Cocaine damage lingers
Although a cocaine high only lasts up to an hour, researchers have discovered the drug can linger in the body over the long term—causing immune system disorders and dangerous inflammation.
Scientists at Columbia University looked at blood samples from cocaine users who had abstained from blow for at least a day. They found that fragments of cocaine molecules had bound to lysine in the samples. Lysine is one of the twenty amino acids that make up proteins. This means cocaine has the ability to modify many important enzymes and proteins in the body, most notably albumin—an essential blood protein.
It was also discovered that cocaine-modified proteins were targeted by antibodies, meaning that tissues exposed to the drug can be attacked by a users’ own immune system.
Showing your age
A group of scientists with a telescope bigger than your mom’s minivan have spotted the oldest object ever seen by human eyes.
By training the 10-metre Keck telescope at the University of Hawaii on a cluster of stars six billion light years away, researchers have detected a galaxy that formed not 780 million years after the Big Bang, making our own Milky Way look like a mere snot-nosed tot in comparison.
After the Big Bang, the gases that made up the infant universe were so hot they needed a good half-million years of cooling on the proverbial cosmic windowsill before they were cold enough to coalesce and make stars. This simmering-down period is known as the Dark Ages, since without stars the universe was, well… dark.
The ancient galaxy, thought to have formed just after these Dark Ages ended, was so dim that researches relied on a phenomenon called “gravitational lensing” to see it. In this process, light emitted by a galaxy under study is focused by the gravitational fields of other galaxies between it and the Earth.
