Extreme microbes living in hostile locations on Earth may be munching on cosmic rays that zip through space, says a study of a peculiar bacterium thriving in a dark gold mine.

AT LEAST two trillion galaxies — 10 times more than scientists thought — exist within the observable universe. And we can’t even see most of them.

A group of international astronomers compiled 20 years of images from the Hubble Space Telescope and other international observatories to create a 3D model of the 200 billion galaxies already estimated to exist.

But the model instead revealed that there are at least one trillion eight hundred billion more out there. Only 10 per cent of these are visible to us even with our strongest telescopes.

“It boggles the mind that over 90 per cent of the galaxies in the universe have yet to be studied,” said Christopher Conselice, who led the study published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal.

Since the scientists were observing deep space, they essentially gazed 13 billion light-years into the past and discovered that the early universe contained more galaxies than it does today. Many of those galaxies have since merged to form larger celestial objects.

Reading old books without opening them 

Scientists have devised a way to read without cracking a volume’s spine or risking paper cuts (and no, we’re not talking about e-books). The new method uses terahertz radiation — light with wavelengths that are between microwave and infrared waves — to view the text of a closed book. The technique is not meant for your average bookworm, but for reading rare books that are too fragile to open.

Barmak Heshmat of MIT and colleagues started small, with a nine-page book of thick paper that had one letter inked on each page. By hitting the book with terahertz radiation and looking at the reflected waves, the scientists could read the letters within.

Differences in the way the radiation interacts with ink and paper allowed the researchers to pick out shadowy outlines of the letters, and a letter-recognition algorithm automatically decoded the characters. The scientists could tell one page from another by using precise timing information: On the later pages, the waves penetrated deeper before reflecting and, therefore, took longer to return.

Historians also may be able to use the technique to find an artist’s signature hidden beneath layers of a painting. 

http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12665

Scientists have found the first experimental evidence that an atomic nucleus can harbor bubbles. The unstable isotope silicon-34 has a bubblelike center with a paucity of protons. This unusual “bubble nucleus” could help scientists understand how heavy elements are born in the universe, and help scientists find new, ultraheavy stable isotopes.

In their quirky quantum way, protons and neutrons in a nucleus refuse to exist in only one place at a time. Instead, they are spread out across the nucleus in nuclear orbitals, which describe the probability that each proton or neutron will be found in a particular spot. Normally, due to the strong nuclear force that holds the two types of particles together, nuclei have a fairly constant density in their centers, regardless of the number of protons and neutrons they contain. In silicon-34, however, some scientists predicted that one of the proton orbitals that fills the center of the nucleus would be almost empty, creating a bubble nucleus. But not all theories agreed. “This was the reason for doing the experiment” .

In pursuit of the bubble nucleus, the scientists smashed silicon-34 nuclei into a beryllium target, which knocked single protons out of the nuclei to create aluminum-33. The resulting aluminum-33 nuclei were in excited, or high-energy, states and quickly dropped down to a lower energy by emitting photons, or light particles. By observing the energy of those photons, Sorlin and colleagues could reconstruct the orbital of the proton that had been kicked out of the nucleus.

The scientists found that they ejected few protons from the central orbital that theorists had predicted would be empty. While the orbital can theoretically hold up to two protons, it held only 0.17 protons on average. In silicon-34, the central proton density is about half that of a comparable nucleus, the scientists calculated, after taking into account other central orbitals that contain normal numbers of protons. (The density of neutrons in silicon-34’s center, however, is normal.)

As protons are added to nuclei, they fill orbitals in a sequential manner, according to the energy levels of the orbitals. Silicon-34 is special — it has a certain “magic” number of protons and neutrons in its nucleus. There are a variety of such magic numbers, which enhance the stability of atomic nuclei. A magic number of protons means that the energy needed to boost a proton into the next orbital is particularly high. This explains the bubble’s origin. For a proton to jump into the unfilled central orbital, it needs significantly more energy. So silicon-34’s center remains sparsely populated.  

It’s an interesting paper and indeed provides evidence for a bubble nucleus.  The research could help scientists understand the spin-orbit interaction, the interplay between a proton’s angular momentum in its orbital and its intrinsic angular momentum, or spin. The effect is important for keeping heavy nuclei stable. Figuring out the impact of that interaction in this unusual nucleus could help scientists better predict the potential location of the “island of stability,” a theorized region of the periodic table with heavy elements that may be stable for long periods of time.

A better grasp of the spin-orbit interaction could also help scientists learn how elements are forged in rare cosmic cataclysms such as the merging of two neutron stars. There, nuclei undergo a complex chain of reactions, swallowing up neutrons and undergoing radioactive decay. Modeling this process requires a precise understanding of the stability of various nuclei — a property affected by the spin-orbit interaction.

http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys3916.html

A titanic volcano stopped a mega-sized earthquake in its tracks.

In April, pent-up stress along the Futagawa-Hinagu Fault Zone in Japan began to unleash a magnitude 7.1 earthquake. The rupture traveled about 30 kilometers along the fault until it reached Mount Aso, one of Earth’s largest active volcanoes. That’s where the quake met its demise, geophysicist Aiming Lin of Kyoto University in Japan and colleagues report online October 20 in Science. The quake moved across the volcano’s caldronlike crater and abruptly stopped, the researchers found.

Geophysical evidence suggests that a region of rising magma lurks beneath the volcano. This magma chamber created upward pressure plus horizontal stresses that acted as an impassable roadblock for the seismic slip powering the quake, the researchers propose. This rare meetup, the researchers warn, may have undermined the structural integrity surrounding the magma chamber, increasing the likelihood of an eruption at Aso.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/10/19/science.aah4629

The continuing promotion of cranberry use to prevent recurrent UTI in the popular press or online advice seems inconsistent with the reality of repeated negative studies or positive studies compromised by methodological shortcomings.

Cranberries Don’t Prevent Urinary Tract Infections

Many think the fruit raises urine acidity and has a bacteria-battling compound 

Over the course of a year, taking cranberry capsules did nothing to stave off urinary tract infections (UTIs) among older women living in nursing homes, a U.S. study finds. There was no significant difference in the presence of bacteriuria plus pyuria in those who took cranberry capsules and those who took placebo capsules, the researchers found.

Originally, it was thought that eating or drinking cranberry products increased the acidity of urine and prevented UTIs. There was also speculation that proanthocyanidin in cranberries prevented bacteria from adhering to the bladder wall.

The results were published online October 27th in JAMA to coincide with presentation at Infectious Disease Week.

An interesting  similarity between human cells and neutron stars

According to new research, we share at least one similarity with the neutron stars: the geometry of the matter that makes us. 

Researchers have found that the 'crust' (or outer layers) of a neutron star has the same shape as our cellular membranes. This could mean that, despite being fundamentally different, both humans and neutron stars are constrained by the same geometry.

To understand this finding, we need to quickly dive into the weird world of nuclear matter, which researchers call 'nuclear pasta' because it looks a lot like spaghetti and lasagne. 

This nuclear pasta forms in the dense crust of a neutron star thanks to long-range repulsive forces competing with something called the strong force, which is the force that binds quarks together.

In other words, two powerful forces are working against one another, forcing the matter – which consists of various particles – to structure itself in a scaffold-like (pasta) way.

"When you have a dense collection of protons and neutrons like you do on the surface of a neutron star, the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic forces conspire to give you phases of matter you wouldn't be able to predict if you had just looked at those forces operating on small collections of neutrons and protons."

Now, it turns out that these pasta-like structures look a lot like the structures inside biological cells, even though they are vastly different.

This odd similarity was first discovered in 2014, when Huber was studying the unique shapes on our endoplasmic reticulum (ER) – the little organelle in our cells that makes proteins and lipids.

You can see the ER structures (left) compared to the neutron stars (right) below: 

University of California, Santa Barbara

The discovery brought both of the scientists together to compare and contrast the differences between the structures, such as the conditions required for them to form

Normally, matter is characterised by a phase – sometimes called its state – such as gas, solid, liquid Different phases are usually influenced by a plethora of various conditions, like how hot the matter is, how much pressure it’s under, and how dense it is.

These factors change wildly between soft matter (the stuff inside cells) and neutron stars (nuclear matter). After all, neutron stars form after supernovae explosions, and cells form within living things. With that in mind, it’s quite easy to see that the two things are very different.

For neutron stars, the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force create what is fundamentally a quantum mechanical problem.

"In the interior of cells, the forces that hold together membranes are fundamentally entropic and have to do with the minimisation of the overall free energy of the system. At first glance, these couldn't be more different."

The team’s work was published in Physical Review C.

Transient Weakening of Earth’s Magnetic Shield Probed by a Cosmic Ray Burst

The GRAPES-3 muon telescope located at TIFR's Cosmic Ray Laboratory in Ooty recorded a burst of galactic cosmic rays of about 20 GeV, on 22 June 2015 lasting for two hours.

The burst occurred when a giant cloud of plasma ejected from the solar corona, and moving with a speed of about 2.5 million kilometers per hour struck our planet, causing a severe compression of Earth's magnetosphere from 11 to 4 times the radius of Earth. It triggered a severe geomagnetic storm that generated aurora borealis, and radio signal blackouts in many high latitude countries.

Earth's magnetosphere extends over a radius of a million kilometers, which acts as the first line of defence, shielding us from the continuous flow of solar and galactic cosmic rays, thus protecting life on our planet from these high intensity energetic radiations. Numerical simulations performed by the GRAPES-3 collaboration on this event indicate that the Earth's magnetic shield temporarily cracked due to the occurrence of magnetic reconnection, allowing the lower energy galactic cosmic ray particles to enter our atmosphere. Earth's magnetic field bent these particles about 180 degree, from the day-side to the night-side of the Earth where it was detected as a burst by the GRAPES-3 muon telescope around mid-night on 22 June 2015. The data was analyzed and interpreted through extensive simulation over several weeks by using the 1280-core computing farm that was built in-house by the GRAPES-3 team of physicists and engineers at the Cosmic Ray Laboratory in Ooty.

Solar storms can cause major disruption to human civilization by crippling large electrical power grids, global positioning systems (GPS), satellite operations and communications.

The GRAPES-3 muon telescope, the largest and most sensitive cosmic ray monitor operating on Earth is playing a very significant role in the study of such events. 

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.171101

Supersolids: strange state of matter

Two teams of scientists report the creation of supersolids, which are both liquid and solid at the same time. Supersolids have a crystalline structure like a solid, but can simultaneously flow like a superfluid, a liquid that flows without friction.

Research teams from MIT and ETH Zurich both produced supersolids in an exotic form of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. Reports of the work were published online at arXiv.org on October 26 (by the MIT group) and September 28 (by the Zurich group).

Bose-Einstein condensates are created when a group of atoms, chilled to near absolute zero, huddle up into the same quantum state and begin behaving like a single entity. The scientists’ trick for creating a supersolid was to nudge the condensate, which is already a superfluid, into simultaneously behaving like a solid. To do so, the MIT and Zurich teams created regular density variations in the atoms — like the repeating crystal structure of a more typical solid — in the system. That density variation stays put, even though the fluid can still flow.

The two groups of scientists formed their supersolids in different ways. By zapping their condensate with lasers, the MIT group induced an interaction that gave some of the atoms a shove. This motion caused an interference between the pushed and the motionless atoms that’s similar to the complex patterns of ripples that can occur when waves of water meet. As a result, zebralike stripes — alternating high- and low-density regions — formed in the material,  indicating that it was a solid.

Applying a different method, the ETH Zurich team used two optical cavities — sets of mirrors between which light bounces back and forth repeatedly. The light waves inside the cavities caused atoms to interact and thereby arrange themselves into a crystalline pattern, with atoms separated by an integer number of wavelengths of light.

J. Li et al. Observation of the supersolid stripe phase in spin-orbit coupled Bo.... arXiv:1610.08194. Posted October 26, 2016.

J. Léonard et al. Supersolid formation in a quantum gas breaking continuous translati.... arXiv:1609.09053. Posted September 28, 2016.

New type of atomic bond

Scientists have for the first time observed a weak atomic bond – in which an electron can grab and trap an atom – that was theorised 14 years ago. Researchers at Purdue University in the US observed a butterfly Rydberg molecule, a weak pairing of two highly excitable atoms that they predicted would exist more than a decade ago.

Rydberg molecules are formed when an electron is kicked far from an atom’s nucleus. Chris Greene, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue, and colleagues theorised in 2002 that such a molecule could attract and bind to another atom.

For all normal atoms, the electrons are always just one or two angstroms away from the nucleus, but in these Rydberg atoms you can get them 100 or 1,000 times farther away. Following preliminary work in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we saw in 2002 the possibility that this distant
Rydberg electron could bind the atom to another atom at a very large distance.

This electron is like a sheepdog. Every time it whizzes past another atom, this Rydberg atom adds a little attraction and nudges it towards one spot until it captures and binds the two atoms together.

A collaboration involving Greene and his postdoctoral associate Jesus Perez-Rios at Purdue and researchers at the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany has now proven the existence of the butterfly Rydberg molecule, so named for the shape of its electron cloud.  This new binding mechanism, in which an electron can grab and trap an atom, is really new from the point of view of chemistry. It’s a whole new way an atom can be bound by another atom.

The researchers cooled Rubidium gas to a temperature of 100 nano-Kelvin, about one ten-millionth of a degree above absolute zero. Using a laser, they were able to push an electron from its nucleus, creating a Rydberg atom, and then watch it.

Whenever another atom happens to be at about the right distance, you can adjust the laser frequency to capture that group of atoms that are at a very clear internuclear separation that is predicted by our theoretical treatment.

They were able to detect the energy of binding between the two atoms based on changes in the frequency of light that the Rydberg molecule absorbed.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12820

Why Neanderthal DNA wasn't much successful...

Neanderthals and modern humans got separated  from a common ancestor about half a million years ago.

Living in colder climes in Eurasia, Neanderthals evolved barrel chests, large skulls and strong hands. In Africa, modern humans acquired shorter faces, a prominent chin and slender limbs. Then, roughly 50,000 years ago, the two species encountered one another and interbred, as modern humans spread out of Africa.

The legacy of this interbreeding has been the subject of much scientific inquiry in the past few years. Today, up to 4 percent of the genes of non-Africans are Neanderthal in origin.. These may have influenced a diverse range of traits, including keratin production, disease risk. Where did all the other Neanderthal DNA go? Why did a Neanderthal-human hybrid not prevail?

Two recent studies converge on an explanation. They suggest the answer comes down to different population sizes between Neanderthals and modern humans, and this principle of population genetics: In small populations, natural selection is less effective.

Neanderthals have this small population over hundreds of thousands of years, presumably because they’re living in very rough conditions. As a result, Neanderthals were more inbred than modern humans and accumulated more mutations that have a slightly adverse effect, such as increasing one’s risk of disease, but do not prevent one from reproducing .

After Neanderthals started mating with humans, natural selection in the larger human population started excluding.

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pg...

Birds and other marine animals are eating the plastic we discard into the ocean as it breaks down into small pieces.Why? 

Two scientists from the University of California, Davis think they have the answer: the birds are drawn by the smell of a dimethyl sulfide released by plastic -- the same chemical released by phytoplankton.

Some birds (which the paper describes as “procellariiform species”) have a strong sense of smell, and respond to a certain chemical, dimethyl sulfide, as a cue to find their prey. And in a study released on 16th Nov., 2016 in Science Advances, their suspicions were confirmed.

Dimethyl sulfide is released by phytoplankton as it gets eaten by a predator or breaks down in the ocean or on shore, signaling to these birds and others to come eat the phytoplankton’s predators (like krill).

Dr. Nevitt and Mr. Savoca found that the chemical is also released when tiny pieces of plastic are present in the ocean, often a result of “biofouling,” which describes the process when algae colonizes pieces of plastic, and then die or are eaten by other organisms.

In this study, the scientists used plastic beads of the type used in bottles, bags, textiles and hundreds of applications, ranging from four to six millimeters in diameter. After the microplastics had been in the ocean for about three weeks, dimethyl sulfide was found in the water and air around them in concentrations high enough that these types of birds may be able to smell, the scientists found, using tools that are otherwise meant for measuring sulfur in beer or wine.

The study suggests that the odor of dimethyl sulfide on or around marine plastic debris is “maladaptive foraging behavior” — that the birds are using their evolutionary traits to forage for food in ways that might be bad for them, causing problems like chemical toxicity or obstruction. According to the study, a recent projection model concluded that more than 99 percent of all seabird species will have eaten plastic debris by 2050.

Dr. Nevitt said that the study could have implications for other marine animals. Those that eat similar species to these birds — like baleen whales — or those that may also be attracted to dimethyl sulfide — like sea turtles — could be at risk. The researchers hope the study will help determine strategies for how to fight this growing environmental problem, as plastic pollution increases in the ocean.

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/11/e1600395

Popular heartburn drugs —  under investigation for possible links to dementia, kidney and heart problems — have a new health concern to add to the list. An analysis of almost 250,000 medical records in Denmark has found an association with stroke.

Researchers from the Danish Heart Foundation in Copenhagen studied patients undergoing gastric endoscopy from 1997 to 2012. About 9,500 of all patients studied suffered from ischemic strokes, which occur when a blood clot blocks a blood vessel in the brain.

Overall, the risk of stroke was 21 percent higher in patients taking a proton pump inhibitor, a drug that relieves heartburn, the researchers reported November 15 during the American Heart Association’s annual meeting. While those patients also tended to be older and sicker to start with, the level of risk was associated with dose, the researchers found. People taking the lowest drug doses (between 10 and 20 milligrams a day, depending on the drug) did not have a higher risk. At the highest doses, though, Prevacid (more than 60 mg/day) carried a 30 percent higher risk and Protonix (more than 80 mg/day) a 94 percent higher risk. For Prilosec and Nexium, stroke risk fell within that range.  

Scientists have hacked a plant's genes to make it use sunlight more efficiently — a breakthrough that could eventually dramatically increase the amount of food grown.

How what you eat effects your gut...

Mucus plays a major role in your gut. There are antimicrobial peptides and proteins that are present in the environment. Bacteria live in your gut and forage on the carbohydrates. And it's a lubricant, it helps sweep contents down the GI tract, without injuring the epithelial layer. In the colon, the mucus builds a wall: a barrier against friendly bacteria, as well as pathogens that could be transiting through. But here's the problem: your gut bacteria may chew right through that wall—if you skimp on fiber in your diet. 

In the studies conducted on mice, extreme high-fiber diet helped keep the mucus barrier intact. But in mice that had zero fiber—or the kind of soluble fiber typically added to processed foods—the fiber-eating members of the gut dwindled. Their absence opened up more space for mucus-munching bacteria, which increased in number, and tore through the protective mucus wall—leaving intestinal cells open for microbial attack. The study's published in the journal Cell. 

Your diet could predispose how you react to an enteric pathogen. Eating natural vegetables, raw vegetables, cooked veggies, whole grains, is definitely good for you. Interestingly, the mice's gut bacteria bounced back within a day to a change in diet. 

A Dietary Fiber-Deprived Gut Microbiota Degrades the Colonic Mucus Barrier and Enhances Pathogen Susceptibility

http://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(16)31464-7

Must read ... An open letter from women of science

 Women scientists' pledge...

https://500womenscientists.org/#our-pledge

The 'BIG Bell Test: worldwide quantum experiments powered by human randomness' aims to conduct a series of quantum experiments in labs around the world that, for the first time, will be controlled by human decisions made by

volunteers across the world. On November 30th, for the first time, participants around the world took part in a unique worldwide experiment with the aim of testing the laws of quantum physics. 

Coordinated by ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences, 12 laboratories from around the world collaborated for the BIG Bell Test: worldwide quantum experiments powered by human randomness with the aim of demonstrating experimentally that the nanoscale world is as strange as quantum physics predicts, consisting of particles in superstates that collapse only when observed; strange instantaneous interactions at a distance; predictions that were questioned by Einstein, who rejected them completely.

During the 48 hours during which it was November 30th somewhere on the planet, participants contributed to the initiative, generating sequences of zeros and ones through a video game to produce sequences of numbers that were as random as possible. Each of these bits was used to control the experimental conditions of the labs in real time. They moved mirrors, polarizing filters, waveplates—elements located on optical tables that affected the types of measurements made on the quantum systems in each lab.

All the participants provided scientists with millions of unpredictable, independent decisions that were used to measure their particles. This independence is a crucial feature for the conclusions of the Bell tests to be valid. Using the sequences provided by the participants, the scientists verified whether or not their particles were intertwined by the quantum entanglement that Einstein could not accept. In a nutshell, the Bell test states that experimentalists have to conduct their measurements with the help of human decisions and calculate the "Bell parameter" (also known as the parameter S). If the universe is predictable and without quantum entanglement, then S cannot be greater than two. That is, S should always be less than two. Otherwise, the inequality has been violated, indicating the presence of intrinsic quantum phenomena.

By 13:00 CET, the minimum number of participations needed to provide enough bits to power the experiments had already been surpassed, registering above 1000 bits per second in a stable manner over the course of several hours. By early afternoon CET, some of the labs had been able to obtain preliminary results, confirming violations of Bell's inequality, and thus confirming the predictions of quantum physics.

5th world conference on research integrity

May 18th to 31st, 2017, Amsterdam, The Nederlands

To  promote the integrity of research – from proper design methodology to ethical submission and publication to making research data available for re-use.

Themes include transparency and accountability, building on the premise that the honesty and reliability of research are best served by openly sharing all aspects of research and by taking personal responsibility for it. It also draws attention to the urgent need to fight questionable research practices. 

More details here: http://www.wcri2017.org/

The BIG Bell Test.

The experiment - coordinated by ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Spain - powered by human randomness is aimed to demonstrate that the microscopic world is in fact as strange as quantum physics predicts. 

Predictions such as particles behaving in a random way, determining their properties only when we look at them; strange instantaneous interactions at a distance - were all questioned by Einstein, who rejected them completely. 

During the 48 hours in which it was November 30th at different place on the planet, participants contributed to the initiative, generating sequences of zeros and ones as random as possible through a video game. 

Each of these bits was used to control in real-time the experimental conditions of the labs. 

They moved mirrors, polarising filters, waveplates - elements located on optical tables and that affect the type of measurements that are made on the different quantum systems in each lab. 

Together all the participants provided scientists with millions of unpredictable, independent decisions which were used to measure their particles. 

This independence is a crucial feature for the conclusions of the Bell tests to be valid. 

Using the sequences provided by the participants, the scientists have been able to verify whether or not their particles were intertwined by the "spooky action at a distance" that Einstein could not accept. 

The Bell test states that experimentalists have to do their measurements with the help of human decisions and calculate the "Bell parameter" (known as the parameter S). 

If the world is, as Einstein believes, predictable and without "spooky actions at a distance", then S cannot be greater than 2. Otherwise, the inequality has been violated, indicating the presence of intrinsically quantum phenomena. 

By 13:00 Central European Time (CET), the minimum number of participations needed to assure enough bits to power the experiments had already been surpassed, registering above 1,000 bits per second in a stable manner over the course of several hours. 

By early afternoon, some of the labs had been able to obtain preliminary results, confirming violations of Bell's inequality, and thus refuting Einstein, giving their complete support to the predictions of quantum physics. 

"The project required contributions from many people in very different areas: the scientists pushed their experiments to new limits, the public very generously gave us their time in support of science, and educators found new ways to communicate between these two groups," said Morgan Mitchell, professor at ICFO.

Effects of c- section births on evolution

Caesarean section (or C-section) deliveries can save lives when babies are too large to be born naturally - or if there are other health complications - but they also appear to be affecting how humans are evolving, scientists report.

In the past, larger babies and mothers with narrow pelvis sizes might both have died in labour.  Thanks to C-sections, that's now a lot less likely, but it also means that those 'at risk' genes from mothers with narrow pelvises are being carried into future generations.

Cases where a baby can't fit through the birth canal have increased from 30 in 1,000 births in the 1960s to 36 in 1,000 today because of this C-section effect, according to estimates from researchers at the University of Vienna in Austria.  That's a significant shift in just half a century.

"Without modern medical intervention, such problems often were lethal and this is, from an evolutionary perspective, selection.

The team used a mathematical model based on obstructed child birth data to reach their estimates.

More detailed studies would be required to actually confirm the link between C-sections and evolution, as all we have now is a hypothesis based on the birth data. But Mitteroecker and his colleagues say it's important to consider the effect the rise in these procedures is having.

There are already a few conflicting evolutionary forces at work here, scientists think, in what's known as the obstetrical dilemma.

The 'dilemma' is that the larger a baby is when it's born, the more likely its chances of survival. At the same time, women have evolved with smaller pelvic sizes to aid upright walking and to limit the chances of premature births.

Both evolutionary pressures are working to try and keep babies healthy... but they're also working against each other.

"One side of this selective force - namely the trend towards smaller babies - has vanished due to caesarean sections.

This evolutionary trend will continue but perhaps only slightly and slowly.

Cliff-edge model of obstetric selection in humans

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/11/29/1612410113

Researchers from Egypt and Saudi Arabia have developed a simple way to manufacture an eco-friendly and affordable membrane that can efficiently adsorb oils spills from sea or waste water.

The membrane can recover quickly and easily for reuse — it can be applied at least 10 times with the same efficiency, according to a study published in Marine Pollution Bulletin.

The nanostructured polymer blend adsorbs oil and can be reused at least 10 times.It is made from natural materials friendly to the environment and aquatic organisms. Its capacity to work on a large scale, with oil spills at sea, has yet to be tested.

the study published last September tested blends of nanoscale polyvinyl alcohol polymers, considered to be among the most dissolvable and non-toxic biopolymers. They can also be manufactured relatively cheaply from biodegradable and biocompatible polymers.

A funny and scientific way of explaining Father Christmas:

The mystery of how Father Christmas can deliver presents to 700 million children in one night, fit down the chimney and arrive without being seen or heard has been explained in a scientific way by a physicist at the University of Exeter.

Santa and his reindeer zoom around the world at such speed that - according to relativity theory - they would shrink, enabling Father Christmas and a huge sack of presents to fit down chimneys.

Dr Katy Sheen, a physicist in the Geography department at the University of Exeter, has also found a scientific explanation for why Santa is not heard arriving by children, and why they rarely catch a glimpse of him on Christmas eve.

Santa's stealth delivery is partly explained by special relativity theory devised by Albert Einstein, whom Dr Sheen thinks bares a passing resemblance to Santa.

Relativity theory explains how Father Christmas can fit down the chimney. At the speeds he needs to travel to deliver presents to every child, Father Christmas shrinks - or gets thinner - in the direction he is travelling. And he has to be careful not to stop for a mince pie in a chimney, or he could grow back to full size!

Relativity also explains why Father Christmas appears not to have aged throughout the ages, because relativity can slow down clocks.

The physicist has calculated that Santa and his reindeer would have to travel at about 10 million kilometres per hour to deliver presents to every child expected to celebrate Christmas in 31 hours (taking into account world time zones).

If millions of children have been good, and deserve bigger stockings, he may need to travel even faster. Such speed would make him change from red to green and, at greater speeds, he would disappear! Children would not be able to recognise him as he would appear as a rainbow-coloured blur, eventually disappearing to the human eye.

Travelling at more than 200,000 times faster than Usain Bolt, the world's fastest man, the laws of physics explain why Father Christmas is rarely seen by children while delivering presents.

The Doppler effect would make Santa change colour because the light waves he releases would get squashed at such a high speed.

The Doppler effect also explains why children cannot hear Father Christmas arrive. As Santa and his sleigh approach, the sound of bells and his deep 'ho, ho, ho' would get higher and higher (like when an ambulance siren whizzes by) and then become completely silent, because he would move beyond human hearing range. Even the sound of Santa urging on Rudolph would become unrecognisable, and then inaudible to the human ear.

If children hear a bang on Christmas night, it may not be the sound of Santa dropping his presents, landing on their roof in his sleigh, or sliding down the chimney with a plop. Santa's reindeer could have broken the speed of sound, resulting in a 'sonic boom.'

Dr Sheen, a physicist working in the University of Exeter's Geography department, is not planning to present her research to a peer-reviewed journal (it's prepared with the festive spirit in mind), and has done the calculations in her own time to interest children in science and physics.

-Eureka Alert

A “crater” in Antarctica once thought to be the work of a meteorite impact is actually the result of ice melt, new research finds.

The hole, which is in the Roi Baudouin ice shelf in East Antarctica, is a collapsed lake — a cavity formed when a lake of meltwater drained — with a “moulin,” a nearly vertical drainage passage through the ice, beneath it, researchers found on a field trip to the area in January 2016.

Combining their fieldwork with satellite data and climate modeling, the researchers found that East Antarctica is more vulnerable to melt than was previously realized. Warm winds to the region blow away the snow cover, which darkens the surface of the ice, the team reported Dec. 12 in the journal Nature Climate Change. Darker surfaces absorb more heat from the sun than lighter surfaces, so they are more prone to melt. These floating ice sheets don’t contribute much to sea level rise ­— as they’re already in the ocean — but they provide an important backstop against the flowing of land-based ice from continental Antarctica into the ocean.

Earth’s surface is shattered by roads into over 600,000 fragments – more than half of which are smaller that one square kilometre – severely reducing the ability of ecosystems to function effectively, a new study has found.

Roads have made it possible for humans to access almost every region but this comes at a very high cost ecologically to the planet’s natural world. Despite substantial efforts to conserve the world’s natural heritage, large tracts of valuable roadless areas remain unprotected, researchers said.

The researchers from the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development in Germany used a dataset of 36 million kilometres of roads across the landscapes of the earth. They are dividing them into more than 600,000 pieces that are not directly affected by roads.

Of these remaining roadless areas only seven per cent are larger than 100 square kilometres. The largest tracts are to be found in the tundra and the boreal forests of North America and Eurasia, as well as some tropical areas of Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. Only nine per cent of these areas undisturbed by roads are protected.

Roads introduce many problems to nature. For instance, they interrupt gene flow in animal populations,facilitate the spread of pests and diseases, and increase soil erosion and the contamination of rivers and wetlands.

Then there is the free movement of people made possible by road development in previously remote areas, which has opened these areas up to severe problems such as illegal logging, poaching and deforestation.

Most importantly, roads trigger the construction of further roads and the subsequent conversion of natural landscapes, a phenomenon the study labels “contagious development.”

“Our global map provides guidance on the location of the most valuable roadless areas,” said Pierre Ibisch, from the Eberswalde University. In many cases they represent remaining tracks of extensive functional ecosystems, and are of key significance to ecological processes, such as regulating the hydrological cycle and the climate,” said Ibisch.

The researchers used a large data base generated through crowd-sourcing platform to produce a global map for roadless.

All roads affect the environment in some shape or form including timber extraction tracks and minor dirt roads, and the impacts can be felt far beyond the road edge.

China's pollution is causing millions of premature deaths.

A team of researchers led by Professor Zhu Tong from Peking university used PM2.5 data from over 500 ground observation stations in China, re-analyzing them using a newly developed integrated exposure-response (IER) model to estimate the risk of premature death due to exposure to PM2.5. They found that 84 percent of China’s population live in areas where the yearly average PM2.5 exceeded 35 micrograms per cubic meter, the upper limit set in ambient air quality standards by the World Health Organization. Their model predicted that this exposure to high PM2.5 levels resulted in 1.37 million premature deaths, of which 50 percent, 28 percent and 12 percent were due to cerebrovascular disease, ischemic heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease respectively. The study also points out that if the concentration of PM2.5 meets the WHO standards, the risk of premature death can decrease by 39 percent, 23 percent and 66 percent respectively, revealing the non-linear relationship between the decrease of PM2.5 and the improvement of different health conditions. 

Estimating adult mortality attributable to PM_2.5 exposure in China with assimilated PM_2.5 concentrations based on a ground monitoring network

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969716310956

The Postmortem Skin Microbiome to Estimate the Postmortem Interval

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.01...

Necrobiome. Heard about it before? It is the microbiological ecology of dead bodies. The genetic signatures of that microbial community as it waned and waxed after death can be used to build an algorithm that could pinpoint a corpse's time of death, to an accuracy of just two summertime days and can be used in forensic science.

Scientists face Intimidation and death threats in the US!

Troubling Signs for Science under Trump

The next four years are looking grim for science in America

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/rosetta-stones/troubling-signs...

Vera Rubin Didn't Discover Dark Matter

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/vera-rubin-didnt-di...

Languages Are Still a Major Barrier to Global Science

A third of new scientific findings are published in languages other than English, contributing to biases in our understanding and hinderances to the advance of science and research, a new study has found.

English is now considered the common language of global science. All major scientific journals seemingly publish in English, despite the fact that their pages contain research from across the globe.

Language hinders new findings getting through to practitioners in the field and causes the international community missing important science, said researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK.

They argue that whenever science is only published in one language, barriers to the transfer of knowledge are created.

The researchers call on scientific journals to publish basic summaries of a studys key findings in multiple languages and universities to encourage translations as part of their outreach evaluation criteria.

The researchers point out an imbalance in knowledge transfer in countries where English is not the mother tongue - much scientific knowledge that has originated there is available only in English and not in their local languages.

Researchers surveyed the web platform Google Scholar in a total of 16 languages for studies on biodiversity conservation published during a single year, 2014.

Of the over 75,000 documents, including journal articles, books and theses, some 35.6 per cent were not in English.

Of these, the majority was in Spanish (12.6 per cent) or Portuguese (10.3 per cent). Simplified Chinese made up six per cent and three per cent were in French.

Random sampling showed that only around half of non-English documents included titles or abstracts in English.

This means that around 13,000 documents on conservation science published in 2014 are unsearchable using English keywords.

This can result in sweeps of current scientific knowledge - known as systematic reviews - being biased towards evidence published in English, researchers said.

This, in turn, may lead to over-representation of results considered positive or statistically significant, and these are more likely to appear in English language journals deemed high-impact.

In addition, information on areas specific to countries where English is not the mother tongue can be overlooked when searching only in English.

For environmental science, this means important knowledge relating to local species, habitats and ecosystems - but also applies to diseases and medical sciences.

But native English speakers tend to assume that all the important information is available in English which is not the case in real terms. On the other hand, non-native English speakers tend to think carrying out research in English is the first priority, often ending up ignoring non-English science and its communication.

The research was published in the journal PLOS Biology.

http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbi...

Disturbing facts: Approximately half of studies published on new medical treatments leave out at least some of the adverse effects they uncovered, according to a recent analysis in PLOS Medicine. A team of British researchers conducted the review after coming across individual cases of missing side effects in medical literature, which includes studies from pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and academics. To determine how widespread the problem was, they analyzed 28 journal articles that together cross-checked the published data from more than 500 clinical studies with their original data sets. The review's results quantitatively confirm that some drugs may have side effects not even doctors know about—which means treatments may not be as safe as they appear.

• These findings suggest that researchers should search beyond journal publications for information on side effects of treatments.
• These findings also support the need for the drug industry to release full data on side effects so that a complete picture can be given to health professionals, policy makers, and patients.

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pm...

Reporting of Adverse Events in Published and Unpublished Studies of Health Care Interventions: A Systematic Review

People who live near roads laden with heavy traffic face a higher risk of developing dementia than those living further away, possibly because pollutants get into their brains via the blood stream, according to researchers in Canada.

A study in The Lancet medical journal found that people who lived within 50 metres (55 yards) of high-traffic roads had a 7.0 percent higher chance of developing dementia compared to those who lived more than 300 metres away from busy roadways.

Air pollutants can get into the blood stream and lead to inflammation, which is linked with cardiovascular disease and possibly other conditions such as diabetes. This study suggests air pollutants that can get into the brain via the blood stream can lead to neurological problems.

Carbon Chemistry: What is new...Carbon can exceed four-bond limit

A molecule originally proposed more than 40 years ago breaks the rules about how carbon connects to other atoms, scientists have confirmed. In this unusual instance, a carbon atom bonds to six other carbon atoms. That structure, mapped for the first time using X-rays, is an exception to carbon’s textbook four-friend limit, researchers report in the Jan. 2 Angewandte Chemie.

Atoms bond by sharing electrons. In a typical bond two electrons are shared, one from each of the atoms involved. Carbon has four such sharable electrons of its own, so it tends to form four bonds to other atoms.

But that rule doesn’t always hold. In the 1970s, German scientists made an unusual discovery about a molecule called hexamethylbenzene. This molecule has a flat hexagonal ring made of six carbon atoms. An extra carbon atom sticks off each vertex of the ring, like six tiny arms. Hydrogen atoms attach to the ring’s arms. And leftover electrons zip around the middle of the ring, strengthening the bonds and making the molecule more stable. 

When the scientists removed two electrons from the molecule, leaving it with a positive charge, some evidence suggested it might dramatically change its shape. It seemed to rearrange so that one carbon atom was bonded to six other carbons.

A  different lab has revisited the question. 

When hexamethylbenzene lost two electrons, it reordered itself. One carbon atom jumped out of the ring and took a new position on top, turning the flat hexagonal ring into a five-sided carbon pyramid. And the carbon on top of the pyramid was indeed bonded to six other carbons — five in the ring below, and one above.

This molecule is very exceptional. Though scientists have found other exceptions to carbon’s four-bond limit, this is the first time carbon has been shown associating with this many other carbon atoms.

When scientists measured the length of the molecule’s chemical bonds, the top carbon’s six bonds were each a bit longer than an ordinary carbon-carbon bond. A longer bond is generally less strong. So by picking more partners, that carbon has a slightly weaker connection to each one.

The carbon isn’t making six bonds in the sense that we usually think of a carbon-carbon bond as a two-electron bond. That’s because the carbon atom still has only four electrons to share. As a result, it spreads itself a bit thin by sharing electrons among the six bonds.

Another theory on how the moon came into existence...

Our moon formed about 4.5 billion years ago, between twenty million and a hundred million years after Earth took shape. How exactly it formed is a matter of debate. Did it accrete in tandem with Earth, from the same proto-planetary stuff, or did it spin off afterward? Is it our fraternal twin or an identical one? Or was it adopted, drawn into our gravitational sway as it passed by? Since the nineteen-eighties, the consensus has centered on the single-impact hypothesis, sometimes known as the Big Splash or the Big Splat, which supposes that the moon formed when a planet-size object, often called Theia, crashed into Earth and sent a huge mass of debris into orbit. But today, in a paper in Nature Geoscience, a team of Israeli researchers is proposing an equally compelling origin story: the moon, they say, is the product not of one impact but of at least a dozen—and it isn’t just one moon but an amalgam of the many moons that came before it.

Hair cells could heal wounds without scars forming...

Scientists found that in mouse during wound healing adipocytes regenerate from myofibroblasts, a cell type thought to be differentiated and non-adipogenic. Myofibroblast reprogramming required neogenic hair follicles, which triggered BMP signaling and then activation of adipocyte transcription factors expressed during development. Overexpression of the BMP antagonist, noggin, in hair follicles or deletion of the BMP receptor in myofibroblasts prevented adipocyte formation. Adipocytes formed from human keloid fibroblasts when treated with either BMP or when placed with human hair follicles in vitro. Thus, they identified the myofibroblast as a plastic cell type that may be manipulated to treat scars in humans.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/01/04/science.aai8792

The toll fetal alcoholic syndrome takes...

Worldwide, an estimated 1,19,000 children are born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) each year, a new study from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) shows.

The study, published in The Lancet Global Health, provides the first-ever estimates of the proportion of women who drink during pregnancy, as well as estimates of FAS by country, World Health Organization (WHO) region and worldwide.

Globally, nearly 10 per cent of women drink alcohol during pregnancy, with wide variations by country and WHO region. In some countries, more than 45 per cent of women consume alcohol during pregnancy.

Nearly 15 per 10,000 people around the world are estimated to have FAS, the most severe form of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). FAS is characterized by mental, behavioural and learning problems, as well as physical disabilities. Not every woman who drinks while pregnant will have a child with FAS. "We estimated that one in 67 mothers who drink during pregnancy will deliver a child with FAS," says lead author Dr. Svetlana Popova, Senior Scientist in CAMH's Institute for Mental Health Policy Research.

Although it's well established that alcohol can damage any organ or system in the developing fetus, particularly the brain, it's still not known exactly what makes a fetus most susceptible, in terms of the amount or frequency of alcohol use, or timing of drinking during pregnancy. Other factors, such as the genetics, stress, smoking and nutrition also contribute to the risk of developing FASD.

"The safest thing to do is to completely abstain from alcohol during the entire pregnancy," says Dr. Popova.

Rocks collected during the Apollo 14 mission made researchers finally pinpoint the exact age of the Moon, and it turns out, our lunar neighbour is an incredible 4.51 billion years old.

These findings suggest that the Moon was formed roughly 60 million years after the Solar System first formed, making it up to 140 million years older than previous estimates.

The reason we've never been able to accurately date the age of the Moon in the past is that there's very few well-preserved Moon rocks left on its surface.

Most of the rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts are breccias - mixes of different rocks that have been mashed together by the meteorite strikes that plague the Moon, thanks to its lack of atmosphere.

So instead of trying to find chunks of rock that had been there since the early days, the team instead turned to zircon - a mineral that would have formed as the Moon was cooling from its fresh, molten state into the rocky satellite we see today.

Once formed, zircon crystals stay perfectly intact as little time signatures of geological events. Studying zircon allows researchers to see when parts of the rock solidified, which is exactly what they needed to figure out when the Moon had fully formed.

This mineral is just the king when you try to understand any processes, because it is amazingly sturdy.

The team performed a process known as uranium-lead dating on zircon samples that were extracted from the Apollo 14 space rocks.

This required them to liquefy the zircon samples in acid, destroying the space rock artefacts.

But inside the zircon, the team was able to pull out four different elements: uranium, lead, lutetium, and hafnium.

Since uranium - a radioactive element - eventually turns into lead after long periods of time, the researchers could analyse how long the lead had been forming, giving them an accurate date of the Moon’s birth.

The ratios of lutetium and hafnium in the zircon also indicated how long the mineral had been around for.

Combining these analytical techniques, the team found that the Moon is 4.51 billion years old, making it far older than we previously thought, and providing us with a more accurate picture of how our Solar System formed.

Nightmare realized: Woman Killed by a Superbug Resistant to Every Available Antibiotic. The bacteria could fend off 26 different drugs!

Public health officials from Nevada are reporting on a case of a woman who died in Reno in September from an incurable infection. Testing showed the superbug that had spread throughout her system could fend off 26 different antibiotics.

“It was tested against everything that’s available in the United States … and was not effective,” said Dr. Alexander Kallen, a medical officer in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of health care quality promotion.

The case involved a woman who had spent considerable time in India, yes, you heard it right, and get alarmed, where multi-drug-resistant bacteria are more common than they are in the US. She had broken her right femur — the big bone in the thigh — while in India a couple of years back. She later developed a bone infection in her femur and her hip and was hospitalized a number of times in India in the two years that followed. Her last admission to a hospital in India was in June of last year.

The unnamed woman — described as a resident of Washoe County who was in her 70s — went into hospital in Reno for care in mid-August, where it was discovered she was infected with what is called a CRE — carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae. That’s a general name to describe bacteria that commonly live in the gut that have developed resistance to the class of antibiotics called carbapenems — an important last-line of defense used when other antibiotics fail. CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden has called CREs “nightmare bacteria” because of the danger they pose for spreading antibiotic resistance.

In the woman’s case, the specific bacteria attacking her was called Klebsiella pneumoniae, a bug that often causes of urinary tract infections.

Testing at the hospital showed resistance to 14 drugs — all the drug options the hospital had. A sample was sent to the CDC in Atlanta for further testing, which revealed that nothing available to US doctors would have cured this infection.

The woman in Nevada was cared for in isolation; the staff who treated her used infection control precautions to prevent spread of the superbug in the hospital.

How Ants Use Vision When Homing Backward

Ants can navigate over long distances between their nest and food sites using visual cues. Recent studies show that this capacity is undiminished when walking backward while dragging a heavy food item. This challenges the idea that ants use egocentric visual memories of the scene for guidance. Can ants use their visual memories of the terrestrial cues when going backward? Recent research results suggest that ants do not adjust their direction of travel based on the perceived scene while going backward. Instead, they maintain a straight direction using their celestial compass. This direction can be dictated by their path integrator  but can also be set using terrestrial visual cues after a forward peek. If the food item is too heavy to enable body rotations, ants moving backward drop their food on occasion, rotate and walk a few steps forward, return to the food, and drag it backward in a now-corrected direction defined by terrestrial cues. Furthermore, ants can maintain their direction of travel independently of their body orientation. It thus appears that egocentric retinal alignment is required for visual scene recognition, but ants can translate this acquired directional information into a holonomic frame of reference, which enables them to decouple their travel direction from their body orientation and hence navigate backward. This reveals substantial flexibility and communication between different types of navigational information: from terrestrial to celestial cues and from egocentric to holonomic directional memories.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(16)31466-X

Scientists are considering psychological fake news vaccine

The appearance of fake news on websites and social media has inspired scientists to develop a "vaccine" to immunise people against the problem.

A University of Cambridge study devised psychological tools to target fact distortion.

Researchers suggest "pre-emptively exposing" readers to a small "dose" of the misinformation can help organisations cancel out bogus claims.

Stories on the US election and Syria are among those to have caused concern.

"Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus," said the University of Cambridge study's lead author Dr Sander van der Linden.

"The idea is to provide a cognitive repertoire that helps build up resistance to misinformation, so the next time people come across it they are less susceptible."

The study, published in the journal Global Challenges, was conducted as a disguised experiment.

More than 2,000 US residents were presented with two claims about global warming.

The researchers say when presented consecutively, the influence well-established facts had on people were cancelled out by bogus claims made by campaigners.

But when information was combined with misinformation, in the form of a warning, the fake news had less resonance.

Cities eating into world’s farm lands

• By 2030 the world could lose 30 million hectares of farm lands to cities

• Asia and Africa accounts for 80 per cent of the losses with China as worst hit

• Forest lands will likely be converted to replace the losses in agricultural lands

By 2030, the world could lose millions of fertile agricultural lands to expanding cities with Asia and Africa accounting for 80 per cent of the total farm losses, a study finds.
 
Analysing satellite data on croplands and their productivity using year 2000 as the reference point and comparing it with urban area projections for 2030, international researchers found that 30 million hectares of crop lands will be lost to growing cities – an area equivalent to the Philippines. Of this, Asia and Africa will lose 24 million hectares of prime agricultural land.

With cities becoming hubs of economic activity, large-scale changes are expected. However, the authors say this is the first study to quantify the effect of urbanisation on crop lands at global, continental, and country levels. The study was carried out by researchers from Austria, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, and United States.
 
The croplands that are going to disappear by 2030 have productivity that is almost twice the global average and accounted for about 3—4 per cent of global crop production in 2000.
 
China, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the US top countries set to lose cropland to urbanisation. The productivity of rice, wheat, maize, and soybean are most likely to be affected, though there are significant variations at regional levels.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/12/20/1606036114

Scientists have discovered 'smart cancer cells' - and realized why a type of breast cancer drug stops working in some patients. The early-stage findings, from an international team led by Imperial College London and the European Institute of Oncology in Milan, reveal some breast tumours evolve to make their own 'fuel supply', rendering treatments powerless.

The team, whose findings are published in the journal Nature Genetics, hope their work will increase treatment options for patients whose cancer has returned.

Around 70 per cent of breast cancers are so-called ER positive, which means the cancer cells contain a receptor for the hormone oestrogen. It is this hormone that fuels the tumours.

Patients with this type of cancer are offered one of two drugs after surgery to prevent the cancer coming back.

One of these drugs, called tamoxifen, prevents oestrogen from binding to DNA in cancer cells, while the second type of treatment, called aromatase inhibitors, prevents residual oestrogen from being produced in other tissues.

However both tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors stop working in around one in three patients.

Scientists assumed the tumours developed resistance in some way.

in the latest study, the team discovered that in one in four patients taking aromatase inhibitors, the tumours had increased production of aromatase in the cancer cells. The tumours appear to do this by increasing the number of aromatase genes, in a process called amplification.

This allowed the cancer cells to effectively make their own oestrogen, without relying on external sources of the hormone, explained Dr Luca Magnani, co-lead author of the research from the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial: “For the first time we have seen how breast cancer tumours become resistant to aromatase inhibitors. The treatments work by cutting off the tumour’s fuel supply – oestrogen – but the cancer adapts to this by making its own fuel supply.”

The researchers also discovered that tumours become resistant in different ways, depending on whether tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors are used.

Almost none of the tumours in patients taking tamoxifen had increased production of aromatase to boost their oestrogen supply - and the team are now planning further studies into how cancer cells become resistant to tamoxifen.

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.3773.html?WT...

Scientists to oppose Donald Trump in huge ‘March for Science’ in Washington

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have announced the development of the first stable semisynthetic organism. Building on their 2014 study in which they synthesized a DNA base pair, the researchers created a new bacterium that uses the four natural bases (called A, T, C and G), which every living organism possesses, but that also holds as a pair two synthetic bases called X and Y in its genetic code.

TSRI Professor Floyd Romesberg and his colleagues have now shown that their single-celled organism can hold on indefinitely to the synthetic base pair as it divides. Their research was published January 23, 2017, online ahead of print in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Doomsday clock advanced!

It's now 2 ½ minutes to “midnight,” according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which warned Thursday that the end of humanity may be near.

The group behind the famed Doomsday Clock announced at a news conference that it was adjusting the countdown to the End of it All by moving the hands 30 seconds closer to midnight — the closest the clock has been to Doomsday since 1953, after the United States tested its first thermonuclear device, followed months later by the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb test.

In announcing that the Doomsday Clock was moving 30 seconds closer to the end of humanity, the group noted that in 2016, “the global security landscape darkened as the international community failed to come effectively to grips with humanity’s most pressing existential threats, nuclear weapons and climate change.”

But the organization also cited the election of President Trump in changing the symbolic clock.

The scientists' message: Climate change exists...there are no alternative facts here.

 “This already-threatening world situation was the backdrop for a rise in strident nationalism worldwide in 2016, including in a US presidential campaign during which the eventual victor, Donald Trump, made disturbing comments about the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons and expressed disbelief in the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.”

Joint Statements on Climate Change from National Academies of Science Around the World

A joint statement issued by the Australian Academy of Sciences, Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts, Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Royal Society of Canada, Caribbean Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, French Academy of Sciences, German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, Indian National Science Academy, Indonesian Academy of Sciences, Royal Irish Academy, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy), Academy of Sciences Malaysia, Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Turkish Academy of Sciences, and Royal Society (UK).

National academies of sciences from around the world have published formal statements and declarations acknowledging the state of climate science, the fact that climate is changing, the compelling evidence that humans are responsible, and the need to debate and implement strategies to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Not a single national science academy disputes or denies the scientific consensus around human-caused climate change. A few examples of joint academy statements since 2000 on climate are listed here. Many national academies have, in addition, published their own reports and studies on climate issues. 

The Science of Climate Change (Statement of 17 National Science Academies, 2001)

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/292/5520/1261