background preloader

Sciam

Facebook Twitter

Has Maternal Mortality Really Doubled in the U.S.? There is no charity walk to raise awareness about the 700 to 800 women that die each year during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth in the U.S. There are no dedicated colored-plastic wristbands. But statistics in recent years have revealed a worrisome trend: the rate of maternal mortality in the U.S. has more than doubled in the past few decades. Whereas 7.2 women died per 100,000 births in 1987, that number swelled to 17.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2009 and 2011.

The uptick occurred even as maternal mortality dropped in less-developed settings around the world. Now women giving birth in the U.S. are at a higher risk of dying than those giving birth in China or Saudi Arabia. So what exactly is it about being in a family way that is getting worse in America? The addition of this question means that the apparent increase in maternal mortality in the U.S. Yet there may be more to the maternal mortality increase than better detection of an existing problem. Ebola Strikes a Blow against Pregnant Women and Maternal Care. For six weeks this past summer pregnant women in a large swath of eastern Sierra Leone were unable to find a single person to perform caesarean sections. Ebola was to blame. The deadly virus, which kills about 70 percent of its west African victims, had killed two of four clinicians at the region’s main hospital.

Another doctor had fled in fear and the remaining clinician was sick with another malady. Kenema Government Hospital—a facility that serves three districts with over one million people in the area—typically delivered around 150 babies and performed 17 C-sections each month before Ebola. But the lack of available, trained medical professionals, coupled with patients’ resistance to coming in for care—especially near where Ebola patients were being treated—led to a precipitous drop in their maternal patient count. Fear was also rampant among the hospital’s remaining patients. And other medical workers did not step in to perform C-sections in the absence of available doctors.

Salmon Use Magnetic Field–Based Internal Maps to Find Their Way. Smartphones and GPS-based navigation systems have made it pretty easy for humans to figure out how to get from point A to point B. But migratory animals lack not only the thumbs to key in search terms for a destination on an iPhone, but the technology itself. Migratory birds and sea turtles, however, may have something better: They can sense variations in Earth’s magnetic field as they travel huge distances across the globe to the same mating grounds or beaches year after year. Now we know more about how salmon do it, too. In a study published February 6th in Current Biology scientists have found that salmon use Earth’s magnetic field like a map, much like hatchling turtles.

Birds, by contrast, use magnetic fields more like a compass: They know what direction they’re facing, but they need other information to know where they’re supposed to go. Can Matter Cycle through Shapes Eternally? From Nature magazine Physicist Frank Wilczek has had to defend his ideas more than once during his long and celebrated career.

His Nobel-prizewinning work on quarks, the smallest building blocks of matter, was originally considered a bit out there, he says. Even so, Wilczek, who is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, was caught off guard by the severity of an attack on his latest proposal, a type of device in never-ending motion called a time crystal. Patrick Bruno, a theoretical physicist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, claims to have torn apart the idea with a mathematical proof published last month in Physical Review Letters. “He's gone on the warpath,” says Wilczek. The time crystal proposed by Wilczek, is, at its most basic, anything that can be observed to move in a pattern that repeats at regular intervals over time without energy being added — essentially, a clock that ticks forever without being wound.

Concept questioned. You Say Potato, I Say Double-Stranded RNA | Guest Blog. Amidst the outrage, puzzlement and theories caused by the finding of genetically-modified wheat in an Oregon field, USDA is considering whether to commercialize another dinnertime staple–the potato. Last month, Idaho-based J.M. Simplot asked the Agriculture Department to grant a deregulated status for a new variety of potatoes genetically engineered to reduce bruising and develop lower levels of acrylamide, a neurotoxin and possible carcinogen, when cooked.

Unlike the transgenic crops thatt use genetic material from other organisms – like the genes from a bacterium that makes Bt corn, soybeans and cotton – Simplot’s Innate (TM) potatoes only use genetic material from other varieties of potatoes. Instead of adding genetic material for desirable traits, certain undesirable traits are “silenced” by inhibiting RNA from carrying the genetic base pairs from the DNA to synthesize proteins. The technology promises to bring both health and economics benefits. Search for Survivors Races On as 91 Feared Dead in Tornado-Hit Oklahoma. Pre-dawn emergency workers searched feverishly for survivors in the rubble of homes, primary schools and an hospital in an Oklahoma City suburb ravaged by a massive Monday afternoon tornado feared to have killed up to 91 people and injured well over 200 residents.

The 2-mile (3-kilometer) wide tornado tore through town of Moore outside Oklahoma City, trapping victims beneath the rubble as one elementary school took a direct hit and another was destroyed. Reporters were cleared back from Plaza Towers Elementary School, which sustained a direct hit Oklahoma Lieutenant Governor Todd Lamb told CNN. But television pictures showed firefighters from more than a dozen fire departments working under bright spotlights to find survivors.

President Barack Obama declared a major disaster area in Oklahoma, ordering federal aid to supplement state and local efforts in Moore after the deadliest U.S. tornado since one killed 161 people in Joplin, Missouri, two years ago. Storm alerts School destroyed. RNA Fragments May Yield Rapid, Accurate Cancer Diagnosis. Fragments of RNA that cells eject in fatty droplets may point the way to a new era of cancer diagnosis, potentially eliminating the need for invasive tests in certain cases. Cancer tumor cells shed microvesicles containing proteins and RNA fragments, called exosomes, into cerebral spinal fluid, blood, and urine. Within these exosomes is genetic information that can be analyzed to determine the cancer’s molecular composition and state of progression. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital discovered that exosomes preserve the genetic information of their parent cells in 2008, however exosomes have not seen widespread clinical testing as a means of cancer diagnosis until now.

“We have never really been able to detect the genetic components of a tumor by blood or spinal fluid,” says Harvard University neurologist Fred Hochberg. “This is really a new strategy.” He says exosome diagnostic tests could potentially detect and monitor the progression of a wide variety of cancers. Barnacles Mate via 'Spermcasting' It can be hard to find a sexual partner when you are glued to a rock.

Barnacles famously get around this problem by having penises longer than their bodies, so that they can seek out relatively distant mates. But now it seems that some adopt another strategy, entrusting their precious bodily fluids to the currents. Some of these crustaceans live alone, with no neighbors near enough to have sex with. In the case of the gooseneck-barnacle species Pollicipes polymerus, this presented a mystery: although some barnacles are thought to self-fertilize, scientists have never been able to witness reproduction of solitary P. polymerus, so these animals were thought to have to mate. But Richard Palmer, a marine biologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his team have now shown that the barnacles are capable of capturing sperm released into the sea, which gives them another route to procreation.

“Barnacles are a highly studied animal,” says Palmer. Green Glow Shows RNA Editing in Real Time. Glowing genes: White arrows show hot spots of ADAR activation; courtesy of Reenan Lab/Brown University It’s a long way from gene to protein. The dogmatic scenario is: DNA gets transcribed into RNA, which gets translated into protein.

But in real life, and in real living things, the workings aren’t quite that simple. One example: individual units of RNA sometimes need to be converted, in what’s called RNA editing, into related entities for the ultimate formation of the right proteins. Now researchers have devised a technique for seeing this particular RNA editing process in real time—the corrected strand gives off a green glow—and even for the restoration of functionality. Reenan and colleagues produced fruit flies that included an altered version of the gene for the oft-used lab tool green fluorescent protein. By following the green glow, the team was able to track the patterns of ADAR in the fruit flies’ brains in vivo.

Steve Mirsky contributed to this story. Octopuses Reveals First RNA Editing In Response to Environment | Octopus Chronicles. Octopus vulgaris. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Beckmannjan Without genetic change we’d be nowhere—well perhaps just unicellular blobs kicking around in ponds. Alterations in DNA, such as point mutations, duplications, rearrangements and insertions from microbial neighbors, have helped humans and our deep-time ancestors climb out of the swamps and, in our case at least, start swimming in backyard pools. But these basic tools of evolution don’t entirely explain how we and other organisms have evolved to be so complex. Recent research has shown that a process called RNA editing, which tweaks how certain enzymes are made without requiring alterations in basic genetic blueprints, has allowed living organisms to regulate important functions, such as nervous system function and development.

Now, octopuses have provided the first evidence that this sort of micro-tinkering can happen in response to external environmental cues rather than just internal developmental ones. Are Zombies nocturnal? | A Blog Around The Clock. For Halloween, I thought I’d republish this old post of mine from July 1, 2010. Blame ‘Night of the Living Dead’ for this, but many people mistakenly think that zombies are nocturnal, going around their business of walking around town with stilted gaits, looking for people whose brains they can eat, only at night. You think you are safe during the day? You are dangerously wrong! Zombies are on the prowl at all times of day and night! They are not nocturnal, they are arrhythmic! Remember how one becomes a zombie in the first place? One of the brain centers that is thus permanently damaged is the circadian clock. When the clock is in its “day” phase, it is very difficult to fall asleep.

When the clock is in its “day” phase, metabolism is high (higher than at night), thus zombies require a lot of energy all the time and quickly burn through all of it. Insomnia, in turn, affects some hormones, like ghrelin and leptin, which control appetite. But at night the digestive function is high. Penises Shaped By Waves (In Barnacles) | EvoEcoLab. Semibalanus balanoides, Photo from Wikimedia Commons The following is edited from a post I published in 2008.

It’s the dead of winter and you must start to think about finding a lover and getting your gametes in the water in time for the Spring algal bloom! But wait a second, you’re a permanent fixture on a rock. Can’t move. What is a young, love-struck sessile hermaphrodite to do? Barnacles are known as one of the more ‘hung’ of the invertebrate world with penises reaching up to 10 times their body size. How much does a penis cost? Biologist Matt Hoch (2008) tested the effects of overcrowding and wave exposure on the penis morphology of the acorn barnacle, Semibalanus balanoides. “Variation in barnacle penis traits may be important when comparing sex allocation of barnacles for several reasons. For most of the year, the barnacle’s penis is rather languid. Proportion of fertilized broods as a function of distance from nearest neighbor on exposed or protected coastlines. HOCH, J. (2008). Don’t lose the context! Response to: Are you maternal enough to be a woman? | Guest Blog. Are you maternal enough to be a woman?

I saw this headline on Scientific American blogs, and was intrigued. As a researcher in intra-sex variation in personality, I was eager to see any reference to maternal inclinations, given that it is the subject of my most recent paper. Hang on a sec? I realised this was about my most recent paper! Both Kate Clancy and Scicurious seemed to have very strong reactions to the paper, and I was quite surprised at their responses. In case you haven’t read them, have a gander at the two blog posts I’m talking about (Framing and definitions: Are you maternal enough to be a women?

Before I talk about the blog posts, I’ll give you a quick synopsis of the results of our research. Late-follicular urinary estrone-3-glucuronide levels (E1-3G: creatinine ratio) and reported ‘ideal number of children’ in 25 nulliparous women aged 18–21 (from Law Smith et al. 2011) Ok, so back to the blogs. Steady on there. References: Framing and definitions: are you maternal enough to be a woman? | Context and Variation. In high school, my mother occasionally found babysitting jobs for me.

Parents, desperate for a trustworthy kid to watch their own, would entrust their offspring to Katie the honors student while they went to a meeting, or to work, or perhaps on a date. If any of those parents are reading, I have a confession for you: I didn’t like watching your kids. It’s not because any of these kids were bad – they weren’t. It’s because I was totally uninterested in children. Then, in college, I spent a weekend with an eleven month old cousin, a boy who was so amazingly sweet and loving that I hardly gave him back to his mother.

Many of you know the rest of the story. My maternal tendencies were age, partner and wealth-dependent. I have always appreciated the thoughtfulness and rigor of the work that is affiliated with Perrett. I teach this material to my students; the studies are always thoughtful, the papers well-organized, the results interesting. It’s ok. So, is this the end of the story? References. Introducing: the new Scientific American blog network! | The Network Central. Yes!!! It finally happened! The shiny new Scientific American blog network is now live! We are excited to announce that 39 new blogs joined the network Check out the press release and the blogs homepage. There are also some changes on the Scientific American homepage – more of those still to come. I know you are all very eager to see who is on the network. So I will get to that really fast – the entire list is immediately below – and will leave the technical, conceptual and editorial details to the end of the post.

First, big thanks to Mariette DiChristina, SA’s Editor-in-Chief, and not just for having the courage to hire someone wild and woolly like me, but for her vision of Scientific American as a modern, fast, nimble and experimental media organization, not afraid to try new things knowing that some will succeed and others not so much. The entire editorial team embraced both me and this project from the very first day. And now, the blogs… – Anecdotes from the Archive.