Month: April 2018

International scientists have identified 44 genetic variants that can increase the risk of developing major depression and found that all humans carry at least some of them.

The new findings could help explain why not everyone treated with antidepressants sees their condition improve, the scientists said, and point the way towards new medicines.

In the largest study of its kind, scientists also found that the genetic basis for depression is shared with other psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and that a number of the variants are linked to the targets of antidepressant drugs.

Major depression affects around 14 percent of people worldwide and is the biggest contributor to long-term disability in the general population. Yet only about half of patients respond well to existing treatments.

“The new genetic variants discovered have the potential to revitalize depression treatment by opening up avenues for the discovery of new and improved therapies,” said Gerome Breen of King’s College London, who worked on the research team.

The study was a global effort, with data covering more than 135,000 patients with major depression and around 344,000 controls as comparisons.

“This study has shed a bright light on the genetic basis of depression, but it is only the first step,” said Cathryn Lewis, another King’s College London expert who worked on the study.

“We need further research to uncover more of the genetic underpinnings, and to understand how genetics and environmental stressors work together to increase risk of depression.”

 
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Scientists in Kenya believe they have discovered a new way to combat malaria. As Faith Lapidus reports, a common medication, already used to treat a host of illnesses, makes people’s blood poisonous to the anopheles mosquito, which spreads the deadly disease.
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The U.S. House approved a bill Wednesday that would reverse a federal judge’s order to spill more water from four Pacific Northwest dams to help migrating salmon reach the Pacific Ocean.

The bill, approved 225-189, would prevent any changes in dam operations until 2022. It was sponsored by Republican Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Dan Newhouse, both of Washington state. 

They say the four Snake River dams provide hydropower, flood control and other benefits while already allowing record salmon runs.

 “We are recognizing the role dams play in the Northwest and that dams and fish can co-exist,” McMorris Rodgers, the fourth-ranking House Republican, said after the vote.

Critics, however, blame the giant dams, built in the 1960s and 1970s, for killing wild salmon, an iconic species in the Northwest. Environmentalists have pushed to remove the dams to aid salmon recovery.

The bill now goes to the Senate.

“I urge my colleagues in the Senate to come forward and support our dams,” Newhouse said.

Once one of the greatest salmon fisheries in the world, the Columbia-Snake river system now has more than a dozen endangered salmon runs.

Democrats have argued that on-going studies of the dams, including whether they should be removed, must go forward.

The four dams — Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite — span the Snake River between the Washington cities of Pasco and Pullman. Together they produce about 4 percent of the region’s electricity.

Proposals to remove the dams have percolated in the Northwest for decades, and have devolved into a largely partisan issue with Democrats generally on the side of fish and Republicans for keeping the dams.

The government has spent some $15 billion over the decades to increase salmon runs, with mixed results.

In March 2017, U.S. District Judge Michael Simon of Portland, Oregon, ordered the dams to increase spillage beginning this spring. Federal agencies estimated that increasing spill from early April to mid-June would cost ratepayers $40 million in lost power revenues this year.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld Simon’s order.

The dams operate under a plan to protect salmon created by a collaboration of federal agencies, states and Indian tribes during the Obama administration.

Simon found the plan does not do enough. He ruled a new environmental study is needed and it must consider the option of removing the dams. He also wrote that wild salmon were in a “precarious” state.

McMorris Rodgers countered that the number of salmon returning from the ocean to spawn is high.

“We have been in court now for 20 years,” McMorris Rodgers said.

The House bill would delay changes to the 2014 plan for dam operations until 2022, she said.

“The experts … should be the ones deciding how to best manage this system,” Newhouse said. “Not a judge in Portland, Oregon.”

Northwest RiverPartners, which represents a group of river users, hailed the bill as good news for salmon.

Salmon “will continue to benefit from protections that are already working,” director Terry Flores said.

But environmental groups were dismayed by the bill.

“This legislation ensures that we continue on the same costly, ineffective path that has seen continued declines in wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest,” the environmental groups said in a joint press release.

The bill “would push salmon closer to extinction,” they contend.
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It’s a punchline that sends every 12-year-old boy into a fit of giggles. Now it has been proven to be true. Uranus stinks!

Scientists using a huge telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano found the seventh planet from the sun is surrounded by clouds made up of hydrogen sulfide, the gas that smells like rotten eggs and bad flatulence.

The study by scientists from the California Institute of Technology, University of Oxford and the University of Leicester was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“If an unfortunate human were ever to descend through Uranus’ clouds they would be met with very unpleasant and odiferous conditions,” Patrick Irwin of the University of Oxford wrote.

Not that they would live long enough to sniff it. “Suffocation and exposure in the negative 200 degrees Celsius atmosphere made of mostly hydrogen, helium and methane would take its toll long before the smell,” Irwin wrote.

Despite previous observations by ground telescopes and the Voyager 2 spacecraft, scientists had failed to determine the composition of Uranus’ atmosphere.

The new data was obtained by using a spectrometer on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. It should help scientists better understand the formation of Uranus and other outer planets.
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A customer from Beijing and one from Hong Kong walk into Starbucks. A chair blocks the path between the counter and their seats. Who of the two moves the chair?

It’s not a joke. It’s a psychology experiment, designed to test the long-lasting imprints of a culture’s agrarian past.

A new study in the journal Science Advances says that over thousands of years, rice farmers in southern China have evolved a culture of interdependence not found in northern, wheat-growing parts of the country. 

The authors say those influences persist even in China’s modern, relatively wealthy cities, among people who have never farmed. And they show up in how people behave in their daily lives — even as they navigate their local coffee shop.

Rice theory

The study found people were much less likely to move the Starbucks chair in southern China, where rice has been the staple crop for thousands of years, than those in the wheat-farming north.

According to what the researchers call the “rice theory of culture,” growing rice demands more cooperation than growing most other crops. Neighbors in rice-farming villages have to coordinate when they will flood and drain their paddies, for example.

And since rice requires about twice as much labor as wheat, rice-growing villagers often share the workload.

Over the centuries, people developed “folkways and habits of thoughts and behavior norms that, once they’re established, you’re not even thinking, ‘I’m doing this because I’m a rice farmer.’ If you’re thinking about it at all, you’re thinking about it as, ‘I’m doing this because I’m a good person. Because that’s how I was raised. Because that’s what they talk about in school,’ ” said psychologist Andrew Ryder at Concordia University in Montreal, who was not part of the research team.

Moving the chairs

To test their theory, University of Chicago psychologist Thomas Talhelm and colleagues went to Starbucks in five cities: Beijing and Shenyang in the wheat-growing north; and Guangzhou, Shanghai and Hong Kong in the rice-growing south.

They chose the Western coffee chain for its uniformity, introducing fewer variables in the environment that might complicate the results.

Researchers put two chairs a hip’s width apart in high-traffic aisles and watched how customers got past them.

In southern China, almost everyone squeezed through them. Just 6 percent moved a chair.

In the north, on the other hand, 16 percent were chair-movers.

“Previous research has found that when people in independent cultures like the United States encounter a problem, they’re more likely to want to change the environment to solve that problem,” Talhelm said. “But when people in interdependent cultures like Japan encounter problems, they’re more likely to try to fit [themselves] into the environment.”

Moving the chair rather than squeezing past it suggests a more independent mindset, he said.

The study also found northerners were more likely than southerners to sit alone: There were about 10 percent more singletons in northern Starbucks shops compared with southern ones during the week, and about 5 percent more on weekends.

Modernization

Talhelm said the findings go against the common theory that “as areas become more wealthy, more modernized [and] more urbanized, people become more individualistic or more Western.”

Even in Hong Kong, among the wealthiest, most modern and most urban cities in China, chair-movers were rare and few people sat alone.

“People’s farming legacies seem to be more important than GDP in explaining their behavior,” he added.

The researchers also checked population density, age, gender, climate and disease presence. Nothing explained the results as well as the rice versus wheat split.

The findings fit with a different type of study Talhelm and colleagues did that tested students on measures of thinking style. They found the same cultural differences between rice-growing regions and wheat-growing regions, even among students from rice-growing or wheat-growing regions of the same county.

The rice theory had been “floating around for quite a long time,” Ryder said, but “I think people hadn’t even necessarily expected that it would be all that testable.” 

Now, he noted, several studies from different approaches are converging on the same results. 

And, he added, it’s an important reminder that China is not a cultural monolith. No country is.

“Get away from ‘one country equals one culture,’ ” he said.

Next, Talhelm is testing the theory in India, another country with a rice/wheat split. 
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The World Health Organization is joining a worldwide call to stop a resurgence of malaria that threatens much of the progress made over the past decade. To mark World Malaria Day, WHO is pushing for urgent action – and money – to get the global fight against this ancient scourge back on track.

For many years, World Malaria Day has been a cause for celebration, but not this year.  World Health Organization data show that starting in 2016  progress has been at a standstill and hopes of ending the global epidemic by 2030 are slipping away.

Watch: Fears Grow Over Malaria Resurgence, London Summit Urges Global Action

Director of WHO’s Global Malaria Program, Pedro Alonso, says some of the gains made in reducing the number of cases and deaths in countries across all regions of the world are being reversed.

“As a consequence, we now have about 260 million cases of malaria every year, in excess of 440,000 deaths every year…13:52…History has told us very clearly that when we stop making progress, it is not that we just stand still, but we go backwards and then malaria comes back, and comes back with a vengeance,” Alonso said. 

About 90 percent of all malaria cases and deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa.  Children under the age of five, pregnant women and patients with HIV-AIDS are most at risk.

Alonso says global political commitment must be renewed and donors and affected countries must increase the financial resources needed to successfully tackle malaria. 

“And, we need new and improved tools to prevent, diagnose and treat malaria,” Alonso said. “Our sense is that with the resources available today and with the tools we have today, we have seen the limit of what can be achieved.”  

The issue of malaria’s resurgence came up on the sidelines of a Commonwealth summit in London this month, where Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates  who has invested billions of dollars in fighting malaria  pledged yet another one billion dollars to the effort.

WHO estimates $5.5 billion are needed each year to wage a successful global fight against malaria.  However, only about half that amount has been pledged.

Vector control is the main way to prevent and reduce the spread of malaria.  Alonso says better insecticides, better insecticide-treated mosquito nets as well as better drugs are essential in combating the disease.

 
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The theme of this year’s World Malaria Day, Wednesday April 25th, is Ready to Beat Malaria. Along with medical advances, beating the disease will take money. After sixteen years of steady decline, malaria cases are on the rise again globally, and experts warn that unless efforts to tackle the disease are stepped up, the gains could be lost. Henry Ridgwell reports from a malaria summit earlier this month in London, where delegates called for a boost in funding for global anti-malarial programs.
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