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Diminutive ancestor of all apes
in Brief
ARCTIC IMAGES / Alamy Stock Photo
IT’S the stuff of nightmares: a drop in cabin pressure on board your flight. The sudden decrease in oxygen leads to hypoxia, causing passengers and pilots to pass out. Now nervous flyers can breathe easier, thanks to a new device that warns pilots of the condition. Although rare, sudden pressure drops do occasionally affect flights. An event like this was thought to have caused a plane crash in Greece in 2005, killing everyone on board. Planes have oxygen-monitoring sensors, but that may not help if hypoxia has already started to affect a crew’s flying ability. Now a team from WrightPatterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, has developed a real-time sensor to warn pilots of hypoxia. The sensor measures chemicals in exhaled breath called volatile organic compounds. By testing the sensor on volunteers during a simulation in which oxygen levels were cut, the team identified a VOC set that signalled the onset of hypoxia (Journal of Breath Research, doi.org/8vn). The team aims to incorporate this technology into military aircrew masks to continuously assess pilot safety, says team leader Claude Grigsby. He says that biomarkers in breath could be used to monitor other aspects of health, such as fatigue, in commercial pilots too.
18 | NewScientist | 7 November 2015
Feeling unwell, and lost your sense of smell? YOUR sense of smell might be more important than you think. It could indicate how well your immune system is functioning, a study in mice suggests. Evidence of a connection between the immune system and the olfactory system – used for sense of smell – has been building for some time. For instance, women seem to prefer the scent of men with different immune system genes to their own. Fulvio D’Acquisto at Queen Mary University of London and his colleagues studied mice
missing a recombinant activating gene (RAG), which controls the development of immune cells. Without it, mice lack a working immune system and some genes are expressed differently, including those involved in the olfactory system. “That rang bells, because people with immune deficiencies often lose their sense of smell,” says D’Acquisto. His team measured how long it took mice to find chocolate chip cookies buried in their cages. Those missing RAG took five times as long as normal mice, and
failed to respond to other scents. Further study uncovered abnormalities in the lining of their noses (Frontiers in Neuroscience, doi.org/8vm). D’Acquisto suspects olfactory cell survival might hinge on the presence of some factor released by immune cells. There could be an evolutionary benefit: “If you have a problem with the immune system, it would be a good idea to avoid exposing yourself to danger,” D’Acquisto says. “Not smelling properly could encourage you to stay still.” NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT/D. Finkbeiner et al.
Breath sensor keeps pilots alert
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Diminutive ancestor of all apes DID great apes start small? A fossil primate found in Spain suggests the last common ancestor of great apes and gibbons might have been a lot daintier than we thought. It had been assumed that our common ancestor was probably like Proconsul, which weighed about the same as a chimpanzee and lived in East Africa 23 million years ago. But David Alba at the Catalan Institute of Palaeontology in Barcelona, Spain, and his team believe that the new find, Pliobates cataloniae, is evolutionarily closer to our split from gibbons. The animal lived 11.6 million years ago and would have had a body mass of about 5 kilograms, roughly the same as a modern gibbon (Science, doi.org/8vp). But the partial fossil’s strange mix of features means not everyone is convinced. “For one thing, the elbow is just too primitive,” says Brenda Benefit at the New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. As well as lacking the bony elbow ridge that we share with gibbons, P. cataloniae also has a bony ear canal – a feature only seen before in a different, extinct group of primates.
Dark matter ‘smoking gun’ fizzles HINTS that dark matter is crashing and burning in the centre of the Milky Way might themselves be going up in smoke. An unexpectedly bright gammaray glow was first spotted at the centre of our galaxy in 2010, in data from the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. Physicists interpreted it as the debris from particles of mysterious dark matter – thought to make up most of the stuff in the universe – crashing together and annihilating each other. But this year, two teams found thousands of previously unnoticed
pulsars – corpses of dead stars – that could account for the brightness. If the signal is down to dark matter it should be seen in other galaxies, such as dwarf galaxies. But when Kevork Abazajian at the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues analysed data from nearby dwarf galaxies, they found no such signal (arxiv.org/abs/1510.06424). “If the dwarf limits were this strong in 2010-12 when we first started working on the dark matter interpretation of the galactic centre excess, we may have not taken it as seriously,” he says.
ARCTIC IMAGES / Alamy Stock Photo
IT’S the stuff of nightmares: a drop in cabin pressure on board your flight. The sudden decrease in oxygen leads to hypoxia, causing passengers and pilots to pass out. Now nervous flyers can breathe easier, thanks to a new device that warns pilots of the condition. Although rare, sudden pressure drops do occasionally affect flights. An event like this was thought to have caused a plane crash in Greece in 2005, killing everyone on board. Planes have oxygen-monitoring sensors, but that may not help if hypoxia has already started to affect a crew’s flying ability. Now a team from WrightPatterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, has developed a real-time sensor to warn pilots of hypoxia. The sensor measures chemicals in exhaled breath called volatile organic compounds. By testing the sensor on volunteers during a simulation in which oxygen levels were cut, the team identified a VOC set that signalled the onset of hypoxia (Journal of Breath Research, doi.org/8vn). The team aims to incorporate this technology into military aircrew masks to continuously assess pilot safety, says team leader Claude Grigsby. He says that biomarkers in breath could be used to monitor other aspects of health, such as fatigue, in commercial pilots too.
18 | NewScientist | 7 November 2015
Feeling unwell, and lost your sense of smell? YOUR sense of smell might be more important than you think. It could indicate how well your immune system is functioning, a study in mice suggests. Evidence of a connection between the immune system and the olfactory system – used for sense of smell – has been building for some time. For instance, women seem to prefer the scent of men with different immune system genes to their own. Fulvio D’Acquisto at Queen Mary University of London and his colleagues studied mice
missing a recombinant activating gene (RAG), which controls the development of immune cells. Without it, mice lack a working immune system and some genes are expressed differently, including those involved in the olfactory system. “That rang bells, because people with immune deficiencies often lose their sense of smell,” says D’Acquisto. His team measured how long it took mice to find chocolate chip cookies buried in their cages. Those missing RAG took five times as long as normal mice, and
failed to respond to other scents. Further study uncovered abnormalities in the lining of their noses (Frontiers in Neuroscience, doi.org/8vm). D’Acquisto suspects olfactory cell survival might hinge on the presence of some factor released by immune cells. There could be an evolutionary benefit: “If you have a problem with the immune system, it would be a good idea to avoid exposing yourself to danger,” D’Acquisto says. “Not smelling properly could encourage you to stay still.” NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT/D. Finkbeiner et al.
Breath sensor keeps pilots alert
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
Diminutive ancestor of all apes DID great apes start small? A fossil primate found in Spain suggests the last common ancestor of great apes and gibbons might have been a lot daintier than we thought. It had been assumed that our common ancestor was probably like Proconsul, which weighed about the same as a chimpanzee and lived in East Africa 23 million years ago. But David Alba at the Catalan Institute of Palaeontology in Barcelona, Spain, and his team believe that the new find, Pliobates cataloniae, is evolutionarily closer to our split from gibbons. The animal lived 11.6 million years ago and would have had a body mass of about 5 kilograms, roughly the same as a modern gibbon (Science, doi.org/8vp). But the partial fossil’s strange mix of features means not everyone is convinced. “For one thing, the elbow is just too primitive,” says Brenda Benefit at the New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. As well as lacking the bony elbow ridge that we share with gibbons, P. cataloniae also has a bony ear canal – a feature only seen before in a different, extinct group of primates.
Dark matter ‘smoking gun’ fizzles HINTS that dark matter is crashing and burning in the centre of the Milky Way might themselves be going up in smoke. An unexpectedly bright gammaray glow was first spotted at the centre of our galaxy in 2010, in data from the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. Physicists interpreted it as the debris from particles of mysterious dark matter – thought to make up most of the stuff in the universe – crashing together and annihilating each other. But this year, two teams found thousands of previously unnoticed
pulsars – corpses of dead stars – that could account for the brightness. If the signal is down to dark matter it should be seen in other galaxies, such as dwarf galaxies. But when Kevork Abazajian at the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues analysed data from nearby dwarf galaxies, they found no such signal (arxiv.org/abs/1510.06424). “If the dwarf limits were this strong in 2010-12 when we first started working on the dark matter interpretation of the galactic centre excess, we may have not taken it as seriously,” he says.