The Science News Digest - 7 May 2009
In the science news this week there is good news for the future of the male contraceptive jab, the release of a prototype of the Anaconda 'sea-snake', the first US face transplant is revealed, and there is also a dancing cockatoo.
A recent study published in the journal Nature suggests that the small fossil creatures often referred to as 'hobbits' are a distinct human species.
William Junger, of Stony Brook University in New York, and his colleagues have analysed the remains of the creatures feet. Similarities between the fossil feet and those of modern humans suggest that the creatures walked upright. However, there are pronounced differences including a stubby big toe, exceptional length and importantly (according to this new research) the absence of an arch. These flat feet would, according to Harcourt-Smith, have meant that "this creature would
have had difficulty doing the long distance running that modern humans do."
Jungers believes that this is compelling evidence that the hobbits are a distinct human species which evolved from a more primitive species than previously though. He claims that the hobbits (Homo floresiensis) derived from either the earliest Homo erectus, which reached Southeast Asia about 1.6 million years ago, or the more primitive Homo habilis, thought to have arrived about 1.8 million years ago. This classification is not without controversy as there are other scientists who believe that the remains belong to dwarf human beings with the differences being the result of a genetic disease.
This research has been published in Nature along with details of another recent study into the size of the hobbits brain.
........................................
Are testosterone injections set to become the equivalent of the male pill? Research published in the Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism suggests that this may not be too far away.
The recent trials were held in China and offer an improvement on similar trials run during the 1990s as the repeat time for the injections has been lengthened from one week to one month.
In the first year of the recent trial there was 1 pregnancy for every 100 men in the study. This rose slightly to 1.1 per 100 men by the end of the second year. Comparing this to other forms of contraception, condoms (when used correctly) result in a pregnancy rate of approximately 2 in 100. However, the female contraceptive pill outperforms both of these methods however with only 0.3 pregnancies per 100 over a year. It is important to note though that these numbers are for ‘perfect use’ of contraception and are not, therefore, representative of the real world.
Mr Laurence Shaw, of the London Bridge Fertility Centre and the British Fertility Society, said: "If a male contraceptive like this became available it would be great and would give people another choice. It would empower men to make a decision which involves more than just a condom. At the moment the onus is on the woman and men do not have that much choice. But we have been here before with testosterone as a method of contraception. We need more rigorous safety testing.”
These drugs are currently undergoing phase III trials (large scale human trials carried out before a new drug can be licenced and marketed). It has not yet been decided whether such drugs would be approved for use in the NHS.
Further information on this recent study can be found in Guardian and BBC articles.
........................................
This week saw the unveiling of a new wave power generator known as Anaconda. Although still in its trial phase the people behind the Anaconda project, being developed by Checkmate Seaenergy, are optimistic about its potential for producing cheap, clean power.
The Anaconda will be 200 metres long and is a simple rubber snake-like device designed to sit just below the surface of the sea, facing the waves. As a wave passes along it, a ‘bulge wave’ is formed in the elastic wall of the Anaconda tube, and the wave outside pushes this, making it bigger and bigger until it finally produces a surge of water. This surge turns a turbine and this movement is harnessed to produce electricity. Each device would be anchored to the ocean floor but through its movement with the waves would be capable of generating enough energy to power 1,000 homes.
Rod Rainey, a chief engineer on the project and inventor of the Anaconda says that: “The beauty of wave energy is its consistency. However, the problem holding back wave energy machines is they tend to deteriorate over time in the harsh marine environment. Anaconda is non-mechanical: it is mainly rubber, a natural material with a natural resilience and so it has very few moving parts to maintain.”
The project proposes groups of 50 anacondas positioned a few miles out to sea around the UK with the hope that the first will be deployed by 2014. Other potential locations would be on western seaboards, including off the coast of America, Australia and Japan.
Find out more in the Telegraph and Guardian.
.......................................
It is five years since a gunshot left Connie Culp with a hole in the middle of her face. Five months ago she became the first person in the US to receive a face transplant and she came forward this week to show the results. Culp is now capable of talking, smiling, smelling and tasting her food again. Doctors plan to offer her further treatment to improve her speech and the animation of her muscles once circulation to her face has improved and nerves have grown in the area.
Prior to the face transplant Culp had endured 30 operations attempting to help her breathe unaided and to restore her face. Doctors used parts of her ribs to build cheekbones and developed an upper jaw using part of one of her leg bones. She also had numerous skin grafts from her thighs. Following all of these she was still unable to eat solid food, breathe on her own, or smell.
On the 10th December 2008, Dr Maria Siemionow led a team of doctors who, in a 22-hour operation, replaced 80% of Culp’s face with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from another woman who had just died. It was the fourth face transplant in the world, although the others had not been as extensive as this one. Previously two have been conducted in France and one in China.
Culp will have to take medication for the rest of her life to suppress her immune system and prevent her system from rejecting the transplanted skin. However, the doctors involved in the functional restoration say that the long-term prognosis is good.
Culp has pleaded for people not to judge other by their disfigurement. She is quoted as saying: “When somebody has a disfigurement and don’t look as pretty as you do, don’t judge them, because you never know what happened to them.”
Read more about this amazing surgery in the Independent.
.......................................
Snowball, a cockatoo, is challenging the previous belief that humans are the only species that align their physical movements to timed sounds, a phenomenon known as entrainment.
YouTube footage shows Snowball bobbing his head, swaying his body and stomping his feet in time to the beat of the Backstreet Boys’ track ‘Everybody’.
Dr Patel, from the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, studied Snowball by speeding up and slowing down the same musical track in different trials. Snowball frequently adjusted the tempo of his movement to stay synchronised to the beat. These periods of synchronicity were broken by times in which Snowball moved either quicker or slower than the beat. Similar studies conducted on dancing preschool children have found similar patterns of intermittent entrainment.
Research about to be published in Current Biology indicates that there are a number of other parrot species capable of ‘dancing’ in time. ‘This is the first evidence that there could be an animal model of rhythm perception in music’ says neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego who has been involved with this study.
Patel published a study in 2006 in which he suggested a connection in the brain circuitry needed for sound imitation and moving
in time with a musical beat. This would explain why humans and parrots have these abilities and would suggest that other creatures
capable of vocal mimicry (songbirds, dolphins, elephants, walruses and seals) should be able to dance too.
You can read more about Snowball and Patel's research on the ScienceNews website and also see Snowball dance on YouTube.
.......................................
New research published in Nature has revealed how satellite tagging has solved a long mystery regarding disappearing sharks. Basking sharks, the second biggest fish in the world, go missing from the coast of Massachusetts every winter. It was proposed in 1954 by marine biologists that they over-winter at the bottom of the ocean, essentially hibernating. It is only recently, with the use of satellite tagging, that this has been disproved and it has been shown that the fish actually remain active all winter.
Gregory Skomal, who tagged 25 basking sharks as part of his work for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries in Oak Bluffs, was surprised by the data they collected. The first signal came from a not unexpected location off the coast of North Florida but he was surprised by another signal later that day from the Cayman Trench in the Caribbean. Tracing this southern movement of the sharks led to the first recording of basking sharks moving into tropical waters. This behaviour is distinct from that found for sharks tagged on the northeast side of the Atlantic where the sharks were not found to cross the Equator.
The report by Skomal and his colleagues in Current Biology suggests the migrations might be linked to reproduction, with female sharks seeking a tropical nursery where they can give birth. David Sims, of the Marine Biological Association, UK, feels that the migration is more likely to be linked to the sharks searching for plankton to feed on.
Further studies are planned to find out why there are such differences in the migratory behaviours between the northeast Atlantic sharks and the western sharks, and also what is the main motivation driving these long journeys.
.......................................
And finally...
a study in the journal Neuroscience Letters has found that listening to upbeat music not only makes you feel happier but it also makes you perceive people around you as happy too. This subconscious effect can happen in just a fraction of a second.
Psychologists at Goldsmiths, University of London, undertook a series of experiments on students in which they were asked to listen to 15 second clips of music and then asked to rate the mood on faces in a number of photographs. A wide range of musical genres were included in the study including instrumental pop, classical and jazz.
The results of these experiments showed that happy music enhanced the perceived happiness of a face. The speed of the response was registered at just 50 milliseconds through further studies of the volunteers’ brain waves. This almost instantaneous response is too fast to be a conscious response.
Musically Girls Aloud and Beethoven’s Ninth were found to persuade people that other people are in a good mood, while 1980s songs from Morrissey and Joy Division made people believe that everyone else is feeling down. It was found that the same effect could be produced using other ‘happy’ sounds such as crashing waves, crackling fires and birdsong, and also using ‘sad’ sounds such as machine guns, whistling wind and industrial machinery.
One of the authors of the report, Dr Joydepp Bhattacharya, has called for more research into how environmental sounds, such as background music in supermarkets, affects our emotions. He is quoted as saying that: “What surprises us is that even as short as fifteen seconds of music can cause this effect. However, more research is needed to find out how long the effect lasts or if, and how, other factors such as musical preference and personality control this.”
Find out more about what constitutes happy music in the Telegraph.
A recent study published in the journal Nature suggests that the small fossil creatures often referred to as 'hobbits' are a distinct human species.
William Junger, of Stony Brook University in New York, and his colleagues have analysed the remains of the creatures feet. Similarities between the fossil feet and those of modern humans suggest that the creatures walked upright. However, there are pronounced differences including a stubby big toe, exceptional length and importantly (according to this new research) the absence of an arch. These flat feet would, according to Harcourt-Smith, have meant that "this creature would
have had difficulty doing the long distance running that modern humans do."
Jungers believes that this is compelling evidence that the hobbits are a distinct human species which evolved from a more primitive species than previously though. He claims that the hobbits (Homo floresiensis) derived from either the earliest Homo erectus, which reached Southeast Asia about 1.6 million years ago, or the more primitive Homo habilis, thought to have arrived about 1.8 million years ago. This classification is not without controversy as there are other scientists who believe that the remains belong to dwarf human beings with the differences being the result of a genetic disease.
This research has been published in Nature along with details of another recent study into the size of the hobbits brain.
........................................
Are testosterone injections set to become the equivalent of the male pill? Research published in the Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism suggests that this may not be too far away.
The recent trials were held in China and offer an improvement on similar trials run during the 1990s as the repeat time for the injections has been lengthened from one week to one month.
In the first year of the recent trial there was 1 pregnancy for every 100 men in the study. This rose slightly to 1.1 per 100 men by the end of the second year. Comparing this to other forms of contraception, condoms (when used correctly) result in a pregnancy rate of approximately 2 in 100. However, the female contraceptive pill outperforms both of these methods however with only 0.3 pregnancies per 100 over a year. It is important to note though that these numbers are for ‘perfect use’ of contraception and are not, therefore, representative of the real world.
Mr Laurence Shaw, of the London Bridge Fertility Centre and the British Fertility Society, said: "If a male contraceptive like this became available it would be great and would give people another choice. It would empower men to make a decision which involves more than just a condom. At the moment the onus is on the woman and men do not have that much choice. But we have been here before with testosterone as a method of contraception. We need more rigorous safety testing.”
These drugs are currently undergoing phase III trials (large scale human trials carried out before a new drug can be licenced and marketed). It has not yet been decided whether such drugs would be approved for use in the NHS.
Further information on this recent study can be found in Guardian and BBC articles.
........................................
This week saw the unveiling of a new wave power generator known as Anaconda. Although still in its trial phase the people behind the Anaconda project, being developed by Checkmate Seaenergy, are optimistic about its potential for producing cheap, clean power.
The Anaconda will be 200 metres long and is a simple rubber snake-like device designed to sit just below the surface of the sea, facing the waves. As a wave passes along it, a ‘bulge wave’ is formed in the elastic wall of the Anaconda tube, and the wave outside pushes this, making it bigger and bigger until it finally produces a surge of water. This surge turns a turbine and this movement is harnessed to produce electricity. Each device would be anchored to the ocean floor but through its movement with the waves would be capable of generating enough energy to power 1,000 homes.
Rod Rainey, a chief engineer on the project and inventor of the Anaconda says that: “The beauty of wave energy is its consistency. However, the problem holding back wave energy machines is they tend to deteriorate over time in the harsh marine environment. Anaconda is non-mechanical: it is mainly rubber, a natural material with a natural resilience and so it has very few moving parts to maintain.”
The project proposes groups of 50 anacondas positioned a few miles out to sea around the UK with the hope that the first will be deployed by 2014. Other potential locations would be on western seaboards, including off the coast of America, Australia and Japan.
Find out more in the Telegraph and Guardian.
.......................................
It is five years since a gunshot left Connie Culp with a hole in the middle of her face. Five months ago she became the first person in the US to receive a face transplant and she came forward this week to show the results. Culp is now capable of talking, smiling, smelling and tasting her food again. Doctors plan to offer her further treatment to improve her speech and the animation of her muscles once circulation to her face has improved and nerves have grown in the area.
Prior to the face transplant Culp had endured 30 operations attempting to help her breathe unaided and to restore her face. Doctors used parts of her ribs to build cheekbones and developed an upper jaw using part of one of her leg bones. She also had numerous skin grafts from her thighs. Following all of these she was still unable to eat solid food, breathe on her own, or smell.
On the 10th December 2008, Dr Maria Siemionow led a team of doctors who, in a 22-hour operation, replaced 80% of Culp’s face with bone, muscles, nerves, skin and blood vessels from another woman who had just died. It was the fourth face transplant in the world, although the others had not been as extensive as this one. Previously two have been conducted in France and one in China.
Culp will have to take medication for the rest of her life to suppress her immune system and prevent her system from rejecting the transplanted skin. However, the doctors involved in the functional restoration say that the long-term prognosis is good.
Culp has pleaded for people not to judge other by their disfigurement. She is quoted as saying: “When somebody has a disfigurement and don’t look as pretty as you do, don’t judge them, because you never know what happened to them.”
Read more about this amazing surgery in the Independent.
.......................................
Snowball, a cockatoo, is challenging the previous belief that humans are the only species that align their physical movements to timed sounds, a phenomenon known as entrainment.
YouTube footage shows Snowball bobbing his head, swaying his body and stomping his feet in time to the beat of the Backstreet Boys’ track ‘Everybody’.
Dr Patel, from the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, studied Snowball by speeding up and slowing down the same musical track in different trials. Snowball frequently adjusted the tempo of his movement to stay synchronised to the beat. These periods of synchronicity were broken by times in which Snowball moved either quicker or slower than the beat. Similar studies conducted on dancing preschool children have found similar patterns of intermittent entrainment.
Research about to be published in Current Biology indicates that there are a number of other parrot species capable of ‘dancing’ in time. ‘This is the first evidence that there could be an animal model of rhythm perception in music’ says neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego who has been involved with this study.
Patel published a study in 2006 in which he suggested a connection in the brain circuitry needed for sound imitation and moving
in time with a musical beat. This would explain why humans and parrots have these abilities and would suggest that other creatures
capable of vocal mimicry (songbirds, dolphins, elephants, walruses and seals) should be able to dance too.
You can read more about Snowball and Patel's research on the ScienceNews website and also see Snowball dance on YouTube.
.......................................
New research published in Nature has revealed how satellite tagging has solved a long mystery regarding disappearing sharks. Basking sharks, the second biggest fish in the world, go missing from the coast of Massachusetts every winter. It was proposed in 1954 by marine biologists that they over-winter at the bottom of the ocean, essentially hibernating. It is only recently, with the use of satellite tagging, that this has been disproved and it has been shown that the fish actually remain active all winter.
Gregory Skomal, who tagged 25 basking sharks as part of his work for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries in Oak Bluffs, was surprised by the data they collected. The first signal came from a not unexpected location off the coast of North Florida but he was surprised by another signal later that day from the Cayman Trench in the Caribbean. Tracing this southern movement of the sharks led to the first recording of basking sharks moving into tropical waters. This behaviour is distinct from that found for sharks tagged on the northeast side of the Atlantic where the sharks were not found to cross the Equator.
The report by Skomal and his colleagues in Current Biology suggests the migrations might be linked to reproduction, with female sharks seeking a tropical nursery where they can give birth. David Sims, of the Marine Biological Association, UK, feels that the migration is more likely to be linked to the sharks searching for plankton to feed on.
Further studies are planned to find out why there are such differences in the migratory behaviours between the northeast Atlantic sharks and the western sharks, and also what is the main motivation driving these long journeys.
.......................................
And finally...
a study in the journal Neuroscience Letters has found that listening to upbeat music not only makes you feel happier but it also makes you perceive people around you as happy too. This subconscious effect can happen in just a fraction of a second.
Psychologists at Goldsmiths, University of London, undertook a series of experiments on students in which they were asked to listen to 15 second clips of music and then asked to rate the mood on faces in a number of photographs. A wide range of musical genres were included in the study including instrumental pop, classical and jazz.
The results of these experiments showed that happy music enhanced the perceived happiness of a face. The speed of the response was registered at just 50 milliseconds through further studies of the volunteers’ brain waves. This almost instantaneous response is too fast to be a conscious response.
Musically Girls Aloud and Beethoven’s Ninth were found to persuade people that other people are in a good mood, while 1980s songs from Morrissey and Joy Division made people believe that everyone else is feeling down. It was found that the same effect could be produced using other ‘happy’ sounds such as crashing waves, crackling fires and birdsong, and also using ‘sad’ sounds such as machine guns, whistling wind and industrial machinery.
One of the authors of the report, Dr Joydepp Bhattacharya, has called for more research into how environmental sounds, such as background music in supermarkets, affects our emotions. He is quoted as saying that: “What surprises us is that even as short as fifteen seconds of music can cause this effect. However, more research is needed to find out how long the effect lasts or if, and how, other factors such as musical preference and personality control this.”
Find out more about what constitutes happy music in the Telegraph.
search this section
