the-BA : Science News Digest - 29 February 2008

Eyes hold a clue to your date of birth (image copyright: istockphoto.com)

In the science news this week: a leap forward in understanding motor neurone disease, our eyes hold the key to revealing our date of birth and the ‘toddlerbot’ that will be taught to talk. Plus, the colour-blind artist who uses sound to paint in colour...

There has been a breakthrough in the understanding of the fundamental nature of motor neurone disease, a debilitating disease of the nervous system that causes progressive paralysis of the body and usually results in death two to five years after diagnosis. Sufferer Stephen Hawking, the famed cosmologist, is a notable exception – he has lived with the disease for more than 35 years.

By studying an extended family with a history of the disease, scientists have been able to locate mutations in the gene responsible for a protein called TDP-43, reports the Independent. The protein builds up inside the nerve cels of affected patients. The study published in the journal Science showed that the build-up of TDP-43 is a cause of motor neurone degeneration, rather than just collateral damage.

Although less than 10 per cent of motor neurone patients have the version that runs in families, the latest discovery is also relevant for those that have the sporadic non-familial form of the disease: the scientists found that 95 per cent of all sufferers exhibit a build-up of TDP-43 protein inside their motor neurone cells.

Researchers were cautious about predicting a future cure or treatment, but said that the latest discovery was ‘a major leap forward in that direction.’ The Director of Research at the Motor Neurone Disease Association, Brian Dickie, said the discovery of the genetic mutations would enable scientists to make animal models of the disease that could then be used to test new drugs and treatments.
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The Telegraph reported that scientists have developed a useful tool that enables them to establish an unidentified corpse’s year of birth from their eye lens, with relatively high precision.

The technique is a byproduct of the atomic weapon testing that took place half a century ago. Carbon isotope C-14 was released into the atmosphere as a result of the explosions but the amount has been decreasing ever since.

The isotope is incorporated into the body during the first two years of life, to make transparent proteins in the eye, known as lens crystallines. Apart from dental enamel, these are the only tissue in the human body to remain essentially unchanged for the rest of our lives. However, teeth can take between six and eight years to develop, so the eye lens offers a dating advantage.

By using a nuclear particle accelerator to measure the amount of C-14 incorporated into the lens crystallines, it is possible to judge the year of birth. The researchers say the technique is ‘extremely accurate, almost to the precise year of birth’ and will be a useful tool until the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere returns to normal levels in a century or so.

As well as offering the potential to help identify victims of disasters such as tsunamis and terrorist attacks, the scientists from the Universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus who published their work in PLoS One, think the C-14 dating technique could also be used to study when certain tissues are generated or regenerated and could, for example, be used to understand when cancerous tissue is formed.
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The first 30,000 pages of the Encyclopedia of Life – a vast resource that aims to catalogue all 1.8 million of the Earth’s species by 2017 – have been published.

Available for use by both scientists and the general public, the encyclopedia hopes to raise our consciousness of biodiversity at a time when our planet is said to be undergoing a sixth mass extinction, reports BBC News. It could also help scientists assess the impact of climate change and monitor the spread of invasive species and diseases.

The project began in Spring 2007 and already has placeholders for one million species, with detailed information for 30,000. It will encompass all six kingdoms of life, and even include viruses. Each species’ entry will include World Conservation Union status on whether it is threatened, endangered or recently extinct.

Dr James Edwards, Executive Director of the project, says the speed with which they are able to compile such an immense amount of information is thanks to the availability of a number of existing online resources that can be drawn upon, as well as the advancement of information technology that enables the pooling of bits of information from different sources.

’If someone were to sit down and start writing, from scratch, an encyclopedia of life, it would take them about 100 years to complete. But we think we’ll be able to do it in one-tenth of that time,’ he says.
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Scientists have questioned the efficacy of some of the world’s most frequently prescribed antidepressants after they examined full sets of clinical trial data for four drugs – including results that manufacturers chose not to publish at the time – and found that patients who took a placebo improved just as much as those who took the drug. The only exception appeared to be in the most severely depressed patients.

One of the authors of the paper published in the journal PLoS Medicine, Professor Irving Kirsch, of Hull University’s Department of Psychology, said: ‘This study raises serious issues that need to be addressed surrounding drug licensing and how drug trial data is reported.’
(Read more in the Guardian)
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The plant that played a crucial part in helping the monk Gregor Mendel decipher the fundamental laws of inheritance around 150 years ago has finally had its genome comprehensively analysed. French scientists have produced a detailed reference collection of mutations of the pea plant Pisum sativum.

Mendel established the concepts of dominant and recessive genetic traits as well as two basic laws about how they are transmitted from generation to generation by cross-breeding more than 29,000 pea plants.
(The Times)
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Scientists have shown that particular teenage behaviour can be traced to size differences in parts of their brains, reported the Telegraph.

137 adolescents aged 11 to 14 were filmed having discussions with their parents on provocative subjects. Psychologists rated them for traits such as anger, contempt, belligerence, anxiety or being happy or caring. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was then used to map each teen’s brain structure.

The researchers found that longer duration of agression in both boys and girls was associated with a larger than average amygdala, the part of the brain involved in emotions and memory. Another difference was that boys with a smaller left anterior cingulate cortex than right one tended to be more anxious.
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Another study relating to behaviour has demonstrated that humans react instinctively to babies’ faces. The medial orbitofrontal cortex, found at the front of the brain and known to be important in regulating emotions, became highly active in volunteers within a seventh of a second when the face of an unfamiliar infant was flashed in front of them. It didn’t when the face was that of an adult, leading the researchers to conclude that it predisposes people to treat babies’ faces as special.

‘Although the degree to which these responses are innate rather than learnt is unknown, these specific responses to unfamiliar infant faces... occur so quickly that they are almost certainly quicker than anything under conscious control,’ said Dr Morten Kringelback, a neuroscientist from the University of Oxford.
(Read more in the Telegraph)
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The University of Plymouth will lead a four-year project known as ‘Italk – Integration and Transfer of Action and Language Knowledge in Robots’. The consortium beat 31 others to win a £4.7-million grant for the work which will attempt to teach a ‘toddlerbot’ to speak.

The humanoid robot, called ‘iCub’ is the same size as a three-year old toddler and develops capabilities in the same way as a child. It is able to crawl, sit up, feel, see and hear and learns progressively – it is already able to complete tasks such as inserting the correct shapes into corresponding holes and stacking wooden blocks. Now language development specialists, who have researched the way parents teach their children to speak, will help the iCub robot aquire language skills.

‘iCub will take us a stage forward in developing robots as social companions,’ said collaborator Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn from the University of Hertfordshire. ‘We have studied issues such as how robots should look and how close people will want them to approach and now, within a year, we will have the first humanoid robot capable of developing language skills.’
(Read more in the Telegraph)
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UK astronomers can continue to use two of the world’s best telescopes after Britain was reaffirmed as a full member of the Gemini Observatory. The UK invested around £70 million in the development of the telescopes and pays about £4 million yearly to help maintain them.

Funding issues led to the Science and Technology Facilities Council announcing last November that it intended to negotiate a withdrawal from the consortium. Now, however, it has been agreed that the UK will remain a full member and seek to recoup some of the costs by selling some of its telescope time. Funding cuts are now likely to come from other areas of physics and astronomy.
(BBC News)
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And finally…

The Times carried a story about a colour-blind artist who has learnt to paint in colour, thanks to a device that helps him ‘hear’ different hues.

Until Neil Harbisson met Adam Montandon, a cybernetics expert, he painted only in black and white because that was all he saw. Now, with the use of an Eyeborg device that Montandon created for him, he is able to distinguish 360 different colours.

The Eyeborg system harnesses the fact that different colours reflect light at different frequencies. It consists of a head-mounted camera that reads the colours directly in front of it. The information is sent to a laptop computer, carried in a backpack, and the light wave frequency is slowed to the frequency of sound waves. The resulting sound is transmitted to an earpiece.

Harbisson says: ‘ When I paint it is as if I am composing music on a canvas.’ His exhibition will arrive in London in April.

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