Squat Lobster and other new species discovered

A ‘Rasta’, a ‘Wee Scots’, and a ‘Squat Lobster’: three new and unusual discoveries revealed by a NIWA deep-sea marine biodiversity survey.

The finds include a coral genus Narella and nicknamed ‘Rasta’ because of its long white dreadlock-like branches; a tiny ‘Squat Lobster’ measuring 1 cm across; and some specimens of sea urchin which are commonly known as Tam O’Shanters due to their similarity to the Scottish hat.

A recent deepsea survey of seamounts on the Chatham Rise found species some of which have never been recorded in the region and some of which may be new to science. This has increased the total number of species known to exist in the New Zealand region.

“There are three new corals that we are confident are new species from the area” says National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) Deepwater Scientist, Di Tracey.

In an eighteen day voyage in June this year, NIWA’s research vessel Tangaroa explored several groups of seamounts (underwater hills and mountains) on the Chatham Rise. This area stretches for 1000 kilometres from near the South Island eastwards to the Chatham Islands.

It is estimated that there are over 100,000 seamounts worldwide. They can be ecologically valuable as hotspots of biodiversity and economically valuable and they are often the target of commercial fishing.

via New species discovered on Chatham Rise expedition.

Squat Lobster! A great new insult appears around the world for babysitters everywhere: “Give me back my iPod you little Squat Lobster, or I’m going to tell your mother that you …”  Or perhaps a band name.

Ricin ‘antidote’ to be produced

An anti-toxin that protects against ricin poisoning is to move into production for the first time.

It is the result of eight years of work by researchers at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory based at Porton Down in Wiltshire.

The antidote can protect against death up to 24 hours after exposure, according to Dr Jane Holley from DSTL.

Security experts say ricin – roughly 1,000 times more toxic than cyanide – could be used in a bio-terror attack.

Dr Holley told BBC News: “In the past there has been lots of research carried out using different methods. But this is the first [anti-toxin] that has been moved into production.

The principal scientist in biomedical sciences at DSTL added: “It is anticipated that a product will be available for use in the next couple of years.”

Ricin is extracted from castor beans, which are processed throughout the world to make castor oil. The toxin is part of the waste “mash” produced when castor oil is made.

It can cause harm if injected, swallowed or inhaled. A tiny amount can be lethal, but the amount needed to kill depends on the route of administration.

A combination of pulmonary, liver, renal and immunological failure can lead to death, though people can recover from exposure. …

Although the anti-toxin developed at Porton Down was initially intended for use by the military, DSTL scientists are investigating its potential use in a civilian environment.

Production of the anti-toxin involves immunising sheep with an inactive form of ricin, which results in the production of antibodies. These are proteins used by the immune system to neutralise harmful substances.

The antibodies are then harvested from the sheep to produce a freeze-dried product. This is reconstituted with water for injection into the body.

Dr Holley said that although the anti-toxin is ready to be manufactured, full licensing is likely to take about five years. ….

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Ricin ‘antidote’ to be produced.

First film of a giant stingray

It is one of the rarest giants of the ocean, and it has been caught on film for the first time.

An underwater camera crew filming for the BBC has recorded a smalleye stingray swimming off the coast of Mozambique.

The smalleye stingray is the largest of all 70 species of stingray, attaining widths of more than 2m.

The elusive creature, first discovered in 1908, has only ever been seen alive off Tofo in southern Mozambique.

Rare sight

Stingrays are cartilaginous fish that are related to sharks.

They occur is marine, freshwater and estuarine habitats and vary in size from the dwarf whipray (Himantura walga), which measures just 24cm wide, to the smooth or short-tail stingray (Dasyatis brevicaudata) which can grow over 2m wide.

However, the smalleye stingray (D. microps) is the largest of all, able to grow to a width of 2.2m.

Specimens have been caught in waters around Australia, Thailand, Malaysia and The Philippines, as well as in various places in the Indian Ocean, including with the Ganges River estuary.

But live smalleye stingrays have only been recorded off Tofo, a beach in southern Mozambique that lies 425km north of South Africa and 820km west of the southern tip of Madagascar.

Several live sightings have been made by resident biologists Dr Andrea Marshall and Dr Simon Pierce of the Manta Ray and Whale Shark Research Centre based at Tofo Beach.

Film of a live specimen was recorded by an underwater film crew working for independent production company Big Wave productions, which was making a documentary about manta rays with Dr Marshall.

The footage was shot as part of the programme “Andrea: Queen of the Mantas” for the BBC documentary series Natural World, which will be broadcast on BBC Two at 2000GMT on Wednesday 11 November.

via BBC – Earth News – First film of a ‘giant’ stingray.

Warm-blooded dinosaurs worked up a sweat

Were dinosaurs “warm-blooded” like present-day mammals and birds, or “cold-blooded” like present day lizards? The implications of this simple-sounding question go beyond deciding whether or not you’d snuggle up to a dinosaur on a cold winter’s evening.

In a study published this week in the journal PLoS ONE, a team of researchers, including Herman Pontzer, Ph.D., assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has found strong evidence that many dinosaur species were probably warm-blooded.

If dinosaurs were endothermic (warm-blooded) they would have had the potential for athletic abilities rivalling those of present day birds and mammals, and possibly similar quick thinking and complicated behaviours as well¬. Their internal furnace would have enabled them to live in colder habitats that would kill ectotherms (cold-blooded animals), such as high mountain ranges and the polar regions, allowing them to cover the entire Mesozoic landscape. These advantages would have come at a cost, however; endothermic animals require much more food than their ectothermic counterparts because their rapid metabolisms fatally malfunction if they cool down too much, and so a constant supply of fuel is required.

Pontzer worked with colleagues John R. Hutchinson and Vivian Allen from the Structure and Motion Laboratory at the Royal Veterinary College, UK, to bring a combination of simple measurements, rigorous computer modeling techniques and their knowledge of physiology in present-day animals to bear in a new study on this hot topic. Using their combined experience, the authors set out to determine whether a variety of dinosaurs and closely related extinct animals were endothermic or ectothermic, and when, where and how often in the dinosaur family tree this important trait may have evolved.

“It’s exciting to apply our studies of living animals back to the fossil record to test different evolutionary scenarios,” Pontzer said. “I work on the evolution of human locomotion, using studies of living humans and other animals to figure out the gait and efficiency of our earliest fossil ancestors. When I realized this approach could be applied to the dinosaur record, I contacted John Hutchinson, an expert on dinosaur locomotion, and suggested we collaborate on this project. Our results provide strong evidence that many dinosaur species were probably warm-blooded. The debate on this issue will no doubt continue, but we hope our study will add a useful new line of evidence.”

via Warm-blooded dinosaurs worked up a sweat.

‘Escaped’ proteins add to hearing loss in elderly

Age-related hearing loss is the most common sensory disorder among the elderly. But scientists are still trying to figure out what cellular processes govern or contribute to the loss.

Now a University of Florida team and researchers from University of Wisconsin and three other institutions have identified a protein that is central to processes that cause oxidative damage to cells and lead to age-related hearing loss.

The findings help point the way toward a new target for antioxidant therapies and will be published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One theory of aging holds that free radicals damage components of mitochondria, the energy center of cells. Such damage accumulates over time, leading to a destabilization of the mitochondria, which leads to release of certain proteins.

“Within the mitochondria these proteins cause life, but when they’re out they’re deadly,” professor Christiaan Leeuwenburgh, Ph.D., chief of the biology of aging division at UF’s College of Medicine and a member of the Institute on Aging.

The cell death triggered by the escaped proteins lead to physical effects we associate with aging, such as hearing loss.

More than 40 percent of people in the United States older than 65 suffer from age-related hearing loss, according to data from the National Health Survey. It is estimated that the condition will affect more than 28 million Americans by 2030.

“Because of the high prevalence of this disorder, AHL is a major social and health problem,” said Shinichi Someya, first author of the paper and a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Tomas Prolla of University of Wisconsin.

Age-related hearing loss involves the death of certain sensory hair, nerve and membrane cells in the inner ear. Since the hair and nerve cells do not regenerate in humans, their death leads to permanent hearing loss.

One protein called Bak is known to play a role in the weakening of the mitochondrial membrane. The more of the protein present, the leakier the mitochondrial membrane becomes, allowing harmful proteins to travel out into the rest of the cell.

Bak is typically induced by oxidative stress and its levels increase as people age. The researchers wanted to see whether its absence would prevent the age-related hearing loss that is associated with the death of certain sensory hair, nerve and membrane cells in the inner ear.

Hearing tests showed that Bak-deficient middle-aged mice were found to have hearing levels comparable to that of young mice. In addition, fewer of the critical hearing cells died, compared with so-called wild type mice that did not have the protein deficiency.

To examine how resistant the inner ear cells of the Bak-deficient mice were, the researchers exposed cells to a chemical that causes oxidative stress. Such stress generally induces Bak expression in inner ear cells.

There was only minor loss of cochlear cells at all doses of the stressor chemical, in contrast with the level observed in wild-type animals. The researchers concluded that Bak promotes cochlear cell death in response to oxidative stress.

“This paper clearly shows us that oxidative stress causes hearing loss,” said Jinze Xu, a postdoctoral fellow in Leeuwenburgh’s group, and second author of the paper.

So if oxidative stress triggers damage and death of hearing-related cells, enhancing the antioxidant defenses of the mitochondria should reduce such damage.

The researchers found that both in animals that had excess amounts of an enzyme that scavenges reactive oxygen species, as well as in those who were fed certain antioxidants orally, onset of age-related hearing loss was delayed.

“It looks like a viable biological target that may be applicable to drug use,” Leeuwenburgh said. “The issue is always timing — when to start antioxidant interventions at what combination and what dose.”

Caloric restriction, another way to reduce oxidative damage, has previously been shown to extend life and prevent age-related hearing loss in the type of mice used in the study. With the new findings, the investigators propose that one of the ways that restriction of calories acts is by reducing the level of cell death that is induced by the protein Bak.

“This extends research into life extension by caloric restriction into a whole new area that hasn’t been looked at before,” said Huber Warner, Ph.D., associate dean for research a University of Minnesota College of Biological Sciences and former director of the biology of aging program at the National Institute on Aging, who was not involved in the study. “The work shows that rather than caloric restriction just having an overall effect on metabolism of nutrients, bak modulation can have segmental effects on particular physical systems that have age-related problems in humans.”

via ‘Escaped’ proteins add to hearing loss in elderly, UF researchers find.

Frigid Antarctica Loaded with Viruses

Antarctica’s icy lakes are home to a surprisingly diverse community of viruses, including some that were previously unidentified, a new study finds.

At first glance, Antarctica’s freshwater lakes don’t seem very hospitable to life. They remain frozen for a good nine months out of the year, and they contain very few nutrients. Some of these lakes have little animal life and are dominated by microorganisms, including algae, bacteria, protozoans and viruses.

With few animal and microbial predators around, viruses likely play an important role in controlling the abundance of other microorganisms, the researcher say. However, these viruses have been historically hard to study since many cannot be grown in a laboratory. But thanks to new genome sequencing technology, scientists can identify viruses without needing to grow them.

“We are just starting to uncover the world of viruses, and this is changing the way we think about viruses and the role they play in microbial ecosystems,” said Antonio Alcami, a researcher from the Spanish Research Council.

A virus is little more than a package of DNA surrounded by a capsule structure. To survive, viruses must hijack, or infect, living cells and use the host’s equipment to replicate.

Alcami and his colleagues analyzed DNA from viruses found in water samples collected from Antarctica’s Lake Limnopolar, a surface lake on Livingston Island. They found nearly 10,000 species, including some small DNA viruses that had never before been identified. In total, the viruses were from 12 different families, some of which may be completely new to science, the researchers suggest.

The results reveal this Antarctic lake supports a virus community that’s more diverse than most aquatic environments studied in the world so far — a surprising find considering that the polar region is generally thought to have low biological diversity due to the extreme environmental conditions. The scientists speculate the newly discovered viruses may have adapted specifically to thrive in such harsh conditions.

via Frigid Antarctica Loaded with Viruses | LiveScience.

Perhaps they survived from a previous civilization that was wiped out by an ice age.

BBC: Penis tissue replaced in the lab

Tissue created in a laboratory has been used to completely replace the erectile tissue of the penis in animals.

The advance raises hopes of being able to restore full function to human penises that have been damaged by injury or disease.

Rabbits given the engineered tissue by the scientists from Wake Forest University in North Carolina had normal sexual function and produced offspring.

The study appears online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor Anthony Atala said: “Further studies are required, of course, but our results are encouraging and suggest that the technology has considerable potential for patients who need penile reconstruction.

“Our hope is that patients with congenital abnormalities, penile cancer, traumatic injury and some cases of erectile dysfunction will benefit from this technology in the future.”

Reconstructing damaged or diseased penile erectile tissue is a tough challenge because of the tissue’s complex structure and function. …

via BBC NEWS | Health | Penis tissue replaced in the lab.

 

Nanoparticles damage DNA at a distance

Lab tests show that metal nanoparticles can affect DNA without actually coming into contact with it – though the results are difficult to extrapolate to the human body

Nanoparticles of metal can damage the DNA inside cells even if there is no direct contact between them, scientists have found. The discovery provides an insight into how the particles might exert their influence inside the body and points to possible new ways to deliver medical treatments.

The preliminary work also raises questions about the safety of nanoparticles – which are a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair and used in everything from sunscreens to electronics – though the researchers point out that the doses they used in their study were higher than anything a person might come into contact with.

They also said it was difficult to extrapolate results from their laboratory tests to the human body.

In the experiment, scientists from the University of Bristol grew a layer of cells and exposed one side to cobalt-chromium nanoparticles. On the other side of this cellular barrier were human cells called fibroblasts. Though the nanoparticles never crossed the cellular barrier, they managed to damage the DNA of the fibrolasts via a cascade of biological signals in the intervening cells.

“We imagined a possibility that, in some way, that material had caused a change in the top cell layer and maybe there’s some sort of signalling going on from the top cell to the middle cell to the bottom cell,” said Patrick Case of the University of Bristol, who led the work.

Case’s team found that the DNA in the fibrolasts had around 10 times as much damage, in terms of breaks in the genetic material, compared with control conditions. DNA damage can lead to various diseases, including cancer, but Case said the changes observed in his experiments did not lead him to believe the fibrolasts were becoming cancerous.

The research team deliberately exposed the barrier cells in their experiment to a dose of nanoparticles thousands of times higher than anything that would occur naturally. “We used high doses of them because we wanted to make sure that the dose we used would cause damage to cells if the cells were exposed. When we measured the damage on the other side of the barrier, to our great surprise, not only did we see damage on the other side of the barrier but we saw as much damage as if we’d not had the barrier at all and had put the materials in contact with the cells underneath.”

via Nanoparticles could damage DNA at a distance | Science | guardian.co.uk.

Research shows how to pay sleep debt

Chronic sleep deprivation is a given for most Americans. But paying off a sleep debt is not as simple as sleeping late on a Saturday.

In studies over the years, scientists have found that it can take a week or more for the cognitive and physiological consequences of poor sleep to wear off — even after increasing sleep.

In a study at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 2003, for example, scientists examined the cognitive effects of a week of poor sleep, followed by three days of sleeping at least eight hours a night. The scientists found that the “recovery” sleep did not fully reverse declines in performance on a test of reaction times and other psychomotor tasks, especially for subjects who had been forced to sleep only three or five hours a night.

In a similar study in 2008, scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that when subjects slept four hours a night over five days, and then “recovered” with eight hours a night over the following week, they still showed slight residual cognitive impairments a week later, even though they reported no sleepiness.

But in another study, also at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, scientists found that people recovered much more quickly from a week of poor sleep when it was preceded by a “banking” week that included nights with 10 hours of shuteye. In other words, if you know you have a week of little sleep ahead of you, try loading up on sleep beforehand, not simply afterward.

via Really? – The Claim – A Person Can Pay Off a Sleep Debt by Sleeping Late on Weekends – Question – NYTimes.com.

Octopus communicates with Psychedelic Color Language

Watch one of the world’s most fascinating creature performing a stunning dance of immediate self-enfoldment, color and surface texture change.

Wave upon wave of bright yellow, white, brown and vermilion flashing neon-like on its burly body. Nature indeed performs its miracles in wondrous and mysterious way!

Cuttlefish, like squid, octopuses and nautiluses, are marine animals belonging to the Cephalopoda class. Studies indicate that cuttlefish are among the most intelligent invertebrate species. They hunt small shrimps in the daylight, changing its external appearance to that of a silt-covered stone before striking out.

via Octopus communicates with Psychedelic Color Language | Erotica…Art…Stories…Photos….