Record breaking season for Utrecht's fish doorbell
What's the latest?
The fish doorbell season has been underway for the past 14 weeks, helping a number of aquatic species swim through the canals. Researchers say that the best time to see the fish is either in the morning or at dusk - when they are at their most active.This year there were a record 30 million visits to the site from around the world, with thousands of fish safely helped through the waterway. Experts say that pike, catfish and lots of eels were among them most common types of fish spotted this year - but other species including carp, zander, bleak and river lamprey were also caught on camera!
Why do fish need a doorbell?
Every spring, fish swim upstream around the Dutch city of Utrecht looking for a place to lay eggs.However, the Netherlands is a country with lots of canals and waterways and, in spring, the lock gates along these canals aren't opened much, which can make it difficult for fish to travel to their breeding grounds.That's why four years ago experts came up with a plan to help the aquatic animals - a digital fish doorbell!An underwater camera was installed at the lock which is live-streamed to a website which people can watch anytime of day.As soon as they spot a fish, viewers can press a digital doorbell on the website to let the lockkeepers know when to open the gates and let the fish through - helping the fish to continue on their route!The keeper checks if there are enough fish there to open the gates and the fish can swim on their merry way.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Medical News Today
11 hours ago
- Medical News Today
Radiotherapy for breast cancer linked to lower Alzheimer's risk
A cohort study led by researchers from Samsung Medical Center in South Korea examined the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease in breast cancer survivors. The scientists compared the prevalence of Alzheimer's to the different methods of cancer treatment and also to a group of healthy women. The researchers found that breast cancer survivors treated with radiation therapy had an 8% reduced risk of developing Alzheimer's in the short term. Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers among women, and according to the American Cancer Society, women have a one in eight chance of developing it at some point. At the same time, Alzheimer's disease is another public health challenge. According to the Alzheimer's Association, it affects an estimated seven million people in the United States researchers noted that a common concern with cancer treatments is that they may cause long-term cognitive side effects, so they explored whether breast cancer treatments impact the chances of developing Alzheimer's. The researchers published their findings in JAMA Network for breast cancer: Is there a link with Alzheimer's risk? Breast cancer has a 5-year relative survival rate of 91%. Treatment depends on whether the cancer is localized or has metastasized (spread beyond the breast). Localized breast cancer is easier to treat, while metastatic breast cancer is more challenging and requires more aggressive ways doctors treat breast cancer include: surgery such as a lumpectomy or mastectomy radiation therapy (also known as radiotherapy)hormone (endocrine) therapytargeted early-stage breast cancer often involves radiation therapy as part of the treatment. Around 70% of women with breast cancer have radiation therapy, and approximately 40% receive chemotherapy. These cancer treatments can cause some serious side effects; radiation therapy can cause hair loss, fatigue, and cognitive impairment. Some side effects of chemotherapy include fatigue, neuropathy, and cognitive changes (chemo brain). The scientists involved in the new study utilized data from the Korean National Health Insurance Service to examine Alzheimer's risk in breast cancer survivors. They included a group of around 70,000 breast cancer survivors and a control group of around 180,000 women. The participants underwent cancer surgery and treatment between 2010 and 2016; the researchers used an average of 7 years of follow-up data for the breast cancer survivors. The most common cancer treatment for the group was radiation, which 71.7% of the group received. More than half of the women received chemotherapy drugs, and nearly half received hormone treatments. Radiotherapy linked to lower short-term Alzheimer's riskDuring the follow-up period, 1,229 women in the breast cancer group received an Alzheimer's diagnosis. When compared to the control group, women who had undergone breast cancer treatment showed an 8% lower risk of developing Alzheimer's. This risk reduction was most pronounced among women who underwent radiation therapy, which made the researchers believe that radiation may have been responsible for the lowered risk of Alzheimer' the scientists observed that this protective effect went away with time. 'Based on these findings, we hypothesize that the risk of [Alzheimer's dementia] could be lowered shortly after cancer treatment but may equalize as the survival period increases,' the authors radiation therapy showed a potential protective benefit, the study found no significant impact on Alzheimer's risk from other authors emphasize the need for further research, noting that the maximum follow-up period in this study was just 11 years, which was potentially too short to fully understand the long-term relationship between breast cancer treatments and Alzheimer's might radiotherapy protect cognitive health?Jon Stewart Hao Dy, MD, a board-certified neurologist affiliated with the Philippines Neurological Association, told Medical News Today that he did not find the study findings surprising. Dy, who was not involved in the current study, told us that:'When a patient is diagnosed with breast cancer and undergoes the necessary evidence-based treatment, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy, they are likely to receive adequate and prompt treatment to control their other comorbidities and to prevent the long-term risk of chemotherapy-induced cognitive dysfunction.'He also touched on why radiation therapy may have provided short-term benefit against developing Alzheimer's. 'The biological mechanisms behind this lower short-term risk are the potential of radiotherapy to reduce astrogliosis and microgliosis and have anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective effects,' explained said that people who are looking to reduce their long-term risk of developing Alzheimer's should focus on controlling vascular risk factors such as blood pressure and Bashir, MD, a board-certified neurologist at AICA Orthopedics, likewise not involved in the study, told MNT that the findings indicating that radiation potentially provided short-term benefit were 'fascinating.''While the results are preliminary and warrant cautious interpretation, they open the door to meaningful hypotheses about underlying mechanisms,' said suggested that radiation therapy might influence the immune system or interfere with the formation of amyloid plaques, both of which are associated with Alzheimer's pathology.'Additionally, estrogen plays a complex role in both cancer biology and neurodegeneration,' shared Bashir. 'Lowering estrogen levels through hormone therapy may, paradoxically, reduce Alzheimer's risk in some patients.'Bashir emphasized that more long-term research is needed in this area. 'This study is encouraging in that it challenges assumptions and suggests that certain cancer-related treatments may influence dementia risk in unexpected ways,' said Bashir. 'More longitudinal research will be critical in clarifying these associations.'
Medical News Today
a day ago
- Medical News Today
Could a single brain scan predict the risk of age-related conditions like dementia?
People age at different rates, partly due to genetics but largely because of lifestyle.A person's rate of aging can indicate how likely they are to develop age-related disorders, such as researchers have developed a method based on a single brain scan in middle age that could predict how fast a person is likely to suggest that their method, which can predict the aging rate of both brain and body, may detect who should implement lifestyle changes to reduce their risk of age-related people appear to age more slowly than others. This is partly due to genetics, which studies suggest accounts for around 25% of the variation in longevity but is largely due to lifestyle and the in lifestyle, such as following a healthy diet, exercising regularly, getting adequate sleep, not smoking, and not drinking alcohol to excess, can help slow a person's rate of aging and delay or prevent age-related disorders.A person's rate of aging is often referred to as their biological age — how old their cells are — which can vary greatly from their chronological age, or the number of years since their birth. Measuring this can be a group of researchers from Duke, Harvard, and the University of Otago, New Zealand, have developed a method of predicting how fast a person will age, based on a single brain scan performed around the age of 45. In their study, which is published in Nature Aging, the researchers suggest that the Dunedin Pace of Aging Calculated from NeuroImaging (DunedinPACNI) could help researchers determine how aging affects health, and help them evaluate the effectiveness of anti-aging strategies.'The study developed and validated a new MRI-based biomarker called DunedinPACNI which shows not only a score for brain age, i.e. how old the brain looks, but also shows connections to cognitive decline and other health measures, allowing to perhaps predict how quickly a person ages and how their health will evolve later in life,' Madalina Tivarus, PhD, associate professor of Imaging Sciences and Neuroscience at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester, not involved in the study, told Medical News scan can predict biological aging'The idea of using a routine MRI brain scan to do a 'aging check-up' is very interesting and exciting,' Tivarus told study builds on the Dunedin Study, previous research conducted in the same cohort of participants. This study, which followed a group of 1,037 people born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1972–'73, looked at age-related changes in gene methylation to create an epigenetic the Dunedin Study, researchers regularly tested participants' blood pressure, body mass index (BMI), glucose (blood sugar) and cholesterol levels, lung and kidney function, and even gum recession and tooth almost 20 years, they used the overall pattern of change across these health markers to generate a score for how fast each person was the latest study, researchers used a single MRI scan of the brain performed when participants were aged 45, which they correlated with the Dunedin Study aging data. They then developed their DunedinPACNI to estimate rate of aging using only information from the MRI evaluate the Dunedin PACNI as a tool for predicting age-related health outcomes, they analyzed it against datasets from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), UK Biobank, and Latin American Brain Health found that their prediction accuracy was in line with more established epigenetic with faster DunedinPACNI scores had several indicators of more rapid aging, including:worse balance, slower gait, weaker lower and upper body strength, and poorer coordinationself-reported worse health and more physical limitations poorer performance on cognitive function tests greater childhood-to-adulthood cognitive declineolder physical MacSweeney, MD, CEO and consultant Neuroradiologist at Re:Cognition Health, who was not involved in this research, highlighted how important brain imaging could be, telling MNT that:'The researchers observed that individuals with higher DunedinPACNI scores, indicating faster brain aging, were also more likely to experience health deterioration in other organ systems, such as cardiovascular and respiratory health. The fact that brain imaging can reflect systemic aging suggests the brain may serve as a biomarker for overall biological age, offering a non-invasive, accessible measure of aging processes throughout the body.'Novel brain scan better predictive tool than existing MRI measuresTivarus enthused that:'This study is exciting because it shows that MRI scans might be used not just to detect disease, but also to track how the brain is aging long before problems begin. However, it's still early days. While promising, DunedinPACNI still needs to be tested more widely in larger and more diverse populations across different ages, ethnicities, and health backgrounds. It did perform well across multiple large datasets, but more global validation is needed.'The researchers compared the DunedinPACNI with measures of hippocampal and ventricular volume, which are commonly used MRI-based measures of brain aging, using UK Biobank and ADNI found that faster DunedinPACNI was more consistently and strongly associated with poor cognition, poor health, frailty, and risk of dementia, disease and mortality than either of these was impressed by the study structure.'The study methodology has some important strengths such as it is using a robust, decades-long longitudinal dataset, uses sound statistical methods, and has been validated extensively using imaging data from other large studies,' she she also pointed out that there were 'some limitations, such as the specific population data used to train the model (mostly European ancestry, from a specific geographical location), its performance in younger or pediatric populations is untested, [and] it infers dynamic processes from one static image (one MRI snapshot).' 'While I don't think it is ready for clinical use, DunedinPACNI appears to be a promising imaging biomarker of biological aging,' Tivarus told us.'The tool empowers people to take proactive steps'As people are living longer, but not necessarily healthier, lives, the ability to predict who is more likely to develop dementia or other age-related illness is becoming increasingly important. The researchers hope that their tool might eventually help clinicians do that well before symptoms, allowing interventions to reduce the risk of conditions developing.'Identifying accelerated aging in midlife provides a critical window of opportunity for intervention. Knowing one's biological age, as distinct from chronological age, could motivate individuals to adopt healthier habits, such as improved diet, increased physical activity or better sleep. By highlighting risk decades in advance, the tool empowers people to take proactive steps that may slow or even reverse aspects of biological aging.' – Emer MacSweeney, MD
BBC News
a day ago
- BBC News
Record breaking season for Utrecht's fish doorbell
Organisers behind the world's first fish doorbell say it's been a record breaking underwater camera was first set up five years ago to help the different fish species that swim in the canals of the Dutch city of Utrecht. Internet users who spot any fish waiting at the lock gate can ring a 'digital doorbell' to help the marine life carry on their year it was rung more than 200,000 times and thirteen different species of fish were popular site is now taking a break until March 2026. What's the latest? The fish doorbell season has been underway for the past 14 weeks, helping a number of aquatic species swim through the canals. Researchers say that the best time to see the fish is either in the morning or at dusk - when they are at their most year there were a record 30 million visits to the site from around the world, with thousands of fish safely helped through the waterway. Experts say that pike, catfish and lots of eels were among them most common types of fish spotted this year - but other species including carp, zander, bleak and river lamprey were also caught on camera! Why do fish need a doorbell? Every spring, fish swim upstream around the Dutch city of Utrecht looking for a place to lay the Netherlands is a country with lots of canals and waterways and, in spring, the lock gates along these canals aren't opened much, which can make it difficult for fish to travel to their breeding why four years ago experts came up with a plan to help the aquatic animals - a digital fish doorbell!An underwater camera was installed at the lock which is live-streamed to a website which people can watch anytime of soon as they spot a fish, viewers can press a digital doorbell on the website to let the lockkeepers know when to open the gates and let the fish through - helping the fish to continue on their route!The keeper checks if there are enough fish there to open the gates and the fish can swim on their merry way.
