22 NEWS Health & Science
Our falling body temperature
In 1851, German doctor Carl Reinhold
August Wunderlich took the temperatures
of some 25,000 people and concluded that
the average human body temperature was
98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. That number
remains the benchmark for scientists and
doctors, although recent studies have con-
cluded that it’s a little high, perhaps because
of flaws in Wunderlich’s research. Now a
new analysis of temperature readings taken
over the past 157 years has determined that
the German was right, but that our bodies
have since steadily cooled down. Stanford
University researchers examined three medi-
cal databases stretching from 1860 to 2017,
containing more than 677,000 readings
collected from 189,338 Americans. They
found that average temperatures decreased
by about 0.05 degrees per decade, and that
a normal body temperature today is about
97.5 degrees. Senior author Julie Parsonnet
tells New Scientist the most likely explana-
tion for this heat drop is a population-wide
reduction in inflammation. People today
have fewer infections, thanks to vaccines
and antibiotics, so their immune systems are
less active. “Microbiologically,” she says,
“we’re very different people than we were.”
Concrete comes alive
Researchers have created a living, self-
replicating form of concrete, reports
SmithsonianMag.com. The team from
University of Colorado, Boulder tweaked
the traditional concrete mix of sand,
cement, and water, instead combining
sand with gelatin, liquid nutrients, and
cyanobacteria, microbes that use sunlight
to make their own food. Using molds,
the researchers created arches, cubes, and
shoebox-size bricks, all of which started out
green—because of the bacteria’s photosyn-
thetic properties—then turned brown as the
concrete dried. A 2-inch cube of the living
material is strong enough for a person to
stand on, although it is still weak compared
with traditional concrete. But the material
has a big advantage over the traditional
gray stuff: it can grow. When the research-
ers split a brick in two and placed each half
in a mold with some additional sand and
nutrients, within seven days they had two
bricks instead of one. The Department of
Defense is interested in these living building
materials, which could aid construction in
remote environments. “Out in the desert,”
says lead author Wil Srubar, “you don’t
want to have to truck in lots of materials.”Playing fetch with wolves
Scientists have identified a possible expla-
nation for why dogs became man’s best
friend: because they could play fetch. It
was long assumed that dogs had to evolve
over hundreds of years to enjoy retrieving
a stick tossed by their human masters. But
researchers at Stockholm University have
discovered that wolves—our pet pooches’
wild ancestors and the first animals tamed
by early humans some 15,000 years ago—
don’t have to
be trained or
selectively bred
to chase after an
object and retrieve
it. Instead, some
young wolves
appear to havean innate playful streak and a willingness
to respond to human instruction. Those
findings come from behavioral tests on
three litters of hand-raised, 8-week-old
wolf pups, in which a stranger threw a ball
and then called for the pup that picked
it up to return it. Of the 13 pups in the
test, three brought the ball back; one did
so in all three tries. Lead author Christina
Hansen Wheat says this suggests that
the game of fetch may have been key to
the domestication process—that humans
selected and bred those wolves that were
willing to play. “It makes sense,” she tells
The Times (U.K.). “We connect with our
dogs when we interact with them.”Health scare of the week
Alarm on antibiotics
The World Health Organization has
sounded the alarm on drug-resistant infec-
tions, warning of the dearth of research into
new antibiotics. Around 700,000 people
die each year because medicines that once
cured their conditions no longer work; the
United Nations estimates that superbugs
could kill 10 million people a year by- Yet a new WHO report noted that
most of the 60 new anti microbial drugs in
development are merely variations of exist-
ing products, and that very few target the
most dangerous drug- resistant infections.
“We urgently need research and develop-
ment,” co-author Sarah Paulin tells The
New York Times. “We still have a window
of opportunity, but we need to ensure there
is investment now so we don’t run out of
options for future generations.” One
issue is that antibiotics aren’t very
profitable—unlike drugs for long-
term health issues, they’re typically
taken for only a week or two at a
time. Several small U.S. drug com-
panies have gone bankrupt in recent
months, in part because of their failure
to make money from new antibiotics. Alam
y,^ Newscom,
Shutt
erstockIn a potential breakthrough for cancer
research, British scientists say they
have found a class of immune cells that
could one day be used as a “one size
fits all” therapy for most cancers. T-cell
immunotherapies—in which immune cells
are harvested from the patient, genetically
modified to search and destroy a cancer,
grown in vast quantities in a lab, and then
returned to the patient’s bloodstream—are
at the cutting edge of cancer treatment.
They have proved highly effective against
some cancers, yet so far have had no suc-
cess against solid tumors, which make
up the majority of cancers. But whileexamining human blood for immune cells
that could fight bacteria, researchers at
Cardiff Uni ver sity came across a T-cell
with a new type of receptor—proteins
that let immune cells “see” at a chemi-
cal level. Tests revealed that this T-cell
can identify and kill cancers of the lung,
skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate,
ovaries, kidney, and cervix. To create a
treatment, T-cells harvested from a patient
would be reprogrammed to make the
receptor. While the therapy has shown
promise in lab tests on mice with human
cancers, many more safety checks are
needed before human trials can begin.But researchers say this could be a signifi-
cant moment in the fight against cancer.
“There’s a chance here to treat every
patient,” lead author Andrew Sewell tells
BBC.com. “Previously nobody believed
this could be possible.”Hope for a universal cancer treatment
He’s cooler than his great-grandparents.Two T-cells, in orange, attack a cancer cell.