Earthtweet

For those of you on Twitter, check it out: It's a tweetathon for Earth Day!

Here's the scoop:

With a new administration and a renewed focus on the environment, Earth Day '09 is bound to be momentous. Use the #earthtweet tag to share what you're doing to help celebrate Earth Day. Whether you're hosting an event, or coming up with a unique way to conserve, your earthtweets will inspire others to get involved.

Help spread the word by telling your followers about #earthweet and installing the widget on your blog. Each day, we'll be handing out prizes for earthtweets that we feel deserve some extra attention. If you'd like to donate a prize, @brighterplanet or @earthtweet us. Happy Earth Day, tweeps!

Weekly Dose of Cute

I admit I'm a sucker for cute, furry things. But even those of you who prefer the scaly creatures have to be won over by these little fur balls:


Photo credits: Jason Collier/SeaWorld Orlando, c/o Zooborns

These are some of SeaWorld Orlando's newest arrivals: a pack of four Asian Small-Clawed Otter pups. The Asian otters (Aonyx cinerea) are the smallest otter species in the world, reaching only 0.9 m (roughly 3 feet) from nose to tip of the tail when fully grown. Like other otters, they live in rivers, creeks and estuaries. These otters are unique in that they capture food with their paws instead of their mouths, and have specialized forepaws which have a human-like proficiency and coordination when feeding on the small animals that make up their diet.

These otters once lived all over Asia, but due to habitat loss and hunting, they are listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN Red List. SeaWorld breeds small-clawed otters as a part of the Association of Zoos and Aquarium’s Species Survival Plan. The goal of the program is to protect and preserve in zoos and aquariums animals that are threatened or endangered in the wild.

I, for one, would kill to be the biologists behind the scenes taking care of these four little tykes. I mean, LOOK AT THEM. And I dare you to do so without an "aw" escaping your lips.

This Week's Sci-Fi Worthy Parasite

So you're sitting there, reading the paper, when you notice your head's a bit itchy. Dry skin? Maybe. Irritated scalp? It's possible. Of course it could be something far more sinister...

It could be every parent and school teacher's worst nightmare: Lice.

Lice, the kind that is the bane of elementary schools everywhere, are a kind of wingless insect. They're members of the order Phthiraptera, which is classically broken into two groups, the chewing lice and the sucking lice - the latter is where our lovely head louse, Pediculus humanus, belongs.

Why did I pick the measly little louse for my Sci-Fi worthy parasite?

Well, first off, they're vectors for a variety of terrible diseases that you just don't want to think about like Typhus or Relapsing Fever, and they're epidemic. Somewhere between 6-12 million people, mainly children, are treated annually for head lice in the United States alone. But, to be honest, that's not why I picked them.

I picked them because of a new study published in Genome Research which found that the sucking lice are unlike any other animal on the planet. In fact, you might even call them almost alien.

That's because instead of having one chromosome in their mitochondrial genome, they have 18 minichromosomes. While multiple mitochondrial minichromosomes have been found in plants and protists, this is the first report of an animal having highly fragmented mitochondrial DNA structure. And it's found in all the species of sucking lice they tested, but not in the closely related chewing lice. How did this fragmented DNA evolve? There aren't any transitional lice - none that have partially fragmented mitochondrial genomes, only not at all and completely broken apart. What purpose does it serve to have lots of little gene packages instead of one? It's a real science mystery, one which makes the common louse into a nifty, Sci-Fi enigma.

That, and I wanted to make your head itch. Don't pretend like you haven't scratched it at least once while reading this - you know you did.


Shao, R., Kirkness, E.F., & Barker, S.C. (2009). The single mitochondrial chromosome typical of animals has evolved into 18 minichromosomes in the human body louse, Pediculus humanus Genome Research DOI: 10.1101/gr.083188.108.

13 yr old dad cuckolded!

Remember the story I wrote about a kid who was a dad at 13 yrs old?

Little Alfie was supposedly only 12 when he had sex for the first time, unprotected, with his 15 yr old girlfriend Chantelle Steadman. At the time, she told him and the news that he was the only person she'd slept with.

Yeah, well it turns out he's not the father, according to a DNA test.

Apparently, she's had LOTS of sex. Around half a dozen boys came forward saying they'd slept with her, and after she told her 17 yr old half sister about her behavior, Alfie was pressured to take a paternity test. The results proved he was not the father of her seven-week-old daughter named Maisie Roxanne. Alfie is reportedly crushed, having fallen in love with little Maisie who he presumed to be his daughter.

What's even more interesting, to me, is that while his apparent fatherhood was splashed all over the news headlines, his lack of fatherhood barely gets 70 words in the paper. Come on, where's the big retraction saying they were wrong? Not to mention, apparently, her mother pressured her to lie about being a virgin except for Alfie. I mean, where's the press now?

Sick. It's all just sick and twisted. Media included. Sick.


Hat tip, with more info from here

Biocontrol of Biocontrol?

One of the most controversial ideas in conservation is that of Biocontrol. The goal is to control invasive species or damaging pests by introducing predators/diseases/etc which kill them. Some attempts at biocontrol have been hugely successful. But others have been disastrous, like the introduction of Cane Toads.

Cane Toads (Bufo marinus) were introduced to a lot of places from 1840-1940 to attempt to control agricultural pests.

Cane Toad extent
both native (blue)
and introduced (red)

They were first unsuccessfully introduced into Jamaica to control the rat population. Then, a seemingly successful introduction to Puerto Rico to control the sugarcane pest Phyllophaga spp. (white-grub) led to introductions all over the world, including Florida, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Ogasawara and Ryukyu Islands of Japan, most Caribbean islands and many Pacific islands like Hawaii and Fiji. It is their introduction to Australia, however, that is seen as the best example of what can go wrong with biocontrol.

The Cane Toad

In Australia, Cane Toads were brought in to control the native Cane Beetle (Dermolepida albohirtum) - which they failed to do. Instead of eating the beetles, the toads seemed to enjoy eating anything and everything else they could get their mouths around. And weighing in at 3-5 lbs and averaging 6" long, they have a big mouth. Cane Toads have been seen feeding on everything from insects to small mammals, birds and snakes. Cane Toad predation has been fingered as the greatest risk to native biodiversity on Australia. And they don't just hurt what they eat. They have specialized poison glands for defense, and native foxes, reptiles and other predators are dying off from trying to eat the toxic toads. And the toads are spreading. In the 70 years since introduction, Cane Toads have spread to over four times the area they were introduced to, and migrating outward more each year. Populations have grown from a few thousand to hundreds of millions of toads.

The spread throughout Australia

It's a biological nightmare. An invasive species which reproduces quickly, outcompetes native fauna, is destroying the Australian ecosystem, and has few natural predators. Australian scientists have been trying desperately to find a solution to the growing problem these toads cause.

Now biologists are suggesting that the solution might just be, go figure, biocontrol. But this time they want to use a native species. It turns out Australian Meat Ants (Iridomyrmex purpureus), which are nasty little buggers that kill and eat small animals, could be a solution to the outbreak of Cane Toads. That's because new research has found that the invasive toads are more susceptible to the ants than the native amphibians.

Biocontrol, take 2?

The Cane Toads, it seems, have a few things working against them when it comes to ant predation. Firstly, they're active during the day which is when the ants are out to feed. The native species hide and sleep, keeping them out of the ants' way. Secondly, the Cane Toads don't seem to realize the threat, and are more likely than the native species to go near the ants. Lastly, the Cane Toads respond differently than the native species when attacked, moving away from the predator more slowly and giving the ants more opportunity to move in for the kill. Because they're toxic, researchers reasoned, they're not used to running from a threat - they generally sit there and have the predator give up. So a predator which doesn't care about the toxin and attacks anyhow is something new to the Cane Toads, something they have little defense against.

Researchers are hopeful that boosting the ant populations could be a real solution to the Cane Toads. However, they're cautious to endorse such a plan just yet. The ants are generalists, and when given the chance, attack native species at the same rate as the invasive toads. So increasing their numbers could do more harm than good. However, the fact that the Cane Toads are so much more susceptible to attack is promising. More research will focus on how to increase ant populations and how those increases actually affect native fauna. Hopefully, this new biocontrol will far outperform the last one, and won't just backfire, making two problematic biocontrol species instead of one.

UPDATE: Check out a video about this from the National Geographic Channel!



Georgia Ward-Fear, & et al (2009). Maladaptive traits in invasive species: in Australia, cane toads are more vulnerable to predatory ants than are native frogs Functional Ecology DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2435.2009.01556.x

Watching HIV spread from cell to cell

Things like this just turn on my nerd switch.

A new study, published in Science, used amazing molecular techniques to film HIV spreading from one cell to another.

See for yourself:


The breakthrough footage was obtained by creating a molecular clone of HIV which included fluorescent genetic code that glows green under blue light. In the video, you can see the infected T-cell interact and infect a healthy one by creating what is called a virological synapse - which is a fancy word for a tunnel of sorts between the two cells.

Before the video, scientists didn't know that the virus particles moved primarily through that kind of cell to cell connection. The synapses had been discovered in 2004, but it was still believed the primary means of transmission was through freely circulating viruses. Thus current searches for cures focus on attacking when HIV is outside of cells - which, in light of this footage, is doomed to be fail to stop the spread of the infection. It explains why our vaccine attempts, which target the viruses themselves, haven't succeeded, as the virus stays protected while spreading by its host cells. The diverse team from UC Davis and Mount Sinai School of Medicine hope that the new knowledge could open up novel treatments for the virulent disease. The new vaccines could target the synapses themselves, or proteins required to form them. This discovery could prove key to finally getting ahead of a pathogen which has killed over 25 million people worldwide and currently infects somewhere around 35 million people.



Hubner, W., McNerney, G., Chen, P., Dale, B., Gordon, R., Chuang, F., Li, X., Asmuth, D., Huser, T., & Chen, B. (2009). Quantitative 3D Video Microscopy of HIV Transfer Across T Cell Virological Synapses Science, 323 (5922), 1743-1747 DOI: 10.1126/science.1167525

How big things relate to sex, stress and testosterone

Males—now this might shock you—generally spend a lot of time and effort trying to convince females they're worth sleeping with. Whether it means building an ornate bower, shaking their tail feathers, or buying the biggest diamond ring, men put a lot of work into getting laid. And why do they go to such ridiculous and even dangerous lengths? Well, because we females demand it.

Sexual selection is a process first coined by Darwin explaining how mate choice could drive evolutionary changes. Females pick guys that they think have the best package—of DNA, that is. The gals pick guys whose genes are most likely to create good offspring. In the end, it all comes down to which men's kids will survive and create the most grandkids. When physical features are important, the decision is easy: it's visible. If size matters, then go for the biggest guy, etc. But what about things you can't directly see, like a man's resistance to disease or parasites? How to females pick the healthiest males without being able to count the parasites on them or see the viruses in their blood? And how come females in many species choose seemingly negative traits (at least when it comes to survival), like ridiculously large, colorful peacock tails?

Enter biologist Amotz Zahavi and what has become known as the Handicap Principle. The hypothesis is that certain traits, because they are potentially damaging (like bright colors = more likely to be eaten) or simply energetically expensive (time and effort required for men to accrue money to spend on expensive jewelry), are honest signals of a male's overall health and genetic fitness. If an individual is plagued with parasites or disease, they have to devote energy to fighting those instead of creating the sexy traits females look for, be it ornate coloring or expensive clothes. Those that are infected or otherwise poor examples of their species simply aren't able to produce the same looks/behavior/etc that the healthy men can. Females, thus, look for signals that are hard to fake, so they get a real indicator of a man's worth.

But how exactly does it work? What interplay occurs in the body which keeps a signal honest? A lot of research has looked into answering those questions. Signals have to be costly, particularly to immune function, otherwise less fit males would just lie to get some. In 1992, Ivar Folstadand Andrew John Karter¹ proposed that testosterone-driven signals could reliably confer quality because testosterone, while it enhances many "male" qualities, damages the immune system. Any ornament or signal derived from high testosterone levels could only be produced by males who have strong, healthy immune systems to begin with. While we might be able to inject hormones and steroids to bulk up now, muscle mass in prehistoric man was probably a pretty honest indicator of his genes which made him a healthy man, free of disease, who can take care of and feed his kids—and pass those traits to his sons. But research has waffled on testosterone's role, and not all studies seem to find a clear link between the hormone and successful sexual signals.

Now Dr.Gary R. Bortolotti and his team might have figured out why testosterone doesn't explain everything. The key, as their new research published in PLoS ONE highlights, is that there's more to the picture. They found a complex interplay between testosterone and stress chemicals like cortisol².

In life, it's rarely just one thing you have to worry about. Poor nutrition, the threat of predation, environmental conditions and even other toxins have a huge impact on our health, too. When we're stressed, our bodies release specialized hormones called glucocorticoids, that help us deal with bad situations. While they help in short term situations (like increasing blood flow when trying to flee from a hungry bear), they damage the immune system with prolonged exposure, and thus would also fit the conditions for keeping sexual signals honest, just like testosterone.

Bortolotti and his colleagues decided to look directly at the interplay between sexual signals, stress hormone levels, testosterone levels, and parasite loads in the red grouse Lagopus lagopus scoticus. They manipulated testosterone and parasite levels to see how they affected the large, red combs atop their heads which females are attracted to. Since they were wild animals, they didn't control their stressors, and simply let those occur naturally. At the end, they measures parasite loads, comb area, testosterone levels, and levels of corticosterone, a stress hormone, in their feathers.

They found that those they'd given testosterone boosts to had significantly bigger combs than those they didn't. Those they infected with parasites had smaller combs than those they didn't in the ones who didn't get extra testosterone boosts. But most interestingly, they found that even when the other factors were taken into account, there existed a significant, strong correlation between corticosterone levels and parasite loads—in short, those that were stressed had more parasites. Similarly, those that were stressed had smaller combs, even in the males who had been given testosterone boosts. In fact, stress explained over 40% of the variation within the high-testosterone group, where parasite loads didn't factor in much at all. So the stress level impacted the grouse's sexual signal, even when they were experimentally given a signal booster which overpowered parasite-driven effects.

This means that while testosterone and infection levels impact sexual signals, stress, too, has a huge impact. Also, the corticosterone levels factored into how many parasites were on the grouse at the end of the study, suggesting it has a large role in susceptibility to infection in the first place. So stress levels affect both health and sexual signaling, even independent of each other's interplay.

And, these results help explain why some studies found trouble teasing out the connection between testosterone and sexual signals. Without controlling for levels of stress, any study looking at ornamentation and parasitic infection is missing a huge part of the puzzle. With this information, we can better understand the subtleties behind the signals that males use to attract their mates, and the ones females use to judge them.

And, of course, if you're a male trying to convince a female you're worth it, you might want to keep the stress in your life as low as possible. We don't know all of the sexual signals that occur between men and women, but it's likely that if stress negatively impacts the Red Grouse's signal, it negatively impacts whatever testosterone-related cues we use to determine a man's genetic fitness. At least it might help more than covering yourself in cheap cologne or pretending you're the second cousin of Brad Pitt.

1.Folstad, I., & Karter, A. (1992). Parasites, Bright Males, and the Immunocompetence Handicap The American Naturalist, 139 (3) DOI: 10.1086/285346
2.Bortolotti, G., Mougeot, F., Martinez-Padilla, J., Webster, L., & Piertney, S. (2009). Physiological Stress Mediates the Honesty of Social Signals PLoS ONE, 4 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004983

Self-healing car paint? Ok, I'm in.

Who hasn't walked to their car after getting groceries or the like and suddenly found a nice, large scratch where you're fairly sure there wasn't one before? Then you think do you spend $50 on some random infomercial product claiming to fix scratches of every color, get the thing repainted, or just live with it? In my case, of course, the third is the obvious option. What can I say? I'm cheap, and my car is instantly recognizable for its terrible paint job (let me tell you, black + Florida weather = bad idea).

But what if my car's paint could fix itself? That would be worth dropping a huge wad of cash on. And it turns out that scientists aren't too far off from a self-healing paint. And the best part? All it would require to heal itself is sunlight.

A study, published in Science, shows that scientists are just a step or two away from creating the magical paint. The researchers started with polyurethane - a major consituent of current paints and other high-performance materials. They then added an oxetane-substituted chitosan, a compound similar to the chitin which makes up the exoskeleton of arthropods like lobsters and crabs. When the special compound mix is scratched, the oxetane, which is a ring, is broken. If ultraviolet light then strikes the mix, the chitosan is stimulated to bond with the broken ring, eventually dragging the two sides back together, thus eliminating the scratch. The image to the right shows photos of the process in action. The whole process, according to the researchers, could take as little as an hour to completely fix minor scratches.

The special reaction between the oxetane and the chitosan only occurs where the paint is damaged, so it won't be changing the look of the paint in any other ways. The scientists are hopeful that a film like the one they tested could one day be used for a variety of uses, adding pigment to create car paint just being one of them. Of course, more testing and tweaking is required before the products could be marketed. Also, because its a derivative of chitin, it's quite green compared to other paints.

*sigh* Since they obviously will need people to test out these products, I guess I could be kind enough to do my part and subject my poor abused car to being a test subject. It could REALLY use a new paint job... just ask anyone whose seen it. It's not a pretty sight.

Ghosh, B., & Urban, M. (2009). Self-Repairing Oxetane-Substituted Chitosan Polyurethane Networks Science, 323 (5920), 1458-1460 DOI: 10.1126/science.1167391

Oh my.

I'd forgotten how unbelievably awesome Isabella Rossellini's Green Pornos were. And, what do you know - I find out they're doing new ones, premiering April 1st, focused on sea creatures!

Oh, yeah, I'll be sharing as soon as I can.

Anyhow, here's an oldie but goodie:

(Not Safe for... well, I dunno. It's just dirty. But it's not TECHNICALLY not safe for work or kids...)



PS You MUST take the quiz to see what kind of green porno star you are. It has the best questions EVER. Like "I always arrive with a) Flowers or b) Birth Control"

For those who are now dying to know, here are my results:

Weekly Dose of Cute

If Dracula started out this cute, I bet people wouldn't have wanted to put a stake through his heart:





Albeit these aren't blood-suckers... They're baby fruit bats. Fruit bats, sometimes called Mega Bats or Flying Foxes, actually range in size depending on species, but can get to as large as 16 inches tall with a 5 foot wingspan. As the name implies, they eat fruit and nectar, and are major seed distributors and pollinators where they live.

How do I say it... oh yeah. I WANT ONE.

This Just In: Dragons Slay Man

Two Komodo Dragons have been blamed for killing a man at Loh Sriaya, in eastern Indonesia's Komodo National Park.

Police and witnesses say that 31 yr old fisherman Muhamad Anwar was attacked by the duet of immense lizards waiting below minutes after he fell out of a tree on Monday. He was trespassing on forbidden park lands in search of fruit when he was surrounded and eventually killed. He bled profusely from bites to his hands, legs, neck and body. He died soon after transport to a clinic.

While there are only a few thousand left in the wild, dragon attacks have increased in recent years, with several attacks occurring in the past few months. Just two years ago, an 8 yr old boy was killed, the first death to have occurred in over thirty years. Natives blamed the attack on environmentalists who banned goat sacrifices, thus causing the Komodo dragons to be denied their usual meals and forcing them to wander into human territories for food. Recent attacks have targeted park rangers and tourists who frequent the protected areas where dragons are found.

Komodo Dragons (Varanus komodoensis) are the largest living lizards and can grow to a massive ten feet long and weigh as much as an adult human. Their teeth are razor sharp, and they are known for a bite that is deadly by more than the damage it inflicts. Komodo's saliva contains 57 different known bacteria strains, and often areas that are wounded get badly infected and must be amputated. There is also some speculation that dragons are venomous, as if the virulent bacteria aren't damaging enough on their own.

Dragons are currently vulnerable according to the IUCN Red List, as habitat loss, poaching, loss of prey and a lack of mates have decimated populations. It's been estimated that although there are thousands of dragons in the wild, there are only 350 or so breeding females left. Here's an interesting fact: in captivity, dragons have been shown to be capable of parthenogenesis, or virgin births. Females who have never encountered a male can give birth to young. They also seem capable of "play", a behavior uncommon in reptiles.

This Week's Sci-Fi Worthy Parasite

If you've ever watched a National Geographic or Discovery Channel special on the deep sea, you know just about everything that lives in the dark part of the ocean is a Sci-Fi writers dream. The species are so diverse and strange that even the best thought-out aliens hardly hold a candle to the bizarre life that lives in the deep. They have fish with lighted lures, strange, colorless creatures, octopuses that resemble elephants, and, of course, this week's parasite.

The Cookie Cutter Shark, Isistius brasiliensis

Imagine you're in the deep. You look above you, and contrasting the very, very slight glow from above you see a small fish. What a tasty little morsel, you think, and you swim closer to investigate your lunch. Suddenly, the little fish disappears, and is replaced by one ten times its size, which quickly grabs a hold of you, rips out a piece of flesh, then disappears into the deep darkness.

You've just met the cookie cutter shark. They're malicious looking creatures with a unique and incredible method of parasitism.

Bioluminescent camouflage

Cookie cutter sharks aren't big fish by any stretch of the imagination (roughly 20" at max), but they pretend to be smaller ones to attract their host. Their undersides are bioluminescent except for a small patch. When viewed from below, the shark looks like it's much smaller than it actually is, attracting predatory fish and even marine mammals to come closer for an easy meal. That's when the shark attacks.

Cookie Cutter Scars

You see, the little guy is far too slow to catch its hosts on its own - it has to lure them closer. Once within range, the sharks unique lips act like a suction cup affixing its mouth to the side of its meal. With a quick, spinning action, its razor-sharp circular jaw slices out a plug of flesh, much like a cookie cutter cutting through dough. The parasite then swims away, leaving the wounded host confused and scarred.

Cookie cutter sharks don't just attack fish. They're well known for taking plugs out of marine mammals, and even non-marine ones. That's right - they DO attack humans. The sharks have been pests for the navy and deep-sea vessels for awhile, taking plugs out of neoprene covers and even reportedly shutting down a submarine by removing some critical rubber piece. But in March, Mike Spalding, a Hawaiian swimmer, was reportedly bitten by a cookie-cutter shark while attempting to swim across Alenuihaha Channel. The shark in question took a 5.5 cm long and 6.7 cm wide chunk out of his lower calf.

Mansour Mohamadzadeh is my god.

For anyone who knows me well, you know there are only 2 things that truly terrify me. The first is moths. They're just creepy. The second, and more logical, is needles. I am a big baby when it comes to shots. I've passed out after getting them. I need someone to hold my hand and talk me through them. Getting novocaine in my foot for minor surgery is the WORST experience of my life. I still have nightmares about the 4" long needle sticking out of my heel, slowly pumping the burning liquid into my flesh for over a minute while I had to sit perfectly still, watching in horror...

Say sayonara to these evil things!

Anyhow, this is why Mansour Mohamadzadeh is my god. He's a researcher from Northwestern University who is developing a new way to deliver vaccines - one that's needle-free. Soon enough getting vaccinated may be as easy as drinking a yogurt smoothie.

That's because Mohamadzadeh's revolutionary technology utilizes probiotics, the healthy bacteria found in dairy products, to carry the vaccine. So far a pre-clinical study has successfully used the method to create immunity to Anthrax exposure, with the response even better than the injected version. And his reasoning runs deeper than just making vaccinations more appealing to babies like me. Delivering vaccines to the gut instead of the muscular tissue allows the body to launch a full-scale immune response needed for complete and successful vaccination.

Vaccines work because of how our immune system responds to invading material. All disease agents are unique on the outside. They express different molecules for all kinds of functions, just like our own cells do. Specialized immune cells find foreign compounds, called antigens, and memorize them. They then tell other cells to attack and destroy anything that carries those antigens. After all the invaders have been destroyed, our immune system stores the memorized antigens for later - that way if the same infection occurs, our response is faster and more efficient.

The dendritic cell (green) engulfs the lactobacilli (small blue dots)
which release the vaccine. The dendritic cells will induce the
proliferation and the activation of other immune cells which will
eliminate the infected cells and store the antigen for later infections.

Vaccines take advantage of this immune behavior by providing the antigens for something without putting live, harmful agents into the body. Often, vaccines carry dead bacteria or viruses or proteins from them, so that the immune cells can identify and memorize them. Once the antigens are stored, an infection by the living form of the disease is unable to evade the immune response.

The bigger and better the immune response to something, the higher the chance that we'll be immune in the future. That's why the Northwestern team wants to target the stomach. The small intestine launches far more intense immune reactions than muscles do because that's where our body is used to having to fight. It's far more common in nature for us to end up with invaders in our gut than in our muscles simply because that's where our body is exposed to the outside world through eating. However, until now, most vaccine proteins couldn't make it past the digestive juices in the stomach. Mohamadzadeh solved this problem by putting the antigens in lactobacillus bacteria, which protect them until they reach their target.

Mohamadzadeh's vaccine technology isn't limited to Anthrax and bacterial diseases. He currently is developing one for breast cancer using the Her2/neu antigen, a protein highly produced by breast tumor cells, to train the immune system to destroy any cells producing Her2/neu. He also is developing a "multi-tasking" cancer vaccine against breast, colon and pancreatic cancer that soon will be tested in mouse models. His methods can be used for just about every vaccine we currently use, from Hepatitis to the Flu. Eventually, Mohamadzadeh hopes this technology can be used for a vaccine against HIV and other fatal diseases.

Personally, I just want them to hurry up and develop these probiotics for the basics. If I can get vaccinated without a needle, I'll be like a kid in a candy store. I don't care how gross the drink is - you can sign me up right now!


Source

An homage to the past

I woke up this morning feeling somehow lighter, freer. The air smelled sweet and the sun was shining - a beautiful day in paradise. But that was not the cause of my elated mood - it's always nice here in Florida. No, something was different. Something had changed.






Oh, that's right. I'd CUT OFF ALL MY HAIR.


It's amazing how good you feel waking up to tangle-free locks first thing in the morning. Having had my hair long for years now, I just took for granted that every morning had to start with a battle with the rat's nest just to look like I own a comb. Truth is, as good as it looked when it behaved, a part of me hated my long, beautiful hair. It was a hassle. Now, I am free.

But part of me will miss my golden mane. So here is my homage to the 11" I donated to Locks of Love:

Gonna need a new phrase... damned pink elephants

My current response to "Duke's gonna win the NCAA Championship" would probably have been "sure, they're going to beat a team of Pink Elephants." Get it? Because pink elephants are imaginary, a fabrication of deluded minds - like Duke's chance of making it to the title game.

Well, crap, I'm gonna have to find a new colloquialism - because there are pink elephants.

A non-imaginary pink elephant

The BBC reports that a baby pink elephant has been sighted in Botswana. The youngster was amongst a large herd in the Okavango Delta, made famous in the BBC series Planet Earth. In the photographer's ten years studying these elephants, this is the first time he'd ever seen a pink one.

The coloration is presumed to be a form of albinism, similar to the pink dolphin sighted in Louisana. There are different types of albinism with varying degrees of complications. The condition can be very harsh, particularly for animals exposed to the high levels of constant sun like in Africa. However, the team that spotted the little guy say that he seems to be adapting to his condition. The baby walks in his mother's shadow more than others, and being in the delta is already a boost to its survival chances. Elephants are known for their intelligence, so it's possible this rosy individual will beat the odds.

So, I guess in the future I'm going to have to find some other creature to showcase my sarcasm. You know, more like "I'm sure when Pittsburgh wins the National Championship they'll celebrate by ice skating in hell." Crap - if Dante's right, that one won't do either. How about when pigs fly? Pigs haven't developed any wings yet, have they?

Hey Look - I can be funnier!

I wouldn't say that I'm the funniest person I know - unless, of course, people laughing at you counts as being 'funny'. I'm one of those people who occasionally has good moments, but really, I'm funniest when I don't intend to be. Like that one time I was making fun of a friend's over-exposed cleavage by shouting in a WalMart "Look out folks! She's gonna blow!" only to turn around and see the look of pure horror on the extremely pregnant woman behind me who presumed I was talking about her. I find that I often say things that sound bad out of context.*

Well maybe I can learn to be properly funny. Apparently a UK researcher has identified 8 patterns which are the basis of all humor regardless of culture, civilization or personal taste. Clarke lists the patterns that are active in humour as positive repetition, division, completion, translation, applicative and qualitative recontextualization, opposition and scale. Somehow, those just don't sound that funny. But seeing as he looked at over ten thousand instances of humor, I'll just have to assume he's on to something.

Or on something.

See that? I used qualitative recontexualization and opposition, as I changed the context of the two words "on" and "something" and turned them from something good to something bad. I'm getting better at this already.

Anyhow, his e-book is available free for 30 days, for those of you anxious to delve into the science of funny. His theory will be published later this year. It's pretty heady, so it's not for the faint of interest. It's just one of his many publications on humor and pattern recognition which shows the depth and breadth of his theory.

So watch out - I'm going to digest this stuff and put it into action and get funnier. You just wait and see.

**Update** Apparently, the dense material was far over most people's heads, and so the author had to try and explain what it all means a little more clearly. Good luck with that - I still just don't get it.

*Heck, they often sound bad in context. I'm sure if you all ask Allie she can give you plenty of good examples...

You're scared - I can smell it.

In January, scientists published a paper which found that women's brains reacted differently to sweat from aroused men. This another study showing the mounting evidence that human beings, although unconsciously, communicate information via olfactory cues that our brains are able to interpret. Now another study has shown that such olfactory cues can actually affect our interpretation of other people. The study, published in Psychological Science, has found that women who smelled 'fearful sweat' actually perceived neutral facial expressions as more fearful.

People have thrown around the phrase to "smell" fear for centuries. Some attribute the phenomenon of animals "smelling" fear to an acute ability to read body language or even hear a racing heartbeat, not to an actual olfactory cue. However, there is reason to believe that scent cues do exist. When human beings are scared, they increase production in their apocrine glands. These are the specialized sweat glands which produce body odor. When we're strongly stimulated (sexually, emotionally), the glands produce chemicals that are broken down by bacteria, which we smell as body odor. Some have suggested that this response could reveal the intensity of emotion, but not specific details about which emotion. It's also possible that we produce pheromones which are detectable by other members of our own species, but these are hard to isolate and thus tough to show scientifically.

The researchers from Rice University have been looking at the effects of scent cues in sweat for years. In 2006, they found that exposing women to sweat produced by fearful men enhanced their cognitive performance on a set of tests. Now, they sought to determine if the fear chemosignals could affect how we perceive the world around us.

The idea that we might be able to pick up on fearful cues in human sweat isn't new. In 2002, researchers from the University of Vienna found that women could distinguish and identify the scent of "fear" sweat from neutral sweat and scent controls when told to rate them by intensity, pleasantness, and how much it smelled like "sex", "aggression" or "fear". However, no study has shown whether these cues influence our own perceptions of fear in others. In other words, are we more likely to think someone is afraid if we can smell fear?

Results from the second experiment: (a) proportion of faces identified
as fearful as a function of morphing level and olfactory condition and
(b) the difference between the observed and predicted proportion of
Level 4 morphs identified as fearful in each olfactory condition. The
dotted line in (a) is the sigmoidal curve fit for the control condition.
The differences plotted in (b) were calculated from the observed values
highlighted by the dotted ellipse and the predicted value shown by the
fitted curve. Error bars represent the standard errors of the means. The
asterisk indicates a significant difference between conditions, p < .05.

In two separate experiments, Rice researchers had men watch scary movies with absorbent pads under their arms to capture the 'smell of fear', or fearful sweat. Afterwards, women were shown faces that morphed from happy to neutral, and finally to fearful expressions while smelling neutral and fearful sweats. They were asked to ID the faces as "happy" or "fearful". When smelling the fearful sweat, the participants interpreted the faces as more fearful when the expressions were ambiguous or neutral, but not when the faces were clearly happy. Thus the chemosignals in the men's fearful sweat modulated the women's visual emotional perception - the first time such an effect has been documented.

This means that scent might help us understand each other when our other senses are unsure of the situation. Evolutionarily, this makes sense. Being able to pick up on someone's fear in a situation when visual cues are ambiguous could give someone the edge in avoiding danger. Future research will look into exactly how we process the smell of fear and which compounds might be involved in the emotional response. I think it would be particularly interesting to see if women are affected the same way by aggressive or sexual sweat - that is, do we think faces look angrier when smelling angry sweat or think a person is into us when smelling sexual sweat. At any rate, studies like this one are opening our eyes - and our noses - to the complex world of olfactory signaling in humans. Who knows? Perhaps, in the future, we will be able to pick our scent signals like we do perfume.


Zhou, W., & Chen, D. (2009). Fear-Related Chemosignals Modulate Recognition of Fear in Ambiguous Facial Expressions Psychological Science, 20 (2), 177-183 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02263.x

Weekly Dose of Cute

After watching the video over at Southern Fried Science with the itty-bitty tiger shark babies, I couldn't help but make this week's dose of cute some wittle-baby sharks:


Virgin-borne hammerhead
(parthenogenesis plus cuteness = super cool)


Smallest ever baby whale shark


Baby bamboo shark

While their parents might be the top of the food chain, baby sharks are down at the bottom. Just ask this sea lion:


Baby shark snack, c/o NatureFocused.com
Sharks reproduce relatively slowly, like people and other large species. With shark populations in decline due to overfishing and loss of prey species, it's more important than ever for us to understand the reproductive biology and behavior of these menacing ocean goers. While Hollywood makes them out to be killers, the truth is that they're not that interested in eating us - we're a bit bony for their taste, without all the deliciousness of a fatty fish or seal. Most shark attacks are considered 'accidents', where the shark mistakes a human for a more popular prey item, or 'provoked', like when people feel an unavoidable urge to touch sleeping sharks - and even still they're incredibly rare. You're more likely to be killed by a falling coconut than a shark. And studies have shown that a lack of these top predators has detrimental effects on commercially and ecologically important species.

Besides, the little ones are so cute, aren't they?

What do noisy oceans mean for fish?

Picture this: It's Monday morning, and you wake up groggy to your alarm because the incessant traffic and blaring of truck horns from the local highway kept you from getting a good nights' sleep. You'd go back to sleep, but your spouse is already up watching TV and that annoying anchor for the 6 AM news is peppily rambling about how great his week abroad in Hawaii was - like an image of him in a speedo is what you need in your head first thing.

You hop in the shower, if only to drown out the television, and try and remember what exactly it was that you were supposed to do before work this morning over the rush of the water. But you can't focus - you're exhausted and unable to think clearly. Suddenly, the smoke detector goes off because your breakfast is burning, and in the momentary panicked response to the high pitched siren invading your thoughts, you run naked out of the house - just as the local school bus happens to be coming down the street. Alert to the rising humiliation, you rush back inside, and end up fiddling with the detector for ten minutes trying to take out the battery while you can feel the siren resonating in your bones and bringing on a terrible headache you know won't go away easily. All this, you think, and you just started your day.

What ruined your morning? Noise. All kinds of different, invasive noises - the cars at night, the alarm, the TV, the shower, the siren - all these noises affected your ability to sleep, think and focus. The ambient noise can take a toll on your mind and body, let alone the immediate effects of a loud, inescapable sound like the smoke detector. Noise is stressful; it's no wonder we like to vacation in the quiet, remote places that still exist.

Unfortunately, the fish in our oceans don't have that luxury. Unlike we might think, our oceans are a hotbed of noisy activity. Shrimp snap their claws, dolphins whistle and click, and a variety of animals make strange and unique noises to hunt and communicate. However, as humans began to conquer the seas, a new set of sounds came into play. Navy sonar, boat engines and a host of other human activities create quite a ruckus underwater. But how much do our noises impact the ocean's creatures? That question is exactly what Arthur Popper and Mardi Hastings sought to answer in their recent review article "The effects of human-generated sound on fish" published this month in Integrative Zoology.

They looked at the research to date on how anthropogenic (human-created) sound affects fish - slim pickings. There haven't been too many good, detailed studies which look at how fish respond to sounds. Many simply try to find threshold hearing levels under quiet conditions. But the ocean is never quiet, and lab-generated thresholds tell us little about how noises affect behavior or health in the real ocean. We have looked at it in marine mammals - and the results aren't promising - but somehow the less cute and cuddly 'sea kittens' (as PETA would say) just haven't been researched well. What we do know is damning.

The first and most obvious effect of sound on fish is the affects of loud, intense blasts like those caused by sonar or seismic exploration. If a sound is loud enough, the pressure created by its wave can damage tissues - this can happen to people on land, not just fish in the oceans. In general, though, we don't create blasts loud enough to rupture vessels and cause hemorrhaging in our own habitats. Sonar and seismic activity have been blamed for fish kills and marine mammal standings all over the world.

But death isn't the only, or necessarily even major, affect of these sounds. Studies have found that loud noises from seismic guns can damage the hearing physiology of fish far enough away to survive, even render them deaf, if only temporarily. If species use sound to warn of approaching predators or to search for mates, the ecological effects of these sounds could be substantial at a much larger radius than the imminent kill zones.

It's not just the ecology we have to think about - we are commercially harmed by these effects. Studies have shown that the catch for commercial species like haddock and cod following seismic exploration decreased dramatically, and didn't rebound for almost a week. Researchers have observed fish actively avoiding loud noises, which might have big impacts on fishing in areas near noisy ports or naval test sites.

Larval fish are especially vulnerable. Their soft, small bodies don't withstand the same levels of sound that the adults do. Some studies have found increased mortality in fry exposed to loud noises, but overall there is a lack of research on the effects. If we're killing or disabling the fish young, they can't keep their population numbers matching our ever increasing demand.

The authors note that there is one area that truly lacks research - sustained effects of background noise on wild populations. While humans and other animals show increased stress and even behavior changes when exposed to high levels of ambient noise, little to no research has looked at the effects of this kind of noise on fish. Lab studies have found that increased background noise can causing temporary or even permanent hearing loss in fish, but to date no one has looked at how this loss might effect the ecology or behavior of wild individuals.

The guess is that long exposure to high levels of ambient noise has the same effect on fish that it does on humans - it sucks, colloquially speaking. It's stressful, affecting their hormones, health, and even ability to function properly. Just like it's hard for you to flirt with a hot chick in a noisy club, it might be hard to fish to find a mate in a noisy reef or tell his buddies that there's a shark on the prowl for tasty morsels. The eventual effect of which is slowed or stopped reproduction, productivity, or even ecosystem shifts due to some species managing better than others in the loud environment. Studies have already shown some species are more susceptible than others.

This research is getting more and more important, as increasing human populations have us hunting further and further from shore for food and oil and upping shipping traffic. And as if the direct increase in human activity weren't bad enough, we're increasing the noise in the ocean another way - by our carbon emissions. As we produce more and more carbon dioxide, we alter the pH of seawater, making it more acidic. In acidic waters, low frequency sounds like boat engines and motors travel further. We might amplify the range of our acoustic effects by 20% or more because of ocean acidification in the next fifty years.

Which, of course, is bad news for the fish, especially those in the highly productive estuaries close to shore where we tend to get a little noisy. And what's bad news for fish is bad news for us - we depend on those ecosystems for food, tourism and other natural products. If we can't find a way to lower the volume, we may find our oceans end up a bit quieter that we might like.


POPPER, A., & HASTINGS, M. (2009). The effects of human-generated sound on fish Integrative Zoology, 4 (1), 43-52 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-4877.2008.00134.x

This Week's Sci-Fi Worthy Parasite

There's something about brain-altering parasites that is just creepy. This is doubly true when the parasite makes the host attempt suicide - which is just what Spinochordodes tellinii, the hairworm, is best at.

Hairworms are free-living aquatic organisms as adults, who, as nematodes, eek out an existence in the mud. As a larvae, however, they're nasty little buggers. Hairworms infect Orthopteran insects (aka grasshoppers and crickets). The adults reproduce in the water, and produce little larvae which are eaten by their unlucky hosts. By the time the little sucker is full grown, it can be four times the size of its host - which, I imagine, isn't exactly comfortable for the cricket, especially since the parasite has grown so big feeding on its tissues. But if that isn't bad enough, the hairworm needs to return to water so it can go back to being a boring, mud-loving nematode - and that's where the mind control steps in.

How exactly the worm control the cricket's brain is unknown, but theories suggest that the parasite has developed a way to mimic natural chemical signals in the bug's brain. Analysis of the compounds of infested brains reveals heightened levels of neurotransmitters and chemicals responsible for movement and orientation, particularly with relation to gravity. These proteins are similar to the ones produced by the insect, but not naturally occurring, suggesting that the parasite is able to produce and excrete its own chemical signals to screw with the cricket's brain.

The end result of which, much to the parasite's joy, is that the cricket seeks out water and hops right in. More often than not, the act is fatal - crickets are terrible swimmers, and most who leap into the cool depths drown. This assisted suicide gives the parasite the chance to break free and wiggle its way easily down to the mud, where it continues its life cycle. Of course, that is, if the thrashing cricket doesn't attract a little attention itself, first. A study in Nature found that, although the parasite does a good little bit of mind voo-doo to get to the water, its suicidal host sometimes gets it in a bit of a pickle - and the worm doesn't always get away cleanly. Predators often find the unlucky cricket before the worm has escaped. What does the trapped worm do then? It turns out the parasite has developed a way of escaping from its hosts' predators mouths and digestive tracts, which is quite an impressive evolutionary feat, as digestive tracts are rarely a nice place to visit.

It makes you wonder whether similar chemicals might be present in our brains, and whether some parasite will find a way to make good use of them. Scientists have already found that the brains of suicidal people show distinct differences in gene expression, though its unclear if these variations are inherited or environmentally induced. Perhaps The Happening could actually happen... *eerie sci-fi music*