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16 | NewScientist | 9 March 2013 THE secret to clear skin may lie in your body’s cocktail of bacteria. Propionibacterium acnes lives in our facial pores and has been implicated in acne, but why the bacterium aggravates spots only in some people is a mystery. Now a team led by Huiying Li of the University of California, Los Angeles, has analysed P. acnes from the nasal skin of 49 people with acne and 52 without. Of the 66 commonest strains, 63 were found in both groups, but two seem linked to acne and one to clear skin (Journal of Investigative Dermatology, doi.org/kng). One of the “bad” strains was hardly found on people with clear skin but was present in 70 per cent of those with spots; the other was found in 84 per cent of people with acne but also in 16 per cent without. Both had extra genes, How to stop people waking in surgery ANAESTHETIC wearing off mid- operation is not just the stuff of nightmares – it occurs in around 0.2 per cent of surgeries globally. But keeping tabs on the brain during surgery could stop this. To look for a signature of consciousness that could be monitored during surgery, Emery Brown at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his team attached an EEG cap to the heads of 10 adults and measured changes in brain activity as unconsciousness was induced using a general anaesthetic. As the volunteers lost and regained consciousness they were asked to press a button whenever they heard a click. By matching brain activity with the stages of wakefulness, the team identified patterns that corresponded to different levels of consciousness, allowing them to tell when someone was waking up (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1221180110). Chimp leader assassinated by gang of underlings ET TU, chimp? The leader of a wild chimpanzee troupe was recently attacked by four of his underlings, who banded together to beat him to death. It’s unusual for chimps to kill their alpha male – and this event gives rare insight into group structure in our closest relatives. From 2007, Pimu was the alpha male of a chimp group living near Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania. His rule came to a violent end in October 2011 – and the moment was captured on video. Stefano Kaburu of the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, and colleagues investigated the incident and conducted an autopsy on Pimu’s body JENNIFER SCOTT IN BRIEF Harness ‘good’ skin bugs to banish acne derived from viruses, that could aggravate acne. The “good” strain was hardly found in people with acne but was present in a fifth of those without. It was able to resist being infected by these rogue genes. Li says the good strain could be used as a probiotic to stop spots forming, and suggests developing drugs to target the bad strains. But she admits the results do not tell us whether the P. acnes strains are the cause or the result of acne. (American Journal of Primatology, doi.org/kn4). The attack happened one morning after Pimu had started a fight with the second-ranking male. This male fled, while four others charged and beat Pimu, biting his hands and feet. It’s rare for chimps to kill their alpha but it happens, says Michael Wilson of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “There was an earlier case in Gombe.” Wilson says male chimps compete for access to small numbers of females, so they have an incentive to kill each other. But rival groups sometimes attack them, so they also have a reason to keep their fellow males around for support. It is a trade-off. Kaburu says Pimu’s group did not have close neighbours, so the other males may have been less worried about outside threats. A BIZARRELY bright supernova may really have been a normal stellar death – magnified by a “lens” of dark matter. First seen in 2010, supernova PS1-10afx was 10 to 20 times brighter than otherwise similar star explosions. Its discoverers proposed that a galaxy cluster acted as a gravitational lens, warping space-time and, in effect, focusing the light towards Earth. But no cluster could be found. Now Robert Quimby of the University of Tokyo, Japan, and colleagues suggest that a blob of invisible dark matter acted as the lens (arxiv.org/abs/1302.2785v1). If so, finding more oddly bright supernovae could help us gauge how much dark matter the universe holds. Dark lens enhanced supernova’s spark
