Wendy Science

One of the 2015 expedition’s final sunsets at Anilao, on the west coast of Luzon. Throughout this seven-week expedition, nearly 50 team members from the U.S. and the Philippines have explored the biological richness of the on the planet. They sampled mangrove thickets and eelgrass shallows. They examined ocean bottoms covered by little more than sand and rubble, and reefs crowded with multicolored corals. They ventured to depths beyond 400 feet, where light scarcely penetrates and where bizarre, resourceful creatures find a way to make a living despite the limitations. And now, the expedition has come to a close. [embedded content] Late last week, several members of the team took a break from analyzing and processing their recent discoveries, and planning upcoming research trips, to chat with ’s Blogs Editor, , about their perspectives on this year’s expedition, and what comes next. The live event was part of the ’s series and featured and , two of the expedition’s scientific ...

Mexican Jays compare peanuts to determine which one has the most meat inside before choosing one for a meal. Karen Hopkin reports. By | | If you’ve ever been to an all-you-can-eat buffet, you know how important it is to . You don’t want to fill up on salad when so many await. It seems some birds also weigh their mealtime choices—literally. A study finds that Mexican Jays pick up and shake peanuts to assess their relative heft before choosing one. That report is served up in the . [Piotr G. Jablonski et al, ] Foods that hide their edible bits on the inside present a challenge to hungry diners. How can you or which shells harbor the biggest nuts? We humans knock on melons or squeeze avocados. But how do other species select the highest quality snacks? To find out how the jays do it, researchers fiddled with their feed. First they doctored peanuts so that some contained three nuts while others had none. When they offered these pods to some jays, the birds turned their beaks up at ...

A Liberian has died of Ebola in the first recorded case of the disease since a country at the heart of an epidemic that has killed more than 11,000 people was declared virus-free on May 9 after going 42 days without a new case. June 30, 2015 | By Alphonso Toweh MONROVIA (Reuters) - A Liberian has died of Ebola in the first recorded case of the disease since a country at the heart of an epidemic that has killed more than 11,000 people was declared virus-free on May 9 after going 42 days without a new case. The body of a 17-year-old tested positive for Ebola in Margibi County and authorities have begun tracing people the victim may have come into contact with while infected, Deputy Health Minister Tolbert Nyenswah said on Tuesday. "There is no need to panic. The corpse has been buried and our contact tracing has started work," Nyenswah told Reuters. Margibi is a rural area close to the capital Monrovia, and is home to the country's main international airport. A tota...

The World Health Organization credited Cuba with offering women early access to prenatal care, HIV and syphilis testing, and treatment for mothers who test positive June 30, 2015 | HAVANA, June 30 (Reuters) - The World Health Organization on Tuesday declared Cuba the first country in the world to eliminate the transmission of HIV and syphilis from mother to child. The WHO said in a statement that an international delegation that it and the Pan American Health Organization sent to Cuba in March determined the country met the criteria for the designation. In 2013, only two children in Cuba were born with HIV and five with syphilis, the statement said. "Cuba's success demonstrates that universal access and universal health coverage are feasible and indeed are the key to success, even against challenges as daunting as HIV," PAHO Director Carissa Etienne said in the statement. Cuba's Communist government considers its free healthcare a major achievement of the 1959 ...

The Viennese physician (1842-1925) has a unique and prominent place in the history of psychotherapy. From 1880-82, while treating a patient known as Anna O., Breuer developed the cathartic method, or , for treating nervous disorders. As a result of that treatment, he formulated many of the key concepts that laid the foundation for modern psychotherapy. This month marked the 90th anniversary of Breuer’s death, offering an opportunity to reflect on the value of his contributions. Breuer is best known for his collaboration with Sigmund Freud and for introducing Freud to the case of Anna O. (whose real name was ). The ideas emerging from that case so fascinated Freud that he devoted the rest of his career to developing them, in the form of psychoanalysis. The two men co-authored , published in 1895, which is considered the founding text of psychoanalysis. However, the significance of Breuer’s contributions goes well beyond his role as Freud’s mentor and collaborator. In fact, Breue...

Superconducting coils can keep objects in magnetic levitatation with virtually no energy input—but require very low temperatures. The long-standing quest to find a material that can conduct electricity without resistance at room temperature may have taken a decisive step forward. Scientists in Germany have observed the common molecule hydrogen sulfide superconducting at a record-breaking 203 kelvin (–70 ˚C) when subjected to very high pressures. The result confirms preliminary findings released by the researchers late last year, and is said to be corroborated by data from several other groups. Some physicists urge caution, however. Ivan Schuller at the University of California in San Diego, says that the results "look promising" but are not yet watertight. However, Antonio Bianconi, director of the Rome International Center for Materials Science Superstripes (RICMASS), thinks that the evidence is compelling. He describes the findings as "the main breakthrough" in...

Maximum temperatures on May 25, 2015 exceeded 40 degress Celsius in many parts of India. Most of India experienced extended extreme heat—with peaks up to 47 degrees Celsius in some areas—from mid-May through early June, resulting in a reported 2,500 deaths. Additionally, over 1,000 deaths are now being reported from a heat wave in neighboring Pakistan. This extreme weather raises important questions about climate change and resilience: How hot was it? What factors contributed to the high death toll? How did this year compare to previous years? Who were the most vulnerable populations? And, most importantly, what lessons can be learned to help reduce the health impacts of future heat waves, in light of increasing weather extremes, poverty and other environmental pressures? Extreme heat has severe impacts on the . Depending on age and humidity level, prolonged activity in temperatures can lead to heat-related hazards like exhaustion or heat stroke. Media reports cited a temperature ...

The history of the leap second reveals a curious pattern of decreasing frequency since its adoption 43 years ago By | | Due to a complex interplay of Earth’s and the moon’s gravitational fields, our planet’s rotation has gradually slowed over the millennia. It hasn’t been the designated length of one solar day—the time it takes Earth to make a full rotation, or slightly more than 86,400 seconds—since about 1820. As a result, our global standard of time, known as Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, occasionally becomes misaligned with UT1—the marker used to measure the actual length of one mean solar day. UT1 is determined using very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), a technique that relies on signals from extremely distant quasars to measure Earth’s precise orientation in space. In 1972 a policy to add a small unit of time, called a leap second, to UTC was implemented to correct the minute discrepancies found using such precise measurements. For reasons that are not entirely cle...

What's the best way to control ecological pests? Feed them to the world's greatest predator—us By THIS IS A PREVIEW. to access the full article.Already purchased this issue? Dinner is served: Asian shore crabs have spread rapidly since their introduction on the U.S. East Coast nearly three decades ago. Here they are served on a “plate” of invasive wakame seaweed.  My restaurant, called Miya's Sushi, is just a few miles from Long Island Sound in New Haven, Conn. We have made it our goal to return our cuisine to the roots of sushi, meaning simply to use what we have available where we live. Too often what we find now are invasive species—unwanted plants and animals humans have introduced to ecosystems. Nationwide, invasive species such as the wild boar and Asian carp are destroying farms and fisheries, causing economic damage that has been estimated at $120 billion a year. Our solution? Eat them. By collecting invasive seafood on shellfish beds, for instance, we basicall...

New software allows researchers to finally capture the powerful health data generated by our smartphones By | | For a recent breast cancer study, epidemiologist Kathryn H. Schmitz of the University of Pennsylvania sent out 60,000 letters—and netted 351 women. Walking each participant through the paperwork took 30 minutes or more. Such inefficient methods of finding test subjects have been the norm for medical research. Yet there's a wealth of data out there from the billion smartphones and 70 million wearable health trackers we buy every year. Their sensors generate terabytes of data every day about our activity, sleep and behavior. Those data would be fantastically useful to medical investigators—if only they could get at them. For the first time, there's a way. It's free software from Apple called ResearchKit. Research Kit lets researchers build apps to do the recruitment and data collection for them. You, the participant, know exactly who's getting this informat...

The game is a contemporary of the original Nintendo but it still appeals to today’s teens and lab monkeys alike—which is a boon for neuroscientists. It offers no lifelike graphics. Nor does it boast a screen. Primate players—whether human or not—are simply required to pull levers and replicate patterns of flashing lights. Monkeys get a banana-flavored treat as a reward for good performance whereas kids get nickels. But the game's creators are not really in it for fun. It was created by toxicologists at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the 1980s to study how chronic exposure to marijuana smoke affects the brain. Players with trouble responding quickly and correctly to the game’s commands may have problems with short-term memory, attention or other cognitive issues. The game has since been adapted to address a different question: whether anesthetics used to knock pediatric patients unconscious during surgery and diagnostic tests could affect a youngster's long-term neura...

Pink salmon are providing researchers with sobering hints to how carbon dioxide-induced acidity could affect freshwater fish species by the end of the 21st century. A study   yesterday in  showed that early exposure to high levels of CO 2 during the larval stage of development had significant negative effects on the fish’s size, metabolism and ability to sense threats in their environment. The study was among the first to look at how different CO 2 levels could affect fish larvae in fresh water, according to the lead author, Michelle Ou, a former master’s student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “We didn’t actually expect to see so many effects,” she said. “We were just poking around to see what we could find.” Pink salmon seemed like a good species to start with. Not only are the fish abundant and economically important, but they also serve as a keystone species in marine, freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems, according to the researchers. ...

SS 433 is a ravenous black hole that sucks the matter off its companion supergiant star like some sort of cosmic vampire—and it’s a messy eater. To date, SS 433 has been the only confirmed instance of a phenomenon known as “supercritical accretion” in which the black hole’s gluttonous stardust scarfing results in a hail of crumbs being thrust out into space. The viewpoint from Earth relative to SS 433 shows the object through a disk of material spiraling toward the black hole, so we do not see the its powerful x-rays in all their glory. But if the view were not obstructed by accreting material, SS 433 would appear as the brightest x-ray emitter in the galaxy. Because it inhales material so ravenously, SS 433 has attained a singular status as an oddball in the Milky Way. Now, observations of exceedingly bright black hole binaries in nearby galaxies—other stars partnered with voracious black holes—suggest that these astronomical pairs may be up to the same thing. The extragalactic binar...

Is pre-crastination — exhibited by college students, bill payers, e-mailers, and shoppers — a symptom of our harried lives?  Procrastination is a well-known and serious behavioral problem involving both and implications. Taxpayers commonly put off submitting their annual returns until the last minute, risking mathematical errors in their frenzy to file. Lawmakers notoriously dawdle and filibuster before enacting sometimes rash and ill-advised legislation at the eleventh hour. And, students burn the midnight oil to get their term papers submitted before the impending deadline, precluding proper polishing and proofreading. For these reasons, we are cautioned not to procrastinate: However, the opposite of procrastination can also be a serious problem — a tendency we call “pre-crastination.” Pre-crastination is the inclination to complete tasks quickly just for the sake of getting things done sooner rather than later. People answer emails immediately rather than carefully contempla...

The ruling, while a setback for the EPA, is unlikely to threaten its most significant climate change-related rule, the proposed Clean Power Plan, which would regulate carbon emissions from existing coal-fired power plants. The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency overstepped its authority with a 2012 regulation limiting mercury emissions and other pollutants from coal-fired power plants because it refused to consider the costs involved in complying with the mandate. In a  the court said that the EPA must consider the cost of an environmental regulation before deciding if it is “appropriate and necessary.” It left it to the EPA to decide how costs should be considered and sent the case back to the federal appeals court to decide whether the rule should remain in effect in the meantime. The ruling, while a setback for the EPA, is unlikely to threaten its most significant climate change-related rule, the proposed Clean Power Plan, which wou...

The interviewers asked about conventional crime, child maltreatment, peer and sibling abuse, sexual assault, indirect exposure to violence and witnessing violence to others, and Internet violence June 29, 2015 | By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - Phone-based surveys show that nearly four of every 10 kids and teens in the U.S. were exposed to violence or abuse over the previous year, researchers have found. "Children are the most victimized segment of the population," said study leader David Finkelhor of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. "The full burden of this tends to be missed because many national crime indicators either do not include the experience of all children or don't look at the big picture and include all the kinds of violence to which children are exposed," Finkelhor told Reuters Health by email. Compared to 2011, the violence rates appear to be stable, and certain kinds of violence e...

The US House of Representatives is wading into the debate over whether human embryos should be modified to introduce heritable changes. Its fiscal year 2016 spending bill for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would prohibit the agency from spending money to evaluate research or clinical applications for such products. In an unusual twist, the bill—introduced on June 17—would also direct the FDA to create a committee that includes religious experts to review a forthcoming report from the US Institute of Medicine (IOM). The IOM's analysis, which considers the ethics of creating  , was commissioned by the FDA. The House legislation comes during a time of intense debate on such matters, sparked by the announcement in April that researchers in China . The US National Institutes of Health (NIH)   that a 1996 law prevents the federal government from funding work that destroys human embryos or creates them for research purposes. Privately funded research on editing th...

The most hyped science story of the 21st century starts with a cocoa bean By | | Thousands of popular headlines over the past couple of decades have touted the supposed health benefits of —particularly dark chocolate (in moderation, of course). But every single one of the major studies on which those claims are based actually failed to prove any such connection. They weren't designed to—they are observational studies, whose main purpose is to identify interesting ideas that warrant closer, more rigorous investigation without wasting too much time and energy. You can blame traffic-hungry journalists (or their editors) for the specious headlines. Really getting to the bottom of whether or not is good for you requires what's known as a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. This is the most scientifically rigorous type of study researchers ever conduct and it's designed to separate honest-to-goodness real evidence from wishful thinking. As it happens, just suc...

This is evidence that the genes are involved in meiotic drive, a somewhat mysterious biological process that subverts the standard rules of heredity. In it, a particular version of a gene — or in this case, an entire chromosome — manages to increase the frequency by which it is transmitted to the next generation. New DNA sequencing data reinforce the notion that the X and Y chromosomes, which determine biological sex in mammals, are locked in an evolutionary battle for supremacy. David Page, a biologist who directs the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues explored the Y chromosomes carried by males of several species, mapping stretches of mysterious, repetitive DNA in unprecedented detail. These stretches may signal a longstanding clash of the chromosomes. Page presented the results last week at a meeting of the Society for the Study of Reproduction in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His team’s subjects included humans and other primates, a standard laboratory...