Cat dander makes some people sneeze, itch and become generally miserable with allergic symptoms. A new study suggests adding an antibody to traditional cat allergy shots may help calm those beastly reactions better than shots alone.
Adding lab-made antibodies to allergy shots may better groom the immune system against cat allergies than standard shots alone. The combination therapy also reduced allergy symptoms for a year after stopping treatment, a new study finds
Allergy shots, also called immunotherapy, have been used for more than a century to reduce the itchy, watery eyes, sneezing, runny nose, congestion and other symptoms of allergies. The shots contain tiny amounts of the things people are allergic to, called allergens. People get shots weekly to monthly for three to five years and gradually build up tolerance to the allergen.
Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
Despite their long use, scientists don’t know exactly how allergy shots work, says Lisa Wheatley, an allergist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Some people are essentially cured of their allergies, while others may need shots indefinitely. “We knew that if you were on immunotherapy for cat [allergies] … you will be better after that year, but you will not retain that benefit.”
The study was done to see if researchers could improve allergy therapy by reducing the amount of time shots were needed while still giving patients long-lasting relief. The team also hoped to better understand how immunotherapy works, she says.
When allergies strike, some immune cells produce alarm chemicals that trigger inflammation and other symptoms. “If we could dampen the signaling that says ‘danger,’ we could maybe improve immunotherapy,” Wheatley says.
She and colleagues used a monoclonal antibody called tezepelumab to block one of those alarm chemicals, known as thymic stromal lymphopoietin, or TSLP. The antibody has been used as an asthma treatment, so researchers already knew it is generally safe.
Researchers gave 121 cat allergy sufferers either standard allergy shots alone, tezepelumab alone, a combination of the two or a placebo. On its own, tezepelumab was no better than just a placebo, the researchers found.
After a year of treatment, people who got the combo had reduced allergy symptoms to cat dander squirted up their noses compared with people who got standard shots, researchers report October 9 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology .
And levels of allergy-triggering antibodies called IgE fell and kept falling even a year after treatment stopped in people who got the combination. In people on standard shots, IgE levels started to claw their way back to baseline once treatment stopped, Wheatley says.
One reason the therapy may work is that it alters inflammation-triggering gene activity in some immune cells, the team found. Immune cells called mast cells made less tryptase — one of the major chemicals released in an allergic reaction — in people who got the combination therapy, an analysis of nasal swabs showed.
While the results are encouraging, it’s not clear that tezepelumab would work as well for other allergies, says Edward Zoratti, an allergist and immunologist at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit who was not involved in the study. “Did they just get lucky and choose the right allergen?”
Cat allergies develop against a single sticky protein called Fel d1 that is in cats’ saliva and in flakes of dead skin cells, or dander ( SN: 2/13/20 ). Cockroach allergies, in contrast, can be produced by a variety of proteins.
Another possible drawback is that monoclonal antibodies are expensive, Zoratti says.
Much more research is needed before this or any other therapy is added to allergy shots in a doctor’s office, he says, but the study is important for understanding how allergy therapies work. “It’s one step in a long chain that will probably lead us to a really useful therapy in the future.”
Tina Hesman Saey is the senior staff writer and reports on molecular biology. She has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s degree in science journalism from Boston University.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
The closest black hole yet found is just 1,560 light-years from Earth, a new study reports. The black hole, dubbed Gaia BH1, is about 10 times the mass of the sun and orbits a sunlike star.
Most known black holes steal and eat gas from massive companion stars. That gas forms a disk around the black hole and glows brightly in X-rays. But hungry black holes are not the most common ones in our galaxy. Far more numerous are the tranquil black holes that are not mid-meal, which astronomers have dreamed of finding for decades. Previous claims of finding such black holes have so far not held up ( SN: 5/6/20; SN: 3/11/22 ).
Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
So astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry and colleagues turned to newly released data from the Gaia spacecraft, which precisely maps the positions of billions of stars ( SN: 6/13/22 ). A star orbiting a black hole at a safe distance won’t get eaten, but it will be pulled back and forth by the black hole’s gravity. Astronomers can detect the star’s motion and deduce the black hole’s presence.
Out of hundreds of thousands of stars that looked like they were tugged by an unseen object, just one seemed like a good black hole candidate. Follow-up observations with other telescopes support the black hole idea , the team reports November 2 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society .
Gaia BH1 is the nearest black hole to Earth ever discovered — the next closest is around 3,200 light-years away. But it’s probably not the closest that exists, or even the closest we’ll ever find. Astronomers think there are about 100 million black holes in the Milky Way, but almost all of them are invisible. “They’re just isolated, so we can’t see them,” says El-Badry, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
The next data release from Gaia is due out in 2025, and El-Badry expects it to bring more black hole bounty. “We think there are probably a lot that are closer,” he says. “Just finding one … suggests there are a bunch more to be found.”
K. El-Badry et al . A sun-like star orbiting a black hole . Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . Published online November 2, 2022. doi: 10.1093/mnras/stac3140.
Lisa Grossman is the astronomy writer. She has a degree in astronomy from Cornell University and a graduate certificate in science writing from University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives near Boston.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus, illustrated in his observatory in Alexandria, Egypt, was thought to have written the first star catalog. Now researchers have found part of it hidden in a medieval codex.
Fragments of a star catalog from the second century B.C. have turned up in a manuscript that had been erased and written over centuries later. A new analysis of the religious manuscript shows that the hidden text is probably from the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus, whose map of the stars — thought to be the first attempt to map the entire sky — has long been considered lost.
“I think this lays to rest doubts about the existence of Hipparchus’ catalog” and confirms that he was “trying to measure coordinates for all of the visible stars,” says Victor Gysembergh, a historian of ancient science at CNRS in Paris. He and his colleagues reported the discovery in the November Journal for the History of Astronomy .
Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
The manuscript that concealed the fragments was a palimpsest, or a parchment that had been erased and reused, called the Codex Climaci Rescriptus . The codex probably comes from the monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai in Egypt, and most of it is currently housed at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.
The visible writing is a Christian text called the Ladder of Paradise. But shadows of earlier symbols were visible behind it. In 2017, researchers with the Early Manuscripts Electronics Library in Rolling Hills Estates, Calif., and the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York took digital pictures of the codex in many wavelengths of light, from many different angles. This technique is called multispectral imaging and is used to analyze palimpsests and other damaged books ( SN: 10/3/07 ). Light that reflected off the ancient ink, or that made the ink fluoresce, highlighted the hidden text. Once the pages are digitized, researchers all over the world can study them without leaving their computers.
Biblical scholar Peter Williams of the University of Cambridge was studying the digitized papers during one of the COVID-19 lockdowns. He and his team had previously found ancient poetry about astronomy beneath the main text. This time, he also found something that looked like astronomical measurements.
Williams reached out to Gysembergh and historian Emanuel Zingg of Sorbonne University in Paris for help. Gysembergh immediately thought of Hipparchus.
Hipparchus was a Greek astronomer and mathematician who lived between about 190 and 120 B.C. Indirect evidence suggests that he made the first star catalog that used two coordinates to uniquely define a position in the sky, rather than describing constellations’ positions relative to each other.
“I think most scholars believe there was such a catalog,” says Mathieu Ossendrijver, a historian of astronomy at Free University Berlin who was not involved in the new work. But the best evidence for it came from poor translations or references in later catalogs, like that of astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in Alexandria, Egypt, four centuries after Hipparchus.
To test the idea that the fragment was part of Hipparchus’ catalog, Gysembergh and colleagues first painstakingly translated the revealed passage. “A lot of it was, ‘Can you read this? I can’t,’” Gysembergh says. “We would struggle over every letter, every numeral.”
The passage turned out to be a description of the constellation Corona Borealis, the northern crown, giving numerical coordinates for several of its stars. The coordinates were written in an unusual notation that was thought to have been used by Hipparchus and no one else.
Next, the researchers used planetarium software to calculate where those stars would have been in the sky in 129 B.C., when Hipparchus was alive and working. Those calculations matched the ancient manuscript’s notations to within one degree.
“It’s quite clear that it is actually a well preserved, well copied, not much distorted part of the original catalog of Hipparchus,” Ossendrijver says. “It’s really an important discovery.”
Astronomers in ancient Babylonia may have had their own star catalog that was written even earlier, Ossendrijver says. “Could [Hipparchus] have picked up the idea of making a catalog maybe from Babylonians, and maybe even some concrete data?”
Gysembergh is hopeful that more of the Hipparchus catalog could turn up in other parts of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, or in other texts that haven’t been analyzed with multispectral imaging yet. “There’s so much more to find in these manuscripts,” he says. “We’ve hardly scraped the surface.”
Lisa Grossman is the astronomy writer. She has a degree in astronomy from Cornell University and a graduate certificate in science writing from University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives near Boston.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
A cryptic chemical signature of unknown origins, hidden for centuries inside the trunks of Earth’s trees, just became even more mysterious.
In the last decade, scientists have discovered traces on Earth of six intense bursts of radiation, known as Miyake events, scattered over the last 9,300 years. The most popular explanation is that these mysterious signatures were left behind by massive solar storms, leading some scientists to warn that the next Miyake event could cripple the world’s electrical grid. But new research, published in the October Proceedings of the Royal Society A , suggests that more than just solar flares might be behind the enigmatic radiation.
Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
The finding underscores the need for further investigations into these strange bursts, which could potentially harm our society in the future, says physicist Gianluca Quarta of the University of Salento in Lecce, Italy, who was not involved in the study. “Something is not fitting with what we know at the moment.”
Miyake events were first discovered in trees. As trees grow, their trunks accrue layers, or rings, which lock in chemical signatures from their surroundings. By analyzing the composition of individual tree rings, researchers can uncover clues about environmental conditions going back thousands of years ( SN: 6/1/20 ).
In 2012, physicist Fusa Miyake of Nagoya University in Japan was studying Japanese cedar tree rings when she found a sharp spike in radiocarbon — a variant of carbon that can form when cosmic radiation strikes Earth’s atmosphere — in rings dating to about A.D. 774. Since then, five other similar bursts , now named Miyake events, have been detected in tree rings around the world as well as in polar ice cores .
Due to the spikes’ global occurrence, many scientists contend that the events have an extraterrestrial origin. The most popular explanation is that especially large solar storms , or flares, blasted Earth with big bursts of radiation ( SN: 2/26/21 ).
The most powerful solar storm in recorded history was the 1859 Carrington event , which broke telegraph lines and sparked a circuit fire in Pittsburgh. The radiation levels associated with Miyake events are more than 80 times those of the Carrington event, says physicist Benjamin Pope of the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia. “They could pose serious risks to global technology.”
But the solar storm story has holes. Radiation levels from the 774 event would have been too high to have come from a single solar flare, some researchers have suggested. And ice cores, which can also store chemical traces of solar flares, have not yet yielded evidence of increased solar activity for every Miyake event .
So, Pope and his colleagues put the leading hypothesis to the test. They analyzed all publicly available tree ring data on the six Miyake events using computer simulations of Earth’s carbon cycle. This allowed the team to calculate the duration, timing and amplitude of each event.
If Miyake events are tied to solar activity, they could align with the solar maxima, which occur roughly every 11 years when solar flares become more frequent. But the researchers found no correlation between Miyake events and any phase of the solar cycle. What’s more, the researchers found that two of the events appeared to last longer than a year — unexpectedly long for solar storms, which typically rage for hours or days.
And if solar flares did cause the events, then trees nearer the poles, where Earth’s protective magnetic field is weaker, should contain higher levels of Miyake event radiation. But the researchers found no such trend.
The findings don’t rule out the solar flare hypothesis, Pope says. Insufficient tree ring data could be hiding a link between solar activity and Miyake events, he says. New Antarctic ice-core data — being analyzed by researchers at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization and hopefully published next year — may provide more answers.
Solar flares could still be behind the events, Quarta agrees. Nuances in Earth’s carbon cycle not captured by the simulations could influence the findings. For instance, trees might metabolize radiocarbon at different rates depending on species or latitude, he says.
Though the mystery remains unsolved, Pope isn’t losing sleep over another Miyake event happening anytime soon. There’s about a 1 percent chance of one happening in the next decade, he says. “I’d be more worried about being hit by a bus on my walk to the office.”
Nikk Ogasa is a staff writer who focuses on the physical sciences for Science News . He has a master’s degree in geology from McGill University, and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
One tiny springtail (left) prepares to launch itself high off of a water surface with far more acrobatic control than researchers have recognized. The other springtail shows how easily these little animals stroll on water.
It’s not just panic and chance. Some of nature’s extreme self-launchers, the springtails, turn out to be much more acrobatic than scientists thought.
Springtails, poppy seed–sized cousins of insects, “are famous because they know how to jump but also famous because they have no control at all according to the literature,” says biomechanist Victor M. Ortega-Jiménez of the University of Maine in Orono.
But in a study published November 7 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , he and colleagues have used high-speed video to challenge that received no-control “wisdom.”
Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
Springtails tend to be ignored by most people because they are so hard to see with the naked eye. What’s more, the 3,000 plus known species do virtually no harm to people and thus don’t even get the attention we pay to ticks and fleas. Some springtails look like lemon drop candies with big spots of eyes and six legs; other species grow more stretched out ( SN: 4/24/20 ).
The unusual organs used for jumping are one of the reasons springtails are no longer considered insects. Springtails (in the taxonomic group Collembola) evolved as insectlike animals with no wings but a long, hinged ground-smacker, called a furcula, latched underneath the springtail body.
Releasing it to whack downward against the ground, or even against water, launches a springtail high into the air and away from danger such as a hungry fish. Some springtail species have ground-smacked themselves to safety at speeds of 280 times their own body length per second. That’s the jump that biologists used to think would send a little body flipping upward with no control at all.
Questioning that notion starts with pandemic musing, Ortega-Jiménez remembers. He was at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, but with labs closed and “a lot of time with my family on rivers in Georgia,” he says. That’s how he saw springtails launching themselves out of the water but usually landing on land — and the jumps just didn’t look random to him.
Once labs reopened, he and a wide collaboration of colleagues attacked the problem of exactly what happens during springtails’ emergency launches. Focusing on the semiaquatic species Isotomurus retardatus , films at such extreme speeds as 10,000 frames per second showed plenty of control.
Springtails are not in fact just squiggles hurtling helplessly through the air. They curl their bodies while in flight in such a way that they stop tumbling and fall oriented for landing, both video and mathematical models showed. This orienting while falling is something cats and some other animals do well, but Ortega-Jiménez notes that springtails do it faster than any other animal tested, at less than about 20 milliseconds.
That landing uses another distinctive springtail body part, a short wide tubelike organ called a collophore that sticks down out of the abdomen. The animal in profile looks like some plastic toy just out of a mold with the collophore hanging from its tummy like a tab not snapped off yet.
A bit of water in the tubular collophore gives it some weight that helps keep the jumper from bouncing into somersaults as it splashes down on the water surface.
Springtails in lab pools landed on their feet about 85 percent of the time, the team found. Mimicking the landings with a springtail-inspired robot not much bigger than a penny achieved 75 percent landing success.
All this attention to springtail jumping prowess cheers Anton Potapov, a soil animal ecologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany, who was not involved in the study. Springtails “are not only cute and interesting to look at; they are also among the most numerous and functionally important animals on our planet,” he says.
“You can find them virtually everywhere, and they contribute to so many ecosystem processes,” such as plant and microbial growth. Long — and high — may they jump.
Susan Milius is the life sciences writer, covering organismal biology and evolution, and has a special passion for plants, fungi and invertebrates. She studied biology and English literature.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
With eyeballs sticking out at the end of extravagant stalks on its head, a long skinny male fruit fly ( Pelmatops tangliangi) prowls shrubbery after the swift and weird extension of its eyes.
Body changes at the brink of adulthood can get awkward in humans, but at least our eyes don’t pop out of our heads on stalks longer than our legs.
High-rise eyes, however, give macho pizzazz to the adult male Pelmatops fruit fly. In one of the stalkier species, P. tangliangi , the eyes-up transformation takes only about 50 minutes, a new study reports. Once stretched, the skinny eyestalks darken and harden, keeping the eyes stuck out like selfie sticks for the rest of the fly’s life.
The details of P. tangliangi ’s eye lift come from the first published photo sequence of their ocular blossoming , which appears in the September Annals of the Entomological Society of America. Biologists have known that eyestalks evolved in eight different fly families. Yet Pelmatops flies have gotten so little scientific attention that a lot of their basic biology has been a string of question marks.
Video images show the eyestalks curl and rise irregularly. Yet “they are not flopping around while partly inflated,” says Xiaolin Chen, an entomologist and evolutionary biologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “They seem slightly stiff, but still flexible enough.”
Females of the species may raise shorter eyestalks too — if Chen and her colleagues have found the right females. Chen suspects that what are now named as two species, based on the few specimens available, may just be two sexes of the same species. The new paper describes a male P. tangliangi mating with a female known by a different species name . Her stalks aren’t as magnificent as his, but she has some.
While the headgear can burden a flying insect, long eyestalks may give flies some swagger. These Pelmatops and other kinds of stalk-eyed flies face off, eyestalk to eyestalk, with uppity intruders. There’s no knocking and locking stalks in fierce fly disputes though. Any pushing and shoving, Chen says, is “done with other body parts.”
Extreme eyes may also have other benefits. In the wild, Chen finds these fruit flies on long stems of Rubus berry brambles. The eyes naturally periscope outward and upward, allowing the flies to spot danger while the body stays hidden in the greenery.
Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Susan Milius is the life sciences writer, covering organismal biology and evolution, and has a special passion for plants, fungi and invertebrates. She studied biology and English literature.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
