Useful Mistakes

Interesting bits and pieces from the world of science

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Neutron star smash-up shows us first light alongside a gravity wave

For the first time ever we’ve detected light from a gravitational wave event, after two incredibly dense neutron stars smashed together, an exciting discovery that  helps scientists understand some of the most violent and powerful collisions in the universe. 

Neutron stars are the crushed remnants of massive stars which exploded as supernovas. What used to be the core lingers behind as the smallest and densest stars in our universe, a ball just a few miles across but containing more mass than our Sun. Just one teaspoon’s worth of neutron star would weigh a billion tonnes. 

Earlier this month the Nobel prize in Physics was awarded for the first detections of gravity waves, ripples through spacetime. But those waves were caused by black holes merging and so no light, or electromagnetic radiation, was observed because famously light can’t escape black holes. 

Astrophysicists believed that when two neutron stars collided there would be visible light alongside gravity waves, as predicted from Einstein’s theories. But until they saw it happen, no-one knew for sure. 

On August 17 2017 this all changed. 

Not only were were gravity waves picked up from a galaxy 130 million light years away, but so were range of light-based measurements from the merger of two neutron stars as they smashed together.  

These included a burst of gamma rays, light from a type of radioactive explosion called a kilo-nova and, later, X-rays from the gamma ray burst afterglow. 

Thousands of scientists around the world have been working furiously ever since to present the initial findings, published today. 

Together these measurements confirm a host of theoretical predictions, and will greatly advance our understanding of what exactly goes on when these incredible events occur, such as the conditions in which some of the heaviest elements including gold and platinum, are formed.

In one sense the we’ve been lucky to capture all this data in such rich detail because we could have been waiting decades for a neutron star merger close enough to Earth to be detected. But, on the other hand, scientists have been working for decades to get to the point where we have good enough equipment to be able to make the most of it. It’s a case of chance meeting preparation, and it’s paid of for the scientific community. 

Animation & image: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

GIF: NASA/CXC/E. Troja

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Microscopic ‘cages’ could change the way medicines are delivered

Thousands of lives could be saved and millions of vaccines doses protected - by encasing them in miniature silica shells. 

Worldwide huge quantities of medicines, including vital vaccines, are lost because they need to be kept refrigerated. If they’re not proteins within them break down, losing effectiveness and even turning toxic. Breaks in the ‘cold chain’ are a major problem in many countries around the world and seriously impact on vaccination programmes in particular, because they rely on a high proportion of people in an area receiving an effective vaccine dose.  

But scientists from the University of Bath have developed a way to encase proteins in a silica shell, like a tiny cage. Amazingly this can keep proteins which would normally degrade at room temperatures intact at up to 100ºC, and when released they still work as they should. 

Lead researcher Dr Asel Sartbaeva (pictured) came up with the idea when she took her daughter to be vaccinated and saw the vaccines needed to be kept cold. 

She said: “Once the proteins in a vaccine break down and tangle up, it’s useless. You can think of it like an egg that’s been boiled – it can’t be unboiled.

“So the ability to store and transport proteins at room temperatures or even hotter would remove a major logistical problem for safely delivering vaccines and other medicines to patients around the world.”

Silica, which sand is made from, is non-toxic and inert. It’s also cheap and abundant. The research team hopes their method can be used to eliminate the need for refrigeration in vaccine storage and transportation - not only would this make it easier to get medicines to the people who need them, but it would make it a lot cheaper too.  

The team needs to do more work to get the technique, which they call ensilication, ready for clinical trials using vaccines, but so far the results have been promising. 

Images: University of Bath

Read the paper 

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Off the scale - new species of gecko with tear-away skin

A new species of gecko which evades predators by shedding its massive scales has been discovered by scientists working in Madagascar. 

The species, named Geckolepis megalepis by the team of American German and Colombian researchers, is a type of fish gecko. 

It has the largest scales of any gecko and skin specially adapted for tearing away at the slightest touch. The scales can grow back without scarring in a few weeks. 

In fact, they are so adept at shedding scientists have had to use bundles of cotton wool to catch them in the past so they wouldn’t shed all their scales. 

And the ease with which their scales come away makes describing and identifying the species a ‘nightmare’ according to the researchers because the scale pattern is one of the main ways to tell species apart. 

In the end they decided to resort to using micro-CT scans to get a 3D picture of their skeletons, and were able to identify some skull features that establish these geckos as a new species. 

Read the paper

Images:  Mark D. Scherz, Juan D. Daza and Frank Glaw.

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Colour-changing burns bandages begin clinical trials

Bandages that change colour and glow when a wound gets infected could be manufactured as early as 2017 if clinical trials go well. 

The bandages, developed at the University of Bath, are being tested with patient samples from four UK hospitals to statistically determine how effective they are. 

Sadly burns often have symptoms of infection but actual infection is much rarer. At the moment infection diagnosis takes up to two days and requires removing dressings, a painful and upsetting process for burns patients which can slow healing and cause scarring. Antibiotics are also prescribed as a precaution while the tests are conducted.

Colour-changing bandages would give an early-warning that real infection is taking hold, meaning medics could provide better and quicker treatment. 

The bandage contains gel in tiny capsules. When infection-causing bacteria are present the capsules dissolve and release the gel which then fluoresces bright yellowy-green, alerting patients and medics to the problem. 

If they do make it onto wards the bandages would not only improve treatment but save money through cutting down on the cost of tests and drug prescriptions. They would also help tackle the threat of drug-resistant bacteria because there wouldn’t be a need to prescribe as many antibiotics as a precaution. 

Images: University of Bath

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Break out the binoculars, there’s a supermoon this Sunday

This Sunday and Monday (Nov 13/14) there’s going to be a supermoon - and it’s the biggest since 1948. 

This one will appear up to 14% larger and 30% brighter than a ‘normal’ full moon.

Supermoons occur when the moon is especially close to the Earth because of its elliptical orbit. When the moon is at it’s closest point to Earth it’s about 30,000 miles nearer than its furthest point. 

If the sun, Earth and the moon line up when the moon is at this stage of orbit we get a supermoon, and we won’t see another like this until 2034.

Let’s hope the skies are clear so we can all get a great view. Apparently the best time to appreciate the difference to a normal full moon is just after moonrise, when the moon is just above the horizon.

Image: Doug Zwick, Flickr

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Does warming water increase or reduce species? It depends on the water...

Climate change can raise water temperatures in habitats around the world and in general scientists had thought that species diversity tended to increase with warmer temperatures. 

But scientists from the universities of Bath and York studying an important group of aquatic crustaceans called the Anomura, which includes hermit crabs, king crabs and squat lobsters, found that warmer waters reduced the rate of speciation - the process leading to new species arising - in marine environments, but increased it in fresh water. 

It’s the first time this has been shown, and suggests there’s no universal rule about how species diversity is affected by warming temperatures. Instead they believe it is likely that responses to climate change are habitat dependent. 

Read the paper

Images: public domain

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Scientists just discovered this shark is the world’s longest living vertebrate

Greenland sharks can live at least 400 years, and probably don’t reach sexual maturity until 150-year-old, making them the longest-living vertebrates on Earth.

The sharks live in the North Atlantic and grow exceptionally slowly, at around 1 cm per year. Because adults reach 400 to 500 cm long researchers suspected they could be very long-lived indeed.

To prove it they used radiocarbon dating methods to date the eye-lenses of 28 females that had been accidentally caught in fishing nets. The average age was 272 years with the two oldest specimens being 335 and 392-years-old.

That means the average Greenland shark from these 28 was born around 1744, the year a great 6-tailed comet could be seen in the sky with the naked eye. 

It also means it’s likely there are Greenland sharks swimming in the Atlantic today who were there before the Mayflower crossed the Atlantic to the New World. 

Read the paper

Images:  Julius Nielsen

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ALS-linked gene found switched on in new bits of the brain

ALS, also known as Motor Neuron Disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative condition for which we don’t have a cure and don’t fully understand.

We do know that a gene called C9orf72 is often involved, and many patients have abnormal repeated sequences within the gene causing neurons in the brain to die. The gene is also implicated in a type of dementia called Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD).

Now scientists studying it in mouse brains have found it is switched on in two regions that we didn’t know about before. 

They discovered that C9orf72 is strongly expressed in the hippocampus -  containing adult stem cells and which is important for memory - and the olfactory bulb - which is involved in the sense of smell. 

Loss of smell is sometimes a symptom in FTD.

The University of Bath team hope the findings will help researchers gain a better understanding of  C9orf72 ′s role in both diseases and help map where it is switched on and off as the brain develops. 

This could help us figure out new ways to slow down, treat or even cure the symptoms and explain why people born with abnormalities in  C9orf72 don’t develop symptoms until decades after birth. 

Read the paper

Images:  Andrew L Bashford and Vasanta Subramanian

The top and bottom images show mouse cerebellum stained to reveal the Purkinje neurons (green).

The middle image shows the dentate gyrus of the mouse hippocampal formation, which contributes to the formation of new memories stained for neurons (green) and stem cells (red).

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Are colour-changing octopuses really colourblind? 

Cephalopods, including octopuses and squid, have some of the most incredible colour-changing abilities in nature. 

They can almost instantly blend in with their surroundings to evade predators or lay in wait, and put on colourful displays to attract mates or dazzle potential prey.

This is impressive enough on its own, but becomes even more amazing when you discover these creatures are in fact colourblind – they only have one type of light receptor in their eyes, meaning they can only see in black and white.

So how do they know what colours to change to at all?

This has puzzled biologists for decades but a father/son team of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University think the unusual shape of their pupils holds the key, and they can see colour after all.

Cephalopods have wide U-shaped or dumbbell-shaped pupils, which allow light into the lens from many directions.

When light enters the pupils in human eyes it gets focused on one spot, cutting down on blur from the light being split into its constituent colours.

The scientists believe cephalopod eyes work the opposite way – the wide pupils split the light up and then individual colours can be focused on the retina by changing the depth of the eyeball and moving the pupil around.  

The price for this is blurry vision, but it does mean they could make out colours in a unique way to any other animals.

Processing colour this way is more computationally intensive than other types of colour vision and likely requires a lot of brainpower, which might explain in part why cephalopods are the most intelligent invertebrates on Earth.

Read the paper

Images:  Roy Caldwell, Klaus Stiefel, Alexander Stubbs

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Good news for the elusive snow leopard

Scientists studying snow leopards say these beautiful and elusive big cats may be more common than we thought.

A team has estimated that an area covering only 44% of the snow leopard's range may be home to between 4,678 and 8,745 animals alone.

Previous estimates for the entire global population were between 3,920 and 7,500. The new figure appears in a book called Snow Leopard edited by experts Drs Tom McCarthy and David Mallon.

The snow leopard lives across the mountain ranges of Asia, an area of roughly 1.2M square miles in the highlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bhutan, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Nepal, and Russia.

Because of their remote and difficult habitat, shy behaviour, scarce numbers and excellent camouflage, studying snow leopards has been extremely difficult. However recent technological advances have allowed researchers to begin to understand more about these endangered creatures.

But despite the good news, this species faces major challenges. Snow leopards are often poached for their fur, or killed by farmers worried they will attack livestock. They also face threats to their habitat from mining, roads and climate change.

Peter Zahler, from the Wildlife Conservation Society's Snow Leopard Program, said: "The protection of snow leopards, their prey, and their unique high-mountain landscapes must continue to be a priority for the global community… with growing pressures our window for ensuring long-term protection of these big cats will close fast."

Here’s some rare footage of a mother with her cub, captured by the BBC.

Images:Bernard Landgraf and Greg Townsend

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Switching on silent genes

For a while now scientists have been excited by a gene-editing tool called CRISPR/Cas9 which allows us to very precisely add, remove or replace specific parts of DNA.

It’s the most efficient, inexpensive and easiest-to-use gene-editing tool we have ever seen, but until now one thing it hasn’t been used for is activating switched-off genes.

However scientists at Hokkaido University's Institute of Genetic Medicine have developed a way to do just that.

Our genes are controlled by switches called promoters. When a promoter switch is ‘methylated’ - a carbon atom and three hydrogen atoms bind to it – then it is switched off, or silenced.

To switch a silenced gene back on, first they used CRISPR/Cas9 to cut out the methylated promoter. Then the researchers used a technique called MMEJ (microhomology-mediated end-joining), to insert a new promoter, replacing the off-switch with an on-switch.

The scientists tested the tool on two genes and found evidence that both were switched on and working robustly once the promoter was swapped. It worked so well that one of the expressed genes made the cell differentiate from a stem cell to a neuron in a week.

In the picture above, you can see human stem cells expressing protein from the activated gene, in red. Cell nuclei are coloured blue.

The team believe their tool has wide potential for manipulating gene expression, creating genetic circuits, or engineering cell fates.

Read the paper

Image: Hokkaido University

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Fishy clue to taking on scoliosis

Millions of people worldwide live with the debilitating consequences of scoliosis - deformities of the spine which cause disfigurement, pain, breathing and circulation problems, and other complications. 

Although the cause of some types of scoliosis are quite well understood, the mechanism causing Idiopathic Scoliosis, or IS, wasn’t known despite 3% of children globally suffering from the condition. 

But researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, working with scientists at the University of Toronto and Princeton, may have figured it out and discovered a way to develop new treatments. 

By studying mutant zebrafish prone to IS, as in the pictures above, they found problems with cilia - small hair-like protrusions from cells - lining the central canal of the spinal cord, were linked to scoliosis. 

When the cilia don’t move properly the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in the spinal cord canal doesn’t flow correctly and this leads to spinal deformities.

Crucially they also showed that restoring cilia function in the fish after the onset of scoliosis halted progression of the disease.

The team suggests that this insight offers potential to develop new treatments which could stop the disease in its tracks, even after onset and diagnosis.  

Read the paper

Images: Brian Ciruna    

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Tiny bird, epic journey

A tiny arctic tern has clocked up the longest bird migration ever seen with an astonishing 96,000 KM round trip between the UK and Antarctica.

The journey between the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumbria to the Weddell Sea off of Antarctica took more than nine months and saw the tern move across the UK, around the western coast of Europe and down the west African coast. It then moved east into the Indian Ocean before travelling south to Antarctica, arriving four months after setting off. 

The tern then made the return journey back to the Farne Islands where more than 2,000 pairs breed every year. 

In total it’s estimated it could travel as many as 3 million KM during its life - almost far enough for four trips to the moon and back. 

It’s an incredible feat for a bird weighing around 100g - less than an iPhone. 

The record-breaking tern and 20 others were tagged by scientists from Newcastle University, who are studying how terns organise their migration and how climate change might affect the routes they take. 

Images: Lindsay Robinson and Newcastle University

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‘Wasteful’ galaxies don’t recycle as much as we thought 

Without heavy elements you couldn’t read this because you wouldn’t exist. In fact no life would, or any planets anywhere in the universe. 

Vital heavy elements such as carbon, oxygen and zinc are made by fusing lighter elements together under incredible conditions of intense heat, pressure and energy found inside the heart of stars, or during violent supernova explosions. 

It’s amazing that many of the atoms in your body were forged during nuclear explosions deep within stars and then blasted into space when they died. But it turns out that this process is pretty wasteful, and that enormous quantities of these precious elements are lost when explosions from supernovae and supermassive black holes propel them far beyond galaxies - sometimes up to a million light years into deep space. 

An international research team showed that more oxygen, carbon and iron atoms exist in the sprawling, gaseous halos outside of galaxies than within them, depriving galaxies of raw materials for stars and planets. 

The near-invisible reservoir of gas that surrounding a galaxy is called the circumgalactic medium (CGM). Using a $70m instrument on board the NASA Hubble Space Telescope the researchers analysed the composition of the CGM, which is near-invisible to human eyes. They were surprised to see so many heavy elements in the CGM as the assumption had been that these elements would be reused to new planets and stars more efficiently.

But as lead author Benjamin Oppenheimer, a research associate in the Center for Astrophysics & Space Astronomy at CU-Boulder, said: "As it turns out, galaxies aren't very good at recycling."  

Images: Adrien Thob, LJMU, and NASA

The paper is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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New rain frog species discovered in the Amazon

This little guy is a new species of frog that has just been discovered in a part of the Amazon with the highest diversity of reptiles and amphibians in the world. 

The rain frog, named Pristimantis pluvialis, was discovered by an American and Peruvian team of researchers in Manu National Park, among the foothills of the Andes. 

The new species brings the number of known amphibian species in this area to 156. 

It was given the name “pluvialis” - meaning “rainy” in Latin - because of the massive rainfall in it’s habitat, more than 8 meters a year.

Images: Alessandro Catenazzi & Alex Shepack

Read the research paper

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To make an organ or tissue transplant a success, it has to be accepted by the recipients’ immune system and must have good blood supply from a healthy network of small blood vessels. 

For scientists looking to grow tissues in the lab for transplants these are two big obstacles.

But researchers at the University of Bath could help to overcome the problem with a new way of growing tiny blood vessels, like capillaries, from a patient’s own blood.

Their technique uses gel made from blood cells as a scaffold, on which cells that help maintain blood vessel walls, called endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs), are grown. The team has shown that this can grow those essential small blood vessels.

Not only are these tiny blood vessel connections vital for the survival of transplanted tissue, the risk of rejection is lower because the gel and EPCs come from the patient in the first place. 

Images: Tiago Fortunato, University of Bath

Read the research paper