The Science of Solidarity

By: Alexandria Addesso

To many Charles Darwin is the utmost authority when it comes to the study of evolution. Many people took his findings about the importance of competition and how it plays a role in evolution and ran with it. Even as far as applying it to society and thus creating social Darwinism. Anarcho-scientist Peter Kropotkin was inspired by the publication of On the Origin of Species to go and do his own observations of a multitude of species and seemed to come to the opposite conclusion of such Darwinism backers. He argued against claims that competition alone led to evolution or ‘survival of the fittest’, and insisted that mutual aid is a major factor of evolution. The following is an introductory excerpt from Kropotkin’s book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And the other was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.



Kropotkin chronicled his findings while observing a wide variety of insects, birds, sea-life, and different mammals including humans. When it came to who was fittest to survive and further their species, it was most often those who cooperated via forms of mutual aid and solidarity.

As soon as we study animals – not in laboratories and museums only, but in the forest and the prairie, in the steppe and the mountains – we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defense amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Of course it would be extremely difficult to estimate, however roughly, the relative numerical importance of both these series of facts. But if we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: "Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organization. If the numberless facts which can be brought forward to support this view are taken into account, we may safely say that mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and characters as insure the maintenance and further development of the species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of life for the individual, with the least waste of energy.



Solidarity scientifically leads to the continuation of life. Through the solidarity of family units, as wells even sometimes larger communities, children are able to be raised and protected. Solidarity is also pivotal for any revolution, social movement, or major change to occur. The slogan “workers of the world unite,” first mentioned in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, called for solidarity among all proletariat (the lower/working class) regardless to nation or ethnicity. These were truly powerful words of unity for those across a particular class line against their oppressors that belonged to the bourgeoisie (the middle/capitalist class).

A major group that unified lower class people across ethnic and gender lines on U.S. soil in the aftermath of the Democratic Convention protests of 1968 was the original Rainbow Coalition. It was formed by the Illinois Chapter of The Black Panthers in Chicago and also included the Young Patriots (a group of white youth who had migrated from Appalachia to Chicago), the Young Lords (a group of Puerto Rican nationalist youth), disenfranchised jewish youth and members of the women’s movement. The Rainbow Coalition epitomized solidarity and intersectionality within the class struggle. Because of its diversity, the Rainbow Coalition was able to bring about treaties among violent rivaling gangs as well as fight against police brutality that did nothing but add to the wave of violence. With unity comes power, and this was highly threatening to both local and national government.



“It seems to me that a lot of the real intense government repression didn’t happen until the Black Panthers started building coalitions,” said Bobby Lee a Black Panthers member who helped organize the Rainbow Coalition along with Deputy Chairman of the Illinois Chapter Fred Hampton, in an interview with Chicago Area. “Once the party departed from the ‘hate whitey’ trip and got serious about building real politics, we were a threat—plain and simple. The FBI were always watching us. But the Rainbow Coalition was their worst nightmare.”

For major changes to occur, for the preservation of life, and to strive towards survival and thus evolution, solidarity is a major factor.

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Scientists use parasite's internal clock to attack sleeping sickness

Trypanosoma brucei is a parasite that causes the deadly sleeping sickness. Scientists have determined the parasite has its own biological clock that makes it more vulnerable to medications in the afternoon.

The parasite that causes deadly sleeping sickness has its own biological clock that makes it more vulnerable to medications during the afternoon, according to international research that may help improve treatments for one of Africa's most lethal diseases.

The finding from the Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute could be especially beneficial for patients whose bodies can't handle side effects of toxic treatments used to eradicate the parasite. By knowing the optimal time to administer these medications - which can be fatal - doctors hope to reduce the duration and dosage of the treatment and save more lives.

"This research has opened a door," said Dr. Filipa Rijo-Ferreira, first author of the study from the O'Donnell Brain Institute at UT Southwestern Medical Center. "If the same therapeutic effect can be obtained with a lower dose, then it may be possible to reduce the mortality associated with the treatment."

Establishing that parasites have their own internal clock is a key step in finding new ways to treat a variety of parasitic conditions, from sleeping sickness to malaria. While many of these diseases are often not deadly, sleeping sickness has been among the most lethal.

The condition - known formally as African trypanosomiasis - is transmitted through the bite of the Tsetse fly and threatens tens of millions of people in sub-Saharan African countries. After entering the body, the parasite causes such symptoms as inverted sleeping cycles, fever, muscle weakness, and itching. It eventually invades the central nervous system and, depending on its type, can kill its host in anywhere from a few months to several years.

Control efforts have significantly reduced the number of cases over the last decade. However, an unknown number of people still die annually from sleeping sickness as scientists continue seeking a vaccine and alternative treatments to the arsenic-based medications that are occasionally fatal to patients.
Dr. Joseph S. Takahashi, who oversaw the collaborative study published in Nature

Microbiology with Dr. Luisa Figueiredo at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, said the finding will likely apply to all types of parasites and perhaps lead to improved treatment for their associated conditions.



"There have been many observations of the presence of daily patterns in parasites, but until now we didn't know if this was the result of an intrinsic molecular clock. In the future, we may consider biological rhythms when defining therapies to treat sleeping sickness and potentially other infections," said Dr. Takahashi, Chairman of Neuroscience at UT Southwestern, holder of the Loyd B. Sands Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience, and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Researchers from UT Southwestern and the Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Lisbon in Portugal made their finding after isolating the parasite - known as Trypanosoma brucei - in the lab and obtaining a type of genetic fingerprint to gauge its daily cycles independent of a host. They found the parasite has daily metabolic cycles that make it more vulnerable to treatments in the afternoon.

Scientists now hope to learn what drives the parasite's internal clock so they can target specific genes and disrupt its circadian rhythms. Much like humans struggle to cope when their sleep cycle is interrupted, scientists expect the parasite would become weaker if its cycle is disturbed.

"We know that in other organisms if we mutate their clock they are less adapted to the world," said Dr. Rijo-Ferreira, an HHMI Associate. "We're trying to jetlag these parasites, trying to make them less fit."

5 parasite diseases to watch for in the U.S.

While deadly sleeping sickness is primarily transmitted in rural regions of Africa, millions of people in the U.S. are exposed to other forms of parasitic diseases. Here are five such diseases the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists as public-health priorities.

Chagas: This disease is most commonly acquired through contact with the feces of an infected kissing bug, a blood-sucking insect. There may be swelling where the parasite enters the body, and in rare cases the disease results in life-threatening inflammation of the heart or brain. If untreated, infection is lifelong. CDC estimates about 300,000 people in the U.S. have the condition.

Toxoplasmosis: This condition is a leading cause of death related to food-borne illness in the U.S. More than 30 million Americans carry the parasite, though few show symptoms because their immune systems protect against the illness. People can become infected by eating undercooked, contaminated meat, and women who are infected during pregnancy sometimes pass the parasite to their unborn children. This transfer can result in a miscarriage, a stillborn child, eye disease, or unusual head size.



Toxocariasis: Caused by two species of roundworm and is typically spread through the feces of dogs and cats. Most infected people don't show symptoms, though in some cases the parasite can travel through parts of the body such as the liver, lungs, or central nervous system. The larvae can also travel to the eye and cause blindness. Each year about 70 people, mostly children, are blinded by the condition.

Cysticercosis: Spread through ingesting larval cysts of a tapeworm, causing infections in the muscles, brain, or other tissue. People become infected when they drink water or eat food contaminated with tapeworm eggs, or if they put contaminated fingers in their mouths. Cysts in the brain or spinal cord commonly cause seizures or headaches. The condition may also cause life-threatening brain swelling or strokes. CDC estimates that at least 1,000 people are hospitalized each year with the more severe brain-related form of the disease.

Trichomoniasis The parasite that causes trichomoniasis is transferred from human to human during sex. About 3.7 million people in the U.S. have the condition, though most do not know they have it. Symptoms may include itching, burning, redness or soreness in the infected areas. The parasite can be eradicated through medications. Without treatment, the infection can last for months or years.

Source: Nature Microbiology - Provided by: UT Southwestern Medical Center

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Viruses Created to Selectively Attack Tumor Cells

The image shows tumor cells infected by the virus, which expresses a fluorescent protein. Over the days (in the image fifth day), the virus multiplies, generating new virus that infect more cancer cells

It is an innovative approach that takes advantage of the different expression profiles of certain proteins between tumor and healthy cells that make the virus to only infect the first ones.

Scientists at the IDIBAPS Biomedical Research Institute and at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) lead a study in which they have designed a new strategy to get genetically modified viruses to selectively attack tumor cells without affecting healthy tissues. The study, published today by the journal Nature Communications, is part of Eneko Villanueva's work for his PhD and it is co-lead by Cristina Fillat, head of the Gene Therapy and Cancer Group at IDIBAPS, and Raúl Méndez, ICREA researcher at IRB Barcelona.

Conventional cancer treatment may cause undesirable side effects as a result of poor selectivity. To avoid them it is important that new therapies can efficiently remove cancer cells and preserve the healthy ones. One of the new approaches in cancer therapy is based on the development of oncolytic viruses, ie, viruses modified to only infect tumor cells. In recent years several studies have been focused on the development of viruses created by genetic engineering to maximize their anticancer effect but, as their potency increases, so does the associated toxicity. Limiting this effect on healthy cells is now the key for the application of this promising therapy.



An innovative and specific approach
In the study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from IDIBAPS and IRB Barcelona have developed an innovative approach to provide adenovirus with high specificity against tumor cells. "We have taken advantage of the different expression of a type of protein, CPEBs, in normal and tumor tissues," explains Raúl Méndez from IRB Barcelona.

CPEB is a family of four RNA binding proteins (the molecules that carry information from genes to synthesize proteins) that control the expression of hundreds of genes and maintain the functionality and the ability to repair tissues under normal conditions. When CPEBs become imbalanced, they change the expression of these genes in cells and contribute to the development of pathological processes such as cancer. "We have focused on the double imbalance of two of these proteins in healthy tissues and tumors: on the one hand we have CPEB4, which in previous studies we have shown that it is highly expressed in cancer cells and necessary for tumor growth; and, on the other hand, CPEB1, expressed in normal tissue and lost in cancer cells. We have taken advantage of this imbalance to make a virus that only attacks cells with high levels of CPEB4 and low CPEB1, that means that it only affects tumor cells, ignoring the healthy tissues," says Méndez.



"In this study we have worked with adenoviruses, a family of viruses that can cause infections of the respiratory tract, the urinary tract, conjunctivitis or gastroenteritis but which have features that make them very attractive to be used in the therapy against tumors," explains Cristina Fillat. To do this, it is necessary to modify the genome of these viruses. In the study researchers have inserted sequences that recognize CPEB proteins in key regions for the control of viral proteins. Their activity was checked in in vitro models of pancreatic cancer and control of tumor growth was observed in mouse models.

The onco-selective viruses created in this study were very sophisticated, being activated by CPEB4 but repressed by CPEB1. Thus, researchers achieved attenuated viral activity in normal cells, while in tumor cells the virus potency was maintained or even increased. "When the modified viruses entered into tumor cells they replicated their genome and, when going out, they destroyed the cell and released more particles of the virus with the potential to infect more cancer cells," says Fillat. She adds that, "this new approach is very interesting since it is a therapy selectively amplified in the tumor."



Since CPEB4 is overexpressed in several tumors, this oncoselective strategy may be valid for other solid tumors. Researchers are now trying to combine this treatment with therapies that are already being used in clinical practice, or that are in a very advanced stage of development, to find synergies that make them more effective.
Source: Materials provided by the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona)

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Do human Pheromones Actually Exist?

Can human pheromones really influence our attraction to others? A new study says two putative pheromones cannot.

You may have seen the ads: Just spray a bit of human pheromone on your skin, and you’re guaranteed to land a date. Scientists have long debated whether humans secrete chemicals that alter the behavior of other people. A new study throws more cold water on the idea, finding that two pheromones that proponents have long contended affect human attraction to each other have no such impact on the opposite sex—and indeed experts are divided about whether human pheromones even exist.

A pheromone, a hormone secreted or excreted, is a chemical factor that triggers a social response in members of the same species. Pheromones are chemicals capable of acting outside the body of the secreting individual to impact the behavior of the receiving individuals.

The study, published today in Royal Society Open Science, asked heterosexual participants to rate opposite-sex faces on attractiveness while being exposed to two steroids that are putative human pheromones. One is androstadienone (AND), found in male sweat and semen, whereas the second, estratetraenol (EST), is in women’s urine. Researchers also asked participants to judge gender-ambiguous, or “neutral,” faces, created by merging images of men and women together. The authors reasoned that if the steroids were pheromones, female volunteers given AND would see gender-neutral faces as male, and male volunteers given EST would see gender-neutral faces as female. They also theorized that the steroids corresponding to the opposite sex would lead the volunteers to rate opposite sex faces as more attractive.



That didn’t happen. The researchers found no effects of the steroids on any behaviors and concluded that the label of “putative human pheromone” for AND and EST should be dropped.
“I’ve convinced myself that ‘AND’ and ‘EST’ are not worth pursuing,” says the study’s lead author, Leigh Simmons, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia in Crawley.

Simmons belongs to a camp of researchers that believes human pheromones likely exist, but none has yet been identified. He sees ‘AND’ and ‘EST’ as an unfortunate distraction, pushed forward in part by science’s “file drawer problem,” which relegates negative results to the laboratory filing cabinet.

A push to publish more negative findings has led to studies like these emerging to question long-held views, says Tristram Wyatt, a pheromone researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom who was not involved with the work. “It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes kind of moment.”

Yet Wen Zhou, a behavioral psychologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, contends that ‘AND’ and ‘EST’ may well be human pheromones. “My major concern with the experiments in this study is that they were not rigorously designed and conducted,” she wrote in an email to Science. Zhou, who in 2014 published a study finding that ‘AND’ and ‘EST’ do indeed influence whether participants judge walking dot figures with “genderless gaits” to be men or women, doubts the faces used were truly “gender neutral.” She’s also concerned that tape used to affix steroid-soaked cotton balls to participants’ faces may have covered up the chemicals.



Martha McClintock, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Chicago in Illinois who is widely credited with (and sometimes criticized for) elevating ‘AND’ and ‘EST’ to pheromone fame, along with the heavily contested idea that women living together will sync their menstrual cycles, says the findings only really negate an overly simplified view of ‘AND’ and ‘EST’ having an almost mystical ability to attract partners. She still thinks the compounds can affect behavior—just in a much more nuanced way than most people think. Her most recent research, for example, has examined how inhaling ‘AND’, perhaps from another person’s sweat, might influence someone’s emotions. “There’s no doubt that this compound, even in tiny amounts, affects how the brain functions,” she says.

Wyatt, who is convinced the new work is solid, hopes that investigators will now re-evaluate how they search for human pheromones. Studies focused on sex and attraction, are exploring a complicated realm, he says, as human sexual behavior is not well understood. Instead, he argues, scientists should examine babies, who have not developed confounding associations with smells, but seem to respond to pheromonelike substances from any mother’s areola gland secretions, which cause them to stick out their tongue and suckle.
Source: Lindzi Wessel

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Biologists propose to sequence the DNA of all life on Earth

Can biologists sequence the genomes of all the plants and the animals in the world, including this greater bird of paradise in Indonesia?

When it comes to genome sequencing, visionaries like to throw around big numbers: There’s the UK Biobank, for example, which promises to decipher the genomes of 500,000 individuals, or Iceland’s effort to study the genomes of its entire human population. Yesterday, at a meeting here organized by the Smithsonian Initiative on Biodiversity Genomics and the Shenzhen, China–based sequencing powerhouse BGI, a small group of researchers upped the ante even more, announcing their intent
to, eventually, sequence “all life on Earth.”

Their plan, which does not yet have funding dedicated to it specifically but could cost at least several billions of dollars, has been dubbed the Earth Bio Genome Project (EBP). Harris Lewin, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Davis, who is part of the group that came up with this vision 2 years ago, says the EBP would take a first step toward its audacious goal by focusing on eukaryotes—the group of organisms that includes all plants, animals, and single-celled organisms such as amoebas.



That strategy, and the EBP’s overall concept, found a receptive audience at BioGenomics2017, a gathering this week of conservationists, evolutionary biologists, systematisms, and other biologists interested in applying genomics to their work. “This is a grand idea,” says Oliver Ryder, a conservation biologist at the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research in California. “If we really want to understand how life evolved, genome biology is going to be part of that.”

Ryder and others drew parallels between the EBP and the Human Genome Project, which began as an ambitious, controversial, and, at the time, technically impossible proposal more than 30 years ago. That earlier effort eventually led not only to the sequencing of the first human genome, but also to entirely new DNA technologies that are at the center of many medical frontiers and the basis for a $20 billion industry. “People have learned from the human genome experience that [sequencing] is a tremendous advance in biology,” Lewin says.

Many details about the EBP are still being worked out. But as currently proposed, the first step would be to sequence in great detail the DNA of a member of each eukaryotic family (about 9000 in all) to create reference genomes on par or better than the reference human genome. Next would come sequencing to a lesser degree a species from each of the 150,000 to 200,000 genera. Finally, EBP participants would get rough genomes of the 1.5 million remaining known eukaryotic species. These lower resolution genomes could be improved as needed by comparing them with the family references or by doing more sequencing, says EBP co-organizer Gene Robinson, a behavioral genomics researcher and director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois in Urbana.



The entire eukaryotic effort would likely cost about the same as it did to sequence that first human genome, estimate Lewin, Robinson, and EBP co-organizer John Kress, an evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History here. It took about $2.7 billion to read and order the 3 billion bases composing the human genome, about $4.8 billion in today’s dollars.

With a comparable amount of support, the EBP’s eukaryotic work might be done in a decade, its organizers suggest. Such optimism arises from ever-decreasing DNA sequencing costs—one meeting presenter from Complete Genomics, based in Mountain View, California, says his company plans to be able to roughly sequence whole eukaryotic genomes for about $100 within a year—and improvements in sequencing technology that make possible higher quality genomes, at reasonable prices. “It became apparent to me that at a certain point, it would be possible to sequence all life on Earth,” Lewin says. Although some may find the multibillion-dollar price tag hard to justify for researchers not studying humans, the fundamentals of matter, or the mysteries of the universe, the EBP has a head start, thanks to the work of several research communities pursuing their own ambitious sequencing projects.

These include the Genome 10K Project, which seeks to sequence 10,000 vertebrate genomes, one from each genus; i5K, an effort to decipher 5000 arthropods; and B10K, which expects to generate genomes for all 10,500 bird species. The EBP would help coordinate, compile, and perhaps fund these efforts. “The [EBP] concept is a community of communities,” Lewin says. There are also sequencing commitments from giants in the genomics field, such as China’s BGI, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom. But at a planning meeting this week, it became clear that significant challenges await the EBP, even beyond funding. Although researchers from Brazil, China, and the United Kingdom said their nations are eager to participate in some way, the 20 people in attendance emphasized the need for the effort to be more international, with developing countries, particularly those with high biodiversity, helping shape the project’s final form.



They proposed that the EBP could help develop sequencing and other technological experts and capabilities in those regions. The Global Genome Biodiversity Network, which is compiling lists and images of specimens at museums and other biorepositories around the world, could supply much of the DNA needed, but even broader participation is important, says Thomas Gilbert, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

The planning group also stressed the need to develop standards to ensure high-quality genome sequences and to preserve associated information for each organism sequenced such as where it was collected and what it looked like. Getting DNA samples from the wild may ultimately be the biggest challenge—and the biggest cost, several people noted. Not all museum specimens yield DNA preserved well enough for high-quality genomes. Even recently collected and frozen plant and animal specimens are not always handled correctly for preserving their DNA, says Guojie Zhang, an evolutionary biologist at BGI and the University of Copenhagen. And the lack of standards could undermine the project’s ultimate utility, notes Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at The Rockefeller University in New York City: “We could spend money on an effort for all species on the planet, but we could generate a lot of crap.”



But Lewin is optimistic that won’t happen. After he outlined the EBP in the closing talk at BioGenomics2017, he was surrounded by researchers eager to know what they could do to help. “It’s good to try to bring together the tribes,” says Jose Lopez, a biologist from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, whose “tribe” has mounted “GIGA,” a project to sequence 7000 marine invertebrates. “It’s a big endeavor. We need lots of expertise and lots of people who can contribute.”

Source: Elizabeth Pennisi

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Dwarf planet Ceres Hosts Home-grown Organic Material

Ceres is doing some home-brewing in the asteroid belt. Organic material has been found on the dwarf planet located between Mars and Jupiter – and it was produced in-house.

Using the Dawn space probe, which has been orbiting Ceres since early 2015, planetary scientists found pockets of carbon-based organic compounds on the surface of the space rock.

The identity of the tar-like minerals can’t be pinned down precisely, but their mineral fingerprints match the make-up of kerite or asphaltite. The constituents and concentrations of these organic materials suggest that it’s unlikely they came to Ceres from another planetary body.

First, they wouldn’t have survived the heat of an impact on the surface of Ceres. And if they had hitched a ride on another stellar object, they would be widely dispersed, rather than concentrated in pockets. That means they must have come from Ceres itself.



“Anything else, you would expect it to be more widespread,” says Michael Küppers at the European Space Agency.

Chris Russell at the University of California, Los Angeles, leads NASA’s Dawn science team and says this finding, along with recent discoveries of water ice and bright spots of mineral deposits on Ceres, points to a more complex picture of the dwarf planet than we once assumed.

“It’s not just an accumulation of rock, but in fact, it’s been doing things,” he says. What it’s doing on the inside is not entirely clear yet, but the organic material on the surface indicates that there are processes within Ceres regulated by heat and water.

All this might sound like the building blocks for life. But Russell is hesitant to go that far.

“This is a different type of material,” he says. “It’s prebiotic, which means that it’s something you would expect to make before you had biology. It’s sort of on the road to biology.”



Russell says that finding organic materials on Ceres makes it more likely that other asteroids may also harbour similar molecular building blocks.
Küppers agrees, adding that this changes our outlook on potential spots where we may look for life in the solar system.

“A couple of decades ago, when talking about life in the solar system, we were focused on Mars. And now, we are more and more looking at other locations, like Saturn’s moon Titan and the subsurfaces of places like [Jupiter’s moon] Europa,” he says. “And now, also Ceres in the asteroid belt.”
Journal reference: Science

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Sweat Sensors

By: Alexandria Addesso

Science and technology seems to steadily progress and the health field is one of the main industries that is reaping the benefits of the new innovations. As our health statuses and test results seem to be at our fingertips, people become more and more health conscious. Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have recently designed a biosensor that is capable of checking glucose levels of the person who wears it.

"We've been developing various thin, soft and flexible skin-mounted devices as a next-generation platform for wearable technologies for a few years now," said Dr. John Rogers, the senior author of the study as well as a materials scientist and director of Northwestern University's Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics in Evanston, Illinois. "Now, we've developed such a device to capture and analyze sweat."



The sensor sticks to the skin and is around the size of a quarter, which is a drastic upgrade in comparison to the handheld glucose reading devices that are currently being used. Such devices needed to pluck the user’s finger to draw a small amount of blood in order to read glucose levels, a task most people suffering with diabetes found daunting.

"Fitness trackers that monitor heart rate and step count are very popular, but wearable, non-invasive biosensors would be extremely beneficial for managing diseases," said Dr. Shalini Prasad, a professor of bioengineering at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.

"We used known properties of textiles and weaves in our design," said Prasad. "What was innovative was the way we incorporated and positioned the electrodes onto this textile in such a way that allows a very small volume of sweat to spread effectively through the surface."



Sweat and blood are not the only bodily secretions that have been tested to see if they can get glucose readings. Google Laboratories is currently working on a contact lense that can read glucose levels from tears. While none of these new sensors have hit the market or even yet been licensed, there is no doubt that they will soon make invasive blood collecting glucose readers obsolete.

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The Time Reality: How its Rules Your Body—and Your Social Life

Time is inescapable, even if you try to ignore it, as author Alan Burdick did, by not wearing a watch.

We can’t smell it, we can’t taste it, we can’t hear it or touch it, but time is with us every second of our lives. And for thousands of years, philosophers and psychologists, from St. Augustine to William James, have pondered its meaning and how we perceive it. For his book Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation, Alan Burdick, who refused to wear a watch for much of his life, set off on a journey in search of time, which took him from a research station in the Arctic to the office of Coordinated Universal Time in Paris.

Speaking from his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, Burdick explains how having twins changed his ideas about time, why as far back as the Romans people have complained about being slaves to time, and how new discoveries in neuroscience show that our bodies are filled with clocks.

It’s ironic that, for many years, the author of a book about time refused to wear a watch. Why was that? And how did your perception of time change after you finally relented?

I started this book some time ago, when I was rather a different person. I really was of the mind that if I could take the time off of me physically, that I somehow made it go away. Part of it was that I am prone to think about mortality. Having a watch on me felt like being a grown up! It meant plugging into, and being subject to, all the things that time requires, like being on time, and it made me feel like my day was chopped up into little bits and my watch was going to parse them out to me, like pellets to a rat.



I used to think that this was a modern outlook but I came across a great quote from a Roman poet, complaining about the sundial and how awful it is that it chops our days up into hours.
A lot of other things changed, too. In my case, I had a family—two fraternal twin boys, ten years old—and that forced me to be on time and get more things done than I used to be able to. I had to come to peace with it in that regard. Also, the more I learned about my subject, the more I came to appreciate the extent to which time and timing is embedded in every aspect of our social lives. You and I are going to have a conversation on such-and-such date at such-and-such time and, in order to do that, the time on your watch in the U.K. has to exactly match my time in the U.S. That’s all made possible by this incredible process that goes into making universal coordinated time, which involves atomic clocks and this global coordinated.



One of the most original ideas in your book is that “time is contagious” and even leads us to feel empathy for one another. Unpack that idea for us.

Yes, it’s super weird! We can come at it from a bunch of different ways. One is that research has found that when people are in conversation in person, there are all these things we do without even noticing. If we’re having lunch, you and I will unconsciously pick up our forks more or less at the same time. There’s a great study about two people playing the game Whack-A-Mole. Even though they were competing against each other, their movements fell into synch, even at the expense of losing points. They would unconsciously work toward this synchrony. The more affiliated and friendly you are with that other person, the more you are in synch.



If I watch a video of two people talking, I will be able to tell, unconsciously, how friendly they are, based on the extent to which their movements fall into synch with each other. The difference between a fake and real smile is a matter of milliseconds. It’s incredibly important to know the difference, right? And, in order to tell the difference, you need, as a viewer, to have a really sensitive timing mechanism that can parse one from the other. We have these clocks in us, which are operating all the time. It’s a very open question where exactly in the brain they are and how they work. But it’s clear that they’re there and utterly essential to making our social interactions go smoothly.

The cool thing about hummingbirds is that their timing mechanism is super sophisticated. In one experiment, they flew around outdoors to different flowers, which recharge their nectar at different rates. The hummingbirds want to get to the flower when it has maximum nectar, before its competitor does. So it’s got to do this elaborate optimization and algorithm to figure out how to get there often enough to get what it wants, without getting there too soon and wasting time, or getting there too late and being beaten to it.

Scientists have known about circadian rhythms for a couple of hundred years in plants. But in the last 20 years, the genetic mechanism has become clear in humans. The idea is that each of our cells can essentially tell the time; they have a 24-hour clock, which enables the cell to organize all the things it needs to do, just like you and I. We need to meet at a certain time, or talk at a certain time. Within yourself, your organelles and proteins and genes have stuff to do. It has to happen in a certain order, and that requires a clock. In humans it’s a little over 24 hours long, pretty close to, but not exactly, the length of a day.



All your cells have this clock. Your stomach and liver, all your organs, have a clock. In order to keep those clocks in synch, mammals and we humans have a master clock in our brains that sends out a neuro-chemical signal on a regular basis. Like the conductor of an orchestra, it keeps all of these clocks in time so your body knows that when you eat, 30 minutes later, your liver’s going to jump into action, then your adrenal glands and kidneys are going to do their thing, and your fat cells are going to absorb energy on a certain schedule.

There’s been a lot of research showing that, for night shift workers, truck drivers and other people who work on schedules that don’t match the circadian rhythm, their metabolism is thrown off. Some cancers may even be associated with night shift work or circadian imbalances. Your body is expecting to metabolize food at certain times of the day but if you are living at a different time of day, you’re eating food when your fat cells want to be sleeping.

Michel Siffre is a French cave explorer. In the 1960s, at the height of the space race, scientists were thinking about whether humans could live for a long time in isolation in deep space. Siffre had this idea: What if I go live in this cave for a period of weeks, and monitor my own heart rate and sleep cycle? What does living in isolation away from the sun do to the body? It was clear that humans have circadian cycles and that our body temperatures go up and down on a reliable 24-hour cycle. But Siffre was the first to show that the circadian
cycle in humans is not exactly 24 hours long.

He went on to repeat a similar experiment in a cave in Texas. He was down there for about 6 months, all by himself. He could talk to people up on the surface every once in a while by message. But he had no idea what time it was. He all but went nuts from loneliness and sensory deprivation, because his sleep cycle went totally out of whack. There were times when he would sleep for 40 hours straight then be awake for a couple of days in a row, without knowing it. When he finally came out, he thought that he had been called out a month too soon because his count of the days was so far off.

Two very good but very separate questions! Time speeds up when we’re having fun for reasons that are going to sound circular and even tautological: i.e. when you’re having fun you aren’t looking at the clock or paying attention to the time. By contrast, when you’re bored and have nothing else to do, you’re thinking about the time.

Why does time seem to speed up as we get old? It’s one of the great paradoxes. The funny thing is, in surveys, whether they’re 20, 40, 60 or 80, 85 percent of people in every range say time is speeding up. All indications seem to be that it’s not so much that the time goes by faster, though. My sense of it is that, as you get older, you become more aware of how little time you have, so the time you have feels more precious.



The neatest experience I had was spending two weeks at a biological research station on the north slope of Alaska, just above the Arctic Circle. We were in constant daylight and I’d never experienced anything like that before. It was amazing and unnerving. Like everyone, I am accustomed to thinking of sleep as this demarcation between one day and the next. But when the sun is always up, I might sleep for 8 hours and it would seem like a nap. Two weeks was really one long day. It was deeply disorienting but that’s what I went there to experience.
I had hoped I would meet people who were studying circadian rhythms but none of them were. They were all studying different aspects of ecology and climate change on a much longer time scale than I had gone there to find. It did make me face the profound reality of the kind of long term change that we are now causing on the planet.

The thing that fascinated me most is the idea of time as a social glue, a language, which is
fundamental to all of our social interactions. We can’t interact and have social lives without it. What we do as a social species is share time. That’s almost the definition of being a social species. Once I understood that, it suddenly felt more important to wear a watch.

Even if I’m lying in bed at night with no clock or watch, I have clocks in every cell. All of those clocks together make a master clock. It’s not like I can get away from time. I might delude myself briefly into thinking so, but I can’t. We are filled with clocks.
By Simon Worrall

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