Root vegetables like carrots were found to contain chemicals of emerging concern.

Pharmaceuticals Found in Low Levels in Wastewater-Irrigated Produce

With 99% of California’s agricultural lands ravaged by drought, some farmers in the state are considering an alternative to freshwater: treated sewage.


 “In water-short regions of the world like Israel, like the Western U.S., like Australia, we will increasingly use recycled water,” says Richard Luthy, professor of environmental engineering at Stanford University. However, two new studies from Israel and California raise questions about whether using treated wastewater to irrigate crops could expose consumers to the low levels of pharmaceuticals that persist in wastewater, even after treatment.

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 One study investigated the fate of chemicals of emerging concern (CECs)—compounds and molecules with no standardized regulations that could have negative health and environmental effects—in the agricultural environment. The results,
 <a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es5017894">
 published in July
 </a>
 in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology by a team at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, revealed that root vegetables absorbed CECs when irrigated with treated wastewater artificially spiked with excess CECs as well as from unaltered treated wastewater.
 <a href="http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es502868k">
 The other
 </a>
 , conducted by a team at the University of California, Riverside, has been accepted for publication by the same journal. The researchers used similar techniques, discovering that over half of the vegetables irrigated by un-spiked treated wastewater had taken up CECs.


 However, neither study nor experts in the field could conclusively say how the presence of CECs in produce might affect public health. “It’s something that’s on the radar screen that we’re looking at, but it’s something that as yet has not appeared as problem,” says Luthy, who wasn’t affiliated with either study. “That’s not the same thing as saying that we shouldn’t look for it.”


 California has a long history of such reuse, going back as far as 1910 when San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park was irrigated with wastewater. Now, around 13% of California’s wastewater is reused, and around 35% of that is devoted to agriculture. The practice of re-using treated wastewater is far more common in Israel, which repurposes 75% of its total effluent for agriculture.


 A 2010 review paper published in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring, however found that CECs persist even in treated wastewater. Treatment removes some CECs, such as the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) ibuprofen and the endocrine disruptor BPA, but not others, including carbamazepine, a seizure medication, or diclofenac, an NSAID. Researchers
 <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/pharmaceuticals-in-the-water/">
 are uncertain
 </a>
 whether the concentrations found in water supplies pose any threat to public health.


 Furthermore, how CECs behave in farm fields remains poorly understood. “Nobody who designed a drug imagined that a drug would eventually be in the soil, so no one knows what the fate of these drugs are in the soil,” says Benny Chefetz, professor of agricultural and soil chemistry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a senior author on the first study. Chefetz’s team tested an artificial worst-case scenario by using treated wastewater spiked with excessive amounts of CECs to irrigate carrots and sweet potatoes.

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 They found that, depending on the compound’s properties and the soil’s characteristics, some drugs, including the seizure medications carbamazepine and lamotrigine, were absorbed by the edible roots and transported to the leafy portions of the plants. Others, including the NSAIDs ibuprofen and diclofenac, were not.


 Chefetz hopes that these results can help direct wastewater treatment plants to remove only the drugs that most likely to be absorbed by crops. “For instance, ibuprofen, which is well used in the U.S., is very easily removed in the soil system, so you don’t need to put a lot of energy to remove it from the treated wastewater,” he says.


 The second study, led by Jay Gan, a professor of environmental chemistry at University of California Riverside, also found that produce could absorb CECs from irrigation. The investigators spiked treated wastewater with fixed concentrations of 15 compounds and used it to irrigate half of a field of vegetables; the other half was irrigated with un-spiked treated wastewater. In the un-spiked half, around 64% of the edible portions of the vegetables absorbed at least one CEC, and 90% did in the spiked half.


 While detectable, the concentrations weren’t high. “In the edible tissues, the levels were very, very low,” Gan says. “Especially if you compare to what people normally take in a medication scenario, it’s probably four or five orders of magnitudes smaller.”


 Chafetz and his team found that carrots and sweet potatoes irrigated with un-spiked treated wastewater also absorbed the seizure drugs carbamazepine and lamotrigine. Based on the amounts measured, the investigators estimated that a half a carrot a day could chronically expose a child to enough low doses of lamotrigine that it might eventually pose a health risk.


 However, the specific implications for public health remain unclear. “The conclusion isn’t as straight forward as we’d like it to be, because there are still a lot of questions,” says Tomer Malchi, a graduate student who worked with Chefetz on this study. For instance, it is unknown how these anti-convulsants might affect a fetus if a pregnant woman were to consume them with her produce.


 Gan, who has collaborated with Chefetz in the past but not on these two recent studies, urges caution. “There are not really any relevant EPA threshold standards, and to try to guess if [CECs] can really cause problems is really hard,” he says. He and his co-authors note in their own study that a person’s annual CEC exposure via produce was only 3.69 micrograms in a year, or “three orders of magnitude smaller than that in a single medical dose for one compound.”


 Chefetz agrees that his team’s results shouldn’t be cause for panic. “The bottom line is not that the treated wastewater is unsafe—I’m not saying that,” he says.


 “A lot of people would be like, ‘Is there a red light? Stop?’ And I’d say no, no,” Malchi says. “It’s a little orange light, and we need to see what this means.”


 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/29487672@N07/14760573314">
 swong95765/Flickr (CC BY)
 </a>

X-ray Vision Unveils Hidden Text in Vesuvius-Blasted Papyrus

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 After two millennia, scientists wielding X-rays have finally revealed the text of an ancient library long thought to be unreadable.
 

 Blasted by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that also demolished Pompeii in 79 CE, the library in Herculaneum, which contained around 1,800 rolled papyrus scrolls, has tantalized classical scholars since archaeologists first unearthed it in 1752. While many of the scrolls did not burn, they were carbonized, locking pages of ancient text into fragile tubes resembling the charcoal remnants of a campfire.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/charred-scroll.width-990_x5tldF2.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Scientists peered inside this fragile scroll using a special X-ray technique.
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>

 Previous attempts to read the scrolls that may once have belonged to Julius Ceasar’s father-in-law have been highly damaging, chastening future would-be readers. But yesterday, an international team of scientists, led by Vito Mocella of the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems in Naples, Italy, and Emmanuel Brun of the European Synchotron, announced that that X-ray phase contrast tomography enabled them to read the text layered inside the scrolls without ever having to unroll them. The technique can detect differences in how similar materials—such as ancient ink and papyrus—bend light. They published their results in the journal Nature.
 

 Richard Van Noorden, reporting for Nature News, explained the technique:
 
<blockquote>

 This is used in medicine to image the structures of soft tissues that do not absorb x-rays well, such as those in the brain, lungs and breast. It works by detecting contrast in how materials refract, rather than absorb, X-rays. Inside the Herculaneum scrolls, the inked letters are raised some 0.1 millimetres above the surface of the papyrus. That tiny bump was enough for Mocella’s team to make out the ink using coherent beams of X-rays from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France.
 
</blockquote>

 From those bumps, the team could read a number of Greek letters and even a few words. Mocella and Brun admit that there are several limitations to using X-ray phase contrast tomography to read ancient text, including how to decide which direction to read words that may be folded or upside down.
 

 But it does show promise, they said. “While our first experiments have revealed only small segments of writing and are in need of further refinement,” the authors wrote, once the technique has been perfected, “the imaging of an entire papyrus scroll should not require more than a few hours.”
 
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 Photo credit: D. Delattre © Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France

You May Be Born to Feel Carsick

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 If you spent your last road trip staring queasily at the horizon, chances are you might be one of around 33% of people who suffer from motion sickness.
 

 Motion sickness, it turns out, might not just be a matter of willpower and intestinal fortitude. Personal genetics company 23andMe has mined the genomes sequenced from the spit of over 80,000 customers to conduct the first ever
 <a href="http://www.genome.gov/20019523">
 genome-wide association study
 </a>
 of motion sickness. They discovered that variation in certain genes may predispose a person to the dizziness and nausea thought to result from conflicting sensory signals about whether the body is in motion, or standing still.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/dizzy_crop.width-990_wLUqazc.jpg"/>
<figcaption>23andMe found common genetic variations in people who get carsick.
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>

 Using an online questionnaire, participants self-reported how carsick they get from never (a score of zero) to frequently (a score of three). Variations in single bits of genetic code—also known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs—in 35 regions of the genome associated with balance, glucose regulation, and eye, ear, and brain development occurred more frequently in people who scored higher on the carsickness scale.
 

 The many different kinds of motion sickness make it difficult to draw broad conclusions from a questionnaire that specifically examined carsickness, explained motion sickness expert and University of Minnesota professor of kinesiology Thomas Stoffregen.
 

 “People get sick in cars, but they get sick in ships, and they get sick at the movies, and they get sick while they’re playing video games, and they get sick in all kinds of different situations,” he said, adding “the fact that there are some genes that line up with the answers that people gave on these online questionnaires does not, does not, does not in any way imply that the genes are causally related to motion sickness.”
 

 From the genetics perspective, Steven McCarroll, assistant professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, said that there are very few genome wide association studies that have been conducted on this scale–and is optimistic about future studies that take advantage of the databases collected by companies like 23andMe.
 

 “When I realized that they had studied this common phenotype in 80,000 people it’s clear that they had a lot of statistical power,” he said. “I think that it’s just tremendously exciting that communities can organize over the internet and bring amazing statistical power to a problem that required really large cohorts to answer a question like this.”
 

 The
 <a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-02/e-2su020215.php">
 announcement
 </a>
 of 23andMe’s results—published in the journal Human Molecular Genetics—comes just days after President Obama announced his $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative, which many hope will use the genetic data collected in databases like 23andMe’s to usher in a new age of genetically guided treatment and therapeutic development.
 
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/areyoumyrik/308908967/in/photolist-5LU1TV-tieSF-9GZkPo-dcAYb-druhJP-7kiuj2-6vx4EG-77rvh-7knoA3-6m4Mwp-5Jr5A-7knotb-7knowy-7knoqw-tiePX-76GzE6-29oiRM-29sFcu-4f1Sq1-fAUHr-6EzpQf-tieNG-5Tfe7t-Jar3A-kxb2s5-9UdxCW-pPeQGL-r7w3U-69vNtQ-MAW5-4v2eM7-7bfYZ4-fvxFc-MpSDi-98yoDw-2tdoEF-dcAzw-6Am9XB-kB7o9-3KL88-6dnmg6-6aXw9e-gs31c-7vMLKw-7jsdJs-9XoqDA-4GiN5a-56jgPv-nchET-mJuPd">
 are you my rik? / Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)
 </a>

Dealing with the Health Data Deluge

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 There’s a revolution afoot in medicine. It has been simmering below the surface for the last decade or so, but like many revolutions, you won’t really take notice until it’s all but over. And it’s all thanks to your phone.
 

 The tiny computers are providing patients, doctors, and medical researchers with unprecedented amounts of data. Equipped with a bevy of sensors, a person’s phone can record data even while it sits unused in their pocket. It then automatically beams it back to secure servers for later analysis. By unobtrusively collecting copious amounts of information, our smartphones are enabling researchers to study disease in ways never before possible. For scientists and clinicians, it’s not quite a free lunch, but it may be as close as they’ll ever get.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/wrist-x-ray.width-990_EJyZV4y.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Merging traditional health records like X-rays with new sources is a significant challenge for the healthcare industry.
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>

 Take the mPower app. Unlike with typical medical studies, which struggle with recruiting participants and frequently require testing or observation in a laboratory, the app, which is hosted by Apple’s newly launched ResearchKit platform, uses the iPhone’s sensors to monitor the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease during a person’s waking moments. All participants have to do is say “ah” into the phone for ten seconds, tap their fingers on the screen, and walk with the phone in their pockets. Researchers at the other end of the app can use this information to assess symptoms like voice changes, hand tremors, slowed movements, and difficulties with balance.
 

 Another ResearchKit app, Breast Cancer: Share the Journey, tracks patient recovery after breast cancer treatment using the iPhone’s motion sensors to monitor movement, and it uses surveys and journal entries to collect patient responses about symptoms and outlook. ResearchKit—Apple’s software framework that allows scientists to build these apps—also hosts apps that collect data on diabetes, cardiovascular health, and asthma. The company recently opened up its code to other developers.
 

 While the profusion of data promises to be useful to medical research, it won’t mean much for the rest of us if it can’t be linked to our other health information. Today, for example, if you suffer from heart palpitations, the heart rate data recorded by your Apple Watch can’t be easily linked to the electronic health records (EHRs) kept by your doctor’s office. Your FitBit may be able to sync with your calorie counter, but if you wanted to know how your activity tracked with lab tests your doctor ordered, you’re probably out of luck. The real challenge is getting all of that health information to communicate.
 

 “The data is trapped in silos, and even if you open the silos, it’s kind of a mess,” says Ida Sim, co-founder of a mobile health non-profit and co-director of biomedical informatics at the University of California, San Francisco. “It’s really, really hard to put the data together.”
 
<h2>
 The 1000 Pound Gorilla
 </h2>

 Unfortunately, this is nothing new. In 2004, President George W. Bush appointed David Brailer as the country’s first health information czar to lead the charge from paper to electronic health records. Initially, the program had very little money, but after Brailer’s tenure, this changed with the signing of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act in 2009. Since then, the federal government has spent $28 billion trying to coax health care organizations into adopting EHRs.
 

 It has been a partial success: as of 2013, 59% of hospitals and 48% of physicians were using “basic EHRs.” But even these modest numbers should be interpreted with caution: they are from a report delivered to Congress in October 2014 by the office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the same agency overseeing the government’s efforts in EHRs.
 

 President Barack Obama wants to push EHRs even further. He recently announced the launch of the Precision Medicine Initiative in this year’s State of the Union address and requested $215 million dollars from Congress to fund (among other things) the creation of a database containing the genetic, health, and lifestyle data from one million people. If successful, it would help integrate EHRs with today’s abundance of sensor and genetic data.
 
<aside class="pulledquote">
 The real challenge is getting all of your health information to communicate.
 </aside>

 But former health information czar David Brailer, now the CEO of the investment firm Health Evolution Partners, says, “We have some things to undo if we chose to move in this direction.”
 

 EHRs, even in their simplistic implementation, remain flawed. Different EHR software platforms at different hospitals still don’t play well with one another. The dysfunction may be built into the system: “Allegations continue to surface that some health care providers and health IT developers are interfering with the exchange or use of electronic health information,” says another report from the office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, noting 60 such complaints in the year 2014.
 

 There are exceptions to the rule, and the Million Veteran Program (MVP) is one of them. It launched in 2011 to mine medical information collected from veterans to improve their healthcare. It has already enrolled 345,000 veterans, who have agreed to provide blood, fill out surveys, and allow researchers access to their health records. Some 200,000 veterans have already been genotyped. Andrew Trister, senior physician at Sage Bionetworks called MVP a “tour de force in big data.”
 

 For the rest of the country to follow MVP’s example, Brailer says, “The major priority that the U.S. is returning to now is making that data all connected.” Converting papers to digital is a valiant first step, but when those digital records are trapped wherever they were generated—hospital, pharmacy, or lab—“it simply is not very useful in terms of us understanding the whole picture of care for a person or for a population,” Brailer says. The Precision Medicine Initiative may not be enough to fix the issues that involve vast swaths of the health information technology system—the proposal allocates $5 million toward revamping health IT infrastructure and making sure all EHR systems work together. Brailer estimates that that’s “about $10 billion short.”
 

 “The electronic health record is the 1,000 pound gorilla,” Sim says. “I think we’re going to have a metaphorical deadweight for a long time.”
 
<h2>
 Trapped in Silos
 </h2>

 One way to potentially lift this metaphorical deadweight would be to give patients control over their own records to keep for themselves, or to submit to the research programs of their choice.
 

 There are individual patients who are already collecting this information on their own. Steven Keating, a 26-year-old graduate student in the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, compiled over 70 gigabytes of his medical information and managed to catch the warning signs of his own brain tumor in time to have it removed (which he filmed).
 

 But requiring patients to recover records from every single lab, doctor’s office, urgent care department, and hospital they’ve ever visited isn’t practical. A few medical centers and systems, including Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Kaiser Permanente on the West Coast, are trying to make this process easier by adopting a system called OpenNotes, which allows patients to read what clinicians write about them.
 

 The government has also been working on a similar tool, a so-called “Blue Button” that would give patients electronic access to their health information. The Blue Button is partly a functional tool that allows patients to download details about medical treatment, lab results, and insurance claims, and partly an alert: the circular blue button is supposed to remind patients that they have the right to access and correct their own medical information. At the moment, however, its use is limited to patients with government insurance or private insurance companies such as UnitedHealthCare and Aetna.
 

 The absence of universal patient access to health information has already slowed the extraction of insights from big data’s mine. Sage Bionetworks, which helped develop two of the apps currently hosted on Apple’s ResearchKit platform, had originally hoped to incorporate patient health records. “In 2013, we thought that the Blue Button might lead to a really interesting way for people to provide the types of information that were already being collected at big hospitals,” Trister says. However, he says that Blue Button implementation has been “prolonged,” so Sage shifted its focus, asking “what other kinds of information could people have access to that’s easy in the event that it turns out that the Blue Button doesn’t come around?”
 

 So far, it hasn’t, which led Trister and his colleagues at Sage to the mobile sensor and survey data that can be easily collected from study participants’ mobile devices. As of last week, over 2,400 women had signed up for the breast cancer app, and over 14,000 men and women were enrolled in the Parkinson’s Disease study, according to Trister. Trister said in an email that they are in the process of updating the apps to deliver research insights directly to participants via a newsfeed. And he holds out hope that they will one day link the information collected by sensors and surveys to clinical data. “In the next iteration, I’d be very excited to see integration with things like the electronic medical records,” Trister says. “Having a deeper clinical understanding of what is going on could be helpful.”
 
<h2>
 The Problems of Putting the Data Together
 </h2>

 Apple’s ResearchKit launched in March, and just last month, IBM announced that they’ll be tasking their artificial intelligence system Watson with making sense of patient information that’s connected to IBM’s health cloud.
 

 ResearchKit could become another, larger silo of patient information, but Sim thinks that because ResearchKit is open-source—meaning anyone can access and adapt the underlying code—it may avoid the same fate as the EHRs locked into proprietary systems that can’t easily talk with each other. “It’s open source. It thought very carefully about informed consent and data sharing. I think it’s very respectful to patients and to the participants in this study,” Sim says. “All those things start to create a culture where we’re in it together. We’re asking questions together, we’re exploring together, we’re sharing together so that we can learn together.”
 

 Sharing health information, though, raises a number of potential issues because these kinds of electronic data are primed for privacy invasion. Trister cautions that the data collected off of iPhone sensors could be misapplied by employers, for example, or insurance companies. “That’s where I’m very worried about going out and saying these are perfect surrogates for health. I want them to be, and I hope they are, but at the same time they are so easy to collect, particularly in the space of big data, that there could be—I don’t want to say nefarious reasons—but certainly people could start to collect information off of the phones that lead to all sorts of inferences about health in a way that really could impact somebody in a way it shouldn’t,” Trister says.
 

 Even anonymizing data may not be enough. Genetic information, for example, can be re-associated with a person using publicly available information, according to work published two years ago in the journal
 
 Science
 
 by Columbia professor Yaniv Erlich. “The reason for our study was to highlight that there are gaps in genetic privacy, and we need to advance this discussion about how we can fix and bypass these gaps for the sustainability of genetic research,” Erlich says.
 
<h2>
 The Payoff
 </h2>

 With tech giants like Apple and IBM developing new tools, healthcare may finally be moving toward treating the genetic or environmental cause of an illness, and not just its symptoms—the definition of a “precision medicine,” according to geneticist David Altshuler, executive vice president of global research and chief scientific officer of Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
 

 “In most cases of medical care, we don’t yet know the underlying cause, and the treatments we have to offer are symptomatic,” Altshuler writes in an email. Obama’s initiative takes aim at that first challenge, using large data sets to discover and understand a disease’s underlying cause. But it would be a mistake, Sim says, to anticipate a single, short path to success.
 

 “We’re not going to be coming up with the miracle drug to cure cancer,” Sim says. “I think that the more proper analogy is the way software works, which is agile development,” where incremental changes accumulate over time. It may not seem like much has changed since last year, but changes over the past five years are more significant.
 

 There are exceptions, of course. ResearchKit, Sim says, is a big increment. And putting artificial intelligence Watson to work looking for patterns in huge amounts of patient information may be a big step, too.
 

 But Altshuler adds that collecting health data into one place is just the first step—even after completing the long process of identifying the underlying source of a disease, time and energy will then need to go into creating a cure. Still, many experts seem to think that the investment, if done right, will be worth it. “I cannot guarantee for every person that it will to be transformative for his or her health,” Erlich says. “But in general we like to plant seeds, so if we cannot get the fruit, at least our kids or our grandchildren can get the fruit. This is part of it, that we want a better world.”
 
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tompagenet/7981355/">
 Tom Page/Flickr (CC BY-SA)
 </a>

We’re awash in health information. But to make sense of it, healthcare has to overhaul how it handles data.

Brontosaurus Is Back From the Dead

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 Everyone’s favorite long-necked dinosaur can once again be called Brontosaurus, thanks to a new study released today.
 

 The long and troubled story of the sauropod began in the late 1800s, when paleontologist Othniel Marsh discovered the fossils of two massive, long-necked dinosaurs in Colorado. He named the first one he discovered
 
 Apatosaurus
 
 (deceptive lizard)
 
 ajax
 
 , and the second
 
 Brontosaurus
 
 (thunder lizard)
 
 excelsus
 
 .
 

 The classifications stuck until another fossil was discovered in the early 1900s that was similar, but different, enough from
 
 Apatosaurus
 
 and
 
 Brontosaurus
 
 to make paleontologists rethink the two, eventually combining them into the same genus. In 1903,
 
 Brontosaurus excelsus
 
 became
 
 Apatosaurus excelsus
 
 . That hasn’t stopped children from adopting the dino as their favorite, but technically, the name
 
 Brontosaurus
 
 went extinct, so to speak.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/brontosaurus.width-990_rvVjcZc.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Did you miss me?
 
 </figcaption>
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 Now, an ambitious classification project led by paleontologist Emanuel Tschopp from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal has reinstated
 
 Brontosaurus
 
 as its own genus. The team published their findings earlier today in the journal
 <a href="http://https://peerj.com/articles/857/">
 PeerJ
 </a>
 .
 

 Here’s Ewen Callaway,
 <a href="http://http://www.nature.com/news/beloved-brontosaurus-makes-a-comeback-1.17257">
 reporting for Nature News
 </a>
 :
 
<blockquote>

 Tschopp didn’t set out to resurrect the
 
 Brontosaurus
 
 when he started analysing different specimens of diplodocid — the group to which
 
 Apatosaurus
 
 ,
 
 Diplodocus
 
 and other giants belong. But he was interested in reviewing how the fossils had been classified and whether anatomical differences between specimens represented variation within species, or between species or genera. Tschopp and his colleagues analysed nearly 500 anatomical traits in dozens of specimens belonging to all of the 20 or so species of diplodocids to create a family tree. They spent five years amassing data, visiting 20 museums across Europe and the United States.
 
</blockquote>

 Several other species also either got promoted to their own genus or moved to another existing one, but Brontosaurus steals the show. The endearing and massive vegetarian’s return to its former name and status has brought it back from the dead—taxonomically speaking, at least.
 
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gaizsian/222676562">
 Liam d'Noit / Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
 </a>

Researchers imaged an entire mouse brain to see how a recent encounter with another mouse changed its chemistry.

Your Last Moments May Be Imprinted on Your Brain After Death

Ever close your eyes and have an image burned into your retina? Our brains may do the same thing after we die.


 Scientists have developed a technique that can recreate a 3D map of the cells that were firing in a mouse’s brain a few hours before it died, giving them a high-resolution picture of what was going on in the mouse’s head during life—in this case, when it met a member of the opposite sex. The team of researchers published their results yesterday in the journal Cell Reports.

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 “The work mapping these circuits in the whole mouse brain is quite heroic,” wrote Rafael Yuste in an email. Yuste, professor of biological sciences and neuroscience at Columbia University and a leader of the Brain Activity Map Project that inspired Obama’s BRAIN initiative, was not involved in the study. He cautions that it’s a less than ideal technique since the mouse must be sacrificed in the process—mice won’t sit still long enough for a noninvasive MRI scan.


 “We can take normal mice and have them do complex tasks such as social behavior, and then look throughout the whole brain and identify brain regions that were activated—at cellular resolution,” said Pavel Osten, professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the senior investigator on the study.

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 Using mice modified so their neurons glow green when they fire, the researchers found that, even before any mating or aggression behaviors, the brain regions associated with reproductive behavior, sexual behavior, and aggression light up when a male mouse meets a female mouse. But when a male mouse meets another male mouse, brain regions that control defensive behavior—in addition to the ones that control sexual behavior and aggression—glow.


 Osten’s new methodology, which improves on one he originally published in 2012, automates several different laboratory techniques formerly done by hand, which in this study allowed the researchers to create a map of brain activation from the earliest moments of sensing another animal to the sex-specific behavioral inclinations that evoked. He hopes that it will eventually be able to shed light on how diseases and pharmaceuticals change connections in the brain. Until now, Osten said, “That comparison in animals hasn’t really been possible at all at this kind of unbiased scale.”


 Yuste wrote that detecting fluorescent markers of brain activity after death represents “a step towards future techniques for the full blown mapping of neuronal activity in living brains in real time.”

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 Photo credit: Frances S. Chance/Janelia Farm Research Campus/HHMI/Sandia National Laboratory

Studies of mouse brains after they die reveal the chemical traces of their last encounters.

Our Solar System May Have Two Undiscovered Planets

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 On the outer reaches of our solar system, well past Neptune and Pluto, lurk dozens of asteroids and possible minor planets, dimly lit by the faint glow of our sun. Last week, that strange place got even stranger.
 

 On January 13, scientists from the University of Madrid and the University of Cambridge announced that the eccentricities of some of the farthest objects might be explained by the gravitational pull of two large bodies—in other words, undiscovered planets.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/etnos-jpl-caltech-image-e1421874263232.width-990_BOJZyM5.jpg"/>
<figcaption>New calculations suggest that two undiscovered planets may lurk at the edge of our solar system.
 
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 The team faces an uphill battle to add them to our solar system’s familiar roster. David Wilson, writing for Astrobites, urges caution:
 
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 The calculations suggesting the existence of unseen planets is based on observations of only 13 KBOs [Kuiper Belt Objects], few enough that the clustering could be down to simple chance. If future observations find many more KBOs that don’t fit the pattern, then the case for missing planets will disappear. If, on the other hand, they do match what has already been seen, then their behaviour could be used to narrow down the locations of the unseen super-Earths, giving future astronomers the information they need to find them.
 
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 The authors of the study—who published their results in two papers, one just this month, and an earlier one in September, in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society—agree that their conclusions are limited by a small sample size, but conclude their earlier paper with the argument that “the same trends are found for asteroids and comets,” and their results are unlikely to be due to Neptune’s gravitational pull or to observational bias.
 

 Fortunately, this all may be sorted out by the New Horizons spacecraft, which is scheduled to buzz Pluto this summer. The data it beams back could shed light on these mysterious gravitational forces.
 
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 Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

R.A. Becker

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