Lifeboat Foundation

Plastic pollution and other ocean debris are a complex global environmental problem. Every year, ten million tons of plastic are estimated to be mismanaged, resulting in entry into the ocean, of which half will float initially. Yet, only 0.3 million tons of plastic can be found floating on the surface of the ocean. Where has the rest of the plastic gone?

The key mechanisms for plastic transport are currents, wind, and waves. Currents and wind transport ocean debris in a straightforward manner like the forces on a sailing boat. However, ocean waves predominantly move objects in circular-like orbits. The orbits do not quite close, resulting in a so-called Stokes drift in the direction in which the waves travel.

A joint team from the Universities of Oxford, Plymouth, Edinburgh, Auckland and TU Delft have investigated how waves transport floating ocean debris while including, for the first time, the effects of an object’s size, buoyancy, and inertia on its transport. Their results are published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

Circa 2016

Accumulated evidence from genetic animal models suggests that the brain, particularly the hypothalamus, has a key role in the homeostatic regulation of energy and glucose metabolism. The brain integrates multiple metabolic inputs from the periphery through nutrients, gut-derived satiety signals and adiposity-related hormones. The brain modulates various aspects of metabolism, such as food intake, energy expenditure, insulin secretion, hepatic glucose production and glucose/fatty acid metabolism in adipose tissue and skeletal muscle. Highly coordinated interactions between the brain and peripheral metabolic organs are critical for the maintenance of energy and glucose homeostasis. Defective crosstalk between the brain and peripheral organs contributes to the development of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Here we comprehensively review the above topics, discussing the main findings related to the role of the brain in the homeostatic regulation of energy and glucose metabolism.

In normal individuals, food intake and energy expenditure are tightly regulated by homeostatic mechanisms to maintain energy balance. Substantial evidence indicates that the brain, particularly the hypothalamus, is primarily responsible for the regulation of energy homeostasis.¹ The brain monitors changes in the body energy state by sensing alterations in the plasma levels of key metabolic hormones and nutrients. Specialized neuronal networks in the brain coordinate adaptive changes in food intake and energy expenditure in response to altered metabolic conditions ( Figure 1 ).^{2, 3}.

Adopting edge technologies will be key to businesses’ success, according to chip giant Intel.

Five years on from the first discovery of gravitational waves, an international team of scientists, including from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), are continuing the hunt for new discoveries and insights into the Universe. Using the super-sensitive, kilometer-sized LIGO detectors in the United States, and the Virgo detector in Europe, the team have witnessed the explosive collisions of black holes and neutron stars. Recent studies, however, have been looking for something quite different: the elusive signal from a solitary, rapidly-spinning neutron star.

Take a star similar in size to the Sun, squash it down to a ball about twenty kilometers across — roughly the distance from Melbourne airport to the city center — and you’d get a neutron star: the densest object in the known Universe. Now set your neutron star spinning at hundreds of revolutions per second and listen carefully. If your neutron star isn’t perfectly spherical, it will wobble about a bit, and you’ll hear a faint “humming” sound. Scientists call this a continuous gravitational wave.

So far, these humming neutron stars have proved elusive. As OzGrav postdoctoral researcher Karl Wette from the Australian National University explains: Imagine you’re out in the Australian bush listening to the wildlife. The gravitational waves from black hole and neutron star collisions we’ve observed so far are like squawking cockatoos — loud and boisterous, they’re pretty easy to spot!

For the first time, researchers have successfully sequenced the entire genome from the skull of Peştera Muierii 1, a woman who lived in today’s Romania 35000 years ago. Her high genetic diversity shows that the out of Africa migration was not the great bottleneck in human development but rather this occurred during and after the most recent Ice Age. This is the finding of a new study led by Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University and being published in Current Biology.

“She is a bit more like modern-day Europeans than the individuals in Europe 5000 years earlier, but the difference is much less than we had thought. We can see that she is not a direct ancestor of modern Europeans, but she is a predecessor of the hunter-gathers that lived in Europe until the end of the last Ice Age,” says Mattias Jakobsson, professor at the Department of Organismal Biology at Uppsala University and the head of the study.

Very few complete genomes older than 30000 years have been sequenced. Now that the research team can read the entire genome from Peştera Muierii 1 (see the fact box below), they can see similarities with modern humans in Europe while also seeing that she is not a direct ancestor. In previous studies, other researchers observed that the shape of her cranium has similarities with both modern humans and Neanderthals. For this reason, they assumed that she had a greater fraction of Neanderthal ancestry than other contemporaries, making her stand out from the norm. But the genetic analysis in the current study shows that she has the same low level of Neanderthal DNA as most other individuals living in her time. Compared with the remains from some individuals who lived 5000 years earlier, such as Peştera Oase 1, she had only half as much Neanderthal ancestry.

The hormone, which is well known for regulating appetite, appears to influence neuronal development—a finding that could shed light on disorders such as autism that involve dysfunctional synapse formation.

When immortality is available to the masses and not just the rich.

This is when immortality is granted on a large scale: to an entire civilization, or a village. Species that are naturally immortal such as elves fall under this as well. This can sidestep some of the problems inherent to immortality because when everyone is immortal then no one is alone and the general culture and mindset is that immortality is ‘normal’ and death is not.

Their source of immortality may be a large or mass-produced Immortality Inducer. If their immortality involves Immortality Immorality it may overlap with Town with a Dark Secret. There’s also the question of what type of Immortality the civilization has; a society whose members can respawn quickly after death will be different from one whose members never die from old age and both will be different from one whose members never die, period. Regardless, Immortal Procreation Clause is likely to be in effect and little attention will be paid to the traditional gender roles.

Continue reading “Society of Immortals” »

“It’s a wake-up call that one-year-old children are already carrying gut bacteria that are resistant to very important types of antibiotics. New resistant bacteria are becoming more widespread due to increased antibiotic consumption. The horror scenario is that we will one day lack the antibiotics needed to treat life-threatening bacterial infections such as pneumonia or foodborne illnesses,” explains Department of Biology professor Søren Sørensen, who led the study.

Danish one-year-olds carry several hundred antibiotic resistant genes in their bacterial gut flora according to a new study from the University of Copenhagen. The presence of these genes is partly attributable to antibiotic use among mothers during pregnancy.

An estimated 700000 people die every year from antibiotic resistant bacterial infections and diseases. The WHO expects this figure to multiply greatly in coming decades. To study how antibiotic resistance occurs in humans’ natural bacterial flora, researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Biology analyzed stool samples from 662 Danish one-year-old children.

Continue reading “Hundreds of antibiotic resistant genes found in the gastrointestinal tracts of Danish infants” »

Don’t panic, but mysterious sources have been sending radio signals to Earth for years. Now, scientists have tracked down some of their origins — and they were surprised by what they found.

And no, it’s still not aliens.

Continue reading “NASA traces source of mysterious fast radio bursts sending signals to Earth” »