Xpandyourhorizons-blog - Xpand Your Horizons

Massive whale faces extinction with just 100 breeding females remaining

Despite legal protection, North Atlantic right whales keep getting struck accidentally by fishing boats and entangled in gear.

For decades, whaling ships targeted right whales. Now that they’re protected, they are still victims of human activity, and it may be too late to save them. The WWF says that their population shows no sign of recovery.

Joe Cartledge invented the jockstrap (or athletic supporter) in the 1920s. He played hockey, football, and rugby so his invention may have been inspired by painful, painful memories. It was marketed as “Protex.”

New imaging study reveals how saturated fatty acids damage cells

In our increasingly health-conscious society, a new fad diet seems to pop up every few years. Atkins, Zone, Ketogenic, Vegetarian, Vegan, South Beach, Raw - with so many choices and scientific evidence to back each, it's hard to know what's healthy and what's not. One message, however, has remained throughout: saturated fats are bad.

A new Columbia University study reveals why.

While doctors, nutritionists and researchers have known for a long time that saturated fats contribute to some of the leading causes of death in the United States, they haven’t been able to determine how or why excess saturated fats, such as those released from lard, are toxic to cells and cause a wide variety of lipid-related diseases, while unsaturated fats, such as those from fish and olive oil, can be protective.

To find answers, Columbia researchers developed a new microscopy technique that allows for the direct tracking of fatty acids after they’ve been absorbed into living cells. The technique involves replacing hydrogen atoms on fatty acids with their isotope, deuterium, without changing their physicochemical properties and behavior like traditional strategies do. By making the switch, all molecules made from fatty acids can be observed inside living cells by an advanced imaging technique called stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy.

What the researchers found using this technique could have significant impact on both the understanding and treatment of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Published online December 1st in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team reports that the cellular process of building the cell membrane from saturated fatty acids results in patches of hardened membrane in which molecules are “frozen.” Under healthy conditions, this membrane should be flexible and the molecules fluidic.

“The behavior of saturated fatty acids once they’ve entered cells contributes to major and often deadly diseases,” Min said. “Visualizing how fatty acids are contributing to lipid metabolic disease gives us the direct physical information we need to begin looking for effective ways to treat them. Perhaps, for example, we can find a way to block the toxic lipid accumulation. We’re excited. This finding has the potential to really impact public health, especially for lipid related diseases.”

Yihui Shen et al, Metabolic activity induces membrane phase separation in endoplasmic reticulum, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1712555114

Hawaii Becomes the First State to Pass a Bill in Support of Universal Basic Income

Hawaii's government is going to evaluate UBI.

As the threat of automation grows, governments will have to deal with growing unemployment. UBI is growing in interest, and while there’s still research to be done, I’m glad that people are at least having the conversation.

Also, since automation is coming for middle and upper class jobs too, I expect to see progress to be made a bit more quickly. Hopefully.

6 Historic Events That Were Nothing Like You Picture Them - The Spit Take

Just 1°C of ocean warming can upend marine ecosystems 

For 9 months, the researchers monitored the distribution and growth of marine species that settled on the heated boxes and compared them with those that lived above unheated boxes. All it took was one look to notice the difference, Ashton says. In the 1°C increase experiment, a single species of moss animal, Fenestrulina rugula, doubled its growth rate. Within 2 months, the calciferous shelves it created dominated the community, the team reports today in Current Biology. What’s more, overall species diversity plummeted by 50%.

Bats from a single cave in China have all the building blocks of a SARS epidemic

When it struck, the contagion spread fiercely. The deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in South China in 2002 infected thousands, and ultimately killed nearly 800 people.

But where did this lethal strain come from? We may now have our answer, with a study showing bats living in a single cave in China possess all the building blocks of the deadly SARS coronavirus – and potentially the means to create a new one.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences spent five years analysing SARS viruses found in multiple species of horseshoe bats nesting in a cave in China’s Yunnan Province.

In all, the team identified 11 new strains of SARS virus carried by the bats, and a genomic analysis of these – along with strains from the same cave identified in previous research – revealed something interesting.

Previous research had suggested bat viruses could have been responsible for SARS, but scientists had never uncovered evidence of a direct ancestor to the human-infecting coronavirus in bat strains.

In the new research, that held true again – none of the viruses from the cave by themselves displayed the genetic traits of the SARS coronavirus that spread to humans, infecting more than 8,000 people during the 2002-2003 emergency.

But together, it was a different story. In this one cave, there were enough genetic ingredients among the strains to build the virus that kills humans.

“Importantly, all of the building blocks of SARS-CoV genome, including the highly variable S gene, ORF8 and ORF3, could be found in the genomes of different SARSr-CoV strains from this single location,” the researchers explain in their paper.

Hypothetically speaking, the team suggests it’s possible – even probable – that if the right strains mixed with one another in the cave, you’d end up with the direct ancestor of a virus that can infect and kill people.

The findings are reported in PLOS Pathogens.

“Lane” is the most complete Triceratops specimen known to date.