Chile's Volcanic Eruption Created Lightening

Earlier this week, Chile's Cabulco volcano started erupting for the first time in 43 years, spraying dust and ash at least 15 kilometres into the sky, and causing the evacuation of up to 2,000 local residents.

Thankfully there have been no casualties or serious injuries reported, but the volcano has put on one hell of a show, producing a breathtaking display of volcanic lightning with its second eruption and blasting out red-hot rocks and lava.

You can marvel at the power of nature in the incredible time-lapse footage below.

What causes volcanic lightning? As Bec Crew wrote for ScienceAlert last month, this eerily beautiful phenomenon is triggered when giant ash clouds spew out of a volcano's mouth: "As the individual ash particles make contact and rub against each other, they produce enough static electricity to convert into bursts of lightning." This ash cloud has since caused flight cancellations as it blows across South America, and has produced a plume that can be seen from space.

The below infrared image was taken by the Suomi NPP satellite on 23 April.

1696v1 20150423-Calbuco web NASA's Terra satellite also snapped a natural-colour photo of the ash plume, below: calbuco tmo 2015113NASA And there have been no shortage of amazing Earth-bound images across Twitter.

Calbuco Volcano erupts in nearby chile! Hopefully no serious casualties.

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A Second Brain in Guts

Okay, so your second brain isn't really a brain at all.

It's more of a 'brain' that happens to live in our stomach and helps regulate an amazing number of feelings and emotions.

Known as the enteric nervous system, this is the mechanism behind all those "I'm going with my gut on this", "I'm having a gut reaction", and "I had a gut-wrenching experience" phrases that have become so much a part of our everyday parlance.

You probably already know that we have a whole lot of neurons - nerve cells that form the basis of our central and peripheral nervous systems - in our spine, but did you know that we have the same number lining the long tube of our gut? The complex make-up of our gut means it's able to create intense cravings - why do I suddenly need a cheeseburger immediately? - without even communicating with our actual brain, says Vanessa Hill in the latest episode of BrainCraft.

It's not just the neurons packed into our stomach that pretty much tell us what to do, says Vanessa - the buzzing microcosm inside is also busy exerting its influence.

Called the microbiome, this colony of bacteria is determined by many factors, such as how old you are, where you live, what you eat, and even how stressed-out you are, and it can communicate with our central nervous system to control everything from how anxious you are about a particular task, to how likely you are to approach things with Kimmy Schmidt levels of positivity.

We're only just now figuring out the extent of its influence over us.

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Blood Test for Breast Cancer

 

Researchers in Denmark have come up with a simple blood test that can predict breast cancer up to five years before it develops.

Last year, a study involving 13,000 women found that screening via mammography misses more than 2,000 cases of breast cancer per year in the UK alone, while falsely alerting other women that they have the disease when they don't.

Not only does it significantly increase your risk of developing breast cancer, but dense breast tissue makes it harder for the mammogram to pick up on any tell-tale lumps.

To test the new breast cancer blood test's efficacy, the Danish researchers observed 57,000 participants over 20 years, gathering blood samples along the way.

A smaller selection of 800 women was split into two groups - those who remained healthy throughout the entire process, and those who developed breast cancer within seven years of their first blood sample - and their blood samples were compared and their metabolic profiles built.

Early detection is crucial for breast cancer - if you catch it up to stage 2, you have a 93 to 100 percent chance of surviving the diseases, which drops down to 72 percent at stage 3, and 22 percent at stage four.

"These exciting findings could help us move a step closer to being able to identify a woman's individual risk of developing breast cancer," Samia al Qadhi - Chief Executive at Breast Cancer Care in the UK, who was not involved in the research - told Donnelly at The Telegraph.

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Map! Lightening Does Strike More Often than you Imagine

Forget what you've been told, lightning definitely does strike twice.

Around the planet, lightning strikes around 40 to 50 times a second, and depending on where you live, you could be in for a whole lot more action.

NASA's Earth Observatory has just released a map that shows where lightning flashes most often, and it reveals that lightning is far more likely to occur over land than water, and is also much more common near the equator.

So which spots on Earth receive the most lightning strikes? That would be Lake Maracibo in northwestern Venezuela, and the far eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, both of which are located close to the equator.

In Lake Maracibo, Reuters reports that there are lightning storms 300 days of the year.

This new map compiles data taken over a much longer time period than previous efforts to map Earth's lightning strikes, the researchers explain.

"The longer record allows us to more confidently identify some of these finer details," NASA scientist Daniel Cecil said in a NASA press release.

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Totally Scientific! Using Electrical Signals to Boost Brain Creativity

Publishing their results in the journal Cortex, a team from the University of North Carolina in the US used a low dose of electrical current to enhance brain waves called alpha oscillations, which naturally occur when someone is day-dreaming.

"We've provided the first evidence that specifically enhancing alpha oscillations is a causal trigger of a specific and complex behaviour - in this case, creativity. But our goal is to use this approach to help people with neurological and psychiatric illnesses." Specifically, there's already strong evidence that people with depression have impaired alpha oscillations.

Alpha oscillations occur within the low range between 8 and 12 Hertz, and are most prominent when we close our eyes and meditate or get lost in our own thoughts, which led scientists to associate them with creativity.

As soon as we have more pressing tasks to attend to, higher frequencies such as gamma oscillations take over.

These electrical currents were either placebo stimulations, that let participants feel a little tingle but didn't do much else, or 10-Hertz currents, designed to work in unison to trigger alpha oscillations.

The independently graded results showed that those who had received the alpha oscillation stimulation performed far better than those who hadn't.

To make sure that the alpha oscillations were really causing this creativity boost, the team repeated the experiment using 40-Hertz electrical stimulation, which boosted the activity of gamma oscillations instead. This had no benefit on creativity.

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Shocking! Oral Infections Could Actually Cause Heart Diseases

Oral infections that destroy teeth are linked to an increased risk of heart disease, a US study has found.

The researchers, reviewing current literature, say inflammation-causing oral diseases, including cavities and gum diseases such as gingivitis and periodontitis, are associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke.

"Given the high prevalence of oral infections, any risk they contribute to future cardiovascular disease is important to public health," says Thomas Van Dyke of the Forsyth Institute.

A high dose of a commonly prescribed cholesterol-lowering medication, atorvastatin, part of the statins group, prevents both periodontal and cardiovascular inflammation and reverses existing disease.

"The majority of diseases and conditions of aging, including obesity and type 2 diabetes, have a major inflammatory component that can be made worse by the presence of periodontitis," Van Dyke says.

"Periodontitis is not just a dental disease, and it should not be ignored, as it is a modifiable risk factor." The review article, published in the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism, summarises the latest clinical evidence supporting a link between oral infections and heart disease.

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What Happens when Astronauts Die in Space?

For the first time since the Apollo missions, there is serious talk of more manned spaceflight missions, and it is raising an important question: When someone dies in space, what do you do with the body? A mission to Mars would require several months of travel just to get there.

The simplest solution is to just pop the ship's airlock and send the body floating out into the vacuum of space, as in Spock's funeral in Star Trek.

A UN agreement says you can't litter in space, and that includes dumping bodies.

That's because bodies floating through space could collide with other spacecraft or even float over to alien planets and effectively colonize them with human remains and whatever bacteria and other organisms may be living on and in the body.One of the most interesting proposals for dealing with death in space is a collaboration between the green burial company Promessa and NASA that spawned the idea of the 'Body Back'.

Body Back involves an airtight sleeping bag that a human corpse is zipped into and then exposed to the freezing temperatures of outer space.

"I mean, no society has done that on Earth that I know of. There are societies that desperately need fertilizer, and even they don't use their dead bodies for the purpose. There's always been an extremely strong taboo for using dead bodies for instrumental purposes." Death is a deeply human issue, but for long-term spaceflight it has to also be treated as a cost issue and a practicality issue.

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