Blue Planet II To Highlight How We Are Choking The Oceans With Plastic

From the vast expanses of the seemingly endless open oceans to the microcosm of life found within a single rock pool, the latest offering from the BBC Natural History Unit has not disappointed. But as Blue Planet II draws to an end, it has a somber warning for humanity: we are smothering the oceans with plastic.

The final episode of the series will address the state of the oceans, and what humans have done to cause it. Often accused of skirting around the issue of how we are destroying the environment, the makers are dedicating a whole episode to how climate change, plastic, overfishing, and noise pollution are creating the greatest threat our oceans have seen in human history.

“For years we thought the oceans were so vast and the inhabitants so infinitely numerous that nothing we could do could have an effect upon them. But now we know that was wrong,” said David Attenborough. “It is now clear our actions are having a significant impact on the world’s oceans. [They] are under threat now as never before in human history. Many people believe the oceans have reached a crisis point.”

One particularly heartbreaking story involves the wandering albatrosses filmed for the Big Blue episode. Despite nesting on remote islands in the Antarctic Ocean, the scientists monitoring the birds on South Georgia's Bird Island have found that the chicks are still being killed due to plastic. The adults search thousands of miles of ocean seeking out enough squid and fish to feed their growing chicks, but often pick up plastic floating on the surface instead.

One researcher described finding that a chick died because a plastic toothpick had punctured its stomach. “It’s really sad because you get to know the birds and how long it takes the parents, away for 10 days at a time, to collect food for their chicks and what they bring back is plastic,” explained Dr Lucy Quinn.

“And what’s sad is that the plague of plastic is as far-reaching as these seemingly pristine environments.”

In fact, in every environment that the crews filmed, they found plastic, with the team collecting it whenever they found it. But this was not the only threat experienced, as rising ocean temperatures are killing coral reefs, the noise from boats and underwater exploration for oil and gas drown out the calls of fish and whales, and overfishing strips the seas bare.

There is hope though. The episode will show how the management of herring fisheries in Norway help to not only make the industry sustainable, but also protect the orca. Or how one conservationist in Trinidad is securing the future of leatherback turtles on the island.

One thing is certain though. We need to act, and we need to act now.

Shady Herpes Vaccine Trial By Rogue Scientist Could Cost University Millions

The controversy has also since brought in PayPal founder Peter Thiel, whose investment firm later invested millions into the project.

The research, led by the late Dr William Halford, involved testing out an experimental genital herpes vaccine on 20 humans on the quiet Caribbean island of St Kitts between March and August 2016. The patient's consent forms openly stated that the trial was ignoring regulations of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The medical trial was run by the private company Rational Vaccines, co-founded by Dr William Halford, who also independently worked at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine (SIU). He died on June 22 of this year, after a battle with cancer. In his account, he wanted to defy the regulations of US clinical trials because he was desperate to fast-track the herpes vaccine following his diagnosis of cancer.

In his own words, Dr Halford wrote: “Some readers may find this course of action reckless... I would suggest the opposite… The risk I accepted by self-injecting the live HSV-2 vaccine pales in comparison to the morbidity that actually occurred in the 1.5 billion people who were newly infected with HSV-1 or HSV-2 whilst FDA sanctioned herpes subunit vaccine trials have failed for three decades.”

In August, Kaiser Health News reported that controversial Paypal founder Peter Thiel and a “group of wealthy libertarians” had invested $7 million into Rational Vaccines. This money was reportedly invested after Dr Halford and Rational Vaccines had carried out the human trial in the Caribbean.

In the past, Silicon Valley billionaire Thiel has expressed disdain for the overly bureaucratic nature of the FDA, once saying“you would not be able to invent the polio vaccine today” due to their regulations.

Halford attempted to submit the findings of his studies on the genital herpes vaccine into the journal Future Virology, however the editors rejected the study. One reviewer said: “This manuscript is partly a vision, partly science, and partly wishful thinking.”

Whether SIU loses their $15 million funding pot depends on the ongoing federal inquiry, conducted by an arm of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

“This researcher went rogue,” Holly Fernandez Lynch, a lawyer who specializes in medical ethics, told Kaiser Health News. “It’s true that universities can’t stand behind their researchers watching their every move. But when one of their own goes rogue, a university should launch an aggressive investigation, interview the participants, and make sure it never happens again.”

Super-Eruptions Are More Frequent Than We Thought

We don't want to alarm you.... Ok actually we do, but only a little. Super-eruptions, so large they can cancel multiple summers and blanket a continent with ash, happen more frequently than we thought. That doesn't mean we should expect one next Tuesday, and the risk remains much lower than for human-induced threats, but the methods used to determine this might reveal some other lurking dangers.

In 2004, geologists estimated that volcanic eruptions where more than 1,000 gigatons of material is released happen somewhere between once every 45,000 and once every 714,000 years. That's a very wide range of uncertainty, but even at the lower end, it's substantially longer than the time since the invention of agriculture, making it unsurprising that an eruption hasn't come along to throw our civilization off course.

Professor Jonathan Rougier of the University of Bristol, UK, has challenged that estimate in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. He thinks the true range is 5,200-48,000 years, with the most likely figure being 17,000 years. It's been longer than that since the Earth last experienced such an event, with the most recent occurring over 20,000 years ago.

However, such eruptions don't occur on a reliable cycle. Rougier's team found that there were two in the period between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago. “On balance, we have been slightly lucky not to experience any super-eruptions since then,” Rougier said in a statement. “But it is important to appreciate that the absence of super-eruptions in the last 20,000 years does not imply that one is overdue. Nature is not that regular.”

He also told IFLScience that geologists now "have a much better database [of big eruptions] than we did a decade ago."

Since humanity survived this pair, and the even larger explosion at Toba, Sumatra, 75,000 years ago, it's likely we'll make it through a future event on the same scale. But that doesn't mean we would remain unscathed. Just how devastating such an event would be depends on its size, location, and timing, but Rougier told IFLScience; "The direct effect of a super-eruption would be to sterilize the land for thousands of miles... The indirect effect (about which there is more uncertainty) would change global weather patterns for possibly decades."

Rougier said the work is also important for applying the techniques his team has developed to other rare events that might not be well recorded. Even though these events are infrequent, some of them, such as very big earthquakes and smaller, locally damaging, eruptions are more common, and therefore more threatening than super-eruptions. To Rougier's mind, these are much more worth worrying about, along with the disasters that are becoming more frequent due to our own behavior.

Unfortunately, this hasn't stopped headlines misrepresenting Rougier's statements by suggesting disaster is imminent.

One Way To Stop Antibiotic Resistance – Electrify Your Bandages

Antibiotic resistance has many people scared, and with good reason. We've forgotten what it's like to live in a world where most bacterial infections can't be cured easily, and where even simple surgery is very dangerous. Most work on the topic, understandably, involves finding new antibiotics bacteria have not yet evolved resistance to, but one team is offering a very different solution. They have found that applying a weak electric field to bandages prevents biofilms forming, and reduces the risk of infection.

Bacteria turn wounds septic, interfering with recovery and often proving fatal. Biofilms are congregations of microorganisms on surfaces that protect their component bacteria against antibiotics and the immune system. When microbiologists realized biofilms use electrostatic interactions to grip onto surfaces, they wondered if it might be possible to disrupt this process using weak electric fields.

This possibility was first demonstrated in 1992, but it has taken 25 years to move from proving the principle on glass to creating and testing a bandage to treat real wounds. Dr Chandan Sen, of Ohio State University, realized that having bandages connected to a power supply, or even a battery, would create a lot of practical difficulties. Therefore, he searched for a way to create small amounts of electricity in situ.

In Annals of Surgery, Sen and colleagues announced the success of what he calls a “wireless electroceutical dressing” (WED) printed with silver and zinc particles. When wet, WED produces a small electric field. It was applied to pigs and worked much better than a placebo both on fresh wounds (two hours after injury) and seven days after infection when a biofilm had had a chance to become established. In both cases, wounds were more likely to close with WED than a conventional bandage – counts of bacteria were lower, and molecules known to interfere with healing were reduced.

"Since it relies on electrical principles, it's not subject to the mechanisms that may promote drug resistance,” Sen said in a statement. Trials on human burns victims start soon.

As useful as WED might be for external infections, it's little help if bacteria take hold of your lungs or bloodstream. These are the more frightening faces of antibiotic resistance, but there's good news on that front too, although it's much further from being applied than Sen's work.

Teixobactin is a natural antibiotic that binds to bacteria using enduracididine, a rare amino acid. Unfortunately, enduracididine isn't easy to synthesize, which has held back teixobactin's application. However, Dr Ishwar Singh of the University of Lincoln and colleagues have revealed in Chemical Science that it's possible to replace enduracididine with two alternative amino acids, without losing potency, making it easier to synthesize teixobactin in quantities suitable for widespread use.

Doctor Claims World's First Successful Human Head Transplant - But There's A Catch

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Never too far away from making headlines, the controversial neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero is back with claims that the world’s first head transplant is “imminent”, after Chinese scientists successfully carried out the first head transplant on a human corpse.

He revealed the news at a press conference in Vienna on Friday morning, The Telegraph reports. Professor Canavero claims the feat was carried out during an 18-hour operation at Harbin Medical University in China, during which a team of surgeons successfully severed then reconnected the spinal cord, nerves, and blood vessels in the spine and neck.

The operation was led by Dr Xiaoping Ren, a surgeon who has previously transplanted the head of a monkey and numerous rodents. Harbin Medical University is expected to write a full report on the operation within the next few days.

“The first human transplant on human cadavers has been done," Canavero told the crowd, according to the Telegraph. "A full head swap between brain-dead organ donors is the next stage. And that is the final step for the formal head transplant for a medical condition which is imminent.”

In a phone interview today, Canavero told USA Today that the operation will take place in China because the scientific establishment and authorities of Europe and the US were unwilling to support the contentious surgery.

"The Americans did not understand,” he said. "Chinese President Xi Jinping wants to restore China to greatness. He wants to make it the sole superpower in the world. I believe he is doing it.”

The eccentric Italian's plans to pull off the first live human head transplant have been surrounded and fueled with controversy. Back in 2015, he estimated that the operation would be done and dusted by 2017, however that’s looking unlikely considering the recent rate of developments.

Even though Canavero has spent the past few year writing scientific studies on the feat, massive doubts are continuing to be cast onto the scientific legitimacy of his big promises. Arthur Caplan, head of medical ethics at Langone Medical Center of New York University, said Canavero was “out of his mind”.

Speaking to Wired in May of this year about head transplant surgery, neuroscientist Dean Burnett said: “When someone makes an extreme claim, my rule of thumb is this: If they haven’t provided robust scientific evidence, but they have done a TED talk, alarm bells should be ringing.”

Canavero’s TEDx Talk can be viewed below.

X-Rays Show Gold Splinters Embedded In Woman's Hands

Meet the woman with the golden touch. Believe it or not, the short squiggly bright-white lines on this X-ray show flecks of gold that have become embedded in her hands.

The story behind this image is explained in a medical case study published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) this week.

The 58-year-old South Korean woman visited the hospital suffering from chronic joint pain and odd deformities in her hands and feet, an ailment she had been suffering from for around 40 years. At age 18, she started to treat her condition using a traditional Asian technique called “gold thread acupuncture”, involving the insertion of small pieces of sterile gold thread with an acupuncture needle (you can probably see where this story is going now).

You can also see in the X-ray how her hands have become deformed due to rheumatoid arthritis. This is caused by inflammatory cells of the immune system gathering around the joints, eventually hardening into a tough fibrous tissue. This tissue, known as pannus, slowly releases substances that can speed up the damage to the bone, cartilage, and ligaments.

There’s not much in the way of scientific evidence that gold threaded acupuncture can help you with this condition. Nevertheless, this treatment has a long history of treating joint pain that continues to this day. Oral and injectable gold treatments are also sometimes used.

“In East Asia and globally, acupuncture – including gold thread acupuncture – has long been used to treat joint pain. Oral and injectable gold preparations are also sometimes used,” Dr Young-Bin Joo and Dr Kyung-Su Park, the doctors who treated the woman, explained in their case report.

After doctors officially diagnosed the 58-year old with rheumatoid arthritis, she was treated with the more conventional combination of methotrexate and leflunomide, two drugs that help reduce the body’s immune system thereby dampening swelling around the joints. 

The golden splinters remain in her hands.

Doctors have come across cases like this before, especially in East Asia where the practice is more common than elsewhere. In 2013, the NEJM reported another case study of a 65-year-old woman in South Korea who had tiny gold splinters within her knee after years of gold thread acupuncture treatment for her osteoarthritis.

Nine "Health" Foods That You'd Be Better Off Avoiding

Food-wise, it can be hard to keep up with what is healthy and what is not. When nutritionists decided that (healthy) fats, carbohydrates, and coffee weren't so bad after all, we could all breathe a deep sigh of relief. But what about some of the so-called "health" foods that aren't as good for you as they're made out to be? Here are nine health fads that might be worth ditching. 

Fruit juices and smoothies

Freshly squeezed orange juice and a green smoothie straight from the Nutribullet – it’s fruit and vegetables so it must be good for you, right? From a nutritional standpoint, juices are a whole load better for you than your regular, sugar-laden fizzy drink. If it’s freshly squeezed, you get most of the vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients from the whole fruit (and obviously that’s a good thing) but the juicing process removes almost all fiber, which is what keeps you feeling full. And because one glass of juice requires more than just one piece of fruit, you are drinking more sugar (a glass of orange juice has six teaspoons of sugar in, nearly the same as a can of full fat Coca-Cola) than you would likely consume had you stuck to one whole fruit. Smoothies aren’t so innocent either.

Granola

Granola tastes good but a lot of its innate deliciousness comes from sugar. It’s also high in carbs and calories but low in protein, and one portion of the "healthy" cereal is a lot smaller than you might imagine. A poll in the New York Times found that more than 70 percent of the public consider granola bars healthy but only 28 percent of nutritionists interviewed will back them up on this view. True, granola is high in fiber and nut varieties contain heart-healthy fats but, given its high sugar content, it might be best to start thinking of it as a dessert rather than a breakfast staple.

Fat-free or low-fat anything

If you’re trying to lose weight or eat healthy, swapping out your regular product for a lighter alternative sounds like a no-brainer. That is until you realize food manufacturers regularly add extra sugar or additives to make something fat-free edible, otherwise, it can be rather tasteless. Besides, the right fats in moderation are good for you. Think, avocados and oily fish, which can help protect you against cardiovascular disease, dementia, and different types of cancer. Sugar, on the other hand, can raise your risk of dying from heart disease. Experts reckon you should limit your intake to less than 10 percent of your daily calories.

Almond milk

Unless you’re dairy-free, buying almond milk instead of cow’s milk isn’t automatically healthier. In fact, it’s lower in protein and the food manufacturing process makes it harder for your body to absorb and retain all the nutrients. (Most vitamins are added in during the production process.) Besides, regular, dairy milk is full of important nutrients like vitamin A and B12, phosphorus, magnesium, zinc, and riboflavin. If you don’t have an intolerance and you’re not vegan, there’s no reason to avoid it.