apologies

Dear 3-5 people who have still been coming here every day even though i haven’t updated in LIKE FOREVER,

I’m sorry. I’ll do better? Between crazy work and after-work business  and traveling, time has been lacking. Also, since my ipod screen died and i can’t choose what i’m playing anymore, i haven’t been listening to my normal podcasts in weeks. Sad. AND, due to events (kinda) beyond my control, i can’t afford a new ipod right now.

SO i will step up my visual skimming of sciency-type articles (and beyond) in efforts to bring you more super cool science newsy stuff ASAP.

KTHXBAI. I think that’s how you’re supposed to say it on the internets.

-evan

 

More cop-out shorties

I should stop calling these “cop-out” shorties, because apparently they have just become the norm. Anyway…

Our first bit of story today is regarding the origin of our Universe and an attempt to divine what was around before it. Creationists, you may want to step outside for a minute. (kidding)

Some dudes at Caltech including Sean Carroll and “Dr Adrienne Erickcek”, who appears to actually be a grad student, have been using data from a NASA probe to study the Universe’s cosmic microwave background. Using these data they’ve come up with a model that might help explain the origin of the Universe as well as the arrow of time. They’re postulating (love that word) that new universes can be created spontaneously from “empty” space, and that it would be barely (if at all) noticeable from inside the “parent” universe. The BBC article doesn’t go into much detail about how they generated the model from their data, but i probably wouldn’t understand much of it anyway. redOrbit’s article has a little more detail, but they published in PRL if you physics-types have access to that.

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Your second tidbit is courtesy of my med-school goin’ friend Vivi with whom i worked as an undergrad. “Meet miracle baby who was born twice!” Sorta. When the McCartney (no, not that one) family went in for a 6-month ultrasound to determine the sex of the fetus (lame!) the tech noticed a grapefruit-sized mass coming off the tailbone. I can’t seem to find what kind of cancer it actually was, just that it was benign. However all the blood it was using was causing problems for the fetus, particularly its heart. So they put Mrs. McCartney under super-deep anesthesia (which i imagine was fairly risky), took out her uterus, cut it open, removed the tumor and put everything back together. The pregnancy lasted another 10 weeks and Macie Hope was born a little early but healthy. The procedure’s only been successfully performed about 20 times in the world. Kudos to Dr. Darrell Cass at Texas Children’s Hospital.

As a side note, i wonder if surgeons (and doctors in general) ever get offended when people are all, “OMG THIS IS A MIRACLE.” Like yeah, there’s certainly some luck (and perhaps your Higher Power of Choice) involved, but come on the guy’s a freaking surgeon and worked (surger’ed?) his ass off to make it work. On the other hand, as my coworker Elin put it, “Maybe surgeons aren’t offended- maybe they think it IS a miracle because the ARE God.” Hah. It should be noted however that he isn’t a neurosurgeon so i’m not sure that applies here.

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Lastly, and i’m not even sure what to write about this, but a baby was born with a second penis, on his back. As my boss (who just walked in on me looking at the article) says, “Embryonic stem cells, man, they’re capable of anything.”

 

Promiscuous genes, wherever you are…

Rotifers are awesome, right? Turns out they’re even more awesome than we thought!

New work from the lab of Matthew Meselson on bdelloid rotifers has shown that these little guys actually pick up DNA from other species and integrate it into their genome. Say what?

Dr. Meselson talked about it on Science Friday last week. Rotifers, which were discovered in some dust by the microscope dude around 1702 are a very interesting group of organisms. They can survive dessication, are very resistant to ionizing radiation/free radicals, and reproduce asexually. Other rotifer species can reproduce sexually, but bdelloid rotifers are all female. However, it has been questioned whether they are exclusively asexual. Unlike other asexual species, they’ve managed to stick around for as long as 100 million years- asexual species don’t tend to exist relatively long.

So what about this gene stealing? Rotifers can take up DNA from other species (including yeast, bacteria and plants) and integrate it into their genome, at the end of DNA segments just inside the telomeres. Thus, the new segments don’t seem to disrupt the native DNA, and are unlikely going to cause any frameshift problems. It’s unclear whether or not they actually use the foreign DNA (though some of the genes are expressed), and hard to tell how long any given bit of it has been incorporated into the rotifer DNA. However, some of the foreign segments have acquired introns, suggesting they’ve been there for quite a while.

How do they do it? When the rotifers are dessicated, their membranes (they’re multicellular though tiny) are broken up, as is the DNA inside the cells. This allows foreign DNA to work its way into the cells (it sounds like a passive process rather than an active uptake of the foreign DNA). As the rotifer is rehydrated, enzymes reconstruct the DNA and might use the foreign DNA as sort of “patches,” or perhaps it just gets incorporated because it’s there. Now the rotifers are all happy and healthy but with new “foreign” DNA!

Dr. Meselson goes on to say that they don’t yet know whether rotifers can take up DNA from other, dead rotifers- this would be sort of like sexual reproduction since there’d be exchange of genetic material. They plan to investigate first whether bdelloid rotifers can take up DNA from dead rotifers of the same species, then perhaps if they can exchange genes with live rotifers.

Additionally, they figure that this ability to survive while dessicated is not only the key to the DNA uptake, but also to their ability to survive extreme temperatures and radiation. This DNA patch/repair mechanism and its relationship with radiation tolerance could conceivably have impact on research in areas like cancer, aging, and neurodegenerative disease.

FMI: ScienceNews, GenomeWeb

 

I believe in miracles…and fruit?

Wow, have i been lazy. Sorry folks!

A couple things have caught my eye this week. The first comes straight outta…not so much Compton, but Brigham and Women’s/CHB/Harvard Med. In this week’s reserch bulletin was a blurb about some spinal cord injury research from the Yang Teng, MD, PhD. They were able to improve hind limb function in rats with a spinal cord lesion (at T13-L1) by rerouting a healthy peripheral nerve around the injury. Additionally, they showed that the improved function only comes if the rerouting is done within a week or so of the injury; by 4 weeks post-injury the recovery of limb function is very limited. There’s a more in-depth summary at News-Medical.net. This guy’s also done interesting work with neural stem cells and polymer scaffolding. Pretty great research with huge potential for clinical benefit.

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The other bit of awesomeness came to my attention courtesy of my roommate Yohan- Flavor Tripping. He spelled it with a “u” but dammit this is AMERICA. Heh. Anyway, this is awesome. So there are these little berries native to Western Africa called miracle fruit (Synsepalum dulcificum), the flesh of which contains a protein called miraculin that binds to the taste buds and causes sour and bitter tastes to be perceived as sweet. It lasts anywhere from half an hour to two hours. Thus, flavor tripping involves eating some miracle fruit and then trying a smorgasbord of different foods and beverages to see what they taste like. From the flavor tripping blog:

It’s like a candy Willy Wonka would have invented - after eating one stout beers taste like chocolate milkshakes, grapefruits taste like pixie sticks, cheeses taste like frosting, it will make even the crappiest tequila taste like lemonade (and strangely enough, it will make all wine taste like Manischewitz).

Such parties are apparently becoming quite vogue in SF and NYC. For the rest of us, you can buy the berries from those dudes, or from their source, the Miracle Fruit Man. The fruit isn’t shelf stable so it ain’t cheap, but you can buy seeds or even a grown plant as well.

I must try this.

Oh, and if you’re like me and you think Saturday Night Live is only about 20% funny these days- and thus not worth watching- check out the SNL Filter. She hasn’t given up on SNL, and watches it every week, posting her picks (with links!) for best and worst sketches. Check it out, and definitely watch the Japanese Office sketch.

 

BLF vs The Goog, and China

Sorry for the lack of updates, people. This has been quite the week between work and massive issues involving the rugby and a mouthy Frenchman.

Anyway, here’s another not-really-science related topic for y’all to check out. My current favorite Liberation Front happens to be the Billboard Liberation Front. I first heard of the BLF not that long ago when their AT&T/NSA work was on boingboing. Clever. Now they partnered with Austrian-based arts/tech collective monochrom to go after the almighty Google.

Google is sort of near and dear to my heart, or at least it owns about half of my brain via Gmail and Google calendar, documents, reader, and notebook. However, it’s been reported for 2+ years now that Google censors itself in China. There was a big stink at the time, and Google sorta said, “Yeah, we know, but some information is better than none, right?” Maybe? Regardless, as happens all too often, the cries died down over time- but the censorship goes on.

From the BLF blog post:

China’s heroic effort to protect their enormous internet market (162 million!) from an overload of useless information includes a moratorium on abrasive, ugly, and thoroughly misleading concepts such as truth. China’s Internet “Cultural Revolution” is made possible through support from America’s most leviathanesque behemoth, Google Inc. ‘Don’t be evil’ says Google’s PR department!

And so, during Eric Schmidt’s keynote address on China, the billboard guerrillas hit signs all over Google’s campus.

The Great Firewall of China (from the BLF Flickr account)

Pretty neat-o. The video is also on boingboing.

But wait- this gets deeper. According to a Pew Internet & American Life Project report, most Chinese people do in fact believe that the internet should be “managed or controlled.” Summary on Slashdot, full report here[pdf]. If you peruse the /. comments, there’s a lot of talk about how honest the survey was, which is a great question since it was an internet-based survey about internet censorship. Do you think maybe the PRC government had any influence on the questions and wording? Maybe? Of course it did, and it says as much in the 3rd paragraph of the report. That also explains why they talk about “management and control,” and avoid the word “censorship.” The gist of the report (which is really worth a gander) is that the Chinese tend to have an increasingly negative view of the internet (in terms of trustworthiness, effect on daily life, children, etc.) and feel that there should be management, particularly regarding pornography, violent content, spam, advertising and slander. However, 41% of respondents say political content should also be controlled. In addition, most (85%) feel that this management should be done by the government.

What gives? Is this purely a cultural thing? Is it the influence of the status quo? If you gave all these people a week to play on un- or really just much less-censored US internet, would they realize how “bad” they have it and change their minds? Is it even okay for us to push our ideals, even regarding free speech/anti-censorship on another culture?

It’s a lot to think about for sure.

 

I got the beer if you got the MRI.

One segment of this past week’s Science Friday was about recent research using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.  fMRI has generated a fair amount of press lately with all this mind reading business, but now someone’s putting it to real use. Jodi Gilman, who works with Dan Hommer at the NIAAA talked with Ira about their use of fMRI to measure the brain’s activity in response to alcohol.

Basically they got volunteers (”healthy social drinkers,” defined as about 3-4 drinks twice a week) to climb in there with an IV infusion[pdf] of ethanol solution (or saline), got their BAC up to 0.08% (in just 15 minutes!) and let the fun begin. Here, by “fun” i mean “showing them pictures of fearful and neutral facial expressions”. They found that with alcohol, subjects showed decreased sensitivity in brain regions involved in fear and avoidance when exposed to fearful faces, whereas activity increased in these regions under the control (saline) conditions. Jodi does say that the actual activity of the amygdala (anxiety) increased with alcohol even with neutral faces- they believe that the brain responds to the contrast in stimuli, and in fact the differences between the response to a neutral and fearful expression was not as pronounced with alcohol as with saline. In other words, subjects’ brains were less able to distinguish between normal and scary when they were somewhat intoxicated. That may explain the use of alcohol to reduce social anxiety, and also the impairment of judgment which leads people to do dumb things. So there’s your biological excuse for getting in that fight on St. Paddy’s Day.

They also saw the striatal areas of the brain light up with alcohol, and the level of activity corresponded with how intoxicated the subjects said they felt. That supports earlier findings and the general notion that alcohol lights up the brain’s reward system. Going further, they want to investigate the biphasic curve of alcohol effects (it’s non-linear with regard to increasing [EtOH]), look at drinkers with higher consumption, and see what happens when the investigators are drunk too. Okay, maybe not the last one. But she did say they had no trouble recruiting subjects, and they had fun doing it. Ya think?

Ira did raise a serious question though- clearly it could be useful to use this setup to see what happens in the brains of heavy drinkers and particularly alcoholics as compared to non-alcoholics, but that raises big, obvious ethical issues. Jodi gave the deflecting but correct answer; that’s a question for the IRB.

 

It’s a good point once again.

Check this out-
Dude works in a model shop. Dude sticks his finger in a propeller and loses the tip. Yikes. Dude’s cousin sends him magic pixie dust and Dude regrows the shit! Watch those videos, but be warned that they’re a little graphic.

The “pixie dust” is from this guy’s lab at Pitt. It’s really just powdered extracellular matrix prepared from pig bladder cells. The hypothesis is that the ECM stimulates cell growth and tissue repair rather than scar tissue formation. It’s really amazing, Dude’s finger looks pretty normal, he even got (presumably) his fingerprint back. They’re looking to start a clinical trial (in Argentina)- i suppose you can’t really publish “So I gave this stuff to my cuz and he totally grew his finger back check it out.”

Obviously this could be huge. I’m curious to see how it will work internally- the Argentinian patient has esophageal cancer, so they want to regrow the resected section of esophagus (good figures here), rather than just stretch the stomach lining which can have serious complications. I’m guessing it will work to some extent, though i bet they’ll have to go in and attach it to the stomach. Not sure what the patient is gonna do while the tissue is regrowing though. Maybe just a long hospital stay with either a feeding tube or IV nutrients.

What particularly impresses me is that the ECM seemed to encourage the growth of all cell types in the correct proportions- his finger looks fine and he has normal motion and feeling- and the speed with which it grew- 4 weeks until it closed up, 4 months until the fingernail and fingerprint came back. Wow. I wonder if this could be scaled up to a full limb?

 

cop-out shorties, the second

Haven’t come across any major stories this week that strike my blogging fancy, so here’s a couple interesting little tidbits:

If any of you were wondering which animal in the Kingdom has the biggest (if not most beautiful) peepers, we now know that distinction falls to the colossal squid. This bad boy (or girl) currently being defrosted and examined in New Zealand has eyes almost 11 inches in diameter- but they might have been closer to 16 inches when the guy was alive. Compare that to the eye of a blue whale, which is only about grapefruit-sized. Definitely watch the video on the Stuff-NZ webpage, if only for the crazy Kiwi accents and the “Eureka-penis” quote toward the end.

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Some clever dudes at Cal Berkeley got a proof-of-concept working for the transmission of medical imaging data using cell phones (ZDNet Emerging Tech). The idea is to decouple the detection, processing and visualization parts of medical imaging instruments. Thus, it’d be possible to have relatively cheap detection instruments (in this case using electrical impedance tomography, but X-ray and ultrasound are mentioned as well) that transmit data via cellular networks to a central processing/analysis facility, and then images and results could be sent back. This would in theory make medical imaging available to a vast number of people around the world who don’t have access to it today. Apparently, they were able to compress the data to just 6 KB which can certainly be sent very easily to and from any recent model phone. Pretty impressive, though i’m not sure how i’d feel about letting my DAD get all up ons me like that. Check out the video on Berkeley’s press release page.

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And one final thing- cheers to Federal District Judge Claudia Wilken, for kicking the Interior Department in the ass for stalling their decision on whether to give polar bears protection under the Endangered Species Act. The accusation (by those damn crazed dirty hippie environmentalists and Sen. Barbara Boxer) is that the Department is delaying the decision so as not to monkeywrench the sale of a $2.6 billion lease it held on a 46,000 square mile area of sea off northwestern Alaska. Oh government, you are so fucking shady. And oh Dana Perino, though you are kinda hot and were funny on Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, you are unbelievably full of shit. From the Times article:

At a news conference earlier this month, the White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said environmentalists were inappropriately trying to use existing environmental laws, like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act, to address climate change. The result, Ms. Perino said, would be a “regulatory train wreck.”

I mean, seriously. Seriously? Seriously. Now we can debate whether or not polar bears are truly endangered, but you’re really gonna tell me that it’s inappropriate to consider using the ESA to protect a species just because your administration refuses to truly acknowledge the problem that is potentially killing them off?! Ugh. How do you sleep at night?

 

In Vitro Meatro

One of the newer (more accurately, resurgent) and arguably crazier ideas out there now is growing meat in culture. William Saletan wrote a good (if overly optimistic) piece on it for Slate. Basically, we’ve come a long way in terms of three-dimensional tissue culture (or whatever you want to call it), growing actual tissue instead of just cell monolayers. It’s very hopeful research for patients on transplant lists and i would think burn victims as well. It has been done with bladders for a couple years, and there’s been good progress toward hearts and other organs. A lab at the University of Minnesota was even able to grow a beating rat heart earlier this year, though they used a prepped cadaver heart as a scaffold.

So why not grow meat? Clearly there are substantial environmental (and perhaps moral) advantages to not raising millions of real actual animals for food. PETA is even offering an in vitro meat prize, which is understandably wicked controversial within their ranks. Their conditions for the prize basically make the whole thing a bunch of crap (shocking, i know), which Daniel Engber explains, also in Slate.

Anywho, back to the concept as a whole. As i said, i think William Saletan is quite overoptimistic here. Sure, it will be possible to grow edible meat in a dish, probably relatively soon. People have been working on it for years. But when we do get it working, who’s going to buy it? First off, there’s the creepy/yuck factor- not necessarily be a turn-off for me, but certainly it would be for a whole lot of people (and understandably so). My main issue is cost. We know the price increase that comes with organic meat, but can you imagine what cultured meat would cost? I spend a few to several thousand dollars a month on supplies alone to keep a 5-person cell culture lab up and running, so to me the idea of in vitro meat being price-competitive with even organic meat is crazy. And i doubt that scaling it up to commercial volume would be much if any more cost-effective. Not to mention the fact that most cell culture requires animal sera and extracts in the growth media, so it’s not completely animal-free. But hey, people smarter than i am seem to think it can work. So i’m not trying to suggest that this isn’t worth pursuing, i just don’t expect to be mawing lab-grown Steak-umms anytime soon.

But wait, hold on. What if we just grew tons and tons (literally) of chicken muscle cells and made them into chicken nuggets? Bet you couldn’t tell them apart from McDonald’s. Anyone know a good patent lawyer? I think i’m on to something here.

 

I love the smell of…nevermind.

Apparently this was in the news a couple months ago, but today was the first i’ve heard of it (via the Slate Explainer podcast which i highly recommend).

The whole mad cow/CJD thing that’s been going around for years really brought to light the dangers of eating neural tissue of cows. Common sense and kuru tell you it’s not a good idea to eat people brains either (unless you’re already undead). But what about pig brains? Certainly lots of people (myself included) eat pig parts, (some worse than others). But what seems to be causing problems in slaughterhouse workers is not the eating of pig brains, but the inhaling of pig brains.

Yep. Turns out that many pork-processing plants use compressed air to blast brain tissue from pig heads, which is then made into paste that’s canned and shipped (and presumably eaten) abroad. Well, workers at slaughterhouses in Minnesota and Indiana have developed symptoms consistent with progressive inflammatory neuropathy (PIN): weakness, “heavy legs”, tingling and numbness, and worse. It’s being hypothesized that the neuropathy is autoimmune-related and caused by the inhalation of pig neural proteins aerosolized and inhaled during the brain blasting (MicrobiologyBytes links to a CDC report on the investigation). There’s a pretty thorough article in the Washington Post too.

Tasty.