Leahgates

Hi, my name is Remi and I am one happy puppy. Whether I am playing at the dog park or out for a walk with my parents, I am constantly wagging my tag and loving life. My favorite pastimes include fetching, chewing on the loudest squeaky toys and getting my belly rubbed. I am a loving, smart and adventurous pup who loves to explore, learn new tricks, and make new friends with any (and every) human and dog. Currently I am working to become a therapy dog and when I grow up I will become a Diabetic Assistance Dog for my mom.

I'm Buttercup and I was born on April Fool's Day. I am a super smart, super cuddly little bundle of joy. I love going on the boat with my mom, and am such a good beach dog. I can already do a bunch of tricks and am learning more every day. I love meeting new people and friends. I can be naughty, too, but it's tough to stay mad at me because I'm so cute!

Digger is a most handsome and great natured dog. He has quite a little fan club now, and all the people on our street know his name, especially all the kids who he adores as much as they do him. He loves all other dogs and even has a cat down the road he is friends with. As his name suggests, he is a digger and has many holes dug in our garden. We hope you find him as adorable as we do, as he is growing fast, and unfortunately won't be a puppy for too much longer.

ladiesagainsthumanity:

RUTH. BADER. GINSBERG. 

via @sethdmichaels

Wild African elephants might offer ranchers their best chance to eradicate the “Sodom apple”—a toxic invasive plant that has overrun vast swaths of East African savanna and pastureland.

Should the reference to the smitten biblical city be unclear, the Sodom apple, or Solanum campylacanthum, is a wicked plant.

Not a true apple, the relative of the eggplant smothers native grasses with its thorny stalks, while its striking yellow fruit provides a deadly temptation to sheep and cattle.

A five-year study shows that elephants and impalas, among other wild animals, can not only safely gorge themselves on the plant, but can efficiently regulate its otherwise explosive growth. Without elephants ripping the plant from the ground, or impalas devouring dozens of its fruits at a time, the shrub easily conquers the landscape.

Just as the governments of nations such as Kenya prepare to pour millions into eradicating the plant, the findings, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, present a method for controlling the Sodom apple that is cost-effective for humans and beneficial for the survival of African elephants, says first author Robert Pringle, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University.

Win-win for elephants, ranchers

“The Holy Grail in ecology is these win-win situations where we can preserve wildlife in a way that is beneficial to human livelihoods,” Pringle says. Similarly, two earlier studies showed that allowing livestock to graze with wild animals such as zebras greatly improved the quality of the domesticated animals’ diet.

“It’s a nice example of how conservation needn’t be about sacrifice. It often is—let’s be honest. But there are situations where you can get a win-win,” he says. “This opens the door for people whose main interest is cattle to say, ‘Maybe I do want elephants on my land.’ Elephants have a reputation as destructive, but they may be playing a role in keeping pastures grassy.”

Elephants and impalas can withstand the poison of S. campylacanthum because they belong to a class of herbivores known as “browsers” that subsist on woody plants and shrubs, many species of which pack a toxic punch. On the other hand, “grazers” such as cows, sheep, and zebras primarily eat grass, which is rarely poisonous.

Grazers easily succumb to to the Sodom apple, that causes emphysema, pneumonia, bleeding ulcers, brain swelling, and death.

Ecological mayhem

As more African savanna is converted into pasture, the proliferation of the Sodom apple may only get worse, Pringle says, which means that the presence of elephants to eat it may become more vital to the ecosystem and livestock.

The Sodom apple thrives on ecological mayhem, such as the stress of overgrazing put on the land, Pringle says. “Typically, people will overload the land with more cattle than it can support. Then they remove the animals that eat the plant.”

The researchers present enough data to potentially determine the amount of pastureland that wild Sodom-apple eaters would be able to keep free of the noxious plant, says Ricardo Holdo, a savanna ecologist and assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri.

Holdo, who is familiar with the research but had no role in it, says that beyond removing the Sodom apple, animals such as elephants and impalas could potentially increase the food available to cattle. This is a departure from the conventional view in Africa that livestock and wild animals compete for the same scarce resources.

“There is enough quantitative information in this paper that they can probably model this effect in a meaningful way,” Holdo says. “When you add the wild (herbivores), they have a negative effect on the Solanum, so they’re actually promoting a higher biomass of high-quality habitat for livestock. So, it’s a win-win in the sense that you’re creating a situation in which you can both have livestock and wild animals, and probably actually increase your yield for livestock.”

Functional redundancy

Researchers say this is one of the first studies to examine “functional redundancy” in land animals. Functional redundancy refers to the situation in which one species declines or goes extinct and another species steps in to fulfill the same ecological role. This consideration helps ecologists predict the overall effect of extinction on an entire ecosystem.

In this case, the effect of large mammals such as elephants and impalas on the Sodom apple population—and perhaps the populations of other plants—is unlikely to be duplicated by another animal species.

“That’s an important question because some species are quite vulnerable to extinction and others aren’t,” Pringle says. “The ones that go first tend to be the biggest, or the tastiest, or the ones with ivory tusks. We’re trying to gauge how the world is changing, and we need to understand to what extent these threatened animals have unique ecological functions.”

The majority of studies on functional redundancy have been conducted in aquatic systems because large land animals can be hard to control in an experiment. The new study is also unusually long by ecology standards, Pringle says—the researchers observed similar patterns year after year.

Keeping elephants out

“A big part of the reason we don’t understand functional redundancy very well in terrestrial ecosystems is because it’s difficult to manipulate land species,” he says. “Doing these experiments in the kind of environment like you have in Kenya is really challenging—keeping elephants out of anything is really a huge challenge.”

Pringle was roughly three years into a study about the effects of elephants on plant diversity when he noticed that the Sodom apple was conspicuously absent from some experiment sites. He and other researchers had set up 36 exclosures—designed to keep animals out rather than in—totaling nearly 89 acres (36 hectares) at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, a multi-institutional research preserve with which Princeton has been long involved.

There were four types of exclosure: one type open to all animals; another where only elephants were excluded; one in which elephants and impalas were excluded; and another off limits to all animals.

It was in the sites that excluded elephants and impala that the Sodom apple particularly flourished, which defied everything he knew about the plant.

Who’s eating the apple?

“This study was really fortuitous. I had always thought that these fruits were horrible and toxic, but when I saw them in the experiment, I knew some animal was otherwise eating them. I just didn’t know which one,” Pringle says. “The question became, ‘Who’s eating the apple?’ It’s a very interesting and simple question, but once you get the answer it raises a lot of other questions.”

Using the exclosures established for the original experiment, Pringle and his co-authors used cameras to document the zest with which wild African browsers will eat S. campylacanthum.

Pringle worked with Corina Tarnita, a mathematical biologist and assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. They specifically observed the foraging activity of elephants, impalas, small-dog-sized antelopes known as dik-diks, and rodents. They captured about 30,000 hours of foraging using cameras they had focused on particular plants. The researchers also marked several hundred Sodom-apple fruit to track how many were eaten, and measured the average height, mortality and reproducibility of Sodom-apple plants in all the exclosures.

In one end, out the other

The Sodom apple proliferated with each group of animal that was excluded. At one point, the plant’s density was three-times greater in areas restricted to all animals than those that permitted all of them.

In February 2011, the researchers counted an average of less than one fruit per plant in the exclosure open to all animals, meaning that nearly every fruit produced by the plants was being consumed. In the plots closed to elephants, that average increased to three fruits per plant. When both impala and elephants were kept away, the average jumped to around 50 fruits per plant, and fruits were more likely to be eaten by insects rather than dik-diks or rodents.

There is a catch to the elephants’ and impalas’ appetite for the Sodom apple: When fruit goes in one end, seeds come out the other. Though some seeds are destroyed during digestion, most reemerge and are potentially able to germinate.

The researchers developed a mathematical model to conduct a sort of cost-benefit analysis of how the Sodom apple’s ability to proliferate is affected by being eaten. The model weighed the “cost” to the plant of being partially consumed against the potential benefit of having healthy seeds scattered across the countryside in an animal’s droppings. They then used the model to determine whether different animal species had an overall positive or negative influence on the population of Sodom-apple plants.

The whole plant

While elephants ate an enormous amount of Solanum seeds, they also often destroyed the entire plant, ripping it out of the ground and stuffing the whole bush into their mouths. The model showed that to offset the damage an elephant wreaks on a plant, 80 percent of the seeds the animal eats would have to emerge from it unscathed. On top of that, each seed would have to be 10-times more likely to take root than one that simply fell to the ground from its parent.

Impalas, on the other hand, can have a positive overall effect on the plants. Impalas ate the majority of the fruit consumed—one impala ate 18 fruit in just a few minutes. But they don’t severely damage the parent plant while feeding and also spread a lot of seeds in their dung. Of the seeds eaten by an impala, only 60 percent would need to survive, and those seeds would have to be a mere three-times more likely to sprout than a seed that simply fell from its parent.

“A model allows you to explore a space you’re not fully able to reach experimentally,” says Tarnita. “Once you’ve explored it, however, the conclusions and predictions need to be confronted with reality. This model helped us conclude that although it is theoretically possible for elephants to benefit the plant, that outcome is extremely unlikely.”

Researchers from University of Wyoming, University of Florida, University of California, Davis, the Mpala Center, and University of British Columbia are coauthors of the study. The National Science Foundation, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Sherwood Family Foundation, the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration, and the Princeton Environmental Institute’s Grand Challenges Program supported the work.

Source: Princeton University

The post Why African ranchers should let elephants gorge on poison apples appeared first on Futurity.

pilotu:

Some pictures of Frankie, aka Lucifer reincarnate.

He’s nice to only me and my friend’s bantam silkie hen. Anyone (or anything) else who tries to interact with him gets bitten. It’s not a good idea to go near him without long pants on because he bites and CLINGS, and he’s very capable of breaking skin. Better yet just stay far away from him l—lol?

He’s a dumb goofy lap baby and mama’s boy for me though. He’ll follow me around the house and stand by the fridge when he wants snacks.

buckythefrenchy:

So angry

Dude on OkCupid: did u just move here
Me: No I'm just here to teach for the summer
Me: I'll go home again in August
Dude on OkCupid: man, there goes our long relationship
Me: I feel like this is literally the first thing disclosed in my profile
Dude on OkCupid: it is but i went straight to the "the two of us" section
Me: oh so the part you were interested in was basically just the part that was about you

masooonderulo:

things that should not concern u:
- the length of a woman’s skirt
- the tightness of a woman’s top
- how many people a woman has slept with

things that should concern u:
- america’s gun laws
- that u haven’t petted enough dogs today
- harry potter named a kid albus severus

kissingwrinkles:

Somebody is creepin on my dinner…

For those wondering why my bed is so tall it is because my bed-room has a mini-fridge and single burner hot plate

onyourproperty:

urbananchorite:

Ellen Page by Randall Slavin

shelby: why wasnt she edward cullen
taz: well there’s a movie concept i only would have watched a permanent amount of times

#ellen page makes out with kristen stewart #ellen page bites the pillow #ellen page smoulders in a tux to ‘a thousand years’ #ellen page is watching you in a car #ellen page smells your floral blood #ellen page sparkles in the sunlight #i know what you are. #say it. #juno.

awwww-cute:

Tiny baby octopus

Scientists are using X-rays to take a closer look at the detailed structure of milk and how its fats interact with our digestive system. What they’re learning could provide a blueprint to create new milk products, including formula for premature babies.

“By unlocking the detailed structure of milk we have the potential to create milk loaded with fat-soluble vitamins and brain-building molecules for premature babies, or a drink that slows digestion so people feel fuller for longer,” says Stefan Salentinig of Monash University Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

“We could even harness milk’s ability as a ‘carrier’ to develop new forms of drug delivery.”

Milk’s unique structure

By chemically recreating the digestive system in a glass beaker and adding cows’ milk, the team found that milk has a unique structure—an emulsion of fats, nutrients, and water forms a structure that enhances digestion.

The researchers used specialized instruments at the Australian Synchrotron to simulate digestion. Enzymes and water were added to milk fat to break it down, and the synchrotron’s small angle X-ray scattering beam showed that when digested, the by-products of milk become highly organized.

The structure is similar to a sponge, Salentinig says.

“We knew about the building blocks of milk and that milk fat has significant influence on the flavor, texture, and nutritional value of all dairy food. But what we didn’t know was the structural arrangement of this fat during digestion.

“We found that when the body starts the digestion process, an enzyme called lipase breaks down the fat molecules to form a highly geometrically ordered structure. These small and highly organized components enable fats, vitamins, and lipid-soluble drugs to cross cell membranes and get into the circulatory system Salentinig says.

The next phase of the research will see the team work with nutritionists to better make the link between these new findings and dietary outcomes, and utilize these findings to design and test improved medicines.

The Australian Research Council funded the research, which appears in the journal ACS Nano.

Source: Monash University

The post X-rays unlock milk’s fatty secrets appeared first on Futurity.

New research finds that personality can determine a spider’s specialization—caregiver or hunter-warrior.

While most spiders are soloists, a few species, such as the Anelosimus studiosus (found in Tennessee, among other places) live in groups. And unlike ants, for example, their specialization isn’t a matter of size or physical structure.

PhD student Colin Wright and his mentor Jonathan Pruitt, assistant professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Pittsburgh, separated the docile spiders from the aggressive by observing how much space they demanded from fellow colony members. Aggressive females demand more space than docile ones.

The team ran the spiders through a series of tests, examining their performance in colony defense, prey capture, parenting skills, and web repair.

The aggressive cohort was great at defending the web, capturing prey, and repairing their web. But they were awful parents.

“We didn’t know what the docile spiders did,” Wright says. “Were they just freeloaders?” No, it turns out, they were the ones who were capable of rearing large numbers of offspring.

In a separate study, Pruitt also created all docile, all aggressive, and mixed colonies of spiders.

The docile colonies died out first. No one was there to protect them from “parasite” spiders that picked off their young and stole their prey. The all-aggressor group died off second, as they became cannibalistic toward their young.

The mixed group thrived.

The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: University of Pittsburgh

The post Social spiders die off without personality mix appeared first on Futurity.

How your brain responds to happy and sad faces could be an indicator of how innately empathic you are, researchers say.

Previous studies have suggested that sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) is an innate trait associated with greater sensitivity, or responsiveness, to environmental and social stimuli.

In a recent study published in Brain and Behavior, Stony Brook University psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron report that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of brains provides physical evidence that the “highly sensitive” brain responds powerfully to emotional images.

According to Arthur Aron, the trait is becoming increasingly associated with identifiable behaviors, genes, physiological reactions, and patterns of brain activation. Highly sensitive people (HSP), those high in SPS, encompass roughly 20 percent of the population.

HSP in action

Elaine Aron originated the HSP concept. People characterized as HSPs tend to show heightened awareness to subtle stimuli, process information more thoroughly, and be more reactive to both positive and negative stimuli. In contrast, the majority of people have comparatively low SPS and pay less attention to subtle stimuli, approach situations more quickly, and are not as emotionally reactive.

The Arons and colleagues, including Bianca Acevedo of the University of California, Santa Barbara, used fMRI brain scans to compare HSPs with low SPS individuals. The analysis is the first with fMRI to demonstrate how HSPs’ brain activity processes others’ emotions.

The brains of 18 married individuals (some with high and some with low SPS) were scanned as they viewed photos of either smiling faces or sad faces. One set of photos included the faces of strangers, and the other set included photos of their husbands or wives.

“We found that areas of the brain involved with awareness and emotion, particularly those areas connected with empathetic feelings, in the highly sensitive people showed substantially greater blood flow to relevant brain areas than was seen in individuals with low sensitivity during the twelve second period when they viewed the photos,” says Arthur Aron, a research professor in psychology.

Physical evidence

“This is physical evidence within the brain that highly sensitive individuals respond especially strongly to social situations that trigger emotions, in this case of faces being happy or sad.”

The brain activity was even higher when HSPs viewed the expressions of their spouses. The highest activation occurred when viewing images of their partner as happy. Most of the participants were scanned again one year later, and the same results occurred.

Areas of the brain indicating the greatest activity—as shown by blood flow—include sections known as the “mirror neuron system,” an area strongly associated with empathetic response and brain areas associated with awareness, processing sensory information, and action planning.

Arthur Aron believes the results provide further evidence that HSPs are generally highly tuned into their environment. He says the new findings via the fMRI provide evidence that especially high levels of awareness and emotional responsiveness are fundamental features of humans characterized as HSPs.

Source: Stony Brook University

The post ‘Highly tuned’ people react strongly to happy faces appeared first on Futurity.

A system based on face recognition could put an end to forgotten passwords or PIN numbers and offer a safer way to sign in to accounts.

Humans can recognize familiar faces across a wide range of images, even when their image quality is poor. In contrast, recognition of unfamiliar faces is tied to a specific image—so much so that different photos of the same unfamiliar face are often thought to be different people.

Rob Jenkins of the psychology department at the University of York is lead author of a paper that suggests the new system, called Facelock, exploits this psychological effect to create a new type of authentication system. The research is published in the open-access journal PeerJ.

Familiarity with a particular face determines a person’s ability to identify it across different photographs and as a result a set of faces that are known only to a single individual can be used to create a personalized “lock.”

Access is then granted to anyone who demonstrates recognition of the faces across images, and denied to anyone who does not.

How it works

To register with the system, users nominate a set of faces that are well known to them, but are not well known to other people. The researchers, who included Jane McLachlan and Karen Renaud at the University of Glasgow, found that it was surprisingly easy to generate faces that have this property.

For example, a favorite jazz trombonist, or a revered poker player are more than suitable—effectively one person’s idol is another person’s stranger. By combining faces from across a user’s domains of familiarity—say, music and sports—the researchers were able to create a set of faces that were known to that user only. To know all of those faces is then the key to Facelock.

The “lock” consists of a series of face grids and each grid is constructed so that one face is familiar to the user, while all other faces are unfamiliar. Authentication is a matter of simply touching the familiar face in each grid.

For the legitimate user, this is a trivial task, as the familiar face stands out from the others. However, a fraudster looking at the same grid hits a problem—none of the faces stand out.

Hard to fake

Building authentication around familiarity has several advantages. Unlike password or PIN-based systems, a familiarity-based approach never requires users to commit anything to memory. Nor does it require them to name the faces in order to authenticate.

The only requirement is to indicate which face looks familiar. Research has shown that familiarity with a face is virtually impossible to lose and so this system is naturally robust. In the current study, users authenticated easily even after a one-year interval.

In contrast, disused passwords can be forgotten within days.

As well as being extremely durable, familiarity is hard to fake. This makes the system difficult for fraudsters to crack. In the current study, the researchers asked volunteer attackers to watch a successful authentication sequence based on four target faces, so that they could pick out the same four faces from similar test grids. These attacks could be defeated simply by using different photos of the same faces in the test grids.

For the user, who is familiar with the target faces, it is easy to recognize the faces across a range of images. For the attacker, who is unfamiliar with the target faces, generalizing across images is difficult.

“Pretending to know a face that you don’t know is like pretending to know a language that you don’t know—it just doesn’t work,” says Jenkins. “The only system that can reliably recognize faces is a human who is familiar with the faces concerned.”

The initial study combines the cognitive science of face perception and the computer science of secure authentication to work in sympathy with the strengths and limitations of human memory.

“We hope that software developers will now take this framework and turn it into a polished app, while other experts optimize the usability of the system,” Jenkins adds. “If those two things happen, you could see this system on your device in the next product cycle.”

Source: University of York

The post With Facelock, never forget your password again appeared first on Futurity.

A modest increase in skilled midwives in the world’s poorest nations could cost-effectively save hundreds of thousands of mothers and babies each year, a new analysis shows.

As little as a 10 percent increase in midwife coverage every five years through 2025 could avert more than a quarter of maternal, fetal, and infant deaths in the world’s 26 neediest countries, such as Ethiopia and Somalia.

“Even deploying a relatively small number of midwives around each country could have a profound impact on saving maternal, fetal, and newborn lives,” says study leader Linda Bartlett, a faculty member in international health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“Our study shows that maternal mortality can be prevented, even in the most difficult of places.”

Maternal mortality is a leading cause of death for women in many developing countries, and public health efforts to avert it have only made headway in a few countries.

34 percent of deaths averted

Poor nations also have troubling rates of infant and fetal deaths. Midwives can play a crucial role in preventing the deaths of millions of women and children around the world who die during and around the time of pregnancy, the researchers report in The Lancet.

The estimates were done using the Lives Saved Tool (LiST), a computer-based tool that allows users to look at the estimated impact of different maternal, child, and neonatal interventions for countries, states, or districts.

For this analysis, the tool compared the effectiveness of several different alternatives including increasing the number of midwives by varying degrees, increasing the number of obstetricians, and a combination of the two.

In a separate study of the 58 poorest countries, reported last week in PLOS ONE, researchers used LiST to estimate that 7 million maternal, fetal, and newborn deaths will occur in those nations between 2012 and 2015.

If a country’s midwife access were to increase to cover 60 percent of the population by 2015, 34 percent of deaths could be prevented, saving the lives of nearly 2.3 million mothers and babies.

Midwives are less costly

The researchers say broadening the availability of midwives who provide family planning and pregnancy care to 60 percent of women would cost roughly $2,200 per death averted as compared to $4,400 for a similar increase in obstetricians.

Midwives are less expensive to train and can handle interventions needed during uncomplicated deliveries, while obstetricians are needed when surgical interventions such as Caesarean sections are necessary.

Maternal mortality is the public health indicator with the greatest disparity between developed and developing countries. “With a very functional medical system,” Bartlett says, “maternal deaths become extremely rare events.”

The 58 countries studied account for about 91 percent of maternal deaths worldwide.

Midwives vs. obstetricians

Midwives can administer antibiotics for infections and medications to stimulate or strengthen labor, remove the placenta from a patient having a hemorrhage, as well as handle many other complications that may occur in the mother or her baby.

While adding more obstetricians would save additional lives, they cost more to deploy and can only use their surgical skills in sterile hospitals, often unavailable in many rural settings. When both midwives and obstetricians who provide family planning are available, even more lives can be saved, Bartlett says: 83 percent of all maternal, fetal, and newborn deaths could be prevented with near-universal (95 percent) coverage.

While the cost of such interventions isn’t small—an estimated $5.5 billion if access to midwives increases to 60 percent coverage—Bartlett says governments and aid agencies are already spending large sums of money on programs to address these issues.

“We have identified a cost-effective way to spend the money.”

USAID supported the research.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

 

The post More midwives would save millions of lives appeared first on Futurity.

Scientists have created new, water-based organic batteries that are long-lasting and built from cheap, eco-friendly components. They built the new battery, which uses no metals or toxic materials, for use in power plants, where it could make the energy grid more resilient and efficient by creating a large-scale way to store energy for use as needed.

“The batteries last for about 5,000 recharge cycles, giving them an estimated 15-year life span,” says Sri Narayan, professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California and corresponding author of the paper published online in the Journal of the Electrochemical Society.

“Lithium ion batteries degrade after around 1,000 cycles and cost 10 times more to manufacture.”

Narayan collaborated with G.K. Surya Prakash, professor of chemistry and director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute. “Such organic flow batteries will be game-changers for grid electrical energy storage in terms of simplicity, cost, reliability, and sustainability,” Prakash says.

Renewable energy

The batteries could pave the way for renewable energy sources to make up a greater share of the nation’s energy generation. Solar panels can only generate power when the sun’s shining, and wind turbines can only generate power when the wind blows. That inherent unreliability makes it difficult for power companies to rely on them to meet customer demand.

With batteries to store surplus energy, which can be doled out as needed, that sporadic unreliability could cease to be an issue. “‘Mega-scale’ energy storage is a critical problem in the future of renewable energy,” Narayan says. The new battery is based on a redox flow design—similar in design to a fuel cell, with two tanks of electroactive materials dissolved in water.

The solutions are pumped into a cell containing a membrane between the two fluids with electrodes on either side releasing energy. The design has the advantage of decoupling power from energy. The tanks of electroactive materials can be made as large as needed—increasing the total amount of energy the system can store—or the central cell can be tweaked to release that energy faster or slower, altering the amount of power (energy released over time) that the system can generate.

Nature’s energy transfer

The team’s breakthrough centered on the electroactive materials. While previous battery designs have used metals or toxic chemicals, Narayan and Prakash wanted to find an organic compound that could be dissolved in water. Such a system would create a minimal impact on the environment and would likely be cheap, they figured.

Through a combination of molecule design and trial-and-error, the scientists found that certain naturally occurring quinones—oxidized organic compounds—fit the bill. Quinones are found in plants, fungi, bacteria, and some animals, and are involved in photosynthesis and cellular respiration. “These are the types of molecules that nature uses for energy transfer,” Narayan says.

Currently, the quinones needed for the batteries are manufactured from naturally occurring hydrocarbons. In the future, the potential exists to derive them from carbon dioxide, Narayan says.

The team has filed several patents in regard to the design of the battery and next plans to build a larger-scale version.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy’s Open-Funding Opportunity Announcement program, USC, and the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute supported the research.

Source: University of Southern California

The post Power plant battery uses tanks of water appeared first on Futurity.

Parents of children with autism are more likely to have autistic traits themselves, according to new research.

Past studies have shown that the siblings of children with autism also tended to have more autistic traits than the siblings of kids without autism. But this study is the first to connect significant numbers of autistic traits in parents.

“When there was a child with autism in the family, both parents more often scored in the top 20 percent of the adult population on a survey we use to measure the presence of autistic traits,” says John N. Constantino, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis.

“It could be that a mother or a father is just a little bit repetitive or slightly overfocused on details,” Constantino says.

“We can measure the presence of those traits with our questionnaire, but higher scores don’t mean a parent has problems. In fact, there may be advantages to having some of those traits. The problem comes when those traits are so intense that they begin to impair a person’s ability to function.”

Too large a ‘helping’

Just as an adequate amount of mashed potatoes and gravy won’t take over a dinner plate—too much may end up spilling over into everything else on the plate. With autistic traits, too large a “helping” of particular traits can have a negative influence on a child’s behavior and social skills. Traits related to autism tend to be natural variations in social skills, Constantino says.

For the study, published in JAMA Psychiatry, researchers analyzed data from 256 children with diagnoses of autism and almost 1,400 children who did not have the disorder. Data from more than 1,200 mothers and 1,600 fathers of the children also were included in the analysis.

All of the subjects were part of the Nurses’ Health Study II, which has been gathering health information from more than 116,000 nurses since 1989.

Kristen Lyall colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health used the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) to measure the presence of autistic traits. People who score less than 59 on the SRS are considered normal and healthy.

All in the family

When both parents had mild elevations in SRS scores, the study indicated that they were 85 percent more likely than parents without elevated scores to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder. If only one parent’s SRS score was high, the likelihood of having a child with autism spectrum disorder increased by 53 percent. And even among children without autism diagnoses, elevated parent scores correlated with higher SRS scores in their children.

It might seem uncommon that couples with high levels of autistic traits would get together and have children, but when one parent scores high for autistic traits, it’s likely the other parent will, too, Constantino says.

“It turns out that people tend to select one another on the basis of many of the same traits that the SRS measures. Likes attract. If one person has a high score, he or she is more likely to partner with another person who also scores high.”

That’s likely to raise the chances that their offspring will have elevated scores.

“When both parents have scores at or above the top 20 percent, the child’s score is 20 to 30 points higher than when neither parent has an elevated SRS score,” Constantino says.

To better understand how the genetic risks for autism are transmitted from parents to children—and what might protect some individuals in a family from experiencing clinical impairment even when they inherit the same risk factors—Constantino and his colleagues are conducting studies involving molecular, neuroimaging and behavioral methods to trace autism susceptibility across generations in families.

Researchers from University of California, Davis, contributed to the research. The National Cancer Institute and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health, Autism Speaks, and the US Army Medical Research and Material Command provided funding.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

The post Kids with autism often have parents with similar traits appeared first on Futurity.

Bringing new drugs to market is an essential part of increasing the life expectancy of young people with HIV, but lowering the drugs’ toxicity may have even greater health benefits for all HIV patients.

For a new analysis, published in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers used a computer simulation to examine what would happen if guidelines for starting HIV treatment took into account the rate of new drug development and the toxicity of those drugs.

“The side effects of treatment remain one of the primary reasons that HIV drug regimens are discontinued,” says senior author Mark Roberts, professor in the health policy and management department at University of Pittsburgh.

“By decreasing the toxicity and side effects of HIV drugs, you increase the amount of time that patients can stay on that life-saving treatment regimen. Some side effects, such as increased cardiovascular risk, also cause problems that directly contribute to premature mortality.”

Quality of life

The simulation, which built upon a model developed at New York University School of Medicine, found that if the toxicity of new HIV drugs is reduced compared to existing drugs, those new drugs will increase the patient’s quality-adjusted life expectancy by as much as 11 percent, or more than 3 years.

“Quality-adjusted life years” and “quality-adjusted life expectancy” are measures that analysts use to determine the value of different medical actions. For example, a potentially life-saving drug that was highly toxic and left a patient debilitated would have a lower value than a life-saving drug that didn’t have such side effects.

New HIV drugs are approved for market nearly twice a year and recently revised World Health Organization guidelines on the initiation of HIV treatment recommend that, with this rate of drug development, all HIV patients start treatment before their immune system is significantly compromised.

The simulation backed this recommendation, finding that, even at current drug toxicity levels, young people with HIV add nearly two years to their lives by initiating HIV treatment regimens soon after infection.

Antiretroviral therapy for HIV typically consists of the combination of at least three drugs that help control HIV. However, over time, these drugs become less effective.

In younger patients, doctors have tended to wait longer to start antiretroviral therapy because those patients will have to be on the drugs the longest in order to live an average lifespan. As such, they’ll need the drugs to be effective longer and have fewer side effects.

“This availability of new drugs means that as the drugs a patient is on become less effective, doctors can adjust the therapy to use a new, more effective drug,” Roberts says. “And if that new drug has a low toxicity and is well-tolerated by the patient, then they are more likely to take it regularly so that it is as effective as possible.”

Researchers from NYU, Clemson University, and University of Chile contributed to the study. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health provided funding.

Source: University of Pittsburgh

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