Health & Science

Hubble’s new eye on the universe

The repaired Hubble Space Telescope is back online, once again with stellar results. The orbiting telescope has undergone several expensive repairs since its launch in 1990; most recently, last May, seven NASA astronauts spent 13 days installing a new, supersensitive camera and instruments, replacing batteries, and tweaking vital parts. The first images to come from that upgrade, released this week by NASA, “are nothing short of spectacular,” astronomer Rogier Windhorst tells Science News. “For the first time, Hubble is reaching its full potential.” Among the prizes: a glimpse of an exploding star shaped like a butterfly and an exquisitely detailed spiral galaxy some 6 billion light-years away. “We’re giddy with the quality of the data we’re getting,” says Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute. Hubble has provided years of spectacular images, but until now has been troubled with a variety of technical problems. NASA hopes the telescope will continue mapping the early universe and analyzing the atmospheres of distant planets for at least another five years. “Thank God we didn’t break it,” says astronaut Michael Massimino, who did most of the repairs with simple tools.

When dogs were cows

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Dogs have been humankind’s best friends for at least 10,000 years, ever since our ancestors tamed their wolf ancestors. But why did we domesticate them in the first place? Most theories presume it was because of dogs’ loyalty or their capacity as guards and hunters. But a new study offers a less, or perhaps more, savory explanation: dog meat. After analyzing the DNA of dogs worldwide, researchers found that the greatest genetic diversity is in dogs from southern China, indicating that that’s where the original act of domestication likely occurred. (A species, in this case Canis lupus familiaris, tends to be most diverse in the region where it first evolved.) Peter Savolainen of Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology thinks the domestication process began when wolves began scavenging at the garbage dumps of early human settlements, about 11,000 to 14,000 years ago. A light bulb went off, and humans decided to breed them for meat, an advance that helped spread and popularize their taming, at least in some places. “Eating dog is a big cultural thing” in that region of China, and has been for centuries, Savolainen tells National Geographic News. “You have to think of the possibility that this was one of the reasons for domesticating dogs.”

Your brain on Tetris

Playing Tetris, the classic computer game, actually enlarges your brain, scientists say. The game, which turns 25 this year, calls on players to rapidly fit together colored puzzle pieces as they fall from the top of the screen. In a recent study, neuroscientists asked two dozen adolescents to play Tetris for a half-hour every day for three months. Subsequent brain scans revealed that, in these players, certain regions of the cerebral cortex—areas with a role in planning complex movements and coordinating sensory information—had added new cells and grown a half-millimeter thicker. “It used to be thought that the number of neurons in the brain was fixed after a certain age,” neuroscientist Richard Haier tells BBC.com. “This appears not to be true.” Left to be resolved is whether the growth in brain cells leads to overall improvements in memory and problem solving. “The $64,000 question is whether these brain changes are beneficial to activities other than playing Tetris,” Haier says.

Time to eat

There’s a time to eat and a time to sleep; eating while you should be sleeping “might be doing double damage” to your waistline, Scientific American reports. The problem lies within our natural circadian rhythm, the body’s 24-hour “clock,” which keeps our sleep cycle in sync with day and night but also regulates when and how quickly we metabolize food. A new study suggests that crossing those wires—simply by eating at the wrong time of day—may contribute to weight gain. The researchers were inspired by the observation that shift workers whose schedules force them to eat at times when they’d normally be sleeping tend to be overweight. So they mimicked the behavior with mice: One group ate at night and slept by day, and a second group slept at night and ate during the day. After several weeks, the mice in the first group had gained 20 percent more weight than the others. The results suggest that weight gain may depend as much on when you eat as on what you eat, says Northwestern biologist Fred Turek. “Better timing of meals, which would require a change in behavior, could be a critical element in slowing the ever-increasing incidence of obesity.”