This girl was born from three

Alana Saarinen is one of just a handful of people in the world who have DNA from three people, thanks to a new infertility treatment that could soon be available in the UK.

While Alana still considers herself to only have one mother and one father, she notes that she’s received a small amount of DNA from a third person. This DNA was contained in some donated mitochondria, which are cell structures that act like tiny factories, producing the energy the cells need to function.

According to Charlotte Pritchard at BBC News, Alana is one of just 30 to 50 people in the world who have received mitochondria - and therefore DNA - from a third person. "She was conceived through a pioneering infertility treatment in the US, which was later banned,” says Pritchard.

While Americans can no longer go through this process, the British Government is currently considering making a similar process, called 'mitochondrial replacement', legal in the UK, to try and eliminate a number of genetic diseases. If the motion passes through parliament, the UK will be the only country in the world where a baby can legally be born using the genetic material of three people. 

Alana's mum, Sharon Saarinen, tried for 10 years to concieve through IVF procedures, and when unsuccessful, went through a new procedure called 'cytoplasmic transfer' at the St Barnabus Institute in the US. The cytoplasm is a soft structure within a cell that contains mitochondria. "We felt that there was a chance that there was some element, some structure in the cytoplasm, that didn't function optimally. One of the major candidates that could have been involved here are structures called mitochondria,” said the clinical embryologist who performed the procedure, Jacques Cohen.

So Cohen transferred a donated cytoplasm to Sharon Saarinen's egg. This egg was then fertilised by her husband's sperm. "As a little bit of mitochondria was transferred, some DNA from the donor was in the embryo,” reports Pritchard at the BBC.

Seventeen babies were reported to be born at Cohen’s clinic using this procedure, including one that was miscarried and another that turned out to be twins. Cohen says that while the odds of one miscarriage occurring in this sample size reflected the rate seen in regular pregnancies, he did report his concerns. "This did worry us and we reported that in the literature and in our ethical and review board that oversees these procedures,” he told Pritchard. 

The decision from the British Government on the legality of mitochondrial replacement is expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

Neurons in our skin are performing advanced calculations

A new study has found that the neurons in our skin can complete advanced calculations that scientists thought only the brain was capable of performing.  

Researchers from Umeå University in Sweden have been studying a particular class of sensory neurons in the human tactile, or touch, system called 'first-order neurons' to discover that they possess some pretty incredible properties. 

These neurons branch through our skin to record the sensation of touch from many highly sensitive zones on our fingertips, and it’s now been revealed that they’re not just sending signals to the brain indicating that the skin has encountered some kind of object. It turns they’re also processing complex information about that object before they send a signal on to the brain. Once the signal has been received by neurons in the brain’s cerebral cortex region, further calculations are then completed.

And thanks to the densely branched structure of these neurons, they’re not only able to collect information from many different areas on the surface of the skin about when and how intensely an object is being touched, the particular arrangement in which they’re branched means they can also process all kinds of information about the object’s shape. 

"Perhaps the most surprising result of our study is that these peripheral neurons, which are engaged when a fingertip examines an object, perform the same type of calculations done by neurons in the cerebral cortex,” said one of the team, neuroscientist Andrew Pruszynski, in a press release. "Somewhat simplified, it means that our touch experiences are already processed by neurons in the skin before they reach the brain for further processing."

The team has reported their finding in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

While the research is cool enough on its own because it’s given us a deeper understanding of the incredibly complex work that’s going on inside us every single second, it also has the potential to improve treatments for nerve injury, says Eric Mack at Forbes, since it had been assumed up till now that the cerebral cortex was doing all the work on its own.

You can train your brain to prefer healthy foods

It might be possible to train your brain to prefer healthy foods over unhealthy, higher-calorie alternatives, according to new research.

A team from Tufts University and Massachusetts General Hospital in the US has performed a brain scan study on a group of adult men and women to find that it might be possible for us to ignore the addictive powers of junk food while also developing a preference for healthy foods.

“We don’t start out in life loving French fries and hating, for example, whole wheat pasta,” said lead researcher and professor of psychiatry Susan B. Roberts from the Tufts Energy Metabolism Laboratory in a press release. “This conditioning happens over time in response to eating - repeatedly! - what is out there in the toxic food environment.”

Previous studies have suggested that once you grow addicted to unhealthy foods, it can become extremely difficult to wean yourself off them, which makes it hard for people who have gained weight from a poor diet to change their habits. To investigate this, Roberts and her team studied the reward system in the brain of 13 overweight and obese men and women, eight of which were already trying to lose weight by following a dieting program that was specifically designed to stop them from getting hungry. They were instructed to get 25% of their energy from protein and fat and half from low-glycemic carbohydrates. The other five participants were not trying to lose weight, so acted as controls.

Their brains were studied via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans at the beginning of the study, and then six months later at the end. The team found that in the weight-loss group, there were changes in the areas of the brain’s reward centre that are associated with learning and addiction - they now had increased sensitively towards healthy, low-calorie foods, and decreased sensitivity towards unhealthy foods. This means when they ate healthy foods, they got greater enjoyment than when they were eating unhealthy foods.

The team reported their findings in the journal Nutrition & Diabetes.

“The weight loss program is specifically designed to change how people react to different foods, and our study shows those who participated in it had an increased desire for healthier foods along with a decreased preference for unhealthy foods, the combined effects of which are probably critical for sustainable weight control,” said one of the team Sai Krupa Das, also from the Energy Metabolism Laboratory. “To the best of our knowledge this is the first demonstration of this important switch.”

The team acknowledges that the sample size is very small, and the study was only conducted over six months, but they say their findings suggest that it might be possible to recondition our brains to crave healthy foods rather than unhealthy foods. “Our study shows those who participated in it had an increased desire for healthier foods along with a decreased preference for unhealthy foods,” said Krupa Das in the press release, “the combined effects of which are probably critical for sustainable weight control.”

WATCH: Ants use undocumented ‘daisy-chaining’ technique to haul food

A new insect behaviour has been revealed in which rows of ants link to each other, mandible-to-abdomen, to haul some heavy food away. Even the world’s most eminent ant experts are amazed.

Belonging to the very large and global Leptogenys genus in the Ponerinae subfamily, the ants seem to be performing a behaviour that has only been recorded in this and a similar video, which we’ve posted below. While explicit descriptions are yet to be published in the scientific literature, Alex Wild, a US-based photographer and research scientist specialising in insects, points to a few possibilities at his blog, Myrmecos:

"I have spent the morning searching the technical literature for mention of this unusual behaviour, and am coming up empty. Some Leptogenys species, including L. diminuta, L. nitida, and L. processionalis, are known to forage in groups and transport prey “cooperatively” (source, source). What is meant by “cooperative” is often vague. Yet I didn’t find any explicit description of workers linking up, mandible to abdomen, to pull together."

Eminent ant expert and ecologist, Christian Peeters from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France wrote to Wild to say he’d observed this behaviour four years ago in Cambodia with his colleague Stéphane De Greef. Also belonging to the Leptogenys genus, Peeters’s ants were seen forming lines by locking their mandibles to the preceding ant’s gaster, which is a part of the body that sits between the ant’s first and second segment. Together these 16-mm-long ants were pulling millipedes that were around 130 mm long.

"Back then I reviewed the literature and found no other record of chain behaviour in Ponerinae. No record of millipede predation in Leptogenysm,” Peeters told Wild at Myrmecos. "I started writing a manuscript on this behaviour ... but sadly I have not been able to get further observations. It seems to happen at certain times of the year only."

Here's another video of the behaviour. We reckon that just about anyone would team up to achieve a common goal if they were backed by this soundtrack:

Serotonin may not play major role in depression, new evidence suggests

New research in mice throws into question the long-standing belief that serotonin deficiency plays a key role in depression.

A study by scientists in the US has cast doubt on the belief that a deficiency in serotonin, a chemical messenger in the brain, is a major trigger for depression.

The team from the John D. Dingell VA Medical Centre and Wayne State University School of Medicine in Michigan developed mice that lacked the ability to produce serotonin in their brains, and found they did NOT show signs of depression-like symptoms.

The results are published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience, and suggest that the majority of today’s antidepressants, which target serotonin, may not be as effective as we had hoped. 

According to the World Health Organisation, depression is the leading cause of disability across the globe, affecting more than 350 million people worldwide. Back in the late 1980s, the antidepressant Prozac was developed, which works mainly by increasing the amount of serotonin in the brain. It seemed to be effective, and so other depression treatments that acted on serotonin began to flood the market. However, scientists know that 60 to 70 percent of patients taking such drugs continue to feel depressed. 

The team, led by Donald Kuhn, decided to investigate whether serotonin was as involved in the disorder as we expect - if at all.

To do this, they developed “knockout” mice that didn’t have the ability to make serotonin in their brains. According to the current dogma, these mice should have been depressed. But while the mice were compulsive and aggressive, they didn't show signs of depression-like symptoms, the researchers report.

After running a range of behavioural tests, the scientists found that when the knockout mice were put under stress, they behaved in the same way as most normal mice. Most of them also responded to antidepressant medications in a similar way to normal mice.

A press release explains: “These findings further suggest that serotonin is not a major player in the condition, and different factors must be involved.”

The authors conclude in their paper that this research could dramatically alter the creation of antidepressants in the future.

If this research is verified, it could turn out to be quite embarrassing - especially when this seems like it should have been one of the first studies done before the development of antidepressants. But mostly it’s great news, as it’ll give scientists a better indication than ever before of where we should be targeting antidepressant treatments.

WATCH: Tiny crustaceans foil fish with fireworks

Why do these fish look like they’re spouting puffs of magic dust out of their mouths? Two words: defence mechanism. And not for the fish.

These little translucent fish belong to the cardinalfish family (Apogonidae), found all over the world in tropical or subtropical waters. Like most fish, they’re wired to eat anything that’s smaller than them, which means when a tiny, 1 millimetre-long crustacean called an ostracod, floats past, they’re likely to become a cardinalfish meal.

Except that ostracods have an awesome defence mechanism that stands between them and the stomach of a cardinalfish. Seen on a new BBC documentary called Super Senses, when an ostracod is pulled into the mouth of a cardinalfish, it will immediately release a brilliant bioluminescent chemical that lights up the fish from the inside. This means the fish is now exposed and vulnerable to predation itself, so it spits out the ostracod light source and scurries off. 

99 percent of Sweden’s waste is now reused

Sweden is so efficient at managing waste they’re now importing garbage from other European countries.

Swedes generally waste as much as people in other countries, around 461 kilograms per person each year - but only one percent of that is ending up in landfill, thanks to the country’s innovative “recycling” program.

While the Scandinavian country focusses primarily on reducing waste and reusing and recycling items, it has an important extra step in the waste cycle - it burns half its rubbish to generate energy.

The country has 32 waste-to-energy (WTE) plants, where waste is incinerated to produce steam, which is then used to turn generator turbines and produce electricity. Across Sweden, WTE plants provide almost one million homes with heating, and 260,000 with electricity, Zi-Ann Lum reports for the Huffington Post Canada.

This not only cuts down on the amount of waste that ends up in landfills, it also helps reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuels.

“A good number to remember is that three tonnes of waste contains as much energy as one tonne of fuel oil … so there is a lot of energy in waste,” Göran Skoglund, spokesperson for Öresundskraft, one of the country’s leading energy companies, explains in the video below.

Each year, more than two million tonnes of trash is burnt in Sweden, which means it’s producing approximately 670,000 tonnes worth of fuel oil energy.

To keep up the demand of its WTE plants, Sweden is now even buying waste from the UK, Italy, Norway and Ireland.

However, it’s not a perfect solution - there is plenty of controversy surrounding the burning of garbage. Critics are concerned that the process is counteracting any positive affects by sending more toxins into the atmosphere. The WTE process produces filter ash and flue gas, both byproducts that contain dioxins, and environmental pollutant.

But Sweden has heavily regulated their WTE plants to reduce emissions and according to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, the introduction of flue-glad cleaning has reduced airborne dioxins produced to “very small amounts”.

There are still some objects, however, that can’t be incinerated safely - any goods that contain porcelain, insulation, asbestos, tiles and other construction debris have to be dumped into landfill.

And although it’s a good solution, an even better one is to reduce waste altogether. “The world needs to produce less waste,” Skoglund told the Huffington Post.

Watch the video below to find out more about how Sweden uses its waste:

Australian court upholds breast cancer gene patent

An appeal to stop gene mutations associated with breast cancer being patented has failed.

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The Federal Court of Australia in Sydney ruled on 5 September that gene mutations can be patented. 

Myriad Genetics has succeeded in obtaining exclusive rights to sell and detect a number of mutations in the BRCA1 gene, which can determine the risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

The court ruled that a naturally occurring gene could be patented as long as human intervention had created a significant “artificial state of affairs” by isolating the gene from the human body.

The company filed the patent in 1994 but it was contested by patient advocacy group Cancer Voices Australia. 

The case concluded in February 2014 but the appeal process was only completed last week when Justice John Nicholas ruled that, although the mutated gene was exactly the same inside and outside the body, the artificial context gave the company grounds to patent the gene. 

The five judges on the appeal panel disagreed with Justice Nicholas’ reasoning but upheld his judgment, saying, "The chemical and physical makeup of the isolated nucleic acid renders it not only artificial but also different from its natural counterpart."

This judgment goes against a recent US court decision, which stated that naturally occurring genes could not be patented because they were a “product of nature”. 

The appeal was in response to widespread public concern that patenting gene mutations could prevent the development of life-saving diagnostics and cures.