Israeli scientists claim they will develop a cure for cancer within the next year - an unlikely prospect, according to world leaders in cancer care and treatment innovation.

In December, Nobel Prize winner James Allison, who helped develop immunotherapy, said: 'Soon we'll get close with some cancers,' citing progress against some forms including melanoma. But, 'the world will never be cancer-free.'

Today, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd in Israel claims to have proved him wrong, using a web of small protein fragments called peptides which can wrap around cancer cells like an octopus, attacking tumors from multiple angles and reaching areas that other treatment molecules are too big to get to.  They say the peptides are so delicate that they should fly under the immune system's radar, preventing counter attacks from the tumor and side effects like nausea and 'chemo brain'.

Critics say the method is promising and not unheard-of but claims of a 'cure' are wildly overstated, since the only study was performed in mice, nobody has seen the results of that study, and even the inventors admit human trials will take years to start and complete.  What's more, it's improbable that we will ever develop one singular cure for all cancers, which vary widely.

Len Lichtenfeld, MD, chief medical officer of the ACS, told DailyMail.com in an email, and since published on his blog: 'It goes without saying, we all share the aspirational hope that they are correct.  Unfortunately, we must be aware that this is far from proven as an effective treatment for people with cancer, let alone a cure.'

The researchers have not published data to back up their claim that this is the most promising treatment to date.  The only words published on their 'exploratory experiment in mice' is an interview they gave to local paper The Jerusalem Post, claiming success.

That is not enough to warrant excitement or even intrigue, says Dr Vince Luca, assistant professor of Cancer Biology at Moffitt Cancer Center.

'Peptides are a rapidly growing class of therapeutics, yet very few peptide-based drugs have received FDA approval for oncology indications.  The Israeli scientists’ reports of a “universal cancer cure” have not been substantiated through publications in peer-reviewed articles, nor have they been demonstrated in human clinical trials, and their claims should be met with extreme skepticism,' Dr Luca told DailyMail.com.

That's not to say it couldn't work as a treatment in some capacity.  But Dr Lichtenfeld warns there is a big difference between finding a treatment with potential and making it work.

Dr Lichtenfeld said: 'Our hopes are always on the side of new breakthroughs in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.  We are living in an era where many exciting advances are impacting the care of patients with cancer. We hope that this approach also bears fruit and is successful.  At the same time, we must always offer a note of caution that the process to get this treatment from mouse to man is not always a simple and uncomplicated journey.  As experience has taught us so many times, the gap from a successful mouse experiment to effective, beneficial application of exciting laboratory concepts to helping cancer patients at the bedside is in fact a long and treacherous journey, filled with unforeseen and unanticipated obstacles.'

PEPTIDES ARE PROMISING FOR CANCER CARE - BUT SCIENTISTS ARE STILL STRUGGLING TO MAKE THEM WORK THIS WAY

Even despite the huge gains made in cancer treatment innovation, we are still far off eliminating the disease, with more than 18 million new cases a year and 8.2 million deaths.

Immunotherapy is the new wonder treatment, winning the Nobel Prize last year, as it trains the patient's immune system to fight cancer itself, getting around the issues of the patient's immune system reacting to drugs.

But that is expensive, still being rolled out into mainstream care, and even the inventors, James Allison of the US and Tasuku Honjo of Japan, would not market it as a cure.

Aside from that, there have been steps to more directly deliver drugs like chemotherapy to the tumor to prevent arduous and sometimes excruciating side effects.

Currently, the top FDA-approved method to do that is with antibodies, which have been perfect vehicles for delivering targeted drugs.  However, the antibody molecules are often too big to reach the brain for brain tumors.  And antibodies have a tendency to bind to parts of the immune system that can have toxic effects on the liver and bone marrow.

Peptides, amino acids connected in a chain, have been held up as a perfect alternative.  They are cheap to make and regulate, are less likely to cause side effects, and they can effectively home in on specific sites without affecting surrounding areas.

Three peptides are already used to treat elements of cancer - mainly targeting hormones that feed tumors, while other drugs do the tumor-killing.  However, many see the potential in peptides to one day do everything in a multi-pronged attack - and that is what the Israeli team claim to have achieved.

The big problem with peptides, according to a study published last year, is that they are often too delicate to be a match for tumors, and they have short half-lives, meaning they don't have the stamina to deliver a sustained attack on tumors.  Attempts have been made to extend their half life and strengthen them, but thus far to no avail.

'My colleagues here at ACS tell me phage or peptide display techniques, while very powerful research tools for selecting high affinity binders, have had a difficult road as potential drugs.  If [the Israeli group] is just beginning clinical trials, they have some tough experiments ahead,' Dr Lichtenfeld said.

WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT THE ISRAELI TEAM'S ATTEMPTS - AND WHAT ARE THE CAVEATS?

Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd (AEBi) has not conducted any human clinical trials, and has only completed one study on mice, according to their profile in the Jerusalem Post.  That is far from what is needed to establish a worthy treatment, let alone a cure.  As a result, most cancer experts will dismiss the study as, at best, a work in progress.

Claims of a cure are, at best, an overstretch.   However, the methods do build on research into peptides for cancer care, and deliver some fresh ideas on how they could be made stronger.

CEO Dr Ilan Morad compared the method, which he calls MuTaTo (multi-target toxin), to the drug cocktails used to target the AIDS virus from multiple angles at the same time.  He says the delicate chain of just 12 amino acids at a time would consist of 'several cancer-targeting peptides for each cancer cell at the same time' and would contain 'a strong peptide toxin that would kill cancer cells specifically.'

'The probability of having multiple mutations that would modify all targeted receptors simultaneously decreases dramatically with the number of targets used.  Instead of attacking receptors one at a time, we attack receptors three at a time – not even cancer can mutate three receptors at the same time,' Morad said.

COULD THIS TREATMENT EVEN REACH CLINICS WITHIN A YEAR?

There are many elements to complete, that are a tall order for a 12-month schedule:

First, AEBi says it is trying to patent specific peptide structures.

Second, they are aiming to conduct human trials which, they say, will take a few years.  Thus far, they have conducted petri dish tests and their 'first exploratory mice experiment'.

Third, the aim is for the treatment to be personalized, taking biopsies from the patients to work out which receptors need targeting.  That will take time to craft.

Dan Aridor, chairman of the board of AEBi, insisted their results are 'consistent and repeatable', adding: 'We believe we will offer in a year's time a complete cure for cancer.  Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, will last a duration of a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market.'

But Dr Lichtenfield warned readers should take the claims with a sizeable pinch of salt.  It is hardly the first time a team has said the same.  He recommends a 'well-established program of experiments' to 'better define how this works - and may not work - as it moves from the laboratory bench to the clinic.'

'It will likely take some time to prove the benefit of this new approach to the treatment of cancer,' he explains. 'And unfortunately - based on other similar claims of breakthrough technologies for the treatment of cancer - the odds are that it won’t be successful.'

WE PROBABLY WON'T EVER DEVELOP ONE SINGLE CANCER CURE 

More importantly, it is unlikely cancer will ever be cured with one silver bullet given the myriad of different types of tumors, locations and diseases.

'There's lot of things we can't control,' Dr Shelley S Tworoger, associate director of the Population Science division at Moffitt Cancer Center, explained to DailyMail.com in an interview last month.

Many types of cancer could be prevented with lifestyle changes, Dr Tworoger said, such as 'stopping smoking, improving diet, more physical activity, better weight control, and HPV vaccines.'

That could allow us to push the preventable types 'off the table' and focus resources on other types.  One day we may be able to better control cancer, and perhaps reach a point where they become similar to a chronic disease, like HIV.  But one pill to nip them all in the bud like antibiotics - as this Israeli team envision - is improbable.

Extracted from: www.dailymail.co.uk

A species of ancient, flat shark that survive on sea beds has been spotted off the Welsh coast.  Sightings around Cardigan Bay, the Bristol Channel and to the north of Holyhead have encouraged scientists that the elusive and critically endangered angel sharks are thriving once more.  Numbers of the unique animal plummeted in the 20th century thanks to commercial fishing and pollution.

Angel sharks are believed to stem from an ancient lineage of sharks that have changed very little over its evolutionary history.  Spain's Canary Islands, just west of Africa has emerged as the long stronghold for the animal after its demise in the latter half of the 1900s.  Sightings from fishermen off the coast of Wales has provided new hope for the conservation hopes of these rare sharks.

It poses little threat to humans, despite the shark's fearsome appearance and stealthy approach to hunting, as they survive on smaller prey such as crabs and fish.

'If we lose the angel shark, we lose a really important lineage of evolutionary history that we can't get from any other shark species,' Joanna Barker, of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), told BBC News.

Numbers of angel sharks plummeted after they became a prize catch for fishermen.  Researchers are now hoping to understand if Wales is a second endemic location or if it is part of a migration for the sharks.  It lies in wait at the bottom of the ocean and waits for small fish or crab strays to wander in its vicinity.

'What we really want to try and understand is what sort of numbers are we talking about and where are their important habitats.  There could be some really critical areas for angel sharks in Wales ,' Joanna said.

Scientists hope that genetic swabs from the sharks could reveal if the sharks seen in the Canary Islands and those believed to be In Wales are the same animals or distinct populations.  Dives has been already scheduled to take place to find direct evidence of the presence of Angel sharks.

Extracted from: www.dailymail.co.uk

   

There are an estimated 170 million pieces of so-called 'space junk' - left behind after missions that can be as big as spent rocket stages or as small as paint flakes - in orbit alongside some US$700 billion of space infrastructure.  But only 22,000 are tracked, and with the fragments able to travel at speeds above 27,000 kmh, even tiny pieces could seriously damage or destroy satellites.

However, traditional gripping methods don't work in space, as suction cups do not function in a vacuum and temperatures are too cold for substances like tape and glue.  Grippers based around magnets are useless because most of the debris in orbit around Earth is not magnetic.

Most proposed solutions, including debris harpoons, either require or cause forceful interaction with the debris, which could push those objects in unintended, unpredictable directions.

Scientists point to two events that have badly worsened the problem of space junk.  The first was in February 2009, when an Iridium telecoms satellite and Kosmos-2251, a Russian military satellite, accidentally collided.  The second was in January 2007, when China tested an anti-satellite weapon on an old Fengyun weather satellite.

Experts also pointed to two sites that have become worryingly cluttered.  One is low Earth orbit which is used by satnav satellites, the ISS, China's manned missions and the Hubble telescope, among others.  The other is in geostationary orbit, and is used by communications, weather and surveillance satellites that must maintain a fixed position relative to Earth.

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NASA has released the clearest image yet of the 'space snowman' Ultima Thule, the most distant known world in our solar system at six billion km away from Earth.

The new image was acquired when the New Horizons spacecraft was just 6,700 km away from the target and shows sharper detail of the rock's surface including what appears to be a dent on the left object.

Because of its distance from Earth, it takes six hours and nine minutes for the data, which was transmitted between January 18th and 19th, to start reaching us.  Since then, experts have been using software to sharpen it.

The picture was obtained using New Horizons' wide-angle Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) which gives a resolution of 5000 x 32 pixels seven minutes before the spacecraft's closest approach to the snowman.  Ultima Thule's detail is now sharpened for us to see the outline of a number of pits, including a deep depression in the left object.

The NASA craft first captured images of the dual-lobed space rock, located more than a billion miles from Pluto, when it reached it on New Year's day.  It continues to perform several flyby's of the 33 km long asteroid and beam data back to Earth for the next 20 months to shed light on how the solar system was created. 

Ultima Thule, formally known as 2014 MU69, got its name from a medieval term for anywhere beyond the known world.

   

The project has spent more than a decade hurtling through the Solar System since it launched on January 19, 2006 and passed Pluto in 2015.

'Ultima Thule will be the most primitive planetary object explored, and will reveal what conditions were like in this distant part of the solar system as it formed from the solar nebula,' Nasa said.

The probe is powered by a plutonium core and when it reached Pluto its sensors were working fine so NASA sent the probe on towards Ultima Thule.

Due to its original formation in the dust that also birthed Earth, scientists hope to find clues about how our planet came to be.

Evidence from the probe led NASA scientists to believe they have found new evidence of the mysterious 'wall' that surrounds all the planets and objects in our solar system.

This mysterious bubble marks the boundary between the solar system and interstellar space and provides a marker for the edge of the sun's influence.  According to the latest findings, the barrier is actually a vast amount of trapped hydrogen atoms caught up in the solar wind of our star.  These produce waves of ultraviolet light in a very distinctive way, which have been detected by the sensors aboard the New Horizons interplanetary space probe.

Ultima Thule orbits the Sun in a sparsely populated and low-energy environment known as the Kuiper belt, a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune.  Because it is so sparsely populated, the chance of a collision with other objects is exceedingly low, but experts say that as it was probably created at the start of the solar system, it would have faced collision with other rocks.

Horizons' principal investigator Prof Alan Stern said: 'Everything that we're going to learn about Ultima - from its composition to its geology, to how it was originally assembled, whether it has satellites and an atmosphere, and that kind of thing - is going to teach us about the original formation conditions in the Solar System that all the other objects we've gone out and orbited, flown by and landed on can't tell us because they're either large and evolve, or they are warm.  Ultima is unique.'

Extracted from: www.dailymail.co.uk

A new study supported by NASA has shed worrying light on the effects of space travel on the human brain.  Brain scans of astronauts from before and after spaceflight revealed changes typically associated with long term processes such as aging, including deterioration in areas responsible for movement and the processing of sensory information.  The results, however, also suggest an astronaut’s brain may be able to adapt to these changes over time.

Rachel Seidler, a professor with the College of Health and Human Performance at the University of Florida said: ‘We know that fluid shifts toward the head in space.  When you see photos and video of astronauts, their faces often look puffy, because gravity isn’t pulling fluids down into the body.’

These gravitational effects aren’t just worn on the surface – according to the new study, spaceflight directly affects the brain’s white matter in the regions that control movement and process sensory information.  And, the team found that spaceflight causes fluid around the brain to pool at the base of the cerebrum, as if the brain is ‘floating higher’ in the skull.  This could play a key role in a condition called Spaceflight Associated Neuro-Ocular Syndrome, which causes visual changes and flattening in the back of the eye.

Seidler said: ‘It could be slower fluid turnover, it could be pressure on the optic nerve or that the brain is sort of tugging on the optic nerve because it’s floating higher in the skull.’

But, the researchers say, the white matter problems don’t appear to be permanent.  Typically, these changes fix themselves in a matter of weeks after the astronauts return to Earth.  Some changes, however, could last months.  Moving forward, the team plans to include scans from six months after spaceflight as well.

The findings aren’t just important for astronauts, but for future space tourists as well, especially as inactive lifestyles continue to be common.

Upon returning to Earth, an astronaut’s body isn’t sending as much sensory input to the brain, the researchers note.

Seidler notes: ‘We have an increasingly sedentary lifestyle.  It’s not the same as the effects on limbs in space, but if we’re laying around and not using our bodies, could the integrity of white matter pathways in the brain be affected?  Another reason is for an active lifestyle.’

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Pop songs have become angrier and sadder over the past 60 years, experts say.  Researchers analysed lyrics in best-selling songs from the 1950s to 2016 to find expressions of anger and sadness had increased, while words about joy had dropped.

The US study team looked at lyrics of more than 6,000 songs from Billboard Hot 100 in each year.  These are the most popular songs in the US each year as chosen by music fans.

In the past songs were ranked mainly by record sales, radio and jukebox plays, but more recently it is based on other popularity indicators such as streaming and social media to reflect changes in music consumption.

Tones expressed in each song were analysed using 'automatic quantitative sentiment' which looked at each word or phrase in the song with a set of tones they express.  The combination of the tones expressed by all words and phrases of the lyrics determines the sentiment of that song.  The sentiments of all Billboard Hot 100 songs in each year are averaged and the average of each year measured whether the expression of that sentiment increased, decreased or remained the same.

The analysis showed the expression of anger in popular music lyrics has increased gradually over time.  Study co-author Lior Shamir, of Lawrence Technological University in Michigan, said: 'The change in lyrics sentiments does not necessarily reflect what the musicians and songwriters wanted to express, but is more related to what music consumers wanted to listen to in each year.'

Songs released during the mid 1950s were the least angry and the anger expressed in lyrics has increased gradually until peaking in 2015.  The analysis also revealed some variations with songs released between 1982 and 1984 being less angry compared to any other period, except for the 1950s.  In the mid 1990s, songs became angrier and the increase in anger was sharper during that time in comparison to previous years.

The expression of sadness, disgust and fear also increased over time, although the increase was milder compared to the increase in the expression of anger.

Disgust increased gradually, but was lower in the early 1980s and higher in the mid and late 1990s.

Popular music lyrics expressed more fear during the mid 1980s and the fear decreased sharply in 1988.  Another sharp increase in fear was observed in 1998 and 1999, with a sharp decrease in 2000.

The study also showed that joy was a dominant tone in popular music lyrics during the late 1950s, but it decreased over time and became much milder in the recent years.  An exception was observed in the mid 1970s, when joy expressed in lyrics increased sharply.

The study shows that the tones expressed in popular music change over time and the change is gradual and consistent, with a few exceptions.

Since the researchers analysed the most popular songs in each year, the study does not show that music changed, but that the preferences of music consumers have changed over time.  While music fans preferred joyful songs during the 1950s, modern music consumers are more interested in songs that express sadness or anger.

The findings appear in the Journal of Popular Music Studies..

Extracted from: www.dailymail.co.uk

A report has found companies waste billions of dollars in wasted hours as a result of forcing staff into pointless meetings.

It found that, on average, a working professional spends around 13 total work days a year in meaningless meetings.  This, the report claims, will cost the UK economy £45 billion in 2019 alone and is considered by employees to be more irritating than a stubbed toe, delayed commute, running out of toilet roll and getting caught in the rain without an umbrella.

Scheduling platform Doodle interviewed over 6,500 professionals across the UK, Germany, the USA and Switzerland, and examined 19 million meetings arranged through its platform in 2018.

It found more than a third (37 per cent) of professionals consider unnecessary meetings to be the biggest cost to their organisation and nearly half say they create confusion in the workplace and negatively impact their ability to actually do their work (43 and 44 per cent, respectively).   Of all the time invested in meetings in the workplace, a third of people (33 per cent) revealed they felt unable to contribute to the wider group.

Researchers did find that face-to-face meetings are still preferred to many other alternatives despite their flaws.  Seventy-six per cent of professionals surveyed said it is their favoured format, with other methods scoring poorly.

Conference calls were favoured by a mere seven per cent of people whereas video calls and instant messaging were favoured by only five and four per cent of the study participants.

An overwhelming majority (95 per cent) also feel that an in-person meeting was an effective way of building relationships at work, with instant messaging scoring less than half of this (47 per cent).

Steven Rogelberg, professor of management at the University of North Carolina and author of 'The Surprising Science of Meetings' said: 'Research on meetings is just so critical.  There is perhaps no other work activity that is just so common, and yet so complained about.  Although technology has made it easier and easier to meet remotely, and that is a good thing, there is something particularly powerful associated with individuals coming together to meet face to face.  Communication tends to be more rich and nuanced given that verbal and non-verbal cues readily abound.  These additional layers not only can promote deeper understandings, but can help actually foster relationships as communication intent is easier to see and empathise with, and misunderstandings are a bit easier to avoid.  Unlike a virtual meeting where it is easier to hide in the background and multi-task, face to face meetings tend to have more accountability and engagement.'

Dr Sankalp Chaturvedi, associate professor of organisational behaviour and leadership at Imperial College London comments on what makes a good meeting: 'The secret of a successful and time-efficient meeting is preparation.  The agenda mustn't be too long.  Otherwise there's a risk of spending too much time on the first items and later items are rushed.  The agenda should be circulated well in advance, including the goals of what is expected from the meeting, and specific detail on the subjects and time allocation.'

Extracted from: www.dailymail.co.uk

   

Researchers have managed to recreate a 'freak wave' in the lab for the first time - and found it perfectly mirrors a famous Japanese painting from 1800.

Freak waves, officially known as Draupner waves, are unexpectedly large in comparison to surrounding waves.  They are difficult to predict, often appearing suddenly without warning, and are commonly attributed as probable causes for maritime catastrophes such as the sinking of large ships.

Most famously, they were captured in 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa' - also known as 'The Great Wave' - a woodblock print published in the early 1800s by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.

The Draupner wave was one of the first confirmed observations of a 'freak wave' in the ocean; it was observed on the 1st of January 1995 in the North Sea by measurements made on the Draupner Oil Platform.

To recreate them in the lab, the team at the University of Oxford recreated the wave using two smaller wave groups and varying the crossing angle - the angle at which the two groups travel.

'The measurement of the Draupner wave in 1995 was a seminal observation initiating many years of research into the physics of freak waves and shifting their standing from mere folklore to a credible real-world phenomenon.  By recreating the Draupner wave in the lab we have moved one step closer to understanding the potential mechanisms of this phenomenon,' said Dr Mark McAllister at the University of Oxford's Department of Engineering Science.

To the researchers' amazement, the wave they created bore an uncanny resemblance to 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa' - also known as 'The Great Wave' - a woodblock print published in the early 1800s by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.  Hokusai's image depicts an enormous wave threatening three fishing boats and towers over Mount Fuji which appears in the background.

Hokusai's wave is believed to depict a freak, or 'rogue', wave.  It was the crossing angle between the two smaller groups that proved critical to the successful reconstruction.

The researchers found it was only possible to reproduce the freak wave when the crossing angle between the two groups was approximately 120 degrees.  When waves are not crossing, wave breaking limits the height that a wave can achieve.  However, when waves cross at large angles, wave breaking behaviour changes and no longer limits the height a wave can achieve in the same manner.

Prof Ton van den Bremer at the University of Oxford said: 'Not only does this laboratory observation shed light on how the famous Draupner wave may have occurred, it also highlights the nature and significance of wave breaking in crossing sea conditions.  The latter of these two findings has broad implications, illustrating previously unobserved wave breaking behaviour, which differs significantly from current state-of-the-art understanding of ocean wave breaking.'

The laboratory-created freak wave also bears strong resemblances with photographs of freak waves in the ocean.  Previous experiments carried out in an ocean research facility showed that when waves intersect at an angle greater than approximately 60 degrees, they cause the surface level of the ocean to rise.  This adds to the overall height of the resulting combined wave.

Dr Ton van den Bremer, who led the study while at the University of Edinburgh, said: 'This improves understanding of rogue waves, decades after this aspect of their behaviour was suggested.  The more we know about this dangerous phenomenon, the better equipped we will be to design offshore structures and to navigate the oceans.'

Experiments were carried out in the FloWave Ocean Energy Research Facility at the University of Edinburgh.  The testing tank is able to simulate ocean currents and waves of any type, which are monitored using overhead sensors.  Researchers used the 25-metre circular tank to study the complex interactions that occur when waves cross in open water.  The study was carried out in collaboration with the University of Oxford and supported by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Dr Mark McAllister, who took part in the research while at the University of Edinburgh, said: 'These experiments provide new insight into how a heightened, or set-up, wave actually forms.  They revealed that this behaves like a partial standing wave, which forms underneath waves as they cross.  This insight allowed us to create a simple theory to predict when such waves might occur.'

Rogue waves happen spontaneously and cause huge damage as well as risk to human life.  The unpredictable nature of the waves is a particular problem for oil-rigs and other off-shore structures and can have devastating consequences.  The rogue waves are referred to by scientists as 'extreme storm waves' and are steep sided, have deep troughs and can become twice the size of surrounding waves.

The paper was published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

Swedish researchers have recreated how birds see the world using a special camera.  The 'birds eye view'  reveals just how different a bird's view of the world is.

While human colour vision is based on three primary colours: red, green and blue, birds can also see ultraviolet.  This, the images reveal, allows them to see foliage in stunning detail, for example.

'What appears to be a green mess to humans are clearly distinguishable leaves for birds.  No one knew about this until this study,' said Dan-Eric Nilsson, professor at the Department of Biology at Lund University.

For birds, the upper sides of leaves appear much lighter in ultraviolet.  From below, the leaves are very dark.  In this way, the three-dimensional structure of dense foliage is obvious to birds.  This in turn makes it easy for them to move, find food and navigate.

People, on the other hand, do not perceive ultraviolet, and see the foliage in green; the primary color where contrast is the worst.

The project is the first time that researchers have succeeded in imitating bird colour vision with a high degree of precision.  To create the images, they built a special camera equipped with rotating filter wheels and specially manufactured filters, which make it possible to show what different animals see clearly.  In this case, the camera imitates with a high degree of accuracy the colour sensitivity of the four different types of cones in bird retinas.

'We have discovered something that is probably very important for birds, and we continue to reveal how reality appears also to other animals', says Dan-Eric Nilsson, continuing: 'We may have the notion that what we see is the reality, but it's a highly human reality.  Other animals live in other realities, and we can now see through their eyes and reveal many secrets.  Reality is in the eye of the beholder'.

Extracted from: www.dailymail.co.uk

 

   

For most it would bring back terrible memories of the scene from Jaws when the immortal line 'you're going to need a bigger boat' was uttered.   But when a team of divers spotted the largest great white shark on the planet they only hesitated to grab their cameras before they jumped into the sea.

The enormous predator named Deep Blue is up to 50 years old, weights 2.5 tons and measures 20ft long.  It was drawn to the water around Hawaii for what one diver described as an 'all you can eat buffet' - to feed on a dead sperm whale.

Deep Blue was last spotted in Mexico in 2013 where it was fitted with a tracker which is how divers were able to identify it this time.

Conservation photographer Juan Oliphant was one of the divers who took the plunge along with marine biologist Ocean Ramsey.  Remarkable photos shot by Oliphant show him and Ramsey swimming right next to the enormous predator.

Posting on Instagram shortly after the swim, Oliphant wrote: 'Face to face with the worlds largest great white ever recorded 'Deep Blue' with @oceanramsey.  I'm still in shock that we spent almost the whole day with this amazing animal in my backyard.  I hope my conservation images like this help people to question their perceptions and realize the beauty, and importance of sharks and I hope that they inspire the kind of compassion and connection we need to have with nature and sharks, to help protect them and coexist alongside them.'

Another diver who swam with Deep Blue. Kimberly Jeffries, wrote: 'If you asked me a few days ago what the most amazing thing I've ever seen in Hawaiian waters the answer probably would be pretty different.  If you asked me yesterday the answer would be freediving with Deep Blue, a great white, the largest ever documented, who was last seen in 2013 in Mexico.  If you asked me right now, it would be freediving with, interacting with and photographing not one but multiple, different great whites AND Deep Blue.'

Footage of Deep Blue was also captured back in 2013 by shark researcher Mauricio Hoyos Padilla off Mexico's Guadalupe Island.  The video shows the enormous apex predator swimming near researchers in steel cages, with one bold enough to be swimming outside the protection of the protective metal bars.

The massive predator was also featured back in 2014 in a Shark Week documentary, when researchers tagged the gigantic fish.

Great whites, the largest predatory fish on earth, typically grow to 15 feet in length, with some, like Deep Blue, exceeding 20 feet in length and weighing up to 5,000 pounds, according to National Geographic.

German tourist Michael Maier also described filming the predator during a 2014 trip to Mexico.  Mr Maier, 48, said: 'Deep Blue is a very large female shark and she is known to be found in Mexico.  When we entered the water we had to wait because there was nothing to see.  All of a sudden out of the deep blue, there she came. We realised almost immediately that she was very big.  She was very calm and not at all nervous and was circling us. She was very interested and was looking at us.  During the circles we realised just how big she was - she must have been something like seven metres long.  Everything was very well prepared.  The whole team felt safe.  We had a very long beautiful dive with her and we were all very much enthusiastic about the encounter.'

George Burgess, director emeritus of the International Shark Attack File at Florida Museum of Natural History, told ABC News: 'It's a very big white shark, obviously.  One of the largest that has ever been seen in the water.  She's a big girl.'

The shark got her name from Discovery Channel diver Mauricio Hoyos Padilla, who swam with the creature as part of a Shark Week documentary.

Extracted from: www.dailymail.co.uk