Scientists Thursday warned the world faced mass global coral bleaching next year driven by the warming effects of the El Nino weather phenomenon, and it could be the worst on record.
A study by the University of Queensland and the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration said it would be only the third recorded global bleaching event in history, with areas such as Australia's Great Barrier Reef set to be hard hit.
"If conditions continue to worsen, the Great Barrier Reef is set to suffer from widespread coral bleaching and subsequent mortality, the most common effect of rising sea temperatures," said the university's Global Change Institute director Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.
"In the first major global event in 1998, more than half the Great Barrier Reef experienced bleaching with about five to 10 percent of the corals dying.
"Thankfully the Great Barrier Reef was spared during this second global event (in 2010) due to storm activity which alleviated the heat stress. The reef may not be so lucky in 2016."
The Barrier Reef -- the world's biggest coral reef ecosystem -- is already struggling from the threat of climate change, as well as farming run-off, development and the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish.
It narrowly avoided being put on the UN World Heritage in danger list this year with Canberra now working on a plan to improve the reef's health over successive decades.
Bleaching is a phenomenon that turns corals white or fades their colours, threatening a valuable source of biodiversity, tourism and fishing.
It occurs when reef symbiosis -- the mutually beneficial relationship between two organisms that inhabit corals -- is disrupted by a rise in ocean warming, although there can also be other causes.
- Predictions unfolding -
One of the worst episodes on record, which affected reefs in 60 tropical countries, took place in 1998, when the El Nino weather pattern was exceptionally strong.
The phenomenon occurs when trade winds that circulate over waters in the tropical Pacific start to weaken and sea surface temperatures rise.
US government scientists in August said the El Nino currently under way -- the first in five years -- could be among the strongest in 65 years, while authorities in Australia have predicted it would be "strong" and "substantial".
Corals depend on single-cell algae called dinoflagellates that live in vast colonies on their surface.
The dinoflagellates feed on nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients provided by the coral and use light to transform this food into energy.
The photosynthesis also releases energy into the tissues of the coral, enabling it to build the calcium skeleton which houses the dinoflagellates.
When corals come under stress, such as from significantly warmer seas, they expel the dinoflagellates.
They then turn visibly pale, as the algae have the pigments which give the skeletons their distinctive colour.
The reefs are not dead at this point. But they become more susceptible to disease and will die if they fail to regain their plankton friends.
Hoegh-Guldberg said research he conducted in 1999 predicted mass coral bleaching events would become successively worse over time if the world failed to deal with rising atmospheric gases.
"Unfortunately, 16 years later, these predictions are beginning to unfold," he said.
The warning comes just months ahead of a UN-led conference in Paris which aims to seal a wide-ranging agreement to limit the worst effects of climate change.
It hopes to crown a six-year effort by 195 nations with a post-2020 pact on curbing greenhouse gases.
Scientists said Wednesday they had grown rudimentary human kidney tissue from stem cells, a key step towards the Holy Grail of fully-functional, lab-made transplant organs.
The tissue is not a viable organ, but may be useful for other purposes such as replacing animals in drug toxicity tests, the team said.
The researchers from Australia and the Netherlands grew their "kidney-like structure" from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells -- adult cells reprogrammed into a neutral state from which they can be coaxed to develop into other cell types.
Given the critical shortage of donor organs to replace those damaged by accident or disease, it has long been a goal of science to create human organs from stem cells.
But it is a complicated task. Scientists need to prompt stem cells to become kidney, liver or lung cells, which must then recreate the complex anatomy of a real organ in order to function in a human recipient.
The first part of this chain has proved most challenging, especially in organs composed of a multitude of different cell types. The kidney, for example, has more than 20.
In the new study, published in the journal Nature, the team managed to transform iPS cells into two different adult cell types.
- Long way to go -
The resulting organoids sported different tissue types and were "similar" to the kidney of a human embryo, the researchers reported.
The work represented "an important step towards building stem-cell-derived kidneys," University of Edinburgh anatomy expert Jamie Davies wrote in a comment, also published by Nature.
But he stressed the product was "not a kidney, but an organoid".
"There is a long way to go until clinically useful transplantable kidneys can be engineered," Davies said.
But the organoids may fulfil a completely different medical need -- testing the safety for humans of new drugs.
"The cell types that are most vulnerable to damage by drugs are present in the organoids," said Davies.
Stem cells are primitive cells that, as they grow, differentiate into the various specialised cells that make up the different organs -- the brain, the heart, the kidney, and so on.
Until a few years ago, when iPS cells were created, the only way to obtain stem cells was to harvest them from human embryos. This was controversial as it required the destruction of the embryo.
Other teams of scientists have also reported growing "organoid" stomachs, livers, retinas and brain and heart tissue from pluripotent stem cells in the lab.
Neutrinos take patience. They’re worth it, and the announcement of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes that, following related prizes in 1988 and 2002. Ironically, these near-undetectable particles can reveal things that cannot be seen any other way.
I could begin by telling you that neutrinos are elementary particles, but that sounds condescending. They’re not called elementary because they’re easy to understand – they aren’t – but because they are seemingly point-like in size, and we can’t break them down into smaller constituents. There’s no such thing as half a neutrino.
The smallest things in the universe
Atoms, despite the Greek name (“cannot be cut”), are not elementary particles, meaning they can be disassembled. An atom is a diffuse cloud of electrons surrounding a tiny, dense nucleus composed of protons and neutrons, which can be broken into up and down quarks.
Particle colliders, which accelerate particles to near the speed of light and smash them together, help us discover new elementary particles. First, because of E = mc2, we know the energy in the collision can be converted into the mass of particles. Second, the higher the accelerator’s beam energy, the more finely we can resolve composite structures, just as we can see smaller things with X-rays than with visible light.
We haven’t been able to take apart electrons or quarks. These are elementary particles, forming the basic constituents of ordinary matter: the Lego bricks of the universe. Interestingly, there are many heavy cousins of familiar particles that exist only for fractions of a second, and thus are not part of ordinary matter. For example, for electrons these are the muon and tauon.
Elementary particles, of which neutrinos are one kind.
How is this elementary particle – the neutrino – different from all other elementary particles? It’s unique in that it’s both almost massless and almost noninteracting. Those features are different, though often conflated (don’t take advice about neutrinos from a poet, even it is John Updike).
It’s a mystery why neutrinos are almost, but not quite, massless. We do know why they’re almost noninteracting, though: They don’t feel the electromagnetic or strong forces that bind nuclei and atoms, only the aptly named weak force (and gravity, but barely, because their masses are small).
Though neutrinos are not constituents of ordinary matter, they are everywhere around us – a trillion from the sun pass through your eyes every second. There are hundreds per every cubic centimeter left over from the Big Bang. Because they so rarely interact, it’s almost impossible to observe them, and you certainly don’t feel them.
Neutrinos have other weird aspects. They come in three types, called flavors – electron, muon and tauon neutrinos, corresponding to the three charged particles they pair with – and all of these seem to be stable, unlike the heavy cousins of the electron.
Because the three flavors of neutrinos are almost identical, there is the theoretical possibility that they could change into each other, which is another unusual aspect of these particles, one that can reveal new physics. This transformation requires three things: that neutrino masses are nonzero, are different for different types and that neutrinos of definite flavor are quantum combinations of neutrinos of definite mass (this is called “neutrino mixing”).
For decades, it was generally expected that none of these conditions would be met. Not by neutrino physicists, though – we held out hope.
Doing astronomy with invisible particles
In the end, nature provided, and experimentalists discovered, supported by calculations from theorists. First came decades of searching by many experiments, with important hints to encourage the chase.
Then, in 1998, the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan announced strong evidence that muon neutrinos produced in Earth’s atmosphere change to another type (now thought to be tauon neutrinos). The proof was seeing this happen for neutrinos that came from “below,” having traveled a long distance through Earth, but not for those from “above,” having traveled just the short distance through the atmosphere. Because the neutrino flux is (nearly) the same at different places on Earth, this allowed a “before” and “after” measurement.
In 2001 and 2002, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada announced strong evidence that electron neutrinos produced in the core of the sun also change flavors. This time the proof was seeing that electron flavor neutrinos that disappeared then reappeared as other types (now thought to be a mix of muon and tauon neutrinos).
Each of those experiments saw about half as many neutrinos as expected from theoretical predictions. And, perhaps fittingly, Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald each got half a Nobel Prize.
In both cases, quantum-mechanical effects, which normally operate only at microscopic distances, were observed on terrestrial and astronomical distance scales.
As the front page of The New York Times said in 1998, “Mass Found in Elusive Particle; Universe May Never Be the Same.” These clear indications of neutrino flavor change, since confirmed and measured in detail in laboratory experiments, show that neutrinos have mass and that these masses are different for different types of neutrino. Interestingly, we don’t yet know what the values of the masses are, though other experiments show that they must be about a million times smaller than the mass of an electron, and perhaps smaller.
That’s the headline. The rest of the story is that the mixing between different neutrino flavors is in fact quite large. You might think it’s bad news when predictions fail – for example, that we would never be able to observe neutrino flavor change – but this kind of failure is good, because we learn something new.
International society of neutrino hunters
I’m delighted to see this recognition for my friends Taka and Art. I wish that several key people, both experimentalists and theorists, who contributed in essential ways had been similarly recognized. It took many years to construct and operate those experiments, which themselves built on slow, difficult and largely unrewarding work going back decades, requiring the effort of hundreds of people. That includes major US participation in both Super-Kamiokande and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. So, congratulations to neutrinos, to Taka and Art, and to the many others who made this possible!
When I first started working on neutrinos, over 20 years ago, many people, including prominent scientists, told me I was wasting my time. Later, others urged me to work on something else, because “people who worked on neutrinos don’t get jobs.” And, even now, plenty of physicists and astronomers think we’re chasing something almost imaginary.
But we’re not. Neutrinos are real. They’re an essential part of physics, shedding light on the origin of mass, the particle-antiparticle asymmetry of the universe, and perhaps the existence of new forces that are too feeble to test with other particles. And they are an essential part of astronomy, revealing the highest-energy accelerators in the Universe, what’s inside the densest stars, and perhaps new and otherwise unseen astrophysical objects.
The author describes how the facts we learn about the universe shape our sense of meaning.
Tiny particles, big mysteries
Why should you care, beyond sharing our curiosity about revealing some of the weirdest things in the universe?
The weak force that neutrinos feel is what changes protons to neutrons, powering nuclear fusion reactions in the sun and other stars, and creating the elements that make planets and life itself possible.
Neutrinos are the only component of dark matter that we understand, and figuring out the rest will help us understand the structure and evolution of the universe. If the neutrino masses had been much larger, the universe would look much different, and perhaps we wouldn’t be here to see.
Finally, if you are purely practical, neutrino physics and astrophysics is one of the most difficult jobs, requiring us to invent incredibly sensitive detectors and techniques. This knowledge has other uses; for example, using a neutrino detector, we could tell if a purported nuclear reactor is on, what its power level is and even if it is producing plutonium. This may have some real-world applications.
The past decades in neutrino physics and astronomy have been great, but some of the most exciting things are just starting to happen. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole is now seeing high-energy neutrinos from outside our galaxy. Super-Kamiokande has announced a plan, based on a proposal from me and Mark Vagins, to improve their sensitivity to antineutrinos compared to neutrinos. And the international community hopes to build a major new neutrino facility, in which a powerful beam of neutrinos will be sent from Fermilab in Illinois to a detector deep underground in the Homestake mine in South Dakota. Who knows what we’ll find?
And that’s what I’ve really been waiting for.
By John Beacom, Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy, and Director of the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics (CCAPP), Ohio State University
The animal kingdom contains a huge diversity of colour patterns, from the near-perfect camouflage of the cuttlefish to the extravagant displays of birds of paradise. Evolution has shaped this diversity, but exactly which selective pressures are at work is still controversial.
While some theories propose that such patterns evolved specifically for camouflage, other theories link them to things like attracting mates, regulating body temperature and giving off warning signals.
One common pattern of animal colouration that has been the subject of this kind of debate is called countershading. Found across air, land and water on many different animals – from tigers to tuna – it features a darker skin or fur on the surface of the animal’s body that faces the sun, and a lighter colour on their underside.
Humpback whales are classic examples of countershading
Countershading has typically been considered beneficial for protection against ultraviolet. This is because the dark colour of the skin or fur is due to melanin, a pigment that strongly dissipates potentially damaging ultraviolet radiation. A dark body colour also often helps animals to gain more heat from sunlight.
Yet it has also long been suggested that this pattern of colouration evolved to enhance visual camouflage. This goes back to one of the oldest theories in the evolution of camouflage, originally put forward in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the British evolutionary biologist Sir Edward Bagnall Poulton and the American artist/naturalist Abbott Thayer. They suggested that shading might counteract the effects of light and make animals harder to see.
In plain sight
But how could the countershading pattern contribute to visual camouflage? That was the question that we sought to answer in two recently published papers. To understand our work, start by considering how light interacts with objects and viewers.
In nature, more light comes from above than from below. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about open country, below a dense canopy of trees or underwater. Three-dimensional objects with a uniform colour are brighter on the top and darker on the parts that are exposed to less light.
This interaction between shape and light provides a source of 3D information for our visual systems known as shape from shading. It is a powerful visual cue, exploited for centuries in art. Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings of 3D figures show us just how sensitive we are to this kind of information, for example. In the picture on the right, Lady of Dishevelled Hair, notice how the forehead and top of the nose are bright, while the areas under the eyes, lips and chin are dark. It is the shading, using a technique called sfumato, that allows us to perceive the graceful shape of the woman’s head on the two-dimensional plane of the drawing.
Shading is also an important cue for animals. Predators can potentially use shape from shading to reveal the 3D shape of their prey, even if this victim is patterned or coloured to match their background.
Countershading is a possible defence. If an animal is darker on top and lighter below, this can offset shading from light and make it harder for predators to detect them. To give you an example, below are two photographs of an Actias luna caterpillar feeding on birch leaves. The first shows it back-uppermost, a position it does not favour, while the second shows it hanging below the branch, its most common pose.
The caterpillar is harder to spot in the second image because the effects of shading are counteracted by the countershading. It happens to be the very example that Abbott Thayer used to illustrate his theory more than 100 years ago. In reverse of the usual countershading rule, the caterpillar’s back is paler than its belly. This is because in its most common pose, hanging below the branch, its belly is uppermost.
Now you see him …
University of St Andrews
Now you don’t
University of St Andrews
The right coat
A key question is what countershading pattern is the best for evading detection. The answer is complex, because it depends on the three-way interaction between object shape, the quality of light and the location of the viewer. Our interdisciplinary group of researchers from the universities of St Andrews, Abertay and Bristol developed a computational model to predict optimal shading in a given situation.
We simulated a three-dimensional world in which we could place an animal of our choice, and choose the location of the viewer. To take account of different habitats and lifestyles, we used realistic sun and sky lighting conditions which could be set up to emulate sunny or cloudy weather at any latitude, time of day or year.
We duly demonstrated that the best pattern to choose depends on weather, time of day and where in the world the animal is located. For example in a sunny location, an animal should have a sharp transition between their light and dark regions with a dark strip down the spine. The axis deer or chital (pictured), found across the Indian subcontinent, carries a good example of this kind of dark strip, which our work suggests might optimise camouflage in open grassland.
This is different to animals that live in woodland or under cloud and therefore experience less direct sunlight. They should have a more gradual transition between the light belly and dark back. A study from 2012 that looked at the coat patterns of ruminant animals supported this prediction. Our model should now allow experimenters to test just how specific camouflage needs to be to prove effective in different environments.
Finally a word on the other theories about the evolutionary reasons for countershading that we mentioned near the beginning, in relation to a related problem: why some animals turn to orient their bodies in a particular direction. Much has been made of the benefits of this for both regulating body temperature and protecting against ultraviolet light. Our model showed that all three theories make predictions that lead to similar animal orientations. This suggests that camouflage could be a crucial evolutionary explanation for how animals orient themselves as well.
Sweden's Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich of the US and Turkish-American Aziz Sancar on Wednesday won the Nobel Chemistry Prize for work on how cells repair damaged DNA, the jury said.
The three were honoured "for having mapped, at a molecular level, how cells repair damaged DNA and safeguard the genetic information. Their work has provided fundamental knowledge of how a living cell functions and is, for instance, used for the development of new cancer treatments," the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences said.
Expert tells headteachers that pupils could go on to have 40 jobs and the education system must adapt to the changing world
By Nicola Slawson, The Guardian
Children today could end up working to the age of 100 in as many as 40 different jobs, a futurologist has predicted.
Rohit Talwar, who helps businesses look at what the world might look like in five to 50 years, told headteachers yesterday that the education system is behind with how fast the world is changing and that they must prepare students now for the world of the future.
Rising life expectancy because of medical advances, combined with the trend for goods and services to be increasingly produced by smart software and robots, mean when today’s children are adults their working lives will likely differ vastly from that of their parents.
Research suggests that between 30 percent and 80 percent of all the jobs that exist today will disappear in the next 10 to 20 years as companies increasingly invest in automation, warning of an impending “huge disconnect”.
Pupils could go on to have a “portfolio career”, Talwar told delegates at the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC).
“You might be driving Uber part of the day, renting out your spare bedroom on Airbnb a little bit, renting out space in your closet as storage for Amazon, doing delivery for Amazon or housing the drone that does delivery for Amazon.
“There are all these sort of new sharing economy models coming through,” he said. “We need to start thinking about these things, we need to start thinking about the kinds of skills we’ll need to help people stay employable.
“If they do have a job all the way through their career, that means they’ll be working potentially up to the age of 100.”
And they “might well have 40 jobs in that period in 10 different careers”, he added.
Talwar, who is chief executive of Fast Future Research, challenged school leaders to think about how they can change their teaching styles.
He said: “Everywhere around the world policy makers are behind the game in understanding how fast the world is changing, and they’re not changing the education or social system anywhere near as quickly.
“The challenge we have is that nowhere around the world is anyone really trying to do some joined-up thinking about what would that look like in the future,” Talwar told reporters.
William Richardson, general secretary of HMC, said: “[Our] schools welcome the challenge laid down by Talwar and stand ready and are willing to contribute to a debate about the fundamental nature of the education our pupils receive in the future.
“Innovation and independence is in our blood and this, combined with harnessing the power of young people to conceive new ideas, will help us find exciting new ways of teaching and learning.”
Homo naledi, the ancient human ancestor whose fossils have been retrieved from a South African cave, may have been handy with tools and walked much like a person, according to scientists who examined its well-preserved foot and hand bones.
Its foot and hand anatomy shared many characteristics with our species but possessed some primitive traits useful for tree climbing, the researchers said on Tuesday.
Scientists last month announced the discovery of this previously unknown species in the human linage in a cave northwest of Johannesburg. The new research offers fresh insight into a creature that is providing valuable clues about human evolution.
Paleoanthropologist Tracy Kivell of Britain's University of Kent said it boasted a hand "specialized for fine, powerful manipulation." Its wrist bones and thumb showed features shared with modern people and Neanderthals and indicated powerful grasping and the ability to employ stone tools.
Its strongly curved fingers, rather than the straight ones of people and Neanderthals, suggested it also regularly used its hands for climbing.
Its foot was largely like ours, particularly in the ankle joint anatomy, the presence of a non-grasping big toe and the proportions of the region from the ankle to toes.
Dartmouth College anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva said it was well-adapted for long distance walking and perhaps running. "The legs are long, the knees are like ours, the feet are human-like. Homo naledi walked a lot like us," DeSilva said.
It possessed some primitive foot features: a flatter arch, curved toes and a heel less robust than ours.
Paleoanthropologist William Harcourt-Smith of Lehman College CUNY and New York's American Museum of Natural History said Homo naledi would have been more proficient than modern humans in the trees based on its curved finger and toe bones.
"Our science has known for decades that upright walking, bipedalism, preceded brain enlargement over the course of human evolution. But never before has it been so obvious. Homo naledi possessed a strikingly modern human-like foot, even though its brain was only about one-third the size of our brains today," DeSilva said.
Similarly, its tool-friendly hand anatomy in combination with its small brain "causes us to perhaps rethink the cognitive requirements for tool use," Kivell said.
The scientists who discovered it call Homo naledi one of the most primitive members of the genus Homo, which includes modern humans. The fossils' age has not been determined.
The research appears in the journal Nature Communications.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler)
Trying to fight against your own psychological biases has a bizarre side-effect, according to new research published in Psychological Science. The study found the perception of time slows down when white people who are concerned about appearing racially biased are perceiving black faces.
“The current research is the first to illustrate that time perception is affected by race,” wrote Gordon B. Moskowitz and his colleagues, Irmak Olcaysoy Okten and Cynthia M. Gooch, in their study.
“An example of time slowing is the experience that a full second has transpired after only half a second, which makes the duration of an actual second feel longer or slower,” the researchers explained. “The implications of a time-slowing bias for interpersonal interactions are profound—imagine a police officer needing to gauge the time in which a minority suspect must respond before force is exerted. The perceived difference of a half second could determine whether shots are fired.”
For their study, the researchers recruited 40 white students (24 women and 16 men) from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. The participants completed a survey to measure their motivation to control bias and then participated in a temporal-discrimination task.
In the temporal-discrimination task, the participants viewed a computer screen that displayed a geometric shape followed by another geometric shape, a black face, or a white face. All of the faces had neutral expressions. The first image was displayed for 600 milliseconds, while the second image was displayed for 300 to 1,200 milliseconds. The participant then indicated whether the second image had been displayed for a longer or shorter time than the first image.
The researchers found that short amounts of time were mistaken for longer ones when participants who were motivated to reduce bias viewed black faces. But there was no effect among participants who were not concerned about appearing biased.
“What felt like the standard duration was in reality a significantly shorter period of time; therefore, time was perceived to slow. However, this effect is contingent on motivation,” the researchers said.
A second experiment of 36 white male students used a slightly different procedure to test time perception but came to the same conclusion.
The motivation to not seem to be biased affected participants’ perception of time by increasing arousal, the researchers said.
“Ironically, people trying to suppress the appearance of bias are most likely to display this form of implicit bias because their motivation to control prejudice induces race-related arousal,” Moskowitz and his colleagues wrote.
Previous studies have established that heightened physiological arousal actually slows the experience of time’s passage. For example, research from 2011 found the perception of time slows down when people view faces with angry expressions.
The weather phenomenon known as El Nino could lead to an epidemic of dengue fever cases in southeast Asia, international researchers said Monday.
Cases of dengue fever have been shown to rise along with the ocean warming trend, which occurs some years but not others. The current El Nino, which has already begun and is forecast to last into next year, is expected to be among the most intense in 20 years, researchers say.
"Large dengue epidemics occur unexpectedly, which can overburden the health care systems," said lead author Willem van Panhuis, assistant professor of epidemiology at University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.
"Our analysis shows that elevated temperatures can create the ideal circumstance for large-scale dengue epidemics to spread across a wide region."
Researchers analyzed 18 years of monthly dengue surveillance reports across southeast Asia, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.
They found trends among the total of 3.5 million reported cases in eight countries.
During the last particularly strong El Nino season, in 1997 and 1998, "dengue transmission was very high, matching up perfectly with high temperatures that allowed mosquitoes to reproduce faster and spread dengue virus more efficiently," said the study.
The higher temperatures in the tropics and subtropics were brought on by El Nino, moving warm sea water temperatures in the eastern Pacific toward the west.
Dengue fever is caused by a mosquito-borne virus in the tropics and subtropics, causing nearly 400 million infections each year.
Symptoms can include fever, severe pain, headache, nausea, vomiting and skin rashes. In some patients, the infection can be fatal.
There is no vaccine to prevent dengue and no medical treatment other than acetaminophen.
The World Health Organization says the global incidence of dengue has grown dramatically in recent decades, and about half of the world's population is now at risk.
Japan's Takaaki Kajita and Canada's Arthur B. McDonald won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery that neutrinos, labeled nature's most elusive particles, have mass, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.
"The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement awarding the 8 million Swedish crown ($962,000) prize.
The scientists' research discovered a new phenomenon – neutrino oscillations - that was seen as ground-breaking for particle physics.
"Yes there certainly was a Eureka moment in this experiment when we were able to see that neutrinos appeared to change from one type to the other in traveling from the Sun to the Earth," McDonald told a news conference in Stockholm by telephone.
Kajita is director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and professor at University of Tokyo, while McDonald is professor Emeritus at Queen’s University in Canada.
Physics is the second of this year's Nobels. The prizes were first awarded in 1901 to honor achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and business tycoon Alfred Nobel.
($1 = 8.3151 Swedish crowns)
(Reporting by Stockholm Newsroom; Editing by Alistair Scrutton)
Three scientists from Japan, China and Ireland whose discoveries led to the development of potent new drugs against parasitic diseases such as malaria and elephantiasis won the Nobel Prize for Medicine on Monday.
Irish-born William Campbell and Japan's Satoshi Omura won half of the prize for discovering avermectin, a derivative of which has been used to treat hundreds of millions of people with river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, or elephantiasis.
China's Youyou Tu was awarded the other half of the prize for discovering artemisinin, a drug that has slashed malaria deaths and has become the mainstay of fighting the mosquito-borne disease.
Some 3.4 billion people, most of them living in poor countries, are at risk of contracting these parasitic diseases.
"These two discoveries have provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these debilitating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people annually," the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute said.
"The consequences in terms of improved human health and reduced suffering are immeasurable."
Traditional medicine
Today, the medicine ivermectin, a derivative of avermectin made by Merck & Co, is used worldwide to fight roundworm parasites, while artemisinin-based drugs from firms including Sanofi and Novartis are the main weapons against malaria.
Omura and Campbell made their breakthrough in fighting parasitic worms, or helminths, after studying compounds from soil bacteria. That led to the discovery of avermectin, which was then further modified into ivermectin.
The treatment is so successful that river blindness and lymphatic filariasis are now on the verge of being eradicated.
Youyou turned to a traditional Chinese herbal medicine in her hunt for a better malaria treatment, following the declining success of the older drugs chloroquine and quinine. This led to the isolation of artemisinin, a new class of anti-malaria drug.
"We now have drugs that kill these parasites very early in their life-cycle," said Juleen Zierath, chair of the Nobel Committee. "They not only kill these parasites but they stop these infections from spreading."
Despite rapid progress in controlling malaria in the past decade, the disease still kills around half a million people a year, the vast majority of them babies and young children in the poorest parts of Africa.
The 8 million Swedish crowns ($960,000) medicine prize is the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year. Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.
(Reporting by Simon Johnson and Ben Hirschler; Additional reporting by Daniel Dickson and Kate Kelland; Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Ralph Boulton)
esus Aceves may never get used to people's stares, but after decades of alcoholism and a painful career as a circus freak, he has made a resolution: to stop burying his hair-covered face in his hands.
Aceves, a 41-year-old Mexican man, has an extremely rare condition called hypertrichosis, also known as "werewolf syndrome" -- an abnormal amount of hair growth on the face and body.
Just 50 cases of hypertrichosis have ever been documented. Thirteen of them -- seven men and six women -- are members of the same Mexican family from the town of Loreto in the central state of Zacatecas.
One of those family members is Aceves, who goes by the nickname "Chuy" and has struggled to deal with the social fallout of the condition all his life.
"Why did God make me this way? Why am I different?" Aceves says he has asked himself since he was small.
Over the years, Aceves developed the habit of walking around with his hands over his face in an effort to dodge strangers' stares.
As a boy, he dropped out of school, where classmates mocked him, bullied him and pulled his facial hair.
He turned to alcohol at just 13 years old, developing an addiction that would haunt him for years.
To support himself, he joined a circus together with two cousins who have the same condition, earning about $8 a day.
Hypertrichosis, which is caused by a genetic mutation, does not have any other symptoms besides hair growth.
But it makes it very difficult to get a job, go to the store, make friends or find love.
"I don't understand it, really. I believe it shouldn't be that way. But unfortunately it is. They don't give you opportunities, just because you're different," Aceves told AFP.
- Circus life -
Speaking in a warm voice, Aceves recounts his difficult life, from his traumatic childhood to his stint working at the Circus of Horrors in London.
The only time a timid smile crosses his face is when he recalls the two occasions when he shaved his facial hair for appearances on TV shows -- one Japanese and one British.
"It wasn't a very pleasant experience. I didn't like it. I looked stranger. My face looked like Herman Munster -- purple or blue," he said.
"I said, 'No, I've been this way all my life, it's best if I stay this way.'"
At first, he enjoyed working in the circus, where he met his wife, a clown with whom he has a 13-year-old daughter who also has hypertrichosis.
But over the course of more than 20 years, being a professional freak took a toll on his self-esteem.
"It damaged me, but I only realized that a long time later," he said.
Several months ago, he started a new career, collecting bottles and cardboard in the street for recycling.
And while he is estranged from two daughters from previous relationships -- who also have hypertrichosis -- he says he has finally found peace in family life.
"We've been lucky, we're doing well. It's complicated sometimes, but I think if you're honest and decent, you can have a good family," he said.
Along with his new work, Aceves says, he has also started a new life.
He gave up drinking and no longer tries to hide his face in the street.
"I'm sick of feeling uncomfortable. I'm just like everyone else and I need to be happy," he said.
- 'Monkey Woman' -
Aceves' struggles are depicted in the new documentary "Chuy the Wolf Man" by Mexican filmmaker Eva Aridjis, who spent a year and a half with him and his family.
For Mexicans, their story inevitably recalls that of Julia Pastrana, an indigenous woman from the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa whose hypertrichosis made her an international sensation in the 19th century.
Pastrana was displayed around Europe as "The Monkey Woman" or "The Ugliest Woman in the World."
After she died from complications of childbirth in 1860, her body and that of her baby were embalmed and put on display in freak exhibitions for decades.
Her remains were only buried in 2013, after a campaign to bring them from Norway back to Mexico.
A massive asteroid strike 66 million years ago triggered a string of potent volcanic eruptions that spelled doom for the dinosaurs, US researchers said Thursday.
Just what led to the demise of the dinosaurs is often debated among scientists, and the latest findings in the journal Science suggest that both events are to blame, not one or the other.
Scientists studied the Deccan Traps lava flows in India, and their most accurate dating yet shows that the volcanoes doubled their output in close proximity to the asteroid or comet strike that set off the last mass extinction on Earth.
"Based on our dating of the lavas, we can be pretty certain that the volcanism and the impact occurred within 50,000 years of the extinction, so it becomes somewhat artificial to distinguish between them as killing mechanisms: both phenomena were clearly at work at the same time," said lead researcher Paul Renne, a University of California, Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science.
"It is going to be basically impossible to ascribe actual atmospheric effects to one or the other. They both happened at the same time."
Together, the asteroid impact and the volcanic eruptions would have "blanketed the planet with dust and noxious fumes, drastically changing the climate and sending many species to an early grave," said a statement from UC Berkeley.
The impact of the asteroid changed the underground plumbing in the volcanoes, making some magma chambers larger so they spouted more lava when they erupted.
It would take Earth and its land and ocean life about 500,000 years to emerge from the devastation.
"If our high-precision dates continue to pin these three events - the impact, the extinction and the major pulse of volcanism - closer and closer together, people are going to have to accept the likelihood of a connection among them," said co-author Mark Richards, also a UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science.
"The scenario we are suggesting -- that the impact triggered the volcanism -- does in fact reconcile what had previously appeared to be an unimaginable coincidence."
