#scied

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Alright people. I need your help. Enrollment for Skype a scientist this semester has been -fine- but we can do better. We have so many scientists who want to speak with classrooms! Will you tell a teacher you know about our program 🥺 please?

Send them to skypeascientist.com/sign-up

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See you around!

After several years on Tumblr, Science News for Students has decided to move on. We won't be posting anymore, but our archives will remain available. You can always find the latest and greatest research at Science News for Students. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up to get our newsletter here. Thank you so much for following and sharing our love of science.

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How two coronavirus drugs for cats might help humans fight COVID-19

Scientists are exploring if drugs for a disease caused by a coronavirus that infects only cats might help also people infected with the coronavirus.

In the rush to find drugs against COVID-19, researchers are exploring myriad possibilities, even drugs used to save feline lives.

Cats can contract an almost always fatal disease that’s caused by a coronavirus that infects only felines. Now preliminary research suggests that two experimental drugs that can cure that disease in cats, called feline infectious peritonitis, might help treat people infected with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus behind the pandemic.

In lab experiments, one of the drugs, called GC376, disables a key enzyme that some coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, use to replicate. The other, called GS-441524, is an antiviral cousin of remdesivir, the first drug found to speed people’s recovery from SARS-CoV-2 in clinical trials (SN: 4/29/20).

“Both drugs have been highly effective in curing cats with feline infectious peritonitis, and usually without any other form of treatment,” says Niels Pedersen, a veterinarian who studies the feline coronavirus at the University of California, Davis. Neither drug, however, has yet been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in cats, much less humans.

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While most animals with feline infectious peritonitis don’t show symptoms, some cats can develop severe illness if the virus mutates to infect a specific type of immune cell. When that happens, the coronavirus spreads throughout the cat’s body, sparking a deadly inflammatory reaction that can cause paralysis or fluid to accumulate in the lungs.

In that way, the cat coronavirus is similar to SARS-CoV-2. Both severe COVID-19 in people and feline infectious peritonitis cases are driven by a dysfunctional inflammatory immune response, says Julie Levy, a veterinarian at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

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Explainer: What are logarithms and exponents?

Mathematics provides a means of tracking, comparing and expressing data that vary broadly in scale.

When COVID-19 hit the United States, the numbers just seemed to explode. First, there were only one or two cases. Then there were 10. Then 100. Then thousands and then hundreds of thousands. Increases like this are hard to understand. But exponents and logarithms can help make sense of those dramatic increases.

Scientists often describe trends that increase very dramatically as being exponential. It means that things don’t increase (or decrease) at a steady pace or rate. It means the rate changes at some increasing pace.

An example is the decibel scale, which measures sound pressure level. It is one way to describe the strength of a sound wave. It’s not quite the same thing as loudness, in terms of human hearing, but it’s close. For every 10 decibel increase, the sound pressure increases 10 times. So a 20 decibel sound has not twice the sound pressure of 10 decibels, but 10 times that level. And the sound pressure level of a 50 decibel noise is 10,000 times greater than a 10-decibel whisper (because you’ve multiplied 10 x 10 x 10 x 10).

An exponent is a number that tells you how many times to multiply some base number by itself. In that example above, the base is 10. So using exponents, you could say that 50 decibels is 104 times as loud as 10 decibels. Exponents are shown as a superscript — a little number to the upper right of the base number. And that little 4 means you’re to multiply 10 times itself four times. Again, it’s 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 (or 10,000).

Logarithms are the inverse of exponents. A logarithm (or log) is the mathematical expression used to answer the question: How many times must one “base” number be multiplied by itself to get some other particular number?

For instance, how many times must a base of 10 be multiplied by itself to get 1,000? The answer is 3 (1,000 = 10 × 10 × 10). So the logarithm base 10 of 1,000 is 3. It’s written using a subscript (small number) to the lower right of the base number. So the statement would be log10(1,000) = 3.

At first, the idea of a logarithm might seem unfamiliar. But you probably already think logarithmically about numbers. You just don’t realize it.

Let’s think about how many digits a number has. The number 100 is 10 times as big as the number 10, but it only has one more digit. The number 1,000,000 is 100,000 times as big as 10, but it only has five more digits. The number of digits a number has grows logarithmically. And thinking about numbers also shows why logarithms can be useful for displaying data. Can you imagine if every time you wrote the number 1,000,000 you had to write down a million tally marks? You’d be there all week! But the “place value system” we use allows us to write down numbers in a much more efficient way.

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Let’s learn about volcanoes

Volcanoes bring melted rock up to a planet’s surface.

Walking around on the surface of the Earth every day, it’s easy to forget that a superhot pool of melted rock lies deep beneath our feet. Volcanoes are here to remind us.

Volcanoes are channels where melted rock, ash and gas can rise to the surface.

See all the entries from our Let’s Learn About series

The Earth has around 1,500 potentially active volcanoes. Many of them are found along the edge of the Pacific Ocean, an area called the Ring of Fire. This is where many of the planet’s tectonic plates meet. These huge slabs, which make up Earth’s outer layer, crash into and slide over each other in extreme slow motion. When they do, they can raise up mountains, cause earthquakes — and open up volcanoes.

Huge volcanic explosions can wipe out ecosystems. They can build new land. And the biggest ones can change the Earth’s climate. The clouds of ash they throw up can cool the whole planet for years at a time. Some scientists thought that huge volcanic explosions might have cooled the planet and helped kill off the dinosaurs. But new evidence suggests that probably wasn’t true.

Volcanoes aren’t just on Earth. Other planets — such as Venus — might have them too.

Want to know more? We’ve got some stories to get you started:

After erupting, one volcano sings a unique ‘song’: The low-frequency sound ebbs and flows with the whooshing of air inside the crater (7/25/2018) Readability: 8.6

Giant volcanoes lurk beneath Antarctic ice: The expanse of buried volcanoes raises questions about the future of the ice sheet (1/5/2018) Readability: 7.6

Study appears to rule out volcanic burps as causing dino die-offs: When toxic gases would have been spewed does not match when extinctions occurred (3/2/2020) Readability: 8.2

Explore more

Scientists Say: Ring of Fire

Explainer: The volcano basics

Explainer: Understanding plate tectonics

Cool Jobs: Getting to know volcanoes

Did rain put the Kilauea volcano’s lava-making into overdrive?

World’s biggest volcano is hiding under the sea

Word find

It’s a classic! The Natural History Museum in London, England offers a guide to making your own model volcano at home.

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To figure out your dog’s ‘real’ age, you’ll need a calculator

What’s your dog’s human-equivalent age? Just multiply how old it is times seven, right? Uh, no. And here’s why.

How old is your dog? Maybe it was born four years ago. At that age, a human would still be a kid. Your dog, however, acts like an adult. You might have heard that to get a dog’s “biological” age, just multiply its age in years by seven. That would make your dog equivalent to a 28-year-old human. But that would probably be wrong, a new study shows. Your dog’s actually more like a 53-year-old human.

Multiplying a dog’s age by seven doesn’t really work, says Matteo Pellegrini at the University of California, Los Angeles. He studies bioinformatics — a research field that uses computers to analyze biological data. He was not involved in the study. On the surface, he notes, multiplying by seven makes sense. On average, people live seven times longer than a dog. So, he notes, “It’s just dividing the human lifespan by the dog lifespan.”

But there are problems with that simple computation. After all, a one-year-old baby is just learning to walk. A one-year-old dog is adult enough to have puppies of its own. This is because species develop at very different rates. Aging doesn’t even happen at the same pace over an individual’s life. “When you’re a newborn, your body is changing very quickly,” Pellegrini explains. “It slows down over time.”

Explainer: What is epigenetics?

Fortunately, dogs and humans both hit very similar developmental milestones. We’re babies (or puppies), then kids (or, er, still puppies), then adolescents and then adults. As we go through those stages, our DNA also undergoes a change. The molecule that carries genetic instructions stays the same. But over time, this DNA acquires or loses tiny chemical “tags.” These are called epigenetic changes. The tags, known as methyl groups, act like little switches that can turn on or off particular genes in that DNA.

Explainer: What are genes?

The genome is the complete set of the genes present in an organism’s DNA. “Think of taking a … marker and start drawing in different places in the genome,” says Elaine Ostrander. She studies genetics at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md. The marks determine how different genes in the DNA get used to make proteins. A complete set of the methyl marks on DNA is called a methylome (METH-el-ohm).

As an animal ages, so does its methylome. How it changes is very predictable. Most adolescent humans will have DNA marks that are in one pattern, while humans nearing 65 or 70 show a different pattern of DNA marks. The same is true for dogs. If the epigenetic markings of humans and dogs at different ages were compared against one another, would there be “places that were kept getting marked up in the same way?” Ostrander and her colleagues wondered. If there were, would finding that pattern in one species point to an equivalent age in the other? Comparing patterns that way might allow people to get at the “real” age of a dog.

To test this, her team looked at the methylomes from 104 purebred Labrador retrievers. Her team has been collecting DNA samples from dogs around the United States since 1993. “I picked Labs because they can live a long time [for dogs], and we were able to pull [the DNA] out of the freezer,” Ostrander says. “We were able to take DNA samples from Labs that were anywhere from a few months old to 16 or 17 years old.” The researchers compared the dog methylomes to methylomes of 320 people between the ages of 1 and 103.

And it worked. By comparing the patterns, they scientists found they could figure out how dog years relate to human years.

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Giving cats a special food may one day help people with cat allergies

Research by pet-food maker Purina aims to disable the major allergen carried in cat saliva. It’s a protein called Fel d1.

Cat lovers who sneeze and sniffle around their feline friends might one day find at least partial relief in a can of cat food. This won’t be ordinary cat food, though. It will contain an antibody to the major allergy-causing protein in cats. This protein is called Fel d1. New research suggests that feeding its antibody to cats changes the protein so that the human immune system can’t recognize it. That reduces the allergic response.

Researchers fed the antibody to 105 cats for 10 weeks. After that, the amount of active Fel d1 protein on the cats’ hair dropped by 47 percent on average. Researchers from pet food–maker Nestlé Purina conducted the research. They reported their results in the June 2019 Immunity, Inflammation and Disease.

Nestlé Purina researchers also conducted a small pilot study with 11 people allergic to cats. These people were exposed in a test chamber to hair from cats fed the antibody diet. They were also exposed to hair from cats fed a normal, control diet. The people had reduced nasal symptoms and less itchy, scratchy eyes with the hair from cats fed the special diet. These preliminary findings were released in June. The researchers presented them in Lisbon, Portugal. They were at a scientific meeting called the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology Congress.