Anglo-Saxon remedy kills hospital superbug MRSA

Take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together… take wine and bullocks gall, mix with the leek… let it stand nine days in the brass vessel…

So goes a thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon recipe to vanquish a stye, an infected eyelash follicle.

The medieval medics might have been on to something. A modern-day recreation of this remedy seems to alleviate infections caused by the bacteria that are usually responsible for styes. The work might ultimately help create drugs for hard-to-treat skin infections.

The project was born when Freya Harrison, a microbiologist at the University of Nottingham, UK, got talking to Christina Lee, an Anglo-Saxon scholar. They decided to test a recipe from an Old English medical compendium called Bald's Leechbook, housed in the British Library.

Some of the ingredients, such as copper from the brass vessel, kill bacteria grown in a dish – but it was unknown if they would work on a real infection or how they would combine.

Careful collection

Sourcing authentic ingredients was a major challenge, says Harrison. They had to hope for the best with the leeks and garlic because modern crop varieties are likely to be quite different to ancient ones – even those branded as heritage. For the wine they used an organic vintage from a historic English vineyard.

As "brass vessels" would be hard to sterilise – and expensive – they used glass bottles with squares of brass sheet immersed in the mixture. Bullocks gall was easy, though, as cow's bile salts are sold as a supplement for people who have had their gall bladders removed.

After nine days of stewing, the potion had killed all the soil bacteria introduced by the leek and garlic. "It was self-sterilising," says Harrison. "That was the first inkling that this crazy idea just might have some use."

A side effect was that it made the lab smell of garlic. "It was not unpleasant," says Harrison. "It's all edible stuff. Everyone thought we were making lunch."

The potion was tested on scraps of skin taken from mice infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This is an antibiotic-resistant version of the bacteria that causes styes, more commonly known as the hospital superbug MRSA. The potion killed 90 per cent of the bacteria. Vancomycin, the antibiotic generally used for MRSA, killed about the same proportion when it was added to the skin scraps.

A loathsome slime

Unexpectedly, the ingredients had little effect unless they were all brought together. "The big challenge is trying to find out why that combination works," says Steve Diggle, another of the researchers. Do the components work in synergy or do they trigger the formation of new potent compounds?

Using exactly the right method also seems to be crucial, says Harrison, as another group tried to recreate the remedy in 2005 and found that their potion failed to kill bacteria grown in a dish. "With the nine-day waiting period, the preparation turned into a kind of loathsome, odorous slime," says Michael Drout of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.

If the 9th Century recipe does lead to new drugs, they might be useful against MRSA skin infections such as those that cause foot ulcers in people with diabetes. "These are usually antibiotic-resistant," says Diggle. However, he doesn't recommend people try this at home.

It wouldn't be the first modern drug to be derived from ancient manuscripts – the widely used antimalarial drug artemisinin was discovered by scouring historical Chinese medical texts.

Harrison is due to present the research at the Society for General Microbiology conference in Birmingham, UK, this week.

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Eek! How your face reveals your body's real age

Think your looks belie your age? Soon there will be an app to tell you how old you really look, and whether your body's age is out of whack with your chronological age.

"Our study is the first to use 3D facial images to predict biological age in a human population to identify fast and slow agers," says Jing-Dong Han of the Shanghai Institutes of Biological Sciences in China.

The aim, says Han, is to enable family doctors to easily identify patients who are ageing prematurely. If the cause can be identified, such as smoking, overeating or lack of exercise, people can then take action.

Han and his colleagues analysed 3D facial images of 332 Chinese volunteers between the ages of 17 and 77. They identified several features that significantly change with age, such as the slope of the eye, the distance between the mouth and the nose, and the smoothness of skin.

They used this information to create a composite map of the human face as it ages and compared each participant's 3D image with the map. This revealed that on average, facial age differed by about six years either way of real age. The difference between real age and facial age increased after volunteers hit 40.

No need for blood

To check the accuracy of their predictions, the team also took blood samples. Biomarkers in the blood associated with biological ageing – such as levels of cholesterol or a blood protein called albumin – more closely reflected facial age than actual age. For example, someone who looked younger than his or her actual age, also had a cholesterol level expected of a younger person.

The team's "facial age predictor" provides the first non-invasive method for measuring disparities between biological and chronological age. At present, the only alternatives require a blood or tissue sample.

Other teams have demonstrated, for example, that the tips of chromosomes wear down faster in people who are ageing prematurely. Likewise, a chemical change to DNA called methylation, which switches genes on or off, is also more common in ageing tissues.

Han's system, by contrast, requires nothing more than a 3D image. "We will package our predictor into a downloadable app, and doctors will be able to use it provided they can upload a 3D image of their patient into it," says Han. At present, he says 3D cameras are relatively expensive, but is hopeful that the price will fall far enough for them to become commonplace in family clinics.

Stephen Harridge of King's College London, who studies the effect of exercise on ageing, says the latest work doesn't account for all factors that could affect facial appearance and biological fitness. "They used a series of blood markers, such as cholesterol and albumin as markers of health, but these are very basic markers and they can tell us nothing about the amount of physical activity the subjects do, which is likely to be a key measure of health status. This is a particularly interesting point in this study given that the more physically active people are more likely to spend time outside in conditions which might well cause more 'facial ageing' – wear and tear through exposure to the elements".

"It would be very exciting if somebody could develop a universal method that applies to most ethnic groups," says Steve Horvath of the University of California, Los Angeles, who developed the way to estimate biological age from methylation patterns. "The best thing would be a webpage where anybody can upload pictures of themselves to find out their ‘facial age'."

Horvath claims his methylation technique is more accurate, dating biological age to within four years, and applies to all races, ethnic groups and even chimpanzees. But he says he'd love to see whether his age prediction technique correlates with the facial method.

Journal reference: Cell Research, DOI: 10.1038/cr.2015.36

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12-gram songbird flies for days non-stop over Atlantic

Think you're good over long distances? You're not. At least not compared to a tiny bird. Come the first signs of winter, the blackpoll warbler (Setophaga striata) takes flight from its home in the forests near of the north-eastern coast of the US and Canada. Three days later, the birds arrive in the Caribbean after a non-stop southwards flight over the western part of the Atlantic Ocean.

Depending on the starting point, the total journey can be as long as 2770 kilometres. It's no mean feat if you weigh only 12 grams. But the journey is made all the more remarkable by taking in part of the Atlantic. For such a small species, flying over an ocean is a huge risk.

The bird's route to the Caribbean and what happens next has been the subject of much speculation, based on local sightings.

So William DeLuca from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and his colleagues decided to clear things up. Attaching geolocators weighing about half a gram to the backs of five blackpolls, the team was able to track the flights. They found that the tiny birds made non-stop flights over the Atlantic to the Caribbean for a short stop-over, before reaching northern Columbia and Venezuela.

Absorbing organs

It is probably one of the longest non-stop flights ever recorded for a songbird. For the return leg, the team found that the birds take a different route, sticking to land with pit stops for refreshment along the way.

"It all depends on the fuel load when they start their flight," says Anders Hedenström of Lund University in Sweden. The percentage of the bird's body mass that can be used as fuel determines how far it can fly. A tail wind from Nova Scotia in Canada probably further assists their flight, he says.

Although these birds usually weigh about 12 grams, DeLuca and his team found that the average weight of a blackpoll in Nova Scotia, before they started their migratory journey, was about 16 grams, showing that the birds took on extra weight to fuel their flight.

"It does fatten up, by almost doubling body weight and absorbing many of its digestive organs. It turns into a lean, mean flying machine, just wings, fuel and a small orientation computer," says DeLuca.

Journal reference: Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2014.1045





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Don't believe in belief

We trust leaders who speak with conviction – but statements of belief need to be backed by evidence and argument

Why believe in belief? (Image: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images)

FOR millions of people around the world, this weekend is a special occasion – a time to celebrate the central article of their religious faith, Jesus's resurrection and ascension to heaven.

Not one of these people can really know what happened 2000-odd years ago in Jerusalem. And yet they believe their version of events is true. In some cases, they base their entire world view on it, and view the billions who do not share their belief as benighted.

That may seem unremarkable. Religious faith has long been considered a special category of belief. Other beliefs – in politics, say, or business – are more often thought to be the product of fact-based reasoning.

But the more we learn about how beliefs work, the less exceptional religion looks. It turns out that almost all of our beliefs are built on intuition, biases and gut instinct: yet another facet of our mental lives over which we possess less conscious control than we like to think (see "I believe: Your personal guidebook to reality").

Science is not exempt. The scientific method is based on verifiable evidence, and is thus not a belief system, despite frequent claims to the contrary. But scientists, as humans, are influenced by their own beliefs about what is important, what they might find and what their findings mean. Yet it is still by far the best way to distinguish what we believe from what we know.

This new view of belief is still incomplete, but unsettling. Belief is a potent force in human affairs. It is hard to think of a major historic event not motivated by it in some way: we might not have civilisation without it (see "Should we thank god for civilisation?"). And our leaders' convictions may count as much as, or more than, their arguments.

But where should we locate our beliefs within modern society? Religion is respected as routinely as its dictates are ignored. We cannot extend the same Janus-faced attitude to all beliefs. But we can reject belief, without robust supporting evidence or argument, as an insufficient basis for politics or policy. Don't believe that belief alone is enough.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Don't believe in belief"

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AI interns: Software already taking jobs from humans

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People have talked about robots taking our jobs for ages. Problem is, they already have – we just didn't notice

FORGET Skynet. Hypothetical world-ending artificial intelligence makes headlines, but the hype ignores what's happening right under our noses. Cheap, fast AI is already taking our jobs, we just haven't noticed.

This isn't dumb automation that can rapidly repeat identical tasks. It's software that can learn about and adapt to its environment, allowing it to do work that used to be the exclusive domain of humans, from customer services to answering legal queries.

These systems don't threaten to enslave humanity, but they do pose a challenge: if software that does the work of humans exists, what work will we do?

In the last three years, UK telecoms firm O2 has replaced 150 workers with a single piece of software. A large portion of O2's customer service is now automatic, says Wayne Butterfield, who works on improving O2's operations. "Sim swaps, porting mobile numbers, migrating from prepaid onto a contract, unlocking a phone from O2" – all are now automated, he says.

Humans used to manually move data between the relevant systems to complete these tasks, copying a phone number from one database to another, for instance. The user still has to call up and speak to a human, but now an AI does the actual work.

To train the AI, it watches and learns while humans do simple, repetitive database tasks. With enough training data, the AIs can then go to work on their own. "They navigate a virtual environment," says Jason Kingdon, chairman of Blue Prism, the start-up which developed O2's artificial workers. "They mimic a human. They do exactly what a human does. If you watch one of these things working it looks a bit mad. You see it typing. Screens pop-up, you see it cutting and pasting."

One of the world's largest banks, Barclays, has also dipped a toe into this specialised AI. It used Blue Prism to deal with the torrent of demands that poured in from its customers after UK regulators demanded that it pay back billions of pounds of mis-sold insurance. It would have been expensive to rely entirely on human labour to field the sudden flood of requests. Having software agents that could take some of the simpler claims meant Barclays could employ fewer people.

The back office work that Blue Prism automates is undeniably dull, but it's not the limit for AI's foray into office space. In January, Canadian start-up ROSS started using IBM's Watson supercomputer to automate a whole chunk of the legal research normally carried out by entry-level paralegals.

Legal research tools already exist, but they don't offer much more than keyword searches. This returns a list of documents that may or may not be relevant. Combing through these for the argument a lawyer needs to make a case can take days.

ROSS returns precise answers to specific legal questions, along with a citation, just like a human researcher would. It also includes its level of confidence in its answer. For now, it is focused on questions about Canadian law, but CEO Andrew Arruda says he plans for ROSS to digest the law around the world.

Since its artificial intelligence is focused narrowly on the law, ROSS's answers can be a little dry. Asked whether it's OK for 20 per cent of the directors present at a directors' meeting to be Canadian, it responds that no, that's not enough. Under Canadian law, no directors' meeting may go ahead with less than 25 per cent of the directors present being Canadian. ROSS's source? The Canada Business Corporations Act, which it scanned and understood in an instant to find the answer.

By eliminating legal drudge work, Arruda says that ROSS's automation will open up the market for lawyers, reducing the time they need to spend on each case. People who need a lawyer but cannot afford one would suddenly find legal help within their means.

ROSS's searches are faster and broader than any human's. Arruda says this means it doesn't just get answers that a human would have had difficulty finding, it can search in places no human would have thought to look. "Lawyers can start crafting very insightful arguments that wouldn't have been achievable before," he says. Eventually, ROSS may become so good at answering specific kinds of legal question that it could handle simple cases on its own.

Where Blue Prism learns and adapts to the various software interfaces designed for humans working within large corporations, ROSS learns and adapts to the legal language that human lawyers use in courts and firms. It repurposes the natural language-processing abilities of IBM's Watson supercomputer to do this, scanning and analysing 10,000 pages of text every second before pulling out its best answers, ranked by confidence.

Lawyers are giving it feedback too, says Jimoh Ovbiagele, ROSS's chief technology officer. "ROSS is learning through experience."

Massachusetts-based Nuance Communications is building AIs that solve some of the same language problems as ROSS, but in a different part of the economy: medicine. In the US, after doctors and nurses type up case notes, another person uses those notes to try to match the description with one of thousands of billing codes for insurance purposes.

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I believe: Your personal guidebook to reality

A Balinese Hindu purification ceremony – beliefs are both fundamental and widespread (Image: Felix Hug/Corbis)

THE day I sat down to write this article the news was rather like any other day. A teenager had been found guilty of plotting to behead a British soldier. Fighting had broken out again in Ukraine. Greece was accusing its creditors of being motivated by ideology rather than economic reality. Some English football fans were filmed racially abusing a man on the Paris subway. Admittedly, all of that day's stories were unique in themselves. But at the root they were all about the same thing: the powerful and very human attribute we call belief.

Beliefs define how we see the world and act within it; without them, there would be no plots to behead soldiers, no war, no economic crises and no racism. There would also be no cathedrals, no nature reserves, ...

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Ancient water cache may be pristine primordial soup

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Deep rocks have been cracked open and water isolated for billions of years released – the liquid may represent Darwin's “warm little pond” where life arose

IT IS the closest we have ever come to finding Earth's primordial soup. Ancient rocks deep underground contain water that has been locked away for billions of years. It may never have been touched by life.

In 2007, geochemist Barbara Sherwood Lollar at the University of Toronto in Canada and her team found treasure in a copper mine. Water gushing out of cracks in the rock, caused by mining, turned out to be over a billion years old. Now the group has made a similar find in a second mine, suggesting ancient rocks could be riddled with such time capsules, right back to the early days of life on Earth.

Sherwood Lollar's team is now scouring the water for ancient forms of life, perhaps unknown to science. So far it seems it holds no life, but that is just as exciting because it means the water they found may be identical to that in which life began.

If that's the case, it opens up an extraordinary opportunity to understand how life got started on Earth, and where (see "Beginner's guide to the origin of life"). The find could also offer insights into how life may survive on other planets.

Sherwood Lollar first got a whiff of the hidden water over a decade ago, deep inside the Kidd Creek Mine in Timmins, Ontario, Canada. In a corridor more than 2 kilometres beneath the surface, she caught a whiff of gas from a fracture in the rock. Water dripped from the hole. Subsequent analyses revealed it to be between 1.1 and 2.7 billion years old (Nature, doi.org/tgw). The smell came from the sulphurous gases mixed in with the water, which also holds methane and hydrogen.

Crucially, as far as the team could tell, the water contained no trace of life. "It speaks to this question of whether we can find an exotic small part of this planet that has not been touched by life," says Sherwood Lollar. "These fractures may have been isolated long enough that they retain chemistry that reflects the same kind of processes that were taking place before there was life on Earth. At that time, presumably the whole planet would have looked something like this."

The discovery could have been a one-off, so the team has been looking for other places where ancient water exists in deep rocks. Last month at the Goldschmidt conference in Sacramento, California, team member Chelsea Sutcliffe presented their results from two mines in the Sudbury basin, also in Ontario.

Like Timmins, the mines are dug into rock that is billions of years old. Sutcliffe collected water from 1.3 and 1.7 kilometres down, and so far it looks very similar to the Timmins water. The chemicals in the water are similar, and isotope ratios suggest it is similarly old. The team are now running further analyses: the noble gases in the water samples will provide a fairly precise age.

"If they are seeing the same thing at Sudbury, that's pretty powerful," says Tullis Onstott of Princeton University. This water is "an abiotic fringe zone – a place where life could exist but doesn't yet", he says. "This is a zone that's been trapped for billions of years, providing a geological experiment on the genesis of life."

At most, the Timmins and Sudbury water is 2.7 billion years old – the age of the rock it is trapped inside. That's about a billion years after life got started, so the researchers are not suggesting they have bottled the actual primordial soup in which life began. But the chemistry they are seeing corresponds to water that could have given rise to life.

"Geochemically, it's the kind of site that has been invoked for the origins of life on our planet," says Onstott. "Yet here we see it isolated from the present-day DNA world."

There are two leading theories for where life got started on Earth. Perhaps the most famous is Darwin's "warm little pond" – a soup of organic chemicals bathed in sunlight. The other, which has gained popularity in recent years, is that deep-sea vents at the bottom of the ocean acted as a cradle for life, offering both heat and nutrition via fluids pumped up through Earth's crust.

That's where the ancient water from the Ontario mines comes in. The rocks they are held in were formed by hydrothermal vent systems at the bottom of the ocean, billions of years ago.

"I would say this is as close as we have come to bottling the warm little pond, in a warm little fracture," says Sherwood Lollar. Onstott agrees: "They are literally like Darwin's warm little pond without the light."

Having bottled Earth's primordial soup, the researchers are now probing it to see what they can learn. It may be that chemical reactions deep underground have given rise to some of the very earliest stages in the formation of life, like the generation of amino acids, or the building blocks of DNA.

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