Between office jobs, motorised transport, the Internet and television, it’s never been easier to be inactive. Many humans in Western countries are masters at conserving energy but in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, there is an animal that would put hardened couch potatoes to shame – the orang-utan. These apes are no slackers – they lead active lives in the jungle canopy. But relative to their size, they still use up less energy than any other mammal except for sloths.

Herman Pontzer from Washington University, who made the discovery, thinks that orangutans have evolved to live life in the slow lane because they can’t be sure of a steady food supply. They mostly eat fresh fruit and, being large animals, they need lots of it. But rainforests are chaotic places where ripe fruit can disappear quickly, unpredictably and for a long time. If orangutans aren’t getting any fuel, they have to minimise the amount of energy they spend, so that they don’t starve to death. And they’re very good at it.

This has many implications for zookeepers who care for captive orangutans. These are animals that eat as much as they can when food is around and burn off their calories very slowly – they’re easy to overfeed and prone to obesity, even in enclosures with plenty of opportunities for exercise. Learning about the energy needs of these great apes will allow keepers to plan more appropriate diets for them.

It’s a lesson that the staff of the Great Ape Trust sanctuary are taking to heart. The sanctuary, a sprawling 230-acre campus in Des Moines, is where Pontzer carried out his research. He studied four of the resident orangutans, including Azy, an adult male; Katy and Knobi, , adult females; and a young male called Rocky.

Pontzer tracked their activity with a technique commonly used in humans. The method involves ‘doubly-labelled water’, made of rarer and heavier versions of the normal hydrogen and oxygen atoms. These heavy atoms can be tracked as they make their way through the body, whether they end up in the animal’s urine or in the carbon dioxide it breathes out. In fact, the amount that ends up in these two waste products is related. So by taking regular urine samples, Pontzer could work out how hard the orangutans were breathing out, and thus how much energy they were using up.

It turned out that they were using very little indeed. All the orangutans, including Rocky the youngster, were in the bottom 1% of all mammals in terms of the calories they burn every day. Adjusting for their size, they use less energy than humans from industrial societies, where inactive lifestyles are common. They even use less than macaque monkeys on a strict diet or lemurs undergoing temporary hibernation.

You might think that captive orangutans might be more lethargic than their wild cousins, but that’s not the case for Azy and his chums. Their enclosure comes with climbing frames, rope and easy access to a three-acre forest, where they spend much of their days. The four apes spent around the same amount of time feeding, resting and sleeping as their wild counterparts, and they walked and climbed over similar distances. They may be more familiar with their surroundings and know the easiest routes, but even if they spent twice as much energy moving around, they’d still burn fewer daily calories than almost all other mammals.

Of course, Pontzer only studied four orangutans but these individuals are hardly sluggish members of the species. They’re as active as their wild peers and they get in about as much exercise as human farmers who lead physically demanding lives. They have lively existences, but they use their energy very efficiently. When they’re at rest, their metabolic rates are slightly lower than expected for their size and much lower than in humans and chimps. The odds of finding four humans that use similar levels of energy, even in a Western population, are 1 in 10,000.

The orangutan’s extremely sparing use of energy is just part of an entire lifestyle that takes place in the slow lane. It grows more slowly than any primate except for humans, and it breeds less frequently than any ape. It lives alone so it doesn’t have to share any food it managed to find. It even moves with incredible efficiency – rather than jumping across an opening in the treetops, it can rock the tree it sits on so they sway across the gap. All of these traits make orangutans “consummate low-energy specialists” that can survive in an environment where their food of choice is hard to come by.

But not all orangutans are the same. Carel van Schaik, who has spent many years studying orangutans, points out that there are two species or orangutan – one that lives in Sumatra and one that lives in Borneo. “The northern part of Sumatra is less subject to the dramatic lean periods seen in most of Borneo, so we might see some interesting differences between the two orangutan species in physiology,” he says. Unfortunately, the individuals at the Great Ape Trust are all hybrids so they have nothing further to say on the matter.

Van Schaik also thinks that energy-saving adaptations might be a common feature among Borneo’s mammals. There’s some evidence that these creatures have a tendency to become smaller. And while orangutans are still relatively large, those from the most unreliable regions seem to have smaller brains for their size. Van Schaik also wants to see if gibbons share the same traits, especially because they lead slow lives with little risk of predators and they share the orangutan’s problem of unpredictable food supplies.

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1001031107

More on orangutans:

• Orang-utan study suggests that upright walking may have started in the trees
• Scientists tickle apes to reveal evolutionary origins of human laughter
• Orang-utans use leaves to lie about their size
• Photo safari – Orangutans Part 1, 2, 3 and 4

The Sun is getting active. Click for larger. Credit: SDO/NASA

The Sun is getting more and more active as time goes by.  Currently we have a Coronal Mass Ejection heading at us.  The CME is part of a series of events on the sun being called a global magnetic disturbance because it involves the whole Earth facing hemisphere.  Discovery has a nice article/video(s) and the SDO site has video’s you should check out.

Is something bad going to come of this?  Probably not and it’s not like it hasn’t happened before.  Our detection and observations are vastly improved over what they were just a few years ago.  Communications satellites can be configured to lessen any damage.  The power grid could be affected, but I’m not sure that this is a big problem with this particular event.  We could be treated to some nice auroral activity though – YAY!

It is not without any consequence though; you may have heard there was a problem when s spike in electrical current tripped a circuit breaker shutting down half of the cooling system on the ISS.  Efforts to reset the breaker and get the coolant pump going again were unsuccessful.  The station stable the affected areas are either running on redundant systems or being powered via jumper cables for now (insert you might be a redneck joke here).  It’s going to take a spacewalk to two to see if they can fix the problem.  Sounds like the spacewalk is scheduled for Thursday and the problems from the CME should be over by then.  Being caught outside during a CME probably would not be a very good thing.  Read more about the cooling failure at NASA.

As we all know it won’t be too much longer and the shuttle will be no more.  How are they going to get a new 780 lb pump up there if they need it?  They won’t.

So keep an eye to the sky tonight for possible northern or southern lights and don’t forget the good vibes for Marian.  I think she needs them.

Yes, you saw a similar headline in 80beats in January of 2009, but this time we mean it. We think.

Back in 2009 the FDA approved an application from Geron Corporation to begin the first human safety trials of a therapy derived from embryonic stem cells, a move that was heralded as a strong vote of confidence in this controversial but exciting area of medicine. But before the treatment of patients with spinal cord injuries could begin, the FDA reversed course and put a hold on the trial, noting that Geron had discovered cysts in some rats injected with the cells.

Since then, Geron has been scrambling to prove that its treatment is safe via new animal studies, and has agreed to change some procedures to minimize the likelihood of cyst formation. Now that the FDA has signed off, Geron expects to begin the small safety trial (involving only 7 to 10 patients) before the year’s end.

“I think it’s a very important milestone for the whole industry,” Alan Trounson, the president of California’s stem cell agency, said Friday, adding that the hold on the trial had been a cloud over the field. “It’s very important that they get on and treat the patients and demonstrate the safety” of the therapy. [The New York Times]

Geron’s treatment is intended to help patients with mid-back spinal cord injuries who are paralyzed below the site of the damage. The cells will be injected within the first two weeks after the injury.

Geron … turns embryonic stem cells into precursors of neural support cells called oligodendrocytes. The precursor cells would be injected into the spinal cord at the site of the injury. The hope is that the cells will repair the insulation, known as myelin, around nerve cells, restoring the ability of some nerves to carry signals. While this is not expected to allow people to rise from their wheelchairs, it may conceivably restore some movement or sensation. [The New York Times]

Related Content:
80beats: Stem Cell Society to Get Tough on “Charlatans” & Unproven Treatments
80beats: The Trouble With Lab-Created Stem Cells—and Why They Won’t Displace Embryonic Ones
80beats: Biotech Co: First Human Embryonic Stem Cell Trial Hit Small Speed Bump
80beats: FDA Approves the First Clinical Trials Using Embryonic Stem Cells
80beats: GE Plans to Use Human Embryonic Stem Cells as Lab Rats

Image: flickr / planetc1

Last week was Comic Con, and for the third year in a row, the Hive Overmind Discover Magazine sent me along to be on a panel. Every year we do a variation on discussing the science of science fiction, and this year we focused on its abuse. We asked our panelists (Jaime Paglia [Eureka], Kevin Grazier [science advisor for Eureka and Battlestar Galactica], Zack Stentz [Fringe, Thor], and Sean Carroll [cosmologist and DM blogger]) to pick examples of good and bad science in the movies.

The results? Well, watch for yourself:

A couple of notes:

• The panel was a bit short. The panels in the room had been running long all day, and the Comic Con Powers That Be were pressuring me to end the panel really early. Sticking it to The Man is one of my favorite things to do, so I let it run almost to the full length.
• It pained me to admit I wasn’t fully caught up on Eureka, which is really a fun show. My own TV show, the blog, and a billion other things have been swamping me lately, but since the panel I’ve been dutifully watching it, and it gets better with each episode! I really recommend it along with Fringe.

To more meaty matters: Zack brought up the point that science is important, and important to get right, but not at the cost of the story. This may surprise you, but I agree. As I said in my opening comments, I was inspired as a kid by some shows that abused science in a pretty awful way. But the science itself wasn’t the key thing, it was just that science and scientists were there. And in many cases, they were the key characters, figuring out what was going on. Spock, Victor Bergman, and many others were my heroes.

Of course, I hate it when science is flogged to death in movies, like in "Armageddon", "The Core", and a gazillion others, but even then it can still inspire someone. I’d rather it were treated with respect, as it was in "Deep Impact", or even "Iron Man". That’s when it really can come alive for kids, and even adults.

But the important thing to remember is that these are stories. Keeping the science accurate but screwing up the story makes for a bad movie or TV show. It’s OK to mess up the science sometimes if it’s necessary.

But only if it’s necessary. Many times, accurate science can vastly improve a story, and that’s the part of the aim of the Science and Entertainment exchange, which in part sponsored the panel. Writers can be very good at their craft, but they may be limited simply by not knowing all the possibilities the science of their story provides them. Nature is more clever than any of us, so I think that looking to the real science can inspire the writers. The more information they have about reality, the more likely they will see avenues and twists in the plot that would’ve been hidden otherwise.

That’s why I like that producers are using more science advisors. They can always ignore the advice if they want, and that’s OK. But sometimes it also provides a more entertaining story, too, and that’s the most important thing of all.

Panelist Sean Carrol provides his own thoughts on this at Cosmic Variance.

I’ve just returned from my second trip to Cambridge, England, as part of the now completed Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion. (Evidence at right: Yours truly at Trinity College [photo credit: Julia Vitullo-Martin].)

Because this fellowship has been much criticized and also much misunderstood, I think another report on the experience and what it entails will be helpful (for my prior reports, see here and here).

Critics depict the fellowship as a kind of Kumbaya love-fest in which journalists are taught that science and religion have always been and always will be best friends. However, I’ve grown increasingly convinced that this critique really isn’t aimed at the target.

The problem is that the field of “Science and Religion” is much broader than critics seem to think. It isn’t just about examining, on a philosophical level, whether the two are in some way “compatible.” Neither is it simply about exploring, from a history of science perspective, how they relate. That may be the clichéd understanding of what we’re about when we talk about “science and religion,” but in truth, it barely scratches the surface.

On our last official day in Cambridge, program director Fraser Watts made some remarks about what really is covered under the field of “Science and Religion.” Regurgitating my notes on what Watts said (and adding some extensions of my own), one might study:

1. The religious views of scientists—aka, Elaine Ecklund’s work. And conversely, the scientific perspectives of religious believers.

2. The history of the relationship between science and religion.

3. The philosophy of the relationship between science and religion.

4. Particular case studies of conflict or cooperation between science and religion, or of how advances in a particular aspect of science challenge (or have some other implication for) religion.

5. The science of religion—e.g., what is it about the human brain, or the evolved beings that we are, that have made us so inclined towards religiosity? What is the neural or cognitive basis for religious belief or experience?

6. A comparative analysis of scientific and religious perspectives on a particular topic of great import—like, say, suffering. Or altruism. Or free will. Or morality. Or any number of others.

7. I seem to recall that Watts listed several other possibilities that aren’t in my notes. In any case, I think this list still barely scratches the surface.

It is only if you are working on # 3 or # 4 that, it seems to me, you are likely to fall into a spat over the validity of what is called “accommodationism.” None of the other areas really require strong stance-taking on the compatibility of science and religion, although they might perhaps imply a position (I think # 2 does, for instance).

But the point is that much work in this general area is simply not interested in that most hotly debated of questions–if only because the debate has a way of getting old, not everyone is a controversialist, and there are many other things to talk about. Indeed, that came out very clearly last week, when it came time for the ten Templeton-Cambridge fellows to present on the topics of their research.

In my assessment–and these are my likely imperfect categorization attempts–nobody really presented on # 3. There was one presentation that I would classify as being about # 2, and another one that was about # 4. There were two presentations that I have a bit of a hard time categorizing using the groupings above–in some ways, they might fit into # 3. As for everybody else: They were dealing with # 1, # 5, or # 6. In particular, there were at least four presentations that fell into the category of # 6.

I have decided not to say explicitly what people were presenting on, because I don’t want to scoop fellow journalists (or myself). But I can say that the experience of our group refutes the idea that the point of the fellowship is to teach journalists to make “accommodationist” arguments. Rather, it is to have journalists do work in the field of “science and religion,” and that’s a very different thing.