Culture

New research, led by biologists from the University of Bristol, has uncovered fresh findings about the most mobile eyes in the animal kingdom - the eyes of the mantis shrimp.

Mantis shrimp vision is extraordinary, both in terms of their colour vision and their ability to see the polarisation of light.

Not only this, but they have extremely mobile eyes that never seem to stop moving. While most animals keep eye movements to a minimum to avoid blur, mantis shrimp apparently go out of their way to move their eyes as much as possible.

Each eye is capable of independent rotation in all three degrees of rotational freedom; pitch (up-down), yaw (side-to-side) and roll (twisting about the eye-stalk).

The Bristol-led team of researchers based at the University's Ecology of Vision Laboratory, wanted to test the limits of this incredible mobility to discover at what point mantis shrimp have to steady their gaze. Their findings are published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Like other animals, mantis shrimp do make stabilising side-to-side movements that help keep their vision steady as they move through the world, but the team found that even while stabilising in the horizontal direction, they can't resist rolling their eyes.

This is completely counter-intuitive; the whole point in stabilising gaze is to keep the appearance of the world around them steady, but by rolling their eyes 'up' suddenly becomes 'sideways' and the world gets very complicated.

Amazingly, this has no effect on the mantis shrimp - no matter what position they've rolled their eyes to, or how quickly they're rolling, mantis shrimp can still reliably and accurately follow the motion of a pattern that is moving sideways.

Ilse Daly from Bristol's School of Biological Sciences and lead author of the study, said: "It would be like you tipping your head on its side, then back to normal and all angles in between all while trying to follow the motion of a target.

"Just to make things even more confusing, the left and right eyes can move completely independently of one another, such that one eye could be oriented horizontally, while the other could be twisted completely through 90 degrees to be on its side."

Following this unexpected discovery, the team tested to see how mantis shrimp would respond if the world started to roll around them.

In humans, such a stimulus would induce severe vertigo, as visitors to certain theme parks may have experienced with rides which challenge people to walk through a tunnel along a solid, fixed gangway while the walls of the tunnel rotate around them - which is nearly impossible to do without falling over.

Ilse Daly added: "We expected that, in response to the world around them apparently rolling, mantis shrimp should roll their eyes to follow their surroundings. They did not.

"The mantis shrimp visual system seems entirely immune from any negative effects of rolling their eyes. Indeed, it appears as though rolling has absolutely no effect on their perception of space at all: up is still up, even when their eyes have rolled completely sideways. This is unprecedented in the animal kingdom."

The next step is to confirm the existence of such a unique motion detection system and fully explore how it provides mantis shrimps with a clear view of the world regardless of how much or how quickly they're rolling their eyes.

However, a more fundamental question is why mantis shrimp need to roll their eyes in the first place, and this is what the team will seek to answer next

Researchers have found evidence that acupuncture could help people who experience dental anxiety.

Dental anxiety affects up to an estimated 30% of the adult population in countries world-wide. Patients can experience nausea, difficulty breathing and dizziness at the thought of going to the dentist, during an examination, and following treatment.

Reasons behind dental anxiety can be various, such as fear of pain, needles or anaesthetic side effects, as well as embarrassment or feeling a loss of control.

In a review of six trials with 800 patients, researchers used a points scale to measure anxiety and studies show that anxiety reduced by eight points when dental patients were given acupuncture as a treatment. This level of reduction is considered to be clinically relevant, which means that acupuncture could be a possibility for tackling dental anxiety.

Previous clinical trials have involved acupuncture for treatment on a range of conditions, including lower back pain, depression, and irritable bowel syndrome. There is, however, limited research detailing its impact on specific cases of anxiety.

More than 120 trials across England, China, Spain, Portugal and Germany were identified as having investigated the effects of acupuncture on patients with dental anxiety, and six trials were eligible for review, with two demonstrating high quality methods.

Professor of Acupuncture, Hugh MacPherson, at the University of York's Department of Health Sciences, said: "There is increasing scientific interest in the effectiveness of acupuncture either as a standalone treatment or as an accompanying treatment to more traditional medications.

"We have recently shown, for example, that acupuncture treatment can boost the effectiveness of standard medical care in chronic pain and depression.

"Chronic pain is often a symptom of a long-term condition, so to further our understanding of the various uses of acupuncture we wanted to see what it could achieve for conditions that occur suddenly, rapidly and as a reaction to particular experiences."

Studies that compared anxiety levels between patients that received acupuncture and those that did not, showed a significant difference in anxiety scores during dental treatment. A clinically relevant reduction in anxiety was found when acupuncture was compared with not receiving acupuncture.

No conclusions could be drawn, however, between patients that received acupuncture as an intervention and those that received placebo treatment, suggesting that larger scale controlled trials are needed to increase the robustness of the findings.

Professor MacPherson said: "These are interesting findings, but we need more trials that measure the impact of acupuncture on anxiety before going to the dentist, during treatment and after treatment.

"If acupuncture is to be integrated into dental practices, or for use in other cases of extreme anxiety, then there needs to be more high quality research that demonstrates that it can have a lasting impact on the patient. Early indications look positive, but there is still more work to be done."

The research is published in the European Journal of Integrative Medicine.

Among predictions of a second fracking boom in the US, the first evidence that chemicals found in ground water near fracking sites can impair the immune system will be published in Toxicological Sciences on May 1. The study, performed in mice, suggests that exposure to fracking chemicals during pregnancy may diminish female offspring's ability to fend off diseases, like multiple sclerosis.

Fracking, also called hydraulic fracturing or unconventional oil and gas extraction, involves pumping millions of gallons of chemical-laden water deep underground to fracture rock and release oil and gas. About 200 chemicals have been measured in waste water and surface or ground water in fracking-dense regions and several studies have reported higher rates of diseases, like acute lymphocytic leukemia and asthma attacks, among residents in these areas.

"Our study reveals that there are links between early life exposure to fracking-associated chemicals and damage to the immune system in mice," said Paige Lawrence, Ph.D., chair of Environmental Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center, who led the study. "This discovery opens up new avenues of research to identify, and someday prevent, possible adverse health effects in people living near fracking sites."

Of the 200 fracking chemicals found in ground water, 23 were recently linked to reproductive and developmental defects in mice. Susan Nagel, Ph.D., associate professor of Reproductive and Perinatal Research at the University of Missouri School of Medicine and a co-author of this study, classified the chemicals as endocrine disrupters, meaning they can interfere with hormones and derail hormone-controlled systems.

Because the immune system is greatly influenced by hormones, Lawrence tested the immune impact of those 23 fracking chemicals on mice. Lawrence's team added the chemicals to the drinking water of pregnant mice at levels similar to those found in ground water near fracking sites.

"Our goal is to figure out if these chemicals in our water impact human health," said Lawrence, "but we first need to know what specific aspects of health to look at, so this was a good place to start."

In Lawrence's study, mouse pups - particularly females - who were exposed to a mixture of 23 fracking chemicals in the womb had abnormal immune responses to several types of diseases later on, including an allergic disease and a type of flu. What was most striking: these mice were especially susceptible to a disease that mimics multiple sclerosis, developing symptoms significantly earlier than mice that were not exposed to the chemicals.

At the heart of these abnormal immune responses lies an intricate mosaic of immune cells, each playing specific and important roles defending against infections, or preventing allergies or damage caused by uncontrolled immune responses. Some of these cells jump into action to fight off invaders, while others tamp down an immune response once an infection is under control.

Proper immune function requires a delicate balance of all of these players - which fracking chemicals appear to disrupt. Lawrence and her colleagues believe the chemicals derail cellular pathways that control which immune cells are spurred to action.

The group will continue to investigate how fracking chemicals interact with the developing immune system in hopes of understanding what this could mean for human health. Their new discoveries will inform biomedical scientists, health care professionals, policy makers, and the public.

San Francisco State University researchers have discovered a new method for testing levels of a tiny but hugely important protein -- "AMPK" -- in human muscle cells. "AMPK is the gas gauge that tells each cell in your body if your fuel is too low. We call it the energy sensor of the cell," said Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Jimmy Bagley.

Muscles make up 30 to 40 percent of our bodies and are the largest users of sugar and fat for energy. But if people have too much stored fuel -- if they are obese or not exercising, for example -- AMPK is not activated and the body doesn't regulate blood sugar the way it should. Bagley and his colleagues at the Center for Sport Performance at CSU Fullerton are the first to test the new method on human muscle cells. Their innovative technique was just published in the Journal of Applied Physiology.

Using human muscle fiber samples provided by Stanford University and CSU Fullerton, researchers in Bagley's Muscle Physiology Laboratory manually isolate single muscle fibers, each about half the size of a human hair. With custom microscopes, tweezers and chemical solutions, they determine fiber type and prepare each cell for protein analysis. They then deliver the cells to CSU Fullerton, where the protein is analyzed using a new machine called Protein Simple. "We can tell what's happening with the AMPK protein in individual muscle cells with a high level of precision," said Bagley.

The new method allows researchers to isolate and examine muscle fibers in much greater detail than was possible before. "What people did in the past is take a muscle sample and grind it up -- homogenize it -- and then run an analysis on that big ground-up sample," said Bagley. "The problem with that is that fat cells, blood vessels, stem cells and other things get mixed in, meaning that there can be false positives or false negatives."

Until recently, diabetes researchers have focused on fat cells and cells in the pancreas and other organs. But muscles are the biggest sugar reservoir in the body, said Bagley. "We need to get diabetics' muscles to use more sugar, and activating AMPK is one of the steps that tells the muscle to do it." The kind of analysis his lab is performing could be used as part of a fitness and training program for pre-diabetics and others. Researchers could take muscle biopsies before and after a 12- to 16-week exercise regimen to see how the muscle fibers have adapted.

"We want to know at the cellular level -- is this muscle fiber able to use glucose better?" said Bagley. "It then gives us ideas about how to treat that. It can probably be used to see if certain pharmaceuticals could affect the AMPK protein, as well."

Bagley currently shares the Protein Simple device with CSU Fullerton, but he is seeking funding for one that can be housed in the Muscle Physiology Laboratory. In the meantime, he says, this new method of analyzing AMPK "supports the ground level of molecular muscle biology in the 21st century. Now we're going to keep stacking on top of it."

WASHINGTON, May 1, 2018 -- Normally, something blowing up in your face is bad. But in the event of a vehicle accident, and in conjunction with a seatbelt, one particular explosion could very well save your life. It's the chemical reaction that inflates your airbags. In this episode of Reactions, learn about the past and present of vehicle airbags and the lifesaving chemistry and physics that make them work: https://youtu.be/Y2sjYOGSV7E.

Over the last 25 years many scholars have questioned the existence of the kingdom of David and Solomon, which was supposed to have existed in the 10th century BCE. This was based to a large extent on the lack of evidence of royal construction at the heart of the region in which the kingdom supposedly existed. As a result, it was assumed that the rulers at the time were just local chiefs who ruled only over Jerusalem and its immediate surroundings.

Now researchers from Bar-Ilan University in Israel have uncovered new evidence that supports the existence of Israel's united monarchy and indicate that the Kingdom extended beyond Jerusalem's vicinity. The findings were recently published by Prof. Avraham Faust and Dr. Yair Sapir in the journal Radiocarbon.

Over the past decade Prof. Avi Faust, of the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University, excavated a large residence of the type, known as a "four-room house", which was destroyed in massive conflagration in the 8th century BCE, during one of the Assyrian campaigns. The residence is located at Tel 'Eton in the Shephelah (20 km. southeast of the city of Qiryat Gat). This large building had at least two stories and its ground floor extended over some 225 sq. m. Large, high quality ashlar stones were placed in the building's corners and entrances. The structure was built on the highest part of the mound, on top of deep foundations, using high quality building materials and according to a meticulous plan. Hundreds of vessels and additional finds were discovered within the conflagration. "Surprisingly, radiocarbon dates from within the floor make-up and from within a foundation deposit that was placed below the floor indicate that the building had already been erected in the 10th century BCE, between the late 11th century and the third quarter of the 10th century BCE. This date is in line with other finds related to the construction, like the foundation deposit itself," says Prof. Faust. Faust and Sapir say that construction of such a large residence on the top of the mound, visible from a great distance, along with the significant growth of the size of the city at the same time, was an important event in the history of Tel 'Eton.

But who initiated the change? The researchers say that the evidence hints at the identity of the builders. The mere fact that the residence was built as a classical four-room house, a style that was very dominant in Israelite sites and missing or rare at Canaanite and Philistine sites, seems to send a clear message regarding the identity of the builders - the emerging Israelite polity in the highlands.

Interestingly, however, the site was not destroyed during the changes, and new construction and development were apparently not a result of a conquest and the arrival of new population. Thus, while the transformations were inspired by the highland kingdom, the development was done in cooperation with the local population. This is also indicated by the combination of the highland, Israelite-inspired architectural style, along with the use of the Canaanite tradition of placing foundation deposits below the floors.

The finds are indicative of impressive public construction underway already in the 10th century BCE, and even on the use of ashlar stones in the region of Judah at this early stage. When the finds from Tel 'Eton are combined with those at other sites in the region, the process in which the highland polity took over the Shephelah, and gradually colonized it, can be reconstructed.

Faust and Sapir stress that "the association with David is not based on direct archaeological evidence, but solely on circumstantial grounds". The source of the changes at Tel 'Eton (i.e,. the erection of the four-room residency and the growth in size of the site) appears to be in the highlands, and since these changes took place at the time when David was supposed to have existed in the highland, the link is plausible." They add that "if someone thinks that there was no king by the name of David, we should find another name to call the highland king in whose time the region was incorporated into the highland kingdom".

Beyond the identification of social complexity in Judah already in the 10th century BCE, the study has broader implications for archaeology. "The finds from Tel 'Eton indicate that structures can exist for centuries, but the finds reflect their last period of usage. From their long lives - sometimes centuries - very little will be found, and even less will be reported," says Faust. One of the negative implications of this, he says, is that a series of destructive events following a long period of peace will lead to extensive information on the time of the destruction, but very little on the era that preceded it. "Archaeologists should therefore be careful when they conclude that the rarity of finds from these eras indicates that society was poor, and lacked social complexity."

UPTON, NY--Plants are among the most effective energy convertors on Earth. They capture solar energy and convert it to carbon-based compounds that are used for energy and also to build up essential plant components, including the cell walls that surround every single plant cell. In a new biochemical genetics study at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists reveal new details of the molecular machinery that helps channel carbon into a key cell-wall component.

Learning how plant cells control the construction of their exterior supports could help scientists devise new ways to either promote the storage of carbon in these structures or facilitate the conversion of carbon-based biomass into biofuels and other useful products.

The study, published in Nature Plants, reports how two proteins embedded on membranes within plant cells serve as a scaffold to organize three key enzymes that specifically channel carbon into the synthesis of a cell-wall polymer called lignin.

Lignin is essential to plants' ability to grow upright and represents a substantial carbon-storage component of plants. But because it surrounds the other cell-wall components--cellulose and hemicellulose--lignin protects these carbon-rich substances from the biochemical processes commonly used to convert them to fuels or other bio-products. Understanding the details of lignin synthesis, in particular, might offer clues about how to conquer this challenge.

The three enzymes establish the structural characteristics of biochemical building blocks known as monolignols, which link up to form lignin. Scientists previously thought that these enzymes were associated with one another and served as the anchor sites for organizing monolignol synthesis.

"We started this project to study the interactions of these three enzymes in detail," said Brookhaven biochemist and project leader Chang-Jun Liu. "We discovered that even though the three enzymes are located near one another on a membrane known as the endoplasmic reticulum, they don't interact directly. Instead, two separate proteins interact with all three enzymes."

The separate proteins are "membrane steroid binding proteins" (MSBPs) embedded in the endoplasmic reticulum--a cell's interior "highway" of membranes lined with the molecular machines that make proteins and transport those products within or out of cells.

"These membrane-bound proteins serve as a scaffold to organize and stabilize the three enzymes into a type of molecular machinery that controls the metabolic pathway channeling carbon specifically into building lignin precursors," Liu said.

Having the enzymes involved in sequential steps of a metabolic pathway organized spatially close to each other can improve the efficiency of that pathway, Liu noted. But the details of how the monolignol biosynthesis enzymes are organized were elusive prior to this study.

Details of the study

"We started by looking for evidence of direct interactions among monolignol biosynthesis enzymes," Liu said. They used biochemical techniques in yeast cell cultures, which are often used as a model system for studying protein-protein interactions. But upon finding no interactions--which was a surprise--they repeated the studies in plant cell cultures.

In these studies, the scientists used fluorescent-labeling and imaging techniques to locate the proteins within plant cells. This time their findings confirmed that all three enzymes were located near one another along the endoplasmic reticulum, implying an interaction.

"The contradiction of the results between these two assays indicated to us that the interactions of the three enzymes observed via fluorescence imaging might have been indirect--and suggested that additional proteins or factors might mediate the association among the enzymes in vivo," Liu said.

To test that hypothesis, the scientists made three enzymes to fuse with specific tags and produced them in plant cells. Then, they pulled those enzymes out from the cells and examined all the proteins that came out together with three enzymes. Those studies, using liquid chromatography-coupled mass spectrometry, identified two membrane steroid binding proteins that accompanied the three enzymes. The scientists also showed that the membrane steroid binding proteins can associate with themselves or each other to form protein clusters.

"Those observations strongly suggested that the MSBPs organize the monolignol biosynthesis enzymes into a multimeric protein complex or enzymatic cluster," Liu said.

"With that type of organization, the three enzymes could be located close to one another without necessarily having direct interactions," he added. Such an arrangement would help drive lignin synthesis by keeping the enzymes and their common cofactor near one another at high enough concentrations to effectively transfer the carbon substrates and electrons needed for efficient chemical reactions to take place.

To test the role of the MSBPs, the scientists created plant lines in which the genes for these proteins were suppressed. While those plants could still make the three monolignol synthesis enzymes, they ended up with significantly less lignin.

In addition, such suppression did not affect the formation of another closely related class of chemicals whose synthesis requires one of the three monolignol synthesis enzymes.

These data convinced the scientists that MSBP-mediated enzyme organization specifically facilitates lignin formation.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Researchers know that certain factors give children a leg up when it comes to school performance. Family income, access to early childhood programs and home environment rank high on the list.

Now, researchers are looking at another potentially advantageous element: curiosity.

The more curious the child, the more likely he or she may be to perform better in school -- regardless of economic background -- suggests a new study published in Pediatric Research.

Researchers at University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital and the Center for Human Growth and Development analyzed data from 6,200 kindergartners from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort. The cohort is a nationally representative, population-based study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education that has followed thousands of children since birth in 2001.

The U-M team measured curiosity based on a behavioral questionnaire from parents and assessed reading and math achievement among kindergartners.

The most surprising association offered new insight: Children with lower socioeconomic status generally have lower achievement than peers, but those who were characterized as curious performed similarly on math and reading assessments as children from higher income families.

"Our results suggest that while higher curiosity is associated with higher academic achievement in all children, the association of curiosity with academic achievement is greater in children with low socioeconomic status," says lead researcher Prachi Shah, M.D., a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at Mott and an assistant research scientist at U-M's Center for Human Growth and Development.

The findings present an opportunity for families, educators and policymakers.

"Curiosity is characterized by the joy of discovery and the desire for exploration and is characterized by the motivation to seek answers to the unknown," Shah says. "Promoting curiosity in children, especially those from environments of economic disadvantage may be an important, underrecognized way to address the achievement gap."

Cultivating curious kids

When it comes to nurturing curiosity, the quality of the early environment matters.

Children who grow up in financially secure conditions tend to have greater access to resources to encourage reading and math academic achievement, whereas those from poorer communities are more likely to be raised in less stimulating environments, Shah notes. In less-stimulating situations, the drive for academic achievement is related to a child's motivation to learn, or curiosity, she explains.

Parents of children enrolled in the longitudinal study were interviewed during home visits; the children were assessed when they were nine months and two years old, and again when they entered preschool and kindergarten. Reading levels, math skills and behavior were measured in these children when they reached kindergarten in 2006 and 2007.

U-M researchers factored in another important known contributor to academic achievement known as "effortful control," or the ability to stay focused in class. They found that even independent of those skills, children who were identified as curious fared well in math and reading.

"These findings suggest that even if a child manifests low effortful control, they can still have more optimal academic achievement, if they have high curiosity" Shah says. "Currently, most classroom interventions have focused on the cultivation of early effortful control and a child's self-regulatory capacities, but our results suggest that an alternate message, focused on the importance of curiosity, should also be considered."

Shah notes that fostering early academic achievement in young children has been a longstanding goal for pediatricians and policymakers, with a growing awareness of the role social-emotional skills in school readiness.

And while more study is needed, similar efforts to boost curiosity could one day follow.

"While our results suggest that the promotion of curiosity may be a valuable intervention target to foster early academic achievement, with particular advantage for children in poverty, further research is needed to help us better understand how to develop interventions to cultivate curiosity in young children.

"Promoting curiosity is a foundation for early learning that we should be emphasizing more when we look at academic achievement."

To satisfy the protein demands of an anticipated nearly 10 billion people by 2050, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and researchers around the world estimate current animal production will need to grow by an average of 52 percent. Meeting this need without pushing the environment to the brink will be critical.

New evidence shows seafood from aquatic farming -- aquaculture -- can help feed the future global population while substantially reducing one of the biggest environmental impacts of meat production -- land use -- without requiring people to entirely abandon meat as a food source.

A new study from UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) found that the amount of cropland required to support future protein needs with more farmed aquatic animals would be significantly smaller than if terrestrial livestock production met those needs. This research is the first land-use analysis of future food systems to focus on aquaculture -- the world's fastest-growing food sector -- and helps reveal its potential role in conservation and food security. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"While aquaculture can add some pressure because -- ultimately -- it is a food production system, our study demonstrates the relative amount is minuscule compared to terrestrially farmed animals," said lead author Halley Froehlich, a postdoctoral researcher at NCEAS. "Aquaculture is not going to be the main strain on future crop feed and land use. It is -- and will likely continue to be -- terrestrial livestock."

Aquaculture production depends on a number of land-based crops for feed, positioning it uniquely at the interface of aquatic and terrestrial food systems. To understand its land-use implications, the researchers examined how much land would be required to grow the seven most common crops used to feed both terrestrial livestock and farmed fish under three scenarios for the year 2050, synthesizing food production data from the FAO and other scientific sources.

The investigators compared a business-as-usual scenario in which terrestrial meat consumption continues to dominate seafood to two scenarios in which aquaculture meets the additional protein demands of the global population in 2050. They found that replacing the added terrestrial production with aquaculture instead could spare between 729 and 747 million land hectares globally; that's an area twice the size of India, the world's seventh biggest country.

These savings, which also consider the substitution of land required for livestock grazing, would occur whether future aquaculture growth is completely marine-based or a mix of marine and freshwater -- the two aquaculture scenarios the investigators assessed to understand a range of possible futures.

Land savings would be achieved because fish and other aquatic animals are extremely efficient at converting feed to biomass for human consumption. For example, a cow requires anywhere from six to 30-plus pounds of feed to gain one pound of biomass, while most farmed fish need just one to two pounds of feed to do the same. This efficiency translates into much less cropland required to grow feed for the fish that people eat.

These results highlight the role that food choices play in the future of biodiversity, the biggest threat to which is habitat lost to human land use. "The expansion of agriculture across the world is driving most species extinctions and the dramatic loss of ecosystems," said co-author Claire Runge, a research scientist at University of Tromsø - The Arctic University of Norway, who was a postdoctoral researcher at NCEAS at the time the research was conducted. "This is only going to increase into the future. Aquaculture offers one way to reduce some of this pressure on our natural landscapes, wild places and wildlife."

According to Froehlich, the study does not advocate aquaculture as a panacea for sustainable food production. As with any food system, tradeoffs exist. Still, these results build on mounting evidence for the potential of sustainable aquaculture production.

"Aquaculture does not have to be this massive burden on land or in the water, especially if farms are sited strategically and there are incentives for management that move it toward sustainable siting and feed practices," Froehlich said. "The potential is ripe to really do it right."

Co-author Ben Halpern, director of NCEAS and a professor at UCSB's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, noted that the study also provides a clear reason for people to shift their diets away from meat and increase fish consumption to reduce the environmental impacts of their food choices.

"What you eat has impact, but we understand shifting diets can be difficult," Halpern said. "We hope that awareness of how much land can be spared with a fish-rich diet helps individuals make the change. Similarly, we hope our results put more 'fish on the bones' of policy arguments to make more systematic changes."

Degraded coral reefs are far quieter than five years ago, and no longer sound like a suitable habitat to young fish searching for a place to live and breed, according to research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Baby fish looking for a home can use noisy coral reef sounds including snapping shrimp clicks, damselfish chirps, and clownfish chattering to locate and select suitable habitat. But that "coral reef orchestra" has been quietened following recent cyclone and coral-bleaching damage on the Great Barrier Reef, raising fears that young fish may no longer hear their way home.

An international team of scientists, led by the University of Exeter, carried out field experiments on the Northern Great Barrier Reef and found that reefs sound much quieter and less acoustically diverse than they did before three years of cyclones and coral bleaching.

The soundscapes of these recently-degraded reefs are less attractive to juvenile fishes attracting 40% fewer fish compared to the sound of previous healthy reefs.

Lead author Tim Gordon, a marine biologist at the University of Exeter, said: "It's heart-breaking to hear. The usual pops, chirps, snaps and chatters of countless fish and invertebrates have disappeared. The symphony of the sea is being silenced."

This loss of attractiveness of reef sounds to fish in the sea could have devastating consequences for reefs.

Fish communities are instrumental to maintaining healthy reefs by removing algae, facilitating coral growth, contributing to nutrient cycles and keeping food webs in balance. Damaged reefs with healthy fish populations recover faster than reefs that have lost their fish.

Harry Harding, co-author from the University of Bristol, explains: "If fish aren't hearing their way home anymore, that could be bad news for the recovery prospects of reefs. Fish play critical roles on coral reefs, grazing away harmful algae and allowing coral to grow. A reef without fish is a reef that's in trouble."

Coral reef animals produce a dazzling array of sounds to communicate with each other while hunting, to warn each other about the approach of predators and to impress each other during courtship. Together, these sounds combine to form a soundscape that can be heard for miles around. This soundscape provides a valuable cue for young fish to locate and select habitat after a period of early development in the open ocean.

Gordon said: "Being able to hear the difference really drives home the fact that our coral reefs are being decimated. Some of the most beautiful places on Earth are dying due to human activity, and it is up to us to fix it."

The scientists from the University of Exeter, University of Bristol, Cefas (Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science), Duke University (USA), the Australian Institute of Marine Science and James Cook University (Australia) built experimental reefs from coral rubble on sand flats, then used underwater loudspeakers to broadcast healthy coral reef sounds or degraded coral reef sounds, to see which sounds attracted more young fish.

Senior author Steve Simpson, Associate Professor in Marine Biology & Global Change at the University of Exeter, said: "Over the last 15 years my research group have discovered how important sound can be for fish to locate and select specific reefs. We have marvelled at the remarkable diversity and complexity of coral reef soundscapes. But in the last few years the reefs we know and love have died before our eyes. And the deserted and crumbling rubble fields have turned eerily quiet."

Professor Simpson added: "If the reefs have gone quiet, then the chances of the next generation of fish recolonising the reefs are much reduced. Without fish, the reefs can't recover."

Warming seas increase the frequency and severity of coral bleaching events worldwide, as higher temperatures cause a breakdown in the relationship between corals and the zooxanthellae that they host in their tissue, providing their energy through photosynthesis.

This bleaching recently killed up to 80% of corals in some areas of the Great Barrier Reef, and bleaching events of this nature are happening worldwide four times more frequently than they used to.

Reductions in carbon emissions are needed to reduce this damage, as Gordon explains: "The damage we've done to reefs worldwide is horrific, but the fight isn't over yet. If we can fulfil our international commitments to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, it's still possible to protect some of the reefs that are left. The time for action is now."

DALLAS, April 30, 2018 -- Maintaining a healthy lifestyle, including eating a healthy diet, regular exercise and not smoking, could prolong life expectancy at age 50 by 14 years for women and just over 12 years for men, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.

America is one of the wealthiest countries worldwide, yet Americans have a shorter life expectancy compared with other high-income countries, including Japan, Canada and Norway. Heart disease and stroke are major contributors to premature death in this country, with 2,300 Americans dying of cardiovascular disease each day, or one death every 38 seconds. Researchers point out that the U.S. healthcare system focuses heavily on drug discovery and disease management; however, a greater emphasis on prevention could change this life expectancy trend.

To quantify the effects of prevention, researchers analyzed data from two major ongoing cohort studies that includes dietary, lifestyle and medical information on thousands of adults in the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. These data were combined with National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data, as well as mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to estimate the impact of lifestyle factors on life expectancy in the U.S. population. Specifically, they looked at how the following five behaviors affected a person's longevity: not smoking, eating a healthy diet (diet score in the top 40 percent of each cohort), regularly exercising (30+ minutes a day of moderate to vigorous activity), keeping a healthy body weight (18.5-24.9 kg/m), and moderate alcohol consumption (5-15 g/day for women, 5-30 g/day for men).

Over the course of nearly 34 and 27 years of follow-up of women and men, respectively, a total of 42,167 deaths were recorded, of which 13,953 were due to cancer and another 10,689 were due to cardiovascular disease. Following all five lifestyle behaviors significantly improved longevity for both men and women. Other noteworthy findings from the study include:

Compared with people who didn't follow any of the five lifestyle habits, those who followed all five were 74 percent less likely to die during the follow-up period; 82 percent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 65 percent less likely to die from cancer.

There was a direct association between each individual behavior and a reduced risk of premature death, with the combination of following all five lifestyle behaviors showing the most protection.

Between 1940 and 2014, Americans' life expectancy at birth rose from around 63 years to nearly 79 years. However, researchers believe the improvement of life expectancy would be even larger without the widespread prevalence of obesity--a known risk factor for heart disease, stroke and premature death.

"Quantifying the association between healthy lifestyle factors and longer life expectancy is important not only for individual behavioral changes but also for health communicators and policy makers," said study author Frank B. Hu, M.D., Ph.D., who chairs the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. "It is critical to put prevention first. Prevention, through diet and lifestyle modifications, has enormous benefits in terms of reducing occurrence of chronic diseases, improving life expectancy as shown in this study, and reducing healthcare costs."

The American Heart Association recommends people work to protect themselves from heart disease, the nation's No. 1 killer, with Life's Simple 7® -- easy-to-embrace ways to significantly lower your risk of heart disease and improve your health. Life's Simple 7 includes being physically active; achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight; eating a healthy diet; avoiding tobacco; and maintaining healthy levels of blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar. Additionally, the Association's Healthy For Good™ movement helps consumers make lasting changes to improve nutrition, physical activity and well-being.

If you're a parasite and want to spread out a little in Amazonia, then you better be cool with riding around in a variety of different birds, a new study found.

The Amazon region of South America is one of the most diverse tropical forest ecosystems on Earth, but an Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University study showed that in the blood parasites that cause malaria, bird hosts and the region's physical geography play significant roles in the spread and diversity of these parasites.

A team led by Alan Fecchio, a former postdoctoral researcher at the Academy, and Jason Weckstein, PhD, an associate curator of the Ornithology at the Academy and an associate professor in Drexel's College of Arts and Sciences, looked into two groups of haemosporidian parasites: Plasmodium and Haemoproteus.

"Plasmodium infection and distribution patterns are principally shaped by geography, whereas Haemoproteus patterns of diversity and distribution are primarily shaped by their host evolutionary relationships," Weckstein said of the findings from his study, published in Ecography.

They found that the ability to switch to new bird host species was the prime indicator of regional diversity in haemosporidian parasites. Furthermore, Fecchio and colleagues found that Plasmodium, in particular, were more widespread, which makes sense because they are "generalists" that can latch onto several different types of birds.

Haemoproteus, however, are limited in the types of birds they can infect. As such, they don't get spread around very much.

But if Plasmodium can hop into a bunch of different birds, what keeps them from being everywhere in this region? Birds can fly anywhere, right?

Well, it's not as simple as that.

"Early 19th century Amazonian explorers Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace noted that major Amazonian rivers often appeared to form barriers to dispersal for birds, primates and other organisms," Weckstein said. "As a result, if one compares the faunas found in areas flanking most Amazonian rivers, a large portion of the species will be different on opposite banks."

Although the Amazon River is the most recognizable to most, there are many rivers in the Amazon region - such as the Xingu, the Tapajós and the Madeira. These make up roughly eight recognized areas of endemism in the region.

And, as it turns out, some of these birds just don't have the endurance to make the trip across these rivers. Others might just have no reason to.

"Some birds never leave the dark understory of the forest and, thus, will not even cross small rivers, streams or open pastures," Weckstein said. "Scientists have even conducted experiments and found that these understory birds fatigue and are unable to cross large expanses of open space, such as open water."

For comparison, some rivers in Amazonia are 10 to 20 times wider than the Delaware River at the spot where the Benjamin Franklin Bridge spans it in Philadelphia.

So even though Plasmodiumcan jump into multiple kinds of birds, if those birds are all staying put, so is the Plasmodium.

Although the study focused mainly on bird parasites, it provides another building block to understanding microorganisms that affect humans, too, like malaria. After all, human malarial parasites are also members of the Plasmodium genus.

"This work helps us to understand the transmission of these parasites between species and how that may play an important role in their evolution," Weckstein explained. "Thus, it helps us to characterize the ecology of pathogen dispersal and host switching events, which is critical to understanding many of our own human pathogens."

Belmont, MA - A collaborative team of researchers at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, and Oxford University has found that elevated levels of certain types of lipids (fat molecules) in the brain may be an early sign of Parkinson's disease (PD). This finding could have significant implications for identifying patients who may be at risk for developing PD and for the early treatment of the disease. The detailed findings are available in the April 29 online edition of Neurobiology of Aging.

Parkinson's disease is a degenerative, progressive disorder characterized by the dramatic reduction of nerve cells, particularly dopamine neurons that are involved in movement initiation, in an area of the brain called the substantia nigra. For many years now, the loss of these nerve cells has been attributed to the toxic accumulation of the protein alpha-synuclein. In the past 15 years, however, researchers have been studying an interesting relationship between the risk of developing PD and a group of disorders called lysosomal storage diseases--particularly Gaucher disease, which is caused by mutations that lead to loss of function in the glucocerebrosidase (GBA) gene.

The GBA gene normally produces an enzyme that breaks down lipids, but in the childhood disorder Gaucher disease, a near total lack of this enzyme activity leads to massive and usually fatal elevations of lipids inside cells. Notably, people who do not develop Gaucher disease but are carriers of one defective gene copy have a 7-to-10-fold risk of developing PD with age.

"This means that lipid accumulation may also be important in PD, and scientists at the Neuroregeneration Research Institute at McLean Hospital have previously shown that there is an elevation of a class of lipids, called glycosphingolipids, in the substantia nigra of patients with PD," said Ole Isacson, MD, PhD, professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, co-director of the Neuroregeneration Research Institute at McLean Hospital, and co-senior author of the study.

Since aging is the most significant risk factor for developing PD, teams from McLean Hospital and the University of Oxford laboratory of Professor Frances M. Platt, PhD, FMedSci, collaborated to measure the levels of glycosphingolipids in the aging brain, using young and old mice. They found that the same glycosphingolipids that are increased in the brains of Parkinson's disease patients are also elevated in the brains of aging mice. These findings show that both genetics (GBA gene mutation) and aging can cause the same lipid elevations in the brain that are demonstrated in Parkinson's disease pathology.

"These results lead to a new hypothesis that lipid alterations may create a number of problems inside nerve cells in degenerative aging and Parkinson's disease, and that these changes may precede some of the more obvious hallmarks of Parkinson's disease, such as protein aggregates," said Penny Hallett, PhD, study lead author and co-director of McLean's Neuroregeneration Research Institute. "This potentially provides an opportunity to treat lipid changes early on in Parkinson's disease and protect nerve cells from dying, as well as the chance to use the lipid levels as biomarkers for patients at risk."

China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope(FAST), still under commissioning, discovered a radio millisecond pulsar (MSP) coincident with the unassociated gamma-ray source 3FGL J0318.1+0252 in the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) point-source list. This is another milestone of FAST.

FAST, world's largest single-dish radio telescope, operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has discovered more than 20 new pulsars so far. This first MSP discovery was made by FAST on Feb. 27 and later confirmed by the Fermi-LAT team in reprocessing of Fermi data on April 18th.

The newly discovered pulsar, now named PSR J0318+0253, is confirmed to be isolated through timing of gamma-ray pulsations. This discovery is the first result from the FAST-Fermi LAT collaboration outlined in a MoU signed between the FAST team and Fermi-LAT team.

"This discovery demonstrated the great potential of FAST in pulsar searching, highlighting the vitality of the large aperture radio telescope in the new era," said Kejia Lee, scientist at the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University.

Radio follow-up of Fermi-LAT unassociated sources is an effective way for finding new pulsars. Previous radio observations, including three epochs with Arecibo in June 2013, failed to detect the MSP. In an one-hour tracking observation with the FAST ultra-wide band receiver, the radio pulses toward 3FGL J0318.1+0252 were detected with a spin period of 5.19 milliseconds, an estimated distance of about 4 thousand light-years, and as potentially one of the faintest radio MSPs.

Millisecond pulsar is a special kind of neutron stars that rotate hundreds of times per second. It is not only expected to play an important role in understanding the evolution of neutron stars and the equation of state of condense matter, but also can be used to detect low-frequency gravitational waves.

The pulsar timing array (PTA) attempts to detect low-frequency gravitational waves from merging supermassive black holes using the long-term timing of a set of stable millisecond pulsars. Pulsar search is the basis of gravitational wave detection through PTAs.

The planned Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey (CRAFTS, arxiv:1802.03709; http://crafts.bao.ac.cn/) is expected to discover many millisecond pulsars and thus will make significant contribution to the PTA experiment.

"The international radio-astronomy community is excited about the amazing FAST telescope, already showing its power in these discoveries. FAST will soon discover a large number of millisecond pulsars and I am looking forward to seeing FAST's contribution to gravitational wave detection," said George Hobbs, scientist of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) of Australia and member of the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC).

FAST will be under commissioning until it reaches the designed specifications and becomes a Chinese national facility.

Scientists from the University of Cambridge have identified a potential therapeutic target in the devastating genetic disease Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS), which is characterised by premature ageing.

In a paper published today in Nature Communications, scientists provide preclinical data showing that chemical inhibition or genetic deregulation of the enzyme N-acetyltransferase 10 (NAT10) leads to significant health and lifespan gains in a mouse model of HGPS.

HGPS is a rare condition: patients have an average life expectancy of around 15 years, suffering a variety of symptoms including short stature, low body weight, hair loss, skin thickening, problems with fat storage, osteoporosis, and cardiovascular disease, typically dying of a heart attack.

The disease arises from specific mutations in the gene for the protein Lamin A, which lead to production of a shorter, dysfunctional protein that accumulates in cells, specifically in the membranes surrounding the nucleus. This causes disorganisation of chromatin (the 'packaging' around DNA), deregulated transcription, accumulation of DNA damage and defective cell proliferation.

By screening candidate molecules for an effect on nuclear membranes in human HGPS patient-derived cells in vitro, the authors have previously identified a small molecule called remodelin as an effective ameliorative agent. They then identified which component of the cells was being affected by remodelin: an enzyme with a variety of cell functions, called NAT10.

Their aim in the new study was to take these findings into a mouse model with the same genetic defect as HGPS patients, to see whether inhibiting NAT10 - either chemically by administration of remodelin or genetically by engineering reduced production of NAT10 - could ameliorate the disease. The results show that these approaches indeed significantly improved the health of the diseased mice, increased their lifespan, and reduced the effects of the HGPS mutation across a variety of measures in body tissues and at the cellular level.

The research was led by Dr Gabriel Balmus from the Wellcome Trust/ Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute and Dr Delphine Larrieu from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, University of Cambridge; and Dr David Adams from the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Senior author Professor Steve Jackson commented: "We're very excited by the possibility that drugs targeting NAT10 may, in future, be tested on people suffering from HGPS. I like to describe this approach as a 're-balancing towards the healthy state'.

"We first studied the cell biology to understand how the disease affects cells, and then used those findings to identify ways to re-balance the defect at the whole-organism level. Our findings in mice suggest a therapeutic approach to HGPS and other premature ageing diseases."