In Carl Sagan’s 1985 sci-fi novel Contact, a radio astronomer battles naysayers and funding setbacks to persist in her audacious plan — scanning the skies for signals from aliens. Sagan had real-life inspiration for his book (and the 1997 movie of the same name): astronomer Jill Tarter, who spearheaded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, for decades.
In Sagan’s story, the protagonist, Ellie Arroway, detects mysterious chatter from the cosmos. Tarter had no such luck. But her story, told by journalist Sarah Scoles in Making Contact, still provides insights into what it means to be human in a vast universe potentially harboring other life. Tarter began her career as a typical radio astronomer, studying mainstream topics like stars and galaxies as a Ph.D. student. But after graduating in 1975, she began to focus on SETI, poring over data from radio telescopes, searching for unnatural blips that could be a sign of an intelligent civilization. SETI researchers typically focus on radio waves because those long wavelengths can travel through our galaxy’s dust without being absorbed. Writings about SETI are prone to dreamy romanticism, but Making Contact admirably steers clear of excessive sentimentality. As a child gaping at the stars, Tarter wondered if creatures in the heavens were looking in our direction. Of course, Scoles notes, plenty of kids have wondered the same thing. Though Tarter’s childhood musings might seem special in retrospect, they aren’t what make her stand out.
Instead, Scoles — who has clear affection for her subject — highlights Tarter’s tenacity. In the face of numerous obstacles, Tarter pushed the field forward, seemingly by force of will.
In a detailed portrait of how the science sausage gets made, the book follows Tarter as she faced numerous funding woes. The field of SETI, which has at various points in its history received money through NASA, is an easy target for funding cuts, with some politicians deriding it as a wasteful hunt for “little green men.” Tarter, like the fictional Arroway, fought with Congress for taxpayer dollars SETI received, then scrambled for cash from other sources to keep telescopes and other equipment in operation. Wealthy donors kept SETI afloat — and still do. To maximize their ability to accept funding, Tarter and other SETI pioneers founded the nonprofit SETI Institute, in Mountain View, Calif., in 1984. Throughout, Tarter somehow managed to maintain her passion for a long shot search.
Although it’s a compelling story, the book stumbles in a few places, mainly minor sloppiness with physics facts, which may bother the most astute readers. (Scoles writes, for example, “Light is the only way we can learn about the universe,” neglecting gravitational waves and neutrinos, both of which have revealed secrets of cosmic objects.)
Now retired, Tarter has lost her chance to follow in Arroway’s fictional footsteps — she will never find any alien communiqués. But even if astronomers never hear from E.T., Tarter sees benefits in the search: SETI is an opportunity to make humankind less selfish. Just the thought that other creatures might inhabit the universe can make human squabbles seem less significant.
A strange property of spider silk helps explain how the arachnids avoid twirling wildly at the end of their ropes.
Researchers from China and England harvested silk from two species of golden orb weaver spiders, Nephila edulis and Nephila pilipes, and tested it with a torsion pendulum. The device has a hanging weight that rotates clockwise or counterclockwise, twisting whatever fiber it hangs from. When a typical fiber is twisted, the weight spins back and forth around an equilibrium point, eventually returning to its original orientation. But unlike several fibers the scientists tested — copper wires, carbon fibers and even human hair — the spider silk deformed when twisted. That distortion changed the silk’s equilibrium point and cut down on the back-and-forth spinning, the scientists report in the July 3 Applied Physics Letters. Eventually, scientists might design spin-resistant ropes for mountain climbers, who, like spiders, should avoid doing the twist.
A new type of soft robot can go under the knife and make a full recovery in about a day.
Researchers fashioned a robotic hand, gripper and muscle from self-healing rubbery material. To test their robots’ resilience, the engineers sliced each with a scalpel, then put them in an oven. After cranking up the heat to 80° Celsius, baking the bots for 40 minutes, then cooling them to room temperature, the researchers found that all three bots’ cuts had completely closed up. Twenty-four hours later, the machines had regained at least 98 percent of their original strength and flexibility, the researchers report online August 16 in Science Robotics. Incisions broke bonds between two chemical ingredients that make up the material, furan and maleimide. At higher temperatures, these chemical compounds can also split up, as well as move around more easily. So as the researchers cooled the material, the compounds were able to re-bond with those on the other side of an incision. “This material could heal, in theory, an infinite number of times,” says study coauthor Bram Vanderborght, an engineer at Vrije University Brussels.
The work helps address a major limitation of squishy, flexible robots — which are better suited than their traditional, rigid counterparts for navigating rough terrain and handling fragile objects, but are vulnerable to punctures and tears. Self-healing machines could pave the way for creating more durable, reusable soft bots.
Getting rid of bodily wastes during long space flights is a problem…. A bizarre possible solution … involves whipping the wastes in with some other ingredients to produce the most unusual rocket fuel…. The four ingredients — carbon, ammonium, nitrate and aluminum — and the waste material are just blended together, and they’re ready to go…. [The material] would probably be used to help a spacecraft change position or to nudge a long-life space station occasionally to keep it up in orbit. –Science News, September 2, 1967 Update Researchers are still trying to figure out how to turn astronaut excrement into something useful. Another process proposed in 2014 would use microbes to convert the waste and other organic material into fuel. But waste might have other uses that would be especially helpful during long-term flights. Synthetic biologists at Clemson University in South Carolina are working with NASA to use algae and genetically modified yeast to turn astronaut urine into 3-D printable plastics and nutritional omega-3 fats.
Sure, students in the classroom have to remember facts, but they also have to apply them. Some research efforts to enhance learning zero in on methods to strengthen memory and recall, while others bolster students’ abilities to stay on task, think more fluidly and mentally track and juggle information.
But there’s a catch. The science behind student learning is so far based on carefully controlled studies, primarily with college students. Do the same approaches work with younger students? Will they work in a classroom of 25 or 30 kids of varying abilities? These are questions researchers are asking now, says Erin Higgins of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Research. Moving from the lab to a classroom, with all its disruptions and distractions, is key for pinning down what works, under what conditions and for whom. In the process of tweaking some of the most promising tools and strategies for classroom use, educators hope to find ways to help low-performing students gain skills that already pay off for their more successful peers. The efforts described here draw on new, innovative training methods to boost learning in K-12 classrooms. Higgins calls them “great examples” of the work under way.
Recall with cues For college students, “free recall” is one of the most effective ways to make new knowledge stick, says psychologist Jeffrey Karpicke of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. Students who read a passage and then jotted down details they remembered from the material recalled about 50 percent more information a week later than did students who just reviewed the material. The trick for younger learners, Karpicke found, is to provide cues to help recall, without making the task too easy. After studying lists of unrelated words (banana and football), fourth-graders either restudied the words or practiced retrieving them from memory before taking a free recall test. Findings, published last year in Frontiers in Psychology, show that children at all reading levels remembered at least 25 percent more words when they practiced retrieving with the help of some cues compared with just rereading the lists.
With psychologist Michael Jones of Indiana University Bloomington, Karpicke is creating a computer-based self-test to help kids hone their retrieval skills. Students might have to answer fill-in-the-blank questions or rearrange scrambled words. Teachers will be able to tailor the tests to the curriculum. Parts of the program are being tested in schools in West Lafayette this year. The program gets harder as children succeed but easier if they struggle. “It’s important that students experience success,” Karpicke says, while keeping the task challenging. Hold that thought
Working memory, which allows a person to hold on to information long enough to use it, is often a weakness in children who struggle with math, says educational psychologist Lynn Fuchs of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Handy for remembering a phone number long enough to find a pen to write it down or for multiplying numbers in our heads, working memory can be strengthened through exercises that put progressively tougher demands on it. But general training may not be enough to help struggling math learners, according to a 2015 review of school-based programs, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology.
Fuchs has developed a routine that embeds working memory exercises within math lessons. Designed for second-graders at risk for math difficulties, the program has students focus on key words in a word problem and hold the words in mind while breaking the problem into smaller segments and choosing the right math tools to solve the problem.
Aiming to catch young learners before they fall behind, researchers are testing the program in Nashville classrooms this school year.
Sum of the parts Researchers typically test one new strategy in isolation, but in real classrooms, educators may try more than one approach at once. Jodi Davenport of WestEd, a San Francisco–based education research and development group, codirected a multi-institutional effort to revise a seventh-grade math curriculum using a handful of promising strategies. Lessons were spaced out to expose students to key concepts or procedures multiple times and were combined with frequent quizzes. Graphics accompanied examples of how to work a problem, to strengthen the connection between the visual and verbal material. Researchers trained 181 teachers at 114 schools and then tracked 2,465 students in 22 states over a full school year.
Strategies such as showing incorrect examples along with correct ones (to point out common errors) and removing distracting information were especially helpful to underperforming students, Davenport says. Students with lower pretest scores scored higher on posttests in six of eight math units when using the new curriculum versus the traditional materials, the researchers reported in March in Washington, D.C., at the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness meeting.
Testing the program in so many schools amid teacher turnover and other real-life challenges made controlling for variance hard, so the data weren’t as robust as researchers had hoped. But there appeared to be improvements, particularly in girls, underrepresented minorities, English-language learners and special education students. The methods work by helping students focus and link related info, Davenport speculates. “Successful students have these skills,” she says. “They’ve developed strategies … to focus their attention and employ problem-solving skills as they work through a problem.” She hopes to help teachers give struggling kids those same skills.
Granting executive powers Students must learn to stay focused in the face of distraction, to direct actions toward a goal and to hold what they have just seen or heard in mind while they work with it. These abilities are part of a set of cognitive skills called executive function. There’s strong evidence that well-designed video games can improve executive function among teens and adults, says psychologist Bruce Homer of the City University of New York. “But we need more research to determine if — and how well — these skills transfer to the classroom to … improve academic performance,” he says. With psychologist Richard Mayer of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Jan Plass of New York University’s game design center, Homer is developing a series of video games for students from middle school to college. Each game targets a specific area of executive function, such as shifting attention or avoiding distractions.
The first of three games is in testing, assigned as homework for 300 kids in Santa Barbara and New York City schools. In the game, students must quickly adapt to rule changes as aliens land on Earth and request help gathering supplies. Preliminary findings show that after eight 30-minute sessions, players of the alien game showed substantially greater improvements in ability to shift strategies in standard cognitive tests compared with students who played a different game. This fall, researchers plan to study whether gains in executive function from game play can improve actual performance in specific academic areas.
Disease reduces a coral’s overall fluorescence even before any sign of the infection is visible to the naked eye, a new study finds. An imaging technique that illuminates the change could help with efforts to better monitor coral health, researchers report November 6 in Scientific Reports.
Many corals naturally produce fluorescent proteins that glow in a wavelength of light that human eyes can’t see in natural light. Previous studies have shown that heat stress and wounding, among others stressors, can affect coral fluorescence, but the new study is the first to look at the relationship between fluorescence and infectious disease. Jamie Caldwell, a disease ecologist now at Stanford University, and colleagues used a technique called live-imaging laser scanning confocal microscopy to compare fluorescence in living fragments of healthy and diseased Montipora capitata coral. The reef coral, common in Hawaii, fluoresces in red and cyan, and can contract a bacterial infection called Montipora white syndrome, which causes coral lesions and tissue loss.
The diseased bits looked healthy at the macroscopic level, but under the researchers’ microscope, the sick coral’s pallid complexion was pronounced. Computer analyses of the microscopy images quantified the lost glow (red is the total area of fluorescence, black regions are where fluorescence was lost, and white lines indicate edges between the two zones). Among the samples studied, healthy coral had on average 1.2 times as much fluorescence area as diseased fragments. Diseased coral had disorganized and fragmented patterns of fluorescence — similar to a forest that has been logged extensively, the researchers found. Such research “is transformative in our struggle to visualize the dance between pathogen attack and host response in the initial attack,” says Drew Harvell, a disease ecologist at Cornell University. Many coral diseases appear to be increasing around the world, even when accounting for increased research effort, Caldwell says. Along with bleaching events and pollution, disease is considered one of the major contributors to reef declines globally. The new technique could be used for other coral species and diseases, she says.
THE WOODLANDS, Texas — It’s been six months since NASA’s Cassini spacecraft plunged to its doom in the atmosphere of Saturn, but scientists didn’t spend much time mourning. They got busy, analyzing the spacecraft’s final data.
The Cassini mission ended September 15, 2017, after more than 13 years orbiting Saturn (SN Online: 9/15/17). The spacecraft’s final 22 orbits, dubbed the Grand Finale, sent Cassini into the potentially dangerous region between the gas giant and its rings, and its final orbit sent it directly into Saturn’s atmosphere. That perspective helped solve mysteries about the planet and its moons that could not be tackled any other way, scientists said March 19 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.
“In so many ways, the Grand Finale orbits provided information that was totally unexpected,” said Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “So many of our models were not correct.”
Here are five things we now know and a few outstanding mysteries.
Saturn’s clouds go deep Those final daredevil orbits allowed Cassini to measure the gravity of Saturn and its rings independent of one another. Looking at the planet’s gravity field alone revealed that the swirling bands of clouds penetrate much deeper into the planet than expected.
Astronomers this month announced a similar discovery for an even larger gas giant, reporting that the Juno spacecraft, which is orbiting Jupiter, had found that the planet’s rotating cloud belts reach roughly 3,000 kilometers below the top of the atmosphere.
Saturn’s clouds reach a few times deeper than that. “This was an astonishing result,” Spilker said.
“People used to think that maybe Saturn was just a slightly smaller version of Jupiter, but it’s evident that that’s not the case,” says planetary scientist Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, who was not involved in the gravity measurements. The difference speaks to how diverse planets are, he says. “Every place you look, everywhere we’ve been to, it’s just been so dramatically different and unique.”
Ring rain is eroding the innermost ring Grains of ice from the rings are raining down into Saturn’s atmosphere, Cassini’s final orbits confirmed. This “ring rain” idea has been suggested since the 1980s, but only by tasting the atmosphere and directly sampling the space between Saturn and the rings could Cassini confirm the rains are real.
In its last five full orbits, Cassini found a zoo of organic molecules in and just above Saturn’s atmosphere, said planetary scientist Kelly Miller of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The spacecraft found a lot of water, which wasn’t surprising — water makes up about 90 percent of the rings. But there were also a lot of hydrocarbons similar to propane, plus some methane and sulfur-bearing molecules.
The types of molecules became less well-mixed as the spacecraft looked deeper into Saturn’s atmosphere, which is what would happen if the particles came from the rings and sank at different speeds. The researchers think this material is especially raining from Saturn’s D ring, the thin innermost ring. Other Cassini data suggest this ring is losing mass.
“The D ring is slowly being eroded away and going into the planet,” Spilker said.
Organics could explain mysterious ring hues The organics in the ring rain could solve a debate about why Saturn’s rings appear reddish in some spots.
“We’ve had this debate going on for a couple of years now — are they red because of good old-fashioned rust like Mars, or because of the same kinds of organic materials … that make carrots and tomatoes and watermelon red?” said planetary scientist Jeff Cuzzi of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “To me, this answers the question of what makes the rings red: It’s organics.”
It’s still not clear where the organics come from, though. They could be created within the rings, or they could come from cosmic dust from the tails of comets. Miller and her colleagues are comparing the ring rain molecules with data on comet 67P, which the Rosetta spacecraft observed, to see how well they match up (SN: 11/11/17, p. 32).
Titan’s “magic islands” aren’t islands, or bubbles Mysterious disappearing features in the lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan are caused by sunlight reflecting off giant waves, said planetary scientist Alexander Hayes of Cornell University. These features were named “magic islands” when they were first spotted in 2014. As recently as April 2017, planetary scientists thought they had the islands solved: They seemed to be the result of champagnelike bubbles of nitrogen burbling through the moon’s methane and ethane seas (SN Online: 4/18/17).
But Hayes presented newly analyzed data from August 2014, when Cassini looked at Kraken Mare, the moon’s largest northern sea, in radar and infrared wavelengths within two hours of each other. The radar images showed a magic island, and the infrared ones showed a peak in brightness at the same spot.
Because the observations were taken two hours apart, the island probably couldn’t have been due to bubbles, Hayes said — bubbles would pop or disperse too quickly. Instead, he thinks the brightening could be the glint of sunlight reflecting directly off of giant waves on the lake, like how the ocean ripples with gold at sunset. Simulations of Titan’s atmosphere suggest these waves could be raised by winds as slow as 0.5 meters per second, which would barely move a wind vane on Earth.
Enceladus’ plumes may brighten by the pull of another moon Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus has plumes that may be driven by nudges from another moon.
The spurts of liquid water were discovered in 2006. Over the next six years, scientists noticed that the plumes varied in brightness (a proxy for how much material is gushing from the moon) on a daily cycle, probably driven by Saturn’s different positions in Enceladus’ sky.
Then, in 2015 some researchers noted that the plumes’ overall brightness had been decreasing since the beginning of the Cassini mission.
One possible explanation was that the plumes changed with Saturn’s seasons. Another was that ice built up in the vents, clogging them and decreasing the flow. But looking at the full 13-year dataset, planetary scientist Francis Nimmo found that the plumes grow brighter in a regular cycle every four and 11 years. The pattern is too coherent to be explained by clogged vents, said Nimmo, of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Oddly, the plume grew brighter in 2017, so the seasonal explanation doesn’t fit either.
The variations could be explained by a neighboring moon, Dione. Every time Dione and Enceladus line up, their gravitational stress on each other could force Enceladus’ vents open a bit more, causing the plumes to grow brighter.
Unsolved enigmas So far, analyzing data from Cassini hasn’t answered all of scientists’ questions. Is Enceladus the only moon with plumes? Dione showed signs of activity, too, but Cassini wasn’t able to confirm it. How thick is Enceladus’ ice sheet? Why are Titan’s smaller lakes full of clear, pure methane, when scientists expected the lakes to be clogged with hydrocarbon silt?
Even though the spacecraft is gone, it left decades’ worth of data to sift through in search of answers. “Cassini is going to keep on giving as long as we keep looking,” Hayes said.
Editors’ note: This story was updated on March 21, 2018, to include the affiliations of Jeff Cuzzi and Francis Nimmo.
A strand of spaghetti snaps easily, but an exotic substance known as nuclear pasta is an entirely different story.
Predicted to exist in ultradense dead stars called neutron stars, nuclear pasta may be the strongest material in the universe. Breaking the stuff requires 10 billion times the force needed to crack steel, for example, researchers report in a study accepted in Physical Review Letters.
“This is a crazy-big figure, but the material is also very, very dense, so that helps make it stronger,” says study coauthor and physicist Charles Horowitz of Indiana University Bloomington. Neutron stars form when a dying star explodes, leaving behind a neutron-rich remnant that is squished to extreme pressures by powerful gravitational forces, resulting in materials with bizarre properties (SN: 12/23/17, p. 7).
About a kilometer below the surface of a neutron star, atomic nuclei are squeezed together so close that they merge into clumps of nuclear matter, a dense mixture of neutrons and protons. These as-yet theoretical clumps are thought to be shaped like blobs, tubes or sheets, and are named after their noodle look-alikes, including gnocchi, spaghetti and lasagna. Even deeper in the neutron star, the nuclear matter fully takes over. The burnt-out star’s entire core is nuclear matter, like one giant atomic nucleus.
Nuclear pasta is incredibly dense, about 100 trillion times the density of water. It’s impossible to study such an extreme material in the laboratory, says physicist Constança Providência of the University of Coimbra in Portugal who was not involved with the research. Instead, the researchers used computer simulations to stretch nuclear lasagna sheets and explore how the material responded. Immense pressures were required to deform the material, and the pressure required to snap the pasta was greater than for any other known material.
Earlier simulations had revealed that the outer crust of a neutron star was likewise vastly stronger than steel. But the inner crust, where nuclear pasta lurks, was unexplored territory. “Now, what [the researchers] see is that the inner crust is even stronger,” Providência says.
Physicists are still aiming to find real-world evidence of nuclear pasta. The new results may provide a glimmer of hope. Neutron stars tend to spin very rapidly, and, as a result, might emit ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves, which scientists could detect at facilities like the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO. But the spacetime ripples will occur only if a neutron star’s crust is lumpy — meaning that it has “mountains,” or mounds of dense material either on the surface or within the crust.
“The tricky part is, you need a big mountain,” says physicist Edward Brown of Michigan State University in East Lansing. A stiffer, stronger crust would support larger mountains, which could produce more powerful gravitational waves. But “large” is a relative term. Due to the intense gravity of neutron stars, their mountains would be a far cry from Mount Everest, rising centimeters tall, not kilometers. Previously, scientists didn’t know how large a mountain nuclear pasta could support.
“That’s where these simulations come in,” Brown says. The results suggest that nuclear pasta could support mountains tens of centimeters tall — big enough that LIGO could spot neutron stars’ gravitational waves. If LIGO caught such signals, scientists could estimate the mountains’ size, and confirm that neutron stars have superstrong materials in their crusts.
When you’re stressed and anxious, you might feel your heart race. Is your heart racing because you’re afraid? Or does your speeding heart itself contribute to your anxiety? Both could be true, a new study in mice suggests.
By artificially increasing the heart rates of mice, scientists were able to increase anxiety-like behaviors — ones that the team then calmed by turning off a particular part of the brain. The study, published in the March 9 Nature, shows that in high-risk contexts, a racing heart could go to your head and increase anxiety. The findings could offer a new angle for studying and, potentially, treating anxiety disorders. The idea that body sensations might contribute to emotions in the brain goes back at least to one of the founders of psychology, William James, says Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. In James’ 1890 book The Principles of Psychology, he put forward the idea that emotion follows what the body experiences. “We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble,” James wrote.
The brain certainly can sense internal body signals, a phenomenon called interoception. But whether those sensations — like a racing heart — can contribute to emotion is difficult to prove, says Anna Beyeler, a neuroscientist at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Bordeaux. She studies brain circuitry related to emotion and wrote a commentary on the new study but was not involved in the research. “I’m sure a lot of people have thought of doing these experiments, but no one really had the tools,” she says.
Deisseroth has spent his career developing those tools. He is one of the scientists who developed optogenetics — a technique that uses viruses to modify the genes of specific cells to respond to bursts of light (SN: 6/18/21; SN: 1/15/10). Scientists can use the flip of a light switch to activate or suppress the activity of those cells. In the new study, Deisseroth and his colleagues used a light attached to a tiny vest over a mouse’s genetically engineered heart to change the animal’s heart rate. When the light was off, a mouse’s heart pumped at about 600 beats per minute. But when the team turned on a light that flashed at 900 beats per minutes, the mouse’s heartbeat followed suit. “It’s a nice reasonable acceleration, [one a mouse] would encounter in a time of stress or fear,” Deisseroth explains.
When the mice felt their hearts racing, they showed anxiety-like behavior. In risky scenarios — like open areas where a little mouse might be someone’s lunch — the rodents slunk along the walls and lurked in darker corners. When pressing a lever for water that could sometimes be coupled with a mild shock, mice with normal heart rates still pressed without hesitation. But mice with racing hearts decided they’d rather go thirsty.
“Everybody was expecting that, but it’s the first time that it has been clearly demonstrated,” Beyeler says. The researchers also scanned the animals’ brains to find areas that might be processing the increased heart rate. One of the biggest signals, Deisseroth says, came from the posterior insula (SN: 4/25/16). “The insula was interesting because it’s highly connected with interoceptive circuitry,” he explains. “When we saw that signal, [our] interest was definitely piqued.”
Using more optogenetics, the team reduced activity in the posterior insula, which decreased the mice’s anxiety-like behaviors. The animals’ hearts still raced, but they behaved more normally, spending some time in open areas of mazes and pressing levers for water without fear. A lot of people are very excited about the work, says Wen Chen, the branch chief of basic medicine research for complementary and integrative health at the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health in Bethesda, Md. “No matter what kind of meetings I go into, in the last two days, everybody brought up this paper,” says Chen, who wasn’t involved in the research.
The next step, Deisseroth says, is to look at other parts of the body that might affect anxiety. “We can feel it in our gut sometimes, or we can feel it in our neck or shoulders,” he says. Using optogenetics to tense a mouse’s muscles, or give them tummy butterflies, might reveal other pathways that produce fearful or anxiety-like behaviors.
Understanding the link between heart and head could eventually factor into how doctors treat panic and anxiety, Beyeler says. But the path between the lab and the clinic, she notes, is much more convoluted than that of the heart to the head.
An experimental treatment for endometriosis, a painful gynecological disease that affects some 190 million people worldwide, may one day offer new hope for easing symptoms.
Monthly antibody injections reversed telltale signs of endometriosis in monkeys, researchers report February 22 in Science Translational Medicine. The antibody targets IL-8, a molecule that whips up inflammation inside the scattered, sometimes bleeding lesions that mark the disease. After neutralizing IL-8, those hallmark lesions shrink, the team found.
The new treatment is “pretty potent,” says Philippa Saunders, a reproductive scientist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved with work. The study’s authors haven’t reported a cure, she points out, but their antibody does seem to have an impact. “I think it’s really very promising,” she says.
Many scientists think endometriosis occurs when bits of the uterine lining — the endometrium — slough off during menstruation. Instead of exiting via the vagina, they voyage in the other direction: up through the fallopian tubes. Those bits of tissue then trespass through the body, sprouting lesions where they land. They’ll glom onto the ovaries, fallopian tubes, bladder and other spots outside of the uterus and take on a life of their own, Saunders says. The lesions can grow nerve cells, form tough nubs of tissue and even bleed during menstrual cycles. They can also kick off chronic bouts of pelvic pain. If you have endometriosis, you can experience “pain when you urinate, pain when you defecate, pain when you have sex, pain when you move around,” Saunders says. People with the disease can also struggle with infertility and depression, she adds. “It’s really nasty.” Once diagnosed, patients face a dearth of treatment options — there’s no cure, only therapies to alleviate symptoms. Surgery to remove lesions can help, but symptoms often come back.
The disease affects at least 10 percent of girls, women and transgender men in their reproductive years, Saunders says. And people typically suffer for years — about eight on average — before a diagnosis. “Doctors consider menstrual pelvic pain a very common thing,” says Ayako Nishimoto-Kakiuchi, a pharmacologist at Chugai Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. in Tokyo. Endometriosis “is underestimated in the clinic,” she says. “I strongly believe that this disease has been understudied.”
Hormonal drugs that stop ovulation and menstruation can also offer relief, says Serdar Bulun, a reproductive endocrinologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago not involved with the new study. But those drugs come with side effects and aren’t ideal for people trying to become pregnant. “I see these patients day in and day out,” he says. “I see how much they suffer, and I feel like we are not doing enough.”
Nishimoto-Kakiuchi’s team engineered an antibody that grabs onto the inflammatory factor IL-8, a protein that scientists have previously fingered as one potential culprit in the disease. The antibody acts like a garbage collector, Nishimoto-Kakiuchi says. It grabs IL-8, delivers it to the cell’s waste disposal machinery, and then heads out to snare more IL-8.
The team tested the antibody in cynomolgus monkeys that were surgically modified to have the disease. (Endometriosis rarely shows up spontaneously in these monkeys, the scientists discovered previously after screening more than 600 females.) The team treated 11 monkeys with the antibody injection once a month for six months. In these animals, lesions shriveled and the adhesive tissue that glues them to the body thinned out, too. Before this study, Nishimoto-Kakiuchi says, the team didn’t think such signs of endometriosis were reversible. Her company has now started a Phase I clinical trial to test the safety of therapy in humans. The treatment is one of several endometriosis therapies scientists are testing (SN: 7/19/19) . Other trials will test new hormonal drugs, robot-assisted surgery and behavioral interventions.
Doctors need new options to help people with the disease, Saunders says. “There’s a huge unmet clinical need.”
