Pollution Affects the Human Brain
Air pollution doesn't only harm lungs. It could also impair brain function.A new study from European researchers found breathing polluted air diminishes cognitive abilities.Scientists have known for a while that reduced lung function can have harmful effects on our brains, and they've thought that pollution hinders our cognitive response through this lung connection.What is interesting about this latest study, which comes from a coalition of German and Swiss researchers, is they've found pollutants can hurt brain function independently of a connection to the lungs."Our findings disprove the hypothesis that air pollution first decreases lung function and this decline, in turn, causes cognitive impairment by releasing stress signals and humoral mediators into the body," said Mohammad Vossoughi, a PhD student at the Leibniz Institute for Environmental Medicine.The result raises questions about how air pollution has such direct effects on the brain, and Vossoughi is careful to emphasize the need for future research. But he postulated that pollutants and particulate matter – small particles of smoke and dust from engines and exhaust - impact the central nervous system through our sense of smell.Researchers culled data from a previous study on aging that involved 834 German women. They tested the association between impaired lung function and cognitive decline.Cars and trucks, of course, are a leading source of these pollutants. Estimates indicate that pollution spewed from vehicles kills about 53,000 people in the United States every year, according to research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That's more than the approximately 33,000 who die in car accidents.As European researchers further examine the causes of that direct link, their counterparts in Canada could suggest a solution. University of Toronto researchers released a paper on car pollution earlier this month that suggests 25 percent of the vehicles on the road are responsible for 90 percent of the pollution.It's not only the cars' fault. It's how they're driven."How you drive, hard acceleration, age of vehicle, how the car is maintained – these are things we can influence that can all have an effect on pollution," said Greg Evans, the study's author.
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Women are Safer Drivers than Men
Cars are easier to drive than they've ever been before, but men are still more likely to be killed behind the wheel than women. That's according to the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's analysis of data from the 2012 Fatality Analysis Reporting System and the General Estimates System.More than twice as many men were killed behind the wheel in 2012 – 23,808 men were killed, compared to 9,733 women – due in part to the fact that they cover more miles each year. On top of that, men are more likely to drive drunk, with nearly a quarter of fatal male crashes involving a driver with a blood-alcohol content above 0.08 compared to about 15 percent of women.It is not all good for women, though. Aside from age groups from five to nine and over 74, females have a higher injury rate than men, with 768 injury crashes for every 100,000 female drivers.However, driving fatality and injury rates are declining steadily, even though the difference in male/female fatalities remains the same.
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A Mystery is Solved
DNA solved a 70-year-old question of whether Loraine Allison survived the sinking of the Titanic. Many people have wondered what happened to the two-year-old little girl who disappeared from the ship's sinking more than 100 years ago. The story begins with Hudson and Bess taking their two kids, Trevor, seven months, and Loraine, two years of age, across the Atlantic on the Titanic. At the time of the sinking, it is said that Trevor was rushed to a lifeboat by their maid and that the other three died on the boat. However, only Hudson’s body was found, leaving the mystery of what happened to Loraine and her mother. The unknown remained until 28 years later when Helen Kramer came forward on a radio show called “We the People”, and said that she was the two-year-old missing girl. Only a few of the distant relatives believed her story, but immediate family members denied the claims and kept her out of the inheritance. When Helen died in 1992 the claims seemed to have died with her. However, in 2012 the granddaughter of Helen, Debrina Woods, resurfaced the claims by saying she had inherited more evidence from her grandmother and that the truth should be told. With all of this evidence, and with a desire to solve this case, a group of Titanic researchers put together a project to help unlock the mystery. They did that by convincing descendants from each family to have a DNA test done. The results from the tests showed that there is not a relationship between the two families suggesting that this was a hoax or a complete misunderstanding.
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Big Bang Theory Science Scholarship
The cast and creators of hit TV comedy series, The Big Bang Theory, have created a 4 million dollar scholarship fund to support low-income science students. Although the sitcom is partly set at California's Caltech, the fund will sponsor studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics at rival UCLA. Series star Mayim Bialik earned a PhD in neuroscience from the university in 2007. The first 20 scholars will be announced on The Big Bang Theory set this autumn. "We have all been given a gift with The Big Bang Theory, a show that's not only based in the scientific community, but also enthusiastically supported by that same community. This is our opportunity to give back," said the show's creator, Chuck Lorre. "In that spirit, our Big Bang family has made a meaningful contribution, and together, we'll share in the support of these future scholars, scientists and leaders", he added. The show which documents the achievements and obsessions of four science nerds and the women who tolerate them has just finished its eighth season. Professor Stephen Hawking, Nobel Prize laureate George Smoot, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and theoretical physicist Brian Greene have all made cameos on the show, along with the cast of Star Trek and other sci-fi franchises. UCLA said the scholarship endowment was the university's first to be created by the cast and crew of a television series. After the initial intake of 20 students for the 2015-16 academic year, the scholarship will support five further students every year in perpetuity.
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Drugs Kill Deadly Cancer
A pair of cancer drugs can shrink tumors in nearly 60% of people with advanced melanoma, a new trial has suggested. An international trial on 945 patients found treatment with ipilimumab and nivolumab stopped the cancer advancing for nearly a year in 58% of cases. UK doctors presented the data at the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Cancer Research UK said the drugs deliver a "powerful punch" against one of the most aggressive forms of cancer. Melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer, is the sixth most common cancer in the UK and it kills more than 2,000 people in Britain each year. The immune system is a powerful defense against infection. However, there are many "brakes" built in to stop the system attacking our own tissues Cancer which is a corrupted version of healthy tissue can take advantage of these brakes to evade assault from the immune system. Ipilimumab, which was approved as an advanced melanoma treatment by the UK's health service last year, and nivolumab both take the brakes off. An international trial on 945 people showed that taking both drugs led to tumors shrinking by at least a third in 58% of patients - with the tumors stable or shrinking for an average of 11.5 months. The figures, published simultaneously in theNew England Journal of Medicine, for ipilimumab on its own were 19% and 2.5 months. Dr James Larkin, a consultant at the Royal Marsden Hospital and one of the UK's lead investigators, told BBC News, "By giving these drugs together you are effectively taking two brakes off the immune system rather than one so the immune system is able to recognize tumors it wasn't previously recognizing and react to that and destroy them. For immunotherapies, we've never seen tumor shrinkage rates over 50% so that's very significant to see. This is a treatment modality that I think is going to have a big future for the treatment of cancer." The research comes on the heels of another immunotherapy break-through which showed lung cancer could also be treatedwith similar drugs.
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Virgin Birth Sawfish
Seven sawfish in Florida have become the first virgin-born animals ever found in the wild from a sexually reproducing species. The discovery suggests that such births may be a natural response to dwindling numbers, rather than a freak occurrence largely seen in captivity. It was made by ecologists studying genetic diversity in a critically endangered species of ray. They say that births of this kind may be more common than previously thought. The findings appear in the journalCurrent Biology. There are many species, particularly invertebrates, that naturally reproduce alone; some types of whiptail lizard, meanwhile, are bizarrely all-female. But, for an animal that normally reproduces by mating, a virgin birth is an oddity. And yet, a number of captive animals have produced virgin births. This roster of surprise arrivals includes sharks, snakes, Komodo dragons and turkeys - all species that normally use sexual reproduction. And, in 2012 a US research group reported two pregnant pit vipers, caught in the wild, each gestating baby snakes (inside eggs) that appeared to be fatherless. But, the small-tooth sawfish, a strange-looking beast that grows up to four meters long, is the first sexually reproducing species whose virgin-born babies have been found roaming free and healthy in their native habitat. Andrew Fields, a PhD student at Stony Brook University in New York and the study's first author, said the find was entirely unexpected. It came during a survey of the sawfish population in the estuaries of southwest Florida. "We were conducting routine DNA fingerprinting of the sawfish found in this area in order to see if relatives were often reproducing with relatives due to their small population size," Fields said."What the DNA fingerprints told us was altogether more surprising. Female sawfish are sometimes reproducing without even mating." Of the 190 individual sawfish that Fields and his colleagues surveyed, seven had DNA that indicated they only had one parent. Specifically, these seven historic fish had identical copies of at least 14 of the 16 genes that the scientists looked at; if they had arisen from normal sexual reproduction, the team calculated that the chance of the animals being "homozygous" for all those genes was less than one-in-100 billion. So, they concluded that the seven sawfish , all of them female and five of them sisters, were produced by "parthenogenesis": a process by which an unfertilized egg develops into an embryo. Researchers believe this takes place in vertebrates when the egg absorbs an identical sister cell. Because the resulting offspring have much less genetic diversity than normal sexual offspring, their chances of survival are usually thought to be very low. But, the seven fish in Fields' study were up to one year old, normal in size and apparently getting on fine.