A team of researchers led by Sven Thatje, an associate professor of marine evolutionary ecology at the University of Southampton, has discovered the first-ever species of Yeti Crab living in the hydrothermal vent systems of the East Scotia Ridge in the Southern Ocean.
The new creature, described in a paper published in Wednesday’s edition of the journal PLOS One, has been identified as Kiwa tyleri, and the authors state that it is a member of an enigmatic group of squat lobsters known as Kiwaidae. These creatures live and thrive in the warm waters surrounding deep-sea geothermally heated hydrothermal vents.
Credit: Thatje et al
Kiwa tyleri is the dominant species at these locations, with densities of more than 700 specimens per square meter reported in some locations. With a body covered in dense bristles (also known as setae) and bacteria, it looks like a furry creature. This also allows the crab to harvest the dense bacterial mats that overgrow vent chimney surfaces.
Cold waters limit the crabs’ ability to travel
Thatje and his colleagues explain that the creature spends the majority of its life trapped in the warm waters of the vent chimney, unable to move from one vent site to another due to the cold, nearly-freezing temperatures of the water separating one vent from another.
Only egg-carrying females are known to leave the vent chimneys and travel into the deep polar season, and only to release their larvae, which normally would be unable to survive the warm conditions of the adult Yeti Crab habitat. Few crab and lobster species can be found in the polar seas, but hydrothermal vents offer them a warmer sanctuary.
In a statement emailed to redOrbit, Thatje said, “The Antarctic Yeti Crab is trapped in its warm-water hydrothermal vent site by the cold polar waters of the surrounding deep-sea. The species has adapted to this very limited sized habitat… by occurring in highly-packed densities and by relying on bacteria they grow on their fur-like setae for nutrition.”
Thatje added that the “engimatic” Kiwa tyleri was named in honor of Professor Paul Tyler, a “world-renowned British deep-sea and polar biologist” from the University of Southampton. Tyler specializes in the field of reproductive biology and has published numerous studies based on his work at the hydrothermal vents and cold seeps of Antarctica.
A red dwarf star is causing a giant cloud of hydrogen gas to escape from a warm, Neptune-mass world, causing the exoplanet to have a massive comet-like tail, astronomers at the University of Warwick in the UK report in the latest edition of the journal Nature.
According to the university, the phenomenon was depicted in an image by Dr. Mark Garlick, and the discovery seems to indicate that low mass exoplanets orbiting close to their host stars may have had a percentage of their atmospheres burned off due to extreme irradiation from the star.
The planet in question is Gliese 436b (also known as GJ 436b), which was discovered in August 2004 by R. Paul Butler from the Carnegie Institute of Washington and Geoffrey Marcy from the University of California, Berkeley using the radial velocity method. At the time, it was one of the smallest known transiting planets in terms of mass and radius.
First confident detection of atmosphere loss in Neptune-sizes exoplanets
According to co-author Dr. Peter Wheatley of the Warwick Astronomy and Astrophysics Group, a large cloud of hydrogen gas was seen absorbing light from its parent red dwarf star. The cloud is created as a result of x-ray emissions from the star burning off the planet’s upper atmosphere.
“We knew that some Jupiter-mass planets are gradually evaporating due to irradiation by their parent stars, and we set out to use the Hubble Space Telescope to try to detect absorption by hydrogen gas escaping from the Neptune-sized planet GJ 436b,” Dr. Wheatley told redOrbit via email. “We were amazed by the strength of the absorption we found.”
“Usually signals of planetary atmospheres are very subtle, but here we see a very extended comet-like tail from the planet that covers more than half of the star!” he added. “This is the first time anyone has made a confident detection of the atmosphere escaping from a Neptune-sized exoplanet. With such a strong signal, future measurements can probe the composition of the planetary atmosphere – and for other small planets as well.”
In fact, Dr. Wheatley and his colleagues believe that not only are such processes occurring on other exoplanets, but that they could be strong enough to result in the evaporation of the planet’s entire atmosphere.
Researchers at the Defitech Foundation Chair in Brain-Machine Interface have developed a new interface that allows people suffering from paralysis or mobility impairments to control a robot using only their thoughts – a breakthrough intended to help them become more independent.
Writing in a special June edition of the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) devoted to brain-machine interfaces, Professor José del R. Millán of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and his CBMI colleagues explained that the idea is to let disabled men and women control a robot from home using only their thoughts.
They recruited a total of 19 subjects (nine disabled and 10 healthy people) from Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, and had each of them attempt to pilot a robot with their thoughts. Over the span of several weeks, each participant donned an electrode-studded hat that could analyze their brain signals and gave instructions ordering the robot to move.
Those instructions were delivered in real-time over the Internet from the subjects’ home country to the CBMI laboratories. The robot was outfitted with a video camera, screen, and wheel that filmed while moving and displayed the pilot’s face via Skype. This allowed the pilot to interact with people the robot came into contact with, making it a surrogate of sorts.
100 percent success rate in trials
The researchers said that the trials had a 100 percent success rate, and according to Millán, the nine disabled subjects were able to learn how to remotely control the robot after no more than 10 days of training. Furthermore, the tests revealed no different in piloting ability between either of the two groups, with both groups operating the machine using only their thoughts.
The CBMI team also pointed out that their interface is capable of more than just allowing robots to be controlled mentally. The machine is able to avoid obstacles on its own without having to be told to do so, and if the pilot takes a break and stops giving instructions to the robot, it will continue along the indicated path until it receives the order to halt.
This allows control to be shared between the person and the computer, Millán’s team explained, which gives the pilot an opportunity to rest while navigating. The research marks the end of the Tools for Brain-Computer Interaction (TOBI) project, a European initiative originally launched in 2008, the research team added.
Researchers from the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior have found that brain scans could help determine which people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) could benefit most from cognitive-behavioral therapy.
In research published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, Jamie Feusner, a UCLA associate professor of psychiatry and director of the Semel Institute’s Adult OCD Program, and Joseph O’Neill, an associate professor of child psychiatry and a research scientist at the Semel Institute, explained that details of those scans could predict which patients are at risk of relapsing.
They explained that up to two percent of the US population could at some point suffer from the disorder. OCD is marked by recurrent and intrusive thoughts and/or recurring behaviors that can cause distress to the patient, adversely impact their ability to function in society, and affect their ability to maintain employment.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is designed to help patients understand the thoughts and feelings that influence their behaviors, and ultimately work toward eliminating them, is one of the most common and effective treatments for OCD. However, not all patients can enjoy its long-term benefits, as symptoms return in an estimated one-fifth of them.
Brain connectivity can predict potential for relapse
Feusner, O’Neill, and their colleagues discovered that a specific detail from a patient’s brain scan could help doctors better indentify which individuals are most likely to have a relapse following cognitive-behavioral therapy. The efficiency of brain network connectivity prior to the treatment can predict the worsening of symptoms afterwards.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyze the brains of 17 OCD patients between the ages of 21 and 50. They took scans both before and immediately after the patients completed an intensive four-week course of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Doctors then monitored the subjects’ clinical symptoms over the course of the next year.
“We found that cognitive-behavioral therapy itself results in more densely connected local brain networks, which likely reflects more efficient brain activity,” Feusner said. They also found that people with more efficient brain connectivity before treatment began did worse in the follow-up period, and that severity of symptoms did not accurately predict post-treatment success.
“Cognitive-behavioral therapy is in many cases very effective, at least in the short term. But it is costly, time-consuming, difficult for patients and, in many areas, not available,” Feusner added. “Thus, if someone will end up having their symptoms return, it would be useful to know before they get treatment,” so that the patients can receive the best possible care available.
New images of Ceres captured by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft reveal that there are more of those mysterious bright spots than previously believed, as well as a unique pyramid-shaped peak and a handful of other unique features on the surface of the far-off dwarf planet.
According to the US space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, the latest images were taken during Dawn’s second mapping orbit at a distance of 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers) above Ceres and show at least eight small spots located in a surface crater.
The crater, which is approximately six miles (nine kilometers) wide, also features one area that is brighter than the others. Scientists still are not certain what type of highly reflective material makes up the spots, though the most likely candidates remain ice and salt, NASA said.
Dawn’s visible and infrared mapping spectrometer makes it possible for scientists to identify the specific minerals present on Ceres by detecting how each reflects light in the visible and infrared spectrums. This will make it possible for them to determine the composition of the dwarf planet, and as more data is collected, gain more information about the spots.
Pyramid-shaped mountain, various-sized craters also found
However, the spots aren’t the only fascinating feature Dawn has uncovered on Ceres. The new images show a pyramid-shaped mountain with steep slopes in an otherwise smooth region of the dwarf planet’s surface. It raises approximately three miles (five kilometers) above the ground.
The spacecraft has also found several craters of various sizes, many of which have central peaks, and evidence of past activity on the surface. That activity includes flows, landslides, and collapsed structures, and indicates that Ceres has more remnants of past activity than Vesta, the protoplanet studied by Dawn over a 14-month span in 2011 and 2012.
Dawn, the first mission to visit a dwarf planet, will continue to take images and collect other data from Ceres from its current altitude through the end of the month. Starting in July, it will begin moving into its next orbit at an altitude of 900 miles (1,450 kilometers).
“The surface of Ceres has revealed many interesting and unique features,” said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for the Dawn mission at JPL. “For example, icy moons in the outer solar system have craters with central pits, but on Ceres central pits in large craters are much more common. These and other features will allow us to understand the inner structure of Ceres that we cannot sense directly.”
It isn’t just Hollywood heavyweights such as Amy Poehler, Mindy Kaling, Lewis Black, and Bill Hader who have been working to make the newest Disney-Pixar film Inside Out a success, as one University of California-Berkeley psychologist also played a key role in the movie.
Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the university and the director of the UC-Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, served as a consultant on the movie. The movie centers around an 11-year-old girl and the personified feelings that live in her head, helping her deal with her family’s move from Minnesota to San Francisco (and with life in general).
As the university explains, children typically dislike identifying or sharing difficult feelings that they may be experiencing, so when Keltner attended the premiere and saw youngsters pretending to be characters such as Fear, Anger, or Sadness, he was thrilled. Inside Out, he said, shows kids how different positive and negative emotions can come together to solve problems.
“I hope this movie becomes part of our cultural understanding of what it means to be a child and what it means to be a human being and to grapple with these emotions,” Keltner added.
Movie inspired by shared struggles of parenting during puberty
The professor visited Pixar’s Emeryville on multiple occasions discussing the fundamentals of emotions and their physiology and purpose. He also was in regular communication with them via email, explaining in particular how emotions can interact with and be influenced by memory (i.e. how sadness alters perception of childhood).
According to the university, the professor’s insights helped the film’s cast flesh out each of their characters. Keltner first met Pete Docter, the film’s director, when both of their daughters were in the midst of puberty, and the pair reportedly formed a bond over the trials of being a parent in those difficult preteen and early teenage years. Their discussions ultimately evolved into Inside Out, a film that Keltner said was unlike anything he had ever seen before.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it,” the professor said, noting that the filmmakers initially struggled with the concept of sadness, but that he told them that it is “a powerful trigger for seeking comfort and bonding.” He added that anger “is often about the sense of being treated unfairly, and can be a motivator for social change.”
Keltner also said that he believed that all people have a “signature emotion” similar to how the main character of Inside Out, Riley, is predisposed to joy. However, this emotion evolves over the course of a person’s lifetime, he added. As for the movie itself, and the interplay between the different emotions in Riley’s head, the professor offered no spoilers.
“You’re just going to have to watch the movie and find out,” he said.
Dreams offer fascinating insights into our psychological state, and can even leave us feeling as if we have learned something new about ourselves, as redOrbit’s recent discussions with University of Montreal expert Antonio Zadra demonstrated.
And yet, many of us cannot remember our dreams at all. Dr. Zadra concludes this three-part series by telling us why that is, and how we can try to remember them in future.
“Some people have a facility for remembering their dreams from when they are very young, but you can also view it as a skill,” Dr. Zadra explains. “Like other skills such as sports, playing the piano, public speaking – some people are naturally good at it and others need to work at it.”
“Modern life makes it harder for people to remember their dreams,” he continues. “Most of us wake up with an alarm each morning; an unnatural awakening. If you wake up when your brain decides it’s time to wake up rather than when an alarm wakes you, you usually wake up from REM sleep, which is most strongly-related to vivid dreaming.”
“If you wake up out of REM sleep, you are more likely to remember a salient dream than when you awaken from another stage of sleep.”
“Dreams are quite fragile experiences,” he adds, “so even when you wake up from a very vivid dream, the memory of it degrades quickly. By lunchtime most of the details are forgotten, and by the next day even parts of the core might be vague.”
How to remember dreams
Dr. Zadra says that: “The parts of the brain that encode short-term memories to long-term memory are deactivated during sleep, so it’s very hard for us to consolidate or to form long-term memories of dreams if you wake up with an alarm.”
“You make a motion with your arm, or with a smartphone you punch in the code, all of these activities, even moving, interfere with any recall you might have.”
He suggests that: “People find it easier to remember their dreams if they give themselves a chance to do so. Try lying back down in bed and see if anything comes back to you. Try changing position from your back to your side while you try to remember.”
“If something comes back to you, write it down. Most people who rarely remember their dreams can train themselves to have better dream recall. They should write it down or dictate it and maybe review the following night before they go to sleep. Everyone dreams multiple times every night, the issue for people is being able to remember them. But because they are pressed for time and because of how they awaken, they don’t always have a chance.”
He adds that: “Women tend to remember dreams more than men, but women are generally more interested in dreams so maybe have a greater motivation to remember them.”
If you are able to remember your dreams, you can find out what they mean here.
Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
A medication already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat high blood pressure has been proven effective at stopping cocaine and alcohol addiction in rats, new research published this week in the journal Molecular Psychiatry has discovered.
Lead investigator Dr. Hitoshi Morikawa, an associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin, and his colleagues explained that the treatment works by effectively erasing the unconscious memories that underlie addiction. If it is proven to be effective in humans, it will be the first treatment of its kind to help combat drug use and alcoholism.
In their studies, Dr. Morikawa’s team trained rodents to associate either a black room or a white one with the use of a drug, and whenever a rat was offered a choice of going into either room, the rats almost always selected the one that they had associated with their addiction. The researchers then started giving the rats the dose of an antihypertensive drug known as isradipine.
After the medication was administered to the rodents, the rats were then presented with the same choice of rooms. While they initially still preferred the room associated with their addiction, over time that preference slowly began to fade away. When compared to the results of a control group, the findings appeared to indicate that the memories were eliminated, not just suppressed. Using israpidine to overcome cues associated with addiction
“Isradipine is currently under clinical trial to slow the progression of Parkinson’s disease, in which dopamine neurons in the midbrain slowly die,” Dr. Morikawa told redOrbit via email. He noted that this was “originally driven by studies… at Northwestern University showing that isradipine prevents death of dopamine neurons in rodent model of Parkinson’s disease.”
Dr. Morikawa explained that he and his colleagues set out to see if the ion channels blocked by isradipine, known as L-type calcium channels, could do more than kill dopamine neurons. This type of neuron is essential for learning the environmental cues associated with rewards, and are good targets to combat addiction. Addiction’s nature involves excessive learning of such cues – cues associated with addictive drugs, such dealers or syringes.
“We were expecting/hoping that isradipine will suppress the learning of drug-associated cues,” he told redOrbit, “but the finding that isradipine also reverses/erases already acquired memory of drug-associated cues was totally unexpected. We got really excited by this not only scientifically but also because of its relevance to addiction treatment.”
“Isradipine might represent an ideal drug to treat, or cure, a critical component of addiction,” Dr. Morikawa continued, admitting that it could require higher dosages than ordinarily used to treat high blood pressure. “The key is to take isradipine, then addicts need to expose themselves to drug-associated cues while isradipine is in the brain, likely within a couple of hours after taking high dosage isradipine. The idea is that everything feels routine on that day (cocaine is good as usual, dealers look attractive as usual) but these start to look unattractive in the future.”
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Darwin’s finches are a group of 15 different bird species that Charles Darwin famously based his theories of evolution on. However, there’s no more room on the island for the development of new species.
Most species of birds are still diversifying, but according to a new report – Darwin’s finches have reached a state of equilibrium in which a new species will not appear until a current one becomes extinct.
Published in the journal Ecology Letters, the new report backs a recently developed tenet of evolutionary theory claiming that as species diversity rises, more and more ecological niches become filled. This has an adverse effect on immigration to the ecosystem and the development of new species.
“However, this has never been tested in detail, for lack of data and the right analytical tools,” said study author Rampal Etienne, associate professor of evolutionary ecology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Now, researchers have developed a mathematical model with phylogenetic data on living species called Dynamic Assembly of Islands by Speciation, Immigration and Extinction (DAISIE) to simulate evolutionary dynamics.
Using phylogenetic trees of existing bird species on the Galápagos Islands, DAISIE calculated the limits of species diversity and rates of immigration, new species creation, and extinction for each bird pedigree.
Finch diversity has negative effect
“The analysis shows that for the finches, diversity does indeed have a negative effect,” Etienne said. “There is no more room for new species, unless one of the existing species becomes extinct, so the islands are saturated regarding finch-type species.”
Etienne emphasized that the study does not mean the diversity of species is static in the Galápagos.
“We found that the rates of both evolution and extinction are very high for Darwin’s finches,” he said. “That is probably why these birds have reached an equilibrium.”
The study team noted mockingbirds and other birds have not yet reached equilibrium, meaning oceanic islands as a whole are not at equilibrium. They added that in a million years or so, unfamiliar mockingbird species might appear, despite conditions on the islands staying the same.
“Our data shows that they are evolving more slowly and are still diversifying,” Etienne said.
The study team has made DAISIE publicly available as a tool to be used by other researchers and plans to apply it to other archipelagoes around the world.
“In the longer term, our plan is to apply the model to over 30 archipelagos and islands worldwide,” study author Luis Valente, an evolutionary biologist from University of Potsdam in Germany, told redOrbit via email. “The aim is to be able to get a general overview of the importance of equilibrium dynamics on islands on a global scale.”
“If we find that islands are generally at equilibrium, this suggests that there are processes that limit and regulate biodiversity,” Valente continued. “If we find that the number of bird species is not at equilibrium, this suggest that controls on diversity may be relaxed, meaning that we can expect increases or decreases in biodiversity in the future.”
A new robot, developed by researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and inspired by cockroaches, is able to navigate through a series of obstacles without needing additional motors or sensors thanks to the unusual shape of its body. Gross.
As the team behind the robot explains, the robot features a rounded shell similar to that of the discoid cockroach and is capable to sneaking through gaps between vertical beam obstacles.
While other, similar robots have been designed to perform tasks while avoiding objects, this is said to be the first designed specifically to traverse obstacles. The researchers hope that the machine will inspire future terrestrial machines to perform search and rescue operations or monitor the environment.
Rounded shells help execute roll-type maneuver
“The majority of robotics studies have been solving the problem of obstacles by avoiding them, which largely depends on using sensors to map out the environment and algorithms that plan a path to go around obstacles,” lead author Chen Li, a researcher in the Poly-PEDAL Lab and the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at the university, explained in a statement.
However, he added, “when the terrain becomes densely cluttered, especially as gaps between obstacles become comparable or even smaller than robot size, this approach starts to run into problems as a clear path cannot be mapped.”
So Li and his colleagues used high-speed cameras to monitor how discoid cockroaches moved through an artificial obstacle course filled with grass-like vertical beams with small spacing, and attempted to mimic that movement in their new robots. The machines were outfitted with three different artificial shells – an oval cone similar in shape to a cockroach body, a flat oval, and a flat rectangle – to see how each on affected their movement through the beams.
The more rounded the artificial shell was, the easier it was for the cockroaches to move through the obstacles. This because they had an easier time executing a maneuver in which they rolled their bodies so that their thin sides fit through the gaps, making it possible for their legs to push off beams to help them maneuver through the obstacles.
Building better bots with terradynamics
This rolling behavior emerged with no change to the computer programming, originating instead from the shell itself.
“We showed that our robot can traverse grass-like beam obstacles at high probability, without adding any sensory feedback or changes in motor control, thanks to the thin, rounded shell that allows the robot body to roll to reduce terrain resistance.” explained Li. “This is a terrestrial analogy of the streamlined shapes that reduce drag on birds, fish, airplanes, and submarines as they move in fluids. We call this ‘terradynamic’ streamlining.”
“There may be other shapes besides the thin, rounded one that are good for other purposes, such as climbing up and over obstacles of other types,” he added. “Our next steps will be to study a diversity of terrain and animal shapes to discover more terradynamic shapes, and even morphing shapes. These new concepts will enable terrestrial robots to go through various cluttered environments with minimal sensors and simple controls.”
While people who use Viagra and other types of erectile dysfunction drugs face a higher risk of developing serious skin cancer, the evidence suggests that the pills themselves are likely not the reason that those individual develop melanoma.
The research, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, involved a detailed analysis of the medical records of more than 20,000 patients, and concluded that Viagra and other ED drugs are not a cause melanoma. It also concluded that the reason for the increased cancer risk in people who use these substances is actually socioeconomic and lifestyle based.
“What our study results show is that groups of men who are more likely to get malignant melanoma include those with higher disposable incomes and education – men who likely can also afford more vacations in the sun – and who also have the means to buy erectile dysfunction medications, which are very expensive,” explained Dr. Stacy Loeb, lead author of the study and a urologist at the New York University Langone Medical Center.
“While medications for erectile dysfunction come with serious risk of a drop in blood pressure if taken together with other medicines called nitrates, overall they are safe medications, and our results suggest that physicians should not be concerned that the drugs cause melanoma,” added Dr. Loeb.
Lack of “dose relationship” helps exonerate ED drugs
The study, which reviewed the medical records of 20,235 mostly Caucasian males, was inspired by an analysis conducted last year in 14 men who had taken Viagra and were later diagnosed as having melanoma. Among those studies, 4,065 were found to have malignant melanoma between 2006 and 2012, and 2,148 who had taken the ED drugs Viagra, Levitra, or Cialis.
A total of 435 ED drug users had skin cancer, and while the study found that there was a greater statistical risk of developing malignant melanoma among erectile dysfunction drug users, there was no increased risk among those men with the most prescriptions. This sort of “dose relationship” (the more drugs taken, the higher the risk) would tend to be expected in cases where the drug itself was the direct cause of the ailment, Dr. Loeb noted.
Furthermore, the NYU Lagnone researchers and colleagues in Sweden also found no correlation between advanced stages of melanoma and ED drug use. The only association they detected was between any use of the drugs and the earliest stages of the disease, thus discrediting the idea that the treatments themselves were somehow responsible for the observed increase in risk.
“When used appropriately, erectile dysfunction medications are very effective and improve the quality of life for many men, so men should know it is doubtful that taking these medications puts them at greater risk of getting skin cancer,” said Loeb, who added that she encourages male patients to minimize exposure to the sun to reduce the risk of developing skin cancer.
Skinny jeans, the snug-fitting type of denim pants that have gained popularity in recent years, could actually be harmful to your health, experts from the University of Adelaide in Australia report in research published Tuesday in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry.
Thomas Edmund Kimber, a member of the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s neurology unit and an associate professor in the University of Adelaide’s Department of Medicine, and his colleagues report on a case study involving a 35-year-old female patient at the medical facility who said she had been experiencing severe weakness in both of her ankles.
The woman told doctors that she had been helping a relative move the previous day, and spent several hours squatting to empty cupboards while wearing tight-fitting skinny jeans. She recalled that the jeans began feeling increasingly tight and uncomfortable as the day progressed. By the evening, she said her feet had grown numb and it had become difficult to walk.
As a result, the woman tripped and fell, and was unable to get up. She spent several hours on the ground before being found, and her calves had become so swollen that her pants had to be cut off her. She was unable to move her ankles or toes properly, and had lost all feeling in her lower legs and her feet.
Some pants advice
An examination found that the patient had damaged muscle and nerve fibers in her lower legs as a result of prolonged compression while squatting – a condition the doctors believe was probably made worse due to the tight jeans she was wearing, Kimber told redOrbit via email.
“I believe that the combination of squatting and tight jeans caused the problem,” he explained. “Prolonged squatting would have compressed the peroneal nerves in the lower leg and reduced the blood supply to the calf muscles. The tight jeans meant that, as the calf muscles started to swell in response to the reduced blood supply, they compressed the adjacent tibial nerves.”
As these nerves were compressed, they would have “further cut off the blood supply” to the patient’s muscles, Kimber added. This reduction in blood supply to her legs – a condition known as compartment syndrome – required that the woman be placed on an intravenous drip for four days, after which time she regained the ability to walk and was discharged from the hospital.
“If the woman had been wearing loose trousers, the calf muscles could have swollen ‘outwards’ rather than ‘inwards,’ thus avoiding pressure on the nerves and blood vessels,” he told redOrbit. While Kimber said that the risk of something like this happening is “probably small,” he added that people should “avoid squatting for long periods of time while wearing skinny jeans. If they experience leg discomfort or tingling while squatting, they should stand up and walk around.”
Fibromyalgia is a disease that causes a lot of issues. It’s hard for us to get up in the morning, we may feel a lot of ache and fatigue in our bones, and we can struggle with mental health issues like memory loss and issues with concentration.
Of course, the extreme fatigue makes it difficult for many fibromyalgia sufferers to go through their daily routine.
Could you imagine how much worse it would be if you had another fatigue disorder alongside of it? Sjogren’s Syndrome is another fatigue disorder that occasionally shows up alongside fibromyalgia.
So, because of that, we’re going to be taking a quick look at that here so that it is easier for you to notice if it starts to rear its ugly head.
What Is Sjogren’s Syndrome?
Sjogren’s Syndrome is a disorder that affects the autoimmune system. You may have also heard it referred to as “sicca.” This disorder is when your immune system is not paying attention to what it should be doing, and instead starts to attack your tissues and such.
The most common targets of your immune system are the glands that help to produce moisture throughout your body. This, of course, doesn’t sound incredibly dangerous on the surface, but when you really start to look at it, it can cause a lot of issues.
First off, imagine what happens when your mouth is overly dry. You feel like there’s cotton in your mouth, and it may be hard for you to chew and do other activities. Imagine feeling that way all of the time, and you’ve got an idea of what Sjogren’s Syndrome does to your mouth.
It hurts like crazy, your teeth could end up becoming decayed, and you may also get ulcers in the roof of your mouth. Then, imagine other parts of the body that may be dealing with those symptoms as well. Dry skin can really hurt if it’s starting to chap and chafe.
Dry eyes could end up getting ulcers, and in the worst cases, it could affect your vision negatively. If your private areas are not moist, it could make sex uncomfortable and it could make it so that you feel as if you can’t perform other tasks. All in all, the lack of moisture really hurts the person and can cause long term health effects if it isn’t taken care of well.
There are other symptoms as well, including fatigue and extreme pain that makes it hard for the person suffering from the disorder to move around and do their daily activities. In the worst cases, a person can be debilitated and in bed for extended periods of time.
Sjogren’s Syndrome is actually what has prevented a number of athletes from being able to perform, including tennis superstar Venus Williams. In those cases, it can be especially frustrating because the athletes would be able to do their job otherwise, but they are prevented because of the complications that are related to Sjogren’s Syndrome.
How Can Sjogren’s Syndrome and Fibromyalgia Be Linked?
So Sjogren’s Syndrome and fibromyalgia often go hand in hand, mainly because of how it attacks the body. Unfortunately, it can be really difficult to figure out exactly what is going on because so many of the symptoms overlap between Sjogren’s Syndrome and fibromyalgia.
So what are you supposed to do when you can’t figure out exactly what disorder you are dealing with? How are you supposed to take care of the symptoms if you can’t actually get a solid diagnosis of what is going on, especially when it comes to Sjogren’s Syndrome?
The big indicator is the dryness that you are dealing with. If you are dealing with unusual dryness during times of year when you shouldn’t be (because remember, the winter months can sometimes be painfully dry), then you want to keep an eye on it.
If you’re starting to notice that you feel dehydrated or that you can’t deal with the itchy, flaky skin that you have on different parts of your body, it may end up being because you’ve got Sjogren’s Syndrome alongside of your fibromyalgia. Go and talk to your doctor in order to try and figure out what the best treatment plan is for you.
So, How Do You Take Care of it?
There are a few different treatment plans that you can utilize when you’re dealing with Sjogren’s Syndrome. If your eyes are the cause of the problem, then your doctor may suggest that you use artificial tears or that you use ointments in order to try and give your eyes a little more moisture. In some cases, you may also use pellets, which are meant to make sure that your tears stick around for awhile.
If your mouth is the issue, you’ll have to go about it a bit differently. You could try hard candy or gum, which help to make your saliva glands work a bit more. Drink a lot of fluids throughout the day.
If your lips are chapped, use balms to keep them moist. And, if you have pain in your mouth, consider talking to your doctor about using a rinse or gel in order to help reduce the amount of pain you’re coping with.
It’s all about your particular symptoms. Your doctor will do everything that he can to help to relieve the symptoms you’re suffering from, and that, in turn, will help you feel a lot less pain and to have a lot more energy in the long run.
The links between Sjorgen’s Syndrome and fibromyalgia are incredibly interesting to look at, and by having a better understanding of both of them, we will be able to determine if one or the other is becoming an issue in our lives.
If you believe Sjorgen’s Syndrome may be part of your exhaustion issue, make sure to consult with your doctor in order to get a proper diagnosis and to determine the best course of action for your treatment plan.
In addition to running its Robotics Challenge to help find the next-generation of first-responder robots, DARPA recently conducted a contest for high-school students in which they were asked to submit videos discussing their hopes and fears about the future of such machines.
However, as Engadget explained, it turns out that the teenagers that submitted entries seemingly welcomed their new robot overlords. Instead of “the dystopian narrative that usually accompanies robotics,” the website said that each of the students “envisioned a collaborative space for robots and humans to coexist,” showing that they aren’t “robotphobic” after all.
According to the event’s website, five lucky student teams were selected as winners and chosen to attend the Robotics Challenge. The lucky winners were Kristina Argao and Riezzalyn Viray from Barrigada, Guam; Ben Chrepta and Alden Giedraitis from Rochester, Minnesota; Hector Cruz from Cedar City, Utah; Shiloh Curtis from Santa Cruz, California; and the team of Atticus Jones, Kentaro Jones and Jigme Tinley from New York City, New York.
More about the Robots4Us Student Video Contest
Known as the Robots4US Student Video Contest, the competition challenged students to make and submit a two- to three-minute long video focusing on how they believed robots would have a positive impact on human lives. Each of the videos were to consider how current and anticipated advances in technology could affect society.
The contest was open only to teenagers currently enrolled in high schools or home-schooled at the ninth through twelfth grade levels in the US and its territories. Teams of up to three students were allowed to collaborate on a submission, but each entry was required to designate one team representative to attend award ceremonies and winner events, and each participant was limited to one entry (either as an individual or as a member of a team).
Entries were judged on the following criteria, DARPA said: the clarity with which the individual or team communicated their vision of how robots could improve society in the future, creativity, thoughtfulness, originality and appeal in expressing the vision, and technical quality of the video. Five winners and one guardian each were selected to travel to the Robotic Challenge finals.
Researchers studying nearly 400 colonies in Madagascar have discovered 10 never-before-seen species of subsocial coweb spiders, most of which belong to the genus Anelosimus, according to a new paper published Tuesday in the open-access scientific journal ZooKeys.
In addition, many of the new species are single forest endemics, and the study authors said in a statement that the number of previously undiscovered spiders found in an otherwise increasingly deforested region of Madagascar demonstrates the need for additional samplings in the area.
Furthermore, lead investigator Dr. Igni Agnarsson, an assistant professor in the University of Vermont’s Department of Biology, and his colleagues wrote that the fact that the discovery is evidence the biodiversity in this part of the world, especially in terms of spiders and other types of arthropods, is “mostly unexplored and undescribed.”
New species reveal new relationships between spider groups
Five of the newly-discovered spider species were named in honor of some of the most famous figures in the field of evolutionary biology, including Buffon, Hooker, Huxley, Lamarck and Wallace, the researchers said. One of them, Anelosimus darwini (featured image above), as named in honor of the father of evolutionary biology himself, Charles Darwin, they added.
Dr. Agnarsson and his co-authors wrote that they conducted a thorough survey of approximately 350 colonies from the Analamazaotra (or Périnet) Special Reserve and three pilot surveys into the Ambohitantely, Ranamofana, and Montagne d’Ambre forests in Madagascar. Their work led to a subsocial clade include the 10 new species as well as six previously identified ones.
Madagascan cobweb spider species, Anelosimus moramora, named after the Madagascan motto ‘no rush’ or ‘take it easy’. (Credit: Ingi Agnarsson)
The known species are identified as A. andasibe, A. may, A. nazariani, A. sallee, A. salut, and A. vondrona, while the 10 new species have been named A. ata, A. buffoni, A. darwini, A. hookeri, A. huxleyi, A. lamarcki, A. moramora, A. tita, A. torfi and A. wallacei. All of the species, except for A. may and A. vondrona, appear to be single forest endemics, the authors noted.
“While additional sampling is necessary, these data imply a much higher local richness and endemism in Madagascan forests than in any other comparable area globally,” they wrote. “The phylogenetic results establish a sister clade relationship between the subsocial Anelosimus in Madagascar and the American ‘eximius group’, and between the solitary A. decaryi on Madagascar and a solitary American clade.”
This is a female Madagascan cobweb spider, Anelosimus ata, and her web. (Credit: Ingi Agnarsson)
“These findings imply duplicate colonizations from America, an otherwise rare biogeographical pattern, calling for more detailed investigation of Anelosimus biogeography,” they added.
In three separate studies, assistant marketing professor Joshua John Clarkson and his colleagues examined the link between a person’s political leanings and two key indicators of self-control in humans (attention regulation and task persistence). They found that conservatives scored higher in both traits consistently and independent of race, age, gender or other factors.
Two of the studies detailed in the report involved tasks conducted by undergraduate students at a pair of Midwestern universities over the past year, while the third involved 135 people across the US who took part in a survey through the Amazon Mechanical Turk service, the authors said.
Studies gauged attention devoted to, time spent on tasks
In one study, 147 undergraduate students were asked to sit in front of a computer screen. Each individual was presented with a word representing a color displayed on a background of another color. Clarkson and his colleagues examined how quickly participants would respond with the word, controlling for correctness.
Those identifying themselves as conservative were as correct as liberals, but they were able to perform the tasks more quickly, suggesting that they could be “better able to fixate their attention on a task,” Clarkson said. In a separate study at a second university, 176 undergraduate students performed the same task, and the results were similar, with both ideologies performing the tasks well but self-described conservatives responding faster.
In the third trial, 135 Americans used Amazon Mechanical Turk to participate in several self-control tasks involving seven-letter anagrams. For each anagram, the individuals were asked to create as many English-language words that adhered to a set of rules (for example, were at least three letters long), and told that they could decide when they wanted to stop. Liberals spent less time on the tasks than conservatives, the authors found.
“When marketers consider self-control, we tend to think of sticking to a diet or exercise regimen, not wandering off your grocery list or avoiding impulsive purchases,” Clarkson said. “All of these behaviors exhibit elements of attention regulation and persistence. Ultimately, however, it all comes down to believing whether or not you can control your own behavior, and what we’re finding is that conservatives are more likely to believe they can control their own behavior.”
RedOrbit recently spoke to Dr. Antonio Zadra, a psychologist and dream expert from the University of Montreal, who explained that men and women often dream differently.
The difference between nightmares in men and women
“Especially in men, dreams often involve being caught in a natural disaster – earthquakes, tidal waves etc.,” Dr. Zadra explained. “Nightmares in women very often touch inter-personal relations; people who are being insulting or degrading to them. It could be family, a spouse, bosses or colleagues at work, but there are often very heated, nasty arguments (in the dreams).”
“To me this makes sense, because if we think that dreams are visually-based metaphorical languages that we get immersed in, we only have to look at what kinds of movies men and women like to go see. I hate drawing these broad generalizations, but it is true that in general more men enjoy going to see action-packed films or movies about disasters, so it makes sense that these are the kinds of metaphors we are more likely to find in men’s nightmares.”
Whereas, he suggested: “Many films that are exquisitely produced and show complexity of human relations and how people try to navigate through these worlds are generally more popular with women. It makes sense that these kinds of metaphors speak more to them and so are more likely to be found in the dreams, and especially their nightmares.”
“The dreams might be dealing with inter-personal issues in their family environment, for example, but it gets represented in their work environment in their dreams, often more amplified and intense.”
“Many women also have dreams of natural disasters and things of that nature, but this gender difference I mention is something we found after examining over ten thousand dreams in men and women.”
Positive dream themes
Positive common dreams are much less common than the negative contents which we often focus on, Dr. Zadra told us, but still worth examining because “they can leave the dreamer with a wonderful feeling when they wake up.”
“One is swimming, in oceans or very large pools and we are swimming deep underwater and we don’t need to breath or are able to breathe underwater,” he said. “This gives the dreamer an incredible sense of freedom. These large bodies of water give a sense of swimming in our emotions, bathing in these positive aspects of ourselves.”
“When we awaken, we feel invigorated and as if we have learned something new about themselves; a feeling which carries throughout the day.”
Another common theme is finding a new room in a familiar house. Usually the person returns to a house they grew up in or their grandparents’ house – one which they haven’t been to for a long time but which they know well. They climb stairs and find a room they can’t believe they never noticed before. When they open the door they discover a wonderful room, elaborate decoration, artwork, the sun shining through the windows. It leaves the dreamer with a sense of awe and joy about the discovery.
“The houses we grew up in are seen as representing our psyche and the new room represents a discovery of a new part of ourselves,” Dr. Zadra explained. “The dreamer awakes with the feeling they have discovered something deeply psychologically meaningful.”
Happily, these positive dream themes occur in both men and women.
The findings, the authors explain, will make it possible for scientists to more accurately replicate the behavior of living cell membranes, which previously could only be modeled using synthetic cell membranes that could not have new phospholipids added to them. The newly created type of membranes, while also synthetic, can mimic many features of living cells.
“The inspiration for this research came from an interest in understanding the transition between chemistry and biology,” lead investigator Neal Devaraj, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC San Diego, told redOrbit via email. “Life emerged at some point from non-living materials, and this was an incredible event that we still have very little understanding of.”
“Our approach has been to create completely synthetic systems that, though highly simplified, can mimic some of the properties of more complex living structures,” he added. “In this work, we mimic membrane growth and reproduction by utilizing a simple autocatalyst (a catalyst that can create itself). This catalyst self-reproduction saves the system as membrane grows, as it ensures that the catalyst does not dilute out. In this manner, we can create artificial membranes that can grow nearly indefinitely, as long as simple reactive precursors are provided.”
Replacing a complex network of pathways with a lone autocatalyst
Devaraj explained that other researchers had previously exploited the ability of lipids to self-assemble into bilayer vesicles with properties similar to those of cellular membranes, but that no one had previously managed to mimic their ability to support persistent phospholipid membrane formation. His team focused on mimicking the synthesis and growth of cell membranes.
“Earlier, we showed that one could use artificial reactions to create cell membranes. These reactions required a simple catalyst to enable membrane formation,” he told redOrbit. “This was interesting, however, as we created more and more membranes, the catalyst diluted out, and membrane production ceased. Living cells have highly sophisticated and intricate pathways to enable membrane reproduction, which entails creating new membranes and new catalysts.”
In their new paper, Devaraj and his colleagues explained that they used the autocatalyst as a substitute for the complex and natural network of biochemical pathways typically found in cellular membranes. By using this autocatalyst to drive membrane growth, they were able to create a system that constantly transforms simple, high-energy building blocks into new artificial cell membranes – a discovery that could prove to be an important new research tool.
“The benefit of mimicking living systems from a practical point,” he told redOrbit, “is that there are some remarkable properties of life that we would be extremely interested in incorporating into man-made materials. For instance, the idea that we could create novel materials that could self-repair, reproduce themselves, or adapt to new environments is highly appealing. This work can represent a small step in that direction.”
“One of the most interesting findings in this work is that we saw that our growing membranes were able to selectively incorporate different molecules from the environment, which altered the composition of the resulting membranes,” Devaraj added. “Furthermore, the incorporation changes in response to environmental stress, which means the membranes can spontaneously change their composition in response to an environmental stress. I think this is a fascinating behavior for such a simple system. It crudely resembles the ability of much more complex cells to alter membrane composition in response to the environment.”
Bass are well known for their swimming aptitude, but new research published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that the same muscles that help the fish travel under water also help it capture its prey.
In their new study, lead author Ariel Camp, who earned a Ph.D. at Brown University in Rhode Island this spring, and her colleagues found that the muscles in the head of a bass contribute virtually none of the power needed to double its mouth volume and produce the overwhelming suction force required to ingest their meals.
Instead, they found that the arrangement of bones in the fish’s mouth are actually driven by the pull of the body’s swimming muscles, which run along their backs and bellies and give them the speed required to catch up to their prey. A complex network allows the same muscles responsible for propulsion to transfer power to the head, doubling the mouth volume.
“In fish, the body muscles are generally synonymous with swimming muscles,” Dr. Camp told redOrbit via email. “But our discovery shows that is just half the story. These body muscles are both swimming and feeding muscles. This changes our understanding of how these muscles have evolved, and recasts the role of body muscles in the over 30,000 species of fishes.”
New imaging technology
According to the study authors, the notion that the body muscles might play some role in suction feeding was first discussed by researchers in the 1950s, but no one had ever previously attempted to test the hypothesis by conducting measurements of fish while they were actively feeding.
Furthermore, few if any researchers had ever considered that the swimming muscles played were this involved in providing power to the mouth muscles for the capture and consumption of prey. So what inspired Dr. Camp’s team to investigate this potential link?
“My colleagues and I were really interested in how fish produce the amazingly powerful motions of suction feeding. There was an idea that body muscles might be contributing some power to feeding, but no one had been able to make the measurements to test this,” she told redOrbit.
“With the new imaging technique of X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology (XROMM), we finally had the tools to put this idea to the test,” Dr. Camp continued. “We expected that the body muscles might generate some power for suction feeding, but we certainly weren’t expecting that they would be producing nearly all the power.”
She added that the findings “also provide insights beyond just fish and feeding, into how muscles function across animals. A small muscle can only produce a limited amount of power, so we might expect very powerful motions to require very large muscles. But just as human athletes learn to use muscles from their legs and trunks to throw or hit a ball, fish have evolved a mechanism to apply power from their large body muscles to move their mouths during feeding.”
Following several years of warmer, drier wintertime conditions in California, wildflowers native to the state are losing species diversity, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the new study, Susan Harrison, a professor in the University of California-Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy, and her colleagues analyzed 15 years of data on about 80 sampling plots at McLaughlin Reserve, a part of the school’s Natural Reserve System.
Their research revealed that the heat and lack of precipitation in the winter was creating a “direct loss of native wildflowers in some of California’s grasslands.” The study is said to provide “the first direct evidence of climate change impacts” in these regions, the authors added. Drought-intolerant species were said to be the most affected.
Large-scale extinctions, food web impact also possible
Harrison said that these diversity losses could foreshadow larger-scale extinctions, especially in parts of the state that are becoming increasingly dry. How serious is this threat? “All large-scale extinctions start as small-scale ones,” she told redOrbit via email. “We know of no reason why, if the current climate trends continue, there would not be large-scale extinctions.”
Furthermore, the researchers have identified similar trends in other Mediterranean environments, including those in southern Europe. They said that this strengthens the case for increased climate change awareness in semi-arid parts of the world, and that when combined with global warming predictions, it results in projections of less-productive grassland communities in the future.
As a result, these lands will provide less nutrition to herbivores and become more susceptible to invasive species. The adverse effects of these phenomena could have an overall impact on the food web, harming insects, seed-eating rodents, birds, cattle, and other species that rely upon California grasslands for their food.
“Our study points to the high risks faced by relatively drought-intolerant native annual forbs (wildflowers). Insects that pollinate or feed on these plants may be at risk too, although that is only speculative,” Harrison told redOrbit.
The professor added that she and her colleagues have “set up a watering experiment to see if we can bring back plant diversity” by alleviating the midwinter drought and/or by adding additional seeds to the affected areas. “We will also keep monitoring our long-term plots to see if the trends continue,” she noted. “We are fortunate to have a protected, university-operated natural reserve where this kind of work can be done.”
Detailed genetic analysis of an ancient European jawbone has found evidence that the person had a close Neanderthal ancestor, suggesting that modern humans started interbreeding with the now-extinct species shortly after their first arrived on the continent.
An international team of researchers, including scientists from Harvard Medical School and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, reported their discovery after intently studying a 40,000-year-old jawbone from Romania – a specimen believed to be one of the earliest remains of a modern human yet discovered in Europe.
DNA from this human mandible, which was found in Oase Cave in Romania, revealed that six to nine percent of the individual’s genome had come from Neanderthals, more than any previously discovered human sequenced to date. On average, the Neanderthals contributed just one to three percent to the genomes of present-day European peoples.
Since such large portions of the individual’s chromosomes were of Neanderthal origin, the study authors believe that a Neanderthal was among his ancestors as recently as four to six generations back. The Neanderthals and the first humans got busy very quickly.
Pretty recent ancestor
“The data from the jawbone implies that humans mixed with Neandertals not just in the Middle East but in Europe as well,” said Qiaomei Fu, one of the lead authors of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Medical School Department of Genetics.
Fu and her colleagues estimated that 5 to 11 percent of the genome preserved in the bone derives from a Neanderthal ancestor, including, as she told redOrbit via email, especially large segments of chromosomes 4, 5, 6, 9, and 12. By estimating how the lengths of DNA inherited from an ancestor become shorter with each passing generation, they were able to estimate that the man had a Neanderthal ancestor within the previous four to six generations.
She explained to redOrbit via email that since the individual received a “large amount” of their chromosomes from a Neanderthal ancestors, she and her colleagues could “clearly identify” the ancestry that of “a fourth, fifth, or sixth degree relative.” In other words, she added, “this recent Neanderthal admixture occurred less than 200 years before the time he lived.”
However, in the case of the Romanian fossil, the Fu and her colleagues found that the individual “belonged to a population that did not contribute much, or not at all, to later Europeans,” which suggests that he was “a member of an initial early modern human population that interbred with Neanderthals, but did not contribute much to later European populations.”
HRV, defined by the researchers as the variation in the time intervals between consecutive heart beats, can be indicative of how well people respond to physiological and environmental changes. Low resting heart rate variability had previously been linked to a variety of mental health issues including depression, anxiety, alcohol dependence, and male erectile dysfunction.
Heart rate variability is a sensitive and objective way to measure the autonomic nervous system, which is made up of both the part of the nervous system that governs the body’s fight-or-flight mechanisms (the sympathetic nervous system) and the part that governs breathing, heartbeat, and other involuntary actions (the parasympathetic nervous system).
Women with low HRV likely to have trouble becoming aroused
When the body is stable, the parasympathetic nervous system should have greater effect on heart rate, the authors said. However, moderate activation of the sympathetic nervous system has been demonstrated to increase female genital arousal, leading the researchers to further investigate this link in 72 women between the ages of 18 and 39.
As lead author and UT Austin graduate researcher Amelia Stanton explained in a statement, “Because HRV has been related to many negative mental health and cardiac problems, it’s interesting to bring an established clinical marker into sex research. It allows us to look at the issue of sexual dysfunction in women in a different way.”
Stanton and her colleagues used the Female Sexual Function Index, which evaluates factors such as pain, satisfaction, and desire, using self-reported information from the study participants. They also analyzed the heart rates of the participants, and found that those with below average HRV were more likely to experience sexual dysfunction and have trouble becoming aroused.
The research team believes that heart rate could be used index of drug-related changes in sexual function. HRV is a potential risk factor for sexual dysfunction. “Physicians have a simple, low-cost and nonintrusive method to measure a woman’s risk for sexual dysfunction. It makes it easier to talk about something a little bit more private and get women the help that they need,” Stanton said.
Why do we dream what we dream, and what do dreams tell us about our psychological well-being? We have all heard the pseudo-science and guesswork, but redOrbit spoke to a leading expert from the University of Montreal, Dr. Antonio Zadra, to find out the truth.
“First off, there are very rarely universal meaning to objects in our dreams, and what dreams mean to individuals varies greatly from one person to another,” Dr. Zadra began by qualifying. “So what our brain tries to pick out to represent things for us depends on our waking experiences.”
“That being said,” he continued, “there are certainly a range of themes that are common in people and have been recorded almost since the dawn of time, and they must have special significance, since we have them so often.”
Let’s take a look at some of the classics.
Being chased, falling, being trapped
“Being chased, falling, and being lost or trapped all fall into the same category, and that is people being conflicted about certain waking emotions,” Dr. Zadra said. “But more specifically they are related to our social network and personal relationships.”
“Being lost or trapped is related to unsatisfying relationships or ones which we cannot escape from.”
Teeth falling out
“Teeth falling out is one of the most prevalent recurrent dreams and one of the most common dream themes, too,” said Dr. Zadra. (Common dreams are dreams which many people experience at some time in their lives, reoccurringdreams are ones that people have repeatedly).
“There are two schools of thought. One is that the dream results from physical sensations in our mouth, for example if we go to bed without brushing our teeth. Some people also grind their teeth during the night.”
“Psychologically, there are a number of theories for teeth falling out dreams. One is lacking confidence or feeling we are unattractive to others – we’re newly single or we recently met someone we are attracted to. It may also be related to aging. Losing one’s teeth is a great metaphor for these things.”
“However,” he added, “this may also be related to feeling we are unable to defend ourselves or to express our anger towards someone; we literally don’t have the ‘bite’ to protect or express ourselves.”
Natural disasters
“With earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, things of that nature, people might be overwhelmed by these or want to save the day,” Dr. Zadra suggested.
“These kinds of images are a good metaphor for a great range of things. With an earthquake, everything crumbling around us, it could be a relationship, or something that we worked very hard to create, such as a business.”
“We may feel overwhelmed and over-powered, in business, in relationships, in studies. They don’t tie in to very specific events, but what all of these events have in common is a feeling of being helpless and vulnerable with respect to what we are living.”
Nakedness
“Being naked in a social environment or being inappropriately dressed means we feel exposed or fear being ridiculed during wakefulness,” Dr. Zadra said.
The examination dream
The examination dream is the one you’ve probably had, where you get to school only to realize you actually have a huge exam that day an you know nothing on the test. This dream “almost always comes with a need to pass or face dire consequences,” Dr. Zadra explained.
There’s also the imposter syndrome where people who have done all the requisite training arrive for a job and still feel they are an imposter. Both of these themes are related to lacking confidence in our ability to perform certain tasks, or do well in our professional lives. However, these fears are often unfounded and apply to people are perfectly good at their job.
Animals
Dr. Zadra believes that finding certain animals in your dreams is not necessarily related to any one emotion, but rather it depends on the context for the dreamer. For example, “dreaming about penguins is different for someone who works at a zoo, a child with penguin on their bedcover, or someone who saw a documentary about penguins on TV,” he said.
“The same with snakes, insects, vermin – it often depends on the context. What matters most is not the mere presence of these things but the actual role they play. Are they scaring us or helping us? Where are we and who else is with us? We need to think about the broader context.”
“Animals are not that common, but are more so in kids’ dreams,” he added.
In a follow-up article, we’ll find out about happier, positive recurrent dreams, and how dream themes vary greatly between men and women. Click here to read.
Drawing inspiration by the way that owls can fly and hunt in silence, experts from Cambridge University in the UK, along with colleagues from the US, have come up with a prototype coating they claim can significantly reduce the noise produced by wind turbine blades.
Based on the results of early tests involving the material, which will be presented Monday at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Aeroacoustics Conference in Dallas, Texas, it could make wind turbines and other types of fans blades quieter, removing the need for brakes to minimize noise production. This would make it possible for turbines to operate at much higher speeds, allowing wind farms to produce more energy without noise pollution.
“It’s been known for a long time that owls fly much more silently than would be expected, and it’s also been known for a while that their feathers have an unusual structure,” lead investigator Professor Nigel Peake from the Cambridge Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, explained to redOrbit via email.
“The possibility of a connection was first suggested by a very well-known acoustics engineer called Professor Geoff Lilley from Southampton UK,” he added. “But our key step forward was the realization that the feather structures were acting like a canopy to shield the wing from the turbulent flow – the interaction of the turbulence with the wing produces a lot of noise. Our coating is designed to mimic this shielding effect.”
No significant adverse affect on aerodynamics
Peake, along with colleagues from Virginia Tech, Lehigh, and Florida Atlantic Universities, used high resolution microscopy to examine owl feathers in fine detail. They discovered that the flight feathers found on an owl’s wing have a downy covering which resembles the canopy of a forest when viewed from above.
Furthermore, they also found that owl wings possess a unique, flexible comb of evenly-spaced bristles along their leading edge, and a porous and elastic fringe on the trailing edge. Peake said that no other type of bird has a wing structure quite this intricate, and that the structure reduces noise by smoothing the passage of air as it passes over the wing and scattering the sound.
The researchers set out to replicate this structure by designing a coating capable of scattering the sound generated by turbine blades. They originally used a material similar to a wedding veil, and while that worked well, it was not suitable to be applied to turbines or planes. Next, they tried a prototype material made from 3D-printed plastic, then tested it on a full-sized segment of a wind turbine blade.
Wind tunnel tests determined that the coating could reduce the noise levels generated by a wind turbine blade by 10 decibels, with no significant impact on its aerodynamic performance. While the substance could be used to treat a wide variety of different airplane wings and blades as well as wind turbines, there is still work to do before this becomes a reality.
“We’re doing more experiments to optimize the height and spacing of the fins, and also their orientation, to see what happens if the flow is not aligned perfectly with the wing chord,” Peake told redOrbit. “The really good news is that the device does not seem to adversely affect the aerodynamics too much – if it had produced a lot of extra drag for instance then it might not be very useful in practice.”
A four-day, low-calorie diet that mimics fasting has been found to improve metabolism and cognitive function, decrease bone loss and cancer incidence, and extend longevity in mice, the authors of a research published Thursday in the journal Cell Metabolism reported.
In the new study, University of Southern California biogerontology professor Dr. Valter Longo and his colleagues showed that cycles of this four-day diet cut visceral belly fat and elevated the number of progenitor and stem cells in several organs of old mice – including the brain, where it increased neural regeneration and improved learning and memory.
The mouse studies were part of a three-tiered study on the effects of periodic fasting which also involved yeast and humans, the researchers explained in a statement, and a pilot study involving people found evidence that the findings were also applicable to men and women.
Three-tiered study shows fasting diet benefits in mice
Studying yeast allowed Longo and his colleagues to discover the biological mechanism triggered by fasting at a cellular level, they explained, while the relatively short life spans of the rodents let the study authors observe the lifelong effects that this type of fasting had on the creatures.
During their research, they found that bimonthly cycles including four days of fasting-mimicking calorie restriction (for a total of eight days per month) beginning at middle age extended the lifespan of the creatures while also reducing cancer incidence, improving their immune systems, and reducing inflammatory diseases.
It also slowed bone mineral density loss and improved cognitive function in older mice the research team said. The total monthly calorie intake was the same for both the fasting-mimicking group and the control diet group, they added, indicating that the benefits were not the result of an overall reduction of caloric consumption.
Diet submitted to FDA for approval after pilot trial success
In the pilot human trial, 19 subjects were given three cycles of a similar diet once per month for the given days. In those individuals, the fasting-mimicking diet was found to reduce the biomarkers and risk factors for aging, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer with no major significant negative side effects.
“Strict fasting is hard for people to stick to, and it can also be dangerous, so we developed a complex diet that triggers the same effects in the body,” said Longo, who is also the director of the USC Longevity Institute. “I’ve personally tried both, and the fasting-mimicking diet is a lot easier and also a lot safer.”
This diet also decreased a person’s caloric intake down to 34 to 54 percent normal levels while making sure that they consumed specific amounts of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and nutrients. It also decreased amounts of IGF-I, a hormone linked to aging and cancer susceptibility, while reducing risk factors linked to diabetes and heart disease without having a negative impact on a person’s muscle or bone mass.
In a separate statement, Longo said that this was “arguably the first non-chronic pre-clinically and clinically tested anti-aging and healthspan-promoting intervention shown to work and to be very feasible as a doctor or dietitian-supervised intervention.” He added that his team planned to submit the concept of the fasting-mimicking diet to the FDA for approval, which would require additional expanded tests followed by a trial involving 500-1,000 patients.
A top Russian official is calling for an international investigation into NASA’s Apollo lunar missions, arguing that the disappearance of the original footage of the moon landing and some 400 kilograms of lunar rocks is suspicious and worthy of an in-depth investigation.
According to UPI and Gizmodo, Russian Investigative Commission spokesman Vladimir Markin called for the investigation in a column for the Russian-language Izvestia newspaper, in which he also said that the US had declared itself “supreme arbiters of international football” in relation to the ongoing FIFA scandal and challenged the validity of several things American.
Markin listed the moon landings alongside the 1994 USA World Cup and even war crimes in Eastern Ukraine as things that the international community should investigate, apparently in retaliation for the US-led investigation into FIFA.
Loss of video footage, moon rocks cited
“We are not contending that they did not fly [to the moon], and simply made a film about it,” he reportedly wrote in the column. “But all of these scientific – or perhaps cultural – artifacts are part of the legacy of humanity, and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. An investigation will reveal what happened.”
For the record, NASA admitted back in 2009 that they erased the original recordings of the moon landings (along with 200,000 other tapes) in an effort to save space, but as Moscow Times noted, the US space agency said that they were able to remaster the original television broadcast of the original moon landing, which took place as part of July 1969’s Apollo 11 mission.
According to the Daily Mail, NASA video engineer Dick Nafzger said at that time that “the inescapable conclusion is that the recordings are no longer. I don’t think anyone in the NASA organization did anything wrong. It slipped through the cracks, and nobody’s happy about it.”
As for the estimated 380 kilograms of lunar rock reportedly retrieved by American astronauts during manned missions to the moon, the majority of it is believed to be stored at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Texas, though samples can often be seen on display at various different museums all over the world, according to various published reports.
In a breakthrough that could bring us one step closer to nanorobotics drug delivery, experts at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and ETH Zurich have developed machines that can easily travel through body fluids.
These nanoswimmers, which are described in a paper published in a recent edition of the journal Nano Letters, are capable of ferrying drugs through the bloodstream and delivering them to specific parts of the body affected by a disease, the authors explained in a statement.
Such robots, they added, could be programmed to target and eliminate cancer cells, lowering the complications associated with typical cancer treatments while also reducing the need for invasive surgeries and resulting in a faster recovery for the patient. However, experts have struggled with designing robots that can easily move through relatively thick, molasses-like body fluids.
Nanobots require no motor, can carry larger drugs
In their study, authors Bradley J. Nelson, Salvador Pané, Yizhar Or, and their colleagues set out to tackle this problem. They put together three links in a chain approximately the same length of the width of a silk fiber – one of which was a polymer, while the others were magnetic, metallic nanowires. They then applied an oscillating magnetic field.
Once this magnetic field was applied, their nanoswimmer moved in an S-like, undulating motion and travelled at speeds of nearly one body length per second. Furthermore, the researchers noted that this magnetic field also can direct the swimmers to reach targets for drug delivery.
“This work demonstrates for the first time planar undulations of composite multilink nanowire-based chains (diameter 200 nm) induced by a planar-oscillating magnetic field,” the authors said in their study, adding that the “multilink design exhibits a high swimming efficiency” and that the “manufacturing process enables tuning the geometrical and material properties to specific applications.”
According to Engadget, their innovation eliminates the need for a motor in the nanobots, which frees up more space for carrying medication. Furthermore, this also makes it fairly easy to build and tweak the machines for use in several different applications, the website added. However, clinical trials are said to still be a long way off.
Although the silver ants that call the Sahara desert home typically leave their underground nests for no more than 20 minutes per day, surface temperatures reach upwards of a blistering 150 degrees Fahrenheit. How do they handle such scorching conditions?
As a new study published Thursday in the journal Science explained, Cataglyphis bombycina, also known as the Sarahan silver ants, survive thanks to an unusual coating of highly-reflective triangularly-shaped hairs that covers their bodies and helps keep them cool, according to a New York Times report.
This coating, study’s authors explain, gives the ants their silvery appearance while also providing them with thermoregulatory benefits. The coating enhances the reflectivity of the ants’ body surface in both visible and near-infrared light, and it allows them to dissipate heat back into their surroundings through blackbody radiation in full daylight conditions.
Coating could inspire new heat-resistant materials
Nanfang Yu, a physicist at Columbia University and one of the study’s authors, told the paper that the hairs were critical to ant’s survival, explaining that the creatures go out during the hottest part of the day because that is when they can find the most dead insects.
He also told New Scientist that it was the unique, metallic appearance of the silver ant that first caught his attention, noting that they reminded him of “a droplet of mercury” as they traveled across the desert sands. However, Yu added that the research revealed that their adaptation may help to inspire the development of new heat-resistant surfaces or materials.
While several different types of creatures have developed ways to interact with light, the silver ant is somewhat unusual in the fact that it has adapted protective coatings effective in more than one wavelength of light, Aaswath Raman from Stanford University told the website.
“The combination of doing something in the visible and the mid-infrared is very unusual,” said Raman, who develops materials that reflect sunlight and re-emit heat similar to silver ants. “It’s kind of remarkable and pretty cool – no pun intended – that there’s an analogue in nature to the way we’re thinking about these problems.”
Already known to be similar to Earth, researchers from University College London reported Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons, is even more like our home planet than previously believed.
According to Space.com, previous research has shown that Earth and Titan are the only objects in the solar system that have rainfall, rivers, and oceans. Furthermore, both objects possess rocky ground, plate tectonics, and a thick atmosphere. These new studies show that the two celestial bodies also both have polar winds.
As the authors explained in their study, Titan’s polar winds are pulling gas from the atmosphere, and seven years worth of data collected by the Cassini probe found interactions between the moon’s atmosphere, the solar magnetic field, and solar radiation. These interactions create a wind of hydrocarbons and nitriles that is blown away from the polar regions into space.
Polar wind and atmospheric loss
Evidence of these winds were captured by Cassini’s Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS) as the probe made a series of nearly two-dozen flybys around Titan, the researchers explained in a statement. The new observations help explain data collected by the probe several years ago which revealed the moon was losing approximately seven metric tons of particulate matter each day.
Hydrocarbons are a type of molecules that includes methane, and nitriles are molecules with nitrogen and carbon bound tightly together, the study authors said. In the new study, the team found that the atmospheric loss of these particles is driven by polar winds powered by sunlight, the solar magnetic field, and particles in the moon’s upper atmosphere.
Lead investigator Andrew Coates from the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory and his co-authors explained that Titan’s atmosphere is comprised primarily of nitrogen and methane, with 50 percent higher pressure at its surface than on Earth.
“Although Titan is ten times further from the Sun than Earth is, its upper atmosphere is still bathed in light,” Coates said. “When the light hits molecules in Titan’s ionosphere, it ejects negatively charged electrons out of the hydrocarbon and nitrile molecules, leaving a positively charged particle behind. These electrons can be traced by the CAPS instrument, and easily distinguished from other electrons, as they propagate through the surrounding magnetic field.”
An experimental vaccine capable of stimulating the immune system so that it can block an HIV infection has been shown to be effective in mice, and human trials may not be all that far off, a team of researchers from Harvard, MIT, and The Scripps Research Institute report.
Studies published Thursday in the journals Cell and Science show that the new vaccine demonstrates a protein similar to HIV (an immunogen known as eOD-GT8 60mer that was designed to bind and activate the B cells needed to fight HIV) was able to produce antibodies in mouse models that are similar to those of humans.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the new studies describe a multi-pronged approach to a vaccine against the AIDS-causing virus, with each prong representing one part of the process. The next step is combining these approaches into a single vaccine suitable for humans. The researchers said that testing may begin in about two years.
Next step: human trials
In one of the newly published studies, the researchers found that they could activate the antibody system using the engineered eOD-GT8 60mer molecule, which mimics a vulnerable region of the virus and produces early versions of broadly-neutralizing antibodies, the newspaper explained.
This will allow the immune system to be exposed to substances that mimic some aspects of HIV, allowing them to produce mature versions of helpful antibodies. The Cell study demonstrated how a different type of engineered molecule could complete the final stage of this maturation process, while a third paper showed how this molecule functioned in rabbit vaccinations.
The next step, the researchers explained in a statement, will be to investigate how other types of immunogens could work alongside eOD-GT8 60mer. The mouse models developed during this research will be essential for testing other engineered proteins, for designing antibodies as well as for analyzing the results of their research, they added.
TSRI Professor David Nemazee told the Union-Tribune that the vaccine “works much better than we expected.” Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, added that the results were “encouraging” and that the next step was “to see if we can duplicate that in a very gradual, safe, gingerly way in humans in a Phase 1 trial.”
Women everywhere are concerned: A recent Vice article revealed that a young women lost a leg as a result of toxic shock syndrome (TSS) caused by tampon use .
In 2012, Lauren Wasser, a then 24-year-old Los Angeles based model, almost lost her life because of the condition, and she did lose her leg. She has since taken legal action against Kotex, the brand of tampon she was using at the time.
But what is the likelihood of somebody suffering a similar problem?
First, it is important to note that this is not a new phenomenon and not related to a fault with any one brand of tampon. The risk of this happening is also very small, so there’s no reason to worry.
The link between tampons and TSS
The UK’s public health service, the NHS, explains that: “Toxic shock syndrome is a rare but life-threatening bacterial infection caused by the Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria. These bacteria normally live harmlessly on the skin, nose, or mouth but they can invade the body’s bloodstream and release poisonous toxins.”
It isn’t entirely clear how tampons allow these bacteria to enter the bloodstream. However, WebMD suggests that: “A tampon saturated with blood is a supportive place for rapid growth of bacteria. It also seems to matter what the tampon is made of. Polyester foam provides a better environment for the growth of bacteria than either cotton or rayon fibers.”
WebMD also points out that where feminine health products are the cause, the device has usually been left inside the vagina for more than 30 hours. It is also possible that small pieces of sponge remain inside after use. Tearing in the walls of the vagina is another culprit, and this is made more probable if the vagina is dried out after extended tampon usage.
No need to avoid tampons
Around 20 percent of people have staphylococcus aureus (staph) bacteria living harmlessly on their body, and there is no need to be tested for it, writes New York Magazine. In 2014, there were only 59 staph-related TSS cases reported in the United States, around half of which were thought to be related to menstruation.
Dr. Mary Jane Minkin, a clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the Yale School of Medicine, told the magazine that: “For people to say, ‘Never again!’ Well, ‘Okay, don’t drive your car because you might get killed. Or don’t fly on an airplane because you might get killed.’ As long as you change your tampon regularly, it shouldn’t be much of an issue.” She advises using a low absorbency tampon.
Finally, to clarify, Vice states that: “It’s transparency, not necessarily zero-tampon-usage, that Lauren and her lawyers (are seeking). Tampons are convenient, and when it comes to stopping up menstrual flow, they make sense.”
The question of cytokine protein and fibromyalgia syndrome
Written By: Fibromyalgia Treating
Recent advances in the understanding of fibromyalgia have been made possible by results from studies looking at cytokine protein and fibromyalgia syndrome. While there hasn’t been a conclusive determination, research has detected a definite connection between the levels of cytokine protein in the blood, and fibromyalgia. This can open whole new doors for treatment and relief of symptoms. It may even be the key to preventing future flare ups too.
What are the symptoms of fibromyalgia?
There is no short list of symptoms for fibromyalgia, it is described as a cluster. The most prevalent are pervasive body, joint and muscle pain, pain in response to pressure, sleep disturbance, mood changes, depression, loss of balance, lack of coordination, muscle stiffness, fatigue and brain fog.
It can also appear disguised as other disorders and diseases too. Cervical stenosis, IBS, endometriosis all have been related to fibromyalgia. It is uncertain which is the cause of what, but it now recognized that the presence of any increases the risk for all.
Why do people get fibromyalgia?
The same way that there is no defined list of symptoms, but a cluster for diagnosing fibromyalgia – there is also a broad range of risk factors that may indicate someone will develop the disease. While it is mostly diagnosed in women over the age of 18, men are also diagnosed with it as are some children. It is suspected that there is a gene for it, as having someone in your family with fibro increases your risk factor.
It is also found to be related to traumatic brain injuries and immune system disorders. Having a major illness or being in a car accident can raise your risk just as high as someone whose mother had the illness too. One curious thing is that the onset of menopause seems to result in a reduction of severity of symptoms for many – this implies a hormonal component to the disease which would explain why men and some children also have it.
What are cytokine proteins?
The simple way to understand the importance of cytokine protein and fibromyalgia syndrome is that the cytokine protein is what the immune system needs to move and be effective – in fibromyalgia, the immune system is impaired. Low levels of cytokine protein are often detected in those suspected of having fibromyalgia. The thinking behind the diagnoses criteria for fibromyalgia is becoming much for targeted and advanced.
The more science can identify the specific measurable elements of fibromyalgia the more people will benefit. Not only will diagnosis be an easier and faster process; but measurable methods also help to dispel the myth that fibromyalgia is “all in your head.”
Between the cytokine protein levels and the latest findings that fibromyalgia creates a detectable change in the brain that can be scanned – more people will get the help they need sooner, and not have to suffer from anyone thinking they are making up their suffering for attention.
How are the levels of cytokine protein measured?
The cytokine protein levels are measured using a blood test called ELISA. This is a profile that stands for enzyme-linked immune-sorbent assay. It is looking specifically at a range of enzyme and protein levels in the blood that are linked to a variety of immune disorders, and the normal aging process. What your doctor is looking for is whether or not your cytokine protein levels are too low, or too high.
Does low cytokine cause fibromyalgia?
A lot of people have misunderstood the research and relationship between cytokine protein and fibromyalgia syndrome to mean that a low level is an indicator of fibromyalgia. This has led much investment in supplements to boost the proteins – but that may not be what you really want to do. Two different research studies have identified a relationship between having a very low cytokine level, and a very high one – as being related to fibromyalgia.
In other words, as cytokine protein is essential to the proper functioning of your immune system, when a disease such as fibromyalgia is present it can cause this protein to either deplete, or become excessive. Both are indicators that the immune system is impaired.
Should I try to boost my cytokine protein levels?
There is no known alternative treatment or supplement that can raise or lower your cytokine protein levels. There are three approved drugs that are known to effect cytokine production. If your levels are too low or too high, you and your doctor should discuss the variety of medications available that are typically used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Rheumatoid arthritis differs from osteoarthritis as it is an immune disorder, not a bone or joint disease.
Looking at fibromyalgia holistically
The most important thing to remember is that if you have fibromyalgia syndrome that you must view it holistically. It is considered a chronic disease, but not a degenerative one or a terminal illness. This means that the best approach is to use all the resources available to you to get relief from your symptoms and to control your flare-ups.
Balancing a traditional and alternative approach to treatment
Choosing to create a balance between traditional Western medicine and alternative treatments has given many people relief from their symptoms. Acupuncture and massage are both known to be very successful. The proper use of pain and anti-inflammatory medications can also help you. Both worlds are also going to recommend that you adopt lifestyle changes that are known to decrease flareups and ease symptoms too. These changes include diet and exercise routines, as well as being proactive about reducing and managing stress.
Making sure your have the right tests done
You and your doctor no longer have to guess if you have fibromyalgia or not. If you are reporting enough of the symptoms in the cluster, your doctor may order tests. The relationship between cytokine protein and fibromyalgia syndrome is not fully understood, but it is recognized. The more you know for sure, the better you will be able to identify treatments that will work for you.
Researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia have discovered fossils of an unusual new species of bat that lived in New Zealand 16 million years ago. It walked using four limbs and was three times larger than the average modern bat.
The new species, which was described Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, has been dubbed Mystacina miocenalis and is related to another type of bat (Mystacina tuberculata) that can still be found living in the old growth forests of New Zealand today.
The fossils were unearthed in sediment left over from a prehistoric body of water called Lake Manuherikia near Central Otago on South Island. It’s the first time this type of bat has been found in the region for roughly 16 million years, according to lead author Suzanne Hand, a vertebrate paleontologist and associate professor at UNSW.
Ancient bat was larger, heavier than modern counterparts
The new species is said to have teeth similar to its modern-day cousins, suggesting that it ate a broad diet including pollen, fruit, nectar, insects, and spiders. However, the newfound species is about three times larger than its contemporary relative, weighing an estimated 40 grams.
The fossils recovered at the site also included limb bones that showed structures similar to those used for walking. That discovery, combined with the unusually large size of the creature, suggests that it did less in-flight hunting than modern bats. Instead, this bat likely took heavier prey from the ground and larger fruit than its living relatives.
The only terrestrial mammals native to New Zealand are three species of bats, including two that are members of the Mystacina genus. These creatures are also known as burrowing bats since they forage both on the ground and under leaf-litter and snow, scuttling on their wrists and backward-facing feet while keeping their wings tightly furled.
While experts have long believed that these bats had an ancient history in New Zealand, before the discovery of these new fossils, no remains older than 17,500 years ago had ever been found previously. This new discovery “helps us understand the capacity of bats to establish populations on islands and the climatic conditions required for this to happen,” Hand added.
While the temperature of the Sun’s atmosphere can reach highs of more than one million degrees Celsius, its surface temperature is only about 6,000 degrees Celsius. Now a team of French astrophysicists has explained the mechanisms for this unusual phenomenon.
In research published last week in the journal Nature, Dr. Tahar Amari, the Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and his colleagues simulated part of the evolution of the sun’s interior and exterior and discovered a layer beneath the surface of the Sun that provides sufficient energy to heat up the solar atmosphere.
This layer acts like a pan of boiling water and is believed to help generate a small-scale magnetic field that serves as an energy reserve. Once this field emerges from the star, it heats successive layers of the solar atmosphere through a series of branches and roots, contributing to the generation of the solar wind that fills the heliosphere.
At the sun’s core, temperatures can reach temperatures of about 15 million degrees Celsius, but it grows cooler further away from the center, falling to just 6,000 degrees at its surface. While it would seem logical that the temperatures would continue to decline in the atmosphere, surprisingly they increase to about 10,000 degrees in the chromosphere.
In-depth look at the mechanisms behind this phenomenon
By the time you reach the corona, those temperatures spike to more than one million degrees Celsius. To determine what type of energy source can heat the atmosphere to such consistently high temperatures, Dr. Amari and his colleagues created a model of the Sun’s heating in which magnetic fields were generated by a subphotospheric fluid dynamo linked to granulation.
“We find that the fields expand into the chromosphere, where plasma is heated at the rate required to match observations (4,500 watts per square meter) by small-scale eruptions that release magnetic energy and drive sonic motions,” they wrote. “Some energetic eruptions can even reach heights of 10 million meters above the surface of the Sun, thereby affecting the very low corona.”
Their simulations latest for several hours and were based on a model of the Sun in which there were multiple layers, including one in the Sun and several others in the atmosphere. They found that the thin layer beneath the surface acts like a boiling plasma soup that is heated from below, amplifying and maintaining the magnetic field largely responsible for this phenomenon.
Their calculations revealed that the atmospheric heating that begins in the chromosphere is the result of a series of micro-eruptions in a structure resembling the roots of a mangrove forest and carries intense electrical current along with bubbles emitted from the boiling plasma. This process generates magnetic waves that transport energy to the upper corona, where they are heated as a result of progressive dissipation, the researchers noted.
The world is about to experience its sixth mass extinction event, and the very future of humanity could be at stake, a group of scientists claim in a new study. The group was led by Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies in biology at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment claim in a new study.
Ehrlich and his colleagues, who published their findings in the journal Science Advances, said that quick action is needed in order to save threatened species and habitats, but caution that the window to make the changes needed to prevent another mass extinction is closing.
In a statement, Ehrlich said that his team’s study shows “without any significant doubt” that the world is currently entering the sixth great mass extinction and that even by the most conservative of estimates, species are vanishing at a rate of nearly 100 times that typically observed between mass extinction events (a statistic known as the background rate).
Humans accused of precipitating a global biodiversity crisis
The researchers used fossil records and extinction counts from a vast array of different records, and compared what they refer to as a highly conservative estimate of current extinctions with a background rate estimate twice that used in most previous analyses. By doing so, they were able to bring the two different estimates as close to one another as possible.
By focusing on vertebrates, the type of creatures for which the most reliable modern and fossil data exists, they determined that even the lowest estimates of the difference between background extinction rates and their contemporary counterparts justified the conclusion that the human race is precipitating what the authors refer to as “a global spasm of biodiversity loss.”
The increasing human population has led to an increase in consumption and economic inequity, as well as the drastic changing or out-and-out destruction of natural habitats. In fact, people have had a tremendous impact on the environment, including the clearing of land for farming and settlements, the introduction of invasive species, and the carbon emissions that have driven climate change and ocean acidification in recent years.
How concerned should we be?
“Extremely concerned,” the professor told redOrbit via email, adding that in order to prevent a possible mass extinction, we should “give women full rights and opportunities” and make sure that “every sexually active person has access to modern contraception and back-up abortion to hopefully set human population size on a slow trajectory of shrinkage.”
In addition, Ehrlich said that people need to do everything in their power to “transition away from burning fossil fuels, curb unnecessary consumption – especially among the rich – which stresses resource supplies,” and “develop and implement more efficient ways of using water.”
He told redOrbit that large creatures with relatively small population size faced the greatest risk of extinction as things stand now, but added that the threat was “severe across almost all groups of animals and plants” – and yes, that includes humans. But the authors write that a true sixth mass extinction can still be avoided through “rapid, greatly intensified efforts to conserve already threatened species, and to alleviate pressures on their populations” (such as climate change).
Thanks to the infrared vision of the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers from Yale University and Middlebury College in Vermont have shed new light on the formation of quasars, some of the brightest objects in the known universe.
Quasars, also known as quasi-stellar radio sources, are the most distant objects yet detected in the universe and can be up to a trillion times brighter than the Sun. They also emit a tremendous amount of energy, which scientists believe is produced by massive black holes in the centers of the galaxies where they are located. However, their origins have long remained a mystery.
Now, Eilat Glikman of Middlebury College and her colleagues report in the latest edition of The Astrophysical Journal that quasars are actually born when galaxies crash into each other, fueling supermassive black holes and causing the host galaxies to undergo a radical transformation.
“The Hubble images confirm that the most luminous quasars in the universe result from violent mergers between galaxies, which fuels black hole growth and transforms the host galaxies,” said C. Megan Urry, the Israel Munson Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Yale University, and co-author of the study. “These mergers are also the sites of future black hole mergers, which we hope will one day be visible with gravitational wave telescopes.”
Quasars during awkward teenage years
Over the past 20 years, experts have determined that supermassive black holes inside the cores of distant galaxies are the source of the energy for quasars, but that does not explain how or where the black holes actually get their fuel. The new research uses Hubble’s sensitivity at near-infrared wavelengths to confirm a previous theory that the energy comes from a galactic merger.
“The Hubble observations are telling us that the peak of quasar activity in the early universe is driven by galaxies colliding and then merging together,” explained Glikman, lead author of the study. “We are seeing the quasars in their teenage years, when they are growing quickly and all messed up.”
Using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, Glikman and her colleagues looked for “dust reddened quasars” in several ground-based infrared and radio sky surveys. They found 11 of these quasars that are enveloped in dust and as a result give off lower levels of visible light.
Glikman said that the new images were “both beautiful and descriptive” and “capture the dust-clearing transitional phase of the merger-driven black hole scenario.”
No, we’re not talking about a tortilla chip, and placenta nachos are definitely not Taco Bell’s newest creation.
Researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have taken “organ-on-a-chip” research into the realm of reproduction, developing a lab-grown placenta model that can be used to study the fetomaternal tissue structure and the role that it plays in pregnancy.
Writing in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine, the NIH scientists and a team of interdisciplinary experts from the US and South Korea explained that their “placenta-on-a-chip” device was designed to imitate the structure and function and an actual placenta on a small scale. It was also designed to model the process through which nutrients are transferred from mother to fetus.
Like other organ-on-a-chip technologies, this prototype mock-placenta is designed to accelerate biomedical advances. Using this device could help experts address questions that cannot be answered using current placenta model systems, and enable the researchers to gain new insight on pregnancy and its potential complications.
The placenta, as most people know, is a temporary organ developed during pregnancy that acts as the primary interface between mother and fetus, the NIH explained. Not only does it control the flow of nutrients and oxygen to the fetus, it helps move waste products away and attempts to prevent bacteria, viruses, and other harmful agents from reaching the unborn child.
Understanding how the placenta performs its functions
Scientists are attempting to find out just how the placenta manages to control all of this traffic, allowing some substances to make their way to the fetus while blocking others to maintain the health of both the child and its mother. The information they gain using this model could help doctors and hospitals better gauge placental health and improve pregnancy outcomes.
Studying an actual human placenta is difficult, time-consuming, and could put the fetus at risk. Most research on placental transport have relied primarily on animal models and lab-grown human cells, and while these techniques have proven helpful, there are limits to how well they can simulate actual human physiological processes.
This new placenta-on-a-chip technology helps address those shortcomings by using human cells in a structure closer in nature to the placenta’s actual maternal-fetal barrier. It features two small chambers, one filled with maternal cells derived from a delivered placenta, and one with fetal cells derived from an umbilical cord, separated by semi-permeable membrane.
Once the structure of the placenta-on-a-chip was completed, the study authors tested its function by evaluating the transfer of glucose from the maternal compartment to the fetal one. They were successful in duplicating the process that happens naturally, and they believe that the device may allow them to conduct more efficient, less costly experiments in the future.
Food and respiratory irritants trapped in the dental tartar of 400,000 year old teeth discovered in Israel represent the earliest known direct evidence of inhaled environmental pollution, according researchers from American Friends of Tel Aviv University (AFTAU) and their colleagues report in a new study.
The irritants were discovered in the dental calculus of teeth discovered at the Qesem Cave site near Tel Aviv, and included traces of charcoal believed to have been the result of inhaled smoke originating from indoor fires used by late Lower Paleolithic period people to roast meat.
The research team, which also includes scholars from the UK, Spain and Australia, believe that this is the earliest direct evidence of manmade environmental pollution and may have adversely affected the health of these early humans. They also believe that the findings provide evidence of what early Palaeolithic people ate and the air quality of their Qesem Cave home.
Charcoal originated from the fires of indoor barbecues
“Human teeth of this age have never been studied before for dental calculus, and we had very low expectations because of the age of the plaque,” explained Professor Avi Gopher from the AFTAU Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations.
“However,” he added, “our international collaborators, using a combination of methods, found many materials entrapped within the calculus. Because the cave was sealed for 200,000 years, everything, including the teeth and its calculus, were preserved exceedingly well.”
The researchers reported three major discoveries in the analyzed calculus – charcoal produced by indoor fires, evidence of the ingestion of plant-based dietary components, and fibers which could have been used to clean teeth (or which alternately were the remnants of raw materials).
“This is the first evidence that the world’s first indoor BBQs had health-related consequences,” said AFTAU Professor Ran Barkai. “The people who lived in Qesem not only enjoyed the benefits of fire – roasting their meat indoors – but they also had to find a way of controlling the fire – of living with it.”
“This is one of the first, if not the first, cases of manmade pollution on the planet,” he added. “Our findings are rare – there is no other similar discovery from this time period. The charcoal and starch findings give us a more comprehensive idea of how these people lived their lives – and this broader view came directly from their teeth.”
For the first time, researchers have identified an internal sensor of the Earth’s magnetic field in an animal, finding evidence of a TV antenna-like structure located in the brain of a tiny species of worm, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal eLife.
The structure was discovered at the tip of the AFD neuron in the worm C. elegans, scientists and engineers from the University of Texas at Austin explained in a statement. It could shed new light on the mystery about how the internal compasses of animals actually function.
The worms use this sensor to navigate underground, and according to research team member and assistant neuroscience professor Jon Pierce-Shimomura, the odds are that the same molecules are used by other creatures, including birds and butterflies, to find their way around. Their discovery “gives us a first foothold in understanding magnetosensation in other animals,” he added.
Findings could be used to protect crops from harmful pests
When hungry worms are placed in gelatin-filled tubes, they usually tend to move down, which the authors believe is a strategy the creatures use to hunt for food. However, when they brought in worms from other parts of the world, they found that they moved at a precise angle relative to how the magnetic field would have corresponded to down if they were home.
For example, worms imported from Australia moved upwards in the tubes. The orientation of the planet’s magnetic field varies from location to location, and the magnetic field sensors found in the worms is finely tunes to its local environment, allowing it to differentiate between down and up based on where it lives. Changing the worm’s location can throw this ability off.
The UT-Austin team uses C. elegans as part of their research into addiction and Alzheimer’s disease, and had previously discovered that the worms are able to sense humidity. Based on that work, they began to investigate what else the creatures were capable of sensing. They found their magnetosensory abilities by observing how the worms’ behavior changed in response to changes in the magnetic field around them.
Worms that had been genetically engineered to have a non-functioning AFD neuron were unable to orient themselves up and down the way normal worms do. They also used a technique called calcium imaging to demonstrate that changes in the magnetic field cause the AFD neuron to activate. Their findings could make it possible to protect agricultural crops from harmful pests through the manipulation of magnetic fields, the authors concluded.
Using the ESO’s Very Large Telescope, a team of scientists has collected the best observational evidence to date of first-generation stars born out of the primordial material produced by the Big Bang. This, according to research accepted for publication by The Astrophysical Journal.
Since oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and other heavier chemical elements were all originally formed in stars, these ancient stars (also known as Population III stars) would have been formed from the only elements that predate the existence of stars: hydrogen, helium and lithium.
These stars, the authors explained in a statement, would have been at least several hundred times more massive than the Sun and exploded as supernovae after roughly two million years. Previous attempts to find physical proof of the existence of Population III stars had been inconclusive.
Distant galaxy possesses characteristics of Population III stars
The authors of this new study, however, used the VLT to look back approximately 800 million years to a period in the history of the universe known as “reionization”. Instead of focusing their efforts on a deep analysis of one small region of the sky, however, they broadened their scope to produce what is being called the widest survey of very distant galaxies to date.
Using the telescope, the research team found and confirmed multiple surprisingly bright, very young galaxies, including one which was the brightest galaxy ever observed at this stage in the universe. Dubbed CR7, the galaxy had a bright pocket that contained ionized helium emissions but no trace of heavier elements. The authors believe that the discovery represents the first-ever solid evidence of Population III star clusters with ionized gas in the early universe.
“The discovery challenged our expectations from the start, as we didn’t expect to find such a bright galaxy,” said lead author David Sobral from the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, the University of Lisbon in Portugal and Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.
“Then, by unveiling the nature of CR7 piece by piece, we understood that not only had we found by far the most luminous distant galaxy, but also started to realize that it had every single characteristic expected of Population III stars,” he added. “Those stars were the ones that formed the first heavy atoms that ultimately allowed us to be here. It doesn’t really get any more exciting than this.”
Researchers from the University of California-San Francisco have discovered that preschoolers with oppositional defiant behavior are more likely to have shorter telomeres, a characteristic of cellular aging that is also linked to obesity, diabetes, and cancer.
In addition, the UCSF team identified maternal clinical depression as an independent predictor for shortened telomeres in young children. Dr. Janet Wojcicki, lead author of the study and an assistant professor in the university’s UCSF Department of Pediatrics, called the findings “the first steps in a new field aiming to understand early determinants of children’s telomeres.”
“There are not any studies yet that examine telomere length changes from birth to adulthood, so the long-term implications are unknown. In adults, however, short telomeres predict earlier onset of many diseases, and shorter telomere length likely tracks from childhood throughout life,” she added. The research was published Tuesday in the journal Translational Psychiatry.
Maternal depression may play a role in some cases
According to the researchers, telomeres are similar to the plastic tips found on shoelaces in that they cap off the end of a chromosome. They also keep the chromosome from losing any protein-coding DNA during cell division, and while they tend to shorten naturally as a person ages, research indicates that mental and physical stress accelerate the process.
Credit: Thinkstock
The study authors assessed telomere length in the white blood cells of low-income Latino kids, including 108 four-year-olds and 92 five-year-olds recruited at birth from a pair of hospitals in San Francisco. They also examined the telomeres of their mothers and screened for prenatal and postnatal maternal depression, as well as behavior problems in the youngsters.
They found that the children of mothers who were clinically depressed when their children were three years old had telomeres that were shorter than the children of non-depressed women at the time of the test. However, severe prenatal depression, depression during the first year post-birth, or milder depression-related symptoms were not related to children’s telomere length.
Among children with oppositional defiant behavior at ages three through five, shorter telomere length may be attributed in part to maternal depression, Dr. Wojcicki and her co-authors noted. Furthermore, they found that children with shorter telomere length tended to have mothers who also had shorter telomeres – a phenomenon which may due to genetics and family stress.
“These findings underscore the importance of intervening early to address behavior issues in children as well as to treat maternal depression,” the UCSF professor said. “While long-term studies are needed, our results suggest that maternal mental health issues and child behavioral problems can impact children at the cellular level.”
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has moved to ban the use of trans fats in all foods by 2018 after officially declaring partially hydrogenated oils or PHOs, the primary dietary source of artificial trans fat in processed foods, no longer safe for human consumption.
In a statement announcing the move, the agency said that it would significantly reduce the use of PHOs in the food supply, and that manufacturers will have a period of three years to completely remove the substance from their products. The decision comes two years after FDA officials first tentatively determined that PHOs were no longer “generally recognized as safe.”
Acting FDA commissioner Dr. Stephen Ostroff said that the agency’s decision to ban PHO use “demonstrates the agency’s commitment to the heart health of all Americans” and “is expected to reduce coronary heart disease and prevent thousands of fatal heart attacks every year.”
The agency said that the three-year compliance period will allow companies to either alter their products in order to remove PHOs and/or petition the FDA for allow for special permission to continue using them. By 2018, no PHOs will be permitted to be added to human food unless the manufacturer has received special approval from the FDA.
A life-saving move
As the Associated Press and the New York Times point out, regular consumption of trans fats can raise a person’s low-density lipoprotein (LDL) or “bad cholesterol” levels and reduce their high-density lipoprotein (HDL) or “good cholesterol” levels. Furthermore, trans fats are a major contributor to heart disease and are considered to be less healthy than saturated fats.
Manufacturers have been legally required to include trans fat content data on the nutrition labels of their food products since 2006, and the FDA estimates that consumption of trans fats declined by approximately 78 percent between 2003 and 2012. Despite the decrease, however, the agency still views the current consumption levels to be a concern to the overall public health.
“Studies show that diet and nutrition play a key role in preventing chronic health problems, such as cardiovascular disease,” said Dr. Susan Mayne, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. She said that the ban was “based on extensive research into the effects of PHOs, as well as input from all stakeholders,” and added that the move “goes hand in hand with other FDA initiatives to improve the health of Americans.”
“This is the final nail in the coffin of trans fats,” Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer organization that petitioned the FDA for the ban, told the New York Times. “In terms of lives saved, I think eliminating trans fats is the single most important change to our food supply.”
In an attempt to observe how noble gases behave in deep-space conditions, a team of researchers led by the Carnegie Institution for Science developed laboratory techniques to mimic the extreme pressures and temperatures that the elements would be exposed to in that situation.
Noble gases, which include helium and neon, are among the matter that makes up distant planets and even more distant stars. The goal of their research was to find out how the gases would behave under these circumstances and to better understand the atmospheric and internal chemistry of these far-off celestial objects.
As the study authors explained Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they used a diamond-anvil cell to bring the noble gases helium, neon, argon, and xenon to a pressure more than 100,000 times that found in Earth’s atmosphere. They then heated the gases with a laser until they reached temperatures of up to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Noble gases do not combine with other elements under normal circumstances, and the Carnegie-led research team said that they were particularly interested in the ability of these gases to conduct electricity changed in response to increased pressure and temperature. This data could provide clues about how these gases interact with other materials in extreme conditions.
Improving our understanding of gas giants, white dwarfs
They found that helium, neon, argon, and xenon transform from transparent insulators (meaning that they are unable to conduct the flow of electrons in an electric current) into visible conductors (materials capable of maintaining an electrical current) under conditions that mimic the interiors of different stars and planets.
This discovery could solve some of the mysteries of the solar system, such as why Saturn emits more heat from its interior than would be expected based on its stage of formation. In gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, helium is an insulator near the surface and becomes more metallic at depths closer to the core of each planet – a change that takes place in conditions where the hydrogen that largely comprises both planets is also metallic.
Scientists predict that helium is dissolved into hydrogen on both planets, but the authors of the study found that Jupiter and Saturn differ when it comes to the behavior of the neon found on each world. Their simulations indicate that neon would remain an insulator on Saturn, even at its core, and would accumulate. This would prevent the core from eroding like on Jupiter, where iron and other materials would dissolve into the surrounding liquid hydrogen.
The researchers believe that this lack of core erosion on Saturn could explain why it is emitting so much more internal heat than Jupiter, as the erosion of a planet’s core causes it to cool down while dense matter is raised upwards while it mixes and converts heat to gravitational potential energy. On Saturn, meanwhile, denser material is able to collect that the planet’s center, leading to hotter conditions.
In addition to potentially helping to solve the mystery of Saturn’s internal heat, the authors said their work could explain why compact white dwarf stars have faint luminosities as they give off residual heat. The atmospheres of these stars are known to contain dense helium, and the lab simulations indicate that the element should be a better conductor than previously believed, thus slowing down the cooling rates of helium-rich white dwarfs and altering their color.
In what is being hailed as a “must-see close encounter,” two of the brightest planets in the night sky are moving increasing closer to one another, and their journeys will culminate with the two worlds being less than the diameter of a full moon apart by the end of June.
Venus and Jupiter began converging during the first two weeks of June, and according to NASA and EarthSky, they were just 10 degrees apart as of Monday. This means that they were so close to each other than you could hide both planets behind the palm of your outstretched hand.
That might sound impressive, but the two worlds are just getting warmed up. By Thursday night, they will be only six degrees apart, and on Friday, the crescent moon will make an appearance, as the three celestial bodies will combine to form a bright isosceles triangle in the sunset sky.
Why does it look like these planets are about to collide?
According to Phil Plait of Slate.com’s Bad Astronomy blog, this phenomenon is possible because the two planets orbit the sun in pretty basically the same plane. This plane also includes Earth, which makes it possible for terrestrial stargazers to watch the planets moving along the same line in the sky as they orbit around the Sun. This line is known as the ecliptic, Plait said.
In truth, the orbits of all of the planets are slightly tilted with respect to each other, meaning that they don’t follow precisely the same line and that they appear to pass one another when viewed from the Earth. In reality, the planets are millions of miles away from each other. From our perspective, however, they appear to be on a virtual collision course.
Don’t feel bad if you miss the show. Plait pointed out that the two planets will be even closer to one another next year, as they will be just four arcminutes apart on August 27. He said that this will be during the daytime hours in the US, but rest assured, the event should be visible with binoculars or a decent telescope. Or you could probably just look for a YouTube video of it.
Our human ancestors relied heavily on smell for hunting and even mating, and early sailors told yarns about using smell for navigation.
Humans can navigate purely using remembered smells, a new study from the University of California, Berkeley has found. The discovery is evidence that we have a kind of olfactory GPS system and our sense of smell is more powerful than previously thought.
“What we’ve found is that we humans have the capability to orient ourselves along highways of odors and crisscross landscapes using only our sense of smell,” said study lead author Lucia Jacobs, a UC Berkeley psychology professor, quoted in a EurekAlert report.
“Olfaction is like this background fabric to our world that we might not be conscious of, but we are using it to stay oriented,” she added. “We may not see a eucalyptus grove as we pass it at night, but our brain is encoding the smells and creating a map.”
Plenty of animals use scent for navigation, of course. Search and rescue dogs are one obvious example, and rats and pigeons, for instance, orient themselves using odor maps, or “smellscapes.” But this is the first in-depth study of the process in humans, who generally rely on visual aids for orientation, and the presence of such an advanced smell-based positioning system was surprising to researchers.
Testing the system
The researchers gave orientation and navigation tasks to 24 young adults, whose hearing, sight, or smell was blocked. They were tested in a 25-by-20-foot room using 32 containers with sponges placed around the edges. The sponges were used in pairs and infused with essential oils such as clove, sweet birch, or anise.
To test how much smell played a role in navigation, the participants wore earplugs, blindfolds and headphones and were led into the room one by one before being walked in circles to disorient them. They inhaled a combination of two fragrances for one minute, at a certain point on the grid. They were disoriented once more, and then asked to sniff their way back to the point at which they had smelled the two fragrances.
Having tested the blockage of different senses, overall smell was judged to be an effective means of navigation. Furthermore, the participants were not only following one scent, but using information from both scents to guide themselves toward a location on the odor grid.
Olfactory bulbs, which are positioned between the nasal cavity and the brain’s frontal lobe, have a strong neural link to the brain’s hippocampus, which creates spatial maps of our environment. However, Jacobs said, “We never thought humans could have a good enough sense of smell for this.” Now, though, she says the results are “as obvious as the nose on my face.”
This summer, Jacobs will explore the mechanism further as a scientist on the team of the National Science Foundation’s “Cracking the Olfactory Code” Ideas Lab.
People often talk about natural cures, but none are quite like these. There are currently six FDA-approved drugs on the market containing animal-derived ingredients like venoms extracted from snakes, lizards, spiders, and sea creatures.
Professor Glenn King from the University of Queensland, Australia, is an expert in the field. RedOrbit spoke to him and began by asking why elements generally thought of as being dangerous can in some cases have a positive effect on human health.
“It’s possible because the toxins have evolved to work on ion channels and receptors in the nervous system of prey that are slightly different and typically more complex in humans, and often located in different parts of the body,” Professor King explained. “So a toxin that kills an insect or other type of prey can be beneficial in a human.”
For example, the analgesic (painkilling) drug Prialt, made from the venom of a marine cone snail, is toxic to fish (which the cone snail hunts), and yet a useful painkiller in humans (find out why in the videos below).
Also from the ocean, sea anemone venom has been used for treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS) and other autoimmune diseases.
Drugs from bugs
Professor King particularly focusses on “getting drugs from bugs.” He utilizes spiders, centipedes, and even scorpions, hoping they will be useful for treatment of things like chronic pain, epilepsy, and stroke.
Venomous animals have a long history as a source of medical treatments. For example, snake venom has been used since the 7th century BCE to treat arthritis and gastrointestinal ailments. Tarantulas are used by indigenous populations of Central and South America to treat ailments ranging from asthma to cancer, while cobra venom has long been used to treat conditions as diverse as polio and rheumatism.
However, modern medicine’s relationship with venom-based drugs began in the 1970s with the development of the blockbuster antihypertensive drug captopril based on the venom of the Brazilian viper,Bothrops jaracaca.
Now, many of the major pharmaceutical companies have venom-based drug discovery programs, including AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck.
At the heart of the processes are the naturally occurring biological molecules, peptides. Professor King explains that: “Venom proteins and peptides are usually endowed with a disulphide-rich architecture that provides them with a high degree of chemical and thermal stability as well as resistance to proteases. It is this feature, along with their selectivity and potency, that has made venoms a valuable source of lead molecules for the development of novel therapeutics.”
According to Professor King, along with the six current FDA-approved drugs derived from venom peptides or proteins, several more are in clinical trials. The majority of approved venom-derived drugs come from snakes or lizards and they mostly target the cardiovascular system. Chronic pain, auto-immune diseases, and stroke are targets, too.
The most recent venom-derived drug to be approved by the FDA is exenatide, which helps insulin to be secreted in order to treat type 2 diabetes. It is isolated from the saliva of the Gila monster, a venomous lizard.
“Despite recent progress, only a tiny fraction of the chemical diversity encoded in animal venoms has been explored. Fortunately, a much wider range of animal venoms can now be studied in detail due to recent advances in analytical techniques,” Professor King said.
Traces of methane have been discovered in meteors of Martian origin, and the discovery could be good news in the hunt for microbial life on the Red Planet, an international team of scientists reported in a recent edition of the journal Nature Communication.
University of Aberdeen professor John Parnell and his colleagues examined samples from six different meteorites made of volcanic rock that had originated on Mars, all of which contained the same gases with the same proportions and isotopic compositions as the planet’s atmosphere, they explained in a statement Tuesday.
All six of the samples also contained methane, which was measured by crushing the rocks and running the emerging gas through a mass spectrometer. Since microbes found here on Earth use methane as a rudimentary food source, the discovery suggests that similar forms of life may exist beneath the surface of Mars.
Environment suitable for microbial life
The discovery “lends weight to the controversial claimed detections of methane in the Martian atmosphere, most recently by Curiosity,” co-author Sean McMahon, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University told redOrbit via email.
“This methane seems to be venting at the present day,” he added. Furthermore, the study “shows that methane has at some point been generated in the Martian crust, which may have required warm, wet subsurface conditions. Even if the methane did not issue from microbes or serve as a fuel for them, it therefore indicates an environment where they could have lived.”
McMahon noted that other experts will most likely be eager to replicate their findings using other measurement tools and techniques, and that the results could benefit astrobiologists who make models and experiments designed to understand whether life could survive beneath the surface of the Red Planet today.
In addition, McMahon told redOrbit that the team also found hydrogen gas (H2) in the meteorites. H2, he said, “is a major energy source for microbes in the earth’s subsurface” and is combined with CO2 by some organisms to produce methane, which “could likewise support life on Mars.”
The similarity of the gas content of the Martian rocks to those found on Earth ups the confidence in the findings, and the researchers plan to continue developing their technique for future Mars rover instruments.
While they have plans for future research on the Martian meteorites, the Yale researcher told redOrbit that he was unable to elaborate at this time. Co-author Nigel Blamey of Brock University in Ontario added that the team intends to expand their research efforts through analysis of additional meteorites in the near future.
Women who are feeling depressed or chronically stressed have significantly lower levels of a hormone that regulates aging and enhances cognition, according to a new study published in the Tuesday edition of the journal Translational Psychiatry.
The study, which was led by experts at the University of California-San Francisco, compared women who had children with an autism spectrum disorder to a group of lower-stressed control subjects, and found that they had far lower levels of the longevity hormone, klotho.
Furthermore, the authors found that women with clinically significant depressive symptoms had even lower levels of klotho in their blood that those who were stressed but were not experiencing such symptoms. This is said to be the first study to show a link between psychological influences and the hormone, which is known to perform several functions in the human body.
“Our findings suggest that klotho, which we now know is very important to health, could be a link between chronic stress and premature disease and death,” explained Dr. Aric Prather, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of psychiatry at UCSF.
“Since our study is observational, we cannot say that chronic stress directly caused lower klotho levels,” he added, “but the new connection opens avenues of research that converge upon aging, mental health, and age-related diseases.”
Klotho-based therapy could ease the aging process
In previous work conducted using mice and worms, researchers have determined that when klotho production is disrupted, it promotes the symptoms of aging, including hardening of the arteries and the loss of muscle and bone. Conversely, when the abundance of the hormone is increased, the animals tended to live longer.
Senior author Dr. Dena Dubal previously demonstrated that one out of every five people has a genetic variant that has been associated with higher levels of klotho in the bloodstream, a larger region of the prefrontal cortex, and improved overall cognitive function. Carriers of this variant also tend to live longer and have lower rates of age-related disease.
Increasing klotho in mice boosted their cognition and increased their resilience to Alzheimer-related toxins, indicating that the hormone may have a therapeutic effect on the brain. To investigate further, they recruited 90 highly-stressed caregivers and 88 low-stress control subjects, most of whom were in their 30s and 40s and otherwise healthy.
While klotho levels are known to decline with age, this decline was only witnessed in the high-stress group in this study. There was no significant age-related reduction in klotho among the low-stress women, leading Dr. Prather’s team to hypothesize that lower levels of the hormone could contribute to stress and depression, since it acts on several neural pathways linked to both.
“Chronic stress transmits risk for bad health outcomes in aging, including cardiovascular and Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Dubal, an assistant professor in the UCSF neurology department. “It will be important to figure out if higher levels of klotho can benefit mind and body health as we age. If so, therapeutics or lifestyle interventions that increase the longevity hormone could have a big impact on people’s lives.”
While chimpanzees and bonobos are closely related to one another, the two species differ significantly in terms of their predisposition for tool use, according to new research published Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports.
Humans are kings of the tool-using primates, the study authors explained in a statement, with chimps following closely behind in terms of the diverse ways that they use implements to help them perform various tasks. For instance, they use sticks to help catch ants and termites, stones to crack nuts, and various other tools to groom themselves and communicate.
Bonobos, on the other hand, rarely use tools for any reason and never use them when foraging for food, the researchers added. In the new study, Dr. Kathelijne Koops from the University of Zurich and the University of Cambridge, and colleagues from Kyoto University in Japan, set out to analyze this phenomenon and learn how humans may have emerged as the ultimate tool user.
Bonobos may have lost the predisposition for tool use
Dr. Koops and her fellow investigators tracked communities of wild chimpanzees and bonobos in Uganda and Congo over a period of several months, cataloguing all instances of tool use and all potential opportunities for tool use based on different environments and other factors.
They hoped to solve the mystery of how exactly a primate becomes a tool user by investigating if it has to do with the environment where the apes live and the opportunities it has for tool use. They also looked to see if it had more to do with learning how to use tools from other apes or if it is something deep within the primates themselves – an intrinsic, innate propensity for object manipulation.
“Chimpanzees and bonobos differ in their predisposition for tool use, which does not mean that the ability to use tools is innate,” Dr. Koops told redOrbit via email. “Both species are able to use tools, and even young chimps need to learn from others how to use tools. The difference lies in the intrinsic motivation to use tools, or their ‘object-orientedness.’”
“We propose the hypothesis that bonobos may have lost the predisposition for tool use,” she added. “The question is indeed why. A recent study on captive apes using eye-tracking techniques found that bonobos pay more attention to social cues, whereas chimpanzees pay more attention to objects. Together with our findings this suggests a possible trade-off between tool use motivation and social attention. In bonobos, selection pressures may have been stronger on social skills, and in chimpanzees tool use skills may have been more important.”
First inter-species tool use comparison
The study, which the authors describe as the first inter-species comparison of tool use in the wild ever completed, found that environmental opportunities did not explain the differences between chimps and bonobos when it comes to tool use, as the latter had access to just as many tools and foraging opportunities in their habitats than the chimpanzees.
Likewise, social opportunities did not play a role, as young bonobos actually spent more time with their mothers and had more individuals in close proximity for longer periods of time when feeding than young chimps. However, immature chimpanzees were found to be more likely to manipulate and play with objects on their own than young bonobos.
“Given their close evolutionary relationship with humans, insights into the tool use difference in our closest living relatives can help us identify the conditions that drove the evolution of human technology,” Koops added.
Next time your boss or professor catches you watching cute cat videos online, tell them that you’re taking the time out to boost your energy, increase your positivity levels, and decrease your negative emotions, and that you have scientific evidence to back up your claims. Don’t blame us when they subsequently fail you in the course or you get in trouble at your job.
This evidence comes courtesy of assistant professor Jessica Gall Myrick, a researcher at Indiana University Media School who has found that watching felines do funny things on YouTube has a profound impact on the viewer’s mood, reducing levels of anxiety, annoyance, and sadness.
“Some people may think watching online cat videos isn’t a serious enough topic for academic research, but the fact is that it’s one of the most popular uses of the Internet today,” Myrick said in a statement. “If we want to better understand the effects the Internet may have on us as individuals and on society, then researchers can’t ignore Internet cats anymore.” Thank goodness.
“We all have watched a cat video online, but there is really little empirical work done on why so many of us do this, or what effects it might have on us,” she added. “As a media researcher and online cat video viewer, I felt compelled to gather some data about this pop culture phenomenon.”
Cheap form of therapy
With the assistance of Mike Bridavsky, a Bloomington, Indiana native and the owner of Lil Bub, a cat featured in a series of online videos, Myrick surveyed nearly 7,000 people. She asked them via social media about their viewing of cat videos, as well as how it impacted their mood.
Those who responded said that they were more energetic and felt more positive after watching cat-related online media than before. They also reported having fewer negative emotions such as anxiety, annoyance, and sadness after watching cat-related online media than they did before.
Approximately 36 percent of participants described themselves as a “cat person,” while about 60 percent said they liked both cats and dogs. They most often viewed Internet feline videos during working hours or when studying, and said that the enjoyment they received from watching the videos typically outweighed any procrastination-related guilt they experiences.
The people who were cat owners and those with specific personality traits, including shyness and agreeableness, were the most likely to watch cat videos, the study found. Nearly one-fourth of all videos watched were sought out by the viewer, while the others were just happened upon.
Overall, the response to watching the videos was largely positive, and Myrick said that based on the results, future research could explore if online cat videos could be used as a form of low-cost therapy. “Even if they are watching cat videos on YouTube to procrastinate or while they should be working,” she said, “the emotional pay-off may actually help people take on tough tasks.”
So here…go ahead and watch. Get sucked down the rabbit hole. It’s good for you.
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