A blazing meteor lit up the night sky like fireworks across a dozen eastern U.S. states and prompted almost 160 sighting reports, the American Meteor Society said on Monday.
The meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere over central Pennsylvania late on Sunday and wowed observers from Virginia to Massachusetts in a "random fireball event," society spokesman Mike Hankey said.
Most of those who reported the fireball on the American Meteor Society website said it began as a brilliant white color and then turned yellow, green and orange.
A witness in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, said the meteor "traveled like a bottle rocket from the clouds to the ground. The eastern sky it lit up and it went off like a firework and was gone."
Other observers said the fireball looked like a plane plummeting to the ground or that it pulsed and appeared out of nowhere.
A fireball is a meteor that is brighter than the planet Venus, and several thousand of them take place daily. The great majority take place over oceans or uninhabited areas, and many are masked by daylight, according to the society website.
The meteor over the U.S. East Coast came a day after a fireball over the Pacific Northwest drew almost 200 comments on the website.
(Reporting by John Clarke; Editing by Doina Chiacu)
Archaeologists set out Monday to use a revolutionary new deep sea diving suit to explore the ancient shipwreck where one of the most remarkable scientific objects of antiquity was found.
The so-called Antikythera Mechanism, a 2nd-century BC device known as the world's oldest computer, was discovered by sponge divers in 1900 off a remote Greek island in the Aegean.
The highly complex mechanism of up to 40 bronze cogs and gears was used by the ancient Greeks to track the cycles of the solar system. It took another 1,500 years for an astrological clock of similar sophistication to be made in Europe.
Now archaeologists returning to the wreck will be able to use a new diving suit which will allow them to more than double the depth they can dive at, and stay safely at the bottom for longer.
- Double the diving depth -
The Exosuit, built in Canada by Nuytco Research, will permit divers to reach depths of 150 metres (492 feet) and still perform delicate tasks, says archaeologist Theotokis Theodoulou.
The suit, which resembles a puffy space suit, "expands our capabilities", Theodoulou told AFP as the team set off for a month-long expedition to Antikythera, which lies between Crete and the Peloponnese.
"I'll be able to grasp, pluck, clench and dig... for several hours," he said.
Archaeologists believe many other artefacts are yet to be discovered in and around the wreck. Up to now they had only been able to operate at a depth of 60 metres.
The mechanism was found with a spectacular bronze statue of a youth in the wreck of a cargo ship apparently carrying booty to Rome, and researchers are certain that other items on board still remain to be discovered.
"We have good signs that there are other objects present," said Angeliki Simosi, head of Greece's directorate of underwater antiquities, after exploratory dives in the area in 2012 and 2013.
"There are dozens of items left, this was a ship bearing immense riches from Asia Minor," added Dimitris Kourkoumelis, another archaeologist on the team.
The archaeologists also hope to confirm the presence of a second ship, some 250 metres away from the original discovery site.
Antikythera, which now has a population of only 44, was on one of antiquity's busiest trade routes, and a base for Cilician pirates, some of whom once captured and held the young Julius Caesar for ransom. He later had them all captured and crucified.
- Monumental statues -
The Greek team is assisted by Brendan Foley, a marine archaeologist from the renowned Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at Massachusetts, which was involved in a dive to the wreck of the Titanic.
Foley has helped in outings to identify ancient shipwrecks over the last five years.
"We may find one or more monumental statues that were left behind in 1901, in the mistaken belief that they were rocks," Foley said.
As well as the new Exosuit, the Antikythera expedition will also use robot mapping equipment and new advanced closed-circuit "rebreathers", which will allow divers much more time underwater.
"We will have more bottom time than any previous human visitors to the site, because we dive with mixed gas rebreathers," the expedition's website said.
"Each diver will have more than 30 minutes of bottom time per day, and will enjoy greater mental acuity and a larger safety margin than that of previous divers at Antikythera."
The discovery of three new small squirrel-like species lends evidence to the notion that mammals originated at least 208 million years ago in the late Triassic Period, according to new research appearing in a recent edition of the journal Nature. The research, which was led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History and the…
Three-quarters of the trash found off Australian beaches is plastic, a study released Monday said as it warned that the rubbish is entangling and being swallowed by wildlife.
Researchers surveyed the vast Australian coastline at intervals of about 100 kilometres (62 miles), compiling the world's largest collection of marine debris data, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) said.
"We found about three-quarters of the rubbish along the coast is plastic," CSIRO scientist Denise Hardesty said.
"Most is from Australian sources, not the high seas, with debris concentrated near cities."
Rubbish found included glass and plastic bottles, cans, bags, balloons, pieces of rubber, metal and fibreglass as well as fishing gear and other items lost or discarded in or near the sea.
This marine debris not only poses a navigation hazard but can smother coral reefs, transport invasive species, harm tourism and kill and injure wildlife, the report said.
It warned that litter impacted wildlife through entanglement and ingestion but also indirectly via the chemicals it introduces into marine ecosystems.
Smaller turtle species in particular ingest the debris, possibly because soft, clear plastic resembles its natural prey jellyfish, it said.
"Our findings indicate oceanic leatherback turtles and green turtles are at the greatest risk of both lethal and sub-lethal effects from ingested marine debris," the report said.
Birds, meanwhile, eat everything from balloons to string, with the survey finding 43 percent of seabirds had plastic in their gut, with the Tasman Sea between Australia, New Zealand and the Southern Ocean pinpointed as a high risk region.
"Our analyses predict that plastics ingestion in seabirds may reach 95 percent of all species by 2050, given the steady increase of plastics production," it said.
Entanglement also poses the risk of death or maiming to seabirds, turtles, whales, dolphins, dugongs, fish, crabs and crocodiles and other species.
"Approximately one-third of marine turtles around the world have likely ingested debris, and this has increased since plastic production began in the 1950s," Hardesty said.
"We also estimate that between 5,000 and 15,000 turtles have been killed in the Gulf of Carpentaria (in northern Australia) after becoming ensnared by derelict fishing nets mostly originating from overseas."
The report, part of a three-year marine debris research and education programme developed by Earthwatch Australia with CSIRO and energy group Shell, found that there were two main drivers of the pollution -- littering and illegal dumping.
Scientists said Sunday they had invented a device that uses a magnet to extract bacteria, fungi and toxins from blood, potentially throwing a lifeline to patients with sepsis and other infections.
The external gadget -- tested so far in rats but not yet humans -- could be adapted one day for stripping Ebola and other viruses from blood, they hoped.
Acting rather like a spleen, the invention uses magnetic nanobeads coated with a genetically-engineered human blood protein called MBL.
The MBL binds to pathogens and toxins, which can then be "pulled out" with a magnet, the developers wrote in the journal Nature Medicine.
The "bio-spleen" was developed to treat sepsis, or blood infection, which affects 18 million people in the world every year, with a 30-50 percent mortality rate.
The microbes that cause it are often resistant to antibiotics, and spread fast.
If the invention is shown to be safe for humans, "patients could be treated with our bio-spleen and this will physically clean up their blood, rapidly removing a wide spectrum of live pathogens as well as dead fragments and toxins from the blood," study co-author Donald Ingber told AFP.
The cleansed blood is then returned to the circulatory system.
"This treatment could be carried out even before the pathogen has been formally identified and the optimal antibiotic treatment has been chosen," said Ingber, of Harvard University, Massachusetts.
The MBL protein is known to bind to the Ebola virus "and so it potentially might be useful for treatment of these patients," said Ingber in an email exchange.
"We potentially could treat patients with this bio-spleen during the most infectious, viraemic phase of the disease and reduce the amount of virus in their blood."
MBL has also been reported to bind to the Marburg and HIV viruses.
In live rats infected with the notorious bugs Staphylococcus aureus or Escherichia coli, the device removed 90 percent of bacteria from the blood, said the study.
"When we injected rats with a lethal dose of LPS endotoxin (a bacteria type)... we found that we could significantly improve animal survival" with the bio-spleen, it said.
Tests with human blood in the lab also showed the bio-spleen cleaned out multiple species of bacteria, fungi and toxins.
Years of testing in larger animals and then in humans lie ahead before the bio-spleen can be approved, Ingber cautioned.
Brazil is building a giant observation tower in the heart of the Amazon to monitor climate change and its impact on the region's sensitive ecosystem, a newspaper reported Sunday.
The Amazon Tall Tower Observatory (ATTO) is a project of Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research and Germany's Max Planck Institute, O Estado de Sao Paulo said.
The tower, which will rise 325 meters (over 1,000 feet) from the ground, will be equipped with high-tech instruments and an observatory to monitor relationships between the jungle and the atmosphere.
It will gather data on heat, water, carbon gas, winds, cloud formation, carbon absorption and weather patterns.
The ATTO project has been seven years in the making, with a site finally being selected far from any human presence, about 100 miles (170 kilometers) from Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas, project coordinator Antonio Manzi told the newspaper.
The steel structure has been transported to the site on trucks and rafts from southern Brazil, nearly 2,500 miles away.
The Amazon jungle is one of the world's most sensitive ecosystems, with a powerful influence on the atmospheric release or intake of carbon.
"The tower will help us answer innumerable questions related to global climate change," said Paulo Artaxo, a project coordinator from the University of Sao Paulo.
"We will gain a better understanding of the role of the Amazon and other humid tropical areas in climate models."
Tiny marine algae can evolve fast enough to cope with climate change in a sign that some ocean life may be more resilient than thought to rising temperatures and acidification, a study showed.
Evolution is usually omitted in scientific projections of how global warming will affect the planet in coming decades because genetic changes happen too slowly to help larger creatures such as cod, tuna or whales.
Sunday's study found that a type of microscopic algae that can produce 500 generations a year - or more than one a day - can still thrive when exposed to warmer temperatures and levels of ocean acidification predicted for the mid-2100s.
The Emiliania huxleyi phytoplankton studied are a main source of food for fish and other ocean life and also absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow. Their huge blooms can sometimes be seen from space.
"Evolutionary processes need to be considered when predicting the effects of a warming and acidifying ocean on phytoplankton," according to the German-led study in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Thorsten Reusch, an author of Sunday's study at the GEOMAR Helmholtz-Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, cautioned the findings about were only for one species of algae in a laboratory test, in water with no predators or disease.
He said it was not an argument that global warming was less serious than expected. Longer-lived creatures, from fish to shellfish, would not be able to evolve their way out of trouble.
A U.N. panel of scientists says that man-made greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere are warming the planet. And carbon dioxide, the main gas, turns into a weak acid when it dissolves in water, slowly acidifying the oceans.
Last year, a study by 540 experts said that acidification was a silent storm in the oceans and threatening life from coral reefs to fish stocks. It said the seas could become 170 percent more acidic by 2100 compared to levels before the Industrial Revolution.
Sunday's study showed that algae, taken from water 15 degrees C (59 Fahrenheit) warm off Norway, tended to evolve to a smaller size in higher temperatures in experiments lasting more than a year but also grew faster, producing a larger mass overall.
Stephen Palumbi, a professor of biology at Stanford University, said there was evidence that some coral reefs or sea urchins could be more resilient than expected to ocean changes.
"What we don't know is how far these mechanisms will go. I suspect personally that they will not solve the future climate problem because climate is changing far too fast."
"But perhaps these abilities will give some important marine life a few more decades than we previously thought," he said.
A U.N. panel of scientists says it is at least 95 percent probable that manmade emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause of global warming since 1950, causing more heatwaves, droughts and rising sea levels.
Opinion polls, however, indicate that many voters believe that natural variations are to blame. The mismatch between scientific and public opinion complicates a plan by almost 200 governments to work out a deal to limit global warming at a summit in late 2015 in Paris.
(Reporting By Alister Doyle; Editing by Rosalind Russell)
Everything is made of something. Take away concrete, glass, textiles, metal, and the other materials from our lives and we are left naked, shivering in a muddy field. The sophistication of our lives is in a large part bestowed by material wealth, we would quickly revert to animal behaviour without the stuff of our civilisation: what makes us human is our clothes, our homes, our cities, our things, which we animate through our customs and language. This becomes very apparent if you ever visit a disaster zone. Thus the material world is not just a display of our technology and culture, it is part of us, we invented it, we made it and it makes us who we are.
The fundamental importance of materials is made clear from the naming of ages of civilisations – the stone, iron and bronze ages – with each new era being brought about by a new material. Iron and steel were the defining materials of the Victorian era, allowing engineers to give full rein to their dreams of creating suspension bridges, railways, steam engines and passenger liners. Isambard Kingdom Brunel used them as a manifesto to transform the landscape and sow the seeds of modernism. The 20th century is often hailed as the age of silicon, after the breakthrough in materials science that ushered in the silicon chip and the information revolution. Yet a kaleidoscope of other new materials also revolutionised modern living. Architects took mass-produced sheet glass and combined it with structural steel to produce skyscrapers that invented a new type of city life. Plastics transformed our homes and dress. Polymers were used to produce celluloid and ushered in a new visual culture, the cinema. The development of aluminium alloys and nickel superalloys enabled us to fly cheaply and accelerated the collision of cultures. Medical and dental ceramics allowed us to rebuild ourselves and redefine disability and ageing – and as the term "plastic surgery" implies, materials are often the key to new treatments used to repair our faculties (hip replacements) or enhance our features (silicone implants for breast enlargement).
My obsession with materials started as a teenager. I was puzzled by their obscurity, despite being all around us. How many people can spot the difference between aluminium and steel? Woods are clearly different from one another, but how many people can say why? Plastics are confusing; who knows the difference between polythene and polypropylene? Eventually I enrolled in a degree at Oxford University's material science department, went on to do a PhD in jet engine alloys and am now professor of materials and society and director of the Institute of Making at University College London. On my journey I have found a hidden world of makers who create the stuff on which we all rely, from aircraft manufacturers to clothing makers. Materials are at the heart of every company I visit and it is hard not to conclude that although Google and Twitter may dominate technology headlines, and cosmologists may be most popular with the media, materials transformation is still what makes the world go around.
Starting next week in a new series of columns for Observer Tech Monthly I am going to tell the story of stuff. Each month I will pick a different material and uncover the human needs and desires that brought it into being, and decode the materials science and engineering behind it. Along the way, we will find that the real differences between materials are deep below the surface, a world that is shut off from most unless they have access to sophisticated scientific equipment. So to understand materiality is necessarily a journey into the inner space of materials. Pretty much the whole of materials science is concerned with the microscopic worlds. Doing so explains why some materials smell and others are odourless; why some can last for 1,000 years and others crumble in the sun; how some glass can be bulletproof, while a wine glass shatters at the slightest impact. The journey into this microscopic world reveals the science behind our food, our clothes, our gadgets, our jewellery, and of course our bodies.
Take for example, a piece of thread, which exists at the same scale as hair. It is a synthetic structure at the limit of our eyesight that has allowed us to make ropes, blankets, carpets, but most importantly, clothes. Textiles are one of the earliest synthetic materials; when we wear a pair of jeans we are wearing a miniature woven structure, the design of which is older than Stonehenge. Clothes have kept us warm and protected for all of recorded history, as well keeping us fashionable. But they are hi-tech too. In the 20th century we learnt how to make space suits from textiles strong enough to protect astronauts on the moon as well as solid textiles for artificial limbs called carbon fibre composites.
But there is more to materials than the science. Those who make things all have a different understanding of the practical, emotional and sensual aspect of their materials. For instance, we know the sounds of the doors in our houses, and can distinguish between someone leaving or entering from the subtle differences in keys rattling and hinges creaking. As a child I could always tell whether it was my mother or my father coming up the stairs, from the subtle differences in the sound of the creaky stairs. These acoustic personalities of buildings are often overlooked during the design process. Carpet makes a room feel warmer but also changes the acoustic signature of the room. The clickity-clack of high heels and the party they announce are muted; the squeak of rubber tennis soles and the sport they anticipate is banished; the comforting solid thump of sensible shoes on their way to work is no longer proclaimed. Installing carpet is a kind of auditory gag, which may of course be used intentionally for that purpose such as when designers want to create a sense of intimacy and calm. It is this diversity of material knowledge that I intend to capture in these columns.
Because materials are built from atoms, we cannot avoid talking aboutthe rules that govern them, which are described by quantum mechanics. This means that as we enter the atomic world, we must abandon commonsense, and talk instead of wave functions and electron states. More materials are being designed from scratch at this scale, and can perform seemingly impossible tasks. Silicon chips designed using quantum mechanics have already brought about the information age. Silicon is now changing the way we light our homes (light emitting diodes) and harvest energy from the sun (solar cells).
The central idea behind materials science is that changes at invisibly small scales manifest themselves as changes in a material's behaviour at the human scale. It is this process that our ancestors stumbled upon to make bronze and steel, even though they did not have the microscopes to see what they were doing – an amazing achievement. When you hit a piece of metal you are not just changing its shape, you are changing the inner structure of the metal, which is why metals get harder when you hit them. Our ancestors knew this from experience but didn't know why. Nevertheless this gradual accumulation of knowledge got us to the 20th century before any real appreciation of the structure of materials was understood. In these columns I will be championing this skill of making. This is not just because it is the hallmark of human civilisation but because the deindustrialisation of the developed world has devalued making.
Making is not just an economic activity, it is the equal of literature, performance or mathematics as a form of human expression. By eschewing material knowledge we cease to understand the world around us. We wring our hands about climate change or urban sprawl without any recognition that our ignorance of materiality might be the cause. We feel proud of the technological marvel that is a smartphone, and yet we upgrade – ditch one for a newer model – at the first opportunity. We may assuage our conscience by hoping that they are recycled with some technology equal in sophistication to their fabrication techniques but they are not; most are disposed of in industrial blenders.
The ages of civilisation are named after materials precisely because they transformed and shaped society. By distancing ourselves from the act of making,by buying and consuming stuff but never having any experience of their manufacture, the developed world finds itself not to be the illiterate society that education ministers fear, but an unmakerly society. In my view this practical ignorance is every bit as dangerous to a modern democracy as a lack of literacy. By swapping a material and industrial understanding of the world for one based on facts and information, we find ourselves uncivilised in a different way.
This series of columns won't be an exhaustive survey of materials, nor a catalogue of the most important ones. But I will aim to capture the fabric of our lives through materiality. After all, everything is made of something.
Some of the most visually stunning sequences from director James Cameron's blockbuster movie "Avatar" involved graceful flying creatures that were ridden by blue human-like beings facing ecological destruction on a moon called Pandora.
It turns out that an animal very similar to those "Avatar" creatures, called Ikran, actually did exist here on Earth long ago.
Scientists on Thursday announced the discovery of fossils in China of a new species of flying reptile called a pterosaur that lived 120 millions years ago and so closely resembled the creatures from the 2009 film that they named it after them.
It is called Ikrandraco avatar, meaning "Ikran dragon" from "Avatar." And this pterosaur is noteworthy for more than just its resemblance to a movie creature.
The scientists said it appears that Ikrandraco avatar had a throat pouch similar to that of a pelican. It probably fed on small fish from freshwater lakes, flying low over the water and catching prey by skimming its lower jaw into the water, they said. It may have stored the fish in the pouch, they added.
This Cretaceous Period pterosaur boasted an unusual blade-like crest on its lower jaw like the one on the movie creatures.
"The head structure is similar in this pterosaur to the Ikran in 'Avatar,'" said one of the researchers, paleontologist Xiaolin Wang of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
"Of course, nobody and nothing can ride this pterosaur," Wang added.
Another of the researchers, paleontologist Alexander Kellner of Brazil's National Museum at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, joked: "Please, (there were) no blue hominids during the Cretaceous."
Ikrandraco avatar, whose fossils were unearthed in China's Liaoning province, boasted a wingspan of about 8 feet (2.5 meters), Kellner said.
It did not have a crest on the top of its elongated head as many pterosaurs did. Behind the lower jaw crest was a hook-like structure that appears to have been the anchor point for the throat pouch, Kellner said. It had relatively small teeth good for snaring small fish.
It lived in a warm region teeming with life, with feathered dinosaurs, birds, mammals, frogs, turtles and other animals along with a variety of trees and other plants, Wang said.
The researchers studied fossils of two specimens of Ikrandraco avatar.
Pterosaurs were Earth's first flying vertebrates, with birds and bats making their appearances later. They thrived from about 220 million years ago to 65 million years ago, when they were wiped out by the asteroid that also doomed the dinosaurs.
The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Vincent van Gogh's "Sunflowers" are losing their yellow cheer and the unsettling apricot horizon in Edvard Munch's "The Scream" is turning a dull ivory.
Some of our most treasured paintings are fading, warn experts who would like more money for the use of sophisticated technology to capture the masters' original palettes before the works are unrecognisably blighted.
"Our cultural heritage is suffering from a disease," Robert van Langh, director of conservation and restoration at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, told AFP in Paris this week.
"These priceless icons of our culture are deteriorating," he said. And the amount spent on conserving them "should be multiplied by ten."
Van Langh was speaking on the sidelines of a conference on the use of synchrotron radiation technology in art conservation at the molecular level.
Synchrotrons, stadium-sized machines that produce beams of bright X-ray light, are used to analyse the chemical degradation of famous artworks gracing the museums of the world.
Much more science is needed to understand the chemical reactions that cause colour changes in canvases, in order to stop them, said Jennifer Mass, an art conservationist from Winterthur Museum in Delaware, who also attended the meeting.
"There are heaps of researchers ready to do this work, but very little money."
Understanding the degenerative process would allow museums to display the precious works in the appropriate light, atmosphere and humidity.
But technology would also allow "digital reconstruction" of original pieces, as they were envisaged by their creators, for posterity.
"The goal is more preservation than restoration," said Mass, adding that restorers would only in very rare cases touch up the original work of an artist.
- Fading like a flower -
Experts already know that the iconic still life "Sunflowers" is browner today than when van Gogh captured it on canvas in 1888.
It turns out the Dutch Impressionist painter had opted for industrial pigments, then new on the market, for his yellows, according to Belgian chemist Koen Janssens of the University of Antwerp.
Exposed to air, the yellow in cadmium, also used by Munch for his 1910 work "The Scream", loses its brightness, while ultraviolet light -- as from the Sun -- turns it brown.
Janssens has also worked on van Gogh's famous "Flowers in a Blue Vase", which has suffered a similar fate but for a different reason.
In this case, it was a varnish applied after the artist's death that became cracked and faded over time, obscuring the picture underneath.
Synthetic pigments like cadmium yellow, emerald green and zinc yellow -- some of which can start losing their depth of colour in only 20 years -- were also popular among other Impressionists of the 19th century and painters of the early 20th like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
The works from this period are therefore more at risk of fading than those by the ancient masters, said Mass.
They are not exempt, though -- for his blue hues the 17th century's Rembrandt van Rijn used smalt, a type of ground-up glass with a tendency to turn grey over time.
According to Janssens, a further role of science could be to beat the drum for art conservation.
"As researchers, we are working on a simulation that will allow us to show what certain artworks will look like in 50 years," if nothing is done, he said.
"If we don't act, future generations will not see these artworks in the same way that we are," warned van Langh.
A new study reveals that microorganisms inhabiting areas of almost all human bodies produce substances that could be used in a wide array of medications, from antibiotics to chemotherapy drugs.
Scientists say that they have only scratched the surface, however, when it comes to body microbes that produce useful compounds.
Nature quoted microbiologist Marc Ouellette, from the University of Laval's Hospital Centre (CHUL) in Quebec, Canada, who said the team who did the research has "shown that there is a huge diverse potential of the microbiome for producing antimicrobial molecules."
The study was published by a University of California, San Francisco team led by microbiologist Michael Fischbach. Fischbach and his team have been attempting to determine exactly how the teeming biome of bacteria that inhabit the human body affect our health. The relationship has so far proven to be highly complex and difficult to pin down.
The team began with a small group of molecules which they knew to produce substances that are useful as drugs. They then constructed a computer model designed to detect organisms in the human microbiome with similar genetic structures.
The computer returned thousands of results, some of which produce compounds that are markedly similar to pharmaceuticals that are already being tested in clinical trials, like a class of antibiotics called thiopeptides.
Fischbach toldNature, "We used to think that drugs were discovered by drug companies and prescribed by a physician and then they get to you. What we’ve found here is that bacteria that live on and inside of humans are doing an end-run around that process; they make drugs right on your body.”
Fischbach's team isolated one such thiopeptide is produced by a bacteria commonly found in the vagina. The vaginally-derived thiopeptide killed the same types of bacteria as the pharmaceutical compounds, including Staphylococcus aureus, which causes skin and other infections.
Rob Knight, a microbial ecologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Nature, "To my knowledge, this is the first work that isolates new compounds with strong drug potential from the human microbiome. This work provides an exciting platform for mining our microbiomes for new compounds of medical interest.”
Fischbach said that the antibiotic-producing microbe is just the beginning of what he believes the microbiome will yield when closely studied.
"People are eager to learn what exactly helpful bacteria are doing,” he said. “Nobody had anticipated that they have the capability to make so many different kinds of drugs. I don’t think this is the only thing they do, but it’s a big thing.”
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Scientists have found that the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko -- the target of study for the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission -- can be divided into several regions, each characterized by different classes of features. High-resolution images of the comet reveal a unique, multifaceted world. ESA's Rosetta spacecraft arrived at…
One person takes their own life every 40 seconds, equating to 803,900 deaths across the world every year, according to the first World Health Organization report on suicide prevention released today. “Preventing Suicide: A Global Imperative” calls for co-ordinated action to reduce suicide worldwide.
Diego De Leo, director of the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention at Griffith University, who was involved in the preparation of the report, said there had not been any previous reports because suicide was an example of negative behaviour rather than a disease, so it did not fall within the jurisdiction of an international entity.
“But this is a fundamental step before we can begin on worldwide suicide prevention,” he said.
The report shows suicide is the second-leading cause of death among 15- to 29-year-olds across the world.
Professorial fellow in mental health at the University of Melbourne, Tony Jorm, said suicide stands out in this group because the general death rate is quite low in the young.
“If you’re dealing with older people you get cancer and heart disease as major causes of death but these are very rare in young people because they’re physically healthy,” he said.
But De Leo added that this was the age when people had to build their lives and that, coupled with a lack of experience, made them more vulnerable.
The report also showed men were more likely to die by suicide than women, especially in developed countries where they were three times more likely to die at their own hands.
Male: female ratio of suicide by age group and income-level of country, 2012.
WHO
Jorm said suicidal thoughts among women were more common in developed countries, but men were more likely to act on such feelings and thoughts.
“Men tend to be more impulsive than women so they are more likely to die by suicide,” he said. “They’re also more likely to use lethal methods so they’re more likely to die on their first attempt.”
De Leo added that in poor countries, the number of women who died by suicide was often higher.
“In many developing countries, young women of marital age are subject to a lot of pressure,” he said. “They may be forced into marriages that they’re not able to tolerate or face abuse that may render their life hell so their suicide rate is higher.”
Jorm said differences in suicide rates reflected social expectations and gender roles that needed to be looked at on a country-by-country basis, and socioeconomic issues also played a role.
“In Japan, for instance, the global financial crisis and its impact on unemployment had a drastic effect on the suicide rate in males,” he said. “There are a whole lot of specific factors in particular countries that are important, and then there are very general things across countries.”
Global suicides by age and income level of country, 2012.
WHO
The report lists a number of measures that governments can take to prevent suicide including responsible media reporting of suicide, policies to reduce harmful alcohol use, follow-up care for people who have attempted suicide, and restricting access to the means of suicide.
“A New Zealand study found that shifting the car park at a jumping point back further so you had to walk to the point reduced the suicide rate from that spot because people had time to reflect,” Jorm noted.
“If people are going to do it impulsively because something bad has happened, and if they don’t have the means readily available, suicidal thoughts are more likely to reduce. But if people have a long-term plan and are feeling suicidal over a long period, it might be quite a different situation.”
De Leo said suicide prevention needed a whole-of-society approach.
“We need education, employment, social welfare – all working together in a coordinated manner. Then you may reduce the impact of financial difficulties, relationship problems and unemployment and all the other things that lead to suicide,” he said.
Jorm agreed.
“You need to look at factors in society that place people in distressing long-term adverse circumstances and reduce those,” said Jorm. “But you also need to work at mental disorders because people can feel suicidal when they are not in those adverse situations. There are internal and external factors and you have to target both.”
If you have depression or feel very low, please seek support immediately. For support in a crisis, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 in Australia. For information about depression and suicide prevention, visit beyondblue, Sane or The Samaritans.
