Abuse can have effects well beyond childhood.

Abuse Casts a Long Shadow by Changing Children’s Genes

<p>
 Over 50 kids showed up at the Child Emotion Lab in Madison, Wisconsin. Most of them grew up in typical households. They were there because their parents just happened to see an ad in the city’s buses or newspapers. But about a third of them were recruited for the study there because their childhoods had been anything but normal. These kids, according to records kept by Child Protective Services, had been abused.
</p>
<p>
 For abused children, that trauma is just the beginning. Most will likely struggle well into adulthood. Living with an abusive parent has increased their risk for depression and other psychological problems while decreasing their chances of successfully maintaining close relationships. Even physical ailments, like type 2 diabetes and heart disease, are more likely in adults who were abused as kids. Early abusive experiences can leave a stubborn imprint on those children’s brains and bodies, and Seth Pollak, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and head of the study, wanted to know how, exactly, abuse was changing these children’s bodies on a cellular level.
</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<p>
 “We know about these difficulties, but we’ve had a really hard time understanding why. What’s getting under people’s skin?” Pollak says. “Why are they still having the social difficulties and the emotional difficulties because of something that happened when they were two?”
</p>
<p>
 Increasingly, scientists are coming to realize that people’s experiences exert a strong influence on their biology by silencing genes or turning them back on, significantly changing the way a cell functions without changing its DNA sequence. It’s a phenomenon known as epigenetics. “Epigenetics makes the genes tick,” explains Moshe Szyf, a professor of genetics and pharmacology at McGill University. Epigenetic changes modify DNA to keep genes from being expressed, and they can explain dramatic differences between cells with identical DNA—for example, how stem cells can turn into either liver cells or heart cells, or why only one of a set of identical twins gets cancer. It’s also, Pollak found, why children who grow up in abusive homes have physical and psychological problems that haunt them well into adulthood.
</p>
<h2>
 Stress, Abuse, and Genetics
</h2>
<p>
 Since he was in graduate school, Pollak has been interested in the way traumatic childhood experiences might change the brain. But, he says, the people studying those at-risk children were mostly social workers. Neuroscientists were interested in the role of brain biology in problems like depression and schizophrenia, but “when you started talking about really messy social problems like child abuse and poverty, they would look at me like, well how are you ever going to study that?” Pollak says. “They were different worlds.”
</p>
<p>
 The first hint that the worlds of child welfare and neuroscience could be unified was a 2005 study by Moshe Szyf and his colleagues at McGill University, which showed that rat pups raised by abusive mothers had epigenetic changes in a gene that helps rats—and humans—manage stress. This gene, called NR3C1, had a few extra methyl groups stuck to it: tiny quartets of carbon and hydrogen atoms that stick to DNA and derail the cellular machinery that translates genes into proteins. A methylated gene is still there, but it’s muted.
</p>
<p>
 Scientists knew that things like drugs or radiation could turn genes off in this way, but Szyf’s experiment, Pollak says, “was the first demonstration that something like parenting, parental care, was flipping the switch.” A few studies in humans also hinted that trauma might be turning this stress-management gene off, but there wasn’t any direct evidence in children. That’s what Pollak was determined to find.
</p>
<div class="pullquote">
<p>
 Rat pups raised by abusive mothers had epigenetic changes in a gene that helps rats—and humans—manage stress.
</p>
</div>
<p>
 So Pollak’s staff recruited those kids and their parents and walked the kids from the lab to a local hospital to get their blood drawn. When they checked each kid’s DNA, they saw that, in the children with a history of abuse, NR3C1 was methylated, just as it had been in the rats—in fact, at the very same sites. That, Pollak thought, was remarkable. “It gives us a real window into understanding why people that are abused as children sort of have these lifelong problems.”
</p>
<p>
 NR3C1 codes for a receptor that senses a hormone called cortisol. “Cortisol is something that we produce in an emergency,” Pollak explains. That’s because it prepares you to respond to a threat: when cortisol from the adrenal gland is sent flowing into the bloodstream, it ramps up blood sugar for a quick burst of energy, dials down energy-draining processes like digestion, growth, and immune function, and can reduce bleeding and inflammation if you’re injured. University of Minnesota professor Megan Gunnar points out that, for children in abusive homes, who are in threatening situations every day, having more cortisol floating around isn’t necessarily bad—at first. “You may need to remain vigilant more often. You may need to flip into vigilant state more easily. That’s keeping you alive under harsh conditions, but it’s also making it really hard for you to function.”
</p>
<p>
 Normally, cortisol molecules dock in receptors that are coded for by NR3C1 in the brain and white blood cells, which signals the body to calm down and return to its normal operating mode, and revives the immune system. But if NR3C1 is methylated, the body won’t be able to produce enough receptors, hobbling its ability to regulate stress. The body can still produce cortisol, but without enough receptors, Pollak says, there’s nothing to reign in the heightened state. “It’s the brake that’s not working.”
</p>
<p>
 When the body can’t signal itself to calm down, the short term results are kids who, Pollak says, are “on alert all the time.” They often misinterpret innocent behavior as threatening; they can be aggressive, and they struggle with change. The long-term results are the chronic psychological problems like anxiety and depression and chronic physical problems like heart disease and type II diabetes, which often surface years later in victims of childhood abuse.
</p>
<h2>
 Health Concerns
</h2>
<p>
 Pollak only looked at DNA from white blood cells, so his study couldn’t tell whether these children have fewer receptors in their brains, a measure that can only be taken from deceased individuals (although the data from postmortem experiments on both rats and humans leads Pollak to believe that they do). But Szyf and Gunnar agree that the fact that these changes occur in the immune system is significant on its own. Having too few receptors for cortisol keeps the immune system from learning to manage inflammation and infections, helping explain why children in abusive homes seem to get sick more often, and are at a higher risk for chronic health problems.
</p>
<div class="related"></div>
<p>
 Gunnar believes that this study is an important demonstration that epigenetic changes can link childhood trauma and long-term physical and emotional problems. “It’s certainly a piece of the puzzle,” she says, but cautions that, “It’s not going to be the whole story.” There are probably a lot of other genes that get methylated, and genes themselves and learned coping mechanisms also play a role in how kids respond to stress. Still, she agrees. “Changes in the epigenetics is going to be a big piece of the story.”
</p>
<p>
 For one thing, identifying NR3C1 methylation in abuse victims gives researchers a concrete way to measure the biological effects of abuse and to determine if treatments are working. “The main thing missing in behavioral intervention,” Szyf says, “was objective measures to develop good protocols.” Cortisol levels themselves aren’t good diagnostic tests, because they fluctuate over the course of the day and are easily swayed by transient factors like illness or even laughter. The methylation Pollak discovered, while not exclusively caused by stress, is a much more stable and useful measure.
</p>
<h2>
 Undoing the Damage
</h2>
<p>
 Fortunately for abused children, there’s reason for hope. Szyf’s experiments in rats suggests that NR3C1 isn’t necessarily permanently silenced: when the abused pups were returned to nurturing mothers, the extra methylation disappeared. “The idea that these things aren’t fixed is really encouraging,” Pollak says.
</p>
<div class="pullquote">
<p>
 Even kids from horrific backgrounds developed a rapport with the lab’s staff.
</p>
</div>
<p>
 To what extent methylation on these genes might be reversible in children, and what kind of interventions might help, Pollak says, “are just big questions that we don’t have the answers to yet.” But he’s hopeful that, now that this epigenetic mechanism is known, “someone who is a really skilled expert clinician might have an aha! moment. And that’s all it takes to kind of really reorient things to think about a different way to have an effective treatment.”
</p>
<p>
 What’s encouraging, Pollak says, is that even kids from horrific backgrounds developed a rapport with the lab’s staff, which has buoyed his optimism for developing treatments. “They want to talk to us, they want to tell us stories,” he says. After making it through the blood draw, a lot of the kids bubbled over with pride.
</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>
<p>
 “I would say honestly there are many days when we all kind of put our head in our hands and we can’t, we just can’t believe what has happened in these children’s lives,” Pollak admits. “But it motivates us; I mean, what’s going on in these children’s lives, it kind of keeps a fire under our ass not to be lazy, and we have to keep these studies going, because there are a lot of kids in need.”
</p>
<p>
 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gbullard/5185726473">
  GabeB/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND)
 </a>
</p>

<p>Epigenetic changes from abuse put victims at risk not just for chronic psychological problems, but physical ones, too.</p>

A schematic of the lower half of the Cannae Drive cavity Photo credit: Cannae Drive

Improbable Thruster Seems to Work by Violating Known Laws of Physics

<p>
</p>
<p>
 Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. It’s perhaps the best known law of physics, and Guido Fetta thinks he’s found a way around it.
</p>
<p>
 According to classical physics, in order for something—like a spaceship—to move, conservation of momentum requires that it has to exert a force on something else. A person in roller skates, for example, pushes off against a wall; a rocket accelerates upward by propelling high-velocity combusted fuel downward. In practice, this means that space vessels like satellites and space stations have to carry up to half their weight in propellant just to stay in orbit. That bulks up their cost and reduces their useful lifetime.
</p>
<div class="related"></div>
<p>
 With that in mind, Fetta designed what he called the “Cannae Drive,” which he claims creates momentum without pushing against seemingly anything at all. He recently convinced a team at NASA to test it, who presented the results at a conference yesterday.
</p>
<p>
 The NASA team, using a torsion pendulum, or a device that can measure minute forces, found that Fetta’s drive created 30-50 micronewtons’ worth of thrust. That’s not a lot of force—even one whole Newton is less than the weight you feel in your hand when you hold an iPhone—but according to the laws of classical physics, Fetta’s device shouldn’t have produced any at all.
</p>
<p>
 Fetta, an independent inventor with a background in chemical engineering,
 <a href="http://vimeo.com/29840866">
  explains
 </a>
 that the drive is a “superconducting resonating cavity.” According to him, the cavity is designed with little wells along the bottom edge to trap electrons, so that when electromagnetic waves bounce around inside the cavity, more electrons push up on the top surface of the cavity than push down on the bottom. This imbalance, Fetta says, creates upward thrust.
</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<p>
 In the paper, NASA seemed reluctant to dive into the drive’s mysterious physics. They wrote nothing to suggest how, exactly, the force was produced. In fact, the mysterious drive actually worked even when they modified it in such a way it shouldn’t have produced any thrust, suggesting the mechanics of the system are hazily understood. The one exception was a reference, in the paper’s abstract, to a possible interaction with the “quantum vacuum virtual plasma.”
</p>
<p>
 David Hambling, writing for Wired.co.uk, explains what that might mean:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
 This […] implies that the drive may work by pushing against the ghostly cloud of particles and anti-particles that are constantly popping into being and disappearing again in empty space.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
 A similar “microwave thruster” drive, proposed by British engineer Roger Shawyer, was tested last year by a Chinese team. Those results were largely dismissed. NASA’s results, though, seem to lend some credence to the idea that supposedly impossible “unbalanced forces” can actually result in momentum.
</p>
<p>
 The NASA team stresses that the drive needs to be tested more thoroughly—but if it really works, it could be a major breakthrough for deep-space exploration. Because a drive like this could be powered solely by solar energy, satellites and space stations could stay on course and in orbit without having to lug around so much propellant.
</p>
<p>
 Hambling:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
 A working microwave thruster would radically cut the cost of satellites and space stations and extend their working life, drive deep-space missions, and take astronauts to Mars in weeks rather than months.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
 We still don’t know if Fetta’s propellant-less drive works the way he claims it does—and we need more evidence before we can be sure that it even works at all. But if it does—watch out, space. We’re coming for you.
</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>
<p>
 Photo credit: Cannae Drive
</p>

Pure lithium holds a lot of energy but can be tricky to work with.

Triple the Lifetime of Lithium Car Batteries Using Carbon Nanospheres

<div class="related"></div>
<p>
 One of the biggest barriers to wider adoption of electric cars is that they constantly need to be recharged. The range of most electric cars is stuck below 100 miles (unless you’re in a position to drop $70k on a Tesla), which isn’t very practical for anyone with a long commute or a penchant for road trips.
</p>
<p>
 These vehicles would be more useful if their batteries could store more energy. The “holy grail” of energy-dense batteries would be one with pure lithium at one end, but lithium is a temperamental material. A Stanford team led by Professor Yi Cui has shown that a layer of hollow carbon nanospheres might be able to make lithium more manageable.
</p>
<p>
 First: a battery primer. Batteries work by making electrons flow through a circuit. The two ends of the battery are made of two different materials: one that electrons want to leave—the anode—and one where they’d love to be—the cathode. A battery is set up so that electrons can’t go through the battery to get from one end to the other, forcing them to travel through the wires outside the battery that make up the rest of the circuit. Along the way, those electrons power a lightbulb or a smartphone screen. Inside the battery, positive ions flow from the anode to the cathode, through a conductive material called an electrolyte. In rechargeable batteries, an external current can make the process run in reverse, giving the anode a fresh supply of electrons.
</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<p>
 Most rechargeable batteries use lithium ions as the positively-charged particles that get shuttled back and forth inside the battery. But for decades, scientists have been trying to find a way to use lithium for another part of a battery: the anode. Lithium is both very light and very eager to release its electrons, which makes it a perfect anode material for batteries that need to be both powerful and portable. But so far, there have been big reasons not to use lithium anodes. When lithium ions return to a lithium anode during recharging, they form random, clumpy shapes that decrease the battery’s efficiency. And the high reactivity that makes lithium such a good anode material also means that it can interact violently—and dangerously—with the materials in the electrolyte.
</p>
<p>
 The carbon nanospheres—which Cui and his colleagues created by coating microscopic plastic beads with carbon dust—cover a lithium anode like an upside-down egg carton.
</p>
<p>
 When lithium ions migrate over from the cathode during recharging, this carbon shell keeps them organized. It also protects the highly reactive lithium metal from interacting with the charged particles in the electrolyte.
</p>
<p>
 The result is a battery that’s more efficient and less dangerous. Henry Gass,
 <a href="http://bit.ly/1pMCrod">
  writing
 </a>
 for Scientific American:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
 Previous lithium anodes achieved a 96 percent coulombic efficiency, but that dropped to less than 50 percent after 100 cycles. This new lithium anode achieves a 99 percent efficiency for 150 cycles. Cui said that over the next few years, the team hopes to refine the battery design to both improve on the coulombic efficiency and sustain it for 500 to 1,000 cycles.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
 This technology isn’t ready for commercial application yet—batteries need to have an efficiency greater than 99.9% to be practical. If they can get there, though, Cui and his colleagues say we’re looking at batteries that could power electric cars for three hundred miles at a time. That’s the start of a pretty respectable road trip.
</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>
<p>
 Photo Credit:
 <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Petalite.jpg">
  Eurico Zimbres / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)
 </a>
</p>

<p>Lithium anodes are the Holy Grail of rechargeable batteries. Now a team at Stanford has found a way to make them feasible.</p>

Just one bite of this granola will unlock your body's energy reserves.

Sixth Taste on Our Tongues May Unleash Our Energy Reserves

<div class="related"></div>
<p>
 If you think a quick carb hit will boost your energy during a workout, your tongue is way ahead of you.
</p>
<p>
 Lots of people rely on sugar as a quick source of energy. Just sipping on Gatorade can be enough to lift you out of a slump. Except it shouldn’t be, at least not directly. Your body won’t actually start using that glucose for energy until after you’ve been exercising for about an hour.
</p>
<p>
 Recently scientists have been learning that the near-instant energy burst may not come from our stomachs, but our tongues. A 2004 study showed that intravenously-injected carbohydrates didn’t help cyclists complete a 1-hour time trial any faster, but, amazingly, just rinsing their mouths with a carbohydrate solution did. Since then, evidence has been piling up that the immediate energy jolt we get from sugar and carbs has more to do with our senses than with digestion.
</p>
<p>
 Now, a new study from the University of Auckland researcher Dr. Nicholas Gant shows what happens in the brain when you combine physical activity with a tongue that’s tasting carbohydrates.
</p>
<p>
 Gant and his colleagues used fMRI to watch how people’s brains responded when they performed a simple motor task—gripping a sensor when they saw a visual cue—while having their mouths rinsed with various solutions. One portion of the subjects received a carbohydrate solution consisting of maltodextrin.
</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<p>
 Ian Randall, writing for
 <i>
  Science
 </i>
 :
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
 When the carbohydrate solution was used, the researchers observed
 <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666314002281">
  a 30% increase in activity for the brain areas that control movement and vision
 </a>
 . This reaction, they propose, is caused by our mouths reporting that additional energy in the form of carbs is coming.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
 The tongue, apparently, tastes the carbohydrates and signals the brain to rev up motor function. It knows the body will be getting extra energy to replenish the reserves once the sugars are processed. It wasn’t just a sweet taste that triggered the rush of energy either. Swishing with an artificially-sweetened liquid had no effect. Plus, the brain’s reward centers only lit up when the tongue sensed real carbohydrates, not artificial sweeteners. These findings suggest that the presence of carbohydrates triggers a sixth taste in addition to the existing five—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami.
</p>
<p>
 Other studies had shown that carb-on-tongue action increased performance in endurance sports (like riding a bike for an hour), and that it seemed to prompt activity in areas of the brain associated with motor control. But Gant’s study is the first to link carbohydrate exposure on the tongue with increased brain performance during a physical task, helping to explain just how an energy bar can boost your 5k time before its sugars ever reach your muscles.
</p>
<p>
 Learn more about the neuroscience of taste in "Can I Eat That?"
</p>
<p>
 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/lunaspin/4943431344">
  Melissa/Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA)
 </a>
</p>

<p>Recently, scientists have been learning that the near-instant energy burst of something sweet may not come from our stomachs, but our tongues.</p>

The planet looks blue from space, but new research shows that most of Earth's water may actually be deep underground.

Huge Underground Reservoir Holds Three Times as Much Water as Earth’s Oceans

<p>
</p>
<p>
 Earth is a jewel of the solar system, painted blue by the vast oceans that hold the majority of our planet’s water—or so we thought. Most of Earth’s water, according to a new study, may actually be locked in a reservoir 400 miles underground.
</p>
<p>
 That Earth, for much of its history, has been covered by water isn’t much of surprise. But how so much water ended up on a planet that, at its birth, was boiling hot has puzzled scientists for decades. Previous theories had assumed that Earth had picked up its water when it collided violently with icy comets and asteroids. But an alternate hypothesis just received a boost courtesy of a new study published in
 <i>
  Science
 </i>
 : Earth’s water may have been here all along, oozing out gradually as rock deep in the crust was pressed by the intense heat and pressure below the surface.
</p>
<div class="related"></div>
<p>
 The idea of water trapped in solid rock isn’t as unlikely as it sounds. Minerals can trap molecules of water in their metals and metal oxides like a sponge. If the pressure gets high enough, the trapped water can get squeezed out.
</p>
<p>
 Steven Jacobsen, the Northwestern University professor who led the study, found water in subterranean ringwoodite, a deep blue mineral chemically similar to peridot, a green mineral often used in jewelry. Until a sample turned up in 2008 in a diamond coughed up from a volcano,
 <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/earth/a-diamonds-journey-from-the-center-of-the-earth-brings-news-of-a-secret-water-reserve/">
  ringwoodite had only been found in meteorites
 </a>
 . The ringwoodite came from the “transition zone” between the upper and lower mantle, about 400 miles below the Earth’s surface, and about 1.5% of its weight turned out to be water. If a lot of this water-heavy mineral existed underground, scientists reasoned, that might be enough to explain where Earth’s oceans came from.
</p>
<div class="ad"></div>
<p>
 So Jacobsen and his team went looking for dampness lurking deep underground by monitoring the seismic waves generated by earthquakes. Because the velocity of these waves changes depending on what kind of material they’re passing through—like, for example, if a mineral is wet or dry—measuring that speed can give geologists a map of what’s below the Earth’s surface.
</p>
<p>
 Andy Coghlan, writing for
 <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25723-massive-ocean-discovered-towards-earths-core.html#.U5skchZgvwI">
  NewScientist
 </a>
 :
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
 Sure enough, they found signs of wet ringwoodite in the transition zone 700 kilometres [400 miles] down, which divides the upper and lower regions of the mantle. At that depth, the pressures and temperatures are just right to squeeze the water out of the ringwoodite. “It’s rock with water along the boundaries between the grains, almost as if they’re sweating,” says Jacobsen.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
 If all the ringwoodite in the transition zone is as damp as the samples that Jacobsen and his team detected, that layer would hold three times as much water as all of the Earth’s oceans combined, reducing their share from 96.5% of all known water to a relatively paltry 24.8%. In other words, the ringwoodite discovery could quadruple the amount of water found on Earth. A blue planet, indeed.
</p>
<div class="newsletter"></div>
<p>
 Photo Credit:
 <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Earth_Pacific_jul_30_2010.jpg">
  NASA/Wikimedia Commons
 </a>
</p>

<p>Most of Earth’s water, according to a new study, may actually be locked in a reservoir 400 miles underground.</p>

Cocaine-Eating Enzyme Could Combat Addiction

<section class="entry-content instapaper_body clearfix" itemprop="articleBody">
<div class="add-container clearfix" id="add-block-placer">
</div>
<p>
  They’re found huddling in the soil near the roots of coca plants and swimming in the industrial waste from pharmaceutical factories. They’re a bacteria called
  <em>
   Stenotrophomonas maltophilia
  </em>
  . And they eat cocaine.
 </p>
<p>
  Cocaine overdoses send half a million people to emergency rooms in the United States every year—but once they get there, there’s not much doctors can do beyond alleviating the symptoms. Opiate overdoses can be treated with naloxone, which dulls opiate action by competing with the drug for binding sites; addicts can be given safer alternatives like methadone. But there aren’t any approved medications for cocaine toxicity, and addiction treatment is mostly limited to behavioral and psychological approaches.
 </p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/4923866114_cf260d947e_o-e1404233687390.width-990_Xk7yCj4.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Unlike opiate addiction, there aren't any pharmaceutical treatments for cocaine addiction. A bacterial enzyme could change that.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
  So Lei Fang, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Kentucky’s College of Pharmacy, turned to
  <em>
   S. maltophilia
  </em>
  , which produces an enzyme called cocaine esterase that breaks down cocaine into inactive molecules. Split up into its constituent parts, cocaine can’t provide its characteristic high—or the risks associated with it. You can’t just inject the bacterial enzyme into humans, though. Cocaine esterase molecules need to be in pairs to work, and because protein structure is so temperature-sensitive, the natural enzyme can’t stay paired up for longer than about 12 minutes at human body temperature.
 </p>
<p>
  Bethany Brookshire,
  <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/mutated-bacterial-enzyme-gobbles-cocaine">
   writing
  </a>
  for Science News:
 </p>
<blockquote>
<p>
   Fang and colleagues set about trying to make cocaine esterase a more stable dimer at body temperature. They carefully switched out the building blocks of the protein, amino acids, at the site where two enzymes become a matched pair. The scientists have already been able to create a version of cocaine esterase that can withstand human body temperature for six hours. And it’s already in a
   <a href="https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01846481">
    phase II clinical trial
   </a>
   to treat cocaine overdose.
  </p>
</blockquote>
<p>
  But Fang was hoping to do more than just treat overdoses—he wanted to find a drug that could treat addiction. To do that, you’d need cocaine esterase to function for a lot longer than six hours. So he and his colleagues used computer models to watch exactly what happens when heat unravels the enzyme. That helped them find the enzyme’s weak spots, and with just two more mutations they produced a new form that can stay paired up and active for more than 100 days. Injecting mice with this reinforced enzyme protects them from lethal cocaine overdoses for more than three months—the longest lasting effect that’s ever been demonstrated.
 </p>
<p>
  The reinforced enzyme is more active, too—it metabolizes cocaine a thousand times faster than the human body does on its own. If cocaine esterase could digest cocaine faster than addicts could get high, it might be able to disrupt the reward circuits that feed addiction. It would be an entirely new tool for helping the country’s more than one million cocaine addicts get clean—all from a little bacterium that lives in dirt and wastewater.
 </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
</section>
<p>
 Photo Credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/spookman01/4923866114">
  Lee Morley / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
 </a>
</p>

Galactic Collision with Power of One Million LHCs Spawns Massive Gravitational Lens

<section class="entry-content instapaper_body clearfix" itemprop="articleBody">
<div class="add-container clearfix" id="add-block-placer">
</div>
<p>
  Five billion light-years from earth, there’s a massive galactic pileup unfolding in slow motion. As four clusters of galaxies plow into each other, thousands of individual galaxies are colliding—creating huge amounts of cosmic chaos and a lot of energy.
 </p>
<p>
  New images of this phenomenon—one of the largest galactic mergers on record—suggest it’s also producing more than just pretty pictures. It’s also serving as quite possibly the largest particle accelerator of all time, besting the exquisitely engineered Large Hadron Collider one million times over.
 </p>
<figure class="richtext-image full-width">
<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/macsj0717.width-990_4rajjHG.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Colliding galaxy clusters MACS J0717+3745 are seen here in this composite image. The background is a Hubble Space Telescope image, blue is an X-ray image from Chandra, and red is a VLA radio image.
        
    </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
  The discovery of the power of the collision, endearingly named MACSJ0717.5+3745, was revealed at a recent American Astronomical Society meeting by Reinout van Weeren of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He and his team observed different types of radiation to peer into the complex interactions.
 </p>
<p>
  Radio-wave data from the Very Large Array show what seems to be radiation emitted by high-energy charged particles. According to X-ray data from the Chandra Observatory, there’s extremely hot (hundred-million-Kelvin-hot) gas in the same place the radiation is coming from. That combination of energetic particles and super-heated gas suggests that gases are colliding and spewing out high-energy particles.
 </p>
<p>
  Galaxies are mostly empty space, of course, and the likelihood of stars colliding is relatively small. But as Clara Moskowitz, writing for Scientific American, explains that the gases in galaxies’ interstellar spaces can interact violently:
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   When clouds of gas slam into one another, they warm up, causing a shock front where magnetic fields get compressed. These fields cause particles to travel back and forth over the front, picking up energy from the heat of the gas during every crossing. Eventually, the particles become so energetic that they escape and fly out into space.
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  This isn’t the first natural particle accelerator we’ve observed—supernova debris can create the same energy-amping shock fronts—but it seems to be one of the strongest. In millions of years, some of the particles could wind up as the cosmic rays that pelt the Earth.
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  The colossal mass of the four clusters has also created a very large gravity lens. The gravity the clusters exert bends the light originating from other galaxies, allowing us to see distant galaxies that would otherwise be invisible, just like a glass lens in a standard telescope. Later this year, in fact, astronomers will use another giant lens, the Hubble Space Telescope, which took the first optical images of this collision, to take advantage of the gravitational lensing to produce long-exposure images which peer deep into the cosmos. The combined powers of Hubble and MACSJ0717.5+3745 will produce what is “probably the best cosmic telescope on our sky,” Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute told Moskowitz.
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  Learn more about telescopes that are expanding our view of the universe.
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 Photo credit: Van Weeren, et al.; Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF; NASA
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Eleanor Nelson

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