Microplastic pollution has been discovered lodged deep in the lungs of living people for the first time. The particles were found in almost all the samples analysed. From a report: The scientists said microplastic pollution was now ubiquitous across the planet, making human exposure unavoidable and meaning "there is an increasing concern regarding the hazards" to health. Samples were taken from tissue removed from 13 patients undergoing surgery and microplastics were found in 11 cases. The most common particles were polypropylene, used in plastic packaging and pipes, and PET, used in bottles. Two previous studies had found microplastics at similarly high rates in lung tissue taken during autopsies.

People were already known to breathe in the tiny particles, as well as consuming them via food and water. Workers exposed to high levels of microplastics are also known to have developed disease. Microplastics were detected in human blood for the first time in March, showing the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs. The impact on health is as yet unknown. But researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year.

Mumbai's city administration reported India's first case of the highly-transmissible coronavirus variant, XE, on Wednesday. From a report: The hybrid of two omicron strains BA.1 and BA.2 was detected in a 50-year-old woman who had traveled to the city from South Africa in February, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation said in a statement. The asymptomatic patient had no cormorbidities and had been quarantined after being diagnosed almost a month later in March, the BMC said. The hybrid strain, which was first detected in the U.K., could be the most transmissible variant yet, according to the World Health Organization.

Olive is the buzzy startup whose purple "go save health care" buses dominate industry conferences. But its promises to save health systems millions of dollars with its automation software don't deliver. Axios reports: An Axios investigation finds that Olive relies on rough estimations for its calculations, inflates its capabilities and, in many cases, generates only a fraction of the savings it pledges. Erin's reporting includes interviews with 16 people, including former and current employees and health tech executives.

Valued at $4 billion by firms like Tiger Global and Vista Equity Partners, Olive is the highest-profile startup in health care automation; a holy grail that promises to cut costs and direct more time toward patient care. In just 10 years, Olive's promise to reduce its clients' administrative spending by roughly 5X the cost of installing the software has garnered the attention of some of the largest health systems in the U.S. Axios' reporting, which includes interviews with 16 people -- including former and current employees, health tech executives and others -- finds Olive is failing to deliver on those promises.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: What seems like a win-win for a pair of pressing environmental problems describes a Rice University lab's newly discovered chemical technique to turn waste plastic into an effective carbon dioxide (CO2) sorbent for industry. Rice chemist James Tour and co-lead authors Rice alumnus Wala Algozeeb, graduate student Paul Savas and postdoctoral researcher Zhe Yuan reported in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano that heating plastic waste in the presence of potassium acetate produced particles with nanometer-scale pores that trap carbon dioxide molecules. These particles can be used to remove CO2 from flue gas streams, they reported.

"Point sources of CO2 emissions like power plant exhaust stacks can be fitted with this waste-plastic-derived material to remove enormous amounts of CO2 that would normally fill the atmosphere," Tour said. "It is a great way to have one problem, plastic waste, address another problem, CO2 emissions." A current process to pyrolyze plastic known as chemical recycling produces oils, gases and waxes, but the carbon byproduct is nearly useless, he said. However, pyrolyzing plastic in the presence of potassium acetate produces porous particles able to hold up to 18% of their own weight in CO2 at room temperature. In addition, while typical chemical recycling doesn't work for polymer wastes with low fixed carbon content in order to generate CO2 sorbent, including polypropylene and high- and low-density polyethylene, the main constituents in municipal waste, those plastics work especially well for capturing CO2 when treated with potassium acetate.

The lab estimates the cost of carbon dioxide capture from a point source like post-combustion flue gas would be $21 a ton, far less expensive than the energy-intensive, amine-based process in common use to pull carbon dioxide from natural gas feeds, which costs $80-$160 a ton. Like amine-based materials, the sorbent can be reused. Heating it to about 75 degrees Celsius (167 degrees Fahrenheit) releases trapped carbon dioxide from the pores, regenerating about 90% of the material's binding sites. Because it cycles at 75 degrees Celsius, polyvinyl chloride vessels are sufficient to replace the expensive metal vessels that are normally required. The researchers noted the sorbent is expected to have a longer lifetime than liquid amines, cutting downtime due to corrosion and sludge formation.

Mortality risk was reduced by 50% for older adults who increased their daily steps from around 3,000 to around 7,000, according to new medical research. Axios reports: 7,000 is the new 10,000, in terms of steps you should shoot for, The Lancet medical journal reports. This is all it takes for those 60 and older to dramatically increase their lifespans. Even for younger adults, the benefits of daily walking actually level off around 9,000 steps per day, not 10,000, the researchers found. The risk reduction plateaued beyond that number.

"Walking benefits nearly every cell in the body," says Amanda Paluch, a kinesiologist and public health expert at UMass Amherst and the lead author of the study. It's wildly effective. Walking strengthens your heart, improves bone density, relaxes your mind, and helps with muscle-building and pain management. Almost everyone can do it anywhere: your house, the office, outside. Start with 30 minutes and work your way up."It's not an all or nothing situation," says Paluch. Even just boosting daily step count to 5,000 -- for 60 and older -- and 7,000 -- for younger folks -- slashed mortality risk by 40%.

The plot was worthy of a Dan Brown thriller -- two Charles Darwin manuscripts worth millions of pounds reported as stolen from Cambridge University library after being missing for two decades. From a report: The disappearance prompted a worldwide appeal with the help of the local police force and Interpol. Now, in a peculiar twist, the notebooks -- one of which contains Darwin's seminal 1837 Tree of Life Sketch -- have been anonymously returned in a pink gift bag, with a typed note on an envelope wishing a happy Easter to the librarian. The bag was left on the floor of a public area of the library outside the librarian's office on the fourth floor of the 17-storey building on 9 March, in an area not covered by CCTV. Who left them and where they had been remains a mystery. Dr Jessica Gardner, who became director of library services in 2017 and who reported the notebooks as stolen to police, described her joy at their return as "immense."

"My sense of relief at the notebooks' safe return is profound and almost impossible to adequately express," she said. "I, along with so many others, all across the world, was heartbroken to learn of their loss. The notebooks can now retake their rightful place alongside the rest of the Darwin archive at Cambridge, at the heart of the nation's cultural and scientific heritage, alongside the archives of Sir Isaac Newton and Prof Stephen Hawking."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Astronomers say they have witnessed a planet being born from a disk of gas and dust swirling around a young star. Such claims have been made before, but the team comes to an even more controversial conclusion: that this planet is forming from gas that is collapsing under its own gravity, a mechanism known as gravitational or disk instability. That stands in contrast to a more widely accepted theory of planet formation, in which dust and rocks stick together, slowly building up a planetary core with enough gravity to pull in gas from the disk. If true, the planetary system would be the strongest evidence to date for disk instability. "This system stands alone right now," says team leader Thayne Currie of the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii.

That conclusion is already dividing theorists. "This system certainly looks like it's [undergoing] disk instability," says Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a longtime advocate of the theory. But Anders Johansen, a theorist at the University of Copenhagen who helped develop the rival theory of core accretion, is not convinced. "This could be either mechanism," he says. Although more than 5000 exoplanets have been discovered, only a few tens have been imaged directly, and none in the act of being born. Currie and colleagues were intrigued by the nearby star AB Aurigae because it was young -- somewhere between 1 million and 4 million years old -- and because its disk contains kinked, spiral features that could indicate protoplanets. But showing that some of the light from its disk was from a glowing-hot new planet rather than reflected starlight was no easy task. "We sat on this result for 5 years," Currie says. "I did not believe it was a planet until fairly recently." The team published their findings in the journal Nature Astronomy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The largest genetic study of Alzheimer's to date has provided compelling evidence linking the disease to disruption in the brain's immune system. The study, using the genomes of 100,000 people with Alzheimer's and 600,000 healthy people, identified 75 genes linked to an increased risk of the disease, including 42 that had not previously been implicated. The findings suggest degeneration in the brains of dementia patients could be spurred on by "over-aggressive" activity in the brain's immune cells, called microglia.

The study, the largest of its kind to date, also allowed scientists to devise a genetic risk score that could predict which patients with cognitive impairment would, within three years of first showing symptoms, go on to develop Alzheimer's. The score is not intended for clinical use at the moment, but could be used when recruiting people for clinical trials of drugs aimed at treating the disease in the earliest stages. The latest work highlights different sets of genes seen in more common forms of Alzheimer's, including a role for the immune system. "If [at the outset] we'd seen the genetics of common disease, we would've said this is an immune disease," said professor Julie Williams, the director of the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University and a co-author of the study. "It's not the same disease."

Risk genes highlighted in the study include ones that affect how efficiently the brain's immune cells, microglia, clear away tissue that is distressed. In people at risk, these housekeeper cells appeared to be working too aggressively. A similar pattern was found for genes that control how readily synapses, which connect neurons, send out an "eat me" signal when in distress. The high-risk variants appeared to lower the threshold for synapses sending out distress signals, causing the brain to purge connections at a quicker rate. The findings, published in the journal Nature Genetics, fit with previous results pointing to a role for the immune system. People with diabetes, which affects the immune system, are at considerably higher risk, for instance, and once dementia has been diagnosed infections can trigger more rapid cognitive decline.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Almost the entire global population (99%) breathes air that exceeds WHO air quality limits, and threatens their health. A record number of over 6000 cities in 117 countries are now monitoring air quality, but the people living in them are still breathing unhealthy levels of fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, with people in low and middle-income countries suffering the highest exposures. The findings have prompted the World Health Organization to highlight the importance of curbing fossil fuel use and taking other tangible steps to reduce air pollution levels.

Released in the lead-up to World Health Day, which this year celebrates the theme Our planet, our health, the 2022 update of the World Health Organization's air quality database introduces, for the first time, ground measurements of annual mean concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a common urban pollutant and precursor of particulate matter and ozone. It also includes measurements of particulate matter with diameters equal or smaller than 10 um (PM10) or 2.5 um (PM2.5). Both groups of pollutants originate mainly from human activities related to fossil fuel combustion. The new air quality database is the most extensive yet in its coverage of air pollution exposure on the ground. Some 2,000 more cities/human settlements are now recording ground monitoring data for particulate matter, PM10 and/or PM2.5, than the last update. This marks an almost 6-fold rise in reporting since the database was launched in 2011.

The world needs to slash greenhouse gas emissions in half this decade, a landmark new United Nations report urges. To reach that goal, the globe needs to make a speedy shift to clean energy, reduce energy use, and deploy technologies that can trap some of our planet-heating carbon dioxide pollution, the report's authors say. From a report: "We are at a crossroads. The decisions we make now can secure a liveable future," Hoesung Lee, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel Panel on Climate Change, said in a press release. "We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming."

Hundreds of leading climate scientists participated in the report, which outlines what's needed to avoid all-out climate catastrophe. It boils down to one key call to action: "rapid and deep" reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors. It builds on previous research that finds that more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming would be devastating for people and wildlife around the world. We are alarmingly close to breaching that threshold. We could surpass it before 2030, today's new report says. But we could rewrite that grim future if big changes are made to cut emissions in half this decade. The longer-term goal is to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century in order to keep global average temperatures stable.

"For 50 years, interplanetary probes have returned thousands of striking images of the surface of Mars, but never a single sound." So says the largest fundamental science agency in Europe, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (France's state research organisation).

Then they made a surprising discovery, reports CBS News: Researchers studying recordings made by microphones on NASA's Perseverance rover found that sound travels much slower on Mars than it does on Earth... In addition, the researchers realized that there are two speeds of sound on Mars — one for high-pitched sounds and one for low-pitched sounds. This would "make it difficult for two people standing only five meters apart to have a conversation," according to a press release on the findings.

The unique sound environment is due to the incredibly low atmospheric surface pressure. Mars' pressure is 170 times lower than Earth's pressure. For example, if a high-pitched sound travels 213 feet on Earth, it will travel just 26 feet on Mars.

While sounds on Mars can be heard by human ears, they are incredibly soft. "At some point, we thought the microphone was broken, it was so quiet," said Sylvestre Maurice, an astrophysicist at the University of Toulouse in France and lead author of the study, according to NASA. Besides the wind, "natural sound sources are rare," the press release said.

But NASA scientists think Mars may become more noisy in the autumn months, when there is higher atmospheric pressure. "We are entering a high-pressure season," co-author of the study Baptiste Chide said in the press release. "Maybe the acoustic environment on Mars will be less quiet than it was when we landed."

Ars Technica looks at the "in-space propulsion company" Impulse Space, which just announced $20 million in seed funding this week to help it build something called an "orbital transfer vehicle."

The company was founded by rocket scientist Tom Mueller, who the article describes as the first employee hired by Elon Musk for SpaceX, leading the development of SpaceX's Merlin rocket engine.

Impulse Space is apparently positioning itself for its own role in a future with lots of reusable rockets and cheaper launch costs: Founded last September, Impulse Space will initially seek to provide "last mile" delivery services for satellites launched as part of rideshare missions, likely including on SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.... While the company is not ready to discuss its specific technology, the goal is to deliver the most delta-V capability [velocity from fuel-burning] in the most efficient manner.

Impulse Space released a teaser video on this earlier this month. [The video's title? "Hello, Solar System...!" And it concludes with the words "Big things have small beginings."]

Impulse Space will seek to complement launch services with sustainable delivery in space, using green propellants and having vehicles with de-orbit capability. Barry Matsumori, who recently joined as the company's chief operating officer, said the company recognizes that if tens or hundreds of satellites will be launching on these heavy-lift rockets, they're going to need to reach different orbits and have different purposes... The company's initial business strategy involves low Earth orbit, but it envisions the need for sustainable transportation from the Earth to the Moon — in the form of a tug — and the storage and movement of propellant in both low Earth orbit and the lunar environment.

Once a company mines a space resource, after all, it will have to go somewhere.

SpaceNews reports: The launch was the latest in a series of Electron launches of BlackSky satellites arranged by Spaceflight. That deal included launches of pairs of BlackSky satellites in November and December 2021 as well as a failed Electron launch in May 2021....

Rocket Lab did not attempt to recover the first stage of the Electron after this launch. The company said in November that, after three launches where it recovered Electron boosters after splashing down in the ocean, it was ready to attempt a midair recovery of a booster by catching it with a helicopter, the final step before reusing those boosters. The company has not announced when that recovery will take place, but hinted it would take place soon....

Lars Hoffman, senior vice president of global launch services at Rocket Lab, during a panel session at the Satellite 2022 conference March 22...added that the company has a "full manifest" of Electron launches this year, including the first from Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Island, Virginia, with a goal of launching on average once per month. "We're keeping pace with the market. We're trying not to get too far ahead."
Meanwhile, in mid-March Space.com reported that the launch-service provider Astra "bounced back from last month's launch failure with a groundbreaking success, deploying satellites in Earth orbit for the first time ever" with its low-cost two-stage launch vehicle, LV0009. (Watch video of the launch here.) It was a huge moment for Astra, which suffered a failure last month during its first-ever launch with operational payloads onboard.... Astra aims to break into the small-satellite launch market in a big way with its line of cost-effective, easily transported and ever-evolving rockets.

The company had conducted five orbital flights before today, four of them test missions from Kodiak. Astra reached orbit successfully on the most recent of those four test flights, a November 2021 mission that carried a non-deployable dummy payload for the U.S. Department of Defense. But the company stumbled on its next mission, its first with operational payloads onboard...

Astra investigators soon got to the bottom of both problems, tracing the fairing issue to an erroneous wiring diagram and the tumble to a software snafu. The company instituted fixes, clearing LV0009's path to the pad... LV0009 rose into the Alaska sky smoothly and ticked off its early milestones as planned. Stage separation and fairing deploy went well, and the rocket's second stage cruised to the desired orbit with no apparent issues. LV0009 deployed its payloads successfully about nine minutes after liftoff....

One of the known payloads is OreSat0, a tiny cubesat built by students at Portland State University in Oregon that is designed to serve as a testbed for future cubesats that will study Earth's climate and provide STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) outreach opportunities.

"Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach," reports the Washington Post.

The tool "could improve the detection and treatment of lung cancer and other pulmonary diseases." In a medical paper released in the journal of Soft Robotics last week, scientists from the University of Leeds unveiled a new "magnetic tentacle robot," which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters thick — about double the size of a ballpoint pen tip — and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long.

In the future, the robot's use could be expanded to help doctors better, and more thoroughly, investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas, they said....

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient's lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.... [I]ts smaller size and magnetic composition would allow it to shape-shift more easily and better navigate the intricate shape of a lung's network of airways, which can look like a tree....

Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment.... Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, said the autonomous robot is "very novel and interesting technology" that could become potentially useful in areas outside the lungs, most notably the heart. The device's autonomous capability is its unique factor, he said, and has the capability to change invasive surgeries. "I can imagine a future," he said, "where a full [cancer-screening] CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: 'Go get it.' "

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Some species play an outsize role in the environment they inhabit. Beavers build dams that create ponds where fish thrive. Otters in kelp forests eat enough sea urchins so that the kelp can grow without being gobbled up first. These so-called keystone species hold their ecosystem together. But what if ecosystems not only hinge on a single species but can be made or broken by a single gene? In a study published on Thursday in Science, researchers have demonstrated the existence of what they call a "keystone gene." The discovery may have implications for how scientists think about the ways ecosystems, and the species in them, persist over time.

In the lab, the researchers built several miniature ecosystems that consisted of just four species each. At the bottom of the food chain was Arabidopsis thaliana, a small annual plant that is a favorite study organism among biologists (its genome was sequenced more than 20 years ago). In each ecosystem, the plant served as food for two species of aphids, which in turn fed a parasitoid wasp. Each bread-box-sized ecosystem contained multiple Arabidopsis plants. In some systems, the plants were genetically identical -- a monoculture. In others, genetic variations were introduced by turning on and off three genes -- MAM1, AOP2 and GSOH -- in various combinations.The researchers focused on these genes because they maintain the production of compounds called aliphatic glucosinolates, which protect the plant by deterring hungry aphids. Some of the experimental ecosystems had more variation in the number of genetic combinations than others; the researchers watched to see how well plants, aphids and wasps would coexist in each scenario.

As the team expected, the ecosystems with more genetically diverse plants turned out to be more stable. For each plant with a different genetic makeup that the researchers added to the mix, the insects' extinction rate fell by nearly 20 percent, compared with monocultures. But what stunned the researchers was that this result seemed to hinge on a single gene. Regardless of diversity, if systems contained plants with a certain variant, or allele, of the AOP2 gene, the extinction rate of the insects decreased by 29 percent, compared with systems without it. Essentially, if you change that AOP2 allele, you lose the insects. Increasing genetic diversity helped the insects because it increased the likelihood of the aphids encountering plants with this one critical gene variant. [...] Also surprising was the mechanism by which the AOP2 allele impacted the aphids. Although the variant changed the way a plant produced its aphid-deterring compound, it also allowed the plant to grow faster. This in turn allowed the aphids, as well as the wasps that relied on them for food, to become larger faster.

"According to The Verge, health providers writing Google reviews about patients with identifiable information is a HIPAA violation," writes Slashdot reader August Oleman. From the report: In the past few years, the phrase 'HIPAA violation' has been thrown around a lot, often incorrectly. People have cited the law, which protects patient health information, as a reason they can't be asked if they're vaccinated or get a doctor's note for an employer. But asking someone if they're vaccinated isn't actually a HIPAA violation. That's a fine and not-illegal thing for one non-doctor to ask another non-doctor. What is a HIPAA violation is what U. Phillip Igbinadolor, a dentist in North Carolina, did in September 2015, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. After a patient left an anonymous, negative Google review, he logged on and responded with his own post on the Google page, saying that the patient missed scheduled appointments. [...]

In the post, he used the patient's full name and described, in detail, the specific dental problem he was in for: "excruciating pain" from the lower left quadrant, which resulted in a referral for a root canal. That's what a HIPAA violation actually looks like. The law says that healthcare providers and insurance companies can't share identifiable, personal information without a patient's consent. In this case, the dentist (a healthcare provider) publicly shared a patient's name, medical condition, and medical history (personal information). As a result, the office was fined $50,000 (PDF).

In the past five years, reports of staggering insect declines have stoked anxiety and debate concerning the fate of the "little things that run the world," as the late biologist E. O. Wilson once called them. As for the how and why of these declines, the prime culprits are habitat destruction, rampant use of pesticides, and climate change. But new research published March 30 in Biology Letters adds an unexpected suspect, at least for a large swath of North America: the earthworm. From a report: The study looked at 60 plots in an aspen and poplar forest in Alberta, Canada, and found that as the numbers of earthworms wriggling in the soil and leaf litter increased, the diversity and abundance of invertebrates aboveground decreased. These results might sound surprising, since earthworms are widely considered to be helpful garden residents. Worms earned their reputation by aerating and mixing soil with their burrows and releasing locked up nutrients in their castings, all of which can help certain plants thrive.

But this new study is part of a growing body of research suggesting that at least in the forests of northern North America, earthworms may not be the slimy angels of the underworld we tend to think they are. "When people talk about insect decline, they rarely talk about the soil," says Nico Eisenhauer, a soil ecologist at Leipzig University in Germany and one of the authors of the new study. "Many of the insects and invertebrates that are in decline have life phases in the soil. What you don't see flying around now has first disappeared from the soil, and earthworms can fundamentally alter soil conditions."

Earthworms' subterranean engineering isn't a problem in their native ecosystems, but in the northern half of North America, the glaciers of the last ice age wiped out virtually all soil-dwelling worms more than 10,000 years ago. The ice sheets covered nearly all of Canada, most of the northeast U.S., and much of the upper Midwest. When the ice receded, forests returned but the worms did not because they can only expand their range by a maximum of about 30 feet a year. These northerly ecosystems evolved for millennia in the absence of earthworms. Without worms munching through fallen foliage and churning the soil, these forests accumulated thick layers of leaf litter, which came to support a vast array of animals, fungi, and plants. Eisenhauer says even non-scientists can appreciate the difference.

Genetic testing to predict how individuals will respond to common medicines should be implemented without delay to reduce the risk of side-effects and ensure that everyone is given the right drug at the right dose, experts have said. From a report: About 6.5% of UK hospital admissions are caused by adverse drug reactions, while most prescription medicines only work on 30% to 50% of people. A significant part of this is due to genetics: almost 99% of people carry at least one genetic variation that affects their response to certain drugs, including commonly prescribed painkillers, heart disease drugs and antidepressants. By the age of 70, about 90% of people are taking at least one of these medications.

A new report, published by the British Pharmacological Society and the Royal College of Physicians, argues that many of these issues could be addressed through pharmacogenomic testing, which allows personalised prescribing according to people's genes. "The ultimate goal is to make pharmacogenomic prescribing a reality for everyone within the NHS, which will empower healthcare professionals to deliver better, more personalised care," said Sir Munir Pirmohamed, a professor of pharmacology and therapeutics at the University of Liverpool, who chaired the report's working party. "The aim of pharmacogenomics is to make sure patients get the right drug, at the right dose, at the right time to be able to improve their outcomes, treat their symptoms, cure their disease and prevent side-effects."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Addition and subtraction must be hard for fish, especially because they don't have fingers to count on. But they can do it -- albeit with small numbers -- a new study reveals. By training the animals to use blue and yellow colors as codes for the commands "add one" and "subtract one," respectively, researchers showed fish have the capacity for simple arithmetic.

To make the find, researchers at the University of Bonn adopted the design of a similar experiment conducted in bees. They focused on bony cichlids (Pseudotropheus zebra) and cartilaginous stingrays (Potamotrygon motoro), which the lab uses to study fish cognition. In the training phase, the scientists showed a fish in a tank an image of up to five squares, circles, and triangles that were all either blue or yellow. The animals had 5 seconds to memorize the number and color of the shapes; then a gate opened, and the fish had to choose between two doors: one with an additional shape and the other with one fewer shape.

The rules were simple: If the shapes in the original image were blue, head for the door with one extra shape; if they were yellow, go for the door with one fewer. Choosing the correct door earned the fish a food reward: pellets for cichlids, and earthworms, shrimp, or mussels for stingrays. Only six of the eight cichlids and four of the eight stingrays successfully completed their training. But those that made it through testing performed well above chance, the researchers report today in Scientific Reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: More than two decades after the draft human genome was celebrated as a scientific milestone, scientists have finally finished the job. The first complete, gap-free sequence of a human genome has been published in an advance expected to pave the way for new insights into health and what makes our species unique. Until now, about 8% of the human genome was missing, including large stretches of highly repetitive sequences, sometimes described as "junk DNA." In reality though, these repeated sections were omitted due to technical difficulties in sequencing them, rather than pure lack of interest.

Sequencing a genome is something like slicing up a book into snippets of text then trying to reconstruct the book by piecing them together again. Stretches of text that contain a lot of common or repeated words and phrases would be harder to put in their correct place than more unique pieces of text. New "long-read" sequencing techniques that decode big chunks of DNA at once -- enough to capture many repeats -- helped overcome this hurdle. Scientists were able to simplify the puzzle further by using an unusual cell type that only contains DNA inherited from the father (most cells in the body contain two genomes -- one from each parent). Together these two advances allowed them to decode the more than 3 billion letters that comprise the human genome. The science behind the sequencing effort and some initial analysis of the new genome regions are outlined in six papers published in the journal Science.