Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2021 i Discover

COLORFUL COMMUNICATION Iridescent colors in animals, like the shimmering hues of this hummingbird’s feathers, have long entranced humans. The colors we see partly depend on the angle they’re viewed from, though, which is why some species have developed unique adaptations to get the right message across. According to a March study in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, researchers at the University of Melbourne suggest that animals with iridescent color patches can only use them as reliable signals by pairing them with certain structures or behaviors. For example, male Anna’s hummingbirds position their opalescent throat patches during courtship rituals so that females perceive them as bright pink. Vibrant rose-red head feathers, meanwhile, may show rival males that they enjoy protein-rich diets. — MOLLY GLICK; IMAGE BY WADE TREGASKIS…

Apollo Creed knocks black-eyed Rocky Balboa to the mat. Rocky’s trainer, Mickey, pleads with him to stay down so the fight can end. Adrian walks into the arena as Rocky gets back up. Soon, the crowd is chanting Rocky’s name. And I … honestly cannot recall who wins the match. I have seen every Rocky movie numerous times, which is why my husband and I were thrilled to introduce the original 1976 film to our kids. Somehow, though, I did not remember that the fight ends with a (spoiler alert!) split decision that gives Apollo Creed the victory. Truth is, it’s not just Rocky. My husband and I have been sharing many classics with our kids, as well as more recent movies. During the viewings, he is constantly telling the…

CLINICAL SITES ▪ Bethesda, MD (NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Program) ▪ Boston, MA (UDN Clinical Site at Harvard Medical School) ▪ Durham, NC (Duke University and Columbia University) ▪ Houston, TX (Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital, and Baylor CHI St. Luke’s Medical Center) ▪ Los Angeles, CA (UCLA Undiagnosed Diseases Clinic) ▪ Miami, FL (University of Miami School of Medicine) ▪ Nashville, TN (Vanderbilt Center for Undiagnosed Diseases) ▪ Philadelphia, PA (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania) ▪ Salt Lake City, UT (University of Utah – Intermountain West) ▪ Seattle, WA (Pacific Northwest Undiagnosed Diseases Clinical Site at University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital) ▪ Stanford, CA (Center for Undiagnosed Diseases at Stanford) ▪ St. Louis, MO (Washington University in St. Louis) CENTRAL BIOREPOSITORY ▪ Nashville,…

Sitting in an isolated room at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Frank Nielsen steeled himself for the first injection. Doctors were about to take a needle filled with herpes simplex virus, the strain responsible for cold sores, and plunge it directly into his scalp. If all went well, it would likely save his life. Nielsen was a cancer survivor and, once again, a cancer patient. His melanoma, which had responded to conventional treatments the first time around, had returned with a frightening aggressiveness. Within weeks, a lump on his scalp had swelled into an ugly mass. Unlike the first time, options like surgery weren’t viable — it was growing too quickly. As a last resort, his doctors turned to a cutting-edge drug known as T-VEC, approved in 2015…

There’s no doubt humans are at Earth’s helm, setting the course of future climate and biodiversity. Our species is now the dominant force shaping Earth’s climate and ecosystems, supplanting forces like solar orbit, volcanism and natural selection, which had directed the planet for most of its 4.5 billion years. Welcome to the Anthropocene, a proposed new epoch in Earth history, in which Homo sapiens are blindly steering the ship. For the past decade, a scientific committee known as the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) has been investigating when the Anthropocene began. In 2016, they voted for a 1950s start. Most members contend that’s when humans became a global superpower, through both nuclear weapons testing and the post-World War II boom in population and production, known as the Great Acceleration. The AWG…

SCIENCE AND SOLUTIONS “When Shame Goes Viral,” Mar/Apr 2021 I have been a subscriber to Discover for a few decades, and notice a distinct drop in “hard” science reporting of late. While cyberbullying is real, you needed to have sociologists formulate studies on how to counteract this. Soft news reporting and editorialization is not good enough for Discover. Tejas Godiwala Metairie, LA I’M SORRY, DAVE. I’M AFRAID I CAN’T DO THAT. “Big Idea: Embracing the Singularity,” Mar/Apr 2021 I suggest when Nick Bostrom, et al., teach “human morality” to a nascent superintelligence, they make sure that this new sentient entity is NEVER given access to any of our history or any current news media. Human treatment of fellow humans has never been very moral. Tucker Spolter I think that concept…

On a rainy day in July 2019, Michael Prior-Jones spent eight hours slip-sliding across a Greenland glacier. To help a colleague test the conditions deep beneath the ice’s surface, he played an intricate game of cat’s cradle with over 3,000 feet of wire cable. Pacing back and forth, he placed the cable on the ice to smooth out tangles and attach sensors that help indicate the speed at which the glacier is melting and moving toward open water. By the end, he was cold and soggy, but the wire was snarl-free and prepped for its descent into the glacier. For decades, researchers like Prior-Jones have affixed instruments to cables, dropped them down cracks and boreholes, and analyzed the data that streams back through the wires. By extracting secrets from the…

Come summer every year, a large swath of the country braces for hail. Known as Hail Alley, the region stretching from Wyoming to Texas receives more hailstorms, and more severe ones, compared to other parts of the country. Features on land and in the atmosphere make perfect hail conditions for this part of the U.S. But living in the hail sweet spot can get inconvenient. “My car got really dinged up the second year that I was here,” says Sam Childs, a researcher at Colorado State University. After that, “I decided I’d like to take a look at hail,” he says. Damaged vehicles are one of many consequences of severe hailstorms. That’s why researchers are trying to improve forecasts for the weather events, to better predict when and what type…

In early 2020, before most people had even heard of an N95 mask, scientists were working around the clock to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Large-scale trials of several vaccines were underway by fall, and months later, providers were injecting them into arms by the millions. It was a vaccine development land-speed record for a virus that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives within months — especially considering that, pre-COVID, typical vaccine timelines ran closer to a decade. There’s every reason to think we can pull off such feats in the future, says Sharon Nachman, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and director of the Office of Clinical Trials at Stony Brook University. The bottom line, in Nachman’s view, is that after COVID-19 popped up, the system worked exactly the way it…

A couple of hundred miles above your head, thousands of human stem cells will soon orbit Earth in a research lab on the International Space Station. If all goes well, the growing cells — which are due to dock later this summer — could help scientists unlock the mysteries of cancer and aging. Late last year, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and Space Tango, an aerospace engineering company based in Lexington, Kentucky, inaugurated the world’s first dedicated stem cell research center on the ISS, thanks to a NASA grant. Researchers have been sending carefully prepped samples to the Integrated Space Stem Cell Orbital Research Laboratory (ISSCOR) to study the effects of microgravity and ionizing radiation on stem cells in low-Earth orbit. Test tubes containing blood-forming stem cells…

When you imagine the Taj Mahal, what do you picture? History books and airbrushed photos show a pristine, milky white structure situated on the banks of the Yamuna River in the city of Agra. But the 17th-century monument that draws millions of tourists from across the world is under threat. The aging exterior of the Taj wears a greenish brown tint due to rising pollution, burning trash and insect poop. And the nearby banks of the Yamuna face similar degradation due to chemical waste from factories, raw sewage and heaps of garbage that sustain swarms of breeding flies — the source of the dung on the Taj. When Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan built the structure in memory of his wife, Empress Mumtaz Mahal, it was viewed as an act of…

For many of us, a cup of coffee is the first thing on our minds in the morning. It’s such a ritual that we’ll still down a mug of joe even when that coffee is missing the thing it’s known for: caffeine. Decaf coffee has been around for over a hundred years, and the process for making it has been roughly the same the whole time. Caffeine is locked inside coffee beans alongside the complex blend of compounds that give roasted coffee its distinctive taste; removing one of its most notable molecules is, naturally, a labor-intensive process. Some techniques take the caffeine directly out of the beans themselves, leaving flavor compounds behind. That procedure starts with steaming or boiling green, unroasted coffee beans to free up the caffeine in their…

Ann was a long-standing patient of mine whom I saw for severe gastroesophageal reflux disease, also known as GERD. She was extremely overweight and met medical criteria for morbid obesity. Doctors consider a patient morbidly obese when they are at least 100 pounds over their ideal body weight — and/or when their weight may significantly contribute to medical conditions, like diabetes, high blood pressure, or fatty liver disease, that put their life in danger. Ann was 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 250 pounds. She had been a slim 130-pound athlete as a teenager, but had gained weight with each of her pregnancies. During one of our clinic visits, the topic of her possibly undergoing surgery to lose weight came up. I was supportive of Ann seeing a surgeon…

Elizabeth wouldn’t walk or talk as a toddler. Laura’s hair fell out, and rashes attacked her skin. Angela’s left leg was so swollen it hurt to stand. Emma needed a breathing machine just to sleep. Their suffering may take different forms, but their stories share a common thread: Neither they or their families knew what was actually causing these issues. Undiagnosed diseases are more common than you might think. Tens of millions of Americans likely suffer from disorders they cannot name. For many, the symptoms are minor. But in some cases, patients come to their doctors with serious problems caused by diseases that defy medical knowledge. Those cases are precisely where the Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) steps in. Established in 2008 at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the UDN’s…

Fierce debate raged in the pandemic’s early months about whether wearing face masks curbed viral transmission. The confusion was understandable: In March 2020, the World Health Organization urged people not to wear a mask unless they were sick with COVID-19 or caring for someone who was ill. Scores of health officials echoed the organization’s advice, with many now claiming that it was an effort to preserve masks for medical workers. But this seeming consensus collapsed in the face of more than a dozen new studies showing that masks slowed the virus’ spread. There was never much science that said masks didn’t work, says Mark Roberts, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Public Health Dynamics Laboratory. Pre-2020 research already showed masks’ effectiveness, and COVID-era studies cemented that verdict, setting the stage…

It’s a reality the pandemic has brought into stark relief: Systemic racism is endemic in U.S. health care. COVID-19 has disproportionately hit communities of color — a June 2020 analysis by health professions found that in one region of Louisiana, 3 in 4 patients hospitalized for the virus were Black, even though only 1 in 3 residents of that region were Black. Infection and death rates have also been two to four times as high among Black, Latino and Asian peoples as among white people, according to an analysis of 300 hospitals in 21 states. Behind these numbing statistics are the stories of thousands who might have been saved with better care. In one viral video, Susan Moore, a Black doctor with COVID-19, described how hospital doctors were dismissing her…

In most clinical studies with psilocybin, MDMA and other psychedelics, the medicine is used alongside talk therapy. Psychologist Alex Belser says most of the trials he has helped facilitate play out something like this: After a thorough screening process, an approved patient works with two or more facilitators — at least one of whom is a licensed psychotherapist. Before interacting with any psychoactive medicine, that patient has three sessions, minimum, of talk therapy. This preparation time helps both the patient and therapist set goals and intentions while also building trust and understanding. That foundation is vital before introducing any psychoactive substances, which can stir up momentary fear, confusion, panic or paranoia in the human brain. When the time comes to try the medicine — often in a pill, though oral…

Late one night in 1982, a Yale University medical student named Martin Yarmush witnessed a harrowing scene at a local hospital. A toddler was admitted, and several nurses attempted to insert an IV needle into one of the child’s tiny veins. Each time they missed the vessel, the child screamed more shrilly, and the mother grew more worried. There has to be a better way, thought Yarmush, now a professor of biomedical engineering at Rutgers University. The incident changed his outlook on medicine. Thoroughly unnerved by the anguish he’d witnessed, Yarmush started to imagine what would happen if the process of drawing blood could be automated. At the time, automation was found primarily on assembly lines for cars, where robots were so powerful and dangerous that they were bolted to…