Something Really Fascinating Happens When You Give Plants Anesthetic

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by PETER DOCKRILL

When somebody mentions anaesthetics, we probably think straight away of pain relief, but there’s a lot more going on in these complex chemical compounds than the simple negation of discomfort.

While there’s a range of chemicals that can induce anaesthesia in humans, just how these unrelated compounds trigger a lack of consciousness remains somewhat unclear.

And the mystery deepens when you consider it isn’t only animals that are affected by anaesthetics – plants are, too.

Humans in ancient societies were using things like herbs for various sedative purposes thousands of years ago, but the roots of modern anaesthesia began around the mid-19th century, when physicians began administering diethyl ether to patients during surgical procedures.

It was only a few decades later that scientists realised plants were similarly affected by ether, leading French physiologist Claude Bernard to conclude plants and animals shared a common biological essence that could be disrupted by anaesthetics.

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A century and a half later, scientists are still investigating this strange commonality – basically by slipping plants the mickey and seeing what it does to them.

In a new study by Japanese and European researchers, the team filmed a number of plants that exhibit the phenomenon of rapid plant movement to see what kinds of anaesthetic chemicals affected them.

The sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica) usually closes its leaves in response to touch stimuli; but when exposed to diethyl ether, the dosed-up plants completely lost this response, becoming motionless, with the movement response only returning to normal after 7 hours.

In a separate experiment with the sensitive plants, a lidocaine solution also immobilised the leaves.

Similarly, the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) lost its ability to close its trap when exposed to diethyl ether – despite repeated prongings by the researchers – but the mechanism recovered in just 15 minutes.

Another carnivorous plant, Cape sundew (Drosera capensis), captures prey via sticky tentacles on its leaves, but experiments showed they lost the ability to bend their leaves and tentacles when exposed to the ether.

As for why plants are incapacitated by these chemicals, the researchers hypothesise it is to do with the inhibition of action potentials, preventing electrical impulses that help plants’ biological systems function.

“[B]ioelectricity and action potentials animate not only humans and animals but also plants,” the researchers explain.

“That animals/humans and also plants are animated via action potentials is of great importance for our ultimate understanding of the elusive nature of plant movements and plant-specific cognition/intelligence based plant behaviour.”

Ultimately, the team thinks these similarities between plant and animal reactions to anaesthetic compounds could lead to future research where plants might function as a substitute model or test system to explore human anaesthesia – something scientists are still pretty uncertain about.

It’s not easy being green, perhaps, but at least they shouldn’t feel any pain.

The findings are reported in Annals of Botany.

https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-respond-anaesthetics-weird-movement-action-brain

Scientists Say They’ve Found The Driver of False Beliefs, And It’s Not a Lack of Intelligence

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by DAVID NIELD

Why is it sometimes so hard to convince someone that the world is indeed a globe, or that climate change is actually caused by human activity, despite the overwhelming evidence?

Scientists think they might have the answer, and it’s less to do with lack of understanding, and more to do with the feedback they’re getting.

Getting positive or negative reactions to something you do or say is a greater influence on your thinking than logic and reasoning, the new research suggests – so if you’re in a group of like-minded people, that’s going to reinforce your thinking.

Receiving good feedback also encourages us to think we know more than we actually do.

In other words, the more sure we become that our current position is right, the less likely we are to take into account other opinions or even cold, hard scientific data.

“If you think you know a lot about something, even though you don’t, you’re less likely to be curious enough to explore the topic further, and will fail to learn how little you know,” says one of the team members behind the new study, Louis Marti from the University of California, Berkeley.

For the research, more than 500 participants were recruited and shown a series of colored shapes. As each shape appeared, the participants got asked if it was a “Daxxy” – a word made up for these experiments.

The test takers had no clues as to what a Daxxy was or wasn’t, but they did get feedback after guessing one way or the other – the system would tell them if the shape they were looking at qualified as a Daxxy or not. At the same time they were also asked how sure they were about what a Daxxy actually was.

In this way the researchers were able to measure certainty in relation to feedback. Results showed the confidence of the participants was largely based on the results of their last four or five guesses, not their performance overall.

You can see the researchers explain the experiment in the video below:

The team behind the tests says this plays into something we already know about learning – that for it to happen, learners need to recognise that there is a gap between what they currently know and what they could know. If they don’t think that gap is there, they won’t take on board new information.

“What we found interesting is that they could get the first 19 guesses in a row wrong, but if they got the last five right, they felt very confident,” says Marti. “It’s not that they weren’t paying attention, they were learning what a Daxxy was, but they weren’t using most of what they learned to inform their certainty.”

This recent feedback is having more of an effect than hard evidence, the experiments showed, and that might apply in a broader sense too. It could apply to learning something new or trying to differentiate between right and wrong.

And while in this case the study participants were trying to identify a made-up shape, the same cognitive processes could be at work when it comes to echo chambers on social media or on news channels – where views are constantly reinforced.

“If you use a crazy theory to make a correct prediction a couple of times, you can get stuck in that belief and may not be as interested in gathering more information,” says one of the team, psychologist Celeste Kidd from UC Berkeley.

So if you think vaccinations are harmful, for example, the new study suggests you might be basing that on the most recent feedback you’ve had on your views, rather than the overall evidence one way or the other.

Ideally, the researchers say, learning should be based on more considered observations over time – even if that’s not quite how the brain works sometimes.

“If your goal is to arrive at the truth, the strategy of using your most recent feedback, rather than all of the data you’ve accumulated, is not a great tactic,” says Marti.

The research has been published in Open Mind.

https://www.sciencealert.com/feedback-study-explains-why-false-beliefs-stick

Inhaled Version of Blood Pressure Drug Shows Promise in Treating Anxiety, Pain

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An inhaled form of a high blood pressure medication has potential to treat certain types of anxiety as well as pain, according to a new study by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).

Anxiety disorders are usually treated with different types of medications, such as antidepressants, and psychotherapy. Amiloride is a medication offering a new approach, as a short-acting nasal spray that could be used to prevent an anxiety attack.

“Inhaled amiloride may prove to have benefits for panic disorder, which is typically characterized by spells of shortness of breath and fear, when people feel anxiety levels rising,” says lead author Dr. Marco Battaglia, Associate Chief of Child and Youth Psychiatry and Clinician Scientist in the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at CAMH.

The study was based on understanding the key physiological changes in brain functioning that are linked to anxiety and pain sensitivity. The researchers then tested a molecule, amiloride, which targets this functioning.

Amiloride was inhaled so that it could immediately access the brain. The study showed that it reduced the physical respiratory signs of anxiety and pain in a preclinical model of illness. This therapeutic effect didn’t occur when amiloride was administered in the body, as it didn’t cross the blood-brain barrier and did not reach the brain.

Results were published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

The role of early life adversity
The study is based on years of research into how a person’s early life experiences affect their genes, says Dr. Battaglia. Childhood adversity, such as loss or separation from parents, increases the risk of anxiety disorders and pain, among other health issues.

At a molecular level, these negative life experiences are linked to changes in some genes of the ASIC (acid-sensing-ion-channels) family. While the DNA itself doesn’t change, the way it functions is affected.

DNA is converted into working proteins through a process called gene expression. As a result of childhood adversity, some ASIC genes showed increased expression and epigenomic changes. (“Epigenomic” refers to changes in gene regulation that can inherited by children). Overlapping genetic changes were also seen in blood taken from twins who responded to specific tests designed to provoke panic.

These genetic changes are linked to physical symptoms. Breathing can be affected, due to over-sensitivity to higher carbon dioxide levels in the air. In such situations, a person might hyperventilate and experience growing anxiety. Preclinical and human data are strikingly similar in this regard. “As a treatment, amiloride turned out to be very effective preclinically,” says Dr. Battaglia.

The next step in his research is to test whether it eases anxiety symptoms. Dr. Battaglia is now launching a pilot clinical trial, supported through a seed grant from CAMH’s new Discovery Fund. Collaborators at the University of Utah are testing the drug’s safety.

Amiloride has been used as an oral treatment for decades for hypertension, and as an inhaled spray in a few experimental studies of cystic fibrosis, he notes. The researchers are therefore further ahead than if they had to develop and test an entirely new medication.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/inhaled-version-of-blood-pressure-drug-shows-promise-in-treating-anxiety-pain-309437

The Brain’s Immune Cells are to Blame for Obesity-associated Cognitive Decline

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Obesity leads to cognitive impairment by activating microglial cells, which consume otherwise functional synapses in the hippocampus, according to a study of male mice published in JNeurosci. The research suggests that microglia may be a potential therapeutic target for one of the lesser known effects of this global health epidemic on the brain.

Nearly two billion adults worldwide are overweight, more than 600 million of whom are obese. In addition to increasing risk of conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, obesity is also a known risk factor for cognitive disorders including Alzheimer’s disease. The cellular mechanisms that contribute to cognitive decline in obesity, however, are not well understood.

Elise Cope and colleagues replicated previous research by demonstrating diet-induced obesity in mice impairs performance on cognitive tasks dependent on the hippocampus and results in loss of dendritic spines — the neuronal protrusions that receive signals from other cells — and activates microglia. Using genetic and pharmacological approaches to block microglial activity, the researchers established microglia are causally linked to obesity-induced dendritic spine loss and cognitive decline. The results suggest obesity may drive microglia into a synapse-eating frenzy that contributes to the cognitive deficits observed in this condition.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/brains-immune-cells-to-blame-for-obesity-associated-cognitive-decline-309339?utm_campaign=NEWSLETTER_TN_Neuroscience_2017&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=65859986&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8GahP4LE2EOoHR4ShLvP0WjIDGrQksSkIDt93_VTrGea3qFC8v7VaOr9RXxmjjl8VDuNn2DK1PVOXEa5FBOdgl-GvhlA&_hsmi=65859986

Freddie Oversteegen, Dutch resistance fighter who killed Nazis through seduction, dies at 92

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As a teenager during World War II, Freddie Oversteegen was one of only a few Dutch women to take up arms against the country’s Nazi occupiers. (Courtesy of National Hannie Schaft Foundation)

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A recent image of Ms. Oversteegen. (Courtesy of National Hannie Schaft Foundation)

By Harrison Smith

She was 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance, though with her long, dark hair in braids she looked at least two years younger.

When she rode her bicycle down the streets of Haarlem in North Holland, firearms hidden in a basket, Nazi officials rarely stopped to question her. When she walked through the woods, serving as a lookout or seductively leading her SS target to a secluded place, there was little indication that she carried a handgun and was preparing an execution.

The Dutch resistance was widely believed to be a man’s effort in a man’s war. If women were involved, the thinking went, they were likely doing little more than handing out anti-German pamphlets or newspapers.

Yet Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus, two years her senior, were rare exceptions — a pair of teenage women who took up arms against Nazi occupiers and Dutch “traitors” on the outskirts of Amsterdam. With Hannie Schaft, a onetime law student with fiery red hair, they sabotaged bridges and rail lines with dynamite, shot Nazis while riding their bikes, and donned disguises to smuggle Jewish children across the country and sometimes out of concentration camps.

In perhaps their most daring act, they seduced their targets in taverns or bars, asked if they wanted to “go for a stroll” in the forest — and “liquidated” them, as Ms. Oversteegen put it, with a pull of the trigger.

“We had to do it,” she told one interviewer. “It was a necessary evil, killing those who betrayed the good people.” When asked how many people she had killed or helped kill, she demurred: “One should not ask a soldier any of that.”

Freddie Oversteegen, the last remaining member of the Netherlands’ most famous female resistance cell, died Sept. 5, one day before her 93rd birthday. She was living in a nursing home in Driehuis, five miles from Haarlem, and had suffered several heart attacks in recent years, said Jeroen Pliester, chairman of the National Hannie Schaft Foundation.

The organization was founded by Ms. Oversteegen’s sister in 1996 to promote the legacy of Schaft, who was captured and executed by the Nazis weeks before the end of World War II. “Schaft became the national icon of female resistance,” Pliester said, a martyr whose story was taught to schoolchildren across the Netherlands and memorialized in a 1981 movie, “The Girl With the Red Hair,” which took its title from her nickname.

Ms. Oversteegen served as a board member in her sister’s organization. But she “decided to be a little bit out of the limelight,” Pliester said, and was sometimes overshadowed by Schaft and Truus, the group’s leader.

“I have always been a little jealous of her because she got so much attention after the war,” Ms. Oversteegen told Vice Netherlands in 2016, referring to her sister. “But then I’d just think, ‘I was in the resistance as well.’ ”

It was, she said, a source of pride and of pain — a five-year experience that she never regretted, but that came to haunt her in peacetime. Late at night, unable to fall asleep, she sometimes recalled the words of an old battle song that served as an anthem for her and her sister: “We have carried the best to their graves/ torn and fired at, beaten till the blood ran/ surrounded by the executioners on the scaffold and jail/ but the raging of the enemy doesn’t frighten us.”

Freddie Nanda Oversteegen was born in the village of Schoten, now part of Haarlem, on Sept. 6, 1925. Her parents divorced when she was a child, and Freddie and Truus were raised primarily by their mother, a communist who instilled a sense of social responsibility in the young girls; she eventually remarried and had a son.

In interviews with anthropologist Ellis Jonker, collected in the 2014 book “Under Fire: Women and World War II,” Freddie Oversteegen recalled that their mother encouraged them to make dolls for children suffering in the Spanish Civil War, and beginning in the early 1930s volunteered with International Red Aid, a kind of communist Red Cross for political prisoners around the world.

Although living in poverty, sleeping on makeshift mattresses stuffed with straw, the family harbored refugees from Germany and Amsterdam, including a Jewish couple and a mother and son who lived in their attic. After German forces invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the couples were moved to another location; Jewish community leaders feared a potential raid, because of the family’s well-known political leanings.

“They were all deported and murdered,” Ms. Oversteegen told Jonker. “We never heard from them again. It still moves me dreadfully, whenever I talk about it.”

Ms. Oversteegen and her sister began their resistance careers by distributing pamphlets (“The Netherlands have to be free!”) and hanging anti-Nazi posters (“For every Dutch man working in Germany, a German man will go to the front!”). Their efforts apparently attracted the attention of Frans van der Wiel, commander of the underground Haarlem Council of Resistance, who invited them to join his team — with their mother’s permission.

“Only later did he tell us what we’d actually have to do: sabotage bridges and railway lines,” Truus Oversteegen said, according to Jonker. “We told him we’d like to do that. ‘And learn to shoot, to shoot Nazis,’ he added. I remember my sister saying, ‘Well, that’s something I’ve never done before!’ ”

By Truus’s account, it was Freddie Oversteegen who became the first to shoot and kill someone. “It was tragic and very difficult and we cried about it afterwards,” Truus said. “We did not feel it suited us — it never suits anybody, unless they are real criminals. . . . One loses everything. It poisons the beautiful things in life.”

The Oversteegen sisters were officially part of a seven-person resistance cell, which grew to include an eighth member, Schaft, after she joined in 1943. But the three girls worked primarily as a stand-alone unit, Pliester said, acting on instructions from the Council of Resistance.

After the war ended in 1945, Truus worked as an artist, making paintings and sculptures inspired by her years with the resistance, and wrote a popular memoir, “Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever.” She died in 2016, two years after Prime Minister Mark Rutte awarded the sisters the Mobilization War Cross, a military honor for service in World War II.

For her part, Freddie Oversteegen told Vice that she coped with the traumas of the war “by getting married and having babies.” She married Jan Dekker, taking the name Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen, and raised three children. They survive her, as do her half brother and four grandchildren. Her husband, who worked at the steel company Hoogovens, is deceased.

In interviews, Ms. Oversteegen often spoke of the physics of killing — not the feel of the trigger or kick of the gun, but the inevitable collapse that followed, her victims’ fall to the ground.

“Yes,” she told one interviewer, according to the Dutch newspaper IJmuider Courant , “I’ve shot a gun myself and I’ve seen them fall. And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/freddie-oversteegen-dutch-resistance-fighter-who-killed-nazis-through-seduction-dies-at-92/2018/09/16/7876eade-b9b7-11e8-a8aa-860695e7f3fc_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.dc5eb2caed7f

ADHD Tied to Raised Risk of Early Parkinson’s Disease

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By Alan Mozes

People with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may be more than twice as likely to develop an early onset form of Parkinson’s, new research warns.

What’s more, among “those ADHD patients who had a record of being treated with amphetamine-like drugs — especially Ritalin [methylphenidate] — the risk dramatically increased, to between eight- to nine-fold,” said senior study author Glen Hanson.

But his team did not prove that ADHD or its medications actually caused Parkinson’s risk to rise, and one ADHD expert noted that the absolute risk of developing Parkinson’s remains very small.

For the study, researchers analyzed nearly 200,000 Utah residents. All had been born between 1950 and 1992, with Parkinson’s onset tracked up until the age of 60.

Prior to any Parkinson’s diagnosis, roughly 32,000 had been diagnosed with ADHD.

Hanson, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Utah, said that ADHD patients were found to be “2.4 times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease-like disorders prior to the age of 50 to 60 years,” compared with those with no history of ADHD. That finding held up even after accounting for a number of influential factors, including smoking, drug and alcohol abuse, and other psychiatric disorders.

“Although we cannot accurately say how much time elapsed between ADHD and [a] Parkinson’s-like disorder diagnosis, it was probably between 20 to 50 years,” he said.

As to what might explain the link, Hanson said that both ADHD and most forms of Parkinson’s source back to a “functional disorder of central nervous system dopamine pathways.”

In addition, Hanson said that “the drugs used to treat ADHD apparently work because of their profound effects on the activity of these dopamine pathways.” Theoretically, the treatment itself might trigger a metabolic disturbance, promoting dopamine pathway degeneration and, ultimately, Parkinson’s, he explained.

Still, Hanson pointed out that, for now, “we are not able to determine if the increased risk associated with stimulant use is due to the presence of the drug or the severity of the ADHD,” given that those treated with ADHD drugs tend to have more severe forms of the disorder.

And while demonstrating “a very strong association” between ADHD and Parkinson’s risk, the findings are preliminary, the study authors added.

Also, the absolute risk of developing Parkinson’s remained low, even in the most pessimistic scenario.

For example, the findings suggest that the risk of developing early onset Parkinson’s before the age of 50 would be eight or nine people out of every 100,000 with ADHD. This compares with one or two out of every 100,000 among those with no history of ADHD, the researchers said.

But the scientists noted that the results should raise eyebrows, because Parkinson’s primarily strikes people over the age of 60. Given the age range of those tracked so far in the study, Hanson said that his team was not yet able to ascertain Parkinson’s risk among ADHD patients after the age of 60.

Hanson also pointed out that because ADHD was only first diagnosed in the 1960s, only about 1.5 percent of the people in the study had an ADHD diagnosis, despite current estimates that peg ADHD prevalence at 10 percent. That suggests that the current findings may underestimate the scope of the problem.

“Clearly, there are some critical questions left to be answered concerning what is the full impact of this increased risk,” Hanson said.

Dr. Andrew Adesman is chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York with Northwell Health in New York City. He was not involved with the study and said the findings “surprised” him.

But, “we need to keep in mind that this study needs to be replicated and that the incidence of these conditions was very low, even among those with ADHD,” Adesman said. “The reality is that this would not affect 99.99 percent of individuals with ADHD.”

Meanwhile, Adesman said, “given that this study needs to be replicated, given that it is unclear whether ADHD medications further increase the risks of Parkinson’s, and given the very low risk in an absolute sense, I believe individuals with ADHD should not be hesitant to pursue or continue medical treatment for their ADHD.”

The report was published online Sept. 12 in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

Glen Hanson, DDS, Ph.D., vice dean and professor, pharmacology, School of Dentistry, University of Utah, Salt Lake City; Andrew Adesman, M.D., chief, developmental and behavioral pediatrics, Steven & Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York, Northwell Health, New York City; Sept. 12, 2018, Neuropsychopharmacology, online

https://consumer.healthday.com/cognitive-health-information-26/parkinson-s-news-526/adhd-tied-to-raised-risk-of-early-parkinson-s-737637.html

2018 Ig Nobel Prizes

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cientific studies on the cleaning power of spit, a lone fruit fly’s ability to spoil wine, and cannibals’ caloric intake garnered top honors at the 28th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. The seriously silly citations, which “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then think,” were awarded on Sept. 13 at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre. Entertaining emcee Marc Abrahams and the savvy satirists of the Annals of Improbable Research produced the ceremony.

The coveted Chemistry Prize went to Portuguese researchers who quantified the cleaning power of human saliva. Nearly 30 years ago, conservators Paula Romão and Adília Alarcão teamed up with late University of Lisbon chemist César Viana to find out why conservators preferred their own saliva to any other solvent for cleaning certain objects—with the goal of finding a more hygienic substitute. Compared with popular solvents, saliva was the superior cleaning agent, particularly for gilded surfaces. The researchers attributed the polishing power to the enzyme α-amylase and suggested solutions of this hydrolase might achieve a spit shine similar to spit (Stud. Conserv. 1990, DOI: 10.1179/sic.1990.35.3.153).

A fruit fly in a glass of wine is always an unwelcome guest. But it turns out that as little as 1 ng of Drosophila melanogaster’s pheromone (Z)-4-undecenal can spoil a glass of pinot blanc. That discovery, from researchers led by Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences’ Peter Witzgall, received the Ig Nobel’s Biology Prize. Only female fruit flies carry the pheromone, so males can swim in spirits without delivering the offending flavor, but the Newscripts gang still prefers to drink wine without flies (J. Chem. Ecol. 2018, DOI: 10.1007/s10886-018-0950-4).

Putting the paleo diet in a new perspective, University of Brighton archaeologist James Cole took home the Nutrition Prize for calculating that Paleolithic people consumed fewer calories from a human-cannibalism diet than from a traditional meat diet. Thus, Cole concludes, Paleolithic cannibals may have dined on their companions for reasons unrelated to their nutritional needs (Sci. Rep. 2017, DOI: 10.1038/srep44707).

A team led by Wilfrid Laurier University psychologist Lindie H. Liang won the Economics Prize “for investigating whether it is effective for employees to use voodoo dolls to retaliate against abusive bosses.” Push in some pins: The findings indicate voodoo doll retaliations make employees feel better (Leadership Q. 2018, DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.01.004).

The Newscripts gang previously reported about this year’s winners of the Ig Nobel for medicine, physicians Marc Mitchell and David Wartinger, who found that riding roller coasters can help people pass kidney stones (J. Am. Osteopath. Assoc.2016, DOI: 10.7556/jaoa.2016.128).

The Reproductive Medicine Prize went to urologists John Barry, Bruce Blank, and Michel Boileau, who, in 1980, used postage stamps t
o test nocturnal erections, described in their study “Nocturnal Penile Tumescence Monitoring with Stamps” (Urol. 1980, DOI: 10.1016/0090-4295(80)90414-8).

The Ig Nobel committee also gave out a Medical Education Prize this year, to gastroenterologist Akira Horiuchi for the report “Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons Learned from Self-Colonoscopy” (Gastrointest. Endoscopy 2006, DOI: 10.1016/j.gie.2005.10.014).

Lund University cognitive scientists Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc and coworkers claimed the Anthropology Prize “for collecting evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often, and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees” (Primates 2017, DOI: 10.1007/s10329-017-0624-9).

For a landmark paper documenting that most people don’t read the instruction manual when using complicated products, a Queensland University of Technology team led by Alethea L. Blackler garnered the Literature Prize (Interact. Comp. 2014, DOI: 10.1093/iwc/iwu023).

And finally, the Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a team from the University of Valencia’s University Research Institute on Traffic & Road Safety “for measuring the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile” (J. Sociol. Anthropol. 2016, DOI: 10.12691/jsa-1-1-1).

The Ig Nobel ceremony can be viewed in its entirety at youtube.com/improbableresearch, and National Public Radio’s “Science Friday” will air an edited recording of the ceremony on the day after U.S. Thanksgiving.

https://cen.acs.org/people/awards/2018-Ig-Nobel-Prizes/96/i37

Kenyan’s Eliud Kipchoge, sets new world record for men’s marathon

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Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge set a new world record for the men’s marathon on Sunday, clocking 2hr 01min 39sec to improve the previous world mark by more than a minute.

Below is a list of the last 10 men’s world records for the marathon, held over a distance of 42.195 km (26 miles).

2:01:39: Eliud Kipchoge (KEN) on 16/9/19 in Berlin

2:02:57: Dennis Kimetto (KEN) on 28/09/2014 in Berlin

2:03:23: Wilson Kipsang (KEN) on 29/09/2013 in Berlin

2:03:38: Patrick Makau (KEN) on 25/09/2011 in Berlin

2:03:59: Haile Gebreselassie (ETH) on 28/09/2008 in Berlin

2:04:26: Haile Gebreselassie (ETH) on 30/09/2007 in Berlin

2:04:55: Paul Tergat (KEN) on 28/09/2003 in Berlin

2:05:38: Khalid Khannouchi (USA) 14/04/2002 in London

2:05:42: Khalid Khannouchi (USA) 24/10/1999 in Chicago

2:06:05: Ronaldo da Costa (BRA) 20/09/1998 in Berlin

Oldest known drawing’ found on tiny rock in South Africa

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Scientists say they have discovered humanity’s oldest known drawing on a small fragment of rock in South Africa.

The drawing is about 73,000 years old, and shows cross-hatch lines sketched onto stone with red ochre pigment.

Scientists discovered the small fragment of the drawing – which some say looks a bit like a hashtag – in Blombos Cave on the southern coast.

The find is “a prime indicator of modern cognition” in our species, the report says.

While scientists have found older engravings around the world, research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature says the lines on this stone mark the first abstract drawing.

The article says the ancient artist used an “ochre crayon” to etch it onto the stone.

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Scientists found the stone fragment in Blombos Cave, 300 kilometres (185 miles) east of Cape Town.

Humanity has used ochre, a clay earth pigment, for at least 285,000 years.

The drawing was “probably more complex” in its entirety, archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood told Reuters.

“The abrupt termination of all lines on the fragment edges indicates that the pattern originally extended over a larger surface,” he said.

Mr Henshilwood works at Norway’s University of Bergen and South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand and led the research into the drawing.

He told Reuters that while the team would be “hesitant to call it art”, it almost definitely had “some meaning to the maker”.

There have been numerous other artefacts found in Blombos Cave, 300 kilometres (185 miles) east of Cape Town, including beads covered in red ochre, engraved ochre fragments, and a paint-making kit dating back around 100,000 years.

Modern man, known as homo sapiens, is first known to have appeared more than 315,000 years ago in what is now Africa.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-45501205

Blazes Of Light Show Plant’s Response To Being Eaten

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When humans are attacked, sensory cells transmit signals through our nervous system, spitting out the neurotransmitter–glutamate. Glutamate stimulates our brain’s amygdala and hypothalamus. This triggers the stress hormone–adrenaline–that jolts us into fight or flight mode. Plants don’t have neurotransmitters. They don’t have nervous systems. The don’t have brains. But now, for the first time, scientists are able to observe how a plant responds to an attack with vivid real-time imagery that illuminates the remarkable differences and similarities between plants and humans. Same substance, same results, different anatomy. In the video below, a plant gets chomped on by a caterpillar. At the site of the wound, the plant spills out glutamate–the same chemical as our glutamate neurotransmitter, but not a neurotransmitter. This triggers a calcium wave throughout the plant body, stimulating a plant stress hormone that prepares it for the vegetal version of fight or flight.

To observe what’s happening, scientists sampled a gene from jellyfish that makes them glow green. Then they genetically modified plants to produce a protein that fluoresces around calcium. The results are a blazing calcium wave that undulates through the plant vascular system when it gets bit.

“[For] the first time, it’s been shown that glutamate leakage at a wound site triggers a system-wide wound response, and the first time we’ve been able to visualize this process happening ,” says Simon Gilroy, professor of botany at the Gilroy Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and senior author on the paper out today in the journal Science.

An incidental breakthrough

The discovery came about via “the classic opportunistic randomness of science,” says Gilroy. The lab wasn’t investigating plant wounds. It was looking at how plants take in and assimilate information. One day, postdoctoral researcher and first author on the paper, Masatsugu Toyota, approached the team: “‘You have to see this. This is amazing,” he said.’ It just played out in front of us,” says Gilroy.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2018/09/13/blazes-of-light-show-plants-response-to-being-eaten-video/#125a991337cc