as their primary energy source. Secondly, glucose is very good at converting into other materials (protein and fat) when appropriate. This conversion is especially useful during times of starvation. Glucose (sugar) is converted to fatty acids and put into storage for future use. Lastly, carbs stimulate hormonal regulation in areas like the adrenal glands. This function is especially important for women.
The Carb Bad Side
The consumption of carbohydrates in moderate amounts are a very healthy component to any diet. However, consumption of high or erratic amounts of carbohydrate (in any form) lead to possible unwanted weight gain, deregulation of hormonal balance, and increased risk for insulin resistance and/or diabetes. When carbohydrates are overconsumed, insulin will signal the metabolic system to convert the glucose molecules to fatty acids. This fatty acids are then put storage in adipose tissue. It is important to note that this conversion is irreversible.
Secondly, when carbohydrate intake is erratic, the beta cells in the pancreas have a much harder job of monitoring insulin release which causes a cascading effect on other key hormones such as cortisol.
Lastly, overconsumption and/or erratic consumption of carbohydrates over time will lead to cellular burn out. A great analogy is that when consumption of carbohydrates is not controlled the pancreas is asked to run a marathon daily with burst of sprints every few hours. This is not sustainable for long periods and will lead the insulin resistance and diabetes.
All carbohydrates are not all unhealthy; however, all carbohydrates can cause negative effects if overconsumed. Here is simple advice on carb intake:
Eat small amounts of carbohydrates at one time. Carbs should take up no more than 25% of your meal.
Always pair your carbohydrate intake with a clean protein and, or fat source.
Stick to plant based, low-glycemic carbs when possible.
Limit your grain and fruit intake to 1 – 2 servings per day.
Carbohydrate Go-To’s:
Sweet potatoes
Yams
Pumpkin
Butternut squash
Plantain
Quinoa
Brown rice
Black rice
Wild rice
Vegetable Pastas: black bean or red lentil
Gluten-free pastas: brown rice, quinoa
Lentils: red, green
Beans: chickpeas, cannelloni, black, pinto, kidney
For a bonus, here are some great lower glycemic fruit that fit perfectly as a snack when paired with nuts, nut butter, or cheese (raw, grass-fed cheese if possible).
Blackberries
Cranberries
Lemons
Limes
Raspberries
Strawberries
Avocados
Coconuts
Olives
Pineapples
Tangerines
Grapefruits
Pomegranates
Blueberries
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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Bioscience firm offers injured athletes stem-cell treatments

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

In September 2011, then-Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning made headlines when he travelled to Europe to receive adult stem cell therapy for a neck injury, and while such therapy was unusual for athletes at the time, reports indicate it is becoming increasingly common.
A story published earlier this week by USA Today reports that “several” current and former pro athletes, including ex-Pittsburgh Steelers running back Merril Hoge, have recently received stem cell treatments at New York-based IntelliCell BioSciences to help repair injuries which would have otherwise required them to undergo surgery and miss considerable playing time.
The treatment they receive is known as “The Soup”, the newspaper reported. For $15,000, pro athletes can receive a mixture of human cells including stem cells derived from their own fat with the hopes that it will be able to repair their damaged knees, elbows, hips, and necks. James Andrews, the foremost sports doctor in the US, even serves as a consultant to the company.
Stem cell treatment is big business these days, and not just in professional sports, University of California-Davis stem cell expert Paul Knoepfler told USA Today. Knoepfler said that there are now nearly 200 stem cell clinics in the US, or four times more than there were five years ago.
But does stem cell therapy work, and is it even legal in the US?
That’s the catch, the newspaper said. Experts interviewed for the piece said that they are not 100 percent certain that it works, or that such treatments are even allowable under current Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. In 2012, the FDA issued a warning to IntelliCell, telling them that their product should be considered a new drug and be subjected to clinical trials.
IntelliCell founder and chairman Steven Victor told USA Today that is company is following the rules, unlike many of his competitors, because his lab is registered with US regulators. The firm is also being sued by two former employees, claiming that false statements regarding the effectiveness of their product and are manipulating data to make it look more favorable.
Even so, NFL players and other athletes continue to use stem cell treatments in the hopes that it will help them heal faster and avoid surgery. The newspaper reports that an unnamed defensive back sought treatments at a Florida clinic to help a torn tendon above his kneecap heal before the start of training camp, and New York Mets pitcher Bartolo Colon credits the therapy with saving his career by revitalizing his pitching arm. There are several other, similar stories.
Joseph Purita, the doctor who treated Colon and the defensive back, called professional athletes “a good bellwether of whether these really work or not… You have people who are making millions of dollars a year. They’re going to do their research – them and their agents. They’re not going to do something that’s bogus and doesn’t work. Why do you think athletes have embraced this? Because they know it works. It’s as simple as that.”
Hoge said that, thanks to the stem cell treatments, his injured elbow felt “completely better in six weeks versus six months.” NFL linebacker Rolando McClain, who received stem cells from an Alabama clinic to treat a high-ankle sprain after the 2011 season, told USA Today that he felt better overall afterwards and that the injury “healed up faster than what was expected.”
However, the doctor who treated McClain, Jason Williams, no longer provides such services in the US, and moved his clinic to Bogota, Columbia after the FDA took action against him. As he told USA Today, the agency took issue with him using fat-derived cells for his treatment and forced him to sign an agreement that he would no longer provide stem cell therapy in the US. The FDA declined the newspaper’s request to comment on Williams’ case.
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Feature image: Thinkstock

Science

Is the mother of all hurricanes about to hit the US?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

Just days after the US marked the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the most destructive storm of its kind ever to make landfall in the States, scientists warn that there’s a possibility that even stronger storms could be on the way.

Dr. Ning Lin, a civil and environmental engineer from the University of Princeton, and Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at MIT, reported Monday in the journal, Nature Climate Change, that Tampa, Florida is one of three cities that could be hit by a theoretical storm they refer to as a “gray swan” – a rare, highly-destructive but predictable tropical cyclone.

Tampa, along with Cairns, Australia and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, currently face a “larger-than-expected” threat of grey swan tropical cyclones, and those events could trigger storm surges of between four- to six-meters in size, the Washington Post said.

While the odds of these storms occurring are currently as little as 1-in-10,000, climate change could increase the chances, especially towards the end of the century. Not only that, but global warming could cause these “gray swan” cyclones to become more intense as well, with surges potentially exceeding 11 meters in Tampa and 7 meters in Dubai possibly by 2100.

Be prepared, but don’t panic just yet

If this sounds like a catastrophic, doom-and-gloom disaster movie scenario waiting to happen, the authors told the Post that there is no need to panic just yet. The purpose of the research, said Emanuel, was use mathematical calculations and computer models “to raise awareness of what a very low probability, very high impact hurricane event might look like.”

Their simulations generated grey swan storms that combined a high-resolution hurricane model with a global climate model, allowing them to create a simulated world filled with a vast array of different types of storms. By creating hundreds of thousands of storm events, Emanuel said that the researchers ensured that they would be creating “hurricanes that are unlike anything you’ve seen in history.”

Previous research conducted by Emanuel found that a theoretical “hypercane” with winds nearing 500 miles per hour is possible in scenarios where an asteroid hits the Earth, causing the ocean waters to heat far beyond normal temperatures, the Post said. As was the case with that scenario, the possibly of a highly-destructive grey swan storm decimating Tampa or any other city is extremely rare, but the research clearly shows that the possibility does exist.

“A storm surge of 5 meters is about 17 feet, which would put most of Tampa underwater, even before the sea level rises there,” Emanuel told the Daily Mail, adding that the Florida city has not experienced a large hurricane since 1921. “Tampa needs to have a good evacuation plan, and I don’t know if they’re really that aware of the risks they actually face.”

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Feature image: Hurricane Katrina from space. Credit: NASA.

Science

Mysterious, pyramid-shaped stairs discovered in Jerusalem

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Christopher Pilny

Researchers from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) have discovered a mysterious flight of pyramid-shaped, podium-like stairs located next to the destroyed Second Temple in the City of David, an archaeological site of ancient Jerusalem, various media outlets are reporting.

According to Discovery News and United Press International (UPI), the staircase is made from large ashlar (finely cut) stones and is believed to be approximately 2,000 years told. It was found alongside a stepped street which once led Jewish pilgrims from an ancient ritual bath, the Pool of Siloama, to the temple, and was likely built in the first half of the first century AD.

Archaeologists explained that they have never encountered a structure like this before, and thus are not certain what the purpose of the staircase might have been. There are references to stone platforms used for auctions or as ancient lost-and-found centers in rabbinic texts, but there have never been any structures like this found in Jerusalem or anywhere else in ancient Israel.

“The structure exposed is unique,” Nahshon Szanton and Dr. Joe Uziel, the archaeologists who led the excavation on behalf of the IAA, said in a statement. “To date such a structure has yet to be found along the street in the numerous excavations that have taken place in Jerusalem and to the best of our knowledge outside of it. For this reason, its exact use remains enigmatic.”

Pottery vessels, glassware also found at the site

Szanton and Uziel added that the unusual staircase “is built along the street in a place that is clearly visible from afar by passers-by making their way to the Temple,” and that they believe that it was “a kind of monumental podium that attracted the public’s attention when walking on the city’s main street,” possibly for government announcements, news or street preaching.

The IAA also reported finding dozens of whole pottery vessels, stone vessels and glassware at the foot of the pyramid-shaped staircase. The excavation site is the Jerusalem Walls National Park in the City of David, they said, and the work is being carried out in cooperation with the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the City of David Foundation.

The podium was dated to the Second Temple Period, which ran from 538 BC to 70 AD, and the street which it is located next to was one of the largest construction projects built in Jerusalem in this era. The Second Temple period ended when the city was sacked and the temple plundered by the Romans, who used the treasures of King Herod the Great to build the Colosseum.

“Given the lack of a clear archaeological parallel to the stepped-structure, the purpose of the staircase remains a mystery,” Szanton and Uziel said. “It is certainly possible the rabbinical sources provide valuable information about structures, such as this, although for the time being there is no definitive proof.”

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Feature Image: Shai Halevy/IAA

Science

The first mass extinction was caused by animals, not catastrophe

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

It wasn’t a massive asteroid crashing into the Earth’s surface or the eruption of an enormous volcano that led to the first known mass extinction, according a new study – rather, the evolution of complex biological organisms capable of altering their environment was the cause.

The research, which was published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, analyzed the events that resulted in the extinction of the world’s first multicellular lifeforms, the Ediacarans, roughly 540 years ago. The authors of that paper concluded that early animals caused dramatic changes to the prehistoric environment that led to the Ediacarans’ demise.

Simon Darroch, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University, and his colleagues believe that their research has provided the first quantitative palaeoecological evidence suggesting that evolution, along with ecosystem engineering and biological interactions, was the root cause of the first mass extinction of complex life.

The rise and fall of the Ediacarans

For more than three billion years, the only type of life that existed on Earth was single-celled microogranisms. Eventually, some of those microogranisms began to photosynthesize, which resulted in the production of oxygen, and since oxygen was toxic to them, they had to develop new ways to protect themselves while harnessing this new energy source.

This additional energy allowed them to adopt multicellular forms, the researchers explained in a statement, and about 600 million years ago, there was a warm period following a prolonged spell of glaciation that resulted in the evolution Ediacarans, which Darroch called “a mysterious bunch of proto-animals” that may not be related to modern animals at all.

“However, whatever the Ediacarans were, our new data shows that their communities become stressed, and their diversity drops, coincident with the appearance of modern-looking animals,” he explained to redOrbit in an email. “The evidence suggests that extinction happened through ‘ecosystem engineering.’ Modern animals (unlike the Ediacarans’ burrow into the sediment, and exhibit a variety of novel behaviors, such as predation and filter feeding.”

These new behaviors, Darroch said, “fundamentally altered” the environment, and since the Ediacarans were “adapted to the environmental status-quo,” they wound up going extinct. The changes made to the environment by the development of modernly-recognizable animals made survival increasingly difficult for the Ediacarans, until they ultimately met their demise.

“The nature of what the Ediacara biota were is very controversial,” added study co-author Marc Laflamme, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences at the University of Toronto. “Some are likely primitive animals, while others were most likely direct competitors with animals, but ultimately unrelated. What our research demonstrates is that the evolution of complex animals… drastically altered their environments and shifted how nutrients and oxygen were cycled within the water column and underlying sediments.”

Findings offer lessons for modern-day complex animals

As part of their research, Darroch and his colleagues conducted an extensive geochemical and paleoecological analysis of a site in southern Nambia that is home to the youngest community of Ediacarans discovered to date. They found a much lower diversity of species and evidence of increased ecological stress than observed at comparable sites 10-15 million years older.

The presence of an increased diversity of tracks and burrows found at the site presented a link between the evolution of the earliest complex animals and the extinction of the Ediacarans, and the study authors worked extensively to eliminate factors such as a lack of essential nutrients at the site as a possible cause of the mass extinction event.

“These findings illustrate that ‘ecosystem engineers,’ organisms that can fundamentally alter their environments can cause mass extinction events; you don’t necessarily need a meteorite impact, or an episode of mass volcanism to wipe out large swathes of life,” said Darroch, noting that there are parallels with these findings and modern-day Earth.

“Unlike all other ‘mass extinctions,’ believed to be caused by catastrophic events like major climate change, poisonous oceans, or giant bolide impacts, this first mass extinction was biologically driven,” Laflamme told redOrbit via email. “Extensive filter feeding and burrowing outcompeted the dominant organisms (i.e. the Ediacara biota) and changed the ecosystems at that time, thus paving the way for animals as we know them.”

“Humans are incredibly powerful ‘ecosystem engineers’ and yet have been slow to accept that they can cause ecological crises (such as a mass extinction event), even while the evidence is mounting up in front of our eyes,” he told redOrbit. “Our study provides an example of where evolutionary innovation (i.e., the appearance of modern animal groups) appears to have caused the mass extinction of the Ediacarans. By extension, it shows us that humans are certainly capable of driving a mass extinction in the future.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

How wasp venom could help cure cancer

Written By: Shayne Jacopian

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

Emily Bills

This possible new tool for cancer treatment is absolutely terrifying—wasps.

Yes, we’re talking about those things that swarm around the nectar feeders made for humming birds and that can sting you as many times as they want. They’re the most terrifying of flying and stinging insects.

Well, not just any wasp can help cure cancer. One wasp in particular, the Brazilian social wasp, Polybia paulista, produces venom containing an ingredient called MP1 that can selectively kill cancer cells without negatively affecting normal cells, according to a release from Cell Press.

How the heck does this work?

The toxin destroys cancer cells by creating holes in the lipids abnormally distributed on their surfaces. This creates holes in the cells that allow various subcellular parts needed for the cell’s processes to simply leak out.

In normal cells, phospholipids called phosphatidylserine and phosphatidylethanolamine (we’ll just call those PS and PE, respectively) are located in the inner membrane, facing the inside of the cell. In cancer cells, however PS and PE are located in the outer membrane, and face outward, leaving cancer cell lipids vulnerable to the MP1 toxin.

“Cancer therapies that attack the lipid composition of the cell membrane would be an entirely new class of anticancer drugs,” says the co-senior author of the study, Paul Beales, of the University of Leeds in the UK. “This could be useful in developing new combination therapies, where multiple drugs are used simultaneously to treat a cancer by attacking different parts of the cancer cells at the same time.”

The researchers put this theory to the test by creating artificial membranes containing different combinations of PE and PS, exposing them to MP1. They found that MP1 sticks better to membranes with PS present, by a factor of seven to eight. Additionally, the presence of PE helped MP1 to more quickly bore holes in the cell membrane, increasing hole size by a factor of 20 to 30.

“Formed in only seconds, these large pores are big enough to allow critical molecules such as RNA and proteins to easily escape cells,” said João Ruggiero Neto of Sãu Paulo State University in Brazil, the other co-senior study author. “The dramatic enhancement of the permeabilization induced by the peptide in the presence of PE and the dimensions of the pores in these membranes was surprising.”

In the future, the researchers plan to experiment with the MP1 toxin’s amino acid sequence, in order to improve the toxin’s selectivity and distinction between healthy and cancerous cells.

“Understanding the mechanism of action of this peptide will help in translational studies to further assess the potential for this peptide to be used in medicine,” Beales adds. “As it has been shown to be selective to cancer cells and non-toxic to normal cells in the lab, this peptide has the potential to be safe, but further work would be required to prove that.”

These findings are published in the Biophysical Journal.

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Feature image: Prof. Mario Palma/Sao Paulo State University

Health

New transplant technology revives hearts after death

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Emily Bills

In the U.S., over 122,000 people sit on waiting lists for organ transplants, and 18 of them will die every day. However, a new medical device could vastly improve their odds by infusing certain organs with oxygen and nutrients, meaning they can last longer before reaching people on the list—but also meaning organs can be taken from entirely new kinds of donors.

In terms of transplants, there are two ways to die—your brain stops working, or your heart does. These distinctions are important, because organs can only come from braindead patients; by the time the heart stops on its own, it’s already starved of oxygen and its muscle cells are dying (and the rest of the organs are, too). In braindead patients, the organs can be cooled down before they are stopped, drastically cutting down cell death before they reach a person in need.

But a company called Transmedics from Massachusetts has developed something called the Organ Care System—and it doesn’t only keep hearts, lungs, kidneys, and livers alive longer, but it can reanimate hearts. So far, it’s been used successfully in at least 15 cases between the United Kingdom and Australia; clinical trials are still being run in the U.S.

How it works: The heart (or other organ) is put in a sterile chamber with the temperature and humidity carefully controlled. The organ donor’s blood is supplied into the heart, which the machine infuses with oxygen and nutrients to keep the heart alive and beating until it can reach the new patient.

But according to MIT, the Papworth Hospital in the United Kingdom (where the device has been used eight times), has managed to figure out a slightly different way to apply the device. In seven of the cases, the patients were severely brain-damaged and on life support. After being taken off, their circulation stopped naturally, leading to circulatory death. The team then waited five minutes before clamping off blood supply to the brains and restarting the hearts—while they were still inside the donors.

Share the love: More hearts will be available

In this way, the condition of the heart was surveyed, and the other organs were kept alive as well. Then, the hearts were removed and placed in the device for transport to patients. These results of these trials are, as of yet, unpublished.

However, this now allows those who didn’t die from brain problems to become donors as well, and it keeps their organs alive much longer. In the case of hearts, this means the supply could be increased by 15 to 30 percent. This is important everywhere, but especially so in the U.K.; there are only 180 hearts available a year, as according to Stephen Large of the Papworth Hospital. In the U.K., very few people experience brain death instead of heart death thanks to their prohibitions against firearms. (There are twice as many heart donors per capita in the U.S.)

Of course, this could raise some ethical questions about what counts as truly dead and how long to wait before taking organs—but as Robert Truog, a medical ethicist at Harvard University, said, “They are dying and it’s permissible to use their organs. The question is whether they are being harmed, and I would say they are not.”

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Feature image: Thinkstock

Gif credit: A donated heart beats while being supplied with blood and oxygen. MIT

Health

Robotic exoskeleton helps paralyzed man voluntarily walk

Written By: Brett Smith

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

Emily Bills

On Tuesday, UCLA researchers announced the successful testing of a robotic exoskeleton system that has allowed a man paralyzed from the waist down to take thousands of steps.

Along with the robotic device, volunteer Mark Pollock was also helped by a novel non-invasive spinal stimulation method that does not call for surgery. His ability to take steps also triggered health benefits, such as enhanced cardiovascular functionality and muscle tone.

Pollock lost his vision in 1998 and later became the first blind person to race to the South Pole. However, during 2010, Pollock dropped from a second-story window and suffered a spine injury that left him disabled.

The procedure utilized a robotic device that captures biometric data, enabling the study team to find out just how much the subject was moving his limbs on his own, rather than being helped by the device. Pollock received a few weeks of physical training and one week of training with the non-invasive spinal stimulation.

Encouraging results

“In the last few weeks of the trial, my heart rate hit 138 beats per minute,” Pollock said in a UCLA news release. “This is an aerobic training zone, a rate I haven’t even come close to since being paralyzed while walking in the robot alone, without these interventions. That was a very exciting, emotional moment for me, having spent my whole adult life before breaking my back as an athlete.”

Biometric data showed Pollock was positively flexing his left knee joint and elevating his left leg. During and after the electric stimulation, he was able to willingly work with the robot during movement; it wasn’t just the robotic device carrying out all the work.

“For people who are severely injured but not completely paralyzed, there’s every reason to believe that they will have the opportunity to use these types of interventions to further improve their level of function. They’re likely to improve even more,” said V. Reggie Edgerton, a UCLA professor of integrative biology and physiology, neurobiology, and neurosurgery. “We need to expand the clinical toolbox available for people with spinal cord injury and other diseases.”

Observers commented that due to the complexity of the central nervous system, a mix of different interventions is required achieve functional recovery for those coping with paralyzed limbs.

“This is a great example of a therapeutic approach that combines two very different modalities—neuromodulation and robotic assist devices—to achieve a result that could not be realized with either approach alone,” said Grace Peng, director of National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering’s Rehabilitation Engineering Program. “This multi-device approach, much like multi-drug therapy, may ultimately benefit patients with impaired mobility in a wide variety of rehabilitation settings.”

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Feature image: UCLA/YouTube

Technology

Swan necks inspire new ways to keep drone cameras steady

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

The ability of whooper swans to perform complex acrobatic maneuvers while still keeping their heads completely skill has inspired a team of researchers from Stanford University to analyze the mechanics of their necks and use that information to improve drone camera stability.

David Lentink, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford, used high-speed video footage and computer models to discover that these swans use a complex neck structure similar in nature to a car suspension to keep their heads stabilized. These findings helped them design a new, steadier camera suspension system for use on drones.

As the study authors report in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, swans and other types of birds can improve their vision by stabilizing their head position relative to their surroundings, while their bodies move up and down as they flap their wings in flight. While scientists have studied the neck morphology of stationary birds, this marks the first time that any were able to analyze these mechanics while the birds were actually in flight.

To do so, Lentink’s team compared high-speed footage of a whooper swan (Cygnus cygnus) as it flew over a lake with computer simulations approximating the linear mass-spring-damper system that allowed the bird’s neck to remain stable during vertical disturbances. They found that, like a car suspension, the neck vertebrae and muscles respond to bumpy flights with enough flexibility and stiffness to passively keep the head steady while the wings flap.

New UAV camera suspension systems in the works

“This simple mechanism is a remarkable finding considering the daunting complexity of avian neck morphology with about 20 vertebrae and more than 200 muscles on each side,” explained Lentink, who said that former master’s student Ashley Pete was the one who developed the idea and methodology for the research while studying the biomechanics of flight.

“The paper she wrote for this class was so good that we expanded it together and submitted it to Interface, where it got published. This really shows students can make remarkable discoveries in the classroom, going beyond textbooks, based on their creativity and enthusiasm,” the professor said in a statement.

Lentink’s laboratory conducts research involving biology and engineering, with the hope they will be able to improve the design and performance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using various traits found in flying birds. This latest paper has given them the blueprint for new, swan-inspired passive camera suspension systems that will allow drones with flapping wings to record higher-quality video.

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Feature image: Thinkstock

Science

World’s oldest Koran fragments could predate Muhammad

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

Fragments from the world’s oldest known Quran, the central spiritual text of Islam, may predate the accepted founding date of the religion itself and could be written on parchment older than the Muslim prophet Muhammad, various media outlets have reported.

According to Fox News and the Daily Mail, radiocarbon dating conducted by a team of experts from the University of Oxford has concluded that the fragments, which were found last month in Birmingham, were originally produced between the years of 568 AD and 645 AD.

Muhammad, on the other hand, is generally believed to have lived between 570 AD and 632 AD. The Islamic prophet is believed to have founded the religion sometime after 610 AD and the first formal text of the Quran was completed in 653, the published reports indicate.

The pages, which were bound within a second Quran from the late seventh century found within the library at the University of Birmingham, were written in ink in an early form of Arabic script on parchment made from animal skin. They contain portions of the Suras (chapters) 18 to 20 and could possibly have been written by someone who actually knew Muhammad.

Opinions differ on the significance of this discovery

Some experts believe that these Quran fragments could predate the prophet and completely alter the early history of the religion. One historian, Tom Holland, told The Times of London that this discovery “destabilizes… the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Koran emerged – and that in turn has implications for the history of Muhammad and the Companions.”

“This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran’s genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven,” added Keith Small from the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.

Muslim scholars dispute those claims. Mustafa Shah of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies told the Times, “If anything, the manuscript has consolidated traditional accounts of the Koran’s origins,” which was first assembled as a formal text by Uthman, the third caliph (leader) of the Muslim community, following Muhammad’s death.

Prior to that time, portions of the religious text had been passed along through oral tradition, although some parts had been written on stones, leaves, parchment, and bones. The pieces of the Birmingham Quran were reportedly written on either sheepskin or goatskin, and the researchers cautioned that only the parchment was dated, not the ink used to write the actual words.

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Feature image: University of Birmingham/YouTube

Health

Why does running make you feel happy?

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Emily Bills

Some people probably laugh when reading the title, because running can feel pretty awful. But apparently once you get past the initial sweat-hurricane/asthma attack/being dragged into the pits of hell part, running does start to feel good. And now, thanks to a study out of the University of Montreal, we know why.

As it turns out, running engages a system that is normally involved in making us feel full, which also activates the neurotransmitter involved in rewards and addiction.

“We discovered that the rewarding effects of endurance activity are modulated by leptin, a key hormone in metabolism. Leptin inhibits physical activity through dopamine neurons in the brain,” said Stephanie Fulton, a researcher at the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre and lead author, in a press release.

Leptin is secreted by fat tissue; the amount in circulation on a given day reflects the amount of fat tissue you have. “The more fat there is, the more leptin there is and the less we feel like eating. Our findings now show that this hormone also plays a vital role in motivation to run, which may be related to searching for food,” explained Fulton.

Running to find food?

A common thought is that endurance running capacity in mammals—but especially humans—evolved in order to maximize the chances of finding food. The suggests that leptin plays a key role in this process by regulating energy balance and by encouraging behaviors that are rewarding in terms of metabolism, like running to find food.

The team studied two types of mice in cages equipped with running wheels: normal mice, and mice with the suppression of a molecule known as STAT3. STAT3 is found in the neurons that make dopamine in the midbrain, and without it, there was an enormous difference in the mice.

“Mice that do not have the STAT3 molecule in the dopaminergic neurons run substantially more. Conversely, normal mice are less active because leptin then activates STAT3 in the dopamine neurons, signalling that energy reserves in the body are sufficient and that there is no need to get active and go looking for food,” explained Maria Fernanda Fernandes, first author of the study.

In other words, leptin seems to discourage exercise in the other mice; blocking its action kept them highly active. This process probably happens normally in relation to body fat: If stores dip low, the brain gives encouragement to go get dinner. The same action seems to be happening in humans, too.

“Previous studies have clearly shown a correlation between leptin and marathon run times. The lower leptin levels are, the better the performance. Our study on mice suggests that this molecule is also involved in the rewarding effects experienced when we do physical exercise. We speculate that for humans, low leptin levels increase motivation to exercise and make it easier to get a runner’s high,” said Fulton.

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Feature image: Thinkstock

Space

Distant rocky planets’ interiors may be far different than Earth

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

Rocky planets orbiting distant stars may not necessarily have the same basic type of chemical or mineral composition as Earth, researchers from the Carnegie Institute of Science, the University of Chicago and Stony Brook University claim in a recently published study.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, Carnegie’s Sergey Lobanov, Nicholas Holtgrewe, and Alexander Goncharov demonstrated that the interiors of these far-off worlds may have different magnesium compounds than those commonly found on our home planet.

Along with oxygen, magnesium is one of the most abundant elements in the Earth’s mantle, the researchers explained. However, that doesn’t mean that other rocky planets would have a similar mantle mineralogy, as the composition of these planets are likely every bit as different from one another as their respective stars are from each other.

For instance, some stars that are home to rocky worlds have been found to have elevated levels of oxygen. This in turn could make the element more abundant in the interior of the planets, as the chemical makeup of a star has a direct impact on the chemical makeup of every planet that formed around it.

Proving MgO2 can synthesize under the right conditions

If it is possible for a planet to be more oxidized than Earth, this could also have an impact on the various compounds found in its interior as well. The researchers focused on the abundance of two magnesium compounds – magnesium oxide (MgO) and magnesium peroxide (MgO2).

MgO, they said, is known to be extremely stable, even under high pressures, and is not reactive under the conditions found in the Earth’s lower mantle. MgO2, on the other hand, can be formed in the laboratory under high-oxygen concentrations but tends to be unstable when heated, which would be the case in the interior of a forming rocky planet.

Building on previous theoretical calculations, Lobanov’s team used a laser-heated, diamond-anvil cell to bring small samples of magnesium oxide and oxygen to different pressure levels in order to mimic planetary interiors, determining whether or not it is possible to synthesize stable magnesium peroxide under such conditions.

They exposed MgO2 to ambient pressure 1.6 million times normal atmospheric pressure (0-160 gigapascals) and temperatures of more than 3,140 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 Kelvin), and discovered that at under about 950,000 times normal atmospheric pressure (96 gigapascals) and at temperatures of 3,410 degrees Fahrenheit (2,150 Kelvin), MgO reacted with oxygen to form magnesium peroxide.

Lobanov: Exoplanet mineralogy may be vastly different than Earth’s

“Planetary physical properties are dependent on its composition,” Dr. Lobanov told redOrbit via email. “Our study is just an example of how exoplanet deep mineralogy may be different from our Earth. In fact, we may think of many new minerals that for some reasons are absent on Earth. MgO2 may be one of the most abundant minerals on a planet where oxygen is more abundant than on our Earth, but we don’t really know how abundant such oxidized planets are.”

“As we discover more and more about exoplanets it would become increasingly interesting to explore how unique our Earth is,” he added. “As of now, it really seems that there are a lot more types of planets than we have in Solar System. One of the key questions is how planetary interiors composed of yet unknown minerals control some planetary features we are used to on Earth such as plate tectonics and life, for example.”

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Feature image: Kepler 22b artist concept. Credit: Thinkstock

Technology

Need a human organoid? DNA-guided 3D printing can now make you one

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Christopher Pilny

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have developed a new technique that allows them to precisely construct custom-designed miniature models of human tissues using what the school refers to as “the biological equivalent of Lego bricks.”

The method is known as DNA-programmed assembly of cells (DPAC), and as senior author Dr. Zev Gartner and his colleagues explained in Monday’s edition of the journal Nature Methods, it allows them to more precisely grow organoid-like tissues of pre-determined sizes, compositions, shapes, and spatial heterogeneity.

Thousands of custom-designed organoids can be produced using this technique, and they can be used as models of human mammary glands, each of which contain several hundred cells. These mini-tissues can be constructed in a manner of hours and enable scientists to study how specific structural features affect normal growth or are altered by cancer.

Furthermore, they could be used to test out potential new drugs or even enable scientists to create entirely new organs, the study authors said in a statement. Any type of cell can be used in DPAC, according to Dr. Gartner, and it will follow pre-determined cues to develop into tissues.

So how does this process work?

Researchers have at times struggled studying how the cells of complex tissues self-organize and make decisions as a unit, as well as how they break down due to disease, because it can be rather challenging to identify the specific cause of a certain cellular behavior. Cells grown in dishes, on the other hand, lack the realistic 3D structure of other cells, according to the authors.

By using DNA as part of their new technique, Dr. Gartner and his colleagues are able to produce simple tissue components that can be easily manipulated and studied. The DNA acts kind of like a Velcro-style fastener, bonding cells with complementary strands and making it possible for the scientists to use them like building blocks to create organoids for research.

“One of the key aspects of our approach to assembling tissues is using synthetic DNA strands to program physical interactions between cell,” Dr. Gartner explained to redOrbit via email. “Two complementary strands of DNA – one flavor on each cell surface – stick to one another” through Watson Crick base pairing, a process which involves hydrogen bonding patterns.

“We have multiple flavors of DNA that can direct multiple interactions between multiple cell types. The complementary DNA sequences are analogous to the male and female sides of a Lego brick,” he added. “However, unlike Legos, the cellular building blocks we use have a spherical shape and hundreds of thousands to millions of individual tiny DNA strands sticking out from its surface, much like the hairs on a tennis ball. Thus, the entire surface of the cell is sticky.”

This enables it to stick to the entire surface of another cell with a complementary DNA sequence on its surface, noted Dr. Gartner, a an associate professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF. The reason that this approach was selected, he said, was because it is “very mild, very specific and very rapid,” enabling them “keep our cells alive, position them with respect to one another with considerable accuracy, and do so quickly so that we can make complex tissues.”

Method could be used for drug screening, cancer research

As part of their research, the UCSF-led team used the technique to develop several different types of human tissues that served as proof-of-concept organoid arrays. In one experiment, they created arrays of mammary epithelial cells and investigated the impact of adding low levels of the cancer gene RasG12V to the cells around them.

They found that normal cells grew faster when an organoid with cells expressing RasG12V at a low level, but that more than one such cell was required to get this abnormal growth process to start. Furthermore, they learned that placing cells with low RasG12V expression at the end of a tube of normal cells allowed the mutant cells to branch and grow.

Dr. Gartner’s group plans to use the DPAC technique to study the cellular or structural changes in mammary glands that can cause tissues linked to tumors that metastasize to break down and spread to other parts of the body. They also plan to adapt what they discover from simple models to ultimately construct fully-functional human tissue, such as lung and kidney tissue.

“In the short term, we plan to explore the use of the arrays of organoid-like tissues we’re building for drug screening, cancer research, and basic science studies of development,” he told redOrbit. “Our long term goal is to figure out how tissues build themselves through the process of self-organization which is very different then the process that engineers use today to build non-living materials like cars, microchips, and buildings.”

“It is our strong feeling is that only when we understand how cells self-organize into tissues and organs will we truly be able to control those processes to engineer functional tissues and organs for transplant,” added Dr. Gartner added, whose team was also assisted by researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

Underwater Bronze Age fortified city found in Greece!

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: September 1, 2015 Last Edited: September 1, 2015

Emily Bills

An “archaeologist’s paradise” has been found underwater south of Athens, Greece: an ancient city dating back to around 2500 BC.

In Greece, diving is strictly controlled in order to prevent the looting of underwater sites. In 2014, team from the University of Geneva was training on Lambayanna Beach while waiting for official authorization when they made a discovery: Nearby, there were pottery fragments and what appeared to be architectural elements.

The team was unable to explore further due to their limitations, but were finally able to return in 2015. Using the world’s largest solar-powered ship, PlanetSolar, as a base, they journeyed down to where the fragments had been seen—and made one of the biggest finds of the classical world: an ancient Greek fortified village.

“The importance of our discovery is partly due to the large size of the establishment: at least 1.2 hectares [nearly 130,000 square feet, or 10 football fields] were preserved,” Professor Julien Beck of the University of Geneva told Spero News.

The quality and quantity of artifacts also add to the importance, according to Beck—over 6,000 have been found. Obsidian blades dating created from volcanic rock on Milos (the island on which the Venus de Milo was found) and dating back to the Helladic period (ca. 3200 to 2050 BCE) were among the discoveries, along with the aforementioned pottery fragments, which dated back to about 2500 BCE.

Further, the town itself is unique, as it features an outer fortification wall with three 60 by 30-foot horseshoe-shaped foundations attached. These structure were thought to belong to defensive towers of a “massive nature, unknown in Greece until now,” said Beck. “The chances of finding such walls under water are extremely low.”

The walls themselves are contemporaneous with the Pyramids of Giza and two civilizations that predated the first Greek ones, the Minoan (2700 to 2000 BCE) and the Cycladic (3200 to 2000 BCE). The first great Greek civilization, the Mycenaean, didn’t arrive for another millennium.

The buildings found in this city are characteristic of the Greek Early Bronze Age: They’re circular or elliptical in shape, and are built on a rectangular plane. Paved surfaces were also found, which could either be streets or the remains of other structures.

So what went on there?

“The full size of the facility is not yet known,” said Beck. “We do not know why it is surrounded by fortifications.” However, the team has a few guesses.

The Bronze Age in Greece was mostly a society of farmers, but there is evidence of some technological advances in regards to metallurgy and mining. Further, there seems to have been a kind of market economy that emerged along the coast of the Peloponnesus, and the city easily could have served as a storage area for trade goods.

As to why it sank, the team did not offer any theories, but the usual ideas of rising sea levels and shifting tectonic plates have been suggested. Further, it is probably not the lost city of Atlantis—which is only mentioned by Plato, and was in all likelihood made up by him to prove a point.

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Feature image: Hellenic Ministry of Culture

Technology

Not even the stickiest of liquids can stick to this new coating

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: September 1, 2015 Last Edited: September 1, 2015

Emily Bills

The leaves of the lotus flower are sometimes considered to be the gold standard when it comes to the ability to repel water and dirt, but now scientists from Penn State University have invented a new hydrophobic nano-surface that actually one-ups the lotus flower.

No matter how slippery natural surfaces like the lotus flower are, tiny water droplets can still stick to them, the research team explained. Their engineered, micro-textured surface, however, outperforms these naturally inspired coatings when water is in tiny droplets or vapor form. It could actually improve water harvesting in dry regions or keep plane wings from icing up.

“This represents a fundamentally new concept in engineered surfaces,” said Tak-Sing Wong, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State. “Our surfaces combine the unique surface architectures of lotus leaves and pitcher plants in such a way that these surfaces possess both high surface area and a slippery interface to enhance droplet collection and mobility.”

Demonstrating mobility in Wenzel-state liquids

Liquid droplets on rough surfaces come in one of two states: Cassie, in which liquids partially float on a layer of air or gas, and Wenzel, in which they are in complete contact with the surface. This new material marks this first time that experiments have demonstrated that liquid droplets can be highly mobile in the Wenzel state, Wong added.

As the authors explained in a recent edition of the journal ACS Nano, droplets on conventional rough surfaces are mobile when in the Cassie state and pinned in the stickier Wenzel one. This causes issues in condensation heat transfer, water harvesting, and ice removal, and the research team set out to solve those problems by allowing droplets in this state to be mobile.

To do so, Wong’s team etched micrometer scale pillars into a silicon surface, and then crafted nanoscale textures onto the pillars. Next, they infused the nanotextures with a layer of lubricant that completely coated the nanostructures, resulting in greatly reduced pinning of the droplets and improving the lubricant retention versus the microstructured surface alone.

These same techniques can be used on materials other than silicone including plastics, metals, ceramics, and glass, the authors noted. They believe that their work, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, could encourage others to search for a new, unified model that can explain wetting phenomena on rough surfaces.

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Feature image: Xianming Dai, Chujun Zeng and Tak-Sing Wong/Penn State

Health

MIT: PTSD could be prevented

Written By: Susanna Pilny

Published Date: September 1, 2015 Last Edited: September 1, 2015

Emily Bills

Seven to eight percent of the population will suffer from the nightmares and flashbacks of PTSD at some point in their lives. Post-traumatic stress disorder often affects soldiers who have been through combat, but can be caused by countless other stressful or frightening events, like muggings or natural disasters. However, a new study from MIT has made serious in-roads into what leads to its development—and maybe even how to keep it from happening at all.

One of the biggest known risk factors for PTSD is chronic stress, or feeling overwhelmed, worried, or run-down for an extended period of time. The researchers confirmed previous studies with their own: The mice who underwent chronic stress prior to a traumatic experience used the pathway that ingrains traumatic memories more strongly than the stress-free animals.

Thus, the idea behind the study was to inhibit this kind of memory formation in the first place to prevent PTSD. “The idea is not to make people amnesic but to reduce the impact of the trauma in the brain by making the traumatic memory more like a ‘normal,’ unintrusive memory,” clarified Ki Goosens, an assistant professor of neuroscience and investigator in MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, in an MIT press release.

Blame it on the serotonin

The specific pathway of this disease involves a part of the brain known as the amygdala, an almond-sized structure involved in responding to and remembering stress and fear. In mice with chronic stress who experience a trauma, a neurotransmitter known as serotonin acted on the amygdala to promote the process of memory consolidation. (Memory consolidation is the process by which short-term memories are turned into long-term memories.)

When this interaction was inhibited following a trauma, the stressed animals did not exhibit signs of PTSD. Moreover, in the unstressed mice, inhibiting this process after trauma had no effect; PTSD still did not develop.

“That was really surprising to us,” said lead author and MIT postdoc Michael Baratta. “It seems like stress is enabling a serotonergic memory consolidation process that is not present in an unstressed animal.”

Besides stress activating a pathway that can lead to PTSD, it also packs a sort of double-whammy by increasing the number of 5-HT2C receptors in the amygdala. Serotonin (also known by a shortened version of its chemical name, 5-HT) binds to these receptors, activating the memory consolidation process. More receptors leads to more binding, causing stronger memory formation. The researchers believe this may account for the flashbacks in PTSD.

“It’s strengthening the consolidation process so the memory that’s generated from a traumatic or fearful event is stronger than it would be if you don’t have this serotonergic consolidation engaged,” Baratta says.

The good (and bad) news

Memories can take hours or days to become ingrained as long-term memories—but are difficult to erase once they are. However, preventative measures taken immediately following a traumatic event might prevent them from forming as strongly.

“The consolidation process gives us a window in which we can possibly intervene and prevent the development of PTSD. If you give a drug or intervention that can block fear memory consolidation, that’s a great way to think about treating PTSD,” said Goosens. “Such an intervention won’t cause people to forget the experience of the trauma, but they might not have the intrusive memory that is ultimately going to cause them to have nightmares or be afraid of things that are similar to the traumatic experience.”

The consolidation process might not be the only window of opportunity, though. When memories are recalled, there is a certain amount of time in which they could be altered and reconsolidated; so serotonin-blocking drugs could help to weaken already encoded memories.

Even better, there is a candidate drug for just this purpose called agomelatine, which is already FDA-approved for depression.

But there is one major caveat out of this study

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a current common treatment for PTSD, are probably a very bad idea. SSRIs keep serotonin around brain cells longer by keeping serotonin-producing cells from drawing them back in. So for PTSD patients, these could make memories and flashbacks more ingrained.

“The consolidation of traumatic memories requires this serotonergic cascade and we want to block it, not enhance it,” she adds. “This study suggests we should rethink the use of SSRIs in PTSD and also be very careful about how they are used, particularly when somebody is recently traumatized and their memories are still being consolidated, or when a patient is undergoing cognitive behavior therapy where they’re recalling the memory of the trauma and the memory is going through the process of reconsolidation.”

The paper can be found in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

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Feature image: Thinkstock

Space

NASA discussing possible life-hunting mission to Enceladus

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: September 1, 2015 Last Edited: September 1, 2015

Emily Bills

The hunt for alien life could be centered on not one, but two gas giant satellites over the next decade, as NASA is reportedly considering sending a spacecraft to Saturn’s moon Enceladus to go along with a previously-announced mission to Jupiter’s satellite, Europa.

According to Space.com, the US space agency is planning to launch a spacecraft to Europa in the early- to mid-2020s, and is currently mulling over a proposal that would launch the Enceladus Life Finder (ELF) to study Saturn’s icy moon by the end of 2021.

ELF is one of approximately two-dozen concepts submitted to NASA earlier this year through its Discovery Program, an initiative created as a way to send low-cost, focused science missions to a variety of destinations throughout the solar system. Finalists will be selected later this month and the overall winner will be announced in September 2016, the website said.

Probe would search for amino acids, other signs of life

Along with Europa, Enceladus is believed to be one of the most likely candidates to be home to alien life, as both moons possess liquid water beneath an icy surface. Members of the ELF team told Space.com that they believe their proposal is a strong candidate to win the competition.

“We think we have the highest chance of success of getting an indicator of [alien] life for really any mission at this point,” principal investigator Jonathan Lunine of Cornell University said. It would be equipped with two mass spectrometers (one to study gaseous plume molecules and one focusing on solid grains) in search of amino acids, fatty acids, methane, and other molecules.

In addition, it would collect samples from geysers of water ice, salts, and carbon-filled organic molecules emitting from the moon’s south polar region. Those jets, which were first discovered by the Cassini spacecraft in 2005, are powered by Saturn’s gravity and reach far out into space. Scientists believe they may be in contact with Enceladus’ underground ocean.

The ELF probe would collect “free samples” from these geysers, Lunine said, giving them the opportunity to see if there are signs of life in the underground ocean without needing to land or drill. Positive results for all three substances it will be searching for would “strongly argue for life within Enceladus,” the ELF team said.

Solar-powered spacecraft would be ready by 2020

In addition, Lunine told Space.com that a fourth test for life may be possible. Currently, the mission plans for a technology demonstration involving an instrument that will determine the chilarlity or “handedness” of amino acids. Earth-based life uses left-handed amino acids instead of right-handed ones, and similar results on Enceladus could be indicative of alien life.

If selected, the ELF mission will have a cost ceiling of $450 million, not counting post-launch operations, and will be ready to fly by the year 2020. As things currently stand, it would launch by 2021 and would take 9.5 years to reach Saturn. Once there, it would enter orbit around the planet and fly through the moon’s plumes up to 10 times over a three-year span.

ELF would be solar-powered, and would be the first spacecraft of its kind to operate at a place as far away from the Sun as Saturn. Lunine explained that his team is confident that the solar-power tech is up to the task, telling the website that it is “a very feasible way to conduct the mission.”

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Feature image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Technology

Emails signed with black-sounding names less likely to receive replies

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: September 1, 2015 Last Edited: September 1, 2015

Emily Bills

Your name could be a key factor when it comes to whether or not you receive a response to a request for information from school districts, sheriffs’ departments, or other local institutions, a new study conducted by University of Southampton researchers has revealed.

In their report, the authors explained that a person with a distinctively African-American name is four percent less likely to receive a response to an identical email than those sent by an individual with a “white-sounding” name. The difference was most apparent in sheriffs’ offices, they added, where black-sounding names were seven-percent less likely to get a response.

The correspondence study, which involved soliciting information about public services from some 19,000 local offices nationwide, also found that people with African-American sounding names were less likely to receive a response that had a cordial tone (i.e. one in which they were addressed by name or greeted with a salutation) than those with white-sounding ones.

As co-author Corrado Giulietti from the Institute for the Study of Labor explained, “Despite the fact that prohibition of racial discrimination by the government is a central tenet of US law, our finding shows that not all citizens are treated equally by local public service providers.”

Racial gap stronger in rural areas, independent of socioeconomic background

Giulietti, University of Southampton professor Mirco Tonin and their colleagues sent emails to school districts, local libraries, law enforcement offices, county clerks, country treasurers and job offices in every US state. The used four correspondent names, two to represent each ethnicity, as most uniquely identifiable to each group based on previous research findings.

Emails that were signed by white-sounding names received replies 72 percent of the time while identical messages signed by black-sounding names only received a reply 68 percent of the time. In addition, 72 percent of responses sent to people with white-sounding names used a salutation or addressed the sender by name compared to 66 percent for those with black-sounding names.

“We find similar levels of discrimination in each of the four regions defined by the Census Bureau (northeast, midwest, south and west),” Tonin said. “We do find a stronger racial gap in rural rather than urban counties. Moreover, it appears that discrimination is not solely due to the perceived lower socioeconomic background of black senders,” as the results were similar when the same profession (real estate agent) was used for both black and white senders.

“Local services constitute the majority of interactions between government institutions and citizens and perform central functions, for instance in education,” added Giulietti. “The discriminatory attitude that our study uncovers could be one of the factors behind the disadvantaged position of black people in American society and could be a major obstacle towards addressing racial inequality.”

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Feature image: Thinkstock

Science

Meet Pentecopterus: The (newest) oldest known species of sea scorpion

Written By: Chuck Bednar

Published Date: September 1, 2015 Last Edited: September 1, 2015

Christopher Pilny

A previously undiscovered species of eurypterid, or sea scorpion, a more than 460 million year old creature representing the oldest known species of its kind, has been discovered by scientists from the University of Iowa and Yale University.

The new species has been given the name Pentecopterus decorahensis and measured more than 1.5 meters long, which also makes it the largest known eurypterid of its time, lead author James Lamsdell, a postdoctoral associate from Yale’s Department of Geology and Geophysics, and his co-authors reported in the September 1 edition of the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

“Pentecopterus is an absolutely bizarre animal and working on it was a constant string of surprises,” Dr. Lamsdell told redOrbit via email. “Finding such a large eurypterid so early in their evolutionary history was completely unexpected, and its appearance is completely unusual. The most obvious strange feature is the head, which has this elongate projection at the front that makes it look unlike any other eurypterid we’ve found.”

“Possibly the strangest thing about it though are the swimming paddles, which are formed by the last pair of appendages on the head,” he added. “Many eurypterids have swimming paddles, but in Pentecopterus they are incredibly complex structures that allow the animal to change the surface area of the paddle, giving it greater maneuverability. This paddle is so unusual that when it was first found parts of it we thought they were from a totally different animal.”

Creature named in honor of ancient Greek warships

It wasn’t until they discovered additional intact specimens that he and his fellow investigators realized that they all belonged to the same creature. The sea scorpion is represented by at least 150 fossil fragments excavated from the upper layer of the Winneshiek Shale, a 27 meter thick sandy shale located in an ancient impact crater in northern Iowa, in 2010.

The extinct predator, which is related to modern arachnids, is said to be roughly 460 million years old, which means that it predates the oldest previously discovered representative of the eurypterids by at least 10 million years. The new species has been named the Pentecopterus decorahensis in honor of an ancient Greek galley known as the penteconter.

“The penteconter was one of the first large Greek warships, while Pentecopterus is the earliest large eurypterid predator that we have discovered,” Dr. Lamsdell told redOrbit. “There is also a superficial physical resemblance; Pentecopterus had a long, narrow body and a long head shield that resembles the prow of the penteconter.”

In addition to the paddles, the fossils included several features that allowed the research team to discern the function of other body parts. For instance, the creature’s second and third limb pairs might have been angled forward, suggesting that they were used primarily for capturing prey and not for locomotion, and the three rearmost pairs were shorter than the front ones, indicating that the creature may have walked on just six legs instead of eight.

“Pentecopterus is an incredibly exciting discovery that can tell us much about the early evolution of eurypterids along with details of how they lived,” said Dr. Lamsdell. “The preservation is exceptional – the exoskeleton is fossilized in such a way that it feels like you a studying an animal that has just shed its skin. This sort of exceptional preservation lets gives us important insight into what eurypterids were like as living animals and allows us to explore patterns in evolution and ecology throughout the groups’ history.”

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Feature Image: This is an artist’s impression Pentecopterus. (Credit: Patrick Lynch/Yale University)

Health

Study: Testosterone changes brain structures in transgender men

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Emily Bills

A new brain imaging study from the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology has shown that the testosterone given to aid trans individuals in sex reassignment alters the brain structures and pathways involved in speech and verbal fluency—and may have just shown how men and women (both cis and transsexual*) experience language and communication differently.

The researchers from Vienna and Austria studied 18 trans individuals (average age of 27) who had been designated female at birth and had decided to transition. Before and after four weeks of testosterone therapy, the subjects underwent MRI brain scans.

Surprise stronger white matter

The results: The volume of grey matter (the part of the brain that processes information) had decreased in two key language areas of the brain. The regions, known as Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, play important roles in language comprehension and communication. Simultaneously, the white matter pathways known as the extreme capsule connecting these two regions got stronger.

“It has been known for some time that higher testosterone is linked to smaller vocabulary in children and that verbal fluency skills decrease in female-to-male transsexuals after testosterone treatment,” explained researcher Dr. Andreas Hahn in a press release. “This fits in well with our finding of decreased grey matter volume. However, the strengthening of the white matter in these areas was a surprise. We think that when it comes to certain language skills, the loss of grey matter outweighs the strengthened white matter connection.”

Testosterone itself is known to exert a strong influence on human behavior and cognition—it has been linked to verbal fluency before—but is often hard to study for ethical reasons, making it impossible to see the direct effects is has on brain structure. However, studying trans individuals allowed researchers to overcome these hurdles.

“What we see is a real quantitative difference in brain structure after prolonged exposure to testosterone,” explained researcher Professor Rupert Lanzenberger. “This would have been impossible to understand without looking at a transsexual population. In more general terms, these findings may suggest that the genuine difference between the brains of women and men is substantially attributable to the effects of circulating sex hormones. Moreover, the hormonal influence on human brain structure goes beyond early developmental phases and is still present in adulthood.”

The research was presented at the 28^th ECNP Congress.

*Used here to denote those who are actively transitioning, or who have transitioned.

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Feature image: Thinkstock

Health

Bad news: Raw oysters harbor and spread the norovirus

Written By: Brett Smith

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

Emily Bills

This is some bad news for people who like to eat raw oysters: The mollusks have a knack for harboring and spreading the stomach bug known as the norovirus.

According to a new study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, researchers found that oysters contain the norovirus, and a genetic analysis revealed norovirus outbreaks can be traced back to the coastal regions where oysters are cultivated.

“More than 80 percent of human norovirus genotypes were detected in oyster samples or oyster-related outbreaks,” study author Yongjie Wang, from Shanghai Ocean University, said in a news release. “The results highlight oysters’ important role in the persistence of norovirus in the environment, and its transmission to humans, and they demonstrate the need for surveillance of human norovirus in oyster samples.”

In the study, the researchers obtained all oyster-related norovirus genetic sequences entered into the National Center for Biotechnology’s GenBank data repository and the Noronet outbreak repository from 1983 through 2014. The team then executed genotyping and phylogenic analyses, and traced the norovirus’ genetic diversity and geographic circulation over time.

In previous study, the researchers discovered that 90 percent of human norovirus sequences in China originated from coastal regions. The current study exhibited the same pattern all over the world, with the exception of tropical locations, from which sequences are missing.

The discovery that oysters are vectors and reservoirs for norovirus spread is likely due to their presence in coastal waters, which are regularly toxified by human waste, according to Wang. Previous studies have indicated that noroviruses can persevere for weeks in oyster tissues, and commercial attempts to expunge them are typically ineffective.

So can I still eat oysters?

Norovirus brings about stomach discomfort, diarrhea, queasiness, and vomiting. The virus is highly contagious, and infects greater than 6 percent of the US population each year, causing around 20 million cases, 56,000 to 71,000 hospitalizations, and 570 to 800 deaths, based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Just touching a contaminated surface can lead to the virus being contracted.

Wang said people who consume shellfish should consume them fully cooked, rather than raw. He also advised advancement of a dependable method for finding noroviruses in oysters, and a global oyster-related norovirus outbreak surveillance network.

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Feature image: Thinkstock

Health

Does pregnancy alter moms’ brains?

Written By: Susanna Pilny

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

Emily Bills

Everyone knows pregnancy has a lot of effects on a woman, from mood swings to the obvious change in abdomen diameter. However, many wonder if some changes are less obvious and much more long-term—if the brain of mothers themselves are altered permanently by pregnancy.

The notion would certainly make sense. During pregnancy, women experience hormonal fluctuations more massive than any other time in their lives—even above brain-altering puberty. According to a 2011 review, there are some indications that these brain changes occur, but the evidence is less than desirable. “Pregnancy is a critical period for central nervous system development in mothers,” said author and psychologist Laura M. Glynn in a press release. “Yet we know virtually nothing about it.”

Momnesia is a real thing

In the short term, these hormones trigger mood swings, cravings, and, according to a 2010 study, probably “momnesia”—the memory problems pregnant women often face as the pregnancy progresses. The 2011 review further backs up these claims, suggesting “Mommy Brain” may be symptomatic of physical changes in the brain brought on by these hormones. The hormones probably help a woman shift into the role of a mother, decreasing stress and attuning her to her baby’s needs, but forgetfulness is the cost.

One hormone in particular is known to spike: Oxytocin. “We see changes at both the hormonal and brain levels. Maternal oxytocin levels—the system responsible for maternal-infant bonding across all mammalian species—dramatically increase during pregnancy,” brain researcher Ruth Feldman told The Atlantic. (Oxytocin, made especially famous by studies in prairie voles, also increases in dads, too.)

It is often hard to study the brains of humans directly, so much of what we know about pregnancy brains comes from mouse and rat studies. Studies have found that pregnancy drives rats’ brains to form new neurons for the purpose of smelling—a change that lasts. Moreover, it’s known that fetal cells enter the mother’s blood in humans, but in mice, they tend to collect in the brain (especially the smelling parts) and stay there. This seems to aid in offspring recognition.

The same seems to hold true in humans—although we don’t know for certain. However, it has been shown that new mothers’ pleasure centers light up when they smell their baby, probably helping them to bond.

In other words, it seems that pregnancy may permanently change moms’ brains in order to transform them into more effective (and affective) parents—probably leading to the disorganized thoughts and forgetfulness as the hormones flood the brain and force it to change. So any partner complaining about running out for 3 AM waffle fries or tuna fish may want to tone it down a notch!

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Feature image: Thinkstock

Science

Researchers find ancient palace in southern Greece

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

Archaeologists have unearthed a 10-room palace believed to date back to the Mycenaean civilization in southern Greece, located not far from the former home of the warrior society Sparta, officials with the country’s culture ministry announced last week.

According to AFP, UPI, and Huffington Post, the palace is believed to have been built in the 17th or 16th century BC and destroyed by a fire in the late 14th or early 13th century BC. It was discovered near the ancient village of Xirokambi, and includes key archaic inscriptions that reportedly date back to the Mycenaean Age.

“The palace complex of Aghios Vassilios provides us with a unique opportunity to investigate, with the use of modern excavation and analysis methods, the creation and evolution of a Mycenaean palatial center in order to reconstruct the political, administrative, economic and social organization of the region,” Culture Ministry officials said in a statement.

“Alongside, it is estimated that new evidence on Mycenaean religion, linguistics and paleography will also be brought to light,” they added. Archaeologists also discovered religious icons and objects of worship, clay figurines, a cup adorned with a bull’s head, bronze swords and fragments of murals at the site, published reports indicate.

New discovery “hugely significant”

Since so much of the building was destroyed by the fire, the researchers are not certain exactly what it looked like. However, the remnants suggested that it contained 10 rooms made from stone, and Torsten Meissner, a classicist at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science that the find was “hugely significant” as Bronze Age Sparta is “the last ‘big prize’” for archaeologists.

More than 150 archaeological excavations conducted at the Aghios Vassilios location since 2009 have unearthed a wealth of artifacts, including tablets detailing religious ceremonies, as well as a number of names and places in a script called Linear B, the oldest script ever found in Europe. It initially appeared in Crete in 1375 BC and was only first deciphered in the mid-20th century.

The new discovery will allow for additional research into the “political, administrative, economic and societal organization of the region” and will also provide “new information on the beliefs and language systems of the Mycenean people,” according to AFP.

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Feature image: Hellenic Ministry of Culture

Space

NASA-sponsored year-long Mars simulation begins

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

Six scientists entered a small dome near an old volcano in Hawaii over the weekend, where they will spend the next year living in isolation as part of a NASA-sponsored experiment designed to simulate what life will be like on Mars!

According to BBC News and United Press International (UPI), the isolation experiment will be the longest of its kind ever attempted and is part of the Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission, a project designed to determine the effects of long-term space exploration on the human body and mind.

The six-person team entered the 100 square-foot home at 3:00 pm local time, and over the 365 day duration of the experiment, they will not have access to fresh air or fresh food. They cannot exit the dome unless they are in a spacesuit, and will have limited privacy, with just a tiny dorm room to call their own.

This is the fourth experiment to be conducted at the dome, which is located along the side of the Mauna Local volcano. Each of those missions have become progressively longer, and the goal of the $1.2 million project is to fully understand the impact of prolonged space travel, Kim Binsted, HI-SEAS principal investigator and UH professor, told UPI.

Meet the experiment participants

The team is comprised of a pilot, an architect, a journalist, and a soil scientist from the US, along with scientists from France and Germany. Each will have a small cot for sleeping and a desk in their rooms, and will be provided with food packets filled with things like canned tuna.

Carmel Johnston, a soil scientist from Montana, will serve as crew commander for the year-long mission, according to the HI-SEAS mission page. She specializes in global food production and sustainability, and previously studied the impact of permafrost thaw on trace gas emission levels in peatlands. Johnston has a master’s degree in land resources and environmental sciences.

German physicist Christiane Heinicke will serve as chief scientific officer and crew physicist, and Sheyna Gifford, a contributor to NASA education website, is the mission’s health science officer and habitat journalist. Pilot and former Lockheed Martin interplanetary flight controller Andrzej Stewart, who has worked on multiple NASA missions, is chief engineering officer.

Astrobiologist Cyprien Verseux, a doctorate student at the University of Rome who is an expert on biological life support systems for Mars exploration, is the crew biologist. Doctoral candidate Tistan Bassingthwaighte is the crew architect. Bassingthwaighte’s doctoral work will be focusing on designing a next generation conceptual Mars habitat, project officials said.

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Feature image: HI-SEAS/University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Technology

Atari games recovered from landfill sold for $100k

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

Copies of the Atari 2600 video game based on E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial may be selling better now that they did when they were new, as the cartridges of title was among those recovered last year from a New Mexico landfill that sold for $100,000 over the weekend.

The games, which according to the Associated Press (AP) were excavated from a landfill in the city of Alamorgodro in April 2014, sold on eBay for nearly $108,000. A total of 881 cartridges, including classics like Asteroids, Centipede, Defender, Missile Command, and Warlords were auctioned off to buyers from 45 states and 14 countries, the wire service reported.

Another 23 games have been donated to various museums, including the Smithsonian, and Joe Lewandowski, the man who led last year’s dig, said that there are nearly 300 others that the team is not sure what they want to do with yet. About $65,000 of the auction proceeds will be given to Alamorgodro, while $16,000 will go to the Tularosa Basin Historical Society, and approximately $26,000 will be used to cover expenses such as shipping fees.

Lewandowski, whose dig was featured in the 2014 Zak Penn documentary Atari: Game Over, told the Alamogordo Daily News that the remaining 297 games “might” be sold if a second movie comes out, “but for now we’re just holding them… we’ll sell [them] at a later date when we decide what to do with them.” He added that the film company received 100 of the recovered games.

A look back at the infamous story of E.T.

The discovery of the E.T. game cartridges confirmed that long-held urban legends that copies of the game had been buried at the New Mexico landfill roughly three decades ago. Based on the popular Steven Spielberg movie of the same name, it was released back in 1982 after only 34 days of development, quickly earning a reputation as one of the worst games ever made.

As reported by redOrbit last April, reports first surfaced in 1983 that 14 trucks carrying unsold Atari products were transported from a factory in El Paso, Texas to Alamogordo, as due in part to E.T., a lousy Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man, and several other poorly-received titles, the game giant found itself in financial trouble – the beginning of the infamous industry “crash”.

Samuel Claiborn of IGN.com called E.T. “Atari’s final, and costliest, blunder of that era.” The game had to be completed in just one-fourth of the time spent developing most video games of the era, he explained. While it went on to sell 1.5 million copies, it was still considered to be a massive disappointment, confirming its status as one of the most infamous games ever made.

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Feature image: taylorhatmaker/Flickr Creative Commons

Science

How lady frogs get tricked into mating with ugly males

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Emily Bills

Celebrities aren’t the only ones who sometimes appear to exhibit irrational behavior when choosing a potential mate, according to a new Science paper indicating that one type of female frog can be tricked into selecting the less attractive of two male suitors.

The study was led by researchers from the University of Texas in Austin and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, Panama, and looked at the female túngara frog, who usually prefers to be serenaded with a low-pitched song but can be fooled into picking the lesser of two potential mates through the introduction of a third candidate.

The study demonstrates that the túngara frog, small Central American frogs best known for their ballooning vocal sacks and their unusual calls, can be influenced by the “decoy effect” – a phenomenon known to decrease rational decision making in people, and which apparently causes some amphibians to make irrational choices regarding sexual selection as well.

Picking the right wingman makes it or breaks it

According to National Geographic, Amanda Lea, a Ph.D. student in integrative biology at UT-Austin, and co-author Michael J. Ryan played previously-recorded male túngara frog calls to 78 females that had been captured in Panama. The females were placed in the center of a room, and their song preferences were based on which speaker they started hopping towards.

The study authors found that the frog preferred fast-paced, low-pitched mating calls, and in a second set of experiments, 120 additional females were forced to choose between two potential mates – one a tenor with a fast call, and the other a baritone with a slow call. The frog with the faster delivery but higher-pitched, less attractive point usually won out, they explained.

Afterwards, they introduced a third frog into the mix – one with an attractive call but a call rate slower than either of the other two. When exposed to this call, the female frog changed how she evaluated the song, considering the lower pitch more important than the faster pace. As a result, the frog that lost the first, head-to-head competition now wound up being the winner.

“These results show that the relative valuation of mates is not independent of inferior alternatives in the choice set,” the study authors wrote in their paper, “and therefore cannot be explained with the rational choice models currently used in sexual selection theory.”

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Feature image: Amanda M. Lea

Health

Coffee bad, naps good for cardiovascular health?

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Christopher Pilny

Pass on that second cup of coffee and take a nap instead – it might be better for your heart, according to the authors of two new studies presented over the weekend at the annual European Society of Cardiology Congress in London.

In the first study, Dr. Lucio Mos, a cardiologist at Hospital of San Daniele del Friuli in Udine, Italy, found coffee consumption and an increased risk of heart attacks among young adults that have been diagnosed with mild hypertension. In fact, he found that heavy coffee drinkers faced a four-fold increased risk, while the risk tripled amongst moderate coffee drinkers.

Dr. Most studied 1,200 patients between the ages of 18 and 45 over a 12 year span, all of whom had untreated stage 1 hypertension. He found a linear relationship between coffee consumption and the risk of hypertension requiring treatment – a link that appears to be “partially mediated by the long term effect of coffee on blood pressure and glucose metabolism,” he noted.

“Our study shows that coffee use is linearly associated with increased risk of cardiovascular events in young adults with mild hypertension,” the doctor explained in a statement. “These patients should be aware that coffee consumption may increase their risk of developing more severe hypertension and diabetes in later life and should keep consumption to a minimum.”

An afternoon siesta may be just what the doctor ordered

In stark contrast to the findings about coffee, research conducted by Dr. Manolis Kallistratos, a cardiologist at Asklepieion Voula General Hospital in Athens, Greece, found that midday naps could reduce blood pressure levels and lower the need for antihypertensive medications.

Dr. Kallistratos recruited 386 middle aged patients (200 men and 186 women with an average age of 61.4 years) with arterial hypertension, and after adjusting for other factors, found that the blood pressure readings of midday sleepers were an average of five percent lower than those who did not take naps during the afternoon.

He also found that nap-takers had 11 percent lower pulse wave velocity levels and five percent smaller left atrium diameters that were five percent smaller, indicating that midday sleepers have less damage to their arteries and hearts due to high blood pressure. Furthermore, the study found that the longer these midday naps are in duration, the better.

“Not only is midday sleep associated with lower blood pressure, but longer sleeps are even more beneficial,” Dr. Kallistratos explained in a statement. “Midday sleepers had greater dips in blood pressure while sleeping at night which is associated with better health outcomes.”

“We also found that hypertensive patients who slept at noon were under fewer antihypertensive medications compared to those who didn’t sleep midday,” he added. “We found that midday sleep is associated with lower 24 hour blood pressure, an enhanced fall of BP in night, and less damage to the arteries and the heart. The longer the midday sleep, the lower the systolic BP levels and probably fewer drugs needed to lower BP.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Technology

Dead spy apparently hacked into Clinton files

Written By: Chuck Bednar

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

Christopher Pilny

A British spy who was found dead trapped inside a bag in his apartment five years ago illegally hacked into secret information pertaining to former President Bill Clinton as a favor to a friend, UK media outlets first reported over the weekend.

According to The Sun and the Daily Mail, 34-year-old Gareth Williams, a Welsh MI6 operative and mathematician, was discovered in large gym bag in the bathtub of his London home. While one probe determined that his death was “unnatural” and potentially “criminally mediated”, the exact circumstances surrounding his demise have long remained a mystery.

Approximately one year after that investigation, Scotland Yard officials said that a review of the matter led them to conclude that it was likely Williams had simply locked himself in the bag and that nobody else was involved, even though there were no traces of his DNA on the lock used to seal the bag he was found in, and no palm prints were found on the bathtub either.

Does hacking shed new light on mysterious death?

Other theories suggest that he may have been poisoned, murdered by the Russian mafia to stop him from investigating money-laundering networks, killed by a lover during an unusual sexual encounter, or that he was murdered by MI6 or American agents after he found sensitive data or threatened to release secret intelligence to the public.

On Sunday, reports surfaced that Williams had obtained a guest list for an event scheduled to be hosted by Clinton as a favor to a friend, thus breaching his security clearance and angering his MI6 bosses. The hacking reportedly came at a time when the relationship between the British and US agencies was tense, and was a “diplomatic nightmare” for new MI6 director Sir John Sawers.

Voicemail messages that Williams, a cryptographer who had worked with the National Security Agency (NSA) in Washington before returning to the UK, had left for his friends and family had also been mysteriously deleted shortly after his death, the media outlets noted. The precise nature of his work remains classified, but may have involved cash flow tracking equipment.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that detectives investigating Williams’ death believe that he had been murdered, and that the killers left and re-entered his home through a skylight in order to cover their tracks. This claim, based on the fact that forensic equipment was moved even though the house was guarded, supports the theory that foul play was involved, his family said.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock