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.