Weird Science
The best way to get bad news
Odd as it sounds, already being distressed makes it easier to absorb bad news.
In general, people tend to be overly optimistic — but the opposite is true in psychiatric conditions such as depression, in which some patients place a premium on negative information.
The UK and US authors of a new study now argue that our ability to flexibly shift between these two patterns can provide a healthy response to a big shock.
In their study, the researchers induced stress by telling participants they’d need to give a surprise public speech.
They then asked participants to estimate their likelihood of experiencing 40 different bad things in their life, such as being involved in a car accident or becoming a victim of card fraud.
Participants were then given either good news — being told that their likelihood of experiencing these events was lower than they had estimated — or bad news, that it was higher.
They next asked participants to provide new estimates.
The control group showed the wellknown optimism bias — or a tendency to take more notice of good news compared to bad news.
In contrast, the stressed participants showed no such bias and became better at processing bad news.
The researchers obtained similar results in a study of US firefighters, who naturally experience fluctuating periods of stress as part of their job.
Good for the planet, good for your gut
Researchers have found an unlikely food to promote gut health — crickets.
More than two billion people around the planet regularly consume insects, which, as well as being a sustainable food in an unsustainable world, are a good source of protein, vitamins, minerals and healthy fats.
A US study looked at what eating crickets might do for the human microbiome and found the bugs not only supported the growth of beneficial gut bacteria, but might also reduce inflammation.
In the trial, 20 healthy men and women ate either a typical breakfast or a breakfast containing 25g of powdered cricket meal made into muffins and shakes.
Each participant then ate a normal diet for a two-week “washout period”.
For the following two weeks, those who started on the cricket diet consumed a normal breakfast and those who started on the control diet consumed a cricket breakfast.
The researchers later discovered an increase in a metabolic enzyme associated with gut health — and a drop in an inflammatory protein linked to depression and cancer.
“This study is important because insects represent a novel component in Western diets and their health effects in human populations haven’t really been studied,” said co-author Professor Tiffany Weir, of Colorado State University.
“With what we now know about the gut microbiota and its relationship to human health, it’s important to establish how a novel food might affect gut microbial populations.
“We found that cricket consumption may actually offer benefits beyond nutrition.”
What koalas tell us about our dud DNA
A koala virus may explain millions of years of accumulated “junk” DNA in the human genome.
A team of scientists have been studying a retrovirus infecting the cuddly Aussies, in the hope it could demonstrate how viruses have altered the DNA of humans and other species throughout history.
“Retroviruses insert their genome into their host’s chromosome, from where they make more copies of themselves,” said Professor Paul Young, a virologist at the University of Queensland.
“Some can also infect what are known as germline cells, which alters the host genetic code and that of all their descendants.”
Retrovirus insertions in humans date back more than five million years, which means it’s difficult to know what happened when the first interactions took place.
“About a decade ago, we discovered that the wild koala population was being invaded by a retrovirus,” Young said.
“This isn’t great news for the koala, but it has provided us with an opportunity to study what’s happening to these retroviral genomes early in their association with a new host.”
Young said new retroviruses within a species could continue to replicate with disastrous consequences but, over time, their disease-causing effects usually stopped and either took on new functions or became inert “junk“DNA.
“Until now, scientists could only guess at why and how this happened.”
But because the koala retrovirus was still relatively young — less than 50,000 years old — and not yet fixed in a certain location within the koala genome, scientists could monitor this early engagement between a retrovirus and its host.
Study co-author Professor Alex Greenwood, of Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, said it was an important opportunity.
“This means that the koala, a species not usually associated with biomedical breakthroughs, is providing key insights into a process that has shaped eight per cent of the human genome, and will likely show us what happened millions of years ago when retroviruses first invaded the human genome.”