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Cells face a daunting task. They have to neatly pack a several meter-long thread of genetic material into a nucleus that measures only five micrometers across. This origami creates spatial interactions between genes and their switches, which can affect human health and disease. Now, an international team of scientists has devised a powerful new technique that 'maps' this three-dimensional geography of the entire genome. Their paper is published in Nature.

Genes are activated to produce RNA and proteins, then switched off again when the molecules are no longer needed. Both the gene and its switches are DNA sequences, and they may lie far apart on the linear genome. This presents a challenge for the cell, because these regions usually have to be brought into contact to activate the gene.

It also creates a problem for scientists trying to understand one of the central questions in biology: how do cells decide which genes should be activated, and when? The answer will partly depend on matching every gene to its control sequences. But DNA strands are too thin to be tracked under the microscope, and even if that were possible, you'd have the vast amount of DNA in the nucleus to contend with. Imagine examining a tangle of yarn the size of Earth in hopes of observing an encounter between individual strands.

A new technique called Genome Architecture Mapping, or GAM, now helps to identify these contacts. It involves flash-freezing tissue or cells, then cutting thin slices of individual nuclei. The tiny amount of DNA within each slice of the nucleus is then sequenced, and the team deploys a mathematical model, named SLICE, to identify 'hotspots' of increased interaction between strands. The model looks at the frequency with which different genomic regions appear in the slice to infer information about the relative positions of genes and regions called enhancers that activate them.

"An analogy might be this; if you want to understand how school children interact you might take occasional photographs of where they sit in the canteen or appear together in the playground," explains joint-lead author Ana Pombo, who began the project whilst working at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences (LMS) and is now based at the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology, Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) and the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH). "If you do that many times over a month, you will begin to see a pattern in those who often sit next to each other, or who run around together while playing. These random snapshots might tell you about their social interactions."

"This is made possible by filtering out random encounters from real interactions using mathematical methods," says the joint-lead author Mario Nicodemi at the Università di Napoli Federico II, who conceived such mathematical models and, aided by his PhD student Antonio Scialdone, developed them.

Paul Edwards, of the Hutchison/MRC Research Centre and Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge, and Ana Pombo had the initial idea before the techniques necessary to do the experiment were available. "My research team optimised the approach, and as new technical steps came along we added them to our method," she says.

The study, which appears in Nature, applies the method to mouse embryonic stem cells and the authors hope it will help shed light on many genes whose activity is disturbed in some very serious diseases. In some diseases, the problem lies within the sequence of a gene, but defects in regulatory regions found elsewhere in the genome can be equally dangerous and much harder to understand. The new data provides a long list of new suspects that can now be scrutinized by researchers.

Whilst previous studies have identified two-way contacts, this information does not reveal how often such contacts take place and by implication how important they might be, Pombo says: "They can spot that you and I are friends, but not how strong this friendship is relative to everyone else."

"People have been measuring two-way contacts for a long time," says Robert Beagrie, joint first author on the paper, who was a PhD student with Ana Pombo at the LMS when he collected the data for the study and is now based at the University of Oxford. "Those studies have often shown that you can have a set of different DNA elements that interact with each other in pairs. With this new approach we are able to generate a genome-wide catalogue of all the regions that we are confident interact in groups." Now, the researchers are able to reliably detect and quantify so-called 'three-way contacts' in regions of the genome that are vigorously expressed.

But perhaps the most notable advance of through GAM is that experiments are based on single cells -- whether common or scarce in a tissue -- and track their positions relative to each other within the tissue. Existing methods require lots of cells of the same type, which has made it difficult to study the biology and diseases of rare types. "There is huge potential for applying this in human tissue samples to catalogue contacts between regulatory regions and their target genes, and to use that to understand genetic variation and how it might alter aspects of nuclear biology," Pombo says.

Some researchers are starting to show interest in using the technique to explore what happens when retroviruses insert their DNA into the genome of a host. Cancer scientists are also keen to create DNA maps of particular areas of a tumor. "By exploiting the unique nature of GAM data, mathematical models can reliably derive such information, opening the way to identify multiple, group interactions that could play a key role in the regulation of genes," explains Nicodemi. "We can now ask whether a gene is contacted at the same time by all of its enhancers, or by each enhancer one at a time?," Beagrie says. "We know that many genes that are important for early development have multiple enhancers. But how and why they are acting to regulate genes remain unanswered questions."

Journal Reference:

Robert A. Beagrie, Antonio Scialdone, Markus Schueler, Dorothee C. A. Kraemer, Mita Chotalia, Sheila Q. Xie, Mariano Barbieri, Inês de Santiago, Liron-Mark Lavitas, Miguel R. Branco, James Fraser, Josée Dostie, Laurence Game, Niall Dillon, Paul A. W. Edwards, Mario Nicodemi, Ana Pombo. Complex multi-enhancer contacts captured by genome architecture mapping. Nature, 2017; DOI: 10.1038/nature21411

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genes; human biology; medical topics; personalized medicine; genetics; biology; developmental biology; biotechnology and bioengineering

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A three-dimensional map of the genome: Gene mapping technique promises to unlock the power of proximity to find genes implicated in diseases

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Cells face a daunting task. They have to neatly pack a several meter-long thread of genetic material into a nucleus that measures only five micrometers across. This origami creates spatial interactions between genes and their switches, which can affect human health and disease.

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https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/jiggly-gelatin-good-workout-snack-athletes

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The night vision of frogs and toads appears to be superior to that of all other animals. They have the ability to see colour even when it is so dark that humans are not able to see anything at all. This has been shown in a new study by researchers from Lund University in Sweden.

Most vertebrates, including humans, have two types of visual cells located in the retina, namely cones and rods. The cones enable us to see colour, but they usually require a lot of light and therefore stop working when it gets dark, in which case the rods take over so that we can at least find our way home, albeit in black and white.

In toads and frogs the rods are a bit special, however. It was previously known that toads and frogs are unique in having rods with two different sensitivities. This has not been found in other vertebrates, and it is also the reason why researchers have long suspected that frogs and toads might be able to see colour also in low-light conditions. The new study was first in proving this to be true, and the results exceeded all expectations.

"It's amazing that these animals can actually see colour in extreme darkness, down to the absolute threshold of the visual system. These results were unexpected," says Professor of Sensory Biology Almut Kelber at the Faculty of Science, Lund University.

It was during the third of three experiments that the researchers discovered that frogs are able to use their rods to distinguish colour in extreme darkness. The researchers studied the frogs in a situation that is as serious as it is common, namely, when frogs need to find their way out in case they are trapped in conditions of complete darkness. This is potentially an everyday occurrence, taking place in dark dens and passageways on the ground. In such instances, finding the exit becomes crucial, which also means that the frog is inclined to make use of any sensory information that is available.

In the other experiments the researchers studied to what extent frogs and toads use their colour vision when searching for a mate or hunting for food. The results showed that the animals stop using their colour information fairly early when it comes to finding someone with whom to mate, whereas they continue to take advantage of their colour vision to select food in such low-light conditions that humans lose their ability to see colour.

"We have previously shown moths and geckos are also able to see colour in inferior light conditions compared to humans. However, frogs apparently have a unique ability to see colour in the dark," says Almut Kelber.

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frogs and reptiles; extreme survival; beer and wine; biology; life sciences; wild animals; developmental biology; cell biology

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Frogs have unique ability to see color in the dark

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The night vision of frogs and toads appears to be superior to that of all other animals. They have the ability to see color even when it is so dark that humans are not able to see anything at all, shows a new study.

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Credit: Michelangelus/Shutterstock

Drug-resistant bacteria can lurk in the pipes of hospital sinks, and a new study shows that these dangerous bacteria can also make their way out of sinks and continue on to reach patients.

A number of recent reports have found that drug-resistant bacteria grow in the drainpipes of hospital sinks, according to the study, published today (Feb. 24) in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. "The wet, humid and relatively protected environment" of the drainpipes makes for an ideal breeding ground for bacteria, the researchers wrote.

In addition, many reports have also found a genetic link between the pathogens in hospital drainpipes and the pathogens in patients, they wrote. In other words, the same bacteria found in the drainpipes have been found in infected patients. [ 6 Superbugs to Watch Out For]

But it was unclear how these pipe-dwelling bacteria ended up infecting patients, considering patients don't come into direct contact with the insides of drainpipes.

To trace the path from pipe to patient, the researchers built a lab with five identical hospital sinks that were all connected via plumbing. It was "the only sink lab we are aware of in the U.S.," senior study author Dr. Amy Mathers, an associate professor of medicine and pathology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, said in a statement.

The researchers began by colonizing the elbow of the drainpipe - also called the P-trap - in one of the sinks with Escherichia coli bacteria. For the first two weeks of the experiment, the researchers occasionally ran water from the faucet, and they did not observe much bacterial growth. But after two weeks, they stopped turning on the faucet, and instead added nutrients to the drainpipe, based on what they predicted would be found in a hospital, such as intravenous fluid, feeding supplements and leftover beverages.

The nutrients jolted the E. coli into action: The researchers observed that the nutrient-fed bacteria colony grew at an average rate of 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) a day, reaching the sink strainer after just one week.

And the bacteria didn't only grow upward, toward the sink; they also grew along the pipes that connected the five sinks. (The sinks in the researchers' lab were all in a row.) Seven days after the E. coli in a sink at the end of the rowwas given nutrients, the researchers found bacteria in the pipes of the next three sinks in the row. Only the sink on the opposite end of the row didn't have bacteria in the pipe. Moreover, one week after that, the bacteria had grown up to the sink strainer in two more sinks, they found.

But the question of how the bacteria could reach a patient still remained. [ Tiny & Nasty: Images of Things That Make Us Sick]

To see how the bacteria spread further, the researchers placed a number of petri dishes in areas around the sink - including the countertop, the sink bowl, the faucet and the faucet handles - and ran the water. They found that running the faucet when there was E. coli in the sink strainer caused the bacteria to be dispersed to petri dishes up to 30 inches (76 cm) away. In other words, the bacteria are splattered around the sink, and can be picked up by hospital workers or patients.

In the dispersion experiment, the researchers noted that the highest concentrations of bacteria were found closer to the faucet, which may be due to the specific design of the sink bowl and the faucet used in the study. This is important, as many hospital sinks have similar designs, the researchers wrote.

An understanding of how the bacteria are spread is important, Mathers said, as it gives researchers the opportunity to "develop and test potential intervention strategies that can be used to prevent further spread."

Originally published on Live Science.

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Sink Full of Superbugs? Study Finds Surprising Way Germs Spread

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Drug-resistant bacteria can lurk in the pipes of hospital sinks, and a new study shows that these dangerous bacteria can also make their way out of sinks and continue on to reach patients. A number of recent reports have found that drug-resistant bacteria grow in the drainpipes of hospital sinks, according to the study, published today (Feb.

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Efforts by Salk Institute researchers to grow the first embryos containing cells from humans and pigs proved more challenging than anticipated, they report January 26 in Cell. Human/animal chimeras can offer insights into early human development and disease onset and provide a realistic drug-testing platform. They may also someday provide a means of growing human cells, tissues, and organs for regenerative medicine. For now, however, they are helping scientists understand how human stem cells grow and specialize.

"The ultimate goal is to grow functional and transplantable tissue or organs, but we are far away from that," says lead investigator Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor in the Salk Institute of Biological Studies' Gene Expression Laboratory. "This is an important first step."

Despite decades of work, scientists are still struggling to coax stem cells growing in Petri dishes to become fully functional specialized adult cells, let alone three-dimensional tissues and organs. "It's like when you try to duplicate a key. The duplicate looks almost identical, but when you get home, it doesn't open the door. There is something we are not doing right," says Izpisua Belmonte. "We thought growing human cells in an animal would be much more fruitful. We still have many things to learn about the early development of cells."

As a first step, Izpisua Belmonte and Salk Institute staff scientist Jun Wu created a rat/mouse chimera by introducing rat cells into mouse embryos and letting them mature. Other researchers had already created a rat/mouse chimera in 2010. That chimera was a mouse with pancreatic tissue formed from rat cells.

Izpisua Belmonte and Wu built on that experiment by using genome editing to flexibly direct the rat cells to grow in specific developmental niches in the mouse. To accomplish this, they used CRISPR genome editing tools to delete critical genes in fertilized mouse egg cells. For instance, in a given cell, they would delete a single gene critical for the development of an organ, such as the heart, pancreas, or eye. Then, they introduced rat stem cells into the embryos to see if they would fill the open niche. "The rat cells have a functional copy of the missing mouse gene, so they can outcompete mouse cells in occupying the emptied developmental organ niches," says Wu. As the organism matured, the rat cells filled in where mouse cells could not, forming the functional tissues of the organism's heart, eye, or pancreas.

Rat cells also grew to form a gall bladder in the mouse, even though rats stopped developing this organ themselves over the 18 million years since rats and mice separated evolutionarily. "This suggests that the reason a rat does not generate a gall bladder is not because it cannot, but because the potential has been hidden by a rat-specific developmental program," says Wu. "The microenvironment has evolved through millions of years to choose a program that defines a rat."

The team's next step was to introduce humans' cells into an organism. They decided to use cow and pig embryos as hosts because the size of these animals' organs more closely resembles humans than mice. The team encountered many logistical challenges, but the scientific challenge was determining what kind of human stem cell could survive in a cow or pig embryo.

Experiments with cow embryos were more difficult and costly than pigs, so the team zoomed in on pigs. The effort required to complete studies of 1,500 pig embryos involved the contributions of over 40 people, including pig farmers, over a four-year period. "We underestimated the effort involved," says Izpisua Belmonte. "This required a tour de force."

Not only are pigs and humans about five times more distant evolutionarily than mice and rats, but pigs also have a gestation period that is about one-third as long as humans, so the researchers needed to introduce human cells with perfect timing to match the developmental stage of the pig. "It's as if the human cells were entering a freeway going faster than the normal freeway," says Izpisua Belmonte. "If you have different speeds, you will have accidents."

The researchers injected several different forms of human stem cells into pig embryos to see which would survive best. The cells that survived longest and showed the most potential to continue to develop were "intermediate" human pluripotent stem cells. So-called "naïve" cells resemble cells from an earlier developmental origin with unrestricted developmental potential; "primed" cells have developed further, but still remain pluripotent. "Intermediate cells are somewhere in between," says Wu.

The human cells survived and formed a human/pig chimera embryo. Embryos were implanted in sows and allowed to develop for between three and four weeks. "This is long enough for us to try to understand how the human and pig cells mix together early on without raising ethical concerns about mature chimeric animals," says Izpisua Belmonte.

Even using the most well-performing human stem cells, the level of contribution to the chimerized embryo was not high. "It's low," says Wu.

Izpisua Belmonte considers this good news. One concern with the creation of human/animal chimeras is that the chimera will be too human. For instance, researchers don't want human cells to contribute to the formation of the brain.

In this study, the human cells did not become precursors of brain cells that can grow into the central nervous system. Rather, they were developing into muscle cells and precursors of other organs. "At this point, we wanted to know whether human cells can contribute at all to address the 'yes or no' question," he says. "Now that we know the answer is yes, our next challenge is to improve efficiency and guide the human cells into forming a particular organ in pigs."

To do this, the researchers are using CRISPR to perform genome editing on the pig genome, as they did with mice, to open gaps that human cells can fill in. The work is in progress.

This research study was supported by The Fundación Séneca in Murcia, Spain, the Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia (UCAM), the Fundacion Dr. Pedro Guillen, the G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Charitable Foundation, and The Moxie Foundation.

Journal Reference:

Jun Wu, Aida Platero-Luengo, Masahiro Sakurai, Atsushi Sugawara, Maria Antonia Gil, Takayoshi Yamauchi, Keiichiro Suzuki, Yanina Soledad Bogliotti, Cristina Cuello, Mariana Morales Valencia, Daiji Okumura, Jingping Luo, Marcela Vilariño, Inmaculada Parrilla, Delia Alba Soto, Cristina A. Martinez, Tomoaki Hishida, Sonia Sánchez-Bautista, M. Llanos Martinez-Martinez, Huili Wang, Alicia Nohalez, Emi Aizawa, Paloma Martinez-Redondo, Alejandro Ocampo, Pradeep Reddy, Jordi Roca, Elizabeth A. Maga, Concepcion Rodriguez Esteban, W. Travis Berggren, Estrella Nuñez Delicado, Jeronimo Lajara, Isabel Guillen, Pedro Guillen, Josep M. Campistol, Emilio A. Martinez, Pablo Juan Ross, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte. Interspecies Chimerism with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells. Cell, 2017; 168 (3): 473 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2016.12.036

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stem cells; lymphoma; immune system; brain tumor; developmental biology; biotechnology; rodents; biology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Scientists use stem cells to create human/pig chimera embryos

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Efforts by researchers to grow the first embryos containing cells from humans and pigs proved more challenging than anticipated, they report in a new study. Human/animal chimeras can offer insights into early human development and disease onset and provide a realistic drug-testing platform.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170213151306.htmhttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170213151306.htm

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Of all the fishy predators in the Great Lakes, few are more destructive than the sea lamprey. There's something of a horror movie in their approach: jawless, they attach to prey such as salmon, whitefish or trout with a sucker mouth and drain the victim of its blood and lymph.

For years, scientists and policy-makers have been trying to devise strategies to curb this population, which first arrived from Europe through shipping channels in the early 20th century.

Now, in a collaborative project with Istvan Imre of Algoma University and Nicholas Johnson of the United States Geological Survey, Concordia biology professor Grant Brown has developed a promising -- and natural -- solution. Their findings, which focus on the species' own alarm cues, were recently published in Fisheries Management and Ecology.
Environmental and financial impacts
"Lamprey cause estimates of millions of dollars of damage in lost commercial and recreational fisheries," says Brown, whose work in the Faculty of Arts and Science focuses on aquatic behavioural and chemical ecology.

"And since they've been introduced into the Great Lakes, they've also caused huge ecological problems."

An effective solution is all the more pressing, given the limitations of current approaches.

A chemical lampricide, intended to kill the predator at its larval stage without harming other fish, is very labour- and cost-intensive and poses potential harm to the watershed.

A slightly more eco-friendly solution is a low-barrier concrete dam that takes advantage of the lamprey's inability to jump upstream. But this also prevents some salmon and trout from getting through, and deters minnows and other swimmers.
What about a chemical barrier?
The researchers have found a substance that could be a successful deterrent. Unfortunately for the sea lamprey, it actually comes from inside the invader itself.

Like many fish, upon injury, the lamprey release a compound into the water with a smell that warns others in their species that danger is near.

After identifying and confirming these cues under lab conditions, Brown and his colleagues investigated whether they were an effective deterrent in the real-world setting. In an intensive project, they tagged hundreds of sea lamprey with passive transponder tags and then found a testing ground.

"By applying these naturally occurring alarm cues to the tributary stream just above the mouth of the main stream, we wanted to determine if we could prevent migrating sea lamprey from going up into that stream. In other words, could we make a chemical barrier to stop the lamprey?"

In control tests, over 60 per cent of tagged lamprey swam up the main stream and around 25 per cent went up the tributary stream. But when they employed the alarm cue barrier, fewer lamprey swam upstream (less than 40 per cent) and 2 lamprey (3 per cent of tagged fish) entered the tributary. The group repeated the study with some variations and found the same dramatic difference.
Further applications
Brown notes that the findings are even more exciting when coupled with research by scientists at Michigan State University, who are working on pheromone cues to attract the species.

"So we can set up traps in streams, and by using these mating pheromones to attract adults combined with the alarm cues to prevent them from going up tributary streams, we can push them away from areas we don't want them, and pull them into areas where we do."

Additional future directions that Brown would like to take with the study include experiments with a synthetic compound, with the goal being to manufacture it on a larger scale.

He also wants to look at different stages in the lamprey's cycle, and even test out the successful approach on other invasive species such as the round goby and Asian carp.

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fisheries; invasive species; fish; biology; exotic species; ecology; global warming; environmental issues

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Science vs. the sea lamprey: Researcher uncovers a natural compound to combat the invasive water species

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Of all the fishy predators in the Great Lakes, few are more destructive than the sea lamprey. There's something of a horror movie in their approach: jawless, they attach to prey such as salmon, whitefish or trout with a sucker mouth and drain the victim of its blood and lymph.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160308110004.htm

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http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2016/09/08/giraffes_more_speciose_than_expected.html

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Clinical trials for genome editing of the human germline -- adding, removing, or replacing DNA base pairs in gametes or early embryos -- could be permitted in the future, but only for serious conditions under stringent oversight, says a new report from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. The report outlines several criteria that should be met before allowing germline editing clinical trials to go forward. Genome editing has already entered clinical trials for non-heritable applications, but should be allowed only for treating or preventing diseases or disabilities at this time.

Genome editing is not new. But new powerful, precise, and less costly genome editing tools, such as CRISPR/Cas9, have led to an explosion of new research opportunities and potential clinical applications, both heritable and non-heritable, to address a wide range of human health issues. Recognizing the promise and the concerns related to this technology, NAS and NAM appointed a study committee of international experts to examine the scientific, ethical, and governance issues surrounding human genome editing.

Human genome editing is already widely used in basic research and is in the early stages of development and trials for clinical applications that involve non-heritable (somatic) cells. These therapies affect only the patient, not any offspring, and should continue for treatment and prevention of disease and disability, using the existing ethical norms and regulatory framework for development of gene therapy. Oversight authorities should evaluate safety and efficacy of proposed somatic applications in the context of the risks and benefits of intended use.

However, there is significant public concern about the prospect of using these same techniques for so-called "enhancement" of human traits and capacities such as physical strength, or even for uses that are not possible, such as improving intelligence. The report recommends that genome editing for enhancement should not be allowed at this time, and that broad public input and discussion should be solicited before allowing clinical trials for somatic genome editing for any purpose other than treating or preventing disease or disability.

"Human genome editing holds tremendous promise for understanding, treating, or preventing many devastating genetic diseases, and for improving treatment of many other illnesses," said Alta Charo, co-chair of the study committee and Sheldon B. Lubar Distinguished Chair and Warren P. Knowles Professor of Law and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin-Madison. "However, genome editing to enhance traits or abilities beyond ordinary health raises concerns about whether the benefits can outweigh the risks, and about fairness if available only to some people."

Germline genome editing, in contrast, is contentious because genetic changes would be inherited by the next generation. Many view germline editing as crossing an "ethically inviolable" line, the report says. Concerns raised include spiritual objections to interfering with human reproduction to speculation about effects on social attitudes toward people with disabilities to possible risks to the health and safety of future children. But germline genome editing could provide some parents who are carriers of genetic diseases with their best or most acceptable option for having genetically related children who are born free of these diseases.

Heritable germline editing is not ready to be tried in humans. Much more research is needed before it could meet the appropriate risk and benefit standards for clinical trials. The technology is advancing very rapidly, though, making heritable genome editing of early embryos, eggs, sperm, or precursor cells in the foreseeable future "a realistic possibility that deserves serious consideration," the report says. Although heritable germline genome editing trials must be approached with caution, the committee said, caution does not mean prohibition.

At present, heritable germline editing is not permissible in the United States, due to an ongoing prohibition on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's ability to use federal funds to review "research in which a human embryo is intentionally created or modified to include a heritable genetic modification." A number of other countries have signed an international convention that prohibits germline modification.

If current restrictions are removed, and for countries where germline editing would already be permitted, the committee recommended stringent criteria that would need to be met before going forward with clinical trials. They include: (1) absence of reasonable alternatives; (2) restriction to editing genes that have been convincingly demonstrated to cause or strongly predispose to a serious disease or condition; (3) credible pre-clinical and/or clinical data on risks and potential health benefits; (4) ongoing, rigorous oversight during clinical trials; (5) comprehensive plans for long-term multigenerational follow-up; and (6) continued reassessment of both health and societal benefits and risks, with wide-ranging, ongoing input from the public.

Policymaking surrounding human genome editing applications should incorporate public participation, and funding of genome editing research should include support to study the socio-political, ethical, and legal aspects and evaluate efforts to build public communication and engagement on these issues.
The report recommends a set of overarching principles that should be used by any nation in governing human genome editing research or applications:

Promote well-being -- providing benefit and preventing harm to those affected

Transparency -- openness and sharing of information in ways that are accessible and understandable to patients, their families, and other stakeholders

Due care -- proceeding only when supported by sufficient and robust evidence

Responsible science -- adhering to the highest standards of research in accordance with international and professional norms

Respect for persons -- recognizing the personal dignity of all individuals and with respect for their decisions

Fairness -- treating all cases alike, with an equitable distribution of risks and benefits

Transnational cooperation -- committing to collaborative approaches for research and governance while respecting different cultural contexts.

"Genome editing research is very much an international endeavor, and all nations should ensure that any potential clinical applications reflect societal values and be subject to appropriate oversight and regulation," said committee co-chair Richard Hynes, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "These overarching principles and the responsibilities that flow from them should be reflected in each nation's scientific community and regulatory processes.

Such international coordination would enhance consistency of regulation."

Access the report at: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24623/human-genome-editing-science-ethics-and-governance

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human biology; personalized medicine; health policy; workplace health; public health; bioethics; stem education; social issues

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With stringent oversight, heritable human genome editing could be allowed

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Clinical trials for genome editing of the human germline -- adding, removing, or replacing DNA base pairs in gametes or early embryos -- could be permitted in the future, but only for serious conditions under stringent oversight, says a new report.

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Why does time seem to inch by at an excruciatingly slow pace when we're bored but fly by at other times?

Credit: JoLin / Shutterstock.com

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

No one is born with an innate understanding of time, and babies must learn to synchronize and coordinate their behavior with the rest of the world. Until then, they demand attention at all hours of the day and night, completely upending their parents' schedules. And for all of us, travel can be disorienting and disruptive, especially if we visit a place where time is organized quite differently from what we're used to (like in Spain, with its afternoon siesta).

But we're all able to eventually adjust - babies included - by adapting to a system of standard temporal units: minutes, hours and days of the week.

Despite the effectiveness of this system, there's still a big difference in how we perceive the passage of time - how fast or slow time seems to go by. A few minutes may seem to last "forever" when we're waiting for a light to turn green, or we may be shocked to realize that the year is almost over.

Variation in the perceived passage of time has been the focus of my research for more than 30 years. I became fascinated by the subject while in graduate school at the University of Illinois. In class one day, my professor showed us an interview with an NFL quarterback who explained how, during games, he often perceived all of the other players to be moving in slow motion.

Why does this distortion occur? What causes it?

I've collected hundreds of stories from people in all walks of life who have described instances when time seems to pass slowly. The circumstances are quite varied, but they can be classified into six general categories.

First, there's intense suffering, like torture, or intense pleasure, like sexual ecstasy. (Time doesn't always fly when you're having fun.)

Then there's violence and danger. Soldiers, for example, often describe time slowing down during combat.

Waiting and boredom may be the most familiar. Solitary confinement in prison is an extreme version of this, but working the counter at a job and having no customers will also do the trick.

People report that being in an altered state of consciousness - such as drug-induced experiences with LSD, mescaline or peyote - will also make time seem to slow down.

Next, high levels of concentration and meditation can influence the subjective passage of time. Various athletes, for example, perceive time to pass slowly when they are "in the zone." Yet people who are adept at meditation can produce comparable effects.

Finally, there's shock and novelty. For example, the perceived passage of time can slow down when we're doing something new, such as learning a challenging skill or going on vacation to an exotic locale.

Paradoxically, then, time is perceived to pass slowly in situations where there is almost nothing happening or a great deal is happening. In other words, the complexity of the situation is either much higher or much lower than normal.

What might explain this paradox?

From the standpoint of a clock or calendar, each standard temporal unit is exactly the same: Every minute contains 60 seconds; every day contains 24 hours. However, standard temporal units vary in what I've dubbed "the density of human experience" - the volume of objective and subjective information they carry.

For example, the density of experience is high when, objectively, there is a great deal happening (as in the case of combat). Yet the density of experience can be equally high when there is almost nothing happening (as in the case of solitary confinement) because that seemingly "empty" period of time is actually filled with our subjective involvement in self and situation: We're concentrating on our own actions or surroundings, thinking about how stressful our circumstances are or even obsessed with how slowly time seems to be passing.

Thus, the answer to this paradox lies in how unusual our circumstances are. We pay increased attention to strange circumstances, which amplifies the density of experience per standard temporal unit - and time, in turn, seems to pass slowly.

It follows, then, that time seems to pass quickly when the density of experience per standard temporal unit is abnormally low. This "compression of time" is something that occurs when we look back at our immediate or distant past. Two general conditions can compress our perception of time.

First, there are routine tasks. When we're learning them, they require our full attention. But with familiarity or training, we can now engage in these activities without devoting much attention to what we are doing (such as driving home using a standard route).

Say you have a busy day at work. You might be doing complex things, but they're routine because you've been doing them for so long. Given that we behave more or less unthinkingly, each standard temporal unit contains very little memorable experience. The "density" of unique experience is low. And at the end of the day, time seems to have passed quickly. We're pleasantly surprised to discover that it is already time to go home.

The erosion of episodic memory is the second general condition that makes time seem to have passed by quickly. This is something that affects all of us, all of the time. Our memories of the routine events that fill our days fade with time. What did you do on the 17th of last month? Unless it was a special occasion, you've probably forgotten the experiences from an entire day.

This forgetting intensifies the further back we look. In another study, I asked people to describe their perception of the passage of time yesterday, last month and last year. They felt that the previous year had passed more quickly than last month, and that the the previous month had passed more quickly than yesterday. Objectively, of course, this doesn't make sense: A year is 12 times longer than a month, and a month is 30 times longer than a day. But because our memory of the past erodes, the density of experience per standard temporal unit decreases, leaving us with the perception that time has passed quickly.

However, the situations I've described above are anomalies. We typically do not perceive time passing quickly or slowly. Under normal conditions, 10 minutes as measured by a clock also feels like 10 minutes. I can agree to meet with someone in 10 minutes and arrive roughly on time without the aid of a watch. This is possible only because we have learned to translate experience into standard temporal units, and vice versa.

We're able to do this because there's consistency in our day-to-day experiences - a consistency that's produced by society's repetitive and predictable patterns. Most of the time, we're not in solitary confinement or visiting new countries. The density of experience per standard temporal unit is both moderate and familiar. We learn how much experience is typically contained in 10 minutes.

Only something that alters the routine - an especially busy day at work or a pause to reflect on the previous year - will reduce the normal density of experience per standard temporal unit, leaving us with the impression that time has flown by.

Likewise, an automobile accident - a jarring incident that seizes our attention - instantly fills each standard temporal unit with the experience of self and situation, making it seem as though the accident is occurring in slow motion.

Michael Flaherty, Professor of Sociology, Eckerd College

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights . No one is born with an innate understanding of time, and babies must learn to synchronize and coordinate their behavior with the rest of the world.

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New evidence is emerging that a devastating combo of events — an asteroid impact and supervolcanoes — may be behind the dinosaurs’ demise.

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Katherine Wolf

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A good night's sleep is about way more than just clocking seven to nine hours in bed each night. And now, experts in sleep medicine and other health care fields have issued new metrics that spell out exactly what high-quality slumber means.

The National Sleep Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group, for the first time defined key indicators of good sleep quality in a recent report:

Being asleep for at least 85 percent of the time you spend in bed;

Taking 30 minutes or less to fall asleep (or up to 60 minutes if you're 65 or older);

Not waking up more than once per night for more than five minutes (or twice a night for five minutes for those 65 or older); and

Spending less than 20 minutes total awake after initially falling asleep.

These new metrics are based on the findings from 277 peer-reviewed sleep studies. An expert panel of sleep-medicine specialists and members of other health organizations (including the American Academy of Neurology, the Society for Research of Human Development and the Society for Women's Health Research) analyzed those studies and agreed on the final version. The sleep-quality indicators are separate from the National Sleep Foundation's recommendations for sleep durations for various age groups, released in 2015.

The new metrics are meant to help people better understand what good sleep health looks like overall, David Cloud, chief executive officer of the National Sleep Foundation, told The Huffington Post in an email.

"Now more than ever people are using devices [that] track their sleep and generate a tremendous amount of data without providing the tools people need to understand it," Cloud explained.

Your sleep might look different ― and that's okay.

The new metrics describe good-quality sleep, Sabra Abbott, a neurologist who specializes in circadian rhythm and sleep disorders at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, told HuffPost. But not everyone's sleep looks the same, she added.

"Just because you aren't able to perfectly meet these four guidelines, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have poor-quality sleep," Abbott said. The metrics "are useful as an initial target."

If your sleep does not meet these measures, that's reason to check what needs improvement ― like spending too much time awake in bed at night, which can make insomnia worse. (If you can't fall asleep within 20 minutes of waking up in the middle of the night, you should actually get up and do something else to help you relax ― like listening to music or reading. Lying awake in bed can create an unhealthy link between your bed and not sleeping, according to the National Sleep Foundation.)

Not meeting the new metrics may also be a sign of an undiagnosed sleep disorder, like sleep apnea, sleep-wake phase disorder (where your body clock does not run on average time) or insomnia, which can all be treated, Abbott said.

Another important indicator of getting good sleep is how you feel when you wake up, and during the day. "Do you have any reason to think you could be getting better sleep, or you feel tired during the day?" Abbott asked.

Answering yes to either of those questions, or not meeting the new quality sleep metrics, are red flags, and you should discuss these issues with your physician, Abbott said. Talking about your sleep habits and patterns with your primary-care doctor is just as important as talking about diet and exercise, she said.

"The intent [of the new report] was not to diagnose the public with potential sleep disorders, but rather to provide information to empower people and help them gauge their sleep health," Cloud added.

Another finding from the report was the need for more research to better understand the parameters of good-quality sleep ― especially which measures correspond to good long-term outcomes for other health measures, Cloud added.

"Ultimately, a better understanding of sleep quality is key to unlocking sleep health overall," Cloud said.

This reporting is brought to you by HuffPost's health and science platform, The Scope. Like us on and and tell us your story: scopestories@huffingtonpost.com .

Sarah DiGiulio is The Huffington Post's sleep reporter. You can contact her at sarah.digiulio@huffingtonpost.com.

BEFORE YOU GO

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So THIS Is How You Know If You're Getting Enough Sleep

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A good night's sleep is about way more than just clocking seven to nine hours in bed each night. And now, experts in sleep medicine and other health care fields have issued new metrics that spell out exactly what high-quality slumber means.

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New research shows that the friends of violent teens are much more likely to become violent themselves.

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Credit: Mooshny/Shutterstock

Meditation may help the body respond to stressful situations, according to a new study that took a rigorous look at how the practice affects people's physiology when they're under pressure.

In the study, people with anxiety disorder took an eight-week course in mindfulness meditation, in which they learned to focus on the present moment and accept difficult thoughts or feelings. The researchers found that, after completing the course, these participants showed reduced levels of stress hormones and markers of inflammation during a stressful event, compared with how their bodies reacted before the course. [ Mind Games: 7 Reasons You Should Meditate]

Importantly, the study also involved a comparison group of people who took a course in stress management that did not involve meditation. These participants did not show a similar reduction in their levels of stress hormones and markers of inflammation after their course, according to the findings, published today (Jan. 24) in the journal Psychiatry Research.

"Mindfulness meditation training is a relatively inexpensive and low-stigma treatment approach, and these findings strengthen the case that it can improve resilience to stress," study researcher Dr. Elizabeth A. Hoge, an associate professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC, said in a statement.

Previous studies have found that there are psychological and physical health benefits to mindfulness meditation, and some therapists already use the practice to treat people who have anxiety. However, many previous studies of meditation compared groups of people who meditated to groups of people who did nothing. This means that any benefit of meditation seen in such studies could be due to the placebo effect, said the authors in the new study. A placebo effect results from people feeling that the treatment works, rather than any physiological effect of the treatment.

In the new study, 89 participants who had previously been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) were randomly assigned to take either the mindfulness meditation course or a stress-management education course. That course included lessons on ways to reduce stress though overall health and wellness, such as good nutrition, healthy sleep habits and time management.

Before and after the courses, participants underwent a laboratory test designed to make people feel stressed. They were asked to give a speech in front of "evaluators" dressed in white coats, with only a few minutes to prepare, and then were asked to do mental arithmetic. The researchers collected blood samples before and after the test, analyzing the blood for several biological markers of stress, including the stress hormone adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), as well as the proteins IL-6 and TNF-alpha, which are markers of inflammation. (stress is one factor that can lead to chronic inflammation in the body.)

After the course, participants in the meditation group showed reductions in their levels of ACTH, IL-6 and TNF-alpha during the stress test, compared with their levels before they took the course. In contrast, the participants who took the stress-management education course showed an increase in levels of these markers on their second stress test, compared to the first. That result suggests that these participants were even more anxious when they took the test a second time.

The findings suggest that mindfulness meditation "may be a helpful strategy to decrease biological stress reactivity" in people with anxiety disorder, the researchers wrote in article.

The scientists noted that future studies should look at the effect of meditation on "real-life" stress, rather than stress created during a lab experiment.

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Meditation Really Does Lower Body's Stress Signals

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Meditation may help the body respond to stressful situations, according to a new study that took a rigorous look at how the practice affects people's physiology when they're under pressure. In the study, people with anxiety disorder took an eight-week course in mindfulness meditation, in which they learned to focus on the present moment and accept difficult thoughts or feelings.

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The world's primates face an "extinction crisis" with 60% of species now threatened with extinction, according to research. A global study, involving more than 30 scientists, assessed the conservation status of more than 500 individual species. This also revealed that 75% of species have populations that are declining.

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Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital researchers have developed a customizable soft robot that fits around a heart and helps it beat, potentially opening new treatment options for people suffering from heart failure.

The soft robotic sleeve twists and compresses in synch with a beating heart, augmenting cardiovascular functions weakened by heart failure. Unlike currently available devices that assist heart function, Harvard's soft robotic sleeve does not directly contact blood. This reduces the risk of clotting and eliminates the need for a patient to take potentially dangerous blood thinner medications. The device may one day be able to bridge a patient to transplant or to aid in cardiac rehabilitation and recovery.

"This research demonstrates that the growing field of soft robotics can be applied to clinical needs and potentially reduce the burden of heart disease and improve the quality of life for patients," said Ellen T. Roche, the paper's first author and former PhD student at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and The Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Roche is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Ireland.

The research, published in Science Translational Medicine, was a collaboration between SEAS, the Wyss Institute and Boston Children's Hospital.

"This work represents an exciting proof of concept result for this soft robot, demonstrating that it can safely interact with soft tissue and lead to improvements in cardiac function. We envision many other future applications where such devices can delivery mechanotherapy both inside and outside of the body," said Conor Walsh, senior author of the paper and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS and Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute.

Heart failure affects 41 million people worldwide. Today, some of the options to treat it are mechanical pumps called ventricular assist devices (VADs), which pump blood from the ventricles into the aorta, and heart transplant. While VADs are continuously improving, patients are still at high risk for blood clots and stroke.

To create an entirely new device that doesn't come into contact with blood, Harvard researchers took inspiration from the heart itself. The thin silicone sleeve uses soft pneumatic actuators placed around the heart to mimic the outer muscle layers of the mammalian heart. The actuators twist and compress the sleeve in a similar motion to the beating heart.

The device is tethered to an external pump, which uses air to power the soft actuators.

The sleeve can be customized for each patient, said Roche. If a patient has more weakness on the left side of the heart, for example, the actuators can be tuned to give more assistance on that side. The pressure of the actuators can also increase or decrease over time, as the patient's condition evolves.

The sleeve is attached to the heart using a combination of a suction device, sutures and a gel interface to help with friction between the device and the heart.

The SEAS and Wyss engineers worked with surgeons at Boston Children's Hospital to develop the device and determine the best ways to implant the device and test it on animal models.

"The cardiac field had turned away from idea of developing heart compression instead of blood-pumping VADs due to technological limitations, but now with advancements in soft robotics it's time to turn back," said Frank Pigula, a cardiothoracic surgeon and co-corresponding author on the study, who was formerly clinical director of pediatric cardiac surgery at Boston Children's Hospital and is now a faculty member at University of Louisville and division chief of pediatric cardiac surgery at Kosair Children's Hospital. "Most people with heart failure do still have some function left; one day the robotic sleeve may help their heart work well enough that their quality of life can be restored."

More research needs to be done before the sleeve can be implanted in humans but the research is an important first step towards an implantable soft robot that can augment organ function.

"This research is really significant at the moment because more and more people are surviving heart attacks and ending up with heart failure," said Roche. "Soft robotic devices are ideally suited to interact with soft tissue and give assistance that can help with augmentation of function, and potentially even healing and recovery."

Journal Reference:

Ellen T. Roche, Markus A. Horvath, Isaac Wamala, Ali Alazmani, Sang-Eun Song, William Whyte, Zurab Machaidze, Christopher J. Payne, James C. Weaver, Gregory Fishbein, Joseph Kuebler, Nikolay V. Vasilyev, David J. Mooney, Frank A. Pigula, Conor J. Walsh. Soft robotic sleeve supports heart function. Science Translational Medicine, 2017; 9 (373): eaaf3925 DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf3925

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heart disease; stroke prevention; vioxx; medical technology; robotics research; engineering; robotics; neural interfaces; artificial intelligence

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Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital researchers have developed a customizable soft robot that fits around a heart and helps it beat, potentially opening new treatment options for people suffering from heart failure. The soft robotic sleeve twists and compresses in synch with a beating heart, augmenting cardiovascular functions weakened by heart failure.

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Olivia Pruss

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Good dog! Canine brains separate tone of speech from its meaning

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Dogs brains divide up the tasks of interpreting words and interpreting emotion. It's a skill that may have evolved even before people did.

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From Nuna to Amasia, researchers are finding new clues to supercontinent comings and goings

Look at any map of the Atlantic Ocean, and you might feel the urge to slide South America and Africa together. The two continents just beg to nestle next to each other, with Brazil's bulge locking into West Africa's dimple. That visible clue, along with several others, prompted Alfred Wegener to propose over a century ago that the continents had once been joined in a single enormous landmass. He called it Pangaea, or "all lands."

Today, geologists know that Pangaea was just the most recent in a series of mighty super-continents. Over hundreds of millions of years, enormous plates of Earth's crust have drifted together and then apart. Pangaea ruled from roughly 400 million to about 200 million years ago. But wind the clock further back, and other supercontinents emerge. Between 1.3 billion and 750 million years ago, all the

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Evidence falls into place for once and future supercontinents

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From Nuna to Amasia, researchers are finding new clues to supercontinent comings and goings Look at any map of the Atlantic Ocean, and you might feel the urge to slide South America and Africa together. The two continents just beg to nestle next to each other, with Brazil's bulge locking into West Africa's dimple.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170116091419.htm

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170112110804.htm

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New research has found concussions accelerate Alzheimer's disease-related brain atrophy and cognitive decline in people who are at genetic risk for the condition.

The findings, which appear in the journal Brain, show promise for detecting the influence of concussion on neurodegeneration.

Moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury is one of the strongest environmental risk factors for developing neurodegenerative diseases such as late-onset Alzheimer's disease, although it is unclear whether mild traumatic brain injury or concussion also increases this risk.

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) studied 160 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, some who had suffered one or more concussions and some who had never had a concussion. Using MRI imaging, the thickness of their cerebral cortex was measured in seven regions that are the first to show atrophy in Alzheimer's disease, as well as seven control regions.

"We found that having a concussion was associated with lower cortical thickness in brain regions that are the first to be affected in Alzheimer's disease," explained corresponding author Jasmeet Hayes, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at BUSM and research psychologist at the National Center for PTSD, VA Boston Healthcare System. "Our results suggest that when combined with genetic factors, concussions may be associated with accelerated cortical thickness and memory decline in Alzheimer's disease relevant areas."

Of particular note was that these brain abnormalities were found in a relatively young group, with the average age being 32 years old. "These findings show promise for detecting the influence of concussion on neurodegeneration early in one's lifetime, thus it is important to document the occurrence and subsequent symptoms of a concussion, even if the person reports only having their "bell rung" and is able to shake it off fairly quickly, given that when combined with factors such as genetics, the concussion may produce negative long-term health consequences," said Hayes.

The researchers hope that others can build upon these findings to find the precise concussion-related mechanisms that accelerate the onset of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, Parkinson's and others. "Treatments may then one day be developed to target those mechanisms and delay the onset of neurodegenerative pathology," she added.

Journal Reference:

Jasmeet P. Hayes, Mark W. Logue, Naomi Sadeh, Jeffrey M. Spielberg, Mieke Verfaellie, Scott M. Hayes, Andrew Reagan, David H. Salat, Erika J. Wolf, Regina E. McGlinchey, William P. Milberg, Annjanette Stone, Steven A. Schichman, Mark W. Miller. Mild traumatic brain injury is associated with reduced cortical thickness in those at risk for Alzheimer's disease. Brain, 2017; aww344 DOI: 10.1093/brain/aww344

Cite This Page:

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alzheimer's research; healthy aging; chronic illness; accident and trauma; alzheimer's; brain injury; intelligence; disorders and syndromes

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Link found between concussions, Alzheimer's disease

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New research has found concussions accelerate Alzheimer's disease-related brain atrophy and cognitive decline in people who are at genetic risk for the condition. The findings, which appear in the journal Brain, show promise for detecting the influence of concussion on neurodegeneration.

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Abul Bajandar, known as the "tree man," had extensive, wood-like warts on his hands.

Credit: Discovery/Barcroft Productions

A 27-year-old man in Bangladesh known as the "tree man" recently underwent surgery to remove the extensive, wood-like warts that covered his hands and feet. But what causes this rare disease?

Over the past year, the man, Abul Bajandar, has undergone 16 surgeries to remove 11 lbs. (5 kilograms) of the unusual growths from his hands and feet, according toAgence France-Presse (AFP).

Prior to the surgery, the growths were so extensive that Bajandar could not feed himself or hold his daughter.

"Now I feel so much better; I can hold my daughter in my lap and play with her," Bajandar told AFP. [ 27 Oddest Medical Cases]

Bajandar has a rare genetic condition called epidermodysplasia verruciformis, according to news reports. People with this condition are more susceptible to human papillomavirus (HPV)infections in their skin, according to a 2010 report of the condition.

In people with this condition, HPV infections lead to the formation of wart-like skin lesions, which progress to malignant tumors in about 50 percent of patients, the report said. In people without this condition, infections with the same HPV strains may not cause any symptoms, according to Medscape.

People with epidermodysplasia verruciformis typically have mutations in two genes, called EVER1 and EVER2. It's not exactly clear how these gene mutations lead to the condition, but it's thought that these mutations make the body less able to ward off HPV infections.

Bajandar's warts first appeared on his hands and feet when he was in his teens, and the growths began to multiply rapidly in his early 20s, according to The Washington Post.

In 2016, doctors at Dhaka Medical College and Hospital in Bangladesh performed the 16 surgeries, and Bajandar is expected to leave the hospital within the next 30 days, according to the AFP report.

It's not clear if Bajandar is cured of his condition; his warts could grow back, the AFP report said.

Currently, there is no definitive cure for epidermodysplasia verruciformis, according to the 2010 paper.

"Finding ways to address skin lesions in epidermodysplasia verruciformis patients is a constant struggle," the paper said.

In addition to surgery, treatment can include drugs called retinoids, which can curb cell growth and are sometimes used to treat skin conditions; and interferon, a protein produced by the body to fight viruses.

However, "though there are a plethora of [treatment] options, none seem to be curative, and lesions usually recur after treatment cessation," the paper said.

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'Tree Man' Has Surgery: What Causes This Rare Condition?

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A 27-year-old man in Bangladesh known as the "tree man" recently underwent surgery to remove the extensive, wood-like warts that covered his hands and feet. But what causes this rare disease? Over the past year, the man, Abul Bajandar, has undergone 16 surgeries to remove 11 lbs.

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The tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur, including bones, soft tissue, and even feathers, has been found preserved in amber, according to a report published today in the journal Current Biology.

While individual dinosaur-era feathers have been found in amber, and evidence for feathered dinosaurs is captured in fossil impressions, this is the first time that scientists are able to clearly associate well-preserved feathers with a dinosaur, and in turn gain a better understanding of the evolution and structure of dinosaur feathers.

The research, led by paleontologist Lida Xing of the China University of Geosciences, was funded in part by the National Geographic Society's Expeditions Council.

The semitranslucent mid- Cretaceous amber sample, roughly the size and shape of a dried apricot, captures one of the earliest moments of differentiation between the feathers of birds of flight and the feathers of dinosaurs. ( Learn more about the evolutionary relationship between dinosaurs and birds.)

Inside the lump of resin is a 1.4-inch appendage covered in delicate feathers, described as chestnut brown with a pale or white underside.

CT scans and microscopic analysis of the sample revealed eight vertebrae from the middle or end of a long, thin tail that may have been originally made up of more than 25 vertebrae.

Based on the structure of the tail, researchers believe it belongs to a juvenile coelurosaur, part of a group of theropod dinosaurs that includes everything from tyrannosaurs to modern birds.
Feathered, but Could It Fly?
The presence of articulated tail vertebrae in the sample enabled researchers to rule out the possibility that the feathers belonged to a prehistoric bird. Modern birds and their closest Cretaceous ancestors feature a set of fused tail vertebrae called a pygostyle that enables tail feathers to move as a single unit.

"[A pygostyle] is the sort of thing you've seen if you've ever prepared a turkey," says study co-author Ryan McKellar, curator of invertebrate paleontology at Canada's Royal Saskatchewan Museum.

The dinosaur feathers feature a poorly defined central shaft (rachis) and appear to keel to either side of the tail. The open, flexible structure of the feathers is more similar to modern ornamental feathers than to flight feathers, which have well-defined central shafts, branches, sub-branches, and hooks that latch the structure together.

In a report in June of this year by the same research team, Cretaceous-era bird wings preserved in amber revealed feathers remarkably similar to the flight feathers of modern birds.

The current study concludes that if the entire length of the dinosaur tail was covered in the type of feathers seen in the sample, the dinosaur "would likely have been incapable of flight." Rather, such feathers may have served a signaling function or played a role in temperature regulation, says McKellar. ( Could dinosaurs fly?)

Maybe we can find a complete dinosaur.

The weakly developed tail feathers also suggest that the owner of the Cretaceous tail falls somewhere lower down on the evolutionary tree of theropod dinosaurs, "perhaps a basal [primitive] maniraptoran," Xing suggests, referring to the subgroup of coelurosaurs that includes oviraptorosaurs and therizinosaurs. ( See the oviraptorosaur that paleontologists have dubbed the "chicken from hell.")
Destined for Jewelry, but With a Silver Lining
The amber sample-formally called DIP-V-15103 and nicknamed "Eva" in honor of paleobotanist Eva Koppelhus, the wife of co-author Philip Currie -comes from a mine in the Hukawng Valley in Kachin state, northern Myanmar. Amber from this region most likely contains the world's largest variety of animal and plant life from the Cretaceous period.

It was one of more than a dozen amber samples with significant inclusions that were collected by Xing and his research team in 2015 at a well-known amber market in Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin state. Two of the other samples contained the dinosaur-era bird wings published earlier this summer.

The majority of Burmese amber is used in jewelry and carvings, and the "Eva" sample had already been subject to shaping by the time it was collected by the researchers.

The modification had a silver lining, however: It offered "a nice cross section" through the tail that enabled the scientists to study the chemistry of the exposed surface, notes McKellar.

That study revealed the presence of ferrous iron, a decomposition product from the blood hemoglobin that was once present in the dinosaur's soft tissue.

"The fact that [the iron] is still present gives us a lot of hope for future analysis, to obtain other chemical information on things like pigmentation or even to identify parts of the original keratin," says McKellar. "Maybe not for this particular specimen, but for other [samples] down the road."

Meanwhile, Xing believes that the "nearing end" of a decades-old conflict between the Myanmar government and the Kachin Independence Army, which controls the Hukawng Valley, will lead to increased scientific access to the amber mines and, in, turn, to an increase in spectacular discoveries.

"Maybe we can find a complete dinosaur," he speculates, rather confidently.

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First Dinosaur Tail Found Preserved in Amber

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The tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur, including bones, soft tissue, and even feathers, has been found preserved in amber, according to a report published today in the journal Current Biology .

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Alexis cross-Tunley
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/news-brief-group-dancing-helps-teens-bond

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A major challenge in truly targeted cancer therapy is cancer's suppression of the immune system. Northwestern University synthetic biologists now have developed a general method for "rewiring" immune cells to flip this action around.

"Right now, one of the most promising frontiers in cancer treatment is immunotherapy -- harnessing the immune system to combat a wide range of cancers," said Joshua N. Leonard, the senior author of the study. "The simple cell rewiring we've done ultimately could help overcome immunosuppression at the tumor site, one of the most intransigent barriers to making progress in this field."

When cancer is present, molecules secreted at tumor sites render many immune cells inactive. The Northwestern researchers genetically engineered human immune cells to sense the tumor-derived molecules in the immediate environment and to respond by becoming more active, not less.

This customized function, which is not observed in nature, is clinically attractive and relevant to cancer immunotherapy. The general approach for rewiring cellular input and output functions should be useful in fighting other diseases, not just cancer.

"This work is motivated by clinical observations, in which we may know why something goes wrong in the body, and how this may be corrected, but we lack the tools to translate those insights into a therapy," Leonard said. "With the technology we have developed, we can first imagine a cell function we wish existed, and then our approach enables us to build -- by design -- a cell that carries out that function."

Currently, scientists and engineers lack the ability to program cells to exhibit all the functions that, from a clinical standpoint, physicians might wish them to exhibit, such as becoming active only when next to a tumor. This study addresses that gap, Leonard said.

Leonard, who focuses on integrating synthetic biology into medicine, is an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering. He is a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.

The research comes out of a rich collaboration that Leonard's team has with clinical oncologists, immunologists and basic cancer researchers at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine as well as other synthetic biologists.

The study, to be published Dec. 12 by the journal Nature Chemical Biology, provides details of the first synthetic biology technology enabling researchers to rewire how mammalian cells sense and respond to a broad class of physiologically relevant cues. Kelly A. Schwarz, a graduate student in Leonard's research group, is the study's first author.

"This work is exciting because it addresses a key technical gap in the field," Schwarz said. "There is great promise for using engineered cells as programmable therapies, and it is going to take technologies such as this to truly realize that goal."

Starting with human T cells in culture, the research team genetically engineered changes in the cells' input and output, including adding a sensing mode, and built a cell that is relevant to cancer immunotherapy.

Specifically, the engineered cells sense vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a protein found in tumors that directly manipulates and in some ways suppresses the immune response. When the rewired cells sense VEGF in their environment, these cells, instead of being suppressed, respond by secreting interleukin 2 (IL-2), a protein that stimulates nearby immune cells to become activated specifically at that site. Normal unmodified T cells do not produce IL-2 when exposed to VEGF, so the engineered behavior is both useful and novel.

This work was carried out in cells in culture, and the technology next will be tested in animal studies.

While Leonard's team has initially focused on the application of this cell programming technology to enabling cancer immunotherapy, it can be readily extended to distinct cellular engineering goals and therapeutic applications. Leonard's "parts" are also intentionally modular, such that they can be combined with other synthetic biology innovations to write more sophisticated cellular programs.

"To truly accelerate the rate at which we can translate scientific insights into treatments, we need technologies that let us rapidly try out new ideas, in this case by building living cells that manifest a desired biological function," said Leonard, who also is a founding member of the Center for Synthetic Biology and a member of the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute.

"Our technology also provides a powerful new tool for fundamental research, enabling biologists to test otherwise untestable theories about how cells coordinate their functions in complex, multicellular organisms," he said.

Related to this research, Leonard was an invited conferee at a special meeting held in October, "Systems and Synthetic Biology for Designing Rational Cancer Immunotherapies," as part of President Obama and Vice President Biden's Cancer Moonshot Initiative.

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lymphoma; brain tumor; immune system; cancer; lung cancer; stem cells; prostate cancer; colon cancer

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'Rewired' cells show promise for targeted cancer therapy: Human immune cells rationally engineered to sense, respond to tumor signal

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A major challenge in truly targeted cancer therapy is cancer's suppression of the immune system. Synthetic biologists now have developed a general method for 'rewiring' immune cells to flip this action around. When cancer is present, molecules secreted at tumor sites render many immune cells inactive.

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In the past 70 years, the world's population tripled to more than seven billion and average global temperature increased by nearly one degree Celsius. Population growth and climate change are associated with big challenges facing modern agriculture. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) combines computer science and biology to identify genes that make plants more resistant to stress factors, such as drought and saline soils.

"To cope with changed requirements on agriculture, development of new plant species is indispensable. For this, we need a better understanding of important crops, such as rice that is considered the most important source of food worldwide," Dr. Michael Riemann of the Molecular Cell Biology Division of KIT's Botanical Institute explains. Together with the startup da-cons, he developed the RiSeGrAn (Rice Seedlings Growth Analysis) system that analyzes the growth of rice seedlings. By comparing genetically different species, conclusions can be drawn with respect to the function of certain genes for resistance against a variety of stress factors. As research concentrates on the first phases of seedling development, gene variations can be classified more quickly. The system uses an infrared camera to take photos of plant seedlings growing in darkness. "At first, the seedlings have to grow in the dark for them to become highly sensitive to light. Then, we can measure the effect of the light on the seedlings," Riemann explains. In the next step, the system evaluates the photos automatically.
Setup of the RiSeGrAn System
The system is accommodated in a box of 50 times 50 centimeters in dimension. The interior is illuminated by 20 infrared LEDs. "The seedlings change their appearance depending on whether they grow in the dark or in light. However, the system is to observe the plants and not to influence them. For this reason, the box is designed to prevent visible light from falling on the seedlings," Riemann says. The seedlings are arranged in a sealed plate in water agar, a transparent nutrient medium that supplies the seedlings with water. For a detailed documentation of plant growth, the system takes a picture every hour for a period of ten days in a computer-controlled manner without a person having to look into the box. Algorithms developed by da-cons GmbH are used to determine from the photos the lengths of the shoot, the first leaf, and the root. In addition, the computer transmits the photos automatically to a server, where they can be look at by the researchers.

A video illustrates the RiSeGrAn system: http://da-cons.de/uploads/images/videos/RiSeGrAn__description.mp4

"By means of the system, we can discover unknown properties of known genes. For example, we can precisely measure parameters, such as the time of germination or growth of certain tissues," Riemann explains. "Our measurements can support molecular biology studies by identifying the genes that make plants more resistant to certain stress factors, e.g. saline soils."
OpenData Platform
In the next step, the developers of the RiSeGrAn project plan to establish an online OpenData platform based on the data collected. Scientists can then publish their data on this platform. OpenData means that raw data obtained from experiments are to be made available to other scientists. Researchers are enabled to check initial results or to study the data for certain characteristics. "Based on the data of the RiSeGrAn system, we can now test how to transfer them to the OpenData platform in the best way. In addition, we can estimate the required computer capacity and study various ways of presenting the results," Dr. Michael Kreim, Development Director of da-cons GmbH, says. "In general, technical background processes and the user interface can be developed better with realistic data than with test data." da-cons uses the data sets of the RiSeGrAn project to determine requirements to be met by the platform and to test the latter.

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Biology 2. 0: Camera observes plant growth

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In the past 70 years, the world's population tripled to more than seven billion and average global temperature increased by nearly one degree Celsius. Population growth and climate change are associated with big challenges facing modern agriculture. New research combines computer science and biology to identify genes that make plants more resistant to stress factors, such as drought and saline soils.

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http://www.livescience.com/57183-could-limestone-sunshade-cool-earth.html

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A melt pond in the Arctic ice.

Credit: Stefan Hendricks, Alfred Wegener Institute.

The Arctic is missing a chunk of sea ice the size of Mexico.

While fall ushers in the season of sea ice growth, November saw a brief retreat that was virtually unprecedented in nearly 40 years of satellite records, according to data released Tuesday by the National Snow and Ice Data Center. That dip helped November set a record low for sea ice area - the seventh month to do so this year, also a record.

At the opposite pole, the sea ice fringing Antarctica also set a record low for November, reversing several years of record highs, though what's driving the flip-flopping isn't clear.

"It is very striking this November in both hemispheres," NSIDC scientist Julienne Stroeve said in an email. "It certainly is continuing the long-term decline in Arctic sea ice. It's a bit more curious about what is happening in Antarctica, so more research on that is needed."

Unusual Cold Season Retreat

Arctic sea ice follows a seasonal cycle, waxing during the cold, dark months of fall and winter, and waning when the sun re-emerges in spring and summer.

Arctic sea ice extent for November 2016 was 3.51 million square miles. The magenta line shows the 1981 to 2010 median extent for the month. The black cross indicates the geographic North Pole.

Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center

But skyrocketing Arctic temperatures, which are rising twice as fast as the global average, have set off a downward spiral in sea ice levels. Summer has seen the biggest decline, with the end-of-season minimum half of what it was just three decades ago.

A recent study found that emissions of carbon dioxide equivalent to that from a single transatlantic flight translates to a loss of 30 square feet of sea ice. If emissions aren't brought under control and temperatures continue to rise, the Arctic could become ice-free during summer by the middle of the century.

That loss of ice affects regional flora and fauna, native communities, and industrial activities like shipping. It may even exert an influence on weather patterns of North America, Europe and Asia.

The end-of-winter maximum this year hit a record low thanks to remarkably warm winter conditions in the Arctic, with air temperatures 4°F to 11°F (2°C to 6°C) above average. But relatively cool and cloudy summer weather kept the summer minimum from beating out the 2012 record low.

As the sun set for the winter, ice began to grow like usual, though it stayed well below normal week after week.

Then, in mid-November, an odd thing happened: the sea ice began to decline. Before it resumed its upward trajectory, sea ice area dropped by 19,300 square miles - a feat virtually unprecedented in the records. The only similar occurrence was a much smaller drop of 5,400 square miles in November 2013.

That unusual cold-season dip helped November finish with a sea ice area 753,000 square miles below the 1981 to 2010 long-term average for the month (even though the growth rate of sea ice was slightly higher than average), just a bit smaller than the area of Mexico.

Not a 'Tipping Point'

The strange cold-season dip in sea ice extent was caused by persistent southerly winds pulling in warm air and warm ocean waters that kept sea ice from forming in the Barents Sea, an area north of Scandinavia and eastern Russia. Sea surface temperatures there were up to 7°F (4°C) above normal during November near Norway's Svalbard Peninsula.

"Typically sea ice begins to form in the fjords at the beginning of November, but this year there was no ice to be found," Stroeve, who was in Svalbard during the month, said in a statement.

Sea ice also dropped unusually sharply in Antarctica, which is nearing summer. The average November extent there was 699,000 square miles below the 1981 to 2010 average, more than twice previous record low for month. NSIDC scientists think the decline was due to warmer air temperatures and a rapid change in the air current that whips around the continent.

In previous years, Antarctic sea ice hit record highs, potentially due to changing ocean conditions linked to the melting of land-bound glaciers. But polar scientists say there is still much to learn about what drives the behavior of Antarctic sea ice, which is quite different than its Arctic cousin.

Stroeve and other sea ice researchers don't think this year's Arctic ice records mark a tipping point, or a point where such loss becomes irreversible. Scientists worried about reaching such a point-of-no-return when sea ice first plummeted to a record low in 2007, but it has since rebounded (though the long-term decline continues) and if warming is brought under control, sea ice can grow back.

"I still don't think we have a tipping point only because the ice could come back if we limit the warming - it's not irreversible," Stroeve said.

It is possible, though, that such a cold season retreat could become more common as global, and Arctic, temperatures, continue to rise.

"I think this is something we might expect to see more of in the future," Walt Meier, a NASA sea ice researcher, said. "With less ice in the summer and more warming of the ocean, there is more heat available near the ice that can be pushed (by winds) into the ice [and] at least temporarily melt back some ice early in the growth season."

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Original article on Climate Central.

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Mexico-Size Chunk of Ice Missing from the Arctic

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The Arctic is missing a chunk of sea ice the size of Mexico. While fall ushers in the season of sea ice growth, November saw a brief retreat that was virtually unprecedented in nearly 40 years of satellite records, according to data released Tuesday by the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/men-women-brains-vision_us_583dafd3e4b0860d611681ab?section=us_science

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161130114154.htm

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/da4b5e8d79c1efcc5f662b0e57f910e9.htm

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Real talk: if you're a regular contact wearer, chances are you've fallen asleep in your contacts at some point in time (or maybe even a few times). We all know it's not recommended by eye doctors, but why, exactly? What's actually happening in your eyes when you sleep with your contacts in?

To find out, we had to get a little familiar with how daily contact wearing actually affects your body. As with any foreign object or substance that you introduce to your body, whether it be a food or a drug, contacts take some time to get used to. "The FDA actually describes contacts as a drug," says Russell Wohl, OD, from Farmingdale, New York. "No you're not ingesting a contact, it's just sitting on your eye, but your body has to get acclimated to it." Contacts can also sometimes burn or cause dryness in the eye, too. Each individual's tears are made up of a certain pH acidity, explains Wohl, and when you put a contact into your eye, the contact solution-not the actual lens- actually has a different pH, so your eye may tear to help wash that solution out. And if you have dry eyes to begin with, lenses may only exacerbate that. "When we blink, we're wiping tears across the cornea to help keep things uniform and clear, because when the cornea is exposed to air, it can become irritating," explains Wohl. "Contacts need moisture once they're removed from the solution they come packaged in, and if you already don't have enough tears or suffer from dry eyes, lenses might only make that worse."

When we sleep, we lose ambient oxygen exposure to the cornea, which is needed to keep the cornea healthy. We are still able to get it in other ways-like through blood vessels-but we are getting less than we do when we're awake. "What a contact lens does is limit the oxygen even more because it creates a barrier between the oxygen and the cornea," explains Wohl. "Some lenses-extended wear ones-allow the oxygen through though," says Wohl, but if not enough oxygen gets through, you can experience what is called hypoxia (oxygen deprivation in a region of the body).

You also increase your chances of developing an infection, because bacteria can get onto the cornea and when your eyes are closed, there's nothing to flush it away. "The bacteria can then become opportunistic and literally start to eat away at your cornea," says Wohl. "Worst case scenario from that is loss of vision." Yikes!

If you fall asleep accidentally with your lenses in for just one night, you're unlikely to experience any serious issues. But if it becomes a more frequent habit or you're purposefully wearing lenses overnight that aren't meant to be, you're upping your chance of a serious health risk. If you start to notice that your eyes are extremely red (we're talking very bloodshot), you feel like there's something in your eye and it's irritated all the time, your eye lid is looking inflamed, you aren't seeing as well as you used to, or if when you look at an indoor lamp it feels like you're looking directly at the sun, these are signs that you could have an infection and you should see your eye doctor right away. "The good news is that most of the time it's an acute episode that can usually be corrected by not wearing the contact lens and allowing the body to heal itself," says Wohl. "If it's worse, your doctor may need to give you a prescription."

So why even take a chance? Make it a routine to take your contact lenses out every night before you go to sleep. "I'm more on the conservative side of things," says Wohl, "so even with my extended wear patients, if it isn't too much hassle, I recommend that everyone try to take them out every single day. If you ask me, that's the healthiest option."

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Here's what really happens when you sleep in your contact lenses

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Real talk: if you're a regular contact wearer, chances are you've fallen asleep in your contacts at some point in time (or maybe even a few times). We all know it's not recommended by eye doctors, but why, exactly? What's actually happening in your eyes when you sleep with your contacts in?

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/967420f0924639876ba4355fb4a9fbf4.htm

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Aspirin doubles survival rates!

Biology Current Events

9/28/2015 - One little pill helps prevent stroke, eases the aches of arthritis and banishes headaches. And now, a new study shows that the humble aspirin tablet also improves survival rates in patients with cancerous tumors of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, that is, cancer of the stomach and/or intestines.

Led by Leiden University Medical Center's Martine Frouws, the study from the Netherlands analyzed data from almost 14,000 patients who had been treated for a GI cancer between 1998 and 2011. The study team found an increase in survival rates for patients who took aspirin compared to those who didn't.

Some 28 percent of patients survived at least five years after diagnosis. Those who took aspirin after diagnosis realized a chance of survival twice as high as those who didn't take aspirin, even after considering other factors such as gender, age and stage of the cancer.

The research team is currently staging a Netherlands-based trial - random, multicenter and with placebos - to investigate the effect on the survival of elderly people with colon cancer who take 80 mg of aspirin daily. The team later wants to expand the trial to include other sites in the GI tract.

Why aspirin?

Aspirin has an anti-platelet effect, and therein lies its benefit, researchers believe. Platelets, you may remember, are parts of the blood that glop together and clog injured blood vessels to stop bleeding. Circulating tumor cells, people think, hide from the immune system by clothing themselves in platelets. Aspirin lets the immune system recognize these circulating cells and eliminate them because it constrains platelet function.

A long history

These findings demonstrating the beneficial effects of aspirin on gastrointestinal cancer are, of course, only the latest discovery relating to the "wonder drug." The action of salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin, has been known since ancient times. Even then, plant extracts, particularly from willow and spiraea, were used to help people with headaches, pains and fevers. Thus, Hippocrates, the father of medicine (c. 460 - 377 BCE), described the use of a powder made from the bark and leaves of the willow tree and noted that it could help these symptoms.

The study results were presented at the 18 th congress of the European Cancer Organisation and the 40th congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO).

This story was based on information obtained from the AAAS. Source >>

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Gastrointestinal cancer: Aspirin doubles survival rates

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9/28/2015 - One little pill helps prevent stroke, eases the aches of arthritis and banishes headaches. And now, a new study shows that the humble aspirin tablet also improves survival rates in patients with cancerous tumors of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, that is, cancer of the stomach and/or intestines.

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http://mediarelations.cornell.edu/2016/10/31/study-shows-link-between-mitochondrial-dna-and-autism/

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A Burmese python shown with the DNA sequence associated with snake limb loss.

Credit: Eric Zamora and Martin J. Cohn | Florida Museum of Natural History and University of Florida

The ancestors of today's slithery snakes once sported full-fledged arms and legs, but genetic mutations caused the reptiles to lose all four of their limbs about 150 million years ago, according to two new studies.

The findings are welcome news to herpetologists, who have long wondered what genetic changes caused snakes to lose their arms and legs, the researchers said.

Both studies showed that mutations in a stretch of snake DNA called ZRS (the Zone of Polarizing Activity Regulatory Sequence) were responsible for the limb-altering change. But the two research teams used different techniques to arrive at their findings. [ Image Gallery: Snakes of the World]

According to one study, published online today (Oct. 20) in the journal Cell, the snake's ZRS anomalies became apparent to researchers after they took several mouse embryos, removed the mice's ZRS DNA and replaced it with the ZRS section from snakes.

The swap had severe consequences for the mice. Instead of developing regular limbs, the mice barely grew any limbs at all, indicating that ZRS is crucial for the development of limbs, the researchers said.

"This is one of many components of the DNA instructions needed for making limbs in humans and, essentially, all other legged vertebrates. In snakes, it's broken," the study's senior author Axel Visel, a geneticist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in a statement.

Visel and his colleagues began looking at the genomes of "early" snakes that were closer to the base of the snake family tree - such as the boa and python - that have vestigial legs, or tiny bones buried within their muscles. The scientists also studied "advanced" snakes, including the viper and cobra, which do not have any limb structures.

During their investigation, the researchers focused on a gene called sonic hedgehog, which is key in embryonic development, including limb formation. Sonic hedgehog's regulators, located in the ZRS sequence of DNA, had mutated, they found.

However, the researchers needed proof that the ZRS mutations were responsible for limb loss. To find out, they used a DNA-editing technique called CRISPR (short for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats") to cut out the ZRS stretch in mice embryos and replace it with the ZRS section from other animals, including snakes.

When the mice had ZRS DNA from other animals, including humans and fish, they developed limbs just like any regular mouse would. But when the researchers inserted the python and cobra ZRS into the mice, the mice's limbs barely developed, the researchers found.

During normal development, mice form full arms and legs (top). But when mice embryos are given a stretch of DNA from a cobra (middle) and a python (bottom) that controls limb development, their arm and leg growth are severely limited.

Credit: Kvon et al. Cell 2016

Next, the researchers took an in-depth look at the snakes' ZRS, and found that a deletion of 17 base pairs (that is, paired DNA "letters") within the snakes' DNA appeared to be the cause of the limb loss, they said. When they painstakingly "fixed" the mutations in the snake ZRS and inserted it into mice embryos, the mice grew normal legs, they found. [ Photos: Weird 4-Legged Snake Was Transitional Creature]

However, creatures usually have redundant DNA that protects against mutations such as these, so it's likely that multiple evolutionary events led to limb loss in snakes, Visel said.

"There's likely some redundancy built in the mouse ZRS," he said. "A few of the other mutations in the snake ZRS probably also played a role in its loss of function during evolution."

Adult snakes don't have limbs, but extremely young snake embryos do, according to the other study, published online today in the journal Current Biology.

Like the researchers of the Cell study, the scientists found that snake ZRS had disabling mutations that prevented limb development. However, they also found that during the first 24 hours of their existence, python embryos have a "pulse of sonic hedgehog transcription [the first step of gene expression] in just a few limb bud cells," said the study's senior author Martin Cohn, a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at the University of Florida College of Medicine.

But that transcription switches off within a day of the egg being laid, meaning that the snake cannot fully develop legs, Cohn and his co-author Francisca Leal, a doctoral student in Cohn's lab, found.

"Python ZRS proved to be very inefficient, turning on transcription for a short time in a few cells," Cohn said.

However, even during that short time, python embryos managed to begin development for leg bones such as a femur, tibia and fibula, the researchers found. "[But] those distal structures degenerate before they fully differentiate into cartilage, and python hatchlings are left with just a rudimentary femur and a claw," Cohn said. He added, "the results tell us that pythons have retained a lot more of the leg than we appreciated, but the structures are transitory and are found only at embryonic stages."

Cohn called the Cell study, "a tour de force" and "absolutely thrilling."

"The two groups took very different approaches to the question of limb loss in snakes," Cohn said. "Axel [Visel]'s group started with genomics, and we started with developmental biology, and the two groups converged on exactly the same discovery."

Original article on Live Science.

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Snakes Used to Have Legs and Arms ... Until These Mutations Happened

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The ancestors of today's slithery snakes once sported full-fledged arms and legs, but genetic mutations caused the reptiles to lose all four of their limbs about 150 million years ago, according to two new studies. The findings are welcome news to herpetologists, who have long wondered what genetic changes caused snakes to lose their arms and legs, the researchers said.

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http://obrag.org/?p=112004

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By Christina Beck / Christian Science Monitor / Sept. 21, 2016
In a near victory for California sea otters, biologists are cautiously optimistic about the future of the state's southern sea otter population after the annual otter census counted more than 3,000 individuals this year.

Although otter population growth has delighted scientists, however, there are also worrying signs that the population range is contracting, a factor that can restrict long term recovery.

"The population index has exceeded 3,090 for the first time, and that's encouraging," said US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) southern sea otter recovery coordinator Lilian Carswell, "but sustained population growth will require range expansion."

While 3,090 may seem like an odd number, it is a significant one for biologists, since otter censuses must show at least that many individuals in the total population for three years in a row before the USFWS will consider taking the otter off the threatened species list.

Most of the population growth appears to have occurred in the center of the otters' typical range. A greater abundance of sea urchins, a popular otter snack, likely contributed to the surging otter population.

"We believe the high count this year is partly explained by excellent viewing conditions, but it also appears to reflect increased food availability in the range center," said Tim Tinker, a research ecologist who leads the USGS sea otter research program, in a Monterey Aquarium statement. "The boom in sea urchin abundance throughout northern and central California has provided a prey bonanza for sea otters, and that means more pups and juveniles are surviving to adulthood."

Yet although the population in general is expanding, the northern and southern populations are experiencing declines of 2.5 and 0.6 percent respectively, a population trend that worries biologists.

Researchers say that "shark gauntlets" at either end of the otters' current range could be keeping the animals penned in to the center of their population range. Many stranded otters found on either extreme of the otters' usual range are found with lethal shark bites, according to a press release by the Monterey Aquarium.

In the long term, scientists say that they would love to see recolonization of otter habitats on the extremes of the species current range, a population spread that would reduce strain on resources in the center of the otters' current range, and restore traditional ecological relationships

"Once sea otters' range expands, recolonizing historical habitats throughout California, we'll see similar ecosystem benefits that sea otters have brought to kelp forests and estuaries," said Monterey Aquarium Sea Otter program lead manager Andrew Johnson.

Sea otters have been in national news lately, after several young otters were found along the California coast, killed by gunshot wounds.

Wildlife officials offered a $10,000 reward for information related to those killings.

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By Christina Beck / Christian Science Monitor / Sept. 21, 2016 In a near victory for California sea otters, biologists are cautiously optimistic about the future of the state's southern sea otter population after the annual otter census counted more than 3,000 individuals this year. Although otter population growth has delighted scientists, however, there are...

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Traumatic stress affects the brains of adolescent boys and girls differently, according to a new brain-scanning study from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Among youth with post-traumatic stress disorder, the study found structural differences between the sexes in one part of the insula, a brain region that detects cues from the body and processes emotions and empathy. The insula helps to integrate one's feelings, actions and several other brain functions.

The findings will be published online Nov. 11 in Depression and Anxiety. The study is the first to show differences between male and female PTSD patients in a part of the insula involved in emotion and empathy.

"The insula appears to play a key role in the development of PTSD," said the study's senior author, Victor Carrion, MD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford. "The difference we saw between the brains of boys and girls who have experienced psychological trauma is important because it may help explain differences in trauma symptoms between sexes."
Smaller insula in traumatized girls
Among young people who are exposed to traumatic stress, some develop PTSD while others do not. People with PTSD may experience flashbacks of traumatic events; may avoid places, people and things that remind them of the trauma; and may suffer a variety of other problems, including social withdrawal and difficulty sleeping or concentrating. Prior research has shown that girls who experienced trauma are more likely to develop PTSD than boys who experience trauma, but scientists have been unable to determine why.

The research team conducted MRI scans of the brains of 59 study participants ages 9-17. Thirty of them -- 14 girls and 16 boys -- had trauma symptoms, and 29 others -- the control group of 15 girls and 14 boys -- did not. The traumatized and nontraumatized participants had similar ages and IQs. Of the traumatized participants, five had experienced one episode of trauma, while the remaining 25 had experienced two or more episodes or had been exposed to chronic trauma.

The researchers saw no differences in brain structure between boys and girls in the control group. However, among the traumatized boys and girls, they saw differences in a portion of the insula called the anterior circular sulcus. This brain region had larger volume and surface area in traumatized boys than in boys in the control group. In addition, the region's volume and surface area were smaller in girls with trauma than among girls in the control group.
Findings could help clinicians
"It is important that people who work with traumatized youth consider the sex differences," said Megan Klabunde, PhD, the study's lead author and an instructor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. "Our findings suggest it is possible that boys and girls could exhibit different trauma symptoms and that they might benefit from different approaches to treatment."

The insula normally changes during childhood and adolescence, with smaller insula volume typically seen as children and teenagers grow older. Thus, the findings imply that traumatic stress could contribute to accelerated cortical aging of the insula in girls who develop PTSD, Klabunde said.

"There are some studies suggesting that high levels of stress could contribute to early puberty in girls," she said.

The researchers also noted that their work may help scientists understand how experiencing trauma could play into differences between the sexes in regulating emotions. "By better understanding sex differences in a region of the brain involved in emotion processing, clinicians and scientists may be able to develop sex-specific trauma and emotion dysregulation treatments," the authors write in the study.

To better understand the findings, the researchers say what's needed next are longitudinal studies following traumatized young people of both sexes over time. They also say studies that further explore how PTSD might manifest itself differently in boys and girls, as well as tests of whether sex-specific treatments are beneficial, are needed.

The work is an example of Stanford Medicine's focus on precision health, the goal of which is to anticipate and prevent disease in the healthy and precisely diagnose and treat disease in the ill.

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children's health; staying healthy; accident and trauma; mental health research; gender difference; ptsd; stress; anxiety

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Traumatic stress changes brains of boys, girls differently

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Traumatic stress affects the brains of adolescent boys and girls differently, according to a new brain-scanning study. Among youth with post-traumatic stress disorder, the study found structural differences between the sexes in one part of the insula, a brain region that detects cues from the body and processes emotions and empathy.

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The Supreme Court has ruled criminal suspects can be subjected to a police DNA test after arrest -- before trial and conviction -- a privacy-versus-public-safety dispute that could have wide-reaching implications in the rapidly evolving technology surrounding criminal procedure.

At issue in the ruling Monday was whether taking genetic samples from someone held without a warrant in criminal custody for "a serious offense" is an unconstitutional "search."

A 5-4 majority of the court concluded it is legitimate, and upheld a state law.

"When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and they bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee's DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment," the majority wrote.

Law enforcement lauds genetic testing's potential as the "gold standard" of reliable evidence gathering, especially to solve "cold cases" involving violent offenders.

But privacy rights groups counter the state's "trust us" promise not to abuse the technology does not ease their concerns that someone's biological makeup could soon be applied for a variety of non-criminal purposes.

Twenty-six states and the federal government allow genetic swabs to be taken after a felony arrest and without a warrant.

Each has different procedures, but in all cases, only a profile is created. About 13 individual markers out of some 3 billion are isolated from a suspect's DNA. That selective information does not reveal the full genetic makeup of a person and, officials stress, nothing is shared with any other public or private party, including any medical diagnostics.

The Obama administration has signaled its support.

The case involves a Maryland man convicted of a 2003 rape in Wicomico County in the state's Eastern Shore region. Alonzo King Jr. had been arrested four years ago on an unrelated assault charge, and a biological sample was automatically obtained at that time. That sample was linked to the earlier sexual assault.

King moved to suppress that evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds, but was ultimately convicted of the 2003 first-degree rape offense and was given a life sentence. The Fourth Amendment grants the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

Both King and his legal team turned down CNN's request for an interview.

A divided Maryland Court of Appeals later agreed with King, saying suspects under arrest enjoy a higher level of privacy than a convicted felon, outweighing the state's law enforcement interests. That court also said obtaining King's DNA immediately after arrest was not necessary in identifying him, and that the process was more personally invasive than standard fingerprinting.

But the high court decided in favor of the state. Kennedy was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, and Samuel Alito.

The issue of citizen privacy has been particularly acute since the 9/11 attacks. Federal and state governments have stepped up surveillance of suspected terrorists and their allies and of high-risk targets, like government buildings and shopping malls.

The current conservative-majority court has generally been supportive of law enforcement in recent search and privacy disputes, but not always. The court last year ruled police could not place a GPS tracking device on a drug suspect's car for several weeks without first obtaining a search warrant.

In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said the majority's reasoning established a "terrifying principle."

"The court's opinion barely mentions the crucial fact about this case: the search here was entirely suspicionless. The police had no reason to believe King's DNA would link him to any crime."

Scalia added the state law "manages to burden uniquely the sole group for whom the Fourth Amendment's protections ought to be most jealously guarded: people who are innocent of the state's accusations," describing of the legal concept of innocent until proven guilty.

He was supported by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Scalia's prior support of Fourth Amendment protections is well-documented, so his siding with three more liberal members of the court was not surprising.

A 1994 federal law created a national database in which local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies can compare and share information on DNA matches from convicted felons, but courts have been at odds on just when such samples can be collected and the information distributed.

In a brief filed by 49 states supporting Maryland, officials also said the information is secure, and retested when an initial "hit" is identified. After a warrant is issued for probable cause, another fresh DNA sample is taken and it is that test that is used to ultimately prosecute in court. Each initial test costs about $30.

The Fourth Amendment requires the government to balance legitimate law enforcement interests with the privacy rights of individuals. A key area of concern in the high court was whether developing "Rapid DNA" technology would allow initial identification testing to be completed within about two hours. Currently it can take two weeks or more, depending on backlogs.

Civil liberties groups worry inadequate testing by overwhelmed lab technicians can lead to errors, such as the one that sent Dwayne Jackson to prison for armed robbery. It was three years before a lab mistake was noticed, and the Nevada man was freed as an innocent man.

DNA -- Deoxyribonucleic acid -- is a coded molecule providing a genetic map for the development of all known living organisms. By 2000, all 50 states and the federal government required DNA collection from convicted offenders, and that was soon expanded by many jurisdiction to criminal arrests.

The number of offender profiles in federal Combined DNA Index System is now about 10 million, with more than a million arrestee profiles.

Congress in December passed the Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act, a grant program to help states pay for the expanded system. The 22-year-old woman was murdered in 2003, but her killer was not identified until three years later, after his conviction for another crime, when his DNA matched cold-case evidence found under the victim's fingernails.

Her mother, Jayann Sepich, personally lobbied lawmakers for months to ensure passage.

President Obama signed the bill earlier this year. "It's the right thing to do," he said in 2010, of expanding DNA swabs for arrestees. "This is where the national registry becomes so important."

The case is Maryland v. King (12-207).

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supreme court: dna swab after arrest is legitimate search - cnn

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By Bill Mears, CNN Supreme Court Producer

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Supreme Court: DNA swab after arrest is legitimate search

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The Supreme Court has ruled criminal suspects can be subjected to a police DNA test after arrest -- before trial and conviction -- a privacy-versus-public-safety dispute that could have wide-reaching implications in the rapidly evolving technology surrounding criminal procedure.

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An enormous amount of water has been discovered locked up in molten rock beneath Cerro Uturuncu volcano in the Bolivian Altiplano.

Credit: Jon Blundy - University of Bristol

The Bolivian volcano Cerro Uturuncu is a massive barren peak rising from the high plateau of South America's Altiplano. If you've heard of the volcano, it may be because of recent news stories claiming that scientists have found a "lake" beneath its base, deep in the Earth's crust.

That's only partially true. There is no actual lake under Cerro Uturuncu - but there is an incredible amount of water locked up in the melted rock beneath the volcano, approximately enough to fill Lake Superior. This sort of dissolved water is a well-known driver of eruptions for volcanoes in subduction zones, where one piece of the Earth's crust is being pushed under another. Still, scientists were surprised at the sheer amount of water trapped beneath Cerro Uturuncu.

"It's probably about twice as much as would have been expected," said Jon Blundy, a petrologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K., who was involved in the new research that discovered the massive store of water. [ See Stunning Photos of Volcano's Lava Lake]

Blundy and his colleagues were studying the volcano because satellite measurements revealed the ground around the mountain was deforming. That's typically a sign that the magma under the volcano is on the move in some form or another. As they took seismic measurements of the crust under the volcano, they found an "anomaly" about 9 miles (15 kilometers) down. There, the seismic waves slowed and the electrical conductivity shot up.

Using andesite, an igneous rock collected from the volcano's old lava flows, the researchers created a mock-up of the subterranean conditions under Cerro Uturuncu in the laboratory. They subjected the rock to various pressures and temperatures to test its conductivity and other features. They could then extrapolate the data from these experiments to the real-world water reservoir under the volcano.

Contrary to elementary-school diagrams of how volcanoes work, researchers have discovered over the past decade or so that there are very rarely chambers of molten magma beneath the volcano's cone. Instead, volcanoes are fed by "mush" - a partially solid, partially liquid zone of very hot rock under great pressure. Rock melts under a range of temperatures, Blundy said, so the liquid (and gas) portions of the mush can get captured in the pores of portions of still-solid rock.

The Altiplano-Puna magma body of mush that underlies Cerro Uturuncu is about 10 percent liquid, Blundy and his colleagues found. Of that liquid, 10 percent by weight is dissolved water. Measured by the proportion of water molecules in the mix, water is about 25 percent of the melted rock, which explains the high electrical conductivity, Blundy told Live Science.

The entire magma body is about 120,000 cubic miles (500,000 cubic km) in size, Blundy said. Thus, the dissolved water comes to a weight of 1.4 X 10^16 kilograms - just about enough to fill Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes. This water was dragged underground as the Nazca tectonic plate dove under the South American plate, and represents about 6 million years of water accumulation, Blundy said.

Similar systems are at work at other volcanoes in subduction zones, including Mount St. Helens in the Cascades. Cerro Uturuncu hasn't erupted for about 250,000 years, Blundy said. The uplift in the ground around the volcano is due to small amounts of melted rock getting squeezed out of the reservoir underneath, but it's not clear if there is a real reawakening imminent for the mountain, he said.

"What we are seeing is that these volcanoes are like little valves on top of the reservoirs, and they can be replenished with a little bit of melt moving up," Blundy said.

Original article on Live Science.

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Hidden Beneath Bolivian Volcano, Enough Water to Fill a Great Lake

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The Bolivian volcano Cerro Uturuncu is a massive barren peak rising from the high plateau of South America's Altiplano. If you've heard of the volcano, it may be because of recent news stories claiming that scientists have found a "lake" beneath its base, deep in the Earth's crust. That's only partially true.

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Bees use a variety of senses and memory of previous experiences when deciding where to forage for pollen, research by the University of Exeter suggests.

The researchers believe pollen-collecting bees do not base their foraging decisions on taste alone, but instead make an "overall sensory assessment" of their experience at a particular flower.

Bees typically do not eat pollen when they collect it from flowers, but carry it back to the nest via special "sacs" on their legs or hairs on their body.

This makes it difficult to understand how bees judge whether the pollen a flower produces is nutritious enough for their young.

Indeed, researchers have been puzzled for a long time as to what exactly bees look for when they collect pollen from flowers.

Co-author Dr Natalie Hempel de Ibarra, expert in insect neuroethology at Exeter's Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour, said: "It seems that bees don't just respond to a single nutritional compound in pollen, such as crude protein content, but to a range of sensory cues in pollen and flowers.

"They also form memories for locations and types of flowers that they have visited which affect their foraging decisions.

"We need more research that considers the behaviour and neurobiology of bees to understand when and why they prefer some plants and some pollen over others.

"A breakthrough in this area could advance our efforts in both biodiversity conservation and crop production."

The review, published in the journal Functional Ecology, examines existing evidence on how bees use their senses, previous experience and -- in the case of social bees -- feedback from the nest to decide where to gather pollen.

First author Dr Elizabeth Nicholls, a former PhD student at the University of Exeter and now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, said: "Our review is unique in considering pollen foraging from an individual bee's perspective, asking which senses bees use to decide which flowers are worth visiting.

"In our review we suggest that although bees may taste pollen during collection and use this nutritional information to guide their choices, they are also likely to pay attention to the strong odour and visual appearance of both pollen and the flower itself.

"For bees that live together in colonies, information passed on from the other bees in the nest, either via chemical cues or even special 'dances', may also be important in influencing their pollen-collecting behaviour."

The University of Exeter is a major hub for bee and pollination research and currently advertising several postgraduate research projects.

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agriculture and food; insects (including butterflies); mating and breeding; food and agriculture; biology; animals; botany; animal learning and intelligence

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Bees use multiple cues in hunt for pollen

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Bees use a variety of senses and memory of previous experiences when deciding where to forage for pollen, research by the University of Exeter suggests. The researchers believe pollen-collecting bees do not base their foraging decisions on taste alone, but instead make an "overall sensory assessment" of their experience at a particular flower.

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Bigger in fact, than it has appeared at any point in the last 68 years, NASA scientists say.

We won't see another supermoon likes this until 2034, so make sure you get a look.

A "supermoon" occurs when the moon becomes full on the same day as its perigee, the point in the moon's orbit when it is closest to Earth.

The term is borrowed from the pseudoscience of astrology but has been adopted by popular culture and astronomers. Supermoons generally appear to be 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full moons.

While such moons occur around every 13 months, November's is a special one.

According to NASA, this month's supermoon "becomes full within about two hours of perigee -- arguably making it an extra-super moon."

In America, the November full moon is known as a "Beaver Moon," because it arrives at the time of year when fur trappers would hunt the dam-building animals.

When and where to see?

According to EarthSky.org, the moon will turn precisely full on November 14 at 1:52 p.m. UTC, or 8:52 a.m. ET.

But people on the East Coast in North America and in Europe can see the supermoon anytime the moon is out in the next day or two.

Moon spotters in Asia are perhaps the best placed to catch the moon at its absolute largest, with full moon occurring at 9:52 p.m. Hong Kong time, or 7:22 p.m. in India.

Moon overshadows meteor shower

A month after the mega-supermoon, another supermoon will rise on December 14.

It too will be a sight to behold, but it'll also limit our opportunity to see something just as beautiful -- a Geminid meteor shower.

The Geminid meteor shower, an annual event, got its name because the meteors look like they're coming from the constellation of Gemini.

But the supermoon's brighter light will drastically reduce the number of meteors you'll be able to see.

NASA says we'll be lucky if we see a dozen meteors in an hour at the shower's peak, when normally the shower lights up the night sky with more than 100 meteors per hour.

CNN's Doug Criss and Holly Yan contributed to this story.

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supermoon on november 14 will be biggest since 1948 - cnn

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Here's how to see the biggest supermoon since 1948

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Bigger in fact, than it has appeared at any point in the last 68 years, NASA scientists say. We won't see another supermoon likes this until 2034, so make sure you get a look. A "supermoon" occurs when the moon becomes full on the same day as its perigee, the point in the moon's orbit when it is closest to Earth.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161027143337.htm

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NASA's Curiosity rover stumbled across a peculiar-looking metallic meteorite last week, while climbing the slopes of Mars' Mount Sharp.

Meteorites are pretty common on the Red Planet due to its thin atmosphere and proximity to the asteroid belt. But this little meteorite is unusually smooth - almost like someone's buffed it.

It also has several deep grooves, which suggests that it might have been molten at some point in time.

Nicknamed the 'Egg Rock' because of its smoothness, Curiosity was able to take a close enough image of the structure for NASA scientists to analyse its composition.

For now, they think the meteorite is most likely made of nickel-iron, and came from the core of a structure in the asteroid belt. Objects in the asteroid belt are often sent smashing into Mars after being kicked out by Jupiter's gravity.

Based on its appearance, it's likely the metallic meteorite became molten as it entered Mars' atmosphere, before hardening once it reached the surface - which could explain both the smoothness and some of the strange grooves that suggest the effects of weathering.

You can get a better look at the meteorite, which is only 4 cm (1.6 inches) wide, in this close-up taken by Curiosity's ChemCam Remote Micro-Imager:

Finding meteorites on the Red Planet might not be a rare occurrence, but it's always exciting for researchers, seeing as many of the rocks that land on the surface of Mars wouldn't make it through Earth's atmosphere.

That gives us the chance to study chunks of the Solar System we wouldn't otherwise come across - and it could help scientists to explain more about the objects in the asteroid belt, as well as conditions on the Red Planet.

Mars also has less oxidation and weather erosion compared to Earth, so the meteorites on its surface are in a better condition than any that do make it through our thick atmosphere.

Curiosity is now roving around the base of Mount Sharp, and continuing to look for evidence that the area might have once been habitable.

We've already detected evidence of liquid flowing water on the surface of the Red Planet, and research suggests that the Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed, might have once been a giant lake.

But since our favourite little rover is banned from directly investigating any sources of liquid water, for now it's giving us a better understanding of the habitability of the Red Planet by analysing soil and rock samples, and providing high-res images of the alien environment.

We're looking forward to seeing what it finds next.

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Curiosity Has Spotted a Weird Metallic Meteorite on Mars

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NASA's Curiosity rover stumbled across a peculiar-looking metallic meteorite last week, while climbing the slopes of Mars' Mount Sharp. Meteorites are pretty common on the Red Planet due to its thin atmosphere and proximity to the asteroid belt. But this little meteorite is unusually smooth - almost like someone's buffed it.

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Using science to understand how ballot design impacts voter behavior

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Concern over the security of the voting process has been a recurring issue in the run up to the US presidential election. Will every vote be registered accurately? Are voting systems vulnerable to tampering? These questions ...

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Scientists have identified for the first time the region in the brain responsible for the "placebo effect" in pain relief, when a fake treatment actually results in substantial reduction of pain, according to new research from Northwestern Medicine and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC).

Pinpointing the sweet spot of the pain killing placebo effect could result in the design of more personalized medicine for the 100 million Americans with chronic pain. The fMRI technology developed for the study has the potential to usher in an era of individualized pain therapy by enabling targeted pain medication based on how an individual's brain responds to a drug.

The finding also will lead to more precise and accurate clinical trials for pain medications by eliminating individuals with high placebo response before trials.

The scientists discovered a unique brain region within the mid frontal gyrus that identifies placebo pill responders in one trial and can be validated (95 percent correct) in the placebo group of a second trial.

The study was published Oct. 27, 2016, in PLOS Biology.

"Given the enormous societal toll of chronic pain, being able to predict placebo responders in a chronic pain population could both help the design of personalized medicine and enhance the success of clinical trials," said Marwan Baliki, research scientist at RIC and an assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Baliki and Vania Apkarian, professor of physiology at Feinberg in whose lab the research was conducted, are both corresponding authors on the paper.

Using drugs to treat patients' pain has been trial and error, with physicians changing dosage or trying another type of drug if one doesn't work.

"The new technology will allow physicians to see what part of the brain is activated during an individual's pain and choose the specific drug to target this spot," Apkarian said. "It also will provide more evidence-based measurements. Physicians will be able to measure how the patient's pain region is affected by the drug."

Currently, placebo response is primarily studied in healthy subjects within controlled experimental settings. While such experiments aid understanding of the biological and behavioral underpinning of placebo response in experimental (applied) pain, they translate poorly to the clinic, where pain is mainly chronic in nature, Baliki said.

In this new study and for the first time, scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) combined with a standard clinical trial design to derive an unbiased brain-based neurological marker to predict analgesia associated with placebo treatment in patients with chronic knee osteoarthritis pain. Scientists showed placebo pill ingestion is associated with a strong analgesia effect, with more than half of the patients reporting significant pain relief.

If future similar studies can further expand and eventually provide a brain-based predictive best-therapy option for individual patients, it would dramatically decrease unnecessary exposure of patients to ineffective therapies and decrease the duration and magnitude of pain suffering and opioid use, Baliki and Apkarian said.

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pain control; fibromyalgia; neuropathy; medical topics; caregiving; brain injury; brain-computer interfaces; ptsd

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Placebo sweet spot for pain relief identified in brain

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Scientists have identified for the first time the region in the brain responsible for the "placebo effect" in pain relief, when a fake treatment actually results in substantial reduction of pain, according to new research. Pinpointing the sweet spot of the pain killing placebo effect could result in the design of more personalized medicine for the 100 million Americans with chronic pain.

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Research by a Texas Tech University behavioral analyst who works with therapy dogs suggests using canines as a reward for completed tasks could be useful.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one of the most widely and deeply researched topics in child development as researchers constantly look for answers into not only its cause but the best way to treat the problematic symptoms of the disorder once diagnosed.

Effects of the various types of ASD include deficits in social communication and interaction, repetitive or restricted behavior, sensory issues and cognitive delays. These traits prevent children on the spectrum from performing or completing tasks in the same timeliness or fashion as other children.

Often, in order to get children with ASD to complete tasks, a reward-based system is implemented, where the child is given a toy or some other form of reward. But the offer of a reward doesn't always guarantee completion of the task.

One Texas Tech University researcher is part of a team taking a unique look at this system by providing access to therapy dogs as the reward, allowing students who complete certain academic tasks to spend time with the pooch, with the hope that potential interaction further motivates them to complete those tasks.

"It is a reward-based program," said Alexandra Protopopova, a behavioral analyst and assistant professor in companion animal science in the Department of Animal & Food Sciences. "There is a second component to it, however, in that dogs, just by being dogs, may alleviate stress. Potentially, the dogs create a more pleasant environment and offer emotional support during academic sessions."

"So, by mediating that stress level, the dogs may improve learning and potentially improve other outcomes as well as being a reward for the child ruing work."

Protopopova is an expert in behavior issues with dogs across a wide array of subjects, from interaction with children with ASD to analyzing what behaviors are more attractive for potential adopters and ways to bring those behaviors out to improve adoption rates.

But she said the methods and philosophies of how behavior works in animals is, at the core, the same as it is in children, and it is that connection that made this current research both attractive and interesting.

"With an iPad or toy as a reward, a child might become bored over time," Protopopova said. "With a dog you might see the exact opposite situation over time where the child grows attached to the dog and the quality of the reward grows as well."
Emotional interaction
Upon arriving at Texas Tech, Protopopova had a colleague in the College of Education, professor Jeanne Donaldson, who is now at Louisiana State University, and wanted to immediately connect the college and the Burkhart Center for Autism Education and Research with the Department of Animal & Food Sciences. The most natural way to make that connection, she said was to incorporate therapy dogs with the research being done involving applied behavior analysis in children with disabilities.

"Social behavior and social interaction has been an often neglected component of these kinds of programs," Protopopova said, "and that is something researchers have attempted to improve, that social behavior and communication. There is some evidence that dogs or animals in general occasionally could bring out that social connection. That part of the research is definitely attractive to us."

Measuring the effectiveness of using therapy dogs as a reward for academic performance in children with ASD was performed in two areas. The first was done biologically; stress responses were detected through the collection of saliva. Breanna Harris, a research assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, used salivary cortisol, a stress hormone, to determine a student's stress level in regard to anticipating interaction with the dog.

The second aspect of measuring effectiveness was done by observing the rate of work in the children and how motivated the children were to engage in academic tasks. Each child was given an individual task based on his or her education level, so those tasks involved the same things they were learning in school at the time or what parents had indicated the child needed extra help with.

A control condition was created where there were not rewards and children received praise only for engaging in academic tasks. A second control group saw children work toward receiving inanimate leisure items such as iPads or toys, which Protopopova said have been proven through prior research to be effective motivational tactics.

Two other control conditions involved the therapy dogs. One condition involved the dogs being used as a reward for work performed and would be present only after that work was completed. The second condition was what Protopopova termed more of the typical animal assisted intervention where the dog was continuously present in the room.

The conditions where there was no reward at all and where the dog was constantly around proved to be the most ineffective methods of motivation, researchers found. The two conditions where there were rewards provided upon completion of the work were the most effective; being rewarded with spending time with the therapy dog proved the most effective for some children.

"In fact, for most of the children, this was very useful as a reward because the dog motivated them quite a bit to do the work," Protopopova said. "We did find, surprisingly to me, that one participant did in fact work where we hypothesized he wouldn't during a session where the dog was present but not as a reward."
Improvement over time
Single-use incidents of using the therapy dog show one thing, but the researchers wanted to determine whether prolonged exposure to the availability of a therapy dog as a reward for performing work continues those results.

For that reason, in this first study, children stayed in the program for anywhere from four to nine months to see if using the same dog repeatedly fosters the child's attachment to the dog.

Prior to the child beginning the program, he or she is given a behavioral preference assessment where the child is asked to choose his or her favorite thing in the room, whether it's a toy, an electronic device, a dog, etc. They also were given the choice of performing the academic test instead. At the end of the program, the child is tested again with the same assessment to see if their preferences had changed.

"We wanted to see how all these preferences for inanimate objects or activities changed," Protopopova said. "Right now we are still collecting the final pieces of data because we're still finishing up with a couple of participants. We don't yet have the clear answers there, but it's not as straightforward as we imagined, either. For some of the children, we did not see the attachment we hypothesized, or at least any evidence of it in our data so far. But it's too early to tell."

Protopopova said one of the advantages of this study is its single-subject design where each child's program or sessions are designed specifically for that child's needs. That will allow, if the program is used outside of an educational setting, for other children to enter the program with a focus on their unique behaviors and what is best to encourage them to learn difficult academic or self-care tasks in a non-stressful learning environment.

She said one family in the original group took the data gathered about their child and obtained a dog and will train it as a service dog because of the benefits the data showed for their child.

"This is definitely a strength," Protopopova said. "Instead of a group design and us concluding that the average child would benefit from some procedure, which is not really that meaningful to individual families, we can give each family specific answers whether their child would or would not benefit from a dog."

One major question to come out of the preliminary research, she said, is whether using a shelter dog to encourage behavior can be used to determine the severity of the disability. Does it work on children who are higher- or lower-functioning?

Protopopova and other researchers are beginning another one to answer new questions that rose from the original, smaller study.

The larger study will involve at least 30 children, and they are actively recruiting children to enter the study. Those children must be between the ages of 2 and 14 with autism spectrum disorder and/or other developmental disabilities.

The hope is the larger study will allow the research to be used in schools and centers on a regular basis.

"There we can answer more generalized questions," Protopopova said. "How useful is this and who is it most useful for? Can we tell which children are going to benefit and which ones will not? So when we get those answers we are going to be a bit closer to really giving that program out to schools to say, 'we have strong evidence that it will be useful for this person or not for this person."

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children's health; staying healthy; attention deficit disorder; learning disorders; child psychology; educational psychology; dogs; veterinary medicine; animal learning and intelligence

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Can therapy dogs assist in motivating children on the autism spectrum?

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Research by a Texas Tech University behavioral analyst who works with therapy dogs suggests using canines as a reward for completed tasks could be useful. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one of the most widely and deeply researched topics in child development as researchers constantly look for answers into not only its cause but the best way to treat the problematic symptoms of the disorder once diagnosed.

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Others said they experienced a high when pushing themselves almost to the point of collapse in a short, intense effort, such as running a five-kilometer race.

But then there are those like my friend Annie Hiniker, who says that when she finishes a 5-k race, the last thing she feels is euphoric. "I feel like I want to throw up," she said.

The runner's-high hypothesis proposed that there were real biochemical effects of exercise on the brain. Chemicals were released that could change an athlete's mood, and those chemicals were endorphins, the brain's naturally occurring opiates. Running was not the only way to get the feeling; it could also occur with most intense or endurance exercise.

The problem with the hypothesis was that it was not feasible to do a spinal tap before and after someone exercised to look for a flood of endorphins in the brain. Researchers could detect endorphins in people's blood after a run, but those endorphins were part of the body's stress response and could not travel from the blood to the brain. They were not responsible for elevating one's mood. So for more than 30 years, the runner's high remained an unproved hypothesis.

But now medical technology has caught up with exercise lore. Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner's body pumps out, the greater the effect.

Leading endorphin researchers not associated with the study said they accepted its findings.

"Impressive," said Dr. Solomon Snyder, a neuroscience professor at Johns Hopkins and a discoverer of endorphins in the 1970's.

"I like it," said Huda Akil, a professor of neurosciences at the University of Michigan. "This is the first time someone took this head on. It wasn't that the idea was not the right idea. It was that the evidence was not there."

For athletes, the study offers a sort of vindication that runner's high is not just a New Agey excuse for their claims of feeling good after a hard workout.

For athletes and nonathletes alike, the results are opening a new chapter in exercise science. They show that it is possible to define and measure the runner's high and that it should be possible to figure out what brings it on. They even offer hope for those who do not enjoy exercise but do it anyway. These exercisers might learn techniques to elicit a feeling that makes working out positively addictive.

The lead researcher for the new study, Dr. Henning Boecker of the University of Bonn, said he got the idea of testing the endorphin hypothesis when he realized that methods he and others were using to study pain were directly applicable.

The idea was to use PET scans combined with recently available chemicals that reveal endorphins in the brain, to compare runners' brains before and after a long run. If the scans showed that endorphins were being produced and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain involved with mood, that would be direct evidence for the endorphin hypothesis. And if the runners, who were not told what the study was looking for, also reported mood changes whose intensity correlated with the amount of endorphins produced, that would be another clincher for the argument.

Dr. Boecker and colleagues recruited 10 distance runners and told them they were studying opioid receptors in the brain. But the runners did not realize that the investigators were studying the release of endorphins and the runner's high. The athletes had a PET scan before and after a two-hour run. They also took a standard psychological test that indicated their mood before and after running.

The data showed that, indeed, endorphins were produced during running and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain associated with emotions, in particular the limbic and prefrontal areas.

The limbic and prefrontal areas, Dr. Boecker said, are activated when people are involved in romantic love affairs or, he said, "when you hear music that gives you a chill of euphoria, like Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3." The greater the euphoria the runners reported, the more endorphins in their brain.

"Some people have these really extreme experiences with very long or intensive training," said Dr. Boecker, a casual runner and cyclist, who said he feels completely relaxed and his head is clearer after a run.

That was also what happened to the study subjects, he said: "You could really see the difference after two hours of running. You could see it in their faces."

In a follow-up study, Dr. Boecker is investigating if running affects pain perception. "There are studies that showed enhanced pain tolerance in runners," he said. "You have to give higher pain stimuli before they say, 'O.K., this hurts.' "

And, he said, there are stories of runners who had stress fractures, even heart attacks, and kept on running.

Dr. Boecker and his colleagues have recruited 20 marathon runners and a similar number of nonathletes and are studying the perception of pain after a run, and whether there are related changes in brain scans. He is also having the subjects walk to see whether the effects, if any, are because of the intensity of the exercise.

The nonathletes can help investigators assess whether untrained people experience the same effects. Maybe one reason some people love intense exercise and others do not is that some respond with a runner's high or changed pain perception.

Annie might question that. She loves to run, but wonders why. But her husband tells her that the look on her face when she is running is just blissful. So maybe even she gets a runner's high.

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Others said they experienced a high when pushing themselves almost to the point of collapse in a short, intense effort, such as running a five-kilometer race. But then there are those like my friend Annie Hiniker, who says that when she finishes a 5-k race, the last thing she feels is euphoric.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161025084744.htm

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Using cells from the cartilage in patients' noses, Swiss doctors have successfully made patches to treat 10 adults whose knee cartilage was damaged by injury.

Two years after the transplants, most of the patients grew new cartilage in their knees and reported improvements in , knee function and quality of life.

"We have developed a new, promising approach to the treatment of articular cartilage injuries," said lead researcher Ivan Martin, a professor of tissue engineering at the University of Basel. The articular cartilage is the tissue that covers and protects the ends of the knee bones, and injuries to it can lead to degenerative joint conditions like osteoarthritis.

Although the results of this preliminary trial are encouraging, more research is needed before this technique could become widely available, Martin stressed.

"Before this can be offered to patients as a standard treatment, obviously it needs to be tested in a larger number of patients and in randomized trials with long-term assessment of clinical outcomes," Martin said.

The report was published Oct. 22 in The Lancet.

One joint repair expert welcomed the new approach.

"Treatment of cartilage injuries remains a significant clinical problem, and there is no gold standard treatment and no optimal treatment available," said Dr. Nicole Rotter, vice chair of the department of otorhinolaryngology at Ulm University in Germany.

Using cells from the nose for joint repair is completely new, added Rotter, who co-wrote an editorial accompanying the study. "Nasal cartilage might be a great source for cartilage repair; however, further clinical studies are required," she said.

For the study, Martin and colleagues took a small sample of cartilage cells from the patient's nose bone, then grew more cells by exposing them to growth hormone for two weeks. All the cells were then placed in a membrane of collagen and cultured for two more weeks.

The engineered graft was cut into the right shape and used to replace damaged cartilage after it was surgically removed from the patient's knee.

With the procedure, only a small sample of cells is taken from the nose, using a local anesthetic. After the knee is repaired, the patient is on crutches for six to eight weeks. It typically takes several months for a full recovery, the researchers said.

Two years after the procedure, revealed that new tissue had developed that was similar to normal knee cartilage. In addition, nine patients reported improvements in the use of their knee and less pain. One patient was excluded because of several new sports injuries.

No bad reactions were reported, but two serious adverse events unrelated to the procedure occurred - an independent injury in the untreated knee and new cartilage damage in other areas of the treated knee, the researchers said.

Dr. Matthew Hepinstall, an orthopaedic surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital Center for Joint Preservation and Reconstruction in New York City, welcomed the new findings.

Even small articular cartilage injuries can cause pain, limit walking and running, and restrict joint motion, Hepinstall said. "Over time, surrounding healthy cartilage can deteriorate - resulting in ," he added.

A variety of surgical procedures have been developed to fill "potholes" in articular cartilage, with varying success, he said.

For the last two decades, surgeons have been able to take cartilage cells from the knee, grow them in a lab, and put them back into a patient's knee, Hepinstall said.

But that procedure requires two operations, Hepinstall noted.

This new study demonstrates the plausibility of taking cartilage cells from the nose in a less invasive procedure that only requires a local anesthetic, he said.

"If the study results can be duplicated and extended to a larger number of patients, this is a step forward in articular cartilage restoration, and I applaud the research efforts," Hepinstall said.

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Cartilage from nose is used to repair bum knees

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Using cells from the cartilage in patients' noses, Swiss doctors have successfully made patches to treat 10 adults whose knee cartilage was damaged by injury. Two years after the transplants, most of the patients grew new cartilage in their knees and reported improvements in , knee function and quality of life.

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They bounced around the coast in a 22-foot Zodiac, a team of federal scientists with a dart rifle trying to nail the dorsal fin on a killer whale. The seas had been calm when they came across the pod of orcas along the Pacific Ocean near the U.S. border with Canada. But then the winds exploded and the waters turned rough, and the satellite tag and dart they fired missed the mark and smacked the water.

It was February 2016, and the scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had been trying to attach tiny satellite transmitters to the endangered cetaceans to track where they go in winter, to help see why their populations are so depressed. So the researchers retrieved the dart, reloaded the rifle, and took another shot, this time hitting the animal, a healthy-looking 20-year-old male known as L95.

The darting seemed " routine in all regards," a report would later state, until the orca wound up dead and that dart became the prime suspect. On Wednesday, an expert panel of scientists agreed that efforts to attach the satellite tag to L95 likely paved the way for a rare fungal infection that killed the endangered mammal, leaving only 82 orcas left in that population.

The accident and findings left whale scientists reeling. NOAA is "deeply dismayed that one of their tags may have had something to do with the death of this whale," said Richard Merrick, the agency's chief scientist, himself a former whale researcher.

"Everybody is devastated by this-nobody more so than me," said Brad Hanson, another NOAA whale expert who helped start the orca satellite tagging operation a decade ago and now oversees the program.

But it also raised new questions: Was the death a collision of unfortunate circumstances that are not likely to be repeated? Or does a common tool intrinsic to marine research around the globe-satellite tagging-pose more risks to large marine mammals than once thought?

For now, NOAA is suspending tagging of endangered orcas and will review whether less invasive tracking methods are necessary. It is also planning a special workshop for the 88-country International Whaling Commission to discuss tagging worldwide.

Satellite tagging "is becoming more widespread, becoming commercially available to scientists all over the world, but the level of experience and training people have around the world varies," said Alex Zerbini, a NOAA scientist who has studied tagging's impact on whales. "We need to be very careful. We need to take every precaution."

In recent decades, as technology has allowed transmitters to get smaller, their use in wildlife research has exploded. They offer scientists rare glimpses of animal behavior when creatures are too far afield to otherwise see or track, providing immeasurable data that can dramatically help conservation efforts. But there's often no way to attach them without being at least mildly invasive.

The type of tag Hanson's team attached to L95 had been used more than 530 times on 19 species, including pilot whales, grays, fins, humpbacks, beaked whales, and 56 killer whales. The transmitter is no bigger than a nine-volt battery and is taped to a pair of small titanium darts that are fired from a CO2-powered air rifle. The darts are supposed to implant in the dorsal fin and slowly work their way out over weeks or months, providing a brief window of information on a whale's whereabouts. The marksman-scientist who pulled the trigger was experienced.

But what appears to have happened, according to an incident report and internal review, is a small but consequential misstep in procedure. After the dart was retrieved from the water, scientists wrestling with the wind and the waves sterilized it with alcohol but neglected to further disinfect it with bleach before taking the second shot.

When researchers spotted L95 two days later, near the mouth of the Columbia River, the killer whale's ribs were showing, a sign of emaciation not altogether uncommon. Unlike more transient orcas, the three pods of southern resident killer whales that make their summer homes in Washington State's Puget Sound and Canada's Strait of Georgia don't eat seals or other marine mammals; their diet consists primarily of salmon, populations of which have been dwindling. The animals also are loaded with toxins, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), that have worked their way up the food chain. And L95, for a male in his community, was already nearing the median age of death.

What all that suggests is that L95's immune system may have been compromised already. Scientists lost track of the animal for good a few days later, until it washed up dead in Esperanza Inlet near the west coast of Canada's Vancouver Island on March 30.

A necropsy by British Columbia pathologist Stephen Raverty showed that fungi that may have originated in the surface film of the water, or perhaps on L95's skin, appeared to have gotten into the animal's blood vessels, eventually making it to the lungs. Concentrations of the fungi were largest near the entry point of the dart, where pieces had broken off in the fin. "That was our biggest clue," Raverty said.

"This infection may have been introduced at the tag wound," said NOAA's Merrick.

While the body was too decomposed to say for certain, Raverty's conclusion was that the infection, aided by an already weakened animal, most likely lead to death, Raverty said.

That angered whale-protection activists who called the tagging program barbaric and defective, suggesting scientists should turn to underwater acoustic monitoring-which is used in Canada to track orcas-or some other method.

NOAA scientists acknowledged the error, but said tagging already has brought them valuable insight, allowing scientists to follow them more frequently in winter and even get prey and fecal samples. That ultimately may lead regulators to expand habitat protections for the endangered animals as far south as northern California.

"It has been a quantum leap for us," Hanson said. "We were all surprised by how much time they were spending down there. That's information we got from satellite tags."

The question now is whether, or at least how, tagging should continue. NOAA already is considering adding new restrictions on future tagging of other whales and dolphins, not just orcas.

But how dangerous is the process generally? The risks seem extremely low, but scientists concede there's much they don't know.

"I'm not sure I can comment with too much authority about how this situation will be received and interpreted," said John Ford, a whale biologist who oversees the marine mammal section of Fisheries and Oceans Canada's Pacific Biological Station. His teams use the same tags on fin whales and gray whales and usesmaller puncturing devices to get biopsy samples of whales. "But we will be looking at our whole program."

Multiyear studies tracking tagged whales in Hawaii and the Gulf of Maine suggest the process isn't particularly dangerous. Tagging sometimes causes extremely minor swelling or scarring. A more invasive type of tag used on endangered North Atlantic right whales has been known to cause infection, "but for all species we looked at there is no evidence of increased mortality," Zerbini said.

Still, Zerbini, Ford, and other experts said that L95's death highlights how little scientists know about many whale species, and how difficult it is to track risk in a marine world that is in constant flux.

For example, of the more than 250 northern and southern resident killer whales in the Pacific Northwest known to have died between 1974 and 2008, no more than 20 percent of the bodies were even recovered for scientists to try and find a cause of death.

In addition, if a dart could help spread a fungus that may be present on skin or in the water, would sterilizing the dart have been enough to prevent it? These are animals that regularly bite and scratch each other, providing ample opportunity already for skin- or waterborne illness to reach the blood stream.

Researchers also can't say with any certainty whether the type of fungus that ultimately killed L95 is showing up now more frequently in marine waters, or just happened to be present on that particular animal. But they did notice recently another fungus normally associated with tropical trees was killing porpoises in British Columbia. Do the risks associated with tagging change as water temperatures change, potentially altering the environment?

"This fungus that affected L95 was not something we had recognized was out there that killer whales had succumbed to, at least in the wild," Hanson said. "It certainly gives us a lot of pause. This is not a static environment relative to pathogens."

For now the expert panel that reviewed L95's death is recommending scientists develop new protocols, such as making better determinations before identifying an animal for tagging about whether or not it's in ill health and more susceptible to disease. But researchers are also quick to point out that the dangers must be weighed against the incalculable information that can be gleaned from satellite tags, which, in turn may help restore many troubled whale populations.

The IWC workshops and more formal recommendations for orcas aren't expected until sometime next year.

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Orca Killed by Satellite Tag Leads to Criticism of Science Practices

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They bounced around the coast in a 22-foot Zodiac, a team of federal scientists with a dart rifle trying to nail the dorsal fin on a killer whale. The seas had been calm when they came across the pod of orcas along the Pacific Ocean near the U.S. border with Canada.

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The first documented evidence of wild chimpanzee mothers teaching their offspring to use tools has been captured by video cameras set to record chimpanzee tool-using activity at termite mounds in the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo, according to new research from anthropologists at Washington University in St. Louis.

"Wild chimpanzees are exceptional tool users, but in contrast to humans, there has been little evidence to date that adult chimpanzees teach youngsters tool skills," said Stephanie Musgrave, the study's first author and an anthropology graduate student in Arts & Sciences.

"We found that mother chimpanzees in the Goualougo Triangle teach by transferring termite-fishing probes to their offspring," Musgrave said. "In this population, chimpanzees select specific herb species to make their fishing probes, and they produce probes that have a particular brush-tipped design. By sharing tools, mothers may teach their offspring the appropriate material and form for manufacturing fishing probes."

Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the study is based on research conducted in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Max Planck Institute and Franklin and Marshall College. The findings have important implications for the evolution of teaching.

"It is easy for us to take for granted the importance of sharing information to learn complex skills, as it is ubiquitous in humans," said Crickette Sanz, associate professor of biological anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University and co-author of the study. "Our research shows that the evolutionary origins of this behavior are likely rooted in contexts where particular skills are too challenging for an individual to invent on their own."

Musgrave, Sanz and colleagues used video to capture examples of wild chimpanzee mothers transferring specialized termite-gathering tools to less-skilled, immature chimpanzees. These transfers, which are costly to tool donors but beneficial to tool recipients, meet the scientific criteria for teaching in wild apes.

"Tool transfers are costly for mothers, whose ability to forage for termites is reduced, but are beneficial for offspring, who gain increased opportunity to learn tool skills and gather termites. This is the first such evidence satisfying these criteria for teaching in wild apes," Musgrave said.

"Identifying teaching among wild animals is difficult because one has to quantify the impact of possible teaching behaviors on both the teacher and the learner," Musgrave said. "Using video footage from remote camera traps placed at termite nests in the chimpanzees' home range, we were able to observe and quantify how sharing tools affected those who relinquished their tools as well as those who received them."

Chimpanzees are exceptional among animals for their remarkable propensity to make and use tools. Since different groups of chimpanzees use different types of tools, the teaching process also may need to be customized to address local conditions.

"Studying how young chimpanzees learn the tool skills particular to their group helps us to understand the evolutionary origins of culture and technology and to clarify how human cultural abilities are similar to or different from those of our closest living relatives," Musgrave said.

The findings have interesting implications for identifying the cognitive underpinnings of teaching. In humans, teaching involves an understanding of others' abilities and the intention to help them learn. In this study, chimpanzee mothers both anticipated the youngsters' need for a tool and devised strategies to reduce the effort necessary to provide them.

In examples captured in this study's videos, mothers sometimes bring multiple tools to a termite nest; they may also divide their fishing probe in half lengthwise, giving one-half to their offspring and keeping the other half. This strategy provides their offspring with a usable tool without compromising their own ability to gather food, Musgrave said.

Washington University pioneered the use of remote video technology to study the behavior of wild chimpanzees in Congo, and now it is used at nearly every ape research site across Africa. "It is a very effective means of monitoring wildlife without increasing human impact. Our camera array also provides a means of monitoring the health of the forest, as other endangered species such as western lowland gorillas, forest elephants, and leopards are 'captured' on film," Sanz said.

"In addition to our traditional tracking of wild chimpanzees through the forest each day, this remote video technology has been a force multiplier in expanding the scope of our research to several other chimpanzee communities," Sanz said. "We have observed a generation of chimpanzee kids learn how to use these tool sets, without having to spend a decade habituating them to human presence or risk exposing them to anthropogenic diseases."

Video: https://vimeo.com/186308470

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apes; wild animals; birds; fisheries; fish; animals; animal learning and intelligence; endangered animals

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Wild chimpanzee mothers teach young to use tools

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The first documented evidence of wild chimpanzee mothers teaching their offspring to use tools has been captured by video cameras set to record chimpanzee tool-using activity at termite mounds in the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo, according to new research from anthropologists.

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Roadside pollution interferes with basics of foraging for nectar

ORLANDO, Fla. - Here's another reason not to love car exhaust: The fumes may make it harder for honeybees to learn floral scents.

In lab tests, bees normally caught on quickly that a puff of floral scent meant a researcher would soon offer them a taste of sugar, Ryan James Leonard of the University of Sydney said September 30 at the International Congress of Entomology. After two sequences of puff-then-sugar, just a whiff of fragrance typically made the bees stick out their tongues. But when that floral scent was mixed with vehicle exhaust, it took the bees several more run-throughs to respond to the puff signal.

Honeybees buzzing among roadside flowers must contend with vehicle pollution as they learn various foraging cues. Another lab reported in 2013 that diesel exhaust reacted with some of the chemical components of canola flowers, rendering them more difficult

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Bees take longer to learn floral odors polluted by vehicle fumes

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Roadside pollution interferes with basics of foraging for nectar ORLANDO, Fla. - Here's another reason not to love car exhaust: The fumes may make it harder for honeybees to learn floral scents.

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The elephant is known in popular culture as a wise animal, not an elegant one. You'd be surprised to find out, though, that African elephants walk on their tippy-toes despite having a huge foot which measures 4.4 feet (1.34 m) in circumference.

Elephants on high heels

Olga Panagiotopoulou, an evolutionary morphologist at the University of Queensland, Australia, wanted to get to the bottom of an oddity. Many captive elephants are plagued by foot problems which not only changes their gait in an awkward way but in time can grow in a disease. Every year, elephants from zoos and conservation sites need to be euthanised because there's nothing that can treat them, Panagiotopoulou said.

The debate has come up with two primary candidate explanations: either the captivity itself is driving the elephants to change their gait and ultimately ruin their feet or something in the environment is to blame. The two are so well connected, however, that it's very difficult to single out the leading factor.

Testing elephant walking is very challenging butPanagiotopoulou and colleagues found a way. They trained five African elephants ( Loxodonta africana) from a park in South Africa to walk over a platform that was fitted with pressure sensors. When an elephant walked over the platform, the researchers could then map the load distribution along the foot.

The results of the tests made on African elephants were then compared to those made on Asian elephants ( Elephas maximus) in a zoo in England using the same pressure plates. This analysis revealed that when elephants walk in wild or semi-wild environments, they put the most pressure on the outside toes of their front feet and the least pressure on their heels. The outside of their feet is, not coincidentally, where most instances of disease occur.

Because zoos and certain conservation park often have harder surfaces, even asphalt, the findings seem to explain why captive elephants have to deal with sore feet on a daily basis.

"We know that elephants in captivity get diseases that we don't see in wild individuals as much, but the major question for conservation purposes is what can we do to prevent them," Panagiotopoulou told ABC Australia.

It's not like we can release elephants in the wild overnight. Captive environments are crucial to elephant conservation in Africa where poachers are having a field day. Since 2007, the African savanna lost 30 percent of its elephants to cut-throat poaching.

Instead, Panagiotopoulou is proposing the wide scale introduction of pressure plates to monitor the health of elephant feet. If an animal is at risk, future development of foot disease might be avoided through trimming.

"You can change the trimming approach to move the weight away from the part of the foot that is injured or can even create elephant orthotics to stop disease progression," she said.

Rhinos also experience similar difficulties. They might also walk on their tippy-toes and we'll soon learn when Panagiotopoulou and colleagues use pressure plates to study their gait as well.

Findings appeared in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
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Elephants walk on their tip-toes and it's literally killing them in captivity

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The elephant is known in popular culture as a wise animal, not an elegant one. You'd be surprised to find out, though, that African elephants walk on their tippy-toes despite having a huge foot which measures 4.4 feet (1.34 m) in circumference.

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When they accidentally run into bird nests sitting on the ground, some slugs help themselves to a free, easy meal of bird chicks.

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All your fears, stresses and anxieties have one thing in common. They are sensed by a pair of pea-sized patches of neurons, called the amygdala, sitting deep inside your brain. So what if you could control your amygdala? What if you could change your brain and become calmer and braver?

That idea has a particular appeal for people suffering from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. But it's easier said than done. The amygdala is an old part of the brain that does its job automatically, without much care for commands from more conscious parts of the mind. You can't just tell an oversensitive amygdala to quiet down.

But a brain training technique known as neurofeedback might help people find a way to change such involuntary and automatic brain processes. In recent years, the technique is being developed and refined to address mental health issues. The treatment involves monitoring a person's brain activity in real time using electroencephalography (EEG) or functional MRI brain scans, and showing those patterns of activity to the person so they can try to boost or reduce them ― basically, changing how their brain functions.

In a new published last month in Biological Psychiatry, researchers set up a series of experiments to use neurofeedback to teach several dozen people how to regulate their amygdala activity.

"People were able to use this new EEG model to learn how to control their brain activity in a deeply located brain area, the amygdala," said Dr. Talma Hendler, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Tel Aviv Center for Brain Functions in Israel.

This method "opens a wide horizon of treatment possibilities for the mentally ill, but also for everyone on a daily basis as an empowering tool for mental activity and well being." Dr. Talma Hendler, Tel Aviv Center for Brain Functions

Reading brain signals from deep parts of the brain is difficult, especially with a cheap and accessible method. Functional MRI, or fMRI, can access these areas, but the device is a complex, gigantic magnet that you can't just set up at home, even if you could afford it.

EEG, on the other hand, is cheaper and simpler. It mainly involves a few electrodes placed on the scalp. The downside of EEG is that it can't accurately zoom in on structures deep in the brain.

So, the researchers combined the two methods. They used the detail provided by fMRI to tease out the amygdala's signal from the electrical activity picked up by the EEG.

"[This method] enables home-based imaging that [targets] brain regions relevant for our mental health," Hendler said. "It opens a wide horizon of treatment possibilities for the mentally ill, but also for everyone on a daily basis as an empowering tool for mental activity and well being."

For the experiments, Hendler and her colleagues asked the volunteers to listen to a sound. They were then instructed to lower the volume of the sound by "exercising mental strategies."

It sounds like a vague instruction. What are the mental strategies that can, seemingly telepathically, control the volume of a sound? No one really knows, and that's sort of the point. People have to try many different ways of thinking ― thereby changing their brain activity ― until they stumble upon a desired activity pattern.

What the participants didn't know was that the volume of the sound was programmed to change based on the electrical activity of their own amygdala, and it would lower if the participants managed to dial down that activity. In other words, they were listening to their own amygdala's firing, disguised in a sound.

A series of tests afterward showed that this game seemed to help participants become more capable of regulating the activity of their amygdala. In response to viewing a series of images, for example, the participants' amygdalas seemed less sensitive compared to those of people in another group given a fake neurofeedback treatment.

The participants in this study were healthy. But Hendler believes that people with mental health problems, too, would respond to training with neurofeedback.

"We already have indication for this (unpublished yet) that people suffering from depression, chronic pain and post traumatic disorders are able to learn and greatly benefit from such training," Hendler said.

If the method proves useful in treating mental health conditions in the future, this low-cost, personalized treatment could be used at home to complement and sometimes substitute medications, Hendler said.

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You May Be Able To Train Your Brain To Be Fearless

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All your fears, stresses and anxieties have one thing in common. They are sensed by a pair of pea-sized patches of neurons, called the amygdala, sitting deep inside your brain. So what if you could control your amygdala? What if you could change your brain and become calmer and braver?

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A bizarre microbe found deep in a gold mine in South Africa could provide a model for how life might survive in seemingly uninhabitable environments through the cosmos. Known as Desulforudis audaxviator, the rod-shaped bacterium thrives 2.8 kilometers underground in a habitat devoid of the things that power the vast majority of life on Earth-light, oxygen, and carbon. Instead, this "gold mine bug" gets energy from radioactive uranium in the depths of the mine. Now, scientists predict that life elsewhere in the universe might also feed off of radiation, especially radiation raining down from space.

"It really grabbed my attention because it's completely powered by radioactive substances," says Dimitra Atri, an astrobiologist and computational physicist who works for the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, Washington. "Who's to say life on other worlds doesn't do the same thing?"

Most life on Earth's surface takes in the energy it needs through one of two processes. Plants, some bacteria, and certain other organisms collect energy from sunlight through a process called photosynthesis. In it, they use the energy from light to convert water and carbon dioxide into more complex and energetic molecules called hydrocarbons, thus storing the energy so that it can be recovered later by breaking down the molecules through a process called oxidation. Alternatively, animals and other organisms simply feed off of plants, one another, etc., to steal the energy already stored in living things.

D. audaxviator takes a third path: It draws its energy from the radioactivity of uranium in the rock in the mine. The radiation from decaying uranium nuclei breaks apart sulfur and water molecules in the stone, producing molecular fragments such as sulfate and hydrogen peroxide that are excited with internal energy. The microbe then takes in these molecules, siphons off their energy, and spits them back out. Most of the energy produced from this process powers the bacterium's reproduction and internal processes, but a portion of it also goes to repairing damage from the radiation.

Atri thinks an extraterrestrial life form could easily make use of a similar system. The radiation might not come from radioactive materials on the planet itself, but rather from galactic cosmic rays (GCRs)-high-energy particles that careen through the universe after being flung out of a supernova. They're everywhere, even on Earth, but our planet's magnetic field and atmosphere shields us from most GCRs.

The surfaces of other planets like Mars are much more susceptible to cosmic rays because of their thin atmospheres and, in the case of Mars, its lack of a magnetic field. Atri argues GCRs could reach the Red Planet's surface with enough energy left to power a tiny organism. This could also be the case on any world with a negligible atmosphere: Pluto, Earth's moon, Jupiter's moon Europa, Saturn's moon Enceladus, and, theoretically, countless more outside our solar system. He does note, though, that because GCRs don't deliver nearly as much energy as the sun, GCR-powered life would be very small, and simple, just like D. audaxviator.

To figure out how this might work, Atri ran simulations using existing data about GCRs to see how much energy they'd provide on some of these other worlds. The numbers were clear: The small, steady shower of cosmic rays would supply enough energy to power a simple organism on all of the planets he simulated except Earth, Atri reports this week in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. "It can't be ruled out that life like this could exist," he says.

Atri thinks Mars is the best candidate to host GCR-powered life. The planet's composition is rocky like Earth's with plenty of minerals, and it might even have some water tucked away. Both would offer excellent mediums to be broken down by cosmic rays and gobbled up by a life form. The most essential part of the equation, though, is the thin atmosphere. "It's funny," Atri says, "because when we look for planets that contain life currently, we look for a very thick atmosphere. With these life forms, we're looking for the opposite."

Duncan Forgan, an astrobiologist at the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom who was not involved with the work, agrees that Mars might be harboring D. audaxviator-like life because its stable temperatures and physical makeup are similar to that of the South African gold mine. He does worry that on other planets that don't receive light energy from a sun but still get bombarded with GCRs-such as free floating rogue planets not tied to any solar system-temperatures would dip too low and freeze life in its tracks. He also cautions that too many cosmic rays could wipe life out altogether: "Life forms like this want a steady flux of energy from cosmic rays, but not so much that it's damaging," he says. "They might not be able to cope with a huge bout of radiation that pops in."

In the future, Atri wants to bring the gold mine bug into the lab and see how it responds to cosmic radiation levels equivalent to those on Mars, Europa, and others. That data would give him more clues to whether this kind of organism could survive beyond Earth. " Desulforudis audaxviator is proof that life can thrive using almost any energy source available," he says. "I always think of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park -life finds a way."
*Correction, 3 January, 2:45 p.m.: This article has been modified to reflect the fact that not all life on Earth gets its energy from either photosynthesis or by eating other life forms.

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A bizarre microbe found deep in a gold mine in South Africa could provide a model for how life might survive in seemingly uninhabitable environments through the cosmos. Known as Desulforudis audaxviator, the rod-shaped bacterium thrives 2.8 kilometers underground in a habitat devoid of the things that power the vast majority of life on Earth-light, oxygen, and carbon.

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http://www.livescience.com/56374-hurricane-matthew-storm-forecast.html

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This satellite image shows that Hurricane Matthew was replacing its inner eyewall, the part of the storm with the highest winds, on Oct. 6.

Credit: NASA/JAXA/NRL/NOAA

Update (Oct. 7 at 10:01 a.m. ET): Hurricane Matthew weakened slightly into a Category 3 hurricane, and is now sustaining winds of 120 mph (195 km/h), but experts still consider it dangerous as it moves up the eastern Florida coast. The storm is moving north-northwest today at 13 mph (20 km/h), and is expected to reach the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina on Saturday (Oct. 8), according to an update released by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) at 8 a.m. ET today (Oct. 7).

Those areas will probably see rain bands long before Saturday, as hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 60 miles (95 km) from the center of the storm, and tropical-storm-force winds extend up to 185 miles (295 km) from the center. Cape Canaveral, Florida, which was north of the hurricane this morning, reported wind gusts of up to 97 mph (155 km/h), the NHC said.

The hurricane is also bringing rain, with an expected 8 to 12 inches (20 to 30 centimeters) over the Atlantic coast, from central Florida to eastern North Carolina, the NHC said. After reaching the top of North Carolina, Matthew is expected to turn east and go out to sea. [ 50 Amazing Hurricane Facts]

Winds speeds for Hurricane Matthew (left) are expected to be highest in the magenta regions, according to this projection made today (Oct. 7).

Credit: National Hurricane Center NOAA

Reports are now coming in that Hurricane Matthew killed more than 300 people in Haiti, largely in towns and fishing villages along the southern coast, according to the BBC. Meanwhile, Gov. Rick Scott in Florida urged people to evacuate, and the Walt Disney World, Universal Studios and SeaWorld theme parks in Orlando are closed for the storm, the BBC said.

-Get the latest information on Hurricane Matthew at the National Hurricane Center.

-See images of Hurricane Matthew and the devastation it left behind.

Update (Oct. 6 at 10:29 a.m. ET): Hurricane Matthew, now classified as a Category 3 hurricane with 125 mph (205 km/h) winds, is expected to reach the eastern coast of Florida late today (Oct. 6) and then move northward, hugging the Florida coast through Friday night, according to an update from the National Hurricane Center (NHC) released at 8 a.m. EDT today.

The storm passed through Haiti, Cuba and most of the Bahamas these past few days, leaving torrential rain and flooding in its path. It's unclear how many people have died, but initial reports have the count at five in Haiti and four in the Dominican Republic, according to the Washington Post.

Matthew is currently moving northwest at 12 mph (19 km/h), and is expected to strengthen, regaining its Category 4 status as it reaches Florida, the NHC said. Hurricane-force winds extend 40 miles (65 kilometers) from its center, and tropical-storm-force winds extend up to 160 miles (260 km) from its center, the NRC reported. [See Photos of Hurricane Matthew]

There may, however, be good news for the Mid-Atlantic and New England states. Forecast models now show that after Hurricane Matthew reaches the Carolinas, it may head east into the Atlantic Ocean, sparing the northern states, according to NHC graphics and a report from The Weather Channel.

Update (Oct. 5 at 10:24 a.m. ET): After passing over Haiti and eastern Cuba yesterday (Oct. 4), Hurricane Matthew is heading for the central and northwestern Bahamas, according to an update released by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) at 8 a.m. EDT today (Oct. 5).

The hurricane now has sustained winds of about 115 mph (185 km/h), making it a Category 3 hurricane, the NHC reported. It's moving to the north-northwest at about 10 mph (17 km/h), and has hurricane-force winds extending outward up to 40 miles (65 kilometers) from its center, and tropical-force winds extending outward up to 160 miles (260 km), the NHC said.

Matthew is expected to make a northwest turn tonight, putting it on track to move across the Bahamas through Thursday, and then be "very near the east coast of Florida by Thursday evening," bringing intense winds, rain and flooding, the center said.

Original article published on Oct. 4, at 4:50 p.m. ET.

Hurricane Matthew is battering Haiti with powerful winds and extreme rain today (Oct. 4), with forecasts indicating it could cross the country and hit eastern Cuba next, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC). With the Bahamas and possibly Florida and the Carolinas within the storm's path in the coming days, how bad could Hurricane Matthew get?

When Hurricane Matthew made landfall in southwestern Haiti this morning, it had wind speeds of 145 mph (233 km/h), making it a Category 4 hurricane, the NHC said in a public advisory. The storm is now moving northward at 10 mph (16 km/h), according to the NHC.

"We have it as a Category 4 hurricane for the next 48 hours, which means as it's going through the Bahamas, it's likely to be a Category 4 hurricane and then weaken into a Category 3 hurricane as it's off of the northeastern and east central coasts of Florida," said Jack Beven, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Florida. [ Hurricanes from Above: Images of Nature's Biggest Storms]

There's even a chance that Matthew could continue its northward course and affect some states in the Mid-Atlantic and New England, Beven said.

"It could be a nor'easter-type blow by that time," he told Live Science. "I doubt it's going to be the reincarnation of [Hurricane] Sandy, but right now, it's just too early to say what kind of a structure and impact it will have."

In case the hurricane does hit Florida, the NHC issued a hurricane watch from Deerfield Beach, Florida, to the Volusia and Brevard County line, the NHC said. There is a tropical storm watch in effect for the Lake Okeechobee area and from Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys northward to the area south of Deerfield Beach, which includes Fort Lauderdale and Miami, according to the NHC.

As of Tuesday (Oct. 4) morning, the U.S. National Hurricane Center predicted that Hurricane Matthew might take this course. The map shows which coastal areas are under a hurricane warning (red), hurricane watch (pink), tropical storm warning (purple) and tropical storm watch (yellow). The blue is the potential several-day track.

Credit: National Hurricane Center NOAA

However, it's not clear yet when the hurricane may arrive. If it's coming toward the southern part of the state, it's expected to hit Thursday (Oct. 6), but if it moves more toward central and northern Florida, it may arrive Friday (Oct. 7), Beven said.

Matthew may weaken if and when it reaches the Carolinas, "although it could still be a major hurricane," Beven said. "The actual forecast track does have it briefly making landfall up in that area," he added. "So, we'll have to watch for that possibility, but that's four days down the road, so there's a lot of uncertainty."

Hurricane Matthew isn't alone. Today, the NHC reported that Tropical Storm Nicole, located farther east in the Atlantic than Matthew, has 50 mph (80 km/h) winds and is moving northwest at 8 mph (13 km/h).

There's a chance that Matthew and Nicole could interact, said James Done, the science lead for the Capacity Center for Climate and Weather Extremes at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. [ 5 Hurricane Categories: Historical Examples]

"There's a possibility that Nicole could pull Matthew away from the U.S., but that depends on a lot of factors, including the relative intensity of each storm and how close they are to one another," Done told Live Science.

Weather conditions also may impact how Matthew and Nicole progress, Done said.

"Generally, [hurricanes] like moist, calm conditions with a warm ocean," he said. "We definitely had a warm ocean. The ocean in the Caribbean right now is warmer than normal for this time of year, and the warmth extends to great depths."

He added that "it's likely a portion of the warming is due to human activity - [so-called] anthropogenic climate change."

Tropical Storm Nicole isn't the only system that may affect Hurricane Matthew. There's also a trough of low pressure moving eastward across the United States this week, Done said. If the trough moves quickly, it could arrive at the East Coast in time to guide Matthew harmlessly out to sea, but it's still unclear whether that will happen, he said. Moreover, ocean temperatures typically cool down north of Cape Hatteras, the part of North Carolina that sticks out into the Atlantic, he said, and those cooler temperatures could weaken the storm.

Original article on Live Science.

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Hurricane Matthew: Where Is This Massive Storm Heading?

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Update (Oct. 7 at 10:01 a.m. ET): Hurricane Matthew weakened slightly into a Category 3 hurricane, and is now sustaining winds of 120 mph (195 km/h), but experts still consider it dangerous as it moves up the eastern Florida coast.

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Two vaccines against Zika virus developed at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have successfully conveyed immunity from female mice to pups conceived weeks after the mother's vaccination.

When challenged with Zika virus within a week of their birth, both vaccines protected the pups against neurological damage better than pups with no maternal-conferred immunity. The results are published online today and scheduled for the November issue of EBioMedicine, a journal supported by CellPress and The Lancet.

"We've not only developed a promising vaccine candidate to move toward larger preclinical and, eventually, human clinical trials, but also a delivery format that would be inexpensive to produce and distribute to hundreds of thousands of people," said senior author Andrea Gambotto, M.D., associate professor of surgery in Pitt's School of Medicine.

Zika is a virus spread primarily through the bite of an infected mosquito of the Aedes species. When pregnant women are infected, the virus can pass to their fetus, which can damage the developing baby and cause severe neurological birth defects, including microcephaly, or an abnormally small head.

One of the two vaccines uses a "microneedle array" to deliver the vaccine just below the surface of the skin through tiny crystals that dissolve after being affixed to the skin by a Band-Aid-like patch. The technology was co-invented by Louis D. Falo, M.D., Ph.D., chair of Pitt's Department of Dermatology and co-author of the study.

The other vaccine uses the traditional needle delivery format and adenovirus, a type of common cold virus, to present Zika antigens to the immune system to induce immunity.

Both vaccines used proteins on the "envelope," or outer shell, of the virus as the antigen to prime the immune system so it can quickly recognize and fight off the actual virus. This approach has worked in the past to develop West Nile, yellow fever and dengue vaccines.

Three groups of female mice, with five mice per group, were immunized with either one of the two vaccines or a saline solution with no vaccine for the control group. Two weeks after the initial vaccination, the mice received a booster of the same vaccine they originally received.

Blood tests were performed at vaccination and every two weeks afterward. The mice showed immunity against Zika two weeks after immunization with the adenovirus Zika vaccine and six weeks after immunization with the microneedle array Zika vaccine.

Five weeks after initial immunization, the female mice were mated with unvaccinated males. Because mice do not develop microcephaly, giving the mothers Zika while pregnant would be unlikely to affect the pups. So the researchers waited until one week after the pups were born and then exposed them to Zika. All of the pups from the mothers immunized with adenovirus Zika vaccine and half of the pups from the mothers who received the microneedle array vaccine survived infection. Only 12.5 percent of the pups from mothers in the unimmunized control group survived.

Furthermore, all of the control group pups showed signs of neurological damage, including loss of balance, muscle weakness and hind-limb paralysis. Five out of six of the microneedle array group pups also exhibited neurological issues, though they weren't as severe as the control group's symptoms. None of the adenovirus vaccine pups showed significant neurological problems.

Although the adenovirus Zika vaccine definitely performed better in this study, Dr. Gambotto said it was used as a proof-of-principle vaccine in mice to quickly develop and test if the envelope protein antigen would work in a mouse model. It wouldn't work well in humans because the vast majority of us have already had adenovirus colds so our immune systems would simply neutralize the vaccine and not develop proper Zika antibodies.

"We decided to move forward with the microneedle array Zika vaccine and have since developed a promising, second-generation vaccine," said Dr. Gambotto. "We are hopeful, now that Congress has approved the $1.1 billion bill to provide funding for Zika prevention and research, that we'll be able to do larger-scale studies to evaluate and develop this vaccine for possible human clinical trials in the future."

Additional researchers on this study are Eun Kim, Ph.D., Geza Erdos, Ph.D., Shaohua Huang, Ph.D., and Thomas Kenniston, M.S., all of Pitt.

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vaccines; zika; cold and flu; infectious diseases; zika virus research; mice; virology; bird flu research

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Preliminary Zika vaccines prevent neurological disorders in newborn mice

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Two vaccines against Zika virus developed at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have successfully conveyed immunity from female mice to pups conceived weeks after the mother's vaccination. When challenged with Zika virus within a week of their birth, both vaccines protected the pups against neurological damage better than pups with no maternal-conferred immunity.

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Old fashioned roller coasters can help patients pass kidney stones

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Old fashioned roller coasters can help patients pass kidney stones

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Kayla Burke

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A Michigan State University urologist has discovered that riding a roller coaster helps patients pass kidney stones with nearly a 70 percent success rate.

David Wartinger, a professor emeritus in the Department of Osteopathic Surgical Specialties, led both a pilot study and an expanded study to assess whether the stories he was hearing from patients were true.

His pilot study is published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association.

"Basically, I had patients telling me that after riding a particular roller coaster at Walt Disney World, they were able to pass their kidney stone," Wartinger said. "I even had one patient say he passed three different stones after riding multiple times."

This resulted in Wartinger going out and testing the theory. Using a validated, synthetic 3D model of a hollow kidney complete with three kidney stones no larger than 4 millimeters inserted into the replica, he took the model in a backpack on Big Thunder Mountain at the theme park 20 times. His initial results verified patient reports.

"In the pilot study, sitting in the last car of the roller coaster showed about a 64 percent passage rate, while sitting in the first few cars only had a 16 percent success rate," Wartinger said.

The expanded study, conducted with Mark Mitchell, an MSU resident at the time, included riding the same roller coaster with multiple kidney models attached to the researchers. They discovered even better results while sitting in the back of the coaster, with a passage rate of nearly 70 percent. They also found that both studies showed a 100 percent passage rate if the stones were located in the upper chamber of the kidney.

"In all, we used 174 kidney stones of varying shapes, sizes and weights to see if each model worked on the same ride and on two other roller coasters," Wartinger said. "Big Thunder Mountain was the only one that worked. We tried Space Mountain and Aerosmith's Rock 'n' Roller Coaster and both failed."

Wartinger went on to explain that these other rides are too fast and too violent with a G-force that pins the stone into the kidney and doesn't allow it to pass.

"The ideal coaster is rough and quick with some twists and turns, but no upside down or inverted movements," he said.

It's estimated that around 300,000 people per year go to an emergency room suffering from kidney stones and the cost for treatment could range anywhere between $5,000 to $10,000.

Lithotripsy, which breaks apart kidney stones that are too large to pass, is a common treatment for the problem. Wartinger said the procedure is usually used in cases where the kidney stone is larger than 5 millimeters.

"The problem though is lithotripsy can leave remnants in the kidney which can result in another stone," Wartinger said. "The best way to potentially eliminate this from happening is to try going on a roller coaster after a treatment when the remnants are still small."

He added that patients could even try going on a coaster once a year as maintenance, lessening the chances of future issues and minimizing health care costs.

"You need to heed the warnings before going on a roller coaster," he advised. "If you have a kidney stone, but are otherwise healthy and meet the requirements of the ride, patients should try it. It's definitely a lower-cost alternative to health care."

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kidney disease; urology; diseases and conditions; patient education and counseling; today's healthcare; restless leg syndrome; multiple sclerosis research; wounds and healing

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Old fashioned roller coasters can help patients pass kidney stones

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A Michigan State University urologist has discovered that riding a roller coaster helps patients pass kidney stones with nearly a 70 percent success rate. David Wartinger, a professor emeritus in the Department of Osteopathic Surgical Specialties, led both a pilot study and an expanded study to assess whether the stories he was hearing from patients were true.

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But it's administered by the most dangerous animal in the world -- the female anopheles mosquito.

This insect sinking its mouth into human flesh to feed its unborn children killed 438,000 people in 2015 alone -- 90% of those fatalities were in Sub-Saharan Africa.

For this region, malaria is still a crippling burden, estimated to cost countries such as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo up to 1.3% of their GDP, according to the Malaria Consortium.

So imagine if this issue could be wiped out by a simple bar of soap.

That's what a Burkina Faso start-up is proposing.

A bar of soap

Faso Soap is the brainchild of Moctar Dembélé, of Burkina Faso, and Gérard Niyondiko, of Burundi.

Comprised of Shea butter, lemongrass, African marigold and other natural resources that are plentiful in Burkina Faso, it is designed to leave an insect-repelling odor on the user's skin after washing.

It could be used to prevent against a wide range of mosquito-transmitted conditions -- perhaps eventually even Zika.

"Soap is one product you can find in all African family homes, no matter how poor they are," Niyondiko tells CNN. "Most people wash in the evening and you want to be protected before you go to bed at night."

The majority of Africans, he adds, do not have access or the financial means to buy expensive repellents.

Suds that stick around

Getting people to use the soap, the team knew, would be easy -- but making it effective after it has been rinsed off would be hard.

"When you use soap, you tend to rinse it off. So part of the effects of Faso Soap would be thrown away," says Franck Langevin, campaigns director for the Ouagadougou-based outfit.

"We decided to combine the latest cosmetic technology with natural repellent ingredients ... we put the natural ingredients into micro-capsules around 100 to 150 micrometers in size, embedded in the soap. These are small enough to stick onto the skin's pores.

"After the soap is rinsed, the capsules remain and gradually break and release the repellent little by little over a six to eight hour period."

The next step

In 2013, Dembélé and Niyondiko became the first African winners of the Global Social Venture Competition at the University of California Berkeley, winning $25,000.

Since then, Faso Soap has been partnering with organizations that have "competencies we don't", such as market-leading soap manufacturers in West Africa, NGOs including Doctors Without Borders for distribution opportunities, and taking their product through rigorous scientific testing so they can bring it to market.

"Once we have the hard scientific data on the soap and its effectiveness in preventing against malaria, we want to approach national and international entities for subsidies," Langevin says.

While markets such as Asia could be more profitable, the group are keenly focused on providing cheap access to the soap to those in need in Africa.

They have set a goal for Faso Soap to save 100,000 lives by 2018.

A possible protection against Zika?

The possibilities for Faso Soap don't end with malaria. Other mosquito transmitted diseases -- such as Zika -- could also be prevented by the product.

More research needs to be done in this area.

"Zika is transmitted by the Tiger mosquito, which looks the same but is actually very different. We need to know to what extent we can be effective with essential oils," says Langevin.

"For now, working on malaria is a big enough challenge -- it kills way more people than Zika.

"A child dies from malaria every two minutes."

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But it's administered by the most dangerous animal in the world -- the female anopheles mosquito. This insect sinking its mouth into human flesh to feed its unborn children killed 438,000 people in 2015 alone -- 90% of those fatalities were in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki/Shutterstock

Dalton Prager, a young man who received national attention because both he and his wife had cystic fibrosis, died this weekend of the disease at age 25. But why does cystic fibrosis shorten lives?

Prager met his wife, Katie, online when the two were 18-year-olds, according to CNN. Because they both had cystic fibrosis, they were warned against ever meeting in person, since two people with the condition can spread bacteria to each other, which can result in life-threatening infections.

But the pair met anyway, and had a five-year marriage before Dalton's death on Saturday (Sept. 17), CNN said. Katie is currently receiving hospice care for cystic fibrosis at her home in Kentucky. The couple's story has been compared to the novel "The Fault in Our Stars" by John Green (Dutton Books, 2012), which tells the story of two teens with terminal cancer who meet and fall in love. [ 10 Celebrities with Chronic Illnesses]

Cystic fibrosis is a genetic condition in which the body produces abnormally thick mucus, which builds up in the lungs, pancreas and digestive tract. As a result, the condition causes breathing and digestive problems, according to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF).

Excessive mucus in the lungs creates an ideal place for bacteria to thrive and multiply, the CFF says. This means that patients with cystic fibrosis are at high risk for lung infections, often from bacteria that don't typically cause symptoms in healthy people. In addition, the body's immune system 's response to these infections results in inflammation that can lead to even more lung damage. As a result, lung infections can be dangerous for cystic fibrosis patients, and over time, lead to worsening lung health and death, the CFF says.

Extra mucus in the pancreas can also block the release of enzymes that are important for digestion, which prevents patients from absorbing vital nutrients from the food they eat, and can result in malnutrition, the CFF says.

Advances in treatments for cystic fibrosis have greatly increase life expectancy for people with the disease, but it remains a life-shortening illness. In the 1950s, children with the condition often did not survive long enough to attend elementary school, whereas those born in 2010 are projected to have a life expectancy of 39 years, according to a 2014 paper. More than 30,000 people in the U.S. are living with cycstic fibrosis, according to the CFF.

Before Dalton and Katie met, Dalton was infected with Burkholderia cepacia, a bacteria that can cause dangerous lung infections in people with cystic fibrosis. Katie did not have the infection, but knew that meeting Dalton would put her at high risk for contracting the bacteria, according to CNN. Indeed, the CFF recommends that two people with cystic fibrosis should be kept a minimum of 6 feet (2 meters) apart because of the risk of cross-infection between people with the disease. Katie did eventually contract the bacteria from Dalton, but told CNN that she had no regrets.

"It gave me some of the best years of my life," Katie was quoted as saying. "I'd rather have five years of being in love and just really completely happy than 20 years of not having anybody."

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'Fault in Our Stars' Couple: Why Cystic Fibrosis Shortens Lives

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Dalton Prager, a young man who received national attention because both he and his wife had cystic fibrosis, died this weekend of the disease at age 25. But why does cystic fibrosis shorten lives? Prager met his wife, Katie, online when the two were 18-year-olds, according to CNN.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160924010200.htm

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Biologists of all stripes attest to evolution, but have debated its details since Darwin's day. Since changes arise and take hold slowly over many generations, it is daunting to track this process in real time for long-lived creatures.

"We know that evolution occurs -- that species change," said Dee Boersma, a University of Washington professor of biology. "But to see this process in long-lived animals you have to look at generations of individuals, track how traits are inherited and detect selection at work."

Boersma studies one particularly intriguing long-lived species, the Magellanic penguins of South America. She has spent 34 years gathering information about their lifespan, reproduction and behavior at Punta Tombo, a stretch of Argentine coast that serves as their largest breeding site. Boersma and her colleagues combed through 28 years' worth of penguin data to search for signs that natural selection -- one of the main drivers of evolution -- may be acting on certain penguin traits. As they report in a paper published Sept. 21 in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, selection is indeed at work at Punta Tombo.

"This is the first decades-long study to measure selection in penguins, and only the second one for birds overall," said lead author Laura Koehn, a graduate student in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences who worked with Boersma as an undergraduate.

Like all penguins, the Magellanic variety are natural swimmers, where they feed on the bounty of the oceans. But once a year they return to the Argentine and Chilean coasts to mate and molt. Their "serial monogamy" -- fidelity to one partner per breeding season -- as well as a nagging preference to breed in the same general location each year make it possible to track individual birds over time, Koehn said.

Boersma began the project, which is ongoing, in 1982. To keep track of individuals amid a colony that at its height held 500,000 birds, Boersma and her team attached unique metal bands to the flipper of each penguin they studied. Each breeding season, the scientists would search for tagged penguins that made it back to Punta Tombo, measure basic physical characteristics and tag new chicks to add to their tracking duties.

"We chose characteristics that might be important to the success of individual penguins, like body size and bill depth," said Boersma. "And once we had generations of trackable data for individuals and their descendants, we could ask: do these traits change over time?"

Through natural selection, individuals with traits that allow them to adapt and thrive in their environment can pass their favorable traits to their offspring.

"Our question was simple: for these traits, do offspring resemble their parents?" said Koehn.

By measuring an entire population -- like the Magellanic penguins at Punta Tombo -- Boersma's team could see if individuals with certain characteristics, for example a large body, were more successful at breeding over the years. Koehn and co-authors searched for signs of selection across 28 years of Boersma's data.

She could detect selection in seven of the 28 years for both males and females. Selection is likely acting on these traits every year, but the highly variable conditions at Punta Tombo mean that the "direction" of selection on each trait may fluctuate too much to see over just 28 years, said Boersma. As the study continues, researchers may divine signatures of natural selection over additional years.

For the seven years the researchers could detect natural selection in males, there was a clear trend. Larger males held an edge in lean years when resources are fewer. In females, they detected selection acting on traits such as foot size, bill depth and body size. But unlike males, they saw no clear trend on how selection was shaping the females of the species over time.

"Those traits appear to be important for survival," said Boersma. "But if environmental conditions change rapidly then selection also constantly changes, and it's harder to see a clear trend over time."

This is only the second time natural selection has been observed over 20 years or more for a bird species.

Evolutionary biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant spent more than 20 years cataloguing traits in seed-eating finches on the Galapagos island of Daphne Major. These are some of the same Galapagos finches that inspired a young Darwin to come up with his theory of evolution by natural selection in the 19th century. The Grants detected signatures of natural selection at work on this island, correlating the changes with the influence of El Niño conditions.

"Now we've been able to track natural selection in a second bird species thanks to these decades of observations at Punta Tombo," said Boersma.

Encouraged by her team's findings with Magellanic penguins, Boersma intends to continue collecting data -- tracking traits and survival for even more generations and repeating this analysis.

"This is only the beginning," she concluded.

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evolutionary biology; mating and breeding; biochemistry research; birds; evolution; charles darwin; fossils; early birds

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How natural selection acted on one penguin species over the past quarter century

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Biologists of all stripes attest to evolution, but have debated its details since Darwin's day. Since changes arise and take hold slowly over many generations, it is daunting to track this process in real time for long-lived creatures. "We know that evolution occurs -- that species change," said Dee Boersma, a University of Washington professor of biology.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160920130921.htmhttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160920130921.htm

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Like a casino dealer shuffling the deck, climate change is starting to reorder species from the grasslands of Argentina to ice-free areas of Greenland.

New research published Monday (Sept. 19) in the journal Nature Climate Change by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Wisconsin-Madison illuminates where and why novel species combinations are likely to emerge due to recent changes in temperature and precipitation. The study includes global maps of novelty that offer testable predictions and carry important implications for conservation and land management planning.

For instance, the findings suggest that novel species associations are likely to form in the North American Great Plains and temperate forests, the Amazon, South American grasslands, Africa and boreal Asia due to recent climate change, and will likely expand as climate novelty increases.

With global temperatures expected to increase by 2.5-8 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century -- compared to the roughly 1.5 degrees of global warming experienced over the last century -- the authors predict the widespread reshuffling of species into new communities, as species abundances and distributions change.

"We're identifying three distinct ways that climate change can lead to community reshuffling," says study co-author John "Jack" Williams, a UW-Madison professor of geography.

One mechanism is climate novelty, in which new climates emerge with no historic equivalent. Some species are already adapted to these new climates while others are not.

Another is the speed of climate change, which may cause shuffling among species that vary in their ability to track with the pace of change.

Finally, climate divergence -- the differences among climate variables in their spatial direction of change -- may pull species ranges in varying directions.

For instance, in the Rocky Mountains, species in the upper treeline appear to be influenced by temperature-related variables such as growing-season length and winter severity, while lower treeline species are more sensitive to moisture availability. As temperatures warm, upper treeline species may migrate to cooler areas upslope, while the lower-elevation treeline species could be pulled in the opposite direction, depending on whether the region gets wetter or drier.

The three mechanisms were mapped together and separately using climate data spanning 1901-2013, showing that each has a distinct spatial pattern.

In so doing, the study clarifies the places where novel communities are expected to emerge in response to climate change, provides a more comprehensive view of how temperature and precipitation variations could pull species in different directions, and could help scientists determine where mismatches between rapid climate shifts and slow species responses could result in the reduction or even extinction of species.

Its holistic view also adds specificity to conversations happening now in conservation groups and boardrooms around the world about how to manage wilderness in an era of changing climates.

"We know from the past that species are going to move in response to climate change, we know that species are going to probably move in different directions, but the challenge is we don't know which species can do well in novel climate spaces and which ones can't," Williams explains. "And probably some will do better than others."

For example, in the face of rapid climate change, many birds or mammals may be able to migrate quickly and stay in their favorable climates. However, species like amphibians, which move more slowly and are often tied to a specific microhabitat, and trees, which are limited by seed dispersal distance and long generation times, could be left behind and struggle.

The study was led by Alejandro Ordonez, now at Aarhus University, who built on research he began as a Climate, People and the Environment Program (CPEP) postdoctoral fellow at UW-Madison from 2010-13.

While at the UW, Ordonez developed new methods for measuring climate novelty, rates of climate change and the interplay among these factors. He and Williams published research applying these analyses first in Wisconsin and then globally. In 2014, they assessed the combined speeds of climate and land-use change across the United States with Volker Radeloff, a UW-Madison professor of forest and wildlife ecology.

But unanswered questions lingered for Ordonez, spurring this latest collaboration.

"So far, my work with Jack and others at UW focused on the 'how much' question, but I had no clear idea of the 'where to' aspect of these changes," Ordonez explains. He saw the need to develop an integrated assessment framework, incorporating his and others' concepts and recent work in the field, that allowed for the testing of where and how novelty could emerge.

"Such an assessment allows us to develop hypotheses regarding what will be the principal mechanism that could push a region, a protected area, or a particular community to a novel environmental playing field," Ordonez says.

Because the study used historic climate change data, the maps provide researchers the opportunity to test predictions, Williams adds. "In principle, these are places where we can go out now and look for novel communities emerging in response to climate changes of the 20th and early 21st century."

In Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest, regional climate gradients include a strong north-south temperature gradient and a moisture gradient from west to east, being generally drier to the west. Hence, as temperatures warm, species are expected to move north, while other species may shift east or west in response to precipitation changes.

For example, in research separate from this study, UW-Madison doctoral candidate Jeremy Ash and professors Tom Givnish and Don Waller, all of the botany department, have found in resurveying hundreds of sites throughout Wisconsin -- first sampled in the 1940s and '50s by UW's John Curtis -- that the distribution of plant species is shifting northwest in the state.

The current study adds to a growing body of research known as climate metrics, aimed at summarizing the ecological risks of climate change in ways that are useful to conservationists and land managers. The findings carry on-the-ground applications for management decisions and, the authors note, highlight the need for unique, localized management and adaptation planning.

For instance, if high rates of climate change are forecast for a particular location, conservation biologists may need to manage species dispersal or consider assisting in the relocation of slow-dispersing or vulnerable species. Indications of climate novelty may require a different management response -- one prepared for ecological surprises.

"That may be more of a monitor-and-watch kind of situation in the sense of it's a bit hard to know what will happen, so you really want to see what's happening on the ground," Williams says.

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nature; new species; endangered animals; endangered plants; environmental awareness; climate; global warming; environmental policy

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Where and how climate change is altering species

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Like a casino dealer shuffling the deck, climate change is starting to reorder species from the grasslands of Argentina to ice-free areas of Greenland. New research published Monday (Sept. 19) in the journal Nature Climate Change by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and the University of Wisconsin-Madison illuminates where and why novel species combinations are likely to emerge due to recent changes in temperature and precipitation.

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http://www.biologynews.net

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Biology News Net - Latest Biology Articles, News & Current Events

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Biology News Articles & Current Events, Updated Daily

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"Yeah, I brought my heart rate down from 80 to 45 beats per minute resting...." The boasting drawl came from behind me as I waited in the starting corral of the Rock and Roll Marathon in Raleigh, N.C. It may seem like an odd comment to those not in endurance sports, but for distance runners, cyclists, swimmers and triathletes, a sluggish resting heart rate can be a matter of pride.

No one knew exactly what causes athletes to have this slow heartbeat, a condition called sinus bradycardia. Now, a study by cardiac physiologist Alicia D'Souza and colleagues from the University of Manchester in England finds the answer in certain "funny channels" in the sinoatrial node, the pacemaker for the heart. The slower heart rate isn't as funny - it has fewer funny channels to transmit current that controls the activity of the heart cells. The results suggest a mechanism for sinus bradycardia in athletes, and also might help scientists understand why athletes can have heart problems later in life.

The study started close to home. "I had a Ph.D. student, Will Morris," says Mark Boyett, a cardiac physiologist and lead author of the study. "He's a cardiologist and he's also a very keen cyclist. He was telling me that his heart rate when he is race-fit is 42 beats per minute!" A normal heart beats at around 70 beats per minute at rest. A professional athlete in top condition will cut that number in half.

Many amateur athletes wear their reduced heart rates as a competitive badge of honor, proof that they are really fit. Unfortunately, sinus bradycardia is not always an effect worth boasting about. Lifelong athletes with low heart rates need pacemakers later in life much more often than the general population. D'Souza and Boyett became interested in how sinus bradycardia occurs.

The sinoatrial node, or SAN, is a small group of cells in the right atrium of the heart. It sets the pace for heart contraction, spreading electrical signals through the rest of the muscle. The SAN is controlled both from electrical channels within the node and by the vagus nerve, which relays signals from the brain. When D'Souza and Boyett started to examine sinus bradycardia in athletes, most scientists assumed that it was causes by changes in the signals coming from the vagus nerve.

But it wasn't quite so simple. "We looked into it but it was a case of the emperor's new clothes. We found no evidence that the vagus nerve was causing sinus bradycardia," Boyett says. So the researchers set up an experiment. They took mice and rats and made athletes out of them, training the rats to run long distance for 12 weeks and the mice to become swimmers for four weeks. The fit rodents all displayed sinus bradycardia, with much slower heart rates compared with their couch-potato counterparts.

The authors focused on the ion channels that control electrical current in the sinoatrial node. They noticed decreases in a particular ion channel called HCN4, one of four known "funny channels." Discovered by coauthor and cardiac electrophysiologist Dario DiFrancesco at the University of Milan in Italy, funny channels are key pacemakers that help to determine heart rate. "It is now widely accepted that the HCN4 channel is a marker of pacemaker tissue and controls pacemaking and cardiac rate in a variety of conditions," DiFrancesco explains. "Whenever changes of cardiac rate are involved, it is natural to think that HCN4 channels may be involved."

The results, published May 13 in Nature Communications, show that endurance training remodels the heart and reduces resting heart rate by altering the number of funny channels. In the rodents, these changes reversed when the animals were allowed to fall off the exercise wagon.

The findings suggest that "the sinus node has an intrinsic ability to react against the chronically increased heart rate" associated with endurance training, says cardiac physiologist Elizabetta Cerbai of the University of Florence, Italy. The study, she says, has uncovered one of the ways in which the changeable heart can modify itself. Cerbai also notes that long-term sinus node sickness is not limited to athletes. The mechanisms uncovered in this study could also benefit the studies of other heart problems such as heart failure.

Matteo Mangoni, a molecular physiologist at the University of Montpellier in France, found the study to be innovative, and is curious to see what would happen with even longer training regimens. While the rodents did undergo some impressive endurance training, it couldn't equal the years and years of training that most endurance athletes put in. "It will be important to understand if this same mechanism that appears to be operant in moderately trained mice is also responsible for severe bradycardia and atrial rhythm disease sometimes observed in endurance sportsmen," he says.

D'Souza agrees that their next step is to look at sinus bradycardia after longer training and in older animals. "It's speculation at this point," she explains. "Our data is in response to very short-term training, so we have to be cautious in interpreting our results."

Boyett points out that the bradycardia was reversible in their young, fit animals, as it is in young athletes when they take time off from training. "But in older athletes it may not be reversible." So for now, he says, the main message is "everything in moderation."

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A slow heartbeat in athletes is not so funny

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"Yeah, I brought my heart rate down from 80 to 45 beats per minute resting...." The boasting drawl came from behind me as I waited in the starting corral of the Rock and Roll Marathon in Raleigh, N.C.

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Sep 17, 2016 06:26 AM EDT

Are foxes man's new best friend? In Russia, there's now a choice after geneticist Dmitry Belyaev began a breeding program 50 years ago.

There are plenty of people who would want to take the adorable looking fox home. However, a regular fox from the wild isn't domesticated and will often wreak havoc in the home.

A report from BBC revealed that the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals even officially cautions people from attempting to get a fox as a pet saying, "Because foxes are wild animals and do not fare well as domestic pets, they should not be kept as such. Even the most experienced fox experts have had difficulty in keeping adult foxes successfully in captivity as they have very specific needs."

In the late 1950s, Belyaev didn't just attempt to bring home a fox and tame it - the scientist actually began to create a tame fox population. The ambitious project of guided evolution through selected breeding proved to be successful, and is still an ongoing project even past the geneticist's death in 1985.

Belyaev's goal was to track the evolutionary pathway of domesticated animals through his subjects, the silver-black foxes. He did it with a breeding program at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics at Novosibirsk in Russia, but operated under the guise of breeding to improve fur coats because of the ban in genetic study in Russia under Joseph Stalin's rule.

He traveled with his intern Lyudmila Trut throughout Russia to select foxes to bring to their Novosibirsk farm. Their selections were based on the animals' initial response to humans; from the original pool, they chose 100 vixens and 30 males as the first generation.

The cubs were hand-fed and exposed to significant human contact, then "discarded" after still displaying aggressive or evasive behavior. Less than 10% of each selection were chosen as parents of the next generation.

"As a result of such rigorous selection, the offspring exhibiting the aggressive and fear avoidance responses were eliminated from the experimental population in just two to three generations of selection," Trut, who took over operations after Belyaev's death, wrote in a report in BioEssays in 2009.

By the fourth generation, the foxes were beginning to act more like dogs. Actions included wagging their tails, seeking contact from humans, whining and licking researchers. Their bodies changed as well with floppier ears, curlier tails, shortened limbs and wider skulls, among others.

The fox farm still exists and now has 270 tame vixens and 70 tame males. Due to financial problems, the foxes are now being sold as house pets.

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First Domesticated Foxes Bred in Russia With Dog Traits Like Licking, Tail Wagging

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Sep 17, 2016 06:26 AM EDT Are foxes man's new best friend? In Russia, there's now a choice after geneticist Dmitry Belyaev began a breeding program 50 years ago. There are plenty of people who would want to take the adorable looking fox home.

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Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed a strategy to overcome a key defense that drug-resistant bacteria use to fend off antibiotic attack.

Antibiotic resistance has become a major public health problem -- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that more than 2 million illnesses are caused in the U.S. each year by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, resulting in 23,000 deaths.

The study findings, published online in PLOS Biology, describe how two UT Southwestern research teams created a synthetic compound that blocks a bacterial pump used to expel antibiotics. Bacteria that use these "efflux pumps" and that are treated with the new compound become sensitive to antibiotics they were previously resistant to.

The findings "potentially have huge implications for clinical infectious diseases," said Dr. Trish Perl," Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, Professor of Internal Medicine, and holder of the Jay P. Sanford Professorship in Infectious Diseases at UT Southwestern. "In an era when antibiotic choices are increasingly limited because of resistance, and few new agents are being developed, this becomes a novel and exciting tool that needs to be explored."

The UTSW experiment focused on Escherichia coli ( E. coli) and bacterial pathogens with genetically similar efflux pump complexes. E. coli belongs to a large family of bacteria, Enterobacteriaceae, which plays a major role in human disease and is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

This is the first time researchers have tailored one of these synthetic compounds, part of a class called PPMOs or peptide-conjugated phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomers, to target a specific efflux pump found in bacterial cell walls, said Dr. David Greenberg, Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and Microbiology at UT Southwestern and a senior author of the study.

The PPMO compound itself doesn't kill the bacteria, he explained, but keeps it from expelling an antibiotic, allowing the drug to do its job.

"This is just a different strategy," Dr. Greenberg said. "There is a lot of interest in trying to develop new antibiotics, or antibiotics that act in new ways. The other way of thinking about this challenge is to try to make a resistant organism sensitive."

Despite the availability of many excellent antibiotics, bacteria are developing resistance to those most commonly used, forcing physicians to give higher doses or fall back to "last line of defense" drugs, said co-senior author Dr. Erdal Toprak, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology and in the Cecil H. and Ida Green Comprehensive Center for Molecular, Computational, and Systems Biology and a Southwestern Medical Foundation Scholar in Biomedical Research at UT Southwestern.

To attack this problem, two UTSW labs with different focuses came together to seek a solution. Dr. Greenberg had been trying to create new antibiotics using PPMOs -- also called anti-sense molecules because they can mimic DNA or RNA and bind to mRNA's genetic sequence like the other half of a zipper, blocking the bacterial machinery for building proteins. Meanwhile, Dr. Toprak's lab was using a device he had developed to study how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. About a year ago, his research team identified a mutation in E. coli that increased drug sensitivity by blocking an efflux pump complex called AcrAB-TolC. The two scientists and their labs then joined forces to create a PPMO that could target this important E. coli complex.

In the study, they reported that a PPMO designed to prevent creation of the AcrA protein significantly increased the efficacy of antibiotics against E. coli in cell models -- from two- to 40-fold. In fact, Dr. Toprak said, some antibiotics that are never used against E. coli because they were thought to be ineffective killed the bacteria, when used in conjunction with the AcrA-PPMO.

The AcrA-PPMO also was effective against the human pathogens K lebsiella pneumoniae and S almonella enterica, since those bacteria contain the same efflux pump with a matching gene sequence, Dr. Greenberg said.

The next step will be to study the effect of the AcrA-PPMO in animal models. The researchers also will study whether a PPMO could be effective against other extremely antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, he said.

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infectious diseases; pharmacology; pharmaceuticals; foodborne illness; bacteria; microbes and more; microbiology; biotechnology and bioengineering

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Scientists enhance ability of antibiotics to defeat resistant types of bacteria using molecules called PPMOs

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Researchers have developed a strategy to overcome a key defense that drug-resistant bacteria use to fend off antibiotic attack. Antibiotic resistance has become a major public health problem; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that more than 2 million illnesses are caused in the U.S.

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Abenezer seyfaw

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More than 300 wild reindeer were recently killed by lightning at a Norwegian national park, officials say.

The Norwegian Environment Agency has released haunting images of reindeer-including 70 calves-that seemingly fell over where they stood in the grasses of Hardangervidda, the largest high mountain plateau in northern Europe.

The national park, the largest in Norway with wild reindeer populations, spans some 8,000 square kilometers (3,088 square miles) and is home to 10,000 to 11,000 wild reindeer.

While specifics on the lightning strike are still unknown at this time, it's likely that the dead reindeer were a herd that huddled together to weather a severe thunderstorm that rolled through the area on Friday.

It's not the first time that lightning has caused animal herds to die en masse. In 1990, a thunderstorm killed 30 cattle on a farm in Orange County, Virginia, leaving their bodies scattered in a field. In 2005, a lightning strike killed 68 cows at a dairy farm outside Dorrigo in New South Wales, Australia. And in 2008, lightning outside of Montevideo, Uruguay, struck a paddock's wire fence, killing 52 of the cattle grazing inside. ( See more reindeer pictures.)

"I've heard of groups of cow [getting killed] when it strikes the ground," says Steve Goodman, a scientist with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Satellite Service. "The lightning can spread for hundreds and hundreds of meters, for sure."

In an interview with the Associated Press, agency spokesperson Kjartan Knutsen said the scale of the wildlife deaths was unprecedented in the country.

"We have not heard about such numbers before," he said.

But Goodman notes that Norway is not particularly prone to severe lightning. Satellite data from NASA's Global Hydrology Research Center show that in an average year, southern Norway sees fewer than one lightning strike per square kilometer.

In contrast, the world's biggest lightning hot spot, Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo, gets struck more than 232 times per square kilometer in an average year-and endures nighttime thunderstorms 297 days of the year.

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Lightning Kills More Than 300 Reindeer in Rare Mass Death

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More than 300 wild reindeer were recently killed by lightning at a Norwegian national park, officials say. The Norwegian Environment Agency has released haunting images of reindeer-including 70 calves-that seemingly fell over where they stood in the grasses of Hardangervidda, the largest high mountain plateau in northern Europe.

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Although Burns, WY. is a speck on the map, it is home to a piece of history.

Sitting on a shelf in an old elementary school is a steel beam from the Twin Towers.

A 1,700-mile journey

Fifteen years after 9/11, virtually all of the artifacts reclaimed from Ground Zero -- ranging from crushed ambulances to crumpled elevator motors -- were distributed across the country.

Though most of the pieces reside in the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in Manhattan, some ended up in unexpected places -- like a tiny town in Wyoming.

Judy Johnstone was the mayor pro-tem of Burns when she heard that a town could submit an application to receive an artifact from the World Trade Center.

"[Residents] were all blown away that ... a town of 300 people could get something like this," she said.

No one from Burns was in the Twin Towers that day in 2001. And many of its residents will never be able to go to Ground Zero or get to visit the museum there.

However, there are many veterans who live in Burns. A piece of history that so profoundly changed America has a particular significance to that community.

"There's a lot of civic pride here in regards to our veterans," said Ralph Bartels, current mayor of Burns.

It took about a year of letter-writing and paperwork to obtain their artifact. The small piece from a steel beam arrived in Burns in March 2011. It's one of only two 9/11 artifacts in the state of Wyoming.

Although the piece of steel sits on a shelf for now, it has a more honorable display in its future -- as the centerpiece of a new park. It will stand in honor of veterans.

"To be able to touch a piece of the actual history," Johnstone said, "is something that means a lot to a lot of people."

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a town of 301 people is home to a piece of 9/11 history - cnn

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A town of 301 people is home to a piece of 9/11 history

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Although Burns, WY. is a speck on the map, it is home to a piece of history. Sitting on a shelf in an old elementary school is a steel beam from the Twin Towers. A 1,700-mile journey Fifteen years after 9/11, virtually all of the artifacts reclaimed from Ground Zero -- ranging from crushed ambulances to crumpled elevator motors -- were distributed across the country.

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Asthma and allergies in children could be prevented by altering the type of microbes inside their gut as babies, researchers have suggested.

The team found that a particular pattern of gut microbes in babies just a month old was linked to an increased risk of them developing asthma and allergic reactions as they grew up.

"Early-life intervention may be a strategy by which we can offset allergic asthma in perhaps a portion of the population," said Susan Lynch, co-author of the research from the University of California, San Francisco, adding that such interventions could include supplementing young babies with a cocktail of bacteria and other microbes lacking in their gut.

According to Asthma UK, the UK has one of the highest rates of asthma symptoms in children in the world, with one in 11 currently receiving treatment for the condition. While the disease can be managed, there is currently no cure.

Writing in the journal Nature Medicine, Lynch and colleagues describe how they analysed the gut microbes of 130 babies aged around one month old by examining their stool samples. They then followed up on the health of the children at two and four years of age.

Microbes such as bacteria and fungi are passed from mothers to babies during birth, while breastfeeding, the surrounding environment and the use of antibiotics are also thought to influence the mix.

The researchers found that the babies fell broadly into one of three groups, based on the mix of microbes living in their gut.

One of the groups, composed of 11 babies, were three times more likely to have allergic reactions at two years and asthma at four years old compared to the other groups.

The stools of these babies, Lynch added, had low levels of bacteria including Faecalibacterium and Bifidobacterium and high levels of fungi such as Candida and Rhodotorula. That raises the possibility of manipulating the mix of gut microbes early in development to reduce the risk.

To unpick how the microbes could affect the likelihood of developing allergies and asthma, Lynch and colleagues exposed immune cells from healthy adults to sterilised stool samples from the lowest and highest-risk babies. The upshot was that samples from the high-risk babies triggered an immune response and suppressed cells involved in keeping allergic responses in check.

That, says Lynch, "[suggests] that the microbes in the gut and their products in these highest-risk children drives an allergic response from very early infancy".

The researchers also delved into possible explanations for why some babies had the problematic set of gut microbes, finding that those children were more likely to be boys and to grow up in a household without a dog.

Benjamin Marsland, an expert on the impact of microbes on the immune system from the University hospital of Lausanne in Switzerland, described the new research as "important".

"There is a growing awareness that events very early in life can shape how our immune system matures, and as a consequence, our susceptibility to, or protection against, allergies," he said.

The new research, he adds, is a stepping stone towards new ways of tackling asthma and allergies. "If we can ensure that a baby is exposed to the right microbes early in life, we might be able to reduce the global burden of allergic diseases, such as asthma," he said.

But William Cookson, professor of genomic medicine at Imperial College London, urged caution, noting the small number of children considered to have asthma or allergy in the study and that an increase in allergic reactions at two years of age was not found using conventional definitions.

"Asthma is a disease of the airways, it is not a disease of the bowel, and the airways have their own microbiota - fungi and bacteria - which are very, very plainly abnormal in asthmatics," he added. "So the more logical thing to do, to me, is to look at the lungs, rather than to look at the bowels."

Dr Erika Kennington, head of research at Asthma UK, said: "We know that gut bacteria can influence our health in many different ways, including determining our risk of developing asthma, but we don't yet know exactly how this process works.

"This new research helps us better understand the link between gut bacteria and asthma in young children and, in the future, could potentially help us to identify youngsters at higher risk of developing asthma and develop treatments to help them manage it."

Lynch adds that early life gut bacteria are not likely to be the whole story. "My personal view is that there are many ways to develop the disease," she said.
Topics

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Altering gut microbes of babies could prevent asthma and allergies

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Asthma and allergies in children could be prevented by altering the type of microbes inside their gut as babies, researchers have suggested. The team found that a particular pattern of gut microbes in babies just a month old was linked to an increased risk of them developing asthma and allergic reactions as they grew up.

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"Gene drives," a technology for controlling genetic traits, could revolutionize disease prevention. But nature has a way of thwarting scientific meddling.

Ricardo Bessa / Quanta Magazine

It's impossible-and unethical-to test a gene drive in a vast wild population to sort out the kinks. Once a gene drive has been released, there may be no way to take it back. (Some researchers have suggested the possibility of releasing a second gene drive to shut down a rogue one. But that approach is hypothetical, and even if it worked, the ecological damage done in the meantime would remain unchanged.)

The next best option is to build models to approximate how wild populations might respond to the introduction of a gene drive. Messer and other researchers are doing just that. "For us, it was clear that there was this discrepancy-a lot of geneticists have done a great job at trying to build these systems, but they were not concerned that much with what is happening on a population level," Messer said. Instead, he wants to learn "what will happen on the population level, if you set these things free and they can evolve for many generations-that's where resistance comes into play."

At the meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Messer discussed a computer model his team developed, which they described in a paper posted in June on the scientific preprint site biorxiv.org. The work is one of three theoretical papers on gene drive resistance submitted to biorxiv.org in the last five months-the others are from a researcher at the University of Texas, Austin, and a joint team from Harvard University and MIT. (The authors are all working to publish their research through traditional peer-reviewed journals.) According to Messer, his model suggests "resistance will evolve almost inevitably in standard gene drive systems."

With the advent of genetic engineering, Burt's idea became reality. In 2012, scientists unveiled CRISPR, a gene-editing tool that has been described as a molecular word processor. It has given scientists the power to alter genetic information in every organism they have tried it on. CRISPR locates a specific bit of genetic code and then breaks both strands of the DNA at that site, allowing genes to be deleted, added or replaced.

CRISPR provides a relatively easy way to release a gene drive. First, researchers insert a CRISPR-powered gene drive into an organism. When the organism mates, its CRISPR-equipped chromosome cleaves the matching chromosome coming from the other parent. The offspring's genetic machinery then attempts to sew up this cut. When it does, it copies over the relevant section of DNA from the first parent-the section that contains the CRISPR gene drive. In this way, the gene drive duplicates itself so that it ends up on both chromosomes, and this will occur with nearly every one of the original organism's offspring.

Just three years after CRISPR's unveiling, scientists at the University of California, San Diego, used CRISPR to insert inheritable gene drives into the DNA of fruit flies, thus building the system Burt had proposed. Now scientists can order the essential biological tools on the internet and build a working gene drive in mere weeks. "Anyone with some genetics knowledge and a few hundred dollars can do it," Messer said. "That makes it even more important that we really study this technology."

Although there are many different ways gene drives could work in practice, two approaches have garnered the most attention: replacement and suppression. A replacement gene drive alters a specific trait. For example, an anti-malaria gene drive might change a mosquito's genome so that the insect no longer had the ability to pick up the malaria parasite. In this situation, the new genes would quickly spread through a wild population so that none of the mosquitoes could carry the parasite, effectively stopping the spread of the disease.

A suppression gene drive would wipe out an entire population. For example, a gene drive that forced all offspring to be male would make reproduction impossible.

But wild populations may resist gene drives in unpredictable ways. "We know from past experiences that mosquitoes, especially the malaria mosquitoes, have such peculiar biology and behavior," said Flaminia Catteruccia, a molecular entomologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "Those mosquitoes are much more resilient than we make them. And engineering them will prove more difficult than we think." In fact, such unpredictability could likely be found in any species.

The Cornell group used a basic mathematical model to map how evolutionary resistance will emerge in a replacement gene drive. It focuses on how DNA heals itself after CRISPR breaks it (the gene drive pushes a CRISPR construct into each new organism, so it can cut, copy and paste itself again). The DNA repairs itself automatically after a break. Exactly how it does so is determined by chance. One option is called nonhomologous end joining, in which the two ends that were broken get stitched back together in a random way. The result is similar to what you would get if you took a sentence, deleted a phrase, and then replaced it with an arbitrary set of words from the dictionary-you might still have a sentence, but it probably wouldn't make sense. The second option is homology-directed repair, which uses a genetic template to heal the broken DNA. This is like deleting a phrase from a sentence, but then copying a known phrase as a replacement-one that you know will fit the context.

It's still unclear where all this interplay between resistance and gene drives will end up. It could be that resistance will render the gene drive impotent. On the one hand, this may mean that releasing the drive was a pointless exercise; on the other hand, some researchers argue, resistance could be an important natural safety feature. Evolution is unpredictable by its very nature, but a handful of biologists are using mathematical models and careful lab experiments to try to understand how this powerful genetic tool will behave when it's set loose in the wild.

Gene drives aren't exclusively a human technology. They occasionally appear in nature. Researchers first thought of harnessing the natural versions of gene drives decades ago, proposing to re-create them with "crude means, like radiation" or chemicals, said Anna Buchman, a postdoctoral researcher in molecular biology at the University of California, Riverside. These genetic oddities, she adds, "could be manipulated to spread genes through a population or suppress a population."

In 2003, Austin Burt, an evolutionary geneticist at Imperial College London, proposed a more finely tuned approach called a homing endonuclease gene drive, which would zero in on a specific section of DNA and alter it.

Burt mentioned the potential problem of resistance-and suggested some solutions-both in his seminal paper and in subsequent work. But for years, it was difficult to engineer a drive in the lab, because the available technology was cumbersome.

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When Evolution Fights Back Against Genetic Engineering

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"Gene drives," a technology for controlling genetic traits, could revolutionize disease prevention. But nature has a way of thwarting scientific meddling. It's impossible-and unethical-to test a gene drive in a vast wild population to sort out the kinks. Once a gene drive has been released, there may be no way to take it back.

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http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2016/08/29/artificial_intelligence_expedites_breast_cancer_risk_prediction.html

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A giant panda at the Bifengxia Giant Panda Breeding and Conservation Center in Sichuan Province.

Credit: Binbin Li

The giant panda, commonly a symbol for conservation, is no longer considered an endangered species, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

In an update to their Red List of Threatened Species on Sunday (Sept. 4), which assesses a species' conservation status, the IUCN reported the giant panda population has improved enough for the endangered species label to be downgraded to "vulnerable."

A nationwide census in 2014 found 1,864 giant pandas in the wild in China, excluding cubs - an increase from 1,596 in 2004, according to the IUCN. Including cubs, the current population count is approaching 2,060, the organization said. The report credits forest protection and reforestation measures in China for increasing the available habitat for the species. [ Baby Panda Pics: See A Cub Growing Up]

"The decision to downlist the giant panda to 'vulnerable' is a positive sign confirming that the Chinese government's efforts to conserve this species are effective," the IUCN noted in its assessment.

The giant panda was once widespread throughout southern China, and is revered in the country's culture. The IUCN's first assessment of the species in 1965 listed the giant panda as "very rare but believed to be stable or increasing."

The species has been the focus of an intensive, high-profile conservation campaign to recover an endangered species since the 1970s, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) - which has used the panda in its logo since 1961.

"For over fifty years, the giant panda has been the globe's most beloved conservation icon as well as the symbol of WWF," Marco Lambertini, director general of the WWF, said in a statement. "Knowing that the panda is now a step further from extinction is an exciting moment for everyone committed to conserving the world's wildlife and their habitats."

Decades of conservation efforts have included the banning of giant panda poaching - their hides were considered a commodity - as well as the creation of the panda reserve system, increasing available habitats. There are now 67 reserves in China protecting nearly 5,400 square miles (14,000 square kilometers) of habitat and 67 percent of the panda population, reported CNN.

"The recovery of the panda shows that when science, political will and engagement of local communities come together, we can save wildlife and also improve biodiversity," Lambertini said in the statement.

The Chinese government's partnerships with the international organization have also spread conservation and breeding efforts. In June, a healthy male cub was born in a Belgian zoo. The captive population is not taken into consideration by IUCN for the Red List, which is specific to species in the wild. However, the captive population being bred for recovery and reintroduction are part of the overall conservation picture, according to Joe Walston, Vice President of Conservation Field Programs for the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The giant panda is not completely in the clear, however. The IUCN warned that climate change and decreasing bamboo availability could reverse the gains made in the past few decades. More than one-third of the panda's bamboo habitat could disappear in the next 80 years, according to the IUCN.

"It is a real concern, and this is emblematic of what species are facing globally with regard to climate change," Walston told Live Science of the threat to habitat and food supply. "The most important thing we can do at the moment is to be able to grow the extent and range of that habitat and by doing that you allow pandas to move across landscapes."

Wildlife as a whole can adapt to short-term changes and season extremes, Walston said, but they need to space to move and adapt.

As such, conservation efforts continue and the giant panda will continue to be considered "a conservation-dependent species for the foreseeable future," the IUCN's report concluded.

Original article on Live Science.

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Giant Panda Is No Longer Endangered Species

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The giant panda, commonly a symbol for conservation, is no longer considered an endangered species, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In an update to their Red List of Threatened Species on Sunday (Sept.

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Tiny pore-pocked plastic lets heat out yet blocks light

Plastic cling wrap with nano-sized pores could give "cool clothes" a new meaning.

The material lets heat escape, instead of trapping it like traditional fabrics, Stanford University materials scientist Yi Cui and colleagues report in the Sept. 2 Science. It could help people keep cool in hot weather, Cui says, and even save energy by reducing the use of air conditioning.

"It's a very bold new idea," says MIT physicist Svetlana Boriskina, who wrote an accompanying commentary. Demand for the new material could be far-reaching, she says. "Every person who wears clothes could be a potential user of this product."

Current cooling devices include wearable fans and wicking fabrics; both rely on evaporation to cool human skin. But skin also sheds heat in another way - as infrared radiation. Clothing holds this heat close to the body, Cui says. If infrared

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High-tech cloth could make summer days a breeze

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Tiny pore-pocked plastic lets heat out yet blocks light Plastic cling wrap with nano-sized pores could give "cool clothes" a new meaning. The material lets heat escape, instead of trapping it like traditional fabrics, Stanford University materials scientist Yi Cui and colleagues report in the Sept. 2 Science.

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movies

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New DVD Releases - All Genres (2017) | Moviefone

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Check out now available All Genres movies on DVD and get ratings, reviews, trailers and clips for now available All Genres DVD releases.

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With Valentine's Day around the corner, we couldn't resist Iris Mimih's question: "Do animals wink at their amours to show interest?"

The answer is mostly no, but for Saturday's Weird Animal Question of the Week, we investigated the various ways that animals signal interest in one another. (See: " Animal Valentines: 5 of Nature's Best Flirters.")

Birds are the most well-known flirters, and among them, peacocks, bowerbirds, and birds of paradise usually steal the show.

Until, that is, you see the male great argus, a type of pheasant that puts on possibly the most impressive display. The great argus flashes long, eyespotted feathers in a dazzling dance to woo females. (We fell in love with it, too, so the flirting must work on humans).

Male bottlenose dolphins also turn up the charm by forming "cooperative alliances," Quincy Gibson, a biologist at the University of North Florida, says via email.

The male dolphins will swim and break the surface in a "highly synchronous" way, even leaping around, in what may be an effort to impress the ladies. (See " Valentine's Science: Why Gauging Sexiness Is Sophisticated.")

If not they have other tricks up their, um, blowholes.

"Dolphins are very tactile animals, and males and females will pet and rub their close associatesfrequently using their pectoral fins and other body parts as a way to bond and/or show affection," Gibson says.

Now that we have some dancing, how about some perfume?

Male giraffes will explore a female's rump and genital area, and if she likes him (wink!) she'll voluntarily produce urine which he'll sniff and taste, to see if she's in estrus.

"Males cannot afford to waste time and energy trying to court a female who is already pregnant or not yet in estrus," Rachel Brand, an independent behavioral ecologist in Namibia, says via email. She added that many animals do the same. (See " Wild Romance: Animal Courtship and Mating Rituals.")

Mating can be "a pretty precarious business," Brand adds.

"A male has to rise quite high on his hind legs and raise his forelegs a long way off the ground," she says. If he makes an attempt to climb on top of her and she walks away, "he could be in for quite a fall!"

So he'll keep checking if she's interested by "pressing lightly on her rump with his chest."

But she may also be stalling until a better suitor arrives.

Insects do the best gift baskets, says Katy Prudic, an entomologist at the University of Arizona.

Males often bring females presents of dead prey, "the insect equivalent of a box of chocolates." (See " Female Peacock Spiders Underwhelmed by Disco Dancing Suitors.")

Male scorpion flies may risk their lives swiping a dead insect from a spider's web to offer a female as a nuptial gift. Or he may offer a blob of his own protein-packed spit, a nice nutritional supplement to help his sweetheart produce eggs.

Thank goodness we're not scorpion flies.
Weird Animal Question of the Week answers your questions every Saturday. If you have a question about the weird and wild animal world, tweet me, leave me a note or photo in the comments below, or find me on Facebook.

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Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink: How Do Animals Flirt?

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With Valentine's Day around the corner, we couldn't resist Iris Mimih's question: "Do animals wink at their amours to show interest?" The answer is mostly no, but for Saturday's Weird Animal Question of the Week, we investigated the various ways that animals signal interest in one another.

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A NASA team came to this conclusion after scientists examined the heights of the region's ice sheet measured from satellites.

The new methods used by scientists to come to this study's conclusion, such as measuring small height changes in the ice over large areas, warrant consideration. But the findings do conflict with more than a decade of research indicating that Antarctica is losing ice and that the loss has contributed to rising global sea levels.

The continent is roughly the size of the United States and Mexico combined, and changes in the ice are not uniform across Antarctica. Some places are gaining ice, and some are losing ice.

Many scientists agree that the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica are losing ice and that the rate of loss is increasing. In the eastern part of the continent and part of the interior, there have been ice gains. These gains, scientists from the study say, are more than the losses in the rest of the region.

This net gain in ice would mean that Antarctica would not be contributing to sea level rises, but could help offset some of the major ice losses in places from Greenland and glaciers worldwide.

Scientists suspect that increased snowfall, which began 10,000 years ago, is the reason for the gain in Antarctica. Over the years, the snow has accumulated and compacted to form ice.

This snowfall added 112 billion tons of ice each year from 1992 to 2001, but the rate slowed to 82 billion tons per year from 2003 and 2008.

However, this isn't good news for our climate necessarily. Authors of the study say the increasing loss of ice in the West Antarctic and the peninsula, plus slowing ice gains elsewhere on the continent, could mean that there will be overall losses of ice in the next 20 years.

In fact, this may already be occurring, according to other research published as recently as this week, which suggests the West Antarctic ice sheet is destabilizing, which would more than overcome the ice gains and could result in 3 meters of sea level rise.

Right now, it's believed that ice loss in Antarctica contributes to roughly 8% of global sea level rise. This rise can been seen in recent high tides in coastal cities like Miami.

If this study is correct, and Antarctica is not contributing to this rise in sea level, that means scientists must be underestimating the impact from other sources of sea level rise -- such as from melting from Greenland or the heating of the oceans.

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Antarctica is gaining ice, NASA study says - CNN

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A NASA team came to this conclusion after scientists examined the heights of the region's ice sheet measured from satellites. The new methods used by scientists to come to this study's conclusion, such as measuring small height changes in the ice over large areas, warrant consideration.

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http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/see-death-valleys-super-bloom-160224.htm

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After building the product for Huffington Post, and owning the product and engineering groups at AOL after we were acquired, it was clear to me there was a huge gap between what the current CMS offering gave the world and what the world needed. Five years later we are at scale, moving the needle and doing to WordPress what Airbnb did to Craigslist.

Social and Centralized

WordPress, Drupal, and the custom CMS solutions of the world are all independent, non-connected instances that each need to be updated individually. There are over 87 million instances of WordPress alone in the world, and each security upgrade, feature update, and every other single thing has to be updated for each site individually.

By contrast, RebelMouse is a social, centralized platform built to keep up with the speed of the tech giants. Our updates are pushed out to all of our sites at once (and sometimes even multiple times a day) with content creation tools integrated directly into social APIs. We can get clients off of clunky CMSs and into the future in a matter of days. Many of our clients have seen page views and unique visitors grow anywhere from 50-300% literally within the first days of launch.

We iterate with the times and tell you what's changing in the world, how we've reacted to it, and how it's built into the updates you get from the platform. Our creative agency team trains your teams or takes on special projects.

Easy Migrations - the Re-Platform Remastered

We create growth with every re-platform. And it doesn't take months, it takes hours or days. We can suck up a WordPress site, optimize its page speed, the user experience, the balance of ads, and how you monetize. We do it in our sleep now.

We are simply the best in the world at this and have taken it to another level.

You'll grow in SEO, you'll grow in social, you'll grow in return users, you'll grow in the amount your users share, and that will, in turn, grow your total audience.

We can set up test environments you send traffic to and show the dramatic comparison. We create growth.

A Better Experience for Readers - Social UX for Media

Everybody is building media sites wrong. We make it look simple. All the hard technology is at work behind the scenes. For readers, your content shines, is shareable, and your website becomes a rabbit hole that pulls users into more content that creates more sharing.

Better Social Distribution Tools - Cross-Platform Reach

It isn't just about publishing. There's a new content life cycle on the internet that leads to fast organic growth at dramatically lower cost. The key is understanding how to use social to your advantage instead of being lost in the noise. RebelMouse is a contagious media company, and the software turns organic growth into an efficient, repeatable, and scalable process.

Better Authoring Tools

Your writers, editors, creators, and community deserve tools that make them fast and efficient. It's also important that they follow a process that leads to best practices, so that the CMS itself is training your team with every post as they onboard.

Grabbing social content, building listicles and slideshows - RebelMouse makes everything simple, clean, and easy for writers.

Analytics and Management Tools

But it's also important for you to manage your writers, see their performance, enable them to learn from each other, and help them become data driven. RebelMouse analytics provide you with a clear view of who is performing, what posts are working, and where that content is gaining traction.

We also have deep Google Analytics integration, so you can easily add in components, promos, third-party units, and ad units. But most importantly, as they're being added, they are set up in staged environments automatically, and the traffic performance from these tests can be traced back to impact on bounce rate, pages/session, session duration, number of shares, percent of shares per visit, and unique custom goals for your business.

You might have the feeling we could go on a bit longer. We could! This is a passion for us. Come talk to us and let's get growing together.

Related Articles Around the Web

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After building the product for Huffington Post, and owning the product and engineering groups at AOL after we were acquired, it was clear to me there was a huge gap between what the current CMS offering gave the world and what the world needed. Five years later we are at scale, moving the needle and...

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The numbers are in. Spurred by warm water, 2015 set a new record for shark attacks around the world, with 98 incidents, including six human fatalities.

That total is 26 more than the previous year and 40 more than the figure from one decade prior.

According to the International Shark Attack File, the main drivers for the rise in incidents were warm water from El Niño and global warming ( 2015 was also the hottest year on record), a lack of severe storms in most developed countries, and a relatively strong economy that sent more vacationers to the beach.

Those factors combined to put more people in the path of sharks, which prefer to avoid people and don't target them the way they do in B movies, says George Burgess, who compiled the report through his work at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The data also showed the U.S. had 59 shark attacks, a new record, with particularly high activity in Florida and the Carolinas. The previous record was 53 attacks, in 2014. Australia had 18 incidents this year and South Africa had 8. ( Get more shark incident data.)

Still, the numbers don't mean people should panic, says Burgess. Instead, "the chances for any individual who goes in the water surviving have probably never been higher, since there are so many more of us going out than before."

As an analogy, Burgess points to car accidents. "There were more car fatalities in 2015 than 1950, but that doesn't mean cars are more dangerous," he says. "It means there are a lot more out there."

In fact, the average annual number of deaths from sharks over the past decade has remained constant, at six, despite fluctuations in the numbers of incidents. The chance for any individual tangling with a shark remains vanishingly small ( learn about tips to reduce that risk even further).

One study in 2014 by Tulane University put the chance at dying from a shark at 1 in 8 million, compared with 1 in 90 for a car accident, 1 in 1,600,000 for impact by a space rock, or 1 in 195 million for winning the PowerBall lottery. ( Another study put the risk at a shark attack at 1 in 11.8 million.)

It's also important to remember that "we're killing a lot more sharks than they're killing us," says Burgess, to the tune of 100 million a year. Many sharks are endangered or threatened around the world, although a few are making a slow comeback thanks to recent protections.

Why the Increases in Incidents Over Time?

Since 1900, the number of shark attacks has risen steadily. The number one reason is the high growth of human population, says Burgess. Beyond that, many more people are spending time in the water, particularly in higher risk activities like surfing or diving.

As waters warm, the ranges for sharks have expanded, putting people in contact with the big fish where they didn't expect them.

Part of the rise can also be attributed to better reporting, says Burgess.

"Now, every bite is a headline, because everyone has a phone on the beach and can record the event," says Burgess. In the past, many events were probably underreported.

Still, the individual risk for a swimmer remains very low. Avoiding the water at night and around fishing activity can decrease that even further, as can covering any cuts that might bleed in the water.

Burgess adds that it's important to remember that sharks play vital roles in the ocean ecosystem and that human beings are just guests there.

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2015 Had a Record Number of Shark Attacks. Here's Why.

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The numbers are in. Spurred by warm water, 2015 set a new record for shark attacks around the world, with 98 incidents, including six human fatalities. That total is 26 more than the previous year and 40 more than the figure from one decade prior.

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Zach Rodriguez

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Combined with expanding ice, the B09B iceberg, which at 1,120 square miles is almost the size of Rhode Island, has cut off the Adelie penguins' food supply and changed the landscape of their home, according to a February report in the peer-reviewed journal published by Cambridge University Press.

The towering mass of water ice first ran aground into the penguins' habitat of Cape Denison in Commonwealth Bay in 2010. Before that it was floating along the coast for nearly 20 years before colliding into the bay. The iceberg essentially has landlocked the penguins, forcing the animals to trek across a desolate stretch of nearly 40 miles to find food.

The once 160,000-strong colony has now dwindled to 10,000 penguins.

"The arrival of iceberg B09B in Commonwealth Bay, East Antarctica... has dramatically increased the distance Adélie penguins breeding at Cape Denison must travel in search of food," said researchers in the report.

Since 2011, the colony's population has fallen dramatically, according to the Climate Change Research Center at Australia's University of New South Wales.

The outlook for the Cape Denison Adelie penguins remains dire. Unless the colossal iceberg is broken up by sea ice, scientists predict the colony will disappear in 20 years.

About 5,500 pairs are still breeding in the area, but there has been a significant decline in their population compared with a century ago, according to estimates based on satellite images and a census in 1997.

However, it isn't the end for all Adelie penguins. About five miles from the Commonwealth Bay, another colony is thriving, which leaves scientists to conclude that the iceberg has had a direct impact of the species that is now landlocked. About 30% of the Adelie penguin population lives in East Antarctica.

Research on the iceberg's impact on the Adelie penguins can give scientists insight into the wider implications on the effects of increasing sea ice in the area.

Long-term environmental changes are projected for the Southern Ocean, which will likely affect marine predators, according to a 2015 report published the peer-reviewed journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. Environmental shifts because of climate change could also affect the breeding habitats of land creatures, finding food in a marine environment and the availability of prey for larger predators

Deglaciation, the gradual melting of glaciers, is a key driver in the Adelie penguins' population over a millennium, according to scientists. But while changes in sea ice can directly affect the species, scientists say it's important to keep perspective on the penguins' population over a larger time frame.

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thousands of penguins die after iceberg traps colony - cnn

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Thousands of penguins die after iceberg traps colony - CNN

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Combined with expanding ice, the B09B iceberg, which at 1,120 square miles is almost the size of Rhode Island, has cut off the Adelie penguins' food supply and changed the landscape of their home, according to a February report in the peer-reviewed journal published by Cambridge University Press.

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Shae White

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While we were watching a group of 13 bull elephants resting underneath an acacia tree just before midday last September, we noticed that in among their pillars of legs were much smaller, miniature legs and trunks. Two calves!

Only when the bulls began to shift and spread out a little could the calves be seen clearly. Both were males that appeared to be around the ages of five and three and a half-no longer completely milk dependent but still too young to be without their mothers.

The younger one had half his tail missing, but because there was no blood or any indication of a fresh wound, we suspected it was the result of an earlier hyena attack.

After scanning the area and seeing no female elephants, the immediate conclusion was that these two young elephants were orphans, a sad and very likely possibility with the ongoing poaching crisis across the continent.

Wanting to make sure this was indeed the situation, we observed them for hours and days. Initially, we'd hoped that they'd only been somehow separated from their families and would reunite at some point.

But each passing day was confirmation of a far more tragic circumstance. Both calves seemed to be, miraculously, maintaining pace with their massive guardians and feeding fairly normally.

I say "fairly normally" because when we first found them, the younger calf was not eating properly but rather play-feeding-nibbling on a bush and swinging a branch about with his trunk but not actually eating.

By the evening, however, the three-year-old calf had gained some momentum in his appetite, easing our concerns somewhat.

Once we felt certain that the calves had no mothers, our first reaction was to inform the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in hopes of rescuing them, but unfortunately because the calves were both over three years old, this wasn't going to be possible.

Despite not being able to intervene, we continued to monitor the calves and the bulls.
Bulls as Guardians
The more time we spent with them, the clearer it became that these bulls were indeed their guardians. I started to pick up subtle body language between the adult males and the juveniles. For example, one day a particular bull seemed to be the designated caretaker, "herding" the calves, and the next day it would be a different male.

The oldest bull and apparent leader, Oloropile, was slightly less tolerant of the calves if they got too close or tried to browse on the same branch at the same time.

But Oloropile too, perhaps not so different from a stern grandfather figure, showed them kindness in his own way. As mother elephants do, the bulls would "shelter" the calves, allowing them to stand or even lie down between their legs.

For almost two weeks we observed this unusual group of elephants, and on the fourth day things had changed slightly: Two of the bulls and one of the calves were missing. Did they leave to try and find a family herd with females? That sounds far-fetched but not impossible.

The remaining bulls and the youngest calf stayed together, though. Whenever we found them, the little fellow, whom we referred to fondly as Half Tail, was always in the center of the group.

The rotational "nanny system" of bulls watching over the calf also continued almost routinely. Murran, one of the younger males, and Tepesi showed the most interest in Half Tail, and I almost always found one of them either close behind the calf or checking on him in some way.

On one day when they were all resting in a thicket, I could just see the calf through binoculars, and he was sleeping peacefully, much as he would if he were with his mother, on the ground just beside one of the bulls, possibly Murran, shaded from the sun by his big body.

Suddenly on the eleventh day, all the bulls and little Half Tail moved away from their usual spot.

It was very dry at the time, and they likely left in search of water. We couldn't find them after that, because they'd disappeared into some very thick woodland.

We hope that both the bulls and the calves are healthy and safe. We do think they're still together, or perhaps they've come across a family herd, which the calves have joined.

The rangers have seen enough sign in a nearby area to hint that these very same elephants could well be around, so we're keeping a lookout.

What a wonderful outcome it would be if these two baby elephants are able to grow up under the patronage of such magnificent, amazing role models.
Trauma and Loss of the Worst Kind
There were times when I felt that Half Tail was looking and feeling depressed, no doubt a result of his recent trauma. His eyes had an acute sadness and appeared downcast, and his movements unsure, forlorn.

We know that elephants, so deeply emotional, must be aware of the world in which they live. I personally believe that elephants are aware of their species' plight and of poaching.

I also think they know that it's their ivory the poachers are after. Are elephants so intellectually advanced as to feel helpless amid a human war of greed? Is it possible that they're trying to live their lives to the fullest while they can, not knowing what tomorrow will hold?

It's absolutely terrible to know that these little elephant calves, at the beginning of their lives, have already experienced trauma and loss of the worst kind.

We do feel that there's a small ray of hope for them, and it's a bit of a consolation to see that they're able to receive some care and protection with these bulls in their lives-as well as a second chance to survive.

We know with absolute certainty that these two calves wouldn't have got this far if it weren't for Oloropile and his comrades.

What's most fascinating to me is that enormous male elephants, thought of as loners, have banded together and come to the aid of two young, vulnerable members of their species.

Gini Cowell was born and raised in Kenya. She lives in a camp in Greater Olarro Conservancy where she helps run a conservation project call Elephant Aware. Since 2011 she has studied elephants with Joyce Poole's collaboration and mentorship.

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Bull Elephants Display 'Mothering Behavior' Toward Orphaned Calves - National Geographic Blog

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While we were watching a group of 13 bull elephants resting underneath an acacia tree just before midday last September, we noticed that in among their pillars of legs were much smaller, miniature legs and trunks. Two calves! Only when the bulls began to shift and spread out a little could the calves be seen clearly.

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El Jefe, the only wild jaguar known in the United States, has made his film debut.

He's no stranger to the media limelight, though: Trail cameras have photographed the male more than a hundred times over the past three years, and schoolchildren named him El Jefe-which means "the boss" in Spanish-during a nationwide contest in 2015. (See "' Indomitable' Jaguars May Have Lessons in Survival for Us.")

To catch the solitary cat on camera, conservationists used dogs to sniff out jaguar scat, and then installed cameras in these strategic spots.

A U.S. jaguar is rare indeed. As late as the 19th century, the big cats frequently roamed from northern Argentina into Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. But ranchers and farmers settling the American West pushed the world's third-largest cat out of its territory.

More Amazing Animal Stories

By the time Arizona's last legally hunted jaguars were shot in the 1960s, there were no known females left in the U.S. The species is now listed as near-threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Today only the occasional outlier like El Jefe makes an appearance. (See " First Jaguar Caught in U.S. Put to Sleep.")

"He's typical of the extreme toehold that this species maintains in the U.S.," says Luke Hunter, president and chief conservation officer for Panthera, a global wild-cat conservation organization.

"Since 1996 there has been evidence of a jaguar in New Mexico or Arizona every year. But I think it has been a total of four or five individuals and they've all been adult males."

El Jefe and his male predecessors seem to have dispersed from the closest breeding population which is located in Sonora, Mexico, more than 125 miles (200 kilometers) to the south.

"Probably these individuals left that breeding population in Sonora and struck out on their own as young male jaguars do," Hunter explains. "Their mothers kick them out of their birth home range, and these young male cats are great explorers." ( Learn more about National Geographic's Big Cats Initiative.)

Thanks to his epic journey, El Jefe is the boss of 764,207 acres (309,263 hectares) of Arizona and New Mexico set aside by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as critical jaguar habitat.

"He's managed to find what a male jaguar really wants-space and a good habitat with lots of prey like white-tailed deer," Hunters says.

More jaguars would likely find the area to their liking, Hunter adds, but females' stay-at-home nature leaves future U.S. population growth in doubt. (See " Pictures: Jaguars Spotted on Colombian Plantation-A First.")

"For a female cat to naturally colonize the United States again from that Sonora population would be really difficult."

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Only Known Jaguar in U.S. Filmed in Rare Video

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El Jefe, the only wild jaguar known in the United States, has made his film debut. He's no stranger to the media limelight, though: Trail cameras have photographed the male more than a hundred times over the past three years, and schoolchildren named him El Jefe-which means "the boss" in Spanish-during a nationwide contest in 2015.

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Hundreds of Sea Turtles released off he North Carolina coast

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Hundreds of sea turtles released off the North Carolina coast

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More than 130 sea turtles have been released into the Gulf Stream off the North Carolina coast after recovering from cold-stunning or hypothermia

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Sea turtles drift in mysterious currents. How long do they live? How fast do they grow? When do they reach sexual maturity?

Answers to these and other basic questions elude researchers, stymieing efforts to better understand and protect the world's seven marine turtle species, all but one of which are endangered. Now scientists in Hawaii may have resolved some of the unknowns by turning to an unlikely environmental marker: nuclear fallout.

As described in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers used bomb radiocarbon, which winds up in the turtles' shells through their diet, to estimate the birth dates, growth rates and age of reproductive maturity of critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles.

In doing so, the team also stumbled upon clues to two critical factors plaguing the turtles: late maturity and poor food sources.

"Coming into this, we didn't expect to raise all of these questions and red flags, but I'm happy it turned into a more complex story than one simply about growth and aging," said Kyle Van Houtan, a conservation ecologist at Duke and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hawksbill turtles are named for their beaky, birdlike faces, but their most eye-catching feature is their shells, ornately patterned in honey, chocolate and mahogany hues. Collectors have long taken note: In the 20th century alone, millions of hawksbills were killed so their shells could be carved into bracelets, hairpieces, jewelry boxes and other trinkets.

Hawksbills were listed as an endangered species in 1970, and international trade in them was banned a few years later. Yet in many parts of the world, including the United States, hawksbills have continued to decline. In Hawaii, the turtle's numbers have remained stubbornly low despite a dedicated conservation program.

Roughly 100 adults live there, with fewer than 20 females nesting per year, making Hawaii's hawksbills the world's smallest population of sea turtles.

Researchers believe a simple lack of information has been holding back conservation of the turtles. "We know very little about hawksbills, even compared to leatherbacks, loggerheads and green turtles," Dr. Van Houtan said. "We wanted to answer some basic biological questions about this population in Hawaii."

Bomb radiocarbon turns out to be one way to do that. In the mid-20th century, the United States and several other countries began conducting open-air nuclear tests that significantly increased concentrations of carbon 14, a radioactive isotope, in the atmosphere. Bomb radiocarbon began tapering off only in the 1970s, with the end of widespread nuclear testing.

Carbon 14 does not harm plants and animals, but it does accumulate in their tissues at varying levels. Researchers figure out how much carbon 14 existed at a particular moment in history by using so-called reference specimens. A coral collected from a certain reef in Hawaii in 1975, for example, would provide a marker of carbon 14 levels for that place and year.

Because bomb radiocarbon varies in a characteristic way over time, comparing levels in a reference material with those in a shell or bone of unknown age allows researchers to determine when it formed - a method that scientists regularly use for estimating the ages of sharks or other long-living fish. Until now, however, the method had not been tried on sea turtles.

Dr. Van Houtan and his colleagues combed museums and government archives to find shell samples from 36 hawksbills - 23 from Hawaii, the rest from other Pacific sites. All of the turtles' death dates were known, spanning 1962 to 2013.

The researchers then used coral samples to build a computer model of background levels of radiocarbon in the Hawaiian archipelago from 1900 to 2012. Because the turtles accrue tissue in their shells throughout life, concentrations of radiocarbon in the most recently formed layers can be compared with the corals' carbon 14 records for the same year.

Those values, however, don't correspond exactly, because coral acquires carbon directly through the water while turtles do so through diet. The team was able to adjust for the difference and thus estimate each turtle's date of birth.

In a final step, the researchers applied the radiocarbon results, along with known measurements from captive and wild-caught turtles, to a mathematical model that could estimate an animal's growth rate. The results gave Dr. Van Houtan and his colleagues an idea of how old their turtles were when they hit maturity.

The age at which sea turtles begin breeding depends on how well they are fed. Not surprisingly, the team found that animals raised in captivity grew the fastest, reaching maturity at 12 years. Wild turtles from places besides Hawaii hit that benchmark at 12 to 15 years.

The Hawaiian turtles, though, were extremely late bloomers, holding out for an average of 29 years before they began breeding. "This means something in the environment in Hawaii is suboptimal, and significantly so," Dr. Van Houtan said.

To discover what that "something" might be, he and his colleagues took a closer look at the radiocarbon levels in corals and turtles. The difference should have been constant over the years. But in recent decades, the researchers discovered, levels found in corals and turtle shells have become strikingly similar, indicating a shift in the turtles' diet toward the bottom of the food chain.

Hawksbills are normally omnivores, eating sponges, crustaceans, algae and more, but it appears the population in Hawaii is going vegetarian - a change the researchers suspect is linked to the decline of Hawaii's coral reefs over the last century. "Decline of the reef means declines of other species in that ecosystem that hawksbills rely on for food," Dr. Van Houtan said.

Brendan Godley, the director of the Center for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter in Britain, who was not involved in the research, said, "The team has assembled a unique data set giving interesting and important information on the life history of a species of intense conservation interest, and also giving a tantalizing insight into possible broad-scale change in the ecology of the Hawaiian Islands."

"If such studies could be replicated across the Pacific and other ocean basins, we could attain a superb window into the long-term ecology of individual sea turtles, populations and their ecosystems," Dr. Godley added.

Dr. Van Houtan believes the new method could easily be applied to other marine turtle populations around the world, though his focus remains on hawksbills.

"I want this work to shine a light on the plight of hawksbills," he said. "My goal is to demonstrate the urgency of some of the problems that the Hawaiian population faces."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Nuclear Clues to a Turtle's Decline. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Old Nuclear Fallout Proves Useful for Sea Turtle Clues

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Sea turtles drift in mysterious currents. How long do they live? How fast do they grow? When do they reach sexual maturity? Answers to these and other basic questions elude researchers, stymieing efforts to better understand and protect the world's seven marine turtle species, all but one of which are endangered.

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Planet X?

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As science often does, it began with a "huh?" Some distant objects far beyond Pluto were behaving very oddly. The orbits of a handful of space rocks had aligned for no apparent reason. Though stumped at first, astronomers now have an explanation: a huge ninth planet at the edge of the solar system.

If the researchers have their sums right, the mysterious new world is 10 times more massive than Earth and up to four times the size. Nicknamed Planet Nine, it moves on an extremely elongated orbit, and takes a staggering 10,000 to 20,000 years to swing once around the sun.

The icy world, if it exists, has evaded detection because it is so far away. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) calculate that the closest it comes to the sun is 15 times the distance to Pluto. It then heads into uncharted territory, 75 times further out than Pluto, or about 93 billion miles from the sun. A ray of light would take a week to get there.

"We saw a strange signal in the data that meant something odd was going on in the outer solar system," Mike Brown, an astronomer at Caltech, told the Guardian. "All of these distant objects were lined up in a weird way and that shouldn't happen. We worked through the mundane explanations, but none of them worked out."

Brown and his colleague, Konstantin Batygin, had been investigating claims that 13 icy objects in the Kuiper belt, the region of space where Pluto lies, shared some unusual orbital features that could be explained by the presence of a small planet. They expected to prove the idea wrong, but then made their own curious discovery.

The researchers found that six of the 13 Kuiper belt objects moved on orbits that headed in the same direction. "If you looked down on the solar system and had the sun in the centre, all of these objects would head out to the 9 o'clock position," said Brown. Moreover, their orbits were all tilted at the same angle to the eight known planets in the solar system.

In science, the banal must be ruled out before more exotic explanations can be considered. The astronomers wondered whether the Kuiper belt might hold enough rocky debris from the birth of the solar system to nudge the objects into the same orbits. But simulations ruled this out: the Kuiper belt would need to be 100 times more massive than it is.

They next considered a new planet. Their first computer models had a world circling around the Kuiper belt objects, but this did not work either. Another explanation came by accident, when they added a massive planet on its own elongated orbit, which swung out in the opposite direction to the Kuiper belt objects - towards 3 o'clock in a solar system viewed from above.

Batygin was sceptical that they had hit on the right answer. According to his simulations, a large planet in such a bizarre orbit would send some Kuiper belt objects into orbits that ran perpendicular to the planets in the solar system. But the astronomers later found that four such objects had already been spotted. "When we found that, my jaw sort of hit the floor," said Brown. "The only way to get the orbits lined up is to have a distant, more massive planet shepherding them around." Details appear in the Astronomical Journal.

Chris Lintott, the Oxford professor of astrophysics, and a presenter on The Sky at Night, said the finding was exciting. "People have proposed the existence of an extra planet several times over the years, but this is the most detailed and most convincing analysis."

"One very interesting thing is that the planet is predicted to be between Earth and Neptune in mass. We see lots of planets this size in our surveys of planets elsewhere in the galaxy, and it's been something of a mystery as to why our solar system doesn't have its own version of this very common planet type," he added.

But some serious questions remain. "It's not at all clear how you form such a large world and move it to the outer reaches of the solar system," Lintott said. "We know the early history of the solar system was chaotic - and there's evidence for a larger planet escaping all together - but the details are murky at best."

The planet is so large that with sensitive enough telescopes, astronomers should be able to see it crossing the night sky. The search has already begun with the Subaru telescope in Hawaii. Brown said he would be surprised if the planet was not found in the next five years.

Brown, who played a key role in demoting Pluto from planetary status to a more lowly dwarf planet, said the discovery of a ninth planet might be good news for those who are still upset about Pluto being kicked out of the planetary club. "All those people who are mad that Pluto is no longer a planet can be thrilled to know that there is a real planet out there still to be found. Now we can go and find this planet and make the solar system have nine planets once again."

"As a scientist, you should never believe your idea too much until someone else confirms it, but we've not been able to come up with any alternative," he said. "Now we've publicly announced it, I'm sure many people will try their hand at coming up with other explanations."

Topics

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Evidence suggests huge ninth planet exists past Pluto at solar system's edge

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As science often does, it began with a "huh?" Some distant objects far beyond Pluto were behaving very oddly. The orbits of a handful of space rocks had aligned for no apparent reason. Though stumped at first, astronomers now have an explanation: a huge ninth planet at the edge of the solar system.

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A 48 million year-old horse-like equoid fetus has been discovered at the Messel pit near Frankfurt, Germany according to a study published October 7, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jens Lorenz Franzen from Senckenberg Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany, and Naturhistorisches Museum Basel, Switzerland, and colleagues.

The authors of this study completed their investigation of the fetus from a 48 million year-old horse-like equoid uncovered near Frankfurt, Germany in 2000. They evaluated the bones and anatomy and used scanning electronic microscopy (SEM) and high-resolution micro-x-ray to describe the ~12.5 cm fetus.

The fetus appears to be well-preserved, with almost all bones present and connected, except for the skull, which appears to have been crushed. The well-preserved condition of the fossil allowed the researchers to reconstruct the original appearance and position of the fetus. They estimate that the mare may have died shortly before birth, but don't believe the death was related to birth.

The authors also found preserved soft tissue, like the uteroplacenta and one broad uterine ligament, which may represent the earliest fossil record of the uterine system of a placental mammal. Applying SEM, the authors discovered a bacterial lawn replacing the soft tissues, as is common with other specimens found in that area. The observable details correspond largely with living mares, which lead the authors to posit that the reproductive system was already highly developed during the Paleocene, and possibly even earlier.
Story Source:
Materials provided by PLOS. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Franzen JL, Aurich C, Habersetzer J. Description of a Well Preserved Fetus of the European Eocene Equoid Eurohippus messelensis. PLoS ONE, 2015 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0137985

Cite This Page:

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horses; new species; developmental biology; microbiology; fossils; ancient dna; early mammals; paleontology

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48-million-year-old horse-like fetus discovered in Germany: Well-preserved uteroplacenta found surrounding fetus similar to modern day mares

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A 48 million year-old horse-like equoid fetus has been discovered at the Messel pit near Frankfurt, Germany according to a study published October 7, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jens Lorenz Franzen from Senckenberg Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany, and Naturhistorisches Museum Basel, Switzerland, and colleagues.

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During the past several years, I've watched country after country destroy their stockpiles of confiscated elephant ivory, preventing that ivory from somehow slipping back into the black market and symbolically demonstrating commitment to stopping the illegal trade.

But to my mind, something that's always been missing is an apology: No country has ever formally said sorry for its complicity in the trade. Tomorrow Sri Lanka will hold a religious ceremony to do just that.

"We have to apologize," said the Venerable Omalpe Sobitha Thero, the Buddhist priest who will lead the service. "Those elephants were victimized by the cruelty of certain people. But all of human society is responsible. We destroyed those innocent lives to take those tusks. We have to ask for pardon from them."

Sri Lanka's destruction of its ivory-the first by a country in South Asia-brings to 16 the total so far. (For the other countries, see the chart below.) The ivory will be crushed at an iconic oceanside park in the heart of Colombo, Sri Lanka's capital, then burned in a city incinerator.

The ivory-the country's entire stockpile-came from a single shipment of 359 tusks, weighing 1.5 tons, seized by customs authorities at the Port of Colombo in May 2012. The shipment was in transit from Kenya to Dubai. DNA testing later showed that the tusks came from Tanzania.

Sri Lanka's president, Maithripala Sirisena, who took office in January 2015, will attend the event. His government's action represents an about-face from the previous regime, which in 2013 had tried to donate the ivory to the Sri Dalada Maligawa Buddhist Temple.

That plan was announced shortly after a National Geographic story, " Ivory Worship," revealed that the global religious market fuels elephant poaching, and it prompted a public outcry. Critics feared that the ivory would re-enter the black market.

They also argued that by giving the ivory to a third party, Sri Lanka would flout the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the body that regulates the global wildlife trade.

"We can show the world that we are also in the CITES family," Samantha Gunesekera, former deputy director of Sri Lanka Customs, says. "We convey that message throughout the world, [and to] our people."

At the ivory crush, there will be two minutes of silence, after which Sirisena, along with Minister of Sustainable Development and Wildlife Gamini Jayawickremea Perera, Minister of Finance Ravi Karunanayake, and CITES Secretary-General John Scanlon, will address the gathering.

Then the Venerable Omalpe Sobitha Thero will lead a religious ceremony that will include a transfer of merits, a Buddhist ritual often done for departed relatives to honor them and help them reach a better place in their next life.

The elephants are family, he says. "We consume the same air and food and water. Everything we share. We're relatives. With sympathy and compassion, we wish that their next birth be happy."

Monks will chant and pour water into a ritual cup until it overflows. "We're empowering them to be born in a higher realm, a happy realm, to conduct their life without suffering," the Venerable Omalpe Sobitha Thero explains.

Hindu, Christian, and Muslim representatives will also say prayers.

"Buddhism and other religions don't tolerate killing and cruelty to elephants," Minister Perera says. "We believe in rebirth, even of elephants or household pets. It's traditional to conduct religious rights for dead humans as well as animals.

Sri Lanka isn't a major participant in ivory trafficking, but it is a transit country on the Indian Ocean sea route, which is often overlooked.

"Sri Lanka is located in a busy maritime route. It's also a transit hub for the whole Asian region," notes Sri Lankan environmentalist Vidya Abhayagunawardena, who has consistently urged the government to destroy the ivory stockpile and is one of the coordinators of the event. "Illegal wildlife traffickers and blood ivory racketeers use Sri Lanka as transit hub."

The country was identified as a potential new transit country by the wildlife monitoring group TRAFFIC in its 2014 Illegal Trade in Ivory and Rhino Horn report.

That prediction has been borne out. In April 2015 Thai authorities seized a shipment of 3.1 metric tons of illegal ivory disguised in bags of tea leaves that had originated in Mombasa, Kenya, and passed through several intermediaries, including Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore, on its way to Thailand.

Protecting Domestic Elephants

Sri Lanka also has its own elephants, nearly 6,000 of them in jungles and national parks. They're under pressure from human encroachment and are in danger of being killed by farmers protecting their crops and by land mines laid during the country's recent civil war.

The country has a long tradition of domesticating elephants, and around 100 are at temples and with private owners.

Under the previous government, there were irregularities in domestic elephant registration and reports of abductions of wild baby elephants. According to a Mongabay.com report, at least 50 to 60 calves were stolen from the wild during the three-year period from 2011 to 2014. But the actual number may have been much greater, and government investigations are ongoing.

During the past 12 months, authorities have seized 42 illegally held elephants and placed them at elephant orphanages in Pinnawala and Udawalawe, until they can be released into their natural habitats.

"Sri Lanka has a zero tolerance policy for illegally captured elephants," Perera says.

Tomorrow's ceremony will not only be an apology to elephants but also an affirmation of Sri Lanka's commitment to saving them. It will be, Perera says, "a model for reducing the ivory thirst."

Read more stories about wildlife crime and exploitation on Wildlife Watch. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas to ngwildlife@natgeo.com.

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One Country Will Destroy Its Ivory-and Pray for Elephants

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During the past several years, I've watched country after country destroy their stockpiles of confiscated elephant ivory, preventing that ivory from somehow slipping back into the black market and symbolically demonstrating commitment to stopping the illegal trade. But to my mind, something that's always been missing is an apology: No country has ever formally said sorry for its complicity in the trade.

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After building the product for Huffington Post, and owning the product and engineering groups at AOL after we were acquired, it was clear to me there was a huge gap between what the current CMS offering gave the world and what the world needed. Five years later we are at scale, moving the needle and doing to WordPress what Airbnb did to Craigslist.

Social and Centralized

WordPress, Drupal, and the custom CMS solutions of the world are all independent, non-connected instances that each need to be updated individually. There are over 87 million instances of WordPress alone in the world, and each security upgrade, feature update, and every other single thing has to be updated for each site individually.

By contrast, RebelMouse is a social, centralized platform built to keep up with the speed of the tech giants. Our updates are pushed out to all of our sites at once (and sometimes even multiple times a day) with content creation tools integrated directly into social APIs. We can get clients off of clunky CMSs and into the future in a matter of days. Many of our clients have seen page views and unique visitors grow anywhere from 50-300% literally within the first days of launch.

We iterate with the times and tell you what's changing in the world, how we've reacted to it, and how it's built into the updates you get from the platform. Our creative agency team trains your teams or takes on special projects.

Easy Migrations - the Re-Platform Remastered

We create growth with every re-platform. And it doesn't take months, it takes hours or days. We can suck up a WordPress site, optimize its page speed, the user experience, the balance of ads, and how you monetize. We do it in our sleep now.

We are simply the best in the world at this and have taken it to another level.

You'll grow in SEO, you'll grow in social, you'll grow in return users, you'll grow in the amount your users share, and that will, in turn, grow your total audience.

We can set up test environments you send traffic to and show the dramatic comparison. We create growth.

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Everybody is building media sites wrong. We make it look simple. All the hard technology is at work behind the scenes. For readers, your content shines, is shareable, and your website becomes a rabbit hole that pulls users into more content that creates more sharing.

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You might have the feeling we could go on a bit longer. We could! This is a passion for us. Come talk to us and let's get growing together.

Related Articles Around the Web

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After building the product for Huffington Post, and owning the product and engineering groups at AOL after we were acquired, it was clear to me there was a huge gap between what the current CMS offering gave the world and what the world needed. Five years later we are at scale, moving the needle and...

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"What a drag it is getting old," the Rolling Stones famously sang. And nobody knows that more than Jonathan, the 183-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise that's thought to be the oldest known living animal on Earth.

Old age has caught up with Jonathan, robbing him of his senses of sight and smell and, until a few years ago, relegating him to an unhealthy diet of twigs on the British island territory of St. Helena (map), off Africa's western coast.

But in 2014, local veterinarian Joe Hollins noticed Jonathan's plight and started giving the reptile a more nutritious menu, which includes apples, carrots, cucumbers, bananas, and guava.

"The feeding has improved him surprisingly," Hollins wrote on December 7.

"His once blunt and crumbly beak has become sharp and lethal, so he was probably suffering from microdeficiencies [sic] of vitamins, minerals and trace elements." (Also see " Is Exotic Diet Giving Giant Tortoises a Boost in Galapagos?")

Also known as the Seychelles giant tortoise, the Aldabra giant tortoise can grow up to 550 pounds (250 kilograms) and is native to several islands in the Indian Ocean.

Most island populations of the species went extinct in the 18th and 19th centuries as people hunted them for food. Today, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists the tortoises as vulnerable to extinction. (Also see " Never, Ever Interrupt Mating Giant Tortoises.")

While most of the world's remaining population of wild Aldabra giant tortoises lives on the Aldabra Atoll (map), an outer island of the Seychelles near Madagascar, Jonathan has been living on Saint Helena since 1882.

According to the Seychelles News Agency, he was likely a gift to the British governor at the time, and still lives on the grounds of the governor's plantation house.

"There is a chance that he'll either drop dead tomorrow or live until he's 250 and see us all off," Hollins wrote.
A Tortoise of a Different Color
Many people have never heard of the Aldabra giant tortoise, and might even mistake the species for its cousins found half a world away on the Galápagos Islands. But these tortoises are quite different.

Aldabra giant tortoises "are much more interesting and sociable than most people would expect," says Justin Gerlach, the scientific coordinator for the Nature Protection Trust of Seychelles. (See " Can Extinct Giant Tortoises Be Brought Back to Life?")

In the wild, they form groups or herds that like to congregate in open grasslands.

And "in captivity, if kept well, they will seek out human company," says Gerlach. Some of the tortoises even like to be stroked, he says.

While Aldabra tortoises are mostly safe from hunting today, Gerlach says there is a far greater danger to the species.

The Aldabra Atoll is only three to six feet (one to two meters) above sea level, and scientists are predicting the world's oceans to rise as much as four feet (about a meter) by the year 2100.

Follow Jason Bittel on Twitter and Facebook.

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Healthy Diet Helps 183-Year-Old Tortoise Feel Young Again

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"What a drag it is getting old," the Rolling Stones famously sang. And nobody knows that more than Jonathan, the 183-year-old Aldabra giant tortoise that's thought to be the oldest known living animal on Earth.

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Reconstruction of theropods engaged in scrape ceremony display activity, based on trace fossil evidence from Colorado.

Credit: Xing Lida and Yujiang Han

Did dinosaurs shake a tail feather? Some meat-eating theropods used fancy footwork to attract their mates, leaving behind their fox-trotting tracks in rocks millions of years ago.

An analysis of the newfound marks suggests they are the first known evidence of a type of mating display behavior known as "scraping," common in modern ground-nesting birds. The dinosaur lads may have performed their paleo-numbers in groups for a (hopefully) swooning female audience, the researchers say.

Paleontologists found scores of these "scrapes," areas in the rock that were shallowly scarred by multiple scratch marks. These collections of marks, each of which averaged about 6.6 feet (2 meters) in length, were scattered across four different Cretaceous sites in Colorado. The site locations, described by the study's authors as "spectacular," are crisscrossed with numerous dinosaur trackways - consecutive footprints made by the same animal. [ Photos: Thousands of Dinosaur Tracks Along Yukon River]

Surprising scrapes

Martin Lockley, co-author of the study and emeritus professor of geology at the University of Colorado, Denver, told Live Science that these scrape marks were unlike anything the scientists had seen before. When Lockley and his colleagues first noticed the marks, the prints were partially covered with sand. "We started cleaning them off and taking a closer look at them, and we knew right away that there was something unusual about them," Lockley said. More and more of these scrape traces emerged as their investigation widened, eventually revealing about 60 of them in one of the sites.

It soon became clear that these unusual scrapes were connected to the dinosaurs whose tracks marched through the area. "We were calling them 'digging dinosaur' traces," Lockley said. "They were obviously made by the feet of dinosaurs, because we could see the claw marks. We could see two sides, a left and a right trough, with a ridge in the middle," he said.

Some of the scrape traces included the trademark three-toed footprint of a theropod, a group of bipedal and mostly carnivorous dinosaurs, further cementing the strange marks' connection to dinosaur creators. According to Lockley, that's when things really got interesting. "It was like, 'OK, we know what kind of dinosaur made them - what were they doing?'"

Team leader Dr. Martin Lockley (right) and co-author Ken Cart kneel beside two large Cretaceous-age scrapes from western Colorado that are the first physical evidence that large theropod dinosaurs engaged in courtship behavior.

Credit: M. Lockley

Paleo-detectives

Like television's Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) detectives, the scientists faced the challenge of recreating a scenario based on the clues left behind. And like detectives, they considered - and ruled out - a number of possibilities.

Were the dinosaurs digging for water? Not likely, Lockley said. The environment in that part of North America was very wet during the Cretaceous, and water would have been plentiful. Could they have been searching for food? Probably not; carnivorous theropods wouldn't have scratched around in the dirt looking for roots or other vegetation, Lockley explained. And there's no evidence suggesting that floods at the time buried carcasses that the theropods might have dug up and scavenged, he added.

That's when Lockley and his colleagues realized that they might find an explanation for these extinct dinosaurs' behavior in the behavior of "dinosaurs" alive today - modern birds.

Perhaps the scrapes were signs of nest building? Existing fossil evidence shows that theropod dinosaurs, like birds, built nests and brooded their eggs. But the study authors were doubtful, because the marks and troughs in the scrapes would likely have been worn smooth by weeks of continued use, as the dinosaurs brooded their eggs and reared their young. And the variable shapes and haphazard placement of the scrapes didn't match up with the more regular nest shapes and spacing in known dinosaur nesting colonies. [ Image Gallery: Dinosaur Daycare]

Dancing like a bird

But when the scientists reviewed accounts of birds' mating display behavior, they hit pay dirt. Descriptions of activity called "nest scrape display" and "pseudo nest building" seemed to produce similar marks to the ones that they found.

"During the breeding season, the males start to get excited and show off to their mates by scratching to say, Look, I can build a nest!" Lockley told Live Science. "And they get so excited that they scratch, and move along and scratch again - they make dozens or hundreds of scratches in a short period of time."

The "nest scrape" explanation, Lockley said, fit well with the Colorado scrape marks. In the study, the researchers point to a "long and diverse" list of birds that perform nest scrape displays, including puffins, a New Zealand parrot, and seven species of shorebirds. And this type of behavior carries across many branches in the bird family tree, according to Paul Sweet, manager of the Ornithology Collections at the American Museum of Natural History.

Sweet, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science that male sage grouse will gather season after season in a "lek," an open area where they perform high-energy mating displays that can include strutting, fanning their tails and "trying to make themselves look as big as possible," Sweet said. [ Animal Sex: How Did Dinosaurs Do It]

According to the researchers, the four sites where they found the scratch marks could have been leks where groups of theropod males would gather to strut their stuff for an appreciative female audience. The scratches they left behind provide the first physical evidence linking dinosaur mating display behavior to that of living birds, the scientists said.

Lockley, who has devoted decades to the study of dinosaur trackways, told Live Science that more examples of this fancy footwork are likely to be discovered, now that paleontologists will be looking for them.

"It seems like every five to 10 years there's a new category of evidence that comes to light, and then it's like, 'Oh, it's everywhere, why didn't we find this before?'" Lockley said. "I wouldn't be surprised if we have dozens of these sites in a few years."

The findings were published online today (Jan. 7) in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

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Did dinosaurs shake a tail feather? Some meat-eating theropods used fancy footwork to attract their mates, leaving behind their fox-trotting tracks in rocks millions of years ago. An analysis of the newfound marks suggests they are the first known evidence of a type of mating display behavior known as "scraping," common in modern ground-nesting birds.