Walk among the Arctic ice and you’ll sometimes encounter distinctive patches of red snow. They’re caused by a species of bacteria called Colwellia psycherythraea. It’s a cold specialist – a cryophile – that can swim and grow in extreme subzero temperatures where most other bacteria would struggle to survive. Colwellia’s cold-tolerating genes allow it to thrive in the Arctic, but Barry Duplantis from the University of Victoria wants to use them in human medicine, as the basis of the next generation of anti-bacterial vaccines.

Colwellia’s fondness for cold comes at a price – it dies at temperatures that most other bacteria cope with easily. By shoving Colwellia genes into bacteria that cause human diseases, Duplantis managed to transfer this temperature sensitivity, creating strains that died at human body temperature. When he injected these heat-sensitive bacteria into mice, they perished, but not before alerting the immune system and triggering a defensive response that protected the mice against later assaults. The Colwellia genes transformed another species of bacteria from a cause of disease into a vaccine against it.

A similar approach has been used for decades to create vaccines against viral diseases, including polio and influenza. Usually, scientists grow a virus at low temperature until they can isolate a strain that’s sensitive to heat and can be used as a vaccine. For bacteria, scientists usually resort to a different tack – they grow the bug under special conditions, or deliberately mutate it, until they get a strain that’s not very good at causing disease. Duplantis wanted to see if the heat-sensitive approach would work for bacteria as well as it does for viruses.

Duplantis used nine Colwellia genes to create heat-sensitive strains of Francisella tularensis, a bacterium that is often passed from animals to humans and can cause the potentially fatal disease tularaemia. Each of the nine genes worked on its own to varying degrees.

While some of the resulting strains were eventually able to evolve temperature-resistant forms, five of them couldn’t. This makes sense when you consider that cryophiles have been evolving in cold climes for several million years. Their adaptations are deeply rooted in their genes and it ought to take a combination of several mutations to create heat-resistant versions.

Duplantis injected these sensitive strains into rats and mice at cool parts of their bodies, like their ears or the base of their tails. While normal strains soon spread to other organs, the heat-sensitive ones didn’t. One strain in particular protected the rodents against later infections by normal bacteria. Three weeks later, Duplantis exposed the mice to a dose of regular Franciscella so large that it would normally kill them within a few days. It didn’t – they became less ill and lost less weight than unvaccinated mice and weeks later, they were still alive and well.

It was a promising result, and Duplantis thinks that the same approach should work for other species of dangerous bacteria. Using genes borrowed from Colwellia, he has already managed to create heat-sensitive versions of Salmonella enterica, which causes food poisoning, and Mycobacterium smegmatis, a relative of the species that causes tuberculosis. Whether these strains can be used to vaccinate mice, or indeed humans, is another matter.

And creating vaccines isn’t the only use for heat-sensitive bacteria. The most dangerous species are very difficult to study, and scientists need to do so in expensive facilities with stringent safety measures. But that might change if we managed to engineer strains that die at low temperatures. If the bacteria die at human body temperature, the risks of accidental infection suddenly become very low. And as Duplantis says, that would reduce the need for “full physical containment.”

Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1004119107

Image by Richard Finkelstein

More on vaccines:

• Vaccine against 2009 pandemic flu also protects mice against 1918 strain
• Retrocyclins: a defence against HIV, reawakened after 7 million years

Engineers hook up the data acquisition system before a test of the landing radar that will guide the next Mars rover, Curiosity, to the surface of the Red Planet in the summer of 2012. This past spring, the radar (you can see it here attached to the nose of helicopter) went through two months of flight tests over desert terrain in Southern California at different altitudes and angles intended to simulate trajectories under consideration for the Mars landing. Preliminary results show that the radar is performing as expected.

Photographer Spencer Lowell shot the recent test for Discover this spring at a small airport near NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs. Lowell: “Steve Lee, the project manager, told me that the system they were so meticulously working on is the nervous system that is responsible for getting the rover safely to the Martian surface. The tests would run the radar through a variety of flight patterns while recording all the hard data which will be used to program the actual descent system. My only restriction while shooting was to not get within three feet of the radar. After asking if they would open the hangar doors (which they did) I backed up as I could to capture the entire scene. In this particular image you can see two of the main engineers checking the connections to the computer system. What I like most about shoots like this is that I get to see firsthand that very precise science, like sending craft to another planet, often starts off looking like a mess.”

Around the United States, state governments are rushing to enact bans on K2, the hot new (and still mostly legal) drug made with synthetic cannabinoids: lab-created compounds designed to mimic the effects of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

Often marketed as incense, K2 — which is also known as Spice, Demon or Genie — is sold openly in gas stations, head shops and, of course, online. It can sell for as much as $40 per gram. The substance is banned in many European countries, but by marketing it as incense and clearly stating that it is not for human consumption, domestic sellers have managed to evade federal regulation [The New York Times].

Missouri is the most recent state to move against K2, the origin of which dates back to the work of Clemson University scientist John Huffman, who was developing these synthetic compounds in the 1990s. Scientifically, the chemicals are interesting for their potential to mimic some of the pain-relieving aspects of marijuana, which advocates of medical marijuana legality point to, without the negative health effects that come with setting a plant on fire and inhaling the smoke. The chemical used in most varieties of K2 is called JWH-018.

Huffman was interviewed by The Guardian last year when K2 was spreading around Europe. Now in his late 70s, he seems to understand something that many politicians can’t seem to get through their heads: Risk-taking teenagers will go to about any length, legal or illegal, to get high. Huffman says he wouldn’t oblige the numerous enterprising types who asked him how to make his substances, and that the substances are always labeled not for human consumption. But he figured someone was going to figure it out sooner or later, especially considering the chemical doesn’t show up on drug tests.

JWH-018 was “nothing special”, Dr Huffman remembered, “but it was one of the more potent compounds we made, and it was quite easy to make from commercially available materials. Probably the reason it has now caught on…. My biggest surprise was that this all hadn’t happened sooner,” he told me. “All it needed was somebody with a reasonable understanding of science to see the papers we had published and think, ‘Aha!’” [The Guardian].

The hurry to ban K2 this year started after U.S. health officials began blaming the substance for more and more hospital visits.

There has been a significant bump in calls to poison centers concerning spice. Nationwide, the American Association of Poison Control Centers logged 567 cases across 41 states in which people had suffered a bad reaction to spice during the first half of 2010. Just 13 cases were reported in 2009 [Washington Post].

But the problem health officials and politicians keep running into is that there isn’t a single K2. What’s probably happening is that dealers buy a synthetic chemical online and then spray it on their own mix of herbs and leaves. They sell the result as K2, marketing it as incense with a wink and a nod, although both parties know it’s meant to be smoked.

Thus, it’s hard for medical responders to know what’s making all these people sick: It could be the dose of the chemical, its stability during combustion, how it’s metabolized, or something else in the mix. And if you’re trying to ban the stuff, how do you do it? If state legislatures outlaw JWH-018, there are scores if not hundreds of other synthetics there to take its place. Texas legislators may attempt to draft a bill that outlaws all possible synthetic cannabinoids, though how that wording will work is unclear.

Related Content:
80beats: 1st Medical Studies on Pot in 20 Years Find It Does Relieve Pain
80beats: A Toke a Day Might Keep Alzheimer’s Away
DISCOVER: Pot Helps an Imbalanced Mind
Discoblog: Forget About Pot’s Surprising Memory Boost

Image: Buy-K2-Incense

We haven't said anything about Ophelia Benson on this blog in a long time. We stopped allowing Benson to comment here back in mid 2009, for very good reasons--among other things, she was sending us emails demanding to have other posters' comments deleted. We had a better solution. Lately, Benson has been clamoring to have her commenting status restored, based on the "Tom Johnson" flap. This doesn't make any sense, as the thread that led to her banning happened long before that affair. Still, we decided to look at what Benson was saying in favor of her restoration:
He or he and Sheril Kirshenbaum banned me from commenting at The Intersection soon after I began trying to get them to do a better job of justifying their claims and to criticize their energetic and often inaccurate bashing of new atheists. Commenters who agreed with them were not banned or even moderated, no matter how abusive their comments were. One “bilbo” repeatedly called me a liar after I posted a list of questions for M and K. Benson's banning had nothing to do with her positions. Moreover, how does she know who was or wasn't banned or moderated? We can't tell you how heavily we have had to ...

We can celebrate another victory for skeptics and reality!

The antivax group Australian Vaccination Network has been found to give "misleading and inaccurate information" to its followers, according to an Australian government investigation. The investigation also concluded that despite their many denials, the AVN is in fact an antivaccination group and must make that clear when disseminating information.

Ouch.

The entire report can be downloaded here from the Antivaxxers.com website.

Here’s the background: Meryl Dorey is the head of the AVN. She travels across Australia talking about the dangers of vaccination, and by "talking about" I really mean spewing misinformation. She says things that are not correct, cherry picks data, misrepresents scientific studies, and basically distorts reality in order to push her propaganda about vaccines.

Given that vaccinations do work, are almost entirely safe, and have almost eliminated such diseases as pertussis, measles, polio, and smallpox, some reality-based people have taken exception to Ms. Dorey’s tactics.

That included Ken McLeod, who filed a complaint about Dorey and the AVN with the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC). There were two thrusts to the complaint: one was that the AVN is a health care service provider, because they dispense health care advice, and second that the way they dispense that advice is misleading and harmful.

The HCCC agreed on both points. First, they concluded that:

According to its own constitution and through its activities the AVN is a health education service.

I found it bizarre that Dorey would try to deny that (it was a classic "who me?" denial on her part). She’s trying to eat her cake and have it, too; dispense health care advice but then deny any responsibility for what happens when she does.

The second part is where the AVN and Dorey get handed their heads. The HCCC report goes on for page after page listing out the breaches by Dorey and the AVN, showing where they have distorted and misrepresented vaccination information, all in a biased, negative way (keep in mind that Dorey has vehemently claimed the AVN is not antivax).

For example, the report points out things like:

• The AVN’s claims that vaccines are untested is simply false;
• The AVN’s claims about toxic substances in vaccinations are exaggerated and in some cases simply wrong;
• The AVN’s claims that vaccines are contaminated with viruses is cherry- picked in order to support an antivax stance;
• The AVNs claims that vaccines do not necessarily protect against disease misrepresents the facts;

and much more.

In the end, sadly, the HCCC won’t punish the AVN for its falsehoods, but it has recommended they put up a prominent disclaimer on their home page stating that they are antivax, that the information provided by the AVN is not medical advice, and that a decision to vaccinate or not should be made after consulting an actual health care provider.

But have no doubt: this is a big win for skepticism and reality! Dorey and the AVN were repeatedly slammed in this document, which is a litany of their transgressions. While I have no doubt Dorey will continue to claim she is the victim of a pogrom by people trying to suppress information and all that — and the rabidly antivax Age of Autism site has already called this whole thing fascism: yes, fascism, which doesn’t mean what they think it means — the truth is, Ms. Dorey and the AVN are guilty of spreading false, slanted information in order to spread their vicious antivax nonsense.

Ken Mcleod, who filed the suit in the first place, has issued a public statement about the report that’s well worth reading, too.

And remember, while Dorey and the AVN place themselves up on pedestals, there’s a pertussis outbreak in Marin County, California , another in Bakersfield, California, and similar reports from around the planet.

The bottom line is that mouthpieces for antivax propaganda distort reality, spread falsehoods, and consistently use fear as a tactic to spread their nonsense. This comes at a great cost: more disease, more disregard for reality, and literally more cost as money has to be spent caring for sick patients.

I’m glad that more people are taking this health threat seriously, and very glad for this victory against the antivaxxers. Keep ‘em coming!

My thanks to Rachel Dunlop, David McCaffery, Al Janulaw, Linda Mitts, and the Stop the Australian Vaccination Network website for info pertaining to this post.

[An old post I'm fond of]

Just before the winter solstice brings autumn to an end, here’s a chance to blog about the great evolutionary biologist–and student of fall foliage–William Hamilton. Hamilton, who died in 2000, has never reached the household-name status of other evolutionary biologists such as E.O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould. But he deserves a place of privilege, for all his profoundly influential ideas. He found an explanation for altruistic behavior in many insect species by expanding biology’s notion of fitness to include the genes an individual shares with its relatives. He offered one of the best-supported theories for the origin of sex–as a way for a species to keep ahead of its parasites in their evolutionary arms race. And he proposed that sexual displays–such as peacock tails and rooster combs–are signals that males send to females to reveal their ability to fight off parasites and otherwise live well.

It wasn’t just the ideas he came up with that made Hamilton extraordinary–it was the way he came up with them. They just seemed to pop into his head, obvious and simple, and he proceeded to write them down in clipped, humble prose, tossing in a few equations to give a sense of their underlying beauty. And then he was off to the next idea, or a trip to the Amazon. Hamilton wasn’t much interested in promoting his ideas to the world at large, to become a talking head or a writer of best-selling science books (in part because he was extremely shy and humble). That’s probably one reason why Hamilton is sliding into obscurity even as his ideas live on.

In the current issue of Biology Letters, there’s an example of Hamilton’s enduring legacy. One of the last papers Hamilton wrote before he died (after an ill-fated trip to Central Africa to investigate a controversial theory about the origin of HIV), appeared in 2001 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. He and co-author Samuel Brown asked why it is that leaves change color in the fall. There are many possible explanations. Perhaps leaves just look that way as they inevitably die, for example. Hamilton, however, believed there was an adaptation involved. He and Brown proposed that a brilliant leaf was, like a peacock’s tail, a signal. A peacock’s tail takes a huge investment of energy, energy that could otherwise be diverted to fighting off parasites or surviving other stresses. A strong male can afford to use up this energy, which makes the tail an honest ad for its parasite-fighting genes. In the case of leaves, trees are not sending signals to other trees–they are sending signals to tree-eating insects.

Trees, after all, are as besieged by insects as birds or other animals are by internal parasites. They fight their enemies a sophisticated arsenal of chemical agents, sticky traps, and other weapons of mass arthropod destruction. Hamilton and Brown proposed that trees that have a strong constitution warn off insects by changing colors in the fall. In a sense, they say, “I can shut down my photosynthesis early in the fall, pump a lot of red or yellow pigments into my leaves, and still have enough energy left to annihilate your babies when they hatch in the spring.. So just move along.”

Warning colors are a well-established fact in biology. Poisonous butterflies and snakes deter predators with them, and other species try to horn in on the protection by mimicking their appearance. But the notion that trees were warning off insects was quite new–just the sort of brilliant notion Hamilton might have while taking a stroll one autumn day. (Note: In forumlating his hypothesis, Hamilton depended heavily on a theory called the Handicap Principle formulated by Amotz Zahavi in the 1970s.)

For evidence that autumn leaves are signals, Hamilton pointed to some interesting patterns. Aphids, for example, lay their eggs on trees in the fall; when the eggs hatch, the larva devour leaves voraciously. Hamilton and Brown found that aphids are less common on trees that have bright red or yellow leaves. And species with bright leaves tend to be burdened with more species of aphids specialized for feeding on them than trees with drab leaves.

Hamilton left this jewel of an idea behind after his death for other scientists to investigate. It’s a challenge to test, because there are so many links in the theoretical chain. “Vigor,” for example, is a tricky thing to measure in trees; you could, for example, shower a tree with aphids, close it up in a gigantic net, and see how well it defends itself against them. That’s a huge amount of work, however, that yields you one data point. And you’d still have to find a way to eliminate other factors, such as weather, the age of the tree, and so on.

But recently scientists have found a reliable clue to vigor in the shape of a tree’s leaves. Vigorous trees produce very symmetrical leaves, while weaker trees produces misshapen ones. Symmetry signifies much the same thing in swallow tails and gazelle horns and human faces. When a complex organ like a leaf or a feather forms, any environmental stress can throw off its development from perfect symmetry. In stronger indviduals, the develoment of the organ is better shielded from these insults.

In September 2001 a team of Norwegian biologists took advantage of the symmetry of vigorous leaves and went gathering leaves of birch trees. They collected them from 100 birch trees all told. Half of the trees were shimmering yellow, and the other half were still green. As Hamilton would have predicted, they found that the yellow leaves were consistently more symmetrical than the green ones. The researchers had gathered half their yellow and green leaves from a healthy stand of trees, and the other half from the middle of an outbreak of birch-feeding moth larvae. On average, the trees in the healthy stand had more symmetrical leaves than the moth-infested ones, once again just as Hamilton would have predicted. Finally, the biologists looked at how trees with different colors fared the following spring. They found that trees with strong colors suffered less damage from insects compared to trees with weak colors.

These results are powerful support for Hamilton, although they don’t tell the whole story. How much do aphids depend on the sight of leaves when they choose a tree, for example, as opposed to their smell? Still, it’s a disconcerting idea that’s gaining strength: a beautiful fall landscape is a giant shout of “Back off.” When you see a tree at its most autumnally glorious, be sure to remember Hamilton.

Update 9/27/04: Here is the sequel: some scientists think that fall colors mean something else.

I'm on a couple of podcasts recently talking about the clash within atheism between "New Atheists" and people like me. First, I was on the "Reasonable Doubts" podcast discussing this topic for a good half hour or so. You can listen here. Many things came up, including the Templeton Foundation and the problem of online incivility. A few brief comments:
* On the Templeton Foundation, I've already had my say, and in a post that has been very interestingly ignored, reporter Dan Jones does a far better job than me at explaining why it is doesn't make sense to discount views just because they may have received Templeton support. On an intellectual level, I think Dan really deserves an answer from those who dismiss Templeton funding and those who receive it in a blanket way. (Note: My post defending Templeton has not been prominently answered either, at least that I have seen.)
* I also am tired of the label "accommodationist." It seems to imply that there is something weak about my view, as if I'm all ready to just cave to some common enemy. On the contrary, I think that I'm being tolerant and pragmatic.
There's an added point here, which is that ...

Mice might turn up their noses at alcohol, but not the prairie vole. This usually upstanding rodent, famous for mating for life and sharing pup-raising duties, apparently likes a stiff drink.

“They not only drink alcohol, they prefer it over water,” Allison Anacker, a neuroscience graduate student at Oregon Health & Science University told The Oregonian.

Anacker, working under behavioral neuroscience professor Andrey Ryabinin, was looking for a model organism to study some humans’ troubled relationship with alcohol. Mice and rats fail in this role–it’s unusual to find ones that want even a sip of the stuff.

In a study published in Addiction Biology last month, Ryabinin’s team records the drunken misadventures of prairie voles. After chugging their preferred 6 percent alcohol drink (about the equivalent of beer), some thirsty voles shoved off parental responsibilities and even walked out on their mates. Though some drank responsibility, others drank to excess, stumbling away from the bar/spiked water bottle.

The study suggests that like humans, the voles also make drinking buddies, seemingly encouraging each other to have another. When caged together, the voles appear to match one another drink for drink, a practice that apparently has nothing to do with who’s buying the next round.

Related content:
Discoblog: “Drunk” Parrots Fall From the Trees in Australia
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Anticipated versus actual alcohol consumption during 21st birthday celebrations.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Beer Consumption Increases Human Attractiveness to Malaria Mosquitoes.
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Pocket science – sperm races and poison-stealing voles
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Of voles and men: exploring the genetics of commitment

Image: flickr / Gilles Gonthier / field vole

On Saturday, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe took the world’s closest pictures of the 80- by 50-mile-wide asteroid known as 21 Lutetia. Though the Lutetia visit is just a stop on the way to Rosetta’s real destination–a 2014 visit to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko–Saturday’s pictures document the closest visit to this big asteroid, the largest we’ve ever visited with a spacecraft.

We’ve known about Lutetia for quite a while: since 1852, according to Sky and Telescope. In November of that year, Hermann Goldschmidt spotted the space rock from his Paris balcony. The asteroid is now around 280 million miles from the Sun. From only 2,000 miles away, Rosetta got a much closer look at Lutetia, whipping around it at about 10 miles per second (30,000 miles per hour) as its OSIRIS camera snapped pictures recording details down to a few dozen meters.

“The fly-by has been a spectacular success with Rosetta performing fautlessly,” ESA said in a statement. “Just 24 hours ago, Lutetia was a distant stranger. Now, thanks to Rosetta, it has become a close friend.” [AFP]

Lutetia is an old chunk of rock, possibly dating back to the solar system’s birth. The big guy is also rather dense; as reported by Sky and Telescope, it has a mean density of about 5½ g/cm³—”nearly twice that of ordinary rock.” Some experts suspect it is an M-type asteroid, meaning it’s made out of metal.

Rosetta will now go back into hibernation mode as it prepares for its rendezvous with comet 67P four years from now. If all goes well, it will snag 67P with a pair of “harpoons” and coast along on a comet ride.

[I]t’ll enter orbit around the comet’s core, and drop a landing vehicle to try and find out more about its composition, firing a pair of harpoons into its surface during its descent to keep it attached and stop it from bouncing off. It’ll then accompany the comet as it approaches the Sun, before ending its mission in 2015. [Wired]

For a recording of Saturday’s live stream and other details, check out Phil Plait’s post in Bad Astronomy.

Related content:
80beats: Rosetta Photographs a Crescent Earth on Its Way to a Comet Rendezvous
Bad Astronomy: Live stream of Rosetta’s July 10 asteroid flyby
Bad Astronomy: Rosetta takes some home pictures
Bad Astronomy: Rosetta swings past home one final time

Image: ESA / Final sequence of images before closest approach

Will this solution finally be the solution? Today in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is attempting to secure another containment cap onto its oil leak, which the company says could trap and collect all the oil gushing from the leak—if it works.

On Saturday BP removed the leaky cap that had been catching a little bit of the oil, meaning that the oil is now flowing unchecked into the Gulf as engineers race to install the new one. This is the latest try in a string of attempts to cap the leak, and BP’s Kent Wells says that engineers are lowering the new, tighter-fitting cap into place this morning.

The new cap, which should eventually not allow any gas or oil to escape, will be used to divert more oil to collection ships that will be brought in over the next two to three weeks, Mr. Wells said. “We’ll continue to ramp up the capacity so that sometime along the line, whatever the flow is, we’ll capture it all,” he said [The New York Times].

BP says it hopes to have the new cap installed by the end of the day. Still, it could be mid-week by the time they know how successful they were.

Once the cap is firmly in place, the company will begin “shutting in” the well by closing perforated pipe at the top. The company will be looking to see if the pressure rises under the cap. If it does, that means there are no other leaks, and the cap is stopping oil from leaking into the Gulf. But lower pressure readings may indicate leaking elsewhere in the well. In that case, Suttles said, the company will work to collect the leak with surface vessels and by dropping yet another cap on top of the stack [AP].

While BP continues to play musical containment caps, its backup project—drilling relief wells to ultimately stem the flow—continues. Company spokespeople say the new wells could intercept the old well by the end of July, though even after that it would take a few weeks into August to pump in enough mud and cement to stop the leak—if it works.

“At this point, there have been so many ups and downs, disappointments, that everybody down here is like, ‘We’ll believe it when we see it,’” said Keith Kennedy, a charter boat captain in Venice, La [MSNBC].

Recent posts on the BP oil spill:
80beats: BP Oil Update: Tar Balls in Texas & Lake Pontchartrain
80beats: Gulf Coast Turtle News: No More Fiery Death; Relocating 70,000 Eggs
80beats: Next from X Prize: An Award for Cleaning up BP’s Oil Spill?
80beats: BP to Kevin Costner: We’ll Take 32 of Your Oil Clean-up Machines

Image: BP

Thought for the day: it just occurred to me how incredibly ironic it is that, when the Pledge of Allegiance was changed in 1954, they actually put "under God" in between the words one nation and indivisible.

Susan, a graduate student, writes,

I got my tattoo in 2008 after raising enough money by carrying around a jar marked “tattoo fund” as I bar hopped for my 21st birthday. The tattoo is of a Permian cephalopod from the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas, Cooperoceras texanum.

I have loved paleontology for as long as I can remember. When I was looking at colleges, I came across a program called “Earth, Life, and Time” at the University of Maryland. It was a 2 year program as a part of an honors living and learning program called College Park Scholars. ELT was run by two amazing paleontologists, Dr. Tom Holtz and Dr. John Merck. The program was what convinced me to go to UMD and without these two great professors, I might not even be alive today. They are not only wonderful human beings, but also some of the greatest teachers at the university. Of all the classes with a natural history or evolutionary focus offered at the university, the classes they taught were truly of the highest caliber. To honor them, I got the mascot of the Earth, Life, and Time program, Cooperoceras texanum, tattooed on my leg. Unfortunately, the program is no longer offered at the university, due to shifting research goals in the the Geology Department, but Dr. Merck and Dr. Holtz now run a new program called “Science and Global Change”. ELT remains in the hearts and minds of the decade worth of students who came through it’s classroom.

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

Earwax (cerumen) might be formulated into a safe and biodegradable insect repellent

“Some of the most common life threatening insect-borne diseases include malaria, leshmaniasis and yellow fever which can be prevented or treated with different non-therapeutic/therapeutic procedures such as use of mosquito net, insect repellent (IR), vector controlling strategies, vaccination and implementation of pharmaceuticals. Among these methods IR provides the cheapest and easiest one to use. Active ingredients of IR usually include N,N-diethyl-3-methylbenzamide (DEET), botanical extracts and picaridin. However still some concerns remain e.g. DEET is not biodegradable, has side effects on skin, cardiovascular and central nervous system and is not applicable in under 3 years old children and animals.

Cerumen is produced by glands that are located on the outer third of the ear canal, has a characteristic of bitter taste and protection of ear which is known as IR, bactericide, fungicide and antivirus. It has lipidic and non-lipidic fractions; lipid fraction is consisted of squalene, cholesterol esters, wax esters, triacylglycerols, fatty acids, cholesterol, ceramides, cholesterol sulfate, and several unidentified polar components.

The authors would like to hypothesize an IR made from fatty acids and steroids of cerumen. Whereas masking skin odor and presenting a bad taste is the mechanism of action for IRs. Also fatty acids considered as major ingredient of Neem Oil as repellent, a screening of lipid fraction with the aim of discovering which components have the major effect is recommended.

The advantages of the proposed formulation will be easy of production, biodegradability and safety of use in adults, children and animals.

Beside, proteins and peptides in cerumen could be further analyzed in order to investigate a nontoxic multi-spectrum antibiotic; possessing bactericidal, fungicidal and antiviral activity.”

Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Gregory F. Maxwell

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Beer Consumption Increases Human Attractiveness to Malaria Mosquitoes.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Superglue in the ear double feature: pros and cons.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Atheism: Solved.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

A little while back we advertised that Eugene Lim had volunteered to visit Haiti to teach in a university there over the summer, and would be reporting back about the experience. Here’s Eugene’s write-up — a powerful and affecting look into conditions there, and the spirit of the students.

———-

I noticed a puzzled look on Vicky’s face — she was squinting at the blackboard filled with equations describing how the subtitution rule in integral calculus works. She is one of my better students whom I know to be following my lectures well. I took it as a cue that I have not made a point clear, and I knew I must fallen back into speaking as though as my students are native English speakers. They are not — they speak Haitian Creole, and I was trying to teach them basic intro to mathematics in English and and a smattering of Creole.

Hello from Fondwa, Haiti, elevation 850m, Population 8000. For the past twenty days, I have been teaching a group of enthusiastic Haitian university students at the University of Fondwa. As I mentioned in my previous post, the university lost all its buildings during the Jan 12 quake. At the moment, we are using an abandoned warehouse as a temporary campus. It has no roof, so we put a tin roof over to keep the rain out. We use tarps (thank you USAID) for our windows to keep the rain out. There are 3 classrooms and an office. Some of the students have lost their homes in the Jan 12 earthquake, so the university allowed them to stay inside the warehouse.

We have no running water and a few solar panels for power. Water is obtained from wells, from a spring (about 15 minutes walk up hill), and from the regular rain showers we have been getting — hurricane season is upon us after all. This often led to me wondering whether I should be wishing for rain so we can fill up our water tank, or for the sun so we can charge up our batteries.

Many of the students are extremely enthusiastic. In my first full day, when I was just waiting for a teaching assignment, Deb, Vicky and Everest approached me and asked me in halting English what I would be teaching. I told them I would probably be teaching them math, and they said they have not had a math professor for the entire semester, and oh would you help us with some of these problems. So I ended up working with them right there and then. Turns out that these vanguard of students have been trying to teach themselves math from some books. They have had some confusion with concepts that one would expect from being self-taught, but they were sharp and intelligent. I found it a joy to work with them. Deb in particular, is especially strong and spoke some English, so I hired him as my Teaching Assistant who can also translate for me. Given his mathematical acumen, I started teaching him more advanced topics in a special class.

I was assigned to teach two classes in four weeks — an Intro to mathematics (for first years) and the vaguely titled “Business Mathematics” class to the 4th years. After a quick evaluation of the students’ ability, I ended up deciding that I am going to teach the first years differential and integral calculus — useful things to know whether you are going to be an agronomist or a manager. For the “business math” class, I chose to teach them some basic statistics — with the goal that they should be able to deal with frequency and probability distribution functions when completed.

English is not a widely spoken language in Haiti, so it was a challenge to teach the classes. However, I find that we can make a lot of headway with a mixture of my rudimentary Creole and the combined English knowledge of my students, assisted by a dictionary. The classes understandably proceed slower than usual, but that is not always a bad thing in pedagogy. After a hesitant start, we settled on a good system where some of the more capable English speakers would translate for the other students in real time. Sometimes, some of the more advanced students would volunteer to teach a difficult concept which they have grasped to the class in Creole. The students are generally attentive, and eager — I am often asked to teach extra classes.

When classes are not in session, I am kept busy with students who wanted to learn more, or have questions about math or English. I find these impromptu discussion sessions the most rewarding — I can teach the students at the pace at which they are learning. As a personal bonus, I have the luxury of having the students teach *me* Creole. Although I am assigned a very good Creole teacher, I learned most of my Creole from such constant interaction with the students.

Living conditions in Fondwa are rough. I am staying in a semi-collapsed building with a couple of volunteers from the US (Rohan Mahy and Reuben Grandon), and a rotating roster of Haitian teachers, most who live outside Fondwa : unfortunately qualified teachers and lecturers are extremely scarce in Haiti. Our quake damaged building has no running water, no power, and red “X” marks on parts of the buildings that are unstable — a non-trivial indicator since we are still experiencing aftershocks (I personally felt three so far). On the other hand, we have a great view — on a clear day, we can see distant Leogane northward and the Gulf of Mexico, 80 km away.

Nevertheless, our humble abode is a palace compared to the conditions that most Haitians live in. Many of them have lost homes in the quake; some of hem are still living in tents. Ironically, many of the stone buildings collapsed, while the wooden ones survived. I visited one of the tent cities of Port-au-Prince — they are hot, dusty, crowded and so incredibly unsanitary that they seems like epidemic timebombs waiting to go off. Every single building left standing suffered some form of damage from the quake — sometimes looking past the intact facade will reveal a completely collapsed back portion of the house. This does not stop Haitians from living in them. There is a strong sense of communal spirit among rural Haitians, more than once, I was told by the tenants that their house was “kraze” (destroyed) in the gudu-gudu (quake) and they are living in that “kind madame’s” house. Our neighbouring house, a wooden structure no bigger than the size of a school bus, is home to thirty men, women and children.

The Haitians are very friendly. After getting past the initial bemusement (and amusement) of being called “blan” (white man) in the first few days, I find the Haitians incredibly hospitable, and resilient in the face of such hardship. Wherever I go, it is easy to smile and call out a “bonjou” or “bonswa”, or “komen ou ye” (how are you?) to people passing me or just doing chores in front of their houses. I have a special love for the Haitian children — they are the most energetic and playful bunch of kids I have ever met. A group of them would show up at our house from time to time, screaming the names of us *blan* volunteers, and we would end up playing with them until we are exhausted. It is poignant for me to know that some of them have lost siblings and parents in the quake.

I will be leaving Haiti in a few days. Personally, I found the teaching experience and my interactions with the Haitians incredibly fulfilling and rewarding. But it was also very sobering to see the damage, destruction and human misery caused by the quake. There is a lingering sense of not having done enough, and that there is so much more left to be done. I do plan to come back again, and perhaps learn enough Creole to teach in it next time.

Now we can get into the fun part of machines; the ones we use today for the exploration of space.  Don’t cheat, go back and read yesterday’s post for the history primer.  I’ll wait.

Okay, you done?  Great.

Obviously, we talk a lot about some of the machines commonly used today on the blog.  We talk about telescopes past and present, about the rovers, the Voyager crafts, Cassini, Messenger, even Mariner 10.  But mostly we talk about the results, not the machines themselves.  Unless you want a 10-part series in this, I’ll have to just give you a fast over-view of the machines we know so well today, so buckle up.

NASA/ESA - Space Shuttle Discovery Launches at start of STS-120

Starting with the Space Shuttles, did you ever stop to think that our astronauts are sitting in a very complicated machine, strapped to a rocket?  A rocket is nothing but a sustained explosion which happens in one direction (we hope).  There they are, sitting on top of a rocket, getting shot into space at 17,000 mph+.  As I’ve mentioned before, I bet they don’t get many solicitors from insurance companies knocking on their doors.  Can you imagine filling out the questionnaire?  “How far do you travel to your work site?”   The Shuttle itself is a vehicle, but it’s also a science lab, an environment, and a home.  It must carry everything with it; not the least its fuel and the oxygen needed for combustion.  It must have a place for food, water, oxygen, equipment, even clothing for the passengers.  The Shuttle is a machine that takes a human from a place where they can survive to a place where they cannot without some seriously expensive equipment.  It keeps them alive, then returns them safely through the hazard of reentry (usually).

The Mars Rovers are vehicles which we designed to work for us, far away from us, in a place where again we cannot yet survive.  They are also little mobile science labs.  They collect and analyze data, then broadcast the information back to us.  When something goes wrong, they are designed to analyze themselves and try to correct the problem, or broadcast to us what’s wrong.  Into an environment about which we knew comparatively little at the time, we had no assurances that the rovers would even be able to function.  We were pretty sure, but not certain.  Now we are certain.

NASA - Mariner 10, now circling the sun

Being so far from us that we have no hope of ever recovering them, the Voyager space crafts are still sending scientific data back to us.  Voyager also is designed to detect problems with itself.  If something happens, Voyager severs contact with us and begins diagnostic analysis.  If possible, it will correct whatever problem has arisen, reestablish contact, and continue on.  As you can imagine, we wouldn’t be much use to the little space crafts if anything happened to them, like getting middled by an asteroid.  By the time we knew it was about to get hit, it would have been hit.

The International Space Station is an amazing machine which also functions as a home, a workplace, a laboratory, a total environment, and an entertainment center.  One thing it’s not is a vehicle.  If it malfunctions catastrophically, the people on board don’t have anywhere to go.  It is one of those machines which must be kept functioning at all costs.  It is designed to provide for the physical and psychological needs of its passengers.  You know, if all you have is work, sleep, eat, and nowhere to go, some serious distraction must be provided or the human psyche will become strange.  Okay, it’ll become stranger.  You cannot have anyone going psychotic on the ISS.  I would think catastrophic failure of the ISS and the human psyche are two of the major concerns aboard the station.  And again, if they get middled by an asteroid there isn’t much we can do except watch and hope.  The issues of waste disposal alone are phenomenal.

NASA/ESA JPL The ISS after STS132 undocks.

The computer technology which has exploded into our lives is unbelievable.  If you grew up using computers, lucky you.  They were something which entered my life after I was an adult; the home computers, anyway.  When we mention computers, we have to mention the Internet.  Now THAT is something.  You have the accumulated knowledge of our species at your fingertips.  I defy you to find a subject not addressed somewhere on the Internet.  In fact, the usual problem is “too much”, instead of “not enough”.  It’s there, all you have to do is ask for it.  Today’s computers practically spoon feed it to you.  I can’t wait to see the next generation; already being developed.

Of course, we’ve all benefited from the advancements made in space exploration (in addition to war and greed, remember Part I).  Not just by the computer sitting in front of you, but in medicine, terrestrial vehicles, the service machines you have in your home (like your dishwasher), education… the list is enormous.  It’s impacted every area of our lives, including socially.  Each step we take brings us only to another step.  We will never reach “the end” of advancements.

I’ve heard many people complain about the speed at which our technology is advancing.  I’m never sure how to answer, but I’m certain they wouldn’t want to go back to a time when we didn’t have it.  Get sick, and tell your doctor you’d rather he bled you with leaches than order the medicine you need?  There is no going back, there is only forward… or fall into stagnation.  When any species falls into stagnation, it gets edited out.  You know what that means, you don’t need me to explain it to you.

Just in case you missed it.

We are only at the beginning.  There are so many things ahead, so much to discover, and our machines will be with us.  This was Trudy’s post.

Some like it hot. The bacteria Francisella tularensis is among them. It likes to live at the temperatures present inside human bodies, and give us the disease tularaemia. But Barry Duplantis figured out a way to make the body an unattractive destination for the bacteria: He injected it with the genes of a cold-lover.

In a study in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Duplantis brought in Colwellia psycherythraea, a bacteria that can survive in the icy temperatures of the Arctic, but would die at a temperature like the nearly 100 degrees inside our bodies. By transferring genes responsible for that temperature sensitivity into F. tularensis, he created versions of that bacteria with lower heat tolerances.

When he injected these microbes into mice, they couldn’t migrate to warm areas like the lungs and do damage. Plus, the presence of the incapacitated bacteria acted as a sort of vaccine, putting the animals’ immune systems at the ready. When the researchers later gave the mice large exposures to unaltered F. tularensis, they didn’t get as sick as control mice.

For plenty more on this study, check out Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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Image: Richard Finkelstein

Where do budding, even experienced, science-fiction writers learn about the science behind the science fiction? Going back to school and getting a university degree in a scientific discipline is an option, but that’s going to take quite a while. You could short-circuit the process by spending a week at Launch Pad at the University of Wyoming!

Launch Pad 2010 Attendees

Launch Pad is a free, NASA-funded workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a “crash course” for the attendees in modern astronomy science through guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming’s professional telescopes.

The workshop’s mission is to:

…teach writers of all types about modern science, primarily astronomy, and in turn reach their audiences. We hope to both educate the public and reach the next generation of scientists.

The person who runs Launch Pad, Mike Brotherton, is a wizard at using sci-fi as a vehicle to teach actual science (or, in his own words, he’s a wizard at funding his own science-fiction habit). A few years ago he received NSF funding to compile ”Diamonds in the Sky” — an anthology of hard science-fiction stories that also can be used by physics and astronomy teachers as a vehicle to teach real science. Some of the stories are quite good and worth the read. Perhaps we’ll see “Diamonds in the Sky II” in the not-too-distant future, populated with stories from former Launch Pad attendees!

Launch Pad 2011 and 2012 are funded, and there’s still time to apply for next year!

In the 1980s, fossil record research showed a curious cycle: Every 27 million years, Earth hosted a mass extinction. Some scientists suggested that a dim star dubbed Nemesis was in a deadly dance with our sun, periodically kicking comets out of the distant Oort Cloud to shower our planet with destruction. Morbidly fascinating as it may be, the authors of a new study argue that this “death star” theory doesn’t hold up.

The cyclical extinctions do make a solid pattern, say Adrian Melott of the University of Kansas and Richard Bambach of Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History, whose paper is available through arXiv.org. The two have gone back in the record to 500 million years ago, further than any other researchers, and have confirmed the 27 million year cycle at a 99 percent confidence.

According to Bambach, there’s no doubt at all that every 27 million years-odd, huge numbers of species suddenly become extinct. He says this is confirmed by “two modern, greatly improved paleontological datasets of fossil biodiversity” and that “an excess of extinction events are associated with this periodicity at 99% confidence”. This regular mass slaughter has apparently taken place around 18 times, back into the remote past of half a billion years ago. [The Register]

The problem, Nemesis fans, is that the cycle is too precise, the researchers say. If these extinctions result from a dance between our sun and Nemesis, the researchers note, the period of these mass extinctions would change as other stars buffeted the pair and changed the courses of Nemesis’s orbit around the sun.

But the data indicates that the extinctions occur every 27 million years, as regular as clockwork. “Fossil data, which motivated the idea of Nemesis, now militate against it,” say Melott and Bambuch.That means something else must be responsible. It’s not easy to imagine a process in our chaotic interstellar environment that could have such a regular heart beat; perhaps the answer is closer to home. [Technology Review]

Some scientists say that the sharply-defined periodicity isn’t enough to rule out Nemesis. Richard Muller, an author of the original Nemesis paper, told Wired.com that there is still hope for a dark star.

“I would agree with most of what he says, but I think he is overestimating the accuracy of the geologic timescale,” he said. The geological record gives only an approximate sense of when major extinctions happened. “You get them in the right order, but it’s really difficult to get an actual date,” he said. In light of that uncertainty, “I would say the Nemesis hypothesis is still alive.” [Wired]

Luckily, given the precision of this death cycle, we can count on having time (i.e. 16 million years) to settle the debate.

There is a smidgeon of good news. The last extinction event in this chain happened 11 million years ago so, in theory at least, we have plenty of time to work out where the next catastrophe is coming from. [Technology Review]

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Image: flcikr / Adhar Shanny Acosta Rocha

It’s not Prada, Gucci, or Dolce & Gabbana. That head-turning jacket is a bacteria cellulose original. Bio-Couture clothing transforms a hardening ooze–yanked from tubs of yeast, bacteria, and green tea–into high fashion.

It may sound a bit like a Project Runway challenge, but according to the Bio-Couture website, the microbe-made clothes are meant as a sustainability project. The bacteria forms a congealing fiber (video), which designers can roll into thin sheets to make the base of each garment. As reported by ecouterre, where we found this story, overlaying pieces of the sheets as they dry will “felt” them together into a fashionable whole, without the need for stitching. Examples of the Bio-Couture’s latest pieces are currently on display as part of a nine-month exhibit called “TrashFashion” at London’s Science Museum.

Suzanne Lee and her design team at the School of Fashion & Textiles at Central Saint Martins in London hope to make even more complicated pieces using this technique–as perhaps evidenced by pictures on the project’s website of mannequins submerged in bacterial slime.

“Our ultimate goal is to literally grow a dress in a vat of liquid…”

Fancy color accoutrements come from dyes made of foodstuffs like port wine, curry powder, cherries, and beetroot. And the whole garment is compostable once passé–eliminating any evidence of past fashion faux pas.

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Image: Bio-Couture

This is, quite simply, brilliant. The Vaccine Song:

I have a hard time disagreeing with anything in that song^*. I really wish everyone knew that at the same time Jenny McCarthy is railing against vaccines for their toxins, she was injecting botox — which contains botulin, one of the deadliest substances known to mankind — directly into her face.