Eric Trump recently suggested that when his father, Donald Trump, bragged about grabbing women's genitals without consent, it was an example of "two alpha guys in a thing."

In addition to shedding some light on how Trump's son views his father and manhood, it's also interesting because "alpha males" aren't actually a thing.

As the writer Saladin Ahmed pointed out, the concept of "alpha male" wolves that assert dominance over their pack through aggression comes from a debunked model of lupine social groups.

David Mech introduced the idea of the alpha to describe behavior observed in captive animals. Alphas, he wrote in his 1970 book "The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species," win control of their packs in violent fights with other males.

But, as he outlined in a 1999 paper, he's since rejected that idea in light of research into the behavior of wolves in the wild.

In nature, Mech writes, wolves split off from their packs when they mature, and seek out opposite-sex companions with whom to form new packs. The male and female co-dominate the new pack for a much simpler, more peaceful reason: They're the parents of all the pups.

Mech writes on his website (with the lovely title Wolf News and Info) that his original book is "currently still in print, despite my numerous pleas to the publisher to stop publishing it."

Another Twitter user, Mike Westphal, pointed out another paper on the misuse of the phrase "alpha males" to describe breeding roosters.

In the 2003 book "Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn about Sex from Animals," the biologist Marlene Zuk points out that social groups of hens do have "pecking orders." That is, hierarchies among the females with dominance asserted through pecking.

But roosters are not part of those social groups, Zuk writes, and the idea that the top hen is somehow an "alpha male" bizarrely misgenders the dominant bird.

All of which is to say: Humans who enjoy the idea of "alpha males" might want to keep in mind that there isn't really any such thing. And to the extent the term has any meaning at all, it describes the behavior of captive, lonely creatures.

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Ew, cheese.

Disgusting!

Quel bleh!

It turns out, a lot of French people find cheese gross. And that's great news for science.

Here's why.

The French researchers behind a study published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience wanted to figure out what happens in our brains when we recoil from certain foods. But they faced some obstacles.

Here's the big one: When researchers study "aversion"— or why we avoid doing things — they can create their own reasons for subjects to avoid a behavior. Small amounts of pain or monetary loss (with permission) can do the trick.

But it's not so easy to study disgust with food. People dislike different flavors and textures, for different reasons. And forcing someone to find a food disgusting — say, by using chemicals to induce vomiting after trying some — is super unethical.

Fortunately, they found, many, many French people are grossed out by cheese — 11.5% of the 332 subjects they surveyed, a much larger group than for any other food.

So they took 15 cheese-haters and 15 people who liked cheese and stuck them in fMRI machines, which can measure blood flow through the brain. None of them knew they'd been selected based on their thoughts on coagulated milk.

(To clarify: A bit more went into selecting the participants than that. For example, they all had to be right-handed, have noses in good working order, and match each other in age.)

Now picture the scene from the perspective of one of these subjects. You enter a room with a giant fMRI machine and lie down. A researcher straps an oxygen mask to your face and slides you in. The machine thrums alive.

Standing outside, a researcher hooks a bottle of some mysterious liquid to the tube connected to your mask, and squeezes a pump. A smell floods your nostrils — cucumber. Wow, that's strong.

Then the bottle switches, and another smell reaches you, and another. Fennel, mushroom, blue cheese, cheddar, goat cheese, pâté, Gruyère, peanut, Parmesan, pizza, tomme. 

As the scents pumped in, you press one of five buttons, indicating how good or gross you find them.

(Again, there was a bit more involved, including a training session on how to breath safely and images flashing on a screen.)

An fMRI can't see exactly which neurons light up in a subject's brain. Instead, it uses a proxy to figure out what your brain is doing: blood flow. There are limits to this kind of research, because the findings are necessarily second-hand and fuzzy. But it's useful for pointing toward some of the basic, underlying mechanisms in how your brain does its business.

The fMRI used in this study saw that folks who hated the smell of cheese saw unusual amounts of blood flow to three regions of the brain: the internal globus pallidus, external globus pallidus, and sunstantia nigra.

If those sound like nonsense words to you, you're not alone. But it matters because theose are all regions of the brain believe to be involved in mechanisms of reward. That is, they usually light up when you really like something. But in this case they seem to be involved in the mechanisms of disgust.

This result gives scientists some clues about how disgust works in the brain, or at least some wayfinding hints to investigate the question further. (We can't determine too much from one fMRI study on 30 French people, of course; previousstudies have found other brain networks that are involved in the disgust response as well.)

But the next time you find yourself gagging at a chunk of Camembert on your plate, keep in mind that your aversion may well be a close neighbor to pleasure.

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For the first time, researchers have grown eggs entirely in a lab dish.

Skin-producing cells called fibroblasts from the tip of an adult mouse’s tail have been reprogrammed to make eggs, Japanese researchers report online October 17 in Nature. Those eggs were fertilized and grew into six healthy mice. The accomplishment could make it possible to study the formation of gametes — eggs and sperm — a mysterious process that takes place inside fetuses. If the feat can be repeated with human cells, it could make eggs easily available for research and may eventually lead to infertility treatments.

“This is very solid work, and an important step in the field,” says developmental biologist Diana Laird of the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. But, she cautions, “I wouldn’t want patients who have infertility to think this can be done in humans next year,” or even in the near future.

Stem cells reprogrammed from adult body cells have been coaxed into becoming a wide variety of cells. But producing eggs, the primordial cells of life, is far trickier. Egg cells are the ultimate in flexibility, able to create all the bits and parts of an organism from raw genetic instructions. They are far more flexible, or potent, than even the embryonic-like stem cells from which the researchers created them.

Making eggs in a dish is such a difficult task that it required a little help from ovary cells that support egg growth, stem cell researcher Katsuhiko Hayashi of Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, and colleagues found. The team had previously reprogrammed stem cells to produce primordial germ cells, the cells that give rise to eggs. But they had to put those cells into mice to finish developing into eggs in the ovary (SN: 11/3/12, p. 14).

It’s unclear how support cells in ovaries foster egg development, Hayashi says. Something made by support cells or physical contact with them, or both, may be necessary for the egg to fully mature. Researchers can’t yet reproduce the supporting cells in the lab and so need to get those cells from embryos, Hayashi says. That could be a problem when trying to replicate the experiments in humans.

Hayashi and colleagues made artificial ovaries to incubate the lab-grown eggs by extracting ovarian support cells from albino mouse embryos. The researchers then mixed in primordial germ cell‒like cells created from tail-tip skin cells from a normally pigmented mouse. After 11 days in the lab dish, the eggs were mature and ready for fertilization. That’s about the same time it takes for eggs to mature in a mouse ovary, Laird says. That means researchers may need patience to make human eggs in lab dishes. “It could be a nine- to 12-month differentiation process in humans,” she says.

Researchers fertilized the eggs and transplanted the embryos into the uteruses of female mice. In that experiment, six pups with dark eyes were born, indicating that they came from the tail-tip eggs and not eggs accidently extracted from the albino mice along with the support cells. The baby mice grew up apparently healthy and have produced offspring of their own.

Growing quality eggs in the lab may be an all-or-nothing exercise. In another experiment using eggs made from embryonic stem cells, the researchers found that some genes weren’t turned on or off as in normal eggs. And only 11 of 316 embryos made from those lab-grown eggs grew into mouse pups. Some of the embryos didn’t make it because they had abnormal numbers of chromosomes, indicating that the eggs weren’t divvying up their DNA properly.

The low success rate implies that only one in every 20 lab-grown eggs, or oocytes, is viable, Hayashi says. “This means that it is too preliminary to use artificial oocytes for clinical purposes. We cannot exclude a risk of having a baby with a serious disease. We still need to do basic research to refine the culture conditions.”

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For the first time, scientists have observed a two-headed shark growing in an egg.

Workers on a research vessel collected the embryonic fish as part of an expedition that retrieved 797 embryos from the western Mediterranean sea. It had two brains, four eyes, two mouths, twenty gills (double the usual ten), and two notochords — a developmental precursor of the spine.

The two heads fused at the neck. Inside, it had two hearts, and a doubled digestive system that fused together where two stomachs met at a single intestine.

You can see the shark in this figure, drawn from a paper in the Journal of Fish Biology where the researchers describe their discovery. Figures (d) and (e) depict another shark embryo with a single head.

Two-headedness is believed to happen in all animals with spines. But it's rare enough that it's never been spotted in an egg-laying shark before.

As recently as 1992, some researchers believed that the uncommon body structure was the result of twins incompletely merging together. But now it's widely accepted that the cause is actually an incomplete separation of one embryo into two. No one has yet offered a conclusive explanation for what causes this to happen.

The two-headed shark embryo described in this paper would probably not have survived had it developed — though it won't get the chance to try. When the researchers spotted the doubled shark through the translucent walls of its egg, they split the egg open and preserved the embryo for study.

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Why can't you quit drinking? Why can't your dad quit cigarettes? Why can't your friend quit cocaine?

There's an easy, incomplete answer: You have addictions. You have a disorder that compromises the mechanisms in your brain that lead you toward better choices.

But what does that mean, really? If addiction is a disease, what does it look like? Is it the same from drug to drug or addicted person to addicted person?

A new paper from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism offers a new framework for describing and understanding addiction writ large.

That's a big deal, because it offers researchers a system for dealing with addiction as a single neurological problem, and fitting the puzzle pieces individual kinds of habitual substance abuse into a larger whole.

It makes it easier to ask and answer questions like Why are certain people more likely to develop addictions? Why do so many addicted people have this gene? and, most importantly How can we prevent and treat addictions once they form?

Addiction, the paper's authors argue, based on a review of existing research, has three keys:

• Executive function: The human brain is really good at zooming out to think about big-picture challenges and how to deal with them. It faces complex questions and offers complex answers.
  
  People with addictions tend to have problems with this kind of thinking though — especially when it comes to long-term planning. They struggle with attention, inhibition, long-term planning, and judgments about the past and future.
  
  These kinds of deficits show up in people with addictions to substances ranging from nicotine to cocaine to cannabis, and seem to play a significant role in addiction as a mental disease.
• Incentive salience: Why did you eat that gross, sugary cinnamon bun this morning? Because your mind doesn't make all of its decisions at the level of executive function. A lot of the choices we make come down to more primal reward seeking.
  
  When your brain is trained to want something, whether a sweet treat or a shot of alcohol, a rewards system kicks in, and you develop a craving. And when it gets it, it releases a surge of reward chemicals, including dopamine — the most well known hormone in the brain. This is the underlying system behind any habit.
  
  In people with addictions, that reward system is altered. The addictive substance gets outsized salience. That is, the addicted brain weighs it as more important and kicks in larger rewards when it arrives.
• Negative emotionality: This is the simplest of the three keys. People with addictions display more negativity. Present them with some stimulus, and their reaction is more likely to be sad or angry.
  
  Negative feelings (which researchers term "hypohedonia") make addicted people more susceptible to their cravings. And the substances that drive their addictions become temporary salves for that internal hurt.

Those three keys drive addictions as common as nicotine habits and as ravaging as opioids and amphetamines. And they track with genetic factors like mental health and family history, as well as environmental factors like class and education.

This paper aims to become a kind of frame on top of which researchers can build future developments in addiction science. Expect to see a lot of studies citing it down the road.

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On November 4, 1818, Scottish chemist Andrew Ure stood next to the lifeless corpse of an executed murderer, the man hanging by his neck at the gallows only minutes before. He was performing an anatomical research demonstration for a theater filled with curious students, anatomists, and doctors at the University of Glasgow. But this was no ordinary cadaver dissection. Ure held two metallic rods charged by a 270-plate voltaic battery to various nerves and watched in delight as the body convulsed, writhed, and shuddered in a grotesque dance of death.

"When the one rod was applied to the slight incision in the tip of the forefinger," Ure later described to the Glasgow Literary Society, "the fist being previously clenched, that finger extended instantly; and from the convulsive agitation of the arm, he seemed to point to the different spectators, some of whom thought he had come to life."

Ure is one of many scientists during the late 18th and 19th centuries who conducted crude experiments with galvanism — the stimulation of muscles with pulses of electrical current. The bright sparks and loud explosions made for stunning effects that lured in both scientists and artists, with this era of reanimation serving as inspiration for Mary Shelley's literary masterpiece, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus." While most scientists were using galvanism to search for clues about life, Ure wanted to see if it could actually bring someone back from the dead.

"This was a time when people were trying to understand the origin of life, when religion was losing some of its hold," says Juliet Burba, chief curator of the exhibit "Mary and Her Monster" at the Bakken Museum in Minnesota, which will open October 29. "There was a lot of interest in the question: What is the essence that animates life? Could it be electricity?"

In 1780, Italian anatomy professor Luigi Galvani discovered that he could make the muscles of a dead frog twitch and jerk with sparks of electricity. Others quickly began to experiment by applying electricity to other animals that quickly grew morbid. Galvani's nephew, physicist Giovanni Aldini, obtained the body of an ox, proceeding to cut off the head and use electricity to twist its tongue. He sent such high levels of voltage through the diaphragm of the ox that it resulted in "a very strong action on the rectum, which even produced an expulsion of the feces," Aldini wrote.

People outside of science were also fascinated by electricity. They would attend shows where bull heads and pigs were electrified, and watch public dissections at research institutions such as the Company of Surgeons in England, which later became the Royal College of Surgeons.

When scientists tired of testing animals, they turned to corpses, particularly corpses of murderers. In 1751, England passed the Murder Act, which allowed the bodies of executed murderers to be used for experimentation. "The reasons the Murder Act came about were twofold: there weren't enough bodies for anatomists, and it was seen as a further punishment for the murderer," says Burba. "It was considered additional punishment to have your body dissected."

Lying on Ure's table was the muscular, athletic corpse of 35-year-old coal miner, Matthew Clydesdale. On August 1818, Clydesdale drunkenly murdered an 80-year-old miner with a coal pick and was sentenced to be hung at the gallows. His body remained suspended and limp for nearly an hour, while a thief who had been executed next to Clydesdale at the same time convulsed violently for several moments after death. The blood was drained from the body for half an hour before the experiments began.

Andrew Ure, who had little to no known experience with electricity, was a mere assistant to James Jeffray, an anatomy professor at the University of Glasgow. He had studied medicine at Glasgow University and served briefly as an army surgeon, but was otherwise known for teaching chemistry. "Not much is known about Ure, but he was sort of a minor figure in the history of science," says Alex Boese, author of "Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments." One of Ure's main accomplishments was this single bizarre galvanic experiment, he says.  

Others, such as Aldini, conducted similar experiments, but scholars write that Ure was convinced that electricity could restore life back into the dead. "While Aldini contented himself with the role of spasmodic puppeteer, Ure's ambitions were well nigh Frankesteinian," wrote Ulf Houe in "Studies in Romanticism."

Ure charged the battery with dilute nitric and sulfuric acids five minutes before the police delivered the body to the University of Glasgow's anatomical theater. Incisions were made at the neck, hip, and heels, exposing different nerves that were jolted with the metallic rods. When Ure sent charges through Clydesdale's diaphragm and saw his chest heave and fall, he wrote that "the success of it was truly wonderful."

Ure's descriptions of the experiment are vivid. He poetically noted how the convulsive movements resembled "a violent shuddering from cold" and how the fingers "moved nimbly, like those of a violin performer." Other passages, like this one about stimulating muscles in Clydesdale's forehead and brow, are more macabre:

"Every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expression in the murderer's face, surpassing far the wildest representations of a Fuseli or a Kean," wrote Ure, comparing the result to the visage of tragic actor, Edmund Kean, and the fantastical works of romantic painter Henry Fuseli. He continued: "At this period several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted."

The whole experiment lasted about an hour. "Both Jeffray and Ure were quite deliberately intent on the restoration of life," wrote F.L.M. Pattinson in the Scottish Medical Journal. But the reasons for the lack of success were thought to have little to do with the method: Ure concluded that if death was not caused by bodily injury there was a probability that life could have been restored. But, if the experiment succeeded it wouldn't have been celebrated since he would be reviving a murderer, he wrote.

Mary Shelley was aware of the types of scientific experiments researchers were toying with at the time. "Science was something that the public paid attention to," says Burba. "There was a lot of crossover, so there were poets who knew a lot about science and scientists who wrote poetry."

Two years before Ure conducted the experiment, Mary Shelley came up with the story of "Frankenstein", and published the novel in 1818, the same year as Ure's experiment. By sheer coincidence, Victor Frankenstein also brought the monster to life "on a dreary night of November." However, unlike Ure, the scene of the creature's resurrection is brief and vague, with no mention of the word "electricity." Shelley wrote that Frankenstein "collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet."

Some historians have hypothesized that Shelley was inspired by other medical procedures being studied at the time, including blood transfusion and organ transplants. It isn't until later in her introduction of the 1831 edition of the book that Shelley mentions galvanism: "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth."

It's unclear whether "Frankenstein" further encouraged Ure or others to dapple in galvanic experimentation, or if Shelley was particularly struck by any one experiment. Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and these galvanic experiments happened in tandem, Burba explains, pointing out that the language in the novel reflects that of scientists of that era. "Both of these things were happening within a cultural milieu where there was great interest in electricity as well as the effects of electricity on bodies—whether electricity might be the 'spark of being' that animates life." 

No actual scientific knowledge or data came from Ure's experiment, yet he still enthusiastically lectured about his experience. He wrote up the results in a pamphlet, which was seen as "publicity of the crudest kind," W.V. Farrar wrote in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. "This rather 'Gothick' experiment, reported in such appropriate literary style, no doubt made Ure's name better known."

These animated and horrifying displays eventually went out of style as sectors of the public began to view them as evil and "satanic in nature." Electricity's first rudimentary experiments on the body did make way for resuscitation technologies such as de fibrillation, but the focus is now on saving lives, not reanimating a long-dead corpse.

"Traditionally, we overlook horrors in the name of science," says Boese. "We have codes of what's acceptable behavior in normal everyday life, but people put on a lab coat and there are totally different codes of conduct that seem to apply. These scientists in the early 18th century were gentleman, upstanding members of society, yet they're doing these things that seem totally sociopathic and bizarre."

Some of their experiments on non-human animals have stood the test of time, however. Students in biology classes still conduct Galvani's famous frog muscle experiment today.

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Come across an image like this, and you'd be a weirdo not to investigate. Meet infrared thermography, a non-invasive way to visualize changes to body surface temperature. Thermographic video cameras not only produce images that would make Andy Warhol proud (or at least sue for infringement), but the tool allows researchers to assess physiological changes — and potentially emotional states — in a wide variety of species like distantly related BFFs Canis familiaris and Homo sapiens.

Think about it — physiological changes are part of the emotional response. When you are frightened, blood rushes away from your extremities to get your muscles ready to go, which means your extremities get cooler as your core gets warmer. Infrared thermography, which captures changes to body surface temperature, is going to pick this up. The tip of a scared person's nose gets cooler (more blue) under an infrared camera, and studies find that when scared or distressed, rat paws and tails appear cooler, as do the outer parts of sheep and rabbit ears.

Dog ears recently caught the attention of Stefanie Riemer and colleagues at the Animal Behavior, Cognition and Welfare Research Group (Twitter) at the University of Lincoln, UK. They wanted to know whether dog ears would show differential blood-flow patterns in response to something good as well as something less good. Dogs participated in a separation test where they were briefly alone in a novel environment (which elicits short-term distress) and then reunited with people (typically a positive experience). The separation, the researchers assumed, would be associated with negative emotions and therefore cooling of the ears, while being reunited with people (excellent!) would show an increase in ear temperature. The study appears in the current issue of Physiology & Behavior.

Six dogs (and their ears) were included in the study, including Cuddles the Rottweiler and Reuben the Jack Russell terrier / Lhasa Apso cross. Milo, Lily, Olga, and Chloe also participated (and now you know just how much I enjoy reading the names of dog subjects. If you are a researcher and considering leaving the names out, please reconsider. I mean, Cuddles the Rottweiler? Come on).

A few more dogs participated in the study, but unfortunately they could not contribute to the final analysis. "[Unsuitable] fur structure," the researchers explain, meaning "ears too densely furred or unevenly furred/fluffy." No Fluff-Balls Allowed is what I'm hearing. If infrared thermography takes off, we may see some interestingly shaven dogs (although the researchers admit dog owners might not be up for this sort of, uhm, grooming).

Back to the ears. The six pairs of ears in the study "performed" as expected: ear temperature showed a pattern of decreasing when dogs were alone, suggesting "that isolation stress is associated with reduced ear temperature" when reunited with people (the good stuff), ear temperatures increased. Under the watchful eye of infrared thermography, ear temperature could be used to assess positive or negative affective states in dogs in other — less straightforward — contexts.

Not all body parts under the thermographic lens are as clear-cut. Take the eyes. Tiziano Travain and colleagues from universities in Parma and Milan, Italy exposed dogs to something good (receiving food) and something less good (undergoing a vet exam).* Eye temperature increased in both contexts, suggesting that, while changes in eye temperature could indicate general arousal, it might fail to indicate valence or direction of arousal (like whether the emotional state is positive or negative).

In conclusion, I'm just kidding! The study found that dog ghosts are all around us. Don't worry. They are friendly. Happy Halloween.

* "Fear or anxiety is more than just an emotional problem for pets — it has the potential to cause many serious physical health problems and contribute to several others,"explainsValarie Tynes, DVM, DACVB, in an article on DVM360. The issue is real Zazie Todd at Companion Animal Psychology recently reviewed a study finding Just How Stressed Dogs Are at the Vet's, and in another post she offers tips for Less Stress at the Vet for Dogs and Cats, and Should Vets Give Treats to Pets?(Yes. Yes, they should). A movement is growing among veterinary professionals to decrease fear and stress in veterinary settings. For example Fear Free is a new initiative promoted by Marty Becker, American's Veterinarian, to reduce anxiety triggers and foster safer veterinary environments.

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Stephen Quake's laboratory at Stanford University looks like biology's version of Thomas Edison's famous New Jersey workshop. Roll-down curtains cast shadows across odd devices buzzing and clicking in the aisles.

You half expect to find Quake, author of 135 patents and rarely seen wearing anything other than a faded polo shirt, sleeping on one of the benches, just as the Wizard of Menlo Park was known to.

In September, Quake was named co-president of the BioHub, a new $600 million center funded by Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. BioHub has as its premier project helping to create a vast directory of human cells, which it calls a "cell atlas." Quake and BioHub are also part a consortium of researchers around the globe who say mapping the millions of cells in the human body is a feat that could help drugmakers and scientists find new ways to treat disease.

Textbooks say there are about 300 types of cells in the human body, including the ones that carry oxygen in the blood, the long-lived neurons in the brain, and the photoreceptors in the eye that work like a digital camera. But the real number is probably far larger—perhaps 10,000, says Quake. It's just that they can't be distinguished under an ordinary microscope.

A new type of map

What scientists want to do now is to inspect tens of millions of human cells for their molecular signatures and also locate each type in the body. That sort of map could be useful to scientists or drugmakers, who might, for instance, look up which cells a new drug is likely to effect. Cataloging how the immune system changes and adapts to fight tumors could be the source of the next insights for cancer treatments.

The atlas project is possible thanks to inventions by Quake and others that allow researchers to move individual cells around channels on microfluidic chips. The technique underlies the atlas because scientists can capture cells inside bubbles of oil or water, moving them apart and readying them for one-by-one analysis by genetic sequencers.

"I don't know if it's the number one hot area in biology, but it's close. Everyone and their grandma wants to do this," says Evan Macosko, a molecular biologist at Harvard University.

One approach ready for massive-scale data production involves detecting which proteins an individual cell is trying to manufacture. The readout, which acts as a molecular fingerprint, has already led to the discovery of new cell types in the retina and brain. A method developed by Macosko has helped bring the cost down to only 17 cents per cell.

Relying on that technique, Aviv Regev, deputy director of the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this year circulated a proposal to donors to catalogue 50 million cells over five years at a cost of $100 million.

Quake says that the BioHub, which will also hand out grants to researchers at Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, wants to further develop technologies that would let scientists analyze cells—and their molecular contents—directly in samples of tissue.

That way, they wouldn't just produce a census of cell types, but a true map of how the body's 20 trillion cells fit together. One new chemical technique, for instance, can turn a dead mouse entirely transparent (and therefore visible to microscopes). Another uses the chemical found in diapers to blow tissues up to huge size, again for easier inspection.

From cells to disease

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have said they plan to give away $3 billion over 10 years to fight disease, something that would make the couple the largest private funders of basic biology research after the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, says Marc Kastner, head of the Science Philanthropy Alliance and an adviser to the 32-year-old billionaire.

With the BioHub, which is his charity's first science project, Zuckerberg is also set to become the biggest funder of the cell atlas technologies, an idea Kastner says government funding agencies have been slow to embrace.

"BioHub is still very small scale compared to what is needed to make progress," he says. "It's going to take an international effort of huge magnitude."

In fact, there is already a group called the International Human Cell Atlas Consortium, which is developing mapping strategies and hoping to get the National Institutes of Health and European funders like the Wellcome Trust interested. It met for the first time earlier this month in London. Quake is also part of that group, which is led by Regev and Sara Teichmann of Britain's Sanger Institute.

"It's starting to take shape," says Quake. "I think 2017 is going to be a big year for the cell atlas."

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While all venomous snake bites are a serious worry, most take longer than you'd expect to kill a fully grown human. That's because venom typically works by slowing down the body's vital systems until the victim drifts off to death.

But the blue coral snake (Calliophis bivirgata) is different. These beautifully coloured snakes from South East Asia have a venom that's so powerful, it can trigger all of the victim's nerves to fire at once, instantly trigging full body spasms, paralysis, and a quick, horrifying death.

Now, researchers from Australia have fully analysed this crazy and unique venom, and the good news is they think it might lead to better pain treatments in the future.

"These snakes are 'killer's killers'. They specialise in preying on other venomous snakes, including young king cobras, so they play a 'hunt the most dangerous' game,"said team member Bryan Fry, from the University of Queensland.

"With its combination of electric blue stripes and neon red head and tail, the blue coral snake is arguably one of the world's most striking species of snake. It also has the biggest venom glands in the world, extending over a quarter the length of its body."

Blue coral snakes typically grow to be about 1.8 metres in length (5.9 feet) and stay pretty thin their entire lives. The snakes' venom has caused two reported human deaths over the past century, and there's currently no anti-venom for their bite. But the good news is they generally tend to avoid humans where possible.

The reason their venom is so ridiculously potent is because the snakes love to eat animals that are also deadly, such as cobras, meaning that if they had a weaker venom that operated like other snakes' venom, they would open themselves up to the possibility of dying at every meal, which is no good when all you want is a quick dinner.

So blue coral snakes have evolved a type of venom that causes their prey to instantly freeze with muscle spasms (think: a giant cramp, but all over your body).

Paralysing their prey in this manner, much like how a spider or scorpion uses venom, allows them to take control of the situation – which is pretty important, if you spend your days hunting cobras and other venomous snakes.

"Their blazingly fast venom does not kill immediately. Instead, it turns on all the nerves of their fast-moving prey – who are also potential predators – at one time, almost instantly resulting in a frozen state,"Fry said.

While previous research has shown that this is how blue coral snakes hunt, it was unclear how the venom could be so potent. So Fry and his team decided to investigate.

After analysing the chemical makeup of the venom, the team identified a new type of toxin called calliotoxin. Calliotoxin works by attacking the prey's sodium channels– the pathways that turn nerves on and off.

So the snake's venom turns these channels on and keeps them on, causing paralysis to take over the body by 'frying' the nervous system. This is the first time a snake has been shown to use this strategy – which is more similar to the venom of cone snails or scorpions.

"Some animals cause their prey's nerves to become fried by a massive shock to the system,"Fry explains. "A cone snail instantly paralyses a fish into a rigid death mask, fully tensing the muscles in a tetanus-like spasm."

"This keeps the fish from escaping the immobile snail. Now it has been shown there is a snake that kills the same way."

Understanding sodium channel disruption has been a long-term pursuit of pharmaceutical researchers, because it's thought that it could hold the keys to unlocking better pain treatments for those with chronic ailments.

So now that researchers know that blue coral snakes produce a venom that affects these channels, the team hopes that their findings might lead to better pain medicine down the road.

"This venom hits a particular type of sodium channel that is important for the treatment of pain in humans,"Fry said. "This is another in the long line of useful discoveries from venom that could benefit human health."

The bad news is that blue coral snakes are becoming rarer in the wild. The team reports that up to 80 percent of the snake's natural habitat has been destroyed by human development.

Hopefully, researchers can do something to save these beautiful snakes, because there are still many unknowns to be figured out, including how they could better our understanding of human health.

The team's work was published in Toxins.

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The first episode of "Planet Earth II," the sequel to BBC's acclaimed documentary miniseries, aired Sunday. And it was amazing.

Possibly the most stirring moment in the episode involved a lone lizard and a minefield of snakes.

It's shot (and edited) cleverly to resemble a heart-pounding action thriller. But the moments of tension, bursts of speed, death-defying leaps, and near-captures are all real.

There's dramatic tension.

And terror.

And biting!

Watch below, and see how it ends.

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At parties and bars, he introduces himself as a "rat tickler."

The title makes Shimpei Ishiyama sound like he belongs in some forgotten guild of yore, with the Victorian "pure-finders," who collected dog dung for a living, and the "flankers and flaggers," who kept partridges in the range of hunters' guns.

But he is, in actual fact, a neuroscientist, and his rat-tickling is anything but antiquated. By trying to titillate these rodents — and recording how their neurons respond — Ishiyama and his adviser are unraveling a mystery that has puzzled thinkers ever since Aristotle posited that humans, given their thin skin and unique ability to laugh, were the only ticklish animals.

Aristotle was wrong, it turns out. In a study published Thursday in Science, Ishiyama and his adviser, Michael Brecht, not only found that rats squeaked and jumped with pleasure when tickled on their backs and bellies, but also that these signs of joy changed according to the rodents' moods. And, for the first time, they pinpointed a cluster of neurons that makes this sensation so powerful that it causes an individual being tickled to lose control.

"It's truly innovative and groundbreaking," said Jeffrey Burgdorf, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who reviewed the paper. "It takes the study of emotion to a new level."

Burgdorf has played a central role in our understanding of animal tickling. He was part of a team that first noticed, in the late 1990s, that rats make a symphony of noises when they are experiencing social pleasure. Others had already noted that they trill and yip and sing during sex and meals — all above the range of human hearing — but the lab where Burgdorf worked noticed that the rodents emitted similar sounds while playing. And so one day, the senior scientist in the lab said, "Let's go tickle some rats."

They quickly found that those cries of pleasure doubled. But other researchers didn't share the rats' joy. Prominent scientists of emotion tried to impede the publication, accusing the team of "the sin of anthropomorphism," Burgdorf and his colleague Jaak Panksepp wrote in a review paper in 2003.

Tickling — and why it has such a powerful effect on us — has remained largely mysterious.

"Here's the problem in a nutshell, and it's a little philosophical," Burgdorf told STAT. "In order for us to function, we have to ignore about 90 percent of our sensory information. We have to process only the important stimuli. What the brain is doing is saying this tickling is important, and I'm going to be able to discriminate this kind of stimulation from other kinds of stimulation."

Ishiyama, a postdoc at Humboldt University in Berlin, wanted to figure out how that worked.

Everyone knows how to titillate an ocelot — you oscillate its tit a lot. But designing a rigorous experiment on how tickling is processed by rat brains isn't as obvious, and is hardly mainstream in neuroscience.

What Ishiyama did was to drill tiny holes into the rodents' skulls and insert wires into their brains that could pick up or elicit electrical currents. A day later, he said, they were fully recovered from the operation — and were ready for tickling.

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It's not exactly surprising that a partner of a venture capital firm with a tagline that "software is eating the world" thinks the same could be said for the drug industry.

Vijay Pande, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, runs the firm's bio fund. So far, the fund's made investments in companies including Freenome, which is developing a blood test that screens for the earliest signs of cancer, and Q, a startup that wants to quantify the human physiology.

Pande's argument, as he explained to Business Insider, is that as health-technology gets better, we might be able to start replacing physical pills (the hardware) with software. At least in part. And where medicines (think: antibiotics) can't get replaced, we might be able to get the right treatment options to the right people.

There are three areas in particular where he says we could see this happen:

• Machine learning could help us put more data to use."There is so much data in healthcare that’s being untapped for better diagnostics, better care, and better applications. It's a software problem."
• We'll start to use "digital therapeutics" instead of getting a prescription to take a pill. Services that already exist — like behavioral therapies — might be able to scale better with the help of software, rather than be confined to in-person, brick-and-mortar locations.
• Automation could help us find new drugs quicker."What will happen is software will start to have an impact traditional drug design." If anything, he said, software could either augment or replace the role of the medicinal chemist, the people who work to discover new drugs. Already, there's been progress in making drugs, Pande says, but in the next decade, software will move on to designing the drugs in the first place.
• Software could also be helpful in areas where early stage research looked promising, but once the studies in humans began, the drug didn't pan out. Alzheimer's disease in particular has had trouble with this —on average, about 99% of all drugs in clinical trials never actually make it to approval. "Where mice models fail, software will be the natural approach," Pande says.

Of course, this software-beating-out-hardware argument is integral to Andreessen Horowitz's health-tech investments. Omada Health, a company the firm invests in, is an online platform that helps people manage chronic conditions, particularly Type 2 diabetes. It's one of the ways Pande thinks a program could replace a pill, namely metformin, a drug used to control blood sugar levels.

For example, when a person first gets diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, they may be prescribed to use Omada at first. If that isn't able to help on its own, they could be given metformin as well.

These changes won't be abrupt and will work within the existing healthcare system, Pande says. We're not necessarily going to see all the pills leave the shelves, nor will drug companies go out of business because all of their investments will be in "hardware." He likens it to self-driving cars that still have to drive on the same roads we're using now. That means there will be room for drug companies to find ways to work with these software-focused startups.

"Software eating the world is part of it," he says. "But there’s no reason why they can’t come along for the ride."

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NOW WATCH: The psychology behind who says ‘I love you’ first in a relationship

It's often said that through our innovations in science, agriculture and medicine humans have become masters of our biological destiny.

That we've seized control of our evolution, eliminating most of the causes of death and suffering experienced by our ancient and not too distant ancestors.

We've wiped out hunger and famine and eliminated food shortages in most parts of the world.

Today, we have access to a wide variety of high quality foods. Items once only available to us seasonally can now be eaten all year round.

Humans have tamed many deadly diseases with antibiotics and even wiped some out completely through vaccination.

As we age and our body parts break or wear out we're increasingly able to repair or even replace them with artificial ones.

We can control our fertility and decide whether to have children or not, even while maintaining active sex lives.

People mature earlier and delay having children until they're ready to, after careers have been established and families are financially ready to raise kids.

Many of us can choose who we marry; people from across the planet rather than just the neighbourhood or tribe; from the opposite, or in some places, the same sex.

We've dramatically extended our lifespan: more people are living much longer than ever before.

Across the planet the number of centenarians is growing dramatically each year.

And with all of these changes in culture, health, nutrition and life expectancy the human population has grown dramatically over the last century.

It took hundreds of thousands of years to reach a population of just a billion people, but by the middle of the twentieth century there were two and a half billion of us.

And by the mid-twenty-first century predictions are there will be almost 10 billion of us on this tiny blue planet.

We're rewriting not only our own future but sealing the evolutionary fate of millions of other species as well.

From the species within our bodies in our vast microbiome affected by shifts in diet and the use of medication, to the many species in the external environment we affect through pollution, land clearing and over exploitation.

What impact might all of these changes have on our future as a species? The future course of our evolution?

Geneticists have found clear evidence that the choices people make can have profound impacts on the evolution of entire populations, and ultimately, our species as well.

Some striking examples have been found like that both women and men are currently under selection for earlier age at first birth across a wide range of societies.

Other work has shown that women are under selection for later age at last birth in some pre-industrial groups, but a later age at menopause in some post-industrial populations.

The upshot is that in some groups the reproductive span seems to be getting longer for both women and men.

Yet other research has shown that women are under selection for increased height in at least one pre-industrial population and for decreased height in three post-industrial groups.

The trend to early maturing at smaller body sizes may be the consequence of the widespread decrease in juvenile mortality resulting from improvements to hygiene, public health and medical care.

An interesting study published this year on the bioRxiv preprint server by a team led by Yair Field from Stanford University has studied DNA stored on the UK10K Project for the signs of recent evolution among living British people.

Field's team investigated the signals of selection spanning the last 2,000 years and found evidence for evolution in three important sets of genes.

First, there has been strong selection for lactase genes, or those associated with a person's ability to digest milk and other dairy foods.

So, dairy tolerance has been on the rise over the last couple of thousand years in Britain, perhaps along with increasing levels of milk consumption.

The second set was with the so-called HLA genes, which play a role in the human immune system.

While the possible cause is less clear cut it might be due to increasing levels of infectious disease exposure from greater numbers of immigrants such as the Romans who occupied Britain around 2,000 years ago and many groups after them.

But most surprising of all was the finding that the genes for blonde hair and blue eyes have been under selection over the last two millenia.

In this case, it seems that sexual selection rather than natural selection has been driving an increase in the number of people carrying the genes for this combination.

In the UK at least, it seems that gentlemen really do prefer blondes, well at least for the last 2,000 years anyway.

Far from being esoteric, this kind of research shows how the decisions we make about how we live, what we eat and even who we marry can have long lasting impacts on our evolution.

While governments and policy makers usually only have their eyes set on short time horizons, we really ought to be thinking about the consequences our modern lifestyle and the profound changes we're making to the planet might have on our evolution as well.

Darren Curnoe, Director of the Palaeontology, Geobiology and Earth Archives Research Centre (PANGEA), UNSW Australia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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On November 14, a recently-deployed high-tech buoy floating in the New York Bight picked up a rare sound, the "up call" of one of the estimated 500 living North Atlantic right whales.

It was the second right whale call that the buoy, which was deployed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Wildlife Conservation Society's New York Aquarium in late July, has picked up in the past weeks.

On October 31, researchers monitoring the device observed a sei whale, another endangered species that grows up to 65 feet long and is rarely seen in the region.

For one thing, it's pretty cool to see these rare giants swing through the area, which — despite being close to the biggest city in the US — harbors a fascinating array of marine life, including a recently-discovered potential great white shark nursery.

But the real-time detection that the buoy, named "Melville," allows is also important because it can be used to alert ship captains that there's a whale in the area.

"Ships are a significant hazard to whales in the New York region; the highest incidence of ship struck whales on the U.S. east coast occurs between the New York Bight and Chesapeake Bay," Woods Hole scientist Dr. Mark Baumgartner, developer of the whale detection software for the acoustic buoy and co-lead of the acoustic buoy project, said in a statement emailed to Business Insider.

"This new technology can help ships avoid lethal encounters with whales by alerting ship captains to the presence of the whales."

The populations of these sea giants were first decimated by the whaling industry. Right whales earned the "right" name because they were deemed optimal for hunting. The large and fast-swimming sei whales, which we know very little about, were similarly exploited.

The buoy has also captured the calls of fin whales, the second-largest animals in the world, and they expect to begin detecting humpbacks in the next year as well.

Despite the traffic, whales seem to enjoy the region — one was spotted near the Statue of Liberty on the morning of November 17.

SEE ALSO: Researchers think they've found a great white shark nursery right off the coast of Long Island

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Why do you glance off to the side when you speak? It's like you're trying to pull a word out of some blank space in the distance.

Breaking eye contact mid-sentence is a strange habit, but almost everyone seems to do it every once in a while.

And a pair of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan offer an intriguing answer as to why in a new study, which will be published in the journal Cognition.

They suggest that maintaining eye contact requires a level of mental effort and uses up your brain's resources.

So sometimes, when you speak, the tasks of coming up with the next word and maintaining eye contact become too much for your brain to handle. Then — snap — your attention shifts to the middle distance, and all the extra oomph in your head goes toward picking your next word.

Here's how the researchers came to their conclusions.

We know from a previous study that different word-associations are more or less hard to come up with. And there's different reasons you might take time to come up with a word.

Some word association tasks are hard because there are too many options. That means the mechanism in your mind for picking a word has to run longer, but it doesn't tax your conscious thought.

For example: Try to come up with a verb for the word scissors.

Now come up with a verb for the word ball.

Typically people think of a word faster for scissors, because there's only really one good option: cut.

But if you have a ball you can kick it, throw it, catch it, or play with it.

And then there are the word associations that don't overwhelm you with choice anxiety, but have weak enough connections that you have to consciously think about them to pick a verb.

So if you're given the word car, it's not too hard to get to drive, so you probably don't have to think about it. But if the word is leaf, you might have to mull it over a bit before getting to fall.

For the eye contact study, the researchers had 26 participants play the word association game while making eye contact with a computer-generated face.

They found that eye contact did make it harder to think of words, so the participants would take longer to think of them. But the effect was only significant when trying to make weak connections, like that between leaf and fall ;— the sort that require conscious thought to come up with.

That means eye contact doesn't directly interfere with the mental task of picking words. But it takes some cognitive effort to maintain. So when you're speaking and you come to a word you have to actively think to come up with, the two tasks come into conflict.

And then, perhaps, you might glance away.

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In a breakthrough for regenerative medicine, scientists have grown intestinal tissues with functional nerves in a laboratory setup using human pluripotent stem cells. The synthesized tissue was used to study Hirschsprung’s disease, a congenital condition where nerve cells are missing from the colon, causing complications in passing stool. The research is detailed in Nature Medicine.

A pluripotent stem cell is a precursor cell to all the other types of cells in the body. In a petri dish, the stem cells were treated in a biochemical bath that triggered the formation into intestinal tissue. The novel part of the study was the construction of a nervous system on the intestinal organoid. The researchers manipulated neural crest cells to grow a system of nerves. By putting together the neural crest cells and the intestinal tissue at the exact time, they successfully grew together into a complex functional system.

The tissues were transplanted into mice. They worked successfully and showed a structure “remarkably similar” to that of a natural human intestine.

The scientists see that in the future, this development could have greater potential in studying diseases, such as Hirschsprung’s, and treating them.

“One day this technology will allow us to grow a section of healthy intestine for transplant into a patient, but the ability to use it now to test and ask countless new questions will help human health to the greatest extent,” said Michael Helmrath, surgical director of the Intestinal Rehabilitation Program at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and co-author of the study.

Soon, all sorts of tissue could be synthesized and grown in laboratories. Though there are still ethical and quality control issues to overcome, there’s no denying the massive potential these developments have in healing the sick. When we can grow parts of ourselves from small biopsies, transplants and transfusions could be fine-tuned to every need, and mutations could be studied to every minute detail—the possibilities are endless.

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NOW WATCH: Sabra recalls virtually every type of hummus it makes over possible Listeria contamination

NYU otologist Dr. Erich Voigt explains why it is important to be careful about how close you trim nose hairs.

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“Orange juice for breakfast is over,” an investor interested in creating large, fair trade coconut plantations recently joked to me. These days, coconut water is king.

For the trendy and the wealthy, including celebrities such as Rihanna, Madonna or Matthew McConaughey, rarest coconut water extracted from the aromatic varieties of the nut, is the “it” drink and even a source of income.

Coconut water is being sold by luxury brands, at up to US$7 for 33 cl, about the same price as basic champagne.

A booming market

There is no doubt that the coconut market is exploding. Coconut water currently represents an annual turnover of US$2 billion. It is expected to reach US$4 billion in the next five years.

In 2007, a 25% stake in Vitacoco, the largest brand for coconut water, was sold for US$7 million to Verlinvest company. Seven years later, another 25% stake in Vitacoco was again sold to Red Bull China for about US$166 million.

Other large players in the coconut water business include Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, but more than 200 brands are now marketing coconut water.

An essential crop

But there’s another side to the story. The coconut is one of 35 food crops listed in Annex 1 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and considered crucial to global food security. In 2014, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated global production to be 61.5 million tonnes.

It is an important livelihood crop for more than 11 million farmers, most of whom are smallholders, cultivating coconut palms on around 12 million hectares of land in at least 94 countries worldwide. The coconut palm is popularly known as the “Tree of Life” – all its parts are useful.

The main products are copra – the dried inner meat of the nut, used for oil – and the husk, which provides a vital source of fibre. More recently, as we’ve seen, there is also high demand for tender coconut water and virgin coconut oil.

Whole mature nuts are exported and sold to factories that produce desiccated coconut and coconut cream. At least half of the coconuts are consumed locally.

Genetic diversity

Over millennia, humans have slowly selected and maintained numerous coconut varieties, used for many purposes.

This has resulted in an extraordinary morphological diversity, which is expressed in the range of colours, shapes and sizes of the fruits. But the extent of this diversity is largely unknown at the global level. The huge amount of work that has gone into coconut breeding by farmers over millennia, and by scientists during the 20th century, remains greatly under-valued.

The rarest coconut varieties, for instance the horned coconut, grown and conserved on the Tetiaroa Atoll and in India, are not even recognised as coconuts by most people, especially Westerners.

Coconut conservation

The genetic diversity found in coconut populations and varieties, known by scientists as “germplasm”, is conserved by millions of small farmers.

A number of initiatives have been launched to recognise and support the role of these farmers, and to sustain them by promoting landscape management approaches, such as the Polymotu concept (“poly” meaning many, and “Motu” meaning island in Polynesian.)

The Polymotu concept capitalises on the geographical or reproductive isolation of various species for the conservation and reproduction of individual varieties of plants, trees and even animals.

In a project led by the Pacific Community and funded by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, two small islands in Samoa have been recently replanted with the famous traditional niu afa variety, which produces the largest coconut fruits in the world, reaching more than 40 cm long.

Sadly, the coconut is endangered. One of the main challenges of coconut cultivation is the existence of lethal diseases, which are rapidly expanding and killing millions of palms. These pandemics are known as lethal yellowing diseases.

The diseases ravage countries in Africa (in Tanzania, Mozambique, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire), and also in Asia (India), North America (Mexico, the Caribbean, Florida) and the Pacific Region (Papua New Guinea, and probably Solomon Islands).

Diversity under threat

Many coconut varieties that could be crucial for the future of agriculture are disappearing because of the loss of traditional knowledge, rapid transformations of agricultural landscapes, climate change and westernisation.

Due to the fragility of insular ecosystems, the Pacific Region is probably the location where the losses are highest.

During a recent survey in the Cook Islands, we succeeded with considerable difficulty in locating a sweet husk palm, known as niu mangaro locally. This is a rare, highly threatened form of coconut.

The husk of its unripe fruit, which in other species is usually tough and astringent, is tender, edible and sweet. It can be chewed like sugarcane. Once the fruits are ripe, the husk fibres are white and thin.

Our survey was conducted together with a government agricultural officer. During the work, he took a tender coconut and started to chew the husk. Then he stopped, telling me, “I do not want people here to see me eating niu mangaro, because they will say I am a poor man.”

The consumption of traditional varieties being still perceived as socially stigmatising, not embracing a “modern” way of life. On the other hand, the consumption of imported food is considered as a mark of modernity and richness.

During another survey conducted in 2010 in Moorea Island, a Polynesian farmer interviewed about sweet husk varieties, known as kaipoa there, told me:

I had one kaipoa coconut palm in my farm, but I cut it down two years ago … Over ten years, I was unable to harvest a single fruit: all were stolen and eaten by children from the neighbourhood.

So, a traditional variety remains appreciated by the next generation of Polynesians, but the farmer is not aware of the rarity and of the cultural value of the resource.

The social and economic factors affecting coconut conservation have been the subject of discussion at two international meetings organised in 2016 by the Asia and Pacific Coconut Community in Indonesia and the Central Plantation Crop Research Institute in India.

Discussions included the constraints and advantages related to coconut biology; links with conservation in institutional field gene banks; farmer’s knowledge regarding the reproductive biology of their crop; socioeconomic dynamics; and policy measures.

The International Coconut Genetic Resources Network (COGENT) now comprises 41 coconut-producing countries, representing more than 98% of global production. Its activities are focused on conservation and breeding of coconut varieties.

Coconut germplasm is represented by about 400 varieties and 1,600 accessions in 24 genebanks. Accessions are the basic units of genebanks.

In the case of the coconut palm, each accession is generally constituted of 45 to 150 palms, all collected at the same location. They are documented in a Coconut Genetic Resources Database and a global catalogue.

COGENT also works on sequencing the coconut genome, in the framework of a collaboration between research organisations in Côte d’Ivoire, France and China.

Despite the upturn in the global market, many coconut farmers remain insufficiently organised, and investment in coconut research is incredibly scarce.

A yearly investment of about US$3 to US$5 million in public international research would be enough to address most of the challenges of coconut agriculture. But private companies benefiting from the market boom are still scarcely involved in research funding.

The coconut is a perennial crop, producing fruit year-round, but it takes a long time to grow. Investors, more interested in rapid profits, remain reluctant to fund the ten-year research programmes that are often needed to efficiently address the challenges of coconut research.

In coconut-producing countries, under-resourced genebanks and laboratories lack the necessary budget, labour, equipment and technical training to conduct the controlled hand-pollinations required for regenerating the germplasm, and to implement other activities such as collecting, characterisation and breeding.

Coconut water brands will only make billions as long as coconuts are plentiful and diverse. More importantly, people all over the world rely on the security of this vital crop. Securing its future must be a priority for everyone who farms, eats and profits from the coconut.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Last year, the bones of a gigantic mammoth were dug up from a farmer's field in Michigan. Many mammoth remains have been unearthed over the decades, but this one was particularly exciting for paleontologists because it could help reveal when humans first stepped foot in the Americas. 

On October 1, 2015, scientists from the University of Michigan Museum excavated the find. They named it the Bristle mammoth after the farmer who owned the land.

Paleontologist and renowned mammoth expert Professor Daniel Fisher, who led the dig, found new evidence about the hunters who took down the beast. 

"What's so interesting about the Bristle site is that there's a mammoth with evidence of human association at a very early date — well before Clovis times,"Fisher said in a University of Michigan press release. "That makes it all the more important to do a complete documentation of this site, and that's why we intend to return to the Bristle farm and open a second excavation adjacent to where we dug before."

The Clovis Culture was a prehistoric Native American culture, named after Clovis in New Mexico. The first evidence for its existence was a spear point found there in 1932, which indicated people living in the area around 13,500 years ago. The Bristle mammoth could be as much as 15,000 years old, meaning it was roaming around long before.

Other research has shown that humans foraged near the bottom of South America between at least 18,500 and 14,500 years ago, so finding evidence of them on the mammoth bones adds another piece to the puzzle.

Fisher said that there were several different pieces of evidence that humans were involved when the mammoth died. Among the 60 bones found, many of the skull bones showed "intentional breakage, targeted toward removal of nutritious tissues that humans might wish to harvest."

He also said that wooden, stone or bone tools were probably used to break bones around the base of both of the mammoth's tusks, the base of the trunk, and along the back of the skull.

There were also three football-sized boulders at the scene. There was no evidence that they could have gotten there from a river current, but there may have been a pond there. Fisher has seen similar finds before at other mammoth kill sites before, and apparently, these stones acted as a sort of meat-storage device. 

The people would have butchered the mammoth carcass and then placed selected portions at the bottom of the pond, using the boulders like anchors.

Early humans definitely did hunt mammoths, but there has been quite a bit of debate between scientists about whether we were to blame for their extinction. After a long time of blaming the Ice Age for killing them off, a paper last year suggested we might have played a bigger role than previously thought in the disappearance of woolly mammoths and sabretooth tigers. 

However, research from this year suggests that the mammoths were responsible for their own extinction, because they worsened the situation by destroying foliage around lake shores when water was running out after a series of environmental changes.

Either way, there has been some talk about bringing back the massive elephant-like beasts when cloning technology is perfected, so maybe we can make amends.

This video shows more about the muddy excavation: 

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Almost every cell in a human body carries a copy of our genetic code, the DNA that holds the unique biological blueprint for who we are.

That DNA tells our cells what to do. When they divide, that information is copied from one cell to another.

But life is hard on our cells. They become damaged every moment of every day, exposed the radiation of the sun, the heat of our laptops, the chemicals we absorb from air pollution, the alcohol we drink, and more. Aging itself damages them.

This damage can easily become a harmful mutation, causing cells to replicate in an out of control way, leading to disease and cancer. With the constant assault, it's a wonder this doesn't happen all the time.

It's only thanks to a mechanism in our cells that can recognize when something has gone wrong that we aren't all riddled with cancer.

That mechanism, known as the DNA damage response, functions like an individual intelligent agent, able to monitor when things are going wrong and then try to come up with a way to deal with them.

Understanding that response is a key to dealing with diseases that affect us as we age. It could help us figure out why we lose of our vitality as we grow old and it could transform how we understand cancer, that "emperor of all maladies." Cell growth is the key to our lives, how we grow and how our bodies repair themselves; cancer is the potentially deadly perversion of that growth.

One of the remarkable properties of nature’s most remarkable molecule, DNA, is self-awareness: it can detect information about its own integrity and transmit that information back to itself.

Discoveries explaining how that mechanism works are so significant that on December 4, geneticist Stephen Elledge was awarded one of five $3 million Breakthrough Prizes in life sciences. These awards, founded by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, honor research that could transform and perhaps more essentially, extend human life. Elledge, Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and Medicine in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and in the Division of Genetics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has done significant work in this area.

Elledge's research on the DNA damage response certainly fits the bill. While we've thought that cells had some way to respond to damage ever since the 1940s, Elledge has helped reveal the biological components involved in the process.

"One of the remarkable properties of nature’s most remarkable molecule, DNA, is self-awareness: it can detect information about its own integrity and transmit that information back to itself," Elledge wrote in JAMA after he was awarded a prestigious Lasker award in 2015 for his work.

When this response detects damaged DNA, it can respond in several ways. It may try to repair the damage, but it may also activate the immune system, cause the cell to destroy itself, or trigger a process known as senescence — which helps prevent tumors but is also largely responsible for aging.

While this research was a large part of why Elledge was awarded a Breakthrough Prize, it's only part of his extensive biology research. As a Harvard press release notes, he and colleagues recently discovered a way to identify every virus a person had ever been exposed to.

Other life sciences Breakthrough Prizes this year were awarded to Harry Knoller for his work understanding how RNA is central to protein synthesis; Roeland Nusse for research on a pathway essential for cancer and stem cell biology; Yoshinori Ohsumi, who was also awarded a Nobel Prize this year, for work on cell autophagy; and Huda Yahya Zoghbi for discoveries related to rare disease that help show how neurodegenerative diseases work.

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