What the scientists are saying…
Chilli may be good for the heart
Adding a bit of chilli to your food could reduce your risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke, a study has found. Researchers in Italy analysed data on almost 23,000 people who were tracked over eight years, and found that those who had eaten a diet rich in the hot spice were 40% less likely to have a heart attack, and 61% less likely to die of a stroke during the study period. Overall, the chilli eaters (who consumed it four times a week) had a mortality rate that was 23% lower than those who generally avoided the pepper. “An interesting fact is that protection from mortality risk was independent of the type of diet people followed,” said Dr Marialaura Bonaccio, who led the observational study. “In other words, someone can follow the healthy Mediterranean diet and someone else can eat less healthily, but for all of them, chilli pepper has a protective effect.” Chilli is rich in capsaicin, a compound that has been linked to improved vascular function, and reduced inflammation, among other health benefits.
Conjuring a human from old gum
Scientists have been able to map the entire genetic code of a Stone Age woman using material extracted from a piece of prehistoric “chewing gum”. The researchers, from the universities of Copenhagen and York, say it is the first time an entire ancient human genome has been obtained from anything other than human remains. Their analysis, of human DNA and oral microbiome, suggests the woman – who lived near a coastal lagoon in what is now southern Denmark, in the late Mesolithic period – had dark hair, dark skin and blue eyes; and that the last meal she ate before spitting out the gum (made from the tar of birch trees) contained duck meat and hazelnuts. “We have this inconspicuous little lump of birch pitch that someone discarded thousands of years ago, and suddenly we’re able to conjure up this person from it,” says Dr Hannes Schroeder, one of the study’s authors. Archaeologists have known for some time that as far back as the Neanderthals, birch tar was used as an adhesive, to make and repair tools and pots, and it has often been found with tooth marks in it. People may have chewed the sticky substance in order to soften it, and possibly to relieve toothache, as it has mild antiseptic properties.
The deepest valley on Earth
The deepest land canyon on Earth has been found buried under the ice of the Denman Glacier in Antarctica. Identified during a six-year project to map the bedrock of the Antarctic continent, the canyon reaches 11,500ft below sea level – making it 8.5 times deeper than the lowest exposed land on Earth’s continents, the Dead Sea in the Jordan Rift Valley, which is 1,355ft below sea level. (Although it is one of the deepest valleys in North America, the Grand Canyon lies on such a high plateau, that it is more than 2,000ft above sea level even at its lowest point.) However, the lowest point on Earth remains the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific, which reaches a depth of almost 36,200ft at its deepest point, the Challenger Deep.
AI software can spot tumours
A computer algorithm has outperformed human experts in spotting signs of breast cancer from mammograms. The AI program was trained using 91,000 scans, then tested on 25,000 historic mammograms from women in the UK and the US, who either had cancer confirmed by biopsy, or showed no signs of cancer during follow-ups a year or more later. Overall, the software missed 2.7% fewer cases of cancer than a radiologist typically would working alone; and, by ignoring misleading features, also recorded 1.2% fewer false positives (where healthy women are wrongly flagged up as possibly having tumours). The algorithm was not better than the NHS at detecting breast cancer, as mammograms are checked by at least two radiologists, but were it to be rolled out (following further trials), it could relieve pressure on the health service, and make its screening programmes more effective. “This is a great demonstration of how these technologies can augment the human expert,” Dr Dominic King, the UK lead at Google Health, told The Guardian. “The AI system is saying ‘I think there may be an issue here, do you want to check?’”