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A new electronic stethoscope designed for NASA could deliver accurate heart and body sounds to medics assessing astronaut health in a noisy spacecraft.

Space itself is silent; the lack of air prevents sound transmission. But inside the average spacecraft, with its whirring fans, humming computers, and buzzing instruments, it’s about as raucous as a party filled with laughing, talking people.

The prototype of a stethoscope designed for use in the noisy environment of a spacecraft replaces familiar ear buds of a traditional stethoscope with noise canceling headphones. Acoustic tubing gives way to wire and the rubber-covered chest piece includes a suction cup to keep it motionless on the skin.

“Imagine trying to get a clear stethoscope signal in an environment like that, where the ambient noise contaminates the faint heart signal. That is the problem we set out to solve,” says Elyse Edwards, an engineering student at Johns Hopkins University who teamed up on the project with fellow seniors Noah Dennis and Shin Shin Cheng.

Full story at Futurity.

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Photo credit: Will Kirk

Workplace bullying is pervasive. A new study indicates that as many as half of all employees in the US have witnessed bullying at work, and 35 percent have been the target of bullying.

“Many bullies can be seen as charming and friendly, but they are highly destructive and can manipulate others into providing them with the resources they need to get ahead,” says the study’s co-author, Darren Treadway, associate professor of organization and human resources at the University at Buffalo School of Management.They use those skills to strategically abuse their coworkers, yet still receive positive evaluations from their supervisors, according to a recent study that is one of the first attempts to measure the relationship between being a bully and job performance.

It offers an initial explanation of why bullies thrive in the workplace despite organizational attempts to sanction bullying behaviors.

Full story at Futurity.

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Chemical changes in two genes reliably predict if a woman will develop postpartum depression.

A simple blood test foretelling depression after giving birth would give a woman and her doctors an opportunity to intervene before symptoms become debilitating.

“Postpartum depression can be harmful to both mother and child,” says study leader Zachary Kaminsky, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “But we don’t have a reliable way to screen for the condition before it causes harm, and a test like this could be that way.”

Full story at Futurity.

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Photo credit: Bridget Coila/Flickr

A new brain study reveals that the circadian clocks of people with depression are altered at the cellular level.

Every cell in our bodies runs on a 24-hour clock, tuned to the night-day, light-dark cycles that have ruled us since the dawn of humanity. The brain acts as timekeeper, keeping the cellular clock in sync with the outside world so that it can govern our appetites, sleep, moods, and much more.

But new research shows that the clock may be broken in the brains of people with depression—even at the level of the gene activity inside their brain cells.

“There really was a moment of discovery,” says Li,a research assistant professor in the department of computational medicine and bioinformatics at the University of Michigan. “It was when we realized that many of the genes that show 24-hour cycles in the normal individuals were well-known circadian rhythm genes—and when we saw that the people with depression were not synchronized to the usual solar day in terms of this gene activity. It’s as if they were living in a different time zone than the one they died in.”

Full story at Futurity.

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Photo credit: Jöshua Barnett/Flickr

Invasive “crazy ants” are displacing fire ants across the southeastern United States and may have dramatic effects on the region’s ecosystem, researchers say.

Unlike fire ants, crazy ants don’t consume most poison baits and don’t have the same kinds of colony boundaries. That means that even if they’re killed in a certain area, the supercolony survives and can swarm back over the area, says Ed LeBrun, a research associate with the invasive species research program at the University of Texas-Austin. “When you talk to folks who live in the invaded areas, they tell you they want their fire ants back.”

Full story with additional images and video at Futurity.

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Photo credit: Joe MacGown / Mississippi Entomological Museum

Kindergarten teachers say they spend most of their math instructional time teaching lessons students have already mastered, like shapes and basic counting. The findings reveal a misalignment between what the students are being taught and what they already know.

“This study is one of the first to raise the question: Is the content that teachers report teaching in kindergarten meeting the needs of the majority of their students?” says Mimi Engel, assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College and lead author of the study.

Full story and video at Futurity.

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The consequences of overfishing have led fisheries to rely on a handful of highly valuable shellfish—but new research shows this approach is extremely risky.

“Shellfish make a valuable contribution to our fisheries,” says Bryce Stewart, a marine ecologist and fisheries biologist at the University of York. “But we cannot just assume everything is rosy. There is an urgent need for continued improvements in management of finfish fisheries, and an ecosystem approach which rebuilds the diversity, resilience, and productivity of our oceans into the future.” Above, Prawns (otherwise known as scampi) are now the most valuable fisheries species in the UK, worth over £110 million in 2011.

Like simplified agricultural systems, these shellfisheries are unstable in the long-term and at great risk of collapse from disease, species invasions, and climate change. Warming and acidification of our oceans due to greenhouse gas emissions is expected to affect shellfish worst. Ocean acidification, in particular, will limit the ability of scallops and other shellfish to form proper shells, and lead to widespread mortality.

Full story at Futurity.

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Photo credit: Bryce Stewart

“The next Cascadia earthquake has the potential to be the biggest natural disaster that the United States will have to come to terms with—far bigger than Sandy or even Katrina,” says Benjamin Horton, associate professor and director of the Sea Level Research Laboratory in the department of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tiny fossils offer clues to a 1700 earthquake in the Pacific Northwest that was strong enough to cause a tsunami as far away as Japan. Through radiocarbon dating and an analysis of different species’ positions with the cores over time, the researchers were able to piece together a historical picture of the changes in land and sea level along the coastline. The research revealed how much the coast suddenly subsided during the earthquake, which infers how much the tectonic plates moved during the earthquake.

The Cascadia subduction zone is of particular interest to geologists and coastal managers because geological evidence points to recurring seismic activity along the fault line, with intervals between 300 and 500 years. With the last major event occurring in 1700, another earthquake could be on the horizon. A better understanding of how such an event might unfold has the potential to save lives.

Full story at Futurity.

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Photo credit: fickleandfreckled/Flickr

The African clawed frog, a species used around the world for biomedical research, is spreading an amphibian-killing fungus when they are released into the wild.

Researchers provide the first evidence that the frogs in California harbor a fungal infection that is decimating amphibian populations across the globe. Among 23 samples tested, the researchers identified three frogs, one found in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, that were carriers of the pathogen that has led to the decline or extinction of some 200 amphibian species worldwide.

The African clawed frog was first brought to the United States in the early 20th century for a somewhat unusual purpose: pregnancy testing. In the 1920s, it was discovered that injecting the frogs with urine from pregnant women would spur egg production in the animals. Hospitals then began routinely using the frogs to determine if female patients were pregnant.

The frogs, which Sherril Green, professor and chair of comparative medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine describes as “big, slimy, green, ugly things,” are predators and are carnivorous, devouring everything in their path, including their own species. They can grow as long as 7 inches and are extremely adaptable, often living a decade or more in the wild, where they have few local predators.

Full story at Futurity.

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Photo credit: Brian Gratwicke/Flickr

Researchers squeezed iron at pressures as high as 3 million times that felt at sea level to recreate conditions at Earth’s center. The results suggest the core is uneven, grainy, and weak.

“The strength of iron under these extreme pressures is startlingly weak,” says Arianna Gleason, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University.

The massive ball of iron sitting at the center of Earth is not quite as “rock-solid” as has been thought, say two mineral physicists. By conducting experiments that simulate the immense pressures deep in the planet’s interior, the researchers determined that iron in Earth’s inner core is only about 40 percent as strong as previous studies estimated.

Full story at Futurity.

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Photo credit: Ed Schipul/Flickr