Canada and Sweden have signed a new cooperative agreement based on science in the Arctic. The deal may have a special meaning for Canada, because the nation’s claims to a large tract of the Arctic is contested by other claimants Russia, Denmark, the U.S., and Norway.
Canada’s claim depends upon proving that the boundaries of its continental shelf extends beneath the North Pole. However, proving the extent of the shelf is challenging because much of the Arctic is still uncharted and work in the area is expensive and dangerous.
The new five-year “Arctic Science Cooperation Agreement” was completed by Canada’s Science Minister Kristy Duncan and Sweden’s Polar Research Secretariat head Bjorn Dahlback, and was announced by Ottawa Saturday.
According to international law, countries are entitled to 200 nautical miles of water as a coastal economic zone.
Currently, Canada, the U.S., Russia, Denmark and Norway are working with the United Nations to resolve jurisdictional boundaries in the Arctic. Rewrites have been made, including a 2013 rewrite by Canada’s Conservative government which included a claim to the North Pole, and a 2015 claim by Russia claiming 1.2 million square kilometers of the Arctic shelf. Denmark also claims the North Pole.
The active sand dunes of Mars were reached by NASA’s Curiosity rover last month, and Friday NASA released some of Curiosity’s latest photography.
The Bagnold Dunes are as high as two stories, and compose the bottom portion of a layered mountain Curiosity is trekking up this month.
Some of Curiosity’s latest photos show the bot’s view looking up the dune hill. Others show the texture of the sand its treaded wheels are covering.
NASA states that the individual dunes of the Bagnold band — which is located along the northwestern flank of Mount Sharp inside Gale Glacier — move up to 3 feet (1 meter) per year, based on observations from orbit.
Curiosity’s current mission task is to scale Sharp and examine the higher layers. It has already explored outcrops between its landing site and the mountain since landing in August 2012.
The Geminids — “the King of Meteor Showers” — will rain down around 100 to 150 multi-colored slow-moving streaks per hour this weekend, visible from anywhere, but the best views will be for those in the Northern Hemisphere.
The show will peak over the night of Sunday, December 13 — between midnight and morning with the highest activity between 2 and 3 a.m. There should be some meteors visible already at sunset, though. While the meteors will radiate from the southwest, there is no particular part of the sky where viewers need to focus their attention because the shower will be so high.
The Gemenids are famous not only for the frequency of meteors, but also their slow movement and the varied colors which are produced by the different chemical compounds burning in the sky.
The Gemenids are a relatively young shower — first observed 150 years ago. They originated from the 3200 Phaeton asteroid — one of only two major showers not originating from a comet.
This collection of photographs was taken by the cameras of the International Space Station from it’s orbit at 319 nautical kilometers (172 miles) from the Earth’s surface. Can you guess what some of these cities are, or even the countries they belong to?
We’ll make it more interesting: This first set of cities are all from the Americas, and they progress from northernmost southwards.
Did you guess any of them? You’ll have to click through to the next set of cities to find out the answers to this set!
Alberta’s Premier said this week that she was not sure the provincial government would raise the minimum wage to $15 after all, citing the state of the Alberta economy and the possibility that raising the minimum wage might lead to job losses.
The NDP came to power in May, the first non-Conservative party to govern the province in 44 years. Among the NDP’s election campaign promises was that the minimum wage would be increased to $15 dollars per hour by 2018. The plan angered businesses, but the NDP indicated that raising the wage would create jobs and insure a better standard of living for all.
In June, Notely reasserted that they would “stick to that promise,” and in October the NDP raised the minimum wage from $10.20 to $11.20.
However, Wednesday Premier Rachel Notley said the government would examine the wage issue in light of continuing economic trends — Alberta has been in recession and predictions for the next couple of years are significantly worse.
Notley said that they would now consider the best available research before making a decision about raising the minimum wage.
She said that the $15 target was an idea rather than a plan.
“[I]n fact,” said Notley, “what we’ve said all along is the pace is something that needs to be sensitive to the current economic situation — the depth and breadth of which we are still, all of us, are still coming to understand. So that’s what we’re going to do.”
“Virgin soil” hypothesis of African tuberculosis burden now challenged by new “European wave” hypothesis
Ethiopia is a hotspot for tuberculosis infection, ranking third among African countries and eighth in the world for TB burden according to the World Health Organization. But, say researchers who have analyzed the genomes of 66 TB strains and reported their findings in the Cell Press journal Current Biology Thursday, that’s most likely not because TB was absent in the country before Europeans made contact–the so-called “virgin soil hypothesis”–as had been proposed ever since colonial times. Rather, they suggest, Europeans may have introduced a new wave of disease spread by more virulent TB strains, which spread during the 20th century as countries of Sub-Saharan Africa grew increasingly urbanized.
The new genomic analysis finds a surprising amount of diversity amongst TB strains in Ethiopia. It also adds to evidence that Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium responsible for TB, originated in Africa.
“The diversity of M. tuberculosis in Ethiopia is considerably higher than is recorded in most other countries; the number of genotypes present in the population is large, and some of them have clear links with other global genotypes while others are specific to East Africa,” says Stefan Berg of the Animal and Plant Health Agency in Surrey, United Kingdom. “Before this project was initiated, this high diversity was not expected.”
“The diversity of M. tuberculosis complex in Ethiopia confirms the African origin of the disease and contradicts early notions that TB was not present in Africa before main European contact,” adds Iñaki Comas of FISABIO Public Health in Valencia, Spain. “However, it remains to be explained why high rates of infection among native people were observed after the contact.”
Topology Obtained by Bayesian Analyses as Described in Experimental Procedures – The report
The findings are part of a larger effort by Comas and Berg along with colleagues in Europe and Ethiopia to understand the high rates of TB and specifically extra-pulmonary TB–a less common form of the infection affecting areas of the body outside of the lungs–seen in Ethiopia.
In the new study, the researchers analyzed a broad sample of M. tuberculosis strains collected from infected people in Ethiopia. Their analysis shows that all of the strains collected trace back to a single common ancestor with a proposed origin in East Africa. The analysis also revealed a pattern of serial introductions of TB strains into Ethiopia in association with human migration and trade.
Although more work remains, the researchers “propose that increased TB mortality in Africa was driven by the introduction of European strains of M. tuberculosis alongside expansion of selected indigenous strains having biological characteristics that carry a fitness benefit in the urbanized settings of post-colonial Africa.”
Contour Maps Derived from PointEstimation of the Frequency of Each Line-age in the Different Sampling Locations – The report
The new evolutionary analyses shed light on past epidemics of TB. They might also help to understand global trends in TB infection and perhaps even better predict the future. “Understanding factors that may have influenced the current population structure of M. tuberculosis in Africa and worldwide can potential help predicting future trends in the disease epidemiology,” Berg says.
Comas says they would now like to sequence the bacteria along with their human hosts to further investigate the biological factors underlying high rates of extrapulmonary TB in Ethiopia, which may lead to new strategies for combatting this form of disease globally. They’d also like to explore whether certain human populations are more susceptible to certain bacterial strains.
The report, “Population Genomics of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Ethiopia Contradicts the Virgin Soil Hypothesis for Human Tuberculosis in Sub-Saharan Africa” was published in the journal Current Biology.
By Joseph Caputo
With images from the report and WHO (WHO/P. Virot)
Many of the body’s processes follow a natural daily rhythm or so-called circadian clock, so there are certain times of the day when a person is most alert, when the heart is most efficient, and when the body prefers sleep. Even bacteria have a circadian clock, and in a December 10 Cell Reports study, researchers designed synthetic microbes to learn what drives this clock and how it might be manipulated.
“This is probably because cyanobacteria are naturally photosynthetic–they’re actually responsible for a large fraction of the photosynthesis in the ocean–and so whether the cell is energized or not is a good indication of whether it’s day or night,” he says. For photosynthetic bacteria, every night is a period of starvation, and it is likely that the circadian clock helps them grow during the day in order to prepare for nightfall.
Dr. Michael Rust
To make their discovery, Rust and his colleagues had to separate metabolism from light exposure, and they did this by using a synthetic biology approach to make photosynthetic bacteria capable of living on sugar rather than sunlight.
“I was surprised that this actually worked–by genetically engineering just one sugar transporter, it was possible to give these bacteria a completely different lifestyle than the one they have had for hundreds of millions of years,” Rust says. The findings indicate that the cyanobacteria’s clock can synchronize to metabolism outside of the context of photosynthesis. “This suggests that in the future this system could be installed in microbes of our own design to carry out scheduled tasks,” he says.
In a related analogy, engineers who developed electrical circuits found that synchronizing each step of a computation to an internal clock made increasingly complicated tasks possible, ultimately leading to the computers we have today. “Perhaps in the future we’ll be able to use synthetic clocks in engineered microbes in a similar way,” Rust says.
Other researchers have shown that molecules involved in the mammalian circadian clock are also sensitive to metabolism, but our metabolism is not so closely tied to daylight as the cyanobacteria’s. Therefore, our bodies’ clocks evolved to also sense light and dark.
“This is presumably why, in mammals, there are specialized networks of neurons that receive light input from the retina and send timing signals to the rest of the body,” Rust explains. “So, for us it’s clearly a mixture of metabolic cues and light exposure that are important.”
The bacteria that live inside of our guts, however, most likely face similar daily challenges as those experienced by cyanobacteria because we give them food during the day when we eat but not during the night. “It’s still an open question whether the bacteria that live inside us have ways of keeping track of time,” Rust says.
The report, “Controlling the Cyanobacterial Clock by Synthetically Rewiring Metabolism,” was published in Cell Reports.
Pretty much everything happening in the brain would fail without astrocytes. These star-shaped glial cells are known to have a critical role in synapse creation, nervous tissue repair, and the formation of the blood-brain barrier. But while we have decades of data in mice about these nervous system support cells, how relevant those experiments are to human biology (and the success of potential therapies) has been an open question.
In Neuron on December 10, Stanford researchers present the first functional and molecular comparison of human and mouse astrocytes, and while 85%-90% of the genes are similar, human astrocytes have unique genes and respond differently to neurotransmitters, particularly glutamate. This presumably means that, at the adult stage, human astrocytes, in contrast to mouse astrocytes, are better at detecting neuroactivity and adjusting their functions in response.
“We are only beginning to understand the unique properties of human astrocytes,” says first author Ye Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar in Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Neurobiology. “We found hundreds of genes expressed exclusively by human astrocytes, and future studies will likely reveal additional biological differences. Potentially, this work will help us recognize the role of these cells in biological disorders.”
Author Ye Zhang
The study of human astrocytes has faced issues related to access (samples of living tissue must be obtained from brain cancer or epilepsy surgeries or fetal tissue) and purification (breaking apart astrocytes away from other cells often killed them and many experiments ended in failure). Zhang, co-first author and graduate student Steven Sloan, and their faculty mentor, senior author and professor Ben Barres, overcame the technical challenges by developing an antibody-driven protocol that isolates astrocytes and keeps them alive in culture.
This method also allowed the researchers to compare astrocytes in healthy tissue versus those coming from people with glioblastoma or epilepsy. It’s known from mouse studies that astrocytes become highly reactive in these diseases, but what this means remains unclear. Genes that produce both positive and negative effects are expressed during these active periods, and through this study, some of the good and bad genes in humans are beginning to be parsed out. The next step is to screen for drugs that can promote or quell the expression of specific genes.
Another surprising discovery was that astrocytes come in two distinct stages (progenitor and mature) and that early-stage astrocytes and brain cancer closely resemble one another. This brings up the possibility that brain cancer cells that originate from glial cells can be forced into a mature state and thus unable to divide. The authors note that this finding could not have been made without the use of fetal tissue.
“Such knowledge could not have been obtained without access to fetal tissue,” Zhang says. “We can’t guess the biology of human brains and neurodevelopmental disorders just by studying mouse brains.”
With their new method, Zhang and her colleagues hope to soon begin looking at the unique properties of human astrocyte cells in a range of disease types, including Alzheimer’s, ALS, stroke, injury, autism, and schizophrenia.
ISIS will be eliminated in about six months, Assange predicted, who blamed both Russia and Turkey for the jet downing last month
Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange spoke via live video stream on a panel on security and surveillance featuring terrorism expert Philip Giraldi, political activist Raymond McGovern, and strategic analyst Gregory Copley Thursday. At the end of the discussion, hosted by broadcast organization Russia Today, Assange commented on the recent developments in the Middle East. Assange criticized Russia for its action in the region, as well as its “severe incompetence” with regards to its jet being shot down by Turkey in November. He also made predictions about the end of ISIS as a significant power, and hinted at new information he had received about the last Turkish election and how it may relate to the jet incident.
“Northern Turkey can be looked at as ‘Novo Turkey,'” said Assange. “It’s a similar situation to which Russia was dealing with in the Ukraine.”
“And that if we imagine a situation where let’s say the United Kingdom came in and bombed rebels in eastern Ukraine in support of western Ukraine — Russian-backed rebels — what would the Russian response be? Would it be to shoot down those planes if it could find a technical excuse to do so?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn4IvHgb7Qk
“And I think the answer is ‘Yes,’ that the domestic nationalist imperative would be to do that.”
Assange continued to criticize Russian actions or lack of actions preceding the downing of its jet along the Turkish border.
“And Turkey send out many warnings. Sorry, it sent out several warnings to Russia in the preceding week.”
Assange began to speak of information relating to the last Turkish election, and that policy established at that time had a part in the jet’s being shot down.
“Now there is some other information that has arisen which what perhaps occurred was a plan that was set in train immediately before the election — the Turkish election, which Erdogan won. And that was a national imperative to win that election.
“And rules of engagement were set up such that if there was a technical violation — even for a second — of Turkish airspace or it could be suggested that there was, this would be a plan to ensure winning that election. And those rules of engagement were not taken down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyEuc4PjVQk
“I’m not sure what the result is but you can see that it’s quite a complex situation, that we don’t have time to go into, but Turkey has historical interest in northern Syria. It has also used the Kurds to create a form of nationalism in Turkey. It is going to continue to push to have various forms of control of at least northern Syria, and that’s a conflict with many different actors that I don’t see going anywhere nice. It’s impossible to satisfy all those actors at once.
“And I really think that while shooting down Russia’s jet was not justified, we have to pause and consider what is perhaps a severe incompetence of Russian intelligence services. Severe incompetence in relation to Ukraine, and severe incompetence in relation to Turkey, because there were plenty of warning signals being given off by the Turks. Why won’t those warning signals properly understood?”
Assange also made predictions about the impending end of ISIS as a significant power. ISIS would be “almost completely debilitated as a state” in about six months time, said Assange, and will return to being a guerilla group.
The U.S., Russia, Iran and other groups which had been militarily active against ISIS would then remain in the region, Assange believed, and continue other activities.
Report by Cambridge professor’s takes a critical look at economics of immigration
The current large-scale immigration policy of the UK will result in small gross economic benefits while creating serious negative consequences, according to a UK economics professor who has just published a report on his research.
The moral and practical questions related to controlling immigration in the UK are ones that have concerned Dr. Robert Rowthorn, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Cambridge University in England, the author of several books on economics, for a number of years, he wrote in the new report broadly covering the economic and demographic consequences of immigration on advanced economies.
The UK’s immigrant numbers shot up from 4.9 million in 1991 to 8.3 million last year — not counting the children of immigrants — half of which were employed in the countries work force, the prime economic benefit of immigration, according to Rowthorn.
In drawing conclusions about the net effects of immigration, Rowthorn wrote that current numbers combined with the children born to immigrants would raise the UK population 20 million over the next 50 years, and the total GDP of the UK would rise faster than otherwise, but the per capita GDP would not see an appreciable change.
Economic gains for the UK from immigration would be achieved mainly from the young age of immigrants — working age citizens.
However, the effects of young immigrants even in large numbers would be modest, Rowthorn found, and the immigrants would themselves age, so that a younger UK population could only be maintained by continually higher rates of immigration.
Whether or not the UK increases immigration rates to maintain a lower working-age population over decades, the “dependency rate” of the UK — the number of citizens age 65 and over who must be supported by younger citizens — will increase significantly due to current immigration numbers as the new young workers age.
Rowthorn also noted that because the primary benefit to the UK economy is the age structure of the population, gains could be achieved with much lower immigration numbers and lower population growth.
Rowthorn also documented several negative effects of immigration on the UK.
Immigrants have a negative impact on native employment, as estimated by the Migration Advisory Committee. Unskilled workers’ wages in the UK have dropped due to competition with immigrants, and will continue to drop as immigration continues.
European Union governments have responded to this effect by increasing screening for educated and skilled workers, but this impoverishes the source countries of their professional and talented workers — “enriching ourselves at their expense,” as Rowthorn puts it.
Overall, the benefits the UK sees due to its large number of immigrants and their descendants are small compared to the negative impacts, Rawthorn concluded.
Rowthorn advised lower immigration rates and an increased retirement age to improve the UK economy. “Many people would consider it better to settle for much less immigration and much slower population growth at the cost of slightly faster ageing,” he wrote.
Mars will most likely develop rings similar to Saturn’s, when its largest moon, Phobos, gets close enough to break apart, according to a recently published study in Nature Geoscience. Mars would be the only inner planet with rings if this took place. Scientists predict it will happen in about 20 – 40 million years.
Unlike Earth’s moon, which is slowly moving away from us, Mars’s largest and inner most moon, Phobos, has been slowly moving towards its parent planet, and once close enough, will be torn into bits by Mars’s gravity. The aftermath of Phobos being torn apart may result in a large ring orbiting Mars, as well as bombarding Mars with meteors for years afterwards. The study concludes that it is far more likely that Phobos will break apart before making contact with Mars, creating rings around the red planet.
Phobos is the larger of Mars’s two moons, and is thought to be a “rubble planet” that is comprised of numerous rocks held together by gravity, to form a large clump with a crust only 100 meters thick, compared to Earth’s average 30 kilometer crust. Every 100 years Phobos orbits 2 metres closer to Mars, and is thought to break apart into thousands of small pieces over 20 million years from now, creating dense rings similar to Saturn’s.
Phobos is Mars’s largest moon, and is made up of thousands of boulders held together by gravity
All planets in our solar system have had rings at one point in time, including Earth, though most rings were too unstable to last very long, and either rained down as meteors, or flew out of orbit. Only the outer gas giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have retained their rings, which will make Mars the only inner planet to have rings again, and will probably be the last time any terrestrial planet gains new rings.
The researchers also said that several missions to Phobos have been proposed, and could help us learn more about asteroids, plate tectonics, and make measurements to test their theories.
Late in 2013, a novel variant of the Ebola virus emerged in Western Africa to start what would become the largest human epidemic on record. In a study published December 9th in Cell Host & Microbe, researchers used genome sequencing to trace the introduction and spread of the virus in Liberia–the second worst-affected country.
The findings suggest that the Ebola virus spread to Liberia multiple times from neighboring countries early during the outbreak, but the majority of Liberian cases are attributable to a single introduction of the virus, which rapidly spread throughout the country and subsequently refueled the ongoing outbreak in Guinea.
“Genome sequencing has played an important role in identifying and confirming chains of transmission throughout this outbreak, in the absence of good epidemiological data. However, relatively few sequences have been determined from patients in Liberia, even though this country had the highest number of Ebola-related deaths,” says senior study author Gustavo Palacios of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). “By providing a detailed view into the ongoing spread and diversification of the Ebola virus, this study supports ongoing surveillance and isolation efforts and provides critical information for developing effective control strategies.”
The Ebola virus is transmitted to people from its reservoir host and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission. Since it was first discovered in 1976, the virus has mainly affected remote villages in Africa, limiting the number of deaths associated with Ebola virus disease (EVD) despite the 50% average fatality rate. However, the latest outbreak reached major urban areas in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and nearby countries, resulting in more than 28,000 reported cases and more than 11,000 deaths.
Dr. Gustavo Palacios
The World Health Organization declared that Ebola virus transmission in the human population had ended in Liberia on September 3rd and in Sierra Leone on November 7th of this year. Moreover, the last patient in Guinea, where the outbreak originated, tested negative for the Ebola virus twice as of November 22nd. “Despite encouraging signs of containment, the cluster of three confirmed cases of EVD that was recently reported in Liberia underscores the importance of robust surveillance measures to ensure the rapid detection of any reintroduction or re-emergence of the virus,” Palacios says.
Palacios and first author Jason Ladner of USAMRIID sequenced Ebola virus genomes from 139 EVD patients affected in the second, largest wave of the Liberian outbreak. They also analyzed 782 previously published sequences from throughout the Western African outbreak. Together, these samples span nearly one year of the epidemic, including the period during which 99% of the confirmed and probable cases were reported in Liberia.
While multiple early introductions of the Ebola virus from Guinea and/or Sierra Leone to Liberia were evident, the majority of Liberian cases were consistent with a single introduction in late May or early June 2014, around the start of the second wave of Liberian cases. Although infected individuals may have continued to enter Liberia from neighboring countries, surprisingly, these transmission chains did not substantially contribute to the Liberian portion of the outbreak.
Contact tracing has revealed at least three potential introductions of the Ebola virus to Liberia from Sierra Leone around the start of the second wave of Liberian cases. Analysis of the viral sequences suggests that one of these introductions, which has been linked to several EVD cases in Monrovia, including health care workers at Redemption Hospital, likely led to the largest wave of cases in Liberia.
Subsequently, the virus rapidly spread and diversified within Liberia. Moreover, reintroductions of the virus from Liberia served as an important source for the continuation of the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Guinea and its spread to Mali. “The widespread movement of the Ebola virus within Liberia, due to a high rate of migration in the country, is likely to have played an important role in the magnitude and longevity of the Liberian portion of the Ebola outbreak,” Ladner says. “Regular migration of infected individuals complicates surveillance and isolation efforts, which are critical for controlling Ebola outbreaks.”
Surprisingly, the study suggested that the Ebola virus did not appear to further adapt to humans during the outbreak, but additional research is needed to understand how the virus transitioned to humans at the beginning of the outbreak. Future efforts should also focus on exploring the public health implications of the findings. “A detailed investigation of Ebola virus control measures throughout Western Africa, in light of the movement patterns highlighted in our analysis, will be illustrative regarding the effectiveness of different management approaches,” Palacios says.
This work was supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Global Biosurveillance Technology Initiative, Global Emerging Infections System and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Additional support was received by the EU Seventh Framework Programme.
