The warning bells for obesity may have been ringing in the West for a while now, but they are quickly moving to the developing world. The Middle East and North Africa have one of the fastest growing rates of obesity in the world. While the epidemic is widespread between men, women and children, it would appear that women are disproportionately affected, with some countries in the region showing double the rate of obesity in women than in men.

The reasons for this rapid increase are different from one country to the other, but the shift to a more “Western” diet, coupled with cultural norms that preclude women from engaging in exercise in public and promotes sedentary lifestyles. In Saudi Arabia, for example, a mere 2% of women take exercise. Researchers argue that governments should be doing more to promote healthy lifestyles and prevent and decrease obesity, which can lead to various chronic diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure. This would be especially relevant to Gulf states where these chronic diseases are widespread.

And while still in the Gulf region, researchers working on understanding the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV), which has had many people worried especially with Hajj season approach, found that the transmission of the virus may be more complicated than previously thought.

Is it from bats? Or camels? Or something completely different? While we are not any closer to knowing the host or source of the virus, researchers have found various variations when analysing the virus genomes isolated from 21 patients from Saudi Arabia. These variations are too big to be the result of replication errors, says the researchers, and could probably involve multiple animal to human infections.

Finally, to end on a slightly more positive tone, researchers have managed to come up with an algorithm that may help screen for cancers. DNA is wrapped around proteins called histones. Sometimes, enzymes may modify histones causing the cell to stop producing certain proteins that can silence cancer. Researchers from Saudi Arabia and France came up with a model that can detect these changes effectively, which could be useful in designing anticancer drugs to undo these cancerous changes.

Beyond the hood

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release its fifth assignment and, to no one’s surprise, will stress again there is a 95% probability that human activities are responsible for climate change. This is an increase from the fourth assessment’s 90% – but just reiterates what we already know. The past three decades have seen the Earth’s surface increasingly warmer than anytime before.

“Observations of changes in the climate system are based on multiple lines of independent evidence. Our assessment of the science finds that the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased,” said Qin Dahe, co-chair of IPCC Working Group I in a press release.

In a Nature editorial for a special focusing on the IPCC, the writers argue that, while the IPCC has done a tremendous job so far, it may be time to retire the mega assessments and switch to smaller, faster reports that address the direct issues that can help policymakers. The five year wait between each assessment may not be the best model going forward, they argue, since by the time the reports are out they are already old news.

Whatever the model chosen going forward, we can be sure of one thing: This is the start of a new round of loud bickering between politicians who will, most probably, again ignore the science.

Since we missed last week’s roundup, we have a double week update today so it’s slightly longer than normal.

Researchers from Egypt and Saudi Arabia are collaborating to study bacteria that live in brine pools in the Red Sea. High temperatures, salinity and concentration of heavy metals, coupled with a lack of oxygen, make the brine pools among the most hostile environments in the world.

While very few organisms can live in these conditions, some bacteria thrive there, and are thus producing hardy and unique enzymes. Researchers are isolating these enzymes to use to remove pollutants and toxic chemicals which can have wide industrial uses. They have already found two unique enzymes and the search is on for more.

Back on land, electricians may be taking a closer look soon at spider silk, which is one of the strongest and toughest substances in the world. Researchers have managed to come up with a technique to coat spider silk with conductive carbon nanotubes. This could pave the way to using spider silk to create electric wiring in electronics.

And speaking of electronics, researchers are closer to realizing lithium-oxygen (Li-O₂) batteries, which can store more energy than any other battery so far, by coming up with a new cathode architecture for the cells. This helps solve the main problem of Li-O₂, which is having a higher voltage during charging, which can damage the battery.

Researchers are also taking a closer look at magmatic systems to understand how crystals precipitate in them. They found that, like aqueous solutions, nanoparticles start forming long before the actual crystals precipitate. This makes it easier for the formation of crystals afterwards as they grow from these nanoparticles.

Finally, we go back to the discovery of a Higgs boson like particle at the Large Hadron Collider last year. Physicists were excited by the discovery, but are finding trouble adapting its properties to the standard model of particle physics. Thus theoretical physicists from Zewail City of Science and Technology are suggesting a modified version of the standard model that contains an new particle called an “octet scalar” which can explain the faster than expected decay of the Higgs particle into two photons.

Beyond the hood

Stem cells have held so much promotion for medicine for many years now, but have come with a fair share of ethical issues. By removing a single protein, researchers for the first time are able to convert cultured skin cells into stem cells with very high efficiency.

In the past, researchers have been able to reprogram cells to become pluripotent stem cells by the addition of four genes. This only converted less than 1% of the cultured cells, however. Working with a line of specially engineered mouse cells that normally had a conversion rate of 10%, the researchers, who published their findings in Nature, were able to bring it up to nearly 100%.

On other medical news, do you hate those annual flu jabs before winter? Well, you may be in luck. Researchers are looking into a vaccine that may require a single jab to give protection from all different strains of flu.

Flu vaccines basically trigger the formation of antibodies that bind to a protein in the surface of the virus that helps it infect other cells to stop the spread. However, this protein mutates rather fast, which is why vaccinemakers need to create a new vaccine every year that targets the protein on current strains. And new viruses that mutate to make the jump to humans from birds or animals add another level of complication and trigger fears of pandemics (which we have had a few of in recent years).

Researchers hope to overcome this problem by using “broadly neutralizing antibodies”, which can bind to almost all the different variants of the protein, as discussed in Science. There are challenges, but scientists are working to tackle those, hopeful to produce what would be the solution to all influenza.

Jordan and Syria capture the limelight this week. The Royal Society’s Atlas of Islamic World Science and Innovation reports on Jordan’s investment in science, technology and innovation, highlighting the need to overhaul its education system.

Specifically, the report underlines the need for Jordanian universities to include entrepreneurial and commercial skills in their curricula. Nevertheless, the Royal Society lauded Jordan’s investment in science and technology, though other critics noted the lack of R&D in high-risk potential areas of growth. Get the full story here.

In Syria, we highlight the conflict’s ongoing toll on ancient monuments and artefacts. While gathering accurate data is difficult in the midst of all the violence, archaeologists and citizens have been trying to document the destruction of historical sites. For instance, an archive of damaged monuments is being compiled by academics and the public in a dedicated multi-lingual Facebook page called Syrian Archaeological Heritage Under Threat.

The page is hoped to help future restoration missions. Read more about this here.

Beyond the hood

The question of whether you can “train your brain” to stave off some of the cognitive decline associated with ageing has been a recurring one. Can cognitive exercise equipment keep our brains nice and cognitively buff? And might video games be the ultimate brain work out?

A new study from the University of California suggests that this may possibly be so. The researchers behind the recently published study designed a video game called NeuroRacer that involves two tasks: pressing a button only when a blue circle appears on the screen and not reacting to other symbols that pop up, all the while using a joystick to control a car zooming down a virtual track.

The experimenters had 16 healthy older adults (aged 60-85) take the game home and play it three times a week for a month. When these subjects returned to the lab, they were found to perform better than untrained 20-year-olds. They also maintained these skills for 6 months after the training without any other further practice.

Beyond the game, these subjects also saw improvements on certain memory and attention tests, suggesting that NeuroRacers changes key mechanisms in the ageing brain. Here’s a link to the study.

The diversity of microbial species living in your gut may serve as markers to identify your likelihood of becoming obese. Researchers, including Jun Wang from King Abdulazziz University, Saudi Arabia, found significant differences in the composition of gut microbes in 169 obese and 123 non-obese Danish individuals.

The research team reports that those with a low diversity of microbial species appear to have more metabolic abnormalities, making them more prone to increased body fat and insulin resistance. Find out more here.

Another research item we highlight this week shows the link between mutations in a specific gene and a group of childhood neurodegenerative disorders. The gene, which codes for the enzyme AMPD2, was found to be mutated in five patients suffering from pontocerebellar hypoplasia (PCH), a disorder characterized by a shrunken brainstem and lower parts of the brain, resulting in cerebral palsy and mental impairment. More details here.

Beyond the hood

It seems that a deficiency in a protein called RbAp48 in the hippocampus is a significant contributor to age-related memory loss. The study, conducted by a team of Columbia University Medical Center researchers, offers the strongest causal evidence yet that age-related memory loss is distinct from and Alzheimer’s disease.

The study entailed performing gene expression analyses of postmortem brain cells from the dentate gyrus (a subregion of the hippocampus) of eight people aged between 33 and 88. While they were free of brain disease, the analyses found a steady decline with ageing across the subjects in the expression of the gene that produces RbAp48.

The research team then genetically inhibited RbAp48 in the brain of healthy, young mice. The result was the same degree of memory loss as among aged mice. When RbAp48 inhibition was turned off, the mice’s memory returned to normal, suggesting that age-related memory loss may be reversible. You can read more about this study here.

Aid organizations are failing to address urgent the health needs of Syrians, domestically and of those driven from home. This conclusion is based on an UNHCR report that highlights the lack of long-term strategies and poor coordination to explain the agencies’ shortfalls.

Already an estimated 70% of medical professionals have fled Syria and 60% of healthcare facilities in opposition-controlled areas have been damaged or destroyed. Facilities in Jordan and Lebanon are strained due to the influx of refugees. With health issues being identified as the most grave risk Syrians face, what’s to be done to minimize this crisis within a crisis? Read more about it here.

On the other hand, in the midst of the political unrest in Egypt, it’s heritage continues to be at risk as violence continues. Raiders broke into the Malawai National Museum and ransacked its collections on two consecutive nights, stealing or destroying almost all of its artefacts.

The museum, 300km south of Cairo in the Upper Egypt city of Minya, is a little-known cultural centre, but is home to a diverse collection that spans Egyptian history from Greco-Roman to the 18th Dynasty eras. Read more about what archeologists are doing to try and salvage what they can of the museum.

In other news, scientists have completed sequencing the genome of Phoenix dactylifera L, more commonly known as the date palm. A team of researchers from Saudi Arabia collaborating with colleagues in China have built on earlier work by a Qatari research team to sequence more than 90% of the genome of an important variety of P. dactylifera called Khalas. More details here.

Beyond the hood

A blood test can tell you all sorts of things about your health, but it does not reveal your deepest, darkest thoughts — unless those thought were about suicide, it now seems. New research from the Indiana University School of Medicine suggests that biomarkers in the bloodstream can indicate whether someone is contemplating killing themselves.

The researchers identified these biomarkers by comparing blood samples drawn when bipolar patients’ suicidal thoughts were low to blood samples drawn when suicidal thoughts were high. A significant increase in the amount of a protein associated with the activity of a gene called SAT1 was observed in those with suicidal thoughts.

The study also examined blood samples taken from nine suicide cases and found this protein to be unusually high–significantly higher than those with suicidal thoughts that didn’t actually kill themselves.

While the sample size used in the study is small, the researchers claim the results reflect a “proof of principle” for a suicide test. More about it here.

The mystery of why the universe contains more matter than antimatter has long puzzled physicists. The standard model of physics predicts that an equal number of particles and antiparticles should have formed soon after the big bang, cancelling each other out and thereby stopping the “content” of the universe (galaxies, stars, planets, etc.) from forming.

Trying to explain this discrepancy, a group of physicists based in Egypt and Mexico have proposed the existence of a new type of particles, called “right-handed neutrinos”. This hypothesized particle is predicted to break down into particles, but not antiparticles — leaving behind more matter than antimatter. But the idea presents some challenges and presupposes an as yet hypothetical extension of the Standard Model: string theory. Read more about this interesting new research here.

In other news, the diodes that light up our streets and panels (LEDs) are apparently in for metamorphic upgrade: researchers—including Safae Aazou from Morocco—have made an ultra-thin, highly flexible and stretchable variety of them. These “polymeric” LEDs are engineered by sandwiching a thin layer of semiconductor photo-emitting material between a metal and a transparent organic electrode, all fixed on top of a thicker flexible polymeric substrate.

This allows the diode to be bent and stretched while still working properly. The entire setup does not exceed two micrometers in thickness. More details here.

Beyond the hood

Here’s a story that’s sure to let the “don’t play God” squad cringe: glow in the dark rabbits. They’ve been bred at the University of Istanbul. And no they don’t run on Energizer batteries.

Out of a litter of eight, the research team (from Turkey and Hawaii) have produced two rabbits that look like normal fluffy bunnies in the light, but glow an eerie green in the dark. The goal of the study was to demonstrate that a particular genetic manipulation technique works effectively—the hope being that it can then be used to develop new medicines.

To create the glowing effect, the researchers injected jellyfish DNA into a female rabbit’s embryos. These were then placed back into the mother, with the effect being that out of its eight offspring, two glow in the dark. Have a look at this extraordinary video of these rabbits.

When epidemiologist Diego Cuadros told fellow scientists that he was moving to Qatar, they looked at him in disbelief. What, they asked, did he hope to gain from doing research in a small Arab emirate, fabulously rich in oil and gas but with no noteworthy tradition in science?

Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE are all providing oases of postdoctoral opportunities for researchers from around the world, but can these institutes offer something on par with the West, or are they mere mirages? Read about the experiences of researchers who have relocated from the West to the Gulf. These centres may still not have the infrastructure of an MIT or the reputation of an Oxford, but with Qatar spending $1 billion on research and higher education each year, and with KAUST running on a $10 billion endowment, the lure of the Gulf for many researchers is starting to prove somewhat irresistible.

On a much smaller scale, exploratory attempts are being made at El-Gouna, an exclusive Egyptian resort by the Red Sea, to transform it into a scientific and research hub. The resort’s developer, Samih Sawiris, CEO of Orascom Development and one of Egypt’s richest businessmen, has single-handedly financed the establishment in El-Gouna of a branch of the prestigious German university, Technische Universität Berlin.

The campus is currently finishing up its first year now, having enrolled 29 students in October 2012 in its three applied technology postgraduate programmes: master’s degrees in water engineering, energy engineering, and urban planning. Read what Kester von Kuczkowski, its managing director, has to say about the campus’s ambitions and the challenges facing it.

Finally, in Morocco, a cigar-shaped fossil unearthed in 2012 is helping explain the origin of starfish and sea lilies. Belonging to a marine animal that lived 515 million years ago, the fossil has features that place it as a missing link between helicoplacoids, the oldest known echinoderms, and the ancestors of echinoderms such as sea lilies and starfish.

The fossil is being heralded as a discovery of exceeding importance in helping scientists understand a major transition in the history of life. Specifically: the development of pentaradial symmetry in echinoderms. More details here.

Beyond the hood

Fancy a €250,000 beef burger? No animal has been killed in the making of it. It’s not made of some vegetable-based substitute, but real beef with real muscles cells and all. Except these cell were grown in a lab, weaved together into fibres, and finally compressed into a burger.

Presenting the burger for the first time, a press conference drew curious journalists from around the world to London this week to witness this product of several years’ work being served up to taste. The two tasters seemed quite impressed with its texture and “mouth feel”, noting that it certainly felt like they were eating meat. But did it actually taste like meat?

Not so much. As the burger is made purely of muscles cells, the lack of any fat gave it a somewhat bland taste. But incorporating fat cells into the next burger is what Mark Post, the scientist behind the burger, is aiming for now. He expects that once mass produced, and presuming that the technology behind it did not advance, a kilogram of cultured beef would cost around $70.

However, the scientist hopes that cultured beef can make its way into supermarkets at a much lower price and with a much better taste in around 10 to 20 years. Currently, around 30% of the Earth’s usable surface is covered by grazing land for animals, while only 4% is being used to directly feed humans. As populations continue to grow towards 9.5 billion by 2060, this trend will become increasingly unsustainable. Beef grown in a lab, however, may provide a more environmentally viable, as well as far more humane, alternative.

You can watch the press conference and get more information here.

Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been heading to Mecca in Saudi Arabia for Umrah during Ramadan and millions from around the world will converge on the city for Hajj in October. Could that be the fuel that the new coronavirus causing Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which was first discovered in Saudi Arabia, needs to spread into a pandemic?

But health officials around the world are not too worried, since the virus has not shown much evolution to adapt to humans and become sustained in communities. This might change in the future, of course, but so far, pilgrims on their religious pilgrimage should be safe and just need to keep in mind they adopt common sense practices, such as washing their hands regularly and making sure their food is clean.

Not too far away from Mecca, researchers at KAUST have worked with their colleagues in Texas A&M University in the United States to produce a computer model to estimate the large number of reaction parameters involved in protein production from gene clusters, which are complex networks of genes that influence each other. There was no special model for these reaction parameters before and the new model, called PEDI, has produced better results than any other previously present models.

Finally, in the United Arab Emirates, researchers have managed to get crystals of a cobalt compound to jump huge distances that are up to hundreds of thousands their size. by exposing the crystals to ultraviolet light, the crystals underwent tiny minute structural changes causing strain energy to build up inside. When this energy was released, the crystals went hopping.

Lead researcher Panče Naumov from the New York University in Abu Dhabi suggests this can be a model to develop self-actuating devices – which are devices that can move without external forces – based on biological and chemical systems. This could, for example, help in the creation of artificial muscles.

Beyond the hood

Are you addicted to your cellphone? Then we might have some bad news for you. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have compared the saliva of heavy mobile phone users to non-users. They found that heavy users had indications of higher oxidative stress, which creates free radicals, can damage cell DNA and is considered a major risk factor for cancer.

The researchers studied saliva because when we hold cellphones up to our ears it is very close to the salivary glands. There is still a lot of research needed to reach more conclusive results, but meanwhile, it may be a good idea to use a hands free while talking on the phone for prolonged periods of time.

Finally, when it comes to love, men and women may not be so equal. According to new research, the hormone oxytocin, often called “the love hormone”, affected them differently. It helps men identify competitive relationships better, while it helps women identify kinship.

Interestingly, the so called love hormone did not help either of the sexes to identify intimate relationships better. The researchers suggest this proves that identifying intimate relationships is a more complex process formed of a combination of biological and cultural factors.

Paleobiologist digging in Tunisia in 2011 have found the most complete dinosaur skeleton from Africa yet, belonging to a family of sauropods. The new species, Tataouinea hannibalis, probably had hollowed bones and probably large air sacs in its abdomen, morphological traits that are similar to birds and suggesting they may have a bird-like respiratory system. These dinosaurs were not small, however, with the remains suggesting they stood at about 14m in length when they were alive some 136 million years ago.  

Not too far away, researchers diving in the Res Sea are making some interesting discoveries. While bacteria have long been known to live on corals, they found that some species of bacteria may have a much more intimate relationship with the corals – actually living inside the coral cells and tissues.

This close relationship has prompted the researchers to suggest the bacteria most play an important symbiotic role for the corals, maybe acting as the “middleman” between algae and the coral by converting photosynthetic products into a form of energy the corals can use. Conservationists are excited that, if this is true, then the bacteria can serve as a measure of how healthy coral reefs are – acting as ‘alarm bells’ if things aren’t going too well.

This week, we are also highlighting two research papers looking into genetic disorders. In the first paper, researchers have produced the first human trials for a gene therapy to treat metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD), a fatal neurodegenerative disorder appearing in children. The trials have been successful, stopping the appearance or progress of the disease in the three patients who underwent the treatment a year afterwards.

In the second paper, researchers produced a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of patients with Brugada syndrome, a rare genetic cardiac disorder that may increase the risk of sudden cardiac death. They found that the risk to develop the disease, which was originally linked to one gene, is actually increased by other genes that are involved in the electric conduction inside the heart. Patients with all three risk alleles identified had an unexpectedly high susceptibility to the disease.

Beyond the Hood

Though millions suffer from epilepsy around the world, our understanding of the disease remains very  limited. Now, however, a team of researchers used stem cells to discover the causes of one type of the disease. They created stem cells from skin cells taken from patients living with epilepsy. They then turned these stem cells into neurons, basically creating an ‘epilepsy in a dish’ to study it. They found high levels of sodium activity bursts in the cells that could set off seizures.

This could be used to test new drugs to try to come up with a treatment for this particular type of epilepsy, called Dravet syndrome. The researchers are also now working on recreating other forms of epilepsy using the same technique to study them and try to find a treatment or medication to handle them.

Have you ever caught yourself staring in awe at a male peacock’s fully-spanned tail? Apparently, without this extra-flamboyant display they would not be able to capture the attention of their mates pretty well. Researchers mounted eye-tracking cameras on peahens to track their eye movement and found it very hard to keep their attention. That is why the males need such large tails. Turns out that the peahens were also not that interested in how tall the tail was, but more interested in its width and the number of eyespots on it when it is further away.

The researchers suggest that, given all the things that can capture the attention of the peahen, the peacock’s tail had to evolve to eclipse everything else that might attract the female to find a possible mate.

Finally, if you suffer from cat allergy, you may be able to visit friends and family that you stopped seeing years ago because they keep pet cats. Researchers from the UK have discovered the mechanism in the body that causes this annoying issue. The culprit is the cat allergen Fel d 1, which is present in cat danders, which is tiny pieces of cat skin, activates a receptor in humans that causes a large immune response. This causes the itching, coughing and runny nose some people get around cats.

Now that the mechanism is known, the researchers hope they can start testing new medication to stop it – allowing many people to start visiting friends again and many cat lovers to finally have cats in their homes without sending their partners running away.

It seems that young researchers from the Arab world are missing out on a big opportunity to mix with people from the highest echelons of science. At least that’s the suggestion when only two Arab researchers attended the Nobel Laureate Meeting at Lindau, Germany—an annual conference where Nobel winners present to and interact with young researchers from around the world.

The two researchers from the region, both from Egypt, were among the 625 undergraduate and postgraduate students attending. In 2011, there were 12 Arab participants, raising the question of whether the drop in number reflects a diminished interested between players in Arab research sectors.

The fact that invited ministers from Egypt and Algeria did not attend—nor invited professors from Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology—seems to suggest so. But there’s more to this story, and you can find out all about it here.

In other news this week, scientists have come a step closer to understanding the role of intracellular scaffold protein (Sch1) in cell signalling. To do so, the research team, including  Mohamed Soliman from Cairo University, mapped all possible interactions between Sch1 and other cellular proteins and found 23 new Sch1-interacting proteins involved in various cellular processes. Read more details about their findings here.

Beyond the Hood

In case you are not fed up with adding the letter “i” to every new invention, check out the i-knife: it doesn’t pump music out of its handle as you cut your carrots, but it can actually tell surgeons whether the tissue they are cutting into is cancerous or not.

In a freshly published study to test out the “iKnife”, the invention was found to diagnose tissue samples from 91 patients with 100 percent accuracy, almost instantly providing information that normally takes about half an hour to reveal using regular laboratory tests.

Here’s how it works: when relying on electrosurgery—an old technique using knives with an electric current running through them to rapidly heat tissue and minimise blood loss—vapours  arising from the cut tissue creates smoke that is a rich source of biological information. The iKnife works by basically being an electrosurgical knife connected to a mass spectrometer, an instrument that can identify what chemicals are present in the ensuing smoke.

Since different types of cells produce metabolites in different concentrations, these can be used to identify exactly what is being cut into: in this case, whether the tissue is cancerous or not.

It’s uses can potentially go beyond this, helping users identify types of bacteria present in a tissue sample, and more generally determine whether what you are cutting into is, say, beef or horsemeat.