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October 31, 2012

Buddhist monk is the world's happiest man

Tibetan monk and molecular geneticist Matthieu Ricard is the happiest man in the world according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin. The 66-year-old’s brain produces a level of gamma waves - those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory - never before reported in neuroscience.

The monk, molecular geneticist and confidant of the Dalai Lama, is passionately setting out why meditation can alter the brain and improve people's happiness in the same way that lifting weights puts on muscle.

"It's a wonderful area of research because it shows that meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are," the Frenchman told AFP.

Ricard, a globe-trotting polymath who left everything behind to become a Tibetan Buddhist in a Himalayan hermitage, says anyone can be happy if they only train their brain.

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson wired up Ricard's skull with 256 sensors at the University of Wisconsin four years ago as part of research on hundreds of advanced practitioners of meditation.

The scans showed that when meditating on compassion, Ricard's brain produces a level of gamma waves -- those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory -- "never reported before in the neuroscience literature", Davidson said.

Transforming America by redirecting wasted health care dollars

The respected national Institute of Medicine estimates that $750 billion is lost each year to wasteful or excessive health care spending. This sum includes excess administrative costs, inflated prices, unnecessary services and fraud -- dollars that add no value to health and well-being.

If those wasteful costs could be corralled without sacrificing health care quality, how might that money be better spent?

In a study published in the current online edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Frederick J. Zimmerman, professor and chair of the department of health policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and colleagues outline some of the myriad ways that $750 billion could benefit Americans.

"If cut from current health care expenditures, these funds could provide businesses and households with a huge windfall, with enough money left over to fund deficit reduction on the order of the most ambitious plans in Washington," Zimmerman said. "The money could also cover needed investments in transportation infrastructure, early childhood education, human capital programs, rural development, job retraining programs and much more. And it could transform America with little to no reduction in the quality of, or access to, health care actually provided."

Agriculture and food production contribute up to 29 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions

Feeding the world releases up to 17,000 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, according to a new analysis released October 30 by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). But while the emissions "footprint" of food production needs to be reduced, a companion policy brief by CCAFS lays out how climate change will require a complete recalibration of where specific crops are grown and livestock are raised.

Together, Climate Change and Food Systems (published in the 2012 Annual Review of Environment and Resources) and Recalibrating Food Production in the Developing World: Global Warming Will Change More Than Just the Climate (published by CCAFS), shed new light on the intertwining evolutions of climate change and the world's food system and their potential impact on humanity's relationship with food.

"Climate Change mitigation and adaptation are critical priorities. Farmers around the world, especially smallholder farmers in developing countries, need access to the latest science, more resources and advanced technology. This research serves as an urgent call for negotiators at the upcoming United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Doha," said Bruce Campbell, CCAFS's program director.

October 29, 2012

The Island Where People Forget to Die

In the ensuing months, something strange happened. He says he started to feel stronger. One day, feeling ambitious, he planted some vegetables in the garden. He didn’t expect to live to harvest them, but he enjoyed being in the sunshine, breathing the ocean air. Elpiniki could enjoy the fresh vegetables after he was gone.

Six months came and went. Moraitis didn’t die. Instead, he reaped his garden and, feeling emboldened, cleaned up the family vineyard as well. Easing himself into the island routine, he woke up when he felt like it, worked in the vineyards until midafternoon, made himself lunch and then took a long nap. In the evenings, he often walked to the local tavern, where he played dominoes past midnight. The years passed. His health continued to improve. He added a couple of rooms to his parents’ home so his children could visit. He built up the vineyard until it produced 400 gallons of wine a year. Today, three and a half decades later, he’s 97 years old — according to an official document he disputes; he says he’s 102 — and cancer-free. He never went through chemotherapy, took drugs or sought therapy of any sort. All he did was move home to Ikaria.

New Ultra Thin Dissolvable Electronics Developed

Miniature, completely biocompatible, electronic instruments that can harmlessly disintegrate into their surroundings after working for a certain amount of time, have been constructed by biomedical engineers from Tufts University.

This discovery of "transient electronics", a new group of silk-silicon devices that function for a specific amount of time followed by disintegration, pave the path for medical implants that never need to be surgically removed. It could also be a potential milestone for compostable consumer electronics and environmental monitoring devices.

Fiorenzo Omenetto, professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts School of Engineering and a senior and corresponding author of these findings published Science says:

"These devices are the polar opposite of conventional electronics whose integrated circuits are designed for long-term physical and electronic stability. Transient electronics offer robust performance comparable to current devices but they will fully resorb into their environment at a prescribed time, ranging from minutes to years, depending on the application."

'Frankenstorm' Full Moon: Hurricane Sandy's Impact Amplified by Lunar Event

The full moon of October may go unseen along the U.S. East Coast due to Hurricane Sandy, but its effect on the storm will be felt. The full moon's tidal effects on Earth will amplify the storm's already large waves, making them a bigger flooding danger than normal, NASA says.

"Very rough surf and high and dangerous waves are expected to be coupled with the full moon," NASA spokesman Rob Gutro explained in the agency's hurricane status report Sunday (Oct. 28). "The National Hurricane Center noted that the combination of a dangerous storm and the tide will cause normally dry areas near the coast to be flooded by rising waters."

The National Hurricane Center said that "Sandy [is] expected to bring life-threatening storm surge flooding to the Mid-Atlantic coast including Long Island Sound and New York Harbor, winds expected to be near hurricane force at landfall," according to Gutro's update.

Titan supercomputer debuts: Computer churns through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory has just launched a new era of scientific supercomputing with Titan, a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second -- or 20 petaflops -- by employing a family of processors called graphic processing units first created for computer gaming. Titan will be 10 times more powerful than ORNL's last world-leading system, Jaguar, while overcoming power and space limitations inherent in the previous generation of high-performance computers.

Titan, which is supported by the Department of Energy, will provide unprecedented computing power for research in energy, climate change, efficient engines, materials and other disciplines and pave the way for a wide range of achievements in science and technology.

The Cray XK7 system contains 18,688 nodes, with each holding a 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerator. Titan also has more than 700 terabytes of memory. The combination of central processing units, the traditional foundation of high-performance computers, and more recent GPUs will allow Titan to occupy the same space as its Jaguar predecessor while using only marginally more electricity.

October 26, 2012

The Link Between Crime And Opiates

Nearly every aspect of society is affected by drug abuse and addiction. It puts a strain on local, state and national economies, drives up healthcare costs, endangers lives, splits up families and stretches the criminal justice system to its limit.

The main threat in this day and age is opiates – in the form of prescription painkillers and heroin. These drugs have changed the very face of drug addiction. Everyday people are getting dependent. Good people. Professional people. Young people. Older people.

For many people, the story goes like this: Someone takes a prescription painkiller for an injury or illness. A tolerance builds, requiring more of the drug. Physical dependence develops. A person increases his or her consumption of the drug. Psychological dependence may set in, meaning the person could develop addiction.

Many people end up switching from prescription painkillers to heroin. Its cheaper on the street and oftentimes, more readily available. And it provides the same effects such as relief of physical, psychological and emotional pain. They both have the ability to dull the senses and numb unwanted feelings.

October 25, 2012

Living power cables discovered: Multicellular bacteria transmit electrons across relatively great distances

A multinational research team has discovered filamentous bacteria that function as living power cables in order to transmit electrons thousands of cell lengths away.

The Desulfobulbus bacterial cells, which are only a few thousandths of a millimeter long each, are so tiny that they are invisible to the naked eye. And yet, under the right circumstances, they form a multicellular filament that can transmit electrons across a distance as large as 1 centimeter as part of the filament's respiration and ingestion processes.

The discovery by scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark and USC will be published in Nature on October 24.

"To move electrons over these enormous distances in an entirely biological system would have been thought impossible," said Moh El-Naggar, assistant professor of physics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and co-author of the Nature paper.

Aarhus scientists had discovered a seemingly inexplicable electric current on the sea floor years ago. The new experiments revealed that these currents are mediated by a hitherto unknown type of long, multicellular bacteria that act as living power cables

Why Men and Women Can't Be "Just Friends"

Can heterosexual men and women ever be “just friends”? Few other questions have provoked debates as intense, family dinners as awkward, literature as lurid, or movies as memorable. Still, the question remains unanswered. Daily experience suggests that non-romantic friendships between males and females are not only possible, but common—men and women live, work, and play side-by-side, and generally seem to be able to avoid spontaneously sleeping together. However, the possibility remains that this apparently platonic coexistence is merely a façade, an elaborate dance covering up countless sexual impulses bubbling just beneath the surface.

New research suggests that there may be some truth to this possibility—that we may think we’re capable of being “just friends” with members of the opposite sex, but the opportunity (or perceived opportunity) for “romance” is often lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce at the most inopportune moment.

Science reveals the power of a handshake

New neuroscience research is confirming an old adage about the power of a handshake: strangers do form a better impression of those who proffer their hand in greeting.

A firm, friendly handshake has long been recommended in the business world as a way to make a good first impression, and the greeting is thought to date to ancient times as a way of showing a stranger you had no weapons. Now, a paper published online and for the December print issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience on a study of the neural correlates of a handshake is giving insight into just how important the practice is to the evaluations we make of subsequent social interactions.

The study was led by Beckman Institute researcher Florin Dolcos and Department of Psychology postdoctoral research associate Sanda Dolcos. They found, as they wrote, that "a handshake preceding social interaction enhanced the positive impact of approach and diminished the negative impact of avoidance behavior on the evaluation of social interaction."

Their results, for the first time, give a scientific underpinning to long-held beliefs about the important role a handshake plays in social or business interactions. Sanda Dolcos said their findings have obvious implications for those who want to make a good impression.

Caffeine Levels in Energy Drinks May Be Higher Than Advertised

Energy drinks may contain more caffeine than their labels claim, according to a new report.

Researchers at Consumer Reports purchased cans of 27 popular energy drinks and shots online and at stores in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, and tested the caffeine levels in three samples of each product.

Caffeine levels in the drinks ranged between 6 and 242 milligrams per serving, and some containers contained more than one serving, they found.

By comparison, an 8-ounce cup of coffee generally contains about 100 mg of caffeine; eight ounces of cola contains about 25 mg.

The researchers found that 16 of the products listed a specific amount of caffeine on their labels. However, their own tests showed that five of these products — Arizona Energy, Clif Shot Turbo Energy Gel, Nestlé Jamba, Sambazon Organic Amazon Energy and Venom Energy — contained at least 20 percent more caffeine than stated. One sample, of Archer Farms Energy Drink Juice Infused, contained about 70 percent less caffeine than was listed on the label.

October 24, 2012

Are schizophrenia and autism close relations?

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), a category that includes autism, Asperger Syndrome, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder, are characterized by difficulty with social interaction and communication, or repetitive behaviors. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Management says that one in 88 children in the US is somewhere on the Autism spectrum -- an alarming ten-fold increase in the last four decades.

New research by Dr. Mark Weiser of Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Sheba Medical Center has revealed that ASD appears share a root cause with other mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. At first glance, schizophrenia and autism may look like completely different illnesses, he says. But closer inspection reveals many common traits, including social and cognitive dysfunction and a decreased ability to lead normal lives and function in the real world.

Studying extensive databases in Israel and Sweden, the researchers discovered that the two illnesses had a genetic link, representing a heightened risk within families. They found that people who have a schizophrenic sibling are 12 times more likely to have autism than those with no schizophrenia in the family. The presence of bipolar disorder in a sibling showed a similar pattern of association, but to a lesser degree.

Summer babies less likely to be CEOs

Sauder School of Business researchers at the University of British Columbia have found that a person's date of birth can affect their climb up the corporate ladder.

he Sauder study shows that only 6.13 per cent of an S&P 500 CEO sample was born in June and only 5.87 per cent of the sample was born in July. By comparison, people born in March and April represented 12.53 per cent and 10.67 per cent of the sample of CEOs.

"Our findings indicate that summer babies underperform in the ranks of CEOs as a result of the 'birth-date effect,' a phenomenon resulting from the way children are grouped by age in school," says Sauder Finance Prof. Maurice Levi, co-author of the study to appear in the December issue of the journal Economics Letters.

In the United States, cut-off dates for school admission fall between September and January. The researchers determined that those CEOs in the sample born between June and July were the youngest in their class during school, and those in March and April were the oldest. This takes into account children born in months close to the cut offs who were held back or accelerated.

Grandma gets credit for humans' long lives

Do you like living past the age of 20 or so? Thank Grandma.

A new simulation suggests the rise of grandmothering explains why human life spans are so much longer than those of chimpanzees and other non-human apes. By taking a theoretical society with apelike life spans and adding grandmas, researchers were able to double everyone's length of life.

The findings, reported Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, support the grandmother hypothesis. This hypothesis aims to explain why human females, unlike other primates and mammals, outlive their reproductive years. Perhaps, the idea goes, grandmothers took on the duty of caring for their grandchildren, allowing their own children to have more offspring. Families where people lived long enough to grandmother thus would have had a genetic advantage, allowing longevity to spread through natural selection.

Flame retardant 'Firemaster 550,' used in infant-products, is an endocrine disruptor

The flame-retardant mixture known as "Firemaster 550" is an endocrine disruptor that causes extreme weight gain, early onset of puberty and cardiovascular health effects in lab animals, according to a new study spearheaded by researchers from North Carolina State University and Duke University.

Firemaster 550 is made up of four principal component chemicals and is used in polyurethane foam in a wide variety of products, ranging from mattresses to infant nursing pillows. The flame-retardant mixture was developed by Chemtura Corp., and was first identified by the research community in 2008. It was developed to replace a class of fire retardants being phased out of use because of concerns regarding their safety. This new study represents the first public data on whether Firemaster 550 has potential health effects.

In this pilot study, pregnant lab rats were assigned to three groups: a control group, which was not exposed to Firemaster 550; a "low-dose" group, which ingested 100 micrograms of Firemaster 550 once per day throughout pregnancy and nursing; and a "high-dose" group, which ingested 1,000 micrograms on the same schedule. These environmentally relevant doses are lower than the doses used in industry-funded studies. Researchers then evaluated the physiological outcomes of the exposure in both the mothers (called dams) and the offspring (called pups).

October 23, 2012

Your happiness could be contagious

Feeling inexplicably cheery today? Thank your friends. And your friends’ friends. And your friends’ friends’ friends.

New research shows that happiness isn’t just an individual phenomenon; we can catch happiness from friends and family members like an emotional virus. When just one person in a group becomes happy, researchers were able to measure a three-degree spread of that person’s cheer. In other words, our moods can brighten thanks to someone we haven’t even met.

“Especially in the United States, we’re very used to thinking of ourselves as rugged individuals. But even very small things that happen to us have big impacts on dozens and hundreds of other people,” says James Fowler, a University of California, San Diego, political scientist, who co-authored the study with Harvard University medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis. “The things that we do and the things that we feel are going to reverberate throughout our social network.”

TV, devices in kids' bedrooms linked to poor sleep, obesity

Children who bask in the nighttime glow of a TV or computer don't get enough rest and suffer from poor lifestyle habits, new research from the University of Alberta has shown.

A province-wide survey of Grade 5 students in Alberta showed that as little as one hour of additional sleep decreased the odds of being overweight or obese by 28 per cent and 30 per cent, respectively. Children with one or more electronic devices in the bedroom -- TVs, computers, video games and cellphones -- were also far more likely to be overweight or obese.

"If you want your kids to sleep better and live a healthier lifestyle, get the technology out of the bedroom," said co-author Paul Veugelers, a professor in the School of Public Health, Canada Research Chair in Population Health and Alberta Innovates -- Health Solutions Health Scholar.

Veugelers, director of the Population Health Intervention Research Unit that works with the Alberta Project Promoting active Living and healthy Eating (APPLE Schools), said the research is the first to connect the dots on the relationship between sleep, diet and physical activity among kids.

Exercise the body to keep the brain healthy, study suggests

People who exercise later in life may better protect their brain from age-related changes than those who do not, a study suggests.

Researchers found that people over 70 who took regular exercise showed less brain shrinkage over a three-year period than those who did little exercise.

Psychologists and Neuroimaging experts, based at the University of Edinburgh, did not find there to be any benefit to brain health for older people from participation in social or mentally stimulating activities.

Greater brain shrinkage is linked to problems with memory and thinking and the researchers say their findings suggest that exercise is potentially one important pathway to maintaining a healthy brain both in terms of size and reducing damage.

The researchers also examined the brain's white matter - the wiring that transmits messages round the brain. They found that people over 70 who were more physically active had fewer 'damaged' areas - visible as abnormal areas on scanning - in the white matter than those who did little exercise.

Additionally, the researchers from the University of Edinburgh found that the over-70s taking regular exercise had more grey matter - the parts of the brain with nerve cell bodies.

How highway bridges sing -- or groan -- in the rain to reveal their health: Just a drop of water can indicate the stability of a bridge

A team of BYU engineers has found that by listening to how a highway bridge sings in the rain they can determine serious flaws in the structure.

Employing a method called impact-echo testing, professors Brian Mazzeo and Spencer Guthrie can diagnose the health of a bridge's deck based on the acoustic footprint produced by a little bit of water.

Specifically, the sound created when a droplet makes impact can reveal hidden dangers in the bridge.

"There is a difference between water hitting intact structures and water hitting flawed structures," Mazzeo said. "We can detect things you can't see with a visual inspection; things happening within the bridge itself."

The study presents a more efficient and cost-effective method to address the mounting safety concerns over bridge corrosion and aging across the U.S. and beyond.

October 22, 2012

Rice agriculture accelerates global warming: More greenhouse gas per grain of rice

More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and rising temperatures cause rice agriculture to release more of the potent greenhouse gas methane (CH4) for each kilogram of rice it produces, new research published in this week's online edition of Nature Climate Change reveals.

"Our results show that rice agriculture becomes less climate friendly as our atmosphere continues to change. This is important, because rice paddies are one of the largest human sources of methane, and rice is the world's second-most produced staple crop," said Dr Kees Jan van Groenigen, Research Fellow at the Botany Department at the School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, and lead author of the study.

Van Groenigen, along with colleagues from Northern Arizona University and the University of California in Davis, gathered all published research to date from 63 different experiments on rice paddies, mostly from Asia and North America. The common theme in the experiments was that they measured how rising temperatures and extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere affect rice yields and the amount of methane that is released by rice paddies.

Children with mental health disorders more often identified as bullies

Children diagnosed with mental health disorders were three times more likely to be identified as bullies, according to new research presented Oct. 22 at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans.

Bullying is a form of youth violence defined as repetitive, intentional aggression that involves a disparity of power between the victim and perpetrator. A 2011 nationwide survey found 20 percent of U.S. high school students were bullied during the preceding 12 months. And while it is well-established that victims of bullying are at increased risk for mental health illness and suicide, few studies have investigated the mental health status of those who do the bullying.

In the study, "Association Between Mental Health Disorders and Bullying in the United States Among Children Aged 6 to 17 Years," researchers reviewed data provided by parents and guardians on mental health and bullying in the 2007 National Survey of Children's Health, which included nearly 64,000 children.

How fear can skew spatial perception

That snake heading towards you may be further away than it appears. Fear can skew our perception of approaching objects, causing us to underestimate the distance of a threatening one, finds a study published in Current Biology.

"Our results show that emotion and perception are not fully dissociable in the mind," says Emory psychologist Stella Lourenco, co-author of the study. "Fear can alter even basic aspects of how we perceive the world around us. This has clear implications for understanding clinical phobias."

Lourenco conducted the research with Matthew Longo, a psychologist at Birkbeck, University of London.

People generally have a well-developed sense for when objects heading towards them will make contact, including a split-second cushion for dodging or blocking the object, if necessary. The researchers set up an experiment to test the effect of fear on the accuracy of that skill.

October 19, 2012

How the brain forms categories

How do we manage to recognize a friend's face, regardless of the light conditions, the person's hairstyle or make-up? Why do we always hear the same words, whether they are spoken by a man or woman, in a loud or soft voice? It is due to the amazing skill of our brain to turn a wealth of sensory information into a number of defined categories and objects. The ability to create constants in a changing world feels natural and effortless to a human, but it is extremely difficult to train a computer to perform the task.

At the IMP in Vienna, neurobiologist Simon Rumpel and his post-doc Brice Bathellier have been able to show that certain properties of neuronal networks in the brain are responsible for the formation of categories. In experiments with mice, the researchers produced an array of sounds and monitored the activity of nerve cell-clusters in the auditory cortex. They found that groups of 50 to 100 neurons displayed only a limited number of different activity-patterns in response to the different sounds.

October 18, 2012

Overeating impairs brain insulin function, a mechanism that can lead to diabetes and obesity

New research from Mount Sinai School of Medicine sheds light on how overeating can cause a malfunction in brain insulin signaling, and lead to obesity and diabetes. Christoph Buettner, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine (Endocrinology, Diabetes and Bone Disease) and his research team found that overeating impairs the ability of brain insulin to suppress the breakdown of fat in adipose tissue.

In previous research Dr. Buettner's team established that brain insulin is what suppresses lipolysis, a process during which triglycerides in fat tissue are broken down and fatty acids are released. When lipolysis is unrestrained, fatty acid levels are elevated, which can initiate and worsen obesity and type 2 diabetes. The current study is published online in The Journal of Biological Chemistry. The first study was published in the February 2, 2011 issue of Cell Metabolism.

"We are interested in understanding why people who eat too much eventually develop diabetes. Our recent studies suggest that once you overeat, your brain develops insulin resistance. Since brain insulin controls lipolysis in adipose tissue by reducing sympathetic nervous system outflow to adipose tissue, brain insulin resistance causes increased spillage of fatty acids from adipose tissue into the blood stream," said Dr. Buettner.

'Power naps' may boost right-brain activity

We've all been there: After struggling over a problem for hours, we rest our eyes for a few minutes and suddenly the answer is lying before us, clear as day.

This common phenomenon has contributed to the idea of the so-called power nap, a quick snatch of rest that stops short of deep sleep yet somehow manages to refresh and stimulate.

Although there is much about the power nap that remains a mystery, researchers have begun to uncover the brain processes behind the little miracles it produces.

The latest research, presented Wednesday at an annual meeting of neuroscientists, may help explain the mental spark that sometimes occurs during a nap. Researchers monitoring the brain activity of 15 at-rest individuals found that the right side of their brain -- the hemisphere most associated with creativity -- chattered busily to itself as well as to the left hemisphere, which remained relatively quiet.

Dolphins can remain alert for up to 15 days at a time with no sign of fatigue

Dolphins sleep with only one half of their brains at a time, and according to new research published Oct. 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE, this trait allows them to stay constantly alert for at least 15 days in a row. Brian Branstetter from the National Marine Mammal Foundation and colleagues found that dolphins can use echolocation with near-perfect accuracy continuously for up to 15 days, identifying targets and monitoring their environment.

The researchers studied 2 dolphins, one male and one female, and found that they were capable of this task with no signs of fatigue for 5 days. The female dolphin performed additional tasks for a 15-day period. How much longer they could have continued was not studied.

Sleeping with only one half of the brain at a time, or unihemispheric sleep, was believed to have evolved in dolphins to enable them to breathe at the surface of water even when half-asleep. This new research suggests that the need to remain vigilant may also have played a role in the evolution of this sleeping behavior.

"These majestic beasts are true unwavering sentinels of the sea. The demands of ocean life on air breathing dolphins have led to incredible capabilities, one of which is the ability to continuously, perhaps indefinitely, maintain vigilant behavior through echolocation" says Branstetter.

October 17, 2012

Creativity 'closely entwined with mental illness'

Creativity is often part of a mental illness, with writers particularly susceptible, according to a study of more than a million people.

Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, the Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute found.

They were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves.

The dancers and photographers were also more likely to have bipolar disorder.

Immune response may link social rejection to later health outcomes

No matter which way you look at it, rejection hurts. Experiencing rejection from a boss, a friend, or a partner is difficult enough for many adults to handle. But adolescents, who are dealing with the one-two punch of biological and social change, may be the most vulnerable to its negative effects.

In a new study published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researcher Michael Murphy and colleagues examine the human immune response as a potential link between social stressors like rejection and later mental and physical health outcomes.

There are many kinds of stressors that increase our risk for disease, but stressors that threaten our social standing, such as targeted rejection, seem to be particularly harmful.

Spider Silk Makes Great Microchips That Dissolve in the Human Body

Spider silk is pretty amazing stuff. Pound for pound, it’s as strong as steel and more durable than Kevlar. It can be stretched to incredible lengths, but it’s no more cumbersome than cotton or nylon. Because it’s so awesome, scientists have long been searching for good ways to synthesize the stuff (it’s not exactly easy to milk spiders in any meaningful quantity), and they’ve made some good progress. Thanks to the latest work from biomedical engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto of Tufts University in Boston and Nolwenn Huby from the CNRS Institut de Physiques de Rennes in France, they’ll have a little extra motivation to get it done soon.

This is your brain on food: Studies reveal how diet affects brain functions

Studies released today explore the neurological component of dietary disorders, uncovering evidence that the brain's biological mechanisms may contribute to significant public health challenges -- obesity, diabetes, binge eating, and the allure of the high-calorie meal.

The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2012, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.

Scientists are ultimately searching for new ways to treat diet-related disorders while raising awareness that diet and obesity affect mental as well as physical health.

October 15, 2012

Sitting for protracted periods increases risk of diabetes, heart disease and death

A new study led by the University of Leicester, in association with colleagues at Loughborough University, has discovered that sitting for long periods increases your risk of diabetes, heart disease and death.

The study, which combined the results of 18 studies and included a total of 794,577 participants, was led by Dr. Emma Wilmot, a research fellow in the Diabetes Research Group at the University of Leicester. The research was in collaboration with colleagues from the newly established National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Leicester-Loughborough Diet, Lifestyle and Physical Activity Biomedical Research Unit and was published in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association of the Study of Diabetes.

The research showed that those who sat for long periods of time have a higher chance in their risk of diabetes, heart-disease and death. Interestingly, the results were independent of any individual physical exercise undertaken, suggesting that even if an individual meets the physical activity guidelines, their health may still be at risk if they sit for long periods of time during the day.

Decriminalise drug use, say experts after six-year study

A six-year study of Britain's drug laws by leading scientists, police officers, academics and experts has concluded it is time to introduce decriminalisation.

The report by the UK Drug Policy Commission (UKDPC), an independent advisory body, says possession of small amounts of controlled drugs should no longer be a criminal offence and concludes the move will not lead to a significant increase in use.

The experts say the criminal sanctions imposed on the 42,000 people sentenced each year for possession of all drugs – and the 160,000 given cannabis warnings – should be replaced with simple civil penalties such as a fine, attendance at a drug awareness session or a referral to a drug treatment programme.

They also say that imposing minimal or no sanctions on those growing cannabis for personal use could go some way to undermining the burgeoning illicit cannabis factories controlled by organised crime.

But their report rejects any more radical move to legalisation, saying that allowing the legal sale of drugs such as heroin or cocaine could cause more damage than the existing drugs trade.

The commission is chaired by Dame Ruth Runciman with a membership that includes the former head of the British Medical Research Council, Prof Colin Blakemore, and the former chief inspector of constabulary, David Blakey.

The report says their analysis of the evidence shows that existing drugs policies struggle to make an impact and, in some cases, may make the problem worse.

Depression May Be Caused By 'Allergy' to Stress

An over-excited immune system may explain why some people are susceptible to depression, according to new research on mice.

Mice whose immune systems responded to stress by overproducing an inflammatory compound called Interleukin-6 were more likely to become the mousy versions of depressed than mice with non-overactive immune systems, the research found. This same compound is elevated in depressed humans, said study researcher Georgia Hodes, suggesting hope for new depression treatments.

"There's probably a subset of people with depression who have this over-sensitive inflammatory response to stress and that this is leading to the symptoms of depression," Hodes, a postdoctoral researcher at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, told LiveScience.

Hodes added that stress could be thought of as an allergen, like pet dander, with the over-reactive immune system making you depressed rather than giving you runny nose.

October 12, 2012

Old adage 'sleep on it' is true -- but only if it's a really difficult problem, study shows

A new study from Lancaster University has found that sleeping on a problem really can help people to find a solution.

The study, published online this week in the journal Memory & Cognition, tested whether sleep or time spent awake worked best in helping people find the solutions to a range of problem solving tasks.

Participants in the study -- 27 men and 34 women -- were asked to attempt easy and difficult verbal insight problems and, following a period of sleep, time spent wake, or no delay at all, the three groups of participants reattempted previously unsolved problems.

The sleep group solved a greater number of difficult problems than did the other groups, but no difference was found for easy problems.

Oysters' Future Imperiled as Oceans Acidify

Oysters, those slimy mollusks whose juices are thought to boost sexual desire, may be losing their comfy sea homes.

The reason? Global oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb carbon dioxide pumped into the air from burning fossil fuels, which makes it difficult for calcifying organisms like oysters to create their shells.

The ocean is now 30 percent more acidic than it was before the Industrial Revolution.

October 9, 2012

Fish In Mom's Diet May Alter Kids' Behavior

For pregnant women, diets rich in fish can offer their babies protection against developing behaviors associated with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, a new study finds. Yet for most Americans, fish consumption is the leading source of exposure to mercury — a potent neurotoxic pollutant that has been linked to a host of health problems, including delays in neural development.

Data from the new study, published online October 8 in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, demonstrate that low-mercury diets and regular fish consumption are not mutually exclusive, says epidemiologist and study leader Susan Korrick of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “It really depends on the type of fish that you’re eating,” she says. In fact, some study participants had been eating more than two servings of fish weekly yet accumulated relatively little mercury.

As part of a long-running study of children born during the 1990s in New Bedford, Mass., 515 women who had just given birth completed a dietary survey. About 420 also provided samples of their hair for mercury testing. About eight years later, Korrick’s team administered a battery of IQ and other tests to assess behaviors associated with ADHD in the children.

Nobel Prize in Physics 2012: Particle control in a quantum world

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2012 to Serge Haroche Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France and David J. Wineland National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado Boulder "for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems."

Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland have independently invented and developed methods for measuring and manipulating individual particles while preserving their quantum-mechanical nature, in ways that were previously thought unattainable.

The Nobel Laureates have opened the door to a new era of experimentation with quantum physics by demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum particles without destroying them. For single particles of light or matter the laws of classical physics cease to apply and quantum physics takes over. But single particles are not easily isolated from their surrounding environment and they lose their mysterious quantum properties as soon as they interact with the outside world. Thus many seemingly bizarre phenomena predicted by quantum physics could not be directly observed, and researchers could only carry out thought experiments that might in principle manifest these bizarre phenomena.

October 5, 2012

BPA's real threat may be after it has metabolized: Chemical found in many plastics linked to multiple health threats

Bisphenol A or BPA is a synthetic chemical widely used in the making of plastic products ranging from bottles and food can linings to toys and water supply lines. When these plastics degrade, BPA is released into the environment and routinely ingested.

New research, however, from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine suggests it is the metabolic changes that take place once BPA is broken down inside the body that pose the greater health threat.

More than 90 percent of all Americans are believed to carry varying levels of BPA exposure.
In recent years, numerous studies have reported alarming associations between BPA exposure and myriad adverse health and development effects, from cancer and neurological disorders to physiological defects and, perhaps, a cause of childhood obesity.

Of particular concern is that BPA exposure is correlated with disruption of estrogen signaling. The chemical's molecular structure is similar to that of estradiol, one of the human body's three main estrogens, suggesting that BPA binds to estrogen receptors. The estrogen receptor is designed to grab and hold estradiol and related estrogens. Disparate chemicals, however, can share some structures found in estrogens, enabling them to bind to the estrogen receptor. When that happens, problems can occur.

Home 3-D printing is getting affordable

Personal 3-D printers are getting more powerful and more advanced every year. The latest models, on display last weekend at New York's annual Maker Faire, can crank out everything from model Eiffel Towers to wearable high-heeled shoes.

Swarms of hobbyists, parents and kids descended upon the event's 3-D printing village to test out the latest innovations, including the Form 1 -- a printer aimed at professionals that creates high-resolution objects using a method called stereolithography.

The process involves a built-in laser that draws on the surface of a liquid plastic resin. It's typically expensive, but a group of engineers and designers at MIT recently pioneered a cheaper way.

12-year-old Brit girl has IQ higher than Einstein

London: With an IQ of 162, a 12-year-old schoolgirl in UK has been rated brainier than even Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.

Olivia Manning, from Liverpool, has been accepted into Mensa, the largest and oldest high IQ society in the world after she got a whopping score of 162 in an Intelligence test.

Her score is not only two points better than German genius Einstein and physicist Hawking, it puts her in the top one per cent of intelligent people in the world, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

Being honoured with entry into Mensa means she will join a network of brains from across the globe.

As a confirmed genius, Olivia is now getting celebrity status at her school - the North Liverpool Academy in Everton.

How order arises from the random motion of particles in the cosmos

One of the unsolved mysteries of contemporary science is how highly organized structures can emerge from the random motion of particles. This applies to many situations ranging from astrophysical objects that extend over millions of light years to the birth of life on Earth.

The surprising discovery of self-organized electromagnetic fields in counter-streaming ionized gases (also known as plasmas) will give scientists a new way to explore how order emerges from chaos in the cosmos. This breakthrough finding was published online in the journal, Nature Physics on Sept. 30.

"We've created a model for exploring how electromagnetic fields help organize ionized gas or plasma in astrophysical settings, such as in the plasma flows that emerge from young stars," said lead author Nathan Kugland, a postdoctoral researcher in the High Energy Density Science Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). "These fields help shape the flows, and likely play a supporting role alongside gravity in the formation of solar systems, which can eventually lead to the creation of planets like the Earth."

"This observation was completely unexpected, since the plasmas move so quickly that they should freely stream past each other," explained Hye-Sook Park, team leader and staff physicist at LLNL. Park added that "laser-driven plasma experiments can study the microphysics of plasma interaction and structure formation under controlled conditions."

October 4, 2012

People with schizophrenia more likely to die of heart attack

The risk of death resulting from heart attack is higher in people with schizophrenia than in the general public, according to scientists at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES).

On average, people with schizophrenia have a lifespan 20 years shorter than the general population. This is partly due to factors such as smoking, increased rates of diabetes, and metabolic problems brought on by the use of some antipsychotic medications. These factors often worsen once a cardiac condition arises because people with schizophrenia are less likely to make the necessary lifestyle changes, such as diet and exercise, to offset the problem.

This study, published online in Schizophrenia Research, examined mortality and access to cardiac care after heart attacks (acute myocardial infarction) in those with schizophrenia.

Ripping a hole in space and time

In an unassuming laboratory at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, they are ripping a hole in the fabric of space and time.

Not too far away, they are working with information that can mean two things at once.

They are two separate studies, but what they have in common is the interaction of light and matter.

Together they've won 3m Euros (£2.3m) in research funding. The money has come from the EU's European Research Council as part of a programme to encourage creativity in research.

Dr Daniele Faccio is working on a laser which emits pulses 100 times a second. The power of each pulse is measured in trillions of watts. He prefers to think of it as 10,000 times the power of a nuclear power plant.

He is using it to create an analogue black hole.

Anthropologist finds evidence of hominin meat eating 1.5 million years ago: Eating meat may have 'made us human'

A skull fragment unearthed by anthropologists in Tanzania shows that our ancient ancestors were eating meat at least 1.5 million years ago, shedding new light into the evolution of human physiology and brain development.

"Meat eating has always been considered one of the things that made us human, with the protein contributing to the growth of our brains," said Charles Musiba, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver, who helped make the discovery. "Our work shows that 1.5 million years ago we were not opportunistic meat eaters, we were actively hunting and eating meat."

The study was published October 3 in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE.

The two-inch skull fragment was found at the famed Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, a site that for decades has yielded numerous clues into the evolution of modern humans and is sometimes called `the cradle of mankind.'

October 3, 2012

A complete solution for oil-spill cleanup can hold 40 times its volume in oil

Scientists are describing what may be a "complete solution" to cleaning up oil spills -- a superabsorbent material that sops up 40 times its own weight in oil and then can be shipped to an oil refinery and processed to recover the oil.

Their article on the material appears in ACS' journal Energy & Fuels.

T. C. Mike Chung and Xuepei Yuan point out that current methods for coping with oil spills like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster are low-tech, decades-old and have many disadvantages. Corncobs, straw and other absorbents, for instance, can hold only about 5 times their own weight and pick up water, as well as oil. Those materials then become industrial waste that must be disposed of in special landfills or burned.

Their solution is a polymer material that transforms an oil spill into a soft, solid oil-containing gel. One pound of the material can recover about 5 gallons of crude oil. The gel is strong enough to be collected and transported. Then, it can be converted to a liquid and refined like regular crude oil. That oil would be worth $15 when crude oil sells for $100 a barrel. "Overall, this cost-effective new polyolefin oil-SAP technology shall dramatically reduce the environmental impacts from oil spills and help recover one of our most precious natural resources," the authors said.

Black mamba venom is 'better painkiller' than morphine

A painkiller as powerful as morphine, but without most of the side-effects, has been found in the deadly venom of the black mamba, say French scientists.

The predator, which uses neurotoxins to paralyse and kill small animals, is one of the fastest and most dangerous snakes in Africa.

However, tests on mice, reported in the journal Nature, showed its venom also contained a potent painkiller.

They admit to being completely baffled about why the mamba would produce it.

The researchers looked at venom from 50 species before they found the black mamba's pain-killing proteins - called mambalgins.

October 2, 2012

Superman-strength bacteria produce 24-karat gold

At a time when the value of gold has reached an all-time high, Michigan State University researchers have discovered a bacterium's ability to withstand incredible amounts of toxicity is key to creating 24-karat gold.

"Microbial alchemy is what we're doing -- transforming gold from something that has no value into a solid, precious metal that's valuable," said Kazem Kashefi, assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics.

He and Adam Brown, associate professor of electronic art and intermedia, found the metal-tolerant bacteria Cupriavidus metallidurans can grow on massive concentrations of gold chloride -- or liquid gold, a toxic chemical compound found in nature.

In fact, the bacteria are at least 25 times stronger than previously reported among scientists, the researchers determined in their art installation, "The Great Work of the Metal Lover," which uses a combination of biotechnology, art and alchemy to turn liquid gold into 24-karat gold. The artwork contains a portable laboratory made of 24-karat gold-plated hardware, a glass bioreactor and the bacteria, a combination that produces gold in front of an audience.

'Superweeds' linked to rising herbicide use in GM crops, study finds

A study published this week by Washington State University research professor Charles Benbrook finds that the use of herbicides in the production of three genetically modified herbicide-tolerant crops -- cotton, soybeans and corn -- has actually increased.

This counterintuitive finding is based on an exhaustive analysis of publicly available data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agriculture Statistics Service. Benbrook's analysis is the first peer-reviewed, published estimate of the impacts of genetically engineered (GE) herbicide-resistant (HT) crops on pesticide use.

In the study, which appeared in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Environmental Sciences Europe, Benbrook writes that the emergence and spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds is strongly correlated with the upward trajectory in herbicide use. Marketed as Roundup and other trade names, glyphosate is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide used to kill weeds. Approximately 95 percent of soybean and cotton acres, and more than 85 percent of corn, are planted to varieties genetically modified to be herbicide resistant.

"Resistant weeds have become a major problem for many farmers reliant on GE crops, and they are now driving up the volume of herbicide needed each year by about 25 percent," Benbrook said.

Irreversible warming will cause sea levels to rise for thousands of years to come, new research shows

Greenhouse gas emissions up to now have triggered an irreversible warming of Earth that will cause sea levels to rise for thousands of years to come, new research has shown.

The results come from a study, published today (Oct. 2) in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, which sought to model sea-level changes over millennial timescales, taking into account all of Earth's land ice and the warming of the oceans -- something which has not been done before.

The research showed that we have already committed ourselves to a sea-level rise of 1.1 metres by the year 3000 as a result of our greenhouse gas emissions up to now. This irreversible damage could be worse, depending on the route we take to mitigating our emissions.

If we were to follow the high A2 emissions scenario adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a sea-level rise of 6.8 metres could be expected in the next thousand years. The two other IPCC scenarios analysed by the researchers, the B1 and A1B scenarios, yielded sea-level rises of 2.1 and 4.1 metres respectively.

Quantum physics: First images of Landau levels revealed

Physicists have directly imaged Landau Levels -- the quantum levels that determine electron behaviour in a strong magnetic field -- for the first time since they were theoretically conceived of by Nobel prize winner Lev Landau in 1930.

Using scanning tunnelling spectroscopy -- a spatially resolved probe that interacts directly with the electrons -- scientists at institutions including the University of Warwick and Tohoku University have revealed the internal ring-like structure of these Landau Levels at the surface of a semiconductor.

The experimental challenge in the work was to have sufficient spatial resolution in order to overcome the intrinsic disorder in the material which usually only allows the observation of smeared out "drift" states.

The images clearly show that Landau was right when he predicted that, in a clean system, the electrons would take on the form of concentric rings, the number of which increase according to their energy level.

This simple counting behaviour forms the basis of the so-called quantum Hall effect.

Many Low IQs Are Just Bad Luck

Intellectual disability affects 1 to 3 percent of children worldwide, half of whom are born to parents of normal intelligence. Researchers have discovered that most of these cases of "sporadic intellectual disability" result from new, random mutations arising spontaneously in the children's genes, not from faulty recessive genes inherited from their parents.

The researchers say their finding is one of the first steps in understanding the underlying causes of this condition (also known as mental retardation), which is marked by having an IQ below 70, and is — perhaps surprisingly — the costliest of all health problems. Understanding the cause may eventually lead to new therapies, they said.

Everyone is born with several de novo mutations, or accidental changes in DNA (such as the deletion or duplication of a base pair) not found in one's parents' DNA. Most of the time, these mutations occur in non-crucial parts of DNA and thus cause minimal harm, but sometimes the mutations can have drastic consequences, such as by impairing the function of a gene that influences cognitive development. The new study finds that this random bad luck accounts for the majority of cases of sporadic intellectual disability.

October 1, 2012

Chaos theory and a little physics predict the outcome at the roulette table

At first glance, a roulette table looks like a jumble of numbers and a randomly hopping little white ball. But with a better understanding of physics and some general knowledge of the starting conditions, it may be possible to shift the odds of winning a little in your favor. According to new research published in the American Institute of Physics' journal Chaos, by knowing some of the starting conditions -- such as the speed of the spin and the rotation of the ball -- this game of chance starts to look a little less random.

Under normal conditions, according to the researchers, the anticipated return on a random roulette bet is -2.7 percent. By applying their calculations to a casino-grade roulette wheel and using a simple clicker device, the researchers were able to achieve an average return of 18 percent, well above what would be expected from a random bet.

With more complete information, such as monitoring by an overhead camera, the researchers were able to improve their accuracy even further. This highly intrusive scheme, however, could not be deployed under normal gambling conditions. The researchers also observed that even a slight tilt in the wheel would produce a very pronounced bias, which could be exploited to substantially improve the accuracy of their predictions.

How sexual power can be disempowering

The commonly held belief that men should dominate sexually can disempower both women and men, according to a new study.

Gender roles and norms play a key role in sexual behavior between men and women. It is often assumed that men should dominate women sexually. This assumption may lead to loss of both power and the ability to control sexual behavior among women and men, as well as lead to increased sexual risk-taking, such as not using a female condom. The new study, by Dr. Lisa Rosenthal from Yale University in the US, and her colleagues, is published online in Springer's journal Sex Roles.

Social dominance orientation is a measure of people's level of support for social power inequalities and hierarchy. The belief is linked to greater hostile sexism, more negative attitudes towards women's rights, a greater tolerance of sexual harassment and a greater preference for traditional gender roles. Rosenthal and team examined whether the extent to which both women and men endorse social dominance orientation explains gender dominance and dynamics in heterosexual relationships.

Valium and the New Normal

Taking a pill to feel normal, even a pill sanctioned by the medical profession, led to a strange situation: it made people wonder what “normal” really was. What does it mean when people feel more like themselves with the drug than without it? Does the notion of “feeling like themselves” lose its meaning if they need a drug to get them there?

At the same time that Valium became famous for being in everyone’s medicine chest (or in every department store shopper’s purse), it also became famous for ruining lives. Elizabeth Taylor said she was addicted to Valium plus whiskey, Jack Daniel’s in particular. Tammy Faye Bakker said she was addicted to Valium plus nasal spray. Elvis Presley’s personal poison was Valium mixed with an assortment of other prescriptions. And Karen Ann Quinlan, the young woman languishing in a chronic vegetative state while her parents fought all the way to the New Jersey Supreme Court for the right to remove her from life support, originally lapsed into a coma in 1975 from a combination of Valium and gin.

Nearly 50 years after Valium was introduced and aggressively marketed, we’ve learned its lessons well. My generation of aging baby boomers does its brain styling, by and large, with antidepressants: Prozac, Wellbutrin, Celexa, Paxil, Zoloft. And for my daughters’ generation, the millennials, the pills of choice tend to be Ritalin and Adderall, for mental focus.

Lack of sleep leads to insulin resistance in teens

A new study suggests that increasing the amount of sleep that teenagers get could improve their insulin resistance and prevent the future onset of diabetes.

"High levels of insulin resistance can lead to the development of diabetes," said lead author Karen Matthews, PhD, of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychiatry. "We found that if teens that normally get six hours of sleep per night get one extra hour of sleep, they would improve insulin resistance by 9 percent."

The study, appearing in the October issue of the journal Sleep, tracked the sleep duration and insulin resistance levels of 245 healthy high school students. Participants provided a fasting blood draw, and they kept a sleep log and wore a wrist actigraph for one week during the school year. Sleep duration based on actigraphy averaged 6.4 hours over the week, with school days significantly lower than weekends.

Enslaved worker ants fight back through acts of sabotage

It would appear that ants that are kept as slaves by more powerful species aren't as helpless as they might appear. New research from Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany shows that enslaved ants conduct their own form of civil disobedience, by neglecting and killing the offspring of their oppressors. And by doing so, the ants may be preventing their comrades outside the nest from being enslaved themselves.

This discovery was made by ant researcher Susanne Foitzik who started to observe this behavior back in 2009. But what she has since discovered is that this is not an isolated trick limited to one species; over the course of her studies, Foitzik has observed at least three different ant populations in which these acts of rebellion occur. It would appear, therefore, that it may be a fairly common way for enslaved ants to fight back.

Ants such as Temnothorax longispinosus become enslaved when workers from the slave-making ant colony, Protomognathus americanus, attack their nests. The parasitic master ants kill the adults of the subjugated population, and steal their offspring. Once back at their nest, the master ants force the new generation to feed and clean their larvae, thus compelling them to raise the offspring of their oppressors (what's called "brood parasitism").

Fish getting smaller as the oceans warm

Changes in ocean and climate systems could lead to smaller fish, according to a new study led by fisheries scientists at the University of British Columbia.

The study, published September 30 in the journal Nature Climate Change, provides the first-ever global projection of the potential reduction in the maximum size of fish in a warmer and less-oxygenated ocean.

The researchers used computer modeling to study more than 600 species of fish from oceans around the world and found that the maximum body weight they can reach could decline by 14-20 per cent between years 2000 and 2050, with the tropics being one of the most impacted regions.

"We were surprised to see such a large decrease in fish size," says the study's lead author William Cheung, an assistant professor at the UBC Fisheries Centre. "Marine fish are generally known to respond to climate change through changing distribution and seasonality. But the unexpectedly big effect that climate change could have on body size suggests that we may be missing a big piece of the puzzle of understanding climate change effects in the ocean."

Should aspirin be used to help prevent cancer?

Aspirin, the everyday drug taken by countless people around the world to ward off pain and reduce their risk of developing heart disease, may have a new trick up its sleeve --preventing cancer.

A growing body of evidence suggests that taking aspirin may reduce an individual's chances of developing colorectal cancer and perhaps other malignancies, but whether that evidence is strong enough to outweigh the risks of prescribing it to millions of healthy people is the subject of debate.

At the ESMO 2012 Congress in Vienna, both sides of that debate are being aired in front of an audience of experts in one of the meeting's popular Controversy sessions.

Arguing in favor of the question -- "Is aspirin (NSAID) ready for chemoprevention of colorectal adenoma/cancer?" -- is Prof Robert Benamouzig from the Department of Gastroenterology, Avicenne Hospital, Bobigny, France.

"The efficacy of aspirin in preventing colorectal cancer has been made obvious by more than twenty years of research," said Prof Benamouzig.

HIV could be turning salmonella nastier

A nastier kind of salmonella infection has emerged alongside the HIV epidemic in Africa. The finding is the first evidence that HIV might be allowing new human pathogens to evolve in immunosuppressed people.

Most people who get salmonella contract it from eating contaminated meat, leading to an unpleasant but brief gut upset. But in Africa, the bacteria escapes into the blood of people with suppressed immune systems, causing a fever called invasive, non-typhoidal salmonella (iNTS) that can kill in up to 45 per cent of cases. The main victims used to be children who have immune deficiency as a result of malnutrition or malaria, but iNTS is also a classic complication of HIV.

Chinyere Okoro of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, and colleagues fully sequenced the DNA of iNTS samples from Africa, then used that to analyse the family trees of the bacteria sampled across the continent. The team found they nearly all clustered in one of two closely related lineages.