Spinach powers failing rat hearts, and a foot angle eases knees

Researchers from the University of Utah, New York University and Stanford had each volunteer walk on a pressure-sensitive treadmill ringed with motion-capture cameras, then worked out whether turning the toe inward or outward, by 5 or 10 degrees, took the most load off that particular knee. Half the group got a sham version prescribing foot angles identical to their natural walk, so the placebo effect had somewhere to show up. The real-angle group had less cartilage degradation on MRI over the year, and the work appeared in The Lancet Rheumatology 118. It is the first placebo-controlled trial of a biomechanical fix for osteoarthritis.

Cultured rat heart cells took up more of the coated particles than uncoated ones, and under red light their ATP levels rose and their mitochondria held their structure better under stress 11. Then came the animals: rats whose aortas were surgically narrowed so the heart had to pump against resistance, four groups of six. Treatment began four weeks after surgery, with particles injected into the heart muscle every three days and 10 minutes of red laser through the chest 11. The lit, treated hearts pumped better and showed less tissue damage, reported in the journal Small 11.

That is the highest figure on record, and the first update to the 100,000 figure that has been cited since the late 1990s 119. Dense vegetation makes counting hard in places, so the team modeled the animals it could not see as well as those it did 119. Over the study years the population looked relatively stable, so this is a new baseline, not a growth curve 119. In the 19th century, exploitation had left fewer than 1,000 tortoises on the island; Aldabra became a strict nature reserve in 1981 and a UNESCO site in 1982 119.

Deep contact strengthened social and economic ties with that one partner. Only broad contact reduced the majority group's misperceptions about outgroup strangers 67. Both arms learned about their partners from how productive they were, but only the rotating group carried the update over to people they had never met 67.

It had blade-like cheek teeth resembling a modern seal's, a platypus-like pelvis, and an otter-like tail, which points to a semiaquatic predator of small vertebrates and invertebrates 6. The surprise sat on the roof of its mouth: a pair of small bony projections closely resembling those in living marsupials and placental mammals, where they help support the soft palate and the muscles of suckling, swallowing and airway protection 6. The throat also held specialized hyoid bones, which anchor swallowing muscles in mammals today 6. The work was published in Nature 6.

When volunteers deliberately focused on the reaction instead of distracting themselves, the swelling and redness were substantially smaller and the swelling subsided faster 31. The findings were published in Nature Human Behaviour 31. In this test, a smaller, quicker-settling reaction is read as better-regulated immune activity 31.

For about 30 minutes around lunchtime, rooftop panels on homes and businesses carried more than half of the total load by themselves, with large-scale solar and wind covering most of the rest, hydro about one percent, and fossil fuels 20 percent 133. More than 4.3 million Australian households now have rooftop solar 133. Coal generation in Queensland hit a record low over the same weekend 133.