Earlier this summer, physicians at NYU Langone were able to successfully transplant pig hearts into two recently-deceased humans. The medical team performed the procedures on June 16 and July 6, using special pig hearts that were genetically modified to be more acceptable for transplantation into a human body. Both the bodies were donated by recently deceased individuals and were placed on ventilator support so the efficacy of the pig hearts could be measured more accurately.
The study arrives as the field of xenotransplantation — or the act of transferring organs from one species to another — is under increased scrutiny. The first person to undergo a pig heart transplant this year, of what scientists believe was an adverse reaction to a drug to prevent rejection. The heart also contained DNA with a pig virus. Since the incident, the medical community has called for more meaningful research on the subject, as well as better safety protocols. Meanwhile, the FDA is considering approval of clinical trials for pig heart transplantation in humans, the Wall Street Journal reported last month.
Both human subjects — a 72-year-old Navy veteran and a 64-year-old retired New York City teacher — were monitored for three days before being taken off life support. Neither heart needed any outside support and functioned normally, which researchers are seeing as a promising sign for future research. Despite the NYU experiment’s positive outcome, surgeons cautioned that much more research is needed before pig heart transplants can be a viable alternative for people with heart disease.
“This is not a one-and-done situation. This is going to be years of learning what’s important and what’s not important for this to work,” NYU’s Dr. Robert Montgomery the Associated Press.
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Summary: Researchers assess whether using modern technologies such as neuromodulation and gene editing could provide “moral enhancement” and curb aggressive behaviors.
Source: The Conversation
It’s a mistake to think problematic aggression is limited to those with psychiatric disorders. Healthy people have also the capacity for impulsive violence – and resulting “morally” poor behavior.
Traditionally, moral development has been facilitated by social institutions such as religion, education and societal convention. But technology could change this.
If scientists could identify the predictors of reactive aggression, bio-medicine may offer ways to improve the moral behavior of those more at risk of problematic aggression.
This concept of “moral enhancement” is strongly contested. Bioethicists ask: can, and should, biomedical interventions be used to make people “morally” better?
We need a lot more research before we can weigh up the practical and ethical feasibility of aggression-reducing techniques. But exploration in this space is well under way.
What is ‘moral enhancement’?
Broadly, moral enhancement refers to the use of bio-medicine to improve moral functioning. Some suggested methods include decreasing bias, increasing empathy, improving self-control and enhancing intelligence.
While this may seem like science fiction, consider the other types of human enhancement that already exist.
Transhumanists are acquiring new modes of perception through seismic sensors, neural implants and magnetoreception devices. Smart drugs are used for purported cognitive benefits such as memory and alertness – and brain-computer interfaces are fusing mind and machine.
It’s not a huge leap, then, to imagine we could target the biological processes that mediate our social behaviours.
Of course, moral enhancement is controversial, and bioethicists disagree over its feasibility and ethical implications. Could it work? And under what conditions (if any) might it be justified?
My latest research explores a proposal I think is underappreciated: that moral outcomes could be improved by reducing aggression.
Everyday aggression
Aggressive disorders have long been treated by medical practitioners. But this is usually confined to psychiatric cases, and we know aggression is more widespread than clinical and forensic statistics reflect.
Research indicates only half of non-fatal violence is reported, with around 72% of unreported cases being assaults that don’t cause severe injury. But just because aggression may fall outside a clinical scope, that doesn’t mean it’s not morally problematic.
Everyday aggression plays out in familiar settings. Violence flares up in professional sports. Parental outbursts at youth matches aren’t uncommon; we’ve seen several examples of mums and dads physically assaulting referees and umpires.
In 2014, one-punch attacks became so frequent in Australia, media outlets deemed them an “epidemic”. Then there’s road rage, which accounts for numerous cases of injury and property damage each year.
These examples tell us aggression pervades almost every forum of human activity. They suggest otherwise healthy people have the capacity to lose themselves to episodic violence. And perhaps some of us pose a greater hazard than others – without necessarily knowing it.
If we can identify risk-predictors of impulsive aggression, we may be able to prevent some of this spontaneous harm before it’s inflicted.
How do we classify aggression?
Psychology defines aggression as any behaviour intended to cause harm. This excludes consensual harm which a person desires for some greater good, such as surgery or tattooing.
Aggression comes in two broad varieties: reactive and instrumental. Reactive aggression is described as “hot-blooded” and involves extreme anger in the face of a threat. Instrumental aggression is “cold-blooded” and involves calculated acts with low emotional arousal.
While both types of aggression can overlap, each has a distinct neurophysiological signature. Reactive aggression activates “primal” parts of the brain, while instrumental aggression recruits more evolved areas in the neocortex.
Morally speaking, there’s reason to think reactive aggression is more hazardous than other forms. That doesn’t mean instrumental aggression isn’t worrisome. In fact, it’s involved in some of the most damaging conditions such as criminal psychopathy.
But reactive aggression is different because it lacks higher-order cognition. It engages the relatively basic limbic system – the region of the brain which deals with behavioural and emotional reactions. It also shuts down the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for rational decision-making.
What can be done?
Precise biomarkers of reactive aggression haven’t yet been established, but scientists have identified some key contributors. These include a range of genes, receptors, neurochemicals related to serotonin and dopamine, hyperactivity of the amygdala, and reduced brain matter in particular regions.
Certain biomedical procedures show promise. Neuromodulation techniques have been found to lower aggression by directly altering brain activity. One example involves a painless procedure in which electrodes are placed on a person’s head to excite or inhibit a specific part of the brain.
See also
Researchers have suggested we could use such technology on young people with conduct disorders to prevent problematic behaviour in adulthood.
Another emerging technique is psychedelic-assisted therapy. Working with therapists, patients use substances such as LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin to access altered states of consciousness and positively shape values, thoughts and behaviour. Early clinical trials have shown impressive results for treating conditions including addiction, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Gene-based strategies such as CRISPR also offer hope for therapeutic and enhancement purposes. These work by inserting genetic material into a person’s body to modify or replace unwanted genes. Most gene therapies are still in early trial stages. They’ll need much more evaluation before they can used safely and ethically on humans.
Aggressive disorders have long been treated by medical practitioners. Image is in the public domain
Importantly, there are questions over whether moral enhancement is already happening, such as when we take drugs that change our brain chemistry. If so, should we simply think of new moral enhancement strategies as a part of existing pre-emptive medical treatments?
The barriers
There are major challenges in implementing any of the above techniques to target aggression. One is non-specificity: the neural structures involved in aggression are also implicated in states such as fear, reward, motivation and threat-detection.
Also, antisocial behaviours can’t simply be associated with one or two genes. They’re a result of a complex genetic architecture in which hundreds of genes, or even thousands, interact with a person’s environment and lifestyle.
Even if we could safely target the determinants of reactive aggression, there are lingering practical and ethical considerations. For one, not all aggression is antisocial. Aggression is often necessary for acts of protection and self-defence.
People can also have mixed motivations, meaning different aggression types can be present in a single act. To complicate things further, some researchers argue for additional classifications such as “micro-”, “prosocial” and “appetitive” aggression.
Any moral enhancement proposals must consider the impact on the person, their character and sense of self. Additionally, there are concerns around autonomy, personal freedom and the possibility of coercive treatment.
These factors would need to be carefully weighed against the potential benefits of moderating an individual’s aggressive tendencies.
Moving forward, we need to learn more about the moral significance of different types of aggression, how they present in an individual’s actions, and how they’re reflected in their biology.
About this neurotech, aggression, and moral enhancement research news
Author: Cohen Marcus Lionel Brown Source: The Conversation Contact: Cohen Marcus Lionel Brown – The Conversation Image: The image is in the public domain
New research by a scientist at the Milner Center for Evolution at the University of Bath suggests that “selfish chromosomes” explain why most human embryos die very early on. The study, published in PLoS Biology, explaining why fish embryos are fine but sadly humans’ embryos often don’t survive, has implications for the treatment of infertility.
About half of fertilized eggs die very early on, before a mother even knows she is pregnant. Tragically, many of those that survive to become a recognized pregnancy will be spontaneously aborted after a few weeks. Such miscarriages are both remarkably common and highly distressing.
Professor Laurence Hurst, Director of the Milner Center for Evolution, investigated why, despite hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, it’s still so comparatively hard for humans to have a baby.
The immediate cause of much of these early deaths is that the embryos have the wrong number of chromosomes. Fertilized eggs should have 46 chromosomes, 23 from mum in the eggs, 23 from dad in the sperm.
Professor Hurst said: “Very many embryos have the wrong number of chromosomes, often 45 or 47, and nearly all of these die in the womb. Even in cases like Down syndrome with three copies of chromosome 21, about 80% sadly will not make it to term.”
Why then should gain or loss of one chromosome be so very common when it is also so lethal?
There are number of clues that Hurst put together. Firstly, when the embryo has the wrong number of chromosomes it is usually due to mistakes that occur when the eggs are made in the mother, not when the sperm is made in the father. In fact, over 70% of eggs made have the wrong number of chromosomes.
Secondly, the mistakes happen in the first of two steps in the manufacture of eggs. This first step, it had been noticed before, is vulnerable to mutations that interfere with the process, such that the mutation can “selfishly” sneak into more than 50% of the eggs, forcing the partner chromosome to be destroyed, a process known as centromeric drive. This is well studied in mice, long suspected in humans and previously suggested to somehow relate to the problem of chromosome loss or gain.
What Hurst noticed was that, in mammals, a selfish mutation that tries to do this but fails, resulting in an egg with one too many or one too few chromosomes, can still be evolutionarily better off. In mammals, because the mother continuously feeds the developing fetus in the womb, it is evolutionarily beneficial for embryos developing from faulty eggs to be lost earlier rather than be carried to full term. This means that the surviving offspring do better than the average.
Hurst explained: “This first step of making eggs is odd. One chromosome of a pair will go to the egg the other will be destroyed. But if a chromosome ‘knows’ it is going to be destroyed it has nothing to lose, so to speak. Remarkable recent molecular evidence has found that when some chromosomes detect that they are about to be destroyed during this first step, they change what they do to prevent being destroyed, potentially causing chromosome loss or gain, and the death of the embryo.
“What is remarkable, is that if the death of the embryo benefits the other offspring of that mother, as the selfish chromosome will often be in the brothers and sisters that get the extra food, the mutation is better off because it kills embryos”.
“Fish and amphibians don’t have this problem”, Hurst commented. “In over 2000 fish embryos not one was found with chromosomal errors from mum”. Rates in birds are also very low, about 1/25th the rate in mammals. This, Hurst notes, is as predicted as there is some competition between nestlings after they hatch, but not before.
By contrast, chromosome loss or gain is a problem for every mammal that has been looked at. Hurst commented, “It is a downside of feeding our offspring in the womb. If they die early on, the survivors benefit. It leaves us vulnerable to this sort of mutation.”
Hurst suspects that humans may indeed be especially vulnerable. In mice the death of an embryo gives resources to the survivors in the same brood. This is gives about a 10% increase in survival chance of the others. Humans, however, usually just have one baby at a time and the death of an embryo early on enables a mother to rapidly reproduce again—she probably never even knew her egg had been fertilized.
Preliminary data shows mammals such as cows, with one embryo at a time seem to have especially high embryo death rates owing to chromosomal errors, while those with many embryos in a brood, like mice and pigs, seem to have somewhat lower rates.
Hurst’s research also suggests that low levels of a protein called Bub1 could cause loss or gain of a chromosome in humans as well as mice.
Hurst said: “The levels of Bub1 go down as mothers get older and as the rate of embryonic chromosomal problems goes up. Identifying these suppressor proteins and increasing their level in older mothers could restore fertility.
“I would hope too that these insights will be one step to helping those women who experience difficulties getting pregnant, or suffer recurrent miscarriage.”
Chromosomal errors that develop early lead to embryonic loss in assisted reproductive technology
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Selfish centromeres and the wastefulness of human reproduction, PLoS Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001671
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Apparently, humans aren’t the only animals going keto. The German cockroach (Blattella germanica), one of the most common pests in the world, is evolving to have a glucose-free diet. Unlike many humans, it’s not because they’re suddenly watching their figure; rather, German cockroaches have inadvertently outwitted human pest control tactics by evolving to dislike sugar, specifically glucose. That could have huge implications for the population of cockroaches worldwide, which is of particular concern given their propensity to spread bacteria and disease.
The not-so-sweet insight emerged from new research coming out of North Carolina State University, where scientists study roach reproductive habits and evolutionary adaptations. There, Dr. Ayako Wada-Katsumata and a team of entomology researchers found evidence of significant changes involving sugar-averse German cockroaches and mating habits.
According to Dr. Coby Schal, professor of Urban Entomology, Insect Behavior, Chemical Ecology, Insect Physiology and head of the eponymous Schal Lab at North Carolina State University, the team’s new research shows that cockroaches have begun to deviate significantly compared to previously observed roach-mating behavior. Female lab roaches, housed in North Carolina lab originating from a Florida-strain, included a significant population of glucose-averse roaches; glucose is a simple sugar that is intrinsic to the processes of plant and animal life.
Surprisingly, researchers found these roaches were unwilling to complete traditional roach mating behavior (accepting what the research study refers to as “nuptial gifts” or “nuptial feedings.”) Further, these glucose-adverse female roaches chose not to complete the mating process, meaning there wouldn’t be any reproduction.
Lest your heart leap for joy at the idea of a significant population drop among roaches, curb your enthusiasm: these male roaches eventually found a workaround. That’s the bad news.
This new behavioral trait among roaches throws a wrench in traditional pest management control techniques that use sweet poison.
The good news — well, good news for roaches, that is — is that researchers found male roaches ingeniously overcame female glucose aversion during mating time. Roach mating — and foreplay, if you can call it that — traditionally lasts for up to 90 minutes. Male roaches adapted to female roach glucose hesitancy (meaning dislike for sugar) and shortened their mating rituals down to minutes or even seconds, while successfully completing fertilization. (If you read that and feel tempted to anthropomorphize female roaches and their sexual satisfaction — just don’t.)
The studies showed the most successful mating pairs were males and females who were both glucose averse. The least successful mating pairs were females who were glucose averse roaches with wild-type or glucose-loving males. While there were short-term population dips among glucose-averse females and wild-type males mating pairs, other more successful matches, including male/female roaches that were both glucose averse. Ultimately, the entire roach population within the lab study stayed within normal predicted ranges, despite this population of sugar-eschewing insects.
According to Dr. Schal, researchers are wondering if new behavioral traits like this could spread through different populations, making this mutation more prevalent.
So why is this research important? For one thing, roaches are a prominent pest — they tend to spread through human settlements, and can spread disease and cause other health problems in humans. And it is possible that this mutation could increase the roach population.
The majority of roaches, experts believe, consistently like sweet food — meaning food with sugar in it, like glucose.
“One of the takeaways is that animals, including roaches, have adaptations that they evolve in terms of natural selection,” Dr. Schal said. He noted that the “German cockroach, a pernicious household pest, plays an important etiological role in allergic disease and asthma. It also serves as a mechanical vector of pathogens, including antibiotic-resistant microbes.”
In other words, this new behavioral trait among roaches throws a wrench in traditional pest management control techniques that use sweet poison. Likewise, it’s obviously impossible for a lay person to know visually whether their local roach population is glucose-averse or not.
The problem with roach bait
So what is glucose aversion exactly, and why does it matter? Well, roaches are omnivorous scavengers. They can go for days without eating, but generally do poorly without any kind of liquid or water. When hungry, roaches will eat anything — including hair, paper, books, building material and a wide range of decaying life forms (including other dead roaches). But the majority of roaches, experts believe, consistently like sweet food — meaning food with sugar in it, like glucose.
According to Dr. Schal, roaches typically dislike bitter-tasting food items and prefer sweet food items. Traditionally, roach pest management has tried to improve the taste of bitter-tasting poisonous bait by wrapping sweetening-agents around the roach poison. Turns out, roaches have been on to our game for a while. They know we’re trying to kill them, and they’ve raised the stakes and adapted and evolved. It is something any evolutionary biologist could have predicted, though it’s frightening that this research actually confirms it.
How did this evolutionary adaptation happen? Well, roaches who quickly eat the sugar-laced poisoned bait die quickly; consequently, the glucose-loving roaches saw their lives-and reproductive capabilities cut short. Previously-published North Carolina State University research found that roaches were more likely to survive if they were glucose averse, meaning they avoid sweetened bait. Naturally, these roaches became more prevalent compared with glucose-loving roaches, and their genes spread through the population.
These glucose-averse roach offspring are normal in almost every way, said Dr. Schal, but future generations of roaches will carry this genetic mutation. And roach offspring will most likely be glucose averse as well, he said, as these genes are passed down from the parent roach to offspring. If a roach is glucose averse, he said, means glucose tastes bitter or unpleasant to roaches. But if glucose-averse roaches are in starvation mode, they may temporarily eat glucose to survive, Dr. Schal said.
Among urban roaches, it is currently unclear what the ratio is of glucose-averse to glucose-loving roaches — at least, as compared with other kinds of roaches, such as those raised in the lab. But if this trend is ongoing among urban roaches, the majority may become glucose-averse at some point in the future.
Roaches are already notorious survivalists
Before you spiral contemplating the rise of mutant roach populations conquering the world (or is that just me?), it’s important to note that no recent entomological research has shown any concrete evidence that roach populations will necessarily have wildly increased population numbers because of this, or because of anything else — at least, not any time soon. The fact is, we already know that roaches are pretty adaptable: they can survive about ten times as much radiation as humans, can live without their heads for a month, and can live off dead and decaying matter alone.
When it comes to roach population growth, it’s hard to say how many roaches there are in any given geographic area, said Dr. Phililp G. Koehler , University of Florida Professor Emeritus of Entomology and Nematology.
“Roaches are pretty much endemic,” he said.
Urban roaches have a relatively short lifespan. A German cockroach’s lifespan is typically 8-10 months, said Dr. Schal. A female German cockroach can produce up to 320 roach offspring. On the other hand, an American cockroach can live 1-2 years, he said. One American roach female roach is capable of producing an average of 240 roaches throughout its average lifetime.
Regardless of species variations, roach population numbers can thus increase dramatically if uncontrolled. And this doesn’t even take into account asexual roach reproduction, through which female roaches can continue to reproduce for years without a resident male.
According to Dr. Koehler, any building structure that is older and/or has structural problems will be more likely to have thousands of cockroach residents. “There are always more roaches hidden in the walls that you actually see,” he said.
Roaches can be found in every state in the country. There are a handful of roach species that have adapted to live around and inside human habitats, including the German cockroach, the Asian cockroach, the American cockroach and the Turkestan cockroach (Notably, the German cockroach is not actually from Germany, nor is the American cockroach originally from the U.S.) According to a U.S. Census Bureau 2021 survey, about 14 million households self-reported seeing roaches in their home over the last 12 months. The survey is mum on whether these households observed a single roach, or thousands.
According to Dr. Koehler, any building structure that is older and/or has structural problems will be more likely to have thousands of cockroach residents. “There are always more roaches hidden in the walls that you actually see,” he said.
So while some may incorrectly assume that roach infestations are primarily a scourge among low-income or untidy households, the presence of urban roaches is an unfortunate fact of life for many, regardless of income or socio-economic status or household cleanliness. Increased reports of roach sightings in multiple states stem from the fact that sewer roaches or aquatic roaches may simply be looking for new living quarters.
Roaches and disease
Most humans find roaches disgusting, but can they actually make you sick? Potentially. And what kinds of pathogens can you get? Experts believe that roaches have transmitted plague, typhoid, cholera and dysentery in the past. But they also spread modern diseases. Indeed, cockroaches are thought to carry bacteria that, if deposited on food or around humans, could potentially cause salmonella, staphylococcus, and streptococcus, which can result in serious stomach issues. (Fortuitously, COVID-19 is not one of these diseases; research experts like Dr. Schal affirmed that roaches cannot transmit SARS-CoV-2, the COVID virus, to humans.)
But throughout pandemic lockdowns — with people staying at home, working at home, and yes, eating at home more — roach infestations have followed. Why? Well, human habits, mostly. Roaches follow the food, Dr. Schal said.
Dr. Phililp Koehler says his academic interest in roach research started during his Naval military career as a Lieutenant, Medical Entomologist, in the U.S. Navy’s Medical Service Corps over 50 years ago. In those years, rampant roach infestations were common on both military and civilian ships. Many more leisure travelers traveled from point A to point B on a ship for extended periods, for both domestic and international travel, he said. This, Dr. Koehler noted, is most likely how different non-native roach species like the Asian cockroach ended up in unexpected regions in North America, including port cities in Florida. The Asian roach then spread to other states, a trend that he researched extensively decades ago.
Returning to the implications of the North Carolina research study on glucose averse roaches, Dr. Schal says there are actually additional findings that might be published as soon as this year. “This study also represents the best understood case of behavioral resistance of pest species to pest control at the evolutionary, behavioral, and cellular level,” he added. It is possible that this newly-emerged roach behavior could prophesy future roach adaptations. Furthermore, this research is important not only for pest-management knowledge, he said, “but also it could potentially have public health implications when it comes to disease transmission.”
This article was originally published in The Conversation.
Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal. Hundreds of thousands of deaths a year are attributed to mosquito-borne diseases, including malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, Zika, and chikungunya fever.
How mosquitoes seek out and feed on their hosts are important factors in how a virus circulates in nature. Mosquitoes spread diseases by acting as carriers of viruses and other pathogens: A mosquito that bites a person infected with a virus can acquire the virus and pass it on to the next person it bites.
For immunologists and infectious-disease researchers like me, a better understanding of how a virus interacts with a host may offer new strategies for preventing and treating mosquito-borne diseases. In our recently published study, my colleagues and I found that some viruses can alter a mouse’s, and perhaps a person’s, body odor to be more attractive to mosquitoes, leading to more bites that allow a virus to spread.
Mosquitoes locate a potential host through different sensory cues, such as your body temperature and the carbon dioxide emitted from your breath. Odors also play a role. Previous lab research has found that mice infected with malaria have changes in their scents that make them more attractive to mosquitoes. With this in mind, my colleagues and I wondered if other mosquito-borne viruses, such as dengue and Zika, can also change a person’s scent to make them more attractive to mosquitoes, and whether there is a way to prevent these changes.
Read: Shazam for mosquitoes
To investigate this, we placed mice infected with the dengue or Zika virus, uninfected mice, and mosquitoes in one of three arms of a glass chamber. When we applied airflow through the mouse chambers to funnel their odors toward the mosquitoes, we found that more mosquitoes chose to fly toward the infected mice than toward the uninfected mice.
We ruled out carbon dioxide as a reason for why the mosquitoes were attracted to the infected mice, because though Zika-infected mice emitted less carbon dioxide than uninfected mice, dengue-infected mice did not change emission levels. Likewise, we ruled out body temperature as a potential attractive factor when mosquitoes did not differentiate between mice with elevated or normal body temperatures.
Then we assessed the role of body odors in the mosquitoes’ increased attraction to infected mice. After placing a filter in the glass chambers to prevent mice odors from reaching the mosquitoes, we found that the number of mosquitoes flying toward infected and uninfected mice were comparable. This suggests that there was something about the odors of the infected mice that drew the mosquitoes toward them.
To identify the odor, we isolated 20 different gaseous chemical compounds from the scent emitted by the infected mice. Of these, we found three to stimulate a significant response in mosquito antennae. When we applied these three compounds to the skin of healthy mice and the hands of human volunteers, only one, acetophenone, attracted more mosquitoes compared with the control. We found that infected mice produced 10 times more acetophenone than uninfected mice.
Similarly, we found that the odors collected from the armpits of dengue-fever patients contained more acetophenone than those from healthy people. When we applied the dengue-fever-patient odors on one hand of a volunteer and a healthy person’s odor on the other hand, mosquitoes were consistently more attracted to the hand with dengue-fever odors.
These findings imply that the dengue and Zika viruses are capable of increasing the amount of acetophenone their hosts produce and emit, making them even more attractive to mosquitoes. When uninfected mosquitoes bite these attractive hosts, they may go on to bite other people and spread the virus even further.
Next, we wanted to figure out how viruses were increasing the amount of mosquito-attracting acetophenone their hosts produce. Acetophenone, along with being a chemical commonly used as a fragrance in perfumes, is also a metabolic by-product commonly produced by certain bacteria living on the skin and in the intestines of both people and mice. So we wondered if it had something to do with changes in the type of bacteria on the skin.
To test this idea, we removed either the skin or intestinal bacteria from infected mice before exposing them to mosquitoes. Though mosquitoes were still more attracted to infected mice with depleted intestinal bacteria compared with uninfected mice, they were significantly less attracted to infected mice with depleted skin bacteria. These results suggest that skin microbes are an essential source of acetophenone.
Read: Two ways of making malaria-proof mosquitoes
When we compared the skin-bacteria compositions of infected and uninfected mice, we identified that a common type of rod-shaped bacteria, Bacillus, was a major acetophenone producer and had significantly increased numbers on infected mice. This meant that the dengue and Zika viruses were able to change their host’s odor by altering the microbiome of the skin.
Finally, we wondered if there was a way to prevent this change in odors.
We found one potential option when we observed that infected mice had decreased levels of an important microbe-fighting molecule produced by skin cells, called RELMα. This suggested that the dengue and Zika viruses suppressed production of this molecule, making the mice more vulnerable to infection.
Vitamin A and its related chemical compounds are known to strongly boost production of RELMα. So we fed a vitamin-A derivative to infected mice over the course of a few days and measured the amount of RELMα and Bacillus bacteria present on their skin, then exposed them to mosquitoes.
We found that infected mice treated with the vitamin-A derivative were able to restore their RELMα levels back to those of uninfected mice, as well as reduce the amount of Bacillus bacteria on their skin. Mosquitoes were also no more attracted to these treated, infected mice than uninfected mice.
Our next step is to replicate these results in people and eventually apply what we learn to patients. Vitamin-A deficiency is common in developing countries. This is especially the case in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where mosquito-transmitted viral diseases are prevalent. We will investigate whether dietary vitamin A or its derivatives could reduce mosquito attraction to people infected with Zika and dengue, and subsequently reduce mosquito-borne diseases in the long term.
A pioneering researcher in the field of astronomy known as SETI, or the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Dan Werthimer’s work involves scanning the cosmos with huge, ground-based radio telescopes to look for strange or unexplained signals that may have originated from alien civilizations.
In recent years, however, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has become even more complicated. Increasing demands for mobile services and wireless internet have crowded the radio spectrum, creating interference that can skew data and add “noise” to scientific results.
“Earth is just getting more and more polluted,” said Werthimer, chief technologist at the Berkeley SETI Research Center. “With some radio bands, it’s already impossible to do SETI because they’re so full of television transmitters, WiFI and cellphone bands.”
At its heart, SETI research aims to answer the question: Are we alone in the universe? In the decades since scientists first started listening for alien signals, improvements in telescope technology and data processing have bolstered the search, Werthimer said.
Werthimer was recently one of the authors of a pre-print study led by Chinese researchers that identified a radio signal that several news outlets mistakenly reported as having characteristics of an alien civilization. The signal was actually found to have been radio interference, Werthimer clarified.
Read the full story on NBCNews.com.
Unknown flying objects could be a military aircraft from here, or a foreign country. But it’s rare for the Department of Defense to come out and say they can’t identify something. LX News spoke to Luis Elizondo, former head of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, for more context.
In 2009, a never-before-seen yeast emerged from the ear canal of a 70-year-old Japanese lady. Unfortunately, this yeast – known as Candida auris – is a health menace, having now spread around the world and become resistant to multiple drugs. A new study now shows it also reproduces in an unexpected way.
C. aurisisn’t your helpful bakers or brewer’s yeast. It has a bad track record of ending up in hospitals and infecting those with weakened immune systems. Unfortunately, it doesn’t just stay in the ear, it can enter the bloodstream as well; without an effective antifungal, patients can die.
Normally, yeast undergoes asexual reproduction through budding and splitting into daughter cells. But researchers from McMaster University in Canada have now detected evidence of sexual reproduction in C. auris. This could result in more drug-resistant and virulent strains of the fungus.
“So far, no evidence for mating and sexual reproduction have been reported in C. auris,” the team writes in their new paper.
“This study identified limited but unambiguous evidence of recombination in both the total sample and within individual clades.”
Recombination – the reshuffling of genetic information – can’t happen in asexual reproduction, meaning that at some point during the past there had to be some hanky panky on the cards (or some other way of shuffling around genetic information).
Although we haven’t seen the yeast in action, the idea that C. auris occasionally sexually reproduces is actually not as crazy as it sounds. We already know that a much more famous type of yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae (this is the yeast used in baking, winemaking, and brewing) will very occasionally mate with each other – particularly when undergoing stressful conditions.
The team didn’t catch C. auris in the act, but they were able to analyze the fungal and mitochondrial genes in 1,285 strains of fungus. This allowed them to look at the genetic differences between the five clades of C. auris, as well as within the clades themselves.
The team found some recombination, but most of it occurred before the yeast split into the five clades. Some clades have seemingly lost the ability to mate, while others have had limited recombination since the split. So, although sex might occasionally be happening, it’s absolutely not frequent.
But even infrequent sex can potentially cause new resistances or other ways of making this pathogen worse for us humans.
“The research tells us that this fungus has recombined in the past and can recombine in nature, which enables it to generate new genetic variants rather quickly,” explains McMaster’s University microbial geneticist Jianping Xu.
“That may sound frightening, but it’s a double-edged sword. Because we learned they could recombine in nature, we could possibly replicate the process in the lab, which could allow us to understand the genetic controls of virulence and drug resistance and potentially other traits that make it such a dangerous pathogen, much faster.”
Although there are lots more we need to know about C. auris, looking deep at its genes to discover a sex life is a good place to start.
The research has been published in Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal.
Octopuses are brainy creatures with sophisticated smarts, and now scientists have uncovered a clue that may partly explain the cephalopods’ remarkable intelligence: Its genes have a genetic quirk that is also seen in humans, a new study finds.
The clues that scientists uncovered are called “jumping genes,” or transposons, and they make up 45% of the human genome. Jumping genes are short sequences of DNA with the ability to copy and paste or cut and paste themselves to another location in the genome, and they’ve been linked to the evolution of genomes in multiple species. Genetic sequencing recently revealed that two species of octopus — Octopus vulgaris and Octopus bimaculoides — also have genomes that are filled with transposons, according to a study published May 18 in the journal BMC Biology.
In both humans and octopuses, most transposons are dormant, either shut down due to mutations or blocked from replicating by cellular defenses, the study authors reported. But one kind of transposon in humans, known as the Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements or LINE, may still be active. Evidence from prior studies suggests that LINE jumping genes are tightly regulated by the brain, but are still important for learning (opens in new tab) and for memory formation in the hippocampus.
When the scientists took a closer look at octopus jumping genes that could freely copy and paste around the genome, they discovered transposons from the LINE family. This element was active in the octopus’s vertical lobe — a brain section in octopuses that is critical for learning and is functionally analogous to the human hippocampus, Graziano Fiorito, study coauthor and a biologist at the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station (SZAD) in Naples, Italy, told Live Science.
Related: Octopuses torture and eat themselves after mating. Science finally knows why.
In the new study, the researchers measured one octopus transposon’s transcription to RNA and translation to protein, and they detected significant activity in areas of the brain related to behavioral plasticity — how organisms change their behavior in response to different stimuli. “We were very happy because this is a sort of proof,” said study coauthor Giovanna Ponte, a researcher in the SZAD Department of Biology and Evolution of Marine Organisms.
Even though octopuses aren’t closely related to animals with backbones, they nonetheless demonstrate behavioral and neural plasticity that’s similar to that of vertebrates, Fiorito added. “These animals, like mammals, have the ability to adapt continuously and solve problems,” and this evidence hints that the similarity may originate at the genetic level, he said.
These findings not only connect jumping genes to octopus’ intelligence, they also suggest that LINE transposons do more than just jump around. Rather, they have some role in cognitive processing, the authors suggested in a statement. Because jumping genes are shared by humans and octopuses, they may be good candidates for future research on intelligence and how it develops and varies between individuals within a species, according to the study.
However, since octopuses are quite distant from humans on the tree of life, it’s possible that active LINE transposons in the two groups are an example of convergent evolution. This means their contribution to intelligence evolved separately in the two lineages, rather than originating in a shared ancestor, the scientists reported.
Utah health officials on Thursday confirmed three cases of rabies in bats that exposed humans and/or dogs to the disease. (Bernd Wolter, Shutterstock)
Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah health officials on Thursday confirmed three cases of rabies in bats that exposed humans and dogs to the disease.
“The humans received preventive vaccines, and the dogs received boosters and a 45-day home quarantine because they were up-to-date on their rabies vaccinations,” the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.
The bats were found in Washington, Salt Lake County, and Weber counties, according to Hannah Rettler, an epidemiologist with the Utah Department of Health and Human Services.
“The location really doesn’t matter,” spokeswoman Charla Haley said. “There is a risk when being around any wild animals regardless of location.”
Health officials noted that a bite or scratch from an infected mammal can transmit rabies. Exposure through bats is the leading cause of human death due to rabies in Utah. The state averages about 15 rabid animals reported every year, according to the statement.
In 2021, five people in the U.S. died from rabies, the department said.
If an unvaccinated pet is exposed to rabies, officials said they either need to be kept in professional isolation for four months or euthanized.
“Keeping your pet current on its rabies vaccines is the most important and affordable way to protect you and your pet from rabies,” the department said.
Bat’s teeth and claws are so small that a bite or scratch “may not be seen or even felt by the injured person,” according to the statement. Symptoms of rabies may not appear for weeks to months after exposure. All exposures should be reported, officials said.
Rabies symptoms begin similar to the flu, then include anxiety, confusion, abnormal behavior and delirium. Officials noted that once those symptoms begin, the disease is typically fatal in humans.
“If you find yourself near a bat, dead or alive, do not touch, hit, or destroy it and do not try to remove it yourself,” said Rettler.
Those who find a bat should contact their local animal control office or the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources to collect the animal for rabies testing.
Symptoms of rabies in pets include changes in normal behavior, aggression, attacking without reason, foaming at the mouth, lack of interest in food or water, staggering or paralysis.
“Infected wild animals may also act uncharacteristically tame or unafraid of humans. Infected bats may be seen flying around during the daytime, resting on the ground, or may show no noticeable signs at all,” officials said.
More information about how to protect yourself and your pets from rabies can be found at epi.health.utah.gov/rabies.
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Ashley Imlay covers state politics and breaking news for KSL.com. A lifelong Utahn, Ashley has also worked as a reporter for the Deseret News and is a graduate of Dixie State University.
The Day Before is currently the most wishlisted game on Steam, but it’s attracting attention for a very different reason. The studio currently uses “volunteers” who are paid with “participation certificates” and free codes, which are, you know, great for paying rent.
“Fntastic’s culture is based on the idea of volunteering,” says the studio’s official website. “This means that every Fntastic member is a volunteer.” However, some developers are more volunteer than others. Full time volunteers are paid a salary, while part-time volunteers who work on translation and community moderating are paid in participation certificates and game codes. However, the studio also encouraged these unpaid workers to “offer unique skills to improve our projects or create new special features.”
The studio explained to Well Played that the unpaid aspect “does not relate to code writing or development itself… just things like localization and moderation.” Apparently, those jobs aren’t considered to be a part of game development at Fntastic, even though they very much are at AAA studios. It’s also a little worrying that they’re willing to use unpaid part-timers to contribute features for an open world MMO, a type of game that is famously simple and easy to make. No, not really.
So what’s the rationale behind not paying people to work on one of the most highly anticipated PC games out there? According to its YouTube video, “Being a volunteer means that you willingly take part in working for a common cause…Volunteering means that in every action you take, you bring a certain pleasantness.” Kotaku reached out to ask if Fntastic had negative experiences with traditional employees, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
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The Day Before is a zombie survival MMO that utilizes realistic environments during combat and co-op features. On May 5, IGN reported that The Day Before would be delayed to March 1, 2023 to accommodate for its shift to Unreal Engine 5.
