Tag Archives: Science

Don’t step on this caterpillar

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SEQUENCER

A Brazilian research institute is the only thing standing between a caterpillar sting and an untimely, grisly death.

In the 1990s, an unlikely culprit sparked an outbreak in southern Brazil. People poured into clinics with severe bruises and mysterious, gangrene-like symptoms. Some patients even suffered brain bleeds and died. The cases initially baffled researchers, who investigated patients’ accounts by probing the surrounding lands and trails. Site after site, they found Lonomia obliqua larvae: two-inch caterpillars with cactus-like spines out of their greenish brown bodies. 

You don’t want to mess with Lonomia obliqua’s prickly prepubescent hairs. If you touch or step on its clumps of spines, venom trickles into your bloodstream, carrying with it procoagulants that spread clots across your body. The venom can deplete your blood’s ability to clot when you actually need it, heightening the risk for internal bleeding and hemorrhage. Lonomia caterpillars cause painful, bloody deaths.

Brazilian officials recorded 600 stings between 1989 and 1996, including 12 deaths, cementing L. obliqua’s place as the world’s deadliest caterpillar. The situation has only gotten more dire: between 2007 and 2017, researchers documented more than 42,000 stings and roughly 250 serious poisonings—only now, there’s an antidote.

Read the full story and support our work in Sequencer Magazine

Umbilical cord blood: a lifeline for pediatric diseases

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DRUG DISCOVERY NEWS

Doctors are recording a wave of wins using cord blood to heal sick children. The clinical evidence suggests that more wins may come.

Caridad Martinez has a bone to pick with bone marrow. In 2008, during her pediatric bone marrow transplant fellowship, Martinez met newborns with severe immunodeficiencies. Those patients’ bone marrow manufactured dysfunctional blood and immune cells. The kids were dying. The standard remedy was to fetch marrow from a donor to hopefully replace the faulty cells with healthier ones.

However, finding a bone marrow match can be hard, especially for racial and ethnic minorities. “You don’t have the same representation of donors,” said Martinez, who is now a bone marrow transplantation researcher at Baylor College of Medicine and a physician at Texas Children’s Hospital. White patients have a 79 percent chance of finding an unrelated donor; Black and African American patients have just a 29 percent chance (1). At the time of Martinez’s fellowship, marrow transplants were a stalwart in the field, but she noticed an urgent need to challenge the status quo. She found that opportunity with a then-budding type of transplant that she felt might be more accessible: transplanting blood from umbilical cords.

Read the full story in the February Issue of Drug Discovery News

How Your Body Adapts to Extreme Cold

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WIRED

Scientists are finding a dynamic story in human physiology linked to frigid temperatures—a story that climate change may rewrite.

A bitter winter storm is sweeping across the north-east of North America this weekend, and is expected to bring significant snow to New York City for the first time in two years. Low temperatures around freezing are expected to last into next week.

If this is making you miserable, it’s because you, like most people, overwhelmingly prefer hot places. That group does not include Cara Ocobock, a biological anthropologist at University of Notre Dame who is one of the scientists trying to understand how the human body adjusts to extreme cold. “I just handle cold much better than I can handle heat,” says Ocobock.

Researchers like Ocobock have recently uncovered a variety of physiological adaptations linked to cold. Those range from anatomical to metabolic changes, and can stem from generations of natural selection or simply the short-term effects of acclimatization. These discoveries help people make practical decisions today, and most important to Ocobock, they hint at what we should expect in an increasingly capricious climate where winter cyclones freeze people in what are normally hot places, and heat waves make people swelter in what are normally icy ones.

Read the full story in WIRED

Snow Sports Are Getting More Dangerous

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WIRED

Extreme conditions caused by climate change are making winter sports more risky. From Colorado to Washington, that’s also making mountain rescue missions even more perilous.

Many people meet Dale Atkins for the first time on their worst days—ice climbers who are stranded and injured, skiers that have been swallowed by an avalanche. Atkins, a skilled mountaineer as well as a climatologist and former weather and avalanche forecaster, is one of the experts on Colorado’s Alpine Rescue Team that local sheriffs call to the rescue.

Read the full story in WIRED

Why Antidepressants Take So Long to Work

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WIRED

A clinical trial reveals the first evidence of how the brain restructures physically in the first month on SSRIs—and the link between neuroplasticity and depression.

CLINICAL DEPRESSION IS considered one of the most treatable mood disorders, but neither the condition nor the drugs used against it are fully understood. First-line SSRI treatments (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) likely free up more of the neurotransmitter serotonin to improve communication between neurons. But the question of how SSRIs enduringly change a person’s mood has never returned completely satisfying answers.

In fact, SSRIs often don’t work. Scientists estimate that over 30 percent of patients don’t benefit from this class of antidepressants. And even when they do, the mood effects of SSRIs take several weeks to kick in, although chemically, they achieve their goal within a day or two. (SSRIs raise the levels of serotonin in the brain by blocking a “transporter” protein that decreases serotonin levels.) “It’s really been a puzzle to many people: Why this long time?” says Gitte Knudsen, a neurobiologist and neurologist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. “You take an antibiotic and it starts working immediately. That’s not been the case with the SSRIs.”

Read the full story in WIRED

A Revelation About Trees Is Messing With Climate Calculations

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WIRED

Trees make clouds by releasing small quantities of vapors called “sesquiterpenes.” Scientists are learning more—and it’s making climate models hazy.

EVERY YEAR BETWEEN September and December, Lubna Dada makes clouds. Dada, an atmospheric scientist, convenes with dozens of her colleagues to run experiments in a 7,000-gallon stainless steel chamber at CERN in Switzerland. “It’s like science camp,” says Dada, who studies how natural emissions react with ozone to create aerosols that affect the climate.

Clouds are the largest source of uncertainty in climate predictions. Depending on location, cloud cover can reflect sunlight away from land and ocean that would otherwise absorb its heat—a rare perk in the warming world. But clouds can also trap heat over Arctic and Antarctic ice. Scientists want to know more about what causes clouds to form, and if that effect is cooling or heating. And most of all, says Dada, “We want to know how we humans have changed clouds.”

Read the full story in WIRED

Rewiring cell communication to treat melanoma

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Drug Discovery News

Exosomes show encouraging results for treating melanoma, offering potential benefits for targeted drug delivery and immunotherapy

When Susanne Gabrielsson first learned about exosomes, her eyes widened. In 1999, she’d just started a postdoctoral fellowship at the Curie Institute in Paris. Gabrielsson, an immunologist now at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, thumbed through paper after paper describing which types of cells release these tiny blobs of information.

“I realized that since they were released from many cells, they probably would be released from all cells,” she said. “And that they would be a new means of communication.”

Read the full story in DDN September Issue

Everyone Was Wrong About Antipsychotics

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WIRED

An unprecedented look at dopamine in the brain reveals that psychosis drugs get developed with the wrong neurons in mind.

ANTIPSYCHOTICS COME FROM a long line of accidents. In 1876, German chemists created a textile dye called methylene blue, which happened to also dye cells. It meandered into biology labs and, soon after, proved lethal against malaria parasites. Methylene blue became modern medicine’s first fully synthetic drug, lucking into gigs as an antiseptic and an antidote for carbon monoxide poisoning. Cue the spinoffs: A similar molecule, promethazine, became an antihistamine, sedative, and anesthetic. Other phenothiazines followed suit. Then, in 1952, came chlorpromazine.

After doctors sedated a manic patient for surgery, they noticed that chlorpromazine suppressed his mania. A series of clinical trials confirmed that the drug treated manic symptoms, as well as hallucinations and delusions common in psychoses like schizophrenia. The US Food and Drug Administration approved chlorpromazine in 1954. Forty different antipsychotics sprang up within 20 years. “They were discovered serendipitously,” says Jones Parker, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University. “So we don’t know what they actually do to the brain.”

Read the full story in WIRED

A Hair Loss Study Raises New Questions About Aging Cells

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WIRED

A protein secreted by seemingly dormant cells in skin moles causes hair to grow again. That’s a big—and potentially useful—surprise.

MAKSIM PLIKUS loves talking about hair. The cell biologist from the University of California, Irvine rattles off obscure facts: Sloth hair has a green tinge thanks to symbiotic algae; African crested rats evolved hollow hairs, which they slather with a pasty bark-derived toxin to defend themselves; his last name comes from a Latvian word for “bald.” Growing up in Eastern Europe (he’s neither Latvian nor bald, despite his name), Plikus aspired to do biomedical research. He joined a lab that had him dissecting rat whiskers under a microscope. It was hard, and his hands would shake. But eventually he got the hang of it. “I started to appreciate just the beauty of the follicle,” he says.

Read the full story in WIRED