the-BA : Science News Digest

Asteroid hurtling towards Earth (Image copyright: Istockphoto.com)

Scientists from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland have created mutant mice with four times more muscle than normal, reported Nature. The excess muscle is because they cannot produce a protein called myostatin which restricts muscle development, but they produce another protein, follistatin, which binds to myostatin, possibly preventing its action.

As well as helping livestock breeders to create more muscular cows and sheep that carry a larger amount of meat, the discovery is good news for medical researchers who are looking for ways to restore muscle in people with diseases such as muscular dystrophy, AIDS, cancer and to help elderly people to avoid losing their muscle.

The UK plans to carry out research which could help us to be better prepared in the event of an asteroid hitting Earth. The BBC reported that there were originally concerns when a 300m-wide rock, known as Apophis, that was discovered in 2004 might collide with us in April 2029.
Apophis will fly nearer to Earth than many communication satellites and although it is now thought that there will be no collision, Astrium, an aerospace company based in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, wants a probe to follow the progress of the asteroid so that its orbit can be studied.
Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik has been vocal in his support for more funding towards the research. Talking to the BBC News Website he said: “The question isn’t whether Earth is hit by an asteroid – it is when. Good luck to Astrium; they are showing that if we have the political will, we certainly have the technical know-how to do something about threatening objects.”

While we are all aware that this has been a very wet and disappointing summer, the BBC reported that 2007 may well be the wettest UK summer since rainfall records began in 1914. More data has to be collected, which may put 2007 into second place, but current figures from the Met Office show a total of 358.5mm (14.114in) of rain fell on the UK, narrowly beating the previous 1956 record of 358.4mm (14.110in).
The jet stream is made up of a band of strong winds that determine weather systems across the UK and is thought to have had a big impact this year, blowing further south and more powerfully than in previous years for much of the summer.
The Association of British Insurers has estimated that the overall cost of all of the flooding might be as much as £3bn.

The Telegraph reported this week on research that shows how women who are hypnotised before having surgery for breast cancer spend less time in the operating theatre and recover better.
The lead author of a study carried out at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, Guy Montgomery, has suggested that it should be considered more widely as it not only helped women after surgery but also saved money – the average score for emotional upset was 8.6 for the hypnotised women compared with 33.4 for those who were not, and the hypnotised patients cost £384.48 less than the control group to treat, the main reason for this being that they spent less time in the operating theatre.

A study carried out at University College London recently used a game similar to “Pac Man” to measure the way we cope with panic and anxiety, and the way in which panic is handled by a different part of the brain to the one that deals with anxiety.
According to the new research by Dr Dean Mobbs and his colleagues where subjects were chased through a maze by an artificial predator, distant threats are assigned to the portion of our brains that allows to us to make complicated decisions, like planning a strategy or escape route, while a more primitive instinct to flight or fight is triggered by nearby threats.
While Dr Mobbs asserted that brain-imaging studies like theirs cannot directly help cure panic and anxiety disorders, they do improve our comprehension of how the emotional system operates, and that this is the first step to helping people who suffer from anxiety-related conditions. Read more at the Telegraph.

Men who pursue younger women, and women who prefer a man a few years senior to them, are not simply obeying cultural stereotypes. The Times reported this week that the trend has evolved naturally in relation to sex and marriage as it carries a reproductive advantage.
A new study carried out by the University of Vienna, has found evidence for this by studying a database of more than 10,000 Swedish men and women. The results show that the average number of children men had, increased as the age of their partners decreased, with the optimum age gap being 5.92 years, before results began to decline again as the difference in ages grew. There were similar findings for women, with the average number of children they had increasing the older their partners were, peaking at a gap of 3.97 years before beginning to decline again.

The Guardian reported this week that it is actually possible to become addicted to chocolate. When a chocoholic sees or tastes chocolate their grey matter reacts differently to people who do not regularly indulge.
Using brain scans, British researchers found that showing chocolate lovers pictures of chocolate activated areas of the brain linked to habit-forming behaviours and drug addiction.
They also found that combining the sight and taste of chocolate produced an even stronger reaction, Professor Edmund Rolls from the University of Oxford’s experimental psychology department who measured this using functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of eight chocoholics and eight non-cravers said, “Sight and flavour combined give a much a bigger response than seeing or tasting the food separately. The sight component is important and complements the flavour”.

Would hospitals be able to cope if the UK were hit by an influenza pandemic? The Times reported that some of us could be at the back of a very long queue, and that the fairest way of deciding who should be given priority might be down to our individual genetic make-up.
Researchers in Canada looked at sufferers of severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and how much interferon, a protein that the body produces to fight infection, each patient produced in relation to their resistance to the disease. Two distinct patterns were identified in the way interferon was expressed by genes – patients who suffered more severe symptoms fell into one category, and those were less affected another.
So while there has been a good deal of debate in the UK about whether patients should be prioritised depending on their age, perhaps now it will merely be a case deciding in the basis of the genes we were born with.

The Guardian tells us a little more about Chris Rapley, speaking on the Thursday of the BA Festival of Science in York, who will take over as Director of the Science Museum this Monday, 3rd September.