This Semester in Science
The Environment
On January 25th, the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) approved a new offshore wind farm that will be built by 2022 between the tip of Long Island and Martha’s Vineyard. This will be the largest wind farm in the nation, with 256 square miles of space that gives the ability for up to 200 turbines to be built. The LIPA was approved to start with 15 turbines off the coast of Montauk that can harvest enough energy to power 50,000 average homes. If all goes well with these beginning turbines, they will be the gateway to the rest of the project. Even though each turbine is about 600 feet tall, and only 35 miles off of the coast, their large structures should not be visible from the New York coast and once built near Massachusetts, should only be barely visible from Martha’s Vineyard. This is the beginning of a rather long process: scientists will start to study and map out the ocean floor in this region to determine where and how each turbine will be securely anchored. Once planned out, the LIPA has to get both federal and state permits for construction, which should start by 2020, allowing for power to be transmitted by 2022. This approximately $740 million project holds great hope as an alternative energy source for many homes on the east coast.
Health
Recently, a team of biologists from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies of San Diego, CA successfully grew human stem cells in a pig embryo. This research provides great hope for the process, which generates stem cells directly from a patient’s skin and then transfers it to the animal, likely a pig, where the organ can then grow before harvested to be put back into the patient. An animal composed of two genomes, like in this case, is called a chimera. Because the organ is grown from the patient’s own cells, there is a much lower risk of infection, compared to other transplants. Another study from the University of Tokyo and Stanford studied the ability to reverse mice diabetes by growing mice pancreas glands in rats and transplanting them back into mice. With these successful results of chimeras in mice and pig embryos, researchers plan to repeat their experiment in full-grown pigs, since now there is potential for a larger scale to grow human organs.
Food
Who would have thought the classic tomato could make headlines? The University of Florida published research in Science to determine why the supermarket tomato is lacking in flavor, and how to fix this problem through genetics. By using classical genetics, they looked for which chemicals in a tomato are most important for taste. In the last 50 years, many tomatoes have lost good flavor because breeders didn’t have a tool to screen for flavor, created by sufficient sugars and some volatile chemicals. Scientists were able to identify the locations of good alleles in the tomato gene that give the specific traits, and then gene mapped the ones that control the production of important flavor chemicals. Finally, through genetic analysis, they replaced bad alleles in the modern tomato with better ones that are able to synthesize the chemicals needed to make the tomato taste better. But don’t get too excited yet. It will likely take up to four years to produce new varieties of tomatoes that contain these alleles to help them explode with their deliciously sweet flavor.
Psychology
A research team from the Zurich University Hospital for Psychiatry recently published their findings on the effects of LSD on perception of meaning, as a way to find and trace different meaningfulness neurochemicals and receptors in our brain. Through understanding of the human experience, an abstract research topic, the researchers hope that they can attempt to use more targeted drug treatments in treating different psychiatric illnesses. LSD is a psychedelic drug that alters the meaning and relevance to one’s environment and changes how the users see themselves. It has always been difficult to comprehend what part of the brain controls this. The first part of the research looked to confirm that the usual effects of LSD were seen as they modify consciousness, mood and anxiety. By using this information, brain imaging, and behavioral assessments, researchers were able to correlate the processing parts of the brain with the personal meaning and relevance. They determined that personal meaning and the effects from LSD are controlled by the 5-HT2A receptor and the cortical midline structures that are necessary for neural self-definition. These results may help us more concretely understand how we perceive our sense of self. Future research will look at how their findings correlate or change in patients with psychological disorders.
Politics
As of the end of January, in the first weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, the scientific world is seeing many changes and obstacles come their way. Climate change scientists are concerned about the future of the planet as Trump plans to move forward with an increase in fossil fuel productions in order to create more jobs. Additionally, he has been putting holds on data sharing, research grants and contracts for many scientific topics, especially climate change. While he has not said outright that he denies climate change, with minimal information about climate change plans on his website, and his only plan for the energy policy being fossil fuels, scientists are fearing a reverse in the progress made in the past years. Information about the EPA is also under scrutiny and although nothing has explicitly been finalized yet, scientists are also concerned about NIH funding cuts, which would have drastic impacts for federal research across the country. With Trump and many of his top officials voicing their opinions against many forms of valid science and research, scientists across the nation are in fear of what the next months of the presidency will have in store.
