Nature Middle East | House of Wisdom

NME’s weekly science dose (April 25 – May 2)

Sci-fi movie scenes of future cities with impossibly tall skyscrapers and hover cars rarely delve into just who actually built these architectural utopias. The presumption is often that robots did it. In the case of modern-day Doha, which continues to transform its skyline into a seemingly sci-fi-inspired backdrop, we ask about the 1.7 million foreign workers making this feat possible — and specifically, we ask about their health and safety conditions.

To summarise: the conditions are not great, but it is interesting to see how the Qatari government is responding to criticisms, particularly as it goes full-throttle leading up to hosting the World Cup in 2022. Our correspondent from Doha, Zainab Sultan, relays the full story here.

In other, more specifically science-y news, a novel way to treat cancer may be found in a protein called Shc that can act as a tumour suppressor. When this protein interacts with extracellular signal-regulated kinases, it stops the latter moving from the cytoplasm of a cell to its nucleus, restricting the potential for uncontrolled cell division. Read this for more details.

Finally, turtles are quite unique as armoured animals. Unlike the armadillo, their shells have changed very little over time. Hoping to get a better idea about their evolution, researchers have just produced a draft sequence of the genomes of the soft-shell and green sea turtles. It turns out both these species are be closely related to the bird-crocodile lineage, which they diverged from some 250 million years ago. More details here.

Beyond the hood

Culture is a hallmark of humanity, but might whales and other cetaceans have it? An intriguing new study suggests they may, at least among a group of humpback whales in the Gulf of Maine. Members of this pod appear to employ a new feeding strategy — called lobtail feeding — by learning the manoeuver socially, with no indication of genetic predispositions towards the behaviour.

The researchers’ data suggests that naive whales — those who never lobtailed for food — were more likely to start engaging in the behaviour if they associated with whales that employed the technique. It’s not exactly up there with salsa dancing and sky burials on the cultural front, but it is a thought provoking study.

Finally, four physicists from the University of California are pondering an interesting question: what is the effect of gravity on anti-matter? Anti-matter has the opposite electrical charge of normal matter, and when these two meet they annihilate each other in a flash of life. But does this also mean that while matter falls downward due to gravity, anti-matter falls upward?

To find out, the physicists attempted the first measurement of antihydrogen in free fall. However, observing this free fall is far from straightforward — currently, researchers don’t even know if anti-matter and its normal counterparts weigh the same. All they could confidently conclude is that, in the case of antihydrogen, it does not weigh 110 times more than “normal” hydrogen, and that if it does fall “upward” — and they are still unsure — it doesn’t accelerate away gravity with more than 65Gs.

Yes, these are possibly the most inconclusive (yet strangely interesting) results ever reported.

Comments

There are currently no comments.