Type 2 diabetes and prion disease seem like an odd couple, but they have something in common: clumps of misfolded, damaging proteins.

Now new research finds that a dose of corrupted pancreas proteins induces normal ones to misfold and clump. This raises the possibility that, like prion disease, type 2 diabetes could be triggered by these deformed proteins spreading between cells or even individuals, the researchers say.

When the deformed pancreas proteins were injected into mice without type 2 diabetes, the animals developed symptoms of the disease, including overly high blood sugar levels, the researchers report online August 1 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.
“It is interesting, albeit not super-surprising” that the deformed proteins could jump-start the process in other mice, says Bruce Verchere, a diabetes researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. But “before you could say anything about transmissibility of type 2 diabetes, there’s a lot more that needs to be done.”

Beta cells in the pancreas make the glucose-regulating hormone insulin. The cells also produce a hormone called islet amyloid polypeptide, or IAPP. This protein can clump together and damage cells, although how it first goes bad is not clear. The vast majority of people with type 2 diabetes accumulate deposits of misfolded IAPP in the pancreas, and the clumps are implicated in the death of beta cells.

Deposits of misfolded proteins are a hallmark of such neurodegenerative diseases as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s as well as prion disorders like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (SN: 10/17/15, p. 12).

Since IAPP misfolds like a prion protein, neurologist Claudio Soto of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and his colleagues wondered if type 2 diabetes could be transmitted between cells, or even between individuals. With this paper, his group “just wanted to put on the table” this possibility.

The mouse version of the IAPP protein cannot clump — and mice don’t develop type 2 diabetes, a sign that the accumulation of IAPP is important in the development of the disease, says Soto. To study the disease in mice, the animals need to be engineered to produce a human version of IAPP. When pancreas cells containing clumps of misfolded IAPP, taken from an engineered diabetic mouse, were mixed in a dish of healthy human pancreas cells, it triggered the clumping of IAPP in the human cells.
The same was true when non-diabetic mice got a shot made with the diabetic mouse pancreas cells. The non-diabetic mice developed deposits of clumped IAPP that grew over time, and the majority of beta cells died. When the mice were alive, more than 70 percent of the animals had blood sugar levels beyond the healthy range.

Soto’s group plans to study if IAPP could be transmitted in a real world scenario, such as through a blood transfusion. They’ve already begun work on transfusing blood from mice with diabetes to healthy mice, to see if they can induce the disease. “More work needs to be done to see if this ever operates in real life,” Soto says.

Even if transmission of the misfolded protein occurs only within an individual, “this opens up a lot of opportunities for intervention,” Soto says, “because now you can target the IAPP.”

Verchere also believes IAPP is “a big player” in the progression of type 2 diabetes, and that therapies that prevent the clumps of proteins from forming are needed. Whether or not future research supports the idea that the disease is transmissible, the study is “good for appreciating the potential role of IAPP in diabetes.”

Cross two flashlight beams and they pass right through one another. That’s because particles of light, or photons, are mostly antisocial — they don’t interact with each other. But now scientists have spotted evidence of photons bouncing off other photons at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European particle physics lab in Geneva.

“This is a very basic process. It’s never been observed before, and here it is finally emerging from the data,” says theoretical physicist John Ellis of King’s College London who was not involved with the study. Researchers with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC report the result August 14 in Nature Physics.
Because photons have no electric charge, they shouldn’t notice one another’s presence. But there’s an exception to that rule. According to quantum mechanics, photons can briefly transform into transient pairs of electrically charged particles and antiparticles — such as an electron and a positron — before reverting back to photons. Predictions made more than 80 years ago suggest that this phenomenon allows photons to interact and ricochet away from one another.

This light-by-light scattering is extremely rare, making it difficult to measure. But photons with more energy interact more often, providing additional chances to spot the scattering. To produce such energetic photons, scientists slammed beams of lead nuclei together in the LHC. Photons flit in and out of existence in the lead nuclei’s strong electromagnetic fields. When two nuclei got close enough that their electromagnetic fields overlapped, two photons could interact with one another and be scattered away.

To measure the interaction, ATLAS scientists sifted through their data to find collisions in which only two photons — the two that scattered away from the collision — appeared in the aftermath. “That’s the trickiest part of the whole thing,” says physicist Peter Steinberg of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., a member of the ATLAS collaboration. The scientists had to ensure that, in their enormous, highly sensitive particle detector, only two photons appeared, and convince themselves that no other particles had gone unaccounted for. The researchers found 13 such events over 19 days of data collection. Although other processes can mimic light-by-light scattering, the researchers predict that only a few such events were included in the sample.

The number of scattering events the researchers found agrees with the predictions of the standard model, physicists’ theory of particle physics. But a more precise measurement of the interaction might differ from expectations. If it does, that could hint at the existence of new, undiscovered particles.

A new species of hermit crab discovered in the shallow waters of southern Japan has been enjoying the perks of living like a peanut worm. Like the worms, the 7- to 8-millimeter-long hermit crab uses corals as a covering, researchers report September 20 in PLOS ONE.

Other kinds of hermit crabs live in coral reefs, but typically move in and out of a series of mollusk shells as the crabs grow. Diogenes heteropsammicola is the first hermit crab known to form a mutually beneficial relationship with two species of mobile corals called walking corals. Unlike more familiar coral species, these walking corals don’t grow in colonies and aren’t attached to the seafloor. Instead, each host coral grows with and around a crab, forming a cavity in the coral skeleton that provides a permanent home for the crustacean. In exchange, the crab helps the coral “walk.”
Walking corals are already known to be in a symbiotic relationship with a different sea creature — flexible, marine peanut worms called sipunculids. A symbiotic shift between such distantly related species as the worms and the crab is rare because organisms in a mutualistic relationship tend to be specialized and completely dependent on one other, says study coauthor Momoko Igawa, an ecologist at Kyoto University in Japan.
But similar to the worms, D. heteropsammicola appears to be well-adapted to live in the corals. Its extra slim body can slip inside the corals’ narrow cavity. And unlike other hermit crabs — whose tails curve to the right to fit into spiral shells — D.heteropsammicola’ s tail is symmetrical and can curl either way, just like the corals’ opening.
“Being able to walk around in something that is going to grow larger as you grow larger, that’s a big plus,” says Jan Pechenik, a biologist at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., who was not involved in the study. A typical hermit crab that can’t find a larger shell to move into “really is in trouble.”

D. heteropsammicola’s relationship with walking corals may begin in a similar way as it does with sipunculan worms, Igawa says. A walking coral larva latches onto a tiny mollusk shell containing a juvenile hermit crab and starts to grow. When the hermit crab outgrows the shell, the crustacean moves into the readily available host coral’s crevice, and the shell remains encapsulated in the coral.

By observing the hermit crab in an aquarium, Igawa and coauthor Makoto Kato, also an ecologist at Kyoto University, determined that the crab provides the corals with the same services as the worms: transportation and preventing the corals from being overturned by currents or buried in sediment.

Igawa hopes to search for this new hermit crab in Indonesia, a region where walking corals are normally found. Plus, because walking coral fossils are easy to come by in Japan, she also wants “to reveal the evolutionary history of the symbioses of walking corals [with] sipunculans and hermit crabs by observing these fossils.”

I recently wrote about the power that adults’ words can have on young children. Today, I’m writing about the power of adults’ actions. Parents know, of course, that their children keep a close eye on them. But a new study provides a particularly good example of a watch-and-learn moment: Toddlers who saw an adult struggle before succeeding were more likely to persevere themselves.

Toddlers are “very capable learners,” says study coauthor Julia Leonard, a cognitive developmental psychologist at MIT. Scientists have found that these youngsters pick up on abstract concepts and new words after just a few exposures. But it wasn’t clear whether watching adults’ actions would actually change the way toddlers tackle a problem.

To see whether toddlers could soak up an adult’s persistence, Leonard and her colleagues tested 262 13- to 18-month-olds (the average age was 15 months). Some of the children watched an experimenter try to retrieve a toy stuck inside a container. In some cases, the experimenter quickly got the toy out three times within 30 seconds — easy. Other times, the experimenter struggled for the entire 30 seconds before finally getting the toy out. The experimenter then repeated the process for a different problem, removing a carabiner toy from a keychain. Some kids didn’t see any experimenter demonstration.

Just after watching an adult struggle (or not), the toddlers were given a light-up cube. It had a big, useless button on one side. Another button — small and hidden — actually controlled the lights. The kids knew the toy could light up, but didn’t know how to turn the lights on.

Though the big button did nothing, that didn’t stop the children from poking it. But here’s the interesting part: Compared with toddlers who had just watched an adult succeed effortlessly, or not watched an adult do anything at all, the toddlers who had seen the adult struggle pushed the button more. These kids persisted, even though they never found success.

The sight of an adult persevering nudged the children toward trying harder themselves, the researchers conclude in the Sept. 22 Science. Leonard cautions that it’s hard to pull parenting advice from a single laboratory-based study, but still, “there may be some value in letting children see you work hard to achieve your goals,” she says.

Observing the adults wasn’t the only thing that determined the toddlers’ persistence, not by a long shot. Some kids might simply be more tenacious than others. In the experiments, some of the children who didn’t see an experimenter attempt a task, or who saw an experimenter quickly succeed, were “incredibly gritty,” Leonard says. And some of the kids who watched a persistent adult still gave up quickly themselves. That’s not to mention the fact that these toddlers were occasionally tired, hungry and cranky, all of which can affect whether they give up easily. Despite all of this variation, the copycat effect remained, so that kids were more likely to persist when they had just seen a persistent adult.

As Leonard says, this is just one study and it can’t explain the complex lives of toddlers. Still, one thing is clear, and it’s something that we would all do well to remember: “Infants are watching your behavior attentively and actively learning from what you do,” Leonard says.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If it takes you a while to recover from a few lost hours of sleep, be grateful you aren’t an orb weaver.

Three orb-weaving spiders — Allocyclosa bifurca, Cyclosa turbinata and Gasteracantha cancriformis — may have the shortest natural circadian rhythms discovered in an animal thus far, researchers reported November 12 at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting.

Most animals have natural body clocks that run closer to the 24-hour day-night cycle, plus or minus a couple hours, and light helps reset the body’s timing each day. But the three orb weavers’ body clocks average at about 17.4, 18.5 and 19 hours respectively. This means the crawlers must shift their cycle of activity and inactivity — the spider equivalent of wake and sleep cycles — by about five hours each day to keep up with the normal solar cycle.
“That’s like flying across more than five time zones, and experiencing that much jet lag each day in order to stay synchronized with the typical day-night cycle,” said Darrell Moore, a neurobiologist at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City.

“Circadian clocks actually keep us from going into chaos,” he added. “Theoretically, [the spiders] should not exist.”

For most animals, internal clocks help them perform recurring daily activities, like eat, sleep and hunt, at the most appropriate time of day. Previous studies have shown that animals that are out of sync with the 24-hour solar cycle are usually less likely to produce healthy offspring than those that aren’t.
Moore and his colleagues were surprised to find the short circadian clocks while studying aggression and passivity in an orb weaver. The team was trying to see if there was a circadian component to these predatory and preylike behaviors, when they discovered C. turbinata’s exceptionally short circadian cycles. “I was looking at this thing thinking, ‘That can’t be right,’” said Moore.

To measure spiders’ natural biological clocks without the resetting effect of the sun, the researchers placed 18 species of spiders in constant darkness and monitored their motion. Three orb weaver species in particular had incredibly short cycles of activity and inactivity.

As far as the researchers know, the short cycle does not seem to be a problem for these spiders. In fact, it might even be useful. Short clocks may help these orb weavers avoid becoming the proverbial “worm” to the earliest birds, the researchers hypothesize. Since the spiders become more active at dusk and begin spinning their webs three to five hours before dawn, they can avoid predators that hunt in the day.

Throughout the day, the spiders remain motionless on their web, prepared to pounce on their next meal. By midday, the spiders’ truncated circadian clocks should have reset, sparking a new round of activity. But in the five to seven hours of daylight left, the orb weavers remain inactive. It’s hard to say whether the spiders are actually resting, Moore said. The researchers suspect that light may delay the onset of another short circadian cycle each day, helping the spiders stay synchronized with the 24-hour environmental cycle.

“The method or molecular mechanism will be really fascinating to figure out,” said Sigrid Veasey, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. She is curious to know how the spiders can be so far off from “normal” circadian periods, and still be able to match their activity to the 24-hour light and dark cycle.

Determining the differences between short and normal period clocks in spiders may help researchers find out why and how different circadian clocks are suited to the particular environmental challenges of each species, Moore said.

SAN FRANCISCO — Blowflies don’t sweat, but they have raised cooling by drooling to a high art.

In hot times, sturdy, big-eyed Chrysomya megacephala flies repeatedly release — and then retract — a droplet of saliva, Denis Andrade reported January 4 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. This process isn’t sweating. Blowfly droplets put the cooling power of evaporation to use in a different way, said Andrade, who studies ecology and evolution at the Universidade Estadual Paulista in Rio Claro, Brazil.
As saliva hangs on a fly’s mouthparts, the droplet starts to lose some of its heat to the air around it. When the fly droplet has cooled a bit, the fly then slurps it back in, Andrade and colleagues found. Micro-CT scanning showed the retracted droplet in the fly’s throatlike passage near the animal’s brain. The process eased temperatures in the fly’s body by about four degrees Celsius below ambient temps. That may be preventing dangerous overheating, he proposed. The same droplet seemed to be released, cooled, drawn back in and then released again several times in a row.

Andrade had never seen a report of this saliva droplet in-and-out before he and a colleague noticed it while observing blowfly temperatures for other reasons. But in 2012, Chloé Lahondère and a colleague described how Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes that exude a liquid droplet that dangles and cools, but at the other end of the animals.

Mosquitoes, which let their body temperatures float with that of their environment, can get a heat rush when drinking from warm-blooded mammals. While drinking, the insects release a blood-tinged urine droplet, which dissipates some of the heat. There’s some fluid movement within the droplet, says Lahondère, now at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, but whether any of the liquid gets recaptured by the body the way fly drool is, she can’t say.

Faced with a do-or-die situation in Game 5, the Warriors came up big.

A 121-106 win at Chase Center kept Golden State's season alive as they successfully avoided elimination at the hands of the Lakers. The series will now head back down to Los Angeles for Game 6, where LeBron James and Co. will have another chance to punch their ticket to the Western Conference Finals.

Stephen Curry led the way for the Warriors with 27 points and eight assists. Andrew Wiggins finished with 25 points and seven rebounds, while Draymond Green had one of his best games of the postseason with 20 points and 10 rebounds.

A bad night got even worse for LA when Anthony Davis was forced to leave the game late in the fourth quarter. He appeared to take a shot to the face from Golden State's Kevon Looney, and TNT's Chris Haynes reported that he was taken down the tunnel in a wheelchair. The Lakers now face an anxious wait to see whether he'll be good to go for a massive Game 6.

The Sporting News was tracking all the key moments as the Warriors defeated the Lakers in Game 5 of the Western Conference semifinals:

Lakers vs. Warriors score
Team Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Final
Lakers 28 31 23 24 106
Warriors 32 38 23 28 121
Lakers vs. Warriors live score, updates, highlights from Game 5
12:31 a.m. FINAL — The final buzzer rings out, and we're headed to a Game 6. Curry finishes with 27 points, Wiggins with 25 and Draymond Green with 20.

12:27 a.m. — Darvin Ham has raised the white flag and sent in his reserves. Golden State is going to get the win, and their season is going to continue. An excellent performance by the Warriors tonight with their backs against the wall.

12:24 a.m. — Both teams continue to trade blows, but with time ticking down, the Warriors look like they're going to cruise to a win here. Davis still hasn't returned to the court, and it sounds like he may be dealing with some dizziness and vision difficulties. He'll probably be sidelined for the rest of the game.

12:19 a.m. — Steph with a big shot! A triple from the corner extends the lead back to 14 points! It's Warriors 109, Lakers 95 as we enter the final minutes.

12:16 a.m. — Draymond gets the crowd on its feet with a nice jumper, but Austin Reaves answers at the other end with a three from way downtown! The Lakers have chipped away and the lead is now down to just nine points with 5:25 left.
12:14 a.m. — Davis is having to head down the tunnel and towards the locker room after that injury. TNT's Chris Haynes reported he looked a little shaky on his feet and needed some help to stay upright. Let's hope he's OK.

12:09 a.m. — Gary Payton II finishes with the hoop and harm over LeBron, and the crowd is loving it. To add insult to injury for the Lakers, Anthony Davis appeared to take an elbow to the face on the other end. He appears to be in significant discomfort, and he is forced to head to the bench.

12:03 a.m. — Any momentum the Lakers may have had has quickly vanished early in the fourth quarter. Curry drains a pull-up jumper with the shot clock winding down, then Wiggins converts on a running floater in the lane to stretch the lead back to 15 points. LA is running out of time here.
11:55 p.m. END OF THIRD QUARTER — The Lakers use a mini-run to cut into the lead slightly. LeBron converts on a layup with time winding down in the quarter, and we enter the final frame with Golden State up 93-82. James appeared to land on the foot of Wiggins on that last shot, and he was grimacing a little bit as he walked away. Something to keep an eye on.

11:49 p.m. — With the third quarter winding down, the Warriors are showing no signs of letting up. Curry just blew right by three defenders for an easy layup, and once again Darvin Ham has used a timeout to try and spark something from his team.

11:41 p.m. — How about Draymond Green in this game? He's been sensational so far, racking up 18 points on 6 of 10 shooting from the field. He just converted on another layup to make it 85-70, Warriors.

11:32 p.m. — The Lakers are off to a terrible start in this half, and in the blink of an eye the Warriors have stretched their lead to 18 points! Wiggins caps off a 9-2 Golden State flurry with a one-handed putback slam and Darvin Ham takes a timeout to stop the bleeding. That could be a huge momentum swing in this game.
11:27 p.m. START OF SECOND HALF — And away we go in the third quarter. Can the Warriors hold off the Lakers to stay alive?

11:20 p.m. — Davis leads all scorers with 18 points at the half while Wiggins leads Golden State with 16. James has 17 and Curry has 12, including that buzzer-beater to make it an eleven-point game.

11:11 p.m. END OF FIRST HALF — Stephen Curry lights up Chase Center with a three to beat the buzzer! That's just his second trey of the night, but it sends the Warriors into the locker room with a 70-59 lead! They ended the half on a 16-5 run to take control of Game 5.
11:03 p.m. — We knew a run was coming from one of these teams, and this time it has come from the Warriors! Poole connects from deep, then Wiggins follows it up with a triple of his own. After a Lakers timeout, the home team leads 64-56 with less than two minutes left in the half.

10:56 p.m. — LeBron isn't cooling off, and he drives for a layup then knocks down a three moments later to tie things up at 50 apiece. Back and forth we go.

10:51 p.m. — Andrew Wiggins gets a bucket and a foul, then does it again less than 40 seconds later! That pair of three-point plays puts the Warriors back in the lead by five with seven minutes remaining in the first half.

10:45 p.m. — Now LeBron is starting to get going! He buries a pair of three-pointers to take his tally to 12 points on the night and give the Lakers the lead. After he sinks a pair of free throws, it's 41-40, LA.
10:37 p.m. END OF FIRST QUARTER — Whew, time to catch your breath! A Jordan Poole floater with six seconds left on the clock has made it 32-28 Warriors at the end of the first quarter. They could really use a good performance from him tonight. If the game continues like this, we're in for a treat.

10:35 p.m. — This game has been fast-paced and a lot of fun so far. Davis continues to fill it up and he's up to 13 points as we near the end of the first quarter. But 20-year-old Moses Moody has knocked down a pair of threes to keep Golden State's lead intact. They're up 30-26 with just over a minute left in the period.

10:27 p.m. — But here come the Lakers! Anthony Davis is getting himself involved, and his putback dunk cuts the Warriors' lead to just five points. He has nine points already in the early going.

10:20 p.m. — This has been one heck of a start by the Warriors. Gary Payton II drains a three, Draymond converts on another layup and then Stephen Curry opens his account for the night with a three from way downtown. The home team is out to a 17-5 lead less than five minutes into the game.
10:17 p.m. — Draymond Green is off to a fast start! He buries a three to get the Warriors on the board, and his layup through contact draws a foul and leads to a three-point play. Golden State leads 9-3 early.

10:12 p.m. — And there's the opening tip. We are underway in San Francisco.

10:07 p.m. — Knicks-Heat just wrapped up. meaning Warriors-Lakers is up next on TNT. Can Golden State do what New York did and stave off elimination at home in Game 5?

9:59 p.m. — Steph was doing Steph things in pregame warmups.
9:52 p.m. — No surprises from the Lakers with their starting lineup.
9:46 p.m. — For the second game in a row, Gary Payton II gets the start for Golden State.
What channel is Lakers vs. Warriors on?
Date: Wednesday, May 10
TV channel: TNT
Live streaming: Sling TV
Lakers vs. Warriors will air on TNT. Viewers can also stream the game on Sling TV.

Fans in the U.S. can watch the NBA Playoffs on Sling TV, which is now offering HALF OFF your first month! Stream Sling Orange for $20 in your first month to catch all the games on TNT, ESPN & ABC. For games on NBA TV, subscribe to Sling Orange & Sports Extra for $27.50 in your first month. Local regional blackout restrictions apply.

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What time is Lakers vs. Warriors tonight?
Date: Wednesday, May 10
Time: 10 p.m. ET | 7 p.m. PT
Lakers vs. Warriors will tip off around 10 p.m. ET (7 p.m. local time) on Wednesday, May 10. The game will be played at the Chase Center in San Francisco.

Lakers vs. Warriors odds
Golden State is a 7.5-point favorite heading into Game 5.

 Warriors    Lakers

Spread -7.5 +7.5
Moneyline -350 +260
For the full market, check out BetMGM.

Lakers vs. Warriors schedule
Here is the complete schedule for the second-round series between Los Angeles and Golden State:

Date Game Time (ET) TV channel
May 2 Lakers 117, Warriors 112 10 p.m. TNT
May 4 Warriors 127, Lakers 100 9 p.m. ESPN
May 6 Lakers 127, Warriors 97 8:30 p.m. ABC
May 8 Lakers 104, Warriors 101 10 p.m. TNT
May 10 Game 5 10 p.m. TNT
May 12 Game 6* TBD ESPN
May 14 Game 7* TBD ABC

It’s three for the price of one. A trio of mysterious high-energy particles could all have the same source: active black holes embedded in galaxy clusters, researchers suggest January 22 in Nature Physics.

Scientists have been unable to figure out the origins of the three types of particles — gamma rays that give a background glow to the universe, cosmic neutrinos and ultrahigh energy cosmic rays. Each carries a huge amount of energy, from about a billion electron volts for a gamma ray to 100 billion billion electron volts for some cosmic rays.
Strangely, each particle type seems to contribute the same total amount of energy to the universe as the other two. That’s a clue that all three may be powered by the same engine, says physicist Kohta Murase of Penn State.

“We can explain the data of these three messengers with one single picture,” Murase says.

First, a black hole accelerates charged particles to extreme energies in a powerful jet (SN: 9/16/17, p. 16). These jets “are one of the most promising candidate sources of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays,” Murase says. The most energetic cosmic rays escape the jet and immediately plow through a sea of magnetized gas within the galaxy cluster.

Some rays escape the gas as well and zip towards Earth. But less energetic rays are trapped in the cluster for up to a billion years. There, they interact with the gas and create high-energy neutrinos that then escape the cluster.
Meanwhile, the cosmic rays that escaped travel through intergalactic space and interact with photons to produce the glow of gamma rays.

Murase and astrophysicist Ke Fang of the University of Maryland in College Park found that computer simulations of this scenario lined up with observations of how many cosmic rays, neutrinos and gamma rays reached Earth.

“It’s a nice piece of unification of many ideas,” says physicist Francis Halzen of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, where the highest energy neutrinos have been observed.

There are other possible sources for the particles — for one, IceCube has already traced an especially high-energy neutrino to a single active black hole that may not be in a cluster (SN Online: 4/7/16). The observatory could eventually trace neutrinos back to galaxy clusters. “That’s the ultimate test,” Halzen says. “This could be tomorrow, could be God knows when.”

Knocking out an animal 15 times your size — no problem. A newly identified toxin in the venom of a tropical centipede helps the arthropod to overpower giant prey in about 30 seconds.

Insight into how this venom overwhelms lab mice could lead to an antidote for people who suffer excruciatingly painful, reportedly even fatal, centipede bites, an international research team reports the week of January 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In Hawaii, centipede bites account for about 400 emergency room visits a year, according to data from 2004 to 2008. The main threat there is Scolopendra subspinipes, an agile species almost as long as a human hand.
The subspecies S. subspinipes mutilans starred in studies at the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China and collaborating labs. Researchers there found a small peptide, now named “spooky toxin,” largely responsible for venom misery.

This toxin blocks a molecular channel that normally lets potassium flow through cell membranes. A huge amount of the biochemistry of staying alive involves potassium, so clogging some of what are called KCNQ channels caused mayhem in mice: slow and gasping breath, high blood pressure, frizzling nerve dysfunctions and so on. Administering the epilepsy drug retigabine opened the potassium channels and counteracted much of the toxin’s effects, raising hopes of a treatment for these bites.

Now there’s a way to tell if a drone is spying on someone.

Researchers have devised a method to tell what a drone is recording — without having to decrypt the video data that the device streams to the pilot’s smartphone. This technique, described January 9 at arXiv.org, could help military bases detect unwanted surveillance and civilians protect their privacy as more commercial drones take to the skies.

“People have already worked on detecting [the presence of] drones, but no one had solved the problem of, ‘Is the drone actually recording something in my direction?’” says Ahmad Javaid, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Toledo in Ohio, who was not involved in the work.
Ben Nassi, a software engineer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, and colleagues realized that changing the appearance of objects in a drone’s field of view influences the stream of encrypted data the drone sends to its smartphone controller. That’s because the more pixels that change from one video frame to the next, the more data bits the drone sends per second. So rapidly switching the appearance of a person or house and seeing whether those alterations correspond to higher drone-to-phone Wi-Fi traffic can reveal whether a drone is snooping.

Nassi’s team tested this idea by covering a house window with a smart film that could switch between transparent and nearly opaque, and aiming a drone with a video camera at the window from 40 meters away. Every two seconds, the researchers either flickered the smart film back and forth or left it transparent. They pointed a radio frequency scanner at the drone to intercept its outgoing Wi-Fi signals and found that its traffic spiked whenever the smart film flickered.

Story continues after graph
For people without such radio equipment, it’s also possible to intercept Wi-Fi signals with a laptop or computer with a wireless card, says Simon Birnbach, a computer scientist at the University of Oxford not involved in the work.

In another test, a drone recorded someone wearing a strand of LED lights from about 20 meters’ distance. At five-second intervals, the person either flipped the LED lights on and off, or left them off. The drone camera’s data stream peaked whenever the LED lights flickered.

This strategy to discern a drone camera’s target is “a very cool idea,” says Thomas Ristenpart, a computer scientist at Cornell University not involved in the work. But the researchers need to test whether the method works in a wider range of settings and find ways to alter a drone’s view without cumbersome equipment, he says. “I don’t think anyone is going to want to wear a [light-up] shirt on the off chance a drone may fly by.”

Javaid agrees that this prototype system must be made more user-friendly to achieve widespread use. For home security, he imagines a small device stuck to a window that flashes a light and intercepts a drone’s Wi-Fi signals whenever it detects one nearby. The device could alert the homeowner if a drone is found scoping out the house.

Still, identifying a nosy drone may not always be enough to know who’s flying it. “It’s sort of the equivalent of knowing that an unmarked van pulled up and waited outside of your house,” says Drew Davidson, a computer scientist at Tala Security, Inc. in Dallas, who was not involved in the study. “Better to know than not, but not exactly enough for the police to find a suspect.”