Space

NASA puts Challenger and Columbia wreckage on display

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Emily Bills

They were moments that shocked and saddened the world: In 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded less than two minutes after lifting off, and in 2003, when Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.

And now, for the first time ever, the remnants of those space shuttles are on public display.

A piece from each shuttle, carefully selected from amongst thousands, accompanies memorials to the 14 astronauts who perished in each disaster. This is all part of a new—and permanent—2000-square-foot exhibit in the Kennedy Space Center, known as “Forever Remembered”. While some may worry the exhibit does not properly honor the fallen astronauts, NASA worked hard over many years to ensure their dignity.

“Great pains were taken not to have anything sensationalized or exploited,” explained Michael Ciannilli, a shuttle engineer and test director who was in charge of creating the exhibit. To that point, not a single image of the shuttles disintegrating is found within. Instead, the focus is shifted to how the astronauts lived.

Personal items from many of the astronauts were donated by family members, like Columbia commander Rick Husband’s cowboy boots and Bible. Other families abstained—such as the family of Christa McAuliffe. McAuliffe was a New Hampshire schoolteacher who had won a national competition to become the first teacher in space. Thousands of students watched the tragedy unfold on live television.

Her display case instead features a NASA “Teach in Space” patch and a block of her very own words: “I touch the future. I teach.”

As for the pieces of the shuttles, designer Ciannilli put careful thought into what was selected.

“I was hoping to find something that would show the beauty of Challenger, the dignity of Challenger, the strength of Challenger, and these are words I don’t use lightly,” he said.

These feelings were embodied by one piece in particular: a battered 12-foot section of the fuselage bearing the American flag. For Columbia, he selected the charred cockpit window frames and suspended them in midair. He says it’s like gazing into the eyes of Columbia—and thus its soul.

(Image credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett)

Health

Legionnaire’s disease NYC outbreak leaves 7 dead

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Emily Bills

An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease has left seven dead in the South Bronx, and with an incubation period of around 10 days, the number may yet rise.

As of Monday, 81 cases of the disease have been reported in the area, leaving officials scrambling to find the source. Legionnaires’ itself is a form of pneumonia caused by bacteria known as Legionella. These bacteria are not transmitted by contact between humans, but instead through water—specifically via inhalation of infected mist.

Once the water is inhaled, it generally takes around two to ten days for the disease to set in, at which point arise symptoms like those of the flu: high fever, chills, fatigue, and muscle aches. It’s usually easily treatable with antibiotics but can be fatal, especially in people who are older, who smoke, who have a chronic lung disease, or who are immunocompromised.

So far, all seven of the victims were older adults with underlying medical conditions, according to the office of Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Baby, now we’ve got bad blood

New York City officials believe they have traced the sources of the infected water to five water-cooling towers used to cool heating and electrical systems in area buildings. The water from the towers is completely separate from bathing and drinking water.

“The New York City water supply does not pose a risk, so people should continue to feel confident in drinking tap water to stay cool during this period of hot weather,” said Dr. Mary Bassett, commissioner of the health department, to CNN.

All five towers have been disinfected, but the possible incubation window is still open for the nearly 50,000 residents in the area. While they wait out the last possible victims, many residents have begun wondering how the water towers became contaminated in the first place.

“Why, instead of doing a good job responding, don’t we do a good job proactively inspecting?” asked Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr.

Mayor de Blasio’s office issued a statement that seemed to agree. “This week, new legislation will be announced designed to halt future outbreaks of Legionnaires’, and place new emphasis on long-term prevention. The comprehensive package will address inspections, new recommended action in the case of positive tests, and sanctions for those who fail to comply with new standards. Legionnaires’ Disease [sic] outbreaks have become far too common over the past ten years, and the City will respond not by only addressing an outbreak as it occurs, but with a new plan to help prevent these outbreaks from happening in the first place.”

(Image credit: Thinkstock)

Space

Ghostly remnants of galaxy interactions uncovered in nearby galaxy group

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

New observations of the large spiral galaxy M81, conducted with the Subaru Telescope’s Hyper Suprime-Cam, has allowed researchers to demonstrate hierarchical galaxy assembly processes in a nearby galaxy located outside of the Local Group for the first time.

The observations, which were part of a galactic archaeology study led by researchers from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, used the telescope’s prime-focus camera to observe M81 and two of its brightest neighbors, M82 and NGC3077, using deep, super-wide field images of the galaxies and their stars.

“Until now, the outskirts of Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy are the only places which have been surveyed to sufficiently faint depths and wide areas to enable detailed tests of the hierarchal galaxy assembly process on these scales,” study author Dr. Sakurako Okamoto of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory told redOrbit via email.

“With such a small sample, it is not possible to determine which behavior is representative or to discount the idea that one of these systems may be anomalous in their properties. Therefore, M81 is a prime target as the third case,” added Dr. Okamoto.

Young star, neutral hydrogen distributions linked

They discovered that the spatial distribution of the young stars in these galaxies closely followed that of their distribution of neutral hydrogen. The study will help astronomers to refine their understanding of galaxy formation and evolution, particularly those models based on the concept that galaxies develop from small “overdensities” and become larger-scaled structures.

Known as hierarchical galaxy assembly, this model has been applied to both the Milky Way and to the Andromeda Galaxy, demonstrating that these galaxies originally formed as part of a local over-density in the primordial matter distribution (the earliest matter accumulations known in the young universe). Over time, they grew through the collection of smaller building blocks, some of which might have survived later mergers to become present-day dwarf satellite galaxies.

According to Dr. Okamoto’s team, establishing the presence and nature of these satellite galaxies and determining the large-scale structure and stellar content of halos within them is necessary to better understand and explain the physics of hierarchical galaxy assembly. Over the past 10 years astronomers conducting large photometric surveys (measuring light intensity of celestial objects) have discovered several new satellite galaxies, over-densities, and stellar streams surrounding the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.

Researchers study the properties of stars in these systems to reconstruct the stellar contents found in early-stage galaxies, a field known as “galactic archeology” or “near-field cosmology”. In this type of research, it’s necessary to resolve individual stars in a galaxy across a sizable percentage of the galaxy’s radius, but until now, only the outskirts of the Milky Way and Andromeda have been the only areas analyzed deeply enough to allow for in-depth tests of the hierarchical galaxy assembly process across a vast scale, they added.

Demonstrating how galaxies cannibalize smaller neighbors

By using the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) to study the archeology of M81, a galaxy located some 11.7 million light years away, the researchers were able to observe out to a projected radius of a half-million light-years from the center of the spiral galaxy. The sensitivity of the camera made it possible for the researchers to observe old red giant branch (RGB), young main-sequence (MS) stars, red supergiants, and asymptotic giant-branch stars at the distance of M81.

Their study revealed that the bright stars were primarily focused in the inner disk of M81 while most of the young stars in outlying concentrations were fainter and had luminosity distributions similar to those of the stellar stream between M81 and NGC 3077. The stars are between 30 and 160 million years old, and the research indicates that these systems were most likely produced by recent tidal interactions between M81, M82, and NGC 3077.

Furthermore, the astronomers found that the distribution of RGB stars revealed that the extended stellar halos of these three galaxies overlap one another, and that M82 and NGC 3077 have outer regions that are highly perturbed, likely due to the recent gravitational encounter. They also were able to discover that the RGB stars in the outer halo of M82 were bluer in color than those in M81 or the inner halo of M82, indicating that they contained less metal.

“Our results show in detailed that how galaxies capture and cannibalize their smaller neighbors and how large galaxies like the Milky Way have formed and evolved over time,” Dr. Okamoto told redOrbit. “People can use it to infer the hierarchal galaxy assembly at the nearby and distant universe, and trace how galaxies evolve.”

(Image credit: NAOJ/HSC Project)

Science

Scientists solve mystery of how earthworms digest toxins

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

While scientists have known that earthworms are capable of digesting fallen leaves and other types of plant material containing chemicals that are toxic to most other types of herbivores, how they were able to pull this off has long remained a mystery – until now, that is.

New research led by Dr. Jake Bundy and Dr. Manuel Liebeke of Imperial College London, published in Tuesday’s edition of the journal, Nature Communications, revealed that these worms have molecules in their guts to counteract the toxins produced by plants.

These molecules are called drilodefensins, and they are so highly abundant that there are at least one kilogram of them within the earthworms for every person on Earth – yet they are so precious that the worms recycle and reuse them. Dr. Bundy explained to redOrbit via email that they aren’t yet certain how these drilodefensins are produced.

“Normally, we would be able to search for earthworm genes related to relevant genes from other species. The problem here is that these drilodefensins aren’t like any other compounds, and so we know nothing about which genes are responsible,” he said. What he and his colleagues do know, thanks to their research, is how these molecules help with the digestive process.

Drilodefensin helps worms counteract plant polyphenols

Dr. Bundy explained that plants produce complex molecules known as polyphenols, used to alter the color and taste of coffee, chocolate, and wine. One of the primary reasons plants produce these compounds is as a chemical defense, and while the toxic compound isn’t targeted at earthworms, they can still affect worms after they fall to the ground.

“In order to be able to digest fallen leaves and other plant material, earthworms use their drilodefensin compounds as a protection mechanism,” the researcher told redOrbit. “They prevent polyphenols from binding and inactivating proteins in the earthworm gut. The drilodefensins do this because they are surfactants – that is, detergent-like molecules. (If you took a large amount of purified drilodefensins, you could use it to wash your dishes.)”

“As part of the study, we showed that even a regular commercial detergent (exactly the same compound that is often found in shampoo or laundry detergents) had the same protective effect against polyphenols, but were completely useless biologically as they also prevented the earthworm enzyme activity,” he added. “Presumably this is because the drilodefensins and earthworm enzymes have evolved together to be compatible.”

If the earthworms did not have these drilodefensins, they would not be able to eat and digest fallen leaves, thus returning the carbon locked inside dead plant material back into the ground, the authors said. The fallen leaves would build up, and the carbon cycle would be disrupted. They also found that the higher the polyphenol content that an earthworm’s diet is comprised of, the greater the amount of drilodefensins they produce.

(Image credit: Thinkstock)

Science

How dogs process, recognize our faces

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

For the first time, researchers have found evidence that dogs have a specialized region in their brains used to process faces, according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal PeerJ.

According to senior author Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, the study provides the first evidence of a face-selective region in the temporal cortex of dogs – a trait which had only previously been well-documented in humans and other primates.

As Dr. Berns explained to redOrbit via email, “Primates (both human and non-human) rely on facial expressions for many types of communication, so it is perhaps not very surprising that parts of the primate brain are dedicated to face-processing. But until now, we didn’t know if dogs had similarly dedicated parts of their brains.”

“The results point to the importance of face processing for dogs. This is quite significant because canids and primates are separated by at least 50 million years of evolution,” he added. “Either these face-processing regions of the brain are a general trait of many mammals, or dogs evolved it as part of their overall sociality with other animals, especially humans.”

Having neural regions dedicated to face-processing suggests that this ability is a deeply evolved aspect of brain function, Dr. Berns said, and it indicates that the dog’s extreme sensitivity to human faces and social cues “is not simply a learned response to associate a human face with food.”

Findings made possible due to Dr. Berns’ Dog Project

Dr. Berns is the head of the Dog Project in Emory’s Department of Psychology, a project devoted to the study of evolutionary questions surrounding man’s best friend. Over the past four years, he and his colleagues have been training dogs to cooperatively sit for MRI scans, which he said they do without the need for sedation or restraints, remaining motionless during the process.

In previous research, the Dog Project located the canine brain’s reward center and demonstrated that this region had a stronger response to the scents of familiar people than to the scents of other people or familiar dogs. In the most recent experiment, they showed the dogs images of human faces, dog faces, and other objects while they were in the MRI being scanned, and that his team identified “a specific part of the dog’s brain that responded more to faces than objects.”

Since canines do not typically interact with two-dimensional images, the dogs had to be specially trained to pay attention to the screen. This led to a small sample size, as only six out of the eight dogs enrolled in the study could focus on each image for the 30 seconds needed to meet the experimental criteria, but the experiment nonetheless found a region in their temporal lope that responded significantly more to humans faces than other items.

Dr. Berns noted that the findings prove that “working with dogs to cooperatively participate in research can advance our understanding of the canine mind in ways that are not only highly ethical, but enjoyable for both canine and human participants. We can learn a great deal about the minds of our best friends just by teaching them to work with us.”

(Image credit: Thinkstock)

Health

Does vegetarianism lower sperm count? An update

Written By: John Hopton
Christopher Pilny

In July, redOrbit published an article on some of the lesser-known causes of low sperm count. One entry on the list was vegetarianism, based on a study by Linda Loma University Medical Center, which linked low sperm count with vegetarian and vegan diets.

The study was reported by major media outlets in October, 2014 – but having become aware of the unreliability of definitive conclusions, we decided to investigate further. We began by going straight to the source: the Linda Loma obstetrician, Dr. Eliza Orzylowska, who worked on the original research.

“Our study was an observational study which showed a difference in sperm concentration and total motility between lacto-ovo vegetarians and non-vegetarians with a more negative association seen in vegetarians regarding these two semen quality parameters,” Orzylowska told us.

“However, the values for lacto-ovo vegetarians were not to the infertile range according to World Health Organization semen analysis parameters. We noted an association, but the most important limitation remains that this was an observational study which does not clearly determine causality or clinical significance of the findings.”

She continued: “It is important to note that couples struggling with infertility are often willing to do more to enhance their fertility potential. Evidence-based lifestyle adjustments which positively influence their abilities to conceive are excellent tools for patients, but recommendations for diet modification require further studies and confirmation of current findings.”

No meaningful clinical recommendations

Dr. Orzylowska also added that: “Dr. Chavarro from Harvard University and the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center has found similar semen analysis differences associated with soy food and isoflavone intake. There are more current ongoing studies searching for the underlying reasons for these semen quality differences. We do think there could be a causal relationship between diet and sperm quality, but cannot make meaningful clinical recommendations at this time.”

RedOrbit also spoke to Dr. Marcin Stankiewicz, Medical Director at the City Fertility clinic in Adelaide, Australia, who said that:

“There is no scientific evidence linking a vegetarian diet to a low sperm count. Some studies have suggested that substituting soy for meat may impact on human fertility. Soy is a dietary source of isoflavones, an important class of phyto-estrogens, a chemical that might impact on the reproductive system.”

“However,” he concluded, “further research is needed before any firm link can be drawn between consumption of soy and/or a vegetarian diet and low sperm count. A balanced healthy diet is an important factor when trying to conceive, and this applies to all couples, whether they follow a vegetarian or non-vegetarian diet.”

On balance, then, while discussion on the subject is not without merit, there appears to be little reason for people on vegetarian and vegan diets to assume a risk of related infertility.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Technology

Facebook coders compete to create ‘ultimate’ Mario level

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

More than 150 Facebook employees recently pooled their talents in an attempt to create the ultimate Super Mario video game level as part of a two-day hackathon event, with the winning entry set to be featured in an upcoming Nintendo title coming out this fall.

According to Wired and Engadget reports, Facebook representatives gathered to try their hand at creating levels using the soon-to-be-released Super Mario Maker for the Wii U. During the 48-hour challenge, more than 40 different levels were created by employees from all parts of the company, with members of the culinary team coding alongside engineers.

The room itself where the hackathon took place was said to resemble a giant Mario level itself, with the game series’ iconic pipes and piranha plants present (presumably to help get the creative juices flowing). Participating teams spend more than 10-hours on average painstakingly creating interesting and challenging levels worthy of being featured in the upcoming title.

Engadget said it was clear the Facebook employees “took level creation seriously,” as many of them “storyboarded their levels on whiteboards” and some even went so far as to “draw up blueprints of bricks and coins and plot out jump points with Post-it notes.” The only rule, the website noted, was that the creators had to beat their own level before submitting it.

Winning level features hearts, takes place on a pirate ship

Brandon Dillon, an Oculus software engineer who took part in the hackathon, told Engadget, “I think it’s great… it’s interesting to look at how Nintendo thinks about constructing levels.” Dillon added that the easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface of Super Mario Maker was an ideal way to design games, “but more than that, it’s got so much polish and love and charm.”

Dillion’s team developed a level known as “Bowser’s Timeline” in which a person would play through the Mario villain’s Facebook page, navigating through all of his minion’s many “happy birthday” wishes, determining whether or not they wanted to accept his friend request. As unique and interesting as this level sound, it did not win the competition.

Rather, the winning level was designed by a pair of Facebook software engineers named Doug Strait and Roy McElmurry, whose “Ship Love” level took place on a pirate ship and was, as the Wired put it, “an obvious homage to the social network’s coding attitude.” The coins in the levels are actually hearts, the website explained, and while Mario’s dinosaur sidekick Yoshi is there to lend a helping hand, in the end Mario must square off against Bowser.

And as one might expect from some of the world’s best coders, the levels were not exactly easy. As Dillon told Engadget, “There are people who made some pretty sadistic levels! I consider myself a competent Mario player and I couldn’t even get past the first screen of some of them.”

(Image credit: Thinkstock)

Science

Bonobos communicate similarly to human babies, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny

Wild bonobos, the primates most closely related to humans, use a high-pitched type of call to communicate in a manner similar to infants, according to new research published in the journal PeerJ and led by researchers at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

Human infants, the researchers explained in a statement, are able to produce vocalizations in a wide range of emotional states and situations at a very early age. This ability is said to be one of the factors required for the development of language, and the study shows that wild bonobos are also able to produce a specific call type known as a “peep” in various situations.

Typically, animal vocalizations are produced in relatively narrow behavioral contexts linked to specific emotional states, such as the ability to express aggression or to warn about predators, the authors said. These new findings, however, show more human-like “functional flexibility” in the vocalizations of bonobos, clouding the division between humans and other primates.

In fact, the Birmingham researchers and colleagues from the University of Neuchatel found that wild bonobos can use their high-pitched “peeps” in many different positive, negative and neutral situations, such as when feeding, traveling, sounding an alarm, nesting or even grooming.

Foundations of speech, language capacity found in bonobos

Dr. Clay told redOrbit via email that research released several years ago found that human babies could produce a special type of vocalizations by the age of three months. These vocalizations are known as “proto-phones” and can be produced flexibly across various emotional states. She called this “an essential building block of human speech and language development.”

“This capacity was contrasted with other infant calls, such as screaming or laughing, and the calls of non-human primates, which were both said to be fixed or tied to specific emotional states (e.g. screaming when in a negative emotional state, laughing in positive state),” she explained. “We felt that the conclusion of fixed vocal signaling in non-human primates was unwarranted, based more on an absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence.”

So for their current study, Dr. Clay and her colleagues examined wild bonobos to see if they could find evidence of this same capacity for functional flexibility in other primates. They found that, “contrary to the conclusion of human uniqueness,” the peep call of bonobos is also flexible, and that this flexibility “suggests that in order to gain meaning, bonobos listening to the peeps may need to combine them with surrounding contextual or vocal information. These capacities also represent important foundations for human language.”

Dr. Clay said that these findings indicate that the ability to produce vocalizations in a flexible way across different contexts or emotional states is not unique to humans, and is in fact a trait that we share with our great ape relatives – and one that likely emerged before the evolution of human speech. While humans remain unique in terms of their speech and language capacities, she said, “the foundations underlying these abilities appear to be already present in the last common ancestor we share with great apes.”

“The more evidence we gather from studies of our great ape relatives, the more we learn that many of capacities thought to be uniquely human actually have their foundations firmly rooted in the primate lineage,” Dr. Clay concluded. “The next step is to conduct experiments to examine how bonobos respond to hearing peeps, what meaning they may extract from them and what additional contextual information they depend on in order to create this meaning.”

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Feature Image Credit: Zanna Clay/Lui Kotale Bonobo Project

Health

Becoming a father before 25 increases risk of mid-life death

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny

Becoming a father before your 25th birthday could be hazardous to your health, according to a new paper published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health which found a link between having a child at an early age and increased likelihood of mid-life death.

In the study, Dr. Elina Einiö of the Population Research Unit (PRU) at the University of Helsinki Department of Social Research and her colleagues indicate that males who father a child in early life have poorer health overall and die earlier than men who put off having a child.

They found that men who were already dads by the time they turned 22 had a 26 percent higher risk of death in midlife than those who had fathered their first child at the age of 25 or 26. Men who became first-time fathers had a 14 percent higher risk of dying during middle age.

“We do not know the mechanisms behind this association based on our study,” Dr. Einiö told redOrbit via email. “However, we know based on other studies that many pregnancies were unplanned and young parents often decided to form a new household at that time. It is possible that suddenly taking on the combined role of father and breadwinner may cause considerable psychological and economic stress for a young man not ready for his new role.”

Breaking down the findings

In a nationally representative sample of households involving data taken from the 1950 Finnish Census, Dr. Einiö’s team looked at more than 30,500 men born between 1940 and 1950 who had become fathers by the age of 45. Those fathers were tracked from the age of 45 until death or up to age 52 using mortality data ranging from 1985 through 2005, they explained.

Fifteen percent of those individuals fathered their first child by age 22, while 29 percent did so between the ages of 22 and 24; 18 percent did so when they were 25 or 26; 19 percent between the ages of 27 and 29; and another 19 percent between the ages of 30 and 44. The average age of first-time fatherhood was 25-26, and men in this age bracket served as a point of reference.

Approximately one in 20 fathers died during the 10-year monitoring period, with ischaemic heart disease and diseases associated with excess alcohol use (21 percent and 16 percent, respectively) as the primary causes of death. As mentioned above, fathers who were younger than 25-26 when they had their first child were found to have a higher mortality risk than older first-time dads.

The study also found that men who became dads between the ages of 30 and 44 had a 25 percent lower risk of death in middle age than those who fathered their first child at 25 or 26, while those fathering their first child between the ages of 27 and 29 had the same risk of death as those in the 25- to 26-year-old reference group, the researchers explained in a statement.

“The findings of our study suggest that the association between young fatherhood and mid life mortality is likely to be causal,” the study authors wrote. “The association was not explained by unobserved early life characteristics shared by brothers or by certain adult characteristics known to be associated both with fertility timing and mortality.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Health

Perfectionism leads to burnout, especially at work

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Emily Bills

Like a moth to a flame, perfectionists often get burned by their striving behaviors, at least according to a new meta-analysis published in the Personality and Social Psychology Review.

The analysis examined 43 studies with 663 effect sizes in an attempt to determine the relationship between various aspects of perfectionism and burnout, specifically in the areas of work, sports, and education.

While perfectionism can have its upsides, like a greater sense of accomplishment at achieving goals, the study also found that it has a dark side—known as “perfectionistic concerns”. These concerns include a fear of making mistakes, letting others down, or failing to reach one’s own unusually high standards.

Previous research has linked these concerns to serious health problems including anxiety, depression, fatigue, eating disorders, and early death.

A high tendency for burnout

“Perfectionistic concerns capture fears and doubts about personal performance, which creates stress that can lead to burnout when people become cynical and stop caring,” lead researcher Andrew Hill, an associate professor of sport psychology at York St. John University in England, said in a press release. “It also can interfere with relationships and make it difficult to cope with setbacks because every mistake is viewed as a disaster.”

Hill’s own study found that perfectionistic concerns have a high tendency for burnout in all areas, but especially in the workplace—possibly because it has less social support and explicit objectives than in sports and education. While perfectionism in the other two often result in good grades or more wins, a stellar performance in the office isn’t necessarily always recognized or rewarded.

However, the researchers noted that these traits aren’t limited to types of people who cry over an A-; most people display some characteristics of perfectionism in some areas of their lives, and can suffer from its downsides as well.

“People need to learn to challenge the irrational beliefs that underlie perfectionistic concerns by setting realistic goals, accepting failure as a learning opportunity, and forgiving themselves when they fail,” Hill said. “Creating environments where creativity, effort, and perseverance are valued also would help.”

(Image credit: Thinkstock)

Science

EPA, President Obama officially announce Clean Power Plan

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

On Monday, President Obama and EPA administrator Gina McCarthy officially unveiled the final version of the administration’s Clean Power Plan, a set of regulations that call for stricter greenhouse gas cuts from power plants than originally planned.

While the original plan unveiled last year set a target of reducing carbon dioxide pollution levels by 30 percent over the next 15 years, the final version of the plan requires a 32 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2030 – but only for power plants. Emissions from all pollution sources (cars and other vehicles included) are set to be reduced between 26 and 28 percent over that span.

The plan calls for 28 percent of the country’s energy to come from renewable sources (up from 22 percent in the original proposal) by 2030, and it establishes a Clean Energy Incentive Program that will reward states for investing in early adoption of renewable, clean energy sources.

“There is such a thing as being too late when it comes to climate change,” the President said at a Monday afternoon White House event announcing the new rules, the Wall Street Journal noted. He also said that the plan, which was in the works for more than two years, was the “single most important step America has taken in the fight against global climate change.”

However, House Speaker John Boehner told reporters, “Instead of being a shining achievement for his legacy, this will be remembered as another irresponsible policy that makes it even harder for Americans to provide for their families and reach the American dream.”

Health benefits of reduced emissions touted

According to the Obama administration, the Clean Power Plan establishes the first-ever national standards to limit carbon pollution from power plants, which they claim is the largest source of carbon emissions in the US. They state that the act will reduce premature deaths from emissions originating from power plants by nearly 90 percent in 2030 compared to 2005.

Furthermore, the President and the EPA said that the plan will reduce the pollutants contributing to asthma-causing soot and smog by more than 70 percent. In all, they believe that it will reduce premature deaths by 3,600; reduce asthma attacks in children by 90,000; and prevent as many as 300,000 missed work and school days, according to their Clean Power Plan fact sheet.

Harold Wimmer, national president and CEO of the American Lung Association, told reporters that the final plan “reflects the progress we as a nation are making to reduce pollution from power plants and marks a tremendous step forward in the fight against climate change. [We] will work with states to maximize the immediate health benefits from power plant cleanup.”

Debate over whether or not the plan will reduce energy bills

The Obama administration’s fact sheet also states that the Clean Power Plan will let each state develop and implement their own plans to meet the mandated emissions standards, requiring a plan to be submitted by September 2016. However, states needing more time are allowed to ask for an extension of up to two years, with the compliance period starting in 2022.

Officials also claim that the bill will spur on “aggressive investment” in clean energy technology, resulting in a 30 percent increase in power generation from those sources. They also claim that it will save the average US family almost $85 on their annual energy bill in 2030.

Not everyone is thrilled about the new regulations, however. As the AP reported on Monday, even though the Obama administration is claiming that the average US family will see a lower energy bill, power companies themselves are skeptical about those claims. Organizations such as the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the American Energy Alliance, the National Mining Association, and others claim that the rules will actually increase electricity bills.

(Image credit: Thinkstock)

Space

Cassini gears up for final look at Saturn’s icy moons

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny

NASA’s Cassini mission is gearing up for the home stretch, as the Saturn-orbiting spacecraft will get its final looks at the icy moons of Enceladus and Dione over the next six months, starting in a couple of weeks with the latter, according to report published late last week.

Cassini will be conducting three additional flybys of Enceladus, an extremely bright object that reflects nearly all of the sunlight that strikes it and which has already been analyzed by the probe on multiple occasions, and one of Dione, which Space.com said will take place on August 17.

Why so much interest in these icy moons? Discovery News explains that NASA believes they may represent some of the best chances of finding life on other planets, as there might be liquid oceans filled with microbes lurking beneath their frozen surfaces. Gravitational interactions with Saturn may warm them enough to allow these tiny living creatures to survive, they said.

Searching for evidence of plumes on Dione

First up will be Dione, where Cassini will conduct gravitational measurements to learn more about the icy shell and interior of this moon. Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Discovery News that they believe Dione may have the same type of eruptions as Enceladus, and they hope to find out for sure this month.

“We haven’t found the equivalent of a smoking gun,” Spilker said. The lack of evidence may be due to the larger size of the moon. A bigger moon means more gravity, which could be pulling down the plumes and making them more difficult to see. In addition to this month’s flyby, far-off observations set for 2017 could also be used to find evidence of these plumes.

The spacecraft will also be looking at the plumes of Enceladus, which were first discovered by the probe’s magnetometer instrument, in the best detail thus far. The final three flybys of the popular Cassini target are scheduled to begin on October 14, with a view of the north pole. A “plunge” into a known plume location is set to follow two weeks later, and the probe will travel to the moon’s south pole to study the thermal environment there in December.

Cassini’s mission is expected to end in 2017, when it will use the gravity of Saturn’s moon Titan to “hop” into a spot in the inner part of the planet’s rings. Once it arrives, it will remain there for 22 orbital cycles before plummeting into the atmosphere on September 15.

Image: The plumes of Enceladus as seen by Cassini in 2009. (Image credit: NASA)

Health

Put a toy chicken on your head to boost your toddler’s development

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Emily Bills

Telling a child that a toy chicken is a hat may actually help with their development, according to studies from the University of Sheffield.

The researchers studied 25 and 40 sixteen- to twenty-four-month-old children in the two respective studies, in an attempt to determine if and how children distinguish joking and pretending from one another.

In the first study, parents were asked to joke and pretend with their children using actions—like joke by putting food on their head or pretending to wash their hands without using soap or water. In the second, the parents were asked to do both things verbally, like by pretending a block was a horse or saying a toy chicken was a hat.

By studying these interactions, the researchers determined that parents themselves offer explicit cues to children that help them to distinguish between pretending and joking, and children as young as 16 months can pick up on these cues.

Play an important aspect of development

These cues involved the parents showing more disbelief when they were joking than when they were pretending, and the children responded with less belief as well. The study found that by understanding this difference, children are allowed more opportunities to learn, imagine, bond, and think in abstract ways.

“The study shows just how important play is to children’s development. Parents who pretend and joke with their children offer cues to distinguish the difference between the two and toddlers take advantage of these cues to perform. For example, if a parent said something like, ‘That’s not really a hat!’ children would realise it was a joke, and not real, and would avoid putting the toy chicken on their head. But if parents were pretending that, for example, a block was a horse, they might repeatedly make the block gallop, which would encourage children to do the same, and understand that the block really was a horse in their imagination,” Dr. Elena Hoicka, co-author, said in a press release.

She added: “The research reveals the process in which toddlers learn to distinguish joking and pretending.

“Knowing how to joke is good for maintaining relationships, thinking outside the box, and enjoying life. Pretending helps children to practice new skills and learn new information.”

“So while parents may feel a bit daft putting a toy chicken on their head they can at least console themselves with the knowledge that they are helping their children develop important skills for life.”

The studies were published in the journal Cognitive Science.

(Image credit: Thinkstock)

Health

Reports: Blood doping, PED use rampant in Olympic sports

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

Documents allegedly containing the leaked blood test data of thousands of athletes claims to show that the use of performance-enhancing drugs, blood doping, or other methods of cheating has reached “extraordinary” levels internationally.

The leaked files, which Mashable reported were handed over to The Sunday Times and German broadcaster AMD, appears to include the result of 12,000 tests from 5,000 athletes, showing that one-third of the medals awarded to endurance runners at the Olympics and world championships between 2001 and 2012 went to athletes with “suspicious” test results.

While The Sunday Times said that no athletes have yet been stripped of their medals, Australian doping expert Robin Parisotto said he had never before seen such an “alarmingly abnormal set of blood values” before, telling the newspaper that it was “damning that the IAAF [International Association of Athletics Federations] appears to have sat idly by and let this happen.”

The reports indicate that more than 800 athletes (one-seventh of those featured) recorded blood tests deemed abnormal or suspicious of PED use or blood doping, which increases the endurance of an athlete by improving their ability to transport oxygen through the body. The most frequent offender was Russia, with “a remarkable 80 percent” of medal winners reportedly recording one or more suspicious tests throughout their careers.

Athletics organizations, doping agencies respond to charges

In a statement, the IAAF said that it aware of the allegations, which they said were “largely based on analysis of… private and confidential medical data which has been obtained without consent.” It said that a detailed response was forthcoming, and would “reserve the right to take any follow up action necessary to protect the rights of the IAAF and its athletes.”

On Sunday, Sir Craig Reedie, president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said in a statement that he was “very disturbed” by the allegations, and that the accusations “require swift and close scrutiny to determine whether there have in fact been breaches under the World Anti-Doping Code and, if so, what actions are required to be taken by WADA and/or other bodies.”

“As always, WADA is committed to doing what’s necessary to ensure a level playing field for clean athletes of the world,” he added. The documents cited in the reports would be handed over to an independent commission formed last December in the wake of similar charges.

In an interview with BBC News, International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach said that currently the reports are “nothing more than allegations” and that the group had to “respect the presumption of innocence.” If the claims are proven and found to involve results at the Olympics, however, he said that the IOC would respond “with zero tolerance.”

(Image credit: Thinkstock)

Health

Drinking coffee helps keep seniors’ brains healthy

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

Research has already found that coffee could have health benefits such as reducing a person’s risk of type 2 diabetes, but new research published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease claims that the caffeinated beverage could improve cognitive function in seniors.

According to UPI and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the study looked at more than 1,400 older Italians between the ages of 65 and 84, and found that over the course of three years, those who drank an average of two cups of coffee per day were less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment (MCI) than those consuming no coffee.

However, the University of Bari Aldo Moro researchers behind the study also found that those individuals who were not regular coffee drinkers and increased their consumption habits later in life actually had a higher risk of developing MCI (a precursor to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease) than those keeping their intake consistently moderate.

Caffeine could prevent amyloid protein accumulation

While the research has not drawn a firm causal link between coffee consumption and improved mental health in seniors, the authors suggest that caffeine could protect a person’s brain from the accumulation of amyloid protein plaques, which have previously been linked to Alzheimer’s.

As researchers Dr. Vincenzo Solfrizzi and Dr. Francesco Panza explained to the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, the findings suggest that “moderate and regular coffee consumption may have neuroprotective effects also against MCI confirming previous studies on the long-term protective effects of coffee, tea, or caffeine consumption and plasma levels of caffeine against cognitive decline and dementia.”

“Findings from neuroimaging studies should become available from experimental data… further explaining the mechanisms underlying the neuroprotective effects of coffee, tea, and caffeine consumption,” they continued, adding that “larger studies with longer follow-up periods should be encouraged” and could open up new diet-related ways to prevent neurodegenerative diseases.

In addition to the link in combating type 2 diabetes, UPI pointed out that previous research has found that coffee was able to boost the memory of laboratory mice, could protect drinkers from such health problems as stroke and high blood pressure, and appeared to offer protection against some forms of cancer, as well as neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease.

(Image credit: Thinkstock)

Technology

Hitchhiking robot journey ends following vandalism in Philly

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny

This is why we can’t have nice things: A child-sized hitchhiking robot that was quickly becoming a social media sensation as it made its way across America had its journey come to an abrupt end over the weekend – before it was even able to leave the Eastern time zone!

HitchBOT, which was created by Dr. David Smith of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and Dr. Frauke Zeller of Ryerson University in Toronto, previously spend 26 days hitchhiking in Canada last year, and has also traveled throughout parts of Europe, was attempting to complete a journey from the East Coast of the US to the West Coast.

Sporting the phrase “San Francisco or bust” on its head, the smiling hitchBOT departed from the town of Marblehead, Massachusetts on July 17, and according to the Associated Press, it made it to a Boston Red Sox game and was also able to visit New York City. However, the robot wound up being vandalized in Philadelphia and was too badly damaged to continue its trek.

No plans to release final photo, press charges

The creators said that they were sent an image of the robot, which is immobile and relied upon people to pick it up and drop it off, on Saturday, but were unable to track its location because its batteries were dead. They do not know who damaged the robot or why, the AP said, but have no plans to pursue the culprits or press charges.

HitchBOT was developed to be a talking travel companion, and could communicate facts and engage in limited conversations with the drivers who stopped by to offer it a lift, reporters said. It has a GPS to track its location, and a camera that snapped a random picture every 20 minutes or so as a way to document its travels.

During its previous journeys, the AP said, the robot made its way to a wedding, stopped off at a comic book convention, had its portrait painted in the Netherlands and even spent an entire week rockin’ out with a heavy metal band. The creators said that they will not release the last image of the damaged hitchBOT, in order to protect younger fans.

“Sometimes bad things happen to good robots,” they said on the project’s website. “We know that many of hitchBOT’s fans will be disappointed, but we want them to be assured that this great experiment is not over. For now we will focus on the question ‘What can be learned from this?’ and explore future adventures for robots and humans.”

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Feature Image Credit: HitchBOT

Space

NASA’s new quad-copter vehicle acts as buddy for rovers

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

NASA engineers are developing a quad-copter-like vehicle that would be used with off-world rovers to map terrain ahead of those machines and collect samples from otherwise inaccessible places.

The Extreme Access Flyer system, affectionately called the “little flying buddy” by Space.com, is being created by engineers at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and would be an airborne robotic vehicle designed to operate on planets with little to no atmosphere.

Rob Mueller, senior technologist for advanced projects at NASA’s Swamp Works team, called it “a prospecting robot” that will be used to find resources in “hard-to-access areas” (such as regions where there is permanent shadow or crater walls too steep for a rover to climb).

Mueller’s team is designing the Extreme Access Flyers to use a lander as a base to replenish its batteries and propellants between flights, using fuel created from resources found on the worlds they explore. They would be small enough for several to accompany a lander on its mission, and could perform hundreds of explorative flights during each mission.

Plans call for autonomous, cold-gas powered mini-UAVs

Compared to Earth-based quad-copters, the Extreme Access Flyers would have far larger rotors to deal with the atmospheric differences of Mars, the moon, or asteroids. They would also need to operate autonomously, due to communication delays, and without the assistance of a GPS.

Lifting and maneuvering duties typically performed by rotors would require cold-gas jets using oxygen or steam water vapor. Also, the team is planning to program the flyer to recognize the terrain and landmarks so that it can navigate, guiding itself to specific areas based on instructions sent by Earth-based controllers or scouting for sample-collection sites on its own.

When it comes to collecting samples, the Swamp Works team is planning to devise a modular approach, allowing the quad-copters to carry one tool at a time to a site and collect about seven grams of material at a time. That should be sufficient for a lander to use its instruments to analyze the samples, and over the course of several flights, would be enough to paint a complete picture of a geological area for scientists on the ground.

Using flight control systems inspired by those of commercially available small, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), they have successfully assembled several models designed to test various parts of the final machines. The prototype they envision will be about five feet across and use ducted fans. Testing is currently underway at the Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility.

(Image credit: NASA)

Science

No shots necessary: How bees naturally vaccinate their young

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny

Unlike humans, there aren’t any anti-vaxxers amongst the bee population, as the pollinating insects naturally immunize their offspring against specific diseases found in their environment – and now researchers have discovered for the first time exactly how they do it.

Writing in the latest edition of the journal PLOS Pathogens, scientists from the Arizona State University and an international team of colleagues report that vitellogenin, a protein found in bee blood, plays a critical but previously undiscovered role in disease immunity transmission.

“The process by which bees transfer immunity to their babies was a big mystery until now,” Gro Amdam, co-author of the study and a professor at the ASU’s School of Life Sciences, explained in a statement. “What we found is that it’s as simple as eating. Our amazing discovery was made possible because of 15 years of basic research on vitellogenin.”

Vitellogenin carries bacteria fragments through the body

Since a queen bee rarely leaves the nest, a colony’s worker bees bring food to her, Amdam and her colleagues said. These bees can pick up pathogens while out collecting nectar and pollen, and once this pollen is returned to the hive, it is used to create a food known as “royal jelly.”

That royal jelly contains bacteria from the outside environment, and once the microbes are eaten, they are digested in the queen’s gut and transferred to a body cavity, where they are stored in the “fat body” (an organ similar to a liver). Fragments of the bacteria are then bound to vitellogenin, and the protein is carried through the blood and into the developing eggs.

This process allows baby bees to be born “vaccinated” from the pathogens, making it so that their immune systems are better prepared for dealing with environmental diseases after they are born. Prior to this new study, scientists did not know that vitellogenin acted as the carrier of the immune-priming signals that make all of this possible, the researchers said.

Now that Amdam’s team understands how bees vaccinate their offspring, they are looking to use this information to develop the first edible, natural vaccine for insects. These vaccines could play a key role in combating colony collapse disorder, and since pollinators are essential to food production, the immunization would ultimately benefit humans as well, they added.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Space

One-third of Milky Way stars wander through the galaxy

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) scientists who created a new map of the Milky Way found that nearly one-third of the stars in the solar system have radically changed their orbits, the researchers reported in the latest edition of The Astrophysical Journal.

In the study, lead author Michael Hayden, a graduate student in astronomy at New Mexico State University, and an international team of experts spent four years using the SDSS’s Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Explorer (APOGEE) spectrograph to observe more than 100,000 stars and found that about 30 percent of them were no longer in their original locations.

The construction of this new stellar map required the researchers to measure the elements in each star’s atmosphere, Hayden explained. By studying their chemical composition, they can learn the ancestry and life history of these stars, and this chemical data is obtained from the measurements of the light each one gives off at different wavelengths (also known as spectra).

Chemical composition of stars evidence of radial migration

Spectra show lines which correspond to different elements and compounds, and by reading these lines, astronomers can determine the chemical composition of each star. These stellar spectra revealed that the chemical makeup of the galaxy is in a constant state of flux, the study authors said, as heavier elements are formed in stellar cores, then released once older stars star to die off.

Those elements then enter the gas clouds that are used to form the next generation of stars, causing those stars to have a higher percentage of heavier elements than their predecessors. Some regions of the galaxy form stars more quickly than others, causing new star generations to form and increasing the average heavy element content of those stars.

Using this knowledge, astronomers can determine what part of the galaxy a star was born in by tracing the amount of heavy elements in that star, the researchers said. Hayden and his fellow researchers used APOGEE data to map the amounts of 15 separate elements inside stars from all over the galaxy, and found that up to 30 percent had compositions indicating that they had been formed in parts of the galaxy that were far away from their present locations.

Further analysis of these elemental abundance patterns revealed that most of the observations could be explained by a model in which stars migrate radially, or move closer to or farther away from the galactic center with time. These motions are believed to be caused by irregularities in the galactic disc, and while evidence of stellar migration had previously been found in stars near the sun, this is the first evidence that this phenomenon occurs all over the galaxy.

Discussing the research with Vanderbilt’s Dr. Jonathan Bird

Dr. Jonathan Bird, a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at Vanderbilt University who specializes in galaxy formation and one of the researchers behind the new study, was kind enough to discuss the work with redOrbit via email while on a work trip in Germany. He played an essential role in determining the signature of the “fossil records” of the stars collected by the SDSS.

The study, Dr. Bird explained, “describes an observational result – how the chemistry of stars changes as we look in different regions of the galaxy.” He “provided theoretical context for the observational result” in two major ways. First, he checked simulations to ensure that the general observational results could be recreated by these so-called “wandering stars.”

Once the simulations showed that this was indeed possible, the team developed what Dr. Bird called a “toy model” (a simplified model which used only the relevant physical phenomena and which ignored everything else) in order to see how the stars would behave. This toy model indicated that wandering stars were indeed the solution to the chemical composition problem.

Dr. Bird also said that he “provided a lot of theoretical context to the findings. There are still many different theories of how galaxies come together and this paper provides an important observational constraint on certain classes of these galaxy formation theories. In the manuscript, I discussed this and how our results also have something to say about the galaxy’s past.”

Dr. Bird on the significance of the study and the APOGEE technology

He called the results “quite significant, because we really didn’t know much about the chemical composition of stars outside of our ‘solar neighborhood.’ There were hints that ‘wandering stars’ were needed to explain some results earlier to this, but we now know that wandering stars must happen, and because we now have information from other parts of the galaxy, we can begin to constrain how common wandering stars are.”

This is essential, the Vanderbilt researcher told redOrbit, because wandering stars made it more difficult to distinguish between the galaxy’s past and present. If stars remained where they were born, scientists would have an easier time piecing together the galaxy’s history. This new study, he said, can be combined with future findings to allow astronomers to describe the galaxy’s wandering stars in more detail, and to “rewind the clock” to locate their original birthplaces.

Dr. Bird also touted the APOGEE instrument, which can observe light for 300 stars at a time and which “breaks ground” as a spectrograph capable of operating in the infrared spectrum as well as the visible spectrum. Infrared wavelengths allow scientists to see through that dust prevents them from seeing stars at visual wavelengths, which he said is “a VERY big deal” and the main reason why APOGEE “is discovering brand new things about the galaxy.”

He noted that APOGEE is currently in its second phase, APOGEE-2, and that the survey was given funding to continue its work for another six years to continue studying stars from Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, as well as funding to create a copy of the spectrograph to be used at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. In March, after completing this paper, Dr. Bird was elected APOGEE-2 Science Working Group Chair, he added.

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Image credit: Dr. Jonathan Bird

Science

Can economics help explain microbial life?

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Adam Smith was a famous 18th century economist, not a biologist, but could his economic theories help solve longstanding mysteries about gut microbes? The authors of a new PLOS One study seem to think that’s the case.
Joshua Tasoff, an economics professor at Claremont Graduate University, and colleagues from Boston and Columbia Universities report in their new study that the same framework that is used to explain how societies buy, sell, and trade goods and services could also be applied to microbial life, and could help answer larger questions about biological evolution and productivity.
“As an economist, I don’t normally get to experiment with a living organism’s DNA,” Tasoff, who conducted the research along with Michael Mee from the BU Department of Biomedical Engineering and Harris Wang of the Columbia Department of Systems Biology, said.
“By developing an economic framework of microbial trade, we can use off-the-shelf economic concepts and theories to better understand how these microbial communities work,” he added in a statement. The authors said that their findings offer new insights into these tiny life forms.
Increasing production caused bacterial communities to thrive
While they are far too small to see with the naked eye, microbes can be found in the air, the soil, and even within the human body, the researchers explained. Bacterial cells even outnumber the human cells found in a person’s body by 10-to-1, and while some of them cause disease, most of them are vital to sustaining life.
Microbes also interact with one another in complicated, but not yet well understood ways. They live in complex communities where they need to exchange molecules and proteins in order to survive, the study authors stated. These resources are traded between microbes in much the same way that modern societies exchange goods and services in order to grow and thrive.
These similarities inspired Tasoff and his colleagues to apply the general equilibrium theory of economics to microbes. The theory was used to explain resource exchange in complex economies as a way of understanding the trade of resources in microbial communities. They used synthetic E. coli and manipulated bacterial cells to alter their production and export rates.
They then tested the population growth implications of the theory, and found that the increase in trade caused microbial communities to grow faster, and that while all of the bacteria benefits from trade, those that predominantly exported their “goods” grew more slowly than those that predominantly imported.
“That means that species face a tradeoff between growing their communities faster versus increasing their own population relative to that of a trading partner,” Tasoff said, adding that the findings could lead to the application of other economic concepts which could help scientists better understand microbial communities, as well as those of other biological organisms.
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Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

X-rays reveal new component of human hair

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

Using x-ray technology, researchers have discovered a never-before-seen component of human hair– an intermediate zone located between the cortex and cuticle. The findings were presented Wednesday at the annual meeting of the American Crystallographic Association.

Stanic’s research found that in the area between a hair strand’s cuticle and cortex lacked a key diffraction feature of alpha keratin, and that the pattern actually corresponded to another type of protein, beta keratin. Beta-keratin, the website explained, is what makes the claws, scales, beaks and feathers of birds and reptiles strong, flexible, and elastic.

According to Discovehttp://news.discovery.com/human/life/x-ray-reveals-mysterious-component-of-human-hair-150728.htmry News, Brazilian Synchrotron Light Source scientist Vesna Stanic and her colleagues made the discovery by accident. They had been using a combination of a powerful submicron X-ray beam and cross-sectional geometry to analyze materials used in hair treatments and how they affect follicles Furthermore, the group wanted to know more about about hair’s diffraction patterns.

Diffraction, the website explained, is the bending of waves around obstacles and openings in an object. X-ray diffraction patterns from a material can reveal the arrangement of both its molecular and atomic structures, and while hair’s diffraction patterns  have been previously documented, Stanic’s team used a novel method to analyze human hair.

While most scientists point X-ray beams perpendicular to the hair fiber axis. Stanic said that she and her colleagues “performed a full diffraction map from a 30-micron-thick cross section of hair, with an incident beam parallel to the hair axis, and then compared it to the diffraction map with the beam perpendicular to the hair axis.”

Findings likely to result in better hair-care products

Stanic told Discovery News that hair typically has been thought to have three main regions: the medulla, or the central part of the hair; the cortex, which makes up the largest volume; and the cuticle, which is the external part of the hair. In addition, it was believed to be composed only of a fibrous protein, alpha keratin, along with select types of lipids and minerals.

While the two types of protein are similar, their shapes and sizes differ, Stanic explained. Beta keratin, she said, “is essentially stretched alpha keratin… alpha keratin has a helical structure, while beta is typically arranged in sheets.” She added that the findings will likely result in the development of better hair-care products.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Health

Getting married helps people stop drinking

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

It’s commonly acknowledged that marriage changes a person, and new study published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research has found that that change can be for the better: Tying the knot tends to decrease how much you drink, especially in heavy drinkers.
Researchers previously found that alcohol-use disorders generally decrease with age, known as “maturing out”. Like the marriage phenomenon, scientists believe it has to do with the roles we take on as we go through life.
“A key conceptual framework psychologists use to explain maturing out and the ‘marriage effect’ is role-incompatibility theory,” said Matthew Lee, a postdoctoral fellow in the psychological sciences department at University of Missouri, in a press release.
“The theory suggests that if a person’s existing behavioral pattern is conflicting with the demands of a new role, such as marriage, one way to resolve the incompatibility is to change behavior. We hypothesized that this incompatibility may be greater for more severe drinkers, so they’ll need to make greater changes to their drinking to meet the role demands of marriage.”
Tie the knot to cork the bottle
In order to test this, the researchers from the University of Missouri and Arizona State University accessed data previously collected from a long-term (and still ongoing) study of familial alcohol disorders. They analyzed the data of 844 participants (around 50% of whom were children of alcoholics) as they aged from 18 to 40, examining how drinking rates changed before and after marriage.
“Confirming our prediction, we found that marriage not only led to reductions in heavy drinking in general, this effect was much stronger for those who were severe problem drinkers before getting married,” said Lee.
“This seems consistent with role incompatibility theory. We believe that greater problem drinking likely conflicts more with the demands of roles like marriage; thus, more severe problem drinkers are likely required to more substantially alter their drinking habits to adapt to the marital role.”
The researchers say that more research needs to be done in order to better understand how role-driven drinking reactions happen, and hope that new findings may improve clinical efforts to help severe problem drinkers, affect public health policy changes, and allow more targeted interventions for problem drinkers to be found.
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Image credit: Thinkstock

Health

Are fitness apps worthwhile?

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Brian Galloway

When it comes to free iPhone fitness apps, most of the popular ones are in need of a boot camp to bulk up their utility—at least according to a new study out of the University of Florida.

The researchers examined the top 100 free health and fitness applications on iTunes in order to see how many met the recommended guidelines for physical activity. 70 apps were eliminated, because an App had to be exercise-based in order to qualify for the study.

The recommended exercise guidelines come from the American College of Sports Medicine, which according to the review is the leading organization working on creating and modifying exercise programs. The ASCM requires three elements of a successful exercise prescription program: aerobic exercise, strength and resistance exercise, and flexibility.

The ASCM also recommends how much time should be given to each of the three areas within a standard exercise program, which was used in determining how apps were rated. Also included in scoring were parameters for safety, warm-ups, cool-downs, stretching, intensity, frequency, and progression.

How many are worth your time?

More than half the apps included some of the recommendations for aerobic exercise and around 90% met the criteria for strength and resistance. Flexibility, however, was a problem area: two-thirds of the apps did not meet any of the criteria.

“Several of the apps contained high-quality content in one of the three categories, but almost none of them had high-quality content in all of them, especially flexibility,” said Heather Vincent, co-author of the paper, in a press release. “This is a problem because flexibility is important for good exercise form, relaxation, and cool-down.”

The top-scoring app was Sworkit Lite Personal Workout Trainer App, which garnered 9.01 out of 14 points, meaning it met over half the criteria. Two other apps met over half as well: the C25K—5K Trainer Free app and Running for Weight Loss.

Besides falling generally short on ASCM standards, 23 out of the 30 apps provided no sort of training plan, did not explain how to choose a workout, or did not explain how to organize workouts across a week—which makes it hard for beginners to follow a safe and productive regimen.

“While apps have great potential to give more people access to workouts that could help them achieve a healthy weight and fitness level, we found that the vast majority of apps are not as safe as they could be and do not give users the type of well-rounded workouts known to be most effective,” said François Modave, associate professor of health outcomes and co-author of the review.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

 

Technology

Kentucky man arrested after shooting down drone

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

A Kentucky man who shot down a drone spotted hovering over his property has been arrested and charged which first degree criminal mischief and first degree wanton endangerment.

Forty-seven-year-old William Meredith of Hillview was reportedly taken into custody by police on Sunday after shooting the drone in mid-air and causing it to crash in a nearly field, according to BBC News and WDRB News reports.

Meredith said that his daughters were on the back deck of their house when the spotted the drone and told their father about it. He told the BBC that he fired three shots while the drone was in the air, causing it to crash in the field behind his house.

The drone owner told WDRB that he was just trying to get pictures of a friend’s house and that the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) cost more than $1,800. After it was shot down, he went over to Meredith’s house and confronted the man.

Privacy rights vs. safety concerns

Meredith, who was booked into Bullitt County Detention Center and released on Monday, told reporters that he was concerned that the drone was invading his privacy and that of his daughters, and that he felt he was “well within my rights as an American citizen to defend my property.”

Likewise, neighbor Kim VanMeter told WDRB that the drone had been “hovering above our house” and “stayed for a few moments” before moving on. She added that she has a 16-year-old daughter who is frequently sunbathes, and that it was creepy to have a drone with a camera in the area. “You should have privacy in your own backyard,” VanMeter explained.

The drone owner and four other men eventually confronted Meredith, who said that he warned the men that he would shoot them if they came towards him and threatened him. The police were called and took Meredith into custody for discharging a firearm in the city. The man said he was disappointed by their response, and that he will pursue legal action against the drone owners.

“He didn’t just fly over. If he had been moving and just kept moving, that would have been one thing – but when he come directly over our heads, and just hovered there, I felt like I had the right,” Meredith said. “When you’re in your own property, within a six-foot privacy fence, you have the expectation of privacy… We don’t know if he was looking at the girls. We don’t know if he was looking for something to steal. To me, it was the same as trespassing.”

However, FAA spokesman Les Dorr warned against shooting down drones for any reason. “An unmanned aircraft hit by gunfire could crash,” Dorr told WDRB, “causing damage to persons or property on the ground, or it could collide with other objects in the air.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

Science

Rare ancient cat paw print found on Roman roof tile

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

A Roman roof tile stored at a museum in southwestern England has been discovered to contain an unusual surprise – paw prints made by a cat an estimated 2,000 years ago which were found by researchers looking through artifacts obtained during a 1969 excavation.

According to Discovery News, the tile was found during an archaeological dig in Gloucester but the paw print itself had long gone unnoticed. As David Rice, curator at Gloucester City Museum, said to the website, “At that time the archaeologists seem to have been more interested in digging things up than looking at what they found.”

Experts believe that the cat ran across the wet clay tile when it was set out to dry, most likely around 100AD. Despite the feline footprint, the Romans fired the tile and used it on the roof of a building in what became the Berkeley Street area of modern Gloucester.

Paw prints likely left by the pesky pet of a Roman soldier

A museum representative told The Telegraph that when Romans made roof tiles such as this one, which was a type of tile known as tegula, they left the wet clay out to dry in the sun. While these tiles were drying, animals (and sometimes people) would walk across them, leaving footprints.

The cat, which is believed to have been the pet of a Roman soldier stationed at the construction site, probably snuck across the wet tiles, much to the dismay of the tile makers. Nonetheless, the tiles were still used, and the paw print went largely unnoticed until recently, when it was found by an archaeologist sifting through tile fragments at the museum.

The tile, which is now on display at the Gloucester City Museum and Art Gallery, contain “the only example for Roman domestic cats that visitors can see in the museum,” Rice told Discovery News. “I believe there are more cat paw prints found on ancient Roman tiles in Britain than anywhere else in the Roman Empire… Roman Britons must have had a special liking for cats.”

Councilor Lise Noakes, cabinet member for culture and leisure at Gloucester City Council, told The Telegraph that it was “a fascinating discovery. Dog paw prints, people’s boot prints and even a piglet’s trotter print have all been found on tiles from Roman Gloucester, but cat prints are very rare. Why not come along and see it for yourself at The City Museum and Art Gallery?”

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Image credit: David Rice

Space

Solar system with three super earths discovered

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Brian Galloway

A new planetary system discovered by researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) is home to four planets, including one giant outer world and three super-Earths– and it’s fairly close at a distance of only 21 light years from Earth.

The study authors, who report their discovery in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, said that one of the planets is likely a volcanic world made out of molten rock, and that the planet with the shortest orbit has been spotted transiting across the face of its star, HD219134.

According to Discovery News, the four-planet system is located in the Cassiopeia, an M-shaped constellation found in the northern hemisphere. Measurements conducted from both ground and space telescopes showed that the transiting planet is 1.6 times larger and 4.5 times more massive than Earth, and that it has a similar mean density and likely a similar composition as well.

Proximity of system makes it conducive for future studies

The temperature of the planet with the shortest orbit, HD219134b is approximately 700 degrees Kelvin (800 Fahrenheit), the authors said, meaning the planet is not in the habitable zone of its star. However, it is the closest transiting planet discovered by scientists thus far, giving them the opportunity to further study its atmosphere and composition, the authors told the website.

The UNIGE team also discovered three other, longer-period planets in the system – one which weighs 2.7 times the Earth and orbits HD219134 once every 6.8 days and a planet weighting 2.7 times as much as our home world that has an orbital period of 46.8 days. Both of these planets are located in the inner regions of the system, the researchers explained in a statement.

The fourth planet is a small-Saturn type world that orbits the star once every three years or so, they added. The researchers believe that the proximity and brightness of this Solar System will make it favorable for a detailed analysis of the physical properties of the planets, especially since it is similar to our own Solar System in that it has small inner planets and a larger outer one.

“For atmospheric studies, astronomers are already planning observations with ground-based high-resolution spectrographs and the future NASA-ESA James Webb Space telescope (JWST) using transmission spectroscopy techniques,” they said. “They even dream about direct imaging of the outer planet in the system with the new generation of giant telescopes on the ground.”

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Image credit: NASA JPL/Caltech

Health

Amazing non-invasive technique helps paralyzed move again

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

In a new study published in the Journal of Neurotrauma, researchers at UCLA report that they have successfully helped completely paralyzed patients regain movement in their legs using non-invasive, non-surgical techniques designed to simulate a spinal cord.

According to senior author V. Reggie Edgerton, a distinguished professor of integrative biology and physiology, neurobiology, and neurosurgery at UCLA, and his colleagues, this is believed to be the first time that paralyzed patients have relearned voluntary leg movements without the need for surgery. In the study, five men regained the ability to rhythmically move their legs.

In a statement, Edgerton said that the results of the study “tell us we have to look at spinal cord injury in a new way,” and that while it will probably be several years before these techniques are widely available, he believes that doctors can now significantly improve the quality of life for a patient with severe injuries to the bundle of nerve fibers connecting the body to the brain.

Not yet clear whether or not they could walk again

In experiments conducted last year, Edgerton’s team were able to help four men who had been paralyzed for years move their legs, hips, ankles, and toes after epidural electrical stimulation of their spinal cords. However, that procedures required surgery to implant the stimulator, and the device remained active under a person’s skin for several years, the authors explained.

Earlier this year, Edgerton and his associates demonstrated that they could induce involuntary stepping movements in uninjured people using noninvasive stimulation, and the success of that study led the UCLA professor to investigate using the same approach for people who had been completely paralyzed. He recruited five male volunteers and set out to test his hypothesis.

Each of the five men were given one 45-minute training session per week for 18 weeks, and were given the anti-anxiety drug, buspirone, twice per day for four weeks. Electrodes were place on the skin, at the lower back and near the tailbone, and the patients were given a unique, painless series of electrical currents. They were able to regain voluntary control of their limbs quickly, indicating that they must have still had neural connections at the injury site.

He explained that the connections must have been dormant, and were awakened by the currents. “It was remarkable,” Edgerton said, as he and most other experts in the field believed that those who suffered such an injury would no longer have such neural connections. While his team does not yet know if these patients will be able to bear their own weight or walk again, the findings do reveal that voluntary control of the legs can be re-established.

(Image credit: parag gad/YouTube)

Health

World’s first malaria vaccine approved by EMA

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Emily Bills

The world’s first malaria vaccine has gotten a thumbs up from the European Medicine Agency for use outside the European Union, paving the way for a WHO policy recommendation by November.

The vaccine, known as Mosquirix or RTS,S, has been developed over the course of 30 years by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It aims to stop malaria in the first stages of infection.

“The vaccine is designed to prevent the parasite [Plasmodium falciparum] from infecting the liver where it can mature, multiply, and re-enter the bloodstream, where it infects red blood cells and can lead to disease symptoms,” wrote MVI, a partner in the trials, in a press release.

The European Medicine Agency (EMA), a decentralized agency of the EU, gave its “positive scientific opinion” after seeing the results of 11 clinical trials across seven countries: Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania. There were 15,459 participants in the stage III trials, all children less than two years of age at enrollment.

Acceptable vaccine with moderate results

The EMA found the safety profile of the vaccine to be “acceptable”, and the results were moderate: The vaccine was effective at preventing a first or only clinical malaria episode in 56% of children (5-17 months old at the start) and in 31% of infants (6-12 weeks old at the start). After a year, the efficacy of the vaccine decreased.

“Based on the results of the trial the CHMP concluded that despite its limited efficacy, the benefits of Mosquirix outweigh the risks in both age groups studied. The CHMP considered that the benefits of vaccination may be particularly important among children in high-transmission areas in which mortality is very high,” wrote the EMA in a press release.

Even a modestly effective drug can have enormous ramifications, because malaria kills around 584,000 people annually worldwide—82% of that number being children under five years old in Africa. When paired with other protective measures, like bed nets, many more children may be saved from the disease. Further, the vaccine also protects against hepatitis B.

However, before treatment can become available, there must be a policy recommendation by the WHO. Once that is (theoretically) achieved, there are several more steps to take, actions by individual countries regarding licensure, and implementation and locating financing options.

GSK is not looking to make a profit from this medication, announcing, “GSK has committed to a not-for-profit price for RTS,S so that, if approved, the price of RTS,S would cover the cost of manufacturing the vaccine together with a small return of around five percent that will be reinvested in research and development for second-generation malaria vaccines, or vaccines against other neglected tropical diseases.”

According to Reuters, sources say the cost would be about $5 per dose, or $20 for the full-recommended vaccination—roughly the equivalent cost of four insecticide-treated bed nets.

The results of the stage III trial were published in The Lancet.

(Image credit: Thinkstock)

Space

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ready for InSight Lander’s 2016 arrival

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

Although the NASA InSight lander isn’t set to make it to the Red Planet until next year, preparations are already underway for its arrival, as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is getting into position to receive radio transmissions from the next-gen spacecraft.

On Wednesday, the MRO fired six of its intermediate-sized thrusters for 75 seconds, adjusting the timing of its orbit so that it crosses the equator one-half hour earlier, at 2:30 pm local solar time instead of 3pm, Engadget said. It was the orbiter’s biggest such maneuver since 2006.

The thrusters, which produce 22 newtons (or five pounds) of thrust each, were used to put the MRO in the right location for it to support the InSight upon its arrival on September 28, 2016, explained NASA. These six engines were previously used to correct the spacecraft’s trajectory during its journey from Earth to Mars.

Next MRO maneuvers scheduled for October 2016

InSight is scheduled to lift off in March 2016, and will be accompanied by a pair of CubeSats that Engadget explains will serve as communications-relay satellites, transmitting messages to the ground team with little to no delay. The MRO will also record those signals, serving as the mission’s official documentation before the lander touches down on the planet’s surface.

“Without making this orbit change maneuver, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter would be unable to hear from InSight during the landing, but this will put us in the right place at the right time,” said MRO Project Manager Dan Johnston of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Upon its arrival, InSight will analyze the deep interior of Mars, searching for new clues about the formation and early evolution not only of this planet, but of all rocky worlds, including Earth. In the meantime, MRO will keep collecting high-resolution imagery, atmospheric profiles, spectral data and other information, and will continue providing communication relay support for rovers.

The next scheduled orbital maneuvers for MRO are scheduled for October 2016 and April 2017, NASA said. Each of those will use “the six intermediate-size thrusters longer than three minutes. These will return it to the orbit timing it has used since 2006, crossing the equator at about 3am and 3pm, local solar time, during each near-polar loop around the planet,” the agency added.

(Image credit: NASA)

Health

Potential cancer therapies found in beer, bread yeast

Written By: Eric Hopton
Emily Bills

The ability to create a tailor-made cancer therapy to target specific tumors could revolutionize treatments. Scientists from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have been studying proteins in the yeast used to make beer and bread in a search for these “silver bullet” therapies.

The ancient proteins, known as “RAD51 paralogues” are involved in cancer predisposition and human disease. They are particularly associated with human breast and ovarian tumors. But cancer research in this field has been problematic because RAD51 paralogues are too difficult to work with in animal cells. As a result, scientists didn’t even know if Rad51 mediators function independently or in a cooperative manner. So the Pittsburgh team turned to yeast for their study.

How the ancient proteins can damage or repair

The research helped the team understand how dysfunction in the proteins can lead to the development of tumors. But, crucially, they also discovered the mechanism by which the proteins repair damaged DNA.

“These are proteins that have been present throughout evolution in many species, but very little has been known about what they do. Our study shows for the first time the mechanism of how they are involved in the repair of damaged DNA,” said Kara Bernstein, assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Pittsburgh.

Bernstein and colleagues found the RAD51 paralogues proteins interact with other proteins called the “Shu complex” to repair breaks in DNA strands. Such DNA damage can result from environmental toxins, radiation, and other naturally occurring exposures.

Mending the broken DNA ladder

The paper, “Promotion of presynaptic filament assembly by the ensemble of S. cerevisiae Rad51 paralogues with Rad52,” appears in the journal Nature Communications. It describes how Shu complex works synergistically with additional RAD51 paralogues to search for homologous, or complementary, DNA regions with double-strand breaks, in which both poles of the twisting DNA ladder have been broken.

In these damaged areas, pieces of the genetic code can be lost. The paralogues and Shu complex home in to the “broken ladder” and repair the damage by filling in the missing pieces in a process called homologous recombination.

“Now that we understand what the proteins do, we can perhaps tailor therapies for patients who have cancer and mutations in these repair genes,” said Bernstein.

Other researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and from Yale University are co-authors of the study. The National Institutes of Health funded the work.

This article used material from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine under the Creative Commons license.

Technology

Surf’s up in Wales: Surf park offers longest man-made waves

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

An artificial inland lake holding more than six million gallons of water is being hailed by its owners as being able to produce the longest man-made surf wave on the planet, an it’s started producing its first breakers.

The park is called Surf Snowdonia and was built on the site of an old aluminum factory near the Snowdonia National Park in Wales, said BBC News. The artificial surf lagoon is 300 meters in length and 110 meters in width, or approximately the same size as six soccer fields, and is filled with millions of gallons of filtered rainwater piped down from mountain reservoirs.

According to the company’s website, the surf lagoon is capable of creating two meter waves that will peel (or break gradually to the right or left along the wave crest) for 150 meters. That means that on water moving about 6 meters per second, surfers can ride the waves for 20 seconds.

Up to 52 people at a time can surf, with different sections suitable for surfers of different skill levels. It also can simultaneously produce three different sizes of waves (70 cm, 1.2 m, and 2 m) using a wavefoil that resembles a snowplow. The wavefoil moves back and forth along a central underwater track, generating a barreling wave on both sides.

Explaining how the wavefoil machine works

Furthermore, the wave production of the technology is consistent, according to BBC News. It creates waves that break in the same place each time, and that consistency could ultimately help enable surfing become an Olympic sport.

The company claims that the waves produced by the wavefoil interact with the contours of the lagoon bed to provide the different wave heights, and the machine is controlled using computers located in towers at both ends of the park’s central pier. The wavefoil moves back and forth across the length of the lagoon using a gearless ropeway drive system, they added.

A porous grid sheet on the lagoon’s shore was designed to help dissipate the wave energy more quickly than an impermeable perimeter, allowing waves to be generated at a highly efficient rate of one per minute. A netted screen made of stainless steel protects the underwater machinery, helping keep surfers safe without lessening the energy of the waves produced.

Four-time Welsh surf champion Jo Dennison, who was recruited to work as a coach, told BBC News, that she thought the park would “shape the future of surfing. You can’t compare it with surfing in the ocean, it’s definitely a special thing to be in the water with nature, but this is a fantastic training facility.”

(Image credit: Surf Snowdonia)

Technology

Hackers can crack self-firing rifles, change targets

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

As if the mere existence of computer-augmented, self-aiming rifles wasn’t worrisome enough, a pair of security experts claim to have discovered how someone could remotely gain access to the firearms, shutting them down or changing the target to one of the hacker’s own choosing.

According to Engadget, computer safety experts Runa Sandvik and Michael Auger have come up with a method that allows them to break into rifles using the TrackingPoiny ShotView computer-augmented targeting system via Wi-Fi, then use several software exploits to assume control of the weapon’s aiming and firing functions.

The method enables hackers to alter the trajectory calculations of the scope, permanently disable its aiming computer, or even prevent the gun from being fired at all. Their findings will be presented at next month’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

Sandvik and Auger gave a demonstration of their techniques to Wired, and the website reported that they were able to “dial in their changes to the scope’s targeting system so precisely that they could… hit a bullseye of the hacker’s choosing rather than the one chosen by the shooter.”

Gun can be compromised, but cannot be fired remotely

“You can make it lie constantly to the user so they’ll always miss their shot,” Sandvik, a former developer for the anonymity software Tor, told Wired. The hacker could also lock out the user or erase the entire file system of the gun, rendering the $13,000 system unusable. There are a series of vulnerabilities in the rifle’s software and its Wi-Fi capabilities that allow this kind of hacking.

The researchers explained that the rifle’s Wi-Fi is off by default, but if activated, uses a default password that gives anyone in range the ability to connect to it. Once connected, hackers can use the device like a service, accessing APIs to alter key targeting system variabilities discovered by the duo by taking apart and analyzing the systems and circuit boards of one of the rifles.

In their demonstration, they were able to change the weight of the ammunition, causing the bullet fired by the gun to fly wildly off target. Higher weights caused bullets to miss to the left and lower ones made it miss to the right, and the only thing that could alert the shooter that the rifle has been compromised is a sudden jump in the scope’s view as it changes position.

They also found that they could use the Wi-Fi connection to add themselves as a user, assuming control of its software, making permanent changes to its targeting variables or deleting files required by the scope to operate. They were also able to disable the firing pin, preventing the gun from shooting, but were not able to cause the gun to fire remotely.

Health

Olympic athletes will most likely swim, boat in poop water next summer

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny

It’s like the movie trope where characters pass a lake and someone whispers, “Don’t disturb the water,” only instead of arousing the ire of a monster, you get violently ill.

An analysis by the Associated Press has found that the waters of Rio de Janeiro—the site of the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics—are highly contaminated with bacteria and viruses.

Rio is infamous for its water being contaminated by untreated human sewage, which often causes young children to develop infectious diarrhea for years (until their bodies develop enough antibodies). Currently, officials there test the waters for bacteria, but do not test for viruses—bad news for the nearly 1,400 athletes who will compete in sailing, swimming, canoeing, and rowing there.

The tests so far show that Rio’s waters “are chronically contaminated,” said Fernando Spilki, the man hired to conduct the analyses. “The quantity of fecal matter entering the waterbodies in Brazil is extremely high. Unfortunately, we have levels comparable to some African nations, to India.”

Leonardo Daemon, coordinator of water quality monitoring for the state’s environmental agency, told the AP that officials are just following Brazilian regulations on water quality, which are all based on bacteria levels, like those of most other nations.

The water is so contaminated that in some places the levels of disease-causing viruses is up to 1.7 million times higher than the level that would be considered dangerous for a SoCal beach.

One expert in risk assessment for waterborne viruses, Kristina Mena, estimated that by ingesting just three teaspoons of this water, athletes run a 99% risk of falling ill. Even those in craft on the water are at risk, as they breathe in mist and often get drenched—because viruses enter the body not only through the mouth, but through other orifices too.

Variety is the spice of life

Spilki, a virologist and coordinator of the environmental quality program at Feevale University in southern Brazil, tested the water in four areas: Marina da Gloria in Guanabara Bay, Copacabana beach, and the Rodrigo de Freitas Lake—three Olympic water venues—and Ipanema Beach, a popular tourist destination.

After collecting 37 samples, Spilki tested for adenoviruses, enteroviruses, and rotaviruses, which are known to cause vomiting, explosive diarrhea, respiratory problems, and serious brain and heart diseases.

In terms of viruses, the AP’s tests found that not one of the venues was safe for swimming or boating, and the concentrations in all of the tests were about equivalent to that seen in raw sewage.

The AP also tested for fecal coliform bacteria, which can suggest the presence of cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A and typhoid. In about 75% of the samples, the amount of fecal coliforms exceeded the legal limit for “secondary contact” (like with boaters).

“Everybody runs the risk of infection in these polluted waters,” said Dr. Carlos Terra, a hepatologist and head of a Rio-based association of doctors specializing in the research and treatment of liver diseases.

Be prepared

According to doctors, visitors to Rio should strongly consider vaccines against hepatitis A (which infects about 60% of the population there) and for typhoid.

Water-bound athletes may want to seek further precautions.

“If I were going to be in the Olympics,” said aid John Griffith, a marine biologist at the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, “I would probably go early and get exposed and build up my immunity system to these viruses before I had to compete, because I don’t see how they’re going to solve this sewage problem.”

Despite what seems like overwhelming evidence, Dr. Richard Budgett, the medical director for the International Olympic Committee, said that the IOC and Brazilian authorities should stick to their program of testing only for bacteria to determine whether the water is safe for athletes.

“We’ve had reassurances from the World Health Organization and others that there is no significant risk to athlete health,” he told the AP.

He added that “there will be people pushing for all sorts of other tests, but we follow the expert advice and official advice on how to monitor water effectively.”

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

How brain surgery may have kept Napoleon from conquering Russia

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny

History tells us that General Mikhail Kutuzov was able to repel Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, but what it doesn’t tell us, according to new research published in the Journal of Neurosurgery, is the role that a brain surgeon played in keeping the French emperor at bay.

In the study, Dr. Mark C. Preul, chair of neurosurgery research at Barrow Neurological Institute, and his colleagues said that Napoleon most likely would have been successful in his conquest of Russia had it not been for a life-saving procedure performed on Kutuzov by Jean Massot, a brain surgeon who operated on the general after bullets passed through his head twice.

Kutuzov was shot in the head in both 1774 and 1788, only to go on to best the French emperor in battle in what history portrays as a miraculous story of survival. However, Dr. Preul’s team spent two years analyzing primary sources in both France and Russia and found that Massot was a key player in events, saving the military leader using a forerunner to modern neurosurgery.

“It’s a story of how medicine changed the course of civilization,” he explained. “We…basically identify this surgeon who saved Mikhail Kutuzov…He is at the vanguard of surgical technique. He uses incredibly modern techniques that we still use today.”

Unusual tactics the result of frontal lobe injuries?

Dr. Preul’s team uncovered evidence that the first wound suffered by Kutuzov, which occurred in a battle with the Turks in Crimea in 1774, caused severe damage to the general’s frontal lobe. This caused him to behave erratically, impairing his ability to make decision but also providing some hints as to the strategy that he used to defeat Napoleon on the fields of battle.

Eye-witness accounts reported that Kutuzov’s personality changed after he suffered that injury, which led him to delay confronting Napoleon in the autumn of 1812. Instead, he ordered his men to burn Moscow, and flee to the east. The French army followed, but due to a lack of food and other supplies, they were defeated that winter, and Napoleon was forced to retreat to Paris.

“The other generals thought Kutuzov was crazy, and maybe he was,” Dr. Preul said. “The brain surgery saved Kutuzov’s life, but his brain and eye were badly injured. However ironically the healing resolution of this situation allowed him to make what turned out to be the best decision. If he had not been injured, he may well have challenged Napoleon and been defeated.”

He added that some of the details about the injuries and the surgeries performed on the general cannot be answered without a detailed medical examination, but that it was clear that Kutuzov would not have been leading his army without the efforts of the French brain surgeon.

As the researchers wrote, “Although some would say fate allowed the brilliant Russian general, who became the personification of Russian spirit and character, to survive two nearly mortal head wounds, the best neurosurgical technique of the day seems to have been overlooked as a considerable part of Kutuzov’s success.”

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Feature Image: Portrait of Napoleon. (Credit: Thinkstock)

Delivering blood samples via drones is possible, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have demonstrated in a new proof-of-concept study that the results of routine blood tests are not affected when the samples being analyzed were transported by drones for periods of up to 40 minutes.

The results of the study, which have been published in the journal PLOS One, are being called promising news for the millions living in communities that are economically struggling, who do not have easy access to medical facilities, or who live in areas without quality roads.

“Poor access to health care results in more morbidity (pain and suffering), mortality, and cost,” lead author Dr. Timothy Amukele, a pathologist at the university and the director of a laboratory partnership between Johns Hopkins and Uganda’s Makerere University, told redOrbit via email. “Small civilian drones are an affordable way to increase access.”

“The risk of using drones to transport biological samples is the same as using a car to transport biological samples. Essentially there is a theoretical risk of infection in the case of exposure or a crash. he added. “However… the potential benefits of using drones are huge. Small civilian drones are an affordable way to increase access. They are cheaper than a motorcycle and faster in many settings because they don’t have the problems of traffic or the need for a drivable road.”

Drones, he and his colleagues report, could give health care professionals quicker access to the lab tests required for diagnosis and treatment. The majority of tests on blood samples, they said, are performed by dedicated lab facilities that can be located miles away from medical clinics.

Little to no differences found between flown and driven samples

As Dr. Amukele pointed out in a statement, blood samples and similar biological materials can be extremely fragile, and due to their sensitive nature, even the pneumatic tube systems used by many hospitals, are not suitable for transporting blood for some purposes.

To see if drones could provide an effective alternative to other blood sample transport methods, he and his colleagues collected six blood samples from each of 56 health adult volunteers, then drove them to a flight site one-hour away on days when the temperatures were in the 70s. Those samples were then packaged for flight in such a way to protect them and prevent leaks.

The samples were loaded into a hand-launched fixed-wing drone and flown for periods of six to 38 minutes, with flights taking place in unpopulated areas and remaining below 100 meters (328 feet) at all times. The samples underwent 33 common lab tests, and the results found that little to no difference in the results when compared to samples that were driven to the laboratory.

However, results did differ between flown and driven samples in one test – the bicarbonate test (a test of total carbon dioxide). Dr. Amukele said that his team is not certain why this is the case, but noted that it may be because the blood was sitting around for up to eight hours before being tested. The next step, he said, will be to conduct a pilot study in a remote part of Africa, where health care clinics can be more than 60 miles away from laboratory facilities.

“Our experiment answered the ‘can it work’ question not the ‘will it work’ question. The ‘will it work’ piece requires technological and likely regulatory intervention. On the technical side, we need drones to be able to sense and avoid each other in flight. On the regulatory side, we need clear guidelines for commercial drone ownership and use,” Dr. Amukele told redOrbit.

“Wish us luck in the ‘will it work’ pilot in Africa,” he added.

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Feature Image: Pathologist Timothy Amukele, left, teamed with Robert Chalmers and other engineers to create a drone courier system that transports blood to diagnostic laboratories. (Credit: Johns Hopkins Medicine)

Space

Beneath the surface: Exploring the composition of Philae’s comet, Part 2

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the destination of the ESA’s Rosetta probe and Philae lander, has a dust-to-ice level of 0.4 to 2.6 and a very high porosity of 75 percent to 85 percent, according to one of several studies published Thursday in a special edition of the journal Science.

Wlodek Kofman of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and his colleagues used the Comet Nucleus Sounding Experiment by Radiowave Transmission (CONSERT) instrument to direct electromagnetic signals through the nucleus of the comet.

No scattering pattern was detected in the signals, indicating that the interior of 67P/C-G is likely homogenous or uniform throughout. Furthermore, they reduced the size of uncertainty over Philae’s final landing site down to roughly 21-by-34 square meters, and found that the average permittivity (resistance of the electrical field) is about 1.27.

Comets not ruled out as source of Earth’s organic compounds

A separate study led by Fred Goesmann of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research analyzed the 67P/C-G’s composition using the Cometary Sampling and Composition (COSAC) instrument, which was made to identify organic compounds in the comet in order to determine if comets delivered materials crucial to chemical and biological evolution to the Earth.

COSAC, which is a mass spectrometer designed to analyze organic molecules on the surface of the comet following Philae’s touchdown, took a reading in what the authors refer to as “sniffing” mode 25 minutes after first contact. It detected a total of 16 organic compounds – including four never before seen in a comet (methyl isocyanate, acetone, propionaldehyde, and acetamide).

In an email, Dr. Goesmann told redOrbit that his team’s interpretation of the mass spectrum was “surprisingly unsurprising.” While he said that the findings probably did not reveal all that much about the origins of life, the detections of organics on a comet suggests that is such material were to “fall onto a planet in the right environment, emerging life could make use of it.”

“As far as I am aware,” he added, “the two main theories about the development of complicated organic chemistry on Earth are: A. hot springs in deep oceans and B. external delivery by comets or meteorites.” His team’s findings indicate that the latter option “should not be ruled out.”

Studying materials preserved from the early solar system

Finally, in related research conducted by Ian Wright of The Open University’s Department of Physical Sciences and his colleagues, Philae’s Ptolemy instrument was used to analyze Comet 67P/C-G’s organic compounds. Wright’s team analyzed mass spectra taken by Ptolemy roughly 20 minutes after the lander’s initial touchdown to determine its chemical content.

The instrument, which measures stable isotope ratios, found regular mass distributions indicative of the presence of a radiation-induced polymer on the comet’s surface. Specifically, Ptolemy was able to detect signs of compounds with additional -CH2- and -O- groups, suggesting the presence of a radiation-induced polymer on the surface.

Furthermore, Wright and his co-authors report that these measurements may indicate an absence of benzene and other aromatic compounds, a lack of sulfur-bearing species, and an extremely low concentration of nitrogenous material on the comet. Since the properties of cometary material are indicative of the physical and chemical conditions during their formation, the study basically provides a look at materials preserved from the formation of the solar system.

“In the history of the Solar System, there was a moment in time when a bunch of abiological compounds somehow got together in the right configuration to initiate the origin of life. You can’t study that process on Earth because it has gone to completion,” Wright told redOrbit. “In order to gain an insight into what these things might have looked like, you need to go and study a surviving remnant from a time before this took place. Comets offer just that possibility.”

Image: Lander position at Agilkia, the initial site. (Credit: J. Biele et al.)

Space

Beneath the surface: Exploring the composition of Philae’s comet, Part 1

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

When Philae, the lander accompanying the ESA’s Rosetta probe, successfully touched down on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and became the first man-made spacecraft ever to pull off such a feat, it captured the public’s imagination – and scored some epic data in the process.

The landing, which took place on November 12, 2014, as well as the in-depth analysis of 67P/C-G that followed, are the focus of several new studies appearing in a special edition of the journal Science on Thursday. In one of those papers, a team of scientists led by Jens Biele of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) detailed the events shortly after Philae’s harrowing landing.

Analyzing Philae’s impact, bounces and eventual touchdown

During its descent, the lander was supposed to activate a cold gas system, which would push it to the surface of the comet, activating a pair of anchoring harpoons to attach it to the ground. As it turns out, however, neither system operated as expected, causing Philae to bounce off the soft designated landing area and ultimately come to rest on a harder surface elsewhere.

Biele’s team analyzed the exact dynamics of those bounces and the compressive strengths of the two different surfaces based on the trajectory of the lander’s bounces. They analyzed the layering and mechanical properties of the comet’s surface, marking the first time that researchers were able to conduct actual, direct observations of the surface.

Based on their analysis of the landing, the authors concluded that Philae’s feet initially came into contact with a soft granular surface known as Agilkia. This particular surface was approximately 0.82 feet (0.25 meters) thick on top, with a harder layer located beneath it.

This layering gave the surface a compressive strength of about one kilopascal. In comparison, the location where the lander finally came to rest, a region known as Abydos, was found to have a compression strength of two megapascals. This could help explain why only one of Philae’s legs was able to find a foothold when it finally came to rest.

Instruments reveal fractured surface, reflective rock structures

In a related study, Jean-Pierre Bibring from the French National Centre for Scientific Research’s Space Astrophysics Institute (CNRS IAS) and his colleagues analyzed the surface of 67P using a series of panoramic images captured by Philae’s Comet Infrared and Visible Analyzer instrument shortly after the lander’s initial bounce and final touchdown.

These images revealed that the comet possessed “a fractured surface with complex structure and a variety of grain scales and albedos” or reflective rock structures “possibly constituting pristine cometary material.” Their work provides new insight into the structure and composition of these cometary constituents, which could reveal the processes and ingredients that form comets, as well as how they evolved to become so diverse.

A third paper looked at descent images captured by the Rosetta Lander Imaging System (ROLIS) instrument to better understand the geography of 67P/C-G. According to the authors, the comet’s surface of the comet is “photometrically uniform” and “covered by regolith composed of debris and blocks ranging in size from centimeters to 5 meters” in size.

Philae’s landing spot covered with porous dust, ice layer

This study, which was led by Stefano Mottola of the DLR Institute of Planetary Research, found boulders on the comet’s surface surrounded by depressions similar to the wind tails found on Earth. Using models, the authors confirmed that these regions were caused by a phenomenon in which soil particles become displaced as the result of an impactor (also known as “splashing”).

Finally, the DLR’s Tilman Spohn and his colleagues analyzed data from Philae’s Multi Purpose Sensors for Surface and Subsurface Science (MUPUS) thermal and penetrating sensors to learn that the comet has a daytime surface temperature of between 90 and 130 degrees Kelvin, and that the surface of its final landing spot is covered with a compact and porous layer of dust and ice.

However, they also reported that the MUPUS thermal probe could not fully penetrate the near-surface layers because the ground in that area was resistant to penetration. More accurately, they believe that the surface had a more than 4 megapascals resistance to penetration equivalent to an approximately two megapascal uniaxial compressive strength.

(Image credit: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/ROLIS/DLR)

Health

What racehorses can teach us about broken bones

Written By: Dr. Charles Price
Christopher Pilny

Broken bones can be deadly for racehorses and also for people. Approximately 20 percent of women will break a hip and one fourth of them will be dead within a year. Half will never again walk independently, and one in five will live permanently in a long-term care facility. The risk of death after a hip fracture is even worse for men.

It’s also worse for race horses, as they rarely survive a broken leg. The great race horse, Barbaro won the Kentucky Derby in 2006 and two weeks later broke his leg in the Preakness Stakes. Barbaro had surgery the next day but there were complications, more surgery and a long stay in the intensive care unit. Barbaro never recovered and died eight months later because of the complications from a broken leg.

In spite of these alarming similarities between horses and people, there have been some helpful developments for both. Race track surfaces are being evaluated for texture and evenness. People can also make their homes safer by adding hand rails, getting rid of uneven carpets, and improving lighting for better visibility. More race horses and people are getting their bones evaluated for bone mineral density and for structure. This allows changes in nutrition and training to improve bone health. People can also improve their exercise and diet to maximize their bone health.

The magic of silicon

One amazing improvement for race horses has been the addition of silicon to their food. Scientists at Texas A&M University conducted a study where one group of horses ate their regular diet while another group of horses had the same diet plus a silicon-rich supplement added to their food (Nielsen BD, et al. J. Equine Vet Sci). This was continued for a year. Then, the horses were evaluated by people who didn’t know which horses had the extra silicon and which did not. After approximately six months of racing and testing, the differences were compared and analyzed. The horses that had the extra silicon had fewer bone-related injuries. They were also able to run faster and train harder than the horses that had the regular food. Silicon supplemented horses also showed greater bone mineral density.

Research studies in other animals have confirmed that bones can become stronger when silicon is added to the diet. Also, men and women who consume more silicon-rich foods have improved bone density. Green beans and whole grains have some silicon. So does beer from the fermentation of barley and hops. In fact, beer-drinking women have better bone mineral density than women who don’t drink any beer. Some mineral waters also have silicon in addition to other minerals.

This doesn’t mean that silicon is the only important nutrient for bone health, but it does mean that a little extra silicon in your diet may be helpful. Calcium and vitamin D are very important for bone health, but research about silicon and other nutrients is showing that you need more than calcium and vitamin D for optimum bone health. When you can’t get everything you need from foods alone, then it’s time to consider a supplement with more than calcium and vitamin D.

Dr. Charles Price is the Medical Director for the Institute of Better Bone Health (www.BoneHealthNow.com), and is rated as one of America’s top doctors. He is a pediatric orthopedic surgeon and faculty member of the orthopedic residency program at Orlando Health. He is a Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Florida State University, College of Medicine. Dr. Price has authored or co-authored over 60 scientific research papers. Dr. Price is also a Certified Sports Nutritionist by the American Sports and Fitness Association.

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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

Earth’s magnetic field older than previously believed

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

New research published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science indicates that the Earth’s magnetic shield is far older than previously believed, which could mean that plate tectonics also started earlier and may explain why the planet is still habitable.

In the study, University of Rochester geophysicist John Tarduno and his colleagues report that their research has led them to conclude that the Earth’s magnetic field is more than four billion years old, not 3.45 billion years old, as previous estimates calculated in 2010 have claimed.

“A strong magnetic field provides a shield for the atmosphere,” protecting it from solar winds (streams of charged particles originating from the sun), Tarduno explained in a statement. “This is important for the preservation of habitable conditions on Earth,” as the magnetic field keeps the solar wind from stripping away the planet’s atmosphere and surface water.

The magnetic field is generated in the planet’s liquid iron core, and a steady release of heat is required for this “geodynamo” to operate. Today, plate tectonics assist with this heat release by transferring heat from the planet’s deep interior to the surface.

Findings may explain why Earth is still habitable (and Mars is not)

However, Tarduno said, the origins of plate tectonics are disputed, as some scientists believe that Earth did not have a magnetic field early on in its existence. Researchers have been attempting to determine how and when this magnetic field first arose, thus helping experts determine when and how plate tectonics began and how our homeworld was able to remain habitable.

The researchers looked at samples of a mineral known as magnetite, which records the magnetic field at the time they cooled from their molten state. The magnetite was obtained from zircon crystals collected from Western Australia, and they sampled zircon crystals of different ages and found evidence suggesting that the magnetic field is approximately 4.4 billion years old.

The measurements taken by Tarduno’s team reveal that the magnetic field likely helped protect the planet at a time when solar winds were 100 times stronger than they are today. Without it, he said, the protons that make up those solar winds would have ionized the atmosphere and caused the loss of the planet’s water – which may explain what happened to life on Mars.

Experts believe that Mars had an active geodynamo when it was formed, but that four billion years later, it had died off. As a result, the Red Planet lacked a magnetic field that could shelter the atmosphere from the solar winds, Tarduno explained. This could explain why Mars’ atmosphere is so thin, he added, as well as why the planet “was unable to sustain life.”

(Image credit: Michael Osadciw/University of Rochester)

Science

East African ‘golden jackals’ are actually wolves, study finds

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny

The creatures known as “golden jackals” are found throughout East Africa, Europe, Asia Minor, the Middle East, and southeast Asia actually represent two different species, claims new research based on DNA analysis and published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

The study, which was led by researchers from UCLA and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington DC, increases the overall biodiversity of the Candiae (a group including dogs, wolves, jackals and foxes) from 35 living species to 36. It is also the first identification of a “new” species of canid species in Africa in more than 150 years, according to the authors.

In a statement, the Smithsonian’s Klaus-Peter Koepfli and UCLA’s Robert Wayne said that their study was inspired by recent research which had analyzed the mitochondrial DNA of the African golden jackal and purportedly found that the creatures were actually a subspecies of gray wolf.

Species aren’t even all that closely related, analysis reveals

Since the previous analysis was restricted to mitochondrial DNA, which is passed along via the maternal lineage, Wayne and Koepfli decided to dig deeper. Using DNA samples obtained from golden jackals in Kenya two decades ago, along with additional ones collected from a variety of other locations throughout Africa and Eurasia, they looked at the entire genome.

“To our surprise, the small, golden-like jackal from eastern African was actually a small variety of a new species,” said Wayne, “distinct from the gray wolf, that has a distribution across North and East Africa.” He and Koepfli are calling the new creature the African golden wolf.

So why did experts mistakenly believe that African and Eurasian golden jackals were the same species for so long? Wayne and Koepfli believe it is due to the similarity of their skulls and the morphology of their teeth. However, the genetic data supports the notion that they are separate, unique lineages that have been evolving independently for more than one million years.

Furthermore, the research suggests that, despite appearances, the two species aren’t even all that closely related, as the lineage of the African species is closer to gray wolves and coyotes than to jackals. Koepfli said that the discovery indicates that “even among well-known and widespread species such as golden jackals, there is the potential to discover hidden biodiversity.”

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Feature Image: A golden jackal (Canis aureus) from Israel. Based on genomic results, the researchers suggest this animal, the Eurasian golden jackal, is distinct from Canis anthus, which they propose be referred to as the African golden wolf. (Credit: Eyal Cohen)

Science

Animal stomach acid evolved for protection

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Emily Bills

An analysis published today in PLOS ONE has discovered an evolutionary link between diet and stomach acidity.

It’s well known that stomach acid is used to chemically break down food and to protect animals from food poisoning. But acidity varies widely between species in the animal kingdom, especially in birds and mammals.

“Yet, while the idea that the stomach serves as a barrier to pathogens has often been discussed, no study appears to have formally compared the stomach pH [the measurement of acidity] in birds or mammals as a function of their biology in general or their likely exposure to foodborne pathogens in particular,” wrote the authors.

This lack of knowledge drove the researchers to examine the relationship between stomach acidity and diet. They hypothesized that the differences in gut pH across animal species related to what they ate, as some diets have a higher risk of pathogen infection than others. Carnivores, for example, run a higher risk than herbivores, as meat carries more pathogens than plants.

To test this, they gathered all the existing literature on the stomach acidity of birds and mammals—68 species in total—along with data on the natural feeding habits of each species. Then, they ran an analysis to see how diet related to acidity levels, with lower pH levels corresponding to stronger acidity.

Scavengers—who run the highest risk of food contamination—had the most acidic stomachs, allowing them to effectively filter microbes. Obligate scavengers (which rely on scavenging alone to eat) had the “strongest” stomachs, with an average pH of 1.3; facultative scavengers (who scavenge opportunistically) were a close second, at 1.8.

Next highest were generalist carnivores (who don’t prey on specific animals) at 2.2, followed by omnivores (2.9), carnivores that specialize in specific prey type (3.6), and herbivores (4.1 and 6.1 for different gut locations).

“The finding confirms our hypothesis, but you have to get that confirmation before moving forward,” said DeAnna Beasley, a co-author of the paper.

Humans are a little weird

One surprise of the research was that humans (who are classified as omnivores) have an average stomach pH of 1.5, an acidity on the level of scavengers. While there is no definitive reason why, the authors had a few hypotheses.

“One explanation for such acidity may be that carrion feeding was more important in humans (and more generally hominin) evolution than currently considered to be the case,” explained the authors. “Alternatively, in light of the number of fecal-oral pathogens that infect and kill humans, selection may have favored high stomach acidity, independent of diet, because of its role in pathogen prevention.”

The authors also made note that when human pH levels change, people are more at risk for illnesses. For example, elderly humans more prone to bacterial infections in the stomach and gut had pH levels of 6.6 in one study.

Further, patients of gastric bypass also experience a drop in acidity, with pH levels around 5.7 to 6.8, along with people who take stomach acid reducing agents like proton-pump inhibitors and young children. This means they are more likely to experience infections from food.

However, the authors did have a suggestion on how to avoid illness due to low acidity: “[T]his risk may be reduced if such individuals tend to avoid foods in which pathogen risk is elevated, which include (as for birds and mammals more generally) foods that resemble carrion (raw fish, raw mammal meat, etc…), and perhaps even meat in general.”

Despite the results, the study still leaves many things unclear: “This raises significant questions about how humans have evolved, our species’ relationship with food over time, and how modern changes in diet and medicine are affecting our stomachs, our gut microbes and – ultimately – our health,” Beasley said. “Those are questions the research community is already exploring, and the answers should be interesting.”

(Image credit: Thinkstock)

Health

Pew pew pew: Human cells converted into mini lasers

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny

Scientists at Harvard Medical School have found a way to take living human cells and transform them into tiny lasers that can emit light to track diseases such as cancer, according to research published earlier this week in the journal Nature Photonics.

In fact, Matjaz Humar and Seok Hyun Yun of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine not only accomplished the feat, but according to Gizmodo and Discovery News, they came up with three different ways to make these light-emitting, disease-tracking mini-lasers from human cells.

In one technique, they injected tiny oil droplets into cells, creating a cavity that could be filled with fluorescent dye. When an external pulse of light was directed at the droplet, the cells gave off a narrow beam of light. In another, tiny polystyrene beads were ingested by a type of white blood cells called a macrophage and used to perform functions similar to the oil droplets.

Fatty deposits already in the cell were used to emit beams of light in the third technique. In pig skin, light injected into the skin caused fatty cells tagged with fluorescent dye to emit laser light in a way similar to the first two techniques, and the researchers believe that the method should be able to work in human skin as well.

Potential new way to track cells, treat illnesses

Currently, fluorescent dyes are often used to tag living cells and emit light. However, since they produce light in a wide range of wavelengths, it can be difficult to tell different types of tagged cells apart. The new techniques turn cells themselves into tiny lasers and could make it much easier to tell tagged cells apart, since lasers have a far narrower range of wavelengths.

“Our new cell laser technology will help us understand cellular processes and improve medical diagnosis and therapies,” Yun and Humar wrote in a piece for Phys.org. “They could eventually provide remote sensing inside the human body without the need for sample collection.”

“A cell is a smart machine, equipped with a computer with ‘DNA Inside,’” the authors added. “Specialized cells, such as immune cells, can find the disease and site of inflammation, carrying the laser to the target for laser-based diagnosis and therapies. Imagine rather than a biopsy for a lump that doctors suspect to be cancer, cell lasers helping determine what it’s made of.”

In addition, they explain that cell lasers could eventually be used to deliver therapies, such as through a method to activate photosensitive drugs that target and eliminate microbial pathogens or cancer cells. They also believe that scientists could eventually give each cell in the human body unique laser signatures, making it easier to track tumor cells or monitor how cells respond to inflammation.

(Image credit: Matjaž Humar and Seok Hyun Yun)

Health

Why UTIs are sometimes reoccurring

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

While the majority of bacteria that cause urinary tract infections can be wiped out with antibiotics, some manage to avoid elimination by remaining dormant, and new research from Duke University has found the possible reason why this happens.

These hard-to-kill bacteria (also known as “persisters”) are essentially put to sleep by a protein called HipA. A better understanding of this protein could lead to new ways to combat drug-tolerant infections, Dr. Richard G. Brennan, professor and chair of biochemistry at the Duke University School of Medicine, and his colleagues reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Dr. Brennan’s team found that particularly potent mutant versions of HipA can cause multidrug tolerance in urinary tract infections (UTIs). They explain how these mutations allow the protein to have an enhanced effect, allowing it to help a greater number of bacteria become dormant. In addition, this discovery opens up a new way to combat drug resistance.

Mutations increase persisters, raising risk of reinfection

Dr. Brennan explained to redOrbit via email that researchers have known of the existence of a potent mutant version of HipA, called HipA7, since the 1980s. This mutation, he said, can cause a dramatic increase in the number of “nondividing, metabolically quiescent” persister cells.

“The HipA7 mutant contains two changes in its protein sequence compared to the wild type HipA protein – a substitution of residue Gly22 by a serine and a substitution of residue Asp291 by an alanine,” he said. He and his collaborators found not only the previous version of HipA7, but also “a new high-persister form that encoded a HipA protein in which residue 86, normally a proline, was changed to a leucine. This is abbreviated hipA(P86L).”

Both types of the mutation “form 1,000-fold more persisters” than the regular version of HipA, and both also showed the ability to withstand doses of different antibiotics. These drugs typically work by targeting the active processes in a cell and corrupting their products. However, since persisters are now growing and are far less active metabolically, the normal targets of many of these drugs are not used by the cells, making antibiotics far less effective against them.

Having observed all of this in the laboratory, Dr. Brennan said that the team then looked to see if they could find similar processes occurring in nature. They focused on strains of E. coli known to cause UTIs. Not only were both versions of the HipA mutation “present in many of the disease causing strains,” but that they “resulted in multidrug tolerant bacteria,” resulting in an increased number of persisters that survived treatment and could cause reinfection.

Searching for inhibitors to reduce HipA-induced persisters

For now, the study authors said that they have to learn more about the biochemical function of HipA, which is a serine-protein kinase, meaning it adds a phosphate group to its substrates. The mechanism through which it does this is unknown, however, so one goal is to see if they can find inhibitors of this kinase. They also said that they are looking for other high persistence protein mutations that work by the same type of mechanism utilized by HipA7 and HipA(P86L).

“In the longer-term,” Dr. Brennan told redOrbit, “if inhibitors could be found that had the ability to decrease or totally eliminate the HipA-induced persisters, then we would try to develop one or more of these inhibitors into a therapeutic, which could be given with the normal antibiotic regimen to treat UTIs.”

“This way we would expect that the antibiotic would be effective in killing the normal planktonic bacteria and that we would also hinder their ability to become persisters,” he added. “Hence, after full treatment one could hope that all the growing bacteria are dead and no persisters are left behind to allow reinfection. This is long-term goal but requires a great deal more basic research before it might be realized.”

(Image credit: US Dept. of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service)

Health

Could this supplement be the cure for Celiac disease?

Written By: Brett Smith
Emily Bills

While many people race to embrace a gluten-free diet for its supposed health benefits, individuals with celiac disease – who cannot digest the grain protein gluten – may be close to a supplement that allows them to eat all the pizza they want.

Developed by researchers from the University of Alberta in Canada, a prospective supplement made from egg yolks block the body’s absorption of the protein gliadin, a component of gluten.

“This protein binds with gluten in the stomach and helps to neutralize it, therefore providing defense to the small intestine, limiting the damage gliadin causes,” Hoon Sunwoo, an associate professor of pharmacy who helped develop the supplement, said in a statement. “It is our hope that this supplement will improve the quality of life for those who have celiac disease and gluten intolerance.”

As described by the Celiac Disease Foundation, celiac disease is an autoimmune condition that causes the immune system to react to gluten and consequently attack the finger-like villi that line the small intestine. Villi absorb nutrients from food, but can be harmed or destroyed by the immune response to gluten, causing overall poor nutrient absorption. Other effects of the hereditary disease include queasiness, bloating, and loose stools.

Without medical care, people with celiac disease are at risk of contracting other autoimmune disorders, such as type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis. Sunwoo said he became fascinated by the disease after learning his friend’s family suffered from it.

Improving lives one pizza at a time

“I wanted to learn more about why some people cannot tolerate gluten and if there was a way to reduce the symptoms,” he said. “With gluten present in so much of our food, I wanted to find a way to improve the quality of life for my friend, his family and others.”

The experimental supplement is scheduled to pass through effectiveness trials within a year. If it proves useful, the supplement might be brought to market within three years via a partnership with the pharmaceutical company Vetanda Group.

“This collaboration gives us the opportunity to change the lives of those suffering with a debilitating autoimmune condition,” said Vetanda Group communications director Claire Perry. “The product could be available to celiac sufferers in Canada within three years, paving the way for testing and product approval in the United States and Europe.”

(Image credit: Thinkstock)

Science

Million-dollar haul of Spanish treasure discovered in Florida

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Christopher Pilny

A 300-year-old Spanish treasure worth more than $1 million, including 52 gold coins, 40 feet of gold chain and 110 silver coins, has been discovered by shipwreck divers off the coast of Florida, National Geographic and other media outlets reported on Tuesday.

The treasure, which belonged to the flagship of a 1715 Spanish treasure fleet, was actually found more than a month ago on June 17. However, it was kept under wraps until it was announced this week, to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the sinking of the fleet, the website noted.

The flagship, the Capitana, was one of 11 ships that was part of Spain’s Tierra Firme and New Spain fleets, which regularly transported gold, silver and other valuable cargo from the country’s territories in the New World to Europe. The ships encountered a hurricane and sank as they were sailing past Florida en route to Spain on July 30 and 31, 1715.

Expedition leader Eric Schmitt and his family had been working with 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels LLC, a Florida company with exclusive rights to the wrecks, for the past several years. The find included a rare coin known as a “Tricentennial Royal,” LiveScience said, and the entire treasure was found just 1,000 feet off the coast of Fort Pierce.

Massive haul may be just the tip of the proverbial iceberg

Schmitt told Nat Geo that his team typically only finds “empty holes” and “beer cans” during their expeditions, but things were different on the morning of June 17. Searching in 15 feet of water at about 9:00 or 9:30 in the morning, they saw a gold coin while cleaning seafloor sand. Schmitt brought it to the attention of 1715 Fleet co-founder Brent Brisben.

Once Brisben saw the discovery he said he was “blown away” and “literally shaking.” Among the coins discovered that day was the Tricentennial Royal, which was special because it was one of the rare coins minted in the day that was perfect in terms of weight and quality. These coins, he explained, were about the size of a silver dollar and would be presented to the king.

According to Gizmodo, Brisben’s salvage company owns the rights to five of the 11 ships that were found by the Schmitt family. All of the treasures discovered are under the jurisdiction of the United States district court of the southern district of Florida, and the state is entitled to 20 percent of anything found by the salvage company or any of its contractors. Once the state had its share, Brisben and the Schmitt family evenly share the remaining haul.

LiveScience added that both Brisben and Schmitt are hopeful that there is even more treasure waiting to be discovered in the waters off the Coast of Florida. The salvage company head said that he estimates there is still roughly $440 million dollars worth of Spanish treasure to be found, including the queen’s jewels, which were part of a dowry the fleet was taking back to Spain.

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Feature Image: Front and center is “The Tricentennial Royal”, which was special because it was one of the rare coins minted in the day that was perfect in terms of weight and quality. (Credit: 1715 Fleet Queens Jewels, LLC)

Space

First evidence of lithium found in exploding star solves mystery

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

For the first time, researchers have found evidence of the chemical element lithium in material ejected by an exploding star, and their discovery could help explain why so many younger stars appear to have this substance in greater-than-expected amounts.

In a paper in The Astrophysical Journal, Luca Izzo of the Sapienza University of Rome Department of Physics and the ICRANet (International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics) in Pescara, Italy, explained how they found the element by studying Nova Centauri 2013 at the ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

“Lithium is one of the elements produced during the Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN),” Izzo and co-authors Massimo Della Valle and Luca Pasquini told redOrbit via email. “It is an element easily destroyed by most astrophysical processes, indeed the lithium abundance observed in old stellar populations is a bit smaller than the value estimated from the BBN.”

“However, in younger stellar populations, the abundance of lithium can reach values larger up to one order of magnitude than the primordial one, so for many years the question about was: where does it come from the Lithium observed in young stars?” they added. “We have detected, for the first time, the presence of lithium in a nova star. This implies that nova systems (about 30 events per year in our galaxy) enrich the gas of the Milky Way through their ejecta.”

Solving the mystery of lithium abundance in young stars

As early as the 1970s, astrophysicists had hypothesized that lithium could be produced in a few astrophysical sources: novae and asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. In depth simulations of chemical enrichment of the galaxy demonstrated the novae were needed to explain the overabundance of lithium in young stellar populations.

However, prior to the detection of the element in Nova Centauri 2013 (V1369 Centauri), there was no evidence to support this hypothesis, Izzo’s said. Their discovery solves a long-standing puzzle regarding the chemical evolution of the galaxy, and shows that lithium-enriched stars will originate from the ejected gas, explaining their overabundance of the element.

Izzo noted that the discovery was a long-time coming for Della Valle and Pasquini, who have been searching for evidence of lithium in novae for well over than two decades. “This is the satisfying conclusion for a long search for them,” he told redOrbit, adding that the discovery “proves that you may need decades before a prediction is observationally validated.”

In a statement, Della Valle added that the lithium detection was “a very important step forward. If we imagine the history of the chemical evolution of the Milky Way as a big jigsaw, then lithium from novae was one of the most important and puzzling missing pieces. In addition, any model of the Big Bang can be questioned until the lithium conundrum is understood.”

(Image credit: ESO)

Science

Remains of 4 Jamestown colony leaders unearthed

Written By: Chuck Bednar
Emily Bills

A recent excavation in Jamestown, Virginia has led to the discovery and identification of the bodies of four long-lost leaders of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, and the discovery could provide new insight into what life was like there in the 1600s.

The discovery, which was announced on Tuesday by officials from the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, found the graves of four colony leaders that had died between the 1608 and 1610, a time marked by conflict and hunger, according to Scientific American. The men were identified through a combination of historical documents and chemical analysis of their skeletons.

They were: Reverend Robert Hunt, the first minister from the Church of England in the colony; Sir Ferdinando Wainman, the man in charge of artillery and horse troops; Captain William West, who was also a high-ranking officer; and Captain Gabriel Archer, an early leader who challenged John Smith for control of the settlement.

Forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, told LiveScience and Discovery News that each of the men had played a key role in the early days of the Jamestown colony. “They’re very much at the heart of the foundation of the America that we know today.”

Hints of a secret Catholic community in Jamestown

Owslety’s team first unearthed the bodies in 2013, and used a combination of genealogical and historical documents from England and the US, as well as artifacts and a detailed analysis of the chemicals in the bones. The presence of lead in two of the skeletons indicates that they were members of the colony’s elite.

Wainman (sometimes spelled Weyman in historical documents) was the uncle of Sir Thomas West, the governor of Virginia, and both men were also related to Captain West, whose body was also among those discovered at the dig. Both West and Wainman were buried in human-shaped coffins, while Captain Archer was found (along with an arrow tip staff that he would frequently use) in a small silver box also known as a reliquary.

Fragments of a lead container used to hold holy water atop his coffin suggests that Archer may have quietly held onto his Catholic faith after coming to the New World, LiveScience said. James Horn, president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, told Scientific American that the finding suggests there may have been “a group of secret Catholics at Jamestown.”

William Kelso, director of archaeology at the Jamestown foundation, told the publication that the Jamestown settlement was emphatically non-Catholic. This was due to England’s split from the Pope back in the 1500s and the settlement’s conflicts with self-proclaimed champion of Catholicism Phillip III and Spain. The colony had even executed a suspected Catholic spy in 1607. Horn said that the artifact may have been repurposed for a New World religion, or that Archer may have been part of a network of Spanish spies or a secret order of Catholic practitioners.

The final man discovered, Reverend Hunt, was found in far more modest conditions, having been buried in a simple shroud and facing west towards his congregation, Discovery News said. He died in 1608 and was approximately 39 years old. The researchers are considering conducting additional analysis to further verify their identities, and hope to identify additional colonists – a feat that will prove difficult, given the sparse remains available for most other settlers.

(Image credit: Donald E. Hurlbert, NMNH / SI)

Health

Child becomes first ever to receive double hand transplant

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny

A Baltimore-area boy who had lost his hands and feet due to a severe infection when he was two years old has become the first-ever recipient of transplanted donor hands and forearms, receiving the new appendages during a 10-hour procedure completed earlier this month.
The operation, which was only just announced this week, took place at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and required a 40-member team of doctors, nurses and surgeons, CBS News and the Associated Press (AP) reported on Tuesday. The now eight-year-old patient, Owings Mills native Zion Harvey, said that waking up with new hands felt ‘‘weird at first, but then good.’’
During the procedure, which was led by Dr. L. Scott Levin, head of the department of orthopedic surgery at Penn Medicine and director of the Children’s Hospital hand transplantation program, the donor’s hands and forearms were attached by connecting bone, muscle, nerves, blood vessels and tendons. The team was divided into four working groups during the surgery, two focusing on each of the donor hands, and two which worked exclusively on the recipient.
According to CBS News, the doctors started by connecting the bones in his arm with steel plates and screws, then used microvascular surgical techniques to connect veins and arteries. After the reconnected blood vessels started having blood flow through them, the muscles and tendons were repaired and reattached one at a time. Finally, the nerves were reattached, the reporters said.
Doctors believe the boy’s hands will grow normally
Only 25 hand transplants have ever been done throughout the world, and Harvey is the first non-adult to undergo such a procedure. In a statement, Dr. Levin said that the “success of Penn’s first bilateral hand transplant… gave us a foundation to adapt the intricate techniques and coordinated plans required to perform this type of complex procedure on a child.”
The Baltimore Sun said that Harvey is working with occupational therapists to learn to use his new hands. His original hands and his feet were amputated after he developed gangrene due to a sepsis infection. That infection also led to a kidney transplant, and that procedure made the boy a candidate for transplant, doctors said, since he was already taking anti-rejection medication.
Harvey will remain in Philadelphia for several more weeks while he recovers, and his therapy will go on for months. For now, he is only allowed to move his hands when a therapist is present. Otherwise his hands are placed in splints so that they can remain in place and heal properly.
Dr. Levin told the newspaper that the successful procedure was “a monumental step” and that he was hopeful that his team “can help many more patients like Zion in the future.” He also told reporters that he and his colleagues “have every reason to believe that because Zion’s hands are alive and his growth plates are intact from the donor that he will grow like a normal child.”
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Feature Image: Thinkstock

Science

560,000-year-old human incisor discovered in France

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Christopher Pilny

Two student volunteers in Tautavel, France have found the oldest human body part discovered in the country: An estimated 560,000-year-old incisor.

“A large adult tooth — we can’t say if it was from a male or female — was found during excavations of soil we know to be between 550,000 and 580,000 years old, because we used different dating methods,” palaeoanthropologist Amelie Viallet told AFP.

“This is a major discovery because we have very few human fossils from this period in Europe.”

Tautavel’s famous cave Caune de l’Arago has been host to enormous discoveries before—in 1971, a 450,000 year-old skull known as Tautavel Man was found, the previous record-holder for oldest human remains in France. Plenty of relics and animal bones have also been found, as the cave is believed to have been used for hundreds of thousands of years starting around 690,000 BCE.

“We believe these men have lived for a long time in the cave or have regularly come back into it,” explained Paleoanthropologist Tony Chevalier, researcher at Tautavel’s archaeological laboratory, to the Associated Press. “We also know that the area was quite cold at the time. It was a steppe, with no trees. There had to be some long periods with snow.”

Filling in gaps

This discovery is especially important, as very few human remains have been found dating back to that time period in Europe. Scientists hope that it will fill the gap between the oldest European fossils and newer ones.

Professor Chris Stringer, merit researcher in human origins at the Natural History Museum of London, told the AP that “well-dated teeth of this age are very important as they probably belonged to the species Homo heidelbergensis, which is already known from Arago (in Tautavel) in France, Mauer in Germany and Boxgrove in England.”

“If the tooth has calculus (tartar) attached to it, this may also provide direct evidence of the diet of these ancient humans,” he added.

“It’s a missing piece in a puzzle which could help us to answer a crucial question,” said Viallet. “Did the emergence of Neanderthal Man, 120,000 years ago, come from a single human line or not?”

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Feature Image Credit: Denis Dainat/EPCC-CERP Tauvalel

Health

Premature babies more likely to be socially withdrawn adults

Written By: Susanna Pilny
Emily Bills

Babies born very prematurely and/or severely underweight are more likely to be socially withdrawn adults, according to a study recently published in The BMJ’s Archives of Disease in Childhood.

The research comes from the Bavarian Longitudinal Study, which has been following the health and wellbeing of subjects born in 1985-6 in Southern Bavaria, Germany. Two-hundred 26-year-olds who had been born very prematurely (less than 32 weeks) and/or born at a very low weight (less than 1500 grams) were compared to 197 adults of the same age who had been born at term and within the normal range.

All were assessed in a span of personality areas: introversion, neuroticism (tenseness and anxiety), openness to new experiences, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, in an attempt to explain how birth conditions affect later life events.

“Defining a general personality profile is important because this higher order personality factor may help to partly explain the social difficulties these individuals experience in adult roles, such as in peer and partner relationships and career,” explained study leader Dieter Wolke, a professor at the University of Warwick, in a press release.

Socially withdrawn

As compared to the control group, the extremely preterm and underweight group scored significantly higher for several features: neuroticism, introversion, and decreased risk taking. Further, the participants had a significantly higher level of autism spectrum behaviors.

The results were not related to sex, income, or education level.

According to the researchers, preterm/low birth weight subjects tended to have “socially withdrawn personalities,” which are characterized by being easily worried, less socially engaged, less interested in risk taking, and less communicative. Being socially withdrawn has been shown to lead to difficulties in adulthood.

“Very premature and very low birth weight adults who have a socially withdrawn personality might experience difficulty dealing with social relationships with their peers, friends and partners,” said Wolke.

Differing brain development

The researchers have several ideas as to what caused these personality differences.

“The higher scores of [the very premature/low birthweight] adults on the socially withdrawn scale are most likely to be the result of alterations in their brain structure and functioning due to the amalgam of changes in brain development related to premature birth and prenatal and neonatal insult,” wrote the researchers in the publication.

They also theorized early stresses in the womb and over-protective parents can lead to socially-withdrawn personalities.

These traits may result in various life events. “Previous studies have found they are more likely to be bullied at school and less likely to progress to university or attain well paid employment,” said Wolke. “They are also less likely to form social contacts, to maintain romantic relationships and to have children.”

But there is hope.

“If identified early parents could be provided with techniques to foster their child’s social skills to help compensate for socially withdrawn personality characteristics.”

(Image credit: Thinkstock)