As the sun set over his campsite one evening, author Douglas Preston silently congratulated himself on still being alive.

Preston had spent the last week in a remote jungle in Honduras. In that time, he and a team of researchers had wrestled a venomous snake, nearly drowned in quicksand, and been visited by hungry pumas on the prowl. He details the full experience in the new book "The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story."

All of this was part of an effort to learn about controversial 1,000-year-old ruins that appeared to be the remains of an ancient, legendary "lost city" that had been buried in the rain forest for 500 years. While there, Preston and the team uncovered more about the site, including a literal treasure trove of sacred objects that appeared to have been hurriedly gathered and hidden by the area's residents — before they hastily vanished.

"It was absolutely incredible the things we found," Preston told Business Insider. "We found an untouched city."

A flesh-eating parasite

But in the weeks after they returned from the jungle, Preston and several other members of his team began to develop some worrying symptoms. Some had trouble breathing; others developed skin sores; still others noticed it was harder than usual to swallow.

Concerned they may have contracted something during their time in Central America, Preston and his colleagues were sent to a specialty laboratory led by the National Institutes of Health. There, two-thirds of his team members were diagnosed with leishmaniasis, a flesh-eating, parasitic disease spread by the bite of an infected sandfly.

"We were very popular with the doctors," Preston said. "If you're gonna get a disease and you're a journalist, this is one of the best ones to get. It's so interesting."

One person's "interesting" may be another person's "terrifying"— if left untreated, leishmaniasis can have horrific consequences, and it has no cure.

"It’s a flesh-eating parasite," explained Preston. "And if it gets to your face, it eats away at the skin and it gets your nose and your lips first, and they fall off. Then it starts to eat away at the rest of your skin until you have an open sore where your face used to be. Eventually it eats away at the bones of your face, and there's essentially a hole there, and you die."

Fortunately, there are treatments for the disease— if you can afford them. These typically involve 6-8 hours of intravenous infusions daily, with highly toxic drugs designed to poison the parasite. The treatment typically takes about three weeks, but some people continue to need treatment depending on the progression of the disease. Initially, Preston and his team were all treated at the NIH lab, which Preston said he was "very impressed" by.

Preston was fortunate — he doesn't feel like the illness hasn't affected him too severely. But some of his colleagues have continued to need treatment. In those cases, the drugs simply weren't enough to tackle the parasite. And in the process of trying to kill it, the regimen essentially poisoned its human hosts as well. One person from Preston's trip now has severely damaged liver.

"One of our members is very ill," said Preston. "He will never be the same because of the treatment."

Though Preston responded better, he still regularly visits doctors to check in and keep an eye on any changes.

"It's a wait and see thing," he said.

Where leishmaniasis is found — and where it may spread

Leishmaniasis (of which there are several different forms) isn't seen too often in the United States — for now. It does exist in parts of 90 countries, most of which are in Central and South America, Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Southern Europe, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In those areas, an estimated 900,000 to 1.3 million new cases of leishmaniasis occur each year, according to the World Health Organization. The disease kills 20,000 to 30,000 people annually.

Studiessuggest leishmaniasis is likely to spread. It's a "climate-sensitive" disease, meaning it's highly subject to changes brought about by human-induced global warming.

To help predict how climate change might affect the occurrence of diseases across the globe, researchers frequently create ecological models that combine what we know about trends in the climate with statistical analyses to create a picture of where different parasites or bacterias might flourish in a warmer world.

Right now, leishmaniasis is confined to a pretty limited range of areas in the US, which is one of the reasons it's so rare. But in the next few decades, as regional climates shift, the disease could flourish beyond its present confines. One study published recently in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases predicts exactly that.

"Even in the most optimistic scenario we found that twice as many individuals could be exposed to leishmaniasis in North America in 2080 compared to today," the researchers write.

Another ecological modeling study examined where sandflies (the insects that spread the leishmaniasis parasite) will live in a warmer world, and produced similarly worrying findings that suggest the insects' habitats will spread, increasing human exposure to the disease.

In other words, while the horrific disease Preston and his team caught is not a major health concern at present, it may become a much bigger deal in the coming decades.

"This is really important research that may be important to Americans in the near future," Preston said.

SEE ALSO: Archaeologists are fuming over the alleged discovery of a 'lost city' in the middle of the Honduran rain forest

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LONDON (Reuters) — Three neuroscientists won the world's most valuable prize for brain research on Monday for pioneering work on the brain's reward pathways — a system that is central to human and animal survival as well as disorders such as addiction and obesity.

Peter Dayan, Ray Dolan and Wolfram Schultz, who all work in Britain, said they were surprised and delighted to receive the Brain Prize, which they said was a recognition of their persistent curiosity about how the human brain works.

The scientists' research, spanning almost 30 years, found that dopamine neurons are at the heart of the brain's reward system, affecting behavior in everything from decision-making, risk-taking and gambling, to drug addiction and schizophrenia.

"This is the biological process that makes us want to buy a bigger car or house, or be promoted at work," said Schultz, a German-born professor of neuroscience who now works at the University of Cambridge.

He said dopamine neurons are like "like little devils in our brain that drive us towards more rewards".

Dayan, director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London, added to Schultz's findings with research showing how humans update and change their goals through a dopamine-driven system "reward prediction error".

He showed that our future behavior is dictated by constant brain feedback on whether anticipated rewards are as expected, or better or worse than expected.

The one million euro (roughly $1 million US dollars) Brain Prize, given by the Lundbeck Foundation in Denmark, is awarded annually and recognizes scientists for outstanding contribution to neuroscience.

Colin Blakemore, chairman of the selection committee, said the three scientists' work had helped decipher the way people use and respond to rewards across many aspects of life.

"The implications of these discoveries are extremely wide-ranging, in fields as diverse as economics, social science, drug addiction and psychiatry," he said in a statement.

Dolan, director of the new Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing, and Dayan, cracked open a bottle of champagne in London after being told of the prize.

Schultz described the news as a fantastic reward.

"I can hear our dopamine neurons jumping up and down," he said.

(Editing by Ed Osmond)

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Every day, scientists work to understand the aspects of the world that are completely unknown to the rest of us. Some study the way blood vessels provide oxygen to an African Grey parrot, others follow tiny bobtail squid that light themselves up while hunting for shrimp, and others try to understand the pain and physical symptoms of diseases like Crohn's.

Most of the time, we can't "see" this work in a way that helps us understand it and shows how fascinating and even beautiful it can be. In the images below, showing the winners of the Wellcome Image Awards 2017 contest, first established in 1997, you can see all this — and it's beautiful indeed.

The winners include photos, illustrations, paintings, and more.

They're all supposed to uncover or "open up a world of science often hidden to the naked eye," according to BBC Medical Correspondent Fergus Walsh, a member of the judging panel. "There is a spectacular array of images here which will draw the public in, make them wonder and make them ask questions about things they’ve never even imagined," he says in a press release emailed to Business Insider.

The overall winner will be announced on March 15. We've republished the winning collection below, along with some information about what each image depicts and how it was created.

SEE ALSO: We know less about marijuana than we think — here are the biggest mysteries researchers are trying to solve

This image shows how an ‘iris clip’, also known as an artificial intraocular lens (IOL), is used to treat conditions such as myopia (nearsightedness) and cataracts (cloudiness of the lens), is fitted onto the eye. (Clinical photography)

This image shows a 3D reconstruction that details the highly intricate system of blood vessels in the head and neck of an African grey parrot, post euthanasia. (Computed tomography (CT) and digital imaging)

This image shows a 3D-printed reconstruction of the pathways connecting the areas responsible for speech and language in the brain. (Tractography)

While some of our ancient human relatives feasted on wild sheep and woolly rhinoceroses, others were satiated by a more ascetic diet of mushrooms and moss.

These findings come from a new analysis of hardened plaque left behind on the teeth of five Neanderthal specimens that were uncovered in Spain and Belgium. The results, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, show that while there are still many mysteries surrounding our long-extinct relatives, one thing is certain: They were a lot like us, perhaps in more ways than we initially imagined.

According to the study, Neanderthal diets varied considerably based on where they lived. There's also evidence that they may have used medicine to heal their aches and pains.

The Neanderthal diet and the role of meat in our health

Neanderthals are thought to have gone extinct some 40,000 years ago. And while researchers have been studying their remains for decades, they had never gotten such a close look at what they ate — until now.

"We found lots of fantastic bits and pieces — animal hair, pollen grains, all this detail trapped in here that survived in the biological record,"Keith Dobney, one of the leading authors on the paper and the head of the department of human paleoecology at the University of Liverpool in London, told Business Insider.

Genetic evidence from the teeth of the Spanish Neanderthals revealed they ate mushrooms, pine nuts, and forest moss. The Belgian Neanderthals, on the other hand, appeared to have indulged in woolly rhinos, wild sheep, and mushrooms.

Thanks to recent advances in gene-sequencing technology, Dobney and his research team revealed that these Neanderthals ate drastically different diets based on where they lived. And those eating choices had large impacts on their oral microbiome, that petri dish of bacteria in the mouth. Oral microbiomes are thought to provide key insight into the development of several key diseases, from diabetes to heart disease and certain forms of cancer. (Much more is known about the gut microbiome — a growing body of research suggests it influences our mood and our risk for depression— but scientists are learning more about all the microbial communities that inhabit our bodies.)

One thing that appears to strongly influence the bacteria that thrive in our mouths: meat.

"We saw huge differences based entirely on whether or not these individuals were eating mostly meat or mostly plants," Dobney said.

Because the specimens analyzed were limited to just a few individuals rather than entire populations, it's hard to draw too many detailed conclusions about how eating meat today might affect the bacteria that thrive in different parts of our bodies.

But one thing is clear, Dobney said: "The oral microbiome changes massively when our diet changes."

In other words, moving from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a settled agrarian one has implications not just on the types of foods we eat but also on the bacteria that live inside us — which influence everything from the diseases we get to our lifespans.

"For millions of years, our resident microbes have co-evolved and coexisted with us in a mostly harmonious symbiotic relationship,"Mogens Kilian, a biomedical professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, wrote in an unrelated paper on the oral microbiome last year. "We are not distinct entities from our microbiome, but together we form a 'superorganism' ... with the microbiome playing a significant role in our physiology and health."

Did our extinct human relatives take medicine?

The new paper also suggests that one of the Neanderthals they examined appeared to have eaten poplar, a flowery plant with anti-inflammatory and pain-relief properties similar to those found in modern-day Aspirin.

That individual also happened to have been suffering from a dental abscess, a painful accumulation of pus that forms inside the teeth.

"There was a kind of smoking gun in one of these individuals," Dobney said. "And that was this giant abscess which would've been quite painful. This individual was quite sick."

It could simply be a coincidence that this sick ancestor ate the poplar — "it could have been ingested accidentally, it could have been growing on something else," Dobney said — but he believes the evidence suggests it was intentional.

"The idea that Neanderthals were these unsophisticated brutes running around with clubs and things, that's been proved untrue by dozens of studies," he said. "So who knows? These were clearly medicinal plants and they would have fit perfectly with the illnesses they had."

Two other factors support Dobney's conclusion: First, this individual was the only one of all the specimens to have been found with poplar DNA in his teeth. And second, poplar is generally inedible. "It's purely medicinal," Dobney said.

SEE ALSO: A group of anthropologists says it finally knows how iconic early human ancestor Lucy died — and other researchers are livid

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NOW WATCH: 50,000-year-old Neanderthal teeth reveal what the real 'paleo diet' was actually like

A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information.

Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic tests are part of a 'workplace wellness' program.

The bill, HR 1313, was approved by a House committee on Wednesday, with all 22 Republicans supporting it and all 17 Democrats opposed. It has been overshadowed by the debate over the House GOP proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, but the genetic testing bill is expected to be folded into a second ACA-related measure containing a grab-bag of provisions that do not affect federal spending, as the main bill does.

What this bill would do is completely take away the protections of existing laws.

"What this bill would do is completely take away the protections of existing laws," said Jennifer Mathis, director of policy and legal advocacy at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, a civil rights group. In particular, privacy and other protections for genetic and health information in GINA and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act "would be pretty much eviscerated," she said.

Employers say they need the changes because those two landmark laws are "not aligned in a consistent manner" with laws about workplace wellness programs, as an employer group said in congressional testimony last week.

Employers got virtually everything they wanted for their workplace wellness programs during the Obama administration. The ACA allowed them to charge employees 30 percent, and possibly 50 percent, more for health insurance if they declined to participate in the "voluntary" programs, which typically include cholesterol and other screenings; health questionnaires that ask about personal habits, including plans to get pregnant; and sometimes weight loss and smoking cessation classes. And in rules that Obama's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued last year, a workplace wellness program counts as "voluntary" even if workers have to pay thousands of dollars more in premiums and deductibles if they don't participate.

Despite those wins, the business community chafed at what it saw as the last obstacles to unfettered implementation of wellness programs: the genetic information and the disabilities laws. Both measures, according to congressional testimony last week by the American Benefits Council, "put at risk the availability and effectiveness of workplace wellness programs," depriving employees of benefits like "improved health and productivity." The council represents Fortune 500 companies and other large employers that provide employee benefits. It did not immediately respond to questions about how lack of access to genetic information hampers wellness programs.

Rigorous studies by researchers not tied to the $8 billion wellness industry have shown that the programs improve employee health little if at all.

Rigorous studies by researchers not tied to the $8 billion wellness industry have shown that the programs improve employee health little if at all.

An industry group recently concluded that they save so little on medical costs that, on average, the programs lose money. But employers continue to embrace them, partly as a way to shift more health care costs to workers, including by penalizing them financially.

The 2008 genetic law prohibits a group health plan – the kind employers have – from asking, let alone requiring, someone to undergo a genetic test. It also prohibits that specifically for "underwriting purposes," which is where wellness programs come in. "Underwriting purposes" includes basing insurance deductibles, rebates, rewards, or other financial incentives on completing a health risk assessment or health screenings. In addition, any genetic information can be provided to the employer only in a de-identified, aggregated form, rather than in a way that reveals which individual has which genetic profile.

There is a big exception, however: As long as employers make providing genetic information "voluntary," they can ask employees for it. Under the House bill, none of the protections for health and genetic information provided by GINA or the disabilities law would apply to workplace wellness programs as long as they complied with the ACA's very limited requirements for the programs. As a result, employers could demand that employees undergo genetic testing and health screenings.

While the information returned to employers would not include workers' names, it's not difficult, especially in a small company, to match a genetic profile with the individual.

It would allow employers to ask employees invasive questions about … genetic tests they and their families have undergone.

That "would undermine fundamentally the privacy provisions' of those laws," said Nancy Cox, president of the American Society of Human Genetics, in a letter to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce the day before it approved the bill. "It would allow employers to ask employees invasive questions about … genetic tests they and their families have undergone" and "to impose stiff financial penalties on employees who choose to keep such information private, thus empowering employers to coerce their employees" into providing their genetic information.

If an employer has a wellness program but does not sponsor health insurance, rather than increasing insurance premiums, the employer could dock the paychecks of workers who don't participate.

The privacy concerns also arise from how workplace wellness programs work. Employers, especially large ones, generally hire outside companies to run them. These companies are largely unregulated, and they are allowed to see genetic test results with employee names.

They sometimes sell the health information they collect from employees. As a result, employees get unexpected pitches for everything from weight-loss programs to running shoes, thanks to countless strangers poring over their health and genetic information.

SEE ALSO: EPA chief claims carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to climate change, despite scientific consensus

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Few things in childhood are more traumatising than waking up one morning to find your beloved pet fish, Michael Scofield, floating upside down in his tank (true story); his tiny fishy light cruelly extinguished before his time. But why do they float upside down when they decide it’s time to take a ride on the porcelain express?

The answer to this question has a lot to do with how they maintain proper buoyancy when they’re alive. As you may or may not know, most fish are in possession of an organ commonly known as a “swim bladder”. This organ can be filled or emptied of air by a fish at will via its gills, allowing them to either float higher, sink lower or stay suspended at about the same depth, not unlike a Buoyancy Compensator (BC) used by scuba-divers.

Although swim bladders are critical to a fish’s ability to float, sink or hover without expending much energy, they have the unfortunate side effect of making them rather unstable. To explain, research has shown that the relative position of a fish’s “centre of buoyancy” is, amongst fish with swim bladders, almost universal located below their centre of mass near their stomach, making them quite prone to hydrostatic rolling which is just a fancy way of saying it makes them more likely to go belly up. This is why fish can often be seen flapping their fins, even when they’re not moving and in perfectly still water.

This is also why when fish become ill or injured, they will sometimes begin swimming on their side or even upside down; they simply lose the ability to maintain hydrostatic equilibrium and the more buoyant part of their body will try to float to the surface. When fish ultimately die, of course, they lose all ability to stop themselves rolling over and the buoyancy of the swim bladder takes over.

It should also be noted that fish don’t necessarily always float when they die. For example, if a fish dies with little to no air in its swim bladder, the act of dying doesn’t magically make this bladder expand to increase buoyancy. In these cases, the fish will often sink, at which point decomposition will begin. That said, the decomposition process can sometimes result in enough gas being produced and trapped inside the fish to cause it to float to the surface.

So in short, fish float upside when they die because many of them are top heavy and posses an organ in their lower region that is filled with air.

SEE ALSO: EPA chief claims carbon dioxide is not a primary contributor to climate change, despite scientific consensus

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Much of what we "know" about dinosaurs has changed in recent years.

We've learned that many of them were covered in feathers, that part of what drove them extinct was how long it took for their eggs to hatch, and that some of them even thrived in snowy, Arctic winters.

But the idea that dinosaurs can be divided into two major groups has remained unchanged for almost 130 years. As those of us who were dinosaur-obsessed children know, these groups are the bird-hipped Ornithschia, including Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and duckbills; and the lizard-hipped Saurischia, which include sauropods like Brontosaurus and theropods like Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Velociraptors we all know and love.

A new paper published in the journal Nature challenges those divisions, arguing that we may need to rewrite the entire dinosaur family tree.

This is a big deal. "When I first read Matthew Baron’s new dinosaur study, I actually gasped,"writes Ed Yong at The Atlantic.

The original division dates back to 1888, when Harry Govier Seeley spotted major differences in the pelvic bones of certain dinosaurs. The division seemed so significant that for almost a century, many scientists didn't even think all dinosaurs had necessarily evolved from a common ancestor, as paleontologist Kevin Padian of Berkeley writes in a commentary for Nature.

But Baron and his co-authors decided to take another look at the simple division that has defined the dinosaur family tree for so long. They examined 74 types of dinosaurs, taking a look at 457 different characteristics to see what similarities and differences they found. And instead of basing their new division on one major characteristic, they argue that a number of different aspects of dinosaur anatomy should make the family tree split in new ways. These inherited traits, things like the shapes of thigh bones, length of shoulder bones, and the ridges on jawbones, showed different patterns of inheritance than a purely-hip based division would.

Specifically, they say that the Onithschia and the theropods are more closely linked and branched off from each other. This separates the massive sauropods, placing them much closer to the very first dinosaurs, the herrerasaurs.

Here's what the old and new trees would look like.

"Put it this way: This is like someone telling you that neither cats nor dogs are what you thought they were, and some of the animals you call 'cats' are actually dogs,"writes Yong.

This is a huge, major hypothesis, and one that could require the rewriting of any textbooks that discuss paleontology, but that doesn't mean it's fully accepted yet. It will be some time before the paleontology community comes to a conclusion on whether or not the full family tree should be re-evaluated, and there may be changes in the ways that certain groups are divided along the way.

"This is a textbook changer — if it continues to pan out," Thomas Holtz, a paleontologist at the University of Maryland, tells Nature News. "It's only one analysis, but it's a thorough one."

The ideas that Baron and his team have suggested could have other major implications. They suggest that the very first dinosaurs, the herrerasaurids (which predate the dinosaurs we are all familiar with by far), were omnivores that walked on two legs and had grasping arms, something that Padian says is consistent with other recent research.

More surprisingly, this revamp of the family tree suggests dinosaurs could possibly have originated in the Northern Hemisphere and not in South America (Gondwana), though this is less certain.

Either way, as Chelsea Whyte points out over at New Scientist, there's another major implication here that we can all take to heart.

Maybe hips really do lie.

SEE ALSO: A surprising factor in the extinction of the dinosaurs may have been how long their eggs took to hatch

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Researchers have successfully used spinach leaves to build functioning human heart tissue, complete with veins that can transport blood.

To tackle a chronic shortage of donor organs, scientists have been working on growing various tissues and even whole organs in the lab. But culturing a bunch of cells is only part of the solution - they simply won't thrive without a constant blood supply.

It's notoriously difficult to build a working network of fine blood vessels (also called vasculature), especially when you get down to capillaries, which are only 5 to 10 micrometres wide. Blood vessels transport the oxygen and nutrients that a lab-grown tissue sample needs to grow and function.

Now a team led by scientists from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have successfully turned a spinach leaf into living heart tissue by using the tiny network of veins you'd already find in a plant.

"Plants and animals exploit fundamentally different approaches to transporting fluids, chemicals, and macromolecules, yet there are surprising similarities in their vascular network structures," the scientists write in their paper.

Instead of trying to build a vasculature from scratch, the researchers stripped their spinach leaves of green plant material until all that was left was the fine cellulose structure that holds the leaf together.

Cellulose from plants is a great material to use in lab-grown samples because it has been well studied, is compatible with living tissue, and is cheap to get your hands on, since many plants are abundant and easy to grow. For this study, the scientists literally bought spinach at the local market.

To access the fine vascular structure of spinach, the team circulated a detergent solution through the leaves to wash the plant cells away in a process called decellularisation.

"I had done decellularisation work on human hearts before, and when I looked at the spinach leaf its stem reminded me of an aorta," says lead researcher Joshua Gershlak.

"So I thought, let's perfuse right through the stem. We weren't sure it would work, but it turned out to be pretty easy and replicable. It's working in many other plants."

The team also stripped the leaves of parsley and sweet wormwood, and demonstrated the technique in the hairy roots of a peanut plant.

They expect that with further research, it might be possible to pick different plants for different tissues - for example, the structure of wood"might be useful in bone engineering".

To test the cellulose scaffolds in a real tissue sample, they ended up using spinach because it has a high concentration of vessels the way heart tissue does.

The researchers seeded the salad leaf vascular structure with heart muscle cells, and were excited to see that within a few days, the heart cells started to spontaneously contract just like they would in human tissue.

You can watch this in action in the video below:

"The idea here is that we have this very thin, flat piece of tissue that already has a vascular network in there, so we should be able to potentially stack up multiple leaves and create a piece of cardiac tissue,"says Gershlak.

Heart tissue transplants are useful for patients who have damaged heart tissue that no longer contracts, which can happen after suffering a heart attack.

So far, the study is only a proof-of-concept, and the team is still figuring out how to integrate it with living human heart tissue.

"Currently, it is as yet unclear how the plant vasculature would be integrated into the native human vasculature and whether there would be an immune response," the researchers write.

But the team is optimistic.

"We really believe that this scaffold has the capability to help treat patients,"says biomedical researcher Glenn Gaudette, who runs the WPI lab. "We have a lot more work to do, but so far this is very promising."

"To be able to just take something as simple as a spinach leaf, which is an abundant plant, and actually turn that into a tissue that has the potential for blood to flow through it, is really very very exciting, and we hope it's going to be a significant advancement in the field."

This is not the first time scientists have turned to plants for help with growing tissue - the Pelling Lab at the University of Ottawa, Canada, made headlines last year with their art project of a human ear grown out of an apple slice.

And it's not just biological tissue scientists have been playing with inside plant systems - last month, researchers managed to grow a 'cyborg rose' with functioning electronic circulatory inside its stem and leaves.

Using spinach is also not the only approach to creating blood vessel networks for human tissue. Scientists have been researching the use of 3D printing for creating blood vessels, and have just reported limited success in printing whole blood vessel networks.

Time will tell which of these approaches will prove the most practical outside the lab, but it's definitely an exciting space to watch.

The research was published in Biomaterials.

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On a 25-kilometer stretch of coastline in Western Australia lies a prehistoric treasure trove.

Thousands of approximately 130 million-year-old dinosaur footprints are embedded in a stretch of land that can be studied only during low tide, when the sea — and the sharks and crocodiles that inhabit the region — can't hide them.

What scientists found there is truly special, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

"Nowhere else has as many types of dinosaurs represented by tracks than Walmadany does," Steve Salisbury, a paleontologist at the University of Queensland and the lead author of the study, said in a video describing the area.

Included among those many dinosaur tracks is the largest dinosaur footprint ever found. At approximately 1.75 meters long (about 5 feet, 9 inches), the track came from some sort of giant sauropod, a long-necked herbivore.

"There's nothing that comes close" in terms of size, Salisbury told CNN.

But there's far more there than one giant footprint.

"We see a unique dinosaur fauna that includes things like stegosaurs and some of the biggest dinosaurs to have ever walked the planet, gigantic sauropods," Salisbury said in the video. This was the first evidence of stegosaurs found in Australia, according to the researchers.

There are also tracks from meat-eating theropods that walked on two feet and left three-toed prints with shapes similar to those represented in the film "Jurassic Park."

The three-toed prints have a special significance: In local lore, the tracks belong to Marala, or "the Emu Man," who journeyed through the region, creating laws that dictated how people should behave.

In a press release announcing the findings, Salisbury described the other types of dinosaur tracks discovered.

"There were five different types of predatory dinosaur tracks, at least six types of tracks from long-necked herbivorous sauropods, four types of tracks from two-legged herbivorous ornithopods, and six types of tracks from armoured dinosaurs," he said.

The University of Queensland researchers were brought in more than five years ago by the aboriginal Goolarabooloo community. The Western Australian government had selected the region as a processing site for liquid natural gas, and the local groups wanted experts to help protect the region by showing what was at stake.

The area was designated a National Heritage site in 2011, and two years later it was announced that the gas production project wouldn't happen.

Since no equipment could be left out when the tide came in, the researchers used drones to map the area with digital photography and laser scans. According to Salisbury, they spent more than 400 hours out on the coast.

"It's such a magical place — Australia's own Jurassic Park, in a spectacular wilderness setting," he said in the press release.

Watch the video:

SEE ALSO: A new theory could overturn one of the most central 'facts' about dinosaurs

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Don't look now, but there's probably a spider right next to you — more or less, anyway.

It's probably hungry, because those little guys eat a whole lot, according to a study recently published in the journal The Science of Nature.

There are lots of spiders out there — about 25 million tons, if you were to put them on a scale. On average around the globe, researchers say there are about 131 per square meter. In grassland habitats, that rises to about 152. And in what the study refers to as "favorable" conditions, 1,000 arachnids per square meter can be found.

By the calculations of Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer, the biologists behind the new study, all these little carnivores kill and devour (certain species, like orb weavers, waste some of what they kill) between 400 and 800 million tons of prey each and every year.

That's a lot.

As Christopher Ingraham points out at the Washington Post, where we first spotted this study, that's more than the entire biomass of humanity. Ingraham notes that if you were to put all humans on scale, one 2005 estimate showed that all the adults put together would weigh 287 million tons. By his estimate, you could "tack on" about 70 million tons to account for kids and we'd still weigh less than spiders eat in a year.

"In other words, spiders could eat all of us and still be hungry," he writes.

Even if you were to account for the approximately 880 million people the world has added since 2005, about 13.5%, total human biomass would still be around 400 million tons, meaning that if spiders were to switch to a diet comprised of exclusively humans, they'd probably still be looking for another meal.

That's a scary idea. But there's a bright side to all this.

Spiders pretty much exclusively eat other arthropods, invertebrates with exoskeletons. Basically, they eat bugs (a few eat other spiders; very rarely will they eat plant material; then there's the occasional terrifying story of a spider eating a small animal, mostly in Australia).

There may be a lot of spiders out there, but there are even more bugs.

There are insects in every home, we just don't notice most of them. Just like other arthropods, spiders — with their eight legs and clusters of eight eyes — might seem creepy, but for the most part they don't actually cause any harm to people.

But some of those other bugs are really bad. Because of the diseases they spread, mosquitoes can be described as the deadliest animals on our planet. Without spiders, there would be a lot more of them.

The same is true for any insect. Some have estimated that the ant population of the globe alone could weigh the same as the human biomass, for example. (Other researchers dispute that calculation.)

Either way, if spiders weren't eating 400 to 800 million tons of insect every year, we'd be engulfed in a plague of disease-spreading, crop destroying insects. And without those spiders, there would be other ripple effects as well. In the study, the authors note that all kinds of other animals survive on a diet largely comprised of spiders. That includes lizards, newts, snakes, frogs, toads, and bats. Between 3,000 and 5,000 bird species eat a diet that's between 20 and 95% made of spider.

So yes, there are a lot of spiders out there, and they eat an astonishing amount of food every year. But that keeps other pest populations under control and at the same time, it feeds the other small creatures who then fit into their own spaces in the food chain.

When Matthew Bertone, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, conducted a study last year that found a "conservative tally" of about 100 species of arthropod in the average North Carolina home last year, he told Business Insider that basically, these things just weren't a big deal.

"The fact that people don't typically see these creatures goes to show they interact with us very little day to day," he said. "Thus I would caution against trying to rid homes of these animals completely — most are living in harmony with us and I don't believe the use of harsh chemicals is necessary nor good for us."

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Bangkok - Conservationists on Tuesday hailed the discovery of a new breeding population of tigers in Thailand as a "miraculous" victory for a sub-species nearly wiped out by poaching.

Images of some tigers including six cubs, captured by camera traps in an eastern Thai jungle throughout 2016, confirm the presence of what is only the world's second known breeding population of the endangered Indochinese tiger.

The only other growing population -- the largest in the world with about three dozen tigers -- is based in a western forest corridor in Thailand near the border with Myanmar.

"The extraordinary rebound of eastern Thailand's tigers is nothing short of miraculous," said John Goodrich, the tiger program director at Panthera, a wild cat preservation group that backed the survey.

The camera trap footage, which shows female tigers and their cubs traipsing through the leafy jungle, was captured with help from the anti-trafficking group Freeland and Thai park authorities.

Indochinese tigers, which are generally smaller than their Bengal and Siberian counterparts, once roamed across much of Asia.

But today only an estimated 221 remain, with the vast majority in Thailand and a handful in neighbouring Myanmar.

Aggressive poaching, weak law enforcement and habitat loss has rendered the animals all but extinct in southern China, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, according to scientists.

Tiger farms around the region have also boosted the trafficking trade by propping up demand for tiger parts, which are treasured as talismans and used in traditional medicines popular in China.

Conservationists and park officials attributed Thailand's success story to a rise in counter-poaching efforts over the past few decades.

But they warned that the breeding populations remained vulnerable and would not thrive without a sustained commitment to busting poachers and taking down the lucrative trafficking trade.

The Dong Phayayen-Khao Yai forest complex, where the latest young cubs were caught on some of the 156 cameras, still hosts a only modest tiger density of 0.63 tigers per 100 square kilometres.

It is a ratio on par with some of the world's most threatened tiger habitats, according to Freeland, but still means there is a population of at least 23 of the big beasts roaming wild.

"It's crucial to continue the great progress made by the Thai government to bolster protection for tigers at the frontlines," said Kraisak Choonhavan, the group's board chairman.

"As long as the illegal trade in tigers continues, they will need protection."

SEE ALSO: Spiders eat up to 800 million tons of prey each year, more than all humans weigh

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Researchers have developed a line immortal stem cells that allow them to generate an unlimited supply of artificial red blood cells on demand.

If these artificial blood cells pass clinical trials, they'll be far more efficient for medical use than current red blood cell products, which have to be generated from donor blood — and would be a huge deal for patients with rare blood types, who often struggle to find matching blood donors.

The idea isn't for these immortal stem cells to replace blood donation altogether — when it comes to regular blood transfusions, donated blood still does the trick.

But it's a constant struggle to propagate red blood cells from donor blood. In the UK alone, 1.5 million units of blood need to be collected each year to meet the needs of patients, particularly those with rare blood types of conditions such as sickle-cell disease.

"Globally, there is a need for an alternative red cell product,"said lead researcher Jan Frayne from the University of Bristol in the UK.

"Cultured red blood cells have advantages over donor blood, such as reduced risk of infectious disease transmission."

In the past, researchers had attempted to turn donated stem cells straight into mature red blood cells — a technique that works, but is an incredibly inefficient process.

Each stem cell only makes around 50,000 red blood cells before it dies off, at which point the researchers need a new blood donation.

And while 50,000 might sound like a lot, put that into perspective, a typical bag of blood used in hospitals contains around 1 trillion red blood cells.

To overcome this, the University of Bristol team took a different approach — they turned adult stem cells into the world's first line of immortalised 'erythroid' stem cells — erythroid refers to the process that produces red blood cells.

They've called the cell line Bristol Erythroid Line Adult or BEL-A cells.

To create these 'immortal' cells, they effectively trapped the adult stem cells in an early stage of development, which means they can divide and create red blood cells forever without dying, which avoids the need for repeat donations.

"Previous approaches to producing red blood cells have relied on various sources of stem cells which can only presently produce very limited quantities,"said Frayne.

"We have demonstrated a feasible way to sustainably manufacture red cells for clinical use,"she told the BBC. "We've grown litres of it."

If immortal stem cells sound familiar to you, that's because there's another famous line of immortal stem cells used in labs around the world, known as HeLa, which was taken from the tissue of a woman called Henrietta Lackswithout her knowledge.

Lacks was an African American woman who had a cancerous tumour biopsied in 1951, and never knew those cells were turned into the immortal HeLa cell line, which has played a crucial role in key milestones such as the development of the polio vaccine, as well as major cancer studies, and continues to be used today.

These BEL-A immortal stem cells, on the other hand, were specifically selected from voluntarily donated blood products with the sole aim of generating adult human blood cells.

If their red blood cell products pass clinical trials, they could prove just as revolutionary and useful as Lacks' cells did.

"Scientists have been working for years on how to manufacture red blood cells to offer an alternative to donated blood to treat patients," Dave Anstee, director of the UK's National Institute of Health Research Blood and Transplant Research Unit in Red Cell products, which collaborated on the research, announced in a press statement.

"The patients who stand to potentially benefit most are those with complex and life-limiting conditions like sickle cell disease and thalassemia, which can require multiple transfusions of well-matched blood."

"The intention is not to replace blood donation but provide specialist treatment for specific patient groups,"he added.

"The first therapeutic use of a cultured red cell product is likely to be for patients with rare blood groups because suitable conventional red blood cell donations can be difficult to source."

The artificial red blood cells still need to undergo clinical trials in humans before we can say for sure that they're safe and effective.

But early safety trials based on previous manufacturing methods will begin by the end of this year. If that goes to plan, the researchers will trial the BEL-A cell products in patients shortly after that.

We'll be watching the progress closely.

The research has been published in Nature Communications.

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NOW WATCH: People are outraged by this shocking video showing a passenger forcibly dragged off a United Airlines plane

In June 2016, a 2-year-old boy was playing near the water at a Disney World resort when an alligator attacked and killed him. A black bear attacked a woman running the marathon in New Mexico a few days later. In Colorado, a mom fought off a mountain lion to save her 5-year-old son, who was attacked in their backyard.

Even when the headlines about wildlife don't involve attacks — a bear is spotted swimming in a backyard pool, for example, or a great white shark is tagged off the coast of Cape Cod — we are still vividly reminded that America is not only our home, but also the home to some dangerous, wild predators as well. And sometimes these creatures are closer than we think.

But how dangerous are these animals really? How afraid of them should we be? Well, it turns out, we shouldn't be too afraid since the animals we fear most might not actually be the most deadly. For example, dogs, deer, and cows kill more Americans every year than bears, sharks, or alligators.

So from wolves to spiders, here is a look at 10 creatures that most normal Americans fear, where they live, and just how dangerous they really are.

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Bears

Odds are if you see a bear, it will be a black bear, as they are the most common in the US. There are at least 600,000 black bears in North America and about half of those are found in the US. As opportunistic eaters, they have also developed a taste for human food and garbage, which has made them more brazen and more dangerous.

Black bears can weigh up to 300 pounds (136 kilograms). Grizzly bears are bigger, weighing upwards of 700 pounds (317 kilograms), and they are very fast runners; some have been clocked running at 30 mph (48 kmh), according to National Geographic. There are an estimated 1,800 grizzly bears remaining in the lower 48 states.

Your chances of being injured by a bear are approximately 1 in 2.1 million, according to the National Park Service. Between 1900 and 2009, around 63 people were killed in 59 incidents involving black bears, according to a report in Wildlife Management, which is a relatively low number. Grizzlies are more threatening, with the average encounter being 21 times more dangerous than a black bear encounter, reports National Geographic. Encounters with mothers and their cubs create the most dangerous situations.

So, if you are in bear country, remember to try not to attract bears with food and perfume. Carry bear spray if you are hiking and travel in groups. Stand your ground, don't run, and make loud noises if you run into one to try to scare them away.

Sharks

For those of us that have seen the movie Jaws, sharks can be terrifying. Of the many different kinds of sharks swimming in our oceans, some of the ones most often involved in attacks on humans are great whites, bull sharks, and tiger sharks. While great whites might be the biggest, bull sharks are the most aggressive. They also hunt closer to shore and in shallower waters.

It is important to note though, that no shark typically hunts humans, according to NOAA, and when they do, it is usually a case of mistaken identity— we humans are mistaken for their normal prey, such as seals. Typically, the US sees only about 30-40 shark attacks a year, reports USA Today, and, on average, maybe only one of those is deadly.

This translates to a 1-in-8-million chance you'd ever die from a shark attack; meanwhile, a global asteroid strike is 100 times more likely to kill you.

If you are planning on swimming in the ocean, try to swim in groups, don't swim with any kind of open cut, take off any shiny jewelry, and try not to splash too much. It is also best to avoid swimming at dawn and dusk, when sharks usually prey.

Mountain lions and Florida panthers

Mountain lions go by many names, including pumas, cougars, or catamounts. They are North America's largest wildcat and they can be fierce predators, with powerful limbs, sharp claws, and the ability to leap as high as 15 feet and as far as 40 feet, according to Defenders of Wildlife.

The big cats roam from California to Texas, and some — like P-22, the cougar accused of killing a koala at the LA Zoo — live near cities. There are an estimated 30,000 of these animals in the US. The Florida panthers, a subspecies of the mountain lion, are less commonly seen because they are critically endangered, with only 100 to 180 left in the wild.

The chances of a person being attacked are small, though, because the cats are shy and usually avoid humans. When they do attack, children or solitary adults are usually the victims. According to National Geographic, there are on average only four mountain lion attacks and one fatality each year in all of the US and Canada.

The tick was fat with blood before it died, having just feasted on a monkey. But searching fingers likely found the bug nestled in its host's fur during a grooming ritual.

Primates bond by picking at each other to look for parasites. That practice is good for the health of a monkey community, but it was very bad for the ancient tick that ended up flung aside and caught in tree sap.

Engorged with blood and strained from being plucked roughly from its host, the bug's body burst. As it died, two small holes in its back leaked monkey blood into the sticky grave.

That bit of tree sap hardened into amber over the next 20 to 30 million years, and recently emerged from a mine in the Dominican Republic. It has now made its way to a laboratory at Oregon State University.

Under a microscope, those squirts of blood were found to be the first fossilized red blood cells from a mammal ever discovered — and they give key insights into life in the ancient Hispaniolan forest.

The biologist George Poinar Jr. examined the fossil, filing down the amber down so that the ancient arachnid was just five-hundredths of a millimeter from the surface. The blood that leaked from those two holes on its back was spread out and naturally stained in the congealed sap, almost as if prepared for examination in a lab. Poinar could tell the blood came from a monkey based on the shape and diameter of the cells.

But mixed into the blood was another parasite even smaller than the tick: Babesia microti, a protozoan parasite that's still around today.

B. microti still travels in ticks, and infects primates when its host sucks their blood. In humans, it causes a malaria-like disease called babesiosis.

When Poinar cracked the tick fossil open after thoroughly studying the intact bug, he found b. microti at all of its several life stages in the tick's gut.

The discovery of this ancient b. microti, beautifully preserved in amber, gives researchers a new minimum earliest date for the emergence of the parasite. And the whole fossil, tiny as it is, therefore tells a complex story about the life cycles of creatures living in the Caribbean islands millions of years ago.

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Early risers are often glorified — there's the well-known saying about the early bird catching the worm, and many articles, blog posts, and Reddit threads about the benefits of getting up at 4:30 a.m.

But if rising early is so good for us, why don't all humans get up at the crack of dawn — or at least try to? Why do some of us consider ourselves morning people (also known as larks) or night owls?

The answer is simple: Everyone has a natural internal clock — a chronotype or circadian rhythm — that determines when they're most alert and most sleepy. That means that we're not all meant to be morning people. As chronobiologist Till Roenneberg explains in his book, "Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You're So Tired," the internal factors determining when we like to wake up are primarily genetic. The biggest external factor is exposure to light, especially sunlight.

Research into chronotypes helps explain why people have natural sleep patterns, how that changes throughout life, the differences in circadian rhythms between men and women, and what we can do to modify our schedules.

What's my chronotype?

Most of us think of ourselves as morning or night people, but those divisions aren't scientific — they're just ways of comparing ourselves to one another. 

"Where you define owl or lark is really arbitrary," says Dr. David Welsh, an associate professor studying circadian clocks at UC San Diego. Welsh says that if you look at large surveys of populations, you get a normal distribution of chronotypes — most people have fairly "average" chronotypes, some prefer to get up a bit earlier or later, and small groups naturally rise extremely early or late. There's no line that distinguishes different chronotypes.

Your chronotype is more than a feeling — it can be verified by measuring your body temperature and the levels of certain hormones in your blood at different times during the day, since those factors are regulated by our circadian clocks.

According to most research on the topic, we have a genetic predisposition for a certain chronotype, but the genetic factors that cause some people to feel alert and productive earlier versus later are complex. A number of different genes are involved, many of which are still being discovered. 

The broad range of human chronotypes also take several other variables into account. For most of their lives, men have slightly later chronotypes than women. And alongside preferences about when we go to bed, people also require different amounts of sleep. Most adults need between seven and nine hours, though some require slightly more or less, and a tiny number need far more or far less.

Most of our internal clocks also don't match the 24-hour cycle of our planet. Instead, they tend to be a little longer than 24 hours (though some people's clocks are far longer or shorter). Those whose internal clocks run short tend to be early risers — sleep pressure builds up for them more quickly, pushing them to fall asleep earlier and rise with the sun.

Roenneberg explains in his book that there might be an evolutionary explanation for why people have such varied body clocks. As humanity evolved, it was probably advantageous for some of us to be more alert at different times of day. That would have allowed members of groups to stay awake at night in order to watch for predators or hunt for food that was easier to catch in the dark. 

The changes our internal clocks undergo throughout our lifetimes could also be related to this evolutionary legacy. Chronotypes start early for young children, become later in adolescence, then get earlier again as we age. Roenneberg notes that the shift toward a later schedule among adolescents tends to coincide with the time of life at which humans peak in athletic ability — around 20. The most physically capable people are therefore also most comfortable staying awake through the night. (In general, night owls can keep working longer in tests that require staying awake for long periods of time.)

Today, however, the observed chronotype changes that happen in teenagers have led many sleep researchers to suggest that high schools should simply start later. 

How do we reset the clock?

Body clocks can be changed — when someone moves from Los Angeles to London, they eventually shift their schedule, after all — but only to a certain degree. So how much can we adjust our internal clock?

"You can’t wish yourself to be a morning person if you’re really an evening person, but what you can do is alter your light exposure," Welsh says.

Daylight naturally helps us feel alert, while darkness prompts the body to produce hormones that make us sleepy. That's how we adjust to new time zones.

According to Welsh, those who want to start waking up earlier should try to expose themselves to bright light first thing in the morning for at least half an hour, since early sunlight exposure acts a daily reset. (In experiments where people are kept away from clocks and natural light, internal clocks can run wild.) Maximizing the amount of natural light you get during the rest of the day and avoiding light at night will also help the brain and body adjust to a new schedule. To move your body clock in the later direction (for travel, for example, or if early risers are trying to sleep in later), Welsh recommends exposing yourself to bright light at night. 

In a lab, Welsh says, it's usually possible to reset someone's body clock by carefully controlling light exposure, but it can be tough to create that kind of light exposure schedule in the real world. Plus, certain people simply find it easier to adjust their chronotypes than others do.

In some cases, it can be impossible to totally change our natural inclinations, which is why some people struggle with the daily schedule that work and school impose. The very fact that most people use alarms to wake up means that for the most part, our days begin before we're biologically awake, according to Roenneberg's book. Either that, or we're simply not getting enough sleep.

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Science can't say whether people in your life are good or evil, per se. But it's getting better at figuring out whether they enjoy hurting you.

A fairly new field in personality research studies "misanthropic" traits: characteristics that lead people to hurt those around them for their own benefit. And psychologists have established a "dark triad" of harmful personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy (or a lack of empathy), and Machiavellianism (or a tendency to manipulate others.)

Any one of these traits makes a person stressful to those around them. Taken together they add up to an "antagonistic and selfish" strategy for getting ahead at other people's expense.

Now, some researchers suggest a fourth trait should join the triad: sadism, or joy in inflicting pain on others.

Why sadism matters

Sadism is a term with a long history. Sadists take pleasure in hurting other people. They're our most fearsome and evil villains — whether real or imagined, like Ramsay Bolton of "Game of Thrones."

But the idea of sadism is fairly new to clinical settings. That's in part because the whole study of personality, and specifically of "dark" personality traits, is fairly recent and underdeveloped. But it's also because traits like sadism, along with the rest of the dark triad, are difficult to tease apart with clinical precision.

Even papers that support the idea of sadism as part of a larger "dark tetrad"acknowledge that its effects can be difficult to distinguish from the three existing triad traits.

But a growing body of work in just the last few years has shown that sadism correlates specifically and strongly with cruel behavior — for example, trolling and cyberbullying.

The sadism test

In order to develop a rigorous test for sadism, researchers assembled a list of questions designed to poke right at the heart of a sadistic personality.

The first version was 20 questions long. Subjects were asked to say how strongly they agreed or disagreed with a list of (rather chilling) statements, using a scale from one to five. (One meant completely disagree and five completely agree.)

1. I have made fun of people so that they know I am in control.
2. People do what I want them to because they are afraid of me.
3. When I tell people what to do, they know to do it.
4. I never get tired of pushing people around.
5. I would hurt somebody if it meant I would be in control.
6. I control my friends through intimidation.
7. When I mock someone, it is funny to see them get upset.
8. Being mean to others can be exciting.
9. When I get annoyed, tormenting people makes me feel better.
10. I have hurt people close to me for enjoyment.
11. I enjoy humiliating others.
12. I get pleasure from mocking people in front of their friends.
13. I think about harassing others for enjoyment.
14. I have cheated others because I enjoy it.
15. I think about hurting people who irritate me.
16. I'd lie to someone to make them upset.
17. I have stolen from others without regard for the consequences.
18. Making people feel bad about themselves makes me feel good.
19. I am quick to humiliate others.
20. I have tormented others without feeling remorse.

When 199 undergraduate students took the test, the results were promising but inconclusive.

The test, researchers found, was good at measuring sadism and dark triad traits. And it suggested that there were specific and interpretable patterns in people's misanthropic personalities. But it didn't as good a job as they'd hoped in identifying sadism as separate from psychopathy and the rest of the dark tried.

So they weeded out questions that might have caused too much overlap and tried again with a nine-question version of the test:

1. I have made fun of people so that they know I am in control.
2. I never get tired of pushing people around.
3. I would hurt somebody if it meant I would be in control.
4. When I mock someone, it's funny to see them get upset.
5. Being mean to others can be exciting.
6. I get pleasure from mocking people in front of their friends.
7. Watching people get into fights excites me.
8. I think about hurting people who irritate me.
9. I would not purposely hurt anybody, even if I didn't like them.

This time, when 202 students took the test, the results were stronger. It still correlated with other dark triad traits like psychopathy as expected, but did a better job of showing that sadism is a separate category. In both tests, men scored much more highly than women for the negative traits. These results were published the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

The researchers note that there's a lot more work to do on what they're calling the Assessment of Sadistic Personality (ASP), including finding subjects who aren't college undergrads taking questionnaires for course credit (not the most diverse or representative sample). But they expect it will play a significant role as they come to understand sadism in clinical terms.

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The board of a luxury New York City apartment complex raised concerns about "dog racism" in 2015, when it started requiring residents to test their dogs' DNA before granting the animals permission to reside in the building.

The board reasoned that certain dog breeds are aggressive by nature. (The complex has a list of banned breeds, which includes Pomeranians, according to DNAinfo.)

Dog DNA tests claim they can tell you about your pet's behavior, estimate how big a puppy will get, and indicate whether it will play nice with children or other pets.

Having experimented with testing my own DNA, I decided to find out more about my pup. In honor of National Pet Day, here's how it went:

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This is Izzie. When I adopted her over a decade ago, I was told she was a mixed-breed golden retriever.

She was only a year old at the time, so no one knew how big she'd get (most goldens reach their full size, about 60 lbs., around age 2) or how she'd behave. Our veterinarian told us she was likely a (smallish) golden retriever mutt.

But Izzie stayed roughly the same size, and we stayed curious about her heritage. Now 15 years old, she's friendly and loyal.

Most people get dog DNA tests so they can find out what kind of behavioral traits to expect — golden retrievers tend to be loyal and good with kids, for example, while dalmatians are super active and generally make good guard dogs.

Source: American Kennel Club

When I got the chance to test her DNA, I seized it. There were several options, but I picked the Wisdom Panel DNA test developed by MARS Veterinary, the world's largest pet healthcare provider.

At $79.99, the kit isn't cheap.

As humans, how we perceive the world is how we define our own reality. And for the vast majority of humans, perception is handled through sight. 

Your hearing, and your senses of smell, taste, and touch also play roles — no doubt — but sight is the most immediate way we experience the world around us. 

This isn't the case for dogs.

The adorable snout on your pup isn't just for petting — dogs "see" the world with their nose first. "We assume that non-human animals' perception would be kind of like ours, but simpler," dog cognition researcher Dr. Alexandra Horowitz told me in an interview earlier this year.

But that isn't the case. Instead, dogs "see" the world through smells. Here's how it works.

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"It's really hard to get outside our perspective."

Because our perception of the world colors our perception of how others see the world, we assume that dogs primarily perceive the world through sight. But it's not so hard to understand — and even experience— the concept of smell as a primary input.

"You could think of it as just another perceptual modality," Horowitz told me. "You can close your eyes. You're still having an experience as a human, and it's transformed in some ways. But there's still a room. There's still a reality — a room that you can hear, you can smell, you can touch. And even though it's not one that we're that familiar with, we're still co-existing."

That's the first way to understand how dogs see the world — close your eyes, maybe cover your ears with sound-canceling headphones. Now take a sniff! As humans, our sense of smell is nowhere near as adept as that of dogs — but you can begin to understand how a dog perceives the world. Maybe you smell something delicious, or something rotting, or the sterile blow of an office air conditioner.

"We basically have a cloud of smell around us. That's interesting, because it means a dog can smell you before you're really there," Horowitz said. "If you're around the corner, your cloud of smell is coming around ahead of you."

"Ultimately, their bigger interest is smell than vision."

Which isn't to say that dogs don't literally see you — their eyes are another form of input, just not the primary one. "They might look at someone with their eyes; as you approach, they look at you," Horowitz said. "But then once they've noticed that there's something with their eyes, they use smell to tell that it's you. So they sort of reverse that very familiar use of ours."

And that's crucial to understanding how dogs see the world.

You, as a human, might smell something delicious and then use your eyes to look around to locate the source of that delicious smell. "Ah, it's pasta sauce slowly coming together on a stove!" 

For dogs, the opposite is true. Or, as Horowitz put it:

"We smell something and then when we see it we're like, 'Oh yeah, that's it. That's what it was. It was cinnamon buns.' And dogs when they see you, they're like, 'Okay, that's something to explore, I'm gonna smell it. Oh yeah that's Ben.'"

"Instead of all the things that are bouncing into my eyes when I sit in a room, I'm just perceiving that room through things— molecules of smell. That's really the transformation you have to make."

We perceive depth, as humans, through stereo vision — our two eyes triangulate on the world around us, and our brain converts that video feed into three dimensions. That same concept applies to dogs, except — once again — it's through scent rather than sight.

"Where something is in a room, or what something even is, kind of changes a bit if you imagine it as an olfactory precept instead of as only a visual precept," Horowitz said. To translate that a bit, your perception of the world fundamentally changes if it's viewed through the lens of scent.

It means not only do you perceive what's immediately around you, but also what was once around you and what's coming up. In this way, how dogs perceive the world is actually more developed than humans — their sense of smell doesn't just alert them to the present, but it also travels through time.

Researchers at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have created an artificial womb. Inside of the womb, they placed a premature lamb fetus. They then kept the fetus in the womb for four weeks. The big question was: Would the lamb fetus survive?

Turns out, it didn't just survive, it thrived. Over its four weeks in the artificial womb, the lamb started to grow a wool coat, gained weight, and even opened its eyes. The researchers successfully tested eight lamb fetuses this way. But growing lamb fetuses is just the beginning. 

Ultimately, the researchers are working toward creating an artificial womb that could sustain premature human babies. Preemies haven't had time to fully develop in the womb and, therefore, are at a higher risk of health problems throughout their life. 

If doctors could place a preemie inside of an artificial womb where it could spend its remaining weeks fully developing, this could completely change that baby's life. The researchers emphasized that future artificial wombs for humans could only sustain babies born after 23 weeks in the womb. 

So, the mother's womb is still essential for conception and early-stage development. 

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Palangkaraya (Indonesia) (AFP) - A rare albino orangutan has been rescued on the Indonesian part of Borneo island where villagers were keeping the white-haired, blue-eyed creature in a cage, a protection group said Tuesday.

In an extremely unusual discovery, authorities picked up the female, estimated to be five years old, in a remote village in Kapuas Hulu district.

The Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOSF), which is caring for the critically endangered ape -- believed to be albino -- said the organization had never before in its 25-year history taken in such an orangutan. 

Normal Bornean orangutans have reddish-brown hair.

Villagers said they captured the ape -- who has not yet been named -- on Thursday. Authorities rescued the ape two days later. 

"Orangutans are rare, and an albino orangutan is even rarer," Nico Herm anu, a BOSF spokesman, told AFP.

"Since BOSF was founded 25 years ago, we had never before taken in an albino orangutan at our rehabilitation center."

Pictures showed dried blood around the creature's nose, with the foundation saying the injury could have been sustained when the ape was fighting the villagers' attempts to capture it.

The orangutan has been taken to BOSF's rehabilitation center for further assessment. Almost 500 orangutans are kept at the center.

The Bornean orangutan, which along with the Sumatran orangutan are Asia's only great apes, is classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as "critically endangered" -- just one step away from extinction.

Around 100,000 are estimated to live on Borneo, which is divided between Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia, down from 288,500 in 1973 and with their numbers expected to shrink to 47,000 by 2025, according to the IUCN.

The creatures have seen their habitat shrink dramatically as the island's rainforests are increasingly turned into oil palm, rubber or paper plantations, and are sometimes targeted by villagers who view them as pests. 

SEE ALSO: Archaeologists have uncovered ancient bones that may rewrite American history

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