A polyp: a pre-cancerous growth in the bowel

A one-off five-minute procedure reduces deaths from bowel cancer by 43 per cent and decreases the incidence of the disease by a third.

If introduced nationally, it would save at least 3,000 lives every year, and save the National Health Service £28 for every person screened by removing the need for treatment, according to a study published in the Lancet.

Listen to Joseph Milton’s audio report below.

doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(10)60551-X

That’s not fair

Overt inequality is distasteful to most of us and social scientists have long suggested that humans dislike perceived unfairness, based on behavioural and anthropological evidence. Now, for the first time, research published in Nature shows that neurons – brain cells- involved in the brain’s reward circuitry directly respond to the fairness of a situation.

John O’Doherty’s team at the California Institute of Technology monitored neural responses in the striatum and prefrontal cortex of participants who were paired up to take part in a monetary game.
One participant in each pair was given more money than the other. Both were aware of the disparity.

The team then selectively handed out more money, and found that neuronal activity was greater in the ‘high-pay’ people when money was given to the ‘low-pay’ person rather than to themselves. The opposite pattern of activity was seen in the low-pay participants.

Scent hormone vital for bonding identified

A key hormone which allows animals to form bonds with others through smell has been identified by researchers at The University of Edinburgh.

Vasopressin helps the brain differentiate between familiar and new scents, allowing animals to establish strong bonds. Many scientists think a failure in this recognition system in humans may prevent people from developing deep emotional bonds with others. A lack of scent based bonding could be at the root of conditions in humans such as some forms of autism and social phobia.

The study, published in the journal Nature, suggests that when the hormone fails to function, animals are unable to recognise other individuals from their scent.

The researchers reached their conclusion by studying rats. They placed an adult rat in an enclosure with a baby rat and left them to sniff each other.

After a short separation, they placed the baby back in the adult’s enclosure, together with an unknown baby. Adult rats which lacked vasopressin failed to recognise the familiar baby.

Google take-away

In the wake of Google’s spat with the Chinese government, Nature’s news team surveyed scientists in China to find out how much they rely on Google – and what the consequences would be if they lost access to the search engine.

More than three-quarters of the scientists quizzed said they use Google as the primary search engine for their research. Over 80 per cent use the search engine to find academic papers; close to 60 per cent use it to get information about scientific discoveries or other scientists’ research programmes; and more than half use the literature search Google Scholar.

Eighty four per cent of the scientists who responded to Nature’s survey said their research would be “somewhat or significantly” hampered by losing access to Google and 78 per cent said that international collaborations would be affected to the same degree.

One Chinese scientist said: “Research without Google would be like life without electricity.”

The full survey results are online at www.go.nature.com/FJ6QTm

Gas-giant losing atmosphere to star

A recently discovered extrasolar planet is losing its atmosphere to its host star, according to a paper published in Nature this week.
A team at Peking University in Beijing analysed WASP-12b, a gas-giant planet larger than Jupiter. The planet is orbiting very close to its star, and has a surprisingly large radius. Although WASP-12b is strongly heated by its host star, this energy source is not sufficient to explain the planet’s inflated size.

The team, led by Shu-lin Li, suggest that WASP-12b’s close orbit subjects it to extremely large tidal forces. These forces are spread throughout the body of the planet, providing an energy source for the planet’s large volume. The authors infer that WASP-12b’s atmosphere is escaping the planet’s gravitational field, and flowing towards the host star.

Clipping the wings of dengue and malaria

An estimated 50–100 million new dengue fever infections occur each year in tropical countries, and improved control of the mosquito species which carries the disease could save many lives.

Now a team of scientists have developed genetically modified strains of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito which carries dengue. The modified male mosquitoes carry a gene which interferes with wing growth.

Research led by Guoliang Fu of the University of Oxford, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggests releasing the GM male mosquitoes to mate with females. The resulting female offspring would then be born with the gene limiting wing growth.

The team estimates the new breed could sustainably suppress the native mosquito population in six to nine months.

The same technique could be used in the future to tackle mosquitoes that spread malaria.

Bankers take note: brain area responsible for financial risk-taking discovered

The aversion to losing money has been tied to specific structures in the brain, the amygdalae – two almond-shaped clusters of tissue located in the medial temporal lobes. The amygdalae register rapid emotional reactions and are involved in depression, anxiety, and autism.

The study by neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), published in this week’s PNAS, offers insight into the role of these structures in economic behaviour.

Two patients whose amygdalae had been destroyed by a genetic disease took part in a simple ‘experimental economics task.’ Both of these patients took risky gambles much more often than subjects of the same age and education who had fully functioning amygdalae.

Even third-hand cigarette smoke is deadly

Tobacco smoke residues which remain on surfaces after cigarettes are extinguished react with the common indoor air pollutant nitrous acid to produce dangerous carcinogens.

A study published in this week’s PNAS and led by researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) found that residual nicotine reacts with ambient nitrous acid – created by unvented gas appliances – forming carcinogenic tobacco-specific nitrosamines or TSNAs.

Hugo Destaillats, a chemist with the Indoor Environment Department of Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division said: “TSNAs are among the most broadly acting and potent carcinogens present in unburned tobacco and tobacco smoke.”

Earlier springs could devastate British wildlife

Spring and summer are occurring earlier in the UK and the effect appears to be accelerating, which could have a devastating effect on British wildlife.

Research led by Dr Stephen Thackeray and Professor Sarah Wanless of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, and published in Global Change Biology, gathered together more than 25,000 records of phenology – dates of reproduction – for 726 species of plants and animals.

More than 80 per cent of trends recorded between 1976 and 2005 indicated that the seasons are occurring earlier.

On average, reproduction is taking place more than 11 days earlier, over the whole period, and the rate of change has accelerated in recent decades.

Cold turkey the best way to stop smoking

The most successful method used to quit by ex-smokers is unassisted cessation, or going ‘cold turkey’, according to a review of 511 studies published in 2007 and 2008.

In this week’s PLoS Medicine, Simon Chapman and Ross MacKenzie, from the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney, Australia, stress the overemphasis on methods such as nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) which they claim has led to the “medicalisation of smoking cessation.”

The authors report that studies repeatedly show that two-thirds to three-quarters of ex-smokers stop unaided.

Feeling blue – or is it grey?

People with anxiety and depression tend to use a shade of grey to represent their mental state.

Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Medical Research Methodology created a wheel of colors of various intensities. Depressed people who were asked which color represented their mood mostly chose grey, whereas healthy subjects tended to pick a shade of yellow.

Mediterranean diet could help limit brain damage

A Mediterranean diet – high in vegetables and fish and low in meat and dairy products- may help avoid small areas of brain damage associated with problems in thinking and memory.

Brain infarcts, or small areas of dead tissue, were 36 per cent less common in people who ate a Mediterranean-like diet, according to a study released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 62nd Annual Meeting in Toronto in April.

We knew that monkeys are adept at counting, adding-up and multiplication. They can even grasp abstract mathematical concepts, suggesting they’re a match for college students when it comes to maths.

Now, for the first time, researchers have demonstrated the neurological basis of monkeys’ understanding of abstract maths principles.

The team at the University of Tübingen, led by Andreas Nieder, used special probes to measure the electrical activity of individual neurons – brain cells – in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of rhesus monkeys as they performed tasks responding to stimuli which they had been trained to recognise as representing “greater than” or “less than” rules.

Their previous work on rhesus monkeys showed that neurons become dedicated to specific numbers, and this new research goes a step further, indicating that individual PFC neurons have the capacity to represent flexible mathematical rules.

Spikes in electrical activity were seen as the rules were being followed in about twenty per cent of the neurons studied, indicating that they encode the rules. About half were dedicated to the ‘greater than’ rule, and the other half, to the ‘less than’ rule.

“It seems the brain operates with specific ‘rule-coding’ units that control the flow of information between sensory, memory and motor stages,” said Professor Nieder.

Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University, who first showed that monkeys could learn abstract principles of mathematics said: “This study shows that neurons in the PFC are encoding the meaning of the rule…responding selectively to either the greater than or less than relationship.”

In humans, PFC lesions lead to problems in following strategies and pursuing long-term goals, while sensation and memory remain unaffected. This research could help understand what goes wrong when this part of the brain is damaged.

It is also further evidence of the existence of an evolutionarily primitive system in primate brains for understanding maths. The ancestors of humans and rhesus monkeys diverged about 20 million years ago, so numerical skills must have evolved before then.

Journal reference: PNAS (DOI:10.1073/pnas.0909180107)

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There’s never been a more exciting time to be doing, writing about, or indeed reading about science and tech.

We are close to receiving results from CERN which could change physics forever, close to seeing synthetic life created from scratch in a lab, close to having unprecedented views of the universe through powerful new telescopes, and the influence of personal technology has never been greater in our lives. We also have to work out what we do next to reduce carbon emissions after the disappointment that was COP15.

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As the editor of the website, I’ll be keeping you up to date with what’s going on here at Elements in regular posts. So, once again, welcome. We hope you enjoy the site,

Joe Milton