Nicola Davis Brain tumour research is to get an £18 million injection of funding to aid projects ranging from exploring how such cancers begin to developing new ways to treat them. More than 250,000 people worldwide, including 11,400 people in the UK alone, are diagnosed with a brain tumour every year and often the prognosis is bleak. According to Cancer Research UK figures, just 14% of those diagnosed survive for 10 years or more, while less than 1% of brain tumours are preventable. The disease was recently thrown into the spotlight after Tessa Jowell, the former Labour minister, revealed she has terminal brain cancer. Among the reasons why treatments have proved elusive, experts say, are that brain tumours show a lot of variation from person to person, are often diagnosed at an advanced stage, and are often resistant to treatments used for other cancers, with the blood-brain barrier also preventing some drugs from reaching the cancer. Also, as the cancer is in the brain, it is not possible to remove large amounts of tissue during surgery. “The human brain has about 100bn neurons and each of those neurons connects to tens of thousands of other neurons – it is incredibly complex,” said Dr Iain Foulkes, CRUK’s executive director of research and innovation. “What we are trying to do here is understand one of the most complex diseases known to humankind, which is cancer, in the most complex of organs. So it is a big challenge.” © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 24929 - Posted: 05.02.2018

By Roni Dengler Hoary bats are habitual squawkers. Sporting frosted brown fur á la Guy Fieri, the water balloon–size bats bark high-pitched yips to navigate the dark night sky by echolocation. But a new study reveals that as they fly, those cries often drop to a whisper, or even silence, suggesting the bats may steer themselves through the darkness with some of the quietest sonar on record. To find out how hoary bats navigate, researchers used infrared cameras and ultrasonic microphones to record scores of them flying through a riverside corridor in California on five autumn nights. In about half of the nearly 80 flights, scientists captured a novel type of call. Shorter, faster, and quieter than their usual calls, the new “micro” calls use three orders of magnitude less sound energy than other bats’ yaps did, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. As bats approached objects, they would often quickly increase the volume of their calls. But in close to half the flights, researchers did not pick up any calls at all. This stealth flying mode may explain one sad fact of hoary bat life: They suffer more fatal run-ins with wind turbines than other bat species in North America. The microcalls are so quiet that they reduce the distance over which bats can detect large and small objects by more than three times. That also cuts bats’ reaction time by two-thirds, making them too slow to catch their insect prey. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 24928 - Posted: 05.02.2018

Helen Thompson In the pitch-black waters beneath the Arctic ice, bowhead whales get funky. A small population of endangered bowheads belt an unusually varied repertoire of songs, which grows more diverse during mating season. Hunted to near extinction in the 1600s, these fire truck–sized mammals now number in the 300s in the frigid waters around the Svalbard archipelago in Norway. Underwater audio recorders captured the whales singing 184 acoustically distinct songs from October to April in 2010 through 2014. On the bowhead charts, a song's popularity is fleeting. Most recorded songs were heard for less than 100 hours total, although one song registered over 730 hours total. Some songs appeared in more than one month, but none repeated annually. December and January, likely the height of breeding season, saw a wider array of new bowhead songs than other months, researchers report in the April Biology Letters. Hearing a more distinct mixtape may play a role in enticing a female to mate. A hot cetacean band The Spitzbergen bowhead whale songbook contains a wide variety of tunes, and some stick around on the charts longer than others. Here each bubble corresponds to one of the 184 songs recorded by researchers from 2010 to 2014. The size of the bubble corresponds to the number of hours it was sung. Click on any of the dark green bubbles to hear that whale’s song. Groups of humpback whales don't change their tunes much in a given year, compared with bowheads. Only a few songbird species boast similar diversity. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24927 - Posted: 05.01.2018

by Eli Rosenberg At least a dozen and a half people have been diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer in two locations in North Carolina and Alabama, leaving medical experts mystified about the cause. Ocular melanoma occurs in about 6 out of every 1 million people, according to CBS News, and at least 18 people who have been diagnosed with the eye cancer have connections to Huntersville, N.C., Auburn, Ala., or both locations. Marlana Orloff, an oncologist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, is studying the cases with her colleagues, according to CBS. “Most people don’t know anyone with this disease,” Orloff said. “We said, 'Okay, these girls were in this location, they were all definitively diagnosed with this very rare cancer — what’s going on?’ ” Alabama health officials have declined to call the outbreak a cluster yet. Three friends, Juleigh Green, Allison Allred and Ashley McCrary, are among those who have been treated for the cancer, and two of them, Green and Allred, had to get an eye removed. “What’s crazy is literally standing there, I was like, ‘Well, I know two people who’ve had this cancer,’ ” McCrary said. Many of the patients are now traveling to Philadelphia for treatment. The cancer has presented complications for some of the patients, CBS reported. Lori Lee, an Auburn University graduate, had the cancer metastasize in her liver. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 24926 - Posted: 05.01.2018

By Kerry Grens Neena Schwartz, a reproductive biologist at Northwestern University who discovered the hormone inhibin and its role in the regulation of reproductive cycles, died this month (April 15). She was 91. “She was a tremendous scientist, a pioneer for women in the sciences, and a leader in our discipline of endocrinology,” Teresa Woodruff and Kelly Mayo, both of Northwestern University, write in a memorial in Endocrine News. Among numerous leadership roles throughout her career, Schwartz founded the American Women in Science (AWIS) in 1971 and was a president of the Endocrine Society in the early 1980s. Schwartz was born in Baltimore, earned her undergraduate degree from Goucher College, and received her doctorate from Northwestern University in 1953. After a faculty position at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, she joined Northwestern in 1973 and remained as a professor there until her retirement in 1999. Her early work focused on rats’ hormonal cycles, and the insight she derived from her studies contributed to a basic understanding of the so-called HPG axis, the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal crosstalk of hormones that controls reproduction. Schwartz later discovered a peptide-based feedback system controlling hormone levels in the ovaries, and described the hormone inhibin, which blocks follicle stimulating hormone (FSH). The presence of inhibin had been proposed decades earlier, but nobody had searched for it in the follicle fluid of ovaries—until Schwartz and her colleague at the University of Maryland, Cornelia Channing took up the cause. Channing had sent Schwartz the fluid, and Schwartz found that it made FSH levels drop. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24925 - Posted: 05.01.2018

Jon Hamilton Military personnel may be endangering their own brains when they operate certain shoulder-fired weapons, according to an Army-commissioned report released Monday. The report, from the Center for a New American Security, says these bazooka-like weapons pose a hazard because they are powered by an explosion just inches from the operator's head. "When you fire it, the pressure wave feels like getting hit in the face," says Paul Scharre, a former Army Ranger who directs the technology and national security program at the Center. Scharre is a co-author of the center's report: Protecting Warfighters from Blast Injury. The report looks at a range of injuries caused by blast waves — pulses of high pressure air that emanate from an explosion and travel faster than the speed of sound. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, military officials recognized that the blast wave from a roadside bomb could damage a person's brain without leaving any visible sign of injury. And in 2010, the Pentagon issued a memo outlining steps to improve care of troops exposed to these explosions. Since then, there's been growing evidence that blasts from weapons like the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle and the AT4 anti-tank weapon can also affect the brain. S © 2018 npr

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 24924 - Posted: 04.30.2018

Edward Bullmore Depression runs in families, we know. But it is only very recently, and after considerable controversy and frustration, that we are beginning to know how and why. The major scientific discoveries reported last week by the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium in Nature Genetics are a hard-won breakthrough in our understanding of this very common and potentially disabling disorder. If your parents have been depressed, the chances that you have been or will be depressed are significantly increased. The background risk of depression in the general population is about one in four – each of us has a 25% chance of becoming depressed at some point in our lives. And if your parents have been depressed, your risk jumps by a factor of three. However, controversy has long swirled around the question of nature or nurture. Is the depressed son of a depressed mother the victim of her inadequate parenting and the emotionally chilly, unloving environment she provided during the early years of his life? Or is he depressed because he inherited her depressive genes that biologically determined his emotional fate, regardless of her parenting skills? Is it nature or nurture, genetics or environment, which explain why depression runs in families? In the 20th century, psychiatrists ingeniously teased out some answers to these questions. For example, it was found that pairs of identical twins, with 100% identical DNA, were more likely to have similar experiences of depression than were pairs of non-identical twins, with 50% identical DNA. This indicated clearly that depression is genetically heritable. But well into the 21st century, the precise identity of the “genes for depression” remained obscure. Since 2000, there has been a sustained international research effort to discover these genes, but the field has been bedevilled by false dawns and inconsistent results. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24923 - Posted: 04.30.2018

By Kirstie Brewer BBC News People might think battling obesity is down to sheer willpower, but medical research says otherwise. Here are five potentially surprising factors that can affect your weight, as unearthed by The Truth About Obesity . 1. Gut microbes Gillian and Jackie are twins - but one weighs over six stone (41kg) more than the other. Prof Tim Spector has been tracking their progress over 25 years, as part of the Twins Research UK study. He believes a lot of their weight differences are down to the tiny organisms - microbes - that live deep in the gut. "Every time you eat anything, you're feeding a hundred trillion microbes. You're never dining alone," he says. A stool sample from each twin revealed Gillian, the thinner of the two, had a very diverse range of microbes, whereas Jackie had very few species living in her gut. "The greater the diversity, the skinnier the person. If you're carrying too much weight, your microbes aren't as diverse as they should be," says Prof Spector, who found the same pattern in a study of 5,000 people. Image copyright Science Photo Library Having a healthy and varied diet, rich in different sources of fibre, has been shown to create a more diverse range of gut microbes. Prof Spector warns most Britons eat only half the fibre they should. 2. The gene lottery Why do some people diligently follow diets and exercise regularly but still struggle to see results, while others do very little and don't pile on the pounds? Scientists at Cambridge University believe 40-70% of the effect on our weight is down to variation in the genes we inherit. © 2018 BBC

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 24922 - Posted: 04.30.2018

By Neuroskeptic | I’ve been thinking lately about the question of what leads scientists to choose a discipline. Why does someone end up as a chemist rather than a biologist? A geneticist as opposed to a cognitive neuroscientist? We might hope that people choose their discipline based on an understanding of what doing research in each discipline involves, but I don’t think this often happens. I know it didn’t happen in my case. Here, then, is how I became a neuroscientist. As far back as I can remember, I had always wanted to be a scientist. As a young child there was no doubt in my mind about that. But back then I didn’t know what kind of science I was most interested in. I didn’t even know that I would eventually have to pick one. When I got to high school, I did well in both chemistry and biology, and I enjoyed studying both. (The less said about physics the better). But it was biology that really held my attention. Chemistry, it seemed to me, was pretty much finished. The big discoveries had all been made already. Only biology was still a work in progress. I realize now that this was a superficial view, but that was how I saw it at 17. So biology it was. But which kind of biology? Here, I didn’t really have a clue. When I arrived at university, I thought vaguely that my future lay in some kind of molecular biology. I dreamed of curing cancer or malaria one day. But this dream did not survive my first year classes in biochemistry and cell biology, which I found dry and, like chemistry, just too well understood. However many lives might be saved by finding out which gene codes for which protein, I couldn’t see myself being interested in this, so I callously abandoned my plan to save the world.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 24921 - Posted: 04.30.2018

Carl Zimmer Nine years later, Erin Wessling can still remember the first time she visited Fongoli, a savanna in southeast Senegal. “You feel like you walk into an oven,” she said. Temperatures at Fongoli can reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit or more. During every dry season, brush fires sweep across the parched landscape, leaving behind leafless trees and baked, orange soil. “It’s really nuts,” said Ms. Wessling, now a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Yet Ms. Wessling and her colleagues keep coming back to Fongoli, despite the harsh conditions. That’s because it’s home to some remarkable residents: chimpanzees. To study them, scientists have mostly traveled to African rain forests and woodlands, where the apes live in dense groups. The sparse populations of chimpanzees that live on savannas in western and central Africa are far less understood. Ms. Wessling and her colleagues think there are important lessons to be learned from chimps like the ones at Fongoli. Because they are our closest living relatives, they may even tell us something about our own deep history. Millions of years ago, our apelike ancestors gradually moved from woodlands to savannas and began walking upright at some point. The Fongoli chimpanzees demonstrate just how difficult that transition would have been — and how that challenge may have driven some major changes in our evolution, from evolving sweat glands to losing fur and walking upright. The savanna became the subject of long-term research in 2000, when Ms. Wessling’s undergraduate adviser at Iowa State University, Jill D. Pruetz, first paid a visit. Surveying Fongoli, Dr. Pruetz decided it would be a good place to observe the differences between chimpanzee life on a savanna compared to forests. In forests, for example, chimpanzees typically thrive on a diet of ripe fruit. That’s a rare treat on a savanna. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 24920 - Posted: 04.28.2018

Nicola Davis Researchers in the US say they have managed to keep the brains of decapitated pigs alive outside of the body for up to 36 hours by circulating an oxygen-rich fluid through the organs. While the scientists, led by Yale University neuroscientist Nenad Sestan, say the brains are not conscious, they add the feat might help researchers to probe how the brain works, and aid studies into experimental treatments for diseases ranging from cancer to dementia. The revelation, disclosed in the MIT Technology Review and based on comments Sestan made at a meeting at the US National Institutes of Health in March, has received a mixed reaction in the scientific community. A neuroscientist explains: the need for ‘empathetic citizens’ - podcast Anna Devor, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, told the MIT Technology Review the feat could help researchers probe the connections between brain cells, allowing them to build a “brain atlas”. However others were quick to stress that the development did not mean humans could expect to cheat death any time soon, noting that it is not possible to transplant a brain into a new body. “That animal brain is not aware of anything, I am very confident of that,” Sestan is reported to have told the NIH meeting. But he noted that ethical considerations abound: “Hypothetically, somebody takes this technology, makes it better, and restores someone’s [brain] activity. That is restoring a human being. If that person has memory, I would be freaking out completely.” © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 24919 - Posted: 04.28.2018

by Melissa Healy Sometimes forgotten in the spiraling crisis of opiate abuse is a clinical fact about narcotic pain medications: Addiction is basically an unwanted side effect of drugs that are highly effective at blunting pain. Addiction, of course, is a particularly dangerous and disruptive side effect, since it hijacks a patient’s brain and demands escalating doses of opioid drugs to hold withdrawal symptoms at bay. What if there were a drug that did the job opioids do best — relieve pain — without prompting many of their negative side effects, especially addiction? A researcher from the University of Michigan Medical School may have done just that. Tomas Joaquin Fernandez has described a process for designing opioid-like drugs that would act on pain receptors in the brain while blocking the receptors responsible for fostering dependence and building tolerance. Using pain-relieving peptides released by the brain as models, Fernandez and colleagues developed a library of “peptidomimetics.” These agents were small enough to get into the brain, and they worked on different opioid receptors in different ways. When they tested one such compound in mice, they found that it not only relieved pain, it also induced less buildup of tolerance and less physical dependence than morphine. In other words, it was less addictive. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24918 - Posted: 04.28.2018

John Henning Schumann Drew was in his early 30s. His medical history included alcohol abuse, but he had been sober for several months when he became my patient. His previous doctor had given him a prescription for Ativan, or lorazepam, which is frequently used to allay tremors and seizures from alcohol withdrawal. My first inclination was to wean him off the medication by lowering the dose and telling him to take it less frequently. But inertia is strong in medical care, and Drew prevailed upon me to continue providing lorazepam at his regular dose for another month while he solidified his situation with a new job. The next time I heard about him was a couple of weeks later when a colleague read me Drew's obituary in the local paper. There was no cause of death listed. But I knew he could have run into serious trouble if he had mixed alcohol or other drugs with his lorazepam. Lorazepam is a benzodiazepine, a class of medicines known as sedative-hypnotics. They're used frequently in the U.S. to treat anxiety and insomnia. Other drugs in the same category include Valium and Xanax. The problem with benzos, as they're also known, is that they're highly addictive medications, both physically and psychologically. Abruptly stopping them can lead to withdrawal symptoms like the ones Drew hoped to avoid when he kicked alcohol. Moreover, with long-term use, our metabolism adjusts to benzos. We need higher doses to achieve the same effects. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 24917 - Posted: 04.28.2018

By Diana Kwon Scientists have long attempted to understand where, and how, the brain stores memories. At the beginning of the 20th century, German scientist Richard Semon coined the term “engram” to describe the hypothetical physical representations of memories in the brain. Then, in the 1940s, Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb proposed that, when neurons encoded memories, connections, called synapses, between coactivated memory, or engram, cells were strengthened—a theory that was famously paraphrased as neurons that “fire together, wire together.” These two ideas have become the cornerstone of memory research—and in the decades since they first emerged, scientists have amassed evidence supporting them. “Donald Hebb suggested that it’s not engram cells that are the critical part of storing the memory, it’s the synapse between engram cells,” says Bong-Kiun Kaang, a neuroscientist at Seoul National University in South Korea. However, he adds, while there has been much indirect evidence that such a process underlies memory formation, such as studies showing long-term potentiation (the process through which two simultaneously activated neurons show enhanced connectivity), direct evidence has been lacking. One of the key issues has been the lack of tools to directly observe this process, Kaang says. To overcome this limitation, he and his colleagues injected a virus containing recombinant DNA—coding for different colors of fluorescent proteins for engram and non-engram cells—into the brains of mice. Using this technique, the team was able to pinpoint which type of cell had connected with a postsynaptic neuron. The endeavor wasn’t easy. Developing the method and getting it to work experimentally was a painstaking process that took almost a decade, Kaang tells The Scientist. So when his team finally managed to get promising results around two years ago, “we were very excited,” he says. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 24916 - Posted: 04.28.2018

Aided by advanced stem cell technology and tissue chips, National Institutes of Health-funded researchers used stem cells originally derived from a person’s skin to recreate interactions between blood vessels and neurons that may occur early in the formation of the fetal human spinal cord. The results published in Stem Cell Reports suggest that the system can mimic critical parts of the human nervous system, raising the possibility that it may one day, be used to test personalized treatments of neurological disorders. Led by Samuel Sances, Ph.D., and Clive N. Svendsen, Ph.D., Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute, Los Angeles, CA, the researchers first converted the stem cells into newborn spinal cord neurons or epithelial cells that line walls of brain blood vessels. In most experiments, each cell type was then injected into one of two chambers embedded side-by-side in thumb-sized, plastic tissue chips and allowed to grow. Six days after injections, the researchers found that the growing neurons exclusively filled their chambers while the growing blood vessel cells not only lined their chamber in a cobblestone pattern reminiscent of vessels in the body, but also snuck through the perforations in the chamber walls and contacted the neurons. This appeared to enhance maturation of both cell types, causing the neurons to fire more often and both cell types to be marked by some gene activity found in fetal spinal cord cells. Tissue chips are relatively new tools for medical research and since 2012 the NIH has funded several tissue-chip projects. Unlike traditional petri dish systems, tissue chips help researchers grow cells in more life-like environments. Using microprocessor manufacturing techniques, the chambers can be built to recreate the three-dimensional shapes of critical organ parts and the tight spaces that mimic the way viscous, bodily fluids normally flow around the cells.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 24915 - Posted: 04.28.2018

By CEYLAN YEGINSU LONDON — The anti-vaccine movement has come for the pets. A spreading fear of pet vaccines’ side effects has prompted the British Veterinary Association to issue a startling statement this week: Dogs cannot develop autism. The implicit message was that dog owners should keep vaccinating their pets against diseases like distemper and canine hepatitis because any concerns that the animals would develop autism after the injections were unfounded. The warning has a long tail. It grew out of an anti-vaccine theory that rippled across the United States and Europe as networks known as “anti-vaxxers” claimed that childhood vaccinations could cause autism. The belief, promoted by some celebrities like the television personality Jenny McCarthy, who says her son has autism, spurred many parents to begin boycotting traditional vaccines. The theory gained prominence in 1998, after a study published in the medical journal The Lancet purported to show a link between autism and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccination. It caused a firestorm in health circles and among parents, resulting in a significant drop in vaccination rates for children in Britain. But the study has since been thoroughly discredited. It was formally retracted by the medical magazine and its lead author, Andrew Wakefield, who at the time was a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital in London, was subsequently struck off the British medical register over ethical lapses. The theory, however, has jumped species. It is increasingly being applied to pets in the United States and is gaining momentum in Britain — raising concerns that the already low vaccination rates in this country could fall further. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 24914 - Posted: 04.28.2018

Ian Sample Science editor Scientists have raised hopes for more effective treatments for depression, a condition that affects over 300 million people globally, after mapping out the genetic foundations of the mental disorder in unprecedented detail. In the world’s largest investigation into the impact of DNA on the mental disorder, more than 200 researchers identified 44 gene variants that raise the risk of depression. Of those, 30 have never been connected to the condition before. By tripling the number of gene regions linked to depression, scientists now hope to understand more about why the disorder strikes some but not others, even when they have similar life experiences. The work could also help in the search for drugs to treat the condition which affects as many as one in four people over a lifetime. Sign up for Lab Notes - the Guardian's weekly science update Read more “If you have a lower genetic burden of depression, perhaps you are more resistant to the stresses we all experience in life,” said Cathryn Lewis, professor of statistical genetics and a senior author on the study at King’s College London. Previous work with twins suggests that genetics explains about 40% of depression, with the rest being driven by other biological factors and life experiences. If people are ranked according to the number of genetic risk factors for depression they carry, those in the top 10% are two-and-a-half times more likely to experience depression than those in the bottom 10%, Lewis said. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 24913 - Posted: 04.27.2018

By Elizabeth Pennisi One of biology's great mysteries is how a single fertilized egg gives rise to the multitude of cell types, tissues, and organs that fit together to make a body. Now, a combination of single-cell sequencing technologies and computational tools is providing the most detailed picture yet of this process. In three papers online in Science this week, researchers report taking multiple snapshots of gene activity in most of the cells in developing zebrafish or frog embryos. They then assembled those data, taken at intervals of just minutes to hours, into coherent, cell-by-cell histories of how those embryos take shape. "My first reaction was, ‘Wow!’" says developmental biologist Robert Zinzen of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology. Just last week, two other papers online in Science traced cell-by-cell gene activity in planaria, simple flatworms, as they regenerated after being cut into pieces. In vertebrates, "the complexity is much higher," Zinzen notes. Yet the researchers managed to track the emerging identities of thousands of cells and their progeny. "I think the future of development will be to routinely single-cell sequence embryos," says Detlev Arendt, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. All these studies started by gently dissolving embryos of different stages in special solutions, then shaking or stirring them to free individual cells. For each cell, the researchers then determined the sequences of all the strands of messenger RNA (mRNA), which reflect the genes being transcribed. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 24912 - Posted: 04.27.2018

By Abby Olena Scientists have known for decades that many animals—including birds and sea turtles—use Earth’s magnetic field to navigate over long distances, but understanding how they do so remains a mystery. In 2015, a group from the University of Texas at Austin reported in eLife that a tiny nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, orients to Earth’s magnetic field using a specific pair of neurons. The findings raised the possibility that C. elegans might be an appropriate model system to dig deeper into how animals sense magnetic fields. But earlier this month (April 13) in a comment published in eLife, researchers from the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Austria describe unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the results of the 2015 study. “Studying animal magnetoreception is really difficult,” says Miriam Goodman, a sensory biologist at Stanford University who is not affiliated with either group. “I think that we will remain in a situation where we have passionate disagreement until we’ve identified what cells or molecules function as receptors, and that still remains unknown,” she adds. The authors of the original study stand by their results, as they describe in a response also published in eLife. “We know a whole lot about how animals see the world and hear the world and touch it,” but magnetosensing is still something that nobody really knows much about, Andrés Vidal-Gadea, a behavioral neuroscientist at Illinois State University, tells The Scientist. As a postdoc in Jonathan Pierce’s lab at the University of Texas, Vidal-Gadea combined his interest in magnetic sensing, cultivated during a past summer as an undergraduate researcher, and his postdoctoral focus on C. elegans to investigate whether worms might detect magnetic fields. “I just thought that was really exciting, both because the behavior is fascinating and because there is so much work to be done,” he says. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 24911 - Posted: 04.27.2018

/ By Cathleen O'Grady Growing up in Saudi Arabia, Aciel Eshky didn’t get the memo that science was for boys. When she was around 10 years old, her aunt started to teach her basic computer programming. From there, going on to a degree in computer science seemed like a natural fit. So when a classmate in her master’s program abroad told her that women were weaker than men at math, it came as a shock. “I was really annoyed,” Eshky says. “I felt like I was being bullied.” “If that means that you get fewer women in certain subjects, and more women in other subjects like psychology, it’s not necessarily a catastrophe.” Despite its dismal reputation for gender equality, Saudi Arabia has a surprising level of female graduates in the so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Ranked among the bottom 20 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index in 2015, women nonetheless made up 39 percent of graduates in a cluster of “core” STEM subjects. This number is higher than Iceland’s 35 percent, even though the Nordic country ranks number one for gender equality. Norway, which has the second-highest level of gender equity, sees only 26 percent of women graduating with STEM degrees. Taken together with these numbers, Eshky’s experience is illustrative of the so-called “gender-equality paradox” reported in a recent headline-grabbing paper: Countries ranking higher on measures of gender equality, the study found, tend to have fewer women pursuing a STEM education than those further down the gender equality ranks. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 24910 - Posted: 04.27.2018