Lanta Eco News

Non-continuous sleep, understood as fragmented sleep, can be linked to an increased risk of migraines unlike the duration of sleep itself and the low quality of general sleep. This was achieved by a group of researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center who published their study on Neurology.

The relationship between sleep and migraine, despite all previous studies, has never been fully understood. The researchers tried to fill this gap by conducting a prospective cohort study on 98 adults with episodic migraine characterized by less than 15 days a month with headaches. Survey participants had to complete electronic journals twice a day recording various details and information related to sleep, headaches and general health habits for six weeks.

In addition, other data came from a wrist device that more objectively captured their sleep patterns. The researchers also considered other factors that could trigger migraine headaches including daily caffeine intake, alcohol intake, physical activity levels, stress and others.

Eventually, the researchers found that the length of sleep, even for people who slept less than 6.5 hours a night, and the poor quality of sleep were not related to migraine the next day or even the day after. What seemed to be related to the increased risk of migraine was the fragmentation of sleep, regularly measured by researchers not only through the diaries compiled by participants but also through the wrist device.

Suzanne Bertisch, an experienced researcher in sleep and circadian disorders at the Brigham and author of the article, explains the results as follows: “Sleep is multidimensional and when we looked at some aspects of sleep, we found that low sleep efficiency, which is the amount of time you are awake in bed when you are trying to sleep, was associated with migraines not the next day, but the day after. However, we have not observed a relationship between the short duration of sleep at night (less than 6.5 hours) or the quality of sleep and the risk of migraines.”

The waters off California are showing a level of acidification twice as fast as the global ocean average. NOAA researchers have obtained this result by analyzing the small microscopic shells found in these areas, shells, and remains of microscopic animals called foraminifers.

They took about 2000 samples of these remains off the coast of Santa Barbara measuring how they have changed over the last 100 years. These shells, in fact, belong to small dead animals and fall to the ocean floor practically every day and are then immediately covered with sediment. The sediment layers themselves therefore represent a sort of vertical recording of climate and environmental changes, including the same level of water acidification.

Looking back in time and measuring the changes in shell thickness, the researchers have obtained an estimate, which they themselves define as “very accurate,” of the level of acidity in this marine area, as explained by Emily Osborne, a scientist who is working in the context of the Ocean Acidification Program and who describes this new technique in a statement that appeared on the site of NOAA itself.

This fossil documentation has shown a sort of cyclical pattern: although the increase in the acidity level of this marine area is quite clear from 1895 to the present day, there have been ten-year changes that have seen a rise or fall in the acidity level itself. According to researchers, these patterns are linked to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), a marine phenomenon that sees cooling and warming cycles. This phenomenon can guide and influence the acidification levels of the sea as, among other things, man can do with his carbon dioxide emissions.

“During the cold phases of the Pacific’s decadal oscillation, stronger winds across the ocean push upward the carbon dioxide rich waters to the surface along the west coast of the United States,” Osborne explains. “It’s like a double hammer that increases ocean acidification in this region of the world.”

Even if a planet is in the so-called “habitable zone,” it is not said that it can boast ideal conditions and not even sufficient for the existence of life because the star around which it revolves can “flood” it with periodic deadly radiation. What was a strong suspicion of astronomers and exobiologists was confirmed by a new study that appeared in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and conducted by Dimitra Atri, a scientist from the Center for Space Science Research at New York University.

The researcher confirmed, in his study, that planets can be subject and in general very sensitive to the so-called “flare,” real radiation explosions coming from the star that can put an end to practically any form of life (except perhaps to those that are used to frequent only underground). The only way for life to thrive even in the face of such radiation explosions is a sufficiently dense atmosphere or a good magnetic field, something that the Earth can boast of but which increasingly seem to be characteristics not typical of planets.

The researcher used data from 70 major radiation emission events from stars observed between 1956 and 2012. He then simulated on the computer the interaction of these “flares” with various types of exoplanetary atmospheres. The researcher came to the conclusion that these flares can massively increase the level of radiation on the planet’s surface interrupting the potentially inhabitable conditions and thus interfering with the possible existence of life itself.

The same simulation confirmed that atmospheric density and a possible magnetic field are the two main factors that can protect the planets’ surfaces from these violent jets of radiation. “As we continue to explore the planets of the solar system and beyond, finding out if these planets have the capacity to sustain life continues to be of immense importance,” reports Atri himself.

A new study warns about the link between urbanization and the climate of the Amazon rainforest, considered as the lung of the planet. The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that urban pollution from Manaus, the populous city in the state of Amazonas, Brazil, causes a sharp increase in aerosol formation in the nearby rainforest and this increase would be higher than previously estimated.

The increase in aerosols, estimated at 60% by scientists of the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, causes more clouds and rain and changes the levels of photosynthesis of plants. According to the researchers, these results “will make meteorological models more accurate and refine regional and global climate modeling.”

The aerosol is composed of countless tiny solid particles or liquid droplets suspended in the air. It is also naturally present because it is produced by forests (for example, it comes from the formation of pollen, ash or carbon particles from fires), but the “artificial” one is formed by the chemical reactions of the “natural” aerosol with volatile organic compounds (VOCs) or gaseous ones produced by human activities, primarily by the combustion of fossil fuels.

These reactions have a significant effect on the environment: a greater quantity of aerosols in the air means greater absorption of solar radiation and, among other things, a greater quantity of rain.

As Henrique Barbosa, one of the authors of the article, points out, “when levels of sulfur and nitrogen compounds from urban pollution accumulate in the atmosphere, biogenic vapors in the forest oxidize much more rapidly, forming many new aerosols – much more than they would if the process were purely natural.”

Facial recognition to monitor the faces of ICU patients? It is the idea that came to a group of researchers at the hospital of the University of Yokohama, Japan. The research, presented at the congress of the European Society of Anaesthesiology, provides a fully automated and computerized system through which it is possible to monitor and perhaps even predict the unsafe behavior of patients in intensive care.

Unsafe behavior can be considered, for example, as the accidental removal of the respiratory tube. According to the first tests, the system has a fairly high precision (75% according to the researchers). The monitoring is done by means of a camera mounted on the ceiling above the bed where the patient is hospitalized.

A special automatic learning algorithm was instructed by the researchers through hundreds of hours of recording collected during the first phase, an algorithm that then proved useful in recognizing high-risk behavior in the first tests. It is a system that could make up for cases of limited personnel or that could prove useful in all those cases in which the staff itself can not continuously, 24 hours a day, monitor unconscious patients.

“We were surprised by the high degree of accuracy achieved, which shows that this new technology has the potential to be a useful tool to improve patient safety and is the first step towards an intelligent ICU (intensive care unit) planned in our hospital,” says Akane Sato, one of the researchers involved in the project.