10 Science News Roundup #12

Here are 10 science news that I find interesting and important to take note.

Pancreatic cancer survival linked to four genes – Alterations in four main genes are responsible for how long patients survive with pancreatic cancer, according to a new study in JAMA Oncology. Science Daily

Humans are driving climate change, federal scientists say – It is “extremely likely” that humans are driving warming on Earth since the 1950s. That statement — which indicates a 95 to 100 percent confidence in the finding — came in a report released November 3 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. This interagency effort was established in 1989 by presidential initiative to help inform national science policy. Science News

Alzheimer’s protein can travel from blood to build up in the brain – An Alzheimer’s-related protein can move from the blood to the brain and accumulate there, experiments on mice show for the first time. Science News

Sleep Deprivation Has The Same Effect as Drinking Too Much, Says Study – A lack of sleep not only causes us to drop off at our desks in the afternoon and feel cranky, it also weakens crucial communications between the neurons in the brain, according to a new study. Science Alert

Scientists Just Confirmed 18 More Possible Habitable Planets – Remember the other day, when we told you that scientists had found some potentially habitable planets hiding in Kepler data? Well, scientists have found 18 more – and they’re just as important. IFLScience

We Think We Know Where That Interstellar Object Came From – We may have spied our first ever interstellar object in the Solar System last month. Now, scientists think they might know where it came from. IFLScience

Mystery void is discovered in the Great Pyramid of Giza – High-energy particles from outer space have helped uncover an enigmatic void deep inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. Science News

The way hungry young stars suck in food keeps most X-rays in, too – A plasma cocoon lets growing stars keep their X-rays to themselves. Laboratory experiments that mimic maturing stars show that streams of plasma splash off a star’s surface, forming a varnish that keeps certain kinds of radiation inside. Science News

Artificial insulin-releasing cells may make it easier to manage diabetes – Artificial cells made from scratch in the lab could one day offer a more effective, patient-friendly diabetes treatment. Science News

Stimulating formation of new neural connections in the adult brain – A team led by University of Idaho scientists has found a way to stimulate formation of new neural connections in the adult brain in a study that could eventually help humans fend off memory loss, brain trauma and other ailments in the central nervous system. Science Daily

10 Science News Roundup #11

Here are 10 science news that I find interesting and important to take note.

Trends in drug development – One third of all drugs on the American market act on the same kind of important cell receptor — the G protein-coupled receptors. A major mapping of these drugs has found that their pharmacological mechanisms are becoming more complex. The mapping also reveals rapid developments especially within Alzheimer’s disease, obesity, asthma and diabetes. Science Daily

How flu shot manufacturing forces influenza to mutate – The common practice of growing influenza vaccine components in chicken eggs disrupts the major antibody target site on the virus surface, rendering the flu vaccine less effective in humans. Science Daily

Building a sustainable future: Urgent action needed – We need to act urgently to increase the energy efficiency of our buildings as the world’s emerging middle classes put increasing demands on our planet’s energy resources. Science Daily

Aliens Probably Went Through Natural Selection Just Like Us – Science fiction normally depicts aliens in one of two ways. The first is that they look almost identical to us (hello Star Trek). The other is they are something wildly beyond our imagination, say, the heptapods in Arrival. IFLScience

Photons are caught behaving like superconducting electrons – Light is a fan of the buddy system. Photons, or particles of light, have been spotted swapping energy with partners. This chummy behavior resembles how electrons pair up in materials that conduct current without resistance, known as superconductors, researchers report in a paper accepted in Physical Review Letters. Science News

Zika hasn’t been in the news much, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone – Less than a year after the World Health Organization declared Zika is no longer a public health emergency, the virus seems to have fallen from public consciousness, at least outside of heavily affected areas. The mosquito-borne virus staged a massive assault on the Western Hemisphere in 2015 and 2016 (SN: 12/24/16, p. 19), but this year, Zika appears to be in retreat. Science News

Extremely Rare Case in US as Woman Gets Pregnant While Already Pregnant – An extremely rare case of a woman becoming pregnant while already pregnant has occurred in the US, with a mother unwittingly giving birth to ‘twins’ who were not conceived at the same time. Science Alert

Alzheimer’s Could Actually Start Elsewhere in The Body And Not The Brain, Says Study – Alzheimer’s disease is usually described as a degenerative neurological condition, one that is commonly associated with memory loss and confusion. Science Alert

This Monster Planet With a Tiny Star Poses a Planetary Formation Puzzle – Astronomers have found something they thought was impossible: a gas giant roughly the size of Jupiter orbiting a white dwarf half the mass and size of the Sun. Science Alert

Yellowstone’s massive volcano could erupt more frequently than scientists thought – SEATTLE, WASHINGTON—Some 630,000 years ago, the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming recorded its last catastrophic eruption, forming a caldera that nearly spans the park’s width and belching a thick layer of ash, or tephra, across North America. Science

10 Science News Roundup #7

Trio wins physics Nobel Prize for gravitational wave detection – Subtle cosmic vibrations kicked up by swirling black holes have captured the public imagination — and the minds of the physics Nobel Prize committee members, too. Three scientists who laid the groundwork for the first direct detection of gravitational waves have won the Nobel Prize in physics. Rainer Weiss of MIT, and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, both of Caltech, will share the 9-million-Swedish-kronor (about $1.1 million) prize, with half going to Weiss and the remainder split between Thorne and Barish. Science News

First evidence of the body’s waste system in the human brain discovered – By scanning the brains of healthy volunteers, researchers at the National Institutes of Health saw the first, long-sought evidence that our brains may drain some waste out through lymphatic vessels, the body’s sewer system. The results further suggest the vessels could act as a pipeline between the brain and the immune system. Science Daily

New approach for AIDS: Lock HIV in reservoir cells, to die through apoptosis – With the successful suppression of the AIDS virus (HIV) through medication, the focus turns toward its eradication. Researchers from Kumamoto University in Japan have developed a new compound that is key to the destruction of HIV. When the compound is introduced into infected cells, viral budding (release) is suppressed thereby confining it within the host cells. The cells then die naturally through apoptosis (cell death). It is hoped that this treatment will lead to the complete recovery from AIDS in the near future. Science Daily

US Mom Could Be Jailed For Refusing To Vaccinate Her Son Against Potentially Life-Threatening Diseases – A mom from Detroit could serve jail time over her refusal to vaccinate her son. Rebecca Bredow was ordered by Oakland County judges on September 27 to vaccinate her boy within a week. Her time has nearly run out. IFLScience

A Strict Diet of Potato, Meat And Cereal Made a Boy Go Blind – There may not be much truth to the old folk wisdom that carrots make your eyesight better, but it turns out that not eating your veg will almost certainly make it worse. Doctors have described the case of an 11-year-old boy who presented to their clinic in Canada with severe vision loss, due to a highly restrictive diet. The culprit? A lack of vitamin A. Science Alert

A Rare Element From The Edge of The Periodic Table Is Breaking Quantum Mechanics – There’s a lot we don’t know about the actinides. On the periodic table, this series of heavy, radioactive elements hangs at the bottom, and includes a host of mysterious substances that don’t naturally occur on Earth. Science Alert

Mini-kidneys grown in lab reveal renal disease secrets – By creating and manipulating mini-kidney organoids that contain a realistic micro-anatomy, UW Medicine researchers can now track the early stages of polycystic kidney disease. The organoids are grown from human stem cells. Science Daily

Castaway critters rafted to U.S. shores aboard Japan tsunami debris – The 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan’s coast cast an enormous amount of debris out to sea — way out. Japanese marine life took advantage of the new floating real estate and booked a one-way trip to America. From 2012 to 2017, at least 289 living Japanese marine species washed up on the shores of North America and Hawaii, hitching rides on fishing boats, docks, buoys, crates and other nonbiodegradable objects, a team of U.S. researchers report in the Sept. 29 Science. Science News

Grass-fed cows won’t save the climate, report finds – f you thought eating only “grass-fed” hamburgers could absolve you from climate change guilt, think again. There’s a lack of evidence that livestock (such as cattle, sheep, and goats) dining on grassland has a lower carbon footprint than that fed on grains, as some environmentalists and “pro-pastoralists” claim, according to a new report by an international group of researchers led by the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN), based at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Science

Quantum Mechanics Effect Appears To Prove We Are Not Living In A Simulation – From René Descartes to the Wachowskis (directors of the Matrix trilogy, amongst others) to Elon Musk, many have envisioned that our existence is just part of the scheme of a superior intelligence and our lives are merely part of a simulated reality. There’s obviously no evidence for it and there are actually many arguments against it, and now researchers think they have found a physical property that occurs in metals that cannot be simulated, telling us once and for all that our lives, good or bad, are actually real. IFLScience