Malaria in Burma. Photo by Tom Stoddart Archive/via Getty Images

Traditional herbal medicine pharmacist Youyou Tu has become the 12th woman and China’s first person awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work in discovering the malaria drug artemisinin. She split the award with two other scientists, William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura, who developed avermectin, a major treatment for the roundworm parasites that cause river blindness and lymphatic filariasis. The awards were announced this morning in Stockholm by Urban Lendahl, Secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine.

During the early days of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, the Chinese government ran a secret military project, dubbed Project 523, to eliminate malaria. The disease was endemic to the region at the time, especially China’s ally, North Vietnam. Drug resistance to the disease’s primary remedy, chloroquine, had sprouted in both Southeast Asia and South America. Close to 20 million people caught the mosquito-borne parasite in China that decade.

Tu was appointed director of Project 523 in 1969, and rather than sift through modern chemicals for a treatment, she scanned ancient Chinese texts for possible herbal remedies for malaria. The earliest description for the parasitic blood disorder comes from Chinese medical texts dating to 2,700 BCE. She found one promising candidate in a 2,000-year-old document that described how sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) could heal malaria.

Her team used chemical extraction to ultimately discover artemisinin. This drug is now given to 400 million people per year across the globe. In China, artemisinin has helped cut the incidence of malaria from 24 million in the early 1970s to tens of thousands by the late 1990s.

“When used in combination therapy, [artemisinin] is estimated to reduce mortality from malaria by more than 20 percent overall and by more than 30 percent in children,” the Nobel committee wrote in a statement. “For Africa alone, this means that more than 100,000 lives are saved each year.” However, drug resistance to artemisinin has surfaced in Southeast Asia in recent years.

Mosquito. Photo by Janos Csongor Kerekes/via Getty Images

In the mid-1970s, Japanese microbiologist Satoshi Ōmura found the key to treating river blindness underfoot. He traveled around Japan collecting soil samples in the hopes of finding a natural product to combat disease-causing microbes. The breakthrough came in 1974, when Ōmura identified the bacteria Streptomyces avermitilis, which was a potent killer of helminth worms. These worms afflicted hundreds of millions through conditions like river blindness (onchocerciasis) and lymphatic filariasis, which causes elephantiasis.

“I humbly accept it, I’m very surprised,” Ōmura said Monday morning, after being notified of the award by Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer of Nobel Media, and later added, “I did good things, but there are many, many good researchers in the world.”

Satoshi Ōmura reacts to winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Campbell, an expert in parasite biology, would later extract the compound avermectin from Streptomyces avermitilis bacteria, leading to the development ivermectin. This drug would become one of the most potent anti-worm medications ever created. Produced under the brand name Mectizan, the drug has been offered free of charge by the drug company Merck since 1987.

Close to 100 million Mectizan prescriptions are given across the globe each year, and the drug has led to the local eradication of worm-borne diseases, like river blindness, in much of South America and parts of Africa.

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Aerial view of Mallows Bay in Maryland, one of the two new designated marine sanctuaries announced by President Barack Obama via a video message Monday during the second annual Our Ocean conference in Chile. Photo by Don Shomette via NOAA

VALPARAISO, Chile — President Barack Obama declared new marine sanctuaries in Lake Michigan and the tidal waters of Maryland on Monday, while Chile blocked off more than 200,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean near the world-famous Easter Island from commercial fishing and oil and gas exploration.

The announcements came as top officials, including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, attended an international conference on marine protection in the Chilean port city of Valparaiso. Several nations also outlined plans for tracing seafood imports to combat overfishing and stemming increased pollution in the ocean.

The new protected waters in the United States are the first to be designated as such in 15 years, the White House said in a statement.

The 875-square mile area of Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan extends from Port Washington to Two Rivers, containing a collection of 39 known shipwrecks. Fifteen are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Mallows Bay-Potomac River in Maryland encompasses a 14-square mile area of the tidal Potomac River next to Charles County. Nearly 200 vessels, some dating to the Revolutionary War, are found in the largely undeveloped area that provides habitat for endangered species of wildlife and fish.

The actions are the latest in a series of environmental steps by Obama, who last year set aside some 400,000 square miles of the central Pacific Ocean from commercial fishing, deep sea mining and other forms of resource extraction. The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument is now the largest marine reserve in the world.

In a videotaped message to conference participants, Obama recalled his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia and said he always maintained “a special love for the ocean.”

Video by The White House

“Our economies, our livelihoods and our food all depend on our oceans,” he said, “and yet we know that our actions are changing them. Greenhouse gas emissions are making our seas warmer and more acidic. Marine pollution harms fish and wildlife, affecting the entire food chain. Illegal fishing depletes the world’s fisheries.”

Obama said he would seek to protect more American waters in the coming months.

Chile made its own ambitious declaration, cordoning off a vast expanse of the South Pacific Ocean.

President Michelle Bachelet said the new marine park would protect the ancestral species of Rapa Nui, the name used by the native Polynesians of Easter Island, which is celebrated for its hundreds of human statues carved out of volcanic rock. She was joined by representatives of the island, who clapped their hands and sang after the announcement was made.

Bachelet called it the third-largest protected marine zone worldwide.

Britain, Gabon, Kiribati, New Zealand and Palau have taken steps as well to protect sections of the sea in recent months.

The “Our Ocean” conference also targeted marine pollution resulting from discarded plastics and increasing levels of ocean acidification, which damages coral reefs and shellfish populations. Such concerns are shared by the U.S., which imports 90 percent of the fish it consumes, and Chile, whose coastline of almost 2,500 miles is vital to the economy.

To address overfishing, the Obama administration announced a global initiative, “Sea Scout,” to identify unregulated and unreported activity, and help prosecute illegal fishing organizations. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is expanding a program for detecting boats that use lights to attract fishery catch at night and will implement it in Indonesia, the Philippines and three other countries next year.

The “traceability” initiative is supposed to start for the most commonly exported fish species such as tuna, cod, shrimp and crab in September 2016. It would apply to all fish a year later and is designed to provide a full accounting of where exporters are getting their catch and whether they are operating in a sustainable manner. Anyone who wants to export fish to the United States would have to adhere to the conditions. The program needs final approval from the U.S. Senate and several additional countries before entering into force.

“There is literally too much money chasing too much fish,” Kerry told the conference. A third of the world’s fish stocks are over-exploited, he said, calling overfishing a $10 billion-a-year industry.

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Torn between identities – tau-, electron- or myon-neutrino? Photo by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

What’s the “flavor” of a neutrino, and does it change? For their work in discovering the answer to this question, Takaaki Kajita of University of Tokyo and Arthur B. McDonald of Queen’s University in Canada have now won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Their discoveries offered the first insights into the nature of what some people call the “chameleons of particle physics.” And by doing so, we might one day be able to send communications through the Earth’s core or independently track illegal nuclear proliferation.

“As it turns out, I did not mind,” said Arthur B. McDonald on being awoken by a phone call from the Nobel committee in Stockholm. The prize was announced by Göran K. Hansson, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Open your hand right now and then close it into a fist. You’re now holding some neutrinos, though they won’t sit there for long. Neutrinos are subatomic particles created by the radioactive decay of elements, and they’re everywhere. Aside from light particles, neutrinos are the second-most abundant particles in the universe.

Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald’s reactions to winning the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics.

“Many neutrinos are created in reactions between cosmic radiation and the Earth’s atmosphere. Others are produced in nuclear reactions inside the sun. Thousands of billions of neutrinos are streaming through our bodies each second,” the Nobel committee wrote in a statement. (Don’t worry, neutrinos are harmless.)

Neutrinos are elementary to the fabric of the universe, but little is known about them. Since scientists developed the theoretical concept of neutrinos 80 years ago, the quantum particles have remained one of physics’ most elusive targets.

Kajita cracked part of the code around the turn of the millenia. In 1998, he presented the first convincing evidence that neutrinos can change “flavors” (or states).

Neutrinos come in three flavors: electron, muon or tau. Kajita showed that muon-neutrinos — which are created when cosmic rays from space interact with our atmosphere — disappeared before reaching a detector on the surface of the planet at the Super-Kamiokande observatory in Japan.

“Super-Kamiokande is a gigantic detector built 1,000 metres below the Earth’s surface. It consists of a tank, 40 metres high and as wide, filled with 50,000 tonnes of water. The water is so pure that light beams can travel 70 metres before their intensity is halved, compared to just a few metres in an ordinary swimming pool,” The Nobel committee wrote. “Every now and then, a neutrino collides with an atomic nucleus or an electron in the water. These collisions create charged particles – muons from muon-neutrinos and electrons from electron-neutrinos. Around the charged particles, faint flashes of blue light are generated. This is Cherenkov light, which arises when a particle travels faster than the speed of light. The shape and intensity of the Cherenkov light reveals what type of neutrino it is caused by, and from where it comes.” Photo by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

But this disappearance wasn’t a regular Houdini act. The muons switched from their original identities into tau neutrinos. This observation was important because it suggested that neutrinos aren’t static, but oscillate. The discovery provided the first hint that neutrinos have mass, giving the particles some much needed identity.

McDonald would later back the idea of neutrino oscillation by examining the sun. It was a long-held belief that electron-type neutrinos from our Sun vanished on their journey to Earth. In contrast, McDonald’s team observed electron-type neutrinos converted into muon- or tau-neutrinos, thanks to recordings at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, Canada over the course of 2001 and 2002.

So why should you care? What are the practical applications?

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Since neutrinos pass through solid objects, they could be used to send messages through the Earth, which would dramatically speed up global communications. The oscillations of the particles could be used as a way to encode the message. A group of scientists at the University of Rochester and North Carolina State University have already shown that neutrinos can communicate a message through 790 feet of stone. Also, nuclear reactors emit neutrinos, so weapons watchdogs might use these particles to detect nuclear proliferation. (The Boston Globe has an excellent rundown of the practical applications of neutrinos and their feasibility.)

Yet the impact of Kajita’s and McDonald’s work becomes most apparent in the field of astrophysics. Together, their discoveries expand our fundamental understanding of our sun, which gives life to everything on the planet, but also the universe at large. By catching the chameleons of particle physics, their work makes it easier to spot exploding stars in distant galaxies or to understand how planet cores stay warm.

“This year’s prize highlights a seriously important step in our understanding of the fundamental particles of the universe, and one that has improved our understanding of both particle physics and cosmology,” said Robert G.W. Brown, CEO of the American Institute of Physics said in a statement.

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Tomas Lindahl (left), Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar split the 2015 Nobel Prize in chemistry for mechanistic studies of DNA repair. Illustrations by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Damage to your DNA is unavoidable. Every day our cells are bombarded by gene-splitting UV radiation or chemical carcinogens. Regular water inside our bodies can cause DNA damage. DNA damage is as natural as waking up. Changes to our genes form the basis of evolution, but too many can cause fatal diseases, like cancer.

Yet our cells aren’t passive victims. This year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar — three scientists who helped unravel how our cells fight back. The discoveries were crucial to our understanding of hereditary disorders and cancer.

“This story has unraveled step by step, and the enormous importance has become more clear in recent years,” said Göran K. Hansson, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, who presented the prize this morning in Stockholm.

Lindahl, Modrich and Sancar exposed three different ways — or mechanisms — of natural DNA repair.

DNA replication explainer. DNA is like a long railroad track with base pairs as the individual rails. When a cell multiplies, it has machinery that unzips your DNA, splits the individual rails, and then tries to make copies of each side of the original tracks. Illustration by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Lindahl’s work came in the early 1970s, while he was investigating how fast our DNA decays.

“Lindahl estimated that there were thousands of potentially devastating injuries to the genome every day, a frequency that was clearly incompatible with human existence on Earth,” the Nobel committee wrote in an explainer.

Since life on Earth hasn’t devolved into a pile of mutated mush, Lindhal and his team suspected that cells in our bodies must have a method for repairing their DNA. By studying bacteria, these researchers discovered that DNA has a weakness where one of its base pairs — the characters in the genetic code — is easily mutated. Even normal water inside our cells can chemically react with DNA base pairs on a regular basis to trigger mutations. Lindhal’s team found a bacterial enzyme that excises and repairs these damaged links. This process was ultimately dubbed base excision repair.

Base excision repair. Illustration by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Turkish scientist Aziz Sancar expanded this field by looking at how the environment influences DNA. His work would ultimately explain why tanning booths or too much time at the beach can be hazardous for your skin cells.

Sancar’s studies uncovered nucleotide excision repair, or the tools that cells use to repair DNA damaged by UV light. His investigation began as a graduate student at University of Texas in Dallas, where he isolated an enzyme in 1976 called photolyase that fixed DNA harmed by UV light. His early work was largely overlooked, and after failing to land a post-doctoral position, he joined a lab at Yale University as a technician.

Photolyase requires light to work, but Sancar’s colleagues at Yale were working with three genes for DNA repair that only work in the dark. The genes went by uvrA, uvrB and uvrC.

“Within a few years he had managed to identify, isolate and characterise the enzymes coded by the genes uvrA, uvrB and uvrC,” the Nobel committee wrote. “In ground-breaking…experiments he showed that these enzymes can identify a UV-damage, then making two incisions in the DNA strand, one on each side of the damaged part. A fragment of 12-13 nucleotides, including the injury, is then removed.”

Sancar published the work in 1983, which led to a professorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he works today.

Nucleotide excision repair. Illustration by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Paul Modrich’s motivation to study genes came from advice from this his father: “You should learn about this DNA stuff.”

Those words came in 1963, the year after James Watson and Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize for resolving the structure of DNA. Over the next three decades, Modrich and Harvard University molecular biologist Matthew Meselson would unpack what’s now known as “DNA mismatch repair.”

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DNA is like a long railroad track with base pairs as the individual rails. If placed in a single line, all of the DNA in an adult would stretch to the sun and back 250 times. When a cell multiplies, it has machinery that unzips your DNA, splits the individual rails, and then tries to make copies of each side of the original tracks. Together, Modrich and Meselson revealed that an enzyme in bacteria — Dam methylase — denotes the original sides of the DNA through a process called methylation. By doing so, other cellular systems can determine if any errors occur during the copying process. These errors are called mismatches.

“This mechanism, mismatch repair, reduces the error frequency during DNA replication by about a thousandfold,” the Nobel committee wrote. “Congenital defects in mismatch repair are known, for example, to cause a hereditary variant of colon cancer.”

Mismatch repair. Illustration by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Modrich would continue his investigation into mismatch repair, and by the end of the 1980s, his lab had isolated several enzymes involved in the process. However, to this day, it’s still unknown how the original strands of DNA are identified in human cells, given our bodies use methylation for other purposes, such as silencing one of the two X-chromosomes in mammalian females.

All three projects played crucial roles in understanding how DNA repair influences human disease. Cancer, for instance, plays both sides of the DNA repair game. Cancer cells profit from abnormal DNA mutations, yet at the same time, these malignant cells keep their DNA repair systems intact, so they don’t die. By understanding that basic principle, this work allowed scientists to explain how environmental assaults, like cigarette smoke, trigger cancer.

“Cigarette smoke contains reactive small chemicals. They bind DNA and prevent DNA from being replicated properly. They are mutagens,” Lindhal said. “This can result in a number of diseases, including cancer.”

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Innovators rarely travel a straight path to arrive at a new idea. Failure — lots of failure — often paves the way.

At least eight out of every 10 new consumer products that enter the market will fail, according to one estimate. That can be frustrating. But for some inventors, the challenge posed by failure can be a driving force.

And when their idea finally does come together, their innovation can drive higher wages, help people live longer and make technology more affordable.

The PBS NewsHour spoke with several innovators who shared their thoughts on failure. Recently, we heard from Paul Litchfield, one of Reebok’s guiding forces behind product innovation, about how he and his team conceive of new ideas and bring them to life.

After learning Litchfield’s insights, put your own innovative instincts to the test with our new interactive.

PAUL LITCHFIELD | Reebok Pump & helmet impact sensor

For nearly 30 years, Paul Litchfield has guided innovation at Reebok.

Remember the Reebok Pump? When you could squeeze your sneaker’s tongue, pumping it with air? Litchfield was behind that, along with footwear cushioning systems that made athletic shoes more comfy.

Recently, sports officials praised his team’s work on helmet impact sensors that signaled when football players need medical attention after a collision.

Photo courtesy of Matt Costa/Reebok

But these breakthroughs in apparel, sportswear and safety equipment didn’t arrive with a dramatic spark of realization, says Litchfield, vice president of advanced concepts at Reebok.

“The process of innovating isn’t so much about the eureka moment,” he said. “It’s a lot more mundane than that, more tedious.”

Litchfield says before he and his team try to invent anything, they first establish a clear objective and then conceptualize what they want to do, explore what materials they need to build the product and then assemble it.

However, there’s more to product development than having a clear plan, he said.

“Inevitably, there are pitfalls along the way, failures if you will,” Litchfield said. “In order to get better, you have to realistically assess those failures, learn from them. You don’t want to repeat that mistake.”

While unexpected obstacles can be discouraging, Litchfield says they can also strengthen an idea.

“Sometimes, that failure brings you into a new direction.”

He stressed the need to not only be humble, but also to have a sense of humor.

“This is all theoretical. I’ve never failed at anything,” he said, laughing.

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MEGAN THOMPSON: In the early 1980s, French scientist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, one of only a few women at the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris, began seeing patients infected with a mysterious virus.

FRANÇOISE BARRÉ-SINOUSSI: The feeling that we had is really to rush. It was a lot of pressure you know because of course we had already some evidence that this virus was transmitted by blood, by sexual roots and from mother to child.

MEGAN THOMPSON: In 1983, Barré-Sinoussi and her mentor discovered HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. She shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 and dedicated her career to research and activism, traveling the world to fight the spread of the disease.

Today, due to new treatments and drugs, HIV is no longer an automatic death sentence for the estimated 37 million people around the world living with the virus.

Barré-Sinoussi says even though a cure may never be found, she’s confident that at some point, patients may no longer need indefinite treatment.

FRANÇOISE BARRÉ-SINOUSSI: I am personally convinced that remission is feasible, is achievable. When? I don’t know. 

MEGAN THOMPSON: Barré-Sinoussi has closed her lab, but she plans to continue her advocacy work as long as she can. 

She says her only regret is not finding an HIV vaccine.

FRANÇOISE BARRÉ-SINOUSSI: Of course, I would have loved, you know, to stop and to see that we have a vaccine against HIV and that we have another treatment at least that induces remission, but that’s life.

I mean, I encourage a new generation of scientists today to continue.

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This image shows the functional connections in the brain that tend to be most discriminating of individuals. Many of them are between the frontal and parietal lobes, which are involved in complex cognitive tasks. Photo by Emily Finn

You’re special. You’ve harbored such thoughts ever since becoming self-aware. It’s an internal inkling that your mind is unlike the ones sitting next to you on the subway. Now, a new study from Yale University has pinpointed a way to identify this uniqueness. By using scans of brain connectivity, the researchers have isolated “brain fingerprints” that can distinguish you from another person with 99 percent accuracy.

Moreover, the team has used this research to create a Harry Potteresque sorting hat. The team showed how brain fingerprints could be used to predict intelligence, and by doing so, they raise the idea of using these mental scans to predict future behavior.

“It brings a slew of ethical issues. With this technique, you might do a brain scan of a person that you’re interviewing for a job to find out if they’ll be a hard worker or diligent or to assess their people skills,” said Peter Bandettini, chief of functional imaging methods at the National Institute of Mental Health who wasn’t involved in the work. “The work is important because it represents one of the holy grails of functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).”

Functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. Image from Zalesky A et al., PNAS, 2014 vol. 111 no. 2810341-10346

Not all MRI is the same. Structural MRI, for instance, maps physical architecture, like a bundle of nerve fibers running between two regions of the brain. It’s easy to draw conclusions about a single patient with structural MRI. What you see is what you get. Functional MRI, in contrast, looks at brain activity and how the mind responds to tasks like reading or listening to music.

Traditionally, researchers have had to compare functional MRI scans from multiple people — usually huge groups — to make inferences about how the brain works. Person A reads faster than Person B, and oh look, these parts of Person A’s brain light up with more intensity.

“While structural MRI has been used all the time in medicine, functional MRI hasn’t been used much at all, mostly because it’s been really hard to get useful information out of a single scan,” said Emily Finn of Yale University, who has now uncovered a way to make functional MRI more individualistic.

To do so, Finn and her colleagues combed over a large batch of brain scans from the Human Connectome Project. Launched in 2010, this huge project is investigating how the brain is wired by comparing the MRI scans of 1,200 healthy adults with their genetics and behaviors.

The Yale study, published today in Nature Neuroscience, looked over the data of 126 participants that were scanned over two days while either resting or performing tasks that challenged their cognitive abilities, such as working memory, emotional state, language and motor skills. During each scenario, they monitored how 10 brain networks sprung to life with activity.

The team looked at 268 nodes in the brain that were grouped into 10 functional networks. Photo by Finn et al., Nature Neuroscience, 2015

Two networks emerged as the most individualistic: medial frontal network and the frontoparietal network. When the mind was at rest, the brain connections — or fingerprint — in the frontoparietal network could identify people with 98-99 percent accuracy.

“The fact that those were the two best wasn’t entirely surprising, because the prefrontal and parietal cortices evolved most recently,” Finn said. “We know that they’re involved in sophisticated functions, like attention, memory and language. The stuff that we think makes us human. As opposed to the lower-order areas that just control muscles or process the visual senses from the retina.”

Next, they wanted to show that these fingerprints are relevant to real world behaviors. They showed that these brain fingerprints could predict a subject’s fluid intelligence, which is the ability to think logically in a novel setting and solve an abstract problem without prior knowledge. Fluid intelligence is thought as an important predictor of academic performance. However, it’s tough to teach fluid intelligence, and an MIT study in 2013 showed that standardized tests can’t always assess this intrinsic trait.

The scientist behind that MIT study — John Gabrieli — said that new research like Finn’s may support better individualization of educational curriculum on a day-to-day basis.

“The major step here is that there are now methods to identify brain characteristics that are reliable across days and conditions,” Gabrieli said.

Brain fingerprints may offer an unbiased way to measure the progress of a student’s intelligence, so maybe in the future kids will get brain scans instead to taking the SATs. Bandettini said brain fingerprints could tell us about a subject’s personality, impulsiveness or comprehension.

But such purposes should be approached with caution, said Gabrieli.

“If we can predict from brain data how individuals will behave in the future in response to a school curriculum, behavioral [therapy] or pharmacological treatment for mental health, there is the risk that such knowledge will be used to select people for success rather than help those in need,” Gabrieli said.

But both Finn and Bandettini see a greater purpose for brain fingerprints with spotting mental disorders.

“I don’t think that the best application for this work is predicting intelligence. I think that the potential could be for things like who is going to develop a mental illness or who will respond to certain drugs,” Finn said. She is currently conducting a study on data from adolescents who were identified as having a high risk for schizophrenia.

“These kids either had a high genetic risk or showing worrisome behavioral symptoms, but it had yet to progress into full blown psychosis. They were scanned at this baseline state and followed for several years to see who ended up with full blown disease and who ended up being fine,” Finn said. “Our idea would be to see if we can use the baseline scan to predict who would go onto get the illness.”

That info might serve as a template that doctors could use to diagnose and treat these mental diseases before they strike, Bandettini said.

The study also provides new insights into what it means to be yourself, Finn said.

“We expected people’s brains to change a little based on what task their doing. And these tasks do change the brain to some degree, but they never make you look like someone else. Your [brain] always sort of looks like yourself regardless of what you’re doing,” Finn said.

For more on neuroscience, check out The Brain with David Eagleman, a new series premiering October 14 on PBS.

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If you were a child in the ’80s or ’90s, you knew Sally Ride.

By 1963, Russia had launched a woman into space, but America lagged behind. Space travel, like so many occupations, remained a (white) boys club. There were strange, unfounded claims holding women back — women were too emotional for space travel, for example, or menstruation in microgravity was dangerous, according to NPR’s Skunkbear.

NASA has since come a long way in terms of gender equality. The makeup of the New Horizons mission is a great example.

And Sally Ride, who on June 16, 1983, became the first American woman in space, played an invaluable role in this progress. She taught millions of American young girls — and at least one black boy growing up outside Atlanta (me) — that their dreams, nay the stars, could reached by learning science.

Behind the icon was a person with private and public passions. And a new photobiography by Tam O’Shaughnessy, Ride’s life and business partner of 27 years, offers an intimate view into that life. PBS NewsHour recently spoke with the O’Shaughnessy about the book. An excerpt of our conversation along with some photos from the book are below.

Sally Ride was bone May 26, 1951. She is pictured here with father, Dale Ride. Courtesy of Tam O’Shaughnessy/Ride Family/MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group

Nsikan Akpan: Describe Sally Ride as a child.

Tam O’Shaughnessy: She was close to her mom and her dad. Sally has one sister, Karen, but she goes by Bear. Sally was two when Bear was born and she couldn’t pronounce her name, so she called her Pear or Perry, and then it kind of morphed into Bear. Bear just stuck.

Joyce Ride, Sally’s mother, loves the church and is kind of an introvert — quiet and thoughtful. Bear is more that way and less athletic. Dale Ride, Sally’s father, loves sports, so I think that they kind of naturally…Sally went with her father and Bear with her mother to do things.

Joyce and Dale never fought. If they had an issue, they wouldn’t talk about it or confront it, so Sally kind of learned to keep her emotions buried. And to not really talk about her feelings, and that kind of stayed with her her whole life, which is a plus in some ways and a negative in other ways.

Her parents are very neat people, and they created a very stable loving home. But I would say that part of Sally’s personality, just like all of ours, gets shaped by her parents.

Sally (right) and Bear (left) at the zoo. Courtesy of Tam O’Shaughnessy/Ride Family/MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group

A young Sally Ride fishing at Lake Gregory in the San Bernardino Mountains, California in 1957. Courtesy of Tam O’Shaughnessy/Ride Family/MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group

Nsikan Akpan: Were Bear and Sally close?

Tam O’Shaughnessy:They were very close. When Bear and Sally were young, Bear tended to copy her older sister. I think that’s common, because they were two years apart.

I’ve seen family films when the girls were very young, and Sally was always moving forward, you know, toward people and toward animals, and Bear was kind of holding back and following Sally.

Nsikan Akpan: What did Sally do for fun?

Tam O’Shaughnessy: Sally was very physical. She loved the outdoors. She was very curious.

Sports were important to her throughout her whole life.

Her grandfather taught her how to play baseball, and he sawed off a little bat for her and taught her how to play catch. She maintained that she loved the Dodgers her whole life.

Her father took her to UCLA basketball games and football games. Because her father helped students transfer from Santa Monica City College to UCLA, they got special privileges and were able to talk to Coach Wooden and be down on the football field with the football players during practices.

Even though she went to Stanford and got her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Stanford, if Stanford was playing UCLA, she rooted for UCLA. That childhood loyalty just never went away.

Nsikan Akpan: How did you and Sally meet?

Tam O’Shaughnessy: Sally started playing tennis when she was 10. Her father drove her to all the junior tournaments

I was standing in the line with a group of kids — boys and girls. We were all in our white tennis shorts and tennis skirts, waiting to check in at the tournament desk. And I saw this girl ahead of me in line, and what I noticed about her is she had long blond hair, straight blond hair, but she was standing on her toes, and it just looked funny to me.

Sally Ride during a break from tennis. Courtesy of Tam O’Shaughnessy/MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group

I was like, ‘What is she doing?’ because she was standing up on her toes, even when we were shuffling forward in line. It was sort of like a ballet dance, and I just thought, “How funny.” And then I recognized that it was Sally Ride, this kid that I had seen at other tournaments but just never spoken to. I was 12, and she was 13.

Sally shoots a layup during a basketball game. Courtesy of Tam O’Shaughnessy/Geni Lebedoff/MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group

She was a good athlete and a very good tennis player. Because she was good at tennis, that helped her get into one of the best all-girls schools for high school. The teachers in the school also liked her intellectual ability, but it was really the tennis that enabled the scholarship.

The same thing was true when she went to college. She got into Swarthmore. Played number one on the tennis team. Played on the basketball team. Played on the field hockey team.

She was at Swarthmore for a year and a half, and called home and said, “I don’t want to be here. There’s too much snow.” She came home and took summer classes at UCLA and really worked hard on her tennis.

Her tennis helped her once again get into Stanford. She played number one on the Stanford team.

When Sally first went to Stanford, she was 20. She skipped a grade, so she was a little younger. She was a junior, and she got a job teaching tennis in the summer at Tennis America in Lake Tahoe, which was created by Billie Jean King and her husband Larry King.

[One day] they set up an exhibition where Sally played with Dennis Van der Meer, this very famous tennis coach, against Billie Jean and another guy.

I think that’s the first time that they formally met, and Billy Jean said, “Hey you’re pretty darn good; if you work hard enough, you could be on the pro tour.”

Nsikan Akpan: What was her experience at Stanford?

Tam O’Shaughnessy: She took physics courses. She was a never a straight-A student, but she certainly did well. But she was also playing volleyball for three to four hours everyday. She fell in love for the first time. A lot of typical undergraduate stuff happened to her.

She was a very easygoing human being. Funny, fun, and smart. She was a person, who, on one hand, you could just sit and do nothing with, and she’d be perfectly happy and you’d be perfectly comfortable, but if you wanted to talk about something interesting, then she’d be a good person to dive into a conversation with and be engaged with.

Nsikan Akpan: How did she learn about NASA’s search for female astronauts?

Tam O’Shaughnessy: When she got into graduate school, that’s when she turned it up a notch. I remember her telling me when she was taking very high-level math classes that it was so dry and dead, until she started applying it. In science, we all have that experience where you finally get why you learn this stuff and how cool it is and how important it is. Then she just loved it.

She was imagining becoming a physics professor, and getting a job somewhere in California and living out her life doing research and writing and teaching students.

When she was a year away from finishing her doctorate, she saw an ad in the student paper about NASA recruiting women for the first time in history. Something happened inside her. It was one of those moments. This was another part of Sally being easygoing. She always left room in her life to change direction and to follow her heart.

She was accepted into the astronaut corps at the end of 1977, and she started after she turned in her dissertation.

NASA’s first six female astronauts (left to right): Sally Ride, Shannon Lucid, Kathy Sullivan, Rhea Seddon, Anna Fisher and Judy Resnick. Courtesy of NASA/Tam O’Shaughnessy/MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group

She started in the summer of 1978. Her class had 35 new rookies. And six of them were the first women in history to be astronauts at NASA.

They had to learn about every system, every part of the space shuttle. They also learned a lot about geology, because when you’re in space, it’s a great opportunity to look back at Earth, and then you need to know what you’re looking at and recognize little wiggles in the ocean.

Nsikan Akpan: What was Sally’s favorite part of becoming an astronaut?

Tam O’Shaughnessy: Sally loved flying in T-38 jets. They’re little two-seaters. They’re like little mosquitoes and they go really fast. She and her then husband Steve Hawley, who was also an astronaut, leased with their friends a small Cessna. They liked flying on the weekends. In fact, Sally flew Steve to their wedding. She loved flying.

Sally Ride recovers from ride in a giant centrifuge, which simulates the massive g-forces experienced during a shuttle launch. Courtesy of NASA/Tam O’Shaughnessy/MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group

They did jumping out of airplanes in parachutes and learning how to safely land and roll. They did water survival. They did the giant centrifuges. That was pure fun — they got to just really be kids again.

Nsikan Akpan: Did she ever talk about her time in space?

Tam O’Shaughnessy: I’ve heard her talk about it a million times. She loved the whole adventure. She said launch is terrifying because you have … you’re out of control. It either works or it doesn’t. You have tons of rocket fuel literally exploding beneath you, and you’re just going up. It’s just eight minutes of terror, but also exhilarating.

Once she hit outer space 50 miles up, suddenly her necklace would float up in front of her face and all the G-forces would suddenly stop, and she was floating. She loved weightlessness.

Sally Ride looking at Earth from space. Courtesy of NASA/Tam O’Shaughnessy/MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group

The other thing that happened was looking out the little shuttle windows back at Earth. It really changed Sally. It made her appreciate that we really do live on a planet; it’s very fragile. It made her an environmentalist.

Nsikan Akpan: What was life like when she landed? She had a tough time with the attention, right?

Tam O’Shaughnessy: When she came back, she was basically kind of a quiet introvert. She had a hard time with people recognizing her. She couldn’t go anywhere. In Houston, going to the grocery store, going for a run around the neighborhood, people were pointing at her, stopping her and wanting to touch her, wanting to take photographs, and she just didn’t like it.

For the first time in her life — it was amazing that Sally thought of this because of how she was as a human being — she realized that she needed help, so she saw a psychologist back in Palo Alto just to figure out how to help herself. The psychologist helped her [by saying], “You need to take more time after giving talks and going to banquets. You need to do fewer of them, and just take better care of yourself, so you can recover.”

People Magazine, June 20, 1983. Courtesy of Tam O’Shaughnessy/MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group

[The fame] was hard for Sally but at the same time, she was happy to be the one chosen to be the first American [woman in space], and she totally appreciated that it would make her life, that it would give her opportunities that even the other female astronauts wouldn’t have.

Nsikan Akpan: Eventually Sally retired from NASA and became a physics professor. You were a psychology professor, but as a side profession together, you began writing children’s science books. Why?

Tam O’Shaughnessy: It came about because we both loved books. No matter where we were in the country, we’d go to bookstores. We’d always go to the science sections, mystery sections, but usually we’d end up in the children’s section.

We noticed that the kids departments had huge fiction sections, and just this little dinky non-fiction section with very few science books. And when we looked at the science books, there were errors.

Sally had written a book about going into space — To Space and Back — with her high school friend Sue Okie in 1986. We just decided, let’s try to make books that are really fun, engaging and scientifically accurate. We just kind of got started and kept doing it.

Sally Ride signing books at a Sally Ride Science Festival at NASA Ames, 2007. Sally and Tam co-founded Sally Ride Science in 2001. Photo by Karen Hom/Sally Ride Science

Our world has become much more sophisticated with technology in science and math. Now, math and technology are part of all the sciences, and you really need to be pretty savvy about all of this stuff.

Our whole society has become much more science-, math- and technology-based, so to get almost any decent job, you have to have a decent background. We just kind of recognized that it’s an equity issue. All kids deserve to know math and science.

Nsikan Akpan: Finally, Sally was internationally renowned, but as your book portrays in lovely detail, she was just a regular person with hobbies and a deep passion for science. With that in mind, what did Sally mean to you, and what did Sally mean for a generation of young scientists? What lessons can young scientists take away from her life?

Tam O’Shaughnessy: I hope what young people realize who read not just my book, but learn about Sally or hear about Sally from their teachers or parents or whomever, is that science and learning is something that’s fun and fulfilling and can take you places, but also that your life doesn’t just need to be one note.

Sally had many things that she enjoyed and that she was good at, and they all helped make her who she was and kind of a content, happy human being.

Just follow your heart and do what you enjoy. Sally was a perfect role model for that.

Editor’s note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

The post The life of Sally Ride, America’s first woman astronaut, in pictures appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

San hunter-gatherers from Namibia sleep about 6.4 hours per night on average. Photo by Josh Davimes

In modern society, we leave the lights on and stay up late. We watch Netflix or scroll news stories on our smartphones until the wee hours of the morning.

We blame societal expectations and technology for these sleep habits, but new research suggests keeping awake long past sundown might just be human nature.

A sleep tracker study of three hunter-gatherer populations shows that ‘primitive’ communities sleep as much or even less than modern societies. The findings detail a paleo lifestyle that comes with fewer sleep disorders, but also point to a way to trigger sleep outside of just turning off the lights.

To make these insights, UCLA neuroscientist Jerome Siegel and his colleagues visited three hunter-gatherer populations: the Hadza of Tanzania, the San of Namibia, and the Tsimane of Bolivia.

“Has sleep decreased because of electronics and electricity?” said Siegel, who directs UCLA’s Center For Sleep Research. “There’s no way to go back before artificial light, to the mid-1800s,” he said, but certain hunter-gatherer societies maintain a pre-industrial lifestyle that can give scientists insight into natural sleep patterns.

Location of study sites. Photo by Yetish et al., 2015, Current Biology

The researchers monitored 94 people among these groups by handing out wrist devices that track physical activity but also light levels. There have been thousands of studies using these devices to measure sleep, and they’ve been found to be quite accurate, Siegel said. In this study, the gadgets worked around the clock to log over 1,165 days of data.

Rather than hit the pillow when night fell, these outdoors communities stayed awake up to four hours after sunset. For comparison, the sun will set in Washington D.C. today around 6:30 pm, so these folks would pass out just after most local TV news programs.

But then, instead of sleeping late, these communities often climbed out of bed before sunrise. On average, the three groups only slept between 5.7 and 7.1 hours per night. (Note: The National Sleep Foundation in the United States recommends 7-9 hours for adults.)

“Their sleep is actually on the low end of what’s been recorded in our modern society. There’s been speculation that humans basically used to sleep when it got dark, which would mean they’d sleep 10, 11, even 12 hours. It turns out that that’s not the case,” Siegel said.

But they can nap whenever they want, right?

Nope. They rarely napped. On cold winter days, the team caught napping activity in only seven percent of afternoon recordings among the San. During the warmer summers, nap frequency increased to 22 percent of the days.

This observation was one of many suggesting a seasonal change in sleeping behavior among these hunter-gatherer groups. This pattern led Siegel’s team to conclude that temperature, rather than light, plays a defining role in the sleep-wake cycles of these three groups.

So should you throw off your comforter at night and live the “paleo” way? Maybe.

According to in-person interviews, the San didn’t seem to suffer from sleep disorders, like insomnia. Their fitness levels could be a factor, for instance, the Hazda make long treks to hunt food by bow and arrow. None of the participants in this study had a body mass index over 30, and obesity has been tied to poorer sleep quality.

Alternatively, the differences between western and paleo sleep patterns might be due to culture and societal demands. We may nap and sleep late because of the high-energetic demands of busy work and school schedules. Or central heating and warm apparel in Western culture, like light exposure, might keep people from falling asleep.

“It depends on the demands of that particular society, their climate, what time of year it is,” said Max Hirshkowitz, chair of the National Sleep Foundation. “Actual physiological sleep time probably hasn’t changed that much, if at all [historically]. What has changed over the years is the amount of time people allocate to get their sleep.”

Yet it is apparent that sleep patterns in western culture are often off-kilter for both teens and adults.

“It’s an uphill battle, because for many, many years people have been encouraged to sleep less so they could spend more time doing their other things,” Hirshkowitz said. “Whether it’s by choice or whether or not they’re being urged, or even coerced in that direction, this is a culture. We need to change that culture.”

Editor’s note: Are we more sleep deprived than our ancestors? On tonight’s PBS NewsHour, Hari Sreenivasan reports on questions raised by new sleep research.

The post Did our paleo ancestors sleep better than us? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: But, first, just how much sleep do you really need? There’s been plenty of concern, as people spend more time looking at their screens ever later into the night.

Previous research has shown that a lack of sleep is associated with a series of problems, ranging from lack of concentration to health effects like obesity and heart disease.

But a new study out today finds seven or eight hours a night may not be as essential as we think.

I went to California to learn more.

They are among the last hunter-gatherers in the world, the Hadza of Northern Tanzania, the San of Namibia’s Kalahari Desert, and in the Andean foothills of Bolivia the Chimane.

By studying the sleep habits of these three groups, who still live the way humans have for thousands of years, a team of scientists led by UCLA’s Jerry Siegel is challenging conventional wisdom about how much sleep we need.

JERRY SIEGEL, Director, UCLA Center for Sleep Research: It’s absolutely incorrect to think that the more you sleep, the healthier you’re going to be.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The study, reported today in the journal “Current Biology” says we in the industrialized world sleep as much as our ancestors did.

JERRY SIEGEL: There’s been speculation that humans basically used to sleep when it got dark, which would mean they’d sleep 10, 11, even 12 hours. But it turns out that’s not the case. These groups sleep five, six, seven hours. None of them average over eight hours of sleep.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Just like us, when the sun sets, these people do not go right to sleep.

JERRY SIEGEL: There’s a thin yellow line here that indicates the light level, and you can see also that they remain awake.

HARI SREENIVASAN: In fact, regardless of what time they go to bed, all three groups, on different parts of the planet, wake up exactly when one very specific thing happens. And, no, it’s not the sunrise.

JERRY SIEGEL: They’re sleeping as the temperature falls, and they seem to quite consistently wake up at the lowest point of temperature in the day. So, when the temperature stops falling, that’s when they wake up.

There’s been a lot of emphasis on light and the effects of light, and there’s no question that light affects sleep. But light may have been connected to sleep largely because of its connection to temperature.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Temperature swings are a thing of the past. Now we just have to turn a dial.

The connections between sleep and many things have been thoroughly studied. Thanks to a smartwatch, I have been a student for the past year-and-a-half, trying to figure out ways to get a better night’s rest. Between late-night check-ins at hotel rooms and early-morning flights, I have become a lousy sleeper.
My smartwatch tracks when I’m in deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep, when I move around, and how many interruptions I have, and it even gives me a score for the night. But there are much more accurate ways to measure sleep in a lab.

So, for the good of the story, I put on a hospital gown and pajamas and got wired up at the UCLA Sleep Disorder Center.

That’s a lot of wires.

(LAUGHTER)

JOEL RECTOR, UCLA Sleep Disorder Center: Yes, I believe 32.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Lab manager Joel Rector placed sensors on specific parts of my head to measure electrical activity in my brain, stuck some near my eyes and on my legs to measure even the slightest twitches, and strapped sensors around my chest and stomach to gauge my breaths.

JOEL RECTOR: I’m going to put this over your shoulder.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Doesn’t feel like the most natural way to go to sleep.

And I did something I have never done at work. I tried to fall asleep on the job.

So, just to run through this, all these are measuring my brain waves. This is measuring my breath and oxygen. This is measuring how much I’m moving here and here and on my legs. And this is measuring my oxygen.

JOEL RECTOR: Yes.

HARI SREENIVASAN: OK.

JOEL RECTOR: All righty. Well, I will get the lights off.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Good night.

While I napped, Rector monitored my patterns.

JOEL RECTOR: He’s in stage two sleep, which is what most people are in for the majority of the night. He’s kind of just sleeping quietly.

HARI SREENIVASAN: When I woke up, I had a chat with neuroscientist Alon Avidan, who runs the sleep disorders lab, to tell me what he saw.

DR. ALON AVIDAN, Director, UCLA Sleep Disorder Center: Typically, when we ask someone to fall asleep, we don’t see them fall asleep in less than eight minutes. You fell asleep in less than a minute, which means that…

(LAUGHTER)

DR. ALON AVIDAN: … you are probably sleep-deprived.

HARI SREENIVASAN: What can happen if you’re chronically sleep-deprived?

DR. ALON AVIDAN: The data shows that in people who are chronically sleep-deprived, the immune system doesn’t work as well. You’re more prone to develop obesity, diabetes. Cognitive function tends to become depressed.

HARI SREENIVASAN: But what constitutes sleep deprivation?

Max Hirshkowitz is chair of the National Sleep Foundation, and a guest lecturer at Stanford Medical School. He recently convened a panel of experts to recommend how much sleep we should get.

MAX HIRSHKOWITZ, National Sleep Foundation: About seven to nine hours. It’s a range. Now, six may be appropriate under unusual circumstances, but, otherwise, seven to nine, somewhere in there.

HARI SREENIVASAN: There is no shortage of pills that try to deliver those seven to nine hours.

NARRATOR: Sleep better, sleep longer.

NARRATOR: There’s a land of restful sleep. We can help you go there.

HARI SREENIVASAN: And that concerns Siegel.

JERRY SIEGEL: The thing that alarms me is this thought that — and this was the motivation for undertaking the study, to find out if this true — that we used to sleep much more, and that we need to increase our sleep from whatever number we get to be closer to 10, 11 hours of sleep. The data that we have gathered indicates that’s not the case.

HARI SREENIVASAN: In fact, these people Siegel studied average less than six-and-a-half-hours, and they seem fine.

JERRY SIEGEL: In general, the adults are more healthy than those in our society. They may for some reason need less sleep, but there certainly doesn’t seem to be any negative consequence resulting from their sleep pattern.

HARI SREENIVASAN: They also don’t appear tired during the day. They hardly nap and they sleep soundly when they do.

JERRY SIEGEL: One thing we found is that these groups have very little insomnia, maybe at a 10th the incidence we have, and so there’s something different there that’s going on.

HARI SREENIVASAN: That something will take more research to figure out.

So, back to the lab, or, in this case, back to bed.

The post These hunter-gatherer tribes sleep less than you, and sleep better appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

ESCHER (Electromechanical Series Compliant Humanoid for Emergency Response) robot takes a tumble at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Robotics Challenge June 5, 2015 in Pomona, California. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A few weeks ago, I slipped in the shower, and after a cartoonish sequence of body contortions, I caught myself while landing. Robots aren’t as lucky. As June’s DARPA Robotics Challenge taught us, when machines fall, they tumble terribly and without the ability to brace themselves.

But those days might be over thanks to a computer program created by scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

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A new algorithm from allows robots to fall with style. Video by Georgia Institute of Technology

As IEEE Spectrum describes, the new algorithm uses “techniques adapted from judo,” allowing a robot to learn how to position its appendages while tumbling.

So rather than the full impact being felt by a single part of the robot, the robot can displace the kinetic energy created during the fall over multiple parts of its body. By learning how to tumble, robots reduced impact intensity to the head by 30 to 90 percent.

Robot somersault. Image by Georgia Tech

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MEGAN THOMPSON: Two-and-a-half million people visit Pompeii every year, making it one of Italy’s busiest tourist attractions.

The ancient city, close to modern-day Naples, is famous for being frozen in time, preserved as it was when the volcano Mount Vesuvius erupted more than 1,900 years ago, in 79 AD.

Pompeii, buried in tons of volcanic ash, along with the remains of some 2,000 people killed, was first excavated in the 1800s.

Those early discoverers poured plaster on the recovered bodies to better preserve them, but little was known about them.

So, last month, researchers brought in a CAT scan machine, like the one you might find in a doctor’s office.

The machine penetrates the thick plaster and creates a 3-dimensional image of each body. The CAT scans reveal two big discoveries.

First, many victims did not die from suffocation, as previously thought, but from the falling buildings.

MASSIMO OSANNA, DIRECTOR: From the analysis carried out on the bones, we have found a lot of broken skulls. This tells us many died from falling roofs under the pressure of the pumice. The pumice is very light but when it builds up two meters, it can collapse roofs and many died because of this.”

MEGAN THOMPSON: Second, the researchers are finding many of Pompeii’s victims had practically perfect teeth, a reflection, perhaps, of a healthy Mediterranean diet low in sugar and high levels of fluoride in their water supply.

MASSIMO OSANNA, DIRECTOR: From the study, we discovered the absence of cavities in the teeth. This is very interesting, it is not completely surprising because we know about the Mediterranean diet and it’s positive aspects.

MEGAN THOMPSON: The researchers plan to scan all 86 casts of the human remains to help us learn more about not only how the people of Pompeii died, but how they lived.

The post New imagery from Pompeii yields surprising findings about ancient humans appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A new study from Stanford pinpoints the best annual temperature for getting the job done. Photo by H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images

It’s no secret that summer lends itself better to beaches and barbecues than actual work. Yet the instinct to shirk work in hot weather is more than a summer slowdown. It’s a broad phenomena that may cripple some nations as global warming progresses.

A new study from Stanford University has pinpointed the optimal annual temperature for economic productivity, and it’s this: 55.4 degrees Fahrenheit, or 13 degrees Celsius. The researchers show that when the climate exceeds this temperature, the country’s economic output drops precipitously. Based on their model published today in the journal Nature, this pattern has held steady for more than 150 countries, affecting both rich and poor, for more than half a century.

If global warming isn’t checked, the team expects average global incomes will be slashed by a quarter by 2100. So whether you’re an Indonesian rice farmer baking in the hot sun or a tech jockey sitting in a cool Silicon Valley office, you can expect your economic prosperity to decline.

“The results indicate that societies will need to adapt in ways that are likely to be expensive, or [they will] face even greater damages in terms of lost GDP,” said economist Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago, who wasn’t involved in the project.

Stanford economist Marshall Burke and his colleagues created this new projection for the future by treating 166 countries like patients getting regular health checkups.
The team isolated the annual temperatures of each country from 1960 to 2010, and then looked at how that country’s economy performed during each of those years. By comparing warm years to normal years, the team was able to chart how individual economies respond to temperature.

A prediction for how gross domestic product (GDP) will change across the globe by 2100. Colder countries, like Canada, will see an economic boost with climate change, while most tropical nations will witness a drop. This model assumes a “business as usual” global warming scenario, wherein unmitigated climate changes raises temperatures by 4.3 degrees Celsius (8 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Photo by Burke M, Hsiang SM and Miguel E., Nature, 2015.

Even when accounting for cultural differences, technological innovations, political upheavals, and economic atom bombs like global recessions, these researchers found an optimal temperature — again, 55.4 degrees Fahrenheit — that, in Burke’s words, “is really good at producing stuff around the world.”

“What we see is it matters less if you’re rich or poor now. It matters more if your [annual] average temperature is hot or cold,” Burke said. “If your country’s temperature is cooler than [55 degrees Fahrenheit], then global warming might help you. If your average temperature is hotter, a little bit of warming might hurt you.”

On a small scale, it’s easy to see how temperatures could impair industries like outdoor construction or agriculture. A drought during a growing season can wipe out crops, whether you’re a midwestern farmer in the U.S. or in Sub Saharan Africa.

But by examining the macroeconomics of climate change, the findings by Burke and his companions support a budding phenomena wherein even white collar jobs in air-conditioned offices will feel the burn of global warming. Prior research in India, for instance, suggests that worker productivity in textile mills drops by “1 to 3 percent per degree Celsius,” despite limited heat stress in the factories. Meanwhile, automobile assembly lines in the U.S. slow down when temperatures outside become too hot.

Photo by moodboard/via Getty Images

“We are already experiencing the economic impacts of climate change — heatwaves, for example, are increasing health costs and employee absenteeism,” economist Thomas Sterner of the University of Gothenburg wrote in accompanying commentary also published today by Nature.

The explanations for the decline in white-collar industries remain unclear, Burke said. What we do know is society gets a little crazy when it’s hot. Fatal car accidents and violence escalate. The rate of heart attacks spikes. Sleep might also be a factor. Burke’s team is currently looking into how sleep quantity and quality dictate economic output on a broad scale.

“It’s an intuitive idea, and we’re searching for quantitative evidence at the moment,” Burke said. Like an itchy, uncomfortable sweater, global warming might simply aggravate society by building collective stress among groups of people.

Until today, the conventional wisdom was that the economic burden of global warming would primarily be felt by poor nations. A seminal study in 2008 drew the relationship between temperature and economic output as a straight line. “The higher temperature, the bigger the costs,” Sterner writes, which meant that low-income nations would be burdened heavily in the future, given most reside in warm climates.

Cornfields during a drought in Tanzania. A 2012 study from MIT predicts that Sub Saharan Africa will witness a decline in the yields of its most common crops over the next century. Photo by Dennis K. Johnson/via Getty Images

Sterner writes that by not assuming a linear relationship, the new model from Burke’s team paints a more accurate picture. It can account for nuanced, micro-level responses between economic productivity and temperature.

As a country’s average temperature gets hotter and extends further past the 55-degree Fahrenheit threshold in Burke’s model, economic productivity fares worse. Poor countries would still suffer the brunt of unmitigated climate change over the next century, but rich countries take a hit too. The annual temperatures for nations like China and the U.S. already hover around the 55 degree-Fahrenheit cliff, so they might witness Overall, 77 percent of the countries surveyed could be poorer by 2100 due simply to global warming.

Temperature effects on GDP over time for nine regions. Black lines are projections using point
estimates. Red shaded area is 95% confidence interval, colour saturation
indicates estimated likelihood an income trajectory passes through a value. Photo by Burke M, Hsiang SM and Miguel E., Nature, 2015.

“All told, these estimates equate to much larger economic losses than most leading models suggest…,” Sterner writes. “ The current leading models, referred to as integrated assessment models (IAMs), are already being used as a basis for policy. In the United States, there have been considerable battles, even in Congress, concerning the ‘social cost of carbon’, which is based on the three most prominent IAMs.”

Burke’s study argues that Congress and other policy agencies have based their predictions on the social costs of global warming and carbon pollution on estimates that are off by several hundred percent.

“[This study] is part of a growing literature suggesting that climate change is more harmful than current models indicate,” Greenstone said.

The post The countries where global warming will shrink bank accounts appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A chorus of howler monkeys of the species Alouatta caraya. Photo by Mariana Raño

Baby, I’m howlin’ for you. Male howler monkeys make deep and boisterous calls to attract mates, but the deepest-pitched songs may come at cost: the size of their testicles. A new study in the journal Current Biology examines this relationship and reveals the untold story of the sacrifices male howler monkeys make when facing competition for mates.

University of Utah primatologist Leslie Knapp and her colleagues were interested in these howls, not only because they’re so boisterous, but because their sound can vary dramatically between species and individuals.

Knapp told PBS NewsHour:

If you’ve ever been South America, and you hear a loud howl early in the morning, it’s probably a howler monkey. They’re communicating about where they are and what’s going on. Both males and females make the noise, but you can detect small differences between individuals in the social group, in terms of the depth and the pitch and the amount of howling that is done.

In case, you haven’t heard a howler monkey, here’s an example:

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More from Knapp:

You can see how much effort it takes. It’s a rhythmic howl, as it gets closer to the end, you can see this male gets kind of agitated. It makes as much effort as possible to make more noise and get a deeper sound to the surrounding audience. Female may use these signals and others to tell if the male is more fit.

To glean what controls these howls, Knapp sent one of her researchers, Jacob Dunn, to museums across Europe and the U.S. Dunn combed these collections for preserved specimens of howler monkeys, namely their hyoid bones. A hyoid is U-shaped bone in the throat that cages the vocal chamber. Its size is thought to dictate if a primate’s call has a low or high pitch.

Dunn and his colleagues used 3-D laser scans to measure the volumes of 255 hyoid bones from nine howler monkey species.

This photo is of a 3-D laser surface scanning of a howler monkey hyoid bone. Photo by Jacob Dunn

Next, researchers read papers or made hand measurements with calipers to collect data on the testicle size of monkeys from five of those species. They also looked at data on the monkey’s social group size, body weight, skull length and canine length. Plus they record vocalizations among different howler monkey species in South America. Their goal: to discern what features might correlate with the sound of a howler monkey’s love call.

They found that there are a number of sexual trade-offs when it comes to howling. First, male hyoids were three to eight times bigger than female hyoids. The biggest males had hyoids were 10 times larger than the smallest males.

“The male monkeys with the deepest- and lowest-pitched howls are giving the impression of having a much bigger body than they actually do,” Knapp said. “Male howler monkeys weigh about 20 pounds or less, but the kins of sounds of the deepest vocalizations compare to what might be made by tigers or red deer.”

One might describe this as the Barry White phenomena.

This photo displays (clockwise) a skull, mandible and hyoid bone of a red howler monkey, indicating the enormous size of the hyoid relative to other body parts and total body size. Photo by Jacob Dunn

“Females of our own species tend to find deeper voices, like soul vocalist Barry White’s, more attractive and romantic,” Knapp said in a statement. “Deeper voices are thought to reflect a larger body size, which could represent a good choice for a mate.”

But with howler monkeys, the sexual trade-offs don’t end with voices. Male monkeys with larger hyoids, which make lower-pitched calls, had smaller testicles. They also tended to live in isolation with a community of a few females.

In contrast, males with smaller hyoids had bigger testes and lived in groups where they had to compete with other suitors for female mates.

Given females have more partners to choose from, males living in large groups may have evolved larger testes in order to make more sperm. More sperm means that they can spread their seed further throughout their community, elevating the odds that their genes will be passed onto to the next generation.

“We know that testes size often results as a consequence of male-male competition. For instance, chimps have large testes, so they can produce more sperm,” Knapp said.

The tradeoff appears to be hyoid size and vocal range. A male howler monkey living in a harem community by himself may have evolved to warn off other suitors with deeper calls. At the same time, his balls shrank, since there is less competition.

In future work, Knapp and her colleagues plan to see if these factors — howl pitch and testes — determine mating success in howler monkeys living in Mexico.

The post Do bigger family jewels mean deeper voices (in howler monkeys)? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Higher levels of a set of blood markers correlate with premature death, and scientists may have figured out why. People Photo by JGI/Jamie Grill/via Getty Images

A blood test claims to provide more information on if, how and why a healthy person will die in the next decade.

Two things in life are ultimately certain: the day you’re born and the day you die. We know one, and the other drives many of our lifestyle choices, even though it’s hard to pinpoint the exact date that we’ll expire.

But what if you could narrow a person’s death date to a precise window? In a study published today in the journal Cell Systems, computational biologists suggest that a simple blood test can tell if an otherwise healthy person is likely to die from pneumonia or sepsis within a decade.

We made the initial discovery of these mortality biomarkers 1.5 years ago, said Johannes Kettunen, who studies “metabonomics” with the University of Oulu and the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Finland. Metabonomics is economics for the human metabolism.

Metabonomicists try to quantify the compounds consumed and produced by our body’s cells. To do so, researchers like Kettunen comb metabolic data from thousands of patients over long periods of time, in order to discern the evolution of our human soup.

In 2011, Kettunen and his colleagues examined blood samples from 10,000 Estonian and 7,000 Finnish subjects, among which 684 patients had died in a five-year follow-up period. They were searching for biomarkers in the samples that might have been an indicator for death, and they found one. A chemical process and byproduct of inflammation, called glycoprotein acetylation (GlycA), predicted whether a person would die from cancer, cardiovascular disease and nonvascular disease. These trends held true even when subtracting for factors like age, weight, smoking, cholesterol levels and preexisting conditions like diabetes and cancer.

“People with a biomarker score in the top 20 percent had a risk of dying within five years that was 19 times greater than that of individuals with a score in the bottom 20 percent (288 versus 15 deaths),” Kettunen wrote in PLOS Medicine.

Yet this information isn’t very useful unless scientists know why these deaths are linked to GlycA. Skeptics might say, “If you look at a large enough group, I’m sure some biological feature will connect their experience.”

This week, Kettunen and his colleague Michael Inouye, a human genomicist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, are back with a sequel. They’ve crunched the data from the original Finnish group as well as a new cohort of 3,500 young Finns that have been monitored since 1980.

By looking at how human genes respond in folks with a spectrum of GlycA levels, the researchers conclude that those with persistently high GlycA exist in a constant state of inflammation. It’s as if they’re fighting a virus or bacterium that isn’t there. Their bodies switch on the production of infection-fighting compounds, called cytokines, and they call upon immune cells — called neutrophils — that typically battle infections.

Chronic inflammation wears at a person’s body and can predispose people to catching infections. Akin to their results from 2011, the researchers found that elevated GlycA levels increased a person’s chances of being hospitalized with or dying from fatal infections. Overall, GlycA blood markers can predict death from infection up to 14 years in the future.

This schematic summary of the investigation into the biology of GlycA, a known biomarker for short-term mortality. It reveals GlycA’s long-term behavior in apparently healthy patients. GlycA levels can be stable for >10 years and are associated with chronic low-grade inflammation. Accordingly, GlycA predicts death from infection up to 14 years in the future. Illustration by Ritchie et al. Cell Systems, 2015

Kettunen suspects high GlycA levels are caused by a low-grade, runaway inflammatory response, but it’s possible that the condition results from a hard-to-detect infection by a virus or bacteria.

Clearing up the mystery behind the GlycA risk could be valuable not only for addressing our morbid curiosity, but also from a public health perspective. However, based on these two studies, it is hard to assign a number on how many people in the general population might have elevated GlycA, Kettunen said.

“We want to short-circuit that risk, and to do that we need to understand what this blood biomarker of disease is actually telling us,” Michael Inouye said in a statement.

But a person’s ability to learn their GlycA profile raises an ethical question, since there’s no known treatment for tweaking it.

“If we can find something that also lowers the health risks indicated by GlycA, then it may be useful to take. Until then, I think it is better not knowing,” Kettunen said.

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Scene from “The plague in Marseilles in 1721″ by Michel Serre. The Great Plague of Marseilles was the last large-scale European outbreak of the disease. Photo by DEA / G. DAGLI ORTI/via Getty Images

You may know the bubonic plague — an infection caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria — by its medieval name: The Black Death. But thousands of years before this pestilence wiped out 30 to 50 percent of the European population in the 1300s, it potentially circulated among humans as a harmless microbe, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Cell.

The new findings argue that the plague infected humans as early as the Bronze age, nearly 3,300 years before historical records began charting the disease. Researchers made this discovery by examining ancient DNA in human teeth from Asia and Europe. In total, they looked at dental samples from 101 people who lived from 2,800 to 5,000 years ago.

They found the DNA of Yersinia pestis bacteria in seven individuals, the oldest of which walked the earth around 2794 B.C. Until now, the earliest known DNA sample of this bacteria dated to the sixth century Plague of Justinian.

The photo shows a Bronze Age human skull from the Yamnaya culture painted with red ochre. Yamnaya later developed into the Afanasievo culture of Central Asia, one of the cultures that carried the early strains of Yersinia pestis a.k.a. the plague. Photo by Rasmussen et al., Cell, 2015.

By comparing this ancient strain of plague with younger specimens, the team was able to build a timeline of the bacteria’s evolution. They learned that the Bronze Age plague didn’t possess a gene called Yersinia murine toxin, which allows the disease to replicate in fleas and ultimately spread like wildfire. However, Yersinia murine toxin does appear in an Iron Age sample, suggesting the bacteria began using fleas as transportation approximately 3,700 and 3,000 years ago.

Based on this evolutionary analysis, two of the oldest Bronze Age Y. pestis bacteria also produced a protein called flagellin. This proteins makes it easier for the human immune system to spot an infection. In later versions of the germ, flagellin is mutated, allowing the bacteria to escape detection in humans.

These findings suggest that the plague wasn’t always such a bad bugger. For more, check out this article in Smithsonian Magazine.

The post Before the bubonic plague wrecked Europe, it was way less contagious appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Artist’s impression of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft encountering a Pluto-like object in the distant Kuiper Belt. If NASA approves a proposal to extend New Horizons’ mission by 2016, the spacecraft would reach an object named 2014 MU69 in the far reaches of the solar system by 2019. Image courtesy of Alex Parker/NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

After months of beaming back one awe-inducing photo after another of Pluto’s icy landscape, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is heading toward a new destination roughly one billion miles away from the dwarf planet.

Flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland initiated the first of four maneuvers Thursday that are needed to change the probe’s trajectory toward an object elsewhere in the Kuiper Belt.

Since the spacecraft is three billion miles from Earth, all four commands will take two weeks to complete, the Associated Press reported.

The New Horizons team selected the destination for a secondary mission in August. The target is an object known as 2014 MU69, or “Potential Target 1″ (PT1). The probe is expected to reach the nearly 30-mile-wide object in the far reaches of the solar system by January 2019, though NASA must receive approval from an independent panel before they can fully execute the second mission. NASA’s proposal to fund the flyby and documentation of the 2014 MU69 object is due in 2016.

Little is known about PT1, even though it was discovered in 2014 by the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA scientists have also said a flyby in a largely unexplored region of space would provide clues to understanding the solar system’s birth, which occurred around 4.6 billion years ago.

Hubble discovery images of “PT1,” or “Potentially Target” 1. Image courtesy of NASA/ESA/SwRI/JHU/APL

The PT1 object is approximately one percent the size of Pluto, but 10 times larger than a typical comet. NASA said that the New Horizons spacecraft was equipped with excess nuclear fuel to potentially tackle a second flyby. PT1’s location is reachable with the fuel leftover from New Horizon’s historic flyby of Pluto.

Lead scientist Alan Stern told AP that the goal was to get the New Horizons spacecraft closer to PT1 than the distance — 7,770 miles — it came within Pluto.

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Hurricane Patricia as viewed from the International Space Station. Photo by Scott Kelly/NASA

In early July, six cyclones struck the Pacific Ocean at once, marking the first time in a decade that this ocean has hosted five or more weather events with tropical storm strength. The following month, two storms with super-typhoon intensity — Goni and Atsani — marched across the Pacific in the same week — that hasn’t happened since 1997.

Now, Hurricane Patricia, the strongest storm ever recorded in the western Hemisphere, is churning across the Pacific on its way to Mexico, raising a number of questions:

Is El Niño responsible for these storm patterns? Partly, but not totally.

Is Patricia the worst storm ever in the Western Hemisphere? Depends on what you’re measuring.

How bad will Patricia be? By some measures, potentially as bad as hurricane Katrina.

And why is Patricia called a hurricane, not a typhoon, if it’s in the Pacific? Because of an arbitrary decision in 1945.

Let me explain.

Did El Niño cause Patricia?

In a word, no. You can’t attribute a single weather event to global climate change or El Niño.

But El Niño has contributed to the storm’s intensity, said Accuweather meteorologist Dan Kottlowski.

Water temperatures in the Eastern Pacific and along the West Coast are warmer than normal. In fact, Kottlowski said, off the coast of Mexico, the water temperatures are by far some of the warmest that have ever been measured since meteorological buoys and satellites began covering the area in the 1970s.

El Niño has also reinforced Patricia and other storms in the Pacific Basin by lowering wind shear.

Cyclones form when ocean temperatures reach 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which heats the air just above the water. That air rises into the cooler portions of the atmosphere, moving massive amounts of air and creating strong winds. The rising humid air also spawns the giant clouds of a cyclone.

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Wind shear occurs when winds move at different speeds at different heights. For example, if there is no wind on the ground but 100 mile per hour winds at the top of the Empire State Building, then you’d say that location has high wind shear. If winds are moving at the same speed, then there is no wind shear.

Cyclones love conditions when there is little wind shear, and that’s what El Niño has done to the northern Pacific Ocean. One readout for this potency is accumulated cyclone energy, or ACE.

“We use what’s called ACE to calculate the energy expelled by tropical cyclones in a year,” Kottlowski said. “That value has been phenomenal this year, much higher than normal. Right now, it’s near a record amount.”

In fact, according to Slate’s Eric Holthaus, “Patricia is now very close to the theoretical maximum strength for a tropical cyclone on planet Earth.” El Niño is also triggering droughts in eastern Africa.

Ironically, El Niño and wind shear have combined to create a weaker than usual hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, according to Kottlowski.

If you’ve ever played with a spinning top, you know that if you tilt the top, it will fall over, Kottlowski said: “It’s the same thing with the atmosphere. What it’s basically doing is all the thunderstorms are getting blown off to the right or the left.”

The fast-moving winds from the west and resulting wind shear are cutting tropical storms to ribbons.

“In the Atlantic Basin, it’s pretty typical when there’s an El Niño that you don’t see as many storms developing. I looked at a graph of the shear across the Caribbean. It’s probably the strongest shear that we’ve seen across the Caribbean. That’s why there have been fewer storms,” Kottlowski said.

Is Patricia the worst storm to ever hit the Western Hemisphere?

The only way to know the true strength of a hurricane is by making measurements inside the storm, which is typically done with weather buoys in the water or by reconnaissance plane.

“It just so happens that [Air Force Hurricane Hunters] had an aircraft into the storm late yesterday,” Kottlowski said.

If you don’t have an aircraft, then you’re using satellite imagery to estimate the wind speeds and the pressure, which is less accurate.

“Patricia is the first hurricane where a reconnaissance aircraft has measured a wind speed of 200 miles per hour and pressure down to 880 millibars in the Eastern Pacific,” Kottlowski said

It’s conceivable that other storms in this region were underestimated. For example, a recon plane wasn’t available for Hurricane Linda in 1997. People estimated a pressure of 902 millibars, but that measurement was made with satellite estimates.

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Conceptual animation illustrates the wind damage associated with increasing hurricane intensity, based on The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Video by Climate Central.

So as far as we know, Patricia has set a pressure record, topping Hurricane Wilma from 10 years ago. But why does it matter?

“Lower pressure gives a guesstimate of what the wind is going to be. The pressure doesn’t do any damage,” Kottlowski said. “It just gives a measure of how intense the storm is. The lower the pressure, potentially the stronger the winds.

Wait, is Patricia a hurricane, a cyclone or a typhoon?

All of the above. From a meteorological view, hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are one in the same. They’re all storms born in tropical waters., Hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, tropical depressions and tropical storms are all technically known as tropical cyclones.

When did people start using these different terms?

According to an article published in 1880 by the Royal Geographical Society of London, the word “typhoon” was first mentioned in print in 1560 by Portuguese explorer Fernão Mendes Pinto. From the article:

“The history of this word which, at the present day, may be considered the common property of about all European languages, is buried in the first reports of Western travellers on their adventures in Chinese waters.

The earliest print making mention of a typhoon seems to be “Pinto’s Journey,” first published in 1560. Here the word appears in its Portugese form at tufaõ, and Pinto himself says that this storm, which he encounterd on two occasions, is so called by the Chinese…The present spelling, typhoon, may be traced to the end of the 17th century; Lecomte, whose Memoirs first appeared in 1693, describing a Typhon, thus spelt.

This account speaks to the regional legacies of describing these storms. The word hurricane derives from the Spanish word “huracan”. Its roots sprouted among Spaniard colonists, who borrowed it from Hunrakan, the Mayan storm god, and Hurakan, a Taino and Carib god, according to The Weather Channel. Cyclone comes from the Greek word for circle, kuklos, but British merchant Henry Piddington is credited for applying the term toward an Indian Ocean storm in 1845.

How are these storms classified today?

The local derivatives stuck, Kottlowski said.

Hurricane is used for storms in the western Atlantic, Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

In the Northwest Pacific, people use the word “ typhoon”, though when the storms reach Category 4 or above 150 miles per hour, they’re called “super typhoons.”

Around Australia, India and throughout the Indian Ocean, these storms are called cyclones. Cyclon is also used for the rare occasions when a tropical storms hits the Mediterranean Sea, which has only happened five times since 1947.

Forecasters have been naming tropical cyclones since the late 19th century, but the habit didn’t become an official practice until 1945, when U.S. armed servicemen in the Western Pacific started naming the storms after their wives. This naming system became alphabetized two years later, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Research Division:

“Starting in 1947, the Air Force Hurricane Office in Miami began designating tropical cyclones of the North Atlantic Ocean using the Army/Navy phonetic alphabet (Able-Baker-Charlie-etc.) in internal communications. During the busy 1950 hurricane season there were three hurricanes occurring simultaneously in the Atlantic basin, causing considerable confusion. Grady Norton then decided to use the Air Force’s naming system in public bulletins and in his year-end summary. By the next year, these names began appearing in newspaper articles.”

The Interdepartmental Hurricane Conference and the U.S. Weather Bureau officially adopted the practice of using female names for hurricanes in 1953, which caused an uproar, according to The Weather Channel. Equal rights activists fought for nearly 30 years to change the practice. Male names were finally adopted in 1979.

In 2014, a study in PNAS claimed hurricanes with female names caused more damage because they spur less fear in the general public; however, as Ed Yong highlighted for National Geographic, experts question the statistical methods used in the research.

The reckoning.

Kottlowski expects that Patricia will do serious damage this weekend. The storm is expected to make landfall just to the west of Manzanillo, Mexico and hit the Sierra Madre mountains..

“The low level part of the storm will fall apart, but the upper level structure of the storm will continue to transport deep tropical moisture through central mexico and into the US,” he said.

The storm will drop up to 6-12 inches, though higher terrain could see rainfall totals of up to 2 feet.

Extreme storm surge is expected to hit the coast. Early estimates predict a surge of 10 feet, though Kottlowski said that it could be much worse.

Hurricane Patricia should make landfall in Mexico Friday evening. Image by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“When we look at surges with some of the bigger storms that hit the U.S., such as Hurricane Katrina, we see a storm surge of 25 to 26 feet. It’s conceivable that [Patricia] could create a storm surge that high.”

Once Patricia moves into the mountains, rain will be the biggest threat. Kottlowski said places like Puerto Vallarta, Guadalajara, and Manzanillo, Mexico are going to see a lot of rainfall, flooding and mudslides — all will be life threatening.

The storm will track eastward into the U.S. and develop into big rainstorm near the Texas coast, dumping heavy rain tomorrow, Sunday and perhaps into Monday over Southeast Texas.

The post The science of how Hurricane Patricia became so colossal appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Hurricane Patricia has been described as potentially one of the most dangerous storms to ever hit the Western Hemisphere. Meteorologists now say that Patricia is bringing with it winds of 190 miles an hour, down just slightly from earlier.

William Brangham has more on the storm itself and what is fueling it. He recorded this interview a short time ago, as the storm was approaching Mexico.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Bob Henson is a meteorologist for Weather Underground, a Web-based weather service that also has a weekday show on The Weather Channel. Henson is also author of five books on weather and climate change.

So, Bob Henson, it seems like meteorologists like yourself have run out of terms to describe the intensity of the storm. Yesterday, it was a Category 1. We wake up this morning, it’s a Category 5. How did this storm get so big so fast?

BOB HENSON, Weather Underground: It’s a true outlier.

You know, there’s only a very, very few hurricanes or typhoons in world history that we know about that have intensified so quickly. They have really only been observing these systems in depth for the last several decades, say, so we can’t really say how strong hurricanes were in 1900 or 1800.

But, certainly in the modern era of hurricane hunting and satellites, for a storm to go to from a tropical storm to a Cat 5 in, say, 24 hours, 30 hours, those kinds of numbers only happen once in a very rare while. So, this is up in the ranks of maybe the top three or four most rapidly strengthening storms.

And, basically, it’s because it was over extremely warm water that went to some depth, so the winds didn’t stir up colder water to weaken it. And upper winds were very weak, which allowed it to intensify rapidly. Really, just all the ingredients came together in just the right way, which, surprisingly, doesn’t happen all that often.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: You mentioned that calling this a Category 5, which is the top of the Saffir-Simpson scale, is almost an insufficient description of this storm. Can you explain?

BOB HENSON: Yes.

The Saffir-Simpson scale was developed several decades ago, and it breaks hurricanes down into five bins, Category 1 all the way up to Category 5. Now, most of those bins are about 28-to-30-miles-per-hour-wide, you might put it. Category 5 starts at 156 miles an hour, but it has no ceiling. It’s 156 and up.

This storm had peak winds of 200, so it was 45 miles an hour above the Category 5 threshold. You might say that, if we had a Cat 6 and Cat 7, that it would fall in the Cat 7 range, close to that. We don’t parse storms out when they get so strong, in part because once you get to Cat 5, it pretty much destroys everything except a really well-constructed building, so there is not as much operational significance to it.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: So, at that level of intensity, is that what we’re expecting that is going to just cause some incredible damage on the coast of Mexico?

BOB HENSON: Well, fortunately, it has weakened a little bit as it has approached land. It’s still a very, very powerful hurricane, still a Category 5, as in the most recent observations within the last couple of hours.

Now, the storm surge is going to be pretty significant over a relatively small area. And that’s another blessing with this storm. It’s not a gigantic hurricane. But there will be an area of a few miles where I would expect very, very severe destruction. And, moreover, when it runs into very steep mountains and hillsides just inland, it is going to be dumping gigantic amounts of rain, again, over not a gigantic area, but there could be tremendous amounts of rain along the way. So, mudslides and floods are also going to be a real issue.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: And then my understanding is that the storm is likely to continue on breaking up somewhat, but then heading into Southern Texas. What are you forecasting for Texas to be looking at?

BOB HENSON: Still pretty stout winds. There will be some high water along the Texas coast, but mainly a lot of rain. Could be six to 12 inches of rain in places like Houston.

And there is an ongoing heavy rain event over Texas already because of a separate storm, so there’s going to be some very, very large local rainfall amounts. And Texas is notorious for October systems that bring in tropical moisture and ex-hurricanes from the Pacific. So this is really something to watch as well.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM: OK.

Bob Henson of Weather Underground, thank you very much.

BOB HENSON: Thank you.

The post How the ingredients for a catastrophic storm came together for Hurricane Patricia appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Barbecue with sausages and hamburger. Photo by JOKER/Erich Haefele/ullstein bild/via Getty Images

Bacon, sausage and other processed meats are now ranked alongside cigarettes and asbestos as known carcinogens, the World Health Organization announced today. Processed meats cause cancer, and red meat likely causes cancer, the health agency says in a new report.

The new investigation involved 22 scientists who were invited by the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer to assess the association between more than 16 types of cancer and the consumption of red meat and processed meat.

Over the course of seven days in early October, the scientific panel examined more than 800 epidemiological studies from the U.S., Europe, Japan, Australia and elsewhere. The scope covered multiple ethnicities and global diets, according to the report which was published today in the journal Lancet Oncology.

The WHO group “classified consumption of processed meat as ‘carcinogenic to humans’ on the basis of sufficient evidence for colorectal cancer.” Colorectal cancer is the second most lethal form of cancer in the U.S., causing nearly 50,000 deaths per year. Processed meat was also linked to a higher incidence of stomach cancer.

Red meat carries a slightly lower risk, the group says, but is still “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Aside from the “strong mechanistic evidence” related to colorectal cancer, the “consumption of red meat was also positively associated with pancreatic and with prostate cancer.

As a main line of evidence, the group cites one study from 2011, which combed through 28 studies on meat consumption and cancer risk dating back to 1966. That meta analysis found that colorectal cancer risk jumps by 17 percent for every 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of red meat consumed each day. Meanwhile with processed meat, colorectal cancer risk increases by 18 percent for every 50 grams (1.7 ounces) eaten each day.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer keeps a list of compounds or activities with suspected, probable and definitive links to cancer, with each possible item falling into a designated grouping based on whether or not it causes cancer.

Processed meat now falls into “group 1,” meaning it ranks as high as tobacco smoking, the most dangerous variants of human papillomavirus (HPV) and asbestos exposure in terms of causing cancer. Red meat lands in “group 2A” with inorganic lead.

Research in rodents and human tissue shows meat consumption increases the production of chemical compounds, including haem iron and its chemical byproduct N-nitroso-compounds (NOCs). NOCs cause oxidative damage to intestinal tissue that is carcinogenic. Curing meats elevates the levels of NOCs as well as carcinogenic compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Heating meat leads to the formation of heterocyclic aromatic amines, a known mutagen and cancer-causing agent.

“High-temperature cooking by pan-frying, grilling, or barbecuing generally produces the highest amounts of these chemicals,” the report states.

The new analysis makes a definitive assertion on the connection between eating meat and cancer. In recent years, studies and health policy groups have linked the two activities, but often without explicitly saying meat causes cancer. Take, for example, the American Cancer Society’s position as of this morning:

Because of a wealth of studies linking colon cancer to diets high in red meats (beef, lamb, or liver) and processed meats (hot dogs, bologna, etc.), the Society encourages people to eat more vegetables and fish and less red and processed meats.

As the Guardian reported, the WHO’s new position aligns the views with other health agencies like the World Cancer Research Fund, which has said there is convincing evidence that processed meats cause bowel cancer.

Though a majority of the WHO’s panel agreed to these assessments, the final decision was not unanimous.

The beef industry has been preparing a rebuttal for months to meet the WHO’s announcement, according to The Washington Post:

“We simply don’t think the evidence support any causal link between any red meat and any type of cancer,” Shalene McNeill, executive director of human nutrition at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, told The Washington Post.

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