An estimated three in 1,000 people suffers from the mysterious affliction chronic fatigue syndrome. Those people were probably enthusiastic in October when a team of U.S. medical researchers released a study arguing that not only is the syndrome real (some doctors dismissed it as purely psychological “yuppie flu”), but also that they’d connected it to a specific virus. DISCOVER covered the hubbub after the paper came out in the journal Science.

But now, in a study in PLoS One, a British research team has cast doubt on the American team’s findings, saying there’s no conclusive link between the virus and chronic fatigue syndrome, which is also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis.

The U.S. team’s findings sounded robust when they came out. They found the murine leukaemia virus-related virus (XMRV) in blood samples of 68 of 101 patients diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. Just eight out of 101 healthy “controls” drawn at random from the same parts of the US also tested positive, suggesting that XMRV played a key role in triggering the condition [The Independent]. When the scientists from Imperial and Kings colleges in London attempted to replicate these findings, however, they found nothing of the sort. Of the 186 people with the syndrome that this team tested, not one showed signs of XMRV, or of any related virus.

Study coauthor Myra McClure of the Imperial College also criticized the U.S. team and the journal Science for rushing the findings into print in October. “When you’ve got such a stunning result you want to be absolutely clear that you are 1,000 per cent right and there are things in that [previous study] I would not have done. I would have waited. I would have stalled a little” [The Independent], she said.

As for the new study conducted in London, McClure declared: “We used very sensitive testing methods to look for the virus. If it had been there, we would have found it…. We are confident our results show there is no link between XMRV and CFS, at least in the UK” [The Guardian]. But the U.K. team says its contradictory findings could have resulted from differences in patients. According to the new study, the discrepancy “may be a result of population differences between North America and Europe regarding the general prevalence of XMRV infection, and might also explain the fact that two US groups found XMRV in prostate cancer tissue, while two European studies did not.”

Though McClure and her colleagues can’t say for sure how they and the Americans came to such different results, they wanted to put a stop to the rush of patients who started seeking antiretroviral treatments for chronic fatigue after the Science paper came out in October (XMRV is a retrovirus, like HIV). They say potent antiretroviral drugs should not be used to treat CFS because there is not enough evidence that this is necessary or helpful. The drugs may do more harm than good, they say [BBC News].

This might throw a wrench into the plans of Judy A. Mikovits, the lead author of the U.S. paper, to go ahead with antiretroviral testing. But the “avalanche of subsequent studies” that one medical researcher predicted to The New York Times after Mikovits’ paper is sure to continue.

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Image: Whittemore Peterson Institute

Researchers from the Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia (they really like Darwin there, apparently) thought they had schemed up a clever way to study how Australian Green Tree Frogs regulate their body temperature.

They surgically implanted temperature-sensitive radio transmitters inside the frogs’ bellies, but months later when they went to retrieve the frogs, the scientists found the transmitters scattered on the ground. Like so many great scientific discoveries, the researchers eventually went from “huh?” to “aha!” according to Nature News:

Researchers have discovered that these amphibians can absorb foreign objects from their body cavities into their bladders and excrete them through urination.

For the frogs, this means that any thorns or spiny insects they swallow while hopping around trees are safely (but painfully?) removed from the body.

This is the first time this phenomenon has been observed in an animal’s bladder, but some fish and snake species can absorb objects into their intestines from their body cavity and remove them by defecation.

Talk about adaptations that would make Darwin proud.

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Image: flickr / VannaGocaraRupa

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has seen first light — in other words, taken its first image from space!

[Click to embiggen and get access to a big TIFF version.]

Nice. It may not look as pretty as a Hubble or Spitzer shot at first glance, but to an astronomer it’s the Mona Lisa. The images are sharp (it’s in focus), the stars are not overexposed, diffuse sources are detected, and the diffraction spikes (the crosshairs centered on stars) are clean.

In other words: bingo!

This is an engineering image, not a science one. So it’s not supposed to be gorgeous or ready for publication or anything like that. It’s more like an aliveness test, to make sure the spacecraft is operating as expected. And it is!

This image is an 8-second exposure of a region in the constellation Carina. Normally, WISE will always be on the move, constantly sweeping the sky and taking data. But in this case, they pointed it at one spot to make sure everything was working. WISE works in the infrared, and this picture is actually a composite of three images: blue represents light at 3.4 microns (about 5 times longer than what we can see with our eyes), green is 4.6 microns, and red is 12 microns. This is well into the IR, and shows stars and warm dust in that region.

To give you an idea of the scale, the image covers the same area of the sky as three full Moons, so WISE takes big swaths of the sky when it looks around. That’s why it’s called a survey explorer. It will take millions of images of the sky, which can be stitched together to make mosaics.

WISE launched last December, and we’ve been waiting for news that it’s working. This image shows it is, so we can expect very cool stuff coming from the orbiting observatory in the future. The mission is actually quite short, only 10 months long. In October, it’s expected run out of the frozen hydrogen (!) being used to cool the detectors — warm objects emit infrared light, and you don’t want your telescope glowing in the light you want to see. In this case, the hydrogen keeps WISE’s cameras at a bone-crushing 8 Kelvin, or -445° F.

You can read more about this in my earlier post about WISE. My congrats to the team!