Science Highlights of the Week - Part Four

The Genetic Sequence of Wheat

The draft genome of bread wheat (Triticum urartu) has been completed. By using this data published in Nature, it is hoped that new strains of wheat that are tougher and giver greater yields will be produced through genetic modifications.

This has brought the debate over the use of GM crops to the surface again, as there are still many who worry that the use of GM plants will lead to the breeding of superbugs or cause adverse reactions in those that consume them. However, as the human population rapidly increases, global food shortages are a genuine threat and any process that can speed up the already intensive selective breeding of foodstuff will likely be welcomed by future generations.

Learning Makes Your Head Hurt

As anyone who has done a 16 hour library stint knows, learning gives you a headache. However all that education may also be causing physical damage, What has now been seen in mice is that exposure to a new environment causes double-strand breaks in DNA in neurons (a single molecule of DNA is broken into two). This is then associated with the movement of histones (DNA packaging proteins) and the rearrangement of other proteins around the neuron.

In a healthy brain, this damaged is quickly repaired and the neuron restored, but in transgenic mice made to mimic a human brain suffering from Alzheimer's this damage is seen to be more severe and longer lasting as the standard repair mechanisms have been disrupted.

This is no excuse to skip on the workload though, as all studies so far have seen that increased brain activity through life, especially in later years, can lessen the risk of neural decline in old age.

Scientists Spend Time Watching Cats

Most cat owners will chat with their pets, I for one have just had a very interesting conversation about the nature of gender bias in the scientific community with my feline companion.

In this vein, two researchers from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo and the Department of Psychology, Keio University have looked into whether or not our furry friends actually recognise the voice of their beloved owners.

In short, the research showed that, unsurprisingly, they do recognise their owners voices but they mostly choose to ignore any calls whatsoever.

Science Highlights of the Week - Part The Third

Higgs Boson Confirmed?

In a press release from CERN on the 14th March, it has been announced that two and a half times more data has been collected from the Large Hadron Collider and analysed.

This new data points towards the particle in question being confirmed as the elusive Higgs boson. However more research is needed to truly be sure what kind of boson it is.

Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria On The Rise

In the last century, we have become ever more dependent on the use of antibiotic drugs. This is not particularly news to anyone who has been following various bacterial epidemic scares across the last few year and ideas to slow the development of resistance have been around almost as long as antibiotics themselves.

A recent report in the UK lead by Sally Davies has highlighted 17 key policies that should be followed to prevent the spread of such resistant pathogens and slow down the evolution of new, even more dangerous ones.

Sex Could Be Good For The Brain

In a study involving rats, researchers in Maryland have seen that sexual experience has a positive effect in increasing neurogenesis(growth of new brain cells) in adult rats.

This is due to the effect of the hormones released during what the paper euphemistically calls a "rewarding experience" on neuron growth and the function of the hippocampus - an area important in memory.

Unfortunately, improved mental function was only seen for some time after sexual experience, if behavioral testing was left too late, little or no improvement in cognitive task was actually seen. On the other hand, frequent sex and often could very well have a strong positive effect on your brain power, at least for a short while.

Congratulations Commander Hadfield

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has taken over the helm of the International Space Station (only the second leader not to be American or Russian).

Hadfield (here on Reddit...) has been part of a skeleton crew manning the station since 21st December, with cosmonaut Roman Romanenko and astronaut Thomas Marshburn. They will return to Earth on 13th May, a total of 144 days in orbit.

Science Highlights of the Week - The Sequel

What's in a name?

Apparently, quite a lot if you are a dolphin. Published in the latestProceedings of the Royal Society B, a study has shown that bottle-nosed dolphins are able to identify themselves and each other by "signature whistles".

The research was done at the University of St. Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit (collecting data in the more dolphin-friendly waters of Florida), and is the first evidence for animals other than humans using identifying names for each other.

The ability to call each other by name probably plays a key role in dolphin social structure. The ocean is a massive place and a dolphin whistle can travel up to 20km through the water. This allows family members and close friends to find each other across great distance and locate each other.

Captive dolphins (both bottle-nosed and other species) have also been seen to create new sounds to apply to objects that they have been recently introduced to, and to identify keepers.

It is the size that counts

In research published in Mammalian Biology , it has been shown that Female Hottentot Golden Moles select mates with larger penises, whereas the appearance of the female genitalia seems to have no impact on the males' choice of mates.

The night-before pill

A new technique to assemble biomimetic enzyme nanocomplexes has been used to create complexes of enzymes that have been used to reduce blood alcohol levels and liver damage in mice that have been given high levels of alcohol.

The technique allows enzymes to be positioned in such away to increase their activity in living systems, by mimicking the way that they are organised within living cells.

Mice treated with aspecially designed nanocomplex containing alcohol dehydrogenase enzymes as they were given alcohol showed a significantly greater reduction in blood alcohol content after three hours when compared to thier untreated counterparts.

However this is not yet any sort of practical anti-hangover treatment as the breakdown of alcohol in the body produces a toxic intermediate called acetaldehyde. There is not yet an enzyme nanocomplex produced to degrade this, so superefficient alcohol breakdown will just result in a different kind of poisoning.

Predicting Future Health during Pregnancy

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death in women in the UK. They account for a quarter of all deaths, three times more than breast cancer. Key to reducing cardiovascular disease risk and mortality is the early spotting of symptoms and signs that a woman is likely to suffer poor cardiovascular health in later life.

In the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), researchers looked at the health of some 13, 600 women during pregnancy in the early 1990s and followed their health and the health of their children across the following two decades.

The study looked into the association of pregnancy diabetes, hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, preterm delivery and size for gestational age with the calculated 10 year risk of cardiovascular disease – measured on the Framingham score (based upon a famous study of several thousand people across many decades, tracking health problems and identifying factors that increased risk, including cardiovascular disease with high blood pressure, high blood glucose levels and many other compounding factors).

A clear trend was seen - HDP (hypertensive disorders of pregnancy) and pregnancy diabetes are both associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease in the mother ten years down the line. Preeclampsia (when a pregnant woman suffers from extremely high blood pressure) was seen as the best predictor of future cardiovascular problems as it was seen to be associated with a wider range of risk factors after ten years.

Pregnancy is a time when a woman’s body is under an incredible amount of biological stress, so systems that may not be as strong as they are in some others can begin to show signs of failing. This makes pregnancy an important opportunity for early identification of women at increased risk of CVD later in life and will allow doctors and health professionals to give preventative advice for ideas such as small lifestyle changes and diet adjustments.

Are you at risk of cardiovascular disease later in life?

There are some factors that greatly increase your risk of suffering from CVD post-middleage. many of which you cannot control. Among these are:

• A strong family history - especally prevalent in some ethnic groups
• Being male
• Hair loss (eg, male pattern baldness)
• Early menopause in women
• Age (the older you are, the more likely you are to develop atherosclerosis

However there are also many things that you can do to reduce your cardiovascular disease risk, and improve your overall health.

Reducing your cardiovascular disease risk:

Being more physically active (walking to work, taking the stairs etc) has been shown to have a massive impact on reducing CVD risk. Keeping to a healthy weight is also very beneficial (that means neither too at nor too thin), if you are worried about your weight, you should speak to a GP.

Quitting smoking and reducing your drinking habits to around the recommeneded weekly allowance will bring about the greatest changes to your CVD and to your health in general.

Published The Yorker 1st March 2013

Science Highlights of the Week

Its a funny old thing, the world of science. It covers a vast area of knowledge and research, with new discoveries being published continuously, all across the world.

Obviously, it wouldn't be possible for any one person to keep up with all the novel discoveries. Instead they can read my list of Interesting Things and Ideas that have been in the headlines this week.

Disclaimer: Some Interesting Things and Ideas may be omitted from this list for reasons of brevity, simplicity and my lack of complete omniscience

©Wikicommons; Image Credit: Emichan

People prefer sex to story telling

Covered in Nature News here.

Researchers first thought that genetic drift could be predicted through the spread of fairy stories across cultures. The idea being that, when groups of people meet each other, they would socialise by sharing folk tales and then part. Later, when they meet again, they might marry (or, more likely, just produce some offspring) and new genetic material would be introduced into each culture.

Instead it seems that the processes for sharing cultural and genetic information are not parallel. It was found that the cultural variation was more pronounced than the genetic variation across the European cultures studied.

In short, people went for sex over conversation when it came to making new friends.

You can tell how stressed an elephant is from its poo

Researchers in Africa's Serengeti National Park have found that elephants living within the protected area of the park are less stressed than those that live in the in the less protected adjoining areas of Grumeti Game Reserve and Ikoma Open Area. The scientists found this by looking at hormone levels in the elephants' dung.

More elephants live inside the park area, even though there are no physical borders marking out the park boundaries. No male elephants were found outside of the protected park. The happiness of the elephants appears to be entwined with the levels of human activity where they are living, and they have learnt not to leave the protected areas to avoid large numbers of humans.

TV lowers your sperm count

In newly published research, The Harvard School of Public Health has announced that a man's sperm quality can be significantly lowered simply by watching 20 or more hours of TV a week.

The young men was all otherwise healthy and had considerably less impressive swimmers than their contemporaries who watched little to no telly. Men who took part in mild to vigorous physical activity for at least 15 hours every week had the healthiest sperm.

Even mild increases in physical activity (5-8 hours a week) had a generally positive impact on the fitness of the sperm.

Previous research into the effects of physical activity on sperm health had only looked into comparisons between professional athletes who dedicate their lives to sport and the average man who doesn't have the time to dedicate to achieving that level of fitness.

This new data is likely to have a significant importance for couples who are struggling to conceive, as it seems that even modest lifestyle changes will have a positive impact on their chances.

We were all cute once

Maureen O'Leary at the University in New York State, has, through incredibly extensive mapping of evolutionary trees, identified the lsat common ancestor of all placental mammals.

Through genetic analysis, our fluffy, bug-eating grandma has been identified as living at the same time as the last of the dinosaurs - approximately 100 million years ago. However, currently no fossil records have been found of placental mammals predating the KPg Extinction.

Ancestral trees based around morphological characteristics can be compared to those based upon molecular characteristics, and often these two do not overlap. Trees based around morphological traits seem to suggest that placental mammals did not begin to diversify until after the dinosaurs had become extinct.

Published in The Yorker 11th February 2013

A flaw in the scale?

The Seventeen BMI calculator taken as a screenshot by recovering anorexic Shirley Wang before the  removal of the feature from the website.

Last November, a petition was sent to the teen magazine Seventeen with over 2,700 signatures requesting the removal of the hideously flawed BMI calulator from their website. The site proclaimed a BMI of 15 to be within the healthy range for an 18 year old girl - for sense of scale, that would mean a 5'6" young lady weighing in at less than 95 pounds.

The calculator has been removed, thankfully, but the problems brought up by the feature have highlighted a lot of problems in the scale we use for defining our physiques. Putting aside the fact that the "healthy BMI range" given here appears to be be pulled out of someones nether-regions, is BMI of any use to any one whatsoever?

The original BMI measurement system has been around for 150 years and is used nowadays to sort people into categories from underweight to morbidly obese dependent on the calculation: 

• weight (in kilos)/(height (in meters) squared)

This system is renowned for being wildly inaccurate, as it fails to take into account any sort of variations in gender or athletic build. Physicians will take into account factors such as age, blood pressure and body fat percentage when accessing someone's health, yet the average person at home on the sofa will simply enter their height and weight into any one of hundreds of online calculators.

Using this calculation, short people are frequently calculated as being "thinner" than they are, whilst tall people come out as "fatter". Large-breasted women often come out several point higher than they actually would be with "average" sized breasts, even if there is not an inch of fat on the rest of their bodies.

A more accurate calculator has recently be devised by Nick Trefethen, a Professor of Numerical Analysis at Oxford University:

• 1.3 x weight / height to the power of 2.5

Whilst this is all very reassuring to those at either end of the scale, the greatest flaws with BMI are at a societal level.

As a girl, I remember weighing myself and calculating my BMI on almost a weekly basis. I wanted to compare myself to my friends who were all much taller and thinner (and generally more glamorous and elegant) than I, I wanted my BMI to match theirs, thinking it would make me just a smaller version of them. I still now feel the need to calculate my BMI every time I weigh myself, aiming for that all elusive number.

The impact that this can have on any one person (young or old, male or female) is immense. In all likelihood  the result of trying 50 different ridiculous diets in early adulthood is just going to be the gain of an extra stone or three in the following years.

So why do we still use BMI? Probably because it is neat and simple. It allows us to put ourselves into boxes of "healthy" vs "unhealthy".

Yet the human body is a hugely complicated bit of machinery and every single one of them is different. Any approach to categorizing them is going to be flawed from the start.

Instead, there are other measurements and factors that one can use to judge their health if they so wish. These are much more subjective, they don't involve any neat equations and they require us to actually trust and understand our bodies.

It really revolves around how healthy you feel. Things like generally clear skin, strong teeth and thick hair tend to be noticed by the opposite (or same) sex very quickly when it come to finding prospective partners as they are good (if general) indicators of a healthy human being.

For women, a hip to waist ration of around 0.65-0.85 (a massive range, covering many body types) is well within the healthy body structure - a recent study has seen that men see a ratio of 0.7 as ideal as this is a sign of high fertility...

As for your general health, if you can comfortably walk a mile in 15-20 minutes without getting out of breath, if you can make it up three flights of stairs without needing a time out, if you eat a few green things (vegetable green, not gummy sweet green) a day, you are probably alright.

Small changes in lifestyle can have big changes in your health, trite but true. Take the stairs, not the lift; walk, don't take the bus; put down the takeaway and cook a proper meal. These will help out your body, and also your bank balance.

Every body is different, every body as an "ideal weight" that it will gravitate towards. The most important thing to remember is that no one knows your body like you. If you think you need to change in either direction, larger or smaller, DO see a doctor first. They will give you good advice and help you to feel the way you should feel.

Yuletide Thoughts

Virgin Birth


As anyone who has ever attended a Nativity play well knows, Mary became pregnant through immaculate conception, she was the virgin mother to Jesus.

Virgin births are not an uncommon phenomenon in mythology and "creative" historical stories (religious or secular), in fact figures as varied as Mithras, Buddha and Genghis Khan were all at one point reported as being carried by a maiden girl.

Hypothetically, is it possible for a human to experience virgin birth?

For Mary (XX) to have a son (XY) would be impossible. However if Mary was in fact XY but displaying a condition called "testicular feminisation" (in which the genitals develop female due to a mutation on the X chromosome leading to a resistance to testosterone), then she would at least have the correct chromosomes to pass on. This would then require the mutation that left her appearing female to reverse to allow Jesus to pass as male.
Alternatively Mary could have eaten her brother.

Not literally of course, but if she had fused in the womb with a male twin, if would have left her a genetic mosaic, carrying both the XX chromosomes to make her appearance female, and the XY chromosomes to pass on to her offspring.

The chances of either of these scientific possibilities coming to pass and actually leading to a pregnancy are so low that such an occurrence could probably be seen as miraculous.

Christmas vs Xmas


This is more a personal bugbear of mine.

Use of "Xmas" to replace "Christmas" annoys many people. But is this a recent phenomenon, a sign of text-speak over taking the word and the commercialisation of Christmas?

No, not really. In fact the first use of "Xmas" dates back to the eleventh century where monks illuminating manuscripts would use the Greek letter _Chi_ to symbolise Christ (Χριστός).

Worried about the secularisation are not new either. In 1647, Cromwell and the Puritan government effectively banned Christmas, considering it a "a popish festival with no biblical justification". The ban in England was lifted by Charles II in 1660, though in the New England and most of America (at the time inhabited by some pretty extreme Puritans) Christmas was not legalised until 1681. Even in 1776, (the Declaration of Independence), Christmas in America was still a time of fasting and piety.

Christmas Science


Moving on to more important matters, what handy science tricks can we put to use this festive season?

With chances of a white Christmas looking slim, artificial snow to decorate your home with is becoming more popular. You can make this yourself by taking the absorbent liner out of a nappy, ripping it up and adding a little water. A can of the stuff cost the better part of a tenner, whilst nappies are 12 for £5 (yes dear readers, I just looked that up for you).

Needle droppage and general wilting is a big problem with real Christmas trees. This can be solved by either buying a reusable plastic one (eurgh) or concocting a "tree saving" growth potion for your new house plant.

All you need for this is about five litres of water, 500ml of golden syrup (a food source for the tree), 4 teaspoons of chlorine bleach (disinfectant to prevent mold, fungi, and algae from growing) and 4 teaspoons of lemon juice (to acidify the hard water which helps the plant take up water and food). Stir it all together, add a copper penny (to act as a further fungicide and acidifier) and make sure you keep your tree stand topped up, especially in warm rooms.

**NB** Do not mix the lemon juice and bleach directly together, they may produce chlorine gas, add them into the large volume of water.