Gizmorama - June 24, 2015

Good Morning,

Having trouble sleeping? Well, you might get a charge out of this... electricity is the enemy of a good night's rest. Read more about this shocking discovery!

Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Electricity isn't good for your sleep habits --*
SEATTLE (UPI) - Recent research has shown that glowing screens are a plague on healthy sleep patterns, but a new study shows the problem is much broader -- electricity is the enemy of a good night's rest.

The circadian rhythms of modern humans are constantly disrupted by things with plugs -- lights, computers, TVs, phones. In a new study, researchers argue the reason people get less sleep than their ancestors did is the uptick in artificial light -- artificial light made possible by electricity.

To test their general theory, researchers set to find out how the introduction of electricity might affect the sleep habits of two similar communities. Two indigenous communities living in rural northeastern Argentina made for the perfect test subjects.

The two traditional Toba/Qom communities were extremely similar in a variety of ways, but only one of the two had 24-hour access to electricity.

Over a two-year period, researchers twice visited the communities -- once at the outset, allowing scientists to outfit study participants with tracking devices that monitored activity and sleep habits. Participants also kept sleep diaries.

The researchers found that the community with electricity slept an hour less per night on average.

"In a way, this study presents a proxy of what happened to humanity as we moved from hunting and gathering to agriculture and eventually to our industrialized society," lead study author Horacio de la Iglesia, a University of Washington biology professor, said in a press release. "All the effects we found are probably an underestimation of what we would see in highly industrialized societies where our access to electricity has tremendously disrupted our sleep."

Researchers also found that both communities slept more in the winter than the summer, despite the fact that length of days and nights barely change through the seasons.

"We tend to think we're isolated from seasonal effects even though we know this is the case for many animals," de la Iglesia said. "I think it's still embedded in our biology even when we do as much as we can to obscure that difference between summer and winter."

The study was published in the Journal of Biological Rhythms.


*-- Worms have an electromagnetic sensor in their brain --*
AUSTIN, Texas (UPI) - Biologists have long believed that a variety of species sense the Earth's magnetic field in order to navigate the globe.

They've proven as much using a variety of experiments. But detailing the actual neurological mechanism has proved elusive.

Now, researchers say they've finally located the first sensor of the Earth's magnetic field in an animal. The mechanism was located inside the brain of a worm, discovered by a team of scientists and engineers at the University of Texas.

Researchers located what they describe as a nano-scale TV antenna located at the end of a neuron called AFD in the brain of a roundworm (Caenorhabditis elegans). The worms use the microscopic antenna to navigate underground.

"It's been a competitive race to find the first magnetosensory neuron," researcher Jon Pierce-Shimomura, a neuroscience professor at Texas, said in a press release. "And we think we've won with worms, which is a big surprise because no one suspected that worms could sense the Earth's magnetic field."

Scientists were able to demonstrate the antenna's electromagnetic sensitivity in a lab setting, by comparing worms from all over the globe. Roundworms typically move downward from the soil surface in an effort to find food.

But when worms from all over the world were brought to Texas to dig freely through the dirt, not all the worms defaulted to a downward dig.

Because the magnetic field varies from region to region, location to location, and because the worms sense of direction is driven by an antenna tuned to their localized magnetic field, worms from Australia moved in different directions than worms from Hawaii and England.

"I'm fascinated by the prospect that magnetic detection could be widespread across soil dwelling organisms," said lead study author Andres Vidal-Gadea, a former postdoctoral researcher at Texas, now a professor at Illinois State University.

Researchers were able to hone in on the AFD neuron using a method called calcium imaging. The technique allowed scientists to watch as manipulation of the magnetic field activated the neuron. Additionally, worms engineered to possess a defective AFD neuron were unable to properly orient themselves.

Because brain structures across species are so similar, researchers believe a similar neuron and antenna-like structure are present in a variety of other animals -- butterflies, geese, sea turtles, wolves and more.

The research was published in the journal eLife.

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