“BACKGROUND: The Arts are replete with examples of presaged events of the future. Since a unique glimpse of the 23rd century is afforded by the television series Star Trek, a survey of the toxin-related events as chronicled by the crew of the USS Starship Enterprise may provide insight to prepare toxicologists for the future. METHODS: An investigation of the logs of the Enterprise was undertaken for the years 2266 to 2269 which were part of its first 5-year mission. Internet sites, published databases, and selected recorded episodes from the original Star Trek television series were searched for poisonings or toxin-related incidents. RESULTS: Out of the 79 Star Trek episodes, 28 (35%) involved toxin-related incidents. A total of 31 poisoning incidents were documented with 13 environmental, 9 intentional, 5 unintentional, and 4 homicidal circumstances. Biotoxins (10 incidents) were the most frequently involved toxin followed by neurotoxins (9), radiation (3), cytotoxins (3), temporal toxins (3), acids (2), and phytotoxins (1). Of these cases, 2 involved hazardous materials incidents, 1 was contamination of food, and 3 involved therapeutic misadventures. CONCLUSIONS: Many of the circumstances encountered in poisonings of the future will likely be similar to contemporary reasons, but the nature of the toxins will differ. Clinical toxicologists should prepare for the future by increasing their study of molecular biology, comparative medicine, physics, and history.”

Image: flickr/hunterseakerhk

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When it comes to religion, I’m more interested in scientific and philosophical questions — Does God exist? Can science say anything about the supernatural? — than in sociological or political ones — Is religion good and or evil?, etc. So there was not much temptation to wade in on Pope Benedict’s recent troubles, or the wider issue of sex scandals in the Catholic Church.

Now, happily, that temptation has dipped to zero, since Phil Plait has done such a good job. Read the whole thing, as they say. Roughly, Phil notes that the Pope seems to be responsible for some very bad things; that he should be brought to justice for any wrong-doings; that there is some relevance to concerns of the skeptical community, insofar as the Church invokes supernatural explanations; but finally, that the strategy should not be simply one of proclaiming superiority and tarring religion as evil and demanding heads on plates. Catholics and other believers, whether we disagree with them or not, are human beings who will understandably be upset and troubled at the recent news. We don’t help to convert them to atheism or naturalism or skepticism by shoving the shortcomings of their leaders in their faces in the midst of a crisis; reason and rational discourse should be more our style. It’s a nuanced argument, which means it’s guaranteed to be misunderstood and caricatured, since even God can’t control the natural impulses of the internet.

Let’s be clear: I want religion to vanish. I think that religious beliefs are wrong, and that the world would be a better place if everyone accepted the real world for what it is. And I believe that many of the actions of the Church when it comes to pedophilia certainly deserve the label “evil,” whatever one might think of the people who perpetrated them.

So the question is, how to bring about the rationalist utopia in which people’s actions are based on reason and reflection rather than faith and hierarchy? I agree with Phil’s answers, as I’ve argued in other contexts. One of the primary tenets of a rationalist philosophy should be that we should be especially skeptical about claims that we want to be true. Our personal preferences don’t have any effect on the truth, so we need to guard against confirmation bias and lazy acceptance of ideas that make us happy. One great example is the idea that we’re going to make the world a better and more rational place by telling everyone how much smarter we are than everyone else, and how evil and stupid our enemies are. The Pope’s recent actions, it seems clear, are some combination of evil and stupid. But now is just not the time for patting ourselves on the back. A lot of people have been deeply hurt, directly or indirectly, and we should be able to show just a modicum of restraint. Not giving up or keeping quiet, but picking our spots. After all, we don’t have to win by being obnoxious — we can win by being right.

In 1935, Australia introduced the cane toad to its sugar cane fields to battle beetle infestations–and the ecosystem has never been the same. The toxic toads took a liking to Australia and began spreading through the northeast, killing the native predators like crocodiles, snakes, and lizards that dined on them. A small cat-like marsupial, the quoll, was no exception. In the decades after the toads’ introduction, quoll populations in northern Australia have dipped precipitously. This year, ahead of the toads’ march into the quolls’ last stronghold, the Kimberly region, scientists have found a clever way to save the endangered marsupial: training it to detest the taste of toad so it won’t get poisoned [Los Angeles Times]. And the success of the experiment has suggested a bizarre conservation campaign.

In their research, scientists from the University of Sydney found that other predators like crocodiles and snakes can learn to avoid trouble, because one experience of snacking on a sickening poison toad is usually enough to teach them a lesson. But because the smaller quoll will die from eating a single large toad, it never learns to make that association. So the researchers decided to train the marsupials to avoid the toads using a method known as conditioned taste aversion.

In their experiments, quolls in the lab were fed small dead toads laced with a nausea-inducing drug. The animals would gobble up the toads and then feel mildly sick. After a while, they began to associate sickness with eating the toads and started avoiding them, according to results published in the Journal of Applied Ecology. The scientists speculated that the memory of the stomach-churning snack would stick with the marsupials, just as bad experiences with food can stick with humans for years [Los Angeles Times].

The researchers later released 31 “toad-smart” quolls and 31 “toad-naive” quolls into the wild and soon found that the conditioned female quolls survived nearly twice as long as their unconditioned counterparts and the conditioned male quolls lived five times longer than the clueless ones [Los Angeles Times]. Jonathan Webb, an ecologist at the University of Sydney, who led the study, remarked: “If you can teach a predator that cane toads make you sick, then that predator will leave them alone afterwards. As a result, animals like quolls can survive in the wild even in a toad infested landscape” [Times Online].

The researchers suggest that, if the quoll’s learned aversion to the toads proves to be long-lasting, the next step might be to bring the lessons to toads in the wild–via aerial toad-bombing exercises. Study coauthor Rick Shine says they may want “to refine our delivery methods – for example, perhaps wildlife agencies could aerially deploy ‘toad baits’ ahead of the cane toad invasion front to educate quolls to avoid attacking cane toads before the toads invade” [LiveScience].

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Image: Perth Zoo

They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but a hotel in Copenhagen lets you get closer to that goal–it just asks for sweat equity.

The Crowne Plaza Copenhagen Towers wants its guests to hit the gym, pedal on special bikes, and generate power for the hotel to help it reduce its carbon footprint. If a guest generates a certain amount of energy via pedal-power, she’ll be rewarded with a free meal.

The eco-friendly hotel is already a carbon-neutral building that’s cooled and heated by Denmark’s first ground water-based cooling and heating system, and which has a facade covered with high-tech solar panels. And starting next week, The Guardian reports, the 366-room hotel will encourage guests to help out the environment by working on on new electricity-generating exercise bikes:

The bikes have iPhones mounted on the handlebars which monitor how much power is being produced and fed into the mains supply of the hotel. Any guest producing 10 watt hours or more will be rewarded with a free meal.

Getting the free meal appears to be surprisingly easy. According to the hotel’s calculations, pedaling the bike for an hour would produce 100 watt hours–that’s enough power to fire up a 100-watt bulb for an hour. That means that just six minutes would produce the 10 watt hours that would qualify the guest for a free meal.

Some critics have scoffed that a guest who produces 100 watts of power won’t make a dent in the energy consumption of this huge hotel. Supporters counter that the effort that goes into producing 100 watts of power would make people more conscious of how difficult it is to produce energy, with Alex Randall, a spokesman for the Centre for Alternative Technology telling The Guardian:

“Realistically, this isn’t a practical way of generating a useful amount of energy, but I certainly wouldn’t criticize it…. As a lesson, and a means of public engagement, it’s excellent – if you sit someone on a bike, pedaling hard, and show them they are only generating enough to power one light bulb or TV, is makes them appreciate how difficult energy is to produce, and therefore why we should be careful not to waste it.”

The bike-for-energy program is a pilot project due to run for a year. If it’s a hit, the program will be rolled out to all 21 Crowne Plaza hotels in Britain.

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Image:Wikimedia

Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups on new stories with, where possible, links to more detailed takes elsewhere. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog.

Tyrant leech king – a new T.rex found in the nose of a Peruvian girl

Three years ago, a nine-year-old girl was admitted to La Merced hospital in Peru with a headache that had lasted for two weeks and a strange “sliding sensation” in her nose. Her parents quickly discovered the source of the problem – a sizeable black worm lodged up her right nostril. They quickly sought medical help and it came in the form of Dr Renzo Arauco-Brown, who “with some effort” removed a seven-centimetre leech from the girl’s nose. Brown sent the animal to leech guru Mark Siddall from the American Museum of Natural History, who immediately recognised it as a new species. Uniquely among leeches, the bloodsucker had a single jaw (most have three) but it was lined with eight enormous sharp teeth. For this reason, the Siddall gave it the fanciful name of Tyrannobdella rex, or “tyrant leech king”. A new T.rex had arrived.

It turns out that T.rex has a history of feeding on humans. After describing the new species, Siddall found two other specimens. Both had been removed from the nostrils of young boys in 1997. Like the most recent case, these children had also been bathing in local lakes and streams, which is almost certainly how they picked up their tyrant vampire.

While most leeches are found on the skin, Tyrannobdella is a member of the praobdellid group, which have a disturbing propensity for entering human orifices. They have specialised at feeding on mucous membranes, such as those found in the nose, eye, vagina, anus and urethra (don’t click on these links if you’re squeamish). These bloodsuckers can stay inside for days or weeks on end. They lead to a condition called “orificial hirudiniasis” and they could be potentially life-threatening, especially if secondary infections kick in. It’s likely that many more members of this group are awaiting discovery, although finding them may be a tricky business. As Siddall slyly writes, “Our standard methods of attracting leeches to our exposed selves may prove awkward given their established propensity for particular anatomical feeding sites.”

Reference: PLoS ONE http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010057

Why losers ejaculate more

Not every male is a fighter and, as a result, many don’t become lovers either. But for these losers, there’s another option for passing on their genes to the next generation – make sure that you ejaculate copiously when you get the chance.

The male flour beetle has to battle other males over the right to mate with a female. Kensuke Okada from Okayama University found that males who lose these fights become less aggressive and avoid fighting again. However, they make up for avoiding combat by doubling the amount of sperm they produce when they ejaculate. This extra investment is a temporary one; after five days, things were back to normal.

These results show that males can fine-tune their sexual strategies according to the competition they face. Males who triumphed in combat didn’t feel the need to produce more sperm. They are strong enough to guard females they mate with and can stop other males from displacing his sperm with their own. Losers have to move about into new territories and when they do get to mate, they run the risk that a stronger male will just flush their sperm out with his own afterwards. For those who lose physical fights, contributing to the next generation means winning the sperm wars, and doing that means producing more sperm.

Reference: Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0225

More on sperm competition: sperm wars of ants and bees, glowing sperm races, spiky penises, traumatic insemination and frigid echidnas

Could cuttlefish “see” with their skin?

Cuttlefish and their cephalopod relatives, squid and octopuses, are capable of nature’s most spectacular acts of camouflage. They can change the colour of their skin on a whim, send moving waves of stripes down their body, and send messages to one another in shifting hues. This ability is even more incredible when you consider that, according to all evidence to date, cuttlefish are colour-blind. If they can’t actually see colour, how can they mimic it so accurately?

Now, cephalopod specialists Lydia Mäthger and Roger Hanlon have made an intriguing discovery that could potentially answer this question. They found that a gene called opsin is active all over a cuttlefish’s skin; opsin proteins are sensitive to light and an essential part of the visual system. It’s possible that these animals can sense light using their entire skin, and that their colour-changing skill is based on this distributed “sight”.

The idea isn’t without precedent. Some squid have organs on their skin that double as an extra pair of “eyes”. But so far, Mäthger and Hanlon’s idea is still a hypothesis. The skin opsins may have no significance at all and the duo has some work ahead to them to show that they actually play an important role. For a start, there’s some evidence that opsin-like genes are active in the skin of humans, and we certainly change colour without a significant amount of make-up. And the opsins in a cuttlefish’s fin, underside and retina are all the same, so it’s unlikely that they could discriminate between different colours.

However, Mäthger and Hanlon suggest that the opsins may be useful in matching brightness and contrast. They could also interact with chromatophores – the tiny, expandable sacs of pigment that underlie a cuttlefish’s colour-changing ability. Chromatophores come in different colours and they could act as filters for the opsins. Light passing through these sacs could provide information on different wavelengths of light coming in from the environment.

Reference: Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0223

More on cephalopods: the squid with living, seeing flashlights, coconut-armoured octopuses, the mimic octopus, clever cuttlefish, and the secret signals of squid

The good news: By combining the DNA of parents with genetic material from a third person, scientists might have developed a way for women with rare genetic disorders to have healthy children. The bad news: The ethical complications involved are so messy that it might be a long time coming.

The researchers outline their work in a study in this week’s Nature. On the surface, the idea is fairly simple. They took the nuclei out of the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg, and transplanted them into a donor’s egg cell that had its nucleus removed, but whose mitochondria remained in the cell’s cytoplasm. What you get is the genetics of both parents, plus the mitochondrial DNA of the host. This technique was pioneered in monkeys last summer, but researchers have now done a proof-of-principle study with human cells.

Mitochondria are often called cellular power plants, because they provide most of the cell’s energy. They also contain their own batch of so-called mitochondrial DNA that can, when mutated, give rise to disease. “What we’ve done is like changing the battery on a laptop,” said lead author Professor Doug Turnbull. “The energy supply now works properly, but none of the information on the hard drive has been changed. A child born using this method would have correctly functioning mitochondria, but in every other respect would get all their genetic information from their father and mother” [BBC News].

In the study, which used eggs that had been fertilized abnormally and so were not usable for in-vitro fertilization, Turnbull transferred 80 nuclei and found that 18 continued to grow beyond the eight-cell stage of division, suggesting that the manipulated embryos were viable.

Only 2 percent of mitochondrial DNA transferred over to the new host, which is a big deal. People need about half of their mitochondrial DNA to be mutated to see the sorts of muscle and heart diseases the researchers are worried about. About one in 250 live births see some kind of pathogenic mutation in the mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child (that’s why scientists often use it to trace back the maternal line). “We’ve proved in principle that this sort of technique can be used to prevent transmission of mitochondrial diseases in humans,” says Turnbull [Nature News].

This Nature paper is just that, though: proof of principle. IVF clinic are not authorized to perform the procedure, and some scientists aren’t as optimistic as Turnbull, saying the procedure may never be approved. The resulting embryo would carry DNA from three parents, and to prove the technique could work in the clinic, scientists would have to try the technique in healthy human embryos — a task that would be “impossible” due to the associated ethical issues [The Scientist], argues researcher Jun-Ichi Hayashi, who wasn’t part of the project.

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Image: Turnbull et. al./ Nature

In January, I told you about a terrific new website from the National Academies called What You Need to Know About Energy. It describes the ways we use energy, where it comes from, and how energy efficiency and alternative sources can figure into our energy future. The following month I also shared the link for NASA's new Global Climate Change site designed to explain how warming impacts our world. Apparently, I'm not the only one who noticed these are fantastic resources... What You Need To Know About Energy and Global Climate Change have both been nominated in the 14th Annual Webby Awards for 'best science website' and I encourage readers to go vote! Scroll waaaaay down to the bottom of the page to find 'science' (what gives?), and choose your favorite site working to communicate science.