SCIENTISTS DISCOVER 3.7-BILLION-YEAR-OLD FOSSILS

A team of Australian researchers has uncovered the world's oldest fossils in a remote area of Greenland, capturing the earliest history of the planet and demonstrating that life on Earth emerged rapidly in the planet's early years. The team discovered 3.7-billion-year-old stromatolite fossils in the world's oldest sedimentary rocks, in the Isua Greenstone Belt along the edge of Greenland's icecap.

Led by the University of Wollongong's (UOW) Professor Allen Nutman, the team discovered 3.7-billion-year-old stromatolite fossils in the world's oldest sedimentary rocks, in the Isua Greenstone Belt along the edge of Greenland's icecap.

The findings are outlined in a study published in Nature, with co-authors Associate Professor Vickie Bennett from The Australian National University (ANU), the University of New South Wales' (UNSW) Professor Martin Van Kranendonk, and Professor Allan Chivas, from UOW.

The discovery of the Isua stromatolite fossils provides a greater understanding of early diversity of life on Earth and researchers said could have implications for our understanding of life on Mars. Professor Nutman, from UOW's School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said the Isua stromatolite fossils predated the world's previous oldest stromatolite fossils -- which were found in Western Australia -- by 220 million years.

The discovery pushes back the fossil record to near the start of Earth's geological record and points to evidence of life on Earth very early in its history. The Isua stromatolites, which were exposed by the recent melting of a perennial snow patch, were laid down in shallow sea, providing the first evidence of an environment in which early life thrived.

For much of Earth's history, life was just single cells, and stromatolite fossils are mounds of carbonate constructed by these communities of microbes.

"The significance of stromatolites is that not only do they provide obvious evidence of ancient life that is visible with the naked eye, but that they are complex ecosystems," Professor Nutman said.

"This indicates that as long as 3.7 billion years ago microbial life was already diverse. This diversity shows that life emerged within the first few hundred millions years of Earth's existence, which is in keeping with biologists' calculations showing the great antiquity of life's genetic code."

Co-lead investigator Associate Professor Vickie Bennett, from ANU, said this study provided a new perspective into the history of Earth.

"This discovery turns the study of planetary habitability on its head," Associate Professor Bennett said.

"Rather than speculating about potential early environments, for the first time we have rocks that we know record the conditions and environments that sustained early life. Our research will provide new insights into chemical cycles and rock-water-microbe interactions on a young planet."

Professor Martin Van Kranendonk, Director of the Australian Center for Astrobiology at UNSW, of which Professor Nutman is also an Associate Member, said it was a groundbreaking find that could point to similar life structures on Mars, which 3.7 billion years ago was a damp environment.

"The structures and geochemistry from newly exposed outcrops in Greenland display all of the features used in younger rocks to argue for a biological origin," Professor Van Kranendonk said.

"This discovery represents a new benchmark for the oldest preserved evidence of life on Earth. It points to a rapid emergence of life on Earth and supports the search for life in similarly ancient rocks on Mars."

The investigation, conducted by the Australian science team in collaboration with a UK partner, was funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

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DOGS HAVE THE ABILITY TO DISTINGUISH VOCABULARY WORDS AND THE INTONATION OF HUMAN SPEECH

Dogs have the ability to distinguish vocabulary words and the intonation of human speech through brain regions similar to those that humans use, a new study reports.

Attila Andics et al. note that vocabulary learning "does not appear to be a uniquely human capacity that follows from the emergence of language, but rather a more ancient function that can be exploited to link arbitrary sound sequences to meanings."

Words are the basic building blocks of human languages, but they are hardly ever found in nonhuman vocal communications. Intonation is another way that information is conveyed through speech, where, for example, praises tend to be conveyed with higher and more varying pitch. Humans understand speech through both vocabulary and intonation.

Here, Andics and colleagues explored whether dogs also depend on both mechanisms. Dogs were exposed to recordings of their trainers' voices as the trainers spoke to them using multiple combinations of vocabulary and intonation, in both praising and neutral ways.

For example, trainers spoke praise words with a praising intonation, praise words with a neutral intonation, neutral words with a praising intonation, and neutral words with neutral intonation.

Researchers used fMRI to analyze the dogs' brain activity as the animals listened to each combination. Their results reveal that, regardless of intonation, dogs process vocabulary, recognizing each word as distinct, and further, that they do so in a way similar to humans, using the left hemisphere of the brain.

Also like humans, the researchers found that dogs process intonation separately from vocabulary, in auditory regions in the right hemisphere of the brain. Lastly, and also like humans, the team found that the dogs relied on both word meaning and intonation when processing the reward value of utterances.

Thus, dogs seem to understand both human words and intonation. The authors note that it is possible that selective forces during domestication could have supported the emergence of the brain structure underlying this capability in dogs, but, such rapid evolution of speech-related hemispheric asymmetries is unlikely.

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SCIENTISTS USE ULTRASOUND TO JUMP-START A MAN'S BRAIN AFTER COMA

A 25-YEAR-OLD MAN RECOVERING FROM A COMA HAS MADE REMARKABLE PROGRESS FOLLOWING A TREATMENT TO JUMP-START HIS BRAIN USING ULTRASOUNDS, SCIENTISTS REPORT. THIS IS THE FIRST TIME SUCH AN APPROACH TO SEVERE BRAIN INJURY HAS BEEN TRIED.

The researchers targeted the thalamus with low-intensity focused ultrasound pulsation.

Credit: Martin Monti/UCLA

"It's almost as if we were jump-starting the neurons back into function," said Martin Monti, the study's lead author and a UCLA associate professor of psychology and neurosurgery. "Until now, the only way to achieve this was a risky surgical procedure known as deep brain stimulation, in which electrodes are implanted directly inside the thalamus," he said. "Our approach directly targets the thalamus but is noninvasive."

Monti said the researchers expected the positive result, but he cautioned that the procedure requires further study on additional patients before they determine whether it could be used consistently to help other people recovering from comas.

"It is possible that we were just very lucky and happened to have stimulated the patient just as he was spontaneously recovering," Monti said.

A report on the treatment is published in the journal Brain Stimulation. This is the first time the approach has been used to treat severe brain injury.

The technique, called low-intensity focused ultrasound pulsation, was pioneered by Alexander Bystritsky, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and a co-author of the study. Bystritsky is also a founder of Brainsonix, a Sherman Oaks, California-based company that provided the device the researchers used in the study.

That device, about the size of a coffee cup saucer, creates a small sphere of acoustic energy that can be aimed at different regions of the brain to excite brain tissue. For the new study, researchers placed it by the side of the man's head and activated it 10 times for 30 seconds each, in a 10-minute period.

Monti said the device is safe because it emits only a small amount of energy -- less than a conventional Doppler ultrasound.

Before the procedure began, the man showed only minimal signs of being conscious and of understanding speech -- for example, he could perform small, limited movements when asked. By the day after the treatment, his responses had improved measurably. Three days later, the patient had regained full consciousness and full language comprehension, and he could reliably communicate by nodding his head "yes" or shaking his head "no." He even made a fist-bump gesture to say goodbye to one of his doctors.

"The changes were remarkable," Monti said.

The technique targets the thalamus because, in people whose mental function is deeply impaired after a coma, thalamus performance is typically diminished. And medications that are commonly prescribed to people who are coming out of a coma target the thalamus only indirectly.

Under the direction of Paul Vespa, a UCLA professor of neurology and neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the researchers plan to test the procedure on several more people beginning this fall at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Those tests will be conducted in partnership with the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center and funded in part by the Dana Foundation and the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation.

If the technology helps other people recovering from coma, Monti said, it could eventually be used to build a portable device -- perhaps incorporated into a helmet -- as a low-cost way to help "wake up" patients, perhaps even those who are in a vegetative or minimally conscious state. Currently, there is almost no effective treatment for such patients, he said.

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DO EYE EXERCISES IMPROVE VISION?

Self-help programs of eye exercises that claim to reduce or eliminate your need for glasses and contacts have been around since the 1920s. But before you spend time and money on anything that promises you will be able to "throw away your glasses," be aware that these programs remain highly controversial and most vision experts contend there is little or no scientific evidence that shows they work.

In fact, several popular eye exercise programs have been removed from the marketplace for making apparently false claims about their effectiveness.

For example, an Iowa district court in November 2006 halted all sales of See Clearly Method kits that had been marketed for several years by a company called Vision Improvement Technologies as a way to improve vision through eye exercises.

Based on allegations that included misleading advertising, the state court ordered the Iowa company to pay $200,000 into a restitution fund to compensate consumers who had paid about $350 for each of thousands of kits.

In the lawsuit, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller accused the company of making "dramatic claims for its product that could not be substantiated."

Steven M. Beresford, PhD, is founder and CEO of American Vision Institute (AVI) — the entity behind the original See Clearly Method. Beresford told AllAboutVision.com via e-mail in late 2008: "In our opinion, the Iowa attorney general was paid off by the AOA [American Optometric Association] by means of a bribe or campaign contribution to carry out a proxy attack."

AVI operates a website that offers a new Power Vision Program "consisting of the most effective techniques of the See Clearly Method," according to the company. The Power Vision Program, which AVI claims can "reduce, perhaps even eliminate your dependency on glasses or contact lenses," can be downloaded from the company's website for $35.

Self-help programs like the See Clearly Method, the Power Vision Program and other eye exercise programs promoted online usually claim they can reduce refractive errors such as nearsightedness and astigmatism, as well as presbyopia.

These programs differ from supervised programs of vision therapy prescribed by eye doctors (usually optometrists) to correct certain eye alignment and other binocular vision problems, or to enhance dynamic visual skills for sports vision.

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NEXT GENERATION ANODE TO IMPROVE LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES

RESEARCHERS HAVE CREATED A NEW SILICON-TIN NANO-COMPOSITE ANODE THAT COULD LEAD TO LITHIUM-ION BATTERIES THAT CAN BE CHARGED AND DISCHARGED MORE TIMES BEFORE THEY REACH THE END OF THEIR USEFUL LIVES. THE LONGER-LASTING BATTERIES COULD BE USED IN EVERYTHING FROM HANDHELD ELECTRONIC DEVICES TO ELECTRIC VEHICLES.

Titled "Tin Nano-particles as an Effective Conductive Addition in Silicon Anodes," a paper describing the research was published Wednesday (Aug. 3) in the journal Scientific Reports. The project was led by Lorenzo Mangolini, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and engineering in UCR's Bourns College of Engineering.

Lithium-ion batteries, the most popular rechargeable batteries in personal electronics, are composed of three main parts: an anode, a cathode, and a lithium salt dissolved in an organic solvent. While graphite is the material of choice for most anodes, its performance is a limiting factor in making better batteries and expanding their applications.

Both silicon and tin have been investigated as novel high-performance alternatives for graphite anodes. In the current research, Mangolini's group showed for the first time that combining both materials into a single composite leads to dramatic improvements in battery performance. In addition to tripling the charge capacity offered by graphite, the silicon-tin nano-composite is extremely stable over many charge-discharge cycles, essentially extending its useful life. These features, coupled with a simple manufacturing process, could help the expansion of lithium-ion batteries for use in next-generation vehicles.

"Lithium-ion batteries are growing in popularity for electric vehicles and aerospace applications, but there is a clear need to alleviate range anxiety -- the fear that a vehicle won't have enough charge to reach its destination -- before we will see large-scale adoption. Any technology that can help is welcome, as long as it is simple and scalable, and our technology meets both those criteria," Mangolini said.

Mangolini said adding tin to the silicon, rather than another conductive material such as carbon black, would circumvent the low conductivity of silicon without decreasing energy storage.

"The synergistic effects between these two materials lead to batteries that exceed the performance of each of the two components alone, an improvement that is a result of the high electrical conductivity and good energy storage capacity of tin. This can be achieved with the addition of even minor amounts of tin, as small as 2 percent by weight," he said.

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ORAL CONTRACEPTIVES HAVE PREVENTED CASES OF ENDOMETRIAL CANCER IN THE LAST DECADE

USE OF ORAL CONTRACEPTIVES (USUALLY REFERRED TO AS "THE PILL"), EVEN FOR JUST A FEW YEARS, GIVES SUBSTANTIAL LONG-TERM PROTECTION AGAINST ENDOMETRIAL (WOMB) CANCER, AND THE LONGER THE PILL IS USED THE GREATER THE REDUCTION IN RISK, ACCORDING TO A DETAILED RE-ANALYSIS OF ALL THE AVAILABLE EVIDENCE.

Researchers from the Collaborative Group on Epidemiological Studies on Endometrial Cancer estimate that in the past 50 years (1965-2014) about 400000 cases of endometrial cancer have been prevented by oral contraceptive use in high-income countries, including about 200000 in the last decade (2005-2014).

"The strong protective effect of oral contraceptives against endometrial cancer -- which persists for decades after stopping the pill -- means that women who use it when they are in their 20s or even younger continue to benefit into their 50s and older, when cancer becomes more common," explains study author Professor Valerie Beral, from the University of Oxford in the UK.

She added "Previous research has shown that the pill also protects against ovarian cancer. People used to worry that the pill might cause cancer, but in the long term the pill reduces the risk of getting cancer."

The researchers pooled data on 27276 women with endometrial cancer in 36 studies from North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South Africa -- virtually all the epidemiological evidence ever collected on the effect of oral contraceptives.

The findings reveal that every 5 years of oral contraceptive use reduces the risk of endometrial cancer by about a quarter. In high-income countries, 10 years of oral contraceptive use reduces the risk of developing endometrial cancer before age 75 from 2.3 to 1.3 cases per 100 users.

Although estrogen doses in oral contraceptives have decreased appreciably over the years, with pills in the 1960s typically containing more than double the estrogen dose of pills in the 1980s, the reduction in endometrial cancer risk was at least as great for women who used the pill during the 1980s as for those who used it in earlier decades. These results suggest that the amount of hormones in the lower-dose pills is still sufficient to reduce the incidence of endometrial cancer, say the authors.

The proportional risk reduction did not vary substantially by women's reproductive history, adiposity (amount of body fat), alcohol use, tobacco use, or ethnicity.

According to study author Dr Naomi Allen, also from the University of Oxford, UK, "The existing evidence suggests that medium-to-long-term use of oral contraceptives (ie, for 5 years or longer) results in substantially reduced risk of endometrial cancer. Over the past 50 years (1965-2014), we estimate that about 400000 endometrial cancers have been prevented in women before the age of 75 years in high-income countries through the use of oral contraceptives, with about 200,000 prevented during the last decade (2005-14)."

This study was funded by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK.

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VIRUS ATTRACTS BUMBLEBEES TO INFECTED PLANTS BY CHANGING SCENT

Study of bee-manipulating plant virus reveals a 'short-circuiting' of natural selection. Researchers suggest that replicating the scent caused by infection could encourage declining bee populations to pollinate crops -- helping both bee and human food supplies.

Plant scientists at the University of Cambridge have found that the cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) alters gene expression in the tomato plants it infects, causing changes to air-borne chemicals -- the scent -- emitted by the plants. Bees can smell these subtle changes, and glasshouse experiments have shown that bumblebees prefer infected plants over healthy ones.

Scientists say that by indirectly manipulating bee behaviour to improve pollination of infected plants by changing their scent, the virus is effectively paying its host back. This may also benefit the virus: helping to spread the pollen of plants susceptible to infection and, in doing so, inhibiting the chance of virus-resistant plant strains emerging.

The authors of the new study, published in the journal PLOS Pathogens, say that understanding the smells that attract bees, and reproducing these artificially by using similar chemical blends, may enable growers to protect or even enhance yields of bee-pollinated crops.

"Bees provide a vital pollination service in the production of three-quarters of the world's food crops. With their numbers in rapid decline, scientists have been searching for ways to harness pollinator power to boost agricultural yields," said study principal investigator Dr John Carr, Head of Cambridge's Virology and Molecular Plant Pathology group.

"Better understanding the natural chemicals that attract bees could provide ways of enhancing pollination, and attracting bees to good sources of pollen and nectar -- which they need for survival," Carr said.

He conducted the study with Professor Beverley Glover, Director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden, where many of the experiments took place, and collaborators at Rothamsted Research.

CMV is transmitted by aphids -- bees don't carry the virus. It's one of the most prevalent pathogens affecting tomato plants, resulting in small plants with poor-tasting fruits that can cause serious losses to cultivated crops.

Not only is CMV one of the most damaging viruses for horticultural crops, but it also persists in wild plant populations, and Carr says the new findings may explain why: "We were surprised that bees liked the smell of the plants infected with the virus -- it made no sense. You'd think the pollinators would prefer a healthy plant. However, modelling suggested that if pollinators were biased towards diseased plants in the wild, this could short-circuit natural selection for disease resistance," he said.

"The virus is rewarding disease-susceptible plants, and at the same time producing new hosts it can infect to prevent itself from going extinct. An example, perhaps, of what's known as symbiotic mutualism."

The increased pollination from bees may also compensate for a decreased yield of seeds in the smaller fruits of virus-infected plants, say the scientists.

The findings also reveal a new level of complexity in the evolutionary 'arms race' between plants and viruses, in which it is classically believed that plants continually evolve new forms of disease-resistance while viruses evolve new ways to evade it.

"We would expect the plants susceptible to disease to suffer, but in making them more attractive to pollinators the virus gives these plants an advantage. Our results suggest that the picture of a plant-pathogen arms race is more complex than previously thought, and in some cases we should think of viruses in a more positive way," said Carr.

Plants emit 'volatiles', air-borne organic chemical compounds involved in scent, to attract pollinators and repulse plant-eating animals and microbes. Humans have used them for thousands of years as perfumes and spices.

The researchers grew plants in individual containers, and collected air with emissions from CMV-infected plants, as well as 'mock-infected' control plants.

Through mass spectrometry, researchers could see the change in emissions induced by the virus. They also found that bumblebees could smell the changes. Released one by one in a small 'flight arena' in the Botanic Gardens, and timed with a stopwatch by researchers, the bees consistently headed to the infected plants first, and spent longer at those plants.

"Bees are far more sensitive to the blends of volatiles emitted by plants and can detect very subtle differences in the mix of chemicals. In fact, they can even be trained to detect traces of chemicals emitted by synthetic substances, including explosives and drugs," said Carr.

Analysis revealed that the virus produces a factor called 2b, which reprograms genetic expression in the tomato plants and causes the change in scent.

Mathematical modelling by plant disease epidemiologist Dr Nik Cunniffe, also in the Department of Plant Sciences at Cambridge, explored how the experimental findings apply outside the glasshouse. The model showed how pollinator bias for infected plants can cause genes for disease-susceptibility to persist in plant populations over extremely large numbers of generations.

The latest study is the culmination of work spanning almost eight years (and multiple bee stings). The findings will form the basis of a new collaboration with the Royal Horticultural Society, in which they aim to increase pollinator services for cultivated crops.

With the global population estimated to reach nine billion people by 2050, producing enough food will be one of this century's greatest challenges. Carr, Glover and Cunniffe are all members of the Cambridge Global Food Security Initiative at Cambridge, which is involved in addressing the issues surrounding food security at local, national and international scales.

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BIOFUELS INCREASE, RATHER THAN DECREASE, HEAT-TRAPPING CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS

Contrary to popular belief, the heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas emitted when biofuels are burned is not fully balanced by the CO2 uptake that occurs as the plants grow

A new study from University of Michigan researchers challenges the widely held assumption that bio-fuels such as ethanol and bio-diesel are inherently carbon neutral.

Contrary to popular belief, the heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas emitted when bio-fuels are burned is not fully balanced by the CO2 uptake that occurs as the plants grow, according to a study by research professor John DeCicco and co-authors at the U-M Energy Institute.

The study, based on U.S. Department of Agriculture crop-production data, shows that during the period when U.S. bio-fuel production rapidly ramped up, the increased carbon dioxide uptake by the crops was only enough to offset 37 percent of the CO2 emissions due to bio-fuel combustion.

The researchers conclude that rising bio-fuel use has been associated with a net increase -- rather than a net decrease, as many have claimed -- in the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. The findings are scheduled to be published online Aug. 25 in the journal Climatic Change.

"This is the first study to carefully examine the carbon on farmland when bio-fuels are grown, instead of just making assumptions about it," DeCicco said. "When you look at what's actually happening on the land, you find that not enough carbon is being removed from the atmosphere to balance what's coming out of the tailpipe."

The use of bio-fuels to displace petroleum has expanded over the last decade in response to policies, such as the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard, that promote their use for transportation. Consumption of liquid bio-fuels -- mainly corn ethanol and bio-diesel -- has grown in the United States from 4.2 billion gallons in 2005 to 14.6 billion gallons in 2013.

The environmental justification rests on the assumption that bio-fuels, as renewable alternatives to fossil fuels, are inherently carbon neutral because the carbon dioxide released when they are burned was derived from CO2 that the growing corn or soybean plants pulled from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.

That assumption is embedded in the carbon footprint models used to justify and administer policies such as the federal RFS and the California Low-Carbon Fuel Standard. The models, which are based on a technique called life-cycle analysis, have often found that crop-based bio-fuels offer at least modest net greenhouse gas reductions relative to petroleum fuels.

Instead of modeling the emissions, DeCicco and his colleagues analyzed real-world data on crop production, bio-fuel production, fossil fuel production and vehicle emissions -- without presuming that that bio-fuels are carbon neutral. Their empirical work reached a striking conclusion.

"When it comes to the emissions that cause global warming, it turns out that bio-fuels are worse than gasoline," DeCicco said. "So the underpinnings of policies used to promote bio-fuels for reasons of climate have now been proven to be scientifically incorrect.

"Policymakers should reconsider their support for bio-fuels. This issue has been debated for many years. What's new here is that hard data, straight from America's croplands, now confirm the worst fears about the harm that bio-fuels do to the planet."

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SCIENTISTS SOLVE PUZZLE OF CONVERTING GASEOUS CARBON DIOXIDE TO FUEL

Every year, humans advance climate change and global warming -- and quite likely our own eventual extinction -- by injecting about 30 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

A team of scientists from the University of Toronto (U of T) believes they've found a way to convert all these emissions into energy-rich fuel in a carbon-neutral cycle that uses a very abundant natural resource: silicon. Silicon, readily available in sand, is the seventh most-abundant element in the universe and the second most-abundant element in the earth's crust.

The idea of converting carbon dioxide emissions to energy isn't new: there's been a global race to discover a material that can efficiently convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water or hydrogen to fuel for decades. However, the chemical stability of carbon dioxide has made it difficult to find a practical solution.

"A chemistry solution to climate change requires a material that is a highly active and selective catalyst to enable the conversion of carbon dioxide to fuel. It also needs to be made of elements that are low cost, non-toxic and readily available," said Geoffrey Ozin, a chemistry professor in U of T's Faculty of Arts & Science, the Canada Research Chair in Materials Chemistry and lead of U of T's Solar Fuels Research Cluster.

In an article in Nature Communications published August 23, Ozin and colleagues report silicon nano-crystals that meet all the criteria. The hydride-terminated silicon nano-crystals -- nano-structured hydrides for short -- have an average diameter of 3.5 nanometres and feature a surface area and optical absorption strength sufficient to efficiently harvest the near-infrared, visible and ultraviolet wavelengths of light from the sun together with a powerful chemical-reducing agent on the surface that efficiently and selectively converts gaseous carbon dioxide to gaseous carbon monoxide.

The potential result: energy without harmful emissions.

"Making use of the reducing power of nano-structured hydrides is a conceptually distinct and commercially interesting strategy for making fuels directly from sunlight," said Ozin.

The U of T Solar Fuels Research Cluster is working to find ways and means to increase the activity, enhance the scale, and boost the rate of production. Their goal is a laboratory demonstration unit and, if successful, a pilot solar refinery.

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NEW EYE MOVEMENT

Scientists have discovered a new type of eye movement which they have called blink-associated resetting movement.

We probably do it every day, but scientists have only just discovered a distinct new way in which we move our eyes.

The team from the University of Tübingen in Germany assessed the eye movements of 11 subjects using tiny wires attached to the cornea and with infrared video tracking. In results published in eLife, they discovered a new type of eye movement that is synchronised with blinking.

The movement they discovered helps to reset the eye after it twists when viewing a rotating object. It is like avoiding tiny rotations of a camera to stabilize the image we perceive. We don't notice the eye resetting in this way because it happens automatically when we blink.

"We were really surprised to discover this new type of eye movement and it was not what we had anticipated from the experiment," says lead author Mohammad Khazali.

"We had expected to find that another, already well-known type of eye movement is synchronized to blinking."

Although it is brief, blinking creates an interruption in our visual perception. We spend up to a tenth of our waking hours blinking but hardly notice it. It serves an essential role in lubricating the eye and may even provide the brain with small, frequent mental breaks.

The scientists sought to investigate whether a reflexive, involuntary eye movement called torsional optokinetic nystagmus (tOKN) occurs at the same time as blinking. The theory was that this reflex also creates a break in the visual system so synchronizing them minimizes downtime.

The subjects' eye movements were tracked as they viewed a rotating pattern of dots. As their eyes twisted to follow the dots, they frequently reset, via tOKN, to avoid moving beyond the mechanical limits of the eye muscles. However, this resetting was imperfect and the eyes gradually twisted until the muscles couldn't twist any more. This varied between subjects from three to eight degrees of rotation.

Once they reached their maximum, the eyes reset so they were no longer twisted at all. This happened at the same time as blinking. The scientists have called this newly-discovered movement blink-associated resetting movement (BARM).

"The eye's sharpest vision is enabled by a spot on the light-sensitive sheet of the retina called the fovea and this needs to stay balanced to ensure objects of interest can be scrutinized in an optimum way," says Khazali.

The frequency and size of the movement is determined by how far the eyes have deviated from a neutral position. It helps to reduce strain in the eyes as they move to assess the world around us. In further experiments, the scientists discovered that it even occurs when the eye is not tracking a rotating object.

"To discover such a ubiquitous phenomenon in such a well-studied part of the human body was astonishing to us and we're very grateful to the volunteers who took part in the study," says Khazali.

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CARDIO-METABOLIC RISK IS SURPRISINGLY COMPLICATED

In a study being published in the August 19 issue of Science, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in collaboration with scientists from Tartu University Hospital in Estonia, the Karolinska Institutet and Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Sweden, and AstraZeneca, have identified a profound new level of complexity and interaction among genes within specific tissues responsible for mediating the inherited risk for cardio-metabolic diseases, including processes that lead to heart attack and stroke.

By analyzing gene-expression data from multiple tissues in hundreds of patients with coronary artery disease, we were able to identify disease-causing genes that either were specific to single tissues or acted across multiple tissues in networks to cause cardio-metabolic diseases," said Johan Björkegren, MD, PhD, senior author of the study, Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, visiting professor at the University of Tartu and senior investigator at the Karolinska Institutet.

The ground-breaking research was done as part of the STARNET study, the first systematic analysis of RNA sequence data from blood, vascular, and metabolic tissues from patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). RNA sequences are copies of the DNA in each cell that serve as templates for protein synthesis and determine whether a tissue remains healthy or becomes diseased.

"Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified thousands of DNA variants increasing risk for common diseases like CAD," said Dr. Björkegren. "However, while GWAS was an important first line of investigations of the genetics of CAD, in order to translate these risk markers into opportunities for new diagnostics and therapies, we must now move into a new phase of discovery and identify the genes perturbed by these DNA variants responsible for driving disease development. Furthermore, we also need to understand in which tissues, pathways, and molecular networks these disease genes are active. Unraveling disease-driving genes with their tissue-belonging, as we have started to achieve using STARNET, will also be a prerequisite for developing precision medicine with individualized diagnostics and therapies."

STARNET was launched in 2007 by Dr. Björkegren and Arno Ruusalepp, MD, PhD, Chief Cardiac Surgeon at Tartu University Hospital and senior co-author on the study. Unlike similar studies, STARNET obtained samples of several key tissues from 600 clinically well-characterized patients with CAD during coronary artery bypass surgery. By using sophisticated data analysis techniques, the researchers found that the gene expression data from STARNET were highly informative in identifying causal disease genes and their activity in networks not only in CAD but also for other cardiometabolic diseases as well as Alzheimer's disease.

"One unexpected and thus potentially important finding of the study was that besides the liver, abdominal fat emerged as a key site for regulation of blood lipid levels," said Oscar Franzén, MSc, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, first author of the study, and computational biologist in Dr. Björkegren's laboratory. "For example, a gene called PCSK9, which is implicated in controlling plasma levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) -- the so-called bad cholesterol -- was found to do so by acting in abdominal fat, not in the liver where blood levels of LDL are mainly regulated." PCSK9 has lately gained substantial attention as the latest target for lipid-lowering drugs now reaching the market.

"The STARNET project is fundamentally relevant for studies of the causes of CAD and other complex diseases," said Eric Schadt, senior co-author on the paper and the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multi scale Biology. "We were not only able to assign a high number of individual genes to DNA markers previously identified by GWAS but also, and quite unexpectedly, we found that many of these downstream genes appeared in disease-causal gene regulatory networks that were shared across tissues and diseases.

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SAFE TO EAT,,,

At the grocery store, most foods -- meats, breads, cheeses, snacks -- come wrapped in plastic packaging. Not only does this create a lot of non-recyclable, non-biodegradable waste, but thin plastic films are not great at preventing spoilage. And some plastics are suspected of leaching potentially harmful compounds into food. To address these issues, scientists are now developing a packaging film made of milk proteins -- and it is even edible.

The researchers are presenting their work today at the 252nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

"The protein-based films are powerful oxygen blockers that help prevent food spoilage. When used in packaging, they could prevent food waste during distribution along the food chain," says research leader Peggy Tomasula, D.Sc.

And spoiled food is just one issue. Current food packaging is mainly petroleum-based, which is not sustainable. It also does not degrade, creating tons of plastic waste that sits in landfills for years.

To create an all-around better packaging solution, Tomasula and colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are developing an environmentally friendly film made of the milk protein casein. These casein-based films are up to 500 times better than plastics at keeping oxygen away from food and, because they are derived from milk, are biodegradable, sustainable and edible. Some commercially available edible packaging varieties are already on the market, but these are made of starch, which is more porous and allows oxygen to seep through its microholes. The milk-based packaging, however, has smaller pores and can thus create a tighter network that keeps oxygen out.

Although the researchers' first attempt using pure casein resulted in a strong and effective oxygen blocker, it was relatively hard to handle and would dissolve in water too quickly. They made some improvements by incorporating citrus pectin into the blend to make the packaging even stronger, as well as more resistant to humidity and high temperatures.

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COOPERATING OR COMPETING ?

When given a choice between cooperating or competing, chimpanzees choose to cooperate five times more frequently Yerkes National Primate Research Center researchers have found. This, the researchers say, challenges the perceptions humans are unique in our ability to cooperate and chimpanzees are overly competitive, and suggests the roots of human cooperation are shared with other primates. The study results are reported in this week's early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To determine if chimpanzees possess the same ability humans have to overcome competition, the researchers set up a cooperative task that closely mimicked chimpanzee natural conditions, for example, providing the 11 great apes that participated in this study with an open choice to select cooperation partners and giving them plenty of ways to compete. Working beside the chimpanzees' grassy outdoor enclosure at the Yerkes Research Center Field Station, the researchers gave the great apes thousands of opportunities to pull cooperatively at an apparatus filled with rewards. In half of the test sessions, two chimpanzees needed to participate to succeed, and in the other half, three chimpanzees were needed.

While the set up provided ample opportunities for competition, aggression and freeloading, the chimpanzees overwhelmingly performed cooperative acts -- 3,565 times across 94 hour-long test sessions.

Frans de Waal, PhD, director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes Research Center, a C. H. Candler Professor of Psychology at Emory University and one of the study authors, adds, "It has become a popular claim in the literature that human cooperation is unique. This is especially curious because the best ideas we have about the evolution of cooperation come straight from animal studies. The natural world is full of cooperation, from ants to killer whales. Our study is the first to show that our closest relatives know very well how to discourage competition and freeloading. Cooperation wins!"

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