Author: Kate Horowitz

Let’s all take a deep breath. The lab-created “pig/human hybrid” being reported in the news this week is real, but it’s not quite the monster you might imagine. Researchers from the Salk Institute, who published their results in the journal Cell, have successfully coaxed human cells to grow inside pig embryos.

Chimeras (hybrid organisms) have always been a sticky issue both scientifically and ethically. Public opinion about this kind of science is hardly favorable, and the National Institutes of Health and other research bodies will not fund studies that involve the implantation of human stem cells into the eggs and embryos of other animals.

But many scientists, including the authors of the new paper, feel it’s important to keep doing it anyway. The first phase of the current research, which was funded by supporters of the Salk Institute, involved creating a cross between a rat and a mouse by implanting rat cells into mouse embryos. (Earlier this week, we reported on similar research in which scientists grew mouse organs inside rats, then transplanted them back into mice.) The researchers used gene editing to encourage those cells to develop into specific parts of the mice, including their eyes, hearts, or pancreata. They even coaxed the rat cells into becoming gallbladders—a very impressive feat, since rats don’t actually have gallbladders.

“This suggests that the reason a rat does not generate a gallbladder is not because it cannot,” co-author Jun Wu of the Salk Institute said in a statement, “but because the potential has been hidden by a rat-specific developmental program.”

Next, the team attempted to try the same technique with human cells and non-human animal hosts. They decided to use cows and pigs, since their organs are naturally similar in size to our own.

But rats and mice are much more closely related to each other than pigs and humans are, so the process proved much more complicated. Part of the difficulty involved timing: Pig embryos develop faster than humans do.

“It’s as if the human cells were entering a freeway going faster than the normal freeway,” said lead investigator Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte. “If you have different speeds, you will have accidents.”

After four years of work by more than 40 people, the researchers achieved their goal. Human cells acclimated to pig embryos and grew inside them alongside the pigs’ own parts. The growth period was brief (3 to 4 weeks); the researchers cut the experiment short well before the embryos became piglets. They were not about to create actual ManBearpigs.

“The ultimate goal is to grow functional and transplantable tissue or organs, but we are far away from that,” Izpisua Belmonte said. “This is an important first step.”

This may be technology at its coolest. Or grossest. Or both. We’d say both. Scientists in Madrid have figured out a way to produce functional sheets of human skin using a 3D printer. They published their results in the journal Biofabrication.

Scientists have really seized 3D printing as a solution to all kinds of problems. In the last few years, they’ve developed techniques for printing cardiac stents, artificial rat models to spare real rats from dissection—even human jawbones and ears. Other researchers have been hard at work growing human skin in the laboratory.

The team in Madrid decided to put the two concepts together. As you can imagine, this was not a simple matter of loading up the ink and hitting a button. The team built a brand-new type of bioprinter that uses human plasma as a medium, or scaffolding.

Co-author Juan Francisco del Cañizo is a surgeon at Madrid’s Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón. He said it was tricky to create an automated process that could create a friendly environment for skin to grow. “Knowing how to mix the biological components, in what conditions to work with them so that the cells don’t deteriorate, and how to correctly deposit the product is critical to the system,” he told The Independent.

The printed skin includes the same functional layers as the home-grown variety: a tough, epidermis-like outer layer; a thick middle layer; and a layer of collagen-producing cells to make the skin stretchy and strong.

The research team believes their new skin printer has huge potential for helping burn patients and other people who need skin grafts. The printer could include the patients’ own cells in the plasma medium, which would significantly decrease the odds that their bodies would reject the new skin.

Animal advocates see the skin as a chance to put an end to cosmetic companies’ animal testing, which currently relies on rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, and dogs as surrogates for human skin.

A bioengineering firm called the BioDan Group has already expressed an interest in mass-producing the skin printers.

Psychologists say little girls have about six years before they’re affected by harmful gender stereotypes about their intelligence. The researchers published their findings in the journal Science.

Belief in oneself is not just some fluffy idea. A multitude of studies have shown that girls and women who are confident in their abilities are more likely to succeed in school and in their careers. They’re more likely to take risks, score higher on tests, and advance in the world. But widespread sexism can make this confidence very difficult to come by.

Lead researcher Lin Bian is a doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois. “Our society tends to associate brilliance with men more than with women, and this notion pushes women away from jobs that are perceived to require brilliance,” Bian said in a statement. “We wanted to know whether young children also endorse these stereotypes.”

The research team recruited 400 children between the ages of 5 and 7 for a series of four experiments. In the first, the kids were told a story about someone who was “really, really smart” and were told about four different people, two men and two women. In the second study, they simply had to guess which of the four people was “really, really smart.”

The 5-year-olds were quite equitable-minded, believing that either gender could be the story’s “really, really smart” protagonist. But by age 6, girls were far less likely to guess that women could be “really, really smart.”

In the third experiment, the researchers showed some of the 6- and 7-year-old kids two very similar games. One was labeled for “children who are really, really smart” and the other for “children who try really, really hard.” Then each kid was asked which game interested them more. Girls and boys were equally interested in the game for hard-working children. The game for smart children was significantly less popular among the girls.

Kids in the last study were shown a game “for smart children,” then asked if they were interested in playing. The 5-year-old girls were all for it, but 6-year-old girls had substantially less interest than the boys.

Co-author Sarah-Jane Leslie studies philosophy at Princeton University. “In earlier work,” she said, “we found that adult women were less likely to receive higher degrees in fields thought to require ‘brilliance,’ and these new findings show that these stereotypes begin to impact girls’ choices at a heartbreakingly young age.”

The amount of plastic in our oceans—and thus in our seafood—is rising. The authors of a forthcoming study say Europeans alone ingest about 11,000 microscopic pieces of plastic apiece every year. And unless we make some very big changes, that number could reach 780,000 pieces per person within a few decades.

Microplastics, also known as microbeads, are popular additives to a wide range of personal care products, from face wash to toothpaste. We rinse them off and send them down the drain, where they head out into the water supply. And there they’ll stay, absorbing chemicals, until something or somebody comes along and eats them.

Studies have found that fish that consume microbeads are smaller than others. They reject real food in favor of more plastic. Their eggs are less likely to hatch, and hatchlings are less likely to escape predators.

Researchers at the University of Ghent in Belgium have been studying the effects of microplastics on shellfish like mussels, oysters, and clams, all of which are filter feeders. The average mussel sucks in and spits out about 20 liters of water per day. Most of the plastic particles in that water will be filtered and sent back out into the ocean. Most, but not all; lead researcher Colin Janssen says the mussels they examined had an average of one tiny plastic fragment apiece.

Janssen and his colleagues say the same process occurs in humans who consume shellfish. About 99 percent of the microplastic will pass through your system. That still leaves 1 percent to stay in the body, and we don’t yet know what that means for our health.

“We do need to know the fate of the plastics,” Janssen told Sky News. “Where do they go? Are they encapsulated by tissue and forgotten about by the body, or are they causing inflammation or doing other things? Are chemicals leaching out of these plastics and then causing toxicity? We don’t know.”

Experts estimate we’re currently dumping one garbage truck’s worth of microplastic into the ocean every minute. By 2050, there could be more plastic than fish in the sea [PDF]. We’ve started to take some steps—in 2016, Congress voted to ban microbeads altogether—but we’ve still got a lot of work to do.

“We have to do something about it,” Janssen said. “We have to act now.”

Researchers from Stanford University and the University of Tokyo have pioneered a technique to grow organs from one species inside another, then transplant them back into individuals of the first species. The technique, described this week in the journal Nature, suggests that we might someday be able to grow desperately needed human organs inside other animals.

The field of organ transplantation is no stranger to interspecies interactions. Surgeons have been giving patients heart valves from pigs for decades—a situation that speaks to the fundamental shortage of viable human organs available today. Researchers are currently attacking that issue from a number of different angles, including recycling used organs and 3-D printing new ones.

The latest study focused on the pancreas, an organ essential for digestion and regulating blood sugar. Pancreas transplants are very effective in combating Type 1 diabetes, but as with hearts and lungs, there just are not enough organs to go around.

To see if they could grow new, viable pancreata from scratch, researchers bred a type of rat that could not grow its own pancreas. They then implanted mouse stem cells into the rats while they were still embryos. The stem cells took, and grew successfully into mouse pancreatic cells. Next, the scientists removed these cells and transplanted them into diabetic mice.

 
The new organs worked beautifully, as though the mice had grown them themselves, co-author Hiromitsu Nakauchi said in a statement: “We found that the diabetic mice were able to normalize their blood glucose levels for over a year after the transplantation of as few as 100 of these islets.”

Rejection of new organs is a substantial risk with any transplant, but the mice’s new pancreata made themselves right at home. The mice only needed a five-day course of immunosuppressive drugs to keep their bodies from attacking the new organs, as opposed to having to take those drugs for the rest of their lives.

“We examined them closely for the presence of any rat cells, but we found that the mouse’s immune system had eliminated them,” said Nakauchi. “This is very promising for our hope to transplant human organs grown in animals because it suggests that any contaminating animal cells could be eliminated by the patient’s immune system after transplant.”

Further research and ethical discussions will be required before the technique can be used in other animals.

Fake news is a real problem. Now researchers say we may be able to inoculate ourselves against real-looking fabrications the same way we would against any other epidemic. They published their findings in the aptly named journal Global Challenges.

Lead author Sander van der Linden is a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge. “Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus,” he said in a statement. “We wanted to see if we could find a ‘vaccine’ by preemptively exposing people to a small amount of the type of misinformation they might experience.”

Van der Linden and his colleagues at Cambridge and George Mason University recruited 2167 participants from across the United States and asked them to rate their familiarity and agreement with a variety of statements about climate change. Some were true, such as: “97% of scientists agree on manmade climate change.” Others were falsehoods created and spread by disinformation campaigns, such as: “There is no consensus on human-caused climate change.”

Some people were shown just the facts; others saw only the falsehoods. Others saw a combination of both in varying proportions. As the participants read through the materials, they were asked repeatedly if scientists agreed about human-made global warming, in order to judge which stories they believed.

The results were what you might expect. Being shown only the facts increased participants’ understanding that there is scientific consensus by 20 percentage points. The folks who only saw the falsehoods experienced a 9-percent drop in that understanding.

Showing participants fact and fiction at the same time had worrisome results: fiction seemed to cancel fact out. This is especially problematic at a time when many media outlets insist on presenting a false “balance” on issues like climate change, even though the facts are clearly piled up on one side of the scale: climate change is real and caused by us.

“It’s uncomfortable to think that misinformation is so potent in our society,” van der Linden said. “A lot of people’s attitudes toward climate change aren’t very firm. They are aware there is a debate going on, but aren’t necessarily sure what to believe. Conflicting messages can leave them feeling back at square one.”

But there’s good (real) news. The researchers also gave one subgroup of people an ‘inoculation’: a warning that “some politically motivated groups use misleading tactics to try and convince the public that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists.”

It worked. People who were given this fake-news vaccine reported a 6.5-percent increase in their understanding that there is scientific consensus on climate change even after they’d read misinformation. Remarkably, this effect held strong even among people who were predisposed to reject climate science. 

“There will always be people completely resistant to change,” van der Linden said, “but we tend to find there is room for most people to change their minds, even just a little.”

An international coalition of researchers and public health officials have created a billion-dollar initiative to create and stockpile vaccines in the hope of preventing future epidemics. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) launched January 18 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

CEPI’s mission is simple: to prevent epidemics in the future by creating and amassing effective vaccines now. Vaccine development is a slow process, often requiring 10 or more years of research and testing before they’re ready and safe for human use.

But as we learned during the West African Ebola outbreak of 2013, disease epidemics don’t give us 10 years to catch up. Researchers were able to adapt existing experimental drugs to produce an effective vaccine in record time. Even that was too long to wait.

Jeremy Farrar is director of the Wellcome Trust, one of CEPI’s backing organizations. He remembers the 2013 outbreak with dismay. “We had to spend what was 9–12 months getting safety data for those vaccines, and that was 9–12 months where ultimately many people lost their lives,” he told Nature.

CEPI aims to eliminate those deadly months of lag time. Their research teams are first looking to create vaccines for the diseases most likely to cause massive outbreaks in the near future: Nipah virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Lassa fever.

Researchers say coalition members’ diverse backgrounds and expertise—from academia to business and government organizations—will be a huge asset to the project. “For too long, we have separated out the academic work from the next step of taking it into all that is actually required to make a vaccine,” Farrar told Nature.

The coalition has already secured $460 million USD in support from Norway, Germany, Japan, the Wellcome Trust, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and representatives say they expect to raise the rest by the end of 2017.

[h/t Nature]

To paraphrase one famous and fish-tailed redhead: We’ve got gadgets and gizmos aplenty. We’ve got smileys and whatsits galore. You want pictures of trains? We’ve got like 20. But who cares? No big deal. We want more.

Little Mermaid (1989) parodies aside, the sentiment is very real: The redheads of the world are clamoring for emojis that look like them. As Emojipedia editor Jeremy Burge writes on his blog, the lack of redhead options has been a top complaint for the last few months. In response, Burge and the Emoji Subcommittee have drafted a proposal [PDF], which they’ll present next week during a meeting with the Unicode Technical Committee.

The proposal lays out two possible ways of rectifying this grievous problem. Unicode could create an emoji of a person with red hair. That emoji would work just like the blonde emoji, allowing users to customize for skin tone and gender.

It’s a simple solution that would be easy to implement, but there are some downsides. First, it keeps redheads as faces only and does not permit them to participate in any emoji activities like sports, cooking, or facepalming. Secondly, the subcommittee notes, “Creating a new human emoji for a single trait may not be desirable precedent.”

The second option is adding a pale skin/red hair option to skin color options, which would allow for redheaded facepalming but also incorrectly assumes that all redheads have pale skin.

Burge notes that the work to create the emoji might not be worth it, and that even an uproarious mob of redhead emoji users is still a pretty small group of people. He might be underestimating redheads’ natural gift for clamoring.

If the concept moves forward, we may be seeing redhead emojis by 2018.

[h/t Mashable]

There’s a lot to explore on this planet. For instance, fairy rings, which are weird bald spots that appear in African grasslands. On this front, a team of scientists have made some headway. They wrote about their findings in the journal Nature.

 
Scientists define fairy circles as evenly spaced, circular bald spots in areas otherwise covered by vegetation. The spots can be between 2 and 35 meters across and have so far been spotted in the grasslands and deserts in both Africa and Australia. The most famous fairy circles in the world can be found in a stretch of sandy soil in Namibia, where scientists have been trying to nail down a culprit for years.

There are currently two prevailing theories. The first is that the circles essentially make themselves when plants opt out of growing in these spots in order to out-compete other plants nearby. The second is that the circles are the product of underground activity by rodents, ants, or termites. Both theories make sense; plants have to be extra-strategic with their growth in dry regions, and many fairy circles abut termite mounds or anthills.

Ecologist Corina Tornita of Princeton University decided to put both theories to the test. She and her colleagues created computer simulations that incorporated just about every element of fairy circle existence: termite colony growth, mortality, rainfall, vegetation spread, root systems—you name it.

 
After crunching the numbers and reviewing the simulations, the researchers realized that neither theory was correct—at least on its own. Fairy circles required involvement from both plant and animal mechanisms to form.

The study authors say their results show that “interactions among social-insect colonies and vegetation can explain a diverse global suite of regular spatial patterns,” and that understanding weird natural phenomena will require considering a broad range of elements, including “behaviours and competitive dynamics of cryptic ecosystem-engineer species, the ways in which plants and SDF respond to bioturbation and climatic variability, and the movement of water through soil in different environmental contexts.” 

In other words: Even seemingly simple shapes are the result of complex networks, in which living and non-living things all influence one another. Some “fairies” are six-legged, some have roots, and others are made out of water or dirt, but it takes all of them together to make what looks like magic.

Talk therapy is often considered the soft option when it comes to mental health treatment. Yet millions of patients and numerous studies testify to its long-term effectiveness, and now researchers say one type of talk therapy can produce visible changes in patients’ brains. They published their research in the journal Translational Psychiatry.

One of the best-known and most successful techniques is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT. People in CBT learn skills that allow them to challenge and disrupt unpleasant and negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. CBT is especially useful for people experiencing psychosis, a state of mind in which it becomes hard—if not impossible—to tell what’s real and what’s not. CBT for psychosis (CBTp) gives patients the tools to reframe their troubling thoughts and help calm themselves down.

For the study, researchers recruited 22 people who were already on medication to help with the symptoms of psychosis. The participants filled out questionnaires about their health and state of mind, then underwent brain scans.

The researchers divided the participants into two groups: Fifteen people continued taking their medication and did a six-month stint of CBT, while the other seven (the control group) simply continued taking their medication. The researchers tracked the participants’ health over the next eight years. At the end, the subjects filled out another questionnaire and underwent another brain scan.

Seven-and-a-half years after their treatment ended, the people in the CBT group showed clear signs of improvement, in both their brain scans and their health histories. Their brains showed stronger connections between several regions, including the amygdala, which helps identify threats, and the frontal lobes, which are vital for thinking and reasoning. People in the CBT group also reported feeling better about their mental health than people in the medication-only group, and felt they’d made more progress toward recovery.

Liam Mason of Kings College London was lead author on the paper. He says his findings dispel the notion that talk therapy is less important because it doesn’t physically change the brain. “This ‘brain bias’ can make clinicians more likely to recommend medication but not psychological therapies,” he said in a statement. “This is especially important in psychosis, where only one in ten people who could benefit from psychological therapies are offered them.”