Science

Awarded in 1962 for shared discovery of double-helix structure of DNA

A Nobel Prize medal awarded to a scientist in 1962 for the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA was said to set a new record for one of the honors at an auction on Thursday.

Though Christie’s in Manhattan set the estimated haul for James D. Watson’s prize between $2.5 and $3.5 million, an anonymous bidder bought it for $4.1 million, the New York Times reports. The total rose to $4.76 million due to the buyer’s premium, which goes to the auction house. Watson, who watched from the back of the room with family members, acknowledged plans to give a portion of the proceeds to the various schools he attended to “support and empower scientific discovery.”

MORE: The Mortification of James Watson

The gifts may help rehabilitate Watson’s image. Though he made the discovery for which he won the prize at 24, the 86-year-old became persona non grata in the scientific community seven years ago when he told The Sunday Times of London that he was pessimistic about making advancements in Africa because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really.” He later apologized, saying, “There is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

Jack Wang, a chief executive of a Chinese biotech company, bought the medal that belonged to one of Watson’s partners in his discovery, Francis Crick, for $2.27 million last year.

[NYT]

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The scariest diseases plaguing the animal kingdom

When we talk about studying, controlling, or just plain worrying about pandemics, we usually think of our own, human diseases. But many other species face existential threats as well. In the wild and on the farm, through climate change, human agency, and other causes, deadly diseases and conditions are ravaging specific animal communities. Here are eight of the scariest diseases plaguing the animal kingdom today.

Plague: White-nose syndrome

Target: Bats

This disease is named for the characteristic fuzzy white bloom found on the muzzles (as well as the wings and ears) of hibernating bats infected with the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans. The fungus seems to have originated in Europe, where it does not harm the native bats. Since it was first documented in New York in 2006, white-nose syndrome has killed an estimated 6.7 million bats in 25 U.S. states and 5 Canadian provinces. Scientists believe bats primarily contract the disease from one another, though it’s also possible bats can pick up spores from contaminated cave surfaces. Some human cave explorers may also transport fungal spores in their clothing and equipment. There’s no known cure, and the disease is incredibly deadly, usually killing between 70 and 90 percent of bats in a hibernating group; scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how the fungus kills bats, and why European bats seem to be immune.

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Plague: Canine distemper virus

Target: Tigers (and dogs, and other canines)

The virus that causes canine distemper is related to measles. It spreads through respiration, but quickly attacks the nervous system and gastrointestinal tract. The virus can also jump to big cats, and is cropping up in tiger populations across the world. In just five years, one population of tigers in Russia dropped from 38 individuals to 9; traces of CDV found in two dead tigers led scientists to finger the virus as the chief suspect in the population crash.

A recent study highlights how smaller populations of tigers are extremely vulnerable to CDV. Tigers are not abundant enough to act as reservoirs for the virus, so researchers think the key to preventing CDV from spreading amongst them is to target the canine species that are the sources of outbreaks. India is contemplating a massive dog vaccination campaign against the virus; the drive is already underway in villages near tiger reserves.

Plague: Starfish wasting disease

Target: Starfish

Over the past 40 years, starfish populations have been stricken by recurring outbreaks of a devastating condition. At first, a starfish’s limbs start to curl, then twist and fall off. Eventually, the wasting disease ravages the entire starfish, turning it into a mushy goo.

Researchers previously blamed this “starfish wasting disease” on environmental changes, like pollution or fluctuations in ocean temperatures. But a new study pins the blame primarily on a type of waterborne virus called a densovirus. One of the chief lines of evidence to support this theory was the fact that captive starfish in aquariums suddenly contracted the disease—except for those starfish in aquariums filled with UV-treated water, which kills viruses. The researchers also found higher genetic traces of the virus in diseased starfish tissue, and found that healthy starfish infected with densovirus would develop the disease within a week or so.

WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL: Can Animals Go Insane?

Plague: Brucellosis

Target: Bison, cow, elk

The bacterial disease brucellosis causes a wide range of symptoms in animals, from arthritis to inflamed joints to reproductive trouble. It can also spread to people via unpasteurized dairy products, causing fever and flu-like symptoms as well as arthritis. While brucellosis has largely been eradicated from cattle in the U.S., the disease persists in the bison and elk of Yellowstone National Park. Fears that the wild animals could reintroduce brucellosis to nearby cattle have been bolstered by 17 documented transmissions of the disease from wildlife to livestock in the greater Yellowstone area from 2002 to 2012. Despite protests from conservation groups, park officials are planning to cull up to 900 bison from the herd this winter to stem the spread of brucellosis and stabilize the population.

Plague: Colony collapse disorder

Target: Honeybees

Starting in 2006, beekeepers in the U.S. began to notice what looked like a honeybee version of the Rapture: At once, most or all of the adult worker bees in the colony vanished without a trace, leaving behind empty hives and queen bees bereft of subjects. Colony collapse disorder, as the phenomenon came to be known, is not entirely new to beekeeping, but the magnitude of losses is unprecedented. The root cause of CCD is still unknown: Pesticides, viruses, mites, fungi, antibiotics and other factors have all been proposed.

Most scientists think CCD is prompted by a combination of factors, and that it may not directly kill the bees outright. University of Maryland bee expert Dennis van Engelsdorp explained, in National Geographic: “You don’t die of AIDS; you die of pneumonia or some other condition that hits when your immunity is down. Once the bees’ immune defenses have been weakened, “we’re pretty sure in all these cases, diseases are the tipping point.” Hive losses are still being felt across the country, but the rate of collapse seems to be slowing. According to the USDA, the loss rate in honeybee colonies nationwide over the 2013-2014 winter from all causes was 23.2 percent—still above what beekeepers consider sustainable, but less dire than the 30.5 percent losses of the 2012-13 winter, or the 8-year average annual loss of 29.6 percent.

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Plague: Rabies

Target: Bats, monkeys, dogs, raccoons, foxes…and a lot more

Rabies is present on all the continents of the world except Antarctica. The virus, transmitted through the saliva of an infected animal or person, travels through the nerves up to the brain, where it undoes an animal’s ability to regulate its own heartbeat, breathing, and salivation. Most victims die from respiratory failure or irregular heart rhythms.

In the U.S., vaccination drives for pets have caused the disease has to move from one primarily of domestic animals to one primarily found in wildlife, which represent 90 percent of all animal rabies cases reported to the CDC. Most mammals can contract rabies, but the primary source of human rabies transmission in the U.S. these days is bats, with raccoons and skunks the most frequently reported rabid animals.

To prevent the spread of rabies, health and wildlife departments in many Eastern U.S. states entice animals to consume oral rabies vaccine by concealing doses in a coating of dog food or fishmeal. The bait is deposited by hand in urban and suburban areas and dropped from planes in rural areas.

Plague: Chytridiomycosis

Target: Frogs

Around 200 amphibian species have declined or gone extinct thanks to this rapidly-spreading fungal disease. The chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis infects the cells of a frog’s outer layer of skin, which they rely heavily on for respiration. The infected skin becomes thicker, impeding the frog’s ability to absorb water and electrolytes through its skin, and eventually leading to cardiac arrest.

Various treatments are being investigated for chytridiomycosis, including incubating tadpoles in warmer water that kills the fungus and bathing adult frogs in antifungal treatments. While these methods show promise, it is still possible for the frogs to get re-infected out in the wild.

Plague: Cattle fever

Target: Cows, deer

The U.S. government employs a cadre of cowboys to ride the banks of the Rio Grande in order to stop the spread of ticks that cause cattle fever. Parasites transmitted by the ticks can kill a cow within days of the first symptoms, or can cause a wasting disease that can last for weeks and cut a steer’s weight by 20 percent in just a year. A nationwide tick eradication program has largely pushed cattle fever out of U.S. borders, but the “tick rider” cowboys still patrol the borders to catch any stray Mexican cattle—often abandoned by ranchers fleeing drug war violence—that might spark an outbreak.

Wildlife are another possible source of cattle fever, as both white-tailed deer and the imported nilgai antelope can also carry the ticks. Climate change may make the southern U.S. an even more hospitable environment for the ticks, as well as the spread of invasive reeds that shelter the bugs. Scientists are working on ways to combat the reeds, the ticks, and the cattle fever parasite—including a wildlife vaccine distributed in biscuit form.

This article originally appeared on World Science Festival.

Debunking the "Mean Girls" myth

Move over, Mean Girls. It turns out that boys might actually the crueler ones.

A new study from the University of Georgia (UGA) published in the journal Aggressive Behavior reveals that when it comes to being mean to your peers, it’s not girls who rule the school, but boys.

It has long been speculated by social researchers that boys are more physically aggressive while girls are more relationally aggressive. To put that in middle-school terms: boys are more likely to shove you into a locker, while girls are more apt to spread a rumor that you didn’t wear deodorant to gym class. Relationally aggressive behavior is the stuff that Mean Girls is made of — malicious rumors, social exclusion and rejection — and it turns out that boys are pretty good at it too.

In fact, as researchers followed a group of boys and girls from middle school to high school, they found that, at every grade level, boys engaged in so-called relationally aggressive behavior more often than girls. The boys were also more physically aggressive than the girls, which leads to an interesting side note: the study seems to have scientifically proved what many have known to be true — middle school ain’t fun. The UGA study shows that the highest levels of physical and relational aggression are present in students from sixth through eighth grade, with all levels of aggression declining throughout high school before reaching a low during senior year. In short, aggressive behavior is at its worst in middle school, but it gets better.

Pamela Orpinas, a professor of health promotion and behavior in the College of Public Health at UGA, led the study and analyzed data collected from 620 students randomly selected from six northeast Georgia school districts. Student participants completed yearly surveys, which allowed the UGA researchers to identify and group them in distinct trajectories for relational aggression and victimization as they progressed from Grade Six to 12 trusting the students to self-report both physically and relationally aggressive behavior and victimization.

“Overall, we found relational aggression to be a very common behavior,” says Orpinas, who notes in an interview with TIME that for the most part, middle school and high school age children are not particularly aggressive, even if they may make snide comments about a classmate at some point. “Almost all of the students surveyed, 96%, had passed a rumor or made a nasty comment about someone over the course of the seven-year study.” Her study revealed that a majority (54%) of the students were unlikely to be perpetrators of relationally aggressive behavior and only 6.5% were ranked “high” as likely perpetrators. Among those students who were perpetrators of violence, the study found that boys were more likely to be both moderate perpetrators (boys 55%, girls 45%) and high perpetrators (boys 66.7%, girls 33.3%) of relationally aggressive behavior.

Still, the study has its limitations: it’s based on a relatively small sample size of students from Georgia schools, rather than looking at a nationally representative sample. Orpinas notes there’s little research on mean boys so far, but hopes to look more closely at the phenomenon in the future. For now, with the “mean girls” myth dispelled, she recommends boys be included in the same school-based programs that have traditionally been used to keep girls from being mean to each other. And maybe that Mean Girls sequel should be called Mean Boys, which would be so fetch.

For more parenting stories and advice on raising a child in today’s world, check out the new TIME for Family subscription.

The explorer will hide behind the asteroid during the blast and will then try to collect material from inside the crater

(TOKYO) — A Japanese space explorer took off Wednesday on a six-year journey to blow a crater in a remote asteroid and bring back rock samples in hopes of gathering clues to the origin of earth.

The explorer, named Hayabusa2, is expected to reach the asteroid in mid-2018, spend about 18 months studying it and return in late 2020.

A small device will separate from the explorer and shoot a projectile to blast open a crater a few meters (several feet) in diameter. The explorer, which will hide behind the asteroid during the blast, will then try to collect material from inside the crater.

Asteroids can provide evidence not available on earth about the birth of the solar system and its evolution. JAXA, Japan’s space agency, said the research could help explain the origin of seawater and how the planet earth was formed.

Hayabusa2 will attempt to expand on the work of Hayabusa, a previous explorer that returned in 2010 after collecting material from the surface of another asteroid. By reaching inside an asteroid this time, the new explorer may recover material that is not as weathered by the space environment and heat.

The earlier mission was plagued by mechanical failures and other problems. JAXA hopes improvements since then will make this trip smoother.

“The mission was completed one way or another, but we stumbled along the way,” said Akitaka Kishi from JAXA’s lunar and planetary exploration program. “To travel there and bring back something is extremely difficult.”

Hayabusa2, which was launched from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, is a rectangular unit with two sets of solar panels sticking out from its sides. The main unit measures 1 x 1.6 x 1.4 meters (3.3 x 5.2 x 4.6 feet) and weighs about 600 kilograms (1,300 pounds).

Freud, the youngest child of "father of psychoanalysis" Sigmund Freud, pioneered the field of child psychology

Google’s latest Doodle celebrates the 119th anniversary of the birth of Anna Freud, whom TIME once referred to as “that pioneering lady of psychoanalysis.”

She was the youngest child of Sigmund Freud, the modern day architect of psychoanalysis, and the only one of his six children to follow in his footsteps.

Born in Vienna in 1895, Freud’s tryst with psychology began at the early age of 13, when she would take part in her father’s weekly discussions on psychoanalytic ideas.

She went on to become one of the founders of the field of child psychoanalysis, having been drawn to it when she taught at an elementary school in the early 1900s.

The Freud family fled Austria during the Nazi occupation in 1938 out of fear of persecution, and emigrated to London where Anna established the Hampstead War Nurseries for children rendered homeless during World War II. She applied her training and knowledge to the children at the institution, which was renamed the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic after being granted charity status in 1952.

Following her death in 1982, it was renamed the Anna Freud Centre and continues to be one of the major global institutions for the mental health of young children.

According to a new analysis by NASA and researchers in California

The fastest-melting region of Antarctica is doing so at a rate triple that of a decade ago, according to a new analysis, making it the largest area contributor to the rise in sea level.

The findings of the 21-year study by scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine offer the most precise estimates yet of just how fast glaciers in West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea Embayment are melting. Scientists determined the rate by taking several radar, laser and satellite measurements of the glaciers’ mass to measure changes over time; between 1992 and 2013, they lost an average of 91.5 billion U.S. tons per year, or what they calculated as the equivalent of losing the water weight of Mt. Everest every two years.

“We have an excellent observing network now,” Isabella Velicogna, a co-author of the study, said in the statement. “It’s critical that we maintain this network to continue monitoring the changes, because the changes are proceeding very fast.”

The findings will provide a greater understanding of glaciers and ice sheets, which the researchers labeled the biggest uncertainties in predicting future sea levels. Previous studies have also examined Greenland, where NASA scientists have witnessed for years “unprecedented” melting of its ice sheet surfaces.