(Image: James Morgan/WWF-Canon)

“LIFE. That’s what’s in this picture that’s missing in pictures of ivory, or poached animals,” says photographer James Morgan.

This blue-eyed tiger cub when he stumbled across a tiger rescue in Bangkok, Thailand. This cub and 15 others were found hidden in a fruit crate behind the cab of a truck bound for Laos. Morgan had a flash of inspiration: rather than continue to bombard the world with pictures of tusks and animal carcasses, essentially information about what is already lost, he decided to remind us of what we still have, in the hope that we’ll feel more compelled to protect it.

Here, veterinary practitioners are sampling the cub’s DNA in order to find out where the batch of 16 came from. This should help authorities better trace and crack down on the criminal network.

Though it’s still unclear who put them in the back of the truck, it’s almost certain that they were being traded for their supposed medicinal qualities. Traditional Chinese medicine views tiger parts as providing good luck and protective powers, but cubs are also often traded for their fur or as pets for the elite.

For this cub, and others like it, the story doesn’t end happily. According to Morgan, it faces a lifetime in captivity at wildlife breeding centres because it is too risky to release these sought-after animals back into the wild. Morgan’s hope is that images like this one – taken on behalf of a WWF campaign – will appeal to the conscience of those who buy animal products.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Cry for help”

(Image: Mingzhai Sun and Joshua Shaevitz, department of physics and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics/Filiz Bunyak and Kannappan Palaniappan, University of Missouri–Columbia/)

Bacteria that glide together… make art together? This contender in the competition run by Princeton University in New Jersey, entitled The history of gliding, depicts the squiggly gliding paths of the bacteria Myxococcus xanthus.

M. xanthus are social bacteria that move in coordinated packs to hunt prey efficiently and protect one another. Mingzhai Sun of Princeton and colleagues recorded their paths for 4 hours to create this intertwined pattern, which shows where groups of hundreds of thousands of bacteria travelled together. The colours indicate the time elapsed on their journeys, with blue representing the start and red the end.

See the winners of the competition, along with the science behind them, in the .

(Image: Carolyn Kaster/AP/Press Association Images)

It sounds like the stuff of a horror movie: cannibalism, and in Jamestown, Virginia, the oldest English settlement in North America.

In 1609, as the colonists were still adjusting to their new home, they were caught in the grip of a brutal winter that has become known as “the starving time“. The recently unearthed bones of a 14-year-old girl sheds light on the unfortunate story of how people survived.

William Kelso, chief archaeologist at the , found the remains and Douglas Owsley, division head for physical anthropology at the , used marks on the girl’s skull and tibia to show that she had been the victim of cannibalism. Her skeleton provides the first tangible evidence of this in Jamestown, corroborating existing written accounts.

Researchers were unable to determine exactly how she died, but her remains did reveal a bit about her life. She was from the south coast of England, and, an analysis of isotopes in her bones suggests, enjoyed a high-protein diet – and so was probably from an upper-class family.

As famine spread in Jamestown, 80 per cent of the residents died. Some turned to leather straps from their clothes and household animals for sustenance. But when even those resources petered out, the colonists were forced to choose between starvation or surviving off the remains of those whom the brutal winter killed.

(Image: Materials Research Society Science as Art Competition and Joong Hwan Bahng, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

This jostling family of garish hedgehogs is not just a playful picture – it shows the serious business of analysing a novel material. You’re looking at zinc oxide growing on the outside of tiny spherical particles, as seen through the lens of a scanning electron microscope.

With colour added to the monochrome original, this picture – taken by Joon Hwan Bahng of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor – bagged first prize in the Materials Research Society’s biannual competition, .

The judges picked out this image for its beauty and its power to reveal visually how the rough surface of a microsphere can affect the growth of crystals.

Fears of the world being taken over by unfeeling zombies might not be totally far fetched. Our books indicate that English speakers are becoming less emotional.

at the University of Bristol, UK, and colleagues calculated the frequency of words associated with six major emotions – anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and joy in the 5 million English-language books digitised by Google Books.

They found the use of emotionally charged words declined over the 20th century, but there was a relative upswing of fear-related words from 1980.

Several historical periods clearly popped out. During the second world war, the incidence of sad words peaked, whereas times of prosperity, such as the roaring twenties and the swinging sixties, saw a high prevalence of words related to joy.

The data also show that within this general emotional decline, books written in American English were more emotional than those written in British English. This divergence began in the 1960s, a time when the UK was still recovering from the war while America was experiencing economic growth.

But do the trends really reflect the mood of the population or are they simply a proxy for the kind of books people like to read or trends in publishing? Because the data doesn’t account for how well the books sold, and because the changes in mood seen seem to correspond with political and economic events, Acerbi is confident that data “reflect a genuine cultural change”.

Doing similar analyses with social media can reveal how people feel about recent events but books are better for gauging long-term changes in psyche, he adds.

Journal reference: PLoS One,

IT IS a nightmare situation. A person diagnosed as being in a vegetative state has an operation without anaesthetic because they cannot feel pain. Except, maybe they can.

at the Schön clinic in Bad Aibling, Germany, and colleagues studied people with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) – also known as vegetative state – and identified activity in brain areas involved in the emotional aspects of pain. People with UWS can make reflex movements but can’t show subjective awareness.

There are two distinct neural networks that work together to create the sensation of pain. The more basic of the two – the sensory-discriminative network – identifies the presence of an unpleasant stimulus. It is the affective network that attaches emotions and subjective feelings to the experience. Crucially, without the activity of the emotional network, your brain detects pain but won’t interpret it as unpleasant.

Using PET scans, previous studies have but their findings were consistent with a lack of subjective awareness, the hallmark of the condition.

Now Markl and her colleagues have found evidence of activation in the affective or emotional network too (, ).

Her team gave moderately painful electric shocks to 30 people with UWS, while scanning their brains using fMRI. Sixteen people had some kind of brain activation – seven only in the sensory network but nine in the affective network as well.

These results question whether some diagnoses should change from UWS to minimally conscious, which is characterised by some level of awareness.

“I don’t think this paper alone will change the clinical approach to people with diagnoses such as UWS,” says Donald Weaver at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, who was not involved in the work. But it will encourage future study, he says.

Changing a diagnosis depends on whether neurologists are ready to accept alternative ways of diagnosing disorders of consciousness, says Boris Kotchoubey at the Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioural Neurobiology in TĂĽbingen, Germany, who worked on the study.

Nonetheless, Kotchoubey is confident that the way people with UWS are cared for will change, even if their diagnoses remain the same. “I know that many doctors working with such patients have been instructed to treat their patients as if they can understand them and perceive at least something in the environment, perhaps pain, pleasure, or emotion,” he says.

But not all people are treated this way. Prior to the study, one of the people in Markl’s study was given no anaesthesia before a tracheotomy, which involves an incision in the neck to allow breathing without using the nose or mouth. As people with UWS are clinically considered unable to understand pain, doctors do not have to give an anaesthetic.

This article appeared in print under the headline “What if people in a coma feel pain…”