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April 29, 2016
Explore Chernobyl In 360° Vision 30 Years On From The Nuclear Disaster
Photo credit:
This documentary is the first of its kind. Eight Photo/Shutterstock
It’s now been 30 years since the world’s worst nuclear disaster took place at Chernobyl, Pripyat, in what is now Ukraine. It used to be a bustling Soviet metropolis of over 50,000 people, but a meltdown at the nearby nuclear power station forced them to quickly evacuate.
Astronaut Moviemakers Share Their Views of a Beautiful Planet
Astronauts—not cinematographers—captured the stunning visuals in the new IMAX movie, A Beautiful Planet: gorgeous views of Earth shot from the International Space Station (ISS), often with parts of the station visible in the frame. Sweeping vistas of continents at night—when webs of light reveal a human presence that is almost impossible to detect during the day—contrast with inside scenes of an ISS that is crammed with equipment but somehow looks almost homey, as described by the narrating astronauts. Both threads come together in the 45-minute film, which depicts life in space to make a powerful point about taking care of Earth.
“It was originally going to be a look at the Earth,” explains the film’s cinematographer James Neihouse. “But one of the things NASA always needs is a reason to be. So we could make the film from that point of view, using the space station as this platform to observe the Earth.”
Highlighting the ISS also helped further one of the film’s core messages: Just as the craft enables astronauts to live in space in exchange for continual maintenance and care, Earth is humanity’s equivalent of a space station and needs to be treated in the same manner. “I wanted to use the analogy of the ISS being a closed system that needs to be maintained in a very careful way, that resources are very limited,” says producer–director Toni Myers. “I wanted to convey to the audience that Earth is basically the same—although Earth doesn’t get any resupply ships.”
Myers is no stranger to space-based movies: This is her seventh full IMAX movie set in space, and her projects span the U.S. space shuttle program and Hubble Space Telescope, along with the ISS and the now-deorbited Russian space station Mir. Going into this one, she had a list of shots she wanted and three astronauts were responsible for capturing as many of them as possible. The filming was done by U.S. astronauts: Butch Wilmore, member of Expedition 41, excelled at capturing shots of Earth; Terry Vrits of Expedition 42 captured life on the ISS itself; and Kjell Lindgren of Expedition 44 came through with some of the trickier shots, such as the aurora borealis and the now-famous space-grown lettuce. Their international colleagues including Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy, Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Yelena Serova appear in the footage.
On Earth it can be easy to forget that everything in the universe is continuously in motion. But it is impossible to forget when one is trying to film the spinning Earth from the hurtling ISS. “If you see it, it’s too late,” says astronaut Vrits, a longtime amateur photographer who has taken somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 shots in space. “Obviously I’m a camera guy, so it’s good I was on this mission.”
Shooting a film on the ISS involves some of the mundane concerns also presented on the ground, such as properly framing a shot and making sure the microphone is turned on. But filming in weightlessness brings its own slew of challenges. “The zero-g experience is a big difference. You think it’s going to be so much easier to move the camera around but it’s also a bad thing,” cinematographer Neihouse explains. When cameras are suddenly weightless it can be easy to accidently capture jerky, difficult-to-watch footage. The astronauts started training for the task at least a year before they began filming.
A Beautiful Planet also had to be filmed with digital cameras rather than the ones used in previous space-based IMAX movies due to ISS cargo weight and size restrictions. This came with an added benefit, however: Footage could be transferred back to the production team on Earth overnight, so astronauts could see the results of their filming with very little wait time.
All the astronauts on the ISS have full-time day jobs in taking care of the spacecraft, monitoring scientific experiments and attending to their own bodies—so filming became an after-hours task. “We basically filmed the whole movie on our spare time,” Vrits says.
The astronauts involved know that watching a film like A Beautiful Planet will be the closest most people will come to life in orbit, and they all agreed that the power of the medium to bring that perspective to Earth is of utmost importance. “From the astronaut’s perspective, we desperately want to share that experience,” Lindgren explains. “It makes you want to be a better steward of our planet, and movies like this are another way to share that experience and help people change their perspectives.”
“I think this is my favorite, most important accomplishment,” Vrits says, adding, “Unless one of the others solves cancer. In the absence of that, I’ll say this is.”
Different Minds: The Wide World of Animal Smarts
Primatologist Frans de Waal discusses his latest book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Norton, 2016)
Also see The Science Is In: Elephants Are Even Smarter Than We Realized
Fossil Friday
My, what great big teeth you have! And double-fanged, too! Be the first correctly to identify the possessor of these pearly whites in the comments below and be the object of ever new and increasing admiration and awe.
Conservationist To Fly Thousands Of Kilometers Alongside Migrating Swans On Epic Journey
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Dench during a practice flight. Flight of the Swans/WWT
In a once-of-a-kind endeavor, a conservationist is planning to travel across 11 different countries, over a distance of 7,250 kilometers (4,500 miles), from the Russian Arctic all the way to the United Kingdom. She’ll be following the migration of a threatened species of swan, but not from the ground: She’ll be paragliding alongside them the entire way.
Researchers Identify Brain Network That Makes Us Binge Drink
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A brain network in action. Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock
Like all good things, drinking should always be practiced in moderation – unless you happen to be a lab mouse, in which case you may be required to binge drink in the name of science. In doing so, a group of experimental rodents recently enabled a team of researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study the neural activity controlling this type of uncontrolled boozing, providing new insights into what causes some people to go a little overboard when on the sauce.
Findings from the Gut–New Insights into the Human Microbiome
People who like milk chocolate have slightly different microbes in their intestines than those who prefer their chocolate dark, although researchers do not know why. Significant differences in the so-called microbiome are also found in individuals based on whether or not they eat a lot of fiber or take certain medications—such as the diabetes drug metformin, female hormones or antihistamines.
But all these variations account for only a small fraction of the microbial diversity seen in the guts of northern Europeans, according to new research published today in a special section of Science. Of the half-dozen microbiome articles in the journal, two studies stand out as being among the largest ever conducted on the gut microbes that inhabit healthy people’s large intestines and help with digestion and various immune processes—among other things.
In one, researchers identified 14 different microbial genera that form the core microbiomes of nearly 4,000 people—mainly from northern Europe. This list provides unprecedented insights into the basics of microbial inheritance and evolution, says researcher Martin Blaser, director of the Human Microbiome Program at New York University, who was not involved in either study. “These are fundamental characteristics of us humans,” he says.
Jeroen Raes, senior author of the first paper and a contributing author on the second, says he had hoped that the study would be large enough to offer definitive answers to some key questions, particularly how investigators might manipulate the microbiome to promote greater human health. “I thought I would know the answer by now,” says Raes, who eats lots of fiber and—true to Belgian custom—loves chocolate and beer. But he does not take probiotics, microorganisms that are believed to add to or restore a healthy bacterial balance. Nor does he really know what to make of the fact that so many medications appear to affect the makeup of intestinal bacteria. “It’s one of those ‘hmm, interesting,’ moments,” he says, adding that, nonetheless, he thinks variations in the microbiome will eventually be shown to influence the effectiveness of certain drugs as well as the side effects that they can cause. His research, he says, highlights the complexity of the system as well as likely flaws in earlier research.
The Belgian study, for instance, failed to find a benefit for participants who had been nursed or delivered through the birth canal, compared with those who had been fed formula in bottles or brought into the world via Caesarean sections. Previous experiments looking at newborns had, in fact, found a difference. (Healthy germs from moms are thought to coat their babies who are born vaginally, helping the infants establish a robust bacterial baseline. Some studies suggest that babies delivered by C-section are at higher risk for asthma and allergies—possibly because they lack this early protection.)
Assorted gut bacteria
Credit: jamesbenet/Getty Images
Raes, a microbiologist at the University of Leuven and the Flanders Institute of Biotechnology (VIB) in Flanders, Belgium, says he does not think the other studies are wrong but that these early-life advantages may wane with age. Most of the people in his study were in their 40s and 50s, he notes, and thus any early advantages they may have originally enjoyed were now likely to have been wiped out by medications they took, the germophobic approach to life in wealthy Western nations and/or other life events.
More concerning, according to Raes, are some of the characteristics that he and his colleagues found that greatly influence the composition of the microbiome and that have been ignored in previous work. Case in point: the time it takes for someone to digest food, also known as “transit time”. Variations in transit time of as much as a day or so can significantly alter the environment in which the intestinal microbes live. Thus, different transit times may influence which species survive by, for example, limiting how long a bacterium can grow in the gastrointestinal system.
Prior studies looking at Parkinson’s disease, for instance, found a particular microbial signature that investigators have suggested may be used to diagnose the condition in people who are in the early stages of the illness. Given his findings on transit time, however, Baes suggests that it is just as likely that the patients’ microbes changed not because of their Parkinson’s but because of the severe constipation that often accompanies the condition. And so, any diagnostic test based on this particular microbial shift might falsely suggest that anyone who has not been to the bathroom in awhile could be at risk for Parkinson’s. Such cautions are reminders, Raes says, that research into the microbiome is still in its early days and is easily hyped. “Our field is coming into this consolidation phase,” he says. “We can fulfill the promise of the microbiome by doing proper studies.”
Emeran Mayer, a gastroenterologist and gut microbiome researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, says he now wants to go back to look at his own research—which suggests there are two types of irritable bowel disease with different microbial signatures—to see if taking transit time into account changes his results. The new findings in the Science study convinced him that all such studies should consider transit time. “Unless transit time is accounted for, which so far has not been done, what you may be seeing is not a correlation with disease process,” says Mayer, whose book The Mind–Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices and Our Overall Health, is due out in July.
The latest research also suggests that most previous microbiome studies were too small. Although Raes and his team looked at more than 1,100 Belgians and compared their results with a similar number of Dutch people, along with previously published studies of other Westerners, they were only able to describe about 7 percent of the microbial variation among individuals. To account for the rest would require a sample size of more than 40,000 people, the researchers estimated—and that is just for groups found in developed, Western economies. Charting normal variation in the microbiomes of people living on farms in rural areas of India or China would presumably require an equivalent sample size.
In the second Science study, which focused on residents of the Netherlands, researchers could explain just 19 percent of the microbial variation among individuals—suggesting there are many influences that have not yet been recognized. Both new studies confirmed that antibiotics have powerful effects on the adult microbiome. Similarly, a large study also out today in Cell found the same in young children.
In an accompanying essay in Science, Blaser argues that clinicians need a new approach to prescribing antibiotics in early childhood. Particularly in the first three years children should probably be prescribed good bacteria along with their antibiotics to restore a healthy microbiome, he says, although we do not yet know which bacteria will be best. Storing children’s pre-antibiotic microbes and then giving them back after antibiotic treatment might also make sense, although this has not been studied, says Blaser, author of Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues. And he called for the development of new, more targeted antibiotics that selectively kill the bad bacteria, rather than also taking out the good. “My concern is that the antibiotics children take affect how their microbiomes will develop and how they will develop immunologically,” Blaser says.
Many activities of modern life, including our obsession with getting rid of germs, deprive us of the microbial diversity that seems to promote long-term health, he says. Low microbial diversity has been associated with several autoimmune disorders, for example, including inflammatory bowel disease, a condition that arises when the body’s own defenses attack the lining of the intestine, and type 1 diabetes, which occurs when the body targets certain cells in the pancreas that produce the insulin hormone.
Genetics also plays a role in the microbiome, although much about the relationship remains to be unraveled. In a review in Science, Ruth Ley, a molecular biologist at Cornell University, examines three recent genetic microbiome studies: a large twin study; a genome-wide association study; and an examination of 200 Hutterites, members of a religious community similar to the Amish. So far, she says, the research does not yet make clear whether genes directly affect people’s microbial populations or whether someone’s microbes are driven by their food preferences, which are known to be genetically linked.
Still, scientists are making some progress in learning how to manipulate the microbiome, says Tommi Vatanen, a graduate student researcher at both the Broad Institute in the U.S. and Aalto University in Finland. “There are very small puzzle pieces that we are starting to understand—maybe the corner pieces of the big puzzle,” says Vatanen, who was a co-author on the Dutch study. If he had small children today, he says, he would give them probiotics with Bifidobacterium, a common component of a healthy microbiome, and get them a dog—which apart from being a great companion also has a microbiome that, studies suggest, may help protect toddlers under a year old against developing certain illnesses later in life.
Ley says she’s not ready to encourage people to take certain probiotics or supplements. But she does avoid antibiotics whenever possible. And she eats yogurt as well as the Korean cabbage dish, kimchi—both of which are known to contain a variety of healthy bacteria.
What to Read Next:
Innovations in the Microbiome
http://www.scientificamerican.com/report/innovations-in-the-microbiome/
Fecal Transplants: The Straight Poop
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/fecal-transplants-the-straight-poop-12-01-31/
A Dark Night Is Good For Your Health
Photo credit:
Turn that off. Light bulbs via www.shutterstock.com.
Today most people do not get enough sleep. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has called insufficient sleep an epidemic. While we are finally paying attention to the importance of sleep, the need for dark is still mostly ignored.
That’s right. Dark. Your body needs it too.
A Man Switched A Helicopter Engine Off Mid-Flight To Prove A Point
Photo credit:
SmarterEveryDay/YouTube
If a plane’s engine fails, you’d think (or like to think) its aerodynamic properties could glide you down to safety. Helicopters, on the other hand, are pretty clunky-looking things. So if you turned off the engine mid-flight, you’d probably expect the results to be pretty messy.
Smoking Cannabis While Pregnant May Increase Chance Of Babies Entering Intensive Care
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Smoking weed while pregnant may not be a great idea. Anton Watman/Shutterstock
Cannabis is never far from the news headlines these days, with several U.S. states and countries around the world taking steps to decriminalize the drug. In response, a wave of academic studies into the health effects of smoking weed have been published, often with wildly conflicting findings. The latest of these, which appears in the journal BMJ Open, takes a look at the consequences of using marijuana during pregnancy, producing evidence that doing so may not be such a smart move.
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