Magnetic sperm and the ugliest shark: science stories of the week
From a lupus breakthrough to why humans naturally move anticlockwise, here are the most interesting scientific developments of the week
Walkers tend to drift leftwards
Humans instinctively move anticlockwise, a study has found. “If you simply ask someone to start walking, whether they are wandering around a museum, a supermarket, or even an empty room, it is surprisingly likely that they will drift [in that direction],” said lead author Dr Iñaki Echeverría Huarte, of the University of Navarra in Spain.
The researchers first noticed the bias when investigating social distancing during Covid: in 32 of the 33 experiments, people ambling around enclosed spaces were more likely than not to do so in an anticlockwise direction. Suspecting that it might be a cultural phenomenon, they asked scientists in Japan to repeat the experiments. The results were the same. Further work revealed that humans veer left regardless of whether they are right- or left-handed, alone or with others, male or female, young or old.
The team can’t explain this but hypothesise that biomechanics play a role. “None of us is perfectly symmetrical and the way each person’s brain gathers sensory information and coordinates it with the muscles seems to tip them gently to one side,” Dr Echeverría Huarte told The Guardian.
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A step closer to a cure for lupus
An experimental treatment that resets the immune system has offered hope of a cure for lupus – a condition that affects about 50,000 people in the UK. In patients with the autoimmune condition, faulty B cells attack healthy tissue and organs, leading to symptoms including painful joints, skin rashes, extreme fatigue, and organ damage. Anti-inflammatory drugs can help control these, but they do not work for everyone. Now, though, patients taking part in a small trial of a new therapy have gone into remission.
Doctors at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and UCL removed T cells (white blood cells that destroy infected cells) from six people with severe lupus that wasn’t responding to treatment. The cells were then modified, to make them hunt down the rogue B cells, before being infused back into the patients.
Within three months, all six were in remission, and five were still in remission 12 months later, suggesting their immune system had been reset. One of them, Katie Tinkler, from Surrey, had previously been in such pain, she’d struggled even to pick up a tea cup. Since the trial, she has been skiing, and she now hopes to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. “If these results are confirmed in larger studies, the prospect of a cure for lupus may no longer be out of reach,” said lead researcher Professor Karl Peggs.
Rare sighting of the ugliest shark
With its soft flabby body, pointy head and retractable jaw that shoots out to snatch prey, the goblin shark is “arguably the ugliest shark on the planet”, one ecologist told The Guardian. It is also one of the most mysterious: the sharks, which live in the deep oceans, have rarely been seen alive, other than when accidentally hauled in by fishing vessels. Now, though, they have been observed for the first time in their natural habitat.
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In 2019, a male thought to be more than 50 years old was spotted in the South Central Pacific at a depth of 1,200m. Five years later, and thousands of miles away, another goblin was filmed at a depth of 2,000 metres in the southwestern Pacific. More than 50 days of filming yielded only about 20 seconds of footage, “which is testament to how elusive this species is”, said co-author Professor Alan Jamieson. “It’s a classic case of a deep-sea animal that has very low abundance, but an absolutely massive geographical range.”
Making sperm magnetic
Scientists have developed magnetic sperm – a breakthrough that could lead to a less invasive, more natural alternative to IVF. When a man has a low sperm count, or sperm that swim poorly, couples often turn to IVF, in which the sperm and egg are combined in a dish in the lab; this involves various invasive procedures, and it is not always successful, partly because of the environment in which the sperm and egg meet, says The New Scientist.
To address this, researchers in Spain incubated sperm with nanoparticles made from iron oxide and polystyrene; about 30 stuck to each one, making the sperm magnetic. They also showed that they could steer these sperm with magnets. Their hope is that, in future, they’ll be able to use magnets to draw such sperm through a woman’s body to the fallopian tubes, where they’d fertilise the waiting egg under natural conditions.