A new study conducted by researchers at Purdue University has found a metabolite resulting from the breakdown of vitamin A acts as a sort of GPS, directing certain disease- fighting cells to the body’s intestine.
“It is known that vitamin A deficiencies lead to increased susceptibility to disease and low concentrations of immune cells in the mucosal barrier that lines the intestines,” study author Chang Kim, a microbiologist and immunologist in Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine, said in a press release. “We wanted to find the specific role the vitamin plays in the immune system and how it influences the cells and biological processes.”
“The more we understand the details of how the immune system works, the better we will be able to design treatments for infection, and autoimmune and inflammatory diseases,” he added.
Published in the journal Immunology, the new study focused on immune system cells called innate immune cells that move quickly to eliminate an infection. These cells collect in lymph nodes before going their final destination.
In the lymph nodes, a vitamin A metabolite called retinoic acid acts upon two of three subsets of innate immune cells meant for the intestines. Kim and his team discovered that retinoic acid activates particular receptors in the cells that behave as tracking devices for the intestines. When the innate immune cells later traverse the circulatory system, the receptors seize and bind to molecules in the intestines whilst holding the cells in place.
The final location for these immune system cells is crucial because they both fight pathogens there and call for back up in the form of adaptive immune cells that are custom-made by the body to kill or neutralize the invaders.
“It is important that these cells be concentrated in mucosal barrier tissues (in the intestines), as opposed to scattered throughout the body, because these tissues are the point of entry for many infections from bacteria, viruses, and parasites,” Kim said. “Now that we have established the system of migration for these cells, we can play with it a little and see what changes the behavior and function of the cells.”
Kim added that vitamin D has also been found to guide immune cells, sending sets of them to the skin.
“We all know that what we eat significantly affects our overall health and immunity,” he said. “While there are other important regulators of immune system function, the role vitamins play is significant. How this works on a molecular level is a growing field of study.”
A team of Duke University neuroscientists have reportedly developed brain-to-brain interface networks which allow rats and primates to work together to complete basic tasks, according to a study published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Scientific Reports.
In a pair of separate experiences reported in the publication, principal investigator Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, co-director of the Duke University School of Medicine Center for Neuroengineering, and his colleagues showed how they were able to link the brains of monkeys and the brains of rats in real time in order to complete computations or control movement.
As part of one of the experiments, the researchers linked the minds of rhesus macaque monkeys and had them work together to control the movements of the arm of a virtual avatar on a digital display located in front of them. Each monkey controlled two of three dimensions of movement for the same arm, guiding it as a team so that it could touch a moving target.
Similarly, they created a network using the brains of four rodents, then had the rats complete a series of computational tasks centered around pattern recognition, storing and accessing sensory information, and even forecasting the weather. The authors explained that their work will help them learn more about the physiological properties and adaptability of brain circuits.
Findings could be used in clinical applications
This is not the first time that the Center for Neuroengineering researchers have worked on what are known as brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) – computational systems which enable subjects to use their brain signals to directly control the movement of exoskeletons, robot arms, VR avatars and other artificial devices.
Previously, Dr. Nicolelis’ team has created BMIs that can capture and transmit the brain signals of individual rats, monkeys, and even human subjects to artificial devices. However, the primary investigator said that this was “the first demonstration of a shared brain-machine interface.”
Their research demonstrates a new paradigm “that has been translated successfully over the past decades from studies in animals all the way to clinical applications,” he added. “We foresee that shared BMIs will follow the same track, and could soon be translated to clinical practice.”
During the experiments, the researchers equipped the rats and monkeys with arrays implanted in their motor and somatosensory cortices to capture and transmit the brain activity of the creatures. Their experiments found that the monkeys were able to improve at the motor task as they gained experience, and that the rats were able to work together as well as they could on their own.
The results, the group added, support their initial claim that these shared BMIs could be assist in the development of organic technology based on the interfacing of multiple animal brains with a computer. Dr. Nicolelis and colleagues are also working on a non-invasive human version of the technology for use in the neuro-rehabilitation training in paralyzed patients.
Bumblebee territories crushed, many species in decline
Written By: Eric Hopton
Emily Bills
Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Bumblebees, nature’s essential pollinators, are being relentlessly squeezed into smaller territories under assault from global warming and pollution. The number of bee colonies and even the number of species are declining rapidly.
“We’re hitting these animals with everything. There’s no way you can nail a bee with neonicotinoids, invasive pathogens, and climate change and come out with a happy bee,” said ecologist Jeremy Kerr of the University of Ottawa in Canada in a report for the journal Science. The loss of bee species could be disastrous for ecosystems and for people. Plants depend on “loyal” pollinators and wild bees help pollinate many crops.
Knocking down nature’s scaffold
“We play with these things at our peril,” says Kerr. “The human enterprise is the top floor in a really big scaffold. What we’re doing is reaching out and knocking out the supports.”
The decline is rapid in both North America and Europe, and a new study points the finger directly at climate change. Bumblebees are losing large amounts of the southern portion of their ranges. But unlike other species, they are not expanding north as the climate warms. Bee ranges are compressing by as much as 200 miles, and some populations are in terminal decline.
The study accessed vast collections of curated specimens in museums and compiled data from around 423,000 observations of 67 bumblebee species, dating back to 1901.
One third of North American species are in decline. In some cases they have reduced by more than 90 per cent. Many previously common species, like the Rusty-patched Bumblebee, are now rarely seen, says co-author, York University environmental studies Professor Sheila Colla.
Fewer bees for our children
“One of the scariest parts of the work that I’ve done is just realizing how quickly the situation is changing. The bumblebees that are in decline were doing fine 50 years ago. We’re talking about large changes in community composition of essential pollinators over just a few decades.” The adults of today were seeing species as children that are no longer there. Their own children won’t see them at all.
The study compared changes in individual bee species’ northward movements in recent decades, against baseline bumblebee activity from 1901 to 1974, when the climate was cooler. The researchers were surprised to find bumblebees were not moving north in recent, warmer decades. At the same time, many populations disappeared from the southernmost and hottest parts of their ranges as they moved to higher, cooler elevations.
“Global warming has trapped bumblebee species in a kind of climate vise. The result is dramatic losses of bumblebee species from the hottest areas across two continents,” said Kerr. “For species that evolved under cool conditions, like bumblebees, global warming might be the kind of threat that causes many of them to disappear for good…We may need to help these species establish new colonies to the north and at continental scales.”
The researchers found no significant correlation between other factors, like land use and pesticide application, as well as range losses, although we know these are damaging bee populations generally. “Bumblebee disappearances from warm, southern areas are just as likely when there is no pesticide use and little agriculture,” said Kerr. “But we know that increasingly frequent weather extremes, like heat waves, can hit bumblebee species hard, and climate change poses threats that are already being felt.”
Solar activity is expected to decrease by 60 percent during the 2030s, plummeting conditions to those not seen since Earth underwent its last “mini ice age” starting in 1645, according to new research presented Thursday at the UK National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, north Wales.
In their study, Professor Valentina Zharkova from the Northumbria University Department of Mathematics and Information Sciences and her colleagues explained that, by using a new model of the Sun’s solar cycle, they have been able to produce “unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities” within the 11-year “heartbeat” of our solar system’s central star.
Their model uses dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone, and predicts the drastic decline in solar activity. Previously, scientists attributed the cause of the solar cycle to caused by convecting fluid deep within the Sun, but that did not explain for differences and fluctuations unique to each cycle. The addition of the second dynamo, closer to the surface, gives them a more complete and accurate picture of events.
“We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs, originating in two different layers in the Sun’s interior,” Zharkova explained. “They both have a frequency of approximately 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different, and they are offset in time. Over the cycle, the waves fluctuate between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Sun.”
Dynamos to become completely out of synch by 2030
She and her colleagues developed their model using a technique known as “principal component analysis” to analyze magnetic field observations from the California’s Wilcox Solar Observatory. They studies three solar cycles worth of magnetic field activity, and found that by combining the two waves together, they could predict solar cycle activity with a 97 percent success rate.
Furthermore, they compared their predictions to average sunspot numbers, another strong marker of solar activity, and found that the observations and predictions matched closely. Based on their new model, they predict that the two waves will become increasingly offset during a cycle which peaks in 2022, and will become completely out of sync during the cycle afterwards (2030 -2040), which will result in “a significant reduction in solar activity.”
During that cycle, “the two waves exactly mirror each other – peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun,” Zharkova explained. “Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other. We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum’.”
“Effectively, when the waves are approximately in phase, they can show strong interaction, or resonance, and we have strong solar activity,” she added. “When they are out of phase, we have solar minimums. When there is full phase separation, we have the conditions last seen during the Maunder minimum, 370 years ago.”
Synthetic biologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have demonstrated for the first time that they are able to hack one of the most common types of gut bacteria. This is being hailed as a breakthrough that could allow them to ultimately be used to deliver drugs.
Writing in Thursday’s edition of the journal Cell Systems, lead investigators Timothy K. Lu and Christopher Voigt reported that they were able to take Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron from the intestinal tract of a mouse, engineer it to add new functions, then re-introduce it to the rodents. By doing so, they moved one step closer to bioengineering bacteria for medical purposes.
This technique could also be used to detect long-term changes to the intestines that can result in inflammatory bowel disease or other conditions. Bacteroides, they said, could potentially express genes on demand, and since it already has stable interactions with human cells, it would likely be long-lasting designer bacteria.
Treating ‘major health-related problems’
Lu, senior author of the study and a biological and electrical engineer at MIT, explained that he and Voigt “took a lot of the tools that people are already using in other organisms” (like memory switches, ribosome-binding sequences, and CRISPR interference), “demonstrated that you could port all of these over into Bacteroides… [and] showed that genetic devices could be implemented in the bacteria and be shown to function in the context of the mouse gut microbiome.”
“The culmination of the work is not only do you have an engineered bacterium that’s colonized the mouse gut, but you can turn on which genes in the bacterium are active based on what you feed the mouse,” added Voigt. “That’s really something new. It allows you to control what the bacterium is doing at the site of where it’s operating.”
However, the researchers explain that there are still obstacles to overcome before their work can enter the human trial stage. For example, in order to colonize the mouse gut with the Bacteroides, the researchers first had to administer antibiotics to the rats. In addition, Lu and Voigt noted that they will have to demonstrate that the bacteria can be engineered with more complex behaviors and show that it can respond to multiple sensory inputs. Their ultimate goal is to engineer microbes capable of altering gene expression based on signals within the intestines.
“The big picture is that the bacteria that live in us or on us impact human health in very significant ways and the existing techniques we have to modulate the microbiome – taking antibiotics or changing our diet – are relatively limited. We’re hoping that with these tools to precisely engineer the intimate interface between bacteria and humans we’re going to be able to tackle some major health-related problems,” Lu said.
A European Space Agency (ESA) project to build a universal telecommunications satellite is a go, as the agency officially signed a deal with private industry partners to build the new, 3.5 ton, completely reconfigurable spacecraft on Thursday.
According to BBC News reports, the telecom satellite will be called Quantum, and while nearly all of these probes launch with their ground coverage pattern and operating frequency parameters locked in place, Quantum will be able to have them adjusted while in orbit.
The ESA is teaming with private-sector firms such as Paris-based satellite operator Eutelsat and the manufacturing firm Airbus Defense and Space from Blagnac, France to develop the satellite. Each of the parties involved in the Quantum project signed an official agreement Thursday at the Harwell Science Campus in Oxfordshire.
Quantum will be created by Airbus at its Portsmouth factory, and then integrated into the spacecraft chassis at Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) in Guildford, the BBC said. The satellite, which is expected to be launched in 2018, can change its coverage area, frequency, and power use at any time, and can even assume the role of another, failed satellite.
Quantum to be used for broadband data, phone traffic
One of the reasons the new telecom satellite will have this capability is so it can use advanced, flat, phased-array antennas capable of changing their shape electronically – a big departure from curved, pre-shaped mechanical receivers typically used in traditional satellites.
“The beauty of Quantum is that it uses active antennas on the uplink to the spacecraft and on the downlink to the Earth,” Airbus representative James Hinds told BBC News. “Active means the coverage – where you point – can be moved around at the touch of a telecommand.”
This will be accomplished “through a process called software definition,” he added. For example, “this means… you can put power where the market demands it, or, and this does happen, you can change your coverage to mitigate interference in places where someone is unintentionally, or even intentionally, jamming your signal.”
While the initial mission parameters for Quantum have yet to be fully defined, the BBC said that the satellite is expected to work primarily in the Ku frequency band. It will likely be used for the transmission of data, video, telephone calls, and broadband access to static and mobile customers, and could even be used for television signals if necessary.
“We are talking to governments, we’re talking to maritime companies, we’re talking to data operators – and we will focus Quantum on those users where we feel the eagerness is greatest,” Michel de Rosen, chairman and CEO of Eutelsat, told the BBC. “Our company is working in an increasingly competitive market with many more players, and to stay ahead of the curve we need to innovate, and Quantum is the clear innovation.”
IBM has unveiled working versions of ultra-dense computer chips with the smallest components to date and four times the capacity of the most powerful products currently on the market.
As part of a consortium including researchers from SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanotech Science + Engineering and Samsung, the computer giant revealed it could now create semiconductors with parts just seven nanometers wide, or 1,000 times smaller than a red blood cell, according to BBC News reports.
Currently, the smallest parts on chips are roughly 14 nanometers big, and the New York Times noted that the breakthrough would enable IBM to build microprocessors that had more than 20 billion transistors. Thus far, the chips have only been created in the lab, but IBM said they’re working on ways to replicate the process in manufacturing centers.
This advance was made by replacing the pure silicon typically used in key regions of the molecular-size switches with silicon-germanium, enabling faster transistor switching and reduced power requirements. IBM said it expects to start using these 7 nanometer chips in computers by 2018.
Breakthrough allows Moore’s Law to continue
IBM’s announcement means that Moore’s Law, the so-called “golden rule” of technology, would be able to continue through another generation, despite concerns that technical issues would keep transition density from continuing to double every two years as has long been the case.
This phenomenon was first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who back in 1965 made a prediction that computing would continue to dramatically increase in power and decrease in cost exponentially on a regular basis. While IBM’s work allows the trend to continue, reports indicate that future advances will require new materials and manufacturing techniques.
“The implications of our achievement are huge for the computer industry,” Mukesh Khare, VP, IBM Semiconductor Technology Research, wrote in a blog post. “By making the chips inside computers more powerful and more efficient, IBM and our partners will be able to produce the next generations of servers and storage systems for cloud computing, big data analytics, and cognitive computing.”
“In recent years, the chip industry has struggled to sustain a torrid pace of semiconductor innovation,” he added. “With this feat… we’re extending the life of the silicon semiconductor, one of the most important inventions of the 20th century… These advances represent the most significant chip-industry design and manufacturing innovations in nearly a decade.”
Astronomers who thought they had only discovered a rare quintuple star system were in for a surprise when they found out that the system was comprised of a pair of linked stars (binaries), one of which had a lone companion star.
According to BBC News, the system is the first of its kind to ever be identified by researchers. Each of the star pairs orbit around one shared center of gravity, despite the fact that they’re separated by a greater distance than that between Pluto and the Sun.
This unique system is located 25 light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It was discovered by astronomers reviewing data from the Wide Angle Search for Planets (SuperWASP), and their findings have been published online and presented this week at the UK National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, north Wales.
Sky ‘would put the makers of Star Wars to shame’
The system has been named 1SWASP J093010.78+533859.5 (rolls off the tongue), and co-author Dr. Marcus Lohr told the BBC that the data indicated that the new system contained two binary stars, one of which was a so-called contact binary. The stars orbited so close to each other that they actually shared an outer atmosphere.
The other stellar duo, a detached binary, were roughly three million kilometers away from each other, he added. They orbited in the same plane at a distance of more than 20 billion kilometers. Additional observations conducted in different wavelengths of light emanating from the system revealed the existence of the fifth star, said to be linked to the detached binary.
“This is a truly exotic star system. In principle there’s no reason why it couldn’t have planets in orbit around each of the pairs of stars,” Dr. Lohr told BBC News Wednesday. “Any inhabitants would have a sky that would put the makers of Star Wars to shame… There could sometimes be no fewer than five Suns of different brightnesses lighting up the landscape.”
Furthermore, he and his colleagues found that based on the consistent angles of inclination for the binaries, it’s likely that all of the stars had formed by fragmentation from the same proto-stellar disk of dust and gas, and had subsequently remained in the same orbital plane.
Researchers from the University of Copenhagen and Herlev and Gentofte Hospital have for the first time analyzed human genes and found regular coffee consumption neither increases nor decreases the risk of developing lifestyle diseases such as obesity and diabetes.
As Dr. Boerge Nordestgaard, senior physician in the Herlev and Gentofte Hospital’s Department of Clinical Biochemistry and a clinical professor at the University of Copenhagen, and his fellow authors explained in the latest edition of the International Journal of Epidemiology, an analysis of the DNA and coffee drinking habits of some 93,000 Danes found that the caffeinated beverage had no significant impact on a person’s risk of developing these conditions.
The study is said to be the first to examine the genetic impact of elevated levels of coffee consumption over a person’s lifetime – genes that are completely independent of other lifestyle factors. By investigating those genes which impact a person’s desire for coffee, the team was able to conclude that drinking the beverage was not linked to an increased or decreased risk of developing lifestyle diseases such as diabetes or obesity.
Coffee intake genes not associated with lifestyle diseases
“Previous studies have shown that coffee intake is associated with five different variations in the human genome, and that each of these variations might lead to a 0.2 cups/day higher coffee intake,” Dr. Nordestgaard told redOrbit via email. “To sum up the effect of these variations we genotyped 93,000 Danish individuals for all of the five genetic variations.”
“We saw that these variations combined lead to an increase in mean coffee intake of up to 50 percent from two to three cups/day for individuals with none of the genetic variations to individuals who had inherited all five variations from both of their parents. The biological explanation for this association is not clear, but it might be related to the metabolism of caffeine,” he added.
Dr. Nordestgaard explained that since genetic variations are inherited randomly and are thus not associated with lifestyle factors that could potentially interfere with the relationship between the risk of lifestyle diseases and a person’s coffee consumption. In their study, they compared people with none of the coffee-intake variations with those that possessed some or all of those genes.
By doing so, they were able to “estimate an unconfounded risk of type 2 diabetes and obesity not prone to reverse causation for an up to 50 percent increase in coffee intake in 93,000 individuals,” he told redOrbit. “We did not observe any change in risk of type 2 diabetes or obesity, and therefore, we concluded that coffee intake most likely is not associated causally with risk of type 2 diabetes or obesity.”
The study was based on the Copenhagen General Population Study, which includes more than 110,000 individuals and is one of the largest cohorts of its kind in the world, he added. By reviewing data on diagnosis and death from National Danish Patient registries, the authors were able to follow participants from 1977 until today with no losses to follow-up.
Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Researchers at Boston’s Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School have made a significant breakthrough by using gene therapy to restore hearing in deaf mice. The proof of concept project could be a defining moment in the fight against genetic forms of deafness in humans.
Severe to profound hearing loss in both ears affects between 1 and 3 babies for every 1,000 live births, and scientists have identified more than 70 different genes that can cause deafness when mutated. But the Boston and Harvard team focused on a gene called TMC1 that’s involved in 4 to 8 percent of cases. TMC1 encodes a protein playing a central role in hearing and helps convert sound into electrical signals which are then sent to the brain.
The “Beethoven” mouse
Two types of mutant mice were tested. One type had the TMC1 gene completely deleted. This is a good model for recessive TMC1 mutations in humans as children with two mutant copies of TMC1 have profound hearing loss from a very young age, usually by around 2 years old.
The other type of mouse, called the Beethoven mouse, has a specific TMC1 mutation, a change in a single amino acid, and is a good model for the dominant form of TMC1-related deafness. In this less common form, a single copy of the mutation causes children to gradually go deaf beginning around the age of 10 to 15.
The team first inserted the healthy gene into an engineered virus called adeno-associated virus 1, (AAV1) together with a promoter – a genetic sequence which turns the gene on only in certain sensory cells of the inner ear known as hair cells. They then injected the gene-bearing AAV1 into the inner ear.
Exciting results
In the recessive deafness model, TMC1 gene therapy restored the ability of sensory hair cells to respond to sound, producing a measurable electrical current, and also restored activity in the auditory portion of the brainstem.
Most importantly, the deaf mice regained their ability to hear. To test hearing, the researchers placed the mice in a “startle box” and sounded abrupt, loud tones. “Mice with TMC1 mutations will just sit there, but with gene therapy, they jump as high as a normal mouse,” said Jeffrey Holt, PhD, a scientist in Boston’s Department of Otolaryngology.
In the dominant deafness model, gene therapy with TMC2, was successful at the cellular and brain level, and partially successful at restoring actual hearing as shown in the startle test.
“Our gene therapy protocol is not yet ready for clinical trials. We need to tweak it a bit more. But in the not-too-distant future we think it could be developed for therapeutic use in humans,” said Holt.
Tailor-made precision treatment on the way
The team plans to further optimize their protocol and follow the treated mice to see if they retain hearing longer than the two months already observed. They hope to start clinical trials of TMC1 gene therapy within 5 to 10 years.
Holt believes the same gene therapy strategy could also work for other forms of genetic deafness. “I can envision patients with deafness having their genome sequenced and a tailored, precision medicine treatment injected into their ears to restore hearing,” he said.
“Current therapies for profound hearing loss like that caused by the recessive form of TMC1 are hearing aids, which often don’t work very well, and cochlear implants. Cochlear implants are great, but your own hearing is better in terms of range of frequencies, nuance for hearing voices, music and background noise, and figuring out which direction a sound is coming from. Anything that could stabilize or improve native hearing at an early age is really exciting and would give a huge boost to a child’s ability to learn and use spoken language,” said Margaret Kenna, MD, MPH, and a specialist in genetic hearing loss at Boston Children’s Hospital.
“These findings mark a defining moment in the way we understand, and can ultimately challenge the burden of deafness in humans,” said Ernesto Bertarelli, co-chair of the Bertarelli Foundation, the primary funder of the research.
Researchers from the Oregon Health & Science University and other institutions have discovered that chromosomal abnormalities occurring in human embryos created for in vitro fertilization can be predicted within the first 30 hours of first-stage cellular development.
As the authors explain in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications, this discovery could improve the overall success rate of IVF procedures, which has long had just a 30 to 35 percent global success rate. An estimated 50 to 80 percent of embryos created for IVF have some type of chromosomal abnormality, which often leads to a miscarriage.
“Many couples are choosing to have children later in life,” said co-author Dr. Shawn Chavez, an assistant professor in the OHSU School of Medicine, “and this trend is only going to continue.”
“A failed IVF attempt takes an emotional toll on a woman who is anticipating a pregnancy as well as a financial toll on families, with a single IVF treatment costing thousands and thousands of dollars per cycle,” he explained. “Our findings also bring hope to couples who are struggling to start a family and wish to avoid the selection and transfer of embryos with unknown or poor potential for implantation.”
Technique allows for earlier detection of abnormalities
Dr. Chavez and colleagues from Stanford University, University of Valencia and IGENOMIX found that by looking at the duration of the first mitotic phase in the cell cycle, they were able to identify chromosomally normal versus abnormal embryos up to approximately the 8-cell stage.
They also found that, by looking at a single cell level, they could correlate the chromosomal composition of an embryo to a subset of a dozen genes activated before the first cell division. These genes likely originate from egg or sperm, and can be used to predict whether or not an embryo is chromosomally normal or abnormal during the earliest stage of development.
Because of this discovery, doctors and embryologists will be able to quickly identify which embryos are the healthiest for implantation, while also reducing the time that they need to spend cultured in the laboratory before being transferred. Typically, an embryo needs to be implanted within five days of creation, which can be problematic, as chromosomal abnormalities are often not identified until the fifth or sixth day, they noted.
“With assisted reproduction at an all-time high, we want to help more families achieve successful pregnancies,” Chavez said. “IVF has helped countless women all over the world, and we now have the technology and research to improve a couple’s chances of having a biological child of their own. This discovery can potentially increase those chances.”
The newest images of Pluto collected by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have revealed yet more unusual-looking features on the dwarf planet, including an elongated dark band called “the whale” and a bright, donut-shaped patch located near this object’s “tail.”
According to BBC News, the latest images were captured between June 27 and July 3 using the probe’s high-resolution black-and-while Lorri instrument and its lower-resolution, color imaging Ralph camera. The features are located along Pluto’s equator.
In a statement, New Horizons scientists said the center of the images corresponds to the side of Pluto that will be visible during the spacecraft’s flyby of the dwarf planet on Tuesday, July 14. The area known as the whale is one of the darkest regions visible to the probe, and measures some 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers) in length along the left side of the pictures.
“We’re at the ‘man in the moon’ stage of viewing Pluto,” said John Spencer deputy leader of the Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado. “It’s easy to imagine you’re seeing familiar shapes in this bizarre collection of light and dark features. However, it’s too early to know what these features really are.”
Breaking down the features in the latest Pluto images
Located to the right of the whale’s “snout” is the brightest region visible on Pluto. This area is approximately 990 miles (1,600 kilometers) across, and could be home to relatively fresh frost deposits, potentially including frozen methane, nitrogen, and/or carbon monoxide.
To the right of the whale are the four mysterious dark spots that have captured the attention of people all over the world, each of which are several hundred miles across. At the left end of the whale is its “tail,” which cradles the 200-mile (350 kilometer) long donut-shaped feature.
“At first glance it resembles circular features seen elsewhere in the solar system, from impact craters to volcanoes, but scientists are holding off on making any interpretation of this and other features on Pluto until more detailed images are in hand,” the New Horizons team said, adding that higher-resolution images coming up will allow scientists to make more accurate maps of the dwarf planet’s surface.
As of Wednesday, New Horizons was less than 4.7 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) from Pluto, according to BBC News. The flyby will take place on the 50th anniversary of the Mariner 4 spacecraft’s flyby of Mars, and the new probe will be collecting nearly 5,000 times as much data at Pluto than Mariner did at Mars.
It’s something we take for granted every day: If you spill water on the counter, it’ll spread out for a while and then stop. But the mathematical formulas we have to describe this phenomenon predict that a liquid will spread endlessly—something that any child could tell you doesn’t happen.
Now, researchers from MIT believe they have finally found an explanation.
“The classic thin-film model describes the spreading of a liquid film, but it doesn’t predict it stopping,” explained co-author Amir Pahlavan. As it turns out, the old model only dealt with activities on a macroscopic level, completely ignoring molecular-level forces that also have a part to play.
These forces are tiny, but have a major effect on how liquid behaves. “[W]hat’s actually stopping the puddle is forces that only act at the nanoscale,” said Pahlavan.
Close to the liquid’s edge, “the liquid-solid and liquid-air interfaces start feeling each other. These are the missing intermolecular forces in the macroscopic description.”
Why this is important
This might seem inconsequential, but it can have many applications down the road. Being able to calculate how fluid will behave can play a major role across multiple industries. For example, it is essential in figuring out how much oil is needed to keep a gear lubricated in a machine, or how much “mud” is needed to allow an oil rig to run smoothly.
It could also be important for building microchips, because as their design grows smaller, heat buildup becomes a more pressing issue. Liquids can be used to keep microchips cool and functioning, but only if you can figure out how cooling fluids will flow and spread across chips.
The work, which was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, can be found in the journal Physical Review Letters.
In an attempt to quantify how much volcanic eruptions contribute to climate variability, a team of researchers from the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Nevada have examined reconstructions of nearly 300 individual eruptions throughout history.
Writing in the latest edition of the journal Nature, the study authors used a new reconstruction of the timing and associated radiative forcing of events dating as far back as the early Roman period and demonstrated that large eruptions in the tropics and high latitudes were “dominant drivers of climate variability,” explained lead investigator Dr. Michael Sigl.
Dr. Sigl, an assistant research professor with DRI and a postdoctoral fellow at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, added that these volcanic eruptions were “responsible for numerous and widespread summer cooling extremes over the past 2,500 years” and that those cooler conditions were the result of “large amounts of volcanic sulfate particles injected into the upper atmosphere, shielding the Earth’s surface from incoming solar radiation.”
In fact, the research reveals that 15 out of the 16 coldest summers recorded between 500 BC and 1,000 AD came following large volcanic eruptions, with four of the coldest happening not long after the largest volcanic events ever recorded. Essentially, the authors found evidence that large eruptions were responsible for cold temperature extremes throughout recorded history.
Using new techniques to address dating inconsistencies
Dr. Sigl’s team set out to address inconsistencies in historical atmospheric data observed in ice cores and corresponding temperature variations found in climate proxies such as tree rings, both of which had made it difficult to gauge the actual impact of volcanic eruptions on climate.
Their new reconstruction method utilized more than 20 individual ice cores which were extracted from ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, analyzing them for volcanic sulfate with technology at DRI. This analysis provided an annual history of atmospheric sulfate levels throughout various periods of time, and additional measurements took place at other participating universities.
“We used a new method for producing the timescale,” explained co-author Dr. Mai Winstrup, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle. “Previously, this has been done by hand, but we used a statistical algorithm instead. Together with the state-of-the-art ice core chemistry measurements, this resulted in a more accurate dating of the ice cores.”
Sigl added that the research team, which included 24 scientists from 18 universities and research institutes in the US, UK, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark and Sweden, used a “multidisciplinary approach” that involved historians and scientists specializing in space, climate and geology. This was “key to the success of this project,” he said.
New evidence of volcanism’s past effect on the climate
The study authors said that they were able to identify new evidence, including signs of a cosmic ray event, in the ice cores and tree rings that allowed them to significantly improve the accuracy of the dating process. Ice-core timescales had previous been misdated by five to 10 years during the first millennium, they noted, throwing off the proposed timing of volcanic eruptions.
The revised chronology of the eruptions and the climatic responses to those events revealed that sustained volcanic cooling effects on climate have triggered crop failures and famines, the study authors explained. In addition, these events may have played a role in pandemics and the decline of society in communities that were based primarily on agriculture, they added.
Tropical volcanoes and large-scale eruptions in high latitude parts of the Northern Hemisphere, such as Iceland and North America, often resulted in severe and widespread summer cooling in this part of the world due to the injection of sulfate and ash into the high atmosphere. Similarly, these particles caused atmospheric dimming over Europe that was recorded by eyewitnesses.
Climatic impact was strongest and most persistent after clusters of two or more large eruptions, the researchers found. They also found that one of history’s most severe climate crises, which began with an 18-month dust veil observed in the Mediterranean region starting in March 536 was the result of a large eruption in the high-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.
Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) are drawing inspiration from an iconic video game character from the 1980s for an ongoing research project designed to tidy up the increasing amount of space junk floating in orbit around the Earth.
According to NBC News, the EPFL’s CleanSpace One project has been searching for a method to safely monitor, collect, and dispose of dead satellites not be re-entering the planet’s atmosphere in the foreseeable future, as well as other debris in low-Earth orbit.
On Monday, they opted to use what is being referred to as the “Pac-Man” technique: a spacecraft will be outfitted with a large cone-shaped net that will close once it consumes a satellite, similar to the way the old arcade game character gobbled up dots.
The clean-up satellite will be tested by capturing the SwissCube satellite, a small probe that no longer functions. CleanSpace One will be trapping the satellite, and once it is secure, the satellites will combust together in the atmosphere. The satellite could launch as early as 2018, NBC added.
Complex calculations required for a successful maneuver
Engineers from the Center for Space Engineering and Signal Processing 5 Laboratory (LTS 5) and their colleagues have spent three years working on the “Pac-Man” satellite as an effort to not only capture SwissCube, but other pieces of space debris as well, including projectiles travelling at speeds of up to 7 km per second, posing a threat to functional satellites.
It’s a difficult mission, according to EPFL officials. Christophe Paccolat, a doctoral student working at LTS5, said SwissCube “is not only a 10cm by 10cm object that’s tough to grasp, but it also has darker and lighter parts that reflect sunlight differently,” that can “perturb the visual approach system and thus also the estimates of its speed and distance.”
Likewise, project leader Muriel Richard-Noca said the mission is delicate, and that it takes just “one error in the calculation of the approach for SwissCube to bounce off CleanSpace One and rocket out into space.” To prevent that from happening, the researchers have constantly been testing the visual approach algorithms that will be used by the cleanup satellite, accounting for a variety of factors such as the CubeSat’s speed and the Sun’s angle of illumination.
Michel Lauria, an industrial technology professor whose students were involved in the project, said the Pac-Man method of capture was selected because it is “more reliable and offers a larger margin for maneuvering than a claw or an articulated hand.”
Researchers from the Royal Ontario Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History have identified an unusual new species of dinosaur that had an elaborately-adorned skull and distinctive forward-curling hook-like horns along its wide, shield-like frill.
The creature, which is described in the latest edition of the journal PLOS One, has been named Wendiceratops pinhornensis or “Wendy’s horned-face” in honor of Wendy Sloboda, a Canadian fossil hunter who originally discovered the site where the fossils were located in 2010.
Wendiceratops pinhornensis was a 20-foot (six meter) long dinosaur that weighed more than a ton. It lived approximately 79 million years ago, making it one of the oldest known members of the horned-dinosaur family of which the Triceratops is a member, the Ceratopsidae.
More than 200 bones representing the remains of at least three adults and one juvenile member of the species were discovered in a bonebed in the Oldman Formation of southern Alberta, near the province’s border with Montana. The new dinosaur was an herbivore which would consume low-lying plants using its parrot-like beak and leaf-shaped teeth, the authors said.
Earliest documented tall nose horn in this dinosaur family
According to Discovery News, study co-author Dr. David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto said in a statement that Wendiceratops “helps us understand the early evolution of skull ornamentation” in this “iconic group” of horned-face dinosaurs.
“The wide frill of Wendiceratops is ringed by numerous curled horns, the nose had a large, upright horn, and it’s likely there were horns over the eyes too,” he added. “The number of gnarly frill projections and horns makes it one of the most striking horned dinosaurs ever found.”
Based on the fossils Dr. Evans and his colleague, Dr. Michael Ryan, the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum, discovered, they reported that the fragmented nature of the remains make it difficult to tell the complete shape of the dinosaur’s nasal bone. However, they could tell that it supported supported a prominent, upright nasal horncore.
The discovery marks the earliest documented occurrence of a tall nose horn in a member of this dinosaur family, they added. This reveals when this particular feature evolved, and that the large conical nasal horn evolved at least twice in the horned dinosaur family (once in the short-frilled group that includes Wendiceratops, and again in the long-frilled one that includes Triceratops).
“Wendiceratops has a unique horn ornamentation above its nose that shows the intermediate evolutionary development between low, rounded forms of the earliest horned dinosaurs and the large, tall horns of Styracosaurus, and its relatives. The locked horns of two Wendiceratops could have been used in combat between males to gain access to territory or females,” said Dr. Ryan.
Could doctors one day tell their patients to “take two laps around the walking trail and call me in the morning?” Researchers at Stanford University seem to think so, and that it could help keep us from dwelling on negative things and getting depressed.
In research published in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doctoral student Gregory Bratman and his colleagues found that more than half of all people currently live in urban areas, and that urbanization has linked to an increased risk of mental illness for reasons currently not known.
The researchers conducted an experiment to see if nature-based experiences could influence a person’s tendency to repetitively focus their thoughts on negative aspects of the self – a known risk factor for mental illness known as rumination. They had some participants go on a 90 minute walk through a natural environment and others walk next to a busy street in Palo Alto.
Those who walked through the natural environment self-reported lower levels of rumination than those walking through the city, and they also showed reduced neural activity in the parts of the brain associated with risk for mental illness, according to the study authors. They believe that the findings underscore the importance of nature when it comes to our mental health.
Findings suggest a link between urbanization, mental illness
Bratman told BBC News that the shift from predominantly rural living to predominantly urban living has “happened in a blink of an eye in terms of human evolution,” and that the percentage of people calling cities their home is projected to rise to at least 70 percent by the year 2050.
He added that there is “an increasing body of evidence showing that natural versus urban areas benefit us at least emotionally with our mood and possibly also our cognitive development too. You could think of these mental health benefits of nature as a psychological ecosystem service.”
According to Stanford, men and women living in the city have a 20 percent higher risk of anxiety disorders and a 40 percent higher risk of mood disorders versus those in rural areas. Furthermore, people who were born and raised in cities are two times more likely to develop schizophrenia.
Bratman called the research “exciting” because it “demonstrates the impact of nature experience on an aspect of emotion regulation – something that may help explain how nature makes us feel better.” Co-author James Gross, a psychology professor at the university, added that the findings were “consistent with, but do not yet prove, a causal link between increasing urbanization and increased rates of mental illness.”
If you’re feeling low about life today, just remember: Your brain is nearly ideal.
At least, that’s what researchers out of Northeastern University and Budapest University of Technology and Economics have found. According to them, the network of connections between parts of the brain is almost ideal, allowing us to expedite the transfer of information across different parts of brain.
“An optimal network in the brain would have the smallest number of connections possible, to minimize cost, and at the same time it would have maximum navigability–that is, the most direct pathways for routing signals from any possible source to any possible destination,” explained physicist Dmitri Krioukov, study co-author.
Or in other words, our brains seem to have evolved to operate at peak capacity.
So how did they figure out the optimal brain network?
John Nash (the one with a beautiful mind) contributed a lot to game theory—a standard tool to study the behavior of a population with given incentives and costs.
Using game theory, the researchers created sophisticated statistical analyses of the ideal brain network. In these analyses, the ideal network becomes a sort of game whose purpose is to find the optimal trade-off between easy navigability (the incentive) and network cost. This allowed them to construct a map of the ideal brain network, which they compared to the brain’s actual network.
As it turned out, 89% of the connections in the ideal brain were also in real human brains.
“That means the brain was evolutionarily designed to be very, very close to what our algorithm shows,” Krioukov said.
Implications beyond Darwin
But the findings, which were published in Nature Communications, have ramifications beyond those of evolutionary progress. If we know, ideally, how the brain should connect, then we know that those connections are probably required for normal brain function.
So if the network links break down, certain neurological diseases can arise—meaning that if we can determine what’s no longer functioning ideally, new treatments can be developed.
“At the end of the day, what we are trying to do is to fix the diseased network so that it can resume its normal function,” said Krioukov.
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have devised a new, high-tech way for people to experience what it’s like to have echolocation, the ability to use sound to communicate and detect objects around them, similar to bats and dolphins.
In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, physicists at the university explained how they used graphene to construct a lightweight ultrasonic receiver and transmitter capable of measuring the speed and the distance of nearby objects.
“Sea mammals and bats use high-frequency sound for echolocation and communication, but humans just haven’t fully exploited that before, in my opinion, because the technology has not been there,” said Alex Zettl, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute.
“Until now, we have not had good wideband ultrasound transmitters or receivers. These new devices are a technology opportunity,” he added.
Ultrasound unit can be used underwater to penetrate steel
The wireless ultrasound devices aren’t just a novelty – they have practical uses as well, as the study authors noted. They can be used along with standard radio transmission in regions where radio is impractical, such as underwater. The new devices can use electromagnetic waves, similar to current ultrasound or sonar devices, but with far more fidelity, they said.
In addition, they can be used to communicate through steel or other objects that electromagnetic waves normally are unable to penetrate. The devices use diaphragms made out of one-atom-thick graphene sheets that are able to respond to frequencies ranging from subsonic to ultrasonic (or from well below 20 hertz to more than 500 kilohertz).
WTF is graphene, though?
Graphene is a material made from carbon atoms arraigned in a hexagon (similar to chicken wire) that creates a tough-but-lightweight sheet that has unique electronic properties. It’s lightweight enough to respond well to different frequencies of an electronic pulse and is also more efficient, converting more than 99 percent of the energy that drives the device into sound. In comparison, current conventional speakers covert just eight percent.
“Graphene is a magical material; it hits all the sweet spots for a communications device,” Zettl said. “There’s a lot of talk about using graphene in electronics and small nanoscale devices, but they’re all a ways away. The microphone and loudspeaker are some of the closest devices to commercial viability, because we’ve worked out how to make the graphene and mount it.”
“Because our membrane is so light, it has an extremely wide frequency response and is able to generate sharp pulses and measure distance much more accurately than traditional methods,” added Zhou. “This is lightweight enough to mount on a bat and record what the bat can hear.”
Geysers of ice and water vapor emanating from the surface of Enceladus experience an unusual delay that could indicate that the sixth-largest moon of Saturn lacks a strong interior, researchers claim in a new study published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience.
According to Space.com, scientists believe that beneath the surface of this icy moon, there is an ocean of liquid water that could potentially harbor life. By studying its geysers, they hope to find out more detail about what the subterranean surface of Enceladus is really like.
In their study, a team of researchers from the US, France, and the Czech Republic explained that “eruptions of water vapor and ice emanate from warm tectonic ridges” at the moon’s south pole, and that observations in the visible and infrared spectra have revealed “an orbital modulation of the plume brightness,” suggesting that the eruptions are “influenced by tidal forces.”
However, that activity appeared to be experiencing a delay of several hours compared to what simple tidal models predicted. This prompted the authors to “simulate the viscoelastic tidal response of Enceladus with a full three-dimensional numerical model and show that the delay in eruption activity may be a natural consequence of the viscosity structure in the south-polar region and the size of the putative subsurface ocean.”
What lies beneath the surface
They compared plume brightness data to simulations of varying normal stress levels along faults, and found that the activity was reproduced in two different interior models: one involving a low-viscosity convective region above a polar sea along the south pole at depths as little as 30km, and one involving a 60km to 70km thick convecting ice shell resting above a global ocean.
“Previous predictions were too simple, in that they ignored important details of the structure of Enceladus,” said Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and co-author of the new study. “Enceladus experiences tides from Saturn, which provide a force on the ice shell. The ice shell flows in response to these forces, and because the flow is quite slow, the response is delayed by several hours.”
The research centers around the viscosity of fluids on the moon – its thickness, or the degree to which it resists flow. For instance, water is a relatively low-viscosity fluid while honey is a relatively high-viscosity one. Nimmo’s team found that, while a strong, high-viscosity ice shell would instantly react to tidal forces, a weaker, low-viscosity one would react more gradually, which could be explained by either of their two models.
“The timing of geyser activity gives us an insight into the interior of a rather complicated planetary body,” lead author Marie Běhounková, a planetary scientist at Charles University in Prague, told Space.com. However, more data from the Cassini spacecraft is required before the researchers could try to determine which is the more likely of those models.
Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have developed a new system for the first time allows for omnidirectional wireless charging of multiple mobile devices from distances of up to one-half meter away.
Their new wireless-power transfer (WPT) technology makes it possible for laptops, tablets, and smartphones to have their batteries replenished at any location and in any direction, even if the devices are away from the power source. The technique is similar to WiFi.
Professor Chun T. Rim of the Nuclear and Quantum Engineering Department at KAIST and his colleagues explained that their system works as long as mobile users remain in a designated area where the charger is available – an area known as the Wi-Power zone. Doing so will allow their devices to collect power automatically, without being tethered to a charger.
Using magnetic dipole coils to generate magnetic fields
Furthermore, Rim’s team said their WPT system is capable of powering-up multiple mobile devices at the same time and from any position in the Wi-Power zone. It will work even if users hold their phones in midair or have their laptops stationed more than a foot away. Their research was published in the June edition of IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.
The KAIST researchers demonstrated the technology on Tuesday at a lab on campus, using high-frequency magnetic materials in a dipole coil structure to build a thin, flat transmitter system shaped like a one square meter-sized rectangle. Their device is capable of charging either 30 smartphones with power capacities of one watt each, or five laptops with capacities of 2.4 watts each. The maximum power transfer efficiency for the laptops was 34 percent.
The team used a device they developed last year, the Dipole Coil Resonance System (DCRS), to induce magnetic fields. The device is composed of a pair of magnetic dipole coils – one for transmitting calls (Tx) and one for receiving them (Rx) – each with a ferrite core and connected with a resonant capacitor.
The coils were placed in a parallel position so they could generate rotating magnetic fields, enabling mobile devices to receive a power charge from any direction. While their device is not the first wireless charger, the KAIST team said it’s the first to offer a substantial advantage over traditional charging technology, since it has a larger charging distance and does not require devices to be in close contact with the transmitter (a charging pad).
Closing the waters around Robben Island in South Africa to fishing for a three-year trial period helped increase the survival of endangered African penguin chicks by 18 percent, researchers at the University of Exeter in the UK report in a new study.
The research team published their results in the latest edition of the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters, and the findings indicate that prohibiting fishing activities, even in small areas, can drastically improve the survival chances of threatened creatures.
“One of the major challenges of conserving a mobile species like the African penguin,” said Dr. Richard Sherley, a research fellow at the university, “is that once they leave a protected area they are subject to outside pressures and dangers, including poor prey availability.”
“Our study shows that small no-take zones can aid the survival of African penguin chicks, but ultimately commercial fishing controls must be combined with other management action if we are to reverse the dramatic decline of this charismatic species,” he added.
Benefits of small-scale fishing bans
The African penguin population is currently in a freefall, with adult survival rates plummeting over the last decade – and even though the Robben Island ban on commercial fishing improved chick survival rates, overall prospects of the species remain dim over the long haul.
African penguins feed on anchovies and sardines, but fishing of those species near Cape Town is being partially blamed for a nearly 70 percent reduction in the species’ numbers that occurred in the years between 2001 and 2013. The status of the penguins led to experimental fishing closures around four colonies between 2008 and 2014.
The newly published study is the first to demonstrate that such experimental closures could have a beneficial impact on the demographics of the penguin population. While the Robben Island closure did improve chick survival, however, the population will not be able to fully recover unless more is done to limit the fishing of sardines in the region.
Penguins and other seabirds sometimes respond to a lack of food by abandoning breeding, opting not to relay eggs after they are lost, or bringing less food to their chicks, thus hampering their ability to grow and harming their overall health. Dr. Sherely’s team reported seeing all of these behaviors in African penguins over the past several years.
It might look as dry and arid as a desert, but scientists claim that Mars has a surprisingly high amount of moisture in its atmosphere, leading some experts to ponder whether or not the Red Planet could actually be humid enough to support life.
According to Space.com, the atmospheric moisture on Mars would be especially conducive to life if the water condenses during the early morning hours, forming short-lived puddles on the planet’s surface. This could theoretically make it possible for the planet’s apparently extremely harsh conditions to support living organisms, even without liquid surface water.
East Carolina University biology professor John Rummel, an astrobiology expert who previously worked with NASA, told the website via email that “the conditions on Mars, where the relative humidity is high and the available water vapor is approximately 100 precipitable microns, is the equivalent of the drier parts of the Atacama Desert in Chile.”
Rummel added there were several “special regions,” or zones where terrestrial organisms are likely to replicate on the Red Planet during a discussion at the Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago last month. Those regions are “interpreted to have high potential for the existence of extant Martian life forms,” according to report.
Lichen-like life
Life here on Earth requires liquid surface water, but even though there is evidence that Mars was once home to liquid H2O, it currently has very little. The air is a different story, as Rummel said that nighttime relative humidity levels can reach as high as 80 to 100 percent.
Earth is home to some types of organisms, including lichens that can survive in arid regions by taking water directly from humid air. In fact, the website explains that some lichens are capable of photosynthesizing when relative humidity levels are as low as 70 percent. Studies indicate that one type of Antarctic lichen can adapt to life under simulated Martian conditions.
However, scientists have yet to discover a terrestrial lifeform that can reproduce under conditions where there is no liquid water, only humidity. Rummel said this doesn’t necessarily prohibit an organism from surviving on Mars. He told Space.com that falling nighttime temperatures may cause water to condense into ice or snow, which would then melt as temperature warm up in the early morning hours. This process could take a few minutes or several hours.
“Such short-term wet periods might be long enough and warm enough to allow for Earth organisms to metabolize and even reproduce,” he said. However, dry conditions aren’t the only thing prohibiting life from living on Mars, the website said – the lack of a global magnetic field, thin atmosphere and radiation levels could force lichen-like organisms underground.
Writing in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USC Professor of Gerontology Dr. Eileen Crimmins reported that after looking at the mortality rates of adults over the age of 40, female death rates decreased about 70 percent faster than those of males in people born after 1880.
Even when controlling for smoking-related ailments, the vast majority of the excess deaths in adult men over 40 appeared to be due to cardiovascular disease, based on an analysis of global data on mortality rates over the same time period. The discovery raises questions over whether or not men and women face different heart disease risks due to inherent biological factors.
An increased risk in men
Furthermore, the study found that significant differences in life expectancies between men and women first emerged as early as the start of the 20th century. While death rates fell for both men and women due to improved diets and disease prevention, females started reaping the benefits at a much faster rate than males, the university said in a statement.
The divergence in morality between the genders was concentrated primarily in the 50- to 70-year-old age range, but faded out drastically after age 80. In adults at least 40 years of age, female death rates decreased 70 percent faster than male death rates after 1890, with smoking accounting for less than one-third of that mortality difference.
Study author Dr. Caleb Finch, a professor of neurobiology at USC, told redOrbit via email that his team’s findings support previous studies that found cardiovascular disease to be “the main cause of male mortality in middle age,” and added that there were three main reasons behind the divergence in mortality between males and females in this age group.
“Men smoke more, which is a major risk, but smoking accounts for only 30 percent of excess male risk,” Dr. Finch added. “Higher animal fat consumption is also a factor, with differences between countries that correspond to mortality patterns. Lastly, at the cell level, male cells are more vulnerable to stress than female cells.”
In the wake of recent outbreaks of measles and whooping cough, one-third of parents polled as part of a recent study said they now believed that vaccines had more benefits than previously believed, and one-fourth felt that they were safer than they were a year ago.
Those findings are part of the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, a nationally-representative survey conducted in May which looked at how the vaccine-related viewpoints of parents changed between 2014 and 2015. Over that time, there were more than two-dozen measles outbreaks reported throughout the US.
The poll found that 34 percent of parents believed vaccines have more benefit than one year ago, while 25 percent felt inoculations are safer now than they were in 2014. A whopping 35 percent reported more support for daycare and school vaccine requirements than just one year ago.
Parents changing attitudes
In a statement, Dr. Matthew Davis, director of the National Poll on Children’s Health as well as a professor pediatrics and internal medicine at UM Medical School, said that media reports of the measles and whooping cough outbreaks may have had an influence on parents, and that the shift in opinions on childhood vaccines over just one year was “quite remarkable.”
“There are likely many reasons why parents’ attitudes and beliefs about childhood vaccines are shifting over time,” Dr. Davis told redOrbit via email. “Certainly in the past year, we know that there are many outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and whooping cough that have received local and national media coverage. Information about such outbreaks may very naturally affect parents’ views, and that appears to be happening for this issue.”
Most moms and dads said they believed that vaccines had the same benefits as they did in 2014, and that their safety had remained the same. However, seven percent said they felt the vaccines were not as safe in 2015 as they had been last year, while five percent said they believed there were fewer benefits to the inoculations, and six percent were less supportive of school and daycare entry requirements.
Attitude shifts being echoes in new state laws
The UM poll also asked parents about their opinions regarding the risk of measles and whooping cough compared to a year ago. Forty percent of those who responded said that they believed there was a higher risk of children contracting measles now than there was a year ago, while 45 percent said it was about the same and just 15 percent believed it was lower.
“In our eight-plus years of conducting the National Poll on Children’s Health, it is typical for 80 percent or more of parents to say that their views on central health issues have not changed over time. However, in this poll, we found that only 60 to 70 percent of parents said that their views were consistent over time, and higher proportions than usual said that their views had shifted – in this case, toward more positive views of the benefits and safety of vaccines,” Dr. Davis said.
“It’s important to emphasize that the purpose of our Poll is to bring the voice of the public into the national dialogue about children’s health and child health policy issues,” he added. “These are not my opinions, or the opinions of my team or the university. Rather, these are the views of parents across the country about an issue central to children’s health, and we are seeing shifts over time that are already being echoed in changes in state laws about childhood vaccination and vaccination exemptions – for example, in California just within the past two weeks.”
Under that new California law, children will no longer be able to skip the shots typically required to attend school because of the religious or personal objections. Unvaccinated children will only be allowed to go to school if there is a valid medical reason why they cannot be immunized, such as receiving chemotherapy treatment for cancer.
Contrary to popular belief, fish did not evolve gills to obtain more oxygen as they grew larger and became more active – the adaptation arose to allow them to survive acidic ocean conditions, according to a new study published recently in the journal Scientific Reports.
“When we think of the gill we automatically associate it with a human lung,” Dr. Jodie Rummer, a fish physiologist at James Cook University in Australia and co-author of the new study, said to ABC Science Online on Monday. “So the common thought has always been that perhaps the first reason a water breather needed to evolve a gill is to get oxygen.”
The longstanding proposal, known as the oxygen hypothesis, claims that as fish and other marine organisms grew larger and more active, they required more oxygen in order to maintain a higher metabolism. The structure of the gill appeared to provide the ideal solution, giving the organisms a larger surface to absorb oxygen into their bloodstreams.
However, Dr. Rummer and her colleagues report that their recent analysis of the hagfish appears to cast doubts on this hypothesis. Hagfish, they explained, are the ocean-floor dwellers and the closes living relative of the earliest fishes. They are also quite different than most types of big fish, as they absorb most of the oxygen they need through their skin.
Hagfish found to use gills to maintain blood pH balance
Hagfish resemble eels and are usually only active when they use their teeth to dig into a sunken and decaying carcass. Based on their body shape and low metabolism, the creatures absorb 80 to 90 percent of the oxygen they require through their skin, even though they have gills. So if the gills weren’t needed for respiration, why did they evolve?
As part of an ongoing study involving an analysis of the mechanism used by different fish to deal with ocean acidification, Dr. Rummer’s team placed hagfish in a highly acidic environment. The researchers found that the creatures are able to withstand higher acidity than any other species of fish they studied thus far. Furthermore, they discovered the primary role of the hagfish gill is to regulate the body’s pH balance so they can survive these harsh conditions.
The fish were collected off the west coast of Canada’s Vancouver Island and exposed to various levels of acidity. The researchers pumped carbon dioxide into their water, then took blood tests and tissue samples from the hagfish at different points after the creatures had been exposed to the higher acidity levels to monitor body chemistry changes, according to Discovery News.
Previous studies revealed that many types of fish experience behavior and physiological changes when exposed to highly acidic water, but when Dr. Rummer and her co-authors subjected the hagfish to levels more than 50 times those predicted to be present in the world’s ocean by 2100, they found that the fish were able to deal with the conditions. After their blood pH initially fell by 1.2 units, they were able to use their gills to correct this in just a few hours.
“They’re very, very good at this – the best of all the living fish that we know of,” Dr. Rummer said, adding that they “are probably going to be the best fish to tolerate high CO2.”
Let’s face it, folks – as cool as the shark is, it’s also the Marsha Brady of the undersea animal kingdom. Whenever a prominent TV station wants to feature a week’s worth of programming about a specific aquatic creature, it’s always “shark, shark, shark!”
Unfortunately, that leaves plenty of interesting, unique and unusual marine life forms out in the cold, completely ignored by cable networks. Well, we here at redOrbit believe it’s way beyond time for these creatures to stop being overlooked. Forget “Shark Week” – here are five other sea animals that are also deserving of their own weeklong block of programming.
1. Whales
The first entry on our list is probably not a surprise. Whales, as Discovery News explained in a recent article, have demonstrated “elaborate communication techniques and cultural exchange” in their interactions with one another. Researchers have found that the creatures are capable of working together in creative ways when it comes to fishing, with each one playing a designated role in the process. They even use nets made out of air bubbles to trap their prey.
2. Dolphins
Again, probably not a surprise, given the fact that dolphins “possess large brains relative to their body size with a neocortex that is more convoluted than a human’s,” experts told CBS News. The dolphin is said to be second only to people when it comes to overall cognitive capacity. They can recognize themselves in mirrors, remember the communications of other dolphins when living in captivity for up to two decades, and use sponges to protect their noses when near rocks.
3. Octopuses
More than 50 years ago, marine biologists discovered that the octopus was able to distinguish between and remember several different types of geometric shapes, according to the Huffington Post. In the years since then, the creature has demonstrated several other feats of intelligence, including the ability to solve intricate puzzles and use items such as coconut shell-like tools in order to protect themselves from predators, as CNN.com noted in a December 2009 article.
4. Cuttlefish
The octopus isn’t the only intelligent cephalopod that’s worthy of a little extra TV time. The cuttlefish possesses the ability to change color and texture to blend in with its environment, the Huffington Post explained, and it also displays communication skills. The creature also alters its behavior based on specific interactions with other cuttlefish or predators, and males can even make themselves look like females to sneak past rivals and mate with secluded females.
5. Manta rays
Finally, we come to manta rays and their relatives, which according to BBC Wildlife Magazine have the largest brains of all of the 30,000-plus species of fish identified to date. Rays regularly demonstrate their smarts through coordinated and cooperative feeding habits, and their fossil record suggest that the creatures have been around in their modern form more than 20 million years. Plus, each of them has a unique series of blotches and spots on its stomach.
A new social media website that prohibits foul language or sexually-charged content, launched by a group of Evangelical Christians in Brazil last month, has attracted more than 100,000 people since going live.
A screenshot of the sign-up screen. (Credit: Facegloria)
The website, which Agence France-Press explains bears “a passing resemblance” to the more widely used Facebook, is called Facegloria and was designed as an alternative to people who found social network to be too secular or sinful in nature.
Facegloria replaces Facebook’s “Like” button with an “Amen” one, and BBC News reports that there are 600 words that are prohibited on the website. Similarly, violent or erotic content is prohibited, as are images or video depictions of homosexual activity.
“On Facebook you see a lot of violence and pornography,” Atilla Barros, a web designer and one of the founders of the Portugese-language social network, told the AFP. “That’s why we thought of creating a network where we could talk about God, love, and to spread His word.”
A morally better Facebook
The origins of the website date back to 2012, when Barros and three colleagues working at the mayor’s office in Ferraz de Vasconcelos, located near Sao Paulo, decided there was a market for a sanitized version of Mark Zuckerberg’s popular social network, especially considering that Brazil is said to be home to more than 40 million Evangelical Christians.
They even secured the financial support of the mayor and set up Facegloria using about $16,000 in start-up money, according to the AFP. The social network is patrolled by a team of nearly two dozen volunteers who evaluate the appropriateness of content and decide whether or not to allow “potentially risqué selfies,” bikini shots, and other debatable content remain online.
Barros said the goal is to make Facegloria “morally and technically better than Facebook.” He added that “in two years we hope to get to 10 million users in Brazil. In a month we have had 100,000 and in two we are expecting a big increase thanks to a mobile phone app.”
It is not the first attempt to create a faith-based social media network, according to BBC News. Ummaland, a social network for Muslims that launched in 2013, currently has roughly 329,000 members. The website’s features include “extended privacy settings” for women and daily Islamic inspirational quotes.
“We are creating Ummaland on Islamic values, no small talk, no boasting, no gossiping and backbiting but focusing on the message that really matters,” co-founders Maruf Yusupov and Jamoliddin Daliyev told reporters shortly following the launch of the social network.
How To Go To Sleep With Fibromyalgia And Endometriosis Pain
Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating
Fibromyalgia and endometriosis pain often go hand in hand. Fibromyalgia is a painful condition in which women often suffer from a dull ache in the body. This ache will start in the muscles and migrate to other parts of the body.
Pain will be on both sides of body. It will also be in both the upper as well as the lower portions of the body. It may come and go and some days are going to be worse than other days.
This makes it difficult to plan any activities as you never know when you’re going to have a bad pain day. Worse, it can greatly affect your ability to sleep.
There are a myriad of other conditions that can occur when someone has fibromyalgia. These can include sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome and painful menstrual cycles including endometriosis. Any form of pain can keep a person awake at night.
But when endometriosis is combined with fibromyalgia it can quickly become debilitating. To make matters worse, the lack of sleep can increase pain. The pain can make sleep nearly impossible and a vicious cycle is quickly set up.
Endometriosis happens when the endometrium tissue which lines the uterus starts growing on the outside of the uterine wall. While in and of itself it’s not painful, it swells during menstruation and presses on other organs causing pain.
It can also stretch ligaments and cause pain by stretching them. This can lead to other pelvic issues and many women may even stop having a period all together. This can create an imbalance in hormones which can also cause lack of sleep.
Many women have auto immune disorders. Some have had a hysterectomy or even a C section birth. These are the women who are considered at high risk for having endometriosis.
It can quickly develop and lead to a plethora of health issues. While the exact reason endometriosis attacks isn’t entirely understood, it is known that the endometrium cells migrate outside of the uterus and begin to grow.
As they grow and press on other organs during the woman’s cycle they can begin to create great pain and disturbances in the body.
Both endometriosis and fibromyalgia are a form of an immune system disorder. While it’s not clearly understood why they tend to attack the body in clusters, it is understood that many women who suffer from one, will suffer from both.
Most doctors have had minimal training at best in understanding how these conditions affect the body. It may take a multitude of health care visits in order to understand what is really going on.
Many women pay a visit to the emergency room and are written off as drug addicts when they go in with pain as the reasons are clear to the health care providers.
Many patients wind up missing out on a lot of work or lose a job due to the chronic pain they are in with fibromyalgia and endometriosis. Lack of sleep further complicates their job positions as they begin to make poor decisions due to the lack of sleep. Unfortunately when this happens, they also wind up losing their health insurance.
As modern medicine advances more studies are being done that help recognize both fibromyalgia and endometriosis as very serious issues that affect a women’s health.
As these studies advance more treatment options are being discovered and many women are beginning to find relief from their debilitating pain.
To get rest many women turn to alternative health care. They may find ways to alleviate pain through heat therapy, medications to help control the pain and more exercise.
Treatments will vary according to the health care provider and many women will seek out more than one doctor in an effort to resolve their sleep issues.
It’s not uncommon for such women to seek out a gynecological doctor for treating the endometriosis, a pain specialist for treating the fibromyalgia and even a sleep doctor to help treat sleep disorders.
By working together with so many specialists many women have found a few tricks to help them get the rest that they need. They may take certain medications at certain times of the month to help alleviate some of the pain just prior to starting their cycle.
They may take pain medications as needed for the fibromyalgia pain and the may also require a c pap machine for help with sleep apnea. It’s not uncommon to require more than one treatment for lack of sleep.
While a heating pad or a hot soak in a bath will help some women, it may not even begin to touch the pain of another woman. Symptoms are as individual as each woman is. Even fibromyalgia works individually like this.
Learning to prepare for the symptoms can also help in many cases. By cutting back on specific foods that may exacerbate painful symptoms (those foods that could cause bloating for example) many women are able to help control their pain levels during their menstrual cycles.
Eating less salt to help reduce swelling is also advised by many doctors as is avoiding foods that contain MSG or mono sodium glutamate which has been shown to cause headaches and other sensitivities in many people.
Avoiding alcohol and caffeine may also help to reduce pain and inflammation in some patients. Caffeine can act as a diuretic and even though alcohol may seem like it could reduce pain, it can quickly dehydrate a person and lead to other distractions that could lead to sleep disturbances.
Many women discover that certain foods affect them differently at different times of the month. By identifying these foods they are often able to reduce their sleepless nights and be more in charge.
Controlling the pain may only be a portion of the issue, eating a proper diet and learning when to slow down or cut back on certain things and exercising more may also have a great effect on sleep patterns for patients with fibromyalgia and endometriosis pain.
Ever wanted to see a meteor shower, but wish you could do it on your own schedule instead of having to wait until just the right moment? Scientists at a Japanese start-up could soon be able to accommodate you by making it so that shooting stars can rain down on-demand.
According to Space.com, officials at the company, ALE, said they possess a secret chemical formula that they hope to place into small, one-inch wide spheres and shoot from a satellite, thus creating artificial meteor showers anytime their paying customers want them to.
ALE is said to be teaming with scientists at several universities to produce their synthetic meteor showers, which will reportedly cost more than $8,000 per meteor to fire off. In addition, the ALE representatives said that the process is bright enough to be visible even in big cities or other areas with light pollution – as long as there’s clear weather that night. Lena Okajima, the company’s founder and CEO, told AFP that the meteor showers could be called off up to 100 minutes in advance in the case of bad weather.
Designed for entertainment, but still scientifically beneficial
Naturally-occurring meteor showers take place when space dust and debris travel through the Earth’s atmosphere, heating up along the way and often burning up completely before they can reach the ground, but the artificial meteors would be launched from a microsatellite some 20 inches (50 centimeters) across.
The launch satellite, which AFP reports is currently being developed by the company along with researchers from other groups, would orbit the planet from north to south, at altitudes of roughly 250 to 310 miles (400 to 500 km), for months at a time before it fell back to the Earth and burned up along the way. Its meteorites would be incinerated in the atmosphere, just like real ones.
ALE is not revealing the chemical composition of the formula it plans to use in the pellets, but the firm said that it is considering altering it to create streaks of different colors.
While Okajima said the main purpose of the artificial shooting stars was “entertainment,” Space.com said that they “could also be valuable to scientists.” Researchers explained that by analyzing the light of a meteor, they can learn about the temperature, density, and movement of the atmosphere at that altitude. However, real meteor showers are unpredictable, while ALE’s will occur at a predetermined time and place, making them easier to find and study.
According to a study done in 2012, Omega 3s can greatly benefit fibromyalgia patients. Medical literature has shown time and again how omega 3s are great for helping with cardiovascular and issues with joint health.
Therefore, it should come as no great shock that omega 3s have their place in helping those patients who are suffering from fibromyalgia pain.
If you’re suffering from fibromyalgia Omega 3s work well to help reduce your symptoms.
Omega 3s act as forerunners to chemicals that help reduce pain and inflammation. By contrast Omega 6 fatty acids can increase inflammation and create chronic pain. It’s important to always differentiate between the two.
If you take the wrong form you can be making your fibromyalgia worse. Read your labels and ensure that you’re taking the right form of Omegas. There are three main types of Omega 3s.
There are Alpha Linoleic acids or as they are often referred to, ALA. There are Docosahexaenoic acids or DHA and then there are eicosapentaenoic acids or EPA.
Recent studies have shown that patients who take at least 1500 mgs of Omega 3 fatty acid supplements per day have shown a large drop in their cholesterol levels and they have fewer tender points and less muscle tightening.
They also show less fatigue. Omega 3s act as an anti-inflammatory in the body. Although there isn’t any scientific evidence at present to prove how or why they seem to work, many swear by Omega 3s as a way to relieve pain and discomfort.
According to one study, one patient was successfully able to lower her pain levels from a level 8 out of 10 points to just 3 out of 10 points by using Omega 3s for seven months.
Authors of this study believe that a good high quality Omega 3 supplement may be well worth the investment for pain relief in fibromyalgia patients.
It is suggested that patients wishing to try Omega 3s as a remedy seek out the highest concentration of the EPA and the DHA per serving. When using fish oils, seek a product that is cold weather produced near the Arctic.
Fish that are harvested in warmer waters may have toxic levels of mercury and a lot of fibromyalgia patients are very sensitive to mercury.
According to the study, patients should try the supplements for at least six months before they will begin to see results although many see results much sooner. If the supplements cause nausea or burping consider freezing the capsules before taking them.
Take the supplements with a meal and split the doses up so that you’re consuming them with each meal. If patients are suffering from severe pain it is recommended that supplements be taken with Lyrica or Cymbalta.
Where To Find Omega 3s
Besides cold water fish, you can find Omega 3s in sardines, wild caught salmon and herring.
Sadly, albacore tuna is no longer a good source as it can contain very high levels of mercury which can in turn exacerbate fibromyalgia.
Nutrition Tips
Begin by checking for potential food allergies. Possible food allergies that may affect fibromyalgia include the following:
Wheat (gluten)
Soy
Corn
All Preservatives
Food Additives
Increase the consumption of foods that are high in antioxidants such as the following foods:
Blueberries
Tomatoes
Cherries
Kale
Spinach
Bell Peppers
– Avoid all refined foods. This should include avoiding white breads, all pasta (gluten) and white sugar.
– Reduce the consumption of red meats and focus instead on eating more lean meats. Eat more cold water fish, tofu (unless there is a soy allergy) and beans (ideal for protein).
– Choose healthy oils for cooking such as olive oils and coconut oil.
– Eliminate all trans fats. This will include eliminating baked goods that have been cooked with trans fats as well as things such as french fries, donuts, onion rings, highly processed foods and all margarines.
– Drink less alcohol and reduce the intake of caffeine. Stop smoking and stop using any tobacco products. Limit all foods that are high in sugar, high in salt and high in fat.
– Avoid MSG or monosodium glutamate.
– Make sure to drink a full six to eight glasses of filtered or purified water daily.
Supplements
Take Omega 3 supplements daily. This could be one or two capsules or one to two tablespoons of fish oil daily. This should help to reduce inflammation and improve your immune system.
Always check with your health care provider prior to taking Omega 3s, especially if you’re on any type of blood thinners like aspirin or warfarin (this includes Coumadin).
Take a daily multivitamin that contains antioxidants like Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Vitamin # and all of the B vitamins. You’ll also want it to contain the trace minerals like magnesium and calcium as well as zinc and selenium.
Take a Vitamin C supplement daily. This can be a 500 to a 1000 mg capsule or tablet. It works as an antioxidant and helps to support your immune system.
Other Supplements You May Wish To Consider:
25 to 50 MG twice per day of Alpha Lipoic Acid. This may lower your thiamine levels and react with some medications that are used in chemotherapy and thyroid treatments, so be sure to check with your doctor before taking this supplement.
SAMe 800 mg for emotional and immune support. Note: If you are taking any type of medication for manic or bipolar disorders DO NOT TAKE THIS MEDICATION. It could have negative side effects.
Probiotics as required to help maintain a healthy gut and for improving the immune system.
Vitamin D to help skeletal support
COQ10 100 to 200 mg at bedtime. This helps to improve the immune system and support the muscular support. Again, if you’re on any type of blood thinners do not take this without first checking with your doctor.
As always, check with your doctor before trying any new remedy or supplement. Many supplements can interfere with medications and your doctor can best advise you regarding medication interactions with supplements. For most people suffering from fibromyalgia, Omega 3s work well to reduce their pain and symptoms.
For gamers, it’s the stuff of legends: a prototype console, jointly developed by Nintendo and Sony that combined the former’s cartridge-based Super Nintendo console with the latter’s CD-ROM technology to create the ultimate gaming system.
The relationship was short-lived, however, as Nintendo ultimately partnered with Phillips instead of Sony, and the PlayStation went on to become a successful stand-alone system. According to Ars Technica, industry reports suggest that only 200 of the fabled hybrid consoles were produced and few people have ever actually seen one – which makes it all the more amazing that images of one found by a reddit user surfaced online over the weekend.
The user claims the grey-and-yellow-colored device was in a box of assorted items given to him by a friend of his father who once worked at Nintendo. The images indicate that the PlayStation had a slot for SNES cartridges on top, a disc tray for CDs in the front, a small LCD display, and buttons that appear to control audio CD playback.
While the controller included with the system resembles the original SNES controller (or, to be correct, Super Famicom – the Japanese name for the Super Nintendo), the front of it has Sony’s name on it and the PlayStation logo. The rear of the system also features slots for various video and audio inputs, and a cartridge and a CD were also included in the box.
Prototype system found in a ‘junk’ box
According to Nintendo Life, the poster said that the box containing the prototype unit came from his father’s friend Olaf. The website speculates that this individual could be Olaf Olafsson, who was the president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Inc. at the time, and who had been involved in both the Nintendo deal and the 1994 launch of the actual PlayStation.
The Sony-Nintendo prototypes were ordered to be destroyed, The Telegraph explained, but this one appears to have survived. It’s not known if the console works, as the owner has been unable to find a power cable for the device, nor is it known what’s on the CD and cartridge that were found with it. The items were found in a “junk” box that was to be thrown out.
So what causes the partnership between the two companies to go south? Ars Technica explained that Nintendo “got cold feet,” and that under the deal, Sony “would control the SNES-CD format, which simply wasn’t acceptable to Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. Rather than renegotiate… Nintendo decided to fly to the Netherlands and form a partnership with Philips, one that would give Nintendo total control over its games on Philips machines.”
“Sony decided to continue to work on its Play Station, regardless of Nintendo,” the website added. “Concerned at the idea of Sony launching SNES-compatible systems, Nintendo resorted to litigation to prevent the Play Station hitting the market, but the litigation failed, and Sony was free to bring the system to market in 1991.”
A newly identified material behaves as both a conductor and an insulator at the same time, a discovery that challenges our current understanding of how materials behave and suggests the existence of a new type of insulating state.
Writing in the July 2 edition of the journal Science, Dr. Suchitra Sebastian from the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues report that the discovery of dual metal-insulator behavior in a single material appears to contradict a long-established dichotomy between metals and insulators.
The material, samarium hexaboride (SmB6), behaves like an insulator in some measurements, but simultaneously acts like a conductor in others, the researchers explained in a statement. In insulators, electrons tend to be held in one place, while in conductors, they flow freely.
Insulators block the flow of electricity, while conductors permit the transfer of charge across an object’s surface. In their new study, however, Dr. Sebastian’s team report that this new material, samarium hexaboride, appears to display both properties at the same time, though they note that at the lowest temperatures, it disobeys the rules governing conventional metals.
While other recently-discovered materials also behave both like a conductor and an insulator, the difference is that those substances have surfaces which behave differently from their cores, while in the case of samarium hexaboride, the interior of the material itself can be both an insulator and a conductor simultaneously, the authors noted.
Behavior could be example of a brand new quantum phase
The Cambridge-led team currently does not know just what’s causing this mysterious behavior, but one possibility is that there could be a third phase in which a material is neither a conductor nor an insulator. The discovery challenges the scientific community’s overall understanding of the distinction between metals and insulators.
To learn more about SmB6, the researchers followed the path taken by electrons as they moved throughout the material. In order to find the geometrical surface traced by the electrons’ orbits, a construction known as a Fermi surface, they used a technique centered around measurements of quantum oscillations in order to measure various characteristics of a material when a magnetic field is present. This allowed them to get an accurate “fingerprint” of the material.
In order for these quantum oscillations to be observed, the materials must be as close to pure as possible to limit the defects that electrons could collide with. For that reason, several of the tests involving SmB6 were conducted at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida, and the researchers found that the interplay of two different types of electrons (localized ‘f’ electrons and larger-orbit ‘d’ electrons) resulted in insulating behavior.
Thus, while the electrical properties of SmB6 demonstrated insulating behavior, Dr. Sebastian said that the Fermi surface her team observed “was that of a good metal.” Furthermore, when it approached temperatures of nearly 0 degrees Kelvin (-273 Celsius), it behaved in a way that was not characteristic of conventional metals, as the amplitude of its quantum oscillations continued to grow dramatically as the temperature lowered instead of leveling off.
The study authors came up with several possible reasons for this unusual behavior. It could be a new phase that is neither conductor nor insulator, they explained. Alternatively, it could be a back-and-forth fluctuation between the two states, or because the material has a small gap between its insulating and conducting behaviors, its electrons could be able to jump that gap.
“The crossover region between two different phases – magnetic and non-magnetic, for example – is where the really interesting physics happens,” Dr. Sebastian said. “Because this material is close to the crossover region between insulator and conductor, we found it displays some really strange properties – we’re exploring the possibility that it’s a new quantum phase.”
Update: Dr. Sebastian discusses her research with redOrbit
Following the initial publication of this article, redOrbit had the opportunity to discuss the research via email with Dr. Sebastian, who explained that, “in our current understanding, metals and insulators are dichotomous. They are by very definition the opposite of each other.”
“Electrons travel large distances in metals, conducting electrical current,” she added. “Electrons are not mobile in insulators, posing a large resistance to the flow of electrical current… So to find a material which simultaneously behaves like a metal in some properties, and like an insulator in some other properties, appears to overturn our current understanding of insulators.”
What are the potential benefits of having a material that can behave like both a conductor and an insulator? “It is too early to tell,” she said to redOrbit, “but there are potential benefits in terms of future electronic applications based on quantum materials” (such as SmB6).
A team of researchers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) along with an international team of colleagues have started a new wide-area dark matter distribution survey that could help explain the role of dark energy in the expansion of the universe.
Using the using Hyper Suprime-Cam, a new wide-field camera installed on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, the NAOJ-led team conducted observations across an area of 2.3 square degrees in the skies near the constellation Cancer. They discovered nine large concentrations of dark matter, each of which was the mass of a galactic cluster, the Observatory said in a statement.
Surveying how dark matter is distributed, as well as how the distribution changes over time, is a key part of understanding how dark energy controls universal expansion. The results demonstrate that astronomers now have both the tools and techniques to understand dark energy, and the next step is to expand the survey to cover more than 1,000 square degrees.
The study is available online and has been published in The Astrophysical Journal. The research team was led by Dr. Satoshi Miyazaki of the NAOJ’s Advanced Technology Center and includes astronomers and astrophysicists from Princeton University and the University of Tokyo.
Using ‘weak lensing’ to study dark energy
Dr. Miyazaki, the lead developer of the HSC instrument, claims the key to understanding the properties of dark energy (and in turn the expansion of the universe) lies in mapping dark matter over a wide area. The results of their research thus far demonstrated that their current equipment and methodology is up to the task.
Using the HSC, the researchers are prepared to investigate how dark matter distribution has been changing over time, as well as conduct a detailed investigation into the expansion history of the universe. Since dark matter does not emit light and cannot be directly detected by telescopes, the team plans to seek out and analyze a phenomenon known as “weak lensing.”
Concentrated dark matter acts like a lens, bending light coming from even more distant objects. By analyzing how that background light is bent, and how the lensing distorts the shapes of those background objects, researchers can determine how dark matter is distributed in the foreground. This allows them to determine how it has assembled over time.
That knowledge can then be linked to the expansion history of the universe and reveal some of the physical properties of dark energy, its strength, and how it has changed throughout the years. To collect enough data to make this possible, astronomers need to observe galaxies more than a billion light years away across an area of more than 1,000 square degrees, which is now possible thanks to the combination of the Subaru telescope and the HSC instrument.
The HSC took a decade to develop, Dr. Miyazaki said, and has a field of view more than seven times larger than its predecessor. Using the instrument, the researchers have uncovered a greater number of galaxy clusters than predicted. If these findings hold up once the dark matter map is expanded, it could indicate that there is less dark energy as expected in the past, suggesting that the universe can expand gently and stars and galaxies can form quickly.
An experimental AIDS vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson is set to begin human clinical trials after being shown to effectively protect 50 percent of monkeys from the disease, making it the first substance to reach this stage since 2009.
The vaccine protected six out of 12 primates that received it from becoming infected from the simian version of HIV, Bloomberg reported late last week. The human trials of the vaccine, the first involving AIDS patients since 2009, have been started with 400 volunteers throughout the US, Thailand, South Africa, Rwanda, and Uganda, with results expected next year.
The trials will determine if the vaccine is safe and can successfully generate immune response in patients, the media company added. Chief scientific officer Paul Stoffels said that J&J thinks there is “a very good chance that we’ll show efficacy,” and if so, the company will move on to a large-scale study to prove its effectiveness. Results from that could come as early as 2020.
Mitchell Warren of the HIV vaccine and treatment advocacy group AVAC told NBC News that the results thus far are “quite promising” but cautioned that there is still “a long way to go.” The results of the research have been published in a recent edition of the journal Science.
Reason to be ‘optimistic’
According to Bloomberg, the new vaccine is a prime-boost vaccine comprised of two different parts. The first is a virus that causes a cold, but sneaks a trio of HIV proteins into the body, thus preparing a person’s immune system to generate antibodies. The second is a booster comprised of a purified HIV protein, which enhances that immune response.
Researchers at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston gave the full vaccine to 12 monkeys, just the prime vaccine to 12 others, and placebo inoculations to a third group of eight more. Each of the monkeys were then given six doses of simian HIV that were 100 times more infectious than the virus that humans are typically exposed to.
Six of the 12 monkeys that received both parts of the vaccine remained HIV free, as did two of those receiving only the prime vaccine. All of the monkeys that received a fake vaccine wound up being infected. To further prove the treatment’s effectiveness, they took blood from protected monkeys and gave it to new ones to see if they would become infected. None did.
“There’s more reason to be optimistic now than ever before, but we still have a long ways to go,” said Dan Barouch, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical and leader of the study. “Over the course of the HIV epidemic there have only been four concepts that have been tested in humans. We need more shots on goal.”
“This is the first time in quite a number of years that a major pharmaceutical company has sponsored the clinical development of an HIV vaccine candidate,” he added in separate comments made to NBC News. “One of the big limitations of the HIV vaccine field has been the relative degree of reluctance of major pharmaceutical companies to take on the responsibility of a clinical development program.”
Increased levels of the hormones testosterone and cortisol could cause financial traders to take more risks, potentially resulting in market instabilities, according to new research published in a recent edition of Scientific Reports.
In the study, a team of international researchers explained that while it’s “widely known” that financial markets can experience dangerous levels of instability, it’s uncertain why this happens. Recent research had suggested that testosterone and cortisol could “critically influence traders’ financial decision making,” so the authors set to further investigate this potential link.
According to BBC News, the researchers recruited 142 male and female volunteers and had each of them take part in a stock market game while monitoring their hormones levels in two different experiments. In the first experiment, men with higher cortisol levels were found to be more likely to take risks, leading to instability in prices, but no such link was found in the women.
In the second experiment, 75 young men were given one of the two hormones before playing the game, and then given a placebo. The experiment showed that cortisol appeared to encourage the men to make higher-risk investments, while testosterone increased the feeling that they were in the midst of a winning streak.
Hormones of financial traders are “like elite athletes”
“We found that both cortisol and testosterone shifted investment towards riskier assets,” the authors explained in their study. “Cortisol appears to affect risk preferences directly, whereas testosterone operates by inducing increased optimism about future price changes.”
“Our results suggest that changes in both cortisol and testosterone could play a destabilizing role in financial markets through increased risk taking behavior, acting via different behavioral,” they added. Dr. Edward Roberts of Imperial College London, one of the study authors, told the BBC that the study demonstrates that financial traders are “like elite athletes” in this regard.
The experiments were conducted in a laboratory, and the researchers recorded testosterone and cortisol levels in the subjects through their saliva. Prior to playing the trading game, participants were given either a single oral dose of 100 mg hydrocortisone or three doses of 10 g transdermal 1 percent testosterone gel over a period of 48 hours.
The controlled condition of the study are one of its shortcomings, Dr. Roberts said, and reveal why addition research is needed. “We only looked at the acute effects of the hormones in the lab,” he told BBC News. “It would be interesting to measure traders’ hormone levels in the real world, and also to see what the longer term effects might be.”
Just 10 days before it was due to make its closest approach to the dwarf planet Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft suffered what is being called an anomaly on July 4, forcing it to enter safe mode over the weekend while mission engineers worked to diagnose the problem.
According to Forbes and NBC News reports, the $700 million probe experienced a glitch around 2pm Eastern time on Saturday that caused the US space agency to lose contact with it for slightly less than an hour and a half. Mission control personnel were able to regain contact via the NASA Deep Space Network at 3:15 Eastern.
After losing contact with mission scientists on the ground, New Horizons went into autonomous autopilot and switched control from its primary computer to its backup one, coming back online in safe mode and attempting to reinitiate communication with Earth. It then started transmitting telemetry to help the engineers figure out the cause of the problem.
In a statement, NASA said that their investigation into the incident revealed that New Horizons did not experience any hardware or software problems, and that issue was caused by “a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence” that had “occurred during an operation to prepare for the close flyby.”
Contact reestablished; science operations to resume Tuesday
Officials at the agency said that no similar operations are planned for the remainder of the Pluto encounter, and that New Horizons was on track to resume normal science operations on Tuesday, July 7. The entire July 14 close-flyby sequence will continue as planned, they added.
“I’m pleased that our mission team quickly identified the problem and assured the health of the spacecraft,” noted Jim Green, the Director of Planetary Science at NASA. “Now – with Pluto in our sights – we’re on the verge of returning to normal operations and going for the gold.”
New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and his colleagues said that the science observations lost during the recovery from the anomaly would have no impact on the mission’s primary objectives, and only a minimal effect on the lesser objectives.
“In terms of science, “ Stem said, “it won’t change an A-plus even into an A.”
Currently, New Horizons is roughly six million miles (9.9 million kilometers) from Pluto and is on course for its scheduled flyby, travelling at a speed of more than 30,000 mph (50,000 km per hour) as it draws closer to the dwarf planet and its moons. The spacecraft’s instruments will be mapping Pluto’s surface, studying its composition and analyzing its atmosphere.
The surprisingly durable, square-shaped tail of the seahorse could help engineers develop and build next-gen robots that are more flexible and durable than currently possible, according to a new study published Friday in the journal Science.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the authors of the study found that the creature’s prehensile tail– comprised of roughly three-dozen square segments– could serve as the inspiration for new advances in the field of robotics.
Michael M. Porter, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Clemson University, and his colleagues wanted to know if the odd shape of the seahorse’s tail had any functional benefits, so they created both a 3D-printed model based on its square prism design and a hypothetical one that was cylindrical, then subjected them to a series tests to see which was more durable.
The researchers hit both tails with a rubber mallet, twisted them, and bent them, and found that the square prototype was stronger, stiffer, and more resilient than the cylindrical one. The square design prevented damage and enabled the structure to be more prehensile, and while both could bend about 90 degrees, the circular one was slightly less restricted.
Research could lead to improved search-and-rescue robots
In a statement, Porter explained that their analysis of the seahorse tail could inspire new types of armor, as well as improved search-and-rescue robots that move along the ground in a serpentine fashion to fit into tight spaces. It could also have defense and biomedical uses.
“We haven’t gotten that far with the applications side of things yet, but we see a lot of potential with this device because it’s so unique,” he said, noting that the next step is to build a robot using the information that he’s gathered about seahorse tails during the course of his research.
Porter told the Times that he initially began investigating sea horse tails while at the University of California-San Diego, as he was studying the composition of their skeletons. He was working on a steerable catheter at the same time, and found that a model that used a square cross section worked better than a round one designed to be inserted into veins.
“The square one… felt like it basically fit together better and just performed more robustly,” he said, “whereas the round one just didn’t really hold its shape well and just didn’t seem to fit together as well. So that’s what led to this idea of ‘Huh, I wonder if the square actually had some advantages over the circle, and how can we actually prove that it has those advantages?’”
In their paper, he and his co-authors wrote that their work “demonstrates that engineering designs are convenient means to answer elusive biological questions when biological data are nonexistent or difficult to obtain. In addition, understanding the role of mechanics in these biologically inspired designs may help engineers to develop seahorse-inspired technologies for a variety of applications in robotics, defense systems, or biomedicine.”
The death of a 21-year-old California woman is being blamed on a rare infection caused by a brain-eating amoeba found in warm freshwater and soil, various media outlets have reported.
According to the Huffington Post, Inyo County public health officials said that the woman died on June 20 after being infected by Naegleria fowleri, a single-celled organism which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains typically infects people when contaminated water enters the body through the noses of people who are swimming or diving.
Once the amoeba enters a person’s system, it travels to the brain and causes a condition known as primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), an infection which is fatal in most instances. PAM is a rare disorder of the central nervous system that lasts for three to seven days and is marked by a growing inability to smell as olfactory nerve cells are destroyed.
Risk to general public is low, doctors report
The woman, whose name has not yet been released, began to display symptoms such as headache, nausea and vomiting a few days before her death. She was admitted to Northern Inyo Hospital and initially diagnoses with meningitis, but as her condition continued to worsen, she was flown to Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno, Nevada.
She died in the emergency room at the hospital, and the CDC said that she tested positive for Naegleria fowleri. It is not known how the patient was exposed to the ameoba, but US health officials emphasize that the infection cannot be contracted by drinking contaminated water, nor can the disease be transmitted directly from one person to another.
“This is a very unusual biology lesson, but an extremely tragic one,” Dr. Richard Johnson of Inyo Public Health told the Reno Gazette-Journal.“Our next steps are to inspect the suspected sites of exposure to find what risk factors might exist like places where people might go swimming and where the domestic water supply is on the property.”
The newspaper noted that the patient is believed to have been infected on private land, not in an area that the public has access to, meaning that it is the risk of widespread infection is low. This is the first reported case of PAM in the region, Dr. Johnson told the Gazette-Journal, but there have been a total of seven previous cases of the disease statewide, he added.
How a child reacts to smelling something like a rose or a cup of sour milk could predict whether or not they have autism, according to a new study from researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
According to CNN.com, the authors recruited 36 children, 18 of whom had autism and 18 which did not, and exposed them to a series of different smells ranging from pleasant fragrances such as roses or shampoo to foul odors such as spoiled milk or rotten fish.
The smells were delivered to the subjects using an olfactometer, a small tube that fit into their nostrils while a second tube measured the amount of air that each youngster breathed in as they were exposed to each smell.
The researchers discovered that non-autistic children took longer sniffs for pleasant smells and shorter ones for unpleasant ones. Autistic children, on the other hand, showed no change in their breathing in response to either type of smell.
Potential for a diagnostic tool?
“What we measure, the sniff response, is quite intuitive– adults and children with typical development react similarly,” lead author Liron Rozenkrantz, a doctoral student in neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute, told CNN.com, adding that the difference between autistic and non-autistic children was striking.
At this point, it is uncertain if the autistic children did not have a sniff response because they perceive odors in different ways than non-autistic children, or because they do not have control over the behavior. The study provides scientific evidence to support anecdotal reports from the parents of autistic kids regarding this behavior, Rozenkrantz told the website.
The test took approximately 10 minutes, did not require the participants to answer any questions and allowed them to simply wear the device while watching cartoons. The study authors said that their test could correctly identify autism in 12 of the 18 subjects, while also correctly concluding that 17 of the 18 control children did not have the developmental disorder.
Dr. Paul Wang, senior vice president and head of medical research for the research and advocacy group Autism Speaks and who was not involved in the research, told CNN that it is “way too early to say whether this could be helpful in diagnosing autism,” and that the device would have to be tested in more children and identify autism in more than two-thirds of children to be used as a diagnostic tool.
New color images taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have revealed four unusual dark spots evenly spaced along the equator of Pluto, each about the same size as the state of Missouri.
The scientists in charge of the mission said that they haven’t seen anything like these dark spots, which the Los Angeles Times said are all approximately 300 miles in diameter. However, NASA said that they have “piqued the interest” of the New Horizons team due to the consistency in the spacing and size of the spots. Their origin, for now, remains unknown.
“It’s a real puzzle – we don’t know what the spots are, and we can’t wait to find out,” principal investigator Alan Stern from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement Wednesday. “Also puzzling is the longstanding and dramatic difference in the colors and appearance of Pluto compared to its darker and grayer moon Charon.”
Stern and his colleagues combined black-and-white images of Pluto and its moon Charon captured with the probe’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument with lower-resolution infra-red data from its Ralph instrument to produce the new images. The objects are shown in nearly true color, or how they would appear to someone riding on New Horizons.
Further analysis
According to the Times, the images reveal that Pluto’s tan surface is far lighter than the gray-colored Charon, and that difference in color also has piqued the interest of researchers. The New Horizons probe is now less than 9.5 million miles from the Pluto system, and is on schedule to make its closest approach of 7,700 miles away from the planet’s surface on July 14.
The spacecraft is currently using its high-resolution LORRI imager and the Ralph color imager to search for clouds on Pluto, NASA said. Science team member Kelsi Singer of the Southwest Research Institute said that they were using “a number of techniques” to find clouds in images. If found, those clouds make it possible “to track the speeds and directions of Pluto’s winds.”
In addition, the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation (PEPSSI) instrument on board New Horizons is also transmitting data of the space environment surrounding Pluto on a daily basis. PEPSSI, NASA explained, is being used to find out the composition of ions that are escaping from Pluto’s atmosphere, and to determine how quickly ions (atoms that have gained or lost electrons) are getting caught up in the dwarf planet’s solar wind.
By using X-ray imaging and CT scans to study the skulls of ancient monkeys, researchers from Duke University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany have discovered that brain complexity can evolve before brain size in primates.
As the authors report in a new study published Friday in the journal Nature Communications, the Old World monkeys known as Victoriapithecus had a relatively small brain compared to its body size and a brain volume less than half of the volume of same-sized modern monkeys.
The researchers created 3D computer models of these brains and revealed that Victoriapithecus had a brain volume of approximately 36 cubic centimeters, which is about the size of a plum. Even so, the monkey’s brain was surprisingly complex.
Brain size, complexity can evolve independently
Using their CT scans, co-authors Fred Spoor from the Max Planck Institute and Duke’s Lauren Gonzales found that the olfactory bulb, which is used to perceive and analyze odors, was three-times larger than expected, and the brain had several distinctive folds and wrinkles.
“It probably had a better sense of smell than many monkeys and apes living today,” Gonzales explained in a statement. “In living higher primates you find the opposite: the brain is very big, and the olfactory bulb is very small, presumably because as their vision got better their sense of smell got worse… instead of a trade-off between smell and sight, Victoriapithecus might have retained both capabilities.”
Co-author Brenda Benefit of New Mexico State University, who originally discovered the skull with co-author Monte McCrossin (also of NMSU), said that the skulls come from a period in which there are few fossils, and that the skull is the oldest ever discovered from an Old World monkey. As such, the fossil provides new insights into primate brain development.
Among primates like humans and apes, “the thinking is that brains got bigger and then they get more folded and complex,” Gonzalez said. “But this study is some of the hardest proof that in monkeys, the order of events was reversed – complexity came first and bigger brains came later.” Benefit added that the findings reveal that “brain size and brain complexity can evolve independently; they don’t have to evolve together at the same time.”
Aging can be tough, and aging when you have a chronic disease or disorder like fibromyalgia can make it even tougher on you. There are lots of things that we can do in order to fend off the issues related to fibromyalgia, but what happens when other signs of aging start to complicate matters even more?
One aging issue that frequently makes fibromyalgia worse is osteoarthritis. What is this disease, and how is it connected with fibromyalgia, its symptoms, and the pain we deal with? That’s what we’re going to look at here today.
What Are the Symptoms of Osteoarthritis?
Osteoarthritis and osteoporosis are two totally different things, but a lot of people mix them up because they share prefixes. The prefix “osteo” means bone. Osteoporosis is the process where bones become brittle and break very easily.
Whereas, osteoarthritis affects the cartilage in your joints, wearing it down and causing the bones in your joint to rub together. This makes it hard for you to move around and it can make it really uncomfortable if you’re looking to be active in any way.
The symptoms can range from mild to severe, and the weather can play a huge role as to the severity of the pain that you are dealing with.
Why does osteoarthritis happen? First off, you could end up having an injury that makes it difficult for your joints to heal properly. As time goes on, the cartilage starts to break down and the joint grinds up against itself. Being obese or having a lot of strain on certain joints can also add to the pain and stress that osteoarthritis has on your body.
Other diseases can also end up causing osteoarthritis, including diabetes and fibromyalgia. And, of course, the number one reason that people end up getting osteoarthritis is because they are aging. Our bodies are wearing down as we age, and because of that, we’re going to start to lose cartilage and our joints are going to start to suffer.
The cause of your osteoarthritis is going to vary depending on a lot of factors, but it’s just as painful, whatever is going on in there and no matter why you started to see the effects of osteoarthritis in the first place.
Osteoarthritis can pretty much happen anywhere in the body. But, many times, you will hear about it in certain areas. The most common areas for osteoarthritis pain to occur are in your hips, your knees, your extremities (feet and hands), and your back, specifically in the area around your spine and neck.
These areas are used a lot and they are the areas that are most prone to injuries, so it’s not odd that they end up getting the brunt of the impact when it comes to osteoarthritis. Other areas of the body can also deal with osteoarthritis, but it’s most common in the areas that we listed above.
How are Osteoarthritis and Fibromyalgia Linked?
It’s estimated that about one-fifth (1/5) of the people who have osteoarthritis also suffer from fibromyalgia, and it’s really not that odd. People with fibromyalgia are more apt to have poor posture and they are more likely to try and overcompensate in order to try and reduce their pain, thus causing more injuries, more often.
It is also common in fibromyalgia patients because, many times, patients try to minimize the amount of motion that they are doing on a daily basis in order to avoid pain. Because of this, their joints will get stiff, or they will gain a lot of weight, both of which are huge risk factors when it comes to the development of osteoarthritis.
Sometimes, it’s hard to notice that you have osteoarthritis when you’re already dealing with the symptoms of fibromyalgia. Since both of them deal with stiffness, joint pain, and fatigue, you may just look at the changes in your body as a case where you’re having a flare up.
The truth of the matter is, yes, you may be having a flare up, but the flare up may be occurring because of the osteoarthritis. Remember, pain from other disorders can cause your fibromyalgia to flare up, and osteoarthritis is no exception to that rule at all.
Instead, you want to make sure that you are watching your symptoms and, if they seem to get worse at any point, you want to talk to your doctor and take care of the problem quickly. They may find something that you didn’t realize that you had going on in your body.
Like fibromyalgia, there is no known cure for osteoarthritis, but there are lots of things that you can do in order to treat it. Many times, the treatments for the two overlap, so your doctor will likely emphasis certain things in order to make sure that you get the care that you need and you find relief from your pain.
One of the most important things you can do, however, is control your weight. Obesity can cause your osteoarthritis to become worse, and it can cause you to have more pain from your fibromyalgia, so if you keep at a healthy weight, you can kill two birds with one stone.
You can also get other types of treatment, including physical therapy, exercise, holistic treatments, prescription medications, and more. Your doctor can help you determine what treatment plan is going to be right for your particular combination of osteoarthritis and fibromyalgia symptoms.
Many people who have fibromyalgia just believe that they are going to have to cope with the problems that end up occurring alongside of it. That being said, there are lots of ways to prevent the issues related to aging. If you’re concerned about your fibromyalgia treatment and how it is connected to osteoarthritis, talk to your specialist for more information. Everyone’s fibromyalgia symptoms are a bit different, so it’s important that we better understand how to treat our issues in relation to how we react to treatment.
For a man named Ben, the issue is one that hits close to home. Ben was born and raised in a family of anti-vaxxers, led by his newspaper-publisher brother James. Although he was a rather influential figure, Ben opted not to weigh in on the debate – that is, until the loss of his son Francis Folger Franklin due to a preventable disease.
While Ben may have been able to save his son’s life through vaccination, the disease that killed the boy was not measles. Nor did his death occur this month, this year or even this century. No, Ben’s young child died of smallpox at the age of four. His death occurred in 1736. And his father was none other than Founding Father Benjamin Franklin.
A leading proponent of vaccination
In truth, the story of Franklin and his stance on vaccination isn’t quite as nice and tidy the beginning of this article would suggest. While he was not overtly an anti-vaccine advocate, he did remain silent on the topic after his brother’s newspaper publicly opposed the practice, calling it unsafe and asserting that clergy, like inoculation advocate and Puritan minister Cotton Mather, had no business getting involved in medicine.
According to a New York Times article by Dr. Howard Markel, author of the forthcoming book An Anatomy of Addiction, Franklin would eventually go on to become “one of the colonies’ leading proponents of inoculation, trumpeting his advocacy in the pages of his own newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette.”
In fact, when reporting on 72 Boston residents who were inoculated in March 1730, he said that only two died while “the rest have recovered perfect health.” Conversely, among those who had caught the disease the natural way, he added that roughly one-fourth of them perished.
“In the following decades Franklin compiled and published quantitative studies on inoculation’s value, working with several physicians at the Pennsylvania Hospital, an institution he helped found, and with the famed British clinician William Heberden,” added Dr. Markel, who is also a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan.
Franklin also established the Society for Inoculating the Poor Gratis in 1774 as a result of his concern for the high cost of the procedure (“more than many colonists’ annual income,” according to the Dr. Markel).
Debating vaccination is nothing new
It’s safe to say that Franklin was probably inspired in his pro-vaccination-quest most by the loss of his son.
Franklin didn’t make a conscious decision to not vaccinate Francis; the boy was simply recovering from another illness at the time and could not be inoculated, according to Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post. Even so, the incident “stuck with him so much that he went on to co-author a how-to guide on smallpox inoculation with a London physician.”
“Many parents in the 1700s avoided inoculating their children for fear of harming them – just as a minority of parents today refuse to vaccinate due to a drastic misunderstanding of the potential harms and benefits of a vaccination,” added Ingraham, formerly of the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center. “Franklin ultimately regretted not inoculating his own son.”
Fast forward to today, more than 200 years after the death of Francis Folger Franklin. The debate over whether or parents should vaccinate their children, and whether or not they should even have the right to decide the matter themselves, rages on, due in part to the claims of published reports that have long since been discredited.
Considering how similar the current situation is to that of Benjamin Franklin’s day, it seems fitting to conclude with the Founding Father’s own testimony on the matter, as written in his autobiography so many years ago.
“In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”
You may think your 4th of July fireworks are something special, but they pale in comparison to the high-energy pyrotechnics expected to occur in early 2018, as a stellar remnant roughly the same size as a city encounters one of our galaxy’s brightest stars.
As David Thompson, a deputy project scientist stationed at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and his colleagues explained recently in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the encounter is expected to put on a rather memorable light show.
In fact, scientists are already in the process of organizing a global campaign to watch the event, which will involve a pulsar known as J2032+4127 swinging by its massive companion star, and will include everything from radio wavelengths to the highest-energy gamma rays detectable, the space agency said.
Pulsars make for quite the show
The pulsar, called J2032 for short, is the crushed core of a massive star that went supernova. The highly-magnetized object weighs almost twice as much as the sun and is approximately 12 miles across, NASA explained, and it spins seven times per second. It was discovered in 2009 by a team of researchers at the University of Manchester in the UK.
As they kept tabs on it from 2010 through 2014, physics professor Andrew Lyne said that his team “detected strange variations in the rotation and the rate at which the rotation slows down, behavior we have not seen in any other isolated pulsar. Ultimately, we realized these peculiarities were caused by motion around another star, making this the longest-period binary system containing a radio pulsar.”
That companion star is a Be star called MT91 213, and according to NASA, its mass is 15 times that of our sun, with a brightness 10,000 times higher than our host star. Be stars like MT91 213 are embedded in large disks of gas and dust and have strong stellar winds. When the researchers first discovered the pulsar, they notices that it was in the same direction as the Be star.
‘Astrophysical fireworks’ are worth the wait
However, as Paul Ray, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory explained, “our initial measurements did not give any evidence that either star was a member of a binary system. The only way to escape that conclusion was if the binary system had a very long orbital period, much longer than the longest known pulsar-massive star binary at the time, which seemed unlikely.”
The pulsar was found to have an elongated orbit lasting about 25 years, and at one point in that orbit three years from now, it passes closest to its companion. As it whips around MT91 213, J2032 is expected to plunge through the star’s surrounding disk and set off what NASA is calling “astrophysical fireworks.”
This event is expected to help astronomers measure the gravity, magnetic field, stellar wind, and disk properties of the massive Be star, the agency said. It will also be special for other reasons, such as the fact that out of the half-dozen systems found thus far in which a massive star uses hydrogen as its central energy source, J2032’s has the greatest combined mass, has the longest orbital period, and is the closest to Earth (just 5,000 light years away).
“This forewarning of the energetic fireworks expected at closest approach in three years’ time allows us to prepare to study the system across the entire electromagnetic spectrum with the largest telescopes,” added Manchester astrophysics professor Ben Stappers.
NASA is developing a boomerang-shaped aircraft that may be the first vehicle of its kind to fly in the skies above Mars – a two-foot-long aircraft which would be light enough to travel up to 20 miles once it reaches the Red Planet, the US space agency has announced.
Earlier this week, NASA unveiled the prototype of what they call the Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Land on Mars (Prandtl-m), a flying-wing aircraft currently in development at the Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Later this year, the vehicle is scheduled to undergo a test launch from a high-altitude balloon.
During the test flight, the Prandtl-m will be released from an altitude of approximately 100,000 feet. Al Bowers, NASA Armstrong chief scientist and Prandtl-m program manager, explained this will simulate the flight conditions of the Martian atmosphere. The tests will be used to validate the design and to find ways to modify it for use in future missions to the planet.
The plan is for the Prandtl-m to deploy from a 3U CubeSat in the aeroshell of a future Mars, the agency said. It would be ejected from the aeroshell, where it would deploy in the atmosphere of the Red Planet. The glider could theoretically be used to fly over and capture image maps of the proposed landing sites for a future manned mission.
Future missions in the works
According to Engadget, the vehicle weighs roughly 2.6 pounds on Earth, but the gravity on Mars will reduce its weight to just one pound. When the prototype takes its test flight later on this year, it will be carrying either the surveyor camera or equipment to study high-altitude radiation, and a second test flight set for next year will see it fly for up to five hours.
Bowers said that NASA has recruited “a number of summer community college students” to help design and build the aircraft used during the first testing phase. “We’re going to build some vehicles and we are going to put them in very unusual attitudes and see if they will recover where other aircraft would not. Our expectation is that they will recover. As soon as we get that information, we will feel much better flying it from a high-altitude balloon.”
While the first test flight will feature either the mapping camera or high-altitude radiometer, the agency said future missions may see it carry both of them at the same time. During the 2016 test flight, Bowers said the Prandtl-m would actually be inside a CubeSat container, which would be dropped by the balloon, allowing the aircraft to deploy and fly away.
A third mission, currently in the planning stages, would involve using a sounding rocket to take the aircraft to altitudes of up to 450,000 feet, then releasing it from a CubeSat at apogee, Bowers said. As it fell, it would deploy at around the 110,000-to-115,000-feet altitude range, and if that proves successful, Bowers “think[s] the project stands a very good chance of being able to go to NASA Headquarters and say we would like permission to ride to Mars with one of the rovers.”
Global warming is having an unusual effect on the bearded dragon lizards of Australia, causing the creatures to hatch as females and give birth to offspring even if they are genetically male, a new study published earlier this week in Nature has revealed.
According to the Associated Press, lead author Clare Holleley from the University of Canberra and her colleagues also found that hotter temperatures are altering the way in which the lizard’s gender is determined so much so that the female sex chromosome may disappear entirely.
“This is the first time we have proved that sex reversal happens in the wild in any reptile at all,” Holleley explained to the wire service on Wednesday. The research, he added, “is showing that climate extremes can very rapidly fundamentally alter the biology of an organism.”
How does that even happen?
Under normal conditions, the sex of a bearded dragon depends on a pair of chromosomes known as the Z chromosome and a W chromosome, National Geographic explained. When a lizard has two Z chromosomes, they develop as males, and when they have both a Z and a W, they become females. That changes, however, when temperatures start to increase.
When dragon eggs are incubated at 34 degrees Celsius or hotter, their bodies ignore the regular instructions from their sex chromosomes, meaning that if even half of them are genetically male (ZZ), every last one of them will hatch as females. While scientists know of other creatures that have their gender decided by incubation temperature, bearded lizards were not one of them.
Holleley’s team captured and examined the genetic sex markers of 131 bearded dragons caught in the wild, and found that 11 of them were outwardly female and could produce offspring, but had the ZZ chromosomes of a genetic male. Furthermore, this radical change in how the lizards determine their gender took place suddenly, over the course of just a single generation.
Holleley told Nat Geo that she doesn’t understand entirely how this change took place, because the genetics responsible for sex determination in lizards are poorly understood. The authors said they plan to look for the gene responsible and determine how it is regulated by temperature, and wrote that their study “adds to concern about adaptation to rapid global climate change.”
Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The idea that walking in a beautiful natural environment is better for the mood than walking in a traffic-filled city seems like a no-brainer.
But is there a scientific basis to the difference, and is it quantifiable? Research from Stanford University suggests the answer to both questions is yes. The study found substantive evidence that walking in nature can lower the risk of depression.
“These results suggest that accessible natural areas may be vital for mental health in our rapidly urbanizing world. Our findings can help inform the growing movement worldwide to make cities more live-able, and to make nature more accessible to all who live in them,” said co-author Gretchen Daily, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
Urbanization and mental illnesses
As more and more people concentrate in the world’s sprawling towns and cities, urbanization and the subsequent “disconnect” from nature are increasingly associated with the rising incidence of mental disorders like depression, anxiety, and mood disorders like schizophrenia.
The study involved two groups of participants walking for 90 minutes, one in a grassland area adorned with oak trees and shrubs, the other along a traffic-heavy four-lane roadway. Before and after the walks, the researchers measured heart and respiration rates, performed brain scans, and had participants fill out questionnaires.
Analysis of the results showed little difference in physiological conditions between the groups. It was a very different story when the brain scans were examined. Among the “nature walkers,” neural activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex (sgPFC), decreased significantly. (The sgPFC is an area of the brain region active during rumination, a repetitive focus on negative emotions.)
“This finding is exciting because it demonstrates the impact of nature experience on an aspect of emotion regulation – something that may help explain how nature makes us feel better,” said lead author Gregory Bratman.
“These findings are important because they are consistent with, but do not yet prove, a causal link between increasing urbanization and increased rates of mental illness,” said co-author James Gross, professor of psychology at Stanford.
“We want to explore what elements of nature – how much of it and what types of experiences – offer the greatest benefits,” said Daily.
In a previous study, also led by Bratman, time in nature was found to have a positive effect on mood and aspects of cognitive function, including working memory, as well as a dampening effect on anxiety.
Separate research from the ongoing Duke Neurogenetics Study (DNS) have found that the same two brain areas predict problem drinking and promiscuity.
The ventral striatum (VS) is involved in reward seeking (and plays a role in drug addiction and depression), while the amygdala is important for threat assessment.
After studying 759 undergraduate students (average age of 19), it was found that problem drinking in response to stress was associated with either the amygdala or the ventral striatum being overactive while the other was underactive.
Out of whack brain activity causes problems
“We now have these two distinct profiles of risk that, in general, reflect imbalance in the function of typically complementary brain areas,” Ahmad Hariri, the senior author of both studies, said. “If you have high activity in both areas, no problem. If you have low activity in both areas, no problem. It’s when they’re out of whack that individuals may have problems with drinking.”
mbalance in the activation of two brain areas predicts problem drinking in university students who are dealing with stress. (Credit: Annchen Knodt, Duke University)
As to why these two seemingly opposite brain patterns predict problem drinking, the answer probably lies in what each area does. High VS and low amygdala activity could mean higher impulsivity without high danger alerts from the amygdala. Meanwhile, low VS and high amygdala activity may indicate a lower mood with high stress sensitivity, leading to drinking as a coping mechanism.
As for promiscuity, the same two brain areas were studied in 70 heterosexual men and women, and the results, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, were compared to self-reported numbers of new sexual partners in an 11-month period.
Interestingly, higher numbers of new sexual partners associated with different brain patterns between the sexes. For men, the pattern was high VS and low amygdala activity; for women, both were higher than normal.
“It’s not really clear why that is,” Hariri said. “One possibility is that this amygdala signal is representing different things in men and women.”
Hariri suggested that the amygdala may be focusing less on danger and more on general awareness in women. When tied with a strong reward center in the VS, women are more likely to seek out new partners.
For men, the amygdala may be focusing on danger, so low activity means less inhibition when one is reward-seeking.
So what’s next?
By adding in a third brain region—the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that makes final decisions—researchers hope to predict more accurately which individuals might engage in risky business. (Look out, Tom Cruise.)
This could help those who don’t know they’re at risk—like those who might become alcoholics. “The key is that these are patterns present before problems emerge,” Hariri said. “If we know this about an individual, we can anticipate the problems and anticipate what the nature of those problems will be. This knowledge brings us one step closer to preventing the problems altogether.”
Extraterrestrial lifeforms similar to humans should have already evolved on other planets like Earth. This makes it seem all the more odd that we have yet to discover any other civilizations like ours elsewhere in the universe, claims the author of a new book.
Professor Simon Conway Morris, a Fellow at St John’s College, University of Cambridge and the author of a new study on the topic of convergent evolution entitled The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe Became Self-Aware, argues that there is a universal “map of life” which dictates the manner in which all living creatures develop, regardless of their location in the cosmos.
Conway Morris’s book takes an established principle, the theory of convergent evolution (which states that species in different lineages will independently evolve similar features), and expands it. He suggests this type of convergence is common and has helped guide every aspect of life’s development on earth, ranging from the formation of proteins, the development of arms, legs and eyes, our intelligence and ability to use tools, and even how we experience orgasms.
All of these things, he argues, are inevitable once life emerges. As such, evolution is not random, but is instead a predictable process that follows a somewhat strict series of rules. If this is true, then it would indicate that life similar to that found on Earth would have obeyed those same rules and would have developed on other, similar planets, given the proper conditions.
We shouldn’t be alone…but we are
With astronomers discovering an increasing abundance of Earth-like planets located throughout the known universe, Professor Conway Morris said it’s rather extraordinary that we have yet to find any aliens that resemble and behave like us living on another planet – not to mention any life forms similar to the other living things, plants and animals alike, that live here.
He argues not only that if there are any aliens out there in the cosmos, they would be a lot like people in that they would have heads, torsos, and limbs. He also says that any life-bearing Earth-like planet would evolve other creatures similar to those we’re familiar with, and that there would almost undoubtedly be extraterrestrials with brains and human-like intelligence.
“The number of Earth-like planets seems to be far greater than was thought possible even a few years ago,” Professor Conway Morris said in a statement. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that they have life, because we don’t necessarily understand how life originates. The consensus offered by convergence, however, is that life is going to evolve wherever it can.”
“I would argue that in any habitable zone that doesn’t boil or freeze, intelligent life is going to emerge, because intelligence is convergent,” he added. “One can say with reasonable confidence that the likelihood of something analogous to a human evolving is really pretty high. And given the number of potential planets that we now have good reason to think exist, even if the dice only come up the right way every one in 100 throws, that still leads to a very large number of intelligences scattered around, that are likely to be similar to us.”
“The almost-certainty of ET being out there means that something does not add up, and badly,” the professor concluded. “We should not be alone, but we are.”
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