Stories tagged Life Science
Bleh.
Check out the video, y’all. It was taken in a sewer in North Carolina somewhere, and it appears to show the end of the world. (Yes, I believe the end of the world will involve gelatinous lumps pulsating in the dark.)
I noticed this on a couple sites yesterday, and the general consensus seemed to be that it was either the product of film students with too much time on their hands or part of some sort of viral marketing campaign. (What was being marketed? Possibly horror.)
But today, it looks like some folks who are more informed than your average comment board dude (whaaaat?) have chimed in, and it seems that the nightmare is all too real. According to Deepseanews (via Gizmodo—I couldn’t get the link to the original site to work) what we’re looking at “are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex).”
The Deapseanews expert elaborates:
“Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting.”
So there you go. They’re alien worm-balls. (“Alien” here being used in the sense of “unfamiliar” or “strange,” rather than “from another planet.”)
The more you know, right? The more you know, the better you understand that you need to stay out of North Carolina sewers unless you’re carrying a flamethrower, or, like, a proton pack.
Tags : 
Super Corn!: Resistant to bugs AND delicious!
Courtesy U.S. Department of Agriculture
While every other industry in the world seems to be tanking and going to visit their loyal bankruptcy lawyer, science and the genome project is on top!
The cost of sequencing has drastically decreased over the past few years and now smaller institutes can afford to contribute to the genome project. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council has recently opened a new research center in Norwich, England to aid farmers in the face of climate change.
Their main overarching goal is to help boost food production for future generations. They take seriously the threats of climate change on the global food sources. As such the institute is hoping to develop crops that are more resistant to harmful insects and can withstand severe drought. Outside of issues surrounding climate change there is great interest on the board to develop new strains of vegetables that will contain compounds that reduce the incidence of some cancers.
With more institutes like the one in Norwich and affordable genome sequencing we may well survive the terrors of climate change!
Warmer climate accelerates evolution in mammals
in Life Science, Cells, Diversity of Organisms, Heredity, and Biological Populations Change Over Time
Warmer climate boosts evolution: Okay, so iguanas aren't mammals, and I doubt Charles Darwin ever visited Sloppy Joe's in Key West, Florida, but the graphic still illustrates the point.
Courtesy Apollo13Ma (background photo), public domain and Mark RyanA study out of New Zealand says a warmer climate speeds up molecular evolution in mammals. The concept isn’t exactly a new one. Scientists have known that a warmer environment increases the pace of microevolution for other types of life, such as some plants and marine animals, but evidence that it affects mammals – which are warm-blooded (meaning their temperature is regulated internally) – has not been observed before.
Lead researcher, Len Gillman from Auckland University of Technology, said the result of the study was “unexpected”.
""We have previously found a similar result for plant species and other groups have seen it in marine animals. But since these are 'ectotherms' - their body temperature is controlled directly by the environment - everyone assumed that the effect was caused by climate altering their metabolic rate.""
Since DNA can potentially mutate each time a cell divides into two copies of itself, the faster (and more often) these divisions take place, the more chances advantageous mutations will be passed onto subsequent generations, and the faster microevolution takes place.
Gillman and his crew traced and compared small genetic changes in 130 pairs of related species that lived in different latitudes, focusing on a single gene in each pair. They then compared the gene against that of a common ancestor, and were able to determine which of the two mammals’ DNA had mutated (microevolved) more rapidly. The changes were small-scale, but the species living in the more tropical environment showed a faster pace in its level of molecular evolution.
The results of the study appear in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
LINKS
Discover magazine story
BBC story
More about evolution
I've recently heard about someone living in MN who went to back to Africa to visit family and he came back with a case of malaria. This is exactly the situation advisors to the exhibition Disease Detectives highlighted as a growing problem. Did you know that if you've developed immunity to malaria you lose that immunity when you move away from a region where malaria is endemic?
Exciting news on the diagnostic front comes from Glasgow University where scientists have developed a new test to quickly diagnose malaria. Currently to diagnose malaria researchers look at a patients sample of blood under a microscope and look for signs of the parasite. You need to be highly trained to be good at diagnosing this way. The new procedure is not only faster and more accurate but it can tell if the parasite is resistant to the first line of drug treatment. Go to this link for an article from the university and this link for a BBC video about the new diagnostic technique. In Disease Detectives we highlighted another new diagnostic technique which can easily be used away from expensive labs called a rapid diagnostic test which uses a "dipstick" method to indicate if certain proteins from the parasite is in a patient's blood. We've highlighted two professionals working on the test on the Disease Detective's website. Find out information about Norman Moore and Sara Hallowell who both work on this rapid diagnostic test.
I wonder what is the best way to get these tests to the people who most need them?
Piranha
Courtesy AlexeyDrWhile working on a river as a guide last summer I was able to tell many stories, one of which was about the infamous prout. A prout is a cross breed of piranha and trout produced by the US government in World War II. With the carnivorous teeth of the piranha and large, fast body of the trout the government hoped that the fish would become a water defence system if the war ever came to our shores and rivers. While some people will fall for this outlandish story (you would be surprised what people will believe when you speak confidently) there have been new findings in a fossil of one of the missing links between plant eating fish and present day piranhas.
Plant eating fish have two rows of flat, square teeth but, the meat eating piranha has one row of triangular teeth with sharp edges. The fossil of a Megapiranha paranensis was found in the early 1900's on a river bank in Argentina and was left sitting in a drawer unstudied until the 1980's. It consists of the jaw bone and shows a zig-zaged line of teeth that could be proof of the transition from two to one row of teeth.
Further research continues to support that this fish is a long lost ancestor of our piranha having lived 8 to 10 million years ago in the South American rivers. Although its diet is unknown it would still be an unpleasant visitor at a length of about 3 ft, much larger then any prout you may run into.
Now, these are Brad Pitt's eyes: Or... no, maybe not. I'm not certain.
Courtesy myrmicianI’ll save you the anxiety of guessing and the effort of researching—it’s the third one. Or maybe psychology grad students really are good at Photoshop, and I simply can’t stand pictures of Bradbrad that have been adulterated in any way.
JGordon, what are you talking about?
Aahh, I don’t even know anymore. But I guess I’m referring to this study that recently came out of Vanderbilt University, about how we recognize human faces. It turns out that while we identify most stuff (cars are given as an example in the article) by individual features, individual humans are identified by the whole collection of facial features.
Holistic recognition (the way we see faces) is nice because we can quickly distinguish between lots of individuals. But the reason we’re able to do it so well, say the scientists, is because we associate names with faces, individuating them as we learn them. This is a different mental path than identifying something by individual parts.
Basically, we don’t identify people by thinking “Let’s see… square jaw, pointy nose, thin eyebrows, small ears… ah! That’s David!” And if we had learned to identify people that way, we would have to relearn to identify them holistically by all their features at once, because the two methods of identification aren’t really linked.
Or something. Like I said, I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
The scientists did, however, attempt to illustrate their point with this picture of actor Brad Pitt. The idea is as follows:
“See this picture of Brad Pitt?”
“Yes, I see that picture of Brad Pitt. Very nice.”
“Are you sure? Take a closer look.”
“What on Earth are you… Oh my goodness! The eyes! Those are Matt Damon’s eyes! Well, I never!”
“Yes, those are Matt Damon’s eyes! But you didn’t look at the eyes and say, ‘This is Matt Damon,’ did you?”
“No indeed!”
Except, if you’re anything like JGordon, you looked at that picture and thought, “What happened to Brad Pitt? Has Angelina Jolie been hitting him? Does he have eyeball parasites?” And you were so distracted by this that any future mention of psychology was overwhelmed by your concern for Benjamin Button himself. He’s only a child, after all.
Eh. Anyway, your photo project looks crazy, Vanderbilt.
This is another good strategy: Decoy ears.
Courtesy niclindhJust kidding, of course. Whisper into either ear, and you’ll probably get all sorts of nothing. I’m cold like that.
For most people, though, it turns out that speaking into someone’s right ear is a good way to get what you want. Not a perfect way to get what you want, but it seems to help.
Apparently it’s been widely accepted that the right ear is usually dominant in “listening to verbal stimuli” (I suppose that means that you pay more attention with that ear, or that that ear pays more attention itself, as it were), but a new study has explored how this plays out in actual human behavior. It was tested in the most sophisticated of human laboratories: the European discotheque. By asking for cigarettes.
I imagine that there has never been a scientific study with “What?!” shouted so many times. Nonetheless, the researchers, sweating and bedecked in glowsticks, determined observed several things over the course of three studies. In the first two, they found that when clubbers couldn’t hear a cigarette request very well, they offered their right ears most often, and 72% of cigarette negotiation took place on the right side. In the third study, the researchers approached people intentionally from either the right or the left when asking for cigarettes, and those clubbers who were asked through the right ear yielded “significantly more” cigarettes.
The reason for this, the scientists think, is that the right ear is (oddly) more directly connected to the left hemisphere of the brain, and the left brain is dominant when it comes to words and numbers. (The left brain is sort of like your inner math nerd, and the right brain is sort of like your inner art nerd. Your inner jock is the stem.) This direct connection, I suppose, makes people more naturally inclined to listen to verbal requests through the right ear, and makes requests received through the right ear more easily processed than those taken through the left ear.
Because I don’t like doing what I’m told, no matter what I’m told, I am now wearing a right ear patch at all times. It has a skull and crossbones on it, to give me a sort of nautical, pirate-getting-dressed-while-drunk look. Please contact me if you’d like to order your own ear patch. Unless you’d rather go around giving everybody cigarettes all the time.
Random Questions: Thirsty times on the HMS Puddleduck
in Earth and Space Science, Life Science, Physical Science, Interdependence of Life, and Human Organism
Not the real HMS Puddleduck: Just a mirage.
Courtesy Myriam ThyesA… hoy.
This heat. Am I right? Am I right? Here on the HMS Puddleduck, triviaship, we haven’t been spared from the heat you feel on land. If anything, it’s worse out here at sea.
The heat has made Captain JGordon listless. In my weakened state, I don’t feel fit to hold a pen or operate the keyboard of a computer. Therefore, I am dictating this entry from the Puddleduck’s crow’s-nest. My crew, having been born and raised in such sweaty, squalid conditions as I now find myself in are more accustomed to this heat, and I have ordered them to paint my words in meter-wide letters on the deck of the ship. This way, the answers to today’s random questions can be easily read from my perch, and transferred to the Internet at a later time. The crew will scrub the deck clean again tomorrow afternoon.
On with it, then. These questions were obtained from the galleries of the science museum, but the answers were divined by yours truly from the movements of the stars.
Question: How come you can see reflections in mirages if they aren’t really there?
Answer: How timely. The questioner is wise to bring up mirages—please, Buzzketeers, be certain of the veracity of all bodies of water might find in front of you on hot days like today before you go chasing after them.
Mirages, it should be noted, are “really there.” They aren’t figments of your imagination, they’re real natural phenomena. And it’s not exactly a reflection that you see—it’s a refraction. In reflections, light bounces off of something to go in a new direction. In a refraction, light bends passing through something. This happens because light travels at slightly different speeds when traveling through different materials. Light that passes from air to water, for example, has to slow down when it moves into the water. If the light enters the water at a non-perpendicular angle, the direction of the light usually changes.
When you see a mirage, you’re seeing a refraction light of the sky (which looks watery), or of an object on the other side of the mirage (like when you see “reflections” of other cars in mirages on the road). The light is refracting because it’s passing through a couple different “mediums.” Instead of air and water, in this case, the light is passing though cooler air and warmer air. When the ground or pavement is very hot, the air immediately above it is going to be hotter too. Because hot air is less dense than cool air, light travels at a different speed through it. So… light moves from cooler air a little ways above the ground to hotter air immediately above the ground, and it gets refracted—it sort of bends away from the ground without ever actually touching it. And that light zooms up to your eyeballs, and it looks kind of like a reflection. Ta-da.
Question: Why does my butt hurt?
Answer: You know, this question comes in kind of a lot. Seriously. Almost as often as “I like cheese,” and “I like pie,” which aren’t really questions. Go figure. Usually I pass it over, but I think you deserve a real answer this time.
Anyway, a common cause of butt-hurt is hemorrhoids. I’m afraid I can’t link to that, because the picture is icky. But I’m guessing you have hemorrhoids. What’s happening to you is the veins in your anus are becoming swollen and inflamed. (And very sore, I’m sure!) This is probably happening because the stress and strain on those blood vessels has recently increased. Have you been suffering from diarrhea or constipation recently? Because that can to it. Don’t worry, though—usually hemorrhoids go away in a few days, and your butt should stop hurting at that point.
Question: What in the brain triggers kids/people to not be considerate & waste paper that is actually set out for writing questions instead of “Hello” “Hi” “Stupid” and more?
Answer: Interesting question. Thank you for using the paper more productively, though. I’m sorry to let you down.
Question: Could the storm on the sun destroy Earth?
Answer: Huh. Probably not?
For clarity, Junior Buzzketeers, the sun doesn’t have storms like Earth. But from time to time, things up there do get a little dicey now and again. There are occasional events called “solar flares” in the sun’s atmosphere, where a huge amount of energy from deeper in the sun very suddenly explodes into space, and similar events called “coronal mass ejections,” where a bunch of energy and matter are shot out of the sun. I suppose these things are sort of like storms, in that they’re sort of violent events in the outer layers of the sun, but they’re not like Earth storms, seeing as how nearby space rarely has to worry about being pelted by rain and lighting during one of our thunderstoms.
As for danger… hmm. If you spend a lot of time out in space, or on another planet with a less robust atmosphere and magnetosphere than Earth (like Mars, or the moon), one of these solar events might cause you a lot of trouble. See they release a tremendous amount of energy. What reaches other planets isn’t the sort of energy that blows you up or fries you like an egg, though. It’s the sort of energy that passes through your body and gives you radiation poisoning, or cancer. If an astronaut didn’t have sufficient shielding during a big solar flare, the dose of radiation could be fatal. It’s something to consider if you’re planning a trip to the moon or mars (which we are).
Earth’s magnetic field, however, does a pretty good job of protecting all of us from these solar blasts. They can interfere with radio transmissions, but generally they don’t cause much trouble. But really big events, like interplanetary coronal mass ejections, can be followed by a shock wave of solar wind (again, not like wind here—solar wind is mostly protons and electrons flying through space) which can temporarily disrupt the Earth’s protective magnetosphere, and affect the ionosphere (the topmost level of our atmosphere). Still, the biological affects on the residents of Earth aren’t much to speak of. The danger lies more in the affect these storms can have on our infrastructure. When crazy electrical fields are created around power lines, they can do crazy things to the whole electrical system; components can break, protective devices trip, and power gets disrupted. Events this severe are very rare though.
I seem to recall reading an article recently that discussed the cyclical nature of powerful solar events, and the author was of the opinion that we are coming up on a particularly active period for the sun, and if we don’t prepare our electrical and communications systems, we are going to be in serious trouble. He also mentioned that it was going to coincide with the 2012 apocalypse, however, at which point I sort of tuned out.
But, in answer to your question, no, storms on the sun won’t destroy the Earth. But there’s a chance that they could make modern life here a lot more difficult.
Question: What’s the most valuable rock?
Answer: Weeellll… this sort of depends on who you ask and what you want if for. Generally, though, you can’t go wrong with higher quality Led Zeppelin.
Now I must return to my air-conditioned cabin. It seems cruel to have the men cranking on that generator if I’m not even going to be in there.
Rogues Gallery: The Great White Shark (center) joins the ranks of infamous serial killers. Clockwise from upper left: Richard Speck, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Whitman, John Wayne Gacy, Charlie Manson, Dennis Radar (BTK Killer), Ed Gein (technically not a serial killer but one weird dude), Ted Bundy, David (Son of Sam) Berkowitz, and Henry Lee Lucas.
Courtesy Public Domain image composite by Mark RyanA new study published in the Journal of Zoology likens the predatory behavior of great white sharks to that of human serial killers.
Both the sharks and their human serial-killing counterparts use geographic profiling to hunt their prey. Co-author Neil Hammerschlag, a University of Miami researcher in the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences says the predators “must get close enough to check out prey and figure out their movements, but they also must be far enough way so that they themselves won't be easily tracked. They must use known traveling routes. For human killers, these would be things like subways, buses and freeways. For great whites, these would include channels, reef edges and other topographical features."
In the waters off Seal Island in South Africa's False Bay, the research team (which included a criminal-profiling retired police officer) observed adult sharks launching their attacks from very focused anchor points just like serial killers lurk about familiar territory as they cruise for hapless victims. They found the sharks positioned themselves about 100 yards from the island in 80 feet of water, close enough for attack but far enough away to remain undetected. The depth and distance also allowed the predators to build up enough speed to start the attack.
Whether this behavior applies to all human serial killers, I’m not sure. For example, I don’t know that the Manson family stalked any of their victims, and Richard Hitchcock and Perry Smith (of In Cold Blood notoriety) originally selected the Clutter family in Kansas for robbery purposes, but in general the comparisons are interesting.
LINKS
LiveScience story
Discover.com story
ScienceDaily story
Matthias Buchinger: The (astounding) Little Man from Nuremburg
in Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, Heredity, Historic Perspectives, and Human Organism
Self-portrait by Matthias Buchinger: The forward-most curls on Buchinger's left shoulder near his collar are magnified on the right to show the inscribed hidden biblical text.
Courtesy Public domain via WikipediaI recently (and literally) stumbled upon a web page about this remarkable man from the 17th century. His name was Matthias Buchinger, and despite being born without hands, legs or thighs, this guy managed to live a full and amazing life with no less than 4 wives (!?), and fathering something like 11-14 children depending on the source. But even more incredible was how - despite his severe physical deformations - Buchinger was able to rise above Nature’s challenges and become an accomplished musician, inventor, artist, model-in-a-bottle builder, and magician.
Born in Anspach, Germany in 1674, he was the youngest of nine children, and became widely known as “The Little Man from Nuremburg” performing his feats of wonder across much of Great Britain and Europe. Buchinger was only 29 inches tall, and for hands had "two excrescences which grew from his shoulder-blades, like fingers without nails" but his skills in magic, marksmanship, and music were legendary. He played several musical instruments, some of which he invented himself, was accomplished at skittles (bowling), and could dance a hornpipe as well as anyone. He was also a talented calligrapher. His engraving skills are evident by the self-portrait to the right. Hidden within his curls are seven psalms and the Lord’s Prayer written in tiny letters. Buchinger lived much of his adult life in England and Ireland, and performed before King George and many of Europe’s royalty. He died in Cork, Ireland in 1732.
I don’t know about you but I find Buchinger quite inspiring. You can read more about this human marvel in the links below.
Matthias Buchinger
More about Matthias Buchinger
And yet another site
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