Newsworthy Science

Birdjaguar said:

Do You Love Your Liver Enough?​

Are you taking care of your liver? Most Americans take their livers for granted. Coffee and soft drinks have different impacts.

Should be open to all.

www.peoplespharmacy.com

Do You Love Your Liver Enough?

Are you taking care of your liver? Most Americans take their livers for granted. Coffee and soft drinks have different impacts.
www.peoplespharmacy.com www.peoplespharmacy.com
Click to expand...

Soda is bad, but it tastes so good as long as it is far from the expiration date. :cry:

Abstract
Importance: Approximately 65% of adults in the US consume sugar-sweetened beverages daily.
Click to expand...

Tell me something I don't know.
Sugar is like steroids for fat, and USA is #1 in the world!

At baseline, 6.8% of women consumed 1 or more sugar-sweetened beverage servings per day, and 13.1% consumed 1 or more artificially sweetened beverage servings per day at 3-year follow-up.
Click to expand...

Wait, 100,000 older women were studied, and only 6.8% were chugging the delicious fattening water everyday?

I thought America was 65% of the adults?!

Are they studying mostly the health nuts?


If one must abuse oneself:
1) Don't sip the soda all day long or it will melt your teeth and make cavities everywhere. It takes 90 seconds after swallowing for saliva to get the mouth back from acidic to normal from the saliva.
2) The body can only tolerate so much acid. If the stomach goes sour and burning, stop.
Don't be the woman who drank 4 liters per day and died. Keep it under 2 liters or 64 fluid ounces per day total.
3) Use Pronamel toothpaste
4 ) If Alzheimer's runs in the family, maybe don't drink out of aluminum cans. For some people with certain genetics, aluminum metal shows up in their brain more than others in old age. Where did it come from? No proof here, but people like me wonder. bah, speculation, aluminum cans probably ok.
5) No caffeine after 9pm. It will turn good sleep into terrible sleep. About as bad as sleeping with the lights on.
6) Keep up the yearly checkups at the doctor.
Sometimes they will draw blood, and if abnormal liver stuff comes back, there is time to cut back on bad habits. The liver is the only organ that grows back besides skin, but it can't if it is full of scar tissue or has so much fat there is no room.
Best to catch problems early.
7) About the steroids for fat thing. Every time a soda is consumed, the body stops burning fat for 4 hours. If they are drunk all day every day, the human will become uhhhh quite fat.
The only thing that competes with that is eating food right before sleep. That too is 100% converted into fat overnight.
 
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Pig-to-human kidney transplant succeeds for a month NYT (Paywalled) Text Verison

Surgeons in Birmingham and New York City on Wednesday reported advances in the transplantation of organs obtained from pigs that have been genetically modified to prevent rejection after they are implanted in humans.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham published a peer-reviewed study showing that modified pig kidneys performed complex life-sustaining functions in a brain-dead patient for a full week.

In an apparent response, surgeons at NYU Langone Health announced that a kidney from a genetically modified pig continued to function well after 32 days in a brain-dead patient maintained on a ventilator, the longest period for such an experiment.

The patient has shown no signs of rejecting the organ, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute. But the research has not yet been published in a scientific journal.
 
More AI Brain reading, his time for speech

Brain-reading implants enhanced using artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled two people with paralysis to communicate with unprecedented accuracy and speed.

In separate studies, both published on 23 August in Nature, two teams of researchers describe brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) that translate neural signals into text or words spoken by a synthetic voice. The BCIs can decode speech at 62 words per minute and 78 words per minute, respectively. Natural conversation happens at around 160 words per minute, but the new technologies are both faster than any previous attempts.

“It is now possible to imagine a future where we can restore fluid conversation to someone with paralysis, enabling them to freely say whatever they want to say with an accuracy high enough to be understood reliably,” said Francis Willett, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California who co-authored one of the papers, in a press conference on 22 August.

These devices “could be products in the very near future”, says Christian Herff, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University, the Netherlands.

 
Samson said:
Over a week later, the headlines are pretty negative, but it does not look bad to me. Less than 2 weeks after the announcement multiple other groups claim to demonstrate the Meissner effect, and no one talking about intellectual property. Is there any other tech that has kicked off that fast? Is not a cheapish materiel that demonstrates the Meissner effect a big thing even if it is not a superconductor? But I know nothing about this, and it could all be fraudsters with lots of lead futures or whatever.

Headlines are pretty negative, from el Reg yesterday:

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

Scientists are struggling to verify South Korean eggheads' claim to have synthesized a material that exhibits superconductivity at room temperature and normal pressure.

and nature from the 4th but corrected on the 7th:

Claimed superconductor LK-99 is an online sensation — but replication efforts fall short

A South Korean team’s claim to have discovered a superconductor that works at room temperature and ambient pressure has become a viral sensation — and prompted a slew of replication efforts by scientists and amateurs alike. But initial efforts to experimentally and theoretically reproduce the buzzworthy result have come up short, and researchers remain deeply sceptical.

Multiple other groups claim to demonstrate the Meissner effect:

If twitterx work this looks easy to see (or nitter here):

https://twitter.com/x/status/1687405505604734978


Then there are these two videos in foreign, harder to see and seriously if that is the third time humanity has made a room conditions superconductor they need some more funding.

This is from the wiki page.
Click to expand...

LK-99 was a bust :(

Oh well.

www.nature.com

LK-99 isn’t a superconductor — how science sleuths solved the mystery

Efforts to replicate the material have pieced together the puzzle of why it displayed superconducting-like behaviours.
www.nature.com www.nature.com
 
www.reuters.com

Crashed Russian mission left a crater on the moon, NASA images show

Russia's failed Luna-25 mission left a 10-metre wide crater on the moon when it crashed last month after a problem preparing for a soft landing on the south pole, according to images released by NASA.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
Special Moon Operation successful. The goal, which was to open a big crater on the moon, was 100% accomplished.
 

Hogfish ‘See’ With Their Skin, Even When They’re Dead​

The camouflaging talents of this fish are driven by a mysterious new type of cell, setting it apart from other animals that know how to blend in.

Video

A juvenile hogfish, showing the transition between its all-dark and mottled colorations. CreditCredit...Lorian Schweikert and Melissa D. Smith
By Elizabeth Anne Brown
Aug. 22, 2023

As a marine biologist, Lorian Schweikert knew hogfish could change color to match their surroundings. But as an angler, she noticed something that wasn’t in the textbooks: Hogfish can camouflage even after they’re dead. When Dr. Schweikert saw a hogfish with a conspicuous spearfishing hole through its body change color to match the texture of a boat’s deck, “it gave me this idea that the skin itself was ‘seeing’ the surrounding environment,” she said. New research by Dr. Schweikert and her team provides a compelling explanation for how and why hogfish blend into their background, even in the afterlife. In a study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, they identified a mysterious new type of cell deep in the hogfish’s skin that might allow the fish not only to monitor its surroundings but also to edit its skin color.

Hogfish are masters of change. They’re sequential hermaphrodites, meaning every hogfish hatches female but can become male once it reaches a certain size or if a power vacuum arises in its social group. And as they cruise the reefs and sand flats of the western Atlantic, hogfish can toggle between three color morphs — a ruddy brown, a pearly white and a stripy or dappled red coloration — in less than a second.

Dr. Schweikert suspected that the hogfish’s ability to camouflage while dead was just a quirk, that some part of the color-changing system was taking a while to get the memo that it was a former fish. Earlier in her quest to figure out how hogfish pull off their “zombie” color change without a living brain, Dr. Schweikert used genetic analysis to discover that there were opsins — light-detecting proteins also found in human retinas — in the hogfish’s skin. But what exactly were the opsins doing? And why “see” through the skin at all when hogfish have a perfectly good pair of eyes?

Dr. Schweikert hoped the answer might lie in the arrangement of the cells in the hogfish’s skin. She and her team used glowing antibodies to pinpoint the opsins, and transmission electron microscopy allowed them to peer into the cellular structures.
The imaging revealed that the opsins weren’t on the surface of the skin, where they would have the best view of the outside world. Instead, they were beneath a layer of chromatophores — “inkjet” cells that produce a color change by expanding and contracting packets of pigment — and concentrated in a previously unknown cell type. “I absolutely screamed,” said Dr. Schweikert, now an assistant professor of biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. “Nothing had ever been seen like this.” Beneath each chromatophore is a cell chock-full of opsins — the first specialized cell for dermal photoreception or “skin sight” identified in a vertebrate, the authors say.

Other researchers who study dermal photoreception say the results are striking. Dr. Schweikert and her team achieved a “crazy amount of detail,” said Desmond Ramirez, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has studied dermal photoreception in octopuses and was a peer reviewer of the paper. Todd Oakley, an evolutionary biology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has also studied octopus dermal photoreception and wasn’t involved in the paper, said the new research went a long way toward explaining the relationship between chromatophores and opsins in hogfish.

The structural arrangement the team identified suggests that hogfish cells aren’t just being used to look at the outside world. Dr. Schweikert had been puzzled when a previous study revealed the opsins were attuned to blue light, which might not be very useful in the blue ocean. But everything clicked when the team realized that the chromatophores might act as a filter, Dr. Schweikert said. Additional experiments confirmed that the red-brown of the hogfish’s chromatophore pigments absorb most blue light — meaning the redder the fish, the less blue light makes it through to the opsins. This would allow the hogfish to tweak the accuracy of its color matches to better evade predators. How well it’s dressed for the occasion is a matter of life and death, and it “can’t very well bend its neck to look,” said Sönke Johnsen, a biology professor at Duke University and a co-author of the paper.

Despite the newly discovered cells, for hogfish it’s not as simple as having a secret ingredient that makes skin sight possible. “People often focus on the materials in biology as being magical,” Dr. Johnsen said. “What’s really magical is the structure — biology is able to take some fairly run-of-the-mill molecules and build almost anything by putting them together.”
 
Not sure where this rates, but scientists cured alcoholism in some monkeys.

nypost.com

Injecting ‘incredibly effective’ gene into the brain could cure alcoholism: monkey study

“Drinking went down to almost zero.”
nypost.com nypost.com

So, Grant and her colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging to guide the injection of GDNF into the ventral tegmental area of the brain, where neurons are located that make dopamine and distribute it throughout the brain.

“This was incredibly effective,” Grant said in a news release. “Drinking went down to almost zero.

“For months on end, these animals would choose to drink water and just avoid drinking alcohol altogether,” she added. “They decreased their drinking to the point that it was so low we didn’t record a blood-alcohol level.”

Moreover, the GDNF treatment has long-lasting benefits. After a year, alcohol use among the four treated monkeys dropped by more than 90%, compared to the control group of monkeys that didn’t receive the treatment.
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Massive quantities of natural hydrogen have been found in the French region of Lorraine. The world's largest deposit that has ever been found up untill now:
energynews.biz

University of Lorraine Discovers World's Largest Natural Hydrogen Deposit - Green Hydrogen News

Researchers from the GeoRessources Laboratory at the University of Lorraine and the CNRS stumbled upon something extraordinary while probing the region's subsoil. What they found could potentially be the largest deposit of natural hydrogen on Earth, heralding a new era in the quest for...
energynews.biz

As you certainly know, combustion of hydrogen allows entirely carbon-free engines to work. They could potentially be used not only for cars and trucks, but also for boats and even planes. The big problem is that untill very recently, geologists were convinced that hydrogen didn't exist on a natural form in large quantities inside the earth's crust. As such, all hydrogen that is consumed nowadays is produced through electrolysis of water, a process that requires a lot of electricity. When natural gas is used to produce hydrogen, we call it "grey", when it's produced using renewable energies, it's called "green". The problem is that no matter the source of power, producing hydrogen requires two thirds of the energy being actually made usable.

Yet it seems geologists were wrong: natural hydrogen does exist on earth, and is now called "white hydrogen" (they love colors apparently). That hydrogen deposit found in France is estimated to represent alone 46 million tons of such white hydrogen. That's about half of current global production of grey hydrogen.

Even better than that, it apparently "regenerates" as it's produced by the natural corrosion of iron ore which exists in large quantity on that site (Lorraine is a former iron ore mining region).

For now, they drilled untill 1,200 m and the concentration of hydrogen has reached 20% and the deeper they drill, the higher is the concentration. CNRS modelized that in drilling at 3,000 m, hydrogen concentration should reach 90%. They have yet to drill to that depth to confirm this. We should know more in early 2024.
 
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Now they just need to find similar rock formations!
 
As we get better at treating cancer, the rate we are getting it is going up, particularly in the "young" (<50). I wonder why the Arabian peninsula has got so much worse? It seems leaving the Soviet Union is quite good for your health, with the best performer being Lithuania with number of incident cases decreased by 30.9%, followed by Georgia (−30.0%) and Latvia (−29.0%).

Shifting tides: the rising tide of early-onset cancers demands attention

The epidemiological landscape of cancer incidence is changing. While increasing age remains a major non-modifiable risk factor for cancer, the incidence of early-onset cancers, largely accepted to be in adults aged under 50 years, is increasing. In addition, cancers historically perceived to be more common in older age groups are now being diagnosed in younger adults, including colorectal, breast, oesophageal, gastric and pancreatic cancers,5 among others.

Epidemiological evidence on early-onset cancers varies between cancer type and world region, with population-based, regional and single centre studies available in the literature. The article by Zhao et al aims to quantify the burden of early-onset cancers using 2019 data from the Global Burden of Disease database, offering a comprehensive overview of cancer statistics globally, and a summary of international trends.

The results show a striking increase in the global incidence of early-onset cancers between 1990 and 2019, with early-onset breast cancer having the highest incidence (13.7 per 100 000 in 2019, 95% CI 12.5 to 15 per 100 000). Early-onset nasopharyngeal and prostate cancers showed the fastest increase in incidence, with an estimated annual percentage change of 2.28% (95% CI 2.1% to 2.47%) and 2.23% (95% CI 1.97% to 2.49%), respectively. The four cancer groups with the highest death and disability-adjusted life-years burden in younger adults in 2019 were breast, tracheal/bronchus/lung, colorectal and stomach cancers. These results contrast with a more traditionally held view of ‘typical’ cancers in adults aged under 50 years.

Editorial Paper


The global incidence, death and DALYs rates of 29 specified early-onset cancers in 1990 and 2019 by sex. DALYs, disability-adjusted life years.
Note the axis are different between the top (1990) and bottom (2019). Why they did that I do not know.


Among 204 countries and territories, the relative change of incident (A), death (B) and DALYs (C) cases of early-onset cancers from 1990 to 2019, and ASIR (D), ASDR (E), age-standardised DALYs rate (F) in 2019. ASIR, age-standardised incidence rate; ASDR, age-standardised death rate; DALYs, disability-adjusted life years.
 
Your prehistoric monster du jour: The Cookie-Cutter Shark

Spoiler :




Teeth.
Spoiler :

A dolphin sporting a Cookie-Cutter Shark bite:
Spoiler :


An elephant seal rescued in Orange County, CA with multiple Cookie-Cutter Shark bites:
Spoiler :


A swordfish that was probably attacked by a school (swarm?) of Cookie-Cutter Sharks:
Spoiler :


3 men in an inflatable catamaran boat were recently swarmed by 20-30 of the things off the coast of Australia. The attack sank their boat. The men were rescued by a nearby merchant freighter that got their SOS.

 
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Cookie cutter sharks used to attack submarines - the US navy covered some external equipment (sonar perhaps?) with neoprene, and the sharks kept taking bites out of it. At first they thought it was some kind of Soviet secret weapon :lol:
 
Birdjaguar said:
Australia keeps trying to kill everyone.
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Cookie-cutter sharks are largely harmless to people. According to what I read, only two people have ever been bitten by a cookie-cutter shark. You'll never guess where... :lol:
 
Cape Cod?
 
Samson said:
As we get better at treating cancer, the rate we are getting it is going up, particularly in the "young" (<50). I wonder why the Arabian peninsula has got so much worse? It seems leaving the Soviet Union is quite good for your health, with the best performer being Lithuania with number of incident cases decreased by 30.9%, followed by Georgia (−30.0%) and Latvia (−29.0%).

Shifting tides: the rising tide of early-onset cancers demands attention

The epidemiological landscape of cancer incidence is changing. While increasing age remains a major non-modifiable risk factor for cancer, the incidence of early-onset cancers, largely accepted to be in adults aged under 50 years, is increasing. In addition, cancers historically perceived to be more common in older age groups are now being diagnosed in younger adults, including colorectal, breast, oesophageal, gastric and pancreatic cancers,5 among others.

Epidemiological evidence on early-onset cancers varies between cancer type and world region, with population-based, regional and single centre studies available in the literature. The article by Zhao et al aims to quantify the burden of early-onset cancers using 2019 data from the Global Burden of Disease database, offering a comprehensive overview of cancer statistics globally, and a summary of international trends.

The results show a striking increase in the global incidence of early-onset cancers between 1990 and 2019, with early-onset breast cancer having the highest incidence (13.7 per 100 000 in 2019, 95% CI 12.5 to 15 per 100 000). Early-onset nasopharyngeal and prostate cancers showed the fastest increase in incidence, with an estimated annual percentage change of 2.28% (95% CI 2.1% to 2.47%) and 2.23% (95% CI 1.97% to 2.49%), respectively. The four cancer groups with the highest death and disability-adjusted life-years burden in younger adults in 2019 were breast, tracheal/bronchus/lung, colorectal and stomach cancers. These results contrast with a more traditionally held view of ‘typical’ cancers in adults aged under 50 years.

Editorial Paper


The global incidence, death and DALYs rates of 29 specified early-onset cancers in 1990 and 2019 by sex. DALYs, disability-adjusted life years.
Note the axis are different between the top (1990) and bottom (2019). Why they did that I do not know.


Among 204 countries and territories, the relative change of incident (A), death (B) and DALYs (C) cases of early-onset cancers from 1990 to 2019, and ASIR (D), ASDR (E), age-standardised DALYs rate (F) in 2019. ASIR, age-standardised incidence rate; ASDR, age-standardised death rate; DALYs, disability-adjusted life years.
Click to expand...

A bit hard to tell because of the axes, but it looks like case rates are up, while death rates and DALYs are more or less the same or down. My hypothesis: Are we just much better at early detection of cancer?
 
uppi said:
A bit hard to tell because of the axes, but it looks like case rates are up, while death rates and DALYs are more or less the same or down. My hypothesis: Are we just much better at early detection of cancer?
Click to expand...
That does not seem to be mentioned in the editorial, but makes sense. I may bother to read the paper in detail.

Legacy of racist US housing policies extends even to bird data

In the 1930s, a US-government-led effort graded urban neighbourhoods across the country on whether they were ‘safe’ for real-estate investment. Areas that were judged to be the safest bets for investment were rated ‘green’, and those judged to be highest risk were rated ‘red’. Grades were determined, in part, by a neighbourhood’s racial composition. This categorization, now called redlining, drove investment in wealthier and white neighbourhoods. It also led to a lack of investment in poorer areas and in neighbourhoods of colour.

To study how redlining has affected biodiversity assessment, Ellis-Soto and his team studied bird sightings in more than 9,000 neighbourhoods, covering almost 200 US cities. They found that there were many more bird observations per square kilometre in green districts, whose residents are in many cases still predominantly white, than in redlined districts, whose residents are mainly people of colour.

“You can better predict where you have data on birds based on systemic racism — redlining maps from 1933 — than climate, tree cover or population density, everything a bird should actually care about,” Ellis-Soto says.
The study is one of the first direct looks at how “systemic racism can play a role in the ecological process”, says Jin Bai, an urban ornithologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

“It’s essentially this self-perpetuating negative loop,” says Chris Schell, an urban ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “You have more observations of a native species in an environment that already has a ton of money. Then that same neighbourhood gets more money to conserve a species, which makes it more exclusive, which makes housing more exclusive, which then continues the legacies of segregation.”
 
Conclusion: birds are racist too, confirming white supremacy! :D
 
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