Soccer spectators can breathe a sigh of relief: Travelers to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil were not responsible for introducing the Zika virus to the Americas after all. New genomic analysis of a small number of Brazilian Zika patients puts a better clock on the travel history of the mosquito-borne virus and suggests that it landed in the Americas at least a year earlier than previously thought—as early as spring 2013....
A type of gene mutation long known to extend the lives of worms, flies and mice also turns up in long-lived humans. Researchers found that among Ashkenazi Jews, those who survived past age 95 were much more likely than their peers to possess one of two similar mutations in the gene for insulinlike growth factor 1 receptor (IGF1R). The mutations seem to make cells less responsive than normal to insulinlike growth factor 1 (IGF1), a key growth hormone secreted by the liver....
Optical physicists Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for “groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics.” Half of this year’s nine-million-kronor (about $1-million) prize goes to American physicist Arthur Ashkin for his invention of “optical tweezers,” lasers that can probe the machinery of life without causing damage. The other half will be split jointly between French physicist Gérard Mourou and Canadian physicist Donna Strickland for their development of “chirped pulse amplification” (CPA)—a method for making ultrashort, high-intensity laser pulses now routinely used in corrective eye surgery and precision machining....
Delegates attending an international meeting meant to protect Antarctic ocean life dashed conservationists’ hopes for new marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean. The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) concluded Friday after a week of virtual negotiations among its 26 member nations. It declined to approve three proposals for marine protected areas near Antarctica. The commission, established in 1982 as part of the Antarctic Treaty System, is charged with conserving marine life around the southern continent and sustainably managing the region’s fish stocks....
Rarely has the inception of an environmental disaster been so triumphantly documented. In a recently unearthed black-and-white newsreel, which played before movies in theaters across Argentina in 1946, a newscaster reported that 20 beavers have been trapped in Canada and flown to Tierra del Fuego—the island that straddles the border between Argentina and Chile at the southernmost tip of South America. Argentine Pres. Juan Perón’s administration had imported the animals in hopes that they would thrive and reproduce, fostering a fur trade in the economically lackluster territory....
Astronomers have spotted the most distant object ever seen in the Solar System: a frigid world that currently lies 103 times as far from the Sun as Earth is. It breaks a record previously held by the dwarf planet Eris, which had been seen at 90 times the Earth-Sun distance. Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, reported the object on November 10 at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in National Harbor, Maryland....
Mood disorders such as depression are known to increase drug abuse risk. Yet mounting evidence suggests that substance abuse also makes people more vulnerable to depression and the negative effects of stress, according to Eric J. Nestler, chair of neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He and his team reported new details about the link between depression and drug abuse in Neuron in August. The team found that mice given cocaine daily for a week—a simulation of chronic drug abuse in humans—were more likely than their drug-free counterparts to display behaviors reminiscent of depression after being subjected to socially stressful situations involving an aggressive and intimidating mouse....
Emissions of a greenhouse gas that has 17,000 times the planet-warming capacity of carbon dioxide are at least four times higher than had been previously estimated. Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is used mainly by the semiconductor industry to clean the chambers in which silicon chips are made. The industry had in the past estimated that most of the gas was expended during the cleaning process and only about 2 percent escaped into the air....
The record-setting heat across the western United States is helping to drive a dangerous side effect: Forests from Oregon to New Mexico are exceptionally dry and primed to ignite into wildfire. Researchers across the West are measuring record levels of dryness in the sticks, leaves and wood samples they extract from forests and grasslands and analyze to determine their moisture level, according to an E&E News analysis of federal data. Dryness makes forests and grasslands more likely to burn if they are ignited by a source such as a downed power line, a smoldering campfire or a lightning strike....
Herpes is a lifelong infection, but Lauren had it only for six tumultuous months. Or rather, she believed she did, after a request for sexually transmitted disease testing returned a positive result. But after weeks of Googling, chatting with members of online herpes forums, and reading scientific papers, she asked for a different test, which eventually confirmed her suspicion — her herpes diagnosis was wrong. In the six months that passed between the tests, the mistake led her to keep a romance at bay and left her anxiously patrolling her health....
The changing climate stands to overturn nearly half a century of gains in human longevity and well-being, but aggressive action to cut carbon could save lives and be a net benefit for humanity. That’s the message in a special publication today from The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal. The report from the Commission on Health and Climate Change lays out the health impacts of a warming world and offers policy advice on how to address medical concerns and prevent them from getting worse....
Scientists at Google say that they have achieved quantum supremacy, a long-awaited milestone in quantum computing. The announcement, published in Nature on 23 October, follows a leak of an early version of the paper five weeks ago, which Google did not comment on at the time. In a world first, a team led by John Martinis, an experimental physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Google in Mountain View, California, says that its quantum computer carried out a specific calculation that is beyond the practical capabilities of regular, ‘classical’ machines....
Treatment: HPTN 046 and Nevirapine Maker: HIV Prevention Trials Network, in collaboration with the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Zimbabwe; and Stanford University Stage: Phase III expected to begin early 2007 Why It Matters More than 500,000 children are infected with HIV each year worldwide. Mother-to-child HIV transmission during pregnancy, labor, delivery or breastfeeding is responsible for more than 90 percent of these cases. In the developing world, where 95 percent of people with HIV infections live, breastfeeding currently accounts for up to 40 percent of infection of infants, or at least 100,000 children a year, says HPTN 046 principal investigator Yvonne Maldonado of Stanford University....
By Janet FangThirty years ago this week, Mount St. Helens in Washington state was swollen to bursting point. The northern flank of the mountain was bulging outward at a rate of more than one meter per day as magma built up inside. By May 18, 1980, the volcano could withstand the pressure no longer. The side of St. Helens collapsed in an immense landslide, unleashing the largest explosive eruption in U....
By George Wigmore of Nature magazineInjectable, light-activated implants could help to reconstruct soft tissue. The implants offer a less invasive alternative to current techniques for rebuilding tissue lost as a result of trauma or disease; they will be especially useful for facial tissue, which is difficult to reconstruct without scarring or loss of function.Jennifer Elisseeff, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and her colleagues developed the implants from a combination of naturally occurring hyaluronic acid and the synthetic polymer polyethylene glycol (PEG)....
Using a novel radiotherapy technology called helical tomotherapy—in essence, the marriage of a computerized tomography (CT) scanner and a radiotherapy linear accelerator—James Welsh, associate professor of medical physics and human oncology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and a group of colleagues have created images of fossil specimens of various types and ages. TomoTherapy, Inc.’s Hi-Art radiation machine, developed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is designed to treat cancer patients with intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT)....
By Amanda Mascarelli of Nature magazineThree coastal-restoration projects intended to rescue Louisiana’s rapidly shrinking wetlands have failed to restore marsh during the past two decades.Instead, the schemes – which involve diverting fresh water from the Mississippi River in the hope of carrying sediment to marshes and aiding plant life – have made these regions more vulnerable to hurricanes, according to the authors of a study published by Geophysical Research Letters.Louisiana’s coastal wetlands are up against a host of natural and anthropogenic factors....
NASA is keeping a close eye on two pieces of space junk expected to whiz by the International Space Station in back-to-back passes, and the station may even have to dodge the orbital debris. The drifting space flotsam includes the remains of a Russian Cosmos satellite and a leftover chunk of an old Indian rocket. The Russian satellite debris will creep close to the space station on Thursday morning (Sept. 27), with the Indian rocket remnant zooming by on Friday, NASA officials told SPACE....
By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - Giving birth outside of a hospital has become more common in the U.S., especially for white women, with almost 60,000 out-of-hospital births in 2014, according to a new study. “I think it speaks to some women’s growing discomfort with the standard hospital-based system of childbirth in the U.S,” said lead author Marian F. MacDorman of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland in College Park....
By Rina Saeed Khan KETI BUNDER, Pakistan (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - For fisherman Sammar Dablo, it was as if “the seawater stole our homes” when land erosion forced his village to relocate further inland on Pakistan’s south coast. The people of the fan-shaped Indus Delta, where the Indus River meets the Arabian Sea, are among the poorest of the poor, mostly illiterate and living in wooden shacks on the mud flats....
