Science & TechnologyS


Info

Go with your gut: How bacteria may affect mental health

 Gut Bacteria
© DreamstimeStudies in mice suggest that gut bacteria can influence anxiety and other mental states.
New York - The oodles of microbes living in the gut may affect brain function, recent studies suggest.

The human body is home to about 100 trillion bacteria - that means there are about 10 times as many bacterial cells as human cells in your body. Increasing evidence shows these microbes - collectively known as the microbiome - play a role in health, including mental health.

Studies in mice suggest that microbes living in the digestive tract are linked to depression and anxiety.

"There's a strong relationship between gastroenterology and psychiatric conditions," said gastroenterologist Dr. Stephen Collins of McMaster University in Canada, at a symposium here at the New York Academy of Sciences.

Many people with inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS) have depression or anxiety, Collins said. His research team has found several lines of evidence that intestinal microbes influence the brain.

Wolf

Why dogs have feelings too

A man's best friend really does share his master's feelings.

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© GETTYFeeling blue: Dogs have emotions just like us
For the first time scientists have established that dogs have the ability to experience positive emotions, such as love and attachment.

The findings mean we may have to rethink the idea of pets as "property".

Dogs could have a level of emotional response comparable to that of a child, the results suggest.

Professor Gregory Berns, who revealed his findings in a New York Times article, carried out scans on his own dog's brain to achieve the results.

The professor, from Emory University, Atlanta, had to give his pet terrier Callie the scans without anaesthetic to keep her still.

So with the help of his friend, dog trainer Mark Spivak, he taught her to go into an MRI scanner he built in his living room, place her head in a custom-fitted chin rest then hold still for up to 30 seconds.After months of trial and error, he built up a series of MRI scans.

2 + 2 = 4

NIH shutdown effects multiply

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© Rhoda Baer/National Eye InstituteMost NIH scientists have been ordered to stay home until the US government reopens.
Businesses and academic researchers among those affected by ongoing US government shutdown.

Tuesday 1 October should have been an exciting day for David Johnson. The biotech chief executive planned to withdraw some of the cash from a US$1.2-million small business grant that his firm, GigaGen in San Francisco, California, had been awarded just days before by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

But Johnson was not able to access the money, nor may he be able to until the deeply divided US Congress agrees on a plan to fund government operations for the fiscal year that began on 1 October. In the meantime, the US government has shut down - a dramatic development that is beginning to hamper and halt the work of academic and private-sector researchers, as well as scientists employed by federal agencies.

"The knock-on effects - undermining confidence in public funding of research and ceding scientific priority to other nations - are hugely deleterious," says Ian Holmes, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

People

Unexpected genomic change through 400 years of French-Canadian history

The unique genomic signature could serve as a research model for founding events.

This news release is available in French.

Researchers at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center and University of Montreal have discovered that the genomic signature inherited by today's 6 million French Canadians from the first 8,500 French settlers who colonized New France some 400 years ago has gone through an unparalleled change in human history, in a remarkably short timescale. This unique signature could serve as an ideal model to study the effect of demographic processes on human genetic diversity, including the identification of possibly damaging mutations associated with population-specific diseases.

Until now, changes in the relative proportion of rare mutations, that could be both detrimental and adaptive, had only been shown over relatively long timescales, by comparing African and European populations. According to Dr. Alan Hodgkinson, the co-first author of an article published online in PLOS Genetics recently and a postdoctoral fellow, "through this first in-depth genomic analysis of more than a hundred French Canadians, we have been surprised to find that in less than 20 generations, the distribution and relative proportion of rare, potentially damaging variants have changed more than we anticipated."

Info

Three-parent embryos immoral and technique to make them is untested, unsafe

mtDNA
© LifeNews
In the last year there has been a push in both the United Kingdom and the United States for permission to create children with three genetic parents. This technique, often called mitochondrial replacement (MR), is presented as a simple switching out the mitochondria in the eggs of women with mitochondrial disease. We inherit all of our mitochondria from our mother, so a woman with mitochondrial disease cannot help but pass that onto her offspring.

In reality, the technique is far from simple. The nucleus of a donor egg is removed and replaced with the nucleus of the woman with mitochrondrial disease. This creates a genetically-engineered egg where the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in the cytoplasm of the egg is from the donor and the nuclear DNA, the chromosomes we all learned about in biology, is from the woman with the mitochondrial disease.

The embryos created with IVF using these genetically-engineered eggs have the nuclear DNA of a woman and a man, like all other embryos, but would also have the mitochondrial DNA of the woman who donated the egg. These children would have the genetic material from three individuals.

In addition, these genetically-engineered children, well at least the girls, could not help but pass this engineering onto their offspring. This is a modification that would affect generations.

Saturn

Cosmic tragedy: shutdown kills radio observatories

Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)
© Discovery.comAtacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)
As the U.S. government shutdown grinds through its fourth day, science projects are falling like flies as they get starved of funds. And now, one of the most symbolic of scientific institutions has become the latest casualty of the political ineptitude on Capitol Hill.

Today, as of 7pm Eastern Time, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (site offline) will shut down all of its North American facilities. This includes the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) in New Mexico, plus the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. Apart from a skeleton crew that will remain behind as security for the radio antennae, the vast majority of the NRAO's 475 employees will be laid off in an unpaid furlough.

Comet

Best of the Web: A dangerous game of 'cosmic roulette'? Mainstream media now talking about the dangers of asteroids and comets

The following script is from "Cosmic Roulette" which aired on Oct. 6, 2013. The correspondent is Anderson Cooper. Andy Court, producer.


For a long time, astronomers saw the asteroids and comets that come close to Earth as useless debris -- space rocks that blocked our view of distant galaxies. Not anymore. They're now viewed as scientifically important and potentially very dangerous if they were to collide with our planet. The odds of that happening on any given day are remote, but over millions of years scientists believe there have been lots of impacts, and few doubt there are more to come. A former astronaut told us it's like a game of "cosmic roulette," and one mankind cannot afford to lose.

Concern over our ability to detect these objects that come near the Earth grew after an incident in Russia this February, when an asteroid crashed into the atmosphere with many times the energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, narrowly missing a city of one million.

This is video of that asteroid in Russia, barreling toward Earth at 40,000 miles an hour. It exploded into pieces 19 miles above and 25 miles south of the city of Chelyabinsk. People thought it had missed them entirely, until minutes later, when the shock wave arrived. Shattering glass, crushing doors, and knocking some people right off their feet. More than a thousand were injured.

Comment: Ifs, buts and maybes in this game of cosmic roulette have periodically become dead certainties in the course of human history - the collapse of civilizations in the past coincided with Earth encountering larger swarms of cometary and asteroid debris... like the planet is encountering now.


Books

Corruption in Science: Who's afraid of peer review?

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© DAVID PLUNKERTA spoof paper concocted by Science reveals little or no scrutiny at many open-access journals.
On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from a lichen.

In fact, it should have been promptly rejected.Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.

I know because I wrote the paper. Ocorrafoo Cobange does not exist, nor does the Wassee Institute of Medicine. Over the past 10 months, I have submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals. More than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. Beyond that headline result, the data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing.

From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, open-access scientific journals have mushroomed into a global industry, driven by author publication fees rather than traditional subscriptions. Most of the players are murky. The identity and location of the journals' editors, as well as the financial workings of their publishers, are often purposefully obscured. But Science's investigation casts a powerful light. Internet Protocol (IP) address traces within the raw headers of e-mails sent by journal editors betray their locations. Invoices for publication fees reveal a network of bank accounts based mostly in the developing world. And the acceptances and rejections of the paper provide the first global snapshot of peer review across the open-access scientific enterprise.

One might have expected credible peer review at the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals. It describes itself as "a peer reviewed journal aiming to communicate high quality research articles, short communications, and reviews in the field of natural products with desired pharmacological activities." The editors and advisory board members are pharmaceutical science professors at universities around the world.

Arrow Down

Scientist wants to transplant a human head

Young Frankenstein
© Gruskoff/Venture Films

In Frankenstein, a mad scientist puts together a man by sewing together dead human parts. One of those parts is a head. It seems like a far-fetched notion, but Italian neuroscientist Dr. Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group believes that with new strides in technology, a human head could be transplanted from one body to another in the very near future.

To quote Young Frankenstein, are we "entering the realm of genius," or of madness? Head transplants are hardly a new concept, but the idea of it actually being possible has been up for debate. The main problem with the concept is that it is would be very difficult to connect a head to a different body's spinal cord. However, Canavero believes that with the recent creation of something called fusogens, the process is now possible. Fusogens, which are plastic membranes, were created to repair severed nerves. They allow nerve impulses to be transmitted to the donor nervous system.

It sounds crazy, but Canavero believes that a full head transplant could be possible within just a few years. Even crazier? He's already figured out how to do it. In 2008, he used electrical stimulation to wake up a patient who had been in a coma for two years. He bases his own theories on those of Robert White, a neurosurgeon who transplanted a monkey's head in the 1970's. The procedure would begin with two bodies: the donor, and the recipient. Both bodies would be chilled to a certain temperature. Two surgeons would cut their spinal cords at the same time. The donated head would be immediately put on the recipient's body and, using fusogens, be attached to the recipient's spinal cord.

Comet 2

New Comet: C/2013 S1 (Catalina)

Discovery Date: September 28, 2013

Magnitude: 19.0 mag

Discoverer: Catalina Sky Survey
C/2013 S1
© Aerith NetMagnitudes Graph
The orbital elements are published on M.P.E.C. 2013-T27.