Rubbery Glass, Zero-Gravity Life and More: Scientific American’s March Issue

HPV is the most widespread sexually transmitted disease in the U.S. and abroad, yet many people still go unvaccinated—especially men. Current HPV vaccination campaigns focus largely on women’s risk for cervical cancer but researchers have recently in younger men. Experts suggest a push for male vaccination to decrease HPV-caused cancers in both sexes.

in the U.S. With the closure of the Vermont Yankee reactor, the nation’s fleet now numbers under 100. As reactors go offline without replacements, the country will be increasingly reliant on natural gas and old, flawed reactor designs.

According to lore, cockroaches will be one of the few survivors of a nuclear winter—but that’s not their only supertrait. Scientists have found that cockroaches’ , building an image photon by photon. Understanding how they do it could lead to better night vision for mankind.

Humans report worse vision while in space as well as headaches and myriad other . In March NASA plans to send one member of an identical twin astronaut duo to the International Space Station to investigate the influence microgravity conditions have on DNA expression, the microbiome, cellular aging and more.

Also in March’s Advances:

The Disease that Killed "Spock": Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

The lung ailment is a leading killer in the U.S.

February 27, 2015 | |

The disease that killed Leonard Nimoy, the actor best known for his role as Mr. Spock on , was chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD), a progressive illness often linked to smoking. He died at his home on February 27 at the age of 83. He was one of the roughly fifteen million Americans diagnosed with the disorder.But just what is COPD? That umbrella term refers to a group of diseases that cause airflow blockage and breathing-difficulties, including emphysema and chronic bronchitis. In the United States COPD most often stems from exposure to tobacco smoke. (Last year Nimoy tweeted to fans that he three decades ago.) Genetic factors, respiratory infections and air pollutant exposures, however, can also play a role. It’s a leading cause of death in the U.S., with symptoms including shortness of breathing, wheezing, chronic coughing or excess production of mucus in the airway. The disease is typically diagnosed with a simple breathing test to assess how much air a person can inhale and exhale called spirometry. And while medications can help patients improve their breathing by dilating their air passages, it has no cure.It’s also a massive global problem. In 2012, six percent of all deaths around the world were attributed to COPD – equivalent to more than 3 million deaths. More than 90 percent of those deaths occurred in low or middle-income countries, according to the World Health Organization. In settings where families may cook over traditional cookstoves that rely on solid fuels to cook (like burning feces), such harmful exposure and subsequent poor air quality is a significant contributor to COPD. And globally, COPD now develops among men and women in equal numbers.President Obama, who once greeted Nimoy with the signature Vulcan salute, wrote in a press statement on Nimoy’s death, “I loved Spock.” Many people around the world could say the same.

Credit:

The Disease that Killed ‘Spock’: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder

The lung ailment is a leading killer in the United States

February 27, 2015 | |

The disease that killed Leonard Nimoy, the actor best known for his role as Mr. Spock on , was chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD), a progressive illness often linked to smoking. He died at his home on February 27 at the age of 83. He was one of the roughly fifteen million Americans diagnosed with the disorder.But just what is COPD? That umbrella term refers to a group of diseases that cause airflow blockage and breathing-difficulties, including emphysema and chronic bronchitis. In the United States COPD most often stems from exposure to tobacco smoke. (Last year Nimoy tweeted to fans that he three decades ago.) Genetic factors, respiratory infections and air pollutant exposures, however, can also play a role. It’s a leading cause of death in the U.S., with symptoms including shortness of breathing, wheezing, chronic coughing or excess production of mucus in the airway. The disease is typically diagnosed with a simple breathing test to assess how much air a person can inhale and exhale called spirometry. And while medications can help patients improve their breathing by dilating their air passages, it has no cure.It’s also a massive global problem. In 2012, six percent of all deaths around the world were attributed to COPD – equivalent to more than 3 million deaths. More than 90 percent of those deaths occurred in low or middle-income countries, according to the World Health Organization. In settings where families may cook over traditional cookstoves that rely on solid fuels to cook (like burning feces), such harmful exposure and subsequent poor air quality is a significant contributor to COPD. And globally, COPD now develops among men and women in equal numbers.President Obama, who once greeted Nimoy with the signature Vulcan salute, wrote in a press statement on Nimoy’s death, “I loved Spock.” Many people around the world could say the same.

Credit:

Why Julianne Moore and Taylor Swift See That Dress Differently

http://ift.tt/1wnsKkg

As a visual neuroscientist I think a lot about how we see the world around us. And so I’ve found the scientific and celebrity controversy to be especially fun and exciting. Most of the scientific pundits have concluded that the dress is black-and-blue, and they have offered up an illusions-in-the-brain explanation of why some people see the dress instead as white-and-gold. Yet after thinking thoroughly about this photo, looking at it on a number of different screens, and speaking with some of my lab partners, I’d like to offer my point of view. Yes, there is an illusion at play here that effects our brains, but no, it is not that illusion that causes it to look differently to different people: that difference is caused by a mundane photographic effect.

First, the illusory explanation (it’s black-and-blue but only appears white-and-gold) arises from what we scientists call “color constancy.” It’s the process by which we can recognize the same object under different light sources. My favorite example of this effect is from , and is shown in the image of the Rubik’s Cube. You see the brown central chip on the top and the orange central chip on the front-face? In fact they are identical in color and only different because of their context: the brain does a computation of the lighting on each surface and calculates the surface properties of each chip based on those lighting properties. This illusory process helps you determine the color of things irrespective of the light source. So I agree that my colleagues are not wrong that the brain can do amazing tricks in your brain that make objects look surprisingly different under different lighting conditions.

Courtesy of Beau Lotto and Dale Purves

But that doesn’t mean that’s what’s happening with the dress. It’s a poor image to work from, but perhaps if we analyze the photo more closely with an eye to determine the nature of the lighting sources, it will inform our decision.

The best analysis of the image I’ve seen so far was done by photo editor Neil Harris, in . The team did a Photoshop analysis in which they analyzed the colors from different parts of the image and, most importantly, varied the white balance of the image. They showed that the dress looks different depending on the white balance. You can also prove this to yourself by simply squinting while viewing the original image on Tumblr… it turns from a white-and-gold image to black-and-blue.

http://ift.tt/1wnsKkg

So this explains why different people see it differently: they are looking at it on different screens set to different brightnesses (or white balances). It has nothing to do with your brain—it’s just an optical issue of light transmission. This also means that we may not need to invoke an illusory process in the brain at all, and that we could potentially identify the nature of the dress through a photographic analysis.

Note that changing the white balance is not changing the colors. Why would black lace look golden, and not green or red, when you crank up the luminosity? Shouldn’t it be gray? Given all the speculating everyone’s been doing, I’m surprised that nobody’s mentioned specularities. These are the mirror-like reflections on the shiniest part of any the object. They provide the best clue of the light source shining on an object, because they are literally reflecting the purest available sample of photons that came from the source. So by analyzing the specularities, we can see what color the lighting is. And when we see what color the lighting is, we can then determine what color the cloth of the dress might be. This matters when you think about the brain because, as you saw with Purves and Lotto’s Rubik’s cube, how we see light dictates how we interpret the world around us, whether it’s outside, inside a store, or on your smart phone screen. It’s an imperfect analysis of course, because the specularities are not perfect mirrors—they are also affected by the cloth’s color itself—but let’s take a look and see what we can determine.

In this case, let’s look at the jacket part of the dress in the top right of the picture. See how shiny it is? That’s where the specularities are the strongest, and there we therefore have the strongest clues to the source of light shining on an object. If you keep your eye on the shiny part of the jacket, you’ll see that its white color changes when the white saturation of the photo changes, but not otherwise.

It would be best if we could analyze specularities made from sunlight. The light that comes from direct sunlight, at midday, is more-or-less exactly known. So if we knew that the dress was bathed in sunlight, we could analyze the specularities. This would help us determine the true color of the cloth, account for different ways that different cameras might operate, or different settings on our display screens, etc. But the original photo wasn’t taken under sunlight, it was taken inside a mall, presumably by a smartphone camera. The camera in the phone likely corrected for color and brightness on its own, reacting to the bright light shining in the background, not the dress in the foreground. Yet even with the bright background, and the color correction, the specularities don’t change.

So what do we see here? Well, the specularities in the original image are bluish. This suggests the light source is either blue, or the cloth is absorbing the non-blue photons (from the lights shining in the mall), and only reflecting the blue photons. Since they aren’t, it’s possible that we are seeing a white-and-gold dress under a blue light source. So how do we know which effect is at play? Is it an illusion or is it photographic? Well, we know that the white balance effect is at play: the WIRED analysis makes that clear. So it’s photographic at least in part. But is there an illusion at play too?

I think there is. This morning I interviewed with and told her I thought that the difference between viewers must be photographic and not illusory. And that’s true. But in investigating this issue, my assistant Max Dorfman saw something interesting in the magnifying tool on the dress manufacturer’s website. The white transparent rectangle that magnifies the dress made it look white and gold, despite there being no issue of light sources. This means that the illusion of gold lace can happen with black fabric when it is surrounded by blue fabric, when a white transparent film is placed in front. From a neuroscience perspective, this means our brain is indeed applying a golden color where none exists, as a color constancy effect. So that’s it then: there is both a light balance effect (as WIRED’s demo shows), to explain why different people see different things on their different screens, and an illusory color constancy effect that contributes to why we see gold instead of gray when its surrounded by blue.

http://ift.tt/1AiRElk

Either way, I don’t think that the reason people see the dress is an interesting brain process. Rather, it is a mundane differences in how people have viewed the image on their electronic display screens (phones, tablets, laptops, etc). So now we know that Taylor Swift and Ellen Degeneres set their phone screens to different brightness levels than Justin Bieber and Julianne Moore. You’re welcome.

'Star Trek''s Leonard Nimoy Dies at 83

Nimoy, the original Spock, got involved in real space science with NASA

February 27, 2015 | and |

Actor Leonard Nimoy, who portrayed the iconic logical Vulcan Spock on the TV's "Star Trek" and in feature films, has died. He was 83.

Nimoy's career spanned TV, feature films, art and photography, but he was perhaps best known for playing Spock, the logical Vulcan on the starship the USS Enterprise, in "Star Trek." Nimoy died from complications due to "end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease," according to the , which first reported the actor's death Friday morning (Feb. 27).

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP [Live long and prosper]," Nimoy wrote in a recent on Feb. 23. The actor would sign his tweets "LLAP," echoing Spock's famous words on "Star Trek."

Nimoy was born in Boston, Massachusetts on March 26, 1931 and started acting by the time he was 8 years old, according to the New York Times.

His idea for Spock's signature Vulcan salute was actually inspired by his Jewish heritage after seeing men at his synagogue use the hand gesture during prayer. He suggested it to the director as a Vulcan greeting and it stuck, Nimoy told the .

Aside from being a beloved science fiction star, Nimoy also got involved with real space science. He detailing the space agency's Dawn mission to the dwarf planet Ceres for the first time.

NASA paid tribute to the actor today with a featuring a photo of Nimoy and his "Star Trek" co-stars in front of the space shuttle Enterprise, named for the fictional starship in the television show. In April 2012, Nimoy greeted the space shuttle Enterprise with a Vulcan salute when the spacecraft prototype was delivered to New York City for installation at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.

"RIP Leonard Nimoy. So many of us at NASA were inspired by Star Trek. Boldly go ..." NASA officials wrote on Twitter.

RIP Leonard Nimoy. So many of us at NASA were inspired by Star Trek. Boldly go...

— NASA (@NASA)

Nimoy's friends and colleagues have posted their feelings about the "Star Trek" legend on social media as well.

"I loved him like a brother," William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk alongside Nimoy's Spock on the TV show, . "We will all miss his humor, his talent, and his capacity to love."

"Today, the world lost a great man, and I lost a great friend," George Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu on the original series, . "We return you now to the stars, Leonard. You taught us to 'Live Long And Prosper,' and you indeed did, friend. I shall miss you in so many, many ways."

Nimoy also starred as Spock Prime in the J.J. Abrams directed "Star Trek" reboot released in 2009. Zachary Quinto, who plays the new Spock in the franchise, paid tribute to Nimoy on today.

"My heart is broken," Quinto wrote. "I love you profoundly my dear friend. And I will miss you everyday. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

Book Review: Rust: The Longest War

Books and recommendations from

Feb 17, 2015

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Rust: The Longest WarSimon & Schuster, 2015 ($26.95)

Of all the environmental challenges threatening worldwide infrastructure, rust, journalist Waldman admits, is not “sexy.” It creeps in gradually and seems like more of an aesthetic blight than a dire danger to the modern machinery our society depends on. Yet rust is costlier than all other natural disasters combined, Waldman explains, and the science of corrosion, along with the ingenious engineering strategies humans have devised to fight it, is fascinating. Rust “seizes up weapons, manhandles mufflers, destroys highway guardrails, and spreads like a cancer in concrete,” he writes. Waldman attends “Can School,” interviews rust experts and visits the Alaska pipeline, among other adventures, to illuminate the myriad attacks rust makes on our daily lives. In doing so, he adds luster to a substance considered synonymous with dullness.

Much Ado About Dress Color

Have you been following this ridiculous debate about the color of this dress? People are going nuts all over different social media about what the color of this dress is based on the photo that has exploded all over the internet.

I'm calling it ridiculous because people are actually arguing with each other, disagreeing about what they see, and then found it rather odd that other people do not see the same thing as they do, as if this is highly unusual and unexpected. Does the fact that different people see colors differently not a well-known fact? Seriously?

I've already mentioned about the limition of the human eye, and why it is really not a very good light detector in many aspects. So already using your eyes to determine the color of this dress is already suspect. Not only that, but due to such uncertainty, one should be to stuborn about what one sees, as if what you are seeing must be the ONLY way to see it.

But how would science solve this? Easy. Devices such as a UV-VIS can easily be used to measure the spectrum of reflected light, and the intensity of those spectral peaks. It tells you unambiguously the wavelengths that are reflected off the source, and how much of it is reflected. So to solve this debate, cut pieces of the dress (corresponding to all the different colors on it), and stick it into one of these devices. Voila! You have killed the debate of the "color".

This is something that can be determined objectively, without any subjective opinion of "color", and without the use of a poor light detector such as one's eyes. So, if someone can tell me where I can get a piece of this fabric, I'll test it out!

Zz.

Battery Fires Pose New Risks to Firefighters

Smoke, sirens and flashing lights interrupted the night on Aug. 1, 2012, as a fire took hold at the remote Kahuku wind farm along the north shore of Oahu in Hawaii. The blaze sparked at 3:30 a.m. in a metal warehouse with 12,000 lead acid batteries mounted in racks towering more than 6 feet high.

The 10-megawatt battery system, installed by Xtreme Power, was used to buffer electricity from the 12-turbine, 30 MW wind farm operated by First Wind, smoothing out spikes and low spots in wind power production.

Within 20 minutes, the Honolulu Fire Department arrived at the scene. It was the third fire the firefighters had responded to at that 9,000-square-foot building since operations there started in 2011, but the previous fires burned themselves out or were extinguished before causing extensive damage.

"On-site supervisors advised us that entry into the building was not advised because of the hazards," said Terry Seelig, battalion chief at the Fire Prevention Bureau of the Honolulu Fire Department.

The risks from scalding heat, poisonous fumes, a collapsing structure and the potential for battery explosions kept firefighters outside the warehouse. After determining no one was inside, the response team focused on keeping the blaze from spreading to other buildings at the site.

"It's a defensive fire attack at that point," Seelig said. "The only risk at that point would be to the responders going in."

The team used water to cool parts of the building but avoided using it to extinguish the fire out of concerns for electric shock and risks of creating toxic chemical runoff. Instead, they waited for a carbon dioxide extinguishing system to arrive on the scene, but that proved ineffective at quenching the inferno.

What happens when 12,000 batteries burn?

The fire was a hard lesson for energy storage developers and first responders in handling a new technology. Grid-level battery systems in particular are cropping up around the country as the industry matures, prices drop and regulations compel energy providers to invest in storage.

"We are increasing our commitment to storage," said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in a House budget hearing this week.

Storing energy on the grid is a big part of making intermittent renewable energy more palatable for utilities (, Feb. 13). Industry officials also want EPA to include storage as a way to comply with the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, as well as state renewable portfolio standards (, Jan. 30).

According to market research firm IHS, energy storage is poised to expand from 340 MW in capacity in 2013 to more than 40 gigawatts by 2022, a hundredfold increase. That means flywheels, batteries, compressed air caverns and pumped hydropower will crop up in more jurisdictions for the first time.

Federal officials now want to make sure that ambulance crews and firefighters don't find out the hard way that giant power storage installations pose unique challenges and are working to establish rules to pre-empt disaster.

"This is not to say that energy storage systems are specifically unsafe," said Imre Gyuk, energy storage program manager in the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability at the Department of Energy. "But the point is, energy storage systems are being deployed more and more."

1,200 storage projects coming

"Many of the big companies are indeed very much aware of the issue, but without codes and standards and generalized guidelines, we are really at the mercy of people's goodwill," he said. "The vast majority of codes were not developed for energy storage."

Moving and storing energy in any form carries inherent risks: Fuel depots can catch on fire. Transmission lines can fall and cause shocks. Gas pipelines can explode. Liquid fuels can leak. But rescue workers have decades of experience fighting these challenges, and the industry has established procedures to prevent problems.

Grid-level energy storage, on the other hand, is a new frontier, and establishing safety standards is crucial not just to protect human life and the environment, but also to safeguard expensive energy investments.

The Kahuku wind farm received a $117 million loan guarantee from DOE in 2010. Xtreme Power declared bankruptcy in 2014, and German energy storage developer Younicos acquired its assets.

"We are still looking into why the fire happened," said Philip Hiersemenzel, press spokesman for Younicos. The company suspects that the fire may not have started with the batteries themselves but may have ignited from foreign material or a ground arc fault.

According to Hiersemenzel, Younicos is agnostic about battery chemistries but is sticking to lithium-ion cells in new projects for now. Many of the company's safeguards come from how installations are designed, using software to regulate cell performance, keeping cells in comfortable conditions and isolating battery packs so a failure in one doesn't cascade to another.

"We are pretty confident that our installations are very safe," Hiersemenzel said, but he acknowledged that cramming megawatt-hours in a small space will always pose hazards. "I think anybody who will say that 'my battery will never burn under no circumstances whatsoever' is being a little disingenuous."

Producer says new technology can be safer

"In a lot of ways, storage is actually safer than other ways we can do things," said Praveen Kathpal, vice president of AES Energy Storage, a firm with 200 MW of storage in its portfolio online and more than 100 MW in development around the world. "One advantage of storage is you have a controlled environment, and you have something that's modular."

He explained that developers build battery storage systems around identical cells. Unlike batteries in cars or aircraft, grid-scale batteries don't face severe weight and size restrictions, nor do they have to withstand high-speed crashes, so developers have ample room to provide cooling, isolation and fire suppression systems.

And when it comes to lithium-ion cells, the technology has a proven safety record and wide public acceptance. "Pretty much everyone has a lithium battery in their pocket," Kathpal said.

Kenneth Willette, manager of the public fire protection division at the National Fire Protection Association, said the transportation sector offers a precedent for how to train first responders in energy storage.

With the rise of electric cars and more energy-dense batteries on aircraft, emergency crews have already dealt with persistent battery fires and thermal runaway conditions (, Dec. 18, 2014).

Willette cited the experience of the hybrid-electric Chevrolet Volt. The manufacturer taught first responders how to handle battery problems and built features into the car to protect firefighters, like marking high-voltage cables orange and including an emergency discharge system for the batteries.

"Those little things really seem huge in the field," Willette said. "When there were Chevy Volt battery fires, that didn't have a significant impact on [perceptions of safety in] the Volt and the industry."

Applications in office buildings and homes

Automaker Tesla Motors has expressed interest in getting its battery systems into the residential market (, Feb. 12).

A larger market means more battery producers, carrying greater risks of manufacturing defects as new companies spring up to meet demand. Wider deployment also means a greater chance of inadequate safety precautions, adding to the urgency of establishing codes governing energy storage.

One important lesson is to have fire response resources on-site, like dry chemicals and deployment systems. Containment structures like warehouses also have to have better ways to contain flames and prevent hazardous chemicals from leaking.

"This is a very rural area," said Seelig of Kahuku. "By the time you get enough firefighting forces and the right extinguishing sources, the fire is going to progress quite a bit."

Another critical factor is the information gap between energy storage operators and responders. "Those facilities might have an internal fire brigade or response team ... but in some instances, there are no on-site people," said Willette. This means firefighters may have to extinguish a blaze without knowing what chemicals are in play, where the electrical shutoffs are or what kind of fire retardant to use.

Developers and responders need to take proactive steps to ensure they know what they are dealing with when an accident occurs, Willette added.

Hawaii's enthusiasm for renewable energy and energy storage is in flux as the state contemplates rolling back incentives (, Jan. 26). In 2014, operators restored the Kahuku wind farm to full capacity, minus the electricity storage component.

Earlier this year, the Hawaii Public Utility Commission signed off on another wind turbine installation at Kahuku, but this installation would send energy directly to power lines instead of buffering through a battery system.

However, demand for energy storage remains robust in other parts of the country, like California, which has a mandate for 1.3 GW of grid energy storage by 2020.

"Finally, finally, finally people are understanding the value of energy storage," said Younicos' Hiersemenzel. "It's transitioning from something exotic to something that's becoming mainstream."

www.eenews.net

Alzheimer’s Diagnostic Tests Inch Forward, but Treatments Are Still Lacking

Researchers are trying to develop ways to more quickly and accurately diagnose Alzheimer’s, which might lead to better treatments and understanding in the future

February 27, 2015 | |

Clinical diagnoses from specialists can be accurate up to 90 percent of the time but the only way to absolutely verify that someone has Alzheimer’s is to examine their brain in a postmortem autopsy.

Kathy Stack’s memory loss began with the little things: losing her wallet, taking a wrong turn, forgetting someone’s name. In 2013 at the age of 68, she visited her neurologist, who sent her to a memory loss specialist. He told her she had a 50–50 chance of developing full-blown Alzheimer’s disease within five years.

Two years later, Stack, who was the first female department director of community services for Saint Paul, Minn., has made lifestyle changes such as working out regularly and doing daily brain exercises to stave off the disease. She is prepared for what the next stages of Alzheimer’s may bring, but says she has noticed her symptoms worsening.

More than five million people in the U.S. currently have Alzheimer’s, and that number is increasing with the aging population. Clinical diagnoses from specialists can be accurate up to 90 percent of the time but currently the only way to confirm that an individual has the disease is to examine the brain after death. Researchers are working to develop tests that diagnose Alzheimer’s earlier and more reliably. But with limited treatment options available, some experts worry that better tests may do more harm than good.

A number of diagnostic tests are now in various stages of development in the research pipeline. Researchers described on Feb. 24 that will be presented at a meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Washington, D.C. in April. It analyzes skin samples, using antibodies to look for proteins associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Because skin and brain cells originate in the same place in the embryo, the researchers hypothesized that they’d find similar levels of tau—a protein that forms distinctive tangles in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients—in both cell types. Early results suggest that Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients have elevated levels of tau in their skin. Lead investigator Ildefonso Rodriguez Leyva of the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosi in Mexico says they also found higher levels of the protein in the skin cells of Parkinson’s patients but not those with Alzheimer’s, which allowed them to distinguish one dementia from the other. The next step is to ramp up the study to include more subjects; these early results came from only 65 people. Rodriguez Leyva says he hopes they can offer the test within two years.

Other tests in development look for different possible markers of disease. of the Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute in Morgantown, West Virginia and his group have developed a that measures so-called (PKCE) levels. PKCE promotes the growth of synapses in the brain and destroys tau protein. It decreases in patients with Alzheimer’s. In clinical trials, Alkon and his group were able to predict which patients would get Alzheimer’s more than 95 percent of the time by measuring PKCE levels in their skin cells. They validated their diagnoses with autopsies years later. But they only studied about 140 patients, and thus will require more findings in later-phase clinical trials. Alkon said he hopes to be able to offer the test to the public in about two years through what is known as a -certified lab, and then will seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval after that.

The lone reliable for Alzheimer’s can only identify the familial form of the disease, which accounts for about 5 percent of cases. This type of Alzheimer’s arises from a mutation in one of three genes that encode proteins involved in the production and processing of amyloid-beta, which, when abnormal, can build up in the brain and form plaques characteristic of the disease. Another can warn of a predisposition to Alzheimer’s, although having this mutation does not guarantee an individual will develop the disease. The single biggest risk factor is age.

In people usually go to the doctor only if they are concerned they have memory loss. To determine if the dementia is likely Alzheimer’s a physician will typically administer memory tests, ask about family history and do a neurological exam. If physicians encounter an unusual type of dementia that they can’t distinguish, says Keith Fargo, director of scientific programs for the Alzheimer’s Association, they can give patients a PET (positron emission tomography) scan to detect in the brain. The Alzheimer’s Association, however, does not recommend it for all patients because amyloid buildup doesn’t necessarily mean they have the disease. Patients could have plaques and no signs of the disease. It takes this suite of examinations to reach the final diagnosis, which is partly what is motivating researchers to develop one single test.

Seeking an early diagnosis can rule out other causes of dementia such as Parkinson’s, or vitamin B deficiencies, some of which are treatable. , a senior clinical investigator at the National Institute on Aging who developed a promising now in clinical trials, says early diagnoses could lead to better results from existing drugs. By the time many patients start taking drugs aimed at reducing the damage the disease has caused, he says, it’s often too late for therapeutics to have much effect. “I think there are hundreds of great drugs out there,” Goetzl says, “but by the time they start them, the cells are dead."

Finding a test that can diagnose Alzheimer’s sooner could eventually mean that patients receive the news years before severe symptoms set in. At the very worst, Goetzl says, early diagnosis could mean having to retire or lose freedoms such as car privileges. It can also lead to , however. “Diagnosing before [symptoms worsen] presents all kinds of ethical and personal challenges that, in my opinion, we aren't really prepared to deal with,” Alkon says. “In the absence of a definitive curative therapy, getting to know that you may get this disease 20 years from now might not do you any good, in fact it may cause you harm.”

But in a 2014 GE Healthcare survey () of 10,000 people worldwide, nearly three quarters of respondents said they would want to know if they had a neurological disorder, even if it had no cure. In this age when so much health information is readily available, from genetic sequencing to early disease diagnoses, it now seems that knowing what could come is preferable to finding out when it happens.

For Stack, the diagnosis was a chance to make decisions before she could not make them for herself. In the weeks following her diagnosis she met with her lawyer, financial planner and visited long-term care facilities. “It’s not as dire as it sounded two years ago when [my doctor] just kind of laid it out for me. I didn’t think 50–50 sounded like good odds at the time,” Stack says. “I think that we are slowing down the progression of the disease, so I can be hopeful.”

Fan-mail Friday

Over the summer, I decided it would be fun to look back through all the mail kids sent me during the 2014-2015 school year. I've picked out some of my favorites and will be posting one every Friday. They truly are inspiring.

When Patient and Doc Speak Different Languages, Google Translate Can Help—or Hinder

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but poorly translated words may also hurt you

Feb 17, 2015 | |

This magazine has various foreign-language editions. As such, I occasionally get requests from overseas translators tasked with trying to make sense of some of my more idiomatic constructions. For example, my January 2014 column discussed Jesse Bering's book . The book's dedication reads: “For you, you pervert, you.” So I wrote, “Bering was kind enough to dedicate to me. And to you. And, well, to any reader brave enough to crack the binding.” Which prompted this response from a translator: “I guess the phrase ‘crack the binding’ has some special meaning about abnormal sex, but I couldn't find it. Could you enlighten me?”

Indeed, translation can be a minefield. If I tried to tell my colleague in his language that I would indeed enlighten him, I could inadvertently say that I was helping him lose weight or setting him on fire. Best leave translation to the pros.

Of course, occasions arise in which no pro is available and the clock is going ticktock (or in Italy or even in Japan). One place where time is of the essence is, of course, a hospital. When health care workers and patients speak different languages, the best available option may be to turn to various Web-based automated translation tools. And so, in the notorious Christmas issue (because it's long been home to offbeat research) of the journal now officially known as the (shortened from to save space for them and to take up more space for the rest of us who have to explain what stands for every time we cite it), Sumant Patil and Patrick Davies of the Nottingham Children's Hospital in England set out to, as they wrote, “evaluate the accuracy and usefulness of Google Translate in translating common English medical statements.”

The two intrepid Internet interpreters tested Google Translate's talents using 10 common English medical phrases, such as “your wife is stable” and “your husband had a heart attack.” They asked the Web-based program to turn each phrase into 26 different languages. The system performed best when turning English into other western European languages (74 percent accuracy, according to the researchers' own metric). It had the most problems attempting to make sense in Asian (46 percent) and African (45 percent) languages. So we are still a long way from a Star Trekian universal translator that does not cause an unfortunate interplanetary incident every time representatives from two cultures start yapping at each other.

For example, the news that “your wife needs to be ventilated” often became “your wife needs to be aired,” which just adds insult to injury. Besides, I've worked in hospitals, and pretty much everybody needs to be aired, especially doctors who've been on call for 36 hours straight. The aforementioned and positive “your wife is stable” was commonly translated as “your wife cannot fall over,” which is great in a raging storm at sea but could fail to offer the necessary comfort to a concerned husband in an emergency room.

A typical error for “your husband had a heart attack” was to have it come out as “your husband's heart was attacked.” That rendering has things exactly backward because the husband in question was in fact attacked his heart, which is clearly trying to kill him. The phrase “we will need your consent for operation” was sometimes mangled into “we need your consent for operating (such as machinery),” which implies that, as you wait for an OR to open up, the management would appreciate it if you could put in a shift at the loading dock.

The researchers admit that, whereas computerized translation seems problematic, “we have, however, not assessed the accuracy of human translators, who cannot be assumed to be perfect and may be subject to confidentiality breaches.” Then again, digital data can also get loose. In a hospital setting, however, a hack that leads to the release of privileged information is less dangerous than a hack who's performing an appendectomy.

Teacher Brings Hope to Ebola Victims

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Before Katie Meyler came to West Point, Liberia, the children living there had little hope for the future. The crowded township, which lies on a peninsula that juts into the Atlantic Ocean at the northern end of Monrovia, Liberia's capital, is the worst slum in the country. Less than two square miles in size, West Point is home to more than 75,000 people crammed into decaying tin shanties without electricity, running water or sanitation.

“It's no place for a child,” says the 32-year-old Meyler, a native of Bernardsville, N.J. “But the kids who live there don't have a choice. West Point is their home.”

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Overuse of Antibiotics Caused Infections that Killed 29,000 in 1 Year

A newly released CDC report focused on the Clostridium difficile bacterium, which can cause deadly diarrhea

February 25, 2015

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By Yasmeen Abutaleb

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Overuse of antibiotics made Americans more vulnerable to a strain of bacteria that caused nearly half a million infections and contributed to at least 29,000 deaths in a single year, U.S. public health officials warned in research published on Wednesday.

The study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention focused on the Clostridium difficile bacterium, which can cause deadly diarrhea. The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, highlight how overprescription of antibiotics has fueled a rise in bacteria that are resistant to treatment.

People who take antibiotics are most at risk of acquiring C. difficile because these medications also wipe out "good" bacteria that protect a healthy person against the infection.

"Antibiotics are clearly driving this whole problem," Clifford McDonald, CDC senior advisor for science and integrity, said on a conference call with reporters.

One in every three infections occurred in patients 65 and older, the study found, with more than 100,000 C. difficile cases found in U.S. nursing homes. The bacteria often spreads through the hands and equipment of health care professionals and hospital surfaces rife with bacteria.

The rate of hospitalizations for C. difficile doubled from 2000 to 2010, according to the study, partly due to the emergence of a particularly dangerous strain, NAP1, that is more likely to cause infection in patients.

The data used in the study are from 2011, and the rate of disease was projected to have continued increasing through 2012.

Part of the increase comes from a more sensitive laboratory test that better detects the infection, McDonald said.

Yet much of the problem still lies in poor detection and diagnosis methods, CDC officials said.

In 2010, for example, Brooklyn teacher Peggy Lillis, 56, developed painful diarrhea one morning, her son, Christian Lillis, told reporters.

After a telephone consultation, her doctor prescribed medication not suited to treating C. difficile. She died less than 36 hours later, after emergency room physicians diagnosed her with C. difficile.

"C. difficile must be diagnosed quickly and correctly," said Michael Bell, deputy director of CDC's division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1FuaDxK

N Engl J Med 2015.

Difficulty with Daily Tasks Predicts Death for Heart Failure Patients

Heart failure patients who struggle with daily tasks such as bathing or dressing are more likely to be hospitalized and tend to die sooner than those who are more independent, according to a new study

February 25, 2015

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By Kathryn Doyle

(Reuters Health) - Heart failure patients who struggle with daily tasks like bathing or dressing are more likely to be hospitalized and tend to die sooner than those who are more independent, according to a new study.

More than five million people in the U.S. have heart failure and about half die within five years of diagnosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Treatments include medications, a low-salt diet, and daily physical activity.

"I certainly suspected that patients who had increasing difficulty with daily living would be at increased risk for death," but just how accurately a brief questionnaire could predict hospitalization and death was surprising, said Dr. Shannon Dunlay, lead author of the study and an advanced heart failure cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

For the study, more than 1,000 people with heart failure, and an average age of 75, filled out questionnaires assessing their ability to perform nine activities of daily living, including feeding themselves, dressing, using the toilet, housekeeping, climbing stairs, walking, and bathing.

Many of the participants had other health problems like hypertension, diabetes, or past stroke.

Those who had difficulty with things like bathing or housekeeping were classified as having "moderate difficulty" and those who struggled to feed themselves, use the toilet, or dress themselves were classified as having "severe difficulty."

Almost 60% of people reported difficulty with at least one of the nine activities. Around one quarter had moderate difficulty and 13% had severe difficulty.

After about three years, more than half of the patients had died and more than 900 had been hospitalized at least once.

The study team adjusted for other illnesses and found that compared to people with no difficulty with daily activities, those with moderate difficulty were 50% more likely to die, and those with severe difficulty were more than twice as likely to die during the study.

Those with moderate or severe difficulty were also more likely to be hospitalized for heart problems or for any reason than those with no difficulty, according to the results published online February 25 in .

People with heart failure tend to be elderly and to have other chronic health conditions, so it can be difficult to separate out what is actually causing the decline in function, Dunlay told Reuters Health.

Doctors do ask their patients about their ability to get around the house and complete daily tasks, but sometimes it can be hard to fit this conversation in with a regular clinic visit, Dunlay said.

Adding a quick questionnaire to the appointment could be a good tool for doctors to assess their patients' risk of death and hospitalization, which can vary widely for people with heart failure, she said. Some patients do maintain most functional ability, while others will have severe disability.

Many patients become asymptomatic with therapy, according to Dr. Eldrin F. Lewis of the cardiovascular division at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new research. "Providers should always aim to get patients to the point where they can do all of the things that they enjoy," he told Reuters Health by email.

"When I first meet a patient, I often ask them about their hobbies so that I can be realistic with them regarding their ability to eventually do those activities," he said.

People who were older, female, unmarried and had other health conditions like diabetes, dementia, or morbid obesity tended to have more difficulty with daily activities and were therefore at higher risk of hospitalization and death, the authors note.

People who are married have a partner to help with daily tasks and may not notice their functional decline as much as those who are widowed, Dunlay said. Women may have worse outcomes because they tend to be slightly older than men when they develop heart failure.

"Certainly the next step is to better understand whether there are interventions we can do to improve or halt the progression of decline," both to extend life expectancy and to improve quality of life immediately, Dunlay said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1LIIFCv

Circ Heart Failure 2015.

Tar Sands Pipeline Vetoed, Climate Threat Marches On

Pres. Barack Obama on February 24— , not because of and not because of the from the tar sands. Obama vetoed the pipeline bill “because this act of Congress conflicts with established executive branch procedures.” In other words Obama used the third veto of his presidency to preserve the prerogatives of his office, in this case evaluating cross-border pipelines and the ever-vague “national interest.”

A map of Canada's network of pipelines to transport liquids, included diluted bitumen from Alberta's tar sands. The dotted blue line cutting diagonally down from Alberta to Oklahoma is the Keystone XL pipeline while the dotted blue line headed east is the leading alternative, known as Energy East. Courtesy of Canadian Energy Pipeline Association

Veto aside, the Obama administration still might find Keystone XL is in the national interest, once the Department of State completes its . Approval appears to hinge on whether the pipeline is judged to “,” as the president put it in a speech in 2013. State has said no it won’t in the past, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, among others, say .

There is little doubt that oil made from the buried beneath Alberta is among the . Interestingly, about the only worse type of petroleum is the heavy crude from Venezuela that refineries on the Texas coast already process—the same facilities that Keystone aims to reach. And that’s just the climate accounting, which leaves out very real and communities as well as the .

There is also little doubt that will find other ways out, whether other pipelines or by truck, railcar or barge. How much or how little depends on future oil price speculation, Canadian geopolitics and the inner machinations of oil companies. But there is little doubt that without Keystone XL, less tar sands oil will find its way out of the ground and, perhaps more importantly, will not be as cheap—and in a time of low oil prices that may prove to be the difference.

Already, projects to have been put on hold as the global price of oil approaches the cost of producing it from the sands. Canada-based Cenovus Energy as well as petroleum giants Shell, Total and others have all shelved planned developments in Alberta.

Still, the tar sands juggernaut rolls on like the giant trucks used to mine the stuff via existing projects, such as the North Steepbank mine or the Christina Lake Project, to . The Canadian government has proved more than willing to subsidize development of the oil sands in the face of low oil prices historically. Keystone XL is also just one pipeline and, as the president has also said time and time again, a nation’s energy strategy hinges on more than just one pipeline. That goes double for the globe: in Australia or limiting U.S. coal exports can do more to slow the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide than stopping Keystone XL.

Welding a pipeline closed. Courtesy of TransCanada

The goal is a shift away from more polluting sources of energy—oil, coal and even natural gas—toward those that add less CO2 to the atmosphere like renewables, nuclear or even fossil fuel–fired power plants outfitted with . Every bit of infrastructure must be accounted for in as either adding more or adding less CO2 while in use. Such but there are obvious swaps, like substituting anything for coal or using less of the tar sands.

A glimpse of the ultimate challenge can be seen right now, in . Low cost encourages more use, which in turn results in more pollution. As alternatives to fossil fuels grow, coal, oil and natural gas will likely become cheaper as demand shrinks, in turn tempting us to burn more again. To prevent catastrophic climate change, that carbon conundrum will need to be solved.

Critically Endangered Plant with Brilliant Purple Flowers Discovered in Hawaii

Here’s the crazy thing about living in Hawaii: Even though the islands are home to more than 18,000 unique species that live nowhere else on Earth, the people of Hawaii rarely see those native plants and animals.

In no small part, that’s because Hawaii is the site of an ongoing extinction crisis. Thousands of species in the Hawaiian Islands risk extinction because of invasive species or habitat loss. Most of those native species evolved in extremely limited ranges, so it takes a lot of effort to see them—and it doesn’t take much to wipe them out.

In the meantime scientists throughout Hawaii are rushing to conserve the state’s native flora and fauna, the majority of which have never been fully studied. That effort often involves documenting where species live, what they need from their environment and what it will take to save them.

Sometimes, in the process of documenting these already endangered species, something novel pops into view. It happened in September 2012 when scientists were surveying the cold, mist-covered summit of Kōnāhua-nui Mountain on Oahu, seeking information about the endangered plant also known as the Oahu rollandia.

Instead they found something new: another species of that had never been documented before. In a paper published this month in the researchers dubbed it . The new species, whose name means “the that is caressed by the mist,” has brilliant purple flowers and grows a little over half a meter in height.

Oh yeah, and it’s probably critically endangered. The researchers located fewer than 50 of the plants, all of which were growing in two subgulches of one stream drainage on the mountaintop.

Even if it is protected—which is likely because it grows on state-owned land—the new species isn’t expected to become any less rare in the wild. Most of the native birds that probably once pollinated the plants and spread their seeds are either extinct, extirpated or have highly reduced populations on Oahu, notes Sebastian Marquez, one of the researchers who discovered the plant and co-authored the paper. “Whatever ecological services those birds provided are not being met for the species,” he says, adding that the researchers observed almost no young plants, indicating that wild reproduction occurs very rarely. Many of the fruits produced by the plants had been chewed on by invasive rats, slugs or feral pigs. Other seeds failed to germinate or decomposed before maturity.

The scientists did manage to collect a small number of seeds as well as two fertile stems and flower heads. These successfully germinated without much effort in an arboretum at the University of Hawaii, so it may be possible to increase the population off the mountain. The researchers recommended collecting immature fruit from all of the known plants in order to build a genetic database that’s as complete as possible.

Saving the wild plants will pose more of a challenge. In their paper the researchers noted that it would only take a single landslide, hurricane or flash flood to wipe out every remaining plant.

Although he’s excited by it, Marquez fears that new discoveries such as will do little to inspire more work to preserve Hawaii’s native flora. “People don’t get to emotionally connect with native Hawaiian terrestrial biota, let alone know what is native or not,” he says. That doesn’t stop him from trying, though. He works with an organization called as well as the Mānoa Cliff Native Forestation Project and his blog to try to educate people about the native species of Hawaii.

Marquez says this new discovery typifies the urgency facing both Hawaii’s endangered species and those that have yet to be discovered. “Without surveying and identifying, the environmental pressures facing these plants would have them go extinct without anyone knowing they were even there,” he says. At least for , this is one discovery that came just in time.

Previously in Extinction Countdown:

Microbes in the Gut Are Essential to Our Well-Being

Revelations about the role of the human microbiome in our lives have begun to shake the foundations of medicine and nutrition

Feb 17, 2015 | |

Antony van Leeuwenhoek wrote to the Royal Society of London in a letter dated September 17, 1683, describing “very little animalcules, very prettily a-moving,” which he had seen under a microscope in plaque scraped from his teeth. For more than three centuries after van Leeuwenhoek's observation, the human “microbiome”—the 100 trillion or so microbes that live in various nooks and crannies of the human body—remained largely unstudied, mainly because it is not so easy to extract and culture them in a laboratory. A decade ago the advent of sequencing technologies finally opened up this microbiological frontier. The Human Microbiome Project reference database, established in 2012, revealed in unprecedented detail the diverse microbial community that inhabits our bodies.

Most live in the gut. They are not freeloaders but rather perform many functions vital to health and survival: they digest food, produce anti-inflammatory chemicals and compounds, and train the immune system to distinguish friend from foe. Revelations about the role of the human microbiome in our lives have begun to shake the foundations of medicine and nutrition. Leading scientists, including those whose work and opinions are featured in the pages that follow, now think of humans not as self-sufficient organisms but as complex ecosystems colonized by numerous collaborating and competing microbial species. From this perspective, human health is a form of ecology in which care for the body also involves tending its teeming population of resident animalcules.

This special report on Innovations in the Microbiome, which is being published in both and Nature, is sponsored by Nestlé. It was produced independently by editors, who have sole responsibility for all editorial content. Beyond the choice to sponsor this particular topic, Nestlé had no input into the content of this package.

Giant Asteroid Collision May Have Radically Transformed Mars

An ancient, global-scale collision could explain the Red Planet’s mysterious “two-faced” appearance

February 25, 2015 | |

When the team simulated a collision with an asteroid about 4,000 kilometers across (slightly larger than Earth’s moon) they found that it caused the crust of the “virtual” Mars to reform into two distinct zones.

The planet Mars has been associated with its namesake god of war for millennia, but its own past may have been more violent than was previously imagined. A new study suggests that Mars was once hit by an asteroid so large that it melted nearly half of the planet’s surface.

Researchers came to this conclusion while studying a strange feature known as the Martian hemispheric dichotomy—a dramatic drop in surface elevation and crustal thickness that occurs near Mars’ equator. In the northern hemisphere the land’s elevation is on average about 5.5 kilometers lower and the crust is around 26 kilometers thinner.

The dichotomy was discovered in the early 1970s when NASA’s Mariner 9 probe made the first detailed map of the Martian surface. The feature has perplexed astronomers ever since. hinted that the dichotomy was formed by a glancing asteroid strike near the Martian north pole. But the , published in in December, suggests that a far more violent impact, at the opposite end of the planet, may have been the actual cause.

In the study astronomers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (E.T.H. Zurich) used an advanced 3-D computer model to simulate the effect of an asteroid impact on Mars 4.5 billion years ago, when experts think the dichotomy formed. They tested a rival hypothesis for its origin—that it had been formed by an impact at Mars’s south pole.

When the team simulated a collision with an asteroid about 4,000 kilometers across (slightly larger than Earth’s moon) they found that it caused the crust of the “virtual” Mars to reform into two distinct zones: a thicker one in the southern hemisphere and a thinner one in the north, similar to what we see on the real planet. What’s more, the predicted thicknesses of the two crustal segments matched the real values observed on Mars almost exactly. Taken together these predictions provide compelling evidence that a south polar impact was the cause of the dichotomy. “This study advances an alternate impact origin for the Martian dichotomy,” says Craig Agnor, an astronomer at Queen Mary, University of London, who was not involved in the work.

The simulation predicted that the impact would have generated so much heat that large swathes of Mars’s crust would have melted, forming a “magma ocean” across most of the planet’s southern hemisphere. It also predicted that, as the molten rock subsequently cooled and solidified, it would leave a thicker, higher-elevation crust over part of that hemisphere.

These findings do not conclusively solve the mystery of the dichotomy's origin. The Swiss team’s model is not perfect; for example, it cannot explain the dichotomy’s exact size. And in any case, it is not possible to prove a hypothesis using only a computer model. But there is another reason to think that the southern impact hypothesis might be right: It sheds light on another oddity of Mars's surface—the locations of its volcanoes.

When large asteroids hit rocky planets they tend to induce volcanic activity by causing “plumes” of hot rock to rise up within the planet's mantle, many years later. A drawback of the previous, “northern” impact scenario was that the high northern latitudes of Mars contain relatively few volcanoes, which occur mostly in equatorial and southern latitudes. But the southern impact simulation predicted that a few million years after the asteroid struck, volcanic plumes would slowly begin to rise toward the surface, at first near the equator and then gradually migrating toward the south pole. This prediction agrees well with the actual locations of the Red Planet’s volcanoes.

Asteroid impacts of the scope suggested by this study are extremely unlikely to happen today. They were probably more common in the early days of the solar system, when it was still littered with the rocky debris left over from planet-building. But even then such events would have been extremely uncommon. “This result has the potential to significantly change our understanding of Mars’s past,” says Giovanni Leone, a planetary scientist at E.T.H. Zurich and the study's lead author. “A rare event may have occurred early in its history that shaped the planet as we see it today.”

Emulsifiers in Food Linked to Obesity in Mice

The common food additives altered mice microbiomes to encourage gut inflammation and overeating. Dina Fine Maron reports February 25, 2015 | |

Inside our guts is a diverse ecosystem of bacteria: the . But the makeup of the community can depend on what we eat. Emulsifiers are food additives that extend the shelf life of processed foods. And now research with mice finds that consuming emulsifiers may and thereby contribute to obesity and inflammatory bowel disease.In the study, mice were fed doses of common emulsifiers in their water and mouse chow. The substances appeared to make it easier for gut bacteria to chew through the layers of mucus that typically line the intestine. The result was the triggering of chronic colitis in mice with impaired immune systems that predispose them to the condition.And even in mice with normal immune systems, emulsifier consumption appeared to trigger mild intestinal inflammation. These mice then tended to overeat and become obese and insulin resistant. The study is in the journal . [Benoit Chassaing et al, , direct link to come]Could emulsifiers cause the same health consequences in humans and be behind some of the obesity trend? The researchers hope to find out in future studies. If nothing else, they write that their new finding suggests that there should be improved testing on the total health effects of chemicals in our food.—Dina Fine Maron[][Scientific American ]

***

Hi, Steve Mirsky here, podcast editor at . This episode is the last scheduled 60-Second Health podcast. But reports about health and medicine will continue as part of the daily 60-Second Science series of podcasts. Just to for health and medical news as well as the latest offerings about all things science.

New Hope for Ebola?

How the largest outbreak on record jump-started the development of two experimental vaccines and a couple of promising treatments

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Researchers often talk about a race between the Ebola virus and the people it infects. A patient wins the race only if the immune system manages to defeat the virus before it destroys most of his or her organs. A community wins the race if it can isolate the first few patients before the disease spreads. Humanity will win the race if it develops treatments and, ultimately, a vaccine before the virus gains a permanent toehold in the cities of the globe.

For years Ebola held a natural advantage. Outbreaks were too small (typically fewer than 100 people) and too short-lived (less than five months) to give researchers the chance to test potential therapies. By the time they could have put a clinical trial in place, the threat would have passed. Pharmaceutical companies and research groups found it difficult to justify spending money on a disease that, as horrible as it was, had taken 40 years to dispatch its first 1,600 victims. Other diseases seemed far more worrisome: malaria, tuberculosis and HIV killed more than three million people in 2013.

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Harsher Punishments for the Obese and Hippies

Groups that elicit disgust are judged more severely for "impure" acts

Feb 12, 2015 | |

We like to think of our moral judgments as consistent, but they can be as capricious as moods. Research reveals that such judgments are swayed by incidental emotions and perceptions—for instance, people become more moralistic when they feel dirty or sense contamination, such as in the presence of moldy food. Now a series of studies shows that hippies, the obese and “trailer trash” suffer prejudicial treatment because they tend to elicit disgust.

Researchers asked volunteers to read short paragraphs about people committing what many consider to be impure acts, such as watching pornography, swearing or being messy. Some of the paragraphs described the individuals as being a hippie, obese or trailer trash—and the volunteers judged these fictional sinners more harshly, according to the paper in the : volunteers' assessments.

A series of follow-up studies solidified the link, finding that these groups also garnered greater praise for purity-related virtues, such as keeping a neat cubicle. If the transgression in question did not involve purity, such as not tipping a waiter, the difference in judgment disappeared. “The assumption people have is that we draw on values that are universal and important,” says social psychologist E. J. Masicampo of Wake Forest University, who led the study, “but something like mentioning that a person is overweight can really push that judgment around. It's triggering these gut-level emotions.”

The researchers also looked for real-world effects. After analyzing records of every New York City Police Department patrol stop from 2004 to 2013, they found that when suspects were stopped for purity violations (such as drugs, prostitution or lewdness), overweight people were more likely to be arrested or receive a summons. Each point increase in their body mass index increased the chances of punishment by 1 percent. Next Masicampo will test whether police make more purity arrests during flu season, with infection in mind.

Prior work shows that these un-conscious biases can lose their effect once made conscious. By alerting people to their purity prejudices, the researchers hope to bring about more equal treatment of those burdened by stigma. A fine aim because, after all, what is more disgusting than bigotry?

Behind the Books: Nonfiction Booktalking

Booktalking can be a great way to get students excited about the books available in a library or classroom collection. When booktalking a fiction title, you might begin by saying something like “it’s a paranormal romance presented from multiple points of view” or “it’s a contemporary realistic novel with an unreliable narrator.” These descriptions give students a general idea of what they’ll encounter without giving away the book’s plot.

Do you approach nonfiction booktalking in the same way? Probably not. Chances are you focus on what the book’s about. Sure, the topic of a nonfiction book is important. But so is the plot of a novel.

The reason we focus on a nonfiction book’s topic is because we don’t know how to do anything else. That’s because there’s no widely-accepted categories to provide a broad overview. But there should be, and I don’t think it would be that hard to come up with a system that works most of the time.

Earlier this school year, I blogged about nonfiction types (survey, specialized, concept, biography/autobiography), styles (expository, narrative, persuasive), and structures (description, sequence/order, compare & contrast, question & answer, cause & effect, and problem & solution). Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing about voice and point of view. Why not use them as a starting point for booktalking nonfiction?

For example, if I were booktalking Bugged: How Insects Changed the World by Sarah Albee, I might say “it’s an expository survey with a chronological structure; a lively, humorous, conversational voice; and a second-person point of view.

Because Bugged is a book for middle-grade readers, it’s perfectly reasonable that students could have been introduced to all the terms I’ve used above, just as they’ve been introduced to the meaning of “multiple points of view” and “contemporary realistic novel.” My description of Bugged lets readers know that the book is full of fascinating facts explained in context and that it will be fun to read.

This sort of terminology can also be used in written book reviews to give potential readers a stronger sense of how the information is presented. Of course, the trick to the success of this approach is getting everyone up to speed on the terminology.

What do you think? Could it work?

Obama Vetoes Keystone XL Pipeline Bill

The President swiftly delivered on his vow to veto a Republican bill approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada, leaving the long-debated project in limbo for another indefinite period

February 24, 2015

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By Jeff Mason and Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON, Feb 24 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday swiftly delivered on his vow to veto a Republican bill approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada, leaving the long-debated project in limbo for another indefinite period.

The Senate received Obama's veto message and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell immediately countered by announcing the Republican-led chamber would attempt to overturn the veto by March 3.

Obama rejected the bill hours after it was sent to the White House. Republicans passed the bill to increase pressure on Obama to approve the pipeline, a move the president said would bypass a State Department process that will determine whether the project is in the U.S. national interest.

"Through this bill, the United States Congress attempts to circumvent longstanding and proven processes for determining whether or not building and operating a cross-border pipeline serves the national interest," Obama wrote in his veto message.

Republicans, who support the project because of its job-creation potential, made passing a bill a top priority after gaining control of the U.S. Senate and strengthening their majority in the House of Representatives in November elections.

The bill passed by 270-152 in the House earlier this month and cleared the Senate in January. Despite their majority in the Senate, Republicans are four votes short of being able to override Obama's veto.

They have vowed to attach language approving the pipeline in a spending bill or other legislation later in the year that the president would find difficult to reject.

Obama has played down Keystone XL's ability to create jobs and raised questions about its effects on climate change. Environmentalists, who made up part of the coalition that elected the president in 2008 and 2012, oppose the project because of the carbon emissions involved in getting the oil it would carry out of Canadian tar sands.

TransCanada Corp's pipeline would carry 830,000 barrels a day of mostly Canadian oil sands petroleum to Nebraska en route to refineries and ports along the U.S. Gulf. It has been pending for more than six years. (Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner and Susan Cornwell; Editing by Peter Cooney)

6 of the Coolest Science Toys Coming Out in 2015 [Slide Show]

Take a sneak peek at the geeky gadgets and games that made their debut at the 2015 Toy Fair

February 24, 2015 | |

The American International Toy Fair is the stuff of dreams—both childhood and adult. All the newest toys, including magnetic sand, remote-controlled pterodactyls, stuffed-animal Grumpy Cats and endless construction sets, are not only on display throughout three massive floors—they’re unboxed. With wide eyes, scoured the aisles in New York City’s Javits Convention Center this February for the standout science and technology toys of 2015. Here are our favorite six:

>>View Slideshow

Why Don’t You Want to Sing and Dance in Public?

As soon as we are able to understand that others can have opinions of their own—and might not share our opinion of our killer dance moves—we lose our performance mojo.

Picture two birthday parties: one for 4 year olds, and one for 14 year olds. The former conjures kids bellowing “Happy Birthday” and putting their left feet in during the “Hokey Pokey”; the second conjures slump-shouldered teens huddled in corners furtively glancing at each other—even as loud music blares in the background. Why the difference? suggests that the process of kids losing the joy of singing and dancing is intricately linked to a crucial development in their understanding of other people. In short, as soon as we are able to understand that others can have opinions of their own—and might not share our opinion of our killer dance moves—we lose our performance mojo.

We tested the link between the ability to understand the minds of observers and willingness to perform with a test of one hundred fifty-nine children ranging in age from 3 to 12 years old. We first gave each child four options in random order: sing a song of their choosing, perform a dance of their choosing, circle red shapes on a page, or color in a square. Children had to select two of the four options to complete in front of us—right then and there. The first two tasks were our performance tasks, made even more difficult by the fact that the singing and dancing had to be completed without any musical accompaniment. The second two tasks were our “control” tasks, which we made deliberately boring to see if older kids would still choose these over the terror of performance.

The differences between kids of different ages were surprising even to us. Whereas some 31% of 3-year olds chose to both sing and dance, not a single child aged 11 or 12 did. Or put another way, while just 6% of 3- and 4-year-olds chose to avoid both singing and dancing, nearly 75% of 11- and 12-year olds chose to avoid both. Yes, 12-year olds would rather circle and color shapes, tasks they typically shun as being for little kids, than take the risk of breaking out the Macarena or belting out Taylor Swift.

Why such a change in preferences? We next measured children’s awareness that others might be judging their performance, using a task that measures “Theory of Mind”—or our ability to understand that others have minds and opinions that differ from ours. Children heard a story about a dolly named Sally who places a toy car in a basket and leaves the room; another doll, Anne, then moves the car to a box without Sally seeing the move. Children are then asked where Sally will look for her doll when she comes back. Those with Theory of Mind understand that Sally will look in the basket, because they understand that they have knowledge that Sally does not. Those lacking Theory of Mind guess that Sally will look in the box, because they lack the ability to realize that Sally does not share their knowledge and view of the world.

Who guessed right? Older children, overwhelmingly. 3- and 4-year olds were very unlikely to guess correctly, while 11- and 12-year olds nearly always got it right. Most importantly, this developmental increase in Theory of Mind was strongly and negatively correlated with children’s desire to sing and dance: the higher children scored on our Theory of Mind test—the more children understood that others can have a different opinion of their abilities—the more likely they are to refuse to perform. And this trend held among our youngest participants: 3- and 4- year olds with a more developed Theory of Mind were more likely to avoid singing and dancing.

Our data rule out a salient alternative explanation for our pattern of performance avoidance, one familiar to anyone interacting with socially awkward teens or tweens: as children enter puberty they experience a host of changes that decrease their desire to perform. However, our results show that the shift away from performance begins as early as age 4—years before children enter puberty—suggesting that these changes associated with puberty are unlikely to account for our results.

While our investigation stopped with 12-year olds, our casual observation of adults suggests that the tendency to refuse to sing and dance lingers long after adolescence (especially in the absence of alcohol). What are we forgoing with our refusal to perform? Research shows that activities like singing and dancing are associated with benefits for health and happiness, but even more qualitatively: have you ever seen a group of happier individuals than 4-year olds belting out “Let It Go” from the Disney movie ? Our results suggest that grown-ups could learn something from children by letting it go ourselves and getting out on the dance floor.

@garethideas

Massive Orion Nebula’s Origins Uncovered?

A vast ring of dust may explain the star-generating nebula’s birth

February 24, 2015 | |

STAR CREATOR: The Orion Nebula, which has spawned thousands of stars, may owe its existence to massive stars that lived and died long before its birth.

All stars are not created equal, nor are their creators. By far the best-known stellar nursery, the Orion Nebula, has spawned thousands of young stars, large and small. It glows so brightly the naked eye can see it, even though it is away. On a clear, dark, moonless night the cloud of gas and dust that makes up the Nebula looks like a fuzzy star south of the highly visible three-star belt of Orion, a constellation prominent tonight in all populated regions of the world. Now a new imaging technique has revealed that this great nebula is just a small part of an enormous ring of dust stretching across hundreds of light-years. The discovery hints at the nebula’s origins: radiation and explosions of massive stars at the ring's center may have blasted gas and dust outward until some of the material collapsed to give birth to the famous star creator.

No one had previously noticed the ring because foreground and background dust obscures the newfound object. "We were completely surprised to find out there's this beautiful ringlike structure," says Eddie Schlafly, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. He and his colleagues found the ring using the 1.8-meter in Hawaii to map interstellar dust. Dust reddens starlight—that's one reason the setting sun looks orange or red—so Schlafly's team observed the colors of stars over most of the sky in order to see where interstellar dust lurks. From the colors and distances of 23 million stars the team established how the dust is distributed in three dimensions in and around Orion.

This map colors dust in and around Orion green. Thein the yellow region around the six-o’clock position.surrounds a star named Lambda Orionis. Red marksand molecular gas mix.

These observations revealed that the Orion Nebula lies on the rim of a vast ring of dust that is 330 light-years in diameter—so large that much of it spills into Monoceros, a constellation east of Orion. If the ring were visible to the naked eye, it would look 27 times wider than the full moon. The Orion Nebula sits in one of its densest sections. appears in the February 1 .

John Bally, an astronomer at the University of Colorado Boulder who was unaffiliated with the discovery, calls the new dust-mapping technique that revealed the ring phenomenal. "It really allows us to measure the dust distribution in three dimensions for the first time," he says. "That I think is an astonishing result." The discovery hints at the Orion Nebula’s origins. One scenario: 10 million or 20 million years ago, long before the Orion Nebula existed, a group of massive stars arose. These stars were hot and luminous and the ultraviolet light they emitted stripped electrons from interstellar hydrogen gas in all directions. This radiation pushed interstellar gas and dust away in an expanding bubble, which was jolted even more when the stars exploded as supernovae. Parts of the bubble's surface grew dense enough to collapse, forming new stars—and an especially rich region of star birth set aglow the gas and dust we now call the Orion Nebula.

Bally and Christopher McKee, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, say this scenario is plausible but requires confirmation. If the idea is right, the dust ring should be expanding, so scientists will have to measure the dust expansion speed to verify it. Those measurements would also indicate when the expansion began, thereby dating the sequence of events that may have led to the Orion Nebula’s formation.

Europe’s new may lend further insight as it determines distances and motions of stars throughout the sky. Gaia may reveal stars that have moved away from the ring’s center, siblings of the deceased stars that created the ring, teaching us more about the formation process. The discovery of the Orion dust ring is an important piece of the puzzle, Bally says, although many aspects of star formation ecology in the region remain to be understood.

Misdirected Vengeance Can Still Feel Just

Revenge is sweet when the target is perceived to be part of a group with the original perpetrator

Feb 12, 2015 | |

In the Hollywood movie version of revenge, our wronged hero justifiably vanquishes the villain. In real life, though, revenge is hardly ever so clear-cut. Aggrieved persons typically do not know, or cannot access, the specific individual who did them wrong. Instead a phenomenon occurs that psychologists call “displaced revenge,” where avengers target a proxy—someone akin to the original transgressor. A new study finds that displaced revenge is sweeter when the target seems to belong to the same group as the wrongdoer.

The study explored entitativity, which is a measure of how closely people are associated with one another. A random crowd at a bus stop is loosely entitative. Sports team members—allied for a common cause and wearing the same jersey—are highly entitative.

The study's authors ran three experiments that compared displaced revenge against low- and high-entitativity third parties. The first involved hypothetical scenarios; the second had subjects recall a time they had felt wronged and then speculate about how they would feel if they had a chance get revenge on various third parties. In the third experiment, real-life victims could choose to exact revenge on innocent, real third parties. Students were manipulated into believing that their partners in a puzzle-solving test had decided not to share a prize of raffle tickets for a restaurant gift card. Before taking the test, the students had watched a video in which their partner—later their nemesis—either conversed with or ignored two other students who were dressed similarly or dissimilarly to the malfeasant partner. The wronged students could choose to do nothing or pursue vengeance by forcing these other students to view unpleasant images.

Across all experiments, avengers reported higher feelings of justice-related satisfaction against more closely tied people. The study illustrates how displaced revenge can fuel, for example, ethnic gang wars, says Arne Sjöström, co-author of the study and a psychologist at the Philipp University of Marburg in Germany. The results also suggest how cycles of retribution might be broken. “One potential strategy,” Sjöström says, “may consist in promoting perceptions of group variability,” so that the target group looks less monolithic.