What the scientists are saying…

A breakthrough heart drug An anti-inflammatory drug called canakinumab, previously used to treat arthritis, may significantly reduce the risk of recurrent heart attacks, a four-year study has found. The massive trial, involving 10,000 people across 39 countries, suggests that the drug – which was administered as an injection every three months – reduced by 24% the risk of heart attacks in those who’d already had one. Almost 200,000 Britons a year suffer heart attacks, and a quarter of those having their first will suffer another within five years. Currently, statins are the mainstay drugs for heart attack prevention, but they work by lowering cholesterol levels, and not everybody who experiences a heart attack suffers from high cholesterol. Dr Paul Ridker, of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School, described treating the inflammation of the arteries as “cracking the door open on the third era” of preventative cardiology, a breakthrough as significant as recognising the effects of diet, exercise and not smoking, and the discovery of the benefits of statins. The next challenge faced by scientists will be tackling the side effects of the drug (such as a heightened risk of fatal infection) as well as its huge cost – currently £40,000 per patient per year, compared with £20 for statins.

Dead languages brought to life A new technique for examining ancient parchments has led to the retrieval of languages spoken more than 1,500 years ago and assumed lost to history. Parchment was such a valuable commodity in ancient times that it was commonly reused, with the result that many ancient texts were lost to early recycling: copies of the Bible, for example, were often written on top of them. The technique involves taking photographs of the manuscripts from several angles, using different visible and invisible parts of the light spectrum so as to highlight traces of the ink that had been washed away: these are then analysed by a computer algorithm. Scientists have now used this method on ancient manuscripts recently discovered in St Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula. (The monastery contains the oldest continually operating library in the world, and lies below Mount Sinai, where God is said to have revealed the Ten Commandments.) Among the writings recovered by the method are “lost languages” such as the extremely rare and barely known Caucasian Albanian. They also include the first known copies of the Bible in Arabic, as well as versions of medical texts by the Greek physician Hippocrates. By means of this technique, said Michael Phelps, of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, “we will recover lost voices from our history”. Virtual reality to tackle dementia A new virtual reality computer game has been developed by the British game design firm Glitchers, which will do more than provide the thrill of hunting for hidden monsters – it will also lay the groundwork for a new test for dementia. With the help of Swiss and British scientists and Alzheimer’s charities, Glitchers has designed Sea Hero Quest VR in such a way as to be able to capture data from those playing it – what actions they take, where they look and for how long. So as players navigate their boats through treacherous waters, their VR headsets will send anonymous data about their abilities and movements that can then be assessed by neuroscientists. This could prove vital in detecting the early signs of dementia – a disease that often establishes itself a decade before symptoms appear – because one of the first abilities lost to the degenerative condition is navigation.

Could bears go veggie? Brown bears on Alaska’s Kodiak Island have increasingly been opting for a diet of elderberries over salmon, in a change that scientists are attributing to climate change. The bears usually eat salmon in summer and move on to berries in September. But a US study has found that in summers when temperatures are notably higher than in previous years, the berries ripen earlier than usual, and as a result that the bears forget about the salmon and head for the hills to munch on berries. William Deacy, a biologist at Oregon State University, predicts that by 2070 the overlap in timing could be a regular occurrence. This could be bad news for the bears. Since berries take less energy to break down than salmon, they could end up being a lot fatter.