What the scientists are saying…
Sepsis is world’s “biggest killer”
Sepsis is the most deadly condition in the world, killing more people than cancer, scientists have found. According to the new estimate, there were 48.9 million cases in 2017, and it was a factor in 11 million deaths – or 19.7% of the global total. (Cancer is responsible for some ten million deaths per year.) Also known as blood poisoning, sepsis occurs when the immune system overreacts to an infection, leading to severe inflammation and, in some cases, organ failure. But as the symptoms of the primary infection can mask those of the sepsis, it often goes undiagnosed – making it notoriously difficult to assess the number of sepsis deaths. Previous studies have tended only to look at middle- and highincome countries – which generally keep better records – and have concentrated on hospital admissions. But the team at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation based their conclusions on data extracted from millions of medical records in 195 countries. According to their figures, more than half of the cases in 2017 involved children. “We need renewed focus on sepsis prevention among newborns and on tackling antimicrobial resistance, an important driver of the condition,” said Prof Mohsen Naghavi, an author of the Lancet-published study.
Human bodies are getting colder
In 1851, the German physician Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich set the temperature for a healthy human body at 37°C. In fact, most people have a temperature slightly below this – a discrepancy that has usually been put down to faulty 19th century temperature-reading techniques. A new study, however, has suggested a different explanation: the human body has got colder over the years. A team at Stanford University looked at three data sets: one involving veterans from the American Civil War, whose temperatures were measured between 1860 and 1940; a second from the early 1970s; and a third from 2007 to 2017. These suggested that men born in the early 19th century typically had body temperatures 0.59°C higher than men today. (Since the earlier data set only featured men, a full comparison between women wasn’t possible.) The team are confident that the fall is real, because younger people were found to have lower temperatures than older people; and because the decline was evident between the two late 20th century data sets. “I don’t think there’s much difference in the thermometers between the 1960s and today,” said senior author Dr Julie Parsonnet. She and her colleagues suspect that a variety of factors – including a decline in infectious diseases and increasingly controlled indoor climates – have caused our bodies to cool down.
Foreign languages “protect” brain
The theory that learning a foreign language has a protective effect on the brain has been boosted by a new study showing that people with multiple sclerosis (MS) experience less cognitive decline if they are bilingual. When a team at the University of Reading compared the mental abilities of bilingual and monolingual MS patients, they found that the former performed markedly better, and particularly in an area known as “monitoring”, which is connected with people’s ability to think laterally. That bilingualism provides some protection against neurodegenerative decline was first suggested by studies that found evidence that the symptoms of dementia develop later in bilingual people. Bilingual people have also been found to be better at remembering shopping lists and at distinguishing quickly between important and irrelevant information.
What a cow’s moo reveals
Their moos may all sound the same to us, but according to a new study, cows use the sounds to communicate a range of emotions to each other. By recording the sounds made by a herd of Holstein Friesian heifers in different contexts, a PhD student at the University of Sydney found that they use their moos to express everything from excitement and arousal to distress. Alexandra Green also found that each heifer’s moo was distinguishable, and that their tone varied, depending on the topic that appeared to be under discussion within the herd: for example, in a positive situation, such as when they were eating, their moos were far more sonorous. “Cows are gregarious, social animals,” Green said.