For everyone out there who’d like to hear a little less of their amorous neighbors, not to mention their kid badly playing the violin, there may be hope: Hong Kong scientists have devised a delightfully simple material made of latex and plastic that they say could one day reduce the racket at noisy places like airports. The paper appears in Applied Physics Letters.

Zhiyu Yang and colleagues devised a system of thin tiles that, when assembled into a large sheet, could cancel out noise in a huge range, including the bass frequencies that tend to breach the walls of our apartments and houses with ease. Each panel is just three millimeters thick, and less than half an inch wide, with the weighted plastic button in the middle. When sound waves hit the panel, the membrane and weighted buttons resonate at difference frequencies. “The inner part of the membrane vibrates in opposite phase to the outer region,” says Yang. That means the sound waves cancel each other out and no sound gets through [New Scientist]. The large pieces of foam that insulate most modern houses can block out many sounds, but unfortunately, low-frequency sound waves usually will penetrate them. That’s because bass sounds in the air can be several yards in wavelength and get longer in a solid. Creating a thin soundproofing material that can block low-frequency sounds has proven extremely difficult. For instance, a thin latex membrane by itself cannot resonate at the right frequency to either absorb or reflect the bass rumble of a jet taking off [Popular Science].

But, Yang says, each thin layer can be tuned to cancel sound waves of particular frequencies by changing the weight of the button. So several layers stacked on top of one another could create a surface impervious to sounds at a wide range. And the panel’s weight is equivalent to ceramic bathroom tiles, “although it’s slightly thicker at 15 millimetres”, he adds [New Scientist].

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DISCOVER: Bulletproof Paper Is Stronger Than Kevlar Image: iStockphoto

This Thursday at 2 pm EST, I will be taking part in a virtual book party. The slots are filling up, but there are still some left. Register here.

What’s a virtual book party you ask? In this case, fellow Discover blogger Chris Mooney and I will each give a 15 minute talk about our new books. From the slipper-and-pajama’d comfort of your home or office (if you wear slippers and pajamas at the office), you can listen to us speak and behold our slide presentations in real time. After we’re through, there will be time for a virtual conversation between you and us.

The event (which will last about an hour) is hosted by the American Institute of Biological Sciences. They’ll be giving away copies of The Tangled Bank to two lucky audience members. Hope to some Loom readers can join us!

Pediatricians have declared that the trusty ol’ hot dog is in need of a makeover, setting the stage for one of the biggest engineering challenges known to man and causing some to worry, “Is it the end of the hot dog as we know it?”

The cylindrical sausage has been deemed a choking hazard by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which published an official statement on choking risks in the journal Pediatrics that included concerns about the snack clogging a child’s wind pipe. The pediatricians pointed out that 17 percent of all food-related asphyxiations among children are caused by hot dogs.

Talking about the proposal for a choke-proof hot dog, a doctor explains to USA Today:

“If you were to take the best engineers in the world and try to design the perfect plug for a child’s airway, it would be a hot dog,” says statement author Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “I’m a pediatric emergency doctor, and to try to get them out once they’re wedged in, it’s almost impossible.”

But Smith admitted that he doesn’t know how the sausage could be redesigned to be safer, adding somewhat lamely that he’s “certain that some savvy inventor will find a way.”

The doctors didn’t just suggest that the wiener needs a design re-think, they also asked that the snack come with a warning label. But the hot dog redesign debate got, uh, hotter when the president of the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council, Janet Riley, retorted that most of the sausage packages sold in stores already come with some sort of a warning label, advising parents to cut the hot dogs into small pieces before feeding them to their kids.

And then pediatrician Alan Greene, author of Feeding Baby Green, found a bigger fault with the pediatricians’ concerns over the high-fat, high-sodium, preservative-packed food item. He told USA Today: “The last thing we need is to redesign candy and junk food with cool shapes, so we can give them to kids even younger.”

So, no star-shaped mini hot dogs anytime soon? Damn.

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Discoblog: Food Fraud: High Schoolers Use DNA Tests to Expose Fake Caviar
Discoblog: Fiber-Filled, Antioxidant-Packed Ice Cream—Brilliant? Sacrilegious? Nasty?
Discoblog: Heart-Stopping Cinematic Excitement: Guess How Much Fat Is in Movie Popcorn?

Image: Wikimedia

Open Laboratory 2009, an anthology of science blogging goodness, is out! Get your copy now. (Full disclosure–I’m in there.)

It’s a big year for South Africa: Less than four months remain until the first matches of the World Cup, when much of the planet’s attention will turn to the country. But being under the spotlight of international sport makes it difficult to hide a country’s less glamorous bits, as China and Canada have found out trying to shield pollution and addiction problems from the glare of the last couple Olympiads. In June, the microscope will turn to South Africa and its ongoing AIDS crisis.

This month one of the country’s health leaders has renewed his call for blanket HIV testing and anti-retroviral drug dispersal to all patients, which he says can stop the AIDS epidemic once and for all–without having to find a vaccine against the virus or a cure for the disease.

Brian Williams’s idea isn’t new. The former World Health Organization figure, who is now one of South Africa’s top health officials, came out with a paper more than a year ago explaining his model for how effective universal testing and immediate therapy could be. But this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego he expounded on his proposal: “The epidemic of HIV is really one of the worst plagues of human history…. I hope we can get to the starting line in one to two years and get complete coverage of patients in five years. Maybe that’s being optimistic, but we’re facing Armageddon” [The Guardian].

The anti-retrovirals given to HIV-positive people have saved millions of lives, Williams says, but have done little to stop transmission, partly because of how many people don’t know they have HIV. Facing such a tall order, Williams is optimistic. If a full-on testing and treatment project were to begin today, he says we could stop the transmission of the disease within five years. If patients take [anti-retrovirals] when they should, the amount of virus in their bodies can fall by 10,000 times, to a level at which they are extremely unlikely to pass the virus on [The Guardian].

However, he knows the price of testing and treating everyone. The cost in South Africa alone would be $3 billion to $4 billion per year, he said. But the plan would save money from the first day because of all of the people today who have to be hospitalized, and because of all of the young people who die in the prime of their lives, he said [CNN]. South Africa already has the world’s largest program of giving out anti-retroviral drugs to treat AIDS, because the country has the world’s largest caseload.

While more health officials consider Williams’ idealistic strategy, he and his colleagues stress that it should be done in conjunction with ongoing research into new treatments and practical measures, like South Africa’s efforts to beef up its condom supply in preparation for the footballers and their supporters who will descend on the country this summer.

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80beats: South African Health Minister Breaks With Past, Says HIV Causes AIDS

Image: flickr / troismarteaux

“More science, less fiction” is the message from the scientific community to Hollywood, even as the sci-fi film Avatar continues to rake in cash at the box office. Physics professor Sidney Perkowitz took to the stage at last week’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to encourage more science in movies, but also to beg filmmakers not to bungle up their facts. For example, a movie should only be permitted to break one law of physics, he suggested.

Perkowitz, a member of the Science and Entertainment Exchange set up to advise Hollywood, singled out the giant space bugs in the film Starship Troopers for special scrutiny. He pointed out that if a real bug was scaled up to the size of the on-screen insects, it would collapse under its own weight. Perkowitz has come up with a set of scientific guidelines for Hollywood, and also encourages filmmakers to fact-check their scripts in a more deliberate manner so that audiences don’t dismiss a movie as absurd and stay away from the box office.

The Guardian reports:

The proposals are intended to curb the film industry’s worst abuses of science by confining scriptwriters to plotlines that embrace the suspension of disbelief but stop short of demanding it in every scene.

Perkotwitz hopes the new guidelines will prevent studio execs from making script snafus like those in the movie The Core, in which scientists drill to the center of the Earth to detonate a nuclear device aimed at restarting the rotation of the planet’s core. Perkotwitz said the science in the film “was out to lunch,” and blamed its obviously unsound premise for its box office failure. Many scientists have noted that the idea that the Earth’s core could stop spinning is deeply implausible, and have also reminded audiences that anyone who traveled to the core would be instantly vaporized by the heat.

The Tom Hanks vehicle Angels and Demons also got an “F” from Perkowitz for its science. In that movie, Hanks’ character, Robert Langdon, has to protect the Vatican from going kaboom. The weapon in question is an antimatter bomb, confined in a glass vial by a magnetic field produced by a small battery. Perkowitz told The Guardian: “The amount of antimatter they had was more than we will make in a million years of running a high-energy particle collider…. You can’t contain it using an iPod battery.”

TV shows that scored low on the science-o-meter included Heroes, for its dubious claims on invisibility. Meanwhile, Lost did well for its depiction of time travel.

And how did James Cameron’s visual extravaganza about blue-skinned Na’avi flying about on multi-colored prehistoric-looking birds fare? Avatar was actually pretty good, according to Perkowitz, and joins films like Gattaca on his list of movies that “reflect real issues of science and society, such as genetic engineering.”

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Image: Starship Troopers

Some people cannot learn.

Thai army chief General Anupong Paojinda is defending the use of what are essentially magic wands to detect bombs, even though the specific device they use has been tested repeatedly and failed to perform. This device is essentially the same as the ones used in Iraq and Afghanistan which have been proven worthless, and for which the head of the manufacturing company, Jim McCormick, has been arrested for suspicion of fraud.

Paojinda is convinced the dowsing rods work, even though it’s little more than an antenna glued to a plastic box. In the meantime, thousands of people are dying in bomb attacks in Thailand near the Malaysian border. Incredibly, the devices cost millions of dollars, when it would be far cheaper and far more effective to employ sniffing dogs at the checkpoints.

Antiscience kills. You might think that dowsing rods are a cute diversion or at worst a waste of money, but in fact believing in them is leading directly to the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of people across the world.

Tip o’ the crystal pendulum to BABloggees Claude Works and Jimmy Reynolds.

Last fall, I described a book I was highly anticipating called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. And unless you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere, you’ve no doubt already read excerpts and phenomenal reviews, seen it covered on television, heard Rebecca on air, and watched it climb the New York Times bestseller list during these first weeks since publication. All of the praise is more than deserved, and I would add that the story of Henrietta Lacks, her family, the immortal HeLa cell line, and the many dimensions to the story that Rebecca does such an extraordinary job of reporting, may just be one of the greatest true stories ever told.

Henrietta’s life wasn’t easy. She lost her parents by the age of four and worked hard alongside her cousins on a tobacco farm while facing the challenge of growing up as an African American woman in the south. After marrying young and having five children, Henrietta died at age 31 from cervical cancer. But around the time of her diagnosis, cancer cells from her cervix—famously known around the world as HeLa cells—were taken from her tumor to be used in research without her knowledge or consent.

HeLa cells were the first living human cells to be successfully grown in culture. They were distributed to scientists around the world and led to the vaccine for polio and many other diseases. HeLa taught scientists about chromosomes and genetic diseases like Down syndrome. They were launched into space to observe how space travel would affect human cells. They were inundated with toxins to understand cell response to different substances. They led to advances such as in vitro fertilization and helped win many Nobel Prizes. Over time, HeLa cells were cultured and copied and shipped and sold so many times, it’s estimated combined they would weigh over 50 million metric tons (equal to at least 100 Empire State Buildings).

Henrietta’s family was not told any of this for years. Her children and husband did not hear how their mother’s cells revolutionized medicine over and over as they were tested by researchers for seemingly ambiguous reasons. For-profit companies made billions off Henrietta’s cells, while those she cared about most often couldn’t even afford healthcare.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about the life, death, and legacy of one of history’s most important individuals who all but lost her identity. Rebecca elegantly shares her true story which deals with science, ethics, and equality. The book spans nearly a century, and reflects the changing landscape of medicine, and the good, bad, and ugly side of research.

Most of all, it’s a human story that touches all of us. It’s beautiful, poignant, interdisciplinary, and should be required reading for every high school student.

I will have more to say about this wonderful book soon, but for now I leave readers with a single suggestion: Read it.

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. We next take a look at Chapter Seven, “Running Time Backward.” Now we’re getting serious! (Where “serious” means “fun.”)

Excerpt:

The important concept isn’t “time reversal” at all, but the similar-sounding notion of reversibility–our ability to reconstruct the past from the present, as Laplace’s Demon is purportedly able to do, even if it’s more complicated than simply reversing time. And the key concept that ensures reversibility is conservation of information–if the information needed to specify the state of the world is preserved as time passes, we will always be able to run the clock backward and recover any previous state. That’s where the real puzzle concerning the arrow of time will arise.

With this chapter we begin Part Three of the book, which is the most important (and my favorite) of the four parts. Over the course of the next five chapters we’ll be exploring the statistical definition of entropy and its various implications, as well as the puzzles it raises.

But before getting to entropy, and the arrow of time that depends on it, we first have to understand life without an arrow of time. The only reason the Second Law is puzzling is because the rules of fundamental physics don’t exhibit an arrow of time on their own — they’re perfectly reversible. In this chapter we discuss what “reversible” really means, and contrast it with “time reversal invariance,” which is related by not quite the same. If a theory is both reversible and time-translation invariant (same rules at all times), it’s always possible to define time reversal so that your theory is invariant under it. (E.g. in most quantum field theories, “CPT” does the trick.)

Reversibility is a very deep idea; it implies that the state of the universe at any one moment in time is sufficient (along with the laws of physics) to precisely determine the state at any other time, past or future. But not many popular physics books spend much time explaining this idea. So we reach all the way back to very simplified models of discrete systems on a lattice (”checkerboard world”). What we’re after is an understanding of what it really means to have “laws of physics” in the first place — rules that the universe obeys as it evolves through time. That lets us explore different kinds of rules, in particular ones that are and are not reversible.

Along the way we talk about time-reversal invariance in the weak interactions of particle physics, and emphasize how this is not related to the thermodynamic arrow of time that is our concern in this book. Which gives me a good excuse to quote a touching passage from C.S. Wu. This chapter has everything, I tell you.

Sure, creatures that reproduce asexually get to avoid some of the hangups that come with sex, but the strategy brings its own problems. First and foremost, how do you prevent genetic deterioration without the fresh infusion of new genes that results from the mixing of male and female DNA? For the all-female whiptail lizard, the solution is to hedge its bets.

In a study forthcoming in Nature, researcher Peter Baumann found that each whiptail lizard egg cells contains twice the number of chromosomes you’d expect. In the fertilized egg cell of a sexually reproducing lizard species, you’d expect to see much what you see in humans—23 chromosomes from the father and 23 from the mother combining into 46. (Most human cells contain 46 chromosomes, but egg and sperm cells contain only 23, so that they can combine to give an offspring a compete, but genetically new, set of chromosomes.)

But the whiptail eggs instead begin with two identical copies of each of their mother’s chromosomes, for a total of 92. Those chromosomes then pair with their identical duplicates, and after two cell divisions, a mature egg with 46 chromosomes is produced. Since crossing-over during the cell divisions occurs only between pairs of identical chromosomes, the lizard that develops from the unfertilized egg is identical to its mother [The New York Times].

Curiously, the whiptail lizards came to be through the fusion of two other lizard species, Baumann says. That gave it a rich genetic diversity, but without sex the lizards needed a new way to maintain that diversity. “There’s an absence of sperm, and genetic information is never provided by another source. Anything that’s lost is lost for good” [Wired.com], Baumann says. This trick he found provides a tidy explanation for how these all-female lizards maintain those rich genetics.

Still, while the whiptail’s trick allows for generation after generation of identical lizards, that’s not necessarily advantageous for long term survival. Unless an animal can recombine the DNA they already have, they will produce an offspring with an identical set of chromosomes, in which any genetic weakness, such as disease susceptibility or physical mutation, would have no chance to be overridden by outside genetic material from a mate [Scientific American]. Asexual reproduction is beneficial in the short run, and species like Komodo dragons will do it if they have to. But relying on it exclusively might cost the whiptails in the long run, especially if they should need to adapt to a changing habitat.

There are other creative solutions invented by other asexual species, like the bdelloid rotifers. Unfortunately, though, lizards probably can’t steal the rotifers’ trick of ripping apart their genome and stealing foreign DNA from the surrounding environment.

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Image: Peter Baumann

Sometimes I’m surprised by something I thought I knew, and found out I didn’t, not really.

For your consideration: NGC 1427A, a dwarf galaxy.

[Click to unendwarfenate.]

I’ve seen pictures of this little guy before. It’s a small galaxy, maybe 20,000 light years across (the Milky Way is 5 times that size), and part of the Fornax cluster, a small but rich cluster of galaxies about 60 million light years away. The picture here was taken with the monster 8.2 meter Very Large Telescope in Chile, and uses filters that give a somewhat true-color appearance, though it also accentuates warm hydrogen (the pinkish glow).

Even though I’ve looked at it before, I don’t think I really saw it, because the boomerang shape is obvious, and to anyone familiar with galaxy dynamics the reason behind it is obvious too. Maybe it’ll help to know that this diminutive galaxy is screaming through the Fornax cluster at 600 kilometers per second, a ridiculously high speed.

See it now? NGC 1427A looks like it’s got a swept-back shape because it’s being swept back. In between galaxies there is an ethereally-thin fog of gas, but there’s enough there to have an effect on a passing galaxy. The boomerang shape of the galaxy is because that side is facing into the wind, so to speak, and being compressed. The pink curve in the image is due to rigorous star-formation going on there, where the gas clouds are collapsing from the pressure and birthing stars at a prodigious rate.

Looking at this image, it’s so obvious what’s going on I’m surprised I didn’t notice it before. I guess sometimes you miss stuff right under your nose if you’re not paying attention. If you consider 60 mega-light-years under your nose.

Tip o’ the Strömgren sphere to the ESO. Image credit: ESO. 10 extra BA points for anyone who knows what the title’s from. Don’t Google it! That’s cheating.

I’ve written about the horrible state of libel laws in the UK before, but there are a couple of new developments:

1) Simon Singh wrote about the issue for the JREF’s Swift blog. He asks people to sign the online petition for reform, and it helps even if you’re not a UK citizen. In general I don’t support online petitions, but in this case it will have a real and important impact; they can present it personally to people who make the laws and show them this is an important issue. I signed. You should too.

2) Simon’s libel case goes before the Court of Appeal in London on Tuesday, February 23 (today for most folks reading this). No doubt the major media will be covering it, as it’s a big story. I’ll try to post something here if and when I hear anything.

You can find out more at the Libel Reform website, including how (if you’re local) you can go downtown to show support for Simon on Tuesday morning at 09:45 (here’s the location).

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is the Mission Status Briefing held yesterday. The briefing explains why the Shuttle most likely will not land today and will extend the mission by one day, termed “End of Mission +1″.

Get ready California looks like the shuttle will be coming your way tomorrow.

I just want to complain a little too, I didn’t get one single opportunity to see the shuttle/ISS because of clouds.  Not too many chances left but I won’t go there.

I am off to see if I can find out when the last time both of the main landing sites were “no go”.

My stance on climate change is clear: the scientific evidence that we’re getting warmer is overwhelming, and the most likely cause is that it’s human-produced. The first is fact, the second is a conclusion based on a lot of evidence.

Climategate showed us that the noise machine is in full swing; nothing in those emails takes away from the fact that there are multiple and independent lines of evidence that we’re warming up. And the talking heads on Fox and other right-wing media saying that the harsh winter is evidence against global warming shows how dumb of an argument they’re willing to make.

But it’s not just the stuffed shirts in the media making their own reality as they go along; some people in the government are trying to legislate it. Climate change deniers in both Utah and South Dakota have passed resolutions essentially condemning the science and reality of climate change. In Utah it was just a broadside at the science; in South Dakota it’s aimed at a "balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools."

Yeah, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Besides the creationist analogies, the South Dakota resolution sounds like something out of 1984:

WHEREAS, the earth has been cooling for the last eight years despite small increases in anthropogenic carbon dioxide;

Wrong! The Earth has been warming overall, and the last decade was the warmest on record, with records going back to 1880.

WHEREAS, there is no evidence of atmospheric warming in the troposphere where the majority of warming would be taking place;

Wrong! The troposphere is warming.

WHEREAS, historical climatological data shows without question the earth has gone through trends where the climate was much warmer than in our present age.

Yes, and the Earth went through a period of heavy bombardment from asteroids and comets a few hundred million years after it formed. Just because something happened once doesn’t make it safe.

WHEREAS, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather a highly beneficial ingredient for all plant life on earth. Many scientists refer to carbon dioxide as "the gas of life";

Wow. I mean, wow. Let’s lock these guys in a room filled with CO₂ for an hour or two and see how much life is left in them. And I love the "many scientists" line. You know what? A whole lot more scientists call it a greenhouse gas.

Wow.

WHEREAS, more than 31,000 American scientists collectively signed a petition to President Obama stating: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, or methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate…"

This petition has been thoroughly debunked before; it’s nothing more than an attempt to muddy the waters by deniers.

However, my absolute favorite part of the South Dakota resolution is this next bit. Are you sitting down? Good:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED [...]
(2) That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can affect world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative; and

Wait, what? Did those guys in the South Dakota legislature actually say astrological?

Geez, no wonder they can’t figure out that global warming is real. They think they’re reading their horoscopes! It makes me wonder if they just want the planet to warm up so that their state has milder winters.

It angers me that the science of so many topics has been warped and mutilated by people with a political agenda. I have no such agenda, except to speak the truth as I see it. I make no money if global change is real, I get no power, no thrill. In fact, the idea of a substantially warmer planet scares me, if not for myself, then for my daughter and everyone destined to live in that environment.

The politicians who would vote yes on these resolutions are doing so out of a near-religious belief that global warming is not real — they’re the otter in that picture. Contacting them probably won’t help; I suspect that if every last constituent they had contacted them, they would still cleave to their beliefs.

But I urge people to write their congressional representatives anyway. And spread the word; if these two states deny reality this blatantly, then others will follow. Bet on it.

So:

And if other states follow suit, they may doom all of us.

If you can’t say it, then sing it! Experts researching patients who have lost their ability to speak after a stroke are now suggesting that they could be able to communicate with music using Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT). Using MIT, the scientists showed that patients who were earlier communicating only in mumbles and grunts could now learn to sing out basic phrases like “I am thirsty.”

The study was conducted by Harvard Medical School neurologist Gottfried Schlaug on 12 patients whose speech was impaired by strokes, and showed that patients who were taught to essentially sing their words improved their verbal abilities and maintained the improvement for up to a month after the end of the therapy [Wall Street Journal]. Schlaug presented these findings at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

The researchers worked with stroke patients whose speech was incoherent, and who had damage in a region of the left side of the brain that is typically involved in speech. Schlaug’s research suggests that the brain can be essentially rewired. Stroke patients can learn to use a region on the right side of the brain, which is typically involved with music, for sing-songy speech instead. “Singing can give entry into a broken system by engaging the right hemisphere,” says Schlaug [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Using MIT, therapists taught patients how to sing words and phrases consistent with the underlying melody of speech, while tapping a rhythm with their left hands. After frequent repetition—1.5 hour-long daily sessions with a therapist for 15 weeks—the patients gradually learn to turn the sung words into speech [Wall Street Journal]. When Schlaug compared images of the patients’ brains before and after the therapy, he found that the right side of their brains had changed both structurally and functionally.

Though it has been known that patients who can’t speak clearly often do better when they sing the words, this is the first time anyone has shown the phenomenon through a clinical trial that combines treatment with brain imaging. Schlaug hopes more patients and caregivers will be enticed to try out Musical Intonation Therapy. However, he points out that MIT is long and expensive; the treatment often lasts for 14 to 16 weeks, with 90-minute sessions five days a week. The results are also dependent on how recently the patient had the stroke and the severity of the attack.

But the benefits of the therapy are usually permanent, and two thirds of patients who have undergone MIT with Schlaug added more words to their spoken vocabulary after their therapy had ended than the 100 words they were “taught” to say in therapy [AFP]. Each year, about 60,000 to 70,000 people suffer speech defects due to a stroke.

Related Content:
DISCOVER:The Genetic Mystery of Music
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80beats: Found: The First Genetic Mutations That Cause Stuttering
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Image: iStockphoto

Louise Brown, the first baby conceived through in vitro fertilization, will be turning 32 this year, and most people born through IVF are still younger than 30. While the technique has become commonplace for would-be parents struggling with fertility problems, doctors note that the long-term effects of the procedure still aren’t certain. Now, some scientists are saying they see slight differences in the DNA expression of people born via IVF, and that it’s possible they could be at higher risk for conditions like cancer or diabetes later in life.

Says lead researcher Carmen Sapienza said “By and large these children are just fine, it’s not like they have extra arms or extra heads, but they have a small risk of undesirable outcomes” [The Guardian]. Rather, the team found a very subtle impact. In 75 IVF babies and 100 naturally conceived ones, they examined 700 genes that particularly interested the researchers because they are linked to fat cell development, insulin signaling, and other functions associated with diseases for which people tend to be at higher risk as they age. The scientists checked DNA methylation, a modification to DNA which affects gene expression, and found that 5 to 10 percent of IVF babies had abnormal patterns of methylation.

Sapienza’s team published the study in October in Human Molecular Genetics, but his work is picking up attention after he spoke at the American Association of the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego.

Studying the health forecast for IVF babies is crucial because they tend to have lower birth weights than traditionally born babies. That could spell trouble ahead, because low-birth-weight babies often have long-term health problems. They’re more likely to be obese, to have diabetes, and to have hypertension when they’re 50, for example [ScienceNOW]. And because no IVF-born person is currently older than 31, there’s no data to predict what health patterns they will have as they age.

Conscious of a strong reactions by parents of IVF children, Sapienza stressed that the work is neither an attack on IVF nor any kind of proof that IVF babies will be unhealthier than other people as they age. But, he says, one must ask the questions. If it turns out that children who were conceived by IVF had a higher risk of, say, colon cancer, he says, it would be useful to be able to tell them to get screened earlier [ScienceNOW].

However, one researcher is publicly concerned about the overuse of a specific kind of IVF called Intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). That’s one of its creators, Andre Van Steirteghem. Also speaking at the AAAS meeting, Van Steirteghem warned that his creation was being overused, becoming the dominant IVF method in many hospitals. He says shouldn’t be employed in cases where regular IVF techniques could suffice: “We have to see what will come out in the future, and long term follow up is extremely important, but yes, ICSI has been overused” [The Telegraph]. ICSI makes it possible for men who ordinarily would be sterile to conceive, but carries a slightly higher risk of health problems down the road than regular IVF.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Baby
DISCOVER: IVM: A Fertility Treatment That Could Mean Pregnancy at Half the Cost
80beats: Vatican’s New Bioethics Rules Grapple With 21st Century Medical Advances
80beats: Is It Ethical To Pay Women To Donate Eggs For Medical Research?

Image: iStockphoto

Exobiology, or more correctly, astrobiology, is the study of life outside the boundaries of Earth.  The possibility, the evolution, the distribution, and the future of life away from Earth.  It’s concerned not just with what you might find crawling across an alien landscape, but in the landscape itself; in recognizing and exploring diverse biospheres.  It is interested in the universal evolution of life, not just the terrestrial evolution of life.

Yellow Mite (Lorryia formosa), Image: Erbe, Pooley: USDA, ARS, EMU

While still new among the empirical sciences, astrobiology (as in all the astrosciences) is multidisciplinary.  It encompasses physics, chemistry, biology (of course), paleontology, astronomy, and planetology… to name a few.  It deals mostly with proven scientific fact and less with theory and conjecture than what you might initially think.  When you get right down to it, the only thing theoretical about the subject is that life is possible in places other than Earth, and that’s barely a stretch.  Really, we have more evidence for the existence of life outside Earth’s biosphere than we do for the existence of intelligent life within it.  Seriously.  It’s hard enough to define “life” without throwing in a completely subjective, umbrella term like “intelligence” to further limit the field.

I'm not even gonna' say it.

Knowing that I’m probably causing a few bipedal, carbon-based, Earth-bound life forms to swell up and take umbrage, I still must point out that our understanding of “life” is in its infancy.  Not its “meaning”, or “purpose” (that’s philosophy); but the nature of life itself.  Astrobiology attempts to look at the possibility of life so diverse that we might not even consider it “life”.  It looks at different possible environments, then at what kinds of life may have evolved in response to the environments.  That’s the way it works, after all.  Environments don’t change to benefit the life forms within it, the life forms change in response to the environment.  That or they become extinct.

While astrobiology may be about life in places other than here, so far everything we know is based on what happens here on Earth.  That’s limiting, true; but it still gives us a rich field with which to work.  After all, we are part of the universe.  We’re not an island off by ourselves.  If we look at Earth as a jumping-off place in considering what extraterrestrial life may be like, we can come up with some very interesting theories.  We can even theorize that for almost any possible environment, some life form has evolved to take advantage of it.  Just because we wouldn’t survive in some of these environments doesn’t mean that something hasn’t evolved to survive there.  This isn’t a new idea, by the way.  Literature has been kicking the concept around for centuries.  Remember Terry Pratchett’s The Dark Side of the Sun?  Sundogs, sentient planets, and a telepathic body of water?

Bacteriophage injecting its genome, Image: Graham Colm, all rights reserved

Well, why not?

President Obama’s plan for NASA in the future is to rely heavily on private industry. One of the companies preparing for this is Space X, which has tested its first generation Falcon 1 rocket successfully. The Falcon 9 is a much larger rocket capable of carrying a much heavier payload, but has not yet flown.

However, the first F9 is at Cape Canaveral, getting ready for launch. It’s been sitting horizontally in a hanger for some time, but is now vertical.

It will undergo a series of ground tests, including a 3.5 second full engine firing (the rocket will be locked down to keep it form going anywhere) before it’ll be cleared for launch. Launch could be as early as March!

Once it’s flown, the next step will be to carry a test version of the Dragon module — the part that will carry big payloads — on top which could happen as early as July. Once that passes, Space X will be ready to start ferrying material to the space station. They hope to be able to be man-rated by 2013 or 2014, so they can begin to ferry humans into orbit.

Image credit: Chris Thompson/SpaceX

In 2008, writer Nicholas Carr worried in The Atlantic that the search engine Google and the easy availability of information on the internet is making our brains lazy–and rendering humans stupid. He wrote that the net was destroying his capacity for concentration and contemplation, adding, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

DISCOVER’s own Carl Zimmer responded by taking the opposite stance, and declaring that Google is making us smarter. He argued that humans are “natural born cyborgs” and the internet is our “giant extended mind.” He wrote that there was “nothing unnatural about relying on the internet—Google and all—for information…. Nor is there anything bad about our brains’ being altered by these new technologies, any more than there is something bad about a monkey’s brain changing as it learns how to play with a rake.”

Now, a new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project agrees with Zimmer; it found that Google is indeed making us smarter by allowing us to make better choices. More than 76 percent of the 895 experts polled said Nicholas Carr was wrong in thinking that Google made us stupid.

PC Magazine reports:

“Google allows us to be more creative in approaching problems and more integrative in our thinking. We spend less time trying to recall and more time generating solutions,” said Paul Jones of ibiblio.org at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

“For people who are readers and who are willing to explore new sources and new arguments, we can only be made better by the kinds of searches we will be able to do,” wrote Oscar Gandy, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Of course, the kind of Googled future that I am concerned about is the one in which my every desire is anticipated, and my every fear avoided by my guardian Google. Even then, I might not be stupid, just not terribly interesting.”

Nicholas Carr meanwhile said he “felt compelled to agree with himself,” telling the Pew Project:

“What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.”

Peter Norvig, Google’s research director, argued in turn that because Google makes so much information available instantly, it’s a good strategy for a knowledge-seeker to skim through many offerings first to get an overview. Then the user can settle down with the best sources for a deeper read. He added that skimming and concentrating can and should coexist.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: How Google Is Making Us Smarter
DISCOVER: Big Picture: 5 Reasons Science [Hearts] Google
DISCOVER: Google Taught Me How to Cut My Own Hair

Image: The Atlantic

In my newest podcast, I talk to a kind of viral Indiana Jones. Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona chases down the evolutionary origins of viruses such as HIV and the flu no matter what it takes–including getting dangerously ill in the middle of a civil war. Check it out.