Monthly Archives: December 2016

2016: Editor’s choice

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Extracts from selected news and feature articles published this year.

Astrophysics

An international team of scientists, including from New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), managed to directly observe structural components of one slowly rotating star, thanks to asteroseismology. This new technique, 10,000 times more precise than its predecessor, reveals a star’s flatter, rounder contours and different rotational speeds. It allows scientists to ‘see’ the nature of the stellar interior with very high precision.

Marine science

In an unprecedented study on non-model organisms in captivity, scientists from Saudi Arabia, Australia and Norway were able to create large sequence datasets on how reef fish and their offspring react to the phenomenon of decreasing pH levels, called ocean acidification, brought on by climate change. Acidification happens due the uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide. “The amount of sequencing data we generated is unparalleled for a non-model organism,” says Timothy Ravasi, the senior author of the paper. Scientists discovered that the offspring of some reef fish can tolerate acidification by adjusting their circadian rhythm to night time function throughout the day.

Ecology and evolution

An international consortium of researchers analysed the coding portions of genes, or “exomes”, belonging to 1,794 nationals of Greater Middle Eastern (GME) countries, a region spanning from Morocco in the west to Pakistan in the east. “As expected for a region so rich in history and at the crossroads of many civilizations, the Middle East ‘variome’ [the set of genetic variations in a given population] suggests mixing with other populations, although the percentage varies greatly depending on which subpopulation you look at,” says geneticist Fowzan Alkuraya from Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center. Northwest African genes were found in people across northern Africa, most likely representing the Berber genetic background. Arabian Peninsular genes were observed in nearly all GME peoples studied, possibly the result of the Arab conquests of the seventh century. Similarly, Persian expansion in the fifth century into the Turkish peninsula, the Syrian Desert region and parts of northeast Africa probably accounts for the Persian and Pakistan genetic signal present in the peoples of those regions. The peoples of the Syrian Desert and Turkish peninsular regions show the highest levels of mixing with European populations.

Geology

Shallow, dense magma reservoirs may be responsible for the most hazardous type of volcano on Earth, according to a new study. Ivan Koulakov and colleagues, including scientists from Saudi Arabia, present a fresh seismic model, based on studying magma paths beneath the Toba volcano in Indonesia, which last erupted some 74,000 years ago. The model explains why the magma system under Toba causes large, devastating eruptions, and how such large volumes of magma are generated.

Archaeology

“We always say it can’t get any worse, and then it does — and that’s the hardest part,” says Allison Cuneo, project manager for the American Schools of Oriental Research’s Cultural Heritage Initiative (CHI), which documents the loss of Syrian heritage. CHI reported 851 incidents of damage to cultural heritage between September 2015 and August 2016, mostly concentrated in areas of northern Syria controlled by forces opposed to President Bashar al-Assad. With such extensive damage, there “is so much data on destruction to report, it’s like holding the ocean back with a broom,” says Michael Danti, the academic director of CHI.

Environment

A world atlas of artificial night sky brightness, published earlier this year in Science Advances, captured the extent to which we are smothered in light. It reveals Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as the most light-polluted places to live on the planet, topped only by Singapore. More than half of people living in Israel and Libya live through extremely bright nights, and the widest connected twilight zone in the world is along the Nile Delta in Egypt. No more can people in Kuwait and Qatar see the glowing band of the Milky Way from their homes. For more than 97 per cent of people in the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and Egypt, this is also true. “The night sky is the beginning of our civilization. It leads to all religions, philosophy, science, literature and the arts. The cultural significance of a sky full of stars is huge. The new generations have lost this source of inspiration,” says Fabio Falchi, of the Italian Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute’s Fabio Falchi, who led the study.

Astronomy

The Qatar Exoplanet Survey (QES) has discovered three new “exoplanets” outside our solar system. The planets, named Qatar-3b, Qatar-4b and Qatar-5b, are hot Jupiters: they are similar in size to Jupiter (11 times the size of Earth) and orbit very closely to their respective suns. They are located some 1400 to 1800 light years away from Earth and can be seen in the same part of the sky as the Andromeda Constellation, best observed in autumn in the northern hemisphere.

Year in review: Under pressure

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Conflict and wars have continued to bend the region out of shape in 2016, with health infrastructure in Syria and Yemen continuing to crumble and fall, and the exodus of people out of dangerous zones affecting neighboring populations. The following are some of the most critical situations borne out of the flow of people as a result of infighting in 2016.

Water

Besides the human cost of the war in Syria, the ecological and environmental impact has, no doubt, been huge. For example, earlier this month, researchers based in the US and Canada have shown how mass migrations are changing the country’s hydrological landscape.

The flight of Syrian refugees since 2013 has dramatically changed water-use patterns and led to an increased water flow into Jordan through the Yarmouk River. In the absence of direct measurement data from Syria, the scientists had turned to remote sensing techniques, combining spatial and statistical analyses of satellite imagery with water balance calculations to estimate the changes in irrigation patterns and reservoir usage in southwest Syria. While the end of a regional drought is partly responsible for the increased flow of the Yarmouk, the analysis showed that decreased water use in the Syrian part of the river basin accounts for roughly half of the 340% increase in transboundary flow.

In a way, the war in Syria carried some good for Jordan – at least in terms of water supply.

Health

War and migration had once led to outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as visceral leishmaniasis, across the region, originating from Sudan and South Sudan. And new research is warning that this could happen again. Visceral leishmaniasis is endemic in Sudan and South Sudan, where the climate allows sandflies to thrive, and poor health systems compound the problem.

Researchers from the US and Saudi Arabia have presented new evidence suggesting that conflict, and the chronic malnutrition and displacement that follow, interrupt the cycle of immunity and allow a disease like visceral leishmaniasis to flourish. Gloomily, the scientists say they expect another outbreak.

Not far off, in Aleppo, the scene of much violence and suffering, an outbreak of another form of leishmaniasis has taken place. The Aleppo boil, which is caused by a parasite in the bloodstream and transmitted through the bites of sandflies, has been reported to have infected hundreds of thousands across the Middle East, especially across refugee camps. The disease causes disfiguring lesions on the body and the numbers are bad, according to scientists.

Until recently, the disease was contained to areas around Aleppo and Damascus, but this changed with the continuous disruption of insecticide control, poor water and sanitation services in conflict zones.

Biosensor zeroes in on dangerous bacteria

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Staphylococcus or Staph aureus is a type of infectious bacteria that commonly causes skin and respiratory infections in addition to food poisoning. In some cases, it can lead to life-threatening diseases such as pneumonia, and brain, bone or heart infections. As well, it’s a common hospital acquired infection.

Now, a team of scientists from Saudi Arabia and Jordan have developed a point-of-care diagnostic test as effective in food samples as it is in clinical samples to detect the bacteria. It’s cheap, instrument-free, and takes less than a minute, according to lead researcher Mohammed Zourob, professor of chemistry at Alfaisal University in Saudi Arabia.

The researcher and his colleagues tested the biosensor in food and clinical isolates from a hospital but instead of targeting bacterial cells, as traditional sensors would, they targeted poteases enzymes released by the cells or expressed on the cells’ surface. The former’s sensitivity is too poor to detect infectious dozes of most bacteria, according to Zourob, unlike the latter method, invented by Zourob et al.

The probe itself is made up of a specific peptide sequence, cleaved by Staph aureus proteases, and sandwiched between magnetic nanobeads and gold surface on top of a paper support.

Another perk to the test, according to its developer, is that it does not require special training to use, so it can be easily administered by food inspectors and hospital nurses.

Zourob and his colleagues say they are now establishing a spin off in order to commercialize this new technology.

Decoding bat talk

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The Egyptian fruit bat is a highly social mammal roosting in crowded colonies.

The Egyptian fruit bat is a highly social mammal roosting in crowded colonies.{credit}Michal Samuni-Blank{/credit}

Bats are extremely social mammals, that live in colonies of thousands and sometimes millions, and they talk or “sing” to each other to communicate. Now, a group of scientists have studied vocalizations by Egyptian fruit bats and they found out that the calls contain information such as the identity of the caller as well as the context of the call.

The study published in Scientific Reports carries an analysis of almost 15,000 vocalizations of 22 Egyptian fruit bats, recorded over 75 days. The analysis paints a picture of some of the social interactions that the animals engage in.

“Bats spend many, up to 40 years, together with the same individuals around them and they live in the dark. All of these suggest that a sophisticated vocal communication might evolve in such animals and this is what we set to examine,” says Yossi Yovel of Tel Aviv University, corresponding author of the study.

The vocalizations the scientists recorded represented the full vocal repertoire the bats used during the experiment. And it turns out the cacophony of sounds that a person hears entering a bat cave is far from just noise, according to Yovel.

Although the calls sounds alike and were previously categorized under one category that boils down to “bat shouting”, the scientists showed it’s not the case.

“The vocalizations we looked at in this study were all categorized in the past as agonistic calls, that is, aggressive vocalizations emitted during fighting,” says Yovel. “We now show that there is information in this chaos. We demonstrate that a third individual listening to a fight between two bats can tell who is shouting, what is the context of shouting, for example fighting over food or over position or over mating, and even to some extent who is being shouted at.”

That said, the communication of the Egyptian bats described therein doesn’t include clearly distinct words, as human communication for instance does, or what linguists often call semantics. “We do not find a ‘word’ that mean ‘hello’ or ‘move’ or ‘eat’ in bat communication. We just show that the spectral content of the vocalizations or their frequencies contain information about the context.”

The scientists elaborates: “You could imagine this as something like this: when a bat shouts at another bat for taking its food, the vocalizations will always be higher in pitch than when they are fighting over a position in the cave. This is what this cannot be defined as language and yet, because we will probably never fully understand animal communication it is important to understand its complexity.”

The next step, which the scientists have already taken, is into learning whether or not these vocalizations are learned by the bats or whether they are born with their vocal repertoire. “Learning new vocalizations is a main factor characterizing human language and it is debated how much other mammals depend on learning to develop their communication,” comments Yovel.