One of those non-military related “wastes” that Democrats insisted on in the new omnibus spending bill was more money for science.
The legislation would boost funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to a historic high of $37 billion, $3 billion over the 2017 level. The National Science Foundation (NSF) would receive $7.8 billion, $295 million more than it received last year. And NASA’s budget would rise to $20.7 billion, an increase of $1.1 billion.
All of those numbers may look pretty small when compared to the $700 billion that goes to the military — over half the total of the bill — but at least these recognize that science has value and represent a marginal improvement, especially in contrast to the heavily anti-science attitude of the Trump White House.
Speaking of which …
One notable outlier to the overall trend: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Congress has proposed holding the agency’s funding at $8.1 billion, even with the 2017 level. But that might be a victory of sorts, given Trump has proposed slashing EPA funding by more than 30% in 2018, to $5.7 billion.
In the current environment, those extra billions will likely go to expanding Scott Pruitt’s personal army, gold plating his cone of silence, and buying a few EPA jets so he no longer has to deal with though dirty hippies in public airports. But in general, science did pretty well in this budget. And you can make a pretty good bet that none of those numbers came easy. They certainly are not what Trump requested. So … good on you, science negotiators!
Trump had sought to cut the NIH budget by 18% in 2018, in part by eliminating one of the agency’s 27 institutes — the Fogarty International Center in Bethesda, Maryland, which helps to train researchers and health-care providers overseas. The spending plan released by Congress includes nearly $76 million for the centre.
There are a lot of things to dislike about the omnibus bill. But on a science front, with Trump in the White House and Republicans running both ends of Capitol Hill … we did okay.
Now come on in, let’s read some science!
Anthropology
We had a break last week from the ongoing Neanderthal-palooza that’s seen our close relatives getting fresh credit for art, tools, and in general being a lot more innovative, a lot sooner, than previously thought.
This week, researchers from the Max Planck Institute are back with a look at the genetics of some of the last known Neanderthals. If you’ve sent your own genetics off to 23-and-me or Ancestry for a peek into the past, you almost certainly got back a number indicating you had some Neanderthal genes from some great to the Nth grandparent, but what the researchers found is that those Neanderthals, weren’t these Neanderthals. Or at least, there was none of us, in them.
Although four of the Neanderthals studied here post-date the putative arrival of early modern humans into Europe, we do not detect any recent gene flow from early modern humans in their ancestry.
The indications are by about 40,000 years ago Neanderthal populations had not only fallen, but they were not very genetically diverse. Like many animals pushed down to small numbers, they were all closely related. Interestingly, these Neanderthals weren’t just free of genes from modern humans, they also didn’t seem to be descendants of Neanderthals who had lived in the same area at an earlier date. So apparently there had been some turnover in Neanderthal populations. By using markers, the researchers estimated that the Neanderthal genes that are shared by modern humans probably came from a group of Neanderthals that lived as much as 70,000 years before this later group.
Paleontology
While recent looks at early birds (and near-birds like Archaeopteryx) have suggested that they were more capable and active flyers than some researchers had suggested in the past, but a group of paleontologists led by a researcher from University of Lincoln in the UK, suggest there was one thing that early birds could not do.
Birds that lived at the time of the dinosaurs might have been too heavy to sit on clutches of eggs without breaking them, according to an analysis of primitive avian fossils. The findings suggest that incubation might be a defining feature of modern birds, evolving only in the past 100 million years. …
Previous work had shown that modern birds evolved a more open pelvis, which would have allowed the size of their eggs to increase over time… In early birds, pelvic bones were fused, creating a canal that limited egg size. Given they had no fossil eggs to measure, the scientists measured the pelvic-canal width to estimate the likely size and mass of each species’ eggs. They then calculated the load mass of each egg — the maximum weight that they could bear without breaking.
It’s clever research, and may well be right. But … for decades, anything associated with the evolution of birds has generated a lot of discussion. Originally that was because fossil specimens made birds the showcase for evolution in action. More recently it’s been because, as the last representatives of the group that included dinosaurs, people are quick to read anything that applies to early birds as also applying to their larger cousins. Saying that pelvic structure in early birds would have locked them out of nest-sitting would certainly seem to rule this out among much larger, ground-dwelling relatives. That’s not something that gains ready acceptance for a couple of reasons: Several types of dinosaurs not only built obvious nests to hold their eggs, but appear to have tended their young in the nest; and large ground-dwelling birds today, like the 200 pound ostrich, do sit on nests. Paleontologists have generally assumed that nest-sitting was a behavior that developed among bird-ancestors within the dinosaurs. So … this less than settled.
Astronomy
The Moon is made of very similar materials to the Earth. So similar that when the first analysis was done of returned lunar materials, it shocked scientists. It was clear that the Moon had formed with the Earth and not in some other part of the solar system only to be later captured by Earth’s gravity. Exactly how this happened was not so easy to explain. Models suggested that two planets forming in orbit around each other wasn’t a likely occurrence (to put it mildly).
Way back in 1898, astronomer George Darwin (son of Charles), suggested that Earth and Moon had once been one body, but had “spun apart” due to the centrifugal force of a rapidly-spinning early planet. But not even Darwin could make the math work out. Then in the 1940s, Canadian geologist Reginald Daly suggested that the Earth and Moon had been broken apart by a collision — a theory that was mostly ignored for the next thirty years. It wasn’t until isotopes in Moon rocks turned out to be more or less identical to those of Earth, that the Giant Impact Theory really gained traction.
In 2012, a NASA research team worked out some math that seemed like a two-in-one winner. They calculated that a Mars-sized body striking the proto-Earth with the right speed and angle of collision, could explain a few things about the structure of the Earth like our over-sized core and the speed of Earth’s rotation. And—if the blow landed just right—could also produce a jet of debris that could form up into the Moon. So … tah dah. Except the very next year, the whole theory that Daly put together back in 1949 seemed to be suffering from it’s own impact. The Giant Impact Theory, neat as it seemed, also had … math problems. Simulations just stubbornly refused to resolve into a neat, massive sphere like the one that now orbits Earth.
There have been more recent studies and simulations, including some that suggest the Moon formed as a kind of cosmic donut rather than a Saturn-like ring, and that this later collapsed and pulled together into the Moon. Which … any way, the formation of the Moon seems to be more complicated than we’ve realized.
Things might be simpler if we could find a few meteorites that came from that moon-forming debris, but we haven’t. A new study of lunar isotopes using a technique often used to determine sources of asteroids, offers some clues.
Here we use the isotopic composition of the refractory element calcium to show that the nucleosynthetic variability in the inner Solar System primarily reflects a rapid change in the mass-independent calcium isotope composition of protoplanetary disk solids associated with early mass accretion to the proto-Sun.
If that sounds like tough sledding, it pretty much is. But what the team from the Centre for Star and Planet Formation and Natural History Museum of Denmark comes up with is just another sign that the Earth and Moon formed together, because Calcium isotopes were varying over both space and time.
The identical calcium isotope composition of Earth and the Moon reported here is a prediction of our model if the Moon-forming impact involved protoplanets or precursors that completed their accretion near the end of the protoplanetary disk’s lifetime.
That’s a pretty good match for the prevailing theory that the Earth-Other Big Planet collision happened somewhere around four and a half billion years ago.
Many features on Mars are interpreted as not just signs of running water, but that there were once seas — or at least, very large lakes — on the Martian surface. On the northern plains, several large craters and valleys are surrounded by light lines that have been interpreted as ancient shores. But other scientists have cast doubt on this idea specifically because these lines don’t always seem to follow current elevations. But scientists from University of California Berkeley have an idea that the lines are shorelines, and that the fact that they don’t follow current elevation can not only be explained, but be used to put a date on Mars’ oceans.
And it has to do with Tharis — an huge complex of volcanoes that affected the entire structure of Mars.
Here we show that variations in shoreline topography can be explained by deformation caused by the emplacement of Tharsis. We find that the shorelines must have formed before and during the emplacement of Tharsis, instead of afterwards, as previously assumed. Our results imply that oceans on Mars formed early, concurrent with the valley networks, and point to a close relationship between the evolution of oceans on Mars and the initiation and decline of Tharsis volcanism, with broad implications for the geology, hydrological cycle and climate of early Mars.
The lava flows of Tharsis have been dated to greater than three billion years. So if Mars’ oceans were already gone before Tharsis — that makes these some truly ancient oceans.
Diet and Health
Reduced calories, Longer lives
The idea that people consuming just enough calories to survive isn’t new. Both animal experiments and previous small scale research seems to back up the theory. But that research has indicated that the reduction in calories necessary to generate a noticeable result, has always seemed to be daunting. As in just-above-starvation daunting.
Now results on the the largest study of dietary restriction are in … and they seem to bear out that even a more modest cut in calories can have big returns when it comes to prolonging life.
The trial participants, aged between 21 and 50, were randomized into two groups: 34 people in a test group reduced their calorie intake by an average of 15%, and 19 people in a control group ate as usual. At the end of each of the two years, they all underwent a range of tests related to overall metabolism and biological markers of ageing, including damage associated with oxygen free radicals released during metabolism. They were also placed in the metabolic chamber for 24 hours.
The scientists found that participants on the diet used energy much more efficiently while sleeping than did the control group. This reduction in their base metabolic rate was greater than would be expected as a result of the test group’s weight loss, which averaged nearly 9 kilograms per participant. All the other clinical measurements were in line with reduced metabolic rate, and indicated a decrease in damage due to ageing.
Since the point of the study was looking at health and age markers, not weight loss, it’s not clear whether this reduced metabolic rate means that participants more readily gained back weight if they broke with their caloric reduction. Researchers admit that this study, which ran for only two years, doesn’t prove that effects are cumulative, or that people eating a reduced calorie diet would actually have a longer life span. Mice on such diets can live 65 percent longer than their free-eating comrades, but … evidence that people can clear their 115th birthday just by dropping desert.
But you might want to think about it a bit when planning today’s meals.
Macular Degeneration is one of the leading causes of blindness, especially among the elderly. So this paper from researchers Case Western Reserve University is a big deal — and it’s just one of two approaches to ending this disease put forward this week.
Here, we describe a systems pharmacology strategy for the treatment of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a multifactorial chronic disease of the eye. By considering the retina as part of a large, interconnected network, systems pharmacology will enable the identification of combination therapies targeting GPCRs to help restore genomic, proteomic, and endocrine homeostasis. Such an approach can be advantageous in providing drug regimens for the treatment of AMD, while also having broader ramifications for ameliorating adverse effects of chronic, age-related disease in humans.
The Case Western approach is using synergistic effects of multiple drugs to overcome the complex causes behind macular degeneration, which they suggests increases benefits while minimizing side effects when compared to current pharmaceutical approaches.
The bigger news on the maculary degeneration front comes from the results of a clinical trial at University College London. This trial follows earlier laboratory work, and while it’s early days, it’s also extremely exciting days.
Rather than the multi-drug approach of the Case Western proposal, the UK researchers used engineered human embryonic stem cells to create new cells rich in retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) . A patch of this material, implanted into the eyes of two patients using micro-surgical tools, not only successfully expanded into a kind of replacement retina — and it worked.
We report successful delivery and survival of the RPE patch by biomicroscopy and optical coherence tomography, and a visual acuity gain of 29 and 21 letters in the two patients, respectively, over 12 months. Only local immunosuppression was used long-term. We also present the preclinical surgical, cell safety and tumorigenicity studies leading to trial approval. This work supports the feasibility and safety of hESC-RPE patch transplantation as a regenerative strategy for AMD.
The number of steps involved in this — from the use of embryonic stem cells, to engineering those cells to produce RPE, to the development of the substrate for the one-cell-thick patch, to the surgical steps necessary to insert the patch successfully — is absolutely amazing. This is on helluva accomplishment.
And it seems to promise a technique that can address a condition that affects the lives of millions each year. The trial will now be expanded. Stay tuned.
Chemistry
Deep within the Earth, way down in the mantle, scientists expect to find something that most people would not expect — water. Not the normal type of water that comes from your tap, or the ice that forms in your freezer. Scientists expect that planets with very deep oceans will contain pressure ice, the result of water being put under such pressure that it becomes a solid. And several different forms of pressure ice have been identified (including one that made it into the round up just a couple of weeks ago). But if Earth has deep water reserves, that water is likely entangled with minerals.
Scientists at the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research in Shanghai have managed to identify what seems like yet another exotic form of water buckled onto a mineral — but that form may turn out to be one of the most common on Earth.
A deep lower-mantle (DLM) water reservoir depends on availability of hydrous minerals which can store and transport water into the DLM without dehydration. Recent discoveries found hydrous phases AlOOH (Z = 2) with a CaCl2-type structure and FeOOH (Z = 4) with a cubic pyrite-type structure stable under the high-pressure–temperature (P-T) conditions of the DLM. Our experiments at 107–136 GPa and 2,400 K have further demonstrated that (Fe,Al)OOH is stabilized in a hexagonal lattice. By combining powder X-ray-diffraction techniques with multigrain indexation, we are able to determine this hexagonal hydrous phase with a = 10.5803(6) Å and c = 2.5897(3) Å at 110 GPa. Hexagonal (Fe,Al)OOH can transform to the cubic pyrite structure at low T with the same density. The hexagonal phase can be formed when δ-AlOOH incorporates FeOOH produced by reaction between water and Fe, which may store a substantial quantity of water in the DLM.
Uhhh … yeah. Any questions? No. Seriously. The materials examined here are expected to make up much of the mantle, that semi-squishy bit between Earth’s crust and the core. Otherwise known as by far most of the planet. So if those materials also carry hydrous materials, it could mean the Earth is more of a water world than we know.
Today’s Infographic
As usual, today’s image comes from Andy Brunning at Compound Interest. You can go here for a larger, easier to read version.