science – The Daily Opinion

Researchers Reveal Giant Glacier Melt Rate

As scientists try to establish a realistic prediction for how much sea levels can be expected to rise globally, a new set of results yielded from a new study in Antarctica have revealed how the continent’s longest glacier is being melted by the warm ocean flowing beneath it, at a rapid rate.

The Pine Island Glacier – measuring an impressive 31 miles long – has always been of great interest and eager scientists are finally able to monitor its behaviour more closely after the first successful research trip to the treacherous ice sheet.

Although it has been known since the end of the 1980s that the ice shelf is melting from beneath, its remote and tricky location had made it an impenetrable site. “In my 35 years doing fairly large oceanographic projects, the Pine Island Glacier one tops it in terms of its complexity and challenge,” said Professor Tim Stanton, the leader of the research team.

“But it’s clear that it’s very important to understand how these massive ice shelves are influenced by changes in the ocean. These observations will provide the basis for improving global climate models.”

An expedition in 2007 saw the first successful attempt to land on the Antarctic’s fastest flowing glacier, after determined efforts by the team to navigate the wind-whipped area. However, the trip ended in disappointment when logistical problems forced them to abandon their efforts for the much-needed research.

This was followed by a further attempt in 2011, which was thwarted by bad weather conditions. The team reached their location too late in the season and were left unable to carry out their investigations.

Finally in the December of 2012, the team of international scientists – including NASA and the British Antarctic Survey- finally embarked upon a fully-successful trip, installing the necessary instruments to generate the much longed-for results.

This trip was again repeated in January of 2013 and these long-anticipated expeditions created three new research camps which were set up in the centre of the glacier. Now finally, scientists have been able to establish specific measurements relating to its deterioration.

Drilling down into at least 450m of ice, using hot-water drills, the team installed a set of instruments below the shell. They were able to generate readings relating to both the speed and temperature of the water flowing beneath – measurements which previous satellite readings and airborne data had been unable to offer accurate results for.

The full paper, published in Science, describes the team’s studies and reveals just how severe the melting is. At some places, the rate is as high as 6 centimetres (2.36 inches) per day- equating to approximately 22 metres (72 feet) per year.

“What we have brought to the table are detailed measurements of melt rates that will allow simple physical models of the melting processes to be plugged into computer models of the coupled ocean/glacier system,” Stanton explained.

“These improved models are critical to our ability to predict future changes in the ice shelf, and glacier melt rates of the potentially unstable Western Antarctic Ice Sheet in response to changing ocean forces.”

It’s Chocolate Time…Yay!

That’s right, now nobody should feel guilty when throwing a kilogram of chocolate down their necks because scientists have supposedly discovered that those who eat the most chocolate are actually the thinnest people in our society. Chocolate makes you thin? Huzzah!

This is something I was sceptical about at first because my first thought was that those who are thinnest will eat the most chocolate because they know it won’t make them fat. However, a fat person wouldn’t touch the stuff through fear of giving themselves a third butt cheek.

The study was published in the journal of the Archives of Internal Medicine and outlined a study carried out by the University of California, in San Diego, and came to the conclusion that chocolate makes you thin.

As for the exact results, it showed that of a study involving just under 1,000 Americans, those who ate chocolate a few times a week were thinner, on average, than those who only ate chocolate on occasion. The study looked at a number of factors when putting together these results, including diet, Body Mass Index (BMI), and calorie intake.

Scientists are putting these results down to the fact chocolate doesn’t encourage the creation of fat, despite the fact that it has a lot of calories. Even though these results only prove that there might be a link, it could lead to a complete change in the way we view weight gain and weight loss when it comes to food.

Chocolate has also been demonstrated by scientists to have some other benefits for the body, other than the urge to eat more. One of these benefits comes from dark chocolate, which contains many antioxidants that can help fight disease and get rid of the harmful free radicals in our body that harm our cells.

But this shouldn’t be new for those who have looked into the subject at all because this was discovered long before this study came to light. The Raw Food Movement were the ones who first came up with this when a book called The China Study was released. They demonstrated that mass amounts of sugar in things like chocolate and fruit doesn’t have a negative effect on one’s weight at all.

This means that chocolate doesn’t contribute to weight gain – otherwise how could it be possible for people to live entirely off of sugary fruits and vegetables? Even though this is only just coming to light in mainstream science now, what we have to remember is that this has already been touched upon in the basement of global science many times before. Yes, chocolate makes you thin, but it will be a long time before it’s made official in the mainstream world.

Are Genes Linked to Obesity?

Although people have long scoffed at those suffering from obesity who claim they are overweight because of their genes, there might be something to it after all. “How?”, you might be asking. Scientists have actually discovered how a faulty gene may lead to obesity.

The study in Nature Medicine was conducted on mice and discovered that the body’s traditional message of “Please…for the love of all that is holy…please put down the cake” can be blocked if the mutation is found in animals.

This message is blocked because the appetite hormones have been disrupted by the faulty gene. The Georgetown University Medical Center has said that they hope this will lead to new ways of controlling weight. But pseudo scientists like me believe that it will help disgustingly obese people claim that they ate their twelfth burger of the week because their genes made them that way.

In truth, there are many genes which are thought to have an impact on one’s weight, such as the neurotrophic factor gene (BDNF), which is derived from the brain. However, a lot of these studies have only been tested on animals like mice and rats which don’t have exactly the same genes as us. The human studies are still fairly thin so everything has to be taken with some scepticism.

The mice used were actually genetically modified to have the faulty genes, and it was shown that the mice spent most of their time eating. To put this into perspective because not many of us will have seen an obese mouse before, the mice consumed an additional 80% of food; so pretty much more than their own body weight, many times over.

Generally, the way a healthy body should work is that after a meal has been completed the hormones known as leptin and insulin should inform the brain that the body is full, but with the mutated gene the hormones in the blood were passing the message to the wrong part of the brain.

Professor Baoji Xu, who worked on the study, said that it’s because the neurons can’t communicate with each other so the leptin and the insulin can’t do their jobs correctly.

Ok, so far we have been very kind to overweight people because this may give them an excuse, but, just as God promised Moses a land flowing with milk and honey only to not let him in when he reached the border, it’s this writer’s sad duty to tell you that it’s a prominent disease in mice but not in humans. So this research is only going to be any good for treating overweight people by stimulating an increased amount of the hormone.

But, hey, maybe things like this will lead to a time where we don’t have to bother exercising to keep weight off anymore? A man can dream.

Bear…Regenerate!

One part of popular games like Call of Duty that has us scratching our heads is how the characters are able to initiate their magic powers and begin regenerating wounds in humans after being shot by a bullet just by hiding outside of combat. But there’s also a real life way to do it too. Bears have apparently mastered this, according to a study completed in the US.

It was reported that medical researchers and zoologists from the University of Minnesota, the University of Wyoming, and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources came together to publish the findings in the journal Integrative Zoology.

Their findings came as a result of a 25-year study carried out on 1,000 tracked black bears. They found that any wounds a bear sustained healed with little scarring and had absolutely no signs of infection at all. This was a process which happened in full during the hibernation process where a bear’s heart beat, metabolism, and body temperature will dramatically decrease; some bears will even have a heart rate of around 9 beats per minute.

Now, you don’t need a scientist to tell you that the point of this is to try and discover the secrets of the bear in order to gain the same skill to begin regenerating wounds in humans. But the scientists who were explaining this said the point of this study was geared towards healing infection-prone wounds in patients who are either malnourished or diabetic.

The researchers reported that bears who had gunshot wounds, arrow wounds, or wounds from other animals often became infected or inflamed by early winter. But, as if by magic, when the bears emerged from their hibernation process in the spring the wounds were healed and there were barely any signs of scarring.

What was even more surprising is the fact that after many months of hibernation the bears hadn’t lost any muscle mass or any fat either. Clearly bears have something special about them which could be useful to humans. And, no, it’s not going to be how to stay fat without eating.

Of course, this has massive implications for medical research because if humans can isolate whatever gives the bear their remarkable healing capabilities then it may be able to be translated into some form of drug to give humans their own healing capabilities.

We all know that the scientists said it was designed to aid those humans who have a significantly reduced capability to heal their own wounds, but, let’s be honest, it can be used for all humans. We could end up seeing it in the military and it might even become as common as morphine. Although don’t expect to be seeing any bear healing hormones for regenerating wounds in humans on the market for a very long time yet.

Hey, Fatty, Are You Going to Be Having Kids?

Scientists have discovered that it’s not just the excessive rolls of fat that mean fat people are less likely to find a woman to have kids with. Rather, it’s the saturated fat in food which is leading to lower sperm counts amongst men.

The Harvard Medical School in Boston carried out the experiment under the stewardship of Professor Jill Attaman. The study asked 99 men questions about their diet and analysed their sperm samples over four years.The results of the study showed that of the 99 men in the study, those with the highest fat intake had 43% less sperm than normal at the end of the study. And even more bad news showed that at the end of the study the concentration of the sperm, measured via number of sperm per unit volume of semen, was down by 38%.

The study, reported in the scientific journal Human Reproduction, revealed these results, but everyone involved in the study is saying that more research needs to be done before any conclusions can be made.The men who ate the most omega-3-rich foods had a conventional structure when it came to the shape of the sperm, but the important thing to take into account was that 71% of the 99 men were already overweight or obese anyway. So this could have had an impact on the sperm even before the study had begun.But like with many of these studies which seem to be appearing at the moment, they all seem to have used very small research groups. Is it because they couldn’t find more people to masturbate into a jar every so often for the next four years? If this is the case then they should either be promoting their cause more or paying their volunteers because 99 men where 71% are already obese is not a study that can be taken very seriously.If the study was designed to discover whether high levels of saturated fat caused a reduction of sperm in men or not then surely they should have used people who lived on relatively healthy diets. This would show comprehensively whether it reduced the number of sperm or not. But if they also wanted to know how much it was reduced by then they should have used an equal number of healthy and unhealthy people when it came to the study.

As for this writer’s own personal study on whether people who eat more saturated fat (by implication, fat people) will have a lower chance of conceiving a child or not then a conclusion has been found. To conceive a child you need a woman, and everybody knows that fat guys generally do finish last in this category.All I need is the warm, fatty embrace of these sausagey buns.

So science may not have discovered whether high levels of saturated fat actually do cause a reduction in the amount of sperm yet, but this writer’s study has definitely brought up some comprehensive results.

Accept the Damn Organ!

Anti-rejection drugs, which are used when an organ transplant is completed, may go out of use with a newly-discovered cellular principle. Hooray!

In the past, when one accepted an organ it was a hassle to get the body to accept it. So the patient would have to take immunosuppressive drugs to keep the organ from being rejected. But the problem with this was that the drugs would either have horrible side-effects or would just stop working. And this is all before we get to the price which Suzanne Ildstadthe, Director for the Institute for Cellular Therapeutics at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, outlines as roughly $25,000 per year in the US.

Now, this is clearly due to the fact that the US operates a terrible health care system where only the rich can afford the necessary treatment, but even in the UK this would still cost the NHS a massive amount of money; and all of this is paid for by us through our taxes.

The trial discovered this involved taking a number of patients and reducing a great many of their immune cells, which was done through radiation and chemotherapy. They then implanted the donated organ, from a genetically mismatched donor, and then implemented bone marrow alongside the organ. The hope was that because bone marrow can produce immune cells from the donor’s genetic code and the patient’s genetic code would “blend” so the chance of organ rejection would be significantly reduced. In this test it was all about testing kidney transplantation.

The study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine demonstrated that 7 out of 10 patients used in this trial could be successfully taken off of immunosuppressive drugs. This is great, right?

Well, for the most part this is great. The only issue with this way of transplanting organs is that it still retains the patient’s chances of suffering from graft-versus-host disease, or GVHD as the disease is most commonly known.

GVHD is where the donor’s immune cells actually attack the body it’s being placed in, like if you dropped a group of chavs into another city whilst they were sleeping; hey, they are simplistic, they can’t help it. However, another study did show that the removal of these cells which were likely to cause GVHD did help in preventing the disease. The only problem is that the results of the study were considered to be inconclusive in the long-term because GVHD can appear years later.

Placing this in an overall perspective, essentially what we have done here is replaced another human’s immune system. If we can successfully replace parts of human beings on a cellular level then who knows what this could lead to in the future?

Yes, it would mean that thousands of patients wouldn’t be waiting on hospital beds until a successful donor could be found, but it could mean the death of many more ailments. If undifferentiated cells, from bone marrow, can be successfully differentiated into cells of the scientist’s choice then we could eliminate things like deafness, blindness, and maybe even learn to regenerate entire limbs.

The only issue with all of this is when we eventually ascend to this scientific plane we may even be getting close to the concept of immortality as everybody’s lifespan starts to reach the 100 mark. Of course, none of this is likely to appear in our lifetimes, but the future of science after we are gone is certainly very bright.