ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 723

These Two Cheap Drugs Could Cut Breast Cancer Deaths

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

Stock image of breast cancer mammograph shown. Tomas K/ Shutterstock.

Two cheap generic drugs could cut breast cancer deaths in postmenopausal women with early stages of the disease. Researchers suggest that two classes of drugs – bisphosphonates and aromatase inhibitors (AIs) – could be used together to complement one another, increasing the benefits and reducing some of the side effects.

What’s Happening To The Flowers At Fukushima?

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

raneko/Flickr CC BY 2.0.

It’s been over four years since an earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, releasing radiation out into the environment. As robot-led investigations and cleanup efforts grind on, research teams from around the world have been studying the impacts of the contamination on wildlife, both in the short term and for years to come. 

Kepler Mission Discovers a Near-twin of Earth Orbiting Sun-like Star

Since rocketing into space in 2009, NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has discovered more than 5,700 confirmed or candidate worlds, in the process reshaping our entire view of the prospects for life in the universe. Thanks to Kepler, we can now conjecture that planets circle essentially every star in the sky, that perhaps ten percent of those might be habitable, and that our solar system’s familiar architecture of small inner worlds and outer giants is rather rare in the cosmos.

And yet despite all these revolutionary results, Kepler’s most sought-after quarry—a mirror Earth around another Sun-like star—has proved elusive. At least, that is, until now. At a NASA press conference today that also unveiled more than 500 other new candidate planets, Kepler’s mission scientists announced they have finally found and confirmed what looks to be the mission’s long-sought holy grail, a near-twin of Earth called Kepler-452b. The discovery is detailed in a paper to be published in The Astronomical Journal.

“Yes, this is the first small, possibly rocky planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star,” says lead author Jon Jenkins, an astronomer and 20-year veteran of the Kepler mission at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Kepler-452b is estimated to be 1.6 times the size of our own world, and resides in a clement, life-friendly orbit around a star in the constellation of Cygnus some 1,400 light-years away that is eerily similar to our own Sun.

The discovery marks the end of a long road. Before reaching the launch pad, Kepler endured decades of developmental woes as its advocates struggled to convince NASA the mission would actually work as planned. After Kepler finally launched, the setbacks continued. Most of the Sun-like stars it surveyed for planets proved to be far less placid than our own star, contaminating the spacecraft’s delicate datasets with astrophysical “noise” that would require years of extra observing time to overcome. Even worse, the reaction wheels used to point the spacecraft wore out earlier than planned, bringing the primary mission to a premature end in 2013.

Early in its mission, Kepler managed to find some tantalizing worlds, a handful of super-sized cousins of Earth, most of them in clement orbits around smaller, cooler, quieter stars than the Sun called M and K dwarfs, but all the setbacks made finding smaller Earth-sized planets around Sun-like G stars a very tall order.

“We thought perhaps that our hopes of finding small, rocky habitable worlds orbiting Sun-like stars were dashed,” Jenkins recalls. But thanks to a host of ingenious analytic techniques and observation methods developed on the fly, with each new pass through Kepler’s data the mission scientists have managed to wring out ever-smaller planets. And as those smaller, cooler planets pile up, astronomers are coming ever closer to pinning down the number of potentially habitable, potentially Earth-like planets in our galaxy, a value they call “eta-Earth.”

“We’re watching Kepler zero in on the Earth analogs in slow motion,” says Natalie Batalha, an astrophysicist at NASA Ames who is also Kepler’s mission scientist. “The closer we get, the harder it gets. We’re tromping through the weeds, looking for the most precious stones…. Some said Kepler couldn’t find small habitable-zone planets orbiting G-type stars. Now that we have, I’m confident that Kepler will determine eta-Earth not just for K and M stars but also for G stars.” Knowing eta-Earth, Batalha says, will allow astronomers to estimate how nearby the closest Earth twins are, and thus how large future space telescopes will have to be to image those planets and study them for signs of life.

After today’s data release, however, there will be only one more official Kepler data release sometime next year. Though astronomers hope to wrest further discoveries from the mission’s archives for generations to come, the end is near for Kepler’s hunt for habitable worlds. “We are reaching the limit of what the Kepler project has to offer regarding the prevalence of potentially Earth-like planets,” says Kepler team member Joe Twicken, an astronomer and study co-author at the SETI Institute in California.

According to Kepler scientist Jeff Coughlin, also of the SETI Institute, today’s announcement still provides a preview of several “hidden gems” that may be fully revealed in next year’s final data release. In addition to Kepler-452b, the team has discovered eleven yet-to-be-confirmed candidate planets that appear to be small, rocky and potentially suitable for life. One of them, presently known only as KOI-7235.01, looks to be only 15 percent larger than Earth, and orbits right in the middle of its star’s habitable zone. If confirmed, it would surpass even Kepler-452b to become the most Earth-like world astronomers have ever found beyond our solar system.

The shaky status of Kepler’s finds, the confusing mixture of “candidates” and “confirmed” planets, comes from how it looks for worlds in the first place. Kepler detects planets through “transits,” watching for the telltale dips in starlight caused by the shadows of worlds that happen to flit across the faces of their stars as seen from Earth. But many things besides planets can cause stars to dim, and to validate any candidate, Kepler’s scientists must rule out all of them. Once confirmed, a transit allows astronomers to confidently measure a planet’s orbital period—its year—as well as to estimate its size, by comparing the depth of its shadow to the estimated dimensions and luminosity of its star. Based on these scant data points, they then guess what the world’s composition and climate might be like.

In the case of Kepler-452b, the Kepler team performed extensive simulations as well as ground-based observations of the star and its immediate surroundings to rule out the possibility of anything spoofing the planetary signal. Based on the planet’s estimated size, the researchers give it a better than even chance of being rocky like Earth. Depending on its exact composition, it could have a mass of anywhere between one to five times that of our own planet, which would powerfully influence its environment and fate.

Fittingly, Kepler-452b may represent an end in more ways than one, being a denouement not only for the Kepler mission, but also for any biosphere the faraway world might harbor. The planet’s host star is estimated to be 1.5 billion years older than our Sun, and the planet itself receives some ten percent more starlight than our own world. Because Sun-like stars gradually increase in luminosity as they age, this could mean that Kepler-452b is a fading, geriatric world, once thriving with life but now withering beneath the slowly brightening light of its sun. If the planet is only one Earth mass, Jenkins says, any life there might be near its end; the world would be on the verge of a runaway greenhouse effect, with gravity too weak to prevent its life-giving water from boiling off into space due to rising surface temperatures.

Study co-author Douglas Caldwell, a SETI Institute astronomer, says that Kepler-452b is more likely to be about five times more massive than Earth, which could give it enough surface gravity to hold on to its water and maintain a flourishing biosphere. The planet “could have a thick atmosphere with lots of water, either in the atmosphere, in oceans, or both,” Caldwell says. “Given the larger size and thus longer core-cooling time, we think there would likely still be volcanism.” All that put together would give any robust biosphere upon the planet another 500 million years of life—about the same amount of time, it turns out, that our own planet may have before it begins losing its oceans to space, too.

“Given the concerns about our own environment and climate change, finding an exoplanet that might experience the runaway greenhouse much sooner than we will made us reflect on the Earth’s near and long term prospects for habitability,” Jenkins says.

“It is bittersweet to see Kepler coming to a close,” he adds, “but we’ve managed to change the world’s view of our place in the universe. When I was a child I used to lay in the grass on summer evenings wondering whether there were people on unseen worlds orbiting the stars I gazed up at. Now we know for certain that there are many small, rocky worlds in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and can move on to the next important steps in answering the question, ‘are we alone?’ What a great way for this Kepler party to end!”

Say Hello To Earth 2.0! Historic Kepler Discovery Suggests We Are Not Alone

Space





Photo credit:

This artist's impression of Kepler 452b shows how its surface might look, complete with water and active volcanoes. SETI Institute/Danielle Futselaar.

Remember the name Kepler 452b. Because in our search to discover if we are alone in this vast and fascinating universe, a sole life-harboring world among countless dead and uninhabitable planets, we may finally have a true candidate for Earth 2.0.

Rare system of five stars discovered

by Paul Rincon

Astronomers have discovered a very rare system of five connected stars.

The quintuplet consists of a pair of closely linked stars – binaries – one of which has a lone companion; it is the first known system of its kind.

The pair of stars orbit around a mutual centre of gravity, but are separated by more than the distance of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun.

The findings have been presented at the UK National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno.

The unusual system lies 250 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It was discovered in data gathered by the SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) project.

Read the full article by clicking the name of the source located below.

ATHEIST BULLY! What would YOU do?

ABC’s What Would You Do? Features Angry Atheist Yelling at Praying Family in a Restaurant. Christian Discrimination for Praying in Public | What Would You Do? | WWYD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4SkVFrQFW4

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Boa Constrictors Don’t Actually Suffocate Their Prey To Death After All

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Boa Constrictor. Nicole Hollenstein/Shutterstock.

The idea of suffocating in the grip of a boa constrictor's coils is enough to make anyone gasp for breath with worry. However, some keen-eyed researchers thought that suffocation might not be the true cause of death from a boa constrictor. Instead, it was found that boa constrictors do just that: constrict their prey to death. 

A Tale Of Three Mosquitoes: How A Warming World Could Spread Disease

Plants and Animals





Photo credit:

Will climate change cause mosquito-borne diseases to spread? Steve Doggett, Author provided

As the world warms, animals and plants will shift their ranges to keep pace with their favoured climate. While the changing distributions of species can tell us how climate change is affecting the natural world, it may also have a direct impact on us.

One good example is the disease carried by insects.

Those small, familiar flies called mosquitoes are responsible for much human suffering around the globe because of their ability to transmit diseases.

Veteran Genome Project Serves as Early Test Bed for Customized Care

Four years before Pres. Barack Obama unveiled plans for a $215-million Precision Medicine Initiative designed to better understand genetic variations within disease and develop treatments, veterans were already volunteering to be part of an avant-garde effort to boost such tailor-made medicine. The venture, called the Million Veteran Program (MVP), aimed to get complete health information and DNA analysis from one million volunteers receiving health services through the Veterans Health Administration (commonly called the VA). Now, as other research groups try to scale up their own efforts for the president’s initiative, the VA effort is one of the lone guideposts in a field with few landmarks.

The fledgling VA project now boasts almost 400,000 blood samples matched to electronic health care records and specially designed questionnaires. The blood samples are each analyzed for more than 700,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs—common genetic variations that could be associated with various diseases depending on their location or effect on gene function. Thousands of those blood samples have also been more fully sequenced for specific research projects that require scientists to get a more in-depth picture of volunteers’ genetic makeup. And to prepare those blood samples for sequencing, researchers must first isolate white blood cells from the blood and extract the DNA from them.

That is just step one. The combination of complete medical records, genetic information and detailed demographic questionnaires could be the recipe to start unraveling questions about schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments including cardiovascular disease. At least that’s the VA’s hope. “This is a new brand of science and we really are inventing the methodology as we go on,” says Michael Gaziano, one of the two principal investigators leading the MVP. Other similar U.S. biobanks—including those run by Vanderbilt University and Kaiser Permanente Northern California—have not yet reached the scale of the VA project. So for now researchers aiming to be part of the Precision Medicine Initiative are eying the VA effort as one of the few available models.

The massive VA project—which links the genetic data to clinical, lifestyle and environmental information—will “inform Pres. Obama’s broader Precision Medicine Initiative through the insights it promises to provide” and “help guide design and implementation of the PMI’s planned million-person cohort,” Jo Handelsman, associate director for science at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, told Scientific American, in a statement.

But the VA is doing more than just collecting information and blood samples from lots of new patients. Some of its specialized research projects include an ongoing genetic analysis that compares more than 9,000 participants who have received a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder with individuals without the disorders, says John Concato, the other lead MVP investigator. And this month the Department of Veterans Affairs announced four more research projects that will draw on the MVP data. They will focus on the genetic contributions of heart disease, kidney disease and substance abuse. Those efforts, according to the White House, will also help inform plans for how the Precision Medicine Initiative should be generally mapped out, including “the types of data that should be included and the design of the data platform.”

Those are formidable hurdles. Genome sequencing data takes up a massive amount of computer space. Characterizing all three billion base pairs (the A, C, T and G letters on the DNA ladder) that make up the human genome takes up far more computer memory than large song or movie files. Even storing the information from the smaller subset of the genome called the exome—that contains the 20,000 or so genes that provide instructions for making proteins—is a massive undertaking. “If one printed out the whole genome of one person it would take 660,000 pages if someone used single space 10-point characters, says Kirk Wilhelmsen, a geneticist and chief domain scientist for biology at the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A finished whole genome sequence could take up the equivalent of five CD’s—just for one person, he says. Even sequencing a person’s exome would take up about 1 to 2 percent of that space. Yet the VA has approximately 28,000 exome sequences and 2,000 whole genome sequences.

But space is not the only obstacle for a project like this. Genome-sequencing data also could be particularly attractive to hackers. The VA took specific steps to protect the data. “We designed this system to maximize patient confidentiality. One way we achieve that is the tube with the sample in it only has a bar code associated with it,” says Timothy O’Leary, the VA’s chief research and development officer. “We did this to reduce the chance of loss of anonymity.”

The VA genome project has already spooled across the country as patients volunteered at some 50 sites, although certain parts of the project are centralized. A massive computer-processing center supporting the data sharing, for one, is located in Pittsburgh. Then, of course, there’s the blood.

Immersed in a two-story, liquid nitrogen–cooled freezer bank in Boston are almost 400,000 tubes of veterans’ blood. The samples are kept at –80 degrees Celsius. When they are needed, a robotic arm lifts them from their icy berth. They do not suffer from some of the limitations of tightly focused demographic sampling that plague so many medical research projects in the U.S.: They have significant numbers of underserved minority populations including African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans. (Approximately 8 percent of MVP samples are from females, consistent with the proportion of female veterans overall, according to Concato.) The samples also include “thousands of people we consider exceptionally aged males,” Gaziano says. Roughly 2,000 participants are 90 years or older and over 200 are 95 years or older.

This is not the first effort to gather medical and biological samples from service members but it will provide information different from any other. For example, the Department of Defense Serum Repository in Maryland already houses more than 50 million samples of blood serum—a yellowish liquid chock full of antibodies and proteins—from 10 million individuals. But sera are not ideal for genomic analysis because they hold little usable DNA. Instead, gene-sequencing work usually hinges on isolating DNA from white blood cells (the standard with MVP).

The repository, which originally started collecting the samples as part of an HIV/AIDS program, remains mired in controversy. Many service members (and family members receiving care through the VA system) did not realize their samples would be kept in perpetuity. Some have even asked for them back—without success. In contrast, the VA actively recruits individuals to MVP through mailed letters asking them to participate or recruits them when they are receiving care at a VA physician’s office. Consenting volunteers fill out an in-depth questionnaire, which asks medical and demographic questions that may not be included in their official health record. They also donate the equivalent of about two tablespoons of blood.

Because veterans access their health care via an integrated system that has long relied on electronic health care records, which follow patients from location to location, the MVP researchers had a built-in advantage when they tried to gather information on volunteering patients. Other research projects may not be so lucky.

Dolphin Study Suggests Saturated Fat Could Help Prevent Diabetes

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

JPC-PROD/Shutterstock

Foods high in saturated fats have been demonized for some time now, with high intake linked to heart disease and a variety of other health conditions, including obesity. But slowly we seem to be realizing that perhaps their “unhealthy” label has been prematurely and unfairly slapped on, and avoiding them could actually be leading to unforeseen problems.