Watch the mesmerizing first-ever footage of a rare Antarctic squid
'The ice blocks were moving so fast, it would put all the ships in danger, so we had to rearrange everything,' said Manuel Novillo, a researcher at the Instituto de Diversidad y Ecología Animal.
Novillo and his crewmates working on the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Expedition originally intended to remotely explore the Powell Basin, an uncharted 9,400-foot-deep abyssal plain near Antarctica, on Christmas Eve last year. Inclement conditions and dangerous ice floes forced a change in plans. To cut their losses, researchers instead traveled to an outer edge of the Basin the following day to see what they could find.
The last-minute itinerary shift proved more surprising than anyone aboard Falkor (too) expected. Novillo noticed a shadowy figure near the vehicle's camera as they guided the submersible deeper into the sunless depths early the next morning, and asked the pilot to try getting a closer look.
'Voilà, it appeared,' he recounted.
Novillo and colleagues were initially unsure about the exact species of squid. But whatever it was, it seemed as surprised to see the submersible as its operators were to find it—the squid released a small, green cloud of ink after noticing the robot visitor. Researchers analyzed the squid's dimensions using the submersible's laser measurement systems while recording a few minutes' worth of video footage. After their brief rendezvous, the squid departed and zoomed away into the murky depths.
The oceanographers sent their data and images to Auckland University of Technology's Lab for Cephalopod Ecology and Systematics (aka the AUT Squid Squad) to properly identify their mystery animal. After reviewing its size and physical characteristics, the AUT Squid Squad concluded that the team had captured the first-known meeting with a live G. antarcticus. Before this, the only specimens had come in the form of carcasses caught in fishing nets, or beak fragments found in other marine animals' stomachs.
According to Kat Bolstad, head of the Lab for Cephalopod Ecology and Systematics, the telltale markers of G. antarcticus were a single, large hook found at the end of each of its longest tentacles.
'It's not consistently visible, but it is definitely there,' Bolstad said of the hooks seen in the video.
The large Antarctic squid likely uses those large tentacle hooks to help capture meals, but beyond that, not much is known about the deep-sea creature. Experts assume daily life is likely a combination of hunting prey and avoiding its own larger predators, possibly even colossal squid. The cephalopods generally possess extremely good eyesight so that they can easily spot and avoid unwanted attention (such as a submersible's headlights).
The specimen caught on camera displayed what appeared to be fresh scratches and sucker-induced wounds, hinting at a brush with its own hungry foes. Despite this, Bolstand said the bright coloration and size indicates it remained 'in pretty good shape' since older squid tend to lose their vibrancy. The team wasn't able to determine its sex, but if it was a female, it was nearly twice the size of past documented adult G. antarcticus. This raises the question: Do males retain their coloration throughout their lifecycles? Another explanation may be that G. antarcticus is actually multiple species, although more information is needed before making that determination.
In any case, the Christmas Day sighting marked an important moment in the study of deep-sea squid. It may be years before another specimen is seen on film, but for Novillo, the unlikely meetup is amazing enough on its own.
'What are the odds?' he said. 'We were not supposed to be there and not at that precise moment.'
For more on this story, visit natgeo.com.
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Scientific American
11 hours ago
- Scientific American
U.S. Cuts Antarctica's Only Research Icebreaker Ship under Trump Budget Squeeze
Many ships have tried to reach the floating tongue of Thwaites Glacier —a 130-kilometer-wide conveyor belt of ice that slides off West Antarctica's coast and splinters into the sea. Thwaites is rapidly destabilizing, and precise mapping of the seafloor and ocean currents surrounding it are urgently needed to know how much damage the crumbling glacier and resulting sea-level rise could do to coasts worldwide. Only one vessel—the U.S. research icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer (NBP)—has successfully penetrated the area's phalanx of sea ice and billion-metric-ton icebergs to reach a critical location on Thwaites, widely considered the world's most dangerous glacier. The NBP has made about 200 research cruises to Antarctica in the past 30 years, in many cases reaching places never before visited. But if the Trump administration has its way, this will all come to an end in October. The NBP's expeditions along remote parts of the Antarctic coast have gathered voluminous data that are critical to U.S. interests. If the Thwaites glacier were to implode, it could raise the average global sea level by 65 centimeters, and it could potentially trigger wider Antarctic ice sheet collapse that could raise global sea level by more than three meters. Marine science shows that a disproportionate brunt of that rise would inundate the Gulf of Mexico and eastern U.S. coasts. Frequent measurements in Antarctica's remote locations are needed to project how quickly this might happen. Expeditions also monitor marine ecosystems that are rapidly shifting as a result of climate change and affecting the large commercial fisheries in surrounding waters. Yet Antarctic science experts and officials told me that the administration is imposing such severe budget cuts on the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) that the organization has no realistic option but to terminate its lease for the NBP after 30 years. The U.S. is 'losing the only research [icebreaker it has] in the Southern Hemisphere,' says Michael Jackson, the NSF's former section head for Antarctic sciences, who left in December. A replacement vessel —if one is even funded—'will probably take 10 years to build,' he says. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. This latest move caps what feels like a major U.S. retreat from Antarctica, says Theodore Scambos, a polar glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. For 27 years, the U.S. had operated two research icebreakers in the region. But in 2024 NSF dropped its lease for the smaller of the two craft because of budget shortfalls. That and the impending loss of the NBP marks 'a general decline of America in the science and exploration fields,' Scambos says. 'And I hate that.' This loss will have widespread consequences, according to a wide range of scientists, logistics experts, former NSF officials and former diplomats interviewed for this story. It will hamstring U.S. influence in the Antarctic at a time when geopolitical competition and resource exploitation are intensifying in the region. It will also undermine scientists' ability to monitor rapid changes in Thwaites and other remote areas—at the very moment climate impacts on the continent are accelerating. Researchers first learned of the NBP 's situation on May 30, when the Trump administration released its full fiscal year 2026 budget request for NSF to Congress. The termination was buried in a single sentence on page 102 of the 222-page document. The budget request also stipulated a 70 percent funding cut for polar science research projects overall. 'None of us saw that coming,' says Patricia Yager, a polar marine biologist at the University of Georgia, who called the move 'shocking.' In response to a request for comment from Scientific American, an NSF spokesperson confirmed via e-mail that NSF had proposed terminating the lease of the NBP in Trump's 2026 fiscal year budget request but provided little additional information. Although the U.S. Coast Guard has three icebreakers— Polar Star, Healy and the newly commissioned Storis, a former commercial icebreaker—none can fill NBP 's role. Healy is continually committed to Arctic duties; sending it to Antarctica and back to do even a single day of scientific work would require 60 days of travel. Storis, which has a troubled history, will also be used in the Arctic. And Polar Star is simply not equipped for the kind of research the NBP does. 'The Palmer is the most amazing research tool that we have; there's nothing like it anywhere in the world,' Yager says. It can plow through meter-thick sea ice at three knots with little more than gentle side-to-side rocking. And it can remain at sea for 65 days, a vital capability given that a round trip to Thwaites takes nearly two weeks from the nearest port. Waiting for vast rafts of sea ice and icebergs to shift and open a passage can add many more days. When the NBP is in Antarctic waters, it continuously collects data. Multibeam sonar captures a three-dimensional map of the seafloor, revealing features such as undersea canyons that influence the stability of coastal glaciers. Another sonar system traces sediment layers below the seafloor, which can provide important records of past climate periods. Even in rough seas and high winds, the ship's dynamic positioning system allows it to hover within a few feet of its intended location while technicians do the delicate work of collecting sediment cores or piloting remote-operated submersibles on the seafloor. The NBP can carry and launch two helicopters, which proved decisive during a 2010 cruise, allowing researchers to leapfrog over impassable sea ice and install instruments for monitoring crustal movements and glacial retreat as far as 200 kilometers away. The impending loss of the NBP means five Antarctic missions, slated for October 2025 through April 2026, now hang in limbo. The NSF is scrambling for ways to salvage at least some of them. For example, the agency might send the University of Alaska Fairbanks's Arctic research vessel Sikuliaq all the way down to Antarctica in January to perform a major ecological survey that has been conducted annually since 1999. The survey covers 2,000 kilometers along the Antarctic Peninsula's coast and out past the lip of the continental shelf. It measures the abundance of krill and phytoplankton—which anchor the region's ecosystem—and monitors deep ocean currents. In recent decades this survey has revealed important changes in ocean mixing that have caused the winter sea ice season in this relatively temperate section of Antarctica to shorten by roughly 100 days a year. But the Sikuliaq is already in high demand in the Arctic, for up to a dozen expeditions per year. And compared with the NBP, it has fewer berths for scientists, can spend fewer days at sea and has more limited ice-breaking capabilities—effectively excluding it from Thwaites and other heavily iced sections of the Antarctic coastline. A few other countries have research icebreakers, including the U.K., Germany, Australia, South Korea and China. It is possible that a couple U.S. researchers could occasionally find ride-along spots. But that may not advance U.S. research priorities, Scambos says: 'You're not going to get somebody else's icebreaker to bring you and 20 of your colleagues and undertake a major mission that has U.S. research interest behind it.' The NSF spokesperson stated that the agency 'has started the process to identify vessels and partnerships to continue support of marine science.' A new icebreaker that would eventually replace the NBP is in early design stages, but it would take a decade to build. The work on this new Antarctic research vessel has been moving slowly for a variety of reasons, even prior to the start of the current Trump administration. The NSF spokesperson stated that the agency 'has paused source selection activities' for the next stage of development. Since the 1950s the U.S. has maintained a larger scientific presence on the Antarctic continent than any other nation, by way of research stations, ships, remote air transport and exploratory teams that drive vehicles in long traverses across the ice sheet. For now, NSF plans to try to keep operating the three U.S. land bases in Antarctica—the Palmer, McMurdo and Amundsen-Scott South Pole stations—because the harsh environment would cause them to rapidly deteriorate if they were not staffed. But spending an ensuing decade without a research icebreaker could have major geopolitical consequences. Antarctica is Earth's largest remaining territory not unilaterally controlled by any particular nation. The U.S. has long backed the Antarctic Treaty, under which nations set aside any territorial land claims they've made and reserve the continent for scientific research. If international commitment to the treaty ever faltered, however, nations might pursue territorial claims on the continent, and those claims would be bolstered by having maintained research stations, communications hubs, deep water ports and air transport and driving routes. 'Operations and logistics are 100 percent necessary for U.S. national security interests,' says William Muntean III, a former senior adviser for Antarctic affairs and a deputy representative for the U.S. State Department to the annual Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. The scientific research conducted there is a fundamental part of that equation. 'In the Antarctic Treaty System,' Muntean says, 'knowledge is what equals power.' That's because the rules of play for Antarctica and its surrounding seas are constantly negotiated and monitored by more than two dozen countries with research stations there—and any negotiations become especially heated when it comes to resource extraction. For years commercial vessels have plied the coastal seas for Antarctic toothfish (sold in restaurants as 'sea bass') and krill. The U.S. and a handful of other countries have sought to establish several marine protected areas around the continent where fishing would be prohibited, but they have encountered resistance from Russia and China. Negotiations often hinge on data collected from research vessels, such as those that document changes in ecosystems. In this way, Muntean says, 'knowing what is actually happening in Antarctica gives a country the ability to then influence' what happens. Right now the NBP remains moored at the main pier in Punta Arenas in southern Chile—its standard departure point for Antarctica. The ship's fate is on hold until early September, when Congress returns from recess. 'The budget request is always just a policy document,' says Alexandra Isern, a former assistant director of the NSF. In the NSF's pending request, she says, the Trump administration is putting 'a line in the sand' for what it wants. Funding bills that were sitting in Congress before recess add confusion. Senate bill 2354, which passed out of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies in mid-July, appears to restore full funding to the NSF. The corresponding House bill restores roughly two thirds of the proposed cuts. Isern says 'members [of Congress] are big supporters of the Antarctic program,' but neither of those bills mentions the NBP or the new icebreaker intended to replace it. Jackson fears that Congress will cave to pressure from the Trump administration and neither the NBP nor the other polar research funding will be saved. In the meantime, polar researchers across the U.S. continue to prepare for science missions that may or may not happen. Some have already shipped their scientific gear south to Chile in case their cruise happens after all. Others will have to do so in the coming weeks, before Congress returns. Amid the uncertainty, Oscar Schofield, a biological oceanographer at Rutgers University, sees a clear message. The administration is already stripping climate data from government websites, preparing to halt EPA regulation of carbon dioxide emissions and quietly discussing plans to scuttle a state-of-the-art NASA satellite that monitors carbon dioxide—allowing the spacecraft to burn up in the atmosphere. Canceling the NBP, he says, looks like 'a political decision of not wanting to support climate change research.' In this decision, Schofield sees an important lever of soft power being abandoned. 'Since World War II,' he says, 'there was always a strong belief that if the U.S. had the strongest scientists and the strongest engineers, it would serve national security.' Those generational investments, he says, are now being undone.
National Geographic
15 hours ago
- National Geographic
How human hibernation could revolutionize medicine and get us to Mars
Putting people into sleep mode is a sci-fi concept that's a lot closer to becoming real than you might think. Erin Belback is part of an ongoing human trial backed by NASA that aims to replicate the effects of hibernation in humans—a potential tool for overcoming some of the physiological problems of long-duration spaceflight. Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh plan to monitor her exhaled breath and body temperature to study her metabolic rate for their research. Photograph by Rebecca Hale, National Geographic Photographs by Corey Arnold The test subject had slipped into what physician Clifton Callaway describes as a 'twilight kind of sleep.' Eighteen hours after Callaway's team at the University of Pittsburgh's Applied Physiology Lab started the man on a sedative that suppressed his body's natural shivering response, his internal temperature had sunk from 98.6°F to 95°F. His heart rate and blood pressure had dropped. His metabolism—and, along with it, his need for food, oxygen, and carbon dioxide removal—had plunged 20 percent. Yet the subject could still rise from his bed, shuffle to the bathroom to empty his bladder, and, when hungry, ring a bell to ask for food or a drink—alleviating the need for a catheter or intravenous lines and ensuring he could still respond and react. The man was one of five exceedingly fit volunteers, ranging in age from 21 to 54, who quietly dozed in the semidarkness—pretend astronauts on a nine-month journey to Mars. NASA had tasked Callaway, an expert in cardiac care and induced hypothermia, with figuring out a simple way to put human beings into a state that mimics some of the key features of hibernation without the use of a ventilator or immobilizing drugs, and careful dosing of dexmedetomidine did the trick. His subject, Callaway says now, was woozy, dreamy, but still able to function in an emergency if required—'just like a bear.' Humans in hibernation mode are a classic staple of space travel in science fiction movies, whether it's HAL 9000 fatally unplugging a few of his passengers in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Chris Pratt waking up Jennifer Lawrence too soon because he's lonely in Passengers. But NASA has grand ambitions of sending astronauts to Mars, for real, as soon as the 2030s, and putting humans in hibernation mode, for real, could be the key to achieving it, which is why both NASA and the European Space Agency are supporting studies like Callaway's. A bearlike state of hibernation could, in theory, help astronauts snooze through the tedium of extended space travel and limit crewmate conflict. Their slowed metabolism could help reduce cargo: Missions would require less food and oxygen, and consequently less fuel. Space agency-funded research is even exploring whether slowing a person's metabolism weakens the health impact of harmful radiation. This would be an encouraging boost for the viability of extended travel through space, where radiation is as much as 200 times greater than on Earth. In fact, when it comes to achieving the dream of crew missions to Mars, says ESA's chief exploration scientist Angelique Van Ombergen, space radiation 'is a big showstopper.' Robert Foote, a volunteer in the NASA-supported trial in Pittsburgh, is monitored by scientists after being asleep for 20 hours. By achieving hibernation on demand, researchers could potentially unlock a wide range of medical benefits, including extending the time that doctors have to treat strokes and heart attacks. Photograph by Tim Betler, UPMC Scientists aren't studying hibernation just so we can ship astronauts ever deeper into space, though. Its physiological superpowers could save countless lives here on Earth, if we can unlock the secrets to the mysterious molecular-level changes that shift animals in and out of a state of hibernation, or 'torpor'—a miraculously reversible state of dormancy characterized by extreme lethargy, a lowered body temperature and metabolic rate, and a host of other remarkable changes. 'It's a well-established principle,' Callaway explains, 'that at low temperatures, like in hibernating animals, you tolerate lack of oxygen, lack of blood flow better and longer.' But why? Why don't bears' muscles atrophy while they sleep? How come their blood doesn't clot? And what triggers the process to begin with? In their hunt for answers, scientists are now inching closer to their most ambitious discovery yet: a central switch in the brains of hibernating animals that activates the various beneficial phenomena of hibernation, all at once. Mimicking the colder body temperature of bears during hibernation, for instance, could lessen the severity of 'reperfusion injuries,' the often devastating damage that occurs after cardiac arrest when blood flow is restored to the oxygen-deprived tissues of the body, setting off massive inflammation, oxidative stress, and cell death. It could also help extend the narrow window of time that doctors have to provide critical care during strokes and heart attacks. A clearer understanding of how hibernating bears preserve muscle mass and turn on and off insulin resistance could have other benefits: It might help us treat chronic obesity and diabetes in humans. ICU patients can lose more than 10 percent of their muscle mass in seven days. Could an induced state of hibernation stall or even stop the decline? Scientists are searching beyond bears for the answers because, of course, bears aren't the only animals that hibernate. A team at Colorado State University is investigating how the 13-lined ground squirrel can rapidly fatten and then switch off its appetite before hibernation for clues to combating obesity. UCLA researchers examining the genes of yellow--bellied marmots have recently found that 'epigenetic aging' is 'essentially stalled' during the seven to eight months they hibernate each year. Experts in Germany are exploring how bats maintain blood circulation at low temperatures, with an eye to human hibernation applications. And biologists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks are studying a squirrel that can drop its body temperature by 70 degrees and heart rate down to five beats per minute and survive eight months in subzero temperatures. Their goal is to develop a 'hibernation mimetic' drug that might safely allow clinicians to place humans into an immediate state of hibernation—without a long prep time, in a rural hospital lacking advanced equipment, or even in an ambulance racing through the streets. It would instantly dial down cellular metabolism, slow cell death, and catalyze a whole host of other biological processes associated with hibernation. (New bat discovery could help humans hibernate during space travel.) To decode hibernation's mysteries, biologists like Heiko Jansen are carefully studying the world's most notorious hibernators: bears. The 11 grizzlies housed at the Washington State University Bear Center are onetime 'trouble' bears from Yellowstone National Park and their offspring. Today they are sleeping for the benefit of science. The center's grizzlies are monitored in camera-equipped dens as they snooze through the late stages of their hibernation. For the five months they rest, their metabolism slows dramatically, reducing their need for food and oxygen. Callaway's twilight sleep experiment provides a glimpse into what might be possible for humans, but what happens in the lab and in the wild are clearly two different things. Bears don't need drugs to settle in for the winter—they have a natural 'torpor switch,' he says, which is flipped through some process that we don't fully understand. And though they're unruly, bears still offer a good comparison for our own potential: They're at least closer to us in size than a rodent, and, perhaps most critically, their temperature drop during deep sleep is well within the range of human survivability. One bright afternoon in late March, biologist Heiko Jansen stood outside a fenced-in pasture at the Washington State University Bear Research, Education, and Conservation Center in Pullman and watched as a shaggy 300-pound female grizzly bear named Kio struggled to eat a marshmallow. Other than a serious case of bedhead and the glacial pace of Kio's chewing, there were few visible clues that the dangerous, disheveled giant with the four-inch claws was undergoing a profound metamorphosis. Looking from the outside, little about Kio's metabolic process seems applicable to humans. Ten days earlier, she rose from her bed of straw and began to slowly work through a feast of bear kibble, apples, and elk bones and leg meat. It was her first meal in five months. Her salivary glands were still sluggish. Then she pooped out a 'fecal plug' composed of plants, dried feces, dead cells, and hair lodged in her lower intestine. Those three key activities—rise, eat, poop out the plug—seem to have helped flip a series of microscopic genetic switches inside her cells, catalyzing the slow-motion reversal of a host of bizarre biological cycles her body had entered into over the winter. Kio's metabolism, which had been operating at one-quarter its normal speed, kicked into gear, more than doubling by the time she was struggling with the marshmallow. Her core body temperature, hovering about 12 degrees below normal, began to rise. Two of her heart's four chambers, which had all but shut down for the winter, reopened for business. Her fat cells, for months miraculously resistant to insulin, the hormone that tells the body when to absorb sugar, started to respond to it again. Her appetite, absent for months, rumbled to life. When the grizzlies begin to stir, in March, they are awake but drowsy—their bodies beginning the process of reversing their metabolic slowdown. This bear, Adak, will be rewarded with honey and other treats after presenting his legs for a blood draw. Five months earlier, back in November, when Kio lay down and packed it in for the winter, she stopped eating, her gut entered 'stasis,' her saliva glands shut down, and she began living on her own body fat. Over the following months, she burned roughly 20 percent, or 70 pounds, of her body weight. To facilitate this, her body became resistant to insulin, a good thing for hibernators. Humans who become insulin resistant often develop diabetes—clearly a bad thing. Bears can switch that resistance on and off, depending on the season, without health consequences. If we could understand how, maybe we could figure out a way for humans to do it too? (Hibernating bears could hold a clue to treating diabetes.) The notion got a boost of confidence in 2018, when a Canadian group published the first complete grizzly bear DNA sequence. A year later, Jansen headed up a team that used a technique known as RNA sequencing to identify which genes are activated in bear muscle, fat, and liver tissue samples before, during, and after hibernation. They found seasonal changes in more than 10,000 of a grizzly's 30,723 genes. Now, in order to decode how bears switch insulin resistance on and off, Jansen has been extracting stem cells from blood samples collected from Pullman's bears at different times of year, methodically eliminating individual genes and then growing colonies of fat cells in petri dishes to see what happens. 'We're not saying that we'll find something that can reverse diabetes,' Jansen offers. 'But at least by looking at a model system, the cells that change their sensitivity, we can begin to develop some clues as to what's going on.' Kio's cardiac function might also yield insights that help treat human blood--clotting disorders. While Kio was hibernating, her heart rate slowed from 80 to 100 beats per minute to about 10. Normally this would cause her blood to clot into dangerous blockages and induce a stroke—'if that happened to us,' says Jansen, 'we'd be dead'—but hibernating bears also experience a remarkable drop in their blood-clotting platelets. It was Kio's ability to maintain muscle tone, however, that particularly transfixed some of her researchers. Unlike humans, who begin to lose muscle mass within a week of inactivity, Kio rose from her hibernation bed as fit as if she'd spent the winter chasing chipmunks. Up in Alaska, researchers Vadim Fedorov and Anna Goropashnaya are trying to unlock the mystery of how bears do this—and test the hypothesis that humans might be able to as well. The Russian-born husband-and-wife team specialize in evolutionary genetics at the University of Alaska's Institute of Arctic Biology (IAB), in Fairbanks. When they began analyzing gene expression patterns in tissue samples collected from captive black bears nearly 20 years ago, the results shocked them. Seeing as how bears stop eating and slow their metabolism during hibernation, Fedorov and Goropashnaya assumed the gene activity involved in building new muscles would be dialed down to preserve energy. Instead, the genes were just as active and even appeared to ramp up. 'We checked it several times,' says Goropashnaya. 'We couldn't believe it.' At the university's Institute for Arctic Biology, Anna Goropashnaya and Vadim Fedorov are investigating how muscle tissue of squirrels and bears (squirrel tissue is projected on their lab wall for this image) is preserved in hibernation when the animals don't eat and barely move. The findings were 'illogical' but somehow correct. Scores of genes known to be part of muscle protein biosynthesis were turned up in what appeared to be a coordinated—and metabolically costly—frenzy of activity. The two presented their first paper on the phenomenon in 2011. Now, with the aid of newer DNA sequencing technologies, they're able to study twice as many genes and with far more specificity, which is what led them to the mTOR pathway, a well-known cellular 'dial' that also plays a key role in controlling the rate of cell division. Typically, when mammals are starved of nutrients, their bodies dial mTOR down to suppress cell regeneration and steer energy to protect existing cells. But in the muscles of hibernating bears, the researchers confirmed what they'd first observed years earlier: mTOR increased instead. Fedorov and Goropashnaya were stumped. If hibernating bears are building new muscle, where are they getting the nutrients to make it? Researchers at the Universities of Wisconsin and Montreal have explored one possibility: microbes. Early findings in other hibernators indicate that instead of producing urine when hibernating, animals recycle the nitrogen in urea, and microbes in their guts could be ingesting and metabolizing it into amino acids, which make new muscles. If Fedorov and Goropashnaya can identify a single, extra-powerful 'upstream' gene responsible for switching on this muscle regeneration, it could have profound medical implications. The muscles of bedbound ICU patients wouldn't melt away within weeks, and astronauts could build muscles while resting. But what if all the disparate and remarkable processes of hibernation could be globally activated all at once—with a drug? To find out, scientists are looking deeper into the animal kingdom to unlock the secrets of the most extreme hibernator of all. (It's not just bears: These hibernating animals may surprise you.) The arctic ground squirrel, a diminutive rodent with gold-tinted fur, a button nose, and a tiny pair of Bugs Bunny-like front incisors, can drastically drop its body temperature and heart rate, slow to one breath per minute, and survive months in subzero conditions. The squirrels are also, for the most part, far easier to study than bears. An arctic ground squirrel remains in hibernation in a lab at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. 'Until they open their eyes,' says Kelly Drew, the affable, silver-haired neuroscientist who directs the Center for Transformative Research in Metabolism at the IAB, after digging through a nest of cotton and wood shavings to pull out a frozen, furry snowball. 'Then they can bite.' In the early 2000s, Drew persuaded the U.S. military to fund a search for the brain chemicals that trigger hibernation in the squirrels. If she could identify those chemicals, she suggested, she could then test them on humans, in hopes of developing new ways to cool wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Drew's first breakthrough with the squirrels arrived in 2005 when an undergraduate research assistant chanced upon a paper from a Japanese lab while combing through scientific literature. The Japanese group had actually achieved the opposite of what Drew hoped to do. They'd found a drug that woke hibernating hamsters by blocking their brain cells' response to a specific chemical called adenosine. Drew assigned a graduate student to inject a synthetic version of adenosine, a drug called 6-Cyclohexyladenosine, or CHA, directly into the brains of her squirrels. Rather than blocking adenosine, which is how the caffeine in your coffee works its magic, CHA replicates its effects. When the graduate student dosed a squirrel's brain in the summer, outside of hibernation season, nothing happened. But when he repeated it closer to hibernation season, the CHA put the animal into such a deep state of torpor, the student initially thought he had killed it. 'He was super sad because that's a big deal,' Drew recalls. 'He takes the animal out for the vet to do the necropsy. The vet gets the tools out, he's going to start cutting open this dead animal, and it starts to move.' Her lab had done it. They'd found a way to put a squirrel in hibernation mode, like flipping a switch. Temporarily removed from its refrigerated hibernation den and settled on a bed of wood shavings, this arctic ground squirrel remained in a state of torpor for over an hour before beginning to stir. The squirrels survive their long hibernation by warming up for short periods every few weeks. On the opposite side of the world, at the University of Bologna in Italy, around the same time Drew's grad student stumbled on that Japanese paper about adenosine, another grad student named Domenico Tupone was charting a similar path. The focus of his laboratory research wasn't hibernation per se but a component of it: identifying the brain circuits that regulate body temperature during sleep. His team suspected that a small patch of neurons at the base of an ordinary rat's brain helped convey temperature-control signals to the periphery of the body. They temporarily immobilized those neurons with an injection, then placed the rat in a cold, dark cage. The experiment validated their hypothesis. As Tupone and his colleagues watched, the rat sank into a state of hypothermia so extreme it should have proved fatal. That's when things got weird. Six hours and four injections later, the hypothermic rat was still alive. And when the team finally removed it from its cage and warmed it up, the rat behaved, at least outwardly, as if nothing had happened. Afterward, as Tupone and his colleagues examined the brain waves picked up by a web of electrodes attached to the rodent's skull, scientist Matteo Cerri made an observation that altered the course of Tupone's future research. The peaks and valleys of the brain waves looked familiar. Cerri had seen the same patterns in hibernating animals. But there was one crucial difference. Unlike arctic ground squirrels, rats do not naturally hibernate. Tupone had to know: If a non-hibernating animal could be safely induced into hibernation, then maybe humans could do it too? In the years that followed, Tupone obsessed over scraps of paper in dimly lit bars, sketching out what a brain circuit capable of triggering hibernation in humans might look like. In bed, he tossed and turned, fantasizing about a 'revolutionary' IV-administered drug akin to Drew's 'hibernation mimetic' that paramedics could use to slow cell death on the way to the hospital. He became convinced that if it could be accomplished safely, inducing natural torpor in humans would upend basic science. The next step for both researchers, though—human trials—presented their stiffest obstacle yet. In order to administer Drew's 'hibernation mimetic' to ground squirrels, her team often had to perform invasive brain surgeries. For humans, the drug would need to be delivered via IV. The trouble is, adenosine receptors are present throughout the body, and activating them globally can trigger unwanted side effects, including cardiac arrest. After four more years of frustrating trial and error, Drew paired the drug with a compound that fixed the heart attack problem, and she's currently trying to solve the additional obstacle of fluctuating blood glucose levels, which in extreme cases can cause seizures in lab animals and even death. 'It works; it definitely cools them,' Drew says. 'We're just trying to tweak it so it's as safe as possible.' Clinicians have lots of devices to regulate temperature, 'but the human body typically fights it. By avoiding that cold defense response, which is what our hibernation mimetic does, then the clinician has the ability to dial in whatever temperature they want.' In minutes, not hours. Tupone, meanwhile, was working on parallel tracks at Portland's Oregon Health & Science University under Shaun Morrison, one of the world's experts on the brain circuits that control body temperature. Tupone's primary focus was on extending the map of temperature--related circuits into new parts of the brain, but in his spare time, he continued to hunt for the elusive hibernation switch. Around 2016, he stumbled upon a curious biological phenomenon that convinced him he was getting close. He and Morrison were attempting to confirm their map of the brain's thermoregulatory control system, in an experiment similar to the one in which the unexpected survival of those hypothermic Italian rats had blown his mind. This time, Tupone used a small knife to sever the bundle of nerves running to the rat's brain stem, cutting off the pathway that relays temperature--control signals down to the body's periphery. Once again, though, Tupone's results seemed to flip the expected rule of mammalian physiology. Rather than disabling the ability of the rat to respond to heat or cold, Tupone's incision somehow enhanced it. When Tupone wrapped the rat in a plastic blanket and ran hot water over it, its body began generating even more heat. When he used freezing cold water, the rat's brain seemed to allow its body temperature to fall even faster. An arctic ground squirrel emerges from a burrow in the foothills of Alaska's Brooks Range shortly after its eight-month hibernation. Each fall, Colorado State University scientists working at the nearby Toolik Field Station collar squirrels with devices to track body temperature data and light, which tells them if a squirrel is in or out of its burrow. In the spring, new squirrels are ear-tagged and weighed before their summer of foraging begins. The long-term study is revealing how climate change is affecting the biology of these important hibernators. Tupone and Morrison quickly concluded they had discovered something profound. The results suggested that a second, previously undiscovered brain circuit capable of modulating body temperature existed—one that facilitated the transition in and out of hibernation. They named the phenomenon 'thermoregulatory inversion' (TI). But where exactly was this circuit, and how could it be activated? After eight years of trial and error, Tupone and Morrison published a paper this past January announcing they'd found a small patch of neurons in the rat's hypothalamus—the ventromedial periventricular area (VMPeA)—that, when activated, not only seems to slow metabolism, lower body temperature, and induce brain waves and cardiac patterns unique to hibernation but also sets in motion phenomena that flip the body's normal temperature-control system on its head, facilitating the transition into and out of the torpor state. They'd found it: the elusive 'torpor switch.' Tupone believes the switch is connected to an incomplete version of the hibernation circuitry that still exists in many animals. To disable it, he hypothesizes, evolution did the most efficient thing. It simply removed the connection between the circuitry and the switch that would flip it on automatically. 'It is like you have all the cables inside your walls to turn on a light,' he says, but you've removed the connection to the switch that controls that light. 'We think humans have all the circuitry.' Our switch, he believes, just isn't connected anymore. To back up his findings, Tupone is now collaborating with Kelly Drew's lab to find the analogous circuitry—and the switch—in arctic ground squirrels. And he's laying the groundwork for a drug of his own that can flip the switch in his rats without invasive brain surgery. Each advance, though, generates more mysteries. To flip their switch on and off in the study they published in January, Tupone and Morrison had to use invasive brain surgery and manually apply a drug to the general area where it was located. Even that infinitesimally small patch of the brain still contained millions of neurons, including an entire neighborhood of unrelated neurons surrounding it. To find a drug specific enough to give to humans without immense side effects, Tupone will need to identify the precise neurons around the switch and design a drug that will target only those involved in hibernation. That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. To suppress the shivering response in humans, anesthesiologists typically administer muscle relaxants or paralyzing drugs, which suppress breathing, so doctors have to intubate patients … which requires putting them into a medically induced coma. This is why induced hypothermia is not available outside hospitals. It's also not currently an option for stroke patients, because of the dangerous drop in blood pressure that often occurs during the gap between administering anesthesia and intubating a patient, which can deprive the brain of even more oxygen at a moment when dangerous blockages are already suffocating its cells. Rats don't hibernate. But what if they could? Neurologist Domenico Tupone and fellow researchers from the University of Oregon say they've identified a 'torpor switch' in rat brain neurons (projected on the wall) that can be activated to send the rodents into a deep state of hibernation. Identifying this circuitry in non-hibernators could be a breakthrough in the human hibernation effort. 'It can actually worsen a stroke,' says researcher Cal-laway, from the University of Pittsburgh. 'But boy, it sure would be nice to lower your body temperature and let your brain tolerate the stroke longer until I can get you to the cath lab and take that blood clot out.' As an emergency physician, Callaway understands better than most the potential applications for humans, as well as the challenges presented by making the leap from bears and squirrels to humans. He's been researching and refining the techniques used to induce hypothermia in cardiac and brain-injured patients since the 1990s, and he's also a former chair of the American Heart Association's Emergency Cardiovascular Care Committee, which is why NASA awarded him a grant through the Translational Research Institute for Space Health to explore whether his techniques can be applied to the metabolic needs of astronauts. So far, there are problems. The drop in blood pressure and heart rate in his five healthy volunteers was so extreme that those with cardiovascular or other medical conditions might not be able to tolerate it. And within days, all five of the 'pretend astronauts' had developed a tolerance to his sedative, suggesting, among other things, that its effectiveness would fade over time. Those are solvable problems, Callaway says. 'This is just the first step' in a process that he believes will take 10 to 15 years—a mere nap for Rip Van Winkle. 'There's a lot of science to be done,' he says. But he's excited by the progress: 'I don't think it's pie-in-the-sky anymore.' To keep the pretend astronauts inspired during the human trial, Callaway's team had plastered the walls of their lab with posters: a satellite floating in space above the swirling blues and whites of Earth; the cratered, gleaming surface of a moonlike planet; the rainbow-hued burst of starlight, radiating from a distant galaxy. For now, such destinations are accessible only in our dreams. But someday in the not too distant future, a real astronaut might awaken from a hibernation-like slumber to gaze on the real thing.
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Yahoo
How long tubes of mud could reveal how Antarctica is changing
Why would anyone brave hand-numbing cold, icy winds and rough seas - sometimes working through the night - to dig up mud from the Antarctic seabed? That is what an international team of particularly adventurous researchers did earlier this year in the remote Antarctic Peninsula, on a mission aiming to reveal centuries of scientific secrets about the Southern Ocean. Scientists around the world will now share and analyse these precious mud samples to work out how human activity - including a century of industrial whaling - affected Antarctica and the rest of our planet. The research is part of a global effort to understand the relationship between the ocean and the climate. A history of ocean life Researchers used a special coring drill - a bit like a huge apple-corer - tethered to a research ship, to drill at depths of up to 500m. They collected more than 40 long cores, or tubes, of seafloor sediment from locations around the peninsula. This is one of the richest habitats for marine life in Antarctica, and a focal point for fishing, tourism and - before it was banned in the 1980s - industrial whale hunting. Collecting the sediment gives insight and clues to the past, "like a book of history", explained lead researcher Dr Elisenda Balleste from the University of Barcelona. "What is living in the seas now, what was living in the seas in the past and evidence of our human impact" is recorded in layer upon layer of sediment over centuries, she said. By preserving and dating those layers, and analysing what they contain, researchers can build a picture of the history of Antarctic marine life. Once on board the ship, the cores were frozen and transported to Barcelona and Dr Balleste's laboratory. From there, carefully extracted pieces of this Antarctic mud will be sent out to several academic institutions around the world. Scientists will scan and date the sediment layers, work out what microbial life they contain, measure levels of pollution and calculate how much carbon is buried in the mud. It is part of a mission - the Convex Seascape Survey - which involves universities and research institutions around the globe working together to better understand how our ocean and climate are connected. Claire Allen, an oceanographer from the British Antarctic Survey who has studied Antarctica's past for more than 20 years, said that cores like these were particularly valuable. "Before 1950 - before there was any kind of monitoring capacity in Antarctica - sediment cores and ice cores are the only way that we can get an insight into any of the climatic or physical properties that have changed over time," she said. The DNA fingerprint from whale hunting The newly collected samples being stored for DNA analysis have to be kept at temperatures low enough to stop all biological processes. Dr Balleste took them out of the industrial-sized freezer where they are being stored to show them to us, very briefly. "They're kept at minus 80 degrees to stop them degrading," she explained. These small pieces of the seabed - frozen in time at temperatures that preserve genetic material - will be used for what is known as environmental DNA analysis. It is an area of science which has developed rapidly in recent years. It gives researchers the ability to extract genetic information from water, soil and even air, like a fingerprint of life left behind in the environment. Dr Carlos Preckler, from King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia, is leading this part of the research and will be trying to measure how almost a century of industrial whaling in Antarctica affected the ocean and our atmosphere. Carbon - when it is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide - warms up our planet like a blanket. So, as the world struggles to reduce those emissions, any processes that absorb and lock significant amounts of carbon might help to rein in global warming. "We know whales have a lot of carbon in their bodies, because they are huge animals," said Dr Preckler. What he and his colleagues want to know is how much of that carbon gets buried in the seafloor - and locked away from the atmosphere - when the animals die. "We can measure whale DNA and the carbon in the sediment," explained Dr Preckler. "So we can measure what happened before industrial whaling removed most of the whales in the [Southern] ocean," he added. That, the researchers say, will provide a measure of how much whales - simply by existing, being huge and living out their natural lives - remove carbon from our atmosphere and help in the fight against climate change.
