Author: Kate Horowitz

Sitting quietly at a desk may be the preferred behavior for elementary-school students, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way for them to learn. Researchers in Denmark have found that integrating whole-body movement into math lessons can significantly boost kids’ test scores. They published their research in the journal Frontiers of Human Neuroscience. 

We all know that being active is good for our whole bodies. Recent studies have shown that those benefits reach all the way into the brain for both adults and kids. Intense exertion—the kind that gets your heart rate up—may improve alertness, and is linked to improved motor skills, sharper thinking, and better grades.

So we know that exercise can boost our brainpower. But can it help us learn? To find out, health scientists at the University of Copenhagen created a movement-centric, six-week math curriculum for elementary students. They recruited 165 pupils, all around the age of 7, and divided them into three groups. Some classes were given math lessons three times a week that required them to use their whole bodies (gross motor skills). They jumped, skipped, and crawled around the classroom, all while solving math problems.

Classes in the second group were sedentary but added fine motor skill activities to their lessons—that is, the students were asked to use LEGO bricks to help them solve math problems. 

Kids in the third group, the control group, had their normal math instruction.

All the students were given standardized math tests before, immediately after, and eight weeks after the experiment. (Standardized test scores are not necessarily the best way to measure kids’ understanding, but they do provide a quantitative baseline by which to gauge improvement over the course of an experiment.) 

Over the course of the six-week study, all three groups’ scores improved, but there was a clear winner. Kids in the crawling-skipping-jumping group saw the biggest boost in their scores, improving twice as much as students in the LEGO classes. The upswing in the gross motor skills group’s test scores was modest—about 7.6 percent—but still significant.

“We need to keep this in mind when developing new forms of instruction,” lead author Jacob Wienecke said in a statement.

Unfortunately, the score bump was not universal. Kids who struggled with math at the beginning of the study were still struggling afterward.

“Individual understanding must be taken into account,” Wienecke said. “Otherwise, we risk an unfortunate combined outcome in which those who are already proficient advance, and those who have not yet mastered concepts cannot keep up.” 

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub—the nonprofit medical research institute launched by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg—has announced its first class of scientific grantees, each of whom will receive up to $1.5 million in funding. The biohub was created to provide a safe but exciting space for scientific experimentation, all with an eye to eliminating disease around the world.

Biohub co-leader Stephen Quake is a bioengineer at Stanford University, one of the organization’s major partners. “We told researchers, ‘Give us your riskiest ideas,’” Quake told Nature. “There is a creative anarchy in the atmosphere here in the Silicon Valley that we want to harvest.”

The 47 grantees represent a broad range of scientific specialties from immunology to (perhaps unsurprisingly) human social networks. Here are 10 of them.

1. JILL F. BANFIELD, UC BERKELEY

Banfield studies geomicrobiology and environmental microbiology—that is, the tiny organisms living in the rock, soil, and sand.

2. MARTIN KAMPMANN, UC SAN FRANCISCO

Kampmann’s research focuses on the molecular mechanisms behind neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

3. MARKITA LANDRY, UC BERKELEY

Landry uses her background in chemical and biomolecular engineering to develop infrared and nanosensor scanners that will produce super-high-resolution images of the inside of the brain.

4. JURIJ LESKOVEC, STANFORD

Leskovec analyzes information and social networks from the large-scale (humans) to the microscopic (neurons) and even the invisible (data).

5. MICHEL MAHARBIZ, LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LAB

Maharbiz develops very, very, very, very small implantable biosensors, including one he calls “neural dust.”

6. RIKKY MULLER, UC BERKELEY

Muller is creating wireless microsystems that could be directly attached to the human brain for long-term, non-invasive monitoring, and treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders.

7. KATIE POLLARD, UC SAN FRANCISCO

An epidemiologist and biostatistician, Pollard researches the ways our microbiome influences our health and response to disease and treatment.

8. MANU PRAKASH, STANFORD

Prakash and his colleagues have invented a number of low-cost, hand-powered tools for researchers and medical practitioners working in remote areas. Their latest invention was a paper centrifuge that can be made for about $0.20.

9. ELIZABETH SATTELY, STANFORD

Sattely’s focus is plants—specifically food plants like grains, and how they might be engineered to become more nutritious.

10. KE XU, UC BERKELEY

Xu has invented new microscope techniques so advanced that we can now see biological structures we’d never seen before.

Check out the Biohub website for the complete list of grantees.

Survival can be a strange business. Take, for example, the newly named Geckolepis megalepis, which, when trapped, simply sheds its big scales and scampers away naked. Researchers described the new species in the journal PeerJ.

Scientists knew that all species of fish-scale geckos (genus Geckolepis) had big scales, and they all use this delightfully distinctive strategy. But what they didn’t know was how many species there actually are—because the same thing that helps the geckos escape predators is also what makes them very hard for scientists to catch. Early naturalists used to swaddle the geckos in handfuls of cotton wool to keep them from slithering out of their skins. Today, scientists set up plastic bags with bait inside and wait for the lizards to wander in.

But even a bagged fish-scale gecko is tough to pin down, taxonomically speaking. Reptiles are often identified by the patterns of their scales. Fish-scale geckos shed and regrow their scales so often that any patterns they ever had are often disrupted by the time they’re fully grown. So scientists have started looking at what’s inside instead.

A few years ago, a team of German biologists analyzed DNA from specimens of what were then thought to be all four Geckolepis species. As it turned out, four was a very low estimate. Genetic differences between specimens suggested that there could be as many as 13 different kinds of fish-scale geckos.

The authors of the new paper decided to dig a little deeper. At first glance, the gecko certainly seemed like a separate species; even by Geckolepis standards, its scales were huge. To make sure, the researchers used micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) to create super high-resolution, 3D images of specimens’ skeletons. From this internal vantage point, it was clear that the mega-scaled gecko was definitely doing its own thing.

Lead author Mark Scherz, a Ph.D student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Zoologische Staatssammlung München, said in a statement, “What’s really remarkable, though, is that these scales—which are really dense and may even be bony, and must be quite energetically costly to produce—and the skin beneath them tear away with such ease, and can be regenerated quickly and without a scar.”

The Irish Parliament has just passed a bill to halt all public funding of coal, oil, and gas companies. If the bill becomes law, Ireland will become the first country to completely divest from fossil fuels.

The Fossil Fuel Divestment Bill saw wide support from almost all of Ireland’s major political parties and will require the nation’s massive Strategic Investment Fund to sell off all existing investments in fossil fuel industries by 2023.

Deputy Thomas Pringle, who introduced the bill, says he sees divestment as a necessary action for people and for the planet.

“Ethical financing is a symbol to these global corporations that their continual manipulation of climate science, denial of the existence of climate change, and their controversial lobbying practices of politicians around the world is no longer tolerated,” Pringle told the Independent. “We cannot accept their actions while millions of poor people in underdeveloped nations bear the brunt of climate change forces as they experience famine, mass emigration, and civil unrest as a result.”

In October, the Irish government also voted to ban fracking, but Ireland isn’t the only European nation taking steps to distance themselves from fossil fuels and address the causes of climate change. Norway divested from coal in 2015, yanking €7.4 billion (nearly $8 billion) back from their investment fund. And in January, Sweden’s fierce deputy Prime Minister signed a law mandating zero emissions by 2045.

Just signed referral of Swedish #climate law, binding all future governments to net zero emissions by 2045. For a safer and better future. pic.twitter.com/OqOO2y8BU6

— Isabella Lövin (@IsabellaLovin) February 3, 2017

Sky-watchers from Kentucky to Canada got quite a surprise this morning: a dazzling ball of light streaking through the sky. Debris from the meteorite arced from the atmosphere toward the ground, eventually plunging into Lake Michigan.

So far today, the American Meteor Society (AMS) has fielded 222 reports from people in Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, New York, Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas, and Ontario, Canada. The event is technically called a “sporadic fireball”—completely random and unanticipated by astronomers.

“We don’t track this in space,” AMS operations manager Mike Hankey told ABC News, “so if you saw it, you were lucky you were at the right place at the right time.”

Police in Lisle, Illinois, were lucky enough to catch the fireball on one of their dash cams, and generous enough to share:

Check out this INCREDIBLE video of the #meteor this morning as viewed from a Lisle, IL police car dash cam! Thanks to Lisle PD for sharing! pic.twitter.com/uYELKkBxRO

— NWS Chicago (@NWSChicago) February 6, 2017

“This was a spectacular fireball!” said Philipp Heck, associate curator of meteorics and polar studies at The Field Museum in Chicago. In an email to mental_floss, Heck said he was disappointed that the meteorite fragments fell into the lake, since it means they’ll be hard to recover.

“Having a piece would be very rewarding as we could study it and learn about where it came from and what it can tell us about its parent asteroid or planet, and about the evolution of our solar system,” he said.

Editor’s note: This post has been updated with input from Philipp Heck.

If the sound of a co-worker repeatedly clicking his pen can send you into a flaming furor, take heart: You’re not being hypersensitive, and you’re not alone. Neurologists in the UK have spotted physical differences in the brains of people with this sound-related rage, although whether these differences are the cause or the result of the disorder remains to be seen. The scientists published their findings in the journal Current Biology.

The technical term for that noise-triggered irritation and rage is misophonia (“hatred of sound”). People who have it experience uncontrollable and intense negative emotions after hearing certain repetitive noises like chewing, lip-smacking, pen-clicking, and foot-tapping.

It’s a relatively new concept within the medical community, although people have been complaining of symptoms for a long time. To those who’ve never experienced misophonia, it may sound silly or made-up—which is what many doctors have concluded. Others have categorized it as a form of anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The authors of the current paper wondered if the problem might not be psychological but neurological. They recruited 20 British adults with misophonia and 22 without, and gave them all questionnaires to gauge their responses to various noises. Then they put each participant inside MRI and fMRI machines and played them all sorts of noises, including the benign (a kettle whistling, rain), the universally unpleasant (a baby crying, someone screaming), and common misophonia triggers (breathing, chewing).

As the researchers suspected, the results for the two groups looked very different. People with misophonia had more myelin, or insulation, around the gray matter in their prefrontal cortex. They also showed abnormal connections between this cortex and the anterior insular cortex, which is involved in processing information and emotions.

Hearing the trigger noises caused a spike in activity in both cortices for people with misophonia. For people without it, activity only increased in the prefrontal cortex. The trigger sounds also provoked a clear stress response in people with misophonia. Their heart rates increased and they began sweating.

Lead researcher Sukhbinder Kumar is a neuroscientist at Newcastle University and University College London. He says his team’s research should reassure people with misophonia and validate the condition’s existence to their doctors.

“Patients with misophonia had strikingly similar clinical features, and yet the syndrome is not recognized in any of the current clinical diagnostic schemes,” he said in a statement. “This study demonstrates the critical brain changes as further evidence to convince a skeptical medical community that this is a genuine disorder.”

It also suggests a possible way of treating the condition. “My hope is to identify the brain signature of the trigger sounds,” Kumar said. “Those signatures can be used for treatment such as for neuro-feedback, for example, where people can self-regulate their reactions by looking at what kind of brain activity is being produced.”

Scientists have found a genetically unique population of miniature sharks off the coast of Belize. They described their results in the Journal of Fish Biology. 

The hammerhead shark family is made up of 10 known species, five of which are on the petite side (relatively speaking). One of those miniature sharks is the bonnethead, Sphyrna tiburo, which meanders through the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans feeding on crabs, shrimp, and little fish. Female bonnetheads are a bit larger than the males, maxing out at around four feet long.

Bonnethead populations appear to be pretty healthy at the moment, but like just about everything else in the ocean these days, their future is pretty uncertain. Researchers decided to assess the bonnetheads’ current situation at the smallest possible level—by looking at their DNA. They collected tiny skin samples from 239 live sharks in the waters off the Bahamas, Texas, Panama City (Florida), Tampa Bay, the Florida Keys, North Carolina, and Belize, then analyzed their genetic code to check up on the sharks’ health. 

The bonnetheads’ DNA looked good—but it also looked sort of odd. The samples taken in Belize were startlingly different from the rest of the bunch. 

Paper co-author Kevin Feldheim leads The Field Museum’s Pritzker Laboratory for Molecular Systematics and Evolution. He said he and his colleagues were quite surprised with their results. “We thought we were doing a standard analysis of a shark population,” he said in a statement, “and suddenly, whoa, we were looking at a whole new species.”

That’s the short version. The long version is that Feldheim and his colleagues have more work to do before they can be certain they’ve got a brand-new bonnethead on their hands 

“There’s no cutoff in DNA that indicates you’ve got a different species,” he said. “Determining when you have a new species is a tricky thing. But these sharks are living in a separate environment from their fellow bonnetheads, and they’re likely on their own evolutionary trajectory.”

New species or no, the sharks still need attention and protection. Co-author Demian Chapman of Florida International University said: “Now we have to define the range of each of these species individually and assess them independently against where the potential threats are … our finding of a new species in Belize highlights that there could be more undescribed ones out there, each one facing a unique set of threats.”

Plants look so helpless and innocent, leafing about in their fields and lawns, but mess with the wrong one and you could find yourself in a world of pain. Scientists say some plants can identify their herbivore attackers—and that the plants use that information to call in bigger, herbivore-killing bugs. A report on the findings was published in the journal New Phytologist.

The arms race between plants and plant-eaters is both brutal and surprisingly advanced. To combat opponents that can bite, pinch, fly, crawl, and run, plants have developed an impressive suite of chemical weapons. Some of these weapons are poison; others simply make the plants taste awful. And then there are the wasp calls. When under attack, some plants emit volatile gases that act almost like dog whistles, silently summoning gangs of parasitic wasps to take care of the offending insect.

Even without the benefit of external sensory organs, plants can tell when they’re being assaulted. Previous studies have found that some plants can sense their attackers’ odors in the air. Others ‘listen’ for the chemical distress calls emitted by nearby plants. Still others pick up on chemicals in a slobbering bug’s saliva.

So lots of plants can tell when they’re being eaten, but can they tell who’s doing the eating? To find out, researchers paired field mustard (Brassica rapa) plants with 12 different herbivore species, including caterpillars, aphids, and a slug. Some species were gnawers and chewers, while others fed via sucking. Some were local and some were unfamiliar. The researchers covered each plant/pest pair with a plastic bag to collect any gases the plants emitted, then tested the gas.

The plants were having none of it. They fought back admirably against all 12 attackers, producing different compounds for each species in order to summon the right species of wasp. The gases all contained the same chemicals; the plants simply adjusted the ratio of chemicals to customize each cocktail. They even concocted successful blends to dispose of species they’d never met before.

Lead author Nicole van Dam says the findings are “spectacular proof” of plants’ hidden capabilities. “The plants may not have a nervous system, eyes, ears, or mouths,” she said in a statement, “but they are capable of determining who is attacking them. What I find truly amazing is that they’re even capable of distinguishing between a native and an exotic herbivore.”

Scientists have figured out a way to make skin cells attack brain tumors. A report on their progress has been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

We have stem cells all over our bodies, including in our skin, and they come in lots of different varieties. You may have heard of pluripotent stem cells, which can, as their name suggests, grow into just about any body part. Then there are neural stem cells (NSCs), which develop into nerve and brain cells.

Glioblastoma is the most common type of primary brain tumor. They’re fast and fierce; after diagnosis, the average survival rate is only 12 to 15 months. But they also have a built-in vulnerability: they emit a chemical that naturally attracts NSCs.

Under ordinary circumstances, this would not be a weakness. But researchers have engineered a type of NSC that works like a heat-seeking missile, carrying cancer-killing medicine straight into tumor cells. The idea is to transplant these special skin cells into people with cancer, giving their drug treatment a much better chance of success.

Early clinical trial results have been positive, but the treatment faces the same obstacle as any other transplant: our bodies do not welcome cells they don’t recognize. In fact, we outright reject them, and this rejection can make transplant patients much sicker.

To get around this issue, the authors of the new study took NSCs from the skin of the very patients they wanted to treat—in this case, laboratory mice. They were able to culture the NSCs into drug carriers in an astonishing four days. They transplanted these new microscopic drug mules back into the mice, whose bodies tolerated them well. The treatment had an incredibly high success rate, shrinking tumors and nearly doubling the rodents’ survival time.

We’ll need more research before we can try this in humans, but the initial results seem encouraging and could be used to treat a broad range of tumor types.

Editor’s note: This post has been updated with the full journal name.

A few months ago, the gears of the future ground to a halt when a curious weasel chewed through the wiring of the Large Hadron Collider. Valiant though the weasel was, it was tragically no match for superconductive wires it came in contact with when it hopped a substation fence. Fans of the weasel will be delighted to learn that its stuffed and slightly singed body will soon go on display at the Rotterdam Natural History Museum in the Netherlands.

The electrocuted weasel (technically a beech marten, Martes foina) is just one small charred part of the museum’s upcoming Dead Animal Tales exhibition, which also includes a hedgehog that got trapped in a McFlurry machine. The program is the brainchild of museum director Kees Moeliker, who’s been collecting weird animal deaths since 1995, when a duck smashed into the museum building. The duck died immediately; alarmingly, this did not prevent it from becoming the object of another duck’s rather forceful affections for a full 75 minutes.

This is actually the second marten to shut down—and be shut down by—the LHC. The first marten struck in April 2016, but someone disposed of the body before the museum could intervene. When it happened again in November, the staff at Cern were ready and put the carcass aside.

“We want to show that no matter what we do to the environment, to the natural world, the impact of nature will always be there,” Moeliker told The Guardian. “We try to put a magnifying glass on some fine examples. This poor creature literally collided with the largest machine in the world, where physicists collide particles every day. It’s poetic, in my opinion, what happened there.”

[h/t The Guardian]