A more eco-friendly palm oil
A team of researchers is develop ing a synthetic alternative to palm oil, which could be manufactured on an industrial scale, averting the damage caused by production of the real thing, reports The
Independent. Derived from the fruit of the palm oil tree, palm oil is widely used in everything from lipsticks to biscuits, and approximately 60 million tonnes of it are produced each year. But owing to
global demand, plantations have been expanding rapidly across Southeast Asia – leading to severe deforestation and habitat loss, as well as pollution as fires are used to clear land. The team, at
Bath University in the UK, has already produced a thick oil with similar properties to palm oil using a yeast called Metschnikowia pulcherrima, which can be grown under non-sterile conditions on a range of agricultural and food waste. Now, they have been given a $6.68m grant to develop the technology.
Their challenge is to find a way to produce it cheaply, in industrial quantities, so that it becomes a
serious commercial proposition.
Genes that protect
Some people are protected from Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of mental decline by special genes that evolved to ensure that older people could pass along their wisdom, a new study suggests. It was previously known that a gene variant called CD33 appeared to suppress the formation of beta amyloid proteins in the brain that are associated with Alz heimer’s. Scientists compared the level of CD33 found in some humans with that of our closest evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees, and discovered that people have four times the amount of that protective gene. The researchers also
discovered two additional anti-dementia gene variants, dubbed APOE2 and APOE3, that are specific to humans. The researchers speculate that natural selection preserved these mutations to protect older
and wiser people from cognitive decline, says ScienceDaily .com. When elderly people succumb to dementia, the community “loses important sources of wisdom, accumulated knowledge, and culture”, explains study co-leader Pascal Gagneux. He said the “information transfer” of the old to the young, as well as the care that grandparents can give children, provides a significant evolutionary advantage.
and hope for others
Scientists have discovered a chemical compound that, when consumed in drinking water, eliminates the amyloid plaques that build up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, reports The Guardian. In tests in South Korea, the chemical – EPPS – was given to mice which had had plaques injected into their
brains, and which were displaying the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. A week later, the plaques in the rodents’ brains were gone, and they were performing better in maze tests, too. “Our findings clearly
support the view that aggregated amyloid beta is the pathological culprit of Alzheimer’s,” said team leader YoungSoo Kim. However, he stressed that the mice in question – though showing cognitive
impairment – had not developed the widespread brain damage suffered by Alzheimer’s patients. He does not believe the compound could be used to reverse this damage, but if prescribed early enough, it could, perhaps, halt neurodegeneration and prevent death. The research is in its very early stages,
however; it’s not even clear if the compound is safe for mice, let alone effective for humans.
Being miserable won’t kill you
There’s no need to cheer up. Being miserable won’t kill you after all, reports The Daily Mail. In the past, numerous studies have found a link between stress and unhappiness, and reduced lifespan –
but it seems these have muddled up cause and effect. Misery doesn’t make you ill, say the authors of a new study; illness makes you miserable. The teams, from the Universities of Oxford and New
South Wales, examined data from The Million Women Study, which has tracked British women since 1996. Once they’d discounted those who were ill at the start of the study, they were left with 720,000, with an average age of 59. The participants were asked about their happiness and stress levels, before being monitored for 10 years, during which time 30,000 of them died. Initially, the researchers found a link between stress and unhappiness and early death – but once they’d discounted “lifestyle” factors such as smoking, this disappeared. They suggest that being unhappy may make people more inclined to take on unhealthy habits, but that it doesn’t directly affect their risk of dying.
Can obesity be inherited
Women trying to conceive have long been told to eat well, and cut down on toxins, to increase their
chances of having a healthy baby; now it seems the same kind of advice could be applicable to men. A study has found that when obese men lose weight, the DNA in their sperm undergoes “epigenetic changes” that may predispose their children to be slim, rather than overweight. The researchers
studied the sperm-cell DNA of six obese men before and after they had gastric bypass surgery, and while they found no genetic change to their genes, they did find thousands of alterations to non-genetic structures in the sperm, reports BBC News online. Team leader Romain Barres, of the University of Copenhagen, speculates that these changes could have been caused by the weight loss – and that they could be passed on to the men’s offspring. It is just a hypothesis, but if correct, he said, the message would be that men also need to “take care of themselves before they have children, which is going to be very novel for them”.
Dinosaur blood discovery
Scientists have found what appear to be red blood cells in the poorly preserved remains of a 75 million-year-old dinosaur. The discovery (which still needs to be verified) came as a complete surprise: the team, from Imperial College, had put the fragment under an electron microscope
hoping to see bone crystals. Instead, they saw striking oval formations, which bore strong similarities to red blood cells. They then used an ion beam to slice a different piece of bone, and found what
looked like collagen tissue. Such proteins have previously only been found in exceptionally well-preserved specimens, which are rare; this one was so “scrappy” it had ended up being stored in a drawer in the Natural History Museum, after being dug up in Canada around 100 years ago. If their findings are verified, it would suggest soft-tissue preservation is relatively common. In turn, the
availability of more samples could lead to new ways of differentiating between dinosaur species, and help scientists work out when dinosaurs evolved a warm-blooded, bird-like metabolism.
Fertility breakthrough
A 27-year-old woman who was left infertile by chemotherapy has given birth to a healthy baby, having had her fertility restored by an implant of her own ovarian tissue that had been removed and frozen when she was 13. The unnamed Belgian suffered severe sickle cell anaemia when she was a child, and was advised she needed a bone marrow transplant. This required her immune system to be disabled by chemotherapy, to prevent the marrow from being rejected. Warned of the risks of being left infertile, she opted to have her right ovary removed before the treatment began. She was then 13, and not yet menstruating. Ten years later, when she wanted to start a family, fragments from the stored ovary were grafted onto her remaining one. Such procedures have worked on women who had their ovarian tissue extracted in adulthood, but it was unclear if immature tissue would “activate” in an adult environment. However, it did, and within a few months, she was ovulating. She went on to give birth, without IVF, to a healthy baby boy. “She was so happy after living with that uncertainty for years,” said gynaecologist Isabelle Deemeestere, who led the trial.
No hiatus in global warming
Hopes that global warming began levelling off at the start of this century have been dashed by new research suggesting that the so-called “hiatus” was merely the result of an error in the way the data was collected. In the past few years, climate change experts have struggled to explain why global temperatures appeared to have flattened since 1998, in defiance of many of their computer models. Now, a team from the US National Oceanic Administration has re-examined the evidence – and concluded that temperatures haven’t levelled off at all. They say errors crept in owing largely to changes in the way measurements were taken. For decades, sea temperatures were taken from ships; but in the 1980s, governments also began dropping temperature-reading buoys into the oceans.
The team looked at readings from ships and buoys in the same areas – and found the buoys read colder than the ships. When they ironed out this anomaly, they found that the hiatus disappeared. “Our analysis suggests… warming over the first 15 years of this century has, in fact, been as fast or
faster than that seen over the last half of the 20th century,” reported Thomas Karl, who led the study, in the journal Science.
Is Verdi good for the heart?
Music compilations are often billed as having a therapeutic “chill-out” effect. Now, cardiologists at Oxford University have found evidence to support this claim, reports The Daily Telegraph: their study found that when people were played certain classical works, it coincided with a reduction in blood pressure and heart rate. The pieces in question included excerpts from works by Verdi, Beethoven and Puccini that had in common a repeated ten-second rhythm, matching phases in which the body’s blood-pressure control mechanism sends and receives messages from the brain. Faster music such as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons had no effect, while recordings by the Red Hot Chili Peppers actually increased the heart rate.
Smokers feel more pain
People who smoke or are exposed to secondhand smoke may require heavier doses of anaesthesia and painkillers during surgery, ScienceDaily.com reports. A new study found that cigarettes – which are
filled with more than 4,000 chemicals – can not only affect the metabolism of anaesthetic drugs in the liver but may also influence nerve cells involved in the sensation of pain. Among 90 women who underwent a total abdominal hysterectomy, those who smoked needed 33% more anaesthesia throughout their operation than did nonsmokers; meanwhile, passive smokers required 20% more anaesthesia. Cigarette users also needed 23% more prescription painkillers than nonsmokers to experience the same level of effectiveness. Researchers said doctors and anaesthesiologists should
factor smoking into their decisions, while smokers should weigh yet another cost of their addiction.
Chimps go ape for cooking own food
Chimps are like us: they like a hot dinner. A new study has found that the apes not only favour cooked food, they will defer gratification in order to cook it. In the study, a team from Harvard
University gave chimpanzees at the Goodall Research Centre a choice of raw or roasted sweet potatoes; 90% of the time they chose the roast veg. The researchers then set up a “cooker” in the chimps’ enclosure: for safety reasons, this was actually a box with a false bottom. The animals now had to wait one minute while the veg was “cooked” by the researcher, yet still opted for roast over raw in almost the same numbers. The researchers then moved the oven away – so that if the chimps wanted their food cooked, they had to go to the effort of carrying it over to the oven; 60% of the time they still did. In a final experiment, half the chimps opted to store raw food, on the expectation of being able to cook it later. The discovery that chimps have many of the cognitive skills to cook suggests that two million years ago, our common ancestor was also poised to do so; but only the
descendants of one line developed the social skills to control fire.