1 February 2014 | NewScientist | 17

A PIECE of the deadly MERS virus might provide its own cure.

The virus causing Middle East respiratory syndrome emerged in 2012. It does not spread readily between people, but there are fears it could cause a pandemic if it ever starts. It has killed 76 of the 178 people known to have caught it, and there is no specific treatment.

Shibo Jiang at Fudan University in Shanghai and colleagues found

the virus forces its way into cells using a rod-like structure made of two “fusion” proteins that bind tightly during infection.

Using X-rays to dissect this structure, they found the binding segments of these two proteins. They made one of the protein’s segments in the lab, and found that it bound tightly to the other protein, blocking the binding site and preventing the rod from

Jellyfish galaxies caught in clusters

GALAXIES need to evolve if they want to swim with their friends.

A hunt through images from the Hubble Space Telescope has turned up half a dozen spiral galaxies that are being sculpted into jellyfish as they move towards joining galaxy clusters.

Previously, researchers had noticed that clusters contain many more elliptical galaxies than spirals, hinting that newcomer spirals were somehow being transformed. Harald Ebeling at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu and his colleagues think jellyfish galaxies capture the process in action (Astrophysical Journal Letters, doi.org/q7q).

Hot gas in the space between clustered galaxies smacks into cold gas within a new arrival, blasting gas outwards in streams. The stripped body of the galaxy settles into a blobby shape, while cold gas in the tendrils compresses enough to ignite new stars.

Grand Canyon is a sprightly young 6-million-year-old

IT’S just a spring chicken. The Grand Canyon in Arizona is almost 65 million years younger than we thought.

Back in 2012, work by Rebecca Flowers of the University of Colorado, Boulder, suggested that the canyon formed 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed. Now it seems the youngest part is just 5 or 6 million years old.

Karl Karlstrom of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and his colleagues used thermochronology to reveal when hot buried rocks first reached the surface and cooled. They took measurements at the base and rim in four sections of the canyon.

Ro

lf M

aed

eR/R

ex f

eatu

Res

IN BRIef

MERS virus holds key to its own demise assembling. This protected cells in culture from becoming infected (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms4067).

Jiang hopes this fragment could be used to treat MERS. A similar fragment of HIV is now used as the anti-HIV drug enfuvirtide. This drug can cause severe side effects, but that may not be the case with MERS, as treatment would take weeks, rather than years as for HIV. He is also working on a MERS vaccine.

One section, Music Mountain, formed 50 to 70 million years ago – as Flowers found. But the rest was still buried then. “If you stand on what is now the rim of the youngest, eastern part of the Grand Canyon and look up you see just air,” says Karlstrom. “But 70 million years ago, you would have been covered by 2 kilometres of rock.”

The next section of the canyon formed 15 to 25 million years ago. But until the two outer sections made it to the surface 6 million years ago, the canyons were drained by different rivers. At that point, the Colorado river gouged a path along all four, creating the Grand Canyon (Nature Geoscience, doi.org/q7x). Karlstrom hopes his findings will resolve some of the uncertainty about the canyon’s age. “We are the first group to take all the data sets and show how we can reconcile them.”

A MANTIS shrimp’s bug-like eyes are equipped with a unique vision system, which recognises colours using a method never seen before.

While humans have three kinds of colour receptors in their eyes, most mantis shrimp have 12. But Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, found they are worse at telling colours apart, struggling to distinguish dark yellow and light orange (Science, doi.org/q7s).

We process colours based on the ratio of the different inputs picked up by each type of photoreceptor. But Marshall thinks the shrimps detect colour based on the pattern in which the photoreceptors fire. This may help them identify colours faster – and give them longer to launch an attack on prey.

Mantis shrimp eyes are fast and sloppy

140201_N_In Brief.indd 17 28/01/2014 10:20