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Bad period pains linked to infertility
NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
IN BRIEF Giant galaxy supercluster found
Polar bear attacks on humans rising as climate changes CLIMATE change may be driving more aggressive polar bears to areas where people live, and the consequences could be lethal. With ice freezing later and thawing earlier, polar bears can’t stock up on seal meat for as long, leading hungry animals to search for food in populated areas. “You’ve got bears that are spending increasing amounts of time on land becoming nutritionally stressed, moving into areas of human settlements,” says Todd Atwood, a wildlife biologist at the US Geological Survey. Atwood’s team combed through 150 years of records of bear attacks in Canada, Greenland, Russia, the US and
Norway. They drew data from government agencies, news reports and, in the older cases, from ships’ logs. They found 73 cases of polar bears attacking groups or individuals, with 63 people injured and 20 killed. The bears were acting in a predatory manner in most cases, and hungry male bears were more often involved (Wildlife Society Bulletin, doi.org/b9m5). Over the 150 years, polar bear attacks averaged eight or nine per decade, Atwood says, but from 2010 to 2014 alone there were 15. “That does lead you to hypothesise that around 2000 we might have hit a shift in the kind of conditions in the Arctic.” Another study found 63 deaths from black bear attacks between 1900 and 2009 in North America alone. “Polar bear attacks are still relatively rare when you compare them to brown bear and black bear attacks,” says Atwood.
Bad period pains linked to infertility EXCRUCIATING period pain can be a sign of endometriosis. Now it seems the degree of pain may also be linked with fertility problems. Around 10 per cent of women have endometriosis, a poorly understood condition in which uterus cells turn up elsewhere in the body and bleed each month. Some women with the condition experience a little pain, but for others it can be much
worse. No one knows why the symptoms vary so much, says Mathilde Bourdon at Descartes University, Paris. To find out more, Bourdon’s team found 422 women with endometriosis who had been unable to conceive naturally after a year. When asked to score their pain on a scale of 1 to 10, 289 of them rated it as a 7 or higher. By looking at surgical reports,
the team found that those who reported worse pain had more extensive disease, with patches of endometriosis deeper in the body. Women who reported being in more pain also took significantly longer to get pregnant, and needed more surgery and more fertility treatment to do so. Bourdon presented the findings at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Geneva, Switzerland, earlier this month.
THINK big. No, much bigger. At over 650 million light years across, the Saraswati supercluster of galaxies is one of the largest structures in the universe. It is about 4 billion light years away – much more distant than other superclusters we’ve seen. It is made up of at least 43 galaxy groups and clusters that contain about 400 galaxies in total, giving it a combined mass 20 million billion times that of our sun. Joydeep Bagchi at Savitribai Phule Pune University in India and his colleagues discovered it using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a map of galaxies (arxiv.org/abs/1707.03082v1). As it was formed relatively early, it could help us probe the tiny fluctuations that later expanded to form the largest structures. “It’s like a geographer discovering a new, great mountain range,” says J. Richard Gott at Princeton University.
Ancient asteroids were big mudballs BEFORE asteroids, the solar system was awash with giant mudballs. Not much is known about the history of the most common asteroids, carbonaceous asteroids, which may have delivered water and organic molecules to Earth. Philip Bland at Curtin University in Australia and Bryan Travis at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona modelled the formation of these rocks and found when ice, dust and mineral grains came together, they wouldn’t have been compacted straight away (Science Advances, doi.org/b9p6). Radioactive atoms would have melted the ice, making a sludgy mud that became rock, perhaps aided by gravitational pressure once the asteroid got big enough, or impacts with other objects. 22 July 2017 | NewScientist | 17
IN BRIEF Giant galaxy supercluster found
Polar bear attacks on humans rising as climate changes CLIMATE change may be driving more aggressive polar bears to areas where people live, and the consequences could be lethal. With ice freezing later and thawing earlier, polar bears can’t stock up on seal meat for as long, leading hungry animals to search for food in populated areas. “You’ve got bears that are spending increasing amounts of time on land becoming nutritionally stressed, moving into areas of human settlements,” says Todd Atwood, a wildlife biologist at the US Geological Survey. Atwood’s team combed through 150 years of records of bear attacks in Canada, Greenland, Russia, the US and
Norway. They drew data from government agencies, news reports and, in the older cases, from ships’ logs. They found 73 cases of polar bears attacking groups or individuals, with 63 people injured and 20 killed. The bears were acting in a predatory manner in most cases, and hungry male bears were more often involved (Wildlife Society Bulletin, doi.org/b9m5). Over the 150 years, polar bear attacks averaged eight or nine per decade, Atwood says, but from 2010 to 2014 alone there were 15. “That does lead you to hypothesise that around 2000 we might have hit a shift in the kind of conditions in the Arctic.” Another study found 63 deaths from black bear attacks between 1900 and 2009 in North America alone. “Polar bear attacks are still relatively rare when you compare them to brown bear and black bear attacks,” says Atwood.
Bad period pains linked to infertility EXCRUCIATING period pain can be a sign of endometriosis. Now it seems the degree of pain may also be linked with fertility problems. Around 10 per cent of women have endometriosis, a poorly understood condition in which uterus cells turn up elsewhere in the body and bleed each month. Some women with the condition experience a little pain, but for others it can be much
worse. No one knows why the symptoms vary so much, says Mathilde Bourdon at Descartes University, Paris. To find out more, Bourdon’s team found 422 women with endometriosis who had been unable to conceive naturally after a year. When asked to score their pain on a scale of 1 to 10, 289 of them rated it as a 7 or higher. By looking at surgical reports,
the team found that those who reported worse pain had more extensive disease, with patches of endometriosis deeper in the body. Women who reported being in more pain also took significantly longer to get pregnant, and needed more surgery and more fertility treatment to do so. Bourdon presented the findings at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Geneva, Switzerland, earlier this month.
THINK big. No, much bigger. At over 650 million light years across, the Saraswati supercluster of galaxies is one of the largest structures in the universe. It is about 4 billion light years away – much more distant than other superclusters we’ve seen. It is made up of at least 43 galaxy groups and clusters that contain about 400 galaxies in total, giving it a combined mass 20 million billion times that of our sun. Joydeep Bagchi at Savitribai Phule Pune University in India and his colleagues discovered it using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a map of galaxies (arxiv.org/abs/1707.03082v1). As it was formed relatively early, it could help us probe the tiny fluctuations that later expanded to form the largest structures. “It’s like a geographer discovering a new, great mountain range,” says J. Richard Gott at Princeton University.
Ancient asteroids were big mudballs BEFORE asteroids, the solar system was awash with giant mudballs. Not much is known about the history of the most common asteroids, carbonaceous asteroids, which may have delivered water and organic molecules to Earth. Philip Bland at Curtin University in Australia and Bryan Travis at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona modelled the formation of these rocks and found when ice, dust and mineral grains came together, they wouldn’t have been compacted straight away (Science Advances, doi.org/b9p6). Radioactive atoms would have melted the ice, making a sludgy mud that became rock, perhaps aided by gravitational pressure once the asteroid got big enough, or impacts with other objects. 22 July 2017 | NewScientist | 17