Calcification in changing oceans

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What do mollusks, starfish, and corals have in common? Aside from their shared marine habitat, they are all calcifiers — organisms that use calcium from their environment to create hard carbonate skeletons and shells for stability and protection.The June issue of the Biological Bulletin, published by the Marine Biological Laboratory, addresses the challenges faced by these species as ocean composition changes worldwide.As atmospheric carbon dioxide rises, the world’s oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic. This impact of global climate change threatens the survival of calcifying species because of the reduced saturation of the carbonate minerals required for calcification.The ability to calcify arose independently in many species during the Cambrian era, when calcium levels in seawater increased. This use of calcium carbonate promoted biodiversity, including the vast array of calcifiers seen today.”Today, modern calcifiers face a new and rapidly escalating crisis caused by warming and acidification of the oceans with a reduction in availability of carbonate minerals, a change driven by the increase in atmospheric CO2 due to anthropogenic emissions and industrialization. The CO2 itself can also directly cause metabolic stress,” write the issue’s co-editors, Maria Byrne of the University of Sydney; and Gretchen Hofmann of the University of California-Santa Barbara.Contributors to the journal address this timely issue across many taxa and from a variety of perspectives, from genomic to ecosystem-wide.Janice Lough and Neal Cantin of the Australian Institute of Marine Science review historical data on coral reefs to look at potential environmental stressors, while Philippe Dubois (Universit Libre de Bruxelles) discusses sea urchin skeletons.Other researchers address lesser-known organisms that are nevertheless critical to marine ecosystems. Abigail Smith of the University of Otago examines how bryozoans, a group of aquatic invertebrate filter-feeders, increase biodiversity by creating niche habitats, and what features make them particularly sensitive to calcium fluctuations.Evans and Watson-Wynn (California State University-East Bay) take a molecular approach in a meta-analysis showing that ocean acidification is effecting genetic changes in sea urchin larvae. Several papers take a broader population-based view by studying the effect of ocean acidification on predator-prey interactions in mollusks (Kroeker and colleagues of the University of California-Davis) and oysters (Wright and colleagues of the University of Western Sydney).”The contributors have identified key knowledge gaps in the fast evolving field of marine global change biology and have provided many important insights,” the co-editors write.By sharing research on this topic from researchers around the world, the Biological Bulletin is raising awareness of some of the greatest threats to the oceans today and emphasizing the global nature of the problem.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by The Marine Biological Laboratory. The original article was written by Gina Hebert. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.


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Shocking behavior of a runaway star: High-speed encounter creates arc

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Roguish runaway stars can have a big impact on their surroundings as they plunge through the Milky Way galaxy. Their high-speed encounters shock the galaxy, creating arcs, as seen in a newly released image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.In this case, the speedster star is known as Kappa Cassiopeiae, or HD 2905 to astronomers. It is a massive, hot supergiant moving at around 2.5 million mph relative to its neighbors (1,100 kilometers per second). But what really makes the star stand out in this image is the surrounding, streaky red glow of material in its path. Such structures are called bow shocks, and they can often be seen in front of the fastest, most massive stars in the galaxy.Bow shocks form where the magnetic fields and wind of particles flowing off a star collide with the diffuse, and usually invisible, gas and dust that fill the space between stars. How these shocks light up tells astronomers about the conditions around the star and in space. Slow-moving stars like our sun have bow shocks that are nearly invisible at all wavelengths of light, but fast stars like Kappa Cassiopeiae create shocks that can be seen by Spitzer’s infrared detectors.Incredibly, this shock is created about 4 light-years ahead of Kappa Cassiopeiae, showing what a sizable impact this star has on its surroundings. (This is about the same distance that we are from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the sun.)The Kappa Cassiopeiae bow shock shows up as a vividly red color. The faint green features in this image result from carbon molecules, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, in dust clouds along the line of sight that are illuminated by starlight.Delicate red filaments run through this infrared nebula, crossing the bow shock. Some astronomers have suggested these filaments may be tracing out features of the magnetic field that runs throughout our galaxy. …


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Is a "buttery" molecule behind cystic fibrosis flare-ups?

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A molecule previously linked to lung injuries in factory workers producing microwave popcorn might play an important role in microbial infections of the lung suffered by people with cystic fibrosis (CF), according to a recent study led by San Diego State University postdoctoral researcher Katrine Whiteson. The molecule, known as 2,3-butanedione or diacetyl, can be detected in higher concentrations in CF patients than in healthy ones.CF patients experience day-to-day persistent coughing and increased mucus production, punctuated by periodic flare-ups of these symptoms, known as exacerbations. Most of the permanent scarring and damage to lung tissue in CF patients, health experts believe, occurs during these exacerbations.If CF patients had some warning of oncoming or imminent exacerbations, they could respond with earlier or more specific treatment, and ward off some of the damaging effects.”Unfortunately, right now there’s really no good way to detect when someone’s about to have an exacerbation,” Whiteson said.When CF patients visit the doctor, they inhale vaporized salt to induce deep coughing, producing a mucus sample. When clinical labs culture the microbes in these samples, they usually don’t find big differences between the microbes that grow when CF patients are feeling healthy and when they are feeling sick, leaving doctors to choose antibiotic therapies based on trial and error. So the question that has plagued researchers is: What’s different about the CF lung during these exacerbations?Mystery MoleculeIn an effort to find out, Whiteson, working with fellow SDSU researchers Yan Wei Lim, Robert Schmieder, Robert Quinn and Forest Rohwer, as well as colleagues Simone Meinardi and Donald Blake at the University of California, Irvine, investigated the molecules produced by microbes in the airway.Working with the same lab that won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of ozone-destroying CFCs in the atmosphere, the researchers measured the breath gases produced by both CF patients and healthy volunteers. Analyzing those gases, they found elevated levels of diacetyl in the CF patients’ lungs.This molecule, which has a buttery flavor and is the main ingredient in microwave popcorn flavoring, is toxic and has been implicated in damaging the lungs of popcorn factory workers.Whiteson and her colleagues theorize that various species of the oral microbe Streptococcus produce the diacetyl via a fermentation process. The molecule can also activate harmful effects of other bacteria that are common in the lungs of CF patients. For example, when the bacteria P. aeruginosa come into contact with diacetyl, it causes the bacteria to produce toxic compounds which may be partially responsible for CF’s characteristic lung damage. The researchers published their findings last month in The ISME Journal: Multidisciplinary Journal of Microbial Ecology. …


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Using holograms to improve electronic devices

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A team of researchers from the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering and Russian Academy of Science have demonstrated a new type of holographic memory device that could provide unprecedented data storage capacity and data processing capabilities in electronic devices.The new type of memory device uses spin waves — a collective oscillation of spins in magnetic materials — instead of the optical beams. Spin waves are advantageous because spin wave devices are compatible with the conventional electronic devices and may operate at a much shorter wavelength than optical devices, allowing for smaller electronic devices that have greater storage capacity.Experimental results obtained by the team show it is feasible to apply holographic techniques developed in optics to magnetic structures to create a magnonic holographic memory device. The research combines the advantages of the magnetic data storage with the wave-based information transfer.”The results open a new field of research, which may have tremendous impact on the development of new logic and memory devices,” said Alexander Khitun, the lead researcher, who is a research professor at UC Riverside.There are three co-authors of the paper: Frederick Gertz, a graduate student who works with Khitun at UC Riverside, and A. Kozhevnikov and Y. Filimonov, both of the Russian Academy of Sciences.Holography is a technique based on the wave nature of light which allows the use of wave interference between the object beam and the coherent background. It is commonly associated with images being made from light, such as on driver’s licenses or paper currency. However, this is only a narrow field of holography.The first holograms were designed in the last 1940s for use with electron microscopes. A decade later, with the advent of the laser, optical holographic images were popularized. Since, other fields have significantly advanced by using wave interference to produce holograms, including acoustic holograms used in seismic applications and microwave holography used in radar systems.Holography has been also recognized as a future data storing technology with unprecedented data storage capacity and ability to write and read a large number of data in a highly parallel manner.Khitun has been working for more than nine years to develop logic device exploiting spin waves. Most of his initial research was focused on the development of spin wave-based logic circuits similar to the ones currently used in the computers.A critical moment occurred last year when he decided the device didn’t need to replace the computer’s electronic circuits. …


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Nothing so sweet as a voice like your own, study finds

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Have you ever noticed that your best friends speak the same way? A new University of British Columbia study finds we prefer voices that are similar to our own because they convey a soothing sense of community and social belongingness.While previous research has suggested that we prefer voices that sound like they are coming from smaller women or bigger men, the new study — published today in the journal PLOS ONE — identifies a variety of other acoustic signals that we find appealing.”The voice is an amazingly flexible tool that we use to construct our identity,” says lead author Molly Babel, a professor in the Department of Linguistics. “Very few things in our voices are immutable, so we felt that our preferences had to be about more than a person’s shape and size.”Aside from identifying the overwhelming allure of one’s own regional dialects, the study finds key gender differences. Among North Americans, it showed a preference for men who spoke with a shorter average word length. The researchers also found a preference for “larger” sounding male voices, a finding that supports previous research.For females, there was also a strong preference for breathier voices — a la Marilyn Monroe — as opposed to the creakier voices of the Kardashians or actress Ellen Page. The allure of breathiness — which typically results from younger and thinner vocal cords — relates to our cultural obsession with youthfulness and health, the researchers say. A creaky voice might suggest a person has a cold, is tired or smokes regularly.Babel says the findings indicate that our preference for voices aren’t all about body size and finding a mate, it is also about fitting in to our social groups.BackgroundBabel and her colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz asked college-aged participants in California to rate the attractiveness of male and female voices from people living west of the Mississippi River.They found that participants preferred different acoustic signals for males and females — and the strongest predictors of voice preference are specific to the community that you’re a part of.For example, the Californian participants had a strong preference for female voices that pronounced the “oo” vowel sound from a word like “goose” further forward in the mouth. This has been a characteristic of California speech since at least the early 1980′s. In many other regions of North America, people would pronounce the “oo” sound farther back in the mouth, as one might hear in the movie Fargo.The preference for males who had shorter average word length relates to a difference between how men and women speak. In North American English, longer average word length is a style typically used by women while shorter average word length is one used by men. …


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Wings, tails, fins: Study looks at how animals propel themselves

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The wonder of animal movement — from the tiniest of insects to the largest fish in the sea — has been a subject of mystery for ages. But when it comes to animal propulsion, there are almost infinite kinds, but also limits that can’t be pushed or breakdowns will occur, according to an unusual study from a team that includes a Texas A&M University at Galveston researcher.Nathan Johnson, a graduate student at Texas A&M-Galveston who also teaches in the marine biology department, and colleagues from Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Indiana University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute have studied the complex ways animal movements have evolved over millions of years and through hundreds of species. Their findings have been published in the current issue of Nature Communications.The team narrowed animal subjects down to 59 species for the study, and concentrated on ways each one is able to propel itself — through air, land or water.The key word appears to be “bend.” One common trait they found was each creature being able to “bend” its means of propulsion, but only to a certain point.”If you take the wing of a bird or a bat, or the fins on a fish or a manta ray, you find that their means of propulsion are flexible,” Johnson explains. “They can move back or forth or sideways easily, or they bend. But this bending and flexibility will only go so far, and it can’t bend any more.”For example, the fixed wing on an airplane is not flexible, while nature has had millions of years to figure out the best way to do it better than we can. So we wanted to see if there any patterns to this flexibility.”For most creatures, there is a certain angle that these propulsion devices will reach and won’t exceed. It’s not that they probably can’t exceed these angles, but rather doing so is just not energetically efficient for them.”There does seem to be a universal range of movement in the species we looked at, from the fruit fly to the humpback whale.”The team found that a 30 to 60-degree angle seems to be the magic range of how far animal propulsion can bend. “This appears to be especially true with bird wings, while insect wings typically bend slightly less than other organisms we looked at,” Johnson adds.Also, the researchers agreed that environmental factors could be a factor in the range of movement. And some species move almost identically to vastly different species; they found that much of the motion made by marine life is almost identical to that of birds — that is, the fin of a fish moves just like the wing of a bird.”We need to understand a lot of these motion patterns in much more detail,” Johnson says.”There are some current day tests being done with man-made materials to see if they can duplicate animal motion, such as some being done with jellyfish. The more we learn about animal propulsion and the way it’s been developed over millions of years of evolution, the more it can help us with human engineering and how we can improve our own movement.”The project was funded by the National Science Foundation.Story Source:The above story is based on materials provided by Texas A&M University. …


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America"s natural gas system is leaking methane and in need of a fix

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The first thorough comparison of evidence for natural gas system leaks confirms that organizations including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have underestimated U.S. methane emissions generally, as well as those from the natural gas industry specifically.Natural gas consists predominantly of methane. Even small leaks from the natural gas system are important because methane is a potent greenhouse gas — about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. A study, “Methane Leakage from North American Natural Gas Systems,” published in the Feb. 14 issue of the journal Science, synthesizes diverse findings from more than 200 studies ranging in scope from local gas processing plants to total emissions from the United States and Canada.”People who go out and actually measure methane pretty consistently find more emissions than we expect,” said the lead author of the new analysis, Adam Brandt, an assistant professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford University. “Atmospheric tests covering the entire country indicate emissions around 50 percent more than EPA estimates,” said Brandt. “And that’s a moderate estimate.”The standard approach to estimating total methane emissions is to multiply the amount of methane thought to be emitted by a particular kind of source, such as leaks at natural gas processing plants or belching cattle, by the number of that source type in a region or country. The products are then totaled to estimate all emissions. The EPA does not include natural methane sources, like wetlands and geologic seeps.The national natural gas infrastructure has a combination of intentional leaks, often for safety purposes, and unintentional emissions, like faulty valves and cracks in pipelines. In the United States, the emission rates of particular gas industry components — from wells to burner tips — were established by the EPA in the 1990s.Since then, many studies have tested gas industry components to determine whether the EPA’s emission rates are accurate, and a majority of these have found the EPA’s rates too low. …


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Geographic variation of human gut microbes tied to obesity

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People living in cold, northern latitudes have bacteria in their guts that may predispose them to obesity, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Arizona, Tucson.The researchers’ analysis of the gut microbes of more than a thousand people from around the world showed that those living in northern latitudes had more gut bacteria that have been linked to obesity than did people living farther south.The meta-analysis of six earlier studies was published this month in the online journal Biology Letters by UC Berkeley graduate student Taichi Suzuki and evolutionary biology professor Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona.”People think obesity is a bad thing, but maybe in the past getting more fat and more energy from the diet might have been important to survival in cold places. Our gut microbes today might be influenced by our ancestors,” said Suzuki, noting that one theory is that obesity-linked bacteria are better at extracting energy from food. “This suggests that what we call ‘healthy microbiota’ may differ in different geographic regions.”"This observation is pretty cool, but it is not clear why we are seeing the relationship we do with latitude,” Worobey said. “There is something amazing and weird going on with microbiomes.”To Worobey, the results are fascinating from an evolutionary biology perspective. “Maybe changes to your gut community of bacteria are important for allowing populations to adapt to different environmental conditions in lots of animals, including humans,” he said.Body size increases with latitudeSuzuki proposed the study while rotating through Worobey’s lab during his first year as a graduate student at the University of Arizona. Studies of gut microbes have become a hot research area among scientists because the proportion of different types of bacteria and Archaea in the gut seems to be correlated with diseases ranging from diabetes and obesity to cancer. In particular, the group of bacteria called Firmicutes seems to dominate in the intestines of obese people — and obese mice — while a group called Bacteroidetes dominates in slimmer people and mice.Suzuki reasoned that, since animals and humans in the north tend to be larger in size — an observation called Bergmann’s rule — then perhaps their gut microbiota would contain a greater proportion of Firmicutes than Bacteriodetes. While at the University of Arizona, and since moving to UC Berkeley, Suzuki has been studying how rodents adapt to living at different latitudes.”It was almost as a lark,” Woroby said. “Taichi thought that if Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes are linked to obesity, why not look at large scale trends in humans. When he came back with results that really showed there was something to it, it was quite a surprise.”Suzuki used data published in six previous studies, totaling 1,020 people from 23 populations in Africa, Europe, North and South America and Asia. …


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How chronic stress predisposes brain to mental disorders

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University of California, Berkeley, researchers have shown that chronic stress generates long-term changes in the brain that may explain why people suffering chronic stress are prone to mental problems such as anxiety and mood disorders later in life.Their findings could lead to new therapies to reduce the risk of developing mental illness after stressful events.Doctors know that people with stress-related illnesses, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), have abnormalities in the brain, including differences in the amount of gray matter versus white matter. Gray matter consists mostly of cells — neurons, which store and process information, and support cells called glia — while white matter is composed of axons, which create a network of fibers that interconnect neurons. White matter gets its name from the white, fatty myelin sheath that surrounds the axons and speeds the flow of electrical signals from cell to cell.How chronic stress creates these long-lasting changes in brain structure is a mystery that researchers are only now beginning to unravel.In a series of experiments, Daniela Kaufer, UC Berkeley associate professor of integrative biology, and her colleagues, including graduate students Sundari Chetty and Aaron Freidman, discovered that chronic stress generates more myelin-producing cells and fewer neurons than normal. This results in an excess of myelin — and thus, white matter — in some areas of the brain, which disrupts the delicate balance and timing of communication within the brain.”We studied only one part of the brain, the hippocampus, but our findings could provide insight into how white matter is changing in conditions such as schizophrenia, autism, depression, suicide, ADHD and PTSD,” she said.The hippocampus regulates memory and emotions, and plays a role in various emotional disorders.Kaufer and her colleagues published their findings in the Feb. 11 issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry.Does stress affect brain connectivity?Kaufer’s findings suggest a mechanism that may explain some changes in brain connectivity in people with PTSD, for example. One can imagine, she said, that PTSD patients could develop a stronger connectivity between the hippocampus and the amygdala — the seat of the brain’s fight or flight response — and lower than normal connectivity between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, which moderates our responses.”You can imagine that if your amygdala and hippocampus are better connected, that could mean that your fear responses are much quicker, which is something you see in stress survivors,” she said. “On the other hand, if your connections are not so good to the prefrontal cortex, your ability to shut down responses is impaired. So, when you are in a stressful situation, the inhibitory pathways from the prefrontal cortex telling you not to get stressed don’t work as well as the amygdala shouting to the hippocampus, ‘This is terrible!’ You have a much bigger response than you should.”She is involved in a study to test this hypothesis in PTSD patients, and continues to study brain changes in rodents subjected to chronic stress or to adverse environments in early life.Stress tweaks stem cellsKaufer’s lab, which conducts research on the molecular and cellular effects of acute and chronic stress, focused in this study on neural stem cells in the hippocampus of the brains of adult rats. These stem cells were previously thought to mature only into neurons or a type of glial cell called an astrocyte. The researchers found, however, that chronic stress also made stem cells in the hippocampus mature into another type of glial cell called an oligodendrocyte, which produces the myelin that sheaths nerve cells.The finding, which they demonstrated in rats and cultured rat brain cells, suggests a key role for oligodendrocytes in long-term and perhaps permanent changes in the brain that could set the stage for later mental problems. …


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Fasting Before Chemotherapy

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Fasting Before Chemotherapy



After survivors Jo Denham and Jan Egerton found out about their mesothelioma diagnosis,they wasted no time before turning to the Internet for more information about the disease.
Like many other newly diagnosed patients, Jo and Jan wanted to learn as much as...

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Looking back to the cradle of our universe: Astronomers spot what may be one of most distant galaxies known

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NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes have spotted what might be one of the most distant galaxies known, harkening back to a time when our universe was only about 650 million years old (our universe is 13.8 billion years old). The galaxy, known as Abell2744 Y1, is about 30 times smaller than our Milky Way galaxy and is producing about 10 times more stars, as is typical for galaxies in our young universe.The discovery comes from the Frontier Fields program, which is pushing the limits of how far back we can see into the distant universe using NASA’s multi-wavelength suite of Great Observatories. Spitzer sees infrared light, Hubble sees visible and shorter-wavelength infrared light, and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory sees X-rays. The telescopes are getting a boost from natural lenses: they peer through clusters of galaxies, where gravity magnifies the light of more distant galaxies.The Frontier Fields program will image six galaxy clusters in total. Hubble images of the region are used to spot candidate distant galaxies, and then Spitzer is needed to determine if the galaxies are, in fact, as far as they seem. Spitzer data also help determine how many stars are in the galaxy.These early results from the program come from images of the Abell 2744 galaxy cluster. The distance to this galaxy, if confirmed, would make it one of the farthest known. Astronomers say it has a redshift of 8, which is a measure of the degree to which its light has been shifted to redder wavelengths due to the expansion of our universe. The farther a galaxy, the higher the redshift. The farthest confirmed galaxy has a redshift of more than 7. …


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