New method of nerve stimulation developed

Better Electrical Stimulation Could Help Damaged Nerves

Functional electrical stimulation (FES) was developed to help return lost function to patients with upper and lower extremity injuries and spinal cord injuries, among other applications. However, the devices, which work by stimulating neuronal activity in nerve-damaged patients, have a potential shortcoming in that the electrical currents needed for the treatment to work can also send errant signals to surrounding nerves, resulting in painful side effects.

Earlier this fall, a plastic surgery research team at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and an engineering team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), described a new method of nerve stimulation that reduces the device’s electrical threshold by 40 percent, compared with traditional FES therapy. Reported in the October 23 Advance On-line issue of the journal Nature Materials, the findings could help researchers develop a safer, more efficient FES therapy with fewer side effects.

“This new device works by manipulating the concentration of charged ions surrounding the nerve,” explains co-senior author Samuel J. Lin, MD, a surgeon in BIDMC’s Divisions of Plastic Surgery and Otolaryngology and Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. “This could potentially mean reduced risk to surrounding nerves because less electrical current is required to stimulate the affected nerve.” The researchers additionally discovered that they could use the device to block signals in nearby nerve fibers, which could help prevent unwanted muscle contractions.
The research team, led by Lin and MIT Associate Professor Jongyoon Han, PhD, determined that by altering calcium ion concentrations in the fluid surrounding the nerves they could adjust the electrical impulses.
“Nerve fibers fire their signals based on the message they receive from the interaction of ions, or charged particles,” explains coauthor Ahmed M.S. Ibrahim, MD, a Research Fellow in BIDMC’s Divisions of Plastic Surgery and Otolaryngology. “We wanted to achieve the lowest current possible that would still result in positive results.” After testing the manipulation of sodium and potassium ions, the researchers determined that consistent results could be achieved by removing positively charged calcium ions from the fluid surrounding the nerves.

The newly designed method not only prevents electrical impulses from traveling along a nerve but also uses significantly less current required by existing FES therapy. “This could be of particular benefit for the treatment of patients with various forms of paralysis,” explains Lin. “The nerves that control movements and the sensory nerves that carry pain signals are extremely close together, so existing FES therapy has had limitations.”
The researchers conducted their study of this new electrochemical-stimulation method in the nerves of frogs and plan to later test it in mammalian nerves.

“This is an important step towards the design of a device to help patients suffering from nerve paralysis and chronic neurological conditions,” say Lin. “By bringing together biomedical and engineering research teams we have been able to successfully develop this new technique. Going forward, these types of collaborations will be absolutely crucial to creating new clinical treatments and enhancing patient care.”
In addition to Lin, Han and Ibrahim, study coauthors include Rohat Melik of MIT, Amr N. Rabie of BIDMC and Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt; David Moses of Rice University, Houston, TX; and Ara Tan of the University of Minnesota.
This study was supported, in part, by a Harvard Catalyst grant from the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center (National Institutes of Health) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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New Hydrogen Storage Material Based on Liquid Nitrogen developed

Hydrogen releases in the presence of iron chloride

In a research funded by the US Department of Energy, four scientists from the University of Oregon have developed a material to store hydrogen, using boron-nitrogen-based liquid-phase.This new material has displayed stability in both air and moisture. To be more specific, the research team developed a platform based on cyclic amine borane, which is also called BN-methylcyclopentane. Apart from being stable, the platform displayed the ability to retain hydrogen without changing phase. For the purpose of hydrogen desorption, the platform used iron chloride which enabled the conversion of the used fuel into the charged state.

This is a welcome change from the current storage materials which are solid, as liquid materials allow for a smooth transition from gasoline phase to hydrogen phase. During the course of the study, the researchers initially discovered six cyclic amine borane materials that were membered. On the release of hydrogen, these materials produced a large molecule. Although these materials were in their solid state, scientists altered the structure of the materials to convert them into liquid forms. The materials that were changed into liquid form in such a manner had low vapour pressure and retained their liquid form even upon the release of hydrogen.

Scientists believe that the new platform could be applicable in devices that use fuel cells. However, they also believe that the greatest hurdle in the commercial usage of such a platform would be the increase of hydrogen yield and the development of an effective mechanism to regenerate. The US Department of Energy is encouraging research to develop a solid or liquid hydrogen fuel carrier by 2017.

Source: http://www.uoregon.edu

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Sweet Spot for Life's Chemistry Discovered

Astronomers home in on places ripe for formation of complex organic molecules.

Some young stars have been found to be cranking out the production of methanol, an chemical that could support life's chemistry. NASA

When scientists realized early Earth didn't have the right ingredients for life on its own, they started looking in space for the complex organic molecules needed to get things going.

Of particular interest is methanol, which can trigger the more complex chemistry that leads to amino acids, the building blocks for proteins and life.

"Methanol is the most complex molecule you can form at the really low temperatures in interstellar space," astronomer Douglas Whittet, with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, told Discovery News. "When you put methanol into a newly forming star system, you have some heat from a proto-sun and that's when methanol really takes off. It's the springboard for more exciting chemistry that follows."

In other words, find the methanol and scientists believe you find the chemical pathways to life.

"Searching for methanol in various regions in space will tell researchers where to look for other complex organic molecules, which will eventually lead to the formation of life," astronomer Sachindev Shenoy, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News.

But where to look?
A new analysis by Whittet and colleagues shows there is a "sweet spot" around a few young stars where methanol production is cranking. What seems to be key is how fast molecules can reach dust grains, which serve as a scaffolding of sorts for chemical reactions.

"The rate of molecule accumulation on the particles can result in an organic boom or a literal dead end," Whittet said.

Not all young stars are suited for organic chemistry. Whittet's team found a range of methanol concentrations in clouds from practically zero to about 30 percent.

If molecules build up too quickly on the surfaces of dust grains, there's not enough time for chemical reactions to occur before they are buried by other molecules. If the buildup is too slow, there are fewer chances for chemical reactions.

The research has implications for understanding where to look for life and suggests it may be more plentiful, from a chemistry point of view, than previously thought.

"The clouds we're observing appear to harbor more favorable conditions for life than the pre-solar cloud from which our solar system formed. And there is life in our solar system," Amanda Cook, a post-doctoral research fellow at NASA Ames, told Discovery News. "The implication is that life may have an even easier time taking root, so to speak, in other parts of the galaxy."
The research will be published Sunday in The Astrophysical Journal.

DISCOVERY NEWS

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Stem cells reverse heart damage

A new study says heart damage may be reversible with stem cell therapy without dangerous side effects.

On a June day in 2009, a 39-year-old man named Ken Milles lay on an exam table at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. A month earlier, he'd suffered a massive heart attack that destroyed nearly a third of his heart.

"The most difficult part was the uncertainty," he recalls. "Your heart is 30% damaged, and they tell you this could affect you the rest of your life." He was about to receive an infusion of stem cells, grown from cells taken from his own heart a few weeks earlier. No one had ever tried this before.

About three weeks later, in Kentucky, a patient named Mike Jones underwent a similar procedure at the University of Louisville's Jewish Hospital. Jones suffered from advanced heart failure, the result of a heart attack years earlier. Like Milles, he received an infusion of stem cells, grown from his own heart tissue.

"Once you reach this stage of heart disease, you don't get better," says Dr. Robert Bolli, who oversaw Jones' procedure, explaining what doctors have always believed and taught. "You can go down slowly, or go down quickly, but you're going to go down."

Conventional wisdom took a hit Monday, as Bolli's group and a team from Cedars-Sinai each reported that stem cell therapies were able to reverse heart damage, without dangerous side effects, at least in a small group of patients.

In Bolli's study, published in The Lancet, 16 patients with severe heart failure received a purified batch of cardiac stem cells. Within a year, their heart function markedly improved. The heart's pumping ability can be quantified through the "Left Ventricle Ejection Fraction," a measure of how much blood the heart pumps with each contraction. A patient with an LVEF of less than 40% is considered to suffer severe heart failure. When the study began, Bolli's patients had an average LVEF of 30.3%. Four months after receiving stem cells, it was 38.5%. Among seven patients who were followed for a full year, it improved to an astounding 42.5%. A control group of seven patients, given nothing but standard maintenance medications, showed no improvement at all.

"We were surprised by the magnitude of improvement," says Bolli, who says traditional therapies, such as placing a stent to physically widen the patient's artery, typically make a smaller difference. Prior to treatment, Mike Jones couldn't walk to the restroom without stopping for breath, says Bolli. "Now he can drive a tractor on his farm, even play basketball with his grandchildren. His life was transformed."

At Cedars-Sinai, 17 patients, including Milles, were given stem cells approximately six weeks after suffering a moderate to major heart attack. All had lost enough tissue to put them "at big risk" of future heart failure, according to Dr. Eduardo Marban, the director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, who developed the stem cell procedure used there.

The results were striking. Not only did scar tissue retreat -- shrinking 40% in Ken Milles, and between 30% and 47% in other test subjects -- but the patients actually generated new heart tissue. On average, the stem cell recipients grew the equivalent of 600 million new heart cells, according to Marban, who used MRI imaging to measure changes. By way of perspective, a major heart attack might kill off a billion cells.

"This is unprecedented, the first time anyone has grown living heart muscle," says Marban. "No one else has demonstrated that. It's very gratifying, especially when the conventional teaching has been that the damage is irreversible."

Perhaps even more important, no treated patient in either study suffered a significant health setback.

The twin findings are a boost to the notion that the heart contains the seeds of its own rebirth. For years, doctors believed that heart cells, once destroyed, were gone forever. But in a series of experiments, researchers including Bolli's collaborator, Dr. Piero Anversa, found that the heart contains a type of stem cell that can develop into either heart muscle or blood vessel components -- in essence, whatever the heart requires at a particular point in time. The problem for patients like Mike Jones or Ken Milles is that there simply aren't enough of these repair cells waiting around. The experimental treatments involve removing stem cells through a biopsy, and making millions of copies in a laboratory.

The Bolli/Anversa group and Marban's team both used cardiac stem cells, but Bolli and Anversa "purified" the CSCs, so that more than 90% of the infusion was actual stem cells. Marban, on the other hand, used a mixture of stem cells and other types of cells extracted from the patient's heart. "We've found that the mixture is more potent than any subtype we've been able to isolate," he says. He says the additional cells may help by providing a supportive environment for the stem cells to multiply.

Other scientists, including Dr. Douglas Losordo, have produced improvements in cardiac patients using stem cells derived from bone marrow. "The body contains cells that seem to be pre-programmed for repair," explains Losordo. "The consistent thing about all these approaches is that they're leveraging what seems to be the body's own repair mechanism."
This is unprecedented, the first time anyone has grown living heart muscle.
Dr. Eduardo Marban, Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute

Losordo praised the Lancet paper, and recalls the skepticism that met Anversa's initial claims, a decade ago, that there were stem cells in the adult heart. "Some scientists are always resistant to that type of novelty. You know the saying: First they ignore you, then they attack you and finally they imitate you."

Denis Buxton, who oversees stem cell research at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, calls the new studies "a paradigm shift, harnessing the heart's own regenerative processes." But he says he would like to see more head-to-head comparisons to determine which type of cells are most beneficial.

Questions also remain about timing. Patients who suffer large heart attacks are prone to future damage, in part because the weakened heart tries to compensate by dilating -- swelling -- and by changing shape. In a vicious circle, the changes make the heart a less efficient pump, which leads to more overcompensation, and so on, until the end result is heart failure. Marban's study aimed to treat patients before they could develop heart failure in the first place.

In a third study released Monday, researchers treated patients with severe heart failure with stem cells derived from bone marrow. In a group of 60 patients, those receiving the treatment had fewer heart problems over the course of a year, as well as improved heart function.

A fourth study also used cells derived from bone marrow, but injected them into patients two to three weeks after a heart attack. Previous studies, with the cells given just days afterward, found a modest improvement in heart function. But Monday, the lead researcher, Dr. Dan Simon of UH Case Medical Center, reported that with the three-week delay, patients did not see the same benefit.

With other methods, there may be a larger window of opportunity. At least in initial studies, Losordo's bone marrow treatments helped some patients with long-standing heart problems. Bolli's Lancet paper suggests that CSCs, too, might help patients with advanced disease. "These patients had had heart failure for several years. They were a wreck!" says Bolli. "But we found their stem cells were still very competent." By that, he means the cells were still capable of multiplying and of turning into useful muscle and blood vessel walls.

Marban has an open mind on the timing issue. In fact, one patient from his control group e-mailed after the study was complete, saying he felt terrible and pleading for an infusion of stem cells. At Marban's request, the FDA granted special approval to treat him. "He had a very nice response. That was 14 months after his heart attack. Of course that's just one person, and we need bigger studies," says Marban.

For Ken Milles, the procedure itself wasn't painful, but it was unsettling. The biopsy to harvest the stem cells felt "weird," he recalls, as he felt the doctor poking around inside his heart. The infusion, a few weeks later, was harder. The procedure -- basically the same as an angioplasty -- involved stopping blood flow through the damaged artery for three minutes, while the stem cells were infused. "It felt exacfly like I was having a heart attack again," Milles remembers.

Milles had spent the first weeks after his heart attack just lying in bed re-watching his "Sopranos" DVDs, but within a week of the stem cell infusion, he says, "I was reinvigorated." Today he's back at work full time, as an accounting manager at a construction company. He's cut out fast food and shed 50 pounds. His wife and two teenage sons are thrilled.

Denis Buxton says the new papers could prove a milestone. "We don't have anything else to actually regenerate the heart. These stem cell therapies have the possibility of actually reversing damage."

Bolli says he'll have to temper his enthusiasm until he can duplicate the results in larger studies, definitive enough to get stem cell therapy approved as a standard treatment. "If a phase 3 study confirmed this, it would be the biggest advance in cardiology in my lifetime. We would possibly be curing heart failure. It would be a revolution."
(CNN) 

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E. coli could convert sugar to biodiesel

Xingye Yu, a graduate student in chemical engineering, and Professor Chaitan Khosla examine a culture of e. coli bacteria.

When it comes to making biodiesel cheaply and efficiently enough to be commercially feasible, E. coli may prove to be "the little bacterial engine that could," say Stanford researchers.
Biodiesel can be made from plant oil or animal fat – usually the former. Used cooking oil from restaurants is common, but for biodiesel to contribute significantly to reducing fossil fuel use, there needs to be a way to mass produce it from plant-derived raw materials. The problem is that synthesizing biodiesel is complicated. That is where E. coli comes in.
The bacteria, often discussed in terms of the human digestive tract, also act as a catalyst in generating biodiesel by converting inexpensive sugars into fatty acid derivatives that are chemically similar to gasoline.
But E. coli's natural conversion capability is not up to snuff, commercially speaking, and researchers tinkering with its internal machinery have yet to boost its capability enough to cross the commercial threshold.
So Chaitan Khosla, a Stanford professor of chemistry and of chemical engineering, decided to investigate whether there might be a natural limit that holds back E. coli's conversion capabilities. In other words, does the basic catalytic engine in E. coli have enough horsepower to do the job at the needed scale?
A powerful engine
"The good news is that the engine that makes fatty acids in E. coli is incredibly powerful," Khosla said. "It is inherently capable of converting sugar into fuel-like substances at an extraordinary rate. The bad news is this engine is subject to some very tight controls by the cell."
It turns out that like any high performance engine, the catalytic process in E. coli can only attain peak efficiency when all the controls are tuned just right. The research is described in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Khosla is a coauthor of the paper, which is available online.
Scientists don't yet understand how all the cellular controls operate. It will require a deeper understanding of the biochemistry of E. coli than they have now to figure that out, Khosla said. But his research team is making progress homing in on the most promising part of the conversion process, thanks in part to a new approach they employed in their analysis.
The researchers managed to isolate all the enzymes and other molecular participants involved in the process that produces fatty acids in E. coli and assemble them in a test tube for study.
"We wanted to understand what limits the ability of E. coli to process sugar into oil. The question we were asking is analogous to asking what limits the speed of my Honda to 150 miles an hour and no faster?" Khosla said. "The most direct and powerful way to figure it out is to pull the biosynthetic engine out of the cell and put it through its paces in a test tube."
By doing so, the team was able to study how the enzymes involved in fatty acid biosynthesis performed when they were free from other cellular influences. That was critical to their analysis, because the products in question, fatty acids, are essentially soap, Khosla said, and too much of them would hurt the bacteria. That is why E. coli has developed some very elaborate and effective ways to contain the amount of fatty acid biosynthesis inside the cell.

Precursor to biodiesel

The fatty acids can't be pumped directly into your gas tank – cars and trucks won't run on soap, after all – but they are an excellent precursor to biodiesel.
Biodiesel has so far lagged behind ethanol as a means of cutting fossil fuel use in vehicles because ethanol is easier and cheaper to make. But biodiesel has a higher energy density and lower water solubility than ethanol, which offer significant advantages.
"It is closer in chemical properties to a barrel of oil from Saudi Arabia than any other biologically derived fuel," Khosla said. Thus it could easily be blended into diesel and gasoline, or used alone as a bona fide transportation fuel.
If researchers can figure out how to manipulate the cellular means of production in E. coli, biodiesel could be made cheaply enough that the little engine of E. coli could end up powering a lot of larger engines at far less cost to the environment than with fossil fuels.
Xingye Yu, graduate student in chemical engineering, and Tiangang Liu, postdoctoral scholar in chemistry, contributed equally to the research and are coauthors of the paper.

(PhysOrg.com)

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Stanford researchers outsmart captcha codes

Real schemes learnability: Accuracy of Decaptcha using KNN vs the size of the training set. Logarithmic scale. Image: Elie Bursztein, Stanford University

Stanford researchers say that captcha security codes, asking Internet sign-up users to repeat a string of letters to prove the users are human, can be thwarted, and they have successfully defeated captcha at big name sites such as Visa, CNN, and eBay as proof. In fact, they found that thirteen out of 15 high-profile sites were vulnerable to automated attacks.
Captcha stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. This is a test that a Carnegie Mellon University computer science graduate student and his advisor created in 2000 as a security tool to safeguard web sites from automated bot attacks and spammers.

Simply put, the test was supposed to be passable by humans, not machines. The Stanford team, however, found that its own anti-spam tool-breaker was able to kill off captcha’s protective cover.
The researchers Elie Bursztein, a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Security Laboratory, Matthieu Martin, and John C. Mitchell were able to crack the codes. In their study, they note that site owners should be taking a closer look at their captchas:
“As we substantiate by thorough study, many popular websites still rely on schemes that are vulnerable to automated attacks. For example, our automated Decaptcha tool breaks the Wikipedia scheme... approximately 25% of the time. 13 out of 15 of the most widely used current schemes are similarly vulnerable to automated attack by our tool. Therefore, there is a clear need for a comprehensive set of design and testing principles that will lead to more robust captchas.”

The Stanford automated tool, Decaptcha, involved removal of image background noise and breaking text strings into single characters for easier recognition. This tool was run in selected websites. Visa's Authorize.net payment gateway was defeated 66 per cent of the time. eBay's captcha was sidestepped 43 per cent of the time. Lower thwart rates were recorded at Wikipedia, Digg and CNN.
Google and reCAPTCHA were the only two that beat out the Stanford team’s automated tool--no gotchas for either one.

Interestingly, reCAPTCHA also has its roots at Carnegie Mellon, and it was developed as a step up from captcha. The reCAPTCHA project sought further protective distortions with random warping and lines for something that would be readable by humans but more complex.In 2009, Google acquired reCAPTCHA.
As for other sites using captcha, the three researchers in their paper suggest various ways that captcha can be harder to outsmart.The Stanford team presented results of their research last month at the CCS 2011 (the ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security) in Chicago.
What’s more, Visa’s Authorize.net and Digg have switched to reCAPTCHA since these tests were performed.

(PhysOrg.com)

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Complex organic matter discovered throughout the Universe

A spectrum from the Infrared Space Observatory superimposed on an image of the Orion Nebula where the complex organics are found
Researchers at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) claim to have solved the mystery of "Unidentified Infrared Emission features" that have been detected in stars, interstellar space, and galaxies. For over two decades, the most commonly accepted theory regarding this phenomenon was that these signatures come from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules - simple organic molecules made of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Now HKU researchers say the substances generating these signatures are actually complex organic compounds that are made naturally by stars and ejected into interstellar space.
The team of Prof. Sun Kwok and Dr. Yong Zhang used observations taken by the Infrared Space Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope of stardust formed in exploding stars called novae to show that the astronomical spectra contain a mixture of aromatic (ring-like) and aliphatic (chain-like) components that cannot be explained by PAH molecules.
The researchers say the substances generating these infrared emissions actually have chemical structures that are so complex that their structure resembles those of coal and petroleum. Since coal and petroleum are remnants of ancient life and this type of organic matter was only thought to arise from living organisms, the researchers say this suggests that complex organic compounds can be synthesized in space even when no life forms are present.

Supporting an earlier idea by Kwok that old stars are molecular factories capable of manufacturing organic compounds, they say that not only are stars producing this complex matter on extremely short time scales of weeks, but they are also ejecting it into the general interstellar space in between stars.
"Our work has shown that stars have no problem making complex organic compounds under near-vacuum conditions," says Kwok. "Theoretically, this is impossible, but observationally we can see it happening."
As the organic stardust is similar in structure to complex organic compounds found in meteorites, the findings raise the possibility that stars enriched the early solar system with organic compounds. With the Earth being bombarded by comets and meteorites early in its life that could potentially have carried the organic stardust, there is a possibility that the seeds of life on Earth were sown by organic compounds created naturally by stars. If that turns out to be the case, it has obvious implications for the chances of life outside our solar system as the complex organic compounds exist throughout the Universe.
Kwok and Zhang's Paper, Mixed aromatic-aliphatic organic nanoparticles as carriers of unidentified infrared emission features is published this month in the journal Nature

( VIA GIZMAG)

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Fluoride shuttle increases storage capacity

A fluoride-containing electrolyte separates the metal anode from the metal fluoride cathode. Credit: Figure: KIT
German researchers have developed a new concept for rechargeable batteries. Based on a fluoride shuttle -- the transfer of fluoride anions between the electrodes -- it promises to enhance the storage capacity reached by lithium-ion batteries by several factors. Operational safety is also increased, as it can be done without lithium. The fluoride-ion battery is presented for the first time in the Journal of Materials Chemistry by Dr. Maximilian Fichtner and Dr. Munnangi Anji Reddy.
Lithium-ion batteries are applied widely, but their storage capacity is limited. In the future, battery systems of enhanced energy density will be needed for mobile applications in particular. Such batteries can store more energy at reduced weight. For this reason, KIT researchers are also conducting research into alternative systems. A completely new concept for secondary batteries based on metal fluorides was developed by Dr. Maximilian Fichtner, Head of the Energy Storage Systems Group, and Dr. Munnangi Anji Reddy at the KIT Institute of Nanotechnology (INT).
Metal fluorides may be applied as conversion materials in lithium-ion batteries. They also allow for lithium-free batteries with a fluoride-containing electrolyte, a metal anode, and metal fluoride cathode, which reach a much better storage capacity and possess improved safety properties. Instead of the lithium cation, the fluoride anion takes over charge transfer. At the cathode and anode, a metal fluoride is formed or reduced. "As several electrons per metal atom can be transferred, this concept allows to reach extraordinarily high energy densities – up to ten times as high as those of conventional lithium-ion batteries," explains Dr. Maximilian Fichtner.
The KIT researchers are now working on the further development of material design and battery architecture in order to improve the initial capacity and cyclic stability of the fluoride-ion battery. Another challenge lies in the further development of the electrolyte: The solid electrolyte applied so far is suited for applications at elevated temperatures only. It is therefore aimed at finding a liquid electrolyte that is suited for use at room temperature.
Provided by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres

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Robot 'Mermaids' Swim Seas to Detect Seismic Waves

Each robot is known as a Mobile Earthquake Recorder in Marine Areas by Independent Divers, or Mermaid. They are equipped with hydrophones, or underwater microphones, with which they record seismic waves from quakes and other earth-shaking phenomena as they ripple through the water. The mics can pick up the waves of quakes from as far away as 7,450 miles (12,000 km).

The seismic waves sent out by these temblors help scientists draw a picture of the Earth's insides.
"Seismologists use seismic waves very much as X-rays," said researcher Yann Hello, a geophysicist at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis in Villefranche-sur-Mer, France.
For instance, seismic waves slow down when they hit hotter rock and speed up when they encounter  colder rock, and "we analyze this information and translate it into a picture of the hot and cold regions inside the Earth," Hello told OurAmazingPlanet.
The heat-driven motions of rock in the deep Earth underlie the movements of continents and the earthquakes that can devastate cities, so having a more detailed picture of what's happening beneath our feet could better prepare us for such natural disasters.
Ocean gaps
One problem facing the effort to "see" what's happening down below is the vastness of the Earth's oceans. There are very few seismic stations in the oceans, which cover nearly three-quarters of the Earth, leading to gaps in our picture of the world's interior. Having robots out there can thus help fill in our picture of the deep Earth, Hello said.
The Mermaids float freely about 3,300 to 6,500 feet (1 to 2 kilometers) below the ocean's surface. During the initial testing of the robots, currently under way, they surface after recording data for a short time so that researchers can gather their data.
In the future, the robots will surface only after detecting powerful seismic waves, transmitting their data to satellites before returning to their floating depth. Each robot carries a GPS unit to provide its location, as well as sensors for temperature, salinity and ocean current strength.
Two prototype Mermaids have just completed their longest autonomous trips so far. One had a carbon hull, the other, aluminum. The carbon hull is lighter, helping a robot carry more batteries and work for longer in the field, but the aluminum hull proved less sensitive to perturbations in the water and ballasting errors.
Achieving new depths
Launched in June in the Ligurian Sea just south of Nice, France, these prototypes were programmed to dive to a series of cruising depths, surfacing after each new depth was maintained for three or four days. They detected a strong earthquake 5,870 miles (9,450 km) away, a magnitude 7.4 temblor near the Fox Islands off the coast of Alaska. [Related: Seafloor Sensors Listen to Quake Rumblings]
The first fleet of a half-dozen fully operational aluminum-hulled Mermaids will be launched in the Indian Ocean in the second half of 2012. Their hardware will allow for oceanographic, weather, biological and seismological observations, researchers said.
The technology of these robots will only improve over time, researchers added. Scientists and engineers are now refining the artificial intelligence algorithms that help the Mermaids decide what seismic waves are meaningful or not, and are hoping to develop larger and more lightweight floats with batteries that allow them to survive for up to five years.
The scientists detailed their findings in the Oct. 4 issue of the journal Eos.

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Weird Science/Black Death genome reconstructed

 

Five skeletal remains from the East Smithfield site (Photo: Museum of London)

It's hard to comprehend the impact of the Black Death. The "Great Pestilence" is believed to have originated somewhere in Northern Asia in the 1330s before hitting Europe in 1347. It killed an estimated 75 million people worldwide - that's around 25 per cent of all humans in existence at the time. Now in an effort to better understand modern infectious diseases, scientist have sequenced the entire genome of the Black Death.

The research is based on analysis of skeletal remains from the East Smithfield "plague pits" in London using a previously developed methodology for extracting degraded DNA fragments of the bacteria that caused the plague - Yersinia pestis.

    Close-up of teeth from a plague victim (Photo: Museum of London)

The international team, led by researchers from McMaster University and the University of Tubingen, say this is the first time a reconstructed genome of any ancient pathogen has been drafted.
So why is this relevant in the 21st Century?
Descendants of the specific variant of the Yersinia pestis found in the 14th Century remain exist today, killing an estimated 2,000 people a year. By drafting the reconstruction of the genome scientist are able to see changes in the pathogen's evolution - which in this case have been minor - and gain a better understanding of such deadly infections.
(Hendrik Poinar, associate professor and director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre Photo: Museum of London)
"The genomic data show that this bacterial strain, or variant, is the ancestor of all modern plagues we have today worldwide," says Hendrik Poinar, associate professor and director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre. "Every outbreak across the globe today stems from a descendant of the medieval plague. With a better understanding of the evolution of this deadly pathogen, we are entering a new era of research into infectious disease."
There are still questions that remain unanswered about why the Black Death was so devastating however.
"We found that in 660 years of evolution as a human pathogen, there have been relatively few changes in the genome of the ancient organism, but those changes, however small, may or may not account for the noted increased virulence of the bug that ravaged Europe," says Poinar. "The next step is to determine why this was so deadly."
In other words, the research may have knocked out one of the main contenders in establishing why the Black Death had such a deadly impact. The Paper states that because the Black Death may not have been due to bacterial phenotype, "factors other than microbial genetics, such as environment, vector dynamics and host susceptibility, should be at the forefront of epidemiological discussions regarding emerging Y. pestis infections."
It has also been shown that the variation of Yersinia pestis that caused the medieval plague originated sometime around the 12th Century, which means that it was not the cause of the Justinian plague that struck the Byzantine Empire around 540 CE was not caused by the same pathogen as once thought.
"Using the same methodology, it should now be possible to study the genomes of all sorts of historic pathogens," says Johannes Krause of the University of Tubingen Krause. "This will provide us with direct insights into the evolution of human pathogens and historical pandemics."
The research is published online in the scientific journal Nature

Source: McMaster University

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Scottish Doctors Use Ultrasound to Heal Broken Bones

Ultrasound Scanner     Wikipedia

Doctors in Scotland are using ultrasound to help patients with severe bone fractures, and finding it speeds recovery time by more than one-third. The ultrasonic pulses induce cell vibration, which doctors say stimulates bone regeneration and healing.

The technology is similar to the type used on pregnant women to image growing fetuses, but it uses a different sound frequency and a different pulse rate, according to the BBC. Patient Gary Denham received the treatment for a shattered ankle he sustained after falling 20 feet. “It's got a wee strap and that goes round where the break was,” he told the BBC.
Technology, Rebecca Boyle, broken bones, fractures, health, medical technology, Scotland, ultrasound, ultrasound probesA water-based gel is applied to a transducer like the type seen above, which then goes inside the strap and stays there for 20 minutes. The patient doesn’t feel anything, but the sound waves penetrate tissue to stimulate cellular activity.
Typically, Denham’s type of injury would take six to 12 months to heal properly — if it does at all — but his foot healed after four months, according to his physician, Dr. Angus MacLean. He said evidence suggests the ultrasound speeds up healing by about 40 percent.
Scottish doctors first developed ultrasound as a diagnostic tool in the 1950s, using adapted sonar technology from Glasgow’s Western Infirmary, the BBC explains. It’s now used for a wide range of diagnostic and therapeutic purposes — we’ve seen ultrasound used to heal punctured lungs, for instance, and it has the potential to break up blood clots, among other uses. But the Glasgow group is the first we’ve seen to use it for bone regeneration.
Apparently the treatment remains fairly expensive, so for now it’s only being used in complex fractures like Denham’s, the BBC says. But as ultrasound devices get smaller and cheaper, future fractures may be much faster to heal.

[BBC]

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Asteroid Has Mountain 3 Times Bigger Than Everest

 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA/PSI

A giant mountain, three times taller than Earth's highest peak, graces the southern polar region of Vesta, an asteroid that's the target of a close-up study by NASA's Dawn science probe. The mountain is pictured in the center of this image.
Dawn went into orbit around Vesta, a large asteroid in the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, in July. Scientists plan to discuss more details about the mission on Wednesday as part of the Geological Society of America's annual meeting.
Dawn's reconnaissance of Vesta is scheduled to end in July 2012. The probe next heads to the king of the Asteroid Belt, Ceres, a dwarf planet.

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Weird Science/Spies Can Hide Secret Messages in Bacteria, Scientists Say

Scientific espionage: microbial messaging.

Espionage just got a little more sophisticated and scientific. Invisible ink? Decoder rings? Lemon juice? Puh-lease -- that's mere child's play compared to what double agents scientists at Tufts University just created.
Now secret messages can be hidden in genetically engineered bacteria, thanks to a new method called steganography by printed arrays of microbes, or SPAM. Developed by chemistry professor David Walt and his cloak-and-dagger team of researchers, this new method uses an assortment of E. coli strains modified with fluorescent proteins that glow in seven colors.
Multiply that number by the two colors each message character is encoded with, and spies like us have more than 49 possible code combinations. That's enough for the alphabet, plus digits 0 to 9, with room left over for a few extra symbols.
The secret microbial messages are first grown in petri dishes. The cultures are then transferred to a thin film and ready to be sent to the desired undercover recipient. To unlock the message, the recipient must transfer the bacteria to a genetically modified growth medium, which acts as the secret key.
For example, the bacteria could be engineered to react only with a certain antibiotic, therefore allowing the message to be revealed only when in contact with that specific chemical. If any other chemical key is used, the message would be scrambled.
Self-destructing messages could also be created by using bacteria that loses its fluorescence over time.

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‘Artificial leaf’ makes fuel from sunlight

Researchers led by MIT professor Daniel Nocera have produced something they’re calling an “artificial leaf”: Like living leaves, the device can turn the energy of sunlight directly into a chemical fuel that can be stored and used later as an energy source.

The artificial leaf — a silicon solar cell with different catalytic materials bonded onto its two sides — needs no external wires or control circuits to operate. Simply placed in a container of water and exposed to sunlight, it quickly begins to generate streams of bubbles: oxygen bubbles from one side and hydrogen bubbles from the other. If placed in a container that has a barrier to separate the two sides, the two streams of bubbles can be collected and stored, and used later to deliver power: for example, by feeding them into a fuel cell that combines them once again into water while delivering an electric current.
The creation of the device is described in a paper published Sept. 30 in the journal Science. Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and professor of chemistry at MIT, is the senior author; the paper was co-authored by his former student Steven Reece PhD ’07 (who now works at Sun Catalytix, a company started by Nocera to commercialize his solar-energy inventions), along with five other researchers from Sun Catalytix and MIT.
The device, Nocera explains, is made entirely of earth-abundant, inexpensive materials — mostly silicon, cobalt and nickel — and works in ordinary water. Other attempts to produce devices that could use sunlight to split water have relied on corrosive solutions or on relatively rare and expensive materials such as platinum.
The artificial leaf is a thin sheet of semiconducting silicon — the material most solar cells are made of — which turns the energy of sunlight into a flow of wireless electricity within the sheet. Bound onto the silicon is a layer of a cobalt-based catalyst, which releases oxygen, a material whose potential for generating fuel from sunlight was discovered by Nocera and his co-authors in 2008. The other side of the silicon sheet is coated with a layer of a nickel-molybdenum-zinc alloy, which releases hydrogen from the water molecules.
“I think there’s going to be real opportunities for this idea,” Nocera says. “You can’t get more portable — you don’t need wires, it’s lightweight,” and it doesn’t require much in the way of additional equipment, other than a way of catching and storing the gases that bubble off. “You just drop it in a glass of water, and it starts splitting it,” he says.
Now that the “leaf” has been demonstrated, Nocera suggests one possible further development: tiny particles made of these materials that can split water molecules when placed in sunlight — making them more like photosynthetic algae than leaves. The advantage of that, he says, is that the small particles would have much more surface area exposed to sunlight and the water, allowing them to harness the sun’s energy more efficiently. (On the other hand, engineering a system to separate and collect the two gases would be more complicated in such a setup.)
(Science Daily)

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Weird Science/Red Wine Ingredient Resveratrol Stops Breast Cancer Growth

Resveratrol, the "healthy" ingredient in red wine, stops breast cancer cells from growing by blocking the growth effects of estrogen, new research shows. (Credit: © Mist / Fotolia)

A new research report appearing in the October 2011 issue of The FASEB Journal shows that resveratrol, the "healthy" ingredient in red wine, stops breast cancer cells from growing by blocking the growth effects of estrogen. This discovery, made by a team of American and Italian scientists, suggests for the first time that resveratrol is able to counteract the malignant progression since it inhibits the proliferation of hormone resistant breast cancer cells. This has important implications for the treatment of women with breast cancer whose tumors eventually develop resistance to hormonal therapy.

"Resveratrol is a potential pharmacological tool to be exploited when breast cancer become resistant to the hormonal therapy," said Sebastiano Andò, a researcher involved in the work from the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Calabria in Italy.

To make this discovery, Andò and colleagues used several breast cancer cell lines expressing the estrogen receptor to test the effects of resveratrol. Researchers then treated the different cells with resveratrol and compared their growth with cells left untreated. They found an important reduction in cell growth in cells treated by resveratrol, while no changes were seen in untreated cells. Additional experiments revealed that this effect was related to a drastic reduction of estrogen receptor levels caused by resveratrol itself.

"These findings are exciting, but in no way does it mean that should people go out and start using red wine or resveratrol supplements as a treatment for breast cancer," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "What it does mean, however, is that scientists haven't finished distilling the secrets of good health that have been hidden in natural products such as red wine."

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Scientists Release Most Accurate Simulation of the Universe to Date

The Bolshoi simulation reveals a cosmic web of dark matter that underlies the large-scale structure of the universe and, through its gravitational effects on ordinary matter, drives the formation of galaxies and galaxy clusters. The image is a slice of the entire simulation, 1 billion light-years across and about 30 million light-years thick. (Credit: Stefan Gottlober (AIP))
The Bolshoi supercomputer simulation, the most accurate and detailed large cosmological simulation run to date, gives physicists and astronomers a powerful new tool for understanding such cosmic mysteries as galaxy formation, dark matter, and dark energy.
The simulation traces the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe, including the evolution and distribution of the dark matter halos in which galaxies coalesced and grew. Initial studies show good agreement between the simulation's predictions and astronomers' observations.
"In one sense, you might think the initial results are a little boring, because they basically show that our standard cosmological model works," said Joel Primack, distinguished professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "What's exciting is that we now have this highly accurate simulation that will provide the basis for lots of important new studies in the months and years to come."
Primack and Anatoly Klypin, professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University, lead the team that produced the Bolshoi simulation. Klypin wrote the computer code for the simulation, which was run on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA Ames Research Center. "These huge cosmological simulations are essential for interpreting the results of ongoing astronomical observations and for planning the new large surveys of the universe that are expected to help determine the nature of the mysterious dark energy," Klypin said.
Primack, who directs the University of California High-Performance Astrocomputing Center (UC-HIPACC), said the initial release of data from the Bolshoi simulation began in early September. "We've released a lot of the data so that other astrophysicists can start to use it," he said. "So far it's less than one percent of the actual output, because the total output is so huge, but there will be additional releases in the future."
The previous benchmark for large-scale cosmological simulations, known as the Millennium Run, has been the basis for some 400 papers since 2005. But the fundamental parameters used as the input for the Millennium Run are now known to be inaccurate. Produced by the Virgo Consortium of mostly European scientists, the Millennium simulation used cosmological parameters based on the first release of data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). WMAP provided a detailed map of subtle variations in the cosmic microwave background radiation, the primordial radiation left over from the Big Bang. But the initial WMAP1 parameters have been superseded by subsequent releases: WMAP5 (five-year results released in 2008) and WMAP7 (seven-year results released in 2010).
The Bolshoi simulation is based on WMAP5 parameters, which are consistent with the later WMAP7 results. "The WMAP1 cosmological parameters on which the Millennium simulation is based are now known to be wrong," Primack said. "Moreover, advances in supercomputer technology allow us to do a much better simulation with higher resolution by almost an order of magnitude. So I expect the Bolshoi simulation will have a big impact on the field."
The standard explanation for how the universe evolved after the Big Bang is known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model, and it is the theoretical basis for the Bolshoi simulation. According to this model, gravity acted initially on slight density fluctuations present shortly after the Big Bang to pull together the first clumps of dark matter. These grew into larger and larger clumps through the hierarchical merging of smaller progenitors. Although the nature of dark matter remains a mystery, it accounts for about 82 percent of the matter in the universe. As a result, the evolution of structure in the universe has been driven by the gravitational interactions of dark matter. The ordinary matter that forms stars and planets has fallen into the "gravitational wells" created by clumps of dark matter, giving rise to galaxies in the centers of dark matter halos.
A principal purpose of the Bolshoi simulation is to compute and model the evolution of dark matter halos. The characteristics of the halos and subhalos in the Bolshoi simulation are presented in a paper that has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and is now available online. The authors are Klypin, NMSU graduate student Sebastian Trujillo-Gomez, and Primack.
A second paper, also accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and available online, presents the abundance and properties of galaxies predicted by the Bolshoi simulation of dark matter. The authors are Klypin, Trujillo-Gomez, Primack, and UCSC postdoctoral researcher Aaron Romanowsky. A comparison of the Bolshoi predictions with galaxy observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey showed very good agreement, according to Primack.
The Bolshoi simulation focused on a representative section of the universe, computing the evolution of a cubic volume measuring about one billion light-years on a side and following the interactions of 8.6 billion particles of dark matter. It took 6 million CPU-hours to run the full computation on the Pleiades supercomputer, recently ranked as the seventh fastest supercomputer in the world.
A variant of the Bolshoi simulation, known as BigBolshoi or MultiDark, was run on the same supercomputer with the same number of particles, but this time in a volume 64 times larger. BigBolshoi was run to predict the properties and distribution of galaxy clusters and other very large structures in the universe, as well as to help with dark energy projects such as the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS).
Another variant, called MiniBolshoi, is currently being run on the Pleiades supercomputer. MiniBolshoi focuses on a smaller portion of the universe and provides even higher resolution than Bolshoi. The Bolshoi simulation and its two variants will be made publicly available to astrophysical researchers worldwide in phases via the MultiDark Database, hosted by the Potsdam Astrophysics Institute in Germany and supported by grants from Spain and Germany.
Primack, Klypin, and their collaborators are continuing to analyze the results of the Bolshoi simulation and submit papers for publication. Among their findings are results showing that the simulation correctly predicts the number of galaxies as bright as the Milky Way that have satellite galaxies as bright as the Milky Way's major satellites, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
"A lot more papers are on the way," Primack said.
This research was funded by grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation.

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World’s First Anti-Magnet to Serve as 'Magnetic Shield'

Spanish researchers have designed what they call the world's first "anti-magnet," a magnetic cloak that can act as a shield they envision helping the military and saving lives. For example, some types of mines in the ocean are set to detonate upon detection of magnetic fields from ships passing above them. Military ships could use an anti-magnet to stop their magnetic fields from tripping the mines.
“It was a big explosion in science [in 2008] -- the possibility of cloaking electromagnetic waves,” professor Alvar Sanchez from from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain and the lead author of the design told FoxNews.com. “So we came up with the idea of trying to make something similar with magnetic fields, and now we have come up with a device we hope can be constructed eventually that will have these properties of an anti-magnet.”
An anti-magnet could protect medical patients as readily as military ships, the researchers theorize. Potentially, those using pacemakers could interact more readily with medical equipment.
“For example, in magnetic resonance imaging [MRI], in principal, you can protect the pacemaker from the field, but often you would need to distort the magnetic field, so then the quality of the images is bad,” Sanchez told FoxNews.com. “We hope in the future our device can be put on the chest of the patient to prevent the magnetic field from entering, while at the same time not causing any distortion.”
While many benefits present themselves, some downsides have also surfaced. The researchers have acknowledged that criminals could potentially use the anti-magnet to confuse security scanners in places like airports. But the scientists think it could help develop more sophisticated security technology.
“It is conceivable that they could be used for reducing the magnetic signature of forbidden objects, with the consequent threat to security,” Sanchez said. “For these reasons, the research could be taken into account by security officials in order to design safer detection systems and protocols.”
The concept for the anti-magnet consists of two main parts. The first component is a superconductor, which serves to shield the magnetic field. That superconductor would need to be surrounded by magnetic layers, finely tuned and configured to combat distortion. Sanchez and his team envision a cylinder made of superconductive material, with a magnet placed inside. The magnet’s field would be unable to reach outside the cylinder.
The team’s design is purely theoretical at this point, but they're looking to change that.
“We're starting to work together with some experimentalists to come up with a real working prototype,” Sanchez told FoxNews.com. “In principal, the idea would work on the scale of meters and then the scale of millimeters or inches. You can have different scales.”
Their study will be published in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society’s New Journal of Physics on Friday, Sept. 23.
The design team recently presented their research at a centennial conference of superconductivity in the Netherlands. This year marks 100 years of superconductivity.
“We benefit very much from the properties of superconductors,” Sanchez told FoxNews.com. “By merging our ideas on superconductivity and cloaking in general, plus all the work it took to develop, it just shows the importance of magnetism in our lives. We use magnetism for so many things. If you go home today and look around, you will probably find 50 items that rely on magnetism -- from the fridge, the phone, your computer.”
“Because of this, any device that presents a new property of magnetism will be so useful. Many of its applications I don’t think we can even imagine today.”

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Weird Science/Tree Frogs Chill out to Collect Precious Water

Research published in the October issue of The American Naturalist shows that Australian green tree frogs survive the dry season with the help of the same phenomenon that fogs up eyeglasses in the winter.

According to researchers from Charles Darwin University in Australia, tree frogs often plop themselves down outside on cool nights during the dry season in tropical Australia. When they return to their dens, condensation forms on their cold skin -- just like it does on a pair of glasses when we come in from the cold. The researchers found that frogs absorb this moisture through their skin, which helps to keep them hydrated during periods of little or no rain.

Before this study, the frogs' dry-season excursions were a bit mysterious.

"Every once in a while, we would find frogs sitting on a stick under the open sky, on nights when it was so cold they could barely move," said Dr. Chris Tracy, who led the research. "It was a real puzzle."

Tracy and his colleagues thought this behavior might enable the frogs collect condensation, but the hypothesis had never been tested.

The researchers designed a series of experiments using real frog dens in eucalyptus trees and artificial ones made from PVC pipe. They wanted to see if the frogs could collect enough moisture through condensation to compensate for what they lost being in the cold. They found that a cold night out cost a frog as much as .07 grams of water. However, a frog could gain nearly .4 grams, or nearly 1 percent of its total body weight, in water upon returning to the warm den.

The researchers also tested how well a frog's skin could absorb water, and found that as much as 60 percent of each water drop could be absorbed.

The results show that frogs can use condensation to hydrate themselves. And in a place as arid as the Australian savannahs during the dry season, where there is essentially no rain from June through August, every little bit counts.

"When there's no water available, even a small amount can mean the difference between surviving the dry season or not," Tracy said.

Tree frogs often plop themselves down outside on cool nights during the dry season in tropical Australia. When they return to their dens, condensation forms on their cold skin -- just like it does on a pair of glasses when we come in from the cold.

(story credit: Science Daily)

(photo Credit: © Patryk Kosmider / Fotolia)

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Weird Science/Climate Change Could Shrink Animals

Climate change could result in a planet full of cold-blooded runts.

IMAGE: A whale shark feasts on plankton. (Wikimedia Commons)

In a warming world, copepods, tiny crustaceans that make up the bulk of the ocean's animal plankton, could end up stunted. Copepods cope with warmer temperatures by maturing faster, but they don't grow as fast as they mature, so they end up runts.
The same phenomenon, called the “temperature-size rule,” affects most cold-blooded animals, so as the planet heats up, many animals' sizes may go down.
Researchers at the University of London examined the case of the incredible shrinking organisms in the journal The American Naturalist.
“We’ve shown that growth and development increase at different rates as temperatures warm. The consequences are that at warmer temperatures a species grows faster but matures even faster still, resulting in them achieving a smaller adult size,” said lead author Andrew Hirst in a press release.
Since copepods are food for marine animals, from fish to whales, what happens developmentally to the shrimp-y crustaceans could affect the entire ocean's food web.
“Decoupling of these rates could have important consequences for individual species and ecosystems,” Hirst added.

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Early to Bed, Early to Rise Keeps Kids Lean, Study Says

Kids who go to bed early and get up early are less likely to become obese than those who do not, according to an Australian study released Friday.
Children who went to bed late and got up late were 1.5 times more likely to become obese than those who went to bed early and got up early, researchers from the University of South Australia found.
Kids who stayed up late were also almost twice as likely to be physically inactive and 2.9 times more likely to sit in front of the TV or play video games for more hours than guidelines recommend.
The study, due to be published in the journal Sleep on Saturday, studied the bedtimes and rising times of 2,200 Australian children aged nine to 16.
"The children who went to bed late and woke up late, and the children who went to bed early and woke up early got virtually the same amount of sleep in total," said co-author Carol Maher.
"Scientists have realized in recent years that children who get less sleep tend to do worse on a variety of health outcomes, including the risk of being overweight and obese. Our study suggests that the timing of sleep is even more important," Maher added.
Maher believes the trend may be down to early risers getting more exercise earlier in the day. She said mornings were more conducive to physical activity than nights, as kids were often distracted with prime-time TV and other sedentary activities in the evening. (FOX NEWS)

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