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NATURE • Good Good Good
Down 99 percent, the rarest sea turtle is nesting again.Kemp's ridley sea turtles, the rarest of the world's sea turtles, had nearly vanished by 1985, when their nesting numbers had collapsed by roughly 99 percent. Three decades of coordinated human effort brought them back. The recovery involved protecting nesting beaches, guarding eggs from poachers, and changing how commercial boats fish so fewer turtles drown in nets. The work spanned generations of biologists who counted nests one at a time, often on the same stretches of sand where the species had almost disappeared. A turtle that begins its life as an egg buried on a Gulf beach can take more than a decade to return and lay eggs of its own, which means the people who started this rescue had to trust math they would not live to confirm. The comeback is not finished. Kemp's ridleys remain critically endangered. But there are far more of them digging nests today than anyone in 1985 dared to expect.
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SCIENCE • Good News Network
A desert mouse holds a clue to living past 100A protein tied to longevity in humans has turned up in unusually high concentrations in a desert rodent, according to researchers at Yale School of Medicine. The animal is the golden spiny mouse, a resident of Middle-Eastern deserts that stays awake during the day and lives far longer than its relatives. "Mice in the wild typically live around 9 months," says senior author Vishwa Deep Dixit, a professor of pathology. "But some of these golden spiny mice are living out in the desert for up to five years." And they do it while dodging predators and foraging, so these are not frail elders. They stay sharp. The team traced the effect partly to a gene that produces clusterin, a protein often found in people over 100. It clears misfolded proteins and lowers inflammation. The mouse also keeps its thymus gland working into old age, a small organ that gives up on most mammals shortly after adulthood.
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PROGRESS • Good News Network
He found a fish that fights disease and feeds familiesAdding fish to rice paddies cut the population of disease-carrying snails and raised rice yields by more than 25%, according to research published in Nature Sustainability by scientists at the University of Notre Dame. The team introduced African bonytongue and Nile tilapia into fields along the northern Senegal River basin, a hot spot for schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease that affects more than 220 million people worldwide. The worms spread through freshwater snails living in the standing water of rice fields, which puts farming families at particular risk. Both fish species eat snails or crowd them out. The researchers never fed the fish, and the fish thrived anyway. Fields with both species held fewer host snails, and the soil improved, and farmers gained a second income from selling the catch. "Those kinds of win-win-win solutions are rare," said professor Jason Rohr, the study's corresponding author. The next step is scaling the approach across other endemic regions.
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NATURE • Good Good Good
A coat of red paint is saving crossing animalsForest officials in India have painted stretches of a busy highway red in an effort to slow drivers and cut down on wildlife deaths along the route. The idea leans on color psychology, the notion that a red road surface reads as a warning and prompts people to ease off the accelerator. Animals crossing the highway had been dying in collisions, and the painted sections give drivers a visual cue to slow before an animal steps into the road. It is a low-tech fix for a problem that usually invites expensive engineering, and it works without any sign for a driver to ignore. Early on, the red stretches appear to be doing their job. The animals, for their part, did not request the color scheme and remain unaware that a coat of paint is now looking out for them.
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MEDICINE • Good News Network
Your morning coffee may protect your liver, study findsCoffee drinkers carry a 47% lower risk of developing liver cancer than people who skip it, according to a new analysis from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Researcher Hyunseok Kim and colleagues drew on the UK Biobank, which has followed roughly 500,000 people aged 40 to 69 for decades. The team also found a 32% lower risk of cirrhosis and a 42% lower risk of liver-related death among coffee drinkers. Blood protein data pointed the same way, with drinkers showing higher levels of proteins tied to healthy liver function. Curiously, the effect held for decaf drinkers too, which suggests the flavonoids and phenols, rather than caffeine, do the quiet work. The World Health Organization only removed coffee from its list of possible carcinogens in 2016. "Our findings support moderate coffee consumption for people who already enjoy and tolerate it well," said senior author Ju Dong Yang. He stopped short of prescribing it.
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With love, The Editor
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