Among the scientific news of the week:
- Biological age reflected in your eyes
- Can a black hole give birth to a star?
- Perfect coral reef discovered off the coast of Tahiti
Life and death reflected in your retina
Photographer, Getty Images
Aging always affects our body in one way or another, but it is known that not all people look their age: someone retains their shape perfectly even at a later age, and someone in the middle of life can look like a deep old man.
But they say that if you take a good look into a person’s eyes, they will tell regarding the true age.
This is the essence of the discovery of scientists from the Australian Center for Eye Research (CERA), who created a self-learning computer program that can use the eyes, or rather the retina, not only to determine the biological age of a person, but also to predict what health problems he may experience in future and even how long he will live.
The algorithm gives such accurate results that during the experiments it allowed to calculate the age of 47 thousand Britons of middle and old age with an error of no more than 3.5 years.
Since the studies were spread over more than a decade, 1,871 people had died since the images were taken, and this group included most of the people whose retinas looked older.
Although earlier studies have already been conducted that suggested that the state of the fundus cells can be used to draw conclusions regarding threatening a person with cardiovascular diseases, problems with the kidneys and other organs, a new study for the first time indicated that the retina can also be used to judge life expectancy in in general.
Researchers attribute this to the fact that retinal tissue is saturated with blood vessels and nerve endings, which provides important visual information regarding the state of the brain and cardiovascular system. According to the scientists, the retina thus serves as a window into which existing and future neurological problems can be seen.
“Our work supports the hypothesis that the retina plays an important role in the aging process and is highly sensitive to the cumulative damage that this process causes, which increases the risk of death,” conclude study authors.
Although other biomarkers of aging are known to science, they are nowhere near as accurate as retinal age determination, and besides, they are very expensive, time-consuming and invasive.
But the retina can be scanned in less than five minutes, and if further research can link this tissue layer to the rest of the body, doctors will have an excellent new diagnostic tool in their hands.
The black hole that gave birth to a star
Photographer, NASA
Black holes are notorious for swallowing anything that carelessly enters their gravitational field.
What was the surprise of autonomers who, using the Hubble Space Telescope, discovered in a neighboring dwarf galaxy a supermassive black fool who became a mother: she literally gave birth to several stars at once.
There is direct evidence of this – the “umbilical cord” of gas and star dust 500 light years long.
This black hole, located regarding 34 million light-years from the Henize 2-10 galaxy (named following the American astronaut and astronomer Carl Gordon Henize), ejected a giant plasma jet from its core at a tremendous speed of 1.6 million km / h, and this fiery stream contributed to the birth of new stars in the so-called “stellar nursery” of the dwarf (consisting of “only” a few billion stars) galaxy.
“I suspected from the very beginning that something unusual was going on in the Henize 2-10 galaxy, and now Hubble has clearly demonstrated the connection between a black hole and a neighboring region 230 light-years away, where stars form,” writes one of co-authors research, astrophysicist from the University of Montana Amy Raines.
Supermassive black holes have long been noted for their ability to spew plumes of ionized gas. Only earlier scientists believed that such plasma flows hinder rather than contribute to the formation of stars.
Before releasing into space a jet of hot plasma at near-light speed, the black hole sucks the necessary material into its bowels in the form of nearby gas clouds and stars.
These gas clouds, when heated to the required temperatures from contact with plasma jets, themselves become an ideal nursery for future stars.
However, as NASA experts point out, it is necessary that the gas clouds be in an ideal zone: if the plasma plume overheats the clouds, they will not be able to cool to the temperatures required to form a star. However, in this case the conditions were ideal.
As for our mother hole, since it has remained relatively small for a long time, the researchers hope that by its example they will be able to understand the nature and formation of truly giant supermassive holes.
“Unfortunately, we did not catch the process of formation of the first black holes,” Reines complains, “but we really want to answer the main question – where did they come from! And here dwarf galaxies should come to our aid, which might keep some memory of those events lost in space and time.
Paradise found: “rose garden” off the coast of Tahiti
Photographer, UNESCO
Marine biologists conducting research under the auspices of UNESCO off the coast of French Polynesia have discovered a vast reef with giant rose-shaped corals up to two meters in diameter, which is largely unaffected by the current climate change – the fate that has befallen many shallower reefs.
According to UNESCO, this is one of the largest coral reefs ever discovered: a 65-meter strip extends almost three kilometers in length. It is located unusually deep for corals – from 30 to 65 meters below the surface, where the water is much colder.
“Today, the surface of the moon has been explored more than the depths of the oceans,” says UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay, meaning that only 20% of the world’s ocean floor has been mapped.
“The discovery of the reef, and in such great condition, is great news and should encourage us to continue our efforts to save nature,” says marine biologist Dr. Laetitia Edouin from the National Center for Scientific Research of France (CNRS). “And we really hope that that deeper reefs are better protected from global warming.”
Photographer, UNESCO
Most coral reefs known today are at depths of up to 25 meters, and the discovery of a reef in Tahiti gives reason to hope that there may be many more healthy corals in unexplored areas of the ocean.
The discovery of the new reef is all the more significant as 2019 saw a significant coral whitening process in French Polynesia due to stress and various diseases, also referred to as bleaching. Scientists call the main reason for bleaching a sharp rise in water temperature, when corals expel the algae living in their tissues, with which they usually form a symbiosis, and the entire vibrant ecosystem of the coral reef (this is where up to a quarter of all ocean animals and plants live) dies.
According to the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network as of October last year, dynamite fishing, pollution, ocean acidification due to rising CO2 in the atmosphere destroyed up to 14% of the known corals in the world between 2009 and 2018.
Only one episode of bleaching in 1998, caused by warming waters, led to the death of 8% of all corals in the world’s oceans.