Stressed moms give babies a boost, squirrel study suggests

Having a stressed-out mom may give baby squirrels a competitive edge, a new study suggests.

Red squirrels who were stressed out during pregnancy had babies that out-competed their peers by growing significantly faster without any extra food, reported the study, published online in Science Express.

"What that suggests is that they're first able to predict what sort of environment their offspring will encounter… and they're preparing them for what their offspring are going to face," said Ben Dantzer, lead author of the study he worked on while he was a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University under the supervision of Guelph University biologist Andrew McAdam.

'The hardest part of the study was spending hundreds of hours grinding up fecal samples.'—Ben Dantzer, researcher

Further investigation uncovered a link between faster growth among the baby squirrels and higher levels of stress hormones in their mothers during the pregnancies.

That link may explain how environmental conditions cue the animals to respond and adapt.

Canadian researchers, including Stan Boutin at the University of Alberta, Murray Humphreys at McGill University in Montreal and McAdam at the University of Guelph, had been studying red squirrels near Kluane Lake, Yukon, for 22 years to find out how they are affected by changes in resources such as food over time.

They had noticed that in the years when food such as white spruce seeds were more widely available, there was a much higher population density of squirrels — crowded conditions that the territorial squirrels find stressful. Among the babies born in those years, only the fastest growing ones survived.

That left researchers wondering whether it was the higher population density that prompted the baby squirrels to grow faster. The tricky part was being able to show that any changes in growth rates weren't caused by greater availability of food.

Squirrels tricked with recordings

To tackle that problem, Dantzer played recordings of calls that squirrels use to defend their territories, tricking the squirrels into thinking their forest was more crowded than it actually was. For these squirrels, the growth rates of their offspring were compared to the growth rates of those whose mothers didn't hear the extra audio recordings.

Researcher Ben Dantzer, shown here removing a baby squirrel from its nest, tricked squirrels into thinking they were living in crowded conditions by playing recordings of squirrels defending their territory. (Ben Dantzer)To confirm whether the recordings stressed the squirrels out, Dantzer, with the help of University of Toronto researcher Rudy Boonstra, collected squirrel feces and analyzed them for the stress hormone cortisol.

"I would say the hardest part of the study was spending hundreds of hours grinding up fecal samples," recalled Dantzer, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge.

As expected, squirrels who thought they were living in crowded conditions had higher levels of cortisol in their feces.

The researchers also fed peanut butter laced with cortisol to some pregnant squirrels to boost their levels of the hormone, and found that their babies grew 41 per cent faster than the babies of squirrels that were fed plain peanut butter.

That bolstered the evidence that it was the increased cortisol levels that had caused the offspring of the stressed mother squirrels to grow faster.

Dantzer said the results came as something of a surprise because researchers had previously thought baby animals always grow as fast as they can according to the amount of food available. The data suggest that baby animals usually aren't growing as fast as they possibly can, but only do that when they really have to.

He added that researchers aren't sure why that is the case, but the results suggest that the faster growth rate may have a cost to either the mother or the babies. For example, there is some evidence that reproducing more often can cause some physiological stress to mother squirrels, and that offspring born in years when the squirrel density is high don't live as long.

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Amateur online sleuthing: Does it do more harm than good?

After the FBI circulated photos of two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings on Thursday afternoon, a thread on the social media site Reddit suggested that one of the wanted men could be a missing student from Brown University in Rhode Island.

Online speculation that followed sent Sunil Tripathi's name trending worldwide on Twitter. News crews descended on his family home in surburban Philadelphia. Hours later, however, NBC News was reporting that "Tripathi was not involved with the bombings at all."

In fact, the two suspects in the FBI photos are believed to be brothers originally from a Russian region near Chechnya. One was arrested Friday night after a massive police manhunt, while the other was killed earlier after gunfire was exchanged with police.

But the brothers didn't seem to figure prominently in any of the widespread amateur sleuthing online that emerged after the bombings. Suspects whose images were front and centre in the public's online speculation ranged from a suspicious man in a blue robe seen in the area around the time of the bombings, to another person who ran away from the scene very quickly after the first explosion on Monday.

The haste with which such images and speculation flooded social media sites such as Reddit and 4chan after the bombings is hardly surprising. In the face of such deadly horror at such an iconic public event, everyone wanted a perpetrator behind bars instantly.

Plus, maybe one of those photos would be the crucial clue that could crack the case wide open.

But the online sleuthing fuelled by the ubiquity of cellphones and their ability to capture every face and activity in their vicinity also highlights a question about the role such activities can play in solving crime. In short, do they do more harm than good?

Photos such as this one of people at the Boston Marathon Monday have been viewed more than 2.9 million times on online site 4chan since the page displaying it was created three days ago. The photo has been blurred to protect the man's identity. (4chan ThinkTank - Imgur)

"There are vigilante-type concerns here, obviously," says Peter Rosenthal, a lawyer and adjunct professor of law at the University of Toronto.

"It's one thing if people gather photographs or videos and turn them in to the proper authorities for analysis. That's obviously a positive thing to do, it seems to me.

"But on the other hand, to be all over the internet identifying people as suspects could be very dangerous for those persons who get identified."

Rosenthal recognizes the trickiness of the situation, with everyone wanting an arrest in the Boston bombings. But he also sees a significant need for caution in such instances.

"That's the kind of situation that leads to wrongful convictions even in court," not to mention a wrongful identification that "can end up with somebody getting beaten or killed. It could be dangerous."

Leave it to the professionals

Rosenthal suggests leaving any examination of potential evidence to the professionals. But that is by no means the only view on this contentious subject.

Sidneyeve Matrix, a media professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., recognizes the inherent danger in the possible identification of people who aren't suspects. But she argues that the kind of crowsourced investigative work occurring around the Boston bombings, does "great good."

Massive online participation can solve problems quickly, she says.

"Having a thousand sets of eyeballs or a million sets of eyeballs … is handy because the wisdom of the masses can come together to solve problems a lot quicker sometimes. It's a speed issue, really."

Misinformation and false leads are risks in every avenue of investigation, she says.

"I think we can probably identify misinformation and then take it off the table a lot quicker when we have lot more people involved, including professionals and amateurs, working together."

A middle ground

In this case, the actions of Reddit and other online sites have drawn considerable media discussion and criticism.

"Our crowd-mobbed vigilante future," was the headline on a piece in Salon. The Atlantic waded in with "Hey Reddit, Enough Boston Bombing Vigilantism."

For its part, Reddit has added some words of explanation to its FindBostonBombers thread, saying that it does not condone vigilante justice.

"FindBostonBombers seeks a middle ground," Reddit editors say in notes down the side of a web page displaying a discussion. "A middle ground populated with debate tempered with cautious restraint. We ask that all viewers and subscribers pursue our goal dispassionately and impartially as possible.

"We do not support any form of vigilante justice. We are not law enforcement. If you have major information about the identities of any of the bombers, please send a tip to the FBI or [Boston Police Department]."

The RCMP declined to be interviewed about this topic, but said in an email that "for reasons such as the safety of the victims, interest in public safety and protecting the integrity of police investigations, the RCMP does not advocate vigilantism."

In Tripathi's case, his mis-identification by members of the public as a possible suspect led to news vans descending on his family's home in suburban Philidelphia, according to a report on philly.com.

No one answered the door, the report said, but "a statement posted on a 'Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi Facebook,' which at one point was taken down and then posted again, said: 'A tremendous and painful amount of attention has been cast on our beloved Sunil Tripathi in the past twelve hours.'

"We have known unequivocally all along that neither individual suspected as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings was Sunil."

Don't blame social media

Of course, any vigilante action would ultimately depend on someone deciding to take that step, but University of British Columbia journalism professor Alfred Hermida suggests that social media shouldn't take the blame for vigilantism.

"The truth isn't in the individual fragment. It's in the overall discussion of all these conversations."

Hermida says that too often it's the mainstream media that takes online comments and amplifies them, distorting their importance. What appears online is simply raw, unfiltered information.

"This is the process of journalism, the process of investigation, happening before our eyes."

And that process has been evolving as technology — and social media — have been changing.

Toronto Police spokesman Mark Pugash says that, over the years, technology has opened a number of investigative avenues.

"One is the ability to send information to more people more quickly than ever before, but it's also the ability to view what's in open-source locations. Developments with [closed-circuit] CCTV cameras have made a fundamental difference to police investigations."

Challenges with any evidence

Pugash says the difficulty that can arise around online information turning out to be incorrect is the same as could develop in any investigation.

"You have to determine whether what you're seeing is accurate or not, if it represents what it claims to represent or not, if it's been altered or if it hasn't. But those are challenges you have with any evidence."

Still, someone has to sort through all the evidence if any investigation is to progress.

"The important factor here is that it's going to take old-fashioned police work, it's going to take humans, it's going to take human journalists that can go through all of this information that's being created," says Matrix.

She considers what has evolved online around the Boston bombings to be "a perfect example of using social media for social good."

"It's a textbook of how we're getting better at this. We're pulling together and we're responding more quickly, more professionally. We have more responders."

She also thinks that we've only seen the beginning of the role social media will play in police investigations. "It's early days, and it's not going anywhere."

With files from the CBC's Chris Brown

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How CBC senior readers are staying atop latest tech trends

CBC News asked readers to help defy the common misperception that social media is a realm of the young.

Our community team wanted to hear our readers' stories of social media seniors: people over the age of 60 who love to tweet, laugh at the latest memes or use Skype to keep in touch with friends and family.

Here is a collection of some of the best responses that came in, showcasing a very digitally savvy Canadian senior population that has no qualms about making use of technology and social media.

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Some fish species may never bounce back, says study

The recovery of overexploited fish populations such as cod has been slower than expected and many depleted stocks may never be able to bounce back, a new study says.

The study, to be published Friday in the journal Science, was compiled by researchers who examined 153 fish and invertebrate stocks from around the world.

Most fish species are resilient enough to recover within a decade if swift action is taken to reduce pressure on depleted stocks, the researchers say.

"But when you don't take action rapidly ... not only does it result in a much longer potential recovery time, but the uncertainty as to whether recovery will happen at all increases exponentially," said Jeff Hutchings, a professor of biology at Dalhousie University and one of the authors of the study.

Hutchings said that may explain why cod hasn't bounced back more than 20 years after Ottawa declared a moratorium on the commercial cod fishery, a once thriving Atlantic Canadian industry.

'Recovery is quite unlikely now for cod because of our failure to act when we could have.'—Jeff Hutchings

"Here we are two decades after enormous depletion of cod stocks... and people are still wondering about the prospects of recovery," said Hutchings.

"Our study really suggests that recovery is quite unlikely now for cod because of our failure to act when we could have."

Hutchings said the federal government needs to set a population threshold that would determine when action must be taken to reduce pressure on a fishery.

He said legislation is needed to allow for depleted stocks to recover, as they have in the United States.

There, when a commercial stock is overfished, fishing ceases immediately and a plan must be put in place within two years to rebuild the stock within a decade, he said.

"Canada currently has no such requirements for recovery or rebuilding plans and we also do not have a legislatively required trigger for such action," he said.

"I would like to think that this kind of work would provide even more scientific incentive ... to come up with target reference points and rebuilding targets for all of our depleted fisheries."

Hutchings said this would not only be beneficial from a biological standpoint, but would also ensure food security and employment in the fishing industry.

Since the early 1960s, cod populations off the northeast coast of Newfoundland and Labrador have declined by more than 97 per cent and are now at historically low levels, according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

The study looked at fish species including herring and yellowtail flounder whose populations had declined below their maximum sustainable yield, which is set by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

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2 super-Earths found in habitable zone of star

Two newly discovered planets in a five-planet system are the right distance from their star to support liquid water and are potentially habitable to life as we know it.

"They are the best candidates found to date for habitable planets," said William Borucki, an astrophysicist at the NASA Ames Research Center, at a news conference Thursday. Borucki led the study that discovered the new planets.

Details of the find were published Thursday online in Science Express.

The planets were detected by NASA's Kepler mission, a planet-hunting space telescope that looks for the telltale dimming of stars caused by planets crossing in front of them.

They are the two outermost of five planets orbiting a dwarf star, called Kepler-62, that is a little bit smaller and one-fifth as bright as the sun. It is located about 1,200 light years away from Earth in the constellation Lyra.The newly discovered planets are 'the most similar objects to Earth that we have found yet,' said Justin Crepp, and astrophysicist at the University of Notre Dame who co-authored the paper. The planets were discovered by the Kepler mission, which detects planets by looking for the telltale dimming of stars caused by planets passing front of them. (Matthew Cashore and Keith Davis/University of Notre Dame)

The inner of the two planets, dubbed Kepler-62e, receives an amount of energy from their star comparable to the solar energy received on Venus and completes its orbit once every 122 Earth days. The outer one, Kepler-62f, gets about the same energy as Mars and orbits once every 267 Earth days.

The pair are the smallest planets ever detected by the Kepler mission within the habitable zone of a star — the region around the star that could have the right conditions for liquid water, and therefore living things, to exist. In particular, the outer of the two is right in the middle of the habitable zone. The inner planet, like many other habitable zone planets previously discovered, is more towards the edge of the zone.

"From what we can tell, from their radius and orbital period, these are the most similar objects to Earth that we have found yet," said University of Notre Dame astrophysicist Justin Crepp, who co-authored the study.

The planets have a radius 1.61 times that of the Earth and 1.41 times that of the Earth, respectively, putting them in a class of planets called "super-Earths" that are thought to be potentially capable of supporting life.

The paper cautioned that the researchers don't yet know whether the planets are rocky, whether they have atmospheres or whether they actually host any liquid water.

Until scientists are able to take chemical fingerprints of the planets' atmospheres, "we cannot determine whether they are in fact habitable," the paper said.

However, Borucki said Kepler-62f has a good chance of being rocky like Earth, given that other distant planets its size have been confirmed to be rocky.

As for Kepler-62e, he added, it may be rocky or it may be a water world, a new type of planet discovered last year.

"It seems to me both those planets have a real chance of habitability," Borucki said. "But we really don't know what's required for life to get started."

The other three known planets in the system each have a radius of between 0.54 and 1.97 times that of the Earth. Borucki said there may be additional planets in the system that have not yet been discovered.

Super-Earth found near sun-like star

In addition to Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f, NASA announced Thursday that it had also found another super-Earth on the edge of the habitable zone of a different star. The planet, known as Kepler-69c, has a radius about 1.7 times that of Earth and orbits a star 2,700 light years away in the constellation Cygnus that is much more sun-like than Kepler-62.

Thomas Barclay, a scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Sonoma, Calif., who led that study, said that planet is right on the inner edge of the habitable zone of its star.

"We consider this more to be a super-Venus than a super Earth," he said at the NASA news conference.

Barclay added that none of the planets found by Kepler to date, including the three announced Thursday, are small enough to be truly Earth-like: "We're still progressing toward finding the first truly Earth-like planets."

Kepler has previously discovered other relatively small exoplanets in the habitable zones of their stars:

As of Thursday morning, Kepler had discovered 2,740 planet candidates and 115 confirmed planets.

The diagram compares the planets of the inner solar system to Kepler-62, a five-planet system about 1,200 light-years from Earth. The habitable zones are shown in green. (NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech)

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LulzSec hacker gets prison in Sony Pictures attack

Hackers breached the Sony Pictures website and stole personal data including the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of about 35,000 customers. The data was then posted online. (CBC)

A 25-year-old hacker with the group known as LulzSec was sentenced Thursday to a year in prison and ordered to pay $605,663 in restitution for an attack on Sony Pictures computers that began in late May 2011.

Cody Andrew Kretsinger, who went by the online nickname "recursion," was also sentenced to a year of home detention and 1,000 hours of community service.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles said Kretsinger pleaded guilty last April to the attack, in which hackers breached the Sony Pictures website, stole personal data including the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of tens of thousands of Sony customers and distributed it over the internet.

Kretsinger, an Arizona college student, was arrested in September 2011.

Raynaldo Rivera, a 20-year-old who also pleaded guilty to the attack in October, is to be sentenced May 16.

The Sony Pictures attack came on the heels of an earlier data breach that compromised personal information from more than 100 million users of Sony's PlayStation Network and its Qriocity entertainment service.

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Seniors and social media: more than keeping up with the grandkids

Bertha Kronenberg readily admits to being a bit of a Nosy Parker.

But it's a well-intentioned nosiness for the Toronto senior who, like any devoted grandmother, just wants to know what her grandchildren are up to.

Kronenberg regularly logs onto her computer and goes to Facebook to find out about their comings and goings, and in doing so, has become one of an increasing number of Canadian seniors turning to computers and social media to stay connected with the world around them.

"I want to check up on my grandchildren … I want to see what they're doing, their girlfriends, their boyfriends, what nonsense they're up to," says Kronenberg, a resident at Forest Hill Retirement Living in north Toronto.

"But I'm a silent granny. I don't make comments but I know … I keep in touch that way."

Figures from Statistics Canada show that the number of Canadians 75 years of age and older who are online grew from five per cent in 2000 to 27 per cent in 2012.

And many of those seniors are, like Kronenberg, logging onto Facebook and other social networking sites.

A report last year by seniors' services provider Revera Inc. in partnership with Leger Marketing found that more than half of online seniors older than 75 belong to a social networking site such as Facebook, and more than one-third of them go to those sites daily.

Surprising numbers

The number of seniors online came as a surprise to staff at Revera, which operates Kronenberg's residence and is trying to find the role the online world can play in improving seniors' lives.

"It was quite shocking and a surprise to us to find out how many of our own seniors are very deeply online and have lots of great knowledge," says Trish Barbato, senior vice-president of home health and business development at Revera Inc.

"They said that they see it as a way to stay socially connected, and also, it's a way to live independently and stay home longer."

But some broad assumptions about seniors may have to be shattered before seniors' online experiences expand broadly.

"There's a bit of myth-busting that has to happen in some ways," says Barbato.

"I think that people sort of have a vision of seniors either not being able to learn [or] being afraid of technology. And while that might be true, that barrier gets broken pretty quickly."

Barbato looks to Kronenberg as a mythbuster. She's embraced online communication, Skyping with family members every morning. She's also encouraging other seniors at her residence, telling them that they, too, could learn to communicate online.

Never too old to learn

"She actually said you are never too old to learn something new," says Barbato. "It's really great."

For Barbato and others, the potential that social media and online communication hold for seniors extends beyond communication, particularly as they consider how the numbers of older people online are likely to grow.

"I don't think it's going to be too long, even within the next 10 years, we're going to see a huge increase in the seniors population that's using technology," says Barbato.

That will have practical implications — making sure all rooms in seniors' facilities are wired, for example — but there is also the opportunity to improve care, whether in a facility or at home.

Maybe as part of a home-care assessment, a way to improve a senior's mental health could be ensuring "there is some way that they can connect to their family and friends easily, so that we're not just working on a medical model, but something that's more holistic," says Barbato.

Revera has teamed with the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab in the computer science department at the University of Toronto to try to develop a way to ease online communication between seniors and their families and friends.

The Families in Touch project focuses on a tablet-based device designed to be something like a picture frame.

Within it are pictures of a senior's family members or friends. A simple touch of a picture – no clumsy mouse needed – sends a message to that person to let him or her know the senior is thinking of him or her. The family member or friend can respond with a picture, voice or text message or a video.

Health benefits

"We know … from other research [that] keeping socially active can be very beneficial for wellness," says Katherine Sellen, a post-doctoral researcher at the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab.

"Keeping active physically is important but social activity also helps to elevate mood and to help to actually impact healing and it can keep cognitive function ongoing as well as one ages. So what we wanted to do was see if we could actually facilitate that social activity."

Researchers have tried the tablet out with chronic pain patients, and "it's had a lot of success," says Sellen.

It's a three-year project, and Sellen says the first step is understanding the physical aspects of it, making sure the design of the tablet works well for seniors: can they hold it easily for any length of time, what about the lighting and font size, and so on.

Research has also suggested that when people have impaired mobility or changing physical capability, they often need to be able to boost their social connections because that's one of the things that can decline as well, says Sellen.

With the boomer population bubble looming, Sellen sees the potential for seniors' use of technology only growing.

Living longer

"People are living longer, they're living longer with more challenges, so there is an absolute need for understanding and design work on how we can make technology flexible so we can in fact cater to … the changing needs and the more variety of needs that they have," says Sellen.

Marion Mills, a senior living in London, Ont., has also embraced the online world, although she's quick to note that it's not a complete replacement for in-person social interaction.

But it bothers her to hear other seniors say they could never be interested in a computer.

"I just feel so strongly that we should never limit ourselves because of our age or stage," says Mills.

"I think we should meet our challenges as we age, whatever they are, and we should choose maybe to make choices that will stimulate our minds as well as our bodies."

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NASA video captures unusual Beaufort Sea ice breakup

Scientists and ice-watchers are taking note of how the Beaufort Sea is melting this year.

A video on the NASA website shows dramatic satellite pictures of the sea ice breaking.

People who live in the area and those who watch the Arctic are discussing what may have caused this unusual breakup.

Dustin Whalen, a physical scientist for the Department of Natural Resources Canada, said the huge open water area is larger than ever seen before that close to shore.

"I think that the ice will be melting not only from the influx of the warmer river water coming into it but also from the open water being so great that it can then create waves that it can eat away at the ice from the outside. So I expect that the ice in the Beaufort Sea will be clear earlier this year," he said.

Robert Kuptana, a hunter in Ulukhaktok, N.W.T., said he's worried about how this phenomenon will affect the wildlife in the area.

"It is a concern for the future. Probably in the future it will affect animals. And one of the major effects will take place with the polar bears because they depend on ice to hunt seals," he said.

Meteorologists suspect that because of the record melting of sea ice in 2012, it was easier for wind storms to blow the newly formed ice apart.

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Molecule's dance captured by 'ultimate slo-mo' technique

The researchers shot an extremely quick series of images of the 'footprint' of the molecules and used them to generate reconstructions of where each atom was. (Lai Chung Liu)

Canadian scientists have found a way to shoot frame-by-frame video, in millionths of a millionth of a second, of key movements made by a molecule, revealing how it undergoes a fascinating transformation.

"It's the ultimate in slo-mo," said R. J. Dwayne Miller, a University of Toronto chemistry and physics professor and director of the Max Planck Research Group at the University of Hamburg. He was the principle investigator of the team that developed the technique to capture the ultra-ultra-fast movements and slow them down to a visible speed.

The video reveals, step-by-step, a process that was previously a big mystery — exactly how an organic molecule known as EDO-TTF changes its shape in order to go from being an insulator to conducting electricity when hit with laser light of a certain colour.

It's a type of transformation in the nature of a material called a phase change, like the one that turns water into ice.

'You had to see all the details in their full atomic splendor.'—RJ Dwayne Miller, researcher

The research team, which included scientists in Germany and Japan, was interested in seeing how the molecule's shape-shifting affected its ability to conduct electricity.

The shape-shifting is of interest because closely related molecules have the potential to be superconductors, said Meng Gao, the graduate student who led the study. Superconductors are used to operate devices such as MRI machines for medical imaging.

Miller, who is Gao's supervisor, said the phase change in EDO-TTF was impossible to understand without witnessing directly how it happened: "You had to see all the details in their full atomic splendour."

The video shows how the molecules slide, bend and unbend during the transformation. In the insulating state, half the molecules are bent, making it impossible for electrons to move between them.

During the phase transition, the molecules reconfigure so they are all lying flat and electrons can move easily between them, making the material conductive.

The results were published Wednesday online in the journal Nature.

Miller's team had previously been able to shoot movies of simpler, more robust inorganic materials, such as melting aluminum, by pulsing a beam of electrons at the material very quickly, like a camera flash or shutter. However, the beam wasn't concentrated or "bright" enough to capture the motions of big, "dark," complex organic molecules such as EDO-TTF.

Bunching up electrons

The problem with the original technique was that the electrons in the beam tended to repel each other, Gao said, and they quickly move apart, resulting in a very dim, diffuse beam.

Gao and his colleagues figured out a way to bunch the electrons back together again using radio waves, essentially focusing and brightening the light before it hit the EDO-TTF.

When the electrons hit the atoms in the molecule, the force generates wavelets like the ones that form in the water around the posts of a pier.

This "footprint" can be used to reconstruct the position of the atoms. And the researchers created their video by capturing an ultra-quick set of these footprints in order to generate a series of reconstructions showing exactly how the molecule moves.

The researchers hope that ultimately, their technique can be used to observe how complex biological molecules such as enzymes — proteins involved in many important biological processes — do their work inside living things.

"Proteins are such big, complicated things — there are so many complicated actions that no one understands," Gao said. He added that EDO-TTF is a good stepping stone because, like a protein, it's a carbon-based organic molecule, but it is also much smaller than a protein, which can have thousands of atoms.

"It's almost like a small-scale protein."

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Canadian astronaut performs students' winning experiment

A group of Grade 10 students from Nova Scotia had an out-of-this-world experience Tuesday when Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield performed an experiment the students designed.

Kendra Lemke and Meredith Faulkner, both Grade 10 students from Lockview High School in Fall River, designed the experiment.

Their project won a National Canadian Space Agency contest that asked young Canadians to design a simple experiment that Hadfield could perform in space using items already available aboard the International Space Station.

Lemke and Faulkner's experiment, "ring it out," investigated the effects of weightlessness on the reaction of water after being wrung out of a soaked washcloth.

Their hypothesis that the water would not drip in microgravity but rather remain on the washcloth was correct. In the absence of gravity to pull the water down, it took a shake or a quick squeeze from Hadfield for the washcloth to release the water.

Since arriving at the ISS in December Hadfield has conducted more than 130 experiments with his crewmates.

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