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7 May 2011 | NewScientist | 21 Morning is bad time for a heart attack A HEART attack in the morning causes more damage than an attack at any other time of the day. Borja Ibanez and colleagues at the Carlos III University of Madrid in Spain collected details from 811 people who suffered a heart attack between 2003 and 2008. The team recorded when symptoms started and blood levels of two protein markers for heart damage. The proteins are enzymes that normally stay inside heart cells, but are released when cells die. Rising enzyme levels in the blood mean a lot of tissue has died. Heart damage was significantly greater following morning attacks (Heart, DOI: 10.1136/ hrt.2010.212621). “There’s a peak between 6 am and noon,” says Ibanez. “People who had heart attacks during this period had 20 per cent more tissue death compared with those who had attacks at any other time.” Ibanez reckons protective proteins called salvage kinases may be responsible. Heart cells in rodents and pigs release varying amounts throughout the day with less produced in the morning. “Proteins that protect human heart cells from damage could provide new therapies,” he says. Fleeting antimatter trapped for a quarter of an hour WHAT can you do with a quarter of an hour? Write a few emails, cook rice – or store antimatter. The team working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have stored atoms of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds – roughly 10,000 times longer than before. This should help reveal if antimatter and matter are true mirror images. Antihydrogen atoms are annihilated by hydrogen. The ALPHA team want to keep antimatter intact long enough to study it, so last year they worked out how to hold a cloud of antihydrogen in a magnetic trap. Not for long, though: collisions with trace gases would have either annihilated the anti-atoms or given them the energy to escape, so the team opened the trap after 170 milliseconds and observed the resulting annihilations, verifying that antimatter had been made. Now they have repeated the experiment, this time waiting much longer before opening the trap. They also cooled the FILE under “unexplained phenomena”: elongated nebulae in the Milky Way’s centre seem to lie parallel to the plane of the galactic disc, hinting at an underlying pattern. Bryan Rees of the University of Manchester, UK, found the strange alignment after studying 44 such nebulae. His findings bolster observations made in 2008 by Walter Weidmann of Cordoba Observatory in Argentina and Ruben Diaz of the Gemini Observatory in Chile. Rees presented his results at the UK National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, UK, last month. The structures are thought to result from the interaction between pairs of stars. As one ageing star breathes out its gases while whirling around a companion, it creates a planetary nebula that stretches out perpendicular to the plane of the stars’ orbits. So the nebular alignment hints at an underlying alignment of stellar pairs. Albert Zijlstra, Rees’s adviser at Manchester, speculates that powerful magnetic fields might have once girded the galaxy’s central stellar bulge and guided the tilt of star-forming gas clouds. Nebulae show mysterious alignment BRUCE BALICK, VINCENT ICKE, GARRELT MELLEMA AND NASA/ESA antiprotons used to create the antihydrogen much further, which lowered the energy of the antimatter, allowed more to be squeezed into the trap and raised the chance that some would last longer (arxiv.org/abs/1104.4982). Antimatter’s life extension will permit experiments, such as checking whether antihydrogen occupies the same energy levels as hydrogen, “perhaps within the next few years”, says Daniel Kaplan of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, who is not on the ALPHA team. A sideways look at balancing in space TILT your head to the left and the leaning tower of Pisa in the picture below might look even more likely to topple than usual; tilt to the right and it may seem more stable. That’s because our perception of how precariously an object is balanced varies with our orientation, a finding that could be used to help astronauts avoid vertigo. Michael Barnett-Cowan at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, and colleagues showed 15 volunteers an image of an object tilted to the right and asked them to judge whether it was about to topple. Volunteers lying on their left side were more likely to say it was than were volunteers lying on their right side (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/ journal.pone.0019289). We perceive which way is down via the effect of gravity on the inner ear’s vestibular system combined with visual information and a sense of the body’s position. When we are upright, these senses are aligned, but when the head is tilted they clash. A better understanding of how these senses contribute to our perception of orientation could help astronauts train to overcome space sickness – which arises as the vestibular system adapts to low gravity – by paying more attention to visual information and the body’s position, says Barnett-Cowan. OLIMPIO FANTUZ/SIME/4CORNERS For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
