Author: Kate Horowitz

The future may be star-shaped—the future of medication, anyway. Scientists have created a pill that can unfurl and stay in the stomach, releasing malaria medication for weeks. The researchers, who published a report on their progress in the journal Science Translational Medicine, say the same delivery method could someday be used for almost any drug.

Malaria affects more than 200 million people each year. While treatment is available, it must be taken every day for several weeks. Many of the people affected by malaria live in remote or impoverished areas, which can make it extremely difficult for them to get and take their drugs on time. And if the treatment isn’t completed, the parasite will stick around. It’s not that the drug doesn’t work; it’s that people often can’t and don’t take it. Non-adherence—or failing to take a prescription exactly as prescribed, for as long as prescribed—is a major problem worldwide.

But a very exciting alternative is on the horizon. An interdisciplinary team of engineers and doctors invented a futuristic drug-delivery method: a time-release capsule packed with weeks’ worth of treatment.

The capsule is, well, capsule-shaped when swallowed, but it expands into a star or snowflake shape as it makes its way through the digestive tract. Once it’s fully expanded, it stays put, delivering carefully calibrated doses of medication until it breaks down as the joints connecting the arms to the core dissolve and the arms break off. These smaller pieces then pass safely through the digestive tract.

To test their creation, the research team loaded their capsule with a malaria drug called ivermectin and gave it to infected pigs. The pill worked beautifully; not only did it not hurt the pigs or prevent them from eating, but it also successfully released the ivermectin for 10 days.

The team then devised a mathematical model to see how long-acting ivermectin might work in humans. Their results showed that adding the new capsule to other standard treatments significantly increased the likelihood of eliminating malaria in a given population.

The new capsule could improve not only medicine but also medical science and drug testing, says Shiyi Zhang, co-lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at MIT during the study. “It may help doctors and the pharma industry to better evaluate the efficacy of certain drugs, because currently a lot of patients in clinical trials have serious medication adherence problems that will mislead the clinical studies,” he said in a statement.

Co-senior author Robert Langer of MIT believes his team’s technology has potential for all kinds of drugs and diseases. “Until now, oral drugs would almost never last for more than a day,” Langer says. “This really opens the door to ultra-long-lasting oral systems, which could have an effect on all kinds of diseases, such as Alzheimer’s or mental health disorders. There are a lot of exciting things this could someday enable.”

The world’s bees are in crisis, beset by a daunting variety of threats. Humans are at least partially responsible for the bees’ decline, but we’re also hoping to be responsible for their rescue. Now scientists have found one way to protect them. Writing in the journal PLOS One, they report that treating hives with red light can help bees recover from pesticide exposure.

About ten years ago, beekeepers began reporting mass die-offs and disappearances from their hives. In many places, it appeared as though the bees had simply been raptured; hive boxes were empty but there were no bodies to be found.

One of the first suspects in Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), as it came to be called, was a parasite called the varroa mite. But even the ravenous, invasive mite couldn’t make bees disappear, so scientists began looking for other clues. Their search led them in a number of different directions, including toward a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. All pesticides are, by design, bad for bugs, but neonicotinoids have an especially nasty effect on bees, causing them to forget to eat and even where they live. They also curtail the production of an energy-carrying molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), weakening the bees and keeping them from flying.

In light of this information, environmental agencies in some countries have banned neonicotinoid pesticides altogether. Others are holding out and leaving the bees to fend for themselves.

But they’re not completely alone. Researchers at University College London (UCL) have been developing a treatment that may help bees bounce back from pesticide exposure. They knew from previous studies that infrared light could help slow and heal cellular breakdown, so they decided to try it out with sick bees.

They set up four hives. For 10 days, the researchers exposed two of the colonies (let’s call them A and B) to a neonicotinoid called imidacloprid, while the other two (C and D) were left alone. During the same period, they exposed hives A and C to infrared light twice a day for 15 minutes.

As expected, the poisoned bees in hive B did not fare well. Their survival rate and ATP levels dropped. With no poison and no light treatment, the unmolested inhabitants of hive D were just fine. But so were the bees in hive A. They were hale and hearty, moving around and living their lives as though they’d never been poisoned. The light was clearly doing them good. It also offered a boost to the healthy bees in hive C, whose survival rates were even higher.

Co-author Glen Jeffery is a visual neuroscientist at UCL’s Institute of Ophthalmology. He and his team were encouraged by their results, and say a simple infrared light in hive boxes could be all that’s needed. Not only does the light help damaged bees heal, but it can even protect those who have never been exposed. It’s “an effective means of preventing loss of life in case a colony becomes exposed to neonicotinoids,” Jeffery said in a press statement. “It’s win-win.”

You just never know how your contributions will change the world. In the case of Arctic birds, those contributions are drippy and white. Poop. We’re talking about poop. A recent study found that gases produced by huge quantities of seabird guano can increase cloud cover, thereby slightly reducing air temperature. The study results were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Climate change is a serious issue all over the globe, but it’s especially pronounced at the poles, where glaciers are vanishing and ecosystems are shifting at a dramatic rate. Understanding the many factors effecting these changes is essential if we want to protect our planet. Some factors, like a damaged ozone layer, are fairly obvious. Others are a little stealthier.

Take those bird droppings, for example. The Arctic is home to dozens of bird species and millions of birds, and they’ve all got to poop somewhere. Their runny poop—actually a combination of urine and feces—dribbles down the walls of their cliffside dwellings, accumulating in puddles and streaks.

Animals have excretory systems in order to get rid of materials they don’t need. We simply push them out of our bodies into the world around us. But the story doesn’t end there. The contents of our waste alter the environment they enter, often imperceptibly. The uric acid in bird poop, for example, releases ammonia (NH3) into the air.

A few years ago, researchers decided to find out exactly how much NH3 those birds’ butts were making. They conducted a global survey of 261 million breeding pairs of seabirds, then built a database listing the birds’ location and ammonia output.

Now, a team of climate and biology researchers from universities in Canada and the U.S. have put the excellent database to a very specific use. They were interested in figuring out if Arctic seabirds in particular were making enough NH3 to affect local weather. To find out, they pulled information on the birds’ productivity, then fed that information into a model that simulated the movement and transformation of ammonia particles in Arctic air.

They found that molecules of the birds’ ammonia could influence the growth of new particles, which could then expand and expand until they created new clouds. The clouds, in turn, could reduce the temperature above the bird colonies. Not by a lot, mind you; we’re talking about teeny, tiny changes. But we’re also talking about millions of birds in a swiftly shifting environment.

The results highlight just how linked we are to our planet, the authors write. Even as our lives and bodies are touched by the heat and air, we are touching back.

If you’re looking to lose weight, a fad diet can be incredibly seductive. Couching their claims in scientific-sounding terms like “ketogenic” and “toxins,” some of the most popular methods promise immediate, lasting results. But is there really evidence that these things work?

No. The answer is no.

Check out the video below from ASAP Science for the science—and pseudoscience—behind some of the biggest diet trends out there today. You’ll learn why “cleanses” can turn your tongue white, what the Atkins diet can do to your digestion, and why “going paleo” can give you especially odiferous farts.

And hey—while the diet industry would love for us to think otherwise, body weight is not the be-all, end-all of health or happiness. Every body is different, from the way it processes food to the way it fills out a bathing suit, and no body is wrong. Studies have also found that weight is a pretty poor indicator of health. If it’s better fitness you’re after, talk to your doctor about small, sustainable changes you can make to your eating and exercise habits.

Researchers have created a disposable HIV test that requires a single drop of blood. The inexpensive, portable test could be used in remote areas where medical facilities are scarce and will allow people to monitor their condition at home. The team described their progress in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

Scientific understanding of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has advanced tremendously since the disease was identified in 1981. There’s still no cure, but a diagnosis of HIV is no longer a death sentence, and the progression to AIDS is no longer inevitable.

The treatment for HIV is a combination of drugs, known collectively as antiretroviral therapy (ART). The drugs keep the virus from multiplying, which keeps it from progressing. It’s important for people on ART to keep an eye on their viral load, or the amount of the virus in their bodies, in order to be sure their treatment is working. But in many parts of the world—including sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV and AIDS are most prevalent—blood tests and doctors can be hard to find. So a cheap, easy-to-use, at-home test could mean the difference between life and death for millions of people.

Researchers at Imperial College London and a company called DNA Electronics decided to create the smallest, most portable version of the test they could. The resulting technology fits onto a computer chip and ingeniously combines chemistry and electronics. Users prick their fingers and deposit a single drop of blood on the chip. If the viral load in the blood meets a certain threshold, the blood will cause a change in the chip’s acidity, which the chip then transforms into an electrical signal. The USB drive containing the stick can then be plugged into a computer and its results read.

The chip’s designers tried out their device on 991 blood samples taken from people with HIV. The results were very encouraging: the chip detected the virus with 88.8 percent accuracy. This is slightly behind the traditional test setup, which yielded a 95 percent accuracy rate, but for a test on a flash drive, the new technology fared surprisingly well.

The researchers will continue to develop their test, and are interested in learning if it could also be used for other diseases like hepatitis. 

If you’ve ever watched a bat in flight, you’ve likely come to two conclusions: first, that bats are adorable*, and second, that boy, does that look like a lot of work. Scientists have long believed bats’ flying style to be inefficient, but a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science shows that all that flapping could be working in their favor.

Very little about a bat appears optimized for flight. In addition to their flap-happy flying technique, their massive ears and protruding features create real drag up in the air. Compared to birds, bats spend relatively little time in the air, and so it was assumed that speed and efficient flight were less important than other skills and traits.

But this is truer of some bats than others. From a distance, a Brazilian free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis, also known as the Mexican free-tailed bat) in midair looks a lot like a bird, with similarly shaped wings and flight patterns. The free-tailed bat is a delicate little critter, maxing out at around 0.5 ounces, with a wingspan of up to 14 inches. Known as speedy fliers, they make their homes in caves and under bridges throughout the western U.S. and down through Central and South America.

To find out just how fast these little bats could go, researchers at the University of Tennessee designed a very unusual experiment that lasted seven nights. Every evening, one scientist boarded an airplane headed toward well-known bat hideout Frio Cave, located about 80 miles west of San Antonio, Texas, while another waited at the mouth of the cave with a handheld net. As the bats emerged to hunt, the researcher by the cave netted a female bat, glued a lightweight radio transmitter to her back, and set her free. The researcher aboard the plane tracked the bats’ movements in real time.

And gosh, those bats were moving. Individual bats reached ground speeds of up to 100 miles an hour in little bursts—faster than any other bird, let alone bat, ever recorded. 

Contrary to expectations, they also negotiated wind currents the same way birds do—increasing their speed into a head wind and easing up when the wind was at their backs.

“Our results suggest that flight performance in bats has been underappreciated,” the authors write modestly, “and that functional differences in the flight abilities of birds and bats require re-evaluation.”

*Disagree? Just look at these faces. 

Scientists using remote sensing technology say we’ve been seriously underestimating the threats facing our planet’s birds. Writing in the journal Science Advances, the researchers say the standard wildlife risk assessment is “seriously outdated” and call for change.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List is the world’s go-to database for wildlife risk information. Federal and local government agencies rely on the list when making policy decisions, which means that the list’s accuracy could be a matter of life and death for the species involved.

“The Red List employs rigorously objective criteria, is transparent, and democratic in soliciting comments on species decisions,” Duke University scientist Stuart Pimm said in a statement. “That said, its methods are seriously outdated.”

Technology has advanced light-years in the 25 years since the list’s inception. Pimm, lead author Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela, and their colleagues hypothesized that using satellite data could provide a huge boost to the accuracy of wildlife risk assessments.

The team was especially interested in measuring animals’ areas of occupancy—a metric that provides a pretty reliable indication of a given species’ health or risk.

The researchers decided to focus their experiment on tropical birds in six wildlife hotspots around the world: the Atlantic forest of Brazil, Central America, the Western Andes of Colombia, Madagascar, Sumatra, and Southeast Asia. They then pulled satellite data on the known habitat areas of 586 native birds species, of which 108 were Red Listed as Vulnerable, Endangered, or Critically Endangered. The team combined maps of land use, national park designation, elevation, and forest cover to create a bigger picture of the worlds these birds inhabit.

That picture was not pretty. The data showed that 210 of the 586 species were in more danger than the Red List recognized, including 189 that are currently categorized as Nonthreatened. Ocampo-Peñuela says some of the discrepancy may come from focusing on habitat size and failing to consider other geographic details like elevation and humidity.

“Some bird species prefer forests at mid-elevations, while others inhabit moist lowland forests,” she said. “Knowing how much of this preferred habitat remains—and how much of it has been destroyed or degraded—is vital for accurately assessing extinction risks,” she said, “especially for species that have small geographical ranges to begin with.”

The researchers offer a “modest” addition to each Red List citation: a single sentence that lays out a species’ area of occurrence and spells out how much of that area is within the species’ preferred elevation, how much of it is natural habitat, and how much is currently protected.

“With better data, we can make better decisions,” Ocampo-Peñuela said, “and have a greater chance of saving species and protecting the places that matter.”

Apparently we’re not the only animals who could benefit from reading glasses; primatologists now report that older bonobos groom their kin from a distance, like a person holding a restaurant menu at arm’s length. Their study, published in the journal Current Biology, confirms that bonobos become farsighted as they age.

Along with the chimpanzee, the bonobo (Pan paniscus) is the closest living relative of humans; our three species share nearly 99 percent of our DNA. But unlike humans or chimpanzees, bonobos have a reputation as the hippies of the animal kingdom, resolving conflicts with sex rather than violence. They put a high value on group harmony, which they maintain through the aforementioned love-ins and by a near-constant social grooming regimen. 

It was during one of these grooming sessions that experts observed a very familiar behavior: An older male named Ten (abbreviated TN) was grooming a younger male, Jeudi (JD), from a somewhat ungainly distance. “TN had to stretch his arm to groom JD,” study co-author Heungjin Ryu of Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute said in a statement, “and only when he found something on JD’s body would he come close to remove it using his mouth.”

Here’s TN grooming JD:

Compare that with this photo of 17-year-old Fuku grooming her friend Hoshi: 

Ryu and his colleagues suspected that TN was grooming at arm’s length to accommodate for presbyopia, or farsightedness. To find out if that was true, and if the strategy was widespread, they spent four months in 2015 monitoring wild bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Each time they spotted the animals grooming, they snapped a photo, eventually capturing pictures of 14 different bonobos between the ages of 11 and 45. 

The researchers then measured the distance in each photograph between groomer and groom-ee. They compared each animal’s grooming proximity with his or her age and, sure enough, a trend emerged. Whether male or female, each bonobo’s preferred grooming distance increased exponentially as he or she got older, especially after age 40. 

The straightforwardness of the results was “very surprising even for us,” Ryu said. Bonobos have no corrective lenses, no reading glasses. When their vision fails, it fails—a dangerous proposition for animals who spend their lives in the forest canopy. 

Ryu says his team’s findings also have some interesting implications for humans. If our bonobo cousins also lose their visual edge as they age, maybe our tech-centric lifestyle is less to blame for our midlife squinting than we previously believed. 

Early humans may have been more sophisticated and even gutsier than we realized. Researchers examining 4000-year-old trash heaps have identified the genetic remains of several species of whales. The team published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

The first Greenlanders were the Saqqaq people, who arrived on the frozen continent around 2500 BCE. These were tempestuous times for our planet’s climate and, consequently, for its inhabitants, especially those in extreme habitats. The Saqqaq had to be super-adaptable if they wanted to survive.

Much of what we know about these early Greenlanders has come as a result of picking through their trash. Over the last century, archaeologists have excavated numerous middens (garbage dumps) dating back to the very first Saqqaq settlements. Unsurprisingly, they’ve found a lot of chunks of bone. Bone fragments are super-interesting, but they’re also quite limited in what they can tell us about a given civilization. For one thing, it’s hard to differentiate closely related species by looking at chips of their bones. For another, not every animal skeleton would end up on a trash heap. If the Saqqaq were hunting large animals, it’s unlikely that they would have dragged whole carcasses all the way home.

Fortunately, the middens contained a lot more than just bones.

Researchers collected 34 different sediment samples from settlement sites dating from around 2500 BCE to around 1800 CE. They processed the sediment through a sieve, which left them with piles of midden soil and smaller piles of the parasite eggs that had been living in it. Then they put both dirt and eggs through a battery of DNA tests to identify their origins.

This approach has a number of perks. Genetic testing can pull information from all kinds of organic material, including fat, skin, meat, and claws. And recruiting parasites to the research adds a whole new level of detail, since many parasites are picky and will only feed on certain species. Finding those parasites means there’s a pretty good chance those species were once there, too.

The middens were delightfully diverse in their contents. The researchers found genetic traces of 42 different types of vertebrate animals, including dogs and wolves (which may have been companion animals tethered near the dump), hares, caribou, and seals, and—in the oldest sites—walruses, seals, narwhals, and bowhead whales.

Exactly how the Saqqaq had snagged these massive animals remains to be seen. Whale scavenging was not unheard of in prehistoric times, the authors note, and an unpredictable climate could have caused a surge in whale strandings. But it’s also possible that these prehistoric settlers were out bagging whales. Hunters in other Greenland cultures are known for using poison-tipped spears to immobilize enormous prey; the Saqqaq people may have done something similar.

The discovery that early Greenlanders ate whales is one that “requires re-evaluating maritime history,” the authors write. “Western history has always considered European whaling as the originator and pinnacle of marine exploitation,” yet this study “pushes back the first evidence of whale product usage in the Arctic and can be seen as a logical development of the powers of indigenous observation and ingenuity in the efficient use of a plentiful northern marine energy resource.”

The study is “quite interesting,” says historical ecologist Josh Drew of Columbia University. Drew, who was unaffiliated with the study, recently co-authored a paper on the 19th-century whaling boom’s effect on other species.

The new paper “recognizes the technological acumen of indigenous people,” Drew tells mental_floss, “and shows that they were capable of highly sophisticated hunting techniques (and apparently using biological warfare) to capture whales.”

On top of that, these findings shake up our ideas of a “pristine” baseline for marine ecosystems. “It turns out those populations weren’t so pristine,” he says, “and that our species has a long, tangled, history with Arctic marine mammals.”

Tomorrow will be a paid vacation day for thousands of Americans, as more than 300 companies close their doors and urge employees to go vote.

Election Day in the United States has been held on a Tuesday since 1845, a time when many eligible voters organized their weeks around farm chores and the Sabbath. The decision was relatively sensible at the time, but these days, many argue, the weekday vote is only hurting our democratic process. The U.S. ranks 138th out of 172 countries when it comes to voter turnout, while countries with weekend votes are faring far better.

The hassle of getting to the polls can vary by location. Some states mandate paid election-day leave so that workers can vote, while others allow a few hours of unpaid leave as long as it’s requested ahead of time. Still others make no provisions for employees at all, leaving would-be voters scrambling to vote early or endure long lines before or after work. It’s no wonder so many Americans just don’t bother.

But private organizations can make their own Election Day rules, and some of the biggest employers in the U.S. are doing just that. So far, more than 300 companies, including General Motors, Ford, Patagonia, and many publishers and tech startups have pledged to close their doors tomorrow in order to give employees the time to vote.

This year marks the first such closing for some organizations, but at Hearst, giving non-news operations employees the day off is an annual tradition that was started by company founder William Randolph Hearst himself at the turn of the 20th century.

Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario has pledged to temporarily shutter all her company’s stores, its headquarters, and its distribution center on Tuesday. “As a business, we have a unique ability to take a stand and choose to prioritize the health of the planet over profit, and I think it’s important we take that opportunity when it truly matters,” Marcario said in a statement.

The bipartisan nonprofit Take Off Election Day is keeping a running list of companies offering paid time off to vote. If your employer isn’t among them, you can visit takeoffelectionday.org to send an anonymous email urging them to get on board the democracy train.

[h/t CNN Money]