A Clever Way to Tell Which of Your Emails Are Being Tracked

While you’ve likely never heard of companies like Yeswear, Bananatag, and Streak, they almost certainly know a good deal about you. Specifically, they know when you’ve opened an email sent by one of their clients, where you are, what sort of device you’re on, and whether you’ve clicked a link, all without your awareness or consent.

That sort of email tracking is more common than you might think. A Chrome extension called Ugly Mail shows you who’s guilty of doing it to your inbox.

Sonny Tulyaganov, Ugly Mail’s creator, says he was inspired to write the “tiny script” when a friend told him about Streak, an email-tracking service whose Chrome extension has upwards of 300,000 users. Tulyaganov was appalled.

“[Streak] allowed users track emails, see when, where and what device were used to view email,” he recalled to WIRED. “I tried it out and found it very disturbing, so decided to see who is actually tracking emails in my inbox.” Once the idea for Ugly Mail was born, it only took a few hours to make it a reality.

The reason it was so easy to create is that the kind of tracking it monitors is itself a simple procedure. Marketers—or anyone who’s inspired to snoop—simply insert a transparent 1×1 image into an email. When that email is opened, the image pings the server it originated from with information like the time, your location, and the device you’re using. It’s a read receipt on steroids that you never signed up for.

Pixel tracking is a long-established practice, and there’s nothing remotely illegal or even particularly discouraged about it; Google even has a support page dedicated to guiding advertisers through the process. That doesn’t make it any less unsettling to see just how closely your inbox activity is being monitored.

Using Ugly Mail is as simple as the service is effective. Once you’ve installed it, the code identifies emails that include tracking pixels from any of the three services mentioned above. Those messages will appear in your inbox with an eye icon next to the subject heading, letting you know that once clicked, it will alert the sender. Tulyaganov also confirmed to WIRED that Ugly Mail also doesn’t store, save, or transmit any data from your Gmail account or computer; everything takes place on the user’s end.

Ugly Mail appears to work as advertised in our test, but it has its limitations. It’s only built for Gmail (sorry… Outlookers?) and is only available for Chrome, although Tulyaganov says that Firefox and Safari versions are in the works. And while it’s effective against Yeswear, Bananatag, and Streak, those are just three pixel-tracking providers in a sea of sneaking marketers. Tulyaganov has indicated that Ugly Mail will continue to add more tracking services to its list, but it’s not clear yet how long that might take. The onrush of users after receiving top billing on Product Hunt may help speed up the process.

If you’d like take take the extra step of just blocking pixel tracking altogether, another Chrome extension called PixelBlock—also referenced on Product Hunt—automatically prevents all attempts, instead of Ugly Mail’s more passive strategy of simply informing you that they’re happening.

Pixel tracking isn’t going away any time soon, and Ugly Mail is an imperfect way to prevent it. But it still offers a valuable glimpse at the marketing machinations we’re all exposed to every day, whether we’re aware of them or not.

The Spectacular Irrelevance of Insurgent

This is an article about Insurgent. We’re letting you know because we won’t actually talk about Insurgent much here, but trust that’s definitely what this story is about. We’re not going to talk about Insurgent much because no one, including most of the people actually in the movie, cares. So, in order to effectively address the release of Insurgent, we’re going to follow their lead and ignore it almost completely.

How did we get to this weird place of wondering whether we should care about a major studio release based on a popular book series that had three sequels greenlit before the projectors cooled down on the first installment, Divergent? In order to correctly address the present, we must first consider the past, and Hollywood’s unselfconscious embrace of the ethos “good enough is good enough.”

There was a time when studio heads would pump the brakes on material that wasn’t working. In those halcyon days, when something like The Golden Compass didn’t live up to expectations, New Line would opt out of producing the rest of the His Dark Materials trilogy. Now, it would have been three books transformed into four movies and an auto-go after the first premiere (even though that movie was totally underappreciated and deserved another chance). The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was an even better movie, but it didn’t hit the marks for Sony so the remainder of the trilogy will likely only live on in its Swedish counterparts.

The number of passes given to movies that are, at best, inoffensive is embarrassingly high.

But the number of passes given to movies that are, at best, inoffensive is embarrassingly high. The Chronicles of Narnia was allowed to meander on for five years and three movies. The trio of Twilight saga movies we had to suffer through after New Moon was unbearable, but hey, at least Edward and Bella—aka Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson—were a cultural phenomenon. Those two proved amazingly bankable, but really? Two Breaking Dawn films?! Fifty Shades of Grey is currently in negotiations with its principals for the sequel, Fifty Shades Darker, but even with the pre-release boost of so much salacious fodder, everyone has basically stopped talking about it already. Surprise! Turns out sex in movies totally existed before Shades, and now that our curiosity has been assuaged we don’t really care. And now, we’re at the halfway point in the Divergent series, with enough tepid reviews for the second movie to keep us lurching towards the third and eventual fourth. Gross.

And this is what’s ruining studio movies. It’s not actually the adaptations or the reboots of dormant properties or the wholesale remakes of old ones that is sucking our souls. It’s the vomiting of resources onto unnecessary big-budget sequels that could have been used to fund better, smaller ideas—or the occasional ultra-expensive awesome one (…like, um, bringing Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune to life for real). And no, I’m not including Michael Bay in that argument, so settle down. Whether or not you like them, Bay movies are still spectacular—in one sense of the word or another. Transformers: Age of Extinction may have made your ears bleed and your brain turn to jelly, but at least you didn’t pay $15 for a nap, which is what might happen if you buy a ticket for Insurgent. (In his Vanity Fair review, Richard Lawson called the movie “a whole lot better than the first,” while calling Divergent a “perfunctory chore” in the very first paragraph.)

So let’s talk about Divergent for a second. The YA adaptation starred many talented people, including industry/media darling Shailene Woodley and Oscar winner Kate Winslet, yet the best that can be said for Divergent is: “it happened.” Has any hotly anticipated, big-budget studio picture ever landed with such a benign thud? Its critical reception wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad, either. Even terrible ratings likely would have been better for the franchise overall (in other words, they may have given it a swift death).

When a film is neither awesome, nor awesomely bad, it lands in movie purgatory—doomed to be hated by few and loved by even fewer. (No one gets a Razzie for “It was OK, I guess” and at least the Razzie is an award.) Thankfully, a precious few people had the good sense to say “no thanks” when it came to The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones and Vampire Academy. No good was to come of trying to make fetch happen with those franchises. But no, as long as a movie can scrape by, as Divergent did, earning just enough in all the right performance metrics to check the requisite boxes, it is allowed to live on in sequels that get progressively more arduous as the years go on—for fans and stars alike.

The lack of industry interest in Insurgent is staggering for a movie of its size. But since this machine has been set to autopilot, it requires the absolute minimum amount of exertion from all parties involved. Consider this: Naomi Watts appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! two weeks ago to “promote” the film, and during her 13-minute interview talked about Insurgent for a whole 50 seconds before Kimmel brought up another movie she did last year. Miles Teller went on The Tonight Show earlier this week and touched on the film for 20 seconds before transitioning into Woodley’s love of eggs and almonds. (Woodley, bless her, went on Late Night with Seth Meyers and managed to talk for two minutes about doing stunts for the franchise.) Teller, mind you, is on record explaining to W magazine that he was “feeling dead inside” while filming Divergent, adding, “I didn’t have an interesting part, and I’d taken the film for business reasons: It was the first movie I’d done that was going to have an international audience. I called my agent and said, ‘This sucks.'” (He recently told The Hollywood Reporter that he was likely “more burnt out than bored,” but, come on dude; you can’t unsay “dead inside.”)

Andrew Cooper/Lionsgate

But really, Teller is just an example of how you can’t sink these sequel factories even if you try. Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan just wrapped the most uninspired press tour in history, that included one of the most uncomfortable interviews I’ve ever seen. The campaign of pain even prompted Jezebel to write a series of posts about how much the co-stars appeared to not exactly be BFFs (see: “Double Crap: Fifty Shades of Grey Stars Can’t Fucking Stand Each Other” and “Fifty Shades Leads Continue to Hate Each Other on the Cover Of Glamour “). In the New York Post review for Insurgent, Lou Lumenick said, “Practically everyone you’re watching seems to be wishing they were somewhere else.” If you didn’t know the context, you’d have to flip a coin to decide which movie he was talking about.

The teams behind Fifty Shades and Divergent (and Narnia and Twilight and whatever other mediocre pile comes next) have all committed the same mortal sin: playing it far too safe for anyone to really give a damn about what happens next, leaving their subsequent sequels with only the fumes of momentum to feed on. If you’re going to make the same movies over and over again, at least swing for the fences! Flame out spectacularly on an origin story and the worst that can happen is your sequels don’t get made, and who needs more bad movies on their production calendar anyway? If you’re going to make bad movies, Hollywood, at least give audiences the respect they deserve by trying. Watching you phone it in is getting really old, and I’d really rather spend my time watching Shailene Woodley be weird in a movie with Eva Green than fulfill her interminable obligations to you.

Stephen Witty of the Newark Star-Ledger put a fine point on the problem when he said in his Insurgent review, “While the ending is meant to build up anticipation for the inevitable parts three and four, it plays as mostly resolved; you don’t walk out of the theater thinking, I can’t wait till the next one.” Studios keep cashing in on the promise of “the next one,” when they should be working harder to earn our money with the first. I hope you’ll find it “good enough” if I watch your movie for free on the Internet in a few weeks, guys. That feels like the appropriate amount of compensation in return for your ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ level of effort.

Absurd Creature of the Week: The Octopus That’s Pretty Much Just a Swimming Blanket

The female blanket octopus will sadly enough never know the comforts of an actual blanket. Stephen Frink/Getty Images

Odds are that as a kid you had what is known as a “security object,” perhaps a stuffed animal or toy that you carried everywhere with you. I had a plushy named Mr. Bear because I was apparently a painfully uncreative child, my sister had one named Beary because she was a little bit more creative, and Linus from Peanuts had his famous blanket.

But roaming the open oceans is a creature that sports a true security blanket: the so-called blanket octopus. Stretched between the cephalopod’s highly elongated arms are vast sheets of flesh, and when the octopus feels threatened, it splays out its arms to deploy a stunning cloak that maybe, just maybe, will convince an encroaching predator to piss off.

Even if that doesn’t do the trick, the octopus’ arms will break off in its enemy’s mouth, like a lizard losing its tail, hopefully allowing the erstwhile prey to beat a retreat. These are invaluable defenses because unlike their cousins, blanket octopuses don’t ever spend time on the seafloor, and thus don’t have the luxury of crevices to squeeze into for protection. And that’s very weird for an octopus.

But perhaps the strangest thing about the blanket octopus has nothing to do with its weaponry or flowing cape. While females can grow to a formidable 6 feet long, males are incredibly hard to find. They’re so small—less than an inch long—that they could fit inside the ladies’ pupils, according to Tom Tregenza, a biologist at the University of Exeter who co-authored a 2002 paper describing the first-ever sighting of a live male blanket octopus. A female blanket octopus can be an astounding 10,000 times heavier than a male, perhaps up to 40,000 times. Indeed, the differences between the two sexes are more extreme than any other animal this size.

But before we dive into that, let’s first talk about one of the gutsiest weaponizations in the animal kingdom. The diminutive males don’t have the flashy flesh blankets of the females, but they can exploit a menace that other creatures, including humans, would be mad to mess with: the infamous Portuguese man o’ war. The blanket octopus is immune to its stings, so a male will just waltz up and snag a tentacle (the man o’ war isn’t actually a jellyfish, but a sort of colony of clones known as a siphonophore). The little male octopus then wields the tentacle like a toxic whip to fend off predators. And that, as biologists say, is legit. Juvenile females also do this, but abandon the strategy as they grow into giants, “because once you get very large, it’s not much of a defense” trying to sting your predator’s mouth, says Tregenza. “If a shark is going to take a big bite out of you, it’s probably not going to worry very much about the peppery taste.”

So why exactly have male blanket octopuses evolved to be so tiny? “I think the males are small because they’ve got no real reason to be big,” he says. “Females have an obvious reason. Females are generally bigger in most animals because if they’re bigger, they can make more eggs or babies, and the more babies or eggs you can make, the more chance you have of getting your genes into the next generation.” But male sperm? Tiny. So males can afford to be miniscule.

Physical differences like this are known as sexual dimorphism. You sometimes see it in something like size or ornamentation—the female bird of paradise is positively drab compared to the flamboyant male. But females are typically bigger than males not only because their gametes take up a lot more space than sperm, but because eggs take tremendous energy to produce. And while males can get away with being tiny, the trend tends to reverse itself when males compete fiercely for females. In that case, bigness can be an evolutionary advantage, since the largest males win the right to mate. Thus does the human “dude bro” seem to get bigger and bigger as the years go by.

I’d be willing to bet that the male blanket octopus has some serious inadequacy issues. David Paul

Interestingly, the blanket octopus’ radical brand of sexual dimorphism is actually more common than you’d think in the open ocean. Another species of octopus, the argonaut, has tiny males who fertilize giant females (which build a beautiful shell out of calcite to house their young). The deep-sea anglerfish has similarly famous sex antics. The eensy-weensy male bites onto the female and permanently fuses his face to her flesh, releasing sperm whenever she demands it for perhaps decades. Finding females is just so difficult for these males that they evolved to do pretty much nothing but mate, so there’s no need for them to be any bigger than they have to be.

So the tiny male blanket octopus finds himself floating out there all alone in the vast ocean. He’ll be lucky to find a female, but once he does, he leaves his mate something special to remember him by—like, uh, a limb. “The blanket octopus male puts all the sperm its got into a modified arm,” says Tregenza. “The arm then breaks off and crawls into the female’s mantle cavity.” There, it may even find company: Females can retain the arms of multiple males simultaneously. The male then jets away, though the female isn’t necessarily fertilized just yet. “The female blanket octopus will have the male’s arm inside her,” Tregenza says, “and when she comes to need to fertilize her eggs, she can pull that arm out and squirt the sperm over her eggs like squirting soy sauce onto fried rice.” Thus concludes the greatest analogy in the history of science.

Sadly, things don’t turn out so rosy for the male. Having fulfilled his purpose, he perishes as the female trucks on, flashing that majestic cape and from time to time taking more lovers. “So it’s not the world’s worst male,” says Tregenza. “But it’s no George Clooney, that’s for sure.”

Browse the full Absurd Creature of the Week archive here. Know of an animal you want me to write about? Are you a scientist studying a bizarre creature? Email matthew_simon@wired.com or ping me on Twitter at @mrMattSimon.

The Shadow Ballet Where Drones Dance With Humans

Drones will change how we ship goods! They’ll revolutionize search and rescue! We hear about these futures all the time. It’s less often that we’re asked to consider how autonomous flying machines might be used for more poetic ends. But, as with any technology, drones can be just as invigorating for art as they are for commerce. “Shadow” is the just the latest example.

It’s a collaboration between dance troupe Elevenplay and the stellar Japanese design crew Rhizomatiks, who began exploring the possibilities of drone-assisted performance early last year. In their first effort, the groups essentially used drones as flying props. It was novel, but not much more than that.

Here, the drones are put to more thoughtful use: They’re robotic spotlights. Continuously reconfiguring their position around a single, human dancer, the ensemble produces a mesmerizing play of shadow and light.

It’s more than a cool gimmick. Instead of having drones on stage just for the sake of having them, the clip shows how the machines can be used in subtler, more expressive ways. Being able to choreograph the three independently-moving light sources around a performer presumably lets you create all sorts of visual effects you simply couldn’t achieve otherwise. At first, the drones flicker their lights in sequence, projecting a stop motion movie in shadow on the wall behind. After that, they explore other configurations around the dancer: spotlighting her, hiding her, and revealing her again in silhouette.

Daito Manabe, the lead Rhizomatiks wizard, occasionally posts YouTube videos of these works in progress. A recent series hints at what we might expect to see next: a 24-drone troupe. They’re less flying spotlights and more like floating lightbulbs—super-sized fireflies whose movements can be programmed. I eagerly await their debut.

A behind the scenes look at a 24-drone experiment. Source

Three Satellite Messengers for Your Journeys Into the Wild

Satellite communication has become much more accessible to recreationalists in recent years. One- and two-way text messaging devices from SPOT, DeLorme, and TextAnywhere have already made strong headway into the hands of amateur and professional adventurers. Now there’s a new generation of satellite communications options for amateur adventurers and professionals alike.

The three satellite devices I tested all work by creating a portable, satellite-based Wi-Fi network for your smartphone, tablet and/or laptop to connect to. Then they can make voice calls or transfer data (email, text messages, upload photos, etc.). I tested them in a variety of situations and environments, including remote areas like the deserts of Utah and Arizona, in the mountains of Colorado, and along the rivers and lakes of the Maine Woods. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able conduct tests in any far-flung international destinations.

When exposed to a clear view of the sky they all delivered crystal clear voice connections. As soon as a canopy of trees or even thick cloud cover came into play, the voice quality of each of them started to suffer and even garble up beyond use. I conducted some urban tests as well but as expected, power lines and buildings interfered with getting a strong and steady signal.

As for exact data speeds, I tried to use speedtest.com to confirm, but none of the devices was able to complete the test. The listed data rates under ideal conditions, though, can be found in the comparison chart below. I’ve listed the unit prices there as well, but won’t go into the various service plans and other pricing options. Each manufacturer distributes differently with a variety of plans to choose from to buy, rent or trade-in. The cost of the unit may also depend on the service plan you choose.

Below are my impressions of the three satellite messengers I used, ordered by just how much coverage they provide.

Iridium Go ($825)

This is the smallest, lightest device we tested, and the only one in the Iridium network to provide true global coverage (save locations under U.S. satellite communications embargo restrictions—true for all three units in this roundup). The Go is a touch bigger than a deck of cards and only weighs 10.5 oz. It’s also the easiest device to set up and operate. Simply rotate its antenna up and the Go starts to power up. Depending on how much sky the Go can see it usually only takes a minute or two for it to give you the green light (literally a green light on the top of the Go means it sees satellites and is ready). The small footprint and compact design, along with the military grade ruggedness (MIL-STD 810F for those of you keeping score) and rubberized exterior, makes it easy to set it out just about anywhere. The IP65 waterproof rating—a splash, rain, or snow is okay, but full submersion isn’t—allows you not to worry about leaving it out when the weather turns foul. Not that you’d be likely to get a signal then, anyway.

The Go has a 3.6Ah (3.7V, 13.3Wh) internal battery and will last for 14 hours on standby. It charges via a standard micro-USB cable and is compatible with most of the portable USB batteries and solar charging systems on the market today. It has a built-in 1 1/2-inch by 7/8-inch LED screen, two control buttons, and a separate (and covered) SOS button to send a distress signal to GEOS even if your smartphone is dead. I would like to have seen a USB power out plug to be able to charge your smartphone from the Go battery if needed.

For more elaborate setups the Go has an external antenna connector, a standard 1/4-inch-20 tripod screw mount and a through-hole to attach a safety leash.

The built-in screen menu is intuitive and easy to navigate with the two buttons. The smartphone/tablet interface is broken down to two separate apps: voice and data. Data speeds are listed at 2.4 kbps. The only major bummer is data is restricted to Iridium-approved apps, meaning it’s not like you’re on an open Wi-Fi signal and you can use whatever app you want (Facebook, Gmail, iMessage, etc.). You can only email/text through the Iridium’s own apps, or browse the web after downloading and installing either Iridium’s browser or Opera Mini.

Inmarsat IsatHub. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Inmarsat IsatHub (Addvalue Wideye iSavi) ($1,350)

The InsatHub service, currently only accessible via Addvalue’s Wideye iSavi terminal, provides over one hundred times the data speed of the Iridium Go, and provides nearly as much global coverage. The only places it won’t work for you are the Arctic and Antarctic Circles (66º33’ latitude north or south). The iSavi is a little bigger and about three times heavier (30 oz.) than the Go as well. And while it doesn’t have the ruggedness of the Go, it is equally dust and splashproof with the same IP rating of 65.

The iSavi’s standard 3Ah (10.8V, 33Wh) battery lasts between two and two and a half hours during transmit time and for 24 hours on standby. A 6Ah (65Wh) battery is also available, and has a USB out plug to charge other devices. Unfortunately, to charge the iSavi requires a proprietary 18V/3.6A plug, so you’ll need access to a standard wall socket on the grid, a generator, an Addvalue car adapter, or rather large 18V solar kit to recharge it.

Along with the (relatively) fast data speeds, I really appreciated that the Inmarsat satellites are geosynchronous, meaning they stay in the same place in the sky relative to your location. In particular on one campout in Colorado, I set each of these three units up under a sparse tree canopy. While the Iridium and Globalstar devices went in and out of service as their satellites moved through the sky and could poke a signal through when they cleared the trees, the iSavi was positioned to point through a hole in the canopy and keep a constant signal with the antenna aimed at the stationary satellite.

Setting up and aiming the antenna is easy. The iSavi has two sets of illuminated arrows to help. Once the iSavi establishes a GPS signal to know where it is on Earth, it then knows where its data satellite is in the sky above it. The arrows then light up indicating whether to angle the antenna higher or lower, or to rotate the unit left or right. Once all the arrows turn green you’re good to leave it be and start transmitting. The only other indicators on the unit are a light behind the power button and a battery level gauge. Unlike the Iridium Go, the iSavi will not work independently of your smartphone or tablet. There is no external SOS button or method to use the iSavi on its own. Nor do you have the option to attach a bigger external antenna.

The iSavi also has two accompanying apps. One is purely for voice and SMS (text) communications. The second is purely to manage and control the iSavi on an administrative level, such as controlling the Wi-Fi network and determining what access level different users have. You can see how much data or voice time each user (up to ten) racks up and set limits to their usage or restrict access to individual users completely. The admin app will also show you how strong the connection signal is with the satellite. Only one person needs this app to be able to administer the unit, while users only need the voice app to make calls.

The good news is, unlike the Iridium and Globalstar service, no proprietary or specifically approved app is needed to browse the web or send email while connected to the iSavi. It’s like a slow version of being connected to your Wi-Fi at home (depending on where you live).

Globalstar Sat-Fi. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Globalstar Sat-Fi ($1,000)

This last unit is the least portable, weatherproof, or rugged of them all, and seems best suited for industrial use rather than recreational. While Globalstar does have the newest satellite network orbiting Earth, the Sat-Fi only works across the middle of the northern hemisphere, South America, and Australia. It also requires an external power source (of at least 12V; there’s no internal battery) and would not perform well in a heavy dew (IP10). The unit also requires an external antenna to be attached (options include a magnetic mount patch, magnetic mount helix, or pole mounted helix). The Wi-Fi antenna is also mounted externally, bumping the range up to 100 feet like the Inmarsat. The Iridium reaches 30 feet.

The Sat-Fi has only a single button to power it on or off, and one LED built into that button to convey cryptic flashing sequences that relay the status of the network, transmission information, and power indication. The physical setup of the Sat-Fi is simple, though still more involved than the other two units I tested. There are connections on the back for power as well as the Wi-Fi and satellite antennae. How much or little this needs to be disassembled between use will be up to the user.

Those newer satellites come into play by providing a more robust and tolerant connection as conditions deteriorate. They also provide a four time faster data rate compared to the Iridium, though still about 30 times slower than the Inmarsat service. Like the Iridium, two separate apps provide voice and data services. In fact, there’s an uncanny similarity between the Globalstar and Iridium apps to make me think they were developed (at least in part) by the same third-party company. Also somewhat like the Iridium service, the only data access is through the native Globalstar app.

Stem cells help researchers peg rabies resistance

Researchers at Texas A&M AgriLife Research have developed a new technology to determine sensitivity or resistance to rabies virus.

"We were able to create a novel platform such that we could look at how pathogens, such as bacteria or virus or even drugs or radiation, interact with specific human genes," said lead researcher Dr. Deeann Wallis, AgriLife Research assistant professor of biochemistry and biophysics. "It allows us a new way to profile the genes involved in sensitivity or resistance to certain agents."

The rabies work is being reported in the journal Stem Cells.

"Our study is the first to show pre-existing libraries of mutant stem cells can be differentiated into different cell types en mass and screened to identify meaningful genes involved in a cell's response to infection," Wallis said. "Moreover, this technique can be used to identify human genes that are involved in any type bacterial or viral infection, or even response to drugs, toxins or radiation. This is a relatively novel way for researchers to discover gene function and assess human host response."

Understanding sensitivity or resistance to rabies is important, she said, not only because the disease still causes 55,000 deaths a year globally, but it could also potentially be weaponized and used as a biowarfare agent.

Wallis said the five-year study used murine embryonic stem cells from a library of mutant stem cells typically used to generate knockout mice.

A knockout mouse is a laboratory mouse in which researchers have inactivated, or "knocked out," an existing gene by replacing it or disrupting it with an artificial piece of DNA, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute. Such cells and mice are frequently used as a model to study human genes, Wallis noted.

She explained that each stem cell clone has a different gene mutated.The researchers took a panel of a variety of different genes and were able to query each cell line separately.

"For the first time ever, we were able to take thousands of different stem cell lines, each carrying a separate mutation, and differentiate them into neurons," she said. "It was quite a large task to miniaturize this. We were able to show with genes that are known to be involved in rabies virus that if we mutated a gene in the mouse, we still can see differences in sensitivity and resistance to rabies virus in these cells.

Knockout mouse stem cells have only one copy of each gene, whereas a regular cell would have two copies of every gene. Therefore, other researchers thought it was not possible to see an impact of a particular gene because half of it is still there, she said.

The research team grew embryonic stem cells in an array of approximately 100 per plate, differentiating them into fully functional neurons. Then, fluorescent green rabies virus was added and plates were photographed daily for several days. An image analysis program was used to measure how much green was on each picture.

"The results are basically sorted on the high amount of green, meaning these are really sensitive to rabies, and the resistant ones that have very little green," Wallis said. "We were able to identify 63 different host target genes. These genes represent new pathways that can be targeted for treatment of rabies.

"If we are able to target host-based genes with drugs, they would mutate much less rapidly than viral or bacterial genes, and so we would have fewer problems with resistance."

She said researchers are already considering the technique for further studies on tuberculosis, botulism, ebola and even attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

"There's no end to the possibilities for screening stem cells in this way," Wallis said.

The U.S. Department of Defense funded this project.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Texas A&M AgriLife . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Arctic Ice Extent Hits a 30-Year Low

As if the public needed more evidence that climate change is real, now there’s one more item to tack on the list: This winter, Arctic sea ice extent reached a record low, and peaked earlier this year than it ever has before. NASA created a stunning visualization of ice developing over the northern pole—a network of thin, swirling sheets that just don’t reach as far as they used to.

New information from the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows Arctic sea ice reached a maximum extent of 5.61 million square miles this winter—50,000 square miles below the next lowest maximum recorded in 2011. As NASA illustrates, this is well short of the average maximum sea ice concentration observed in the 35 years prior, and the lowest of any year since satellite observation began in 1979.

The most drastic difference was found in the Sea of Okhotsk, north of Japan. This year’s maximum ice extent was 346.7 miles short of the previous 35-year average maximum. That’s nearly identical to the length of Utah.

This latest maximum occurred on February 25 of this year. (It took this long for climate scientists to be sure that the ice wouldn’t freeze any further this year.) Barring any aberrant global cold spike to hit the northern hemisphere—and hey, stranger things are happening—it will be one of the earliest maximums on record, 15 days earlier than the average.

Perhaps the silver lining here is that as it turns out, there’s very little relation between the maximum extent of Arctic ice in the winter, and the summer minimum. That means a low maximum won’t necessarily beget a low minimum. Conditions for the summer might look relatively normal yet—but we’re not betting on it.