Let’s face it: asexual reproduction is not exactly “fun”. In flowering plants, where some species commonly transition from cross-fertilization to self-fertilization, the effect can come with a loss in genetic variety and ability to eliminate harmful mutations.

At least that’s what a team of researchers, including Khaled Hazzouri from New York University Abu Dhabi, has concluded. The team sequenced the genome of Capsella rubella, a self-fertilizing plant that separated from its cross-fertilizing ancestor Capsella grandiflora less than 200,000 years ago.

Comparing RNA expression and polymorphism patterns between the two Capsella species, they found that C. rubella (the asexual one) had a decreased ability to eliminate harmful mutations compared to its cross-fertilizing ancestor. They also made intriguing comparisons between C. rubella and two species of Arabidopsis. Read more about it here.

Another thing that is really not fun at all is ankylosing spondylitis (AS): a painful inflammatory disease that causes bones in the spine and pelvis to grow abnormally, fusing joints and stiffening movements. This inheritable condition was previously linked to the allele HLA-B *27. However, new research, with contributions from King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, has identified 13 gene loci also associated with the risk of inheriting AS disease.

The researchers did this by combing known immune-related sections of the genomes of 25,764 participants of European, East Asian and Latin American ancestry. Their findings turned up important clues to understanding how HLA-B *27 is involved in the disease. The results may also help provide an efficient way to screen people with back pain for AS risk. More details here.

Beyond the hood

New research from Carnegie Mellon University seems to have found a good, selfish reason to engage in the relatively selfless activity of volunteering. According to a study published in the journal Psychology and Aging, older adults who volunteer for at least 200 hours a year decrease their risk of hypertension by 40 percent.

The researchers studied 1,164 adults between the ages of 51 and 91 from across the U.S. They interviewed the participants once in 2006 and another time in 2010. All had normal blood pressure levels during the 2006 interview. During both interviews, they measured  their level of volunteerism, along with various social and psychological factors.

As it turned out, those who reported at least 200 hours of volunteer work during the initial interview were 40 percent less likely to develop hypertension when compared to those who did not volunteer in the 2010 interview. The researchers also found that the amount of time spent volunteering was what mattered, and not the type of volunteer activity.

However, while it seems to pay to be good, the researchers suggest that the real beneficial effect likely comes from the social connections volunteers make through these activities — evidence consistently suggests that having good social connections promotes healthy aging.

This week it’s all about separation: getting salt out of salt water, and removing carbon dioxide from other gases.

First: desalination. It holds the promise of securing the water needs of virtually everyone, but comes at the cost of being unfeasible expensive and energy consuming for most countries. In Egypt, a team of researchers at the American University in Cairo have come up with a prototype for a cheap membrane that filters out the salt from salt water. If it proves itself under industrial conditions, it may help make desalination a viable option for Egypt at a mass scale. Get more details about this story here.

Second: carbon capture. As a major contributor to climate change, efforts have been underway to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for some time now. While techniques exist, they remain generally inefficient and expensive. But check out this research by a Saudi Arabian team: they’ve come up with a crystalline, porous metal-organic framework that can capture carbon at very low concentrations. This links up with similar research also recently published which we highlighted here.

On another note, while chocolate fans may not be able to explain why the substance is so close to their hearts, scientists appear to have discovered how it may help protect that most vital organ — at least that’s the case with dark chocolate. It all comes down to epicatechin, a nutrient in dark chocolate that seems to induce beneficial metabolic and structural changes in the mitochondria of heart cells. Read more about this here.

Finally, and this is not quite science news related, but if you are a postgraduate or research assistant working in any Arab state (regardless of your nationality), we’d like to hear about your work. We are having a little competition to highlight the five most interesting research ideas being work on in the region. See this for more details.

Beyond the hood

Turns out women are generally better at recalling faces than men. According to a new study from Canada’s McMaster University, without even being aware of it, it seems that women spend more time analyzing new faces, thereby reinforcing their capacity to recall them, and hence identify them, later.

The researchers used eye tracking technology to observe where participants looked while they were being shown a series of randomly selected faces on a computer screen. Women were generally found to fixate on features far more than men — a strategy that operates outside of people’s awareness. Interestingly, this suggests that by intentionally changing our eye movement patterns when looking at a new face, we may be able to better recall that face later. Here’s a link to the study.

Primary school students in Egypt may have a tough time seeing the screen of a computer connected to the internet. That is because for each one of these computers, an average of 441 pupils have to share it.

That is one of the many disconcerting facts that a new UNESCO report highlights. Looking at how ICT is being used in education across five Arab states, the report highlights issues of infrastructure, gender, policy, and teacher preparedness. Among its findings, it reported that less than a third of computers in schools in Egypt and the West Bank are connected to the internet. In contrast, about two-thirds of school computers in Jordan, Oman and Qatar are connected. Click here to read more about the report.

Also, a 3-year initiative to introduce foreign crop varieties and farming techniques was launched in Amman, Jordan, this month. The Dry Systems programme is to be implemented in five vast, dry areas across the planet with the aim of helping the world’s most vulnerable populations survive the damaging effects of climate change. Read more about this initiative here.

Finally, after World Asthma Day this month, health professionals in the Middle East have highlighted the increasing prevalence of the condition in the region. A study led by pulmonologist Mohammed Al Ghobain at King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences found that almost a quarter of Saudia Arabia’s population suffers from asthma. Qatar came next with almost 20% of its population suffering from the condition.

But is this solely the effect of rapid urbanisation in these countries, or is it that the condition is being better diagnosed for what it is? Read more about this issue here.

Beyond the hood

A recently unearthed bird fossil in northeastern China may be the oldest yet at 160 million years. Called Aurornis xui, it predates the official holder of the “oldest bird” title — archaeopteryx  — by 10 million years. The discovery of archaeopteryx in 1861 proved that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs and was the first fossil to support Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The new species adds another branch to the bird lineage. However, while it is clawed, feathered and with a long tail, it is unlikely that it flew due to the absence of fossil traces suggesting it had the larger feathers necessary for flight. Read more about Aurornis here.

Fumes from car exhausts may have contributed to 651 death in the UAE in 2008, say researchers investigating the relation between death and air pollutants. The interesting question is, how did they come up with the number?

Our top news story this week looks at how a research team used a computer model to simulate human exposure to pollutants outdoors, indoors, in drinking water, and coastal water, all across the UAE’s seven emirates. Among their conclusions, they also found that second-hand smoke and other forms of indoor air pollution lead to 153 deaths in the UAE that same year.  Get more details here.

On another front, physicists have come up with a protocol to give quantum cryptography a much needed boost. Currently, the mechanisms used to securely transmit information via quantum effects is limited to about 100km.  Read this to see how these researchers have employed some of the mindboggling characteristics of the quantum world to amplify cryptographic signals.

Finally, thinking of going on a treasure hunt? Apparently, it’s not the most environmentally friendly activity, since the process of recovering gold from rock relies on hazardous chemicals. But fear not, a new study lays out a greener method for gold hunting that relies on a cheap and environmentally-friendly carbohydrate derived from starch. Check it out here.

Beyond the hood

The phrase “to catch a cold” is often deemed as one of the most frustratingly inaccurate expressions by those with the least bit of interest in medicine or basic biology. (You don’t catch a cold, you catch a virus!! What does catching a cold even mean??)

As it turns out, our mothers may have had a point, of sorts: being cold can give us a cold. Or rather, being cold can make it more likely for a virus we’ve already caught to survive the initial onslaught of our immune response.

It’s been a long considered hypothesis, but now researchers seem to have come up with the evidence. They grew human airway cells in the lab under both cold and warm conditions. These cell were then infected with the typical rhinoviruses that lead to a cold. As it turned out, warmer cells were more likely to commit cell suicide when infected, an initial immune response aimed at limiting an infection’s spread.

The researchers also found that when mice were infected with a rhinovirus, warmer ones produced a wave of antiviral immune signals. When cold, their immune response was smaller, with the infection persisting. Read more about it here.

Qatar takes center stage this week with highlights on its first professional astronomer as well as the youngest Arab doctor to graduate from its own branch of Weil Cornell Medical College.

Khaled Al Suabi, whose team discovered three Jupiter-like exoplanets since 2010, was awarded a US$5 million grant by the Qatar National Research Fund to expand his planet hunting scheme. The money will help establish observations stations in the Canary Islands, New Mexico and Iran, and he expects his team will discover around 50 more planets in the next five to six years. Read more about his story here.

Iqbal El-Assad, a 20 year old Palestinian who grew up in Lebanon, is the youngest medical doctor to graduate from Weil Cornell College in Qatar. In a Q&A, El-Assad reveals an inspiring story of a prodigy with ambition fueled in part by her childhood visits to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Read her story here.

On the medical front, a discovery in Mauritius is helping scientists sidestep some of the ethical hurdles of studying hepatitis B (HBV), a virus that continues to defy current therapies, killing half a million people each year.

The discovery — naturally occurring HBV infection among wild macaques living in Mauritius Island — provides a suitable animal model to study the disease, since using other animal models would require deliberately infecting simians. Investigating the disease among these macaques will be highly valuable in studying new immunotherapeutic approaches against HBV. Read more here.

Also, an inherited muscle disease — facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) — that affects the face, shoulder and upper arms has been found to be related to the shortening of telomeres — the protective tips of chromosomes.

The shortening of telomeres was demonstrated to affect DUX4, a gene related to FSHD. The researchers found over ten times more DUX4 protein in FSHD patients, with  shorter telomere length correlating with greater production of DUX4. More details here.

Finally, optical resonators, in which solar cells and light-emitting diodes store energy, are ripe for a much needed upgrade. A research team has built a prototype optical resonator with an irregular shape that encourages light rays to bounce around chaotically, with no single frequency being preferentially stored.

In theory, such a set up would allow at least six times the amount of energy to be stored if these resonators were made with less symmetric geometries, as they currently are. Read more about this here.

Beyond the hood

The most exciting development this week is a scientific first that brings stem cell therapies a step closer to fulfilling their promise: namely, regenerating and replacing damaged tissues and alleviating numerous diseases.

A new study shows how the cloning technique that led to Dolly the sheep can be used to turn human skin into embryonic stem cells, which can then be manipulated to form any tissue in the body.

The researchers, led by Oregon Health & Science University’s Shoukhrat Mitalipov, started with a donated human egg cell. After removing its nucleus, they inserted skin cells from another human subject. Using a combination of chemical cues and electrical pulses, they then induced the egg cell to grow and divide into an embryo without being fertilized by a sperm, thereby solving a technical challenge that has been confounding scientists for over a decade.

This embryo — which can only grow into a clump of stem cells, and not a baby — can then be harvested and used to treat a multitude of ailments suffered by the skin cell donor. As the cells are made of the skin cell donor’s own genes, there is no risk of rejection, a common problem with other stem cell techniques.

Alice and Bob communicate without actually communicating this week — or something like that. Physicists dig into the weirdness of the quantum world to uncover the possibility of information exchange without any particles being exchanged, senseless as that sounds. It’s called counterfactual communication.

It’s a baffling possibility that we explore here, disentangling along the way some of the more mindboggling properties of the quantum world to help our readers brush up on the often cryptic domain of physicists.

As for the domain of Arab female scientists, here’s another baffling thought: two thirds of university science students in the UAE are women, but these go on to comprise only 12% of the research work force. At the other end of the Arab world, 70% of students enrolled in scientific studies are women, but few ever achieve leadership positions in the research field.

While the number of woman embracing scientific careers in the Arab world is growing, discrimination and a host of social norms and attitudes are keeping opportunities limited. Read more about it here.

As for our tech-loving readers, check out how researchers have come up with an ingenious way to transform building and car windows into display screens using lightweight carbon nanotubes. Read about it here.

Finally, a new study suggests that laminopathies — rare genetic diseases that affect the heart and muscles — may be treated by targeting impaired MKL1 signalling, which relates to a protein important in the development and function of the heart. Get more details here.

Beyond the hood

In case you didn’t know, the Moon actually does have water, both on its surface and beneath. What’s interesting, however, is that this water appears to have a common source with water here on Earth — at least that’s what a new study suggests. Based on an examination of samples of the Moon brought back from the Apollo missions, it seems that water on both the moon and our planet comes from primitive meteorites.

Most likely, the study suggests, this water was already present on Earth and was transferred to the Moon when it formed from the disc of debris left after a giant object hit the planet 4.5 billion years ago.

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.

We’ve gone nuclear this week and decided it was time someone tried to make sense out of the never ending obscurity and procrastination plaguing nuclear energy plans in the Arab world. Egypt has been huffing and puffing about it since the 1950s, and now Saudi Arabia seems to be on track to spend US$80 billion to build 16 reactors by 2030.

Meanwhile, Qatar has officially commenced construction, while Jordan (like Egypt) remains in the limbo of indeterminacy. But we’re giving away too much already. Here’s the full story.

And if that’s not enough to quench your thirst for all things radioactive (did you know that many toothpaste brands were laced with radioactive substances in the past?), we also have two very contrasting Q&A’s on whether Egypt should harness nuclear power or not. On one side of the ring is Yusri Abu Shadi, a former head of Alexandria University’s nuclear engineering department, and he’s quite adamant about Egypt going nuclear. At the other is Hani El-Nokrashy, co-found of Desertec Foundation, and he’s all about going solar instead.

Beyond the hood

Seeing as diabetes has killed some 357,000 people in the Middle East alone last year, you may want to consider giving up soft drinks. A new study suggests that drinking just 336ml of a sugar-sweetened soft drink (roughly, a can) a day can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 22%. And if you are drinking two cans, you are also 22% more likely to develop the disease than the person drinking just one.

The finding is based on data collected across eight European cohorts and covering some 350,000 participants. However, the researchers also found that the risk fell to 18% when total energy intake and body-mass index (BMI) were accounted for — both factors that are thought to mediate the association between sugar-sweetened soft drink consumption and diabetes incidence.

Also, in case you are a soft drinks fan as well as a cigarette smoker, here’s some more troubling news: even a few cigarettes a day can significantly increase the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis (RA) — at least for women. This latest entry in RA research found that just 1 to 7 cigarettes more than doubled the risk of developing the disease.

While stopping smoking reduces the chances, the risk was still significantly higher for women who had given up for 15 years than for those who had never started smoking to begin with.

Over the past five years, the Egyptian government has spent US$500 million treating Hepatitis C (HCV). Despite this, Egypt remains the country with the highest incidence of the disease, and health officials are growing impatient with the current strategy.

So is it time for Egypt to take on a more preventative approach to this epidemic? Check out our latest feature on the debate between HCV prevention and treatment — is it possible that just 10% of the money spent on treatment could be used to prevent new transmissions of the disease altogether?

Also, hopeful news comes from a study just published in Nature on blocking a protein that is stopping adult hearts from regenerating after injury. Mammals have hearts that can generate new heart muscle cells only up to seven days after birth — however, blocking a protein called Meis1 may allow hearts to carry on this capacity safely into adulthood — at least in mice.

Beyond the hood

12.8 billion light-years from Earth — yes, billion — there is (or at least there was) a galaxy churning out nearly 3000 stars per (Earth) year — that’s 2000 times more than our own galaxy.

The massive galaxy was discovered using a global collection of telescopes , and is so distant that the astronomers viewing it are looking at the universe when it was just 6% of its current age. You can read more about this prolific galaxy, called HFLS3, here.

Also interesting this week: apparently there is a brain region that is fully dedicated to recognizing numerals. Just one-fifth of an inch across on the outer cortex of the brain (in an area called the inferior temporal gyrus), neurons  in that region were found to be activated when people view ordinary numerals — that is, 1, 15, and 23, and not one, fifteen and twenty three.

When presented with the numerals spelled out as numbers, activity in that brain area dropped off substantially. Interestingly, while the brain never evolved to have an innate ability to recognize numerals, it seems it can learn to dedicate the 1 to 2 million neurons in this region just to numeral recognition thanks to early elementary education. More details here.

Refugees who have fled from Syria’s ongoing conflict are faced with a different crisis when they arrive in Lebanon: limited access to healthcare and a heightened risk of becoming ill in the overcrowded camps.

With some 40,000 Syrian refugees coming into Lebanon each month, a recently published survey found that only 32.6% of refugee children have been vaccinated against some of the most common diseases such as tetanus, polio and measles. The risk of communicable diseases spreading among the refugees is alarming. You can find the full story here.

A study of a consanguineous Egyptian family in which five siblings are affected by a rare epileptic condition has identified mutations in a particular gene called CNTN2 as the cause. Called cortical myoclonic tremor, the researchers compared the genomes of the siblings with 500 healthy controls and found these mutations present only in the affected siblings. More details here.

Finally, a research team from Cairo University and the University of California have come up with a flexible supercapacitator that promises to help realise the next generation of flexible electronic devices such as electronic paper, displays and health-monitoring kits. Their secret? Graphene. Read more here.

Beyond the hood

Researchers from the University of Granada have found another reason for our readers to get off their backsides and do some exercise: sporty folks seem to have significantly better cognitive capacities than those with more sedentary lifestyles.

These better brain muscles however appear to only highlight sporty people’s capacity to sustain their attention and react rapidly to external stimuli while engaged in monotonous tasks. The article was published in the latest edition of the journal PLOS ONE.

Sporty or not, however, it seems the adults of today are less “metabolically” healthy than their counterparts from previous generations. A large cohort study from the Netherlands compared a range of metabolic risk factors across generations. They found that more recently born generation are doing worse, despite having a greater life expectancy.

Their results show that while obesity and hypertension increase with age across all generations, more recently born generations have a higher prevalence of metabolic risk factors compared to those born ten years earlier. You can find more details here.