agnieszka biskup — writer & editor

The calming influence of nature may even work on stressed-out drivers. Jack Nasar and Jean Marie Cackowski of Ohio State University report in the November issue of Environment and Behavior that people who viewed a videotape of a scenic drive down a tree-lined road scored lower on a frustration test than those who saw a drive through an urban area filled with buildings and utility poles. The researchers first had participants take a difficult, 10-minute test that was meant to stress them, and the subjects’ frustration levels were then tested. The subjects then watched three different tapes of a view through the front windshield of a car. “Scenic Parkway” showed a four-lane roadway through a wooded area, “Garden Highway” showed a six-lane highway with relatively few buildings and utility poles, and “Built-Up Highway” featured a drive through an area of strip malls with little vegetation. The viewers’ frustration levels were measured again. Even though “Scenic Parkway” had the most congested traffic, its viewers had the lowest frustration scores. “This suggests that the scenic views [. . .] had a restorative, calming effect on those who watched it. If these people were less frustrated, it may translate into a real behavioral difference,” Cackowski stated. The researchers acknowledged that the study was not a realistic driving experience, but, Nasar stated, “The fact that we got results even with this simple study suggest there may be real effects.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 12/02/2003.

Researchers have found a way to use magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to help predict who will sustain memory decline, according to a study appearing in the December issue of Radiology. Henry Rusinek of the New York University School of Medicine and his colleagues showed that tracking the atrophy rate of a specific area of the brain called the medial temporal lobe was highly predictive of future cognitive decline. (The medial temporal lobe is near regions of the brain critical to forming new memories.) The researchers studied 45 healthy adults over the age of 60 over a six-year period. All the patients were given initial MRI scans and neurological tests, and then two or more follow-up exams later on. During the study period, 13 patients demonstrated cognitive decline, and the atrophy rate of the temporal lobe proved to be the most significant predictor with an accuracy rate of 89 percent. Elderly adults with mild cognitive problems are more likely to decline to dementia than healthy senior citizens. If the changes involved with those problems could be detected earlier, therapy could be started sooner.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 12/02/2003.

Tired of boring, normal pets with their dull, unmodified genomes? Yorktown Technologies, a Texas-based company, is betting you are. Over the objections of several environmental groups, the company plans to release the genetically modified GloFish to consumers on Jan. 5. It will be the first GM pet to go on sale in the United States. The GloFish is a zebra fish with a fluorescence gene introduced from a sea coral. Zebra fish are normally pale gray and black, but due to the added gene, the GloFish are vivid red and glow under ultraviolet light. The genetically modified fish was originally developed in Singapore to help detect pollutants in water by changing color. Yorktown Technologies, which licenses the fish in the United States, has stated that GloFish are safe for the environment because, being tropical fish, they cannot survive outside a fish tank in the colder waters of the United States. The GloFish are to sell for approximately $5 each and will be available for purchase in pet stores across the country. A similarly glowing GM fish is already being sold in Asia.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 12/02/2003.

It often seems that the golden age of animal discovery is over. Oh, sure, there are still plenty of insects and microbes left to identify, and the occasional new frog species hops by, but finding a big mammal that’s new to science is pretty unlikely. But, remarkably, that’s exactly what Japanese researchers have done by discovering a new whale species. In the Nov. 20 Nature, Shiro Wada of the National Research Institute of Fisheries Science in Japan and colleagues report that they have identified mysterious specimens caught by a whaling research vessel almost 30 years ago as belonging to a new species of baleen whale, which they have dubbed Balaenoptera omurai. (Baleen whales do not have teeth; rather, they filter their food through comb-like baleen plates that hang from their upper jaws.) The researchers base their claim on DNA analysis as well as by comparing the shape of the whale’s skull and baleen to other species. Their analysis has also confirmed suspicions that the Bryde’s whale and Eden’s whale are also two separate species. If their findings turn out to be true, the number of living baleen whale species will have risen to eight.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 11/25/2003.

Last week, the World Conservation Union released its annual list of species in danger of extinction. The so-called “Red List” is updated every year, based on information from thousands of conservation experts around the world. This year’s list makes especially depressing reading. More than a thousand species have been added since 2002, and the list has passed the 12,000 mark: 12,259 species are officially classed as critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable. The study highlights island fauna and flora, which are usually found nowhere else on earth, as being particularly at risk from introduced plants and animals that destroy their habitats. In Hawaii, for example, 85 native plant species are at risk. On the Galapagos, over 30 species of snails are in danger. “While we are still only scratching the surface in assessing all known species, we are confident this [12,259] figure is an indicator of what is happening to global biological diversity,” stated Achim Steiner, the union’s director general.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 11/25/2003.

Everyone knows that friendship is good for you: strong social bonds are important to health, both mental and physical. But it now looks like it’s also good for your children: Researchers have shown a direct link between having friends and reproductive survival. In a study published in the Nov. 14 Science, UCLA researcher Joan B. Silk and her colleagues analyzed 16 years of data from a baboon population in Kenya. They found that baboon mothers who were the most social, who spent the most time grooming and being groomed by other adult baboons, had more offspring survive to 12 months of age. (A baboon that survives its first birthday has a good chance of surviving to adulthood and breeding in the future.) Indeed, the most social females enjoyed a reproductive success rate that was about one-third higher than that of the least social females. “Until now, social scientists assumed that because females invest a lot in social relationships, they must gain a lot from those relationships, but we’ve never been able to make a direct link to reproductive success,” stated Silk. “These findings provide the first evidence that there’s a link between the amount of social involvement and having offspring who survive the critical first year of life.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 11/25/2003.

To the disappointment of future lunar colonists everywhere, the moon may have much less water than previously thought. Observations from NASA’s Lunar Prospector orbiter a few years back had fueled hopes that thick layers of ice, which could have been mined for water, existed in deep, sunless craters at the moon’s frigid poles. A new study, however, suggests their existence is unlikely. Bruce Campbell of the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies and colleagues used the huge radar telescope at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory to probe deeper into the polar craters than ever before, and report in the Nov. 13 Nature that they did not come up with the telltale signature for thick ice deposits. They write, “Any lunar ice present within regions visible to the Arecibo radar must therefore be in the form of distributed grains or thin layers,” which would make extracting water and establishing a permanent base a much harder proposition than once hoped.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 11/18/2003.

Prehistoric Alaska once teemed with woolly mammoths, large bison, and wild horses. Then, about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, about 70 percent of North America’s large mammal population mysteriously disappeared — including all the existing horse species. (The Americas remained horseless until the Spaniards reintroduced the animal in the 1500s.) The reasons behind this massive die-off remain controversial — some researchers believe that humans hunted the animals to extinction, others that climate changes led to their demise. R. Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska suspects that, for horses at least, climate change may have been the culprit. He reports in the Nov. 13 Nature that before Alaskan horses went extinct, they shrank — their bones upon the eve of their disappearance (about 12,500 years ago) were up to 12 percent shorter than those of horses that lived 15,000 years earlier. The fact that horses became smaller suggests to Guthrie that environmental changes were at least partly to blame for their decline. “The present data do not suggest human overkill,” he writes.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 11/18/2003.

Here’s another reason mad cow disease might keep you up at night. It turns out that there might be a small chance of contracting the human version, known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), through routine surgery. Both mad cow and CJD are caused by prions, mutated, misshapen proteins that force healthy proteins to misfold in the brain, fatally clumping together. All prion diseases are characterized by loss of motor control, dementia, paralysis, and eventually death, due to massive destruction of brain tissue. Researchers had previously thought that the disease-producing proteins were confined to the brain and nervous system, but a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine states otherwise, and also hints at the new — if extremely unlikely — route of transmission. Adriano Aguzzi of Switzerland’s University Hospital Zurich and his colleagues have also detected prions in the muscle tissue and spleens in approximately one-third of 36 tested CJD victims. The finding suggests that there is a chance the infectious proteins could be passed on to others by surgical equipment that had been previously used on CJD patients. Prions cannot be killed by normal hospital sterilization procedures.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 11/18/2003.

Is there anything more annoying than having something stuck in your teeth? It looks like our oldest human ancestors may have been bothered by the exact same feeling. Paleontologists have been puzzled by the tiny grooves discovered on fossilized hominid teeth, some specimens dating back 1.8 million years. It’s been speculated that the curved marks, found at the roots of the teeth, could have been made by some kind of toothpicklike implement, but critics note that modern toothpick users show no such distinctive grooves. Continue reading →