the-BA : Science News Digest

Boy sleeping (image copyright: istockphoto.com)

In the news this week: Space shuttle Atlantis blasts off, sleep can help obese children to lose weight and the MoD reveals how goats were used in experiments by the navy. Plus, how the global trend towards city living could help curb population growth.

After a two month delay the Atlantis Shuttle blasted off from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida at 2.45pm on 7 February.

The shuttle is headed for the International Space Station with Europe’s two-billion-U.S.-dollar science laboratory that has been in preparation for years.

A larger Japanese laboratory which will take three shuttle flights to deliver is due to take off in March. Read more in the National Geographic.

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Worries about increasing child obesity can be allayed simply by encouraging children to sleep more, reported the Telegraph this week.

A set of studies carried out at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health asserted that the risk of a child being obese or overweight decreases by nine per cent with each additional hour of sleep per night.

Chronic sleep deprivation is thought to have a profound effect on the brain’s food-seeking circuitry and is apparently influencing a general increase in obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes and heart disease.

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For years the Royal Navy used goats to test whether it was safe for sailors to escape from stricken submarines because their skulls are similar in shape to the human skull, the Ministry of Defence revealed to the Guardian.

Few have known about the experiments, which looked at the effects of different degrees of decompression to avoid submariners getting the bends, until now, but they were revealed in a written Commons statement this week by the defence minister, Derek Twigg.

Last year the experiments were suspended after the French navy ceased using live animals for research purposes. Wendy Higgins from the Dr Hadwen Trust, a non-animal medical research charity, said “it is regrettable but inevitable that warfare causes human suffering but it is totally unethical that we should add to this the unnecessary suffering of innocent animals."

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We may have underestimated the long-term effects of low-level pollution Nature reported this week.

Human activities that produce Nitrogen could be changing plant communities worldwide. It is known that high concentrations of nitrogen pollution change plant dynamics, yet new research is now predicting substantial effects from the lower, chronic levels of nitrogen pollution that is spread through out most of the world.

Nitrogen-based fertilisers have been developed to aid food production as Nitrogen is a vital limiting factor in the growth of many plants. As well as this it is produced by the burning of fossil fuels and the excreta of livestock, and through avenues such as these has a habit of being absorbed into the atmosphere and then raining back down onto areas otherwise untouched by human activity.

David Tilman, of the University of Minnesota, asserts that “this is one of the big ways that humans are changing the world, but it is not very well understood by policymakers."

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A man who was only sleeping an average of 14 minutes a night for almost two decades can finally sleep soundly after experts diagnosed him with one of the most severe cases of sleep apnoea ever recorded in the UK.

Apnoea is a medical condition that causes the airways to close every time the sufferer falls asleep. In the case of Philip Skeates he would stop breathing every 40 seconds or so throughout the night causing him to wake up briefly and then fall straight back to sleep again.

Skeates finally visited his local GP because his snoring was so loud that his wife and three children were being kept awake at night. Various doctors said that it was one of the worst cases they had ever seen and that he had been waking up approximately 90 times an hour.

Fortunately for Skeates and his family he is now able to get a good night’s rest with the help of a continuous positive airway pressure machine being installed at his home. By wearing an oxygen mask and tube while he sleeps air is forced into his lungs to keep him breathing throughout the night.

He has now stopped snoring, lost weight and is starting to enjoy life again. Read more at the Guardian.

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Research has started to suggest that a cure for type 1 diabetes might one day be achieved using human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), reported New Scientist this week.

A team from Novocell in San Diego, California, told a conference in Evry, France, how they were able to ‘cure’ diabetic mice by injecting hESCs into the abdomens or backs of mice whose insulin-producing islet cells, which when functioning healthily prevent animals from being diabetic, had been destroyed.

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And finally…

The Telegraph claimed this week that cities ‘are like giant contraceptives’, and that mass urbanisation occurring on the scale that it now does could help to control the global population explosion.

Historically the main concern of a parent was for their baby to survive infancy, but this has now given way to a concern that for children being as successful as possible as adults.
This is shown by the way in which parents put more and more resources into each child to enable them to compete with their peers, which leads to parents having fewer children.

The United Nations has estimated that 2007 will be the first year in history that the majority of the world’s population were living in towns and cities. Clear examples of this can be found in Italy and Mexico but Professor Ruth Mace of University College London has noted how fertility rates are decreasing fastest in urban areas of Africa too. The evidence therefore suggests that this will become a worldwide phenomenon.