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.

Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's a bit more complicated.

Intelligent parents often have intelligent offspring. This is a clear trend that many people are aware of. However there is much debate as to how much of this intelligence is conferred by genetics and how much is a result of upbringing and environment - most likely, it is a complicated balance of the two. Nevertheless research published this April has now identified certain genetic factors that appear to convey a higher level of intelligence.

Previous studies, looking at identical twins and children adopted into families have shown that approximately half of all intelligence is derived from genetic factors. Neurophysiological research has also shown that key differences in brain structure and function leads to differences in levels of intelligence.

slice of the brain of a 56 year old patient (male) taken with positron emission tomography (PET) ©Wikicommons; Image Credit: Jens Langner

In this study, 3511 unrelated and healthy adults were assessed for their levels of intelligence (through reasoning tests, educational level and general IQ-type tests). They were also given full genetic screening that looked at upwards of 500, 000 SNPs (common DNA mutations).

After sifting through the data, the researchers found that 40% of the variation seen in crystallized-type intelligence and 51% of the variation in fluid-type intelligence was accounted for though the SNPs - the rest of the variation most likely came through still unknown/unidentified variations in lifestyle and upbringing. Factor such as diet, obesity, smoking and drug abuse are all thought to impact on intelligence.

One key mutation was seen in the gene coding for production of a protein with the rather catchy name of FNBP1L. FNBP1L is known to influence cell signalling and movement. It is produced in large quantities in growing neurons in the brain. Certain specific mutations in this gene have been linked with significant increase in fluid intelligence.

The researchers that were performing the study found that they were able to predict the comparative intelligence of a random subject with an 8-11% (fluid vs crystallized) margin of error based around knowledge of the subject's genome and certain socioeconomic factors . Whilst this may not seem too accurate, it is in fact a huge leap forward in our understanding of the heritable traits of intelligence.

Some definitions

Fluid intelligence is the abiltiy to think logically and solve problems. It is independent of acquired knowledge.

Crystallized intelligence is the ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience. It is often increased with age

SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphisms) are single changes in one chromosome compared to its pair.

Read the original paper here

Published in The Yorker January 10th, 2013

Morgellon's, Messiahs and Mass Hysteria.

Over the course of the last 14 months, 15 people (mostly teen-aged girls) in the town of LeRoy in New York State developed Tourette's-like twitches and vocalizations. After an exhaustive series of diagnosis, it was concluded that these occurrences were most likely the result of conversion disorder.

Conversion disorder, formally known as hysteria, is a psychiatric disorder that causes sufferers to display neurological-like symptoms of twitching, fits and spams

An example of Jerusalem syndrome ©Wikimedia Commons; Image Credit: Ja

This is looked into in the Channel 4 documentary "The Town That Caught Tourette's". Many of the girls felt let down by the diagnosis, thinking "this can't all be in my head" and sort out other, even less probable answers.

There are many cases throughout history and the modern world of similar occurrences and there are many more diseases and disorders that we are yet to understand. Here I am going to have a look at some of the odder cases:

Morgellon's Disease

First reported in the 17th century by the physician Thomas Browne, Morgellon's exhibits as aches, faitigue, skin lesion and the sensation that insects or fungal roots are growing beneath the skin. Fibers are "seen" to be growing beneath the skin surface.

The disease has shown a sudden boom, thought to be due to the internet - a meme sickness as it were. However, in recent months, researchers and doctors have begun to report strange findings within the skin of sufferers, possible markers of an actual fungal infection. Cases have also now begun to be reported in infant children who are not normally susceptible to psychosomatic disease.

Whether or not Morgellon's is an actual disease or a "delusional parasitosis" - a case of the brain becoming convinced of an infection - is still up in the air.

Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

Also known as the less catchy Todd's Syndrome, this is a disorder that affects the mind's concept of perception. The visual cortex stops being able to process scale, thus larger things seem small and vice versa. Sufferers report feeling taller than a tree or too small to reach up and sit on a chair.

Normally temporary (an episode can last anywhere from one minute to a whole day), and presenting mostly in migraine sufferers and young children, this syndrome could give us interesting insights into how the brain deals with self-perception and scale.

"Strawberries With Sugar virus"

Back in 2006, in an episode of the popular Portuguese teen show "Strawberries With Sugar", the characters and their school were struck by a life threatening virus. Shortly after, over 300 pupils at 14 separate schools came down with dizziness, rashes and shortness of breath, all symptoms of the fictional disease.

Many of the schools were forced to temporarily shut down and, coincidentally, reschedule some state exams that were meant to be occurring.

After much investigation, the Portuguese National Institute for Medical Emergency concluded that the cases were simply doe to mass hysteria.

Jerusalem Syndrome

An odd phenomenon has been seen in tourists visiting the city of Jerusalem; people, normally middle-aged men, who have lived their lives otherwise perfectly normally spend time in the city and suddenly begin to dress in old bed sheets and declare that they are John the Baptist.

That is a vast over simplification, but Jerusalem Syndrome is a well-studied occurrence with vast numbers of tourists every year suffering from religious psychosis and delusions that evaporate as soon as they are removed from the city.

The syndrome even got a mention in The Simpsons; in The Greatest Story Ever D'ohed, the family visit Jerusalem and Homer becomes convinced that he is the Messiah.

Dancing Plague of 1518

An oldie but a goodie. the Dancing Plague began in Strasbourg as a woman named Frau Troffea began to dance in the street. She didn't stop moving until she died of exhaustion and dehydration four days later. By that point, 30 or so people had joined her and by a month later over 400 dancers were out in the street. Many of the afflicted died from heart failure or strokes.

Records documenting the dancing deaths make it very clear that this was not twitching, or convulsing, but "although they were entranced, their arms and legs were moving as if they were purposefully dancing".

Over the last 490 years, many explanations have been offered. Everything from divine inspiration to ergot poisoning (think the organic version of LSD) has been blamed.

Most likely though, this is another case of mass hysteria and stress-induced psychosis. These people had been living in famine conditions for at least 7 months and in an area riddled with disease and horrific living conditions, it is possible that something just snapped in the population as a whole.

Published in The Yorker November 17th, 2012