What’s the News: If you’ve ever been told been that a massage is good for “releasing toxins”—or to sound more scientific, “lactic acid”—from your muscles, then you’ve been told wrong. Turns out muscle cells do like a good massage, but it has nothing to do with lactic acid.
In the first study on the cellular effects of massage post-exercise, researchers found that massage bolsters chemical signals reducing inflammation and promoting repair of muscle cells.
A protein tangle in an Alzheimer’s-afflicted neuron
Exactly how Alzheimer’s disease proliferates through the brain, overtaking one region after another, has eluded scientists. As the disease progresses, tau—a malformed protein that forms snarls and tangles inside neurons—shows up in more and more brain areas. Researchers have wondered whether tau, and the disease, are working their way out from a single area of origin or mounting numerous, distinct attacks on vulnerable parts of the brain. Two new studies in mice provide strong support for the first idea: Tau seems to pass from affected cells to their neighbors, spreading much the same way a virus or bacteria infection would.
The strangest thing about this Chinese boy’s light blue eyes is not their color. It’s the purported fact that he can see in the dark. His eyes are just like cat eyes, glowing blue-green when you shine a light in them, says this clip from China’s state-run English TV channel. The boy can catch crickets in the dark without a flashlight and even completes a writing test in a pitch-black stairwell. True, or too good to be?
Natalie Wolchover at Life’s Little Mysteries has rounded up some experts and their collective reaction seems to be, “Hmm…” (It doesn’t help that this video has been posted on YouTube under the name, “Alien Hybrid or Starchild Discovered in China? 2012.”) One possibility they consider is whether the boy has a mutation that produced something like a tapetum lucidum, an extra layer of tissue that helps cats see in the dark. James Reynolds, a pediatric ophthalmologist at State University of New York in Buffalo, puts a stop to that idea:
What’s the News: The surprising strength of spider silk has fascinated scientists (and everyone else) for years: it’s stronger than steel, yet incredibly flexible. A new paper gives some delicious details that explain how, exactly, spider silk has such superpowers.
Go With the Flow, Then Stay Strong: The strand of silk that a spider hangs from can stretch to double its usual length. But then, after that virtuosic show of elasticity, it turns rigid.
The reason for that, this team found previously, is that on the molecular level, spider silk is made of scrunched-up proteins that are pulled straight as the silk stretches. But once they’ve been fully unfurled, the proteins lock into a new, stiff pattern called a beta-sheet nanocrystal. For a spider, having the molecules snap to stiffness after stretching is probably analogous to a rock climber arresting a rappel by clipping the end of her rope in place.
What’s the News: The bacterial hordes that call your mouth home—and yes, even if you brush rigorously, you’ve got ‘em—are generally a pretty benign bunch. Mostly they just mooch around, snagging tastes of whatever you’re eating, but Streptococcus mutans, the bad boy that causes cavities, releases tooth-corroding acid whenever you eat sugar. Even mouthwash that kills everything it touches can’t save you from the ravages of S. mutans in the long term; it just grows back, along with the rest of your bacteria.
Scientists who study the mouth microbiome, however, think that a mouthwash that kills S. mutans and leaves the rest of the bacteria to take over S. mutans‘s real estate could spell the end of cavities. In a small clinical study last year, one team found that one application of the mouthwash knocked down S. mutans levels, and that harmless bacteria grew back in its place. If the mouthwash pans out, it could join the ranks of an emerging new type of treatment: better living through hacking the microbiome.
Artist’s rendering of AVIATR flying on Titan.
Saturn’s moon Titan is a lot like Earth: it has rain, seasons, volcanoes, and maybe even life. Well, it’s not exactly like Earth: the rain is liquid methane, the volcanoes spew ice, and any life would be based on methane. But still, it’s an interesting and relatively Earth-like place, considering the other planets and moons in our solar system. And University of Idaho physicist Jason Barnes says he has a perfect way to explore this moon: with a flying drone.
Why use a flying machine rather than the rovers that worked so well on Mars? With 1/7 the gravity but 4 times the atmospheric density of Earth, flying through Titan is 28 times easier than on our own planet. In fact, it’s the easiest place to fly in our entire solar system. Drones on Titan can be heavier while requiring less fuel. With these facts in hand, University of Idaho physicist Jason Barnes has proposed AVIATR, otherwise known as the Aerial Vehicle for In-situ and Airborne Titan Reconnaissance.
The outline of Lake Vostok beneath the ice, as seen from space.
After two decades of drilling through miles of Antarctic ice, Russian scientists are about to breach an underground lake that has not been exposed to the surface in more than 20 million years. Lake Vostok, as the body of water is called, is part of a chain of more than 200 lakes hidden beneath the ice, some of which were formed when Australia and Antarctica were still connected. Vostok will be the first one of all to be opened when the drill hits water next week.
Scientists believe that there may be life in the lake, as ice removed from the Vostok borehole has been found to contain bacteria. And since the subterranean lakes, kept liquid by heat from the Earth’s core, are similar to those found on moons Enceladus and Europa, scientists are excited to see what such inhabitants might be like. But the Russian team’s somewhat sloppy drilling methods have got a number of people worried about preserving the pristine lake from contamination, as Marc Kaufman reports in a great feature for the Washington Post.
Chemotherapy is poison that happens to kill cancer cells faster than it kills healthy cells; that it wreaks havoc on the bodies of patients is unsurprising. But chemo may also affect their unborn children. According to a new study in PNAS, the offspring of mice treated with chemotherapy have higher rates of mutation, even though the offspring themselves were never exposed to the drugs.
The results suggest that these mutations arise from genome destabilization caused by exposure to chemo, rather than just mutated sperm from the treated father. Male mice in the study were exposed to one of three common anticancer drugs—cyclophosphamide, mitomycin C, or procarbazine—and then allowed to mate with untreated females. After sequencing a small piece of DNA from the offspring, the researchers found that mice with treated fathers had mutation rates up to twice that of mice with untreated fathers. Notably, these mutations were present in DNA inherited from both the treated father and untreated mother.
Creatures as large as elephants are unusual; it takes a long time to evolve such size.
How long does it take for a mammal as small as a mouse to evolve into something as large as an elephant? A really, really long time, a recent study has found: about 24 million generations, at minimum.
To get that number, researchers looked at the evolution of body mass over the last 70 million years, after the dinosaurs went extinct and surviving animals expanded into the ecological niches they left behind. That estimate is far longer than earlier estimates, which, extrapolating from bursts of super-fast evolution in mice, range from just 200,000 to 2 million generations. Such speedy evolution, in actuality, is probably not sustainable over the long term—hence the lengthy new estimate.
The researchers chose to examine the sperm of crickets, because, as with humans, you can get samples of it without having the male come into contact with a female first.
What’s the News: You might already know that sperm, which can survive for only a few hours when exposed to the outside world, can live for several days in women after ejaculation. But did you know that an ant queen can fertilize her eggs with sperm she’s stored for up to 30 years? And that organisms as diverse as birds, reptiles, and insects can hang onto sperm and keep it fresh for days, weeks, or months?
Scientists studying this ability have been trying to figure out how females do it, and in a recent paper, researchers put forth evidence showing that the ladies may be arresting the aging process, by slowing down sperms’ metabolism.
A funny thing happened after Google’s new privacy policy was announced last week. When people started checking what Google knows about them on Ad Preferences Manager—that’s the profile of you they build by watching your movements on the Web, so they can tailor ads accordingly—young women began reporting that actually, Google had aged them quite a bit. And had thought they were dudes. One young lady of our acquaintance is believed by the Ad Preferences genie to be a “65+” male. Why?
In this graphic from the restoration authority, the land that will
be lost to erosion if the plan isn’t undertaken is shown in red.
Six years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Louisiana coast, the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has finally released a draft of a plan to try to keep it from happening again. How? By restoring the wetlands along the Mississippi River Delta, which we have more or less systematically destroyed but used to act as buffers between storm surge waves and inland cities.
Previous plans had relied on mainly on building levees and seawalls, so it’s striking that this plan, which would unroll over the course of 50 years at a cost of $50 billion, focuses on wetland restoration, writes Mark Fischetti, who has been covering this issue for Scientific American for years. Here’s how it would work:
Along the outer edge of the torn-up coast, furthest from New Orleans, former barrier islands that have been worn to thin wisps of land would be broadened with sandy sediment, mostly dredged from the ocean bottom and conveyed through pipelines. Natural ridges of land along the coast would be strengthened in similar fashion. Together, the islands and ridges would form a dotted line around southeastern Louisiana that can cut down storm surges. They would not all connect, so wind-driven water could still find its way through, but the many segments would break up the incoming wavefront into chaotic eddies flowing in conflicting directions that would at least partially cancel out one another.
The plan is already drawing ire from fishermen, who say that current restoration projects haven’t had much effect, and that all this shuttling of sand and water will interfere with their livelihoods.
Read more at Scientific American.
Images courtesy of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority
We’ve written before about hapless business owners practically handing hackers customers’ information by failing to observe basic computer security (Subway, we’re looking at you). But this is a security fail on a whole different level. A researcher has just revealed that about ten thousand systems controlling water plants, sewage plants, and other infrastructure are online, mostly unprotected and findable with a simple search.
If you think of your personal computer as almost an extension of yourself, a recent federal court ruling in Colorado sounds a little disturbing. The court has ordered that a woman decrypt files on her laptop so they can be used by prosecutors against her. The woman, who is being tried for mortgage fraud, argued that this is a violation of her Fifth Amendment right to keep from testifying against herself, but the court sees the matter differently. Timothy Lee at Ars Technica’s explanation of the problem gets to the heart of it:
In previous cases, judges have drawn a distinction between forcing a defendant to reveal her password and forcing her to decrypt encrypted data without disclosing the password. The courts have held that the former forces the defendant to reveal the contents of her mind, which raises Fifth Amendment issues. But Judge Robert Blackburn has now ruled that forcing a defendant to decrypt a laptop so that its contents can be inspected is little different from producing any other kind of document.
For some, being forced to decrypt your computer and handing over your password to investigators so they can decrypt it might not seem that different—what’s hidden by your password might well feel as much a part of your mind as your password. But when you think about the precedent a ruling in the other direction might set, things get cloudier. The Department of Justice argues that if encryption is all that’s required to keep documents out of the hands of the courts, then potential child pornographers, drug smugglers, and others can refuse to hand over evidence on the grounds that it’s encrypted. Hmmm.
Another case from this week that shows the difficulty of aligning the modern sense of privacy with the law. The Supreme Court ruled that sticking a GPS device on a suspect’s car to track his whereabouts, without a warrant, is unconstitutional. But the court was divided as to why, on a very important point.
Vultures eating a gazelle.
By now, you’re probably familiar with the Body Farm at University of Tennessee. It’s one of the places where bodies donated to science go to rot while being closely observed by appreciative forensic scientists, and we say that with the greatest respect: if not for the brave few who gave their mortal remains to be studied, we would have a much harder time telling when and how people found in fields, woods, and other unusual locales died. Now, scientists working at another Body Farm-like facility, Texas State University’s Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, have performed a fascinating study to see exactly what happens when a human body is eaten by vultures.
Their findings imply that vultures can take much longer—37 days instead of 24 hours—to find a body than the carcass of a pig left in the wilderness, which is what previous studies in the Texas facility have used. On the other hand, vultures can also pick clean, or skeletonize, a body much faster than we’d thought: it took just 5 hours instead of the expected 24. The scientists also tracked where the vultures spread the body parts that they didn’t consume, as they kept visiting the body over the following five months, which will be useful in figuring out how far away a body might be if a bone or other part is found by itself in future forensic investigations.
[via New Scientist]
Image courtesy of appenz / flickr
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