Health & Science

A bird’s record-breaking flight

A small, plump shorebird has proved itself the greatest endurance athlete in the animal kingdom, migrating 7,242 miles from Alaska to New Zealand without stopping to eat, sleep, or rest its wings. At the end of summer every year, the bar-tailed godwit migrates from its breeding grounds in northern North America to its feeding grounds in the Southern Hemisphere, and scientists banded 23 of them with satellite trackers to see how they did it. Several of the birds flew nonstop, with one female arriving in New Zealand after nine continuous days of frenetic wing-flapping, having burned off half of its 1.5-pound weight. “The human species doesn’t work at these levels,’’ biologist Robert Gill Jr. tells The Washington Post. “So you just have to sit back in awe of it all.” During flight, godwits operate at a metabolic rate about 10 times their resting, or basal, metabolism. The peak rate achieved by human athletes—Tour de France cyclists—is six times their basal metabolism.

Baby boomer suicide

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Baby boomers are among the most affluent and comfortable groups in human history. Yet since 1999, says a new study, the suicide rates of white men and women between 40 and 64 have risen steadily each year—16 percent overall. (Among blacks, suicide rates are falling, while among Asians, they’re level.) Sociologists admit to being perplexed by the finding, since global studies have found middle age to usually be a time of rising satisfaction and emotional well-being. So what, exactly, is the problem? It’s possible, says researcher Susan Baker of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, that “the youth generation’’ is having a particularly hard time dealing with wrinkles, gray hair, loss of sexual attractiveness, and other effects of aging, leading to a quiet epidemic of depression. Another factor might be that boomers learned to self-medicate away negative feelings in their youth, so to cope with problems in middle age, they’re abusing prescription drugs such as OxyContin. Drug abuse is strongly associated with suicide. “We don’t really know what is causing this,’’ Dr. Paula Clayton of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention tells the Los Angeles Times. “All we have is speculation.’’

Smart kids get drunker

Children with high IQs at age 10 are more likely to have alcohol problems as adults, says a new study. The findings of the study, which followed 8,000 people over a 20-year period, surprised researcher Dr. G. David Batty, who also found that the effect is “markedly stronger among women than among men.’’ In young girls, a 15-point IQ bump increases the risk of alcohol dependency in adulthood by 38 percent. For boys, 15 additional IQ points translates to a 17 percent increase in risk. Batty tells MSNBC.com that “these findings ran counter to our expectations,” and he recommends further research into the link between intelligence and susceptibility to alcoholism.

Volcanoes: The crucible of life?

More than 50 years ago, a landmark experiment by Stanley Miller created the building blocks of life in a bottle. Using glass bulbs and tubes, Miller mixed together all the chemicals he believed to be present at the birth of the planet: ammonia, methane, and hydrogen. Then he zapped them with electric sparks to simulate lightning, and amino acids—the proteins that make up DNA—spontaneously arose in the mixture. A new analysis of Miller’s landmark study, conducted with modern technology, has led to the conclusion that the final ingredients for life on Earth may have come from volcanic eruptions. At the time Miller did his experiment, it was believed hydrogen had been abundant in the Earth’s early atmosphere. It turns out that it wasn’t. “If Earth’s early atmosphere had little of the molecules used in Miller’s classic experiment, it becomes difficult to see how life could begin using a similar process,’’ researcher Daniel Glavin tells Science. But two of his graduate students went back to his original experiment, and found that Miller had performed one set of trials by injecting hydrogen-rich gas into the chamber to simulate the belching of volcanoes, which were numerous when Earth was young and still hot from its formation. These experiments, the new analysis found, led to a pre-life goo that contained every single amino acid found in organisms today. So Miller was right all along.

Making ‘paralyzed’ muscles move

Temporarily paralyzed monkeys were able to move again when scientists routed electrical signals from wires in their brains to the animals’ wrists. Researchers at the University of Washington implanted electrodes into the brains of monkeys, analyzing how their brain cells fired when the monkeys flexed their wrists to play a videogame. The scientists then temporarily paralyzed the monkeys’ limbs with a powerful anesthetic, and implanted a wire between the brain electrode and the paralyzed muscle. When the neurons fired as usual (because the monkeys wanted to flex their wrists for the game), the wires carried an electrical signal to the wrist muscles, causing them to flex even though their regular nerves were not working. The device is just the beginning of a long road toward technology that could enable muscle movements in paralyzed people, neurobiologist Dr. Andrew Schwartz tells the Los Angeles Times. “It is a nice sort of glimmer of something, but in the real world you need many muscles acting simultaneously.’’