Newsworthy Science

Best science of the past year?

Besides the mRNA vaccine and James Webb telescope, I'd say it is the new MIT 20T superconductor.
It might just make commercial fusion possible some day :)
Fusion startup builds 10-foot-high, 20-tesla superconducting magnet | Ars Technica

Why superconductors are nice:
"Performance of this magnet is similar to a non-superconducting one that was used in an MIT experiment that concluded its experiments five years ago," said MIT's Whyte. "The difference in terms of energy consumption is rather stunning. That magnet, because it was a normal copper conducting magnet, consumed approximately 200 million watts of energy to produce the confining magnetic field. This magnet was around 30 watts, so a factor of around 10 million decrease in the amount of energy that was needed to provide the confining magnetic field."

Even if we wreck the planet, fusion power in 2150 should in theory be able to help rip CO2 out of the atmosphere the hard way.
Would take a long time to fix the planet that way though, but if you have an unlimited power supply it would be possible to scrub the atmosphere.

Fusion power by 2050 would be perfect. We could easily go to a zero carbon economy with fusion power.
 
https://www.science.org/content/article/conservation-first-cloned-ferret-could-help-save-her-species
[...]a small, weasellike animal named Elizabeth Ann. She is the world’s first cloned black-footed ferret, one of North America’s most endangered species, and her first birthday was a major milestone: She is one of the first clones of an endangered species to reach sexual maturity.

Now, Elizabeth Ann—cloned from the cells of a female ferret that died 35 years ago—is poised to make history again. This spring, if all goes as planned, Elizabeth Ann will mate with a carefully selected bachelor in an effort to introduce greater genetic diversity into wild ferret colonies, which are threatened by inbreeding. If she gives birth to healthy kits, it will mark the first time conservation biologists have been able to integrate cloning into an effort to save a species from extinction.

So it begins :bounce:.
Don't add any raptor genes though please.
 
Autoimmune disease may be in the brain

But not in the "you are imagining it" sense, but the "brain is controlling the immune system" sense.

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Using a model of inflammatory bowel disease (in which a chemical called DSS is given to mice in their drinking water to induce intestinal inflammation), the authors investigated whether intestinal inflammation leads to the activation of certain brain areas. Neurons activated during episodes of bowel inflammation were identified in the insula, a region in the cerebral cortex that is involved in sensory processing and motor control.

When the mice had recovered from the episode of bowel inflammation, CNO-induced reactivation of these ‘captured’ insula neurons was sufficient to trigger an intestinal response that was reminiscent of the initial bowel inflammation (for example, in terms of the types of immune cell observed in the gut tissue).

Finally, Koren et al. tested whether inhibiting neurons in the insula affects the course of intestinal inflammation. Inhibition of insula neurons during an episode of DSS-induced intestinal inflammation reduced some signs of inflammation, indicating that inhibition of this brain area can attenuate intestinal inflammatory responses .
Write up Paper
That makes intuitive sense. As anxiety & depression have exploded so too have intestinal disorders.

A buddy of mine who suffers from this told me about some website chronicling what medical issues US presidents have seen doctors about. IIRC before the 1950s (I could be off by a decade or two) almost none of them dealt with stomach issues (forgot what was most common back then), now they pretty much all do. Everyone I know w a lot of trauma seems to have some sort of gut problem.
 
MIND & MATTER SUSAN PINKER

A Gender Split Over Sniffing a Baby’s Scalp

IMAGINE THERE WAS an odorless substance that made men less aggressive when they inhaled it but had the opposite effect on women. Sniffing it made women bolder. Would you go online and immediately click “buy”?

There’s no need: Our bodies produce this substance already. Hexadecanal, or HEX, is one of 6,000 volatile chemicals emitted by our body secretions, like tears and sweat, and in HEX’s case, by an infant’s scalp. Chemical signals like HEX fly under our conscious radar while altering our behavior, said Noam Sobel, a professor of neurobiology at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, who calls his lab “very nose-centric.”

Two experiments—recently published in the journal Science Advances by Prof. Sobel, data scientist Eva Mishor and a team of colleagues—revealed that breathing in HEX influences our social behavior, dialing up aggression in women but attenuating it in men. This sex difference stunned the researchers. Based on mouse studies, they expected HEX to have a calming effect across the board. “Until the end of the second study I was skeptical about the results. HEX has no odor, yet our body reacts to it, and our behavior changes,” said Dr. Mishor. The researchers made this discovery through a classic double-blind study in which 127 people were randomly assigned to an experimental or a control group, either inhaling clove oil infused with HEX or clove oil alone. Both groups played a computer-based negotiation game, believing that they were interacting with a remote opponent.

In reality the participants were playing against an algorithm that offered them egregiously unfair financial deals. “The ‘opponent’ proposes that he get 90% of a sum of money while you get 10%,” said Prof. Sobel, for example, and by the time participants reached the next phase of the experiment “they’re really mad at this person because they’re being so antisocial.”

That’s when the participants moved to a reaction-time game in which they could exact their revenge. When their “opponent” lost a round, the subject could punish them with a horn blast at different volumes, each illustrated by a face showing increasing signs of distress. “What we saw was a small but consistent difference between the HEX and the control subjects,” said Dr. Mishor. “Women exposed to HEX reacted 19% more aggressively, while men were 18.5% less aggressive.”

This was such an unexpected finding that the researchers did a second experiment. This time participants were tested while in a brain scanner. They were compared with themselves after inhaling either HEX or a dummy liquid. After being made to believe that money was being stolen from them in the game, would the same person react the same way in both conditions? Again, the women reacted with more aggression when exposed to HEX vs. the control liquid, this time by extracting more money from their “opponent” as retribution, while the men reacted less aggressively when exposed to HEX.


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In the HEX condition, the men’s scans also showed greater connectivity to other areas of the brain, suggesting more neural engagement in regions that might control aggression. “We can look at the functional connectivity alone and distinguish men from women at 86% accuracy,” said Prof. Sobel.

What to make of the findings? The authors speculate that HEX is an ancient survival mechanism. Mothers exposed to the chemical signal would be more likely to defend their babies against threats, while fathers who inhale it would likely be less aggressive. Excited by the finding, Prof. Sobel thinks this is just the beginning of investigating olfaction as a driver of human aggression. “The next stage is to do this with actual babies’ heads instead of HEX in a jar.”
 
How tiny beetles fly (I am not sure about newsworthy, but cool video counts for something?)

Flying is a tricky business, but when you are less than a millimetre long, things get even tougher. At such tiny scales the physics of flight changes, and yet insects have evolved strategies to fly in miniature. In this Nature video, we zoom in on new research which is revealing the never-before-seen flight tactics of a species of feather wing beetle.

Flight speed is positively correlated with body size in animals. However, miniature featherwing beetles can fly at speeds and accelerations of insects three times their size.
Here we show that this performance results from a reduced wing mass and a previously unknown type of wing-motion cycle.

The flapping bristled wings follow a pronounced figure-of-eight loop that consists of subperpendicular up and down strokes followed by claps at stroke reversals above and below the body. The elytra act as inertial brakes that prevent excessive body oscillation.​

 
The staggering death toll of drug-resistant bacteria

Infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria are among the leading causes of death for people of all ages, finds the most comprehensive global study of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) yet.

The analysis, published in The Lancet on 19 January, estimates that in 2019, 4.95 million people died from illnesses in which bacterial AMR played a part. Of those, 1.27 million deaths were the direct result of AMR — meaning that drug-resistant infections killed more people than HIV/AIDS (864,000 deaths) or malaria (643,000 deaths).

The figures show that lower-income countries experience the highest rates of AMR-related death. Among the 21 GBD geographical regions, Western sub-Saharan Africa had the highest rate of deaths directly attributable to AMR, with 27.3 per 100,000 people. Australasia had the lowest, with 6.5 deaths per 100,000 people. Both the prevalence of resistance and the number of infections with resistant bacteria are higher in low-income regions than in wealthier countries. Reasons for this include poor sanitation and hygiene, insufficient facilities for testing to inform treatment, and a lack of access to the newest antibiotics and vaccines. “Regional estimates are useful for policy planning specific to the challenges faced by each region,” says Naghavi. “One-size-fits-all approaches are unlikely to be appropriate.”
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Paper Writeup
Spoiler World Maps :
gr7a.jpg

gr7c.jpg

gr7d.jpg

Raw data and modelled estimates for the percentage of pathogen isolates that are resistant by country and territory, 2019
Meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (A), isoniazid and rifampicin co-resistant (excluding XDR) Mycobacterium tuberculosis(C), carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (D), fluoroquinolone-resistant E coli (. Locations with no data or modelled estimates are presented in white. XDR=extensively drug resistant.
Note I have only included some of the maps, perhaps it is possible to have too many maps?
 
FFS stop giving antibiotics to healthy livestock. We dont expect much better from the US and the developing world. But Netherlands, we're looking at you. What's that behind your back Netherlands?

Antibiotic of last resort from a couple of years ago sir...

Had them over, and see me after class!
 
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FFS stop giving antibiotics to healthy livestock. We dont expect much better from the US and the developing world. But Netherlands, we're looking at you. What's that behind your back Netherlands?

Antibiotic of last resort from a couple of years ago sir...

Had them over, and see me after class!
I think another of the things they want to get rid of in the "blank cheque" that Bojo wants parliament to write him is allowing the UK to use more:

The reputation of British farming is at risk after its failure to follow the EU in curbing the overuse of antibiotics in healthy animals, say campaigners.

From today [28 January], a ban on the administration of antibiotics to groups of healthy animals comes into force across the EU.

UK ministers have previously refused to commit to an outright ban on preventive use – also referred to as “prophylactic use”. The nearest the UK came was in 2018, when farming minister George Eustice told MPs that the UK intended to “implement restrictions on the preventive use”.

“British farmers have made good progress in cutting their antibiotic use,” said Cóilín Nunan, from the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics, “but antibiotic use in British pigs remains two-and-a-half times higher per animal than in Denmark and the Netherlands.​
 
FFS stop giving antibiotics to healthy livestock. We dont expect much better from the US and the developing world. But Netherlands, we're looking at you. What's that behind your back Netherlands?

Antibiotic of last resort from a couple of years ago sir...

Had them over, and see me after class!

Oh cram it. :lol:
 
FFS stop giving antibiotics to healthy livestock. We dont expect much better from the US and the developing world. But Netherlands, we're looking at you. What's that behind your back Netherlands?

Antibiotic of last resort from a couple of years ago sir...

Had them over, and see me after class!

mmhhh? Antibiotics usage in the Netherlands is famously low.
Mostly because the doctors are infamous for only wanting to "prescribe" Paracetamol, and nothing else, even if you come in with a cut-off limb.


But yes, it's a probem.
No map for Gonorrhea, or didn't include it here? Because there the situation is also pretty bad, where we have untreatable strains in the meantime.
EDIT: Checked, nope, not included there. The other stuff is also more deadly, makes sense.
 
Last-resort cancer therapy holds back disease for more than a decade

Take immune cells out of the body, genetically alter them to produce proteins that recognize cancer cells, and inject them back. It is really risky, and only used when there is no other hope. They have now followed up 2 chronic lymphocytic leukaemia patients for 10 years and no sign of remission. This is a technology that is applicable to many forms of cancer, and it and other immune based treatments are really the closest we have to a "cure for cancer".

Spoiler Whole article :
A few weeks after receiving an experimental cancer therapy that turns immune cells into tumour-killing hunters, Doug Olson’s doctor sat him down to give him news of his progress. “He said, ‘Doug, we cannot find a single cancer cell in your body,’” Olson recalls. “I was pretty convinced that I was done with cancer.”
Olson’s doctors, however, weren’t so sure. The year was 2010, and Olson was one of the first people with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia to receive the treatment, called CAR-T cell therapy. When his doctors — including Carl June and David Porter at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia — wrote the protocol for the clinical trial that Olson was involved in, they hoped that the genetically engineered cells might survive for a month in his body. They knew that cancer research could be heartbreaking; they didn’t dare to expect a cure.
But more than ten years later, the immune cells continue to patrol Olson’s blood and he remains in remission. June is finally ready to admit what Olson suspected all along. “We can now conclude that CAR T cells can actually cure patients with leukaemia,” June told reporters at a press briefing describing results that were published in Nature on 2 February.
Tumour destroyers
CAR-T cell therapies involve removing immune cells called T cells from a person with cancer, and genetically altering them so that they produce proteins — called chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs — that recognize cancer cells. The cells are then reinfused into the person, in the hope that they will seek out and destroy tumours.
In the years since Olson’s treatment, five CAR-T cell therapies have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, to treat leukaemias, lymphomas and myelomas. June estimates that tens of thousands of people have received CAR-T cell treatment.
Building better CAR-T therapies
But the therapy is expensive, risky and technically demanding. It remains a last resort, to be used when all other treatments have failed. Despite the treatment’s success for Olson, not everyone experiences durable remission of their cancer. In the beginning, only about 25-35% of CAR-T cell recipients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia experienced a complete remission of their cancer, says Porter. With refinement, that percentage has increased over the years, he says, but some of these initial successes still lead to relapse. Tracking the treatment long-term could reveal clues as to what factors are important for lasting CAR-T cell success.
For more than ten years, Porter and his colleagues analysed the CAR-T cells in Olson and one other person treated in 2010, tracing the cells’ evolution and looking for any signs of safety concerns.
They found that the CAR T cells persisted, but the characteristics of the population shifted over time. Soon after infusion, a prominent population of T cells called CD8+ cells emerged. These are sometimes called killer T cells, and can identify and destroy cells that display unusual proteins, such as cancer cells or cells that are infected with a virus.
But over the years, a different type of CAR T cell became dominant. CD4+ T cells can take on a variety of functions in the immune system, but the researchers showed that both study participants had CD4+ cells with characteristics suggesting that they would be capable of killing leukaemia cells.
Tremendous impact
Olson and the other participant now have no signs of leukaemia. It’s unclear whether the CAR T cells killed all the leukaemia cells soon after they were introduced, or if the cells that continue to patrol are able to destroy any leukaemia cells before they reach detectable levels.
Highly mutated cancers respond better to immune therapy
“The potential impact of CAR T is tremendous,” says Nirali Shah, a paediatric haematologist at the US National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. This study “gives you a proof of concept about the safety of having long-term persistence and integration of the T cells into your body”.
It remains to be seen, she adds, how well the findings from these two individuals with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia will translate to other diseases. Efforts are underway to use CAR-T cell approaches to treat solid tumours, such as prostate tumours and the devastating brain cancer glioblastoma. In January, researchers reported success in using the cells to destroy scar tissue in the heart — an approach that could one day be used to treat cardiac fibrosis.
In the years after his treatment, Olson returned to his career in medical diagnostics. He committed to staying healthy, and his son talked him into running half marathons. “If my cancer was gone, I certainly didn’t want to die of a heart attack,” he says. Eventually, he decided to go public with the story of his recovery, and serve as a mentor for other people with cancer.
He tries to give them hope, he says: “If there isn’t a cure for their cancer today, there’s a reasonable chance that around the corner, there’s going to be one.”


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T-cells attacking a brain cancer cell
 
This is a technology that is applicable to many forms of cancer, and it and other immune based treatments are really the closest we have to a "cure for cancer".
And +1 Content citizen in all towns...? ;)
 
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