US government plans to breed millions of flies to combat a pest in Texas
The New World Screwworm lays eggs in the open wounds of warm-blooded animals, including livestock and humans, with the hatched larvae burrowing into flesh and potentially killing the host.
The strategy involves breeding flies, irradiating them to induce sterility, and then releasing them so that sterile males mate with wild females, leading to unfertilized eggs and a reduction in the screwworm population.
Screwworms were previously thought to have been eradicated in the US by 1966 using a similar sterile insect technique, but have recently re-emerged in Texas following an outbreak in Mexico.
To support this new program, a breeding factory will open in southern Mexico next July, followed by a distribution center in southern Texas to manage the release of the sterile Flies.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Can you see circles or rectangles? And does the answer depend on where you grew up?
Do people from different cultures and environments see the world differently? Two recent studies have different takes on this decades-long controversy. The answer might be more complicated, and more interesting, than either study suggests. One study, led by Ivan Kroupin at the London School of Economics, asked how people from different cultures perceived a visual illusion known as the Coffer illusion. They discovered that people in the UK and US saw it mainly in one way, as comprising rectangles – while people from rural communities in Namibia typically saw it another way: as containing circles. To explain these differences, Kroupin and colleagues appeal to a hypothesis raised more than 60 years ago and argued about ever since. The idea is that people in western industrialised countries (these days known by the acronym 'weird' – for western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic – a summary that is increasingly questionable) see things in a specific way because they are generally exposed to highly 'carpentered' environments, with lots of straight lines, right angles – visual features common in western architecture. By contrast, people from non-'weird' societies – like those in rural Namibia – inhabit environments with fewer sharp lines and angular geometric forms, so their visual abilities will be tuned differently. The study argues that the tendency of rural Namibians to see circles rather than rectangles in the Coffer illusion is due to their environments being dominated by structures such as round huts instead of angular environments. They back up this conclusion with similar results from several other visual illusions, all supposedly tapping into basic brain mechanisms involved in visual perception. So far, so good for the cross-cultural perceptual psychologists, and for the 'carpentered world' hypothesis. The second study, by Dorsa Amir and Chaz Firestone, takes a sledgehammer to this hypothesis, but for the much better-known illusion: the Müller-Lyer illusion. Two lines of equal length seem to be different lengths because of the context provided by inward-pointing, compared with outward-pointing, arrowheads. It's a very powerful illusion. I've seen it on thousands of occasions and it works every time for me. There are many explanations for why the Müller-Lyer illusion is so effective. One of the more popular is that the arrowheads are interpreted by the brain as cues about three-dimensional depth, so our brains implicitly interpret the illusion as representing an object of some kind, with right angles and straight lines. This explanation fits neatly with the 'carpentered world' hypothesis – and indeed a lot of early support for this hypothesis relied on apparent cultural variability in how the Müller-Lyer illusion is perceived. In their study, Amir and Firestone carefully and convincingly dismantle this explanation. They point out that non-human animals experience the illusion, as shown in a range of studies in which animals (including guppies, pigeons and bearded dragons) are trained to prefer the longer of two lines, and then presented with the Müller-Lyer image. They show that it works without straight lines, and for touch as well as vision. They note that it even works for people who until recently have been blind, referencing an astonishing experiment in which nine children, blind from birth because of dense cataracts, were shown the illusion immediately after the cataracts were surgically removed. Not only had these children not seen highly carpentered environments – they hadn't seen anything at all. After you absorb their analysis, it's pretty clear that the Müller-Lyer illusion is not due to culturally specific exposure to carpentry. Why the discrepancy? There are several possibilities. Perhaps there are reasons why cross-cultural variability should be expected for the Coffer but not the Müller-Lyer illusion (one possibility here is that the Coffer illusion is based on how people pay attention to things, rather than on some more basic aspect of perception). It could also be that there are systematic differences in perception between cultures, but that the 'carpentered world' hypothesis is not the correct explanation. It's also worth noting that the Kroupin study has some potential weaknesses. For example, the UK/US and Namibian participants were exposed to the illusions using very different methods. All in all, the jury remains out and – favourite scientist punt coming up – 'more research is needed'. The notion that people from different cultures vary in how they experience things is certainly plausible. There's a wealth of evidence that as we grow up our brains are shaped, at least to some extent, by features of our environments. And just as we all differ in our externally visible characteristics – height, body shape and so on – we will all differ on the inside too. As the author Anaïs Nin put it in quoting the Talmud: 'We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.' For me, an important implication of this line of thought is that there are likely to be substantial differences in perception within 'groups' as well as between them. This will probably hold however these 'groups' are defined, whether as different cultures or as a contrast between 'neurotypical' and 'neurodivergent' people. I believe that paying more attention to within-group perceptual diversity will help us to better interpret the differences we do find between groups, and equip us with the tools needed to resist relying on simple cultural stereotypes as explanations. More research is needed here too. But it's on the way. In the Perception Census, a project led by my research group at the University of Sussex together with professor Fiona Macpherson at the University of Glasgow, we are studying how perception differs in a large sample of about 40,000 people from more than 100 countries. Our experiment includes not just one or two visual illusions but more than 50 different experiments probing many different aspects of perception. When we're done analysing the data, we hope to deliver a uniquely detailed picture of how people experience their world, both within and between cultures. We'll also make the data openly available for other researchers to explore new ideas in this important area. One critical insight lies behind all these questions. How things seem is not how they are. For each of us, it might seem as though we see the world exactly as it is; as if our senses are transparent windows through with the world pours itself directly into our mind. But how things are is very different. The objective world no doubt exists, but the world we experience is always an active construction, a kind of 'controlled hallucination' in which the brain uses sensory signals to update and calibrate its best interpretation of what's going on. What we experience is this interpretation, not a 'readout' of the sensory information. For me, this is the key insight that underlies any claim about perceptual diversity. When we take it fully on board, it encourages a much-needed humility about our own ways of seeing. We live in perceptual echo chambers, just as we do in those of social media, and the first step to escaping any echo chamber is to realise that you're in one. Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and author of the Sunday Times bestseller Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
Forgetfulness or early dementia? How to decipher your memory loss
Illustrations by James Yates At some point, we've all strode into a room with purpose and proceeded to completely forget what we were about to do. 'It's a very common complaint,' confirms Prof Scott Small, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Centre at Columbia University, who has studied memory for more than three decades. It used to be thought that a forgetful blip like this served no purpose and was simply a malfunction in our memory machinery, but now we know otherwise. Our memory machinery comprises several stages: our short-term and long-term memory, as well as our ability to save and recall memories. Prof Small uses the analogy of a computer to explain how we remember and forget: 'If you type something into a document and don't save it, it's gone forever – that's your short-term memory,' he says. 'If you click save, that transfers information from the short-term memory to the long-term memory. 'The other function is to be able to come back to your computer, or brain, and recall what was talked about the day before. For this, you need to have the 'open' function to be able to sift through all your memories and choose the right one.' Rather than a glitch in this hardwiring, forgetting is a healthy and necessary part of our brain's normal functioning and is vital for our creativity and mental health, as Prof Small explains in his book Forgetting, The New Science of Memory. Not only does forgetting clear cognitive bandwidth and ensure our brains are not overwhelmed with irrelevant information, but 'emotional forgetting' is also necessary to move past traumatic experiences. Though, there is a catch. As well as normal forgetting, there is also what Prof Small refers to as 'pathological forgetting' – the type that we are right to worry about. Typically caused by neurodegenerative disorders, it indicates a worsening of memory that impacts our ability to live our life fully. 'If you notice worsening of your memory over time from your own baseline, that's probably pathological forgetting, such as Alzheimer's.' Here, Prof Small shares his expertise on common examples of forgetting to distinguish which fall into the normal category and which could be an early sign of Alzheimer's. 'However, the ultimate diagnosis is when you see a doctor,' he notes. I've gone upstairs and forgotten why 'That's a super common complaint,' Prof Small says. 'This symptom alone tells me that it's probably the hippocampus, as that's the structure of the brain that's critical for memory.' The hippocampus is the 'save' button on your computer, transferring information from temporary to long-term. 'If that's always happened to you, it's normal forgetting.' Like height and weight, normal forgetting is a trait that varies between us and it's nothing to worry about if it remains consistent. However, if you're increasingly catching yourself uncertain about what you're doing mid-task, it could be an early indicator of pathological forgetting, which can be a result of cognitive ageing (forgetting that occurs as part of the normal ageing process) or Alzheimer's, Prof Small says. 'This symptom alone is not enough for me to say whether it's the earliest stages of Alzheimer's or if it's just cognitive ageing,' he notes. 'A rule of thumb in medicine is, if you experience something that really disturbs your life, it might be worth seeing a doctor. But, on its own, forgetting why you've gone upstairs doesn't declare itself as a disorder that's worth seeing a doctor for.' I'm getting names mixed up If you've forgotten or mixed up the name of someone you met a couple of times many years ago, it's nothing to worry about, Prof Small says. If you've forgotten the name of a loved one as a one-off, it's also not a cause for concern. 'It may be a bad night's sleep or stress,' he notes. 'But if someone's frequently forgetting the names of loved ones, people in their inner circle, it's time to see a doctor,' he says. It indicates a memory problem and could be a sign of Alzheimer's, he says. Similarly, if you forget the name of your prime minister or president, that's more concerning than if you forget the name of your local MP, Prof Small says. I can't remember how to make my favourite recipe 'If someone forgets a recipe that they've been making over and over again, I'm starting to worry about a disease,' Prof Small says. 'It sounds like Alzheimer's.' The memory decline that occurs with age doesn't affect our memory 'hard drive', where we store key pieces of information that we use regularly, like a favourite recipe. However, Alzheimer's does. 'It spreads to areas of the memory store, memory retrieval and recall, while ageing does not,' Prof Small says. 'The example of the recipe sounds like Alzheimer's because it's not the 'save' function of our brain,' which is used for new memories, he notes. Instead, it signals a problem with the memory hard drive. I got lost on a route I've done a million times Whilst forgetting why you walked into a room or the name of someone you only vaguely know is likely innocuous, Prof Small says that getting lost is a sign of something more serious. 'If someone tells me that they've forgotten where they've parked their car or if they've gotten lost while driving to work, that's a red flag,' he says. 'I start thinking, maybe this is Alzheimer's.' One way to think about the hippocampus is as a circuit made up of different regions that are all interconnected, Prof Small explains. The area responsible for spatial memory is the region where Alzheimer's takes hold. 'So when I hear people complain about getting lost, I start thinking more about Alzheimer's disease,' he says. I asked my husband a question but can't remember the answer five minutes later Forgetting information that we've just been told happens to all of us, Prof Small says. It could be poor attention or, if it's always in relation to your husband, there could be psychological reasons why you're not focusing on what he's saying, he notes. As a result, this falls into normal forgetting but, if it's becoming more frequent, this could be a worrying symptom. What can we do to protect our memory? There are many risk factors that increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, including obesity, poor heart health, high blood pressure and cholesterol and diabetes, Prof Small says. 'That doesn't mean these factors alone will cause Alzheimer's but, if you're going to get it, these may accelerate it,' he explains. In addition, there are certain genes that are associated with Alzheimer's, most famously Apolipoprotein E (APOE), and a family history also raises the risk. While these can't be changed, living a healthy lifestyle has been shown to benefit brain health and reduce the risk of dementia. 'Exercise seems to be a very strong influencer of maintaining our memory health into late life,' Prof Small notes. Meanwhile, his own research has found that eating a diet rich in flavanols, compounds found in apples, berries and tea, amongst other fruits and vegetables, also protects brain health. Scientists are also racing to find medicines to ward off memory-robbing diseases. 'Where we are in the field is trying to develop statins for the brain,' Prof Small says. To do that, researchers need to understand the mechanisms that are causing Alzheimer's, with the brain's immune network and system for moving proteins around our cells (known as the trafficking pathway) under investigation. So far, development has focused on drugs that work by clearing proteins called amyloid from the brain, which have been shown to disrupt neuron function. However, these have so far been blocked for use on the NHS due to their cost (estimated to be £30,000 per patient per course of treatment) and worries over side effects. 'The next generation of drugs are trying to target either the immune response or the trafficking pathway,' he explains. 'Once the biomedical enterprise has a target, where the field at large is so sophisticated, we should be optimistic that we will have a way to intervene,' Prof Small says. 'It could mean that in a year we'll have effective new drugs that target the pathways that I and others believe will be more beneficial than anti-amyloid drugs. It could take a few years but I don't think it's going to take decades. 'I think we're on the cusp of really translating all the remarkable discoveries that happened in the first 20 years of this century into meaningful therapeutics.'
Daily Record
4 hours ago
- Daily Record
Buffer zone law must be upheld as anti-abortion protestors announce new 'vigils'
Record View says groups are entitled to their beliefs but they are not above the law. Women who attend abortion clinics should be free to do so without being harassed by strangers. This is a position the majority of Scots will agree with without a second thought. But sadly, despite the introduction of buffer zones to keep anti-abortion protesters a safe distance away from clinic entrances, there remains a small but vocal minority who wish to confront women in person. Texas-based 40 Days for Life announced online it will hold a series of 'prayer vigils' near the Chalmers Clinic in Edinburgh in September. The activity is expected to last for 40 days and will commence from September 24 with the last 'vigil' to take place on November 2. But the organisation has suggested it will gather across the road from the clinic's entrance - ignoring the 200m buffer zone that is now law. Anti-abortion groups are entitled to their beliefs but they are not above the law. The group has been known to harass women outside healthcare facilities offering abortion services across Scotland in recent years. Repeatedly targeted clinics include those at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH), Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Sandyford Clinic, Edinburgh Chalmers Street Clinic and Aberdeen Maternity Hospital. It's up to police to ensure any protest is legal and does not subject women to unwanted harassment. Scotland upholds freedom of expression. But it also upholds the rights of people to attend medical clinicians without being targeted by political campaigners. The law is there, it must be upheld for all our benefit. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. Bussed of British To slow down climate change we need to get more people onto public transport and out of fuel and petrol cars. So if we're going to build an environmentally friendly public transport network, we should be buying as many vehicles from UK manufacturers as possible. Alexander Dennis' two factories in the Falkirk area could be a big part of this. We have already seen how many of their buses have been bought for public use in Manchester. If we need to change the law in order to procure vehicles from our own country, then so be it. We need more high-skilled manufacturing jobs in Scotland, not less. Not only do these benefit the economy as a whole but they also help keep our communities together. Euan Stainbank is right to fight for his constituents and try to keep the jobs in the area. It will be a sad day if the historic firm leaves Scotland.
