When we come to define the overarching feeling of the early part of the 21st century, it may come down to one word: queasiness. Some of the most exciting advances in technology – virtual reality, wearable tech, superfast smartphones and 3D films and operating systems – may all be scuppered by a basic human weakness: motion sickness.
“If you walk into a room, you see the visual input that shows us we’re moving, and our vestibular system, the organs of balance, tell us we’re moving, [as does] the perception from your muscles and bones,” says Dr Cyriel Diels , human factors specialist at the Centre for Mobility and Transport at Coventry University. “Below deck on a ship, you are physically moving, but because you are moving with the boat, the visual field seems to be stationary. The two seem to conflict. Your body responds with motion sickness: vomiting, feeling dizzy.”
With digital motion sickness, he argues, “it’s in the opposite direction. You’re stationary but you are watching something that is moving. Again, you have this conflict.” Depending on susceptibility and what we are watching, up to 80% of the population can be affected. “It’s a natural response to an unnatural environment.”
It is an issue that makers of virtual reality headsets, such as Sony, HTC and Oculus VR , have had to confront; developments such as higher resolution images and reducing the lag between the movement of your head and what you see on screen are said to reduce or eliminate motion sickness.
“Combating it is quite difficult,” says Diels. More motion means more motion sickness, but a gentle film or game “goes against some of the aims of virtual reality, where you want it to be an engaging, moving environment”.
Taking pills designed to combat travel sickness can help, as some gamers attest , “but really you don’t want people to start taking drugs so they’re able to be immersed in a virtual environment”. You can train yourself out of motion sickness, he says, if you “start slowly, reduce the time you’re exposed to it, and have resting time between”. But that won’t help everyone.
Will we just have to accept that vomiting and feeling nauseous are going to be a part of life, the “occupational disease of the 21st century” , as one headline put it? Or are we reaching our limits? It will be no fun sitting in our driverless cars (they are said to be more likely to induce queasiness partly because we are not in control of the car’s movements) wearing our virtual reality headsets, if we have to be accompanied by the least glamorous of travel accessories: the sickbag.
One hundred years ago in November 1915, Albert Einstein presented to the Prussian Academy of Sciences his new theory of general relativity. It is fair to say the theory turned out to be a great success.
General relativity was built on Einstein’s special relativity, which provided solutions to some of the greatest puzzles of the 19th century theoretical physics.
So in order to grasp the meaning and significance of general relativity, it is worth reflecting on the state of physics in the 19th century to see how Einstein came to realise that space, time and geometry are not absolute but depend on the physical environment.
The beauty of invariance
In the 17th century, Isaac Newton developed a set of equations that described the physical properties of the world around us. These equations were very successful, from a description of the flight of a cannonball, to the motion of the planets.
They also had a very appealing property: all observers, regardless of whether they are moving or not – i.e. regardless of which “inertial frame” they are in – are equivalent when it comes to their description of the world around them. So two individuals moving in different directions would see events unfold in the same way.
Even though formally these individuals would see things in a different way – one might say that things move from left to right, whereas the other might say they move from right to left – still the fundamental description of the unfolding events would remain the same, and the laws of physics derived by these individuals would have literally the same form.
But in the 19th century, people started noticing that not everything plays accordingly to this rule.
Problems with electromagnetism
The 19th century was a time of extensive study of the phenomena of electricity, magnetism and light. In 1865 James Clerk Maxwell published a set of equations that combined all these phenomena into a single phenomenon of “electromagnetism”.
Soon after Maxwell’s discovery, people realised that there is something strange when it comes to his equations. Their form changes when we move from one inertial frame to another. So an individual who is not moving can observe distinctively different physical phenomena than a person who is moving.
All the beauty of invariance and irrelevance of observers that we had got used to in Newtonian physics was gone. It now looked like some frames were preferable to others when it came to describing events in nature.
Then, at the turn of the 20th century, a new mathematical transformation was discovered that could preserve the structure of Maxwell’s equations when moving from one frame to another. Although many people contributed to this discovery, we now refer to it as the “Lorentz transformation”.
The Lorentz transformation was different from the standard transformation of inertial frames that had been used in the Newtonian physics. In Newtonian physics, length and time are absolute, so the length of an object in one frame is the same as the length of that object in another frame. Also, time passes in the same way in one frame as in the other frame.
However, if taken literally, the Lorentz transformation implies that time and length do actually change, depending on which frame of reference you are in.
Principle of relativity
This got Einstein wondering whether the transformation that preserved the structure of Maxwell’s equations was merely a mathematical trick or whether there was something fundamental about it. He wondered whether time and space were absolute, or whether the principle of invariance of the laws of physics should be paramount.
In 1905, Einstein decided that it is the invariance of the laws of physics that should have the highest status, and postulated the principle of relativity: that all inertial frames are equivalent, the observer’s motion (with constant velocity) is irrelevant, and that all laws of physics should have the same form in all inertial frames.
When combined with electromagnetism, this principle would require that the transformation from one inertial frame to another must have a structure of the Lorentz transformation, meaning that time and space are no longer absolute and change their properties when changing from one inertial frame to another.
A visualisation of special relativity.
What about gravity?
In 1907 Einstein realised that his theory was not complete. The principle of relativity was only applicable to observers moving with a constant velocity. It also did not fit with the Newtonian description of gravity.
Einstein, being a patent officer, did not have access to laboratory equipment. To compensate, he had to engage himself in thought experiments. He considered various scenarios in his head and worked through them step by step.
These thought experiments showed to him that gravity is not different from acceleration. So standing stationary on the Earth feels just the same as standing in a rocket ship accelerating at a constant 1G.
It also showed that the accelerated observer would observe that fundamental geometrical properties change. For example, that the number π (a mathematical constant) could no longer be defined as a ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
So it was not just time and space that lost their absolute meaning, but Einstein realised that also geometry itself was not absolute and could be susceptible to physical conditions.
The road to general relativity
All this reasoning convinced Einstein that the geometry of the spacetime and the physical processes that take place in the spacetime, are related to each other and that one can affect the other.
It also led to a striking conclusion: what we perceive as gravity is just a consequence of the motion through the spacetime. The larger the curvature of the spacetime the stronger gravity is.
Experiment with falling objects. In the 17th century Newton concluded that objects fall because they are pulled by Earth’s gravity. Einstein’s interpretation was that these objects do not fall. According to Einstein, these objects and Earth just freely move in a curved spacetime and this curvature is induced by mass and energy of these objects.
It took Einstein eight years to find the relation between the geometry of spacetime and physics.
The equations that he presented in 1915 not only led to a completely different interpretation of events around us but also provided an explanation for some baffling or yet to be discovered phenomena: from the anomalous orbit of the planet Mercury, through the bending of light by the Sun’s gravity, to predicting the existence of black holes and expanding universe.
It was a bumpy road from Newtownian physics to special and then general relativity. But each step, driven by Einstein’s insight, drove inexorably towards a picture of the universe that persists to this day.
Officials with the Unicoi County Board of Education in Tennessee said this week that they had no plans to remove a Christian flag from board meetings.
In a recent letter to Director of Schools John English, the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) noted that the board had displayed the Christian flag at every meeting since 2014.
"The Christian flag being displayed during public school board meetings unabashedly creates the perception of government endorsement of Christianity," FFRF Staff Attorney Rebecca Markert explained. "The display of this Christian flag is a brazen affront to the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution.
Unicoi County Board of Education chairman Tyler Engle told WJHL on Tuesday that the county was not taking immediate action to remove the flag from meetings.
“I’m unsure as to how long the flag has been displayed here, you know its not something that is intentionally brought out at every meeting, it is here in the room even when the board doesn’t meet,” Engle remarked.
“Our attorney is carefully reviewing the constitutional precedent and the constitutional law as well as the case law that is cited in the letter," he added. "The board is not planning to take immediate action."
Non-religious science buffs looking to mark the upcoming holiday season finally have an album truly made for them, courtesy of a British duo, the Friendly Atheist reported.
The album, Scientific Songs of Praise, reimagines traditional carols and "use them to celebrate natural wonders of science; from the big bang to the evolution of life on Earth," according to the group's Facebook page.
For example, "O Holy Night" becomes "Oh Satellite," complete with images from the International Space Station. The new lyrics are credited to Tariq Abdulla, with vocal performances by Natalie Windsor.
"Under the clouds, while half the world is dreaming, you're probing questions of intrigue and depth," she sings. "A thrill of hope, the joy of exploration, the world is spinning an ever-breaking dawn."
The five-song album also contains tributes to the Large Hadron Collider, and an ode to tectonic plates set to the tune of "Amazing Grace," as seen here.
The album is scheduled to be released on Dec. 20, but can be ordered in advance at the group's website.
It’s about as sure a bet as you can make: 2015 is going to be the hottest year on record.
Month after month this year, above-average — and sometimes record — global temperatures have piled up, raising the odds that this year will be the hottest one humanity has ever experienced. And now October has blown those records out of the water.
According to newly released NASA data, October was not only the warmest October on record, but had the biggest temperature difference of any month in the 135 years of NASA’s archive. The month was more than a full degree Celsius (nearly 2°F) above the average for the 1951-1980 base period that NASA uses — an unprecedented feat in all those years of data.
The global average temperature for the year so far gives 2015 a 99.9 percent chance that 2015 will best 2014 as the warmest year in the books, according to Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which keeps the temperature records. The virtually assured record is a mark of the steady upward march of global temperatures thanks to the accumulation of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, as well as a very strong El Niño.
That news comes amid a flurry of other climate milestones: The year is likely to finish with global temperatures at about 1°C above preindustrial levels, halfway past the stated international goal of limiting temperature rise to no more than 2°C from that baseline. International climate talks are scheduled to begin later this month in Paris to hammer out an agreement toward that goal.
Carbon dioxide levels are also currently drifting back above 400 parts per million, possibly never to dip back down again for the foreseeable future as a strong El Niño event lends the buildup of the greenhouse gas an extra push.
El Niño is a major factor in this year’s considerable heat. The event is expected to be one of the three strongest on record. In fact, by one measure, it has already entered the record books, as ocean temperatures in a key region of the Pacific Ocean climbed above those of the blockbuster 1997-1998 event.
El Niño years are generally warmer than those in which conditions in the tropical Pacific are neutral or when there is a La Niña. La Niña is the counterpart to El Niño, featuring cooler-than-normal tropical Pacific waters. But in the past couple of decades, La Niña years have been warmer than El Niño years of preceding decades because of global warming.
That steady warming has overall tipped the odds toward record heat; in fact, the last time there was a globally record cold year was 1911. In contrast, 13 of the 15 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.
With that overall trend, it was only a matter of time before a month saw a temperature departure greater than 1°C, Schmidt said in an email, adding that it will likely happen more moving forward.
A treatment for alcoholism can reactivate dormant HIV, potentially allowing other drugs to spot and kill the virus hiding out in human immune cells, researchers said Tuesday.
The medication, called Disulfiram, draws out the AIDS-causing virus without any side effects for patients, according to a study published in The Lancet.
In people undergoing treatment for AIDS, the virus can take cover in certain cells and hide away, only to reemerge once therapy is stopped.
This latency has been one of the biggest hurdles in developing a cure.
"Waking up" the virus - and then destroying it -- is a promising strategy for ridding patients of HIV.
But other drugs which are able to rouse HIV from its dormant state are toxic to humans.
In clinical trials led by Sharon Lewin, a professor at the University of Melbourne, 30 people on antiretroviral treatment (ART) were given increasing doses of Disulfiram over a period of three days.
At the highest dose, there was evidence of slumbering HIV being stimulated, with no side effects.
"This trial clearly demonstrates that Disulfiram is not toxic and is safe to use, and could quite possibly be the game changer we need," Lewin said in a statement.
The next step will be to test Disulfiram's rousing effect in combination with a virus-killing drug.
"Waking up the virus is only the first step to eliminating it," said the study's lead author Julian Elliott, head of clinical research in the department of infectious diseases at Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia.
"Now we need to work out how to get rid of the infected cell."
Approximately 34 million people have died of HIV-related causes worldwide. By the end of 2014, there were an estimated 36.9 people living with HIV globally.
People who report drinking three to five cups of coffee per day are less likely to die prematurely from heart disease, suicide, diabetes or Parkinson's disease, US researchers said Monday.
Both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee were shown to have benefits, said the study by researchers at the Harvard University Chan School of Public Health published in the November 16 edition of the journal Circulation.
The study compared people who don't drink coffee, or drank less than two cups daily, to those who reported drinking "moderate" amounts of coffee, or up to five cups daily.
The study did not prove a cause-and-effect for coffee and the reduced likelihood of certain diseases, but uncovered an apparent link that aligns with previous research, and that scientists would like to probe further.
"Bioactive compounds in coffee reduce insulin resistance and systematic inflammation," said first author Ming Ding, a doctoral student in the Department of Nutrition.
"That could explain some of our findings. However, more studies are needed to investigate the biological mechanisms producing these effects."
No protective effect was found against cancer in this study. Some previous research has pointed to a link between coffee consumption and a lower risk of certain cancers.
The study was based on data gathered from three large, ongoing surveys including some 300,000 nurses and other health professionals who agree to answer questionnaires about their own medical conditions and habits at regular intervals over the course of 30 years.
"In the whole study population, moderate coffee consumption was associated with reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease, and suicide," said the findings.
Researchers also accounted for potential confounding factors such as smoking, body mass index, exercise, alcohol consumption, and diet. But the fact that the research relied on surveys, which use self-reported behavior, could raise questions about its reliability.
And experts warned that coffee -- a substance adored by many devotees -- may not be right for everyone.
"Regular consumption of coffee can be included as part of a healthy, balanced diet," said senior author Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard.
"However, certain populations such as pregnant women and children should be cautious about high caffeine intake from coffee or other beverages."
Antibiotic resistance, which can turn common ailments into killers, has reached dangerous levels worldwide, the World Health Organization warned Monday, saying users still know too little about how antibiotics work.
Antibiotic resistance happens when bugs become immune to existing drugs, allowing minor injuries and common infections to become deadly.
Overuse and misuse of the drugs increases this resistance, but WHO also published a survey of 10,000 people worldwide showing a range of dangerous misconceptions about the threat, which are allowing it to prosper.
"The rise of antibiotic resistance is a global health crisis, and governments now recognise it as one of the greatest challenges for public health today," WHO chief Margaret Chan said in a statement, stressing that resistance was "reaching dangerously high levels in all parts of the world."
"Antibiotic resistance is compromising our ability to treat infectious diseases and undermining many advances in medicine," she warned.
WHO's 12-country survey published Monday found that nearly two thirds of all those questioned (64 percent) believe wrongly that antibiotics can be used to treat colds and flu, despite the fact that the drugs have no impact on viruses.
The survey, conducted in Barbados, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, Sudan and Vietnam, also showed that 66 percent believe that there is no risk of antibiotic resistance for people who take their antibiotics as prescribed.
And nearly half (44 percent) thought antibiotic resistance was only a problem for people who take the drugs regularly, when in fact, anyone, of any age and anywhere, can get an antibiotic-resistant infection.
Around a third meanwhile believed it was best to stop an antibiotic treatment as soon as they felt better, rather than completing the prescribed course of treatment, the survey showed.
- 'Urgent' to improve understanding -
"The findings of this survey point to the urgent need to improve understanding around antibiotic resistance," Keiji Fukuda, the UN chief's special representative on antimicrobial resistance, said in the statement.
Along with its survey, WHO launched a campaign Monday called "Antibiotics: Handle with care", aimed at raising awareness about the problem, and correcting such misconceptions.
"This campaign is just one of the ways we are working with governments, health authorities and other partners to reduce antibiotic resistance," Fukuda said.
"One of the biggest health challenges of the 21st century will require global behaviour change by individuals and societies," he added.
A WHO report in April showed there were "major gaps" in all regions of the world in addressing the problem and reining in overuse and misuse of antibiotics.
The UN health agency has warned that without urgent action, the world could be headed for "a post-antibiotic era" in which common infections and minor injuries that have long been treatable once again become killers.
The survey published Monday showed a dire lack of understanding of the problem and widespread dangerous behaviour.
Broken down by country, the survey for instance showed that five percent of Chinese respondents who had taken antibiotics in the past six months had purchased them on the Internet, while the same percentage in Nigeria had bought them from a stall or hawker.
In Russia, only 56 percent of those who had taken antibiotics in the past year had them prescribed by a doctor or nurse.
Dr Eduardo Rodriguez performed the transplant over 26 hours in August. In that time, he gave a 41-year-old former firefighter from Tennessee, Patrick Hardison, the face of David Rodebaugh, a 26-year-old bike mechanic from Brooklyn who became braindead after a cycling accident this summer.
The procedure and the stories of the two men’s lives were extensively detailed in a piece written for New York Magazine by Steve Fishman and published on Sunday night .
Hardison was badly burned when responding to a house fire in Senatobia, Mississippi on 5 September 2001. He was given the semblance of a face with flesh transferred from his thighs, but in the years leading up to his surgery at Langone he underwent 71 operations at a rate of seven a year and became dependent on painkillers, wrecking his family life.
Of his appearance before the transplant, Hardison told Fishman: “Kids ran screaming and crying when they saw me. There are things worse than dying.”
Facial transplants are not common, but they have been performed around the world for 10 years. The first partial facial transplant was performed in 2005 on Isabelle Dinoire, a 38-year-old French woman who had been bitten by a dog. The first such operation in the US was performed in December 2008 on Connie Culp , a 46-year-old Cleveland woman who was shot by her husband four years earlier.
In Spain in 2010, a 31-year-old man named only as Oscar, a farmer who accidentally shot himself in the face, was given what was then described as the world’s first full facial transplant .
In the US in 2011, surgeons at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston gave a new nose, lips, skin, muscle and nerves to Dallas Wiens, a 25-year-old construction worker from Texas who was disfigured in an accident involving power lines. That operation was paid for by the US military . It could not restore his sight.
Rodebaugh’s face was the third offered to Hardison, who met the pioneering Dr Rodriguez in 2012. The first was from a Hispanic man, whose family withdrew consent. The second was from a woman, which Hardison declined. Rodebaugh’s face was offered through LiveOnNY , the New York organ donor network.
In the New York magazine piece, Fishman details the delicate, exhausting and perilous procedure which Dr Rodriguez followed – which he warned his patient would be “the most extensive face transplant yet performed”.
“Two days after [Rodebaugh] was declared braindead,” he writes , “at 7.30am on 14 August, the surgery began. Rodriguez started on Rodebaugh, carefully dissecting the half-inch-thick scalp away from the skull. He worked from the back toward the ears, then the nose, which he sawed off. The trick was to cut away the tissue while preserving nerves, muscles and the carotid arteries and the internal jugular veins – the ‘big pipes’.”
The procedure was not without drama, as Hardison’s jugular vein proved to be bigger than that which had belonged to Rodebaugh, causing Hardison to lose blood dangerously. Dr Rodriguez improvised, inserting one jugular into a minutely cut hole in the side of the other.
Hardison is now recovering. He will take immunosuppressant drugs for his life, and Dr Rodriguez told Fishman “there will be a rejection – not if but when”. Dr Rodriguez estimated that between three and five of the other patients who have received facial transplants around the world died after the new tissue was rejected.
One of Hardison’s sons, though, told Fishman : “When I see his face, I want to memorise it, so the next time I see him, I know it’s my dad.”
Archaeologists and geneticists have sequenced the genome of a boy sacrificed 500 years ago during an Incan ritual in the Andes, finding a previously unidentified lineage that hints at genetic diversity before the Spanish landed in the Americas.
Spanish geneticists extracted the DNA of a mummy found in the icy heights of Aconcagua, the world’s tallest mountain outside Asia, near the border of Argentina and Chile. The mummy, of a seven-year-old boy who was sacrificed by the Inca, showed a DNA signature that has virtually disappeared in modern South Americans.
The researchers ran the mummy’s DNA through a database of genetic code and found only four people with a corresponding trace: three modern people from Peru and Bolivia and one ancient person from the Wari empire , a Peruvian civilization that predated the Inca by several hundred years.
The researchers suggested in a study published in the journal Scientific Reports that the gene pool changed so dramatically due to the consequences of colonization.
“Up to 90% of native South Americans died very quickly,” lead researcher Antonio Salas, of the University of Santiago de Compostela, told Science magazine. “You can imagine that a lot of genetic diversity was lost as well.”
Studying the DNA of ancient people, mummified or not, can help “reconstruct …colonial politics and migration and change”, Lars Fehren-Schmitz, a geneticist and anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told the Guardian.
Fehren-Schmitz noted that although diseases likely killed more Native Americans in the 16th century than any other factor – and in doing so removed genes from the population accordingly – the different ways in which Europeans colonized the Americas were also reflected in the gene pools.
Fehren-Schmitz, who was not involved in the study, noted that the mitochondrial DNA analyzed in the Aconcagua mummy was passed along by the boy’s mother, and thus revealed only some of who he was, genetically.
European DNA appears in relatively high proportions around South America, but is rare in mitochondrial DNA.
“In North America there were mass migrations, with men, women and children,” Fehren-Schmitz said. “In South America, the Spanish brought specialists, soldiers, priests. It was men.”
He added that the study generally supports other hypotheses about how quickly the original colonizers of the Americas – ancient people who crossed the frozen Bering strait from Asia – managed to spread down through the continents. The lineage subgroup in the Aconcagua mummy’s DNA dates back to more than 18,000 years ago, the researchers found.
“It’s only one individual, but it’s a specific sub-lineage in a restricted geographic area,” Fehren-Schmitz said, referring to the relative isolation of the southern Andes. A relatively rare DNA signature, like that of the Aconcagua boy, could suggest that the genomes of groups of Americans became more unique over long phases of isolation.
“It’s another brick in the wall,” he said, to the idea that “people came to the Americas quite rapidly and then groups stopped in isolated places, creating their own demographic complexities”.
In 2011 Fehren-Schmitz co-wrote a paper assessing a much larger dataset of ancient and modern genomes, and found that Native Americans suffered a sizable population loss in the 1500s.
The Aconcagua mummy is special for its extraordinary state of preservation, Salas said, which was caused by the high altitude and freezing temperatures of its burial site. The boy was killed in a sacrificial ritual called capochoca, which the Inca performed to make offerings to the gods.
The children were often young, high-born and “special”, Vanderbilt University archaeologist Tom Dillehay told the Guardian. When climbers discovered it in 1985, the Aconcagua mummy wore two tunics and was flanked by gold, silver and shell statuettes.
Capochoca was performed for important events, either religious or relating to the Inca emperor – who was considered a descendant of the sun. The children were taken up into the mountains to be killed.
Most of the children chosen for capochoca “were not physically traumatized, and were often given some kind of herb or alcoholic drink”, such as the Peruvian corn drink chicha, to put them into a deep sleep or coma, Dillehay said.
Little is known of who the Aconcagua boy was, but he does not appear to have died in peace. Vomit stained his clothes red and archaeologists found achiote , a dye which can act as a hallucinogen, in his intestines. He was strangled and died from a blow to the head .
The children were taken into the mountains because the Inca considered them “sacred landscapes”, Dillahey said, in part because their “deities were stacked vertically, top to bottom”.
A child entombed on the slopes of Aconcagua, near one of the mountain roads along which the Inca carved their empire, would thus rest as close as the Inca could get to their highest gods.
“They looked up to the heavens in the same way we still do,” Dillehay said. “In a sense, that is.”
Vets studying the muscle-wasting disease in dogs say new drugs being tested could halt its progress in humans
At first glance, the beagles running round the enclosure of the Royal Veterinary College look typical of the breed. Inquisitive and affectionate, the dogs rush from visitor to visitor, anxious to play and make contact. Endearing behaviour like this has made the beagle one of Britain’s most popular breeds.
But closer scrutiny shows something unusual: some beagles look a little clumsy and weak on their paws. Occasionally one will stagger or stop in its tracks. The cause of this behaviour is straightforward. The dogs have the inherited the wasting condition muscular dystrophy. Crucially, the animals – kept at the college’s site near Potter’s Bar, Hertfordshire – suffer from a version very similar to the disease’s most common human version, Duchenne muscular dystrophy .
The college’s colony has been created to help researchers pinpoint treatments that could halt the disease’s dreadful progress in humans – and in dogs. “A host of promising new methods have been developed for treating muscular dystrophy in recent years, and these are now ready for trials,” said Professor Richard Piercy, an expert on neuromuscular disease at the college. “We could use rats and mice, but beagles are far closer to humans in size and physiology, and their responses to treatments will give us far greater insights into patients’ likely clinical responses to drugs we develop.”
Duchenne is caused by a mutated gene carried by symptomless females. Male children who inherit the mutation cannot produce the muscle protein dystrophin, which is vital for building and repairing muscle. The disease affects around 2,500 boys in the UK at any one time and starts to manifest itself around the age of five. By 12, most use wheelchairs and many die in their late 20s.
The impact on boys and their families is devastating, as Sue Davies (not her real name) makes clear. Her seven-year-old son, Harry, has Duchenne and already notices he is different from his brother, Jack, and his friends. “It is heartbreaking to watch as he gets more and more frustrated that he can’t do the small things like climb, or run fast, or play football as well as his brother,” said Sue. “If there was a treatment for Harry – even one that would just give us some extra time – it would mean more than I can say.”
The Royal Veterinary College’s beagle project began a few years ago when a family of dystrophic dogs, which had been bred from a cavalier king charles spaniel and a bichon frise, was discovered by vets. Dogs from this family were bred with beagles to produce the college colony. As a result these dogs sometimes have fluffier coats than normal. In the past, the use of beagles in experiments – including research concerned with tobacco – has caused considerable controversy and triggered accusations of animal cruelty. However, the college’s scientists emphasise that their dogs are treated with care and compassion.
Ultimately we would give these drugs to patients not long after birth to stop the disease ever damaging their bodies
Professor Dominic Wells
“We chose to create a colony of beagles with muscular dystrophy, rather than other dogs, because the breed possesses fewer genetic problems than other types of dogs. That makes our results easier to interpret,” said Professor Dominic Wells, of the college’s neuromuscular group.
Having created the colony, college researchers are now studying the progress of the disease in individual dogs, which usually have to be put down at around 18 months old as the disease takes its toll on their muscles. “We are giving them MRI scans, we are studying the action of their hearts, and we are taking muscle biopsies and blood samples,” said Wells. “We need to find out the best time in their lives to treat them in order to reveal most clearly if they are deriving benefit from the drugs we are giving them. That will provide real insights into human responses to new drugs.”
Wells added that potential new treatments for Duchenne were being developed in laboratories around the world. The most promising involve a technique known as anti-sense therapy.
“Essentially we add small strands of DNA to a subject so that the disrupted message from their genes to the protein-making cells in their body is restored and their cells start to make dystrophin again,” said Wells. “We hope to begin testing this kind of treatment on our beagles next year, and if those trials go well, we can think about trials on humans. Ultimately we would give these drugs to young patients not long after birth and so stop the disease from ever damaging their bodies. You could call that a cure.”
Asteroid platinum and the briny water on Mars may soon be available for plunder, Republicans and Democrats have agreed, advancing a bill that would grant “space resource rights” and could challenge an international treaty on outer space.
The US Senate passed the Space Act of 2015 this week, sending its revisions of the bill back to the House for an expected approval, after which it would land on the president’s desk. The bill has a slew of provisions to encourage commercial companies that want to explore space and exploit its resources, granting “asteroid resource” and “space resource” rights to US citizens who managed to acquire the resource themselves.
The lawmakers defined “space resource” as “an abiotic resource in situ in outer space” that would include water and minerals but not life.
Space law is a new frontier for the lawmakers and lawyers planted on Earth, and although the commercial spaceflight sector has grown enormously in the past decade – including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic – the prospects of space mining have remained unclear.
Planetary Sciences, a private company backed by Google’s founders and film-maker James Cameron, welcomed the Senate vote with an exuberant statement celebrating “the right of US citizens to own asteroid resources”.
The company’s president, Chris Lewicki, compared the bill to the Homestead Act, which distributed public land to Americans heading west and helped reshape the United States.
“The Homestead Act of 1862 advocated for the search for gold and timber, and today, HR 2262 fuels a new economy,” Lewicki said in a statement. “This off-planet economy will forever change our lives for the better here on Earth.”
Aside from the daunting logistics , the largest earthbound obstacle to space mining is an 1967 international treaty known as the Outer Space Treaty, to which the US is a signatory. The treaty holds that no “celestial body” is subject to “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”.
Senate lawmakers were careful to add in their bill that they grant rights only to citizens who act under the law, “including the international obligations of the United States”.
They also added a “disclaimer of extraterritorial sovereignty”, saying the US does not thereby assert ownership, exclusive rights or jurisdiction “of any celestial body”.
So although the bill asserts certain rights for US citizens, it disavows any national claim – sending a mixed message on asteroid rights, space lawyer Michael Listner told the Guardian.
“So on the one hand Congress is saying to these companies, ‘Go get these rights and we’ll defend you,’ and at the same time saying, ‘We’re making no sovereign claim of ownership,’” he said.
“They’re trying to dance around the issue. I tend to think it doesn’t create any rights because it conflicts with international law. The bottom line is before you can give somebody the right to harvest a resource you have to have ownership.”
Listner admitted that many in his profession disagreed about whether the act would create new rights, saying that “space lawyers are kind of split right down the middle on this”. But he added that there’s “a lot of great things” in the bill, which he said should encourage investment in commercial space projects.
The bill would also extend the current timeline for use of the International Space Station to at least 2024, for instance, and would also put a moratorium on regulations for commercial spaceflight companies. Perhaps most importantly, Listner said, the bill would keep commercial spaceflight lawsuits in federal court rather than state courts, where plaintiffs have an easier time finding sympathetic juries.
The companies have a strong interest to avoid the fate of the general aviation industry, he said, which has “gotten killed over the years” with lawsuits.
In Washington and on the campaign trail, lawmakers put aside their usual vitriol for each other and praised the vote. Republican Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, said the bill would “give our commercial space pioneers the certainty they need to expand our technology capabilities and explore the next frontier”.
Senator Ted Cruz, the chairman of the subcommittee for space and science and a presidential candidate for the Republican party, said the bill gives NASA “nearly a decade of mission certainty”.
“Most importantly, it solidifies America’s leading role in the commercial space sector and builds upon the work of President Reagan,” he added.
Two professors, Tim Servoss, professor of psychology at Canisius College in New York, and education professor Jeremy Finn at the State University of New York at Buffalo, have performed research they plan to present in full in spring showing that the prevalence of police in schools correlates to the number of black students in those schools.
Their research, previewed to Talking Points Memo, looks at the presence of school-based security, often referred to as school resource officers (SROs). In their study, they controlled for the presence of neighborhood crime and school misconduct and still found that the presence of African American children is the major factor in a school's decision to deploy SROs.
“To the extent that police in schools may contribute to the disproportionate arrest of African-American students, the use and/or role of police in schools should require careful reexamination,” says the overview provided to TPM.
They also found disparities between the arrests that occurred within the schools with SROs. “In the average school without police, the black-white disparity in arrests was negligible,” but in schools that had police, black students were 2.2 times more likely to be arrested than white students.
“These results suggest that the implementation of security measures are at least partially based on the perceived threat of the African-American student population rather than any objective dangers within (crime or misconduct), or in the neighborhood (neighborhood crime) surrounding the school,” they conclude.
