80beats

Ancient Golden Earring Discovered Hidden in a Jar in Israel

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 23 May 2012 19:01:02 +0000

This beautiful golden earring, decorated with figures of goats, was one of a trove of jewelry pieces that were wrapped in cloth and stuffed into a jar discovered by archaeologists at the Tel Meggido dig in Israel. When the team flushed the jar’s interior with water, earrings, a ring, and carnelian beads came tumbling out.

They aren’t sure why the jewelry was in the jar, but they posit that it could have been hidden there by the inhabitants of the home where the jar was found for safekeeping. The layer of soil where the find occurred dates from the 11th century BCE, a period when Meggido was under Egyptian rule, and the team believes the jewelry is either of Egyptian origin or inspired by Egyptian designs.

Image courtesy of American Friends of Tel Aviv University

Watch This: Non-Stick Coating Keeps Ketchup Flowing & Airplane Wings Free of Ice

Sarah Zhang — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:15:57 +0000

Let’s face it, ketchup bottles suck. When you get down to an almost empty the bottle, plastic ones burp and splat all over your clothes, and glass ones have you awkwardly whacking the “57″ on the Heinz bottle. That’s why this video of ketchup sliding effortlessly with a tip wrist is so impressive—even surreal.

This little bit of magic is the effect of LiquiGlide, a superslippery coating developed by physicists at MIT. The lab headed by Kripa Varanasi initially began researching coatings that could prevent clogs in deep sea oil pipes and ice from sticking to airplane wings. Other research groups have also come up with nonstick coatings that follow the same broad principle: the coating is actually a thin layer of liquid, which allows things to slip right off.

Getting the coating into ketchup bottles meant an extra hurdle because the materials had to be food safe. The scientists are keeping mum about what the coating is actually made of—a patent is in the works—but they promise it’s all FDA-approved materials.

And if you prefer your fries in the Dutch style, don’t worry: LiquiGlide handles mayonnaise just as well.

[via Fast Company]

Some Imported Shrimp on Grocery Store Shelves are Contaminated with Antibiotics

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 23 May 2012 14:37:03 +0000

Most of us assume that by the time food arrives at the grocery store, it’s been checked for any chemicals that might harm us. That’s not necessarily the case: food manufacturers and federal employees test for some known culprits in some foods, but the search isn’t exhaustive, especially when it comes to imported items. Recently, scientists working with ABC News checked to see whether imported farmed shrimp bought from grocery stores had any potentially dangerous antibiotic residue, left over from the antibiotic-filled ponds in which they are raised. It turns out, a few of them did.

Out of 30 samples taken from grocery stores around the US, 3 turned up positive on tests for antibiotics that are banned from food for health reasons. Two of the samples, one imported from Thailand and one from India, had levels of carcinogenic antibiotic nitrofuranzone that were nearly 30 times higher than the amount allowed by the FDA. The other antibiotics the team discovered were enroflaxin, part of a class of compounds that can cause severe reactions in people and promote the growth of drug-resistant bacteria, and chloramphenicol, an antibiotic that is also a suspected carcinogen.

These findings aren’t entirely surprising. ...

We Pump Water From Underground. It Flows to the Ocean. The Oceans Are Getting Deeper.

Sarah Zhang — Wed, 23 May 2012 12:30:14 +0000

It’s easy to see how overwatering our crops would deplete the groundwater supply and cause land nearby to sink, but could it cause sea level to rise on a global scale? Yes, according to a model published in Nature Geosciences, that attributes 42% of the sea-level rise over the past half century to groundwater use.

Ninety percent of readily available freshwater is underground, and water used for drinking or crop irrigation must, of course, be brought above ground. That water then evaporates or flows into rivers, entering the water cycle and eventually the oceans, making them deeper.

Sea levels rose by 1.8 millimeters per year in the last half of the century, but calculations of the contribution from melting ice and rising sea temperatures (which causes water to expand) accounted for only 1.1 millimeters of that. This new model found that the remaining sea-level rise could be explained by groundwater depletion. Some more data is needed to prove the link conclusively, but it suggests that the global consequences of groundwater deserve a more serious look.

[via Nature News]

Image via NOAA

Synthetic Biologists Turn DNA Into Rewritable, Digital Data Storage

Sarah Zhang — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:25:17 +0000

DNA is a great way to store information—just ask your cells. Its molecules are stable, and billions of base pairs coil neatly into a few microns in a cell nucleus. While it’s easy for a cell to read information from DNA, a cell can’t rewrite new data into its DNA sequence.

But now synthetic biologists at Stanford have managed to pull off that very trick. To do so, they had to abandon the genetic code of ATCG and get a DNA sequence to act like bits—pieces of binary information—in a computer. The memory system uses two enzymes that can cut out and reintegrate a sequence of DNA in a live cell. Crucially, the attachment sites are designed so that the DNA sequence can be flipped every time it is put back in. The sequence oriented one way would represent 1, and its inversion is 0.

This may sound unnecessarily convoluted and maybe even a little inefficient—this DNA “bit” took three years to engineer—but synthetic biologists have something bigger brewing on their hands. By working out the pieces of a biological circuit, they hope to get cells to perform computations. A DNA bit, for example, can be used as a counter for ...

SpaceX’s Ship Blasted Off This Morning, Bound for the International Space Station

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:54:40 +0000

It’s been a rocky few years for spaceflight. NASA’s budget isn’t getting any bigger. And though the Space Shuttle program was expensive, dangerous, and kept better designs from being developed, once it ended last year, US astronauts have had to hitch rides on Russian rockets, which are themselves not too reliable. But this morning’s launch of SpaceX’s first International Space Station supply rocket was a bright spot.

NASA is betting on the private sector to bring about the next great space age. It has made grants to various private space flight companies, including PayPal founder Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies, colloquially known as SpaceX, to develop space taxi technologies and supply the International Space Station.

And early this morning, after an aborted launch attempt on Sunday, SpaceX’s first rocket left Earth, carrying a capsule bound for the space station. You can watch the unmanned vehicle take off in the video above, and you can hear in the excitement in the NASA launch commentator’s voice as the fiery ship takes off through the night.

Flaming Rocks That Ignited in Woman’s Pocket Were Coated in Phosphorus

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:11:48 +0000

Flares have been washing up on beaches for a long time:
an AP news item from February 23, 1993

Last week, several small stones in the pocket of a California woman’s shorts exploded into flame, leaving her with third-degree burns. The stones came from a beach at San Onofre State Beach in San Diego, which she’d visited earlier in the day.

The story caused a sensation, as media discussed what could make rocks catch on fire. By Friday, California environmental health officials had an answer, or at least part of one: two of the rocks were covered in phosphorus, an element that’s known for igniting into a fierce white flame when it’s exposed to air. Near as they can tell, as long as the rocks were wet with seawater, the phosphorus didn’t ignite, but after they’d dried out in the woman’s pockets over the course of the day, the phosphorus reacted explosively.

But how did the rocks get covered with phosphorus? Though the substance is mined and used in fertilizers, it isn’t very common in in the natural world in its explosive form, called white phosphorus. White phosphorous does, however, have a long ...

A Massive National Effort to Study Children Is Threatened

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:18:31 +0000

The NIH National Children’s Study was launched in 2000 with much fanfare and an important mission: to follow a hundred thousand of American children from birth to age 21 and collect data on the environmental, chemical, physical, and psychosocial factors affecting them, with an eye towards understanding diseases that start in childhood, including autism, diabetes and asthma.

Now, however, the study has been deemed too expensive to continue in the same form—so far, only about 4,000 children have been enrolled, at a cost of a billion dollars. While it makes sense to look into bringing the costs down, one of the NIH’s money-saving strategies is in danger of compromising the study’s statistical usefulness: instead of continuing to recruit children from all over the country, the NIH is proposing working with health maintenance organizations, or HMOs, to gather the remaining data. This move would mean that children in rural areas, which tend not to be served by HMOs, would be excluded, and the mountains of data the study is poised to gather would not be complete. Already, two advisory board members have resigned in protest of this proposed policy.

Given all the time and money have already been invested in ...

And THIS Tiny Sphere is All the World’s Water That We Can Use

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:46:02 +0000

A few days ago, we wrote about a remarkable graphic released by the USGS, showing all the water on Earth—freshwater, saltwater, water vapor, water in plants and animals; all of it—rolled into a sphere.

That sphere was only 860 miles in diameter, fitting comfortably between Salt Lake City and Topeka, Kansas, on a map. It was striking, especially considering that the water available for humans use in our daily lives is only a very small fraction of that; the vast majority of the Earth’s water is saltwater, and most of the freshwater is tied up in glaciers.

How big would a sphere of just the freshwater available to humans be? Reader Jay Kimball of 8020Vision, his interest piqued, went ahead and made such a graphic:

That sphere—the sphere representing the freshwater available to humans—has a diameter of just 170 miles. Head to his blog to see the math.

Up Close and Personal With the Mysterious “Placental Jellyfish”

Sarah Zhang — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:47:57 +0000

Last week, a video of this mysterious blob floating 5000 feet under the sea was all over the Internet. Was it a whale placenta? A jellyfish? After some collective ooing and aahing, folks on the interwebs put their thinking hats on. Craig McClain at Deep Sea News dug through the literature and found a 1988 paper describing just such a jellyfish, calling it Deepstaria reticulum.

Now the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has posted a stunning video of Deepstaria jellyfish. Watch it to learn more about Deepstaria—and to look at pretty images. Win win for a Friday afternoon.

[via Deep Sea News]

What’s Wrong With the Coffee Mortality Study? You Tell Us.

Sarah Zhang — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:47:54 +0000

A recent study suggesting a link between coffee drinking and longer lives has prompted a flurry of coverage—some snarky, some cautious, but mostly celebratory. (We see you there, reaching for another cup of coffee.)

The study published at the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine is about as good as observational epidemiology studies go, but it’s limited by virtue of being observational. Last month on our Crux blog, Gary Taubes wrote a hard-hitting piece about the problems with observational studies. A major limitation of surveying people about their lifestyle habits is that correlation does not imply causation. It can’t prove coffee drinking actually led to living longer. There are always confounding variables.

In this coffee study, for example, they initially found that coffee drinkers died younger, but coffee drinkers are also more likely to be smokers. When they controlled for smoking as a confounding variable though, the result flipped: coffee drinkers lived longer. The researchers recognized there are other confounding variables too, and this is the entire list the researchers controlled for, taken directly from the paper:

The multivariate model was adjusted for the following factors at baseline: age; body-mass index (BMI; the weight in kilograms ...

No More Midnight Snacks? Mice That Eat at Odd Hours Get Fat

Sarah Zhang — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:21:09 +0000

FA=high-fat, ab libitum (eat-at-will) diet, FT=high-fat, time-restricted diet, NA=normal ab libitum (eat-at-will) diet, NT=normal diet, time-restricted

Diets tell you what you eat, but a new study suggests when you eat matters too. Of two groups of mice who were fed the same high-fat diet, the mice who could eat around the clock were much heavier than those who had food restricted to eight hours per day, in a new study published in Cell Metabolism.

Researchers in the study gave the mice a special high-fat chow, 61% of whose calories come from fat (compared to just 13% in normal feed). The mice who chowed down all day and night became, unsurprisingly, obese, but the ones who ate the same amount of hi-fat food in only eight hours per day did not. Their body weight was comparable to mice fed an equivalent amount of calories on normal feed.

This being a study in Cell Metabolism, the researchers didn’t stop with just weighing the mice; they did a lot of molecular experiments to work out the link between timing and weight gain. Mice on high-fat, eat-whenever diets had the insulin problems associated with obesity-induced diabetes and lower expression of genes linked to breaking down fats in the ...

Arrested Development Pays Off for Male Orangutans: Meek Ones Often Get the Girls

Sarah Zhang — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:00:32 +0000

A sexually mature male with cheek flanges, throat pouch, and very long fur.

Why would a sexually mature male orangutan want to look too young to father children? Just ask male dung beetles or goby fish. All these species have two types of males: big, aggressive ones that elaborately woo females and smaller sneaker males who, well, sneak behind the backs of the bigger ones. Both can end up successful fathers.

Male orangutans become sexually mature around age 10, but some will stay in arrested development for up to 20 years, even after fathering children of their own. These immature-looking males don’t have the broad cheek flanges, throat pouches, and long orange hair we normally associate with male orangutans. They also don’t produce the long calls that mature-looking males use to attract mates. Even with none of these secondary sex characteristics, male orangutans can get mates and have children. A previous study that tracked an orangutan population in Sumatra for 27 years found that 6 of 11 new babies were fathered by the immature-looking males.

A new paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology models how arrested development works in a population. The ...

North American Fish Populations Slowly Crawling Back From Disaster, NOAA Report Shows

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:15:54 +0000

A snow crab

If you’ve ever read up on the environmental impact of your eating habits, you know that eating fish can be a dicey prospect. Having been overfished for decades, many wild fish populations are on the brink of disappearing.

A new report from NOAA shows that one attempt to deal with this problem of severely depleted fisheries, the Magnuson-Stevens Reauthorization Act of 2006, seems to be helping, at least a little bit. The act states that each year, NOAA must give status updates on all fish populations within 200 miles of the US Coast. If the fisheries are hurting, fishermen must stop catching those fish until their numbers recover. Over the last 11 years, 27 previously precarious fish populations have been announced recovered; this year, the six lucky winners were the haddock in the Gulf of Maine, the Chinook salmon along the coast of Northern California, the snow crab of the Bering Sea, the summer flounder on the mid-Atlantic coast, the coho salmon on the coast of Washington, and the widow rockfish in the Pacific.

Overall, NOAA takes these recoveries as a sign that the law is doing its job; according to a metric ...

Trapped in Amber, the Oldest Evidence of Pollination

Valerie Ross — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:54:49 +0000

Peering inside an ancient piece of amber, scientists have uncovered the oldest direct evidence of pollination: insects covered in pollen grains, likely from a gingko tree, from between 105 and 110 million years ago. These insects—a new genus of thrips, insects that still scuttle around today—had likely gathered pollen for food, trailing it from plant to plant along the way. To get an even closer look at the specimens (without cracking open the amber), the researchers took the lump to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. There, they used synchrotron X-ray tomography to generate a detailed 3-D image of the bugs, revealing tiny, specialized hairs they used to collect pollen grains (which are shown here in yellow).

Flowering plants first evolved about 130 million years ago, making them relative evolutionary newcomers; dinosaurs had already been around for 100 million years by then. Since early on, these plants have been aided in reproduction by insects that spread their pollen from one flower to the next, and in turn helped the insects by providing sustenance. “The co-evolution of flowering plants and insects, thanks to pollination, is a great evolutionary success story,” ...

To Disinfect Water Cheaply, Just Add Sunlight (and Salt or Lime Juice)

Sarah Zhang — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:41:09 +0000

The cheapest and easiest way to disinfect water? Sunlight. Just leave a clear glass or plastic bottle out in the sun for six hours. SODIS, or solar water disinfection, is an age-old method touted by the World Health Organization for areas where access to clean water is limited. UV rays in the sunlight tear apart the microbes to make water safe. Drink up!

SODIS is quite effective, but scientists have found two hacks that make the technique even better. One problem is that the water may be cloudy from sediment, which can be fixed with a dash of salt. NPR’s Salt blog explains:

Pierce and his colleagues discovered that by adding a little table salt to this murky water, they could get the particles of clay to stick together and settle to the bottom, making the water clear enough to purify using the solar disinfection method. They also found that the addition of salt works best for certain kinds of clay soils, namely bentonite, and not so well with others. But when they added a little bentonite along with salt to water that contained other types of clay soils, it worked just as well.

Pierce says the method works because bentonite clays have ...

Come For the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn; Stay for a Dose of Genetics

Sarah Zhang — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:57:51 +0000

No, this isn’t Photoshop or a gemstone-studded trinket—just an ear of corn. Seedsman Greg Schoen of the Seeds Trust got this “Glass Gems” corn from his “corn-teacher,” a part-Cherokee man in his 80s. He planted the seeds, had a gorgeous harvest last fall, and posted the posts on Seeds Trust’s Facebook page in October. Then last week, the photos of the gem-like corn got picked up on the internet and went viral. Good luck trying to get your hands on any seeds now…

But kernel color is a fascinating—dare we say, colorful—topic in the annals of genetics research. For one, why are there so many vibrant colors in a single ear of corn? You don’t usually see flowers of different colors on a single tree. Each kernel is actually a different corn plant (or the seed of one) with a unique mix of genes inherited from its parents. That’s why counting up kernels of different colors in the more familiar purple and yellow corn cobs is a common way of teaching how pigment genes are inherited in Mendelian genetics.

Kernel color has also been used to unravel an ...

Dogs Catch Yawns From Their Owners. Does That Mean They Empathize with Us?

Valerie Ross — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:45:45 +0000

One sleepy person can start a bout of contagious yawning that quickly spreads through a room. But a new study suggests the effect may not be limited to the room’s human inhabitants: Dogs can “catch” yawns from people, the study found—especially their owners, hinting that pooches may empathize with familiar people.

When listening to recordings of people yawning, 12 of the 29 dogs in the study yawned themselves. It made a big difference, however, whom they heard: The dogs yawned more than four times as much when they heard their owner yawn as when they heard as a stranger.

Earlier work has suggested a link between contagious yawning and empathy. Humans and chimps both yawn more when friends and acquaintances yawn than when strangers yawn, and people who don’t have much insight into what others are feeling—such as very young children and people with autism—don’t seem to catch contagious yawns. This is some of the strongest evident yet that dogs—humans’ constant companions for 15,000 years—may be able to empathize with us. But a yawn alone can’t tell us what’s going on in a dog’s brain, or its heart of hearts. A similar ...

What’s in Spam with Bacon? Tasty, Tasty Chemistry

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:26:24 +0000

You’d be surprised what’s in your lunch. When you look closer at what makes your American cheese melt well and your hotdog so delicious, you might cringe for a few minutes, but hopefully you also get curious about what other characteristics we like in our food and how food manufacturers have, for better or for worse, given our taste buds what they want.

Over at Wired, they’ve dissected Spam with Bacon, and what they find runs the gammut from “Hey, it’s cool that science can do that!” to “Maybe canned meat was a really bad idea.”

This description of bacon captures the balance nicely:

“The cured belly of a swine carcass,” says the USDA. “Mmmm, bacon,” says most of America. Large-scale curing is usually done by injecting a brine solution into the belly of a butchered swine. The brine contains sodium erythorbate, an antioxidant that’s chemically similar to vitamin C. But it’s not here to prevent scurvy; instead it boosts the conversion of the sodium nitrite in bacon into nitric oxide, which minimizes the production of carcinogens when the pork belly is fried up. The brining increases the meat’s weight by 12 percent, but a ...

Is High-Risk Science Nuts or Brilliant? Event Tomorrow at the NY Academy of Sciences

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:05:00 +0000

Just so it’s on your radar, New Yorkers: You won’t want to miss tomorrow night’s exciting discussion at the New York Academy of Sciences of how cutting-edge science and innovation are stimulated and sustained:

Moderated by Corey Powell, Editor-in-Chief of Discover Magazine, the panel will feature Jon Gertner, author of the recent bestselling book The Idea Factory; renowned theoretical physicist Brian Greene, PhD; technology investment expert Shelley Harrison, PhD; and MacArthur Genius Award-winning nanoscientist Michal Lipson, PhD.

Despite popular depictions on televisions and in film, scientific discoveries don’t always come as “Eureka!” moments after years of careful study and pursuit. A fair portion of scientific discoveries are the result of “that’s so crazy it just might work” thinking, or even, “this might fail, but we have to try it” ideas.

High-risk, high-reward science is defined by unique ideas and unconventional approaches that have the potential to create new models or fields within science and engineering or to radically change our understanding of a current concept. Such high-risk ideas may seem obvious in hindsight, but at the time they are unorthodox, impossible, or simply crazy. Yet there are organizations and individuals who make it their mission to identify and invest ...

Murals in an Ancient Mayan Chamber Include Calendar Calculations

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:18:39 +0000

The Xultun scribe’s chamber, with A, B, and C showing the locations of the calculations.

In a small closet-like chamber off a central plaza of the ancient Mayan city of Xultun, a scribe once sat with a paintbrush in hand.

On the north walls of the room, he painted an apparent self-portrait, facing a figure with an elaborate headdress, perhaps a ruler. But on adjacent walls, he and his successors, starting in about 800 C.E., painted and inscribed various astrological calculations. They are very similar to those found in the Dresden Codex, one of the most famous extant Mayan books, which contains numerous astrological and ritualistic cycles and is thought to have been copied from older books sometime between the 11th and 15th centuries. The markings on the scribe’s walls in Xultun, unveiled last week in a paper in Science, represent the earliest known depictions of some of these calculations.

The glyphs in location C, which consist of columns of dates

National Geographic, which helped fund the work, has a news feature on the discovery that gives perspective on the calculations’ purpose:

For ninth-century Maya, tabulating astronomical calendars ...

This Tiny Sphere is All the World’s Water

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:34:11 +0000

When you’re trudging through the pouring rain to the office, it seems like the Earth possesses an infinite amount of water, a not-insignificant amount of which is dripping down your collar. But when you see an image like this one, produced by the USGS, it hammers home the reality of the situation: the water’s all spread out in a very thin layer, like a millimeter of frosting on a cake. If you gathered all the world’s water—from oceans, lakes, groundwater, water vapor, everything—into a sphere, it would have a diameter of 860 miles. That’s the distance between Salt Lake City and Topeka, Kansas.

That’s still a fairly big sphere, when you think about it: that same water spread out in an even layer across the United States would leave us under a 90-mile-deep lake. But it isn’t nearly as big as you might expect, looking at our blue marble in photos from space or dipping your toes in the Atlantic. To boot, very little of that water—less than 4%—is freshwater, and the vast majority of that is locked up in glaciers and ice caps. We’ve got just a tiny fraction of that sphere at our disposal; ...

Why Preserved Food is So Bad: “Retort Flavor”

Sarah Zhang — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:29:41 +0000

Autoclaves—would you cook a turkey in this?

At Popular Science is a profile of food scientists given an impossible task: make year-old mashed potatoes taste good. Food that lasts a year on the shelf needs to be sterilized, and that is a battle against extremophiles. Our most effective weapon is a very blunt one—heat. 252 degrees Fahrenheit to be exact.

Writer Paul Adams tours a food science lab and gets a taste of “retort flavor” in his sterilized mashed potatoes. The unappetizing term refers to the retort, a machine that obliterates microbes and flavor in one fell (and very hot) swoop:

The potatoes look right, once we’ve fluffed them up a bit, but the wholesome earthy taste and smell of fresh potatoes is almost gone from the dish. In its place there’s a tired, wet-paper flavor with notes of old steam pipe. This side effect of confined high-heat cooking is known in the trade as “retort flavor.” Stuckey’s theory is that it’s just underlying parts of the flavor coming through. Before food is retorted, she says, the dank base notes present in it are masked in part “by the beautiful aromatic volatile notes that we ...

Why Are 90% of Asian Schoolchildren Nearsighted? From Doing What You’re Doing Now

Sarah Zhang — Sat, 12 May 2012 12:40:47 +0000

With glasses, contacts, and LASIK surgery, most of us nearsightedness folks don’t have to worry about squinting at the blackboard anymore. But the sheer prevalence of nearsightedness, or myopia, among Asian schoolchildren (in Singapore, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea) is stunning: 80 to 90% according to a recent review in the journal Lancet. In comparison, that number is just 20 to 30% in the UK. Myopia has also been on the rise in both Asia and Europe over the past few years.

While there are genes linked to myopia, its rising prevalence in both continents points to environmental causes. Namely, kids are spending more time hunched over screens and books instead of playing outdoors. In myopia, light coming into the eye can no longer focus at the retina because the eyeball has become too long. A body of research in humans and animals suggest that reading at close distances and lack of bright sunlight could cause elongated eyeballs.

In Singapore, myopia has shot up in the last 30 years among all three major ethnic groups—Chinese, Indian, and Malay—which highly suggests a environmental cause. Singaporean schoolchildren who read more than two books per week were also more likely ...

Now This Is a Cell Phone: Using Radio Waves to Control Specific Genes in Mice

Sarah Zhang — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:25:08 +0000

With some clever genetic engineering but without ever touching a cell or an animal, scientist can remotely control cells using ultrasound, light, and, now, also radio waves. The electromagnetic waves can be used to selectively heat up parts of cells and activate a gene to make insulin in mice, according to a recent study published in Science.

But why care about radio waves if we have light and ultrasound? Radio waves have a couple distinct advantages over existing techniques.

In the current study, the radio waves didn’t heat up a whole patch of tissue or even a whole cell—it only affected specific pores in the cell, called TRPV1, that open in response to heat. To get this specificity, the scientists made special iron oxide nanoparticles attached to an antibody that only sticks to TRPV1. When they turned on the radio waves, the iron oxide particles warmed up and opened the TRPV1 channel, minimally affecting the rest of the cell or surrounding cells. Ultrasound, on the other hand, heats up a whole patch of tissue to 42° Celsius, which could have damaging or confounding effects on the cells.

Radio waves, unlike light, can also penetrate deep into tissue. To show ...

Millions of Taxpayer Dollars are Used to Secretly Massacre Wildlife, Family Pets, Threatened Species

Veronique Greenwood — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:10:11 +0000

Nearly a million coyotes have been killed by Wildlife Services since 2000.

In the western US, conflict between ranchers and wild animals who might harm their stock is an old, old story. But in 1915, the federal government started helping ranchers and farmers out by killing animals suspected of attacking livestock, eventually forming an agency known as Animal Damage Control. Today, though, the agency has morphed into something that appalled many of the readers who learned of its activities last week in the Sacramento Bee.

When Wildlife Services, as the group is now called, finds a bald eagle, a family’s beloved husky, or a young badger in a trap laid for coyotes or prairie dogs, its back broken or leg snapped, it is shot and its body buried. Its death at the hands of federal employees is rarely, if ever, reported as required. This happens thousands of times a year, on top of all the killings of wildlife that are the agency’s intended targets.

The Bee’s evidence against Wildlife Services’s claims of killing only when necessary, assembled in three investigative articles, is damning. The series is worth reading for yourself, along with the follow-up articles ...

How Microbes & Plants Around Us Might Prevent Allergies

Sarah Zhang — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:16:36 +0000

Crawling my way to a healthier immune system.

Bacteria are practically everywhere around us, including on and inside you, but that is in many ways a good thing. For instance, having a diverse set of microbes living on your skin might help prevent allergies. A new study published in PNAS links two factors related to how microbes might affect our health: the observation that diversity of microbes on a person is related to the diversity of microbes in their environment, and the hygiene hypothesis, which suggests that the modern uptick in allergies and autoimmune diseases is caused by childhood under-exposure to bacteria.

For a while now, scientists have known that kids living on farms are less likely to have allergies or asthma. Being around livestock means the farm kids are also around a more diverse set of bacteria than city kids living in an apartment. In this new study, scientists swabbed the skin bacteria of 118 Finnish kids, some who lived in rural areas and some who lived in urban areas. They also tested the kids for levels of an antibody called IgE, high levels of which indicate hypersensitivity to allergens, or what is ...

Flame Retardants Are Toxic & Haven’t Been Shown to Save Lives. Why Are They Ubiquitous?

Sarah Zhang — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:49:49 +0000

“The average American baby is born with 10 fingers, 10 toes and the highest recorded levels of flame retardants among infants in the world.” So begins the Chicago Tribune’s damning four-part series about spin and science, or lack thereof, in the flame retardants industry. Flame retardant chemicals have become so ubiquitous–there’s two pounds of the stuff in just the cushions of a large couch—because we’ve accepted the health dangers are worth the protection they provide against fire. Except, there is no scientific basis for the claim that flame retardants save lives.

Part three in the series, published today, is a systematic debunking of the few studies the industry has continuously cited as evidence for the efficacy of flame retardants. One obscure Swedish study, available only in Swedish, relied on flimsy evidence from just eight electrical fires caused by TVs. The peer-reviewed paper also lists a PR specialist among its authors. The lead scientist of another study has disavowed what he calls the industry’s “grossly distorted” flogging of his work, which looked at levels of flame retardants far above industry standard in household furniture. These examples and many more show how scientific authority has been manipulated for profit:

Industry has disseminated ...

16% of Cancers Are Caused by Viruses or Bacteria

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:03:40 +0000

Where viruses and bacteria cause cancer

Strictly speaking, cancer is not contagious. But a fair number of cancers are clearly caused by viral or bacterial infections: lymphomas can be triggered by the Epstein-Barr virus, which also causes mononucleosis. Liver cancers can be caused by Hepatitis B and C. Cervical cancers can be caused by human papillomavirus, the major reason behind the development of a vaccine against it. For some of these cancers, nearly 100% of the cases have an infectious link—when researchers check to see if a virus or bacterium is working in the tumor or has left signs of its presence in a patient’s blood, the answer is nearly always yes.

A new paper in The Lancet takes a look at the very best data on the prevalence of infection-caused cancers and comes up with some striking numbers. Overall, they estimate that 16% of cancer cases worldwide in 2008 had an infectious cause—2 million out of 12.7 million.

Hepatitis B and C, HPV, and Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that triggers stomach cancer, caused the lion’s share of those cases, about 1.9 million together. Eighty percent of all infection-caused cancers were in less developed regions, ...

What People in 1859 Thought of the Great Solar Storm (Hint: They Were Very Confused)

Sarah Zhang — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:41:15 +0000

An 1865 painting by Frederic Edwin Church, possibly inspired by the aurora of 1859.

On September 1, 1859, the sky erupted in color: “alternating great pillars, rolling cumuli shooting streamers, curdled and wisped and fleecy waves—rapidly changing its hue from red to orange, orange to yellow, and yellow to white, and back in the same order to brilliant red,” read a New York Times account. This was the aurora seen around the world.

Meanwhile, the telegraph operators were perplexed to find that the system suddenly failed. None of the lines worked, and telegraph paper spontaneously caught on fire. The aurora and disconnected telegraphs were both the working of the largest solar storm recorded in history.

As charged particles from the sun showered down onto Earth, people in 1859 didn’t quite know what to think. Matthew Lasar over at Ars Technica has collected historical accounts from reporters, telegraph operators, astronomers, and people who believed it was the end of the world. As science writers ourselves, we were especially curious to read this:

In the months shortly after the incident, newspapers and scientific journals found other possible causes. Scientific American postulated falling debris from active volcanoes, the San Francisco Herald theorized about “nebulous matter” from “planetary ...

Rare Footage of Endangered Gorillas Includes Chest-Pounding Silverback

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 08 May 2012 21:53:01 +0000

The Cross River gorillas are an elusive bunch: there are fewer 250 individuals left of this western gorilla subspecies, and, understandably, they are afraid of humans. A few hours ago, though, the Wildlife Conservation Society announced that they’d managed to capture a tape of 8 gorillas—about 3% of the remaining population—in their native Cameroonian habitat, by using a motion-activated camera.

It’s a fascinating glimpse into the behavior of an animal that, given current trends, more than likely won’t exist in the near future. Lumbering on their knuckles through the crackling leaves, the gorillas occasionally plunk themselves down under a tree before continuing on their journey. About half-way through the edited clip, a large male gorilla charges past the camera, striking his chest with cupped hands, a motion that produces a high, distinctive, almost yodeling sound, and as he falls back on all fours, you can see the silver hair on his back. Shortly afterward, a gorilla missing its left hand moves across the scene; WCS thinks the hand could have been lost to a poacher’s snare.

It seems, though, that the ululating sound threw a few people off. CBS News’ coverage is studded with some choice work-arounds demonstrating that they’re not really sure ...

Japan Is Now Running on 0% Nuclear Power. That Means Using More Fossil Fuels.

Veronique Greenwood — Tue, 08 May 2012 18:39:33 +0000

The Fukushima Daiichi power plant in 1975, seen from above.

As of this weekend, when Tomari Nuclear Power Plant was shutdown for maintenance, every last one of Japan’s 54 nuclear plants have Japan has been taken offline. Although the shutdowns are supposed to be temporary, after the power utilities’ mismanagement of the Fukushima disaster last year, the Japanese public has registered increasing distrust for official reassurances that nuclear power can be safe. These shutdowns could conceivably become permanent.

The world’s major economies all use nuclear power to some extent, and Japan, which got about 30% of its power from reactors, was one of the heavier users before the the Fukushima meltdown. Now, public opinion there and the world over has soured toward nuclear power, to the extent that Germany has officially announced plans to abandon nuclear completely by 2022.

As Bryan Walsh at TIME Science points out, though, this backlash against one of the few high-output energy sources that does not involve fossil fuels comes with a price.

Japan’s business community and its government have warned that the country could face serious energy shortages this summer without nuclear power, which could dent the world’s third largest economy ...

Do Unhatched Chicks Sleep and Wake In Their Eggs?

Sarah Zhang — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:07:24 +0000

You go to sleep at night, you wake up in the morning—the definition of sleep doesn’t seem so complicated. But start asking questions and things start getting thorny: Are dolphins that never stop swimming sleeping? Are migrating birds that “shut down” half their brains sleeping? Is someone under general anesthesia sleeping? And what about babies in the womb?

Unborn human babies in the womb are pretty difficult to monitor 24/7, so the researchers interested in that last question got ahold of unhatched chicken eggs. In a new Current Biology paper, they report that chicks show higher-brain activity patterns similar to sleep, and the cries of a hen could “wake up” the chick even when other loud but not chicken-salient sounds could not. These higher-brain activity patterns only appear in the last stage of incubation, presumably after their brains become well developed.

To monitor brain activity in the chicks, the scientists carefully made a small hole in the top of the egg and injected radioactive sugars onto the egg’s inner membrane. The developing embryo absorbed these sugars, which the team could then track with a PET scan. Active neurons need energy, which they get from sugar, so ...

Zombie Ant Parasite Has Its Own Parasite—a Fungus That Attacks Fungi

Sarah Zhang — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:19:15 +0000

Fruit body of a parasitic fungus, growing out of a dead ant.

The tale of the ant and the mind-controlling fungus Ophiocordyceps is straight out of a horror story.

An unlucky ant inhales a spore, the fungus begins to eat the ant from inside, and, in a particularly sinister twist, Ophiocordyceps hijacks the ant’s brain. The “zombie” ant is forced to leave its nest to climb up onto a tree, clamping its jaws into a leaf vein with abnormal force. A stalk sprouts from the now dead ant’s head. This stalk is fruiting body of the fungus, which will produce new spores that rain down onto the unlucky ants below.

Ophiocordyceps seems like a lean mean killing machine in that scenario, but the fungus itself is vulnerable—to another fungus it turns out. A new paper published in PloS ONE models the disease dynamics of Ophiocordyceps with respect to ants and a hyperparasitic fungi, which is the name for parasite whose host is also a parasite. Unfortunately, this hyperparasite is not of much help for the ant, as it only infects the Ophiocordyceps after the ant has died.

The researchers collected 432 fungus-infected ants from “graveyards” ...

Gross But Cool: Weaving Blood Vessels with Threads of Human Tissue

Veronique Greenwood — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:14:17 +0000

This machine is weaving 48 strands of human connective tissue together into a tube.

Growing fresh blood vessels is a much fantasized-about goal of biomedical engineers. It sounds vaguely vampiric, but the idea is to replace the veins in the arms of dialysis patients, which are a mess from being breached several times a week to be hooked up to a blood-cleaning machine. From there, engineers hope to provide off-the-shelf replacements for heart valves and such.

Most approaches involve getting human cells—either donor cells or cells from the patient—to manufacture rubbery connective tissue made of proteins, from which the cells are stripped away to avoid an immune reaction in patients. Some companies start with flat sheets of this tissue and roll them into tubes, while others have the cells make the stuff around a tubular mold. One company, though, is trying out a technique that made us look twice. They’re weaving the vessels from thread spun with thin strips of cultured connective tissue, Technology Review reports.

The hope is that given manufacturers’ copious experience with machine weaving, these woven structures could be easier to mass-produce than the tubes made with other techniques. Though there isn’t much ...

The Mystery of the Melanesian Blondes

Veronique Greenwood — Fri, 04 May 2012 20:28:17 +0000

A blond boy from the island of Vanatu

In many places, blond hair usually goes with white skin and European ancestry. But in the islands of Melanesia and among the Aborigines of Australia, blond hair crops up on dark-skinned people with no known European heritage. Scientists have long wondered, is it because they have some (very, very) long-lost European ancestors? Or did blond hair arise from a genetic mutation in the population there?

A paper published in Science this week lays that question to rest. The researchers found that blond Solomon Islanders in Melanesia have a single amino acid difference in the tyrosinase-related protein 1 (TYRP1) gene, which codes for an enzyme involved in the production of the pigment melanin. Other mutations in TYRP1 can give people albinism; this one gives them light-colored hair. The mutation is recessive, so only people who have two mutant copies of the TYRP1 gene are blond.

This mutation is not responsible for European blondness, which hammers home the fact that pale hair didn’t arrive on a boat with early European explorers—it’s definitely native to the islands.

For the full story and lots of tasty genetics, head over to Discover’s Gene ...

Cockroaches Get Lonely, Kind of (But a Little Feather-Poking Can Help)

Sarah Zhang — Thu, 03 May 2012 20:07:40 +0000

When people think of cockroaches, some may think of the much-smarter-than-a-bug Gregor Samsa, but it takes a special kind of person—a social biologist, really—to think of them as “gregarious.” Yes, these unloved (by humans), trash-eating creatures have social lives too. A recent review in the journal Insectes Sociaux highlights the social behavior of two so-called gregarious cockroach species: Blattella germanica and Periplaneta americana. Although not as sophisticated as eusocial insects like ants or bees, these cockroaches can communicate, recognize kin, and even get “lonely” in isolation. Now we’re getting Kafka-esque.

To talk to and recognize one another, cockroaches use hydrocarbons, molecules that are made of only hydrogen and carbon atoms. These chemical markings help them identify group shelter spots, where they hang out together during the day between nightly foraging runs. (When they are out looking for new shelter or food, they tend to follow the crowd too.) The hydrocarbon signature is unique to each cockroach. Siblings can recognize each other and avoid incest, which is not so great for genetic diversity.

When forced into isolation by lab researchers, these gregarious cockroaches get “isolation syndrome,” taking longer to molt and reach sexual maturity. Isolated cockroaches also have problems ...

Sourcemap: Slick App for Tracking the Supply Chain for Your Laptop (or Tuna or Nutella)

Sarah Zhang — Thu, 03 May 2012 12:14:40 +0000

If you’ve ever wondered where all the parts in your laptop came from, take a second to look at this map—or maybe a few minutes, because it is a dense, complicated web. Sourcemap, which has its origins in MIT Media Lab, is a new open source website for mapping global supply chains and carbon footprints. There are also Sourcemaps for Chicken of the Sea’s tuna and Nutella among others.

Although the site seems to have been conceived as a way of keeping track of modern corporations, some of the most intriguing maps are historical ones. Take this supply chain for Western Electric’s candlestick telephones from 1927 or this overview of international trade in 19th century London. The beauty of open source projects is that they can go off in unexpected and delightful directions.

But as Ariel Schwartz at Fast Company has pointed out, Sourcemap also suffers from that plague of open source sites, quality control. Go to the browse tab, and you’ll immediately be finding yourself among maps titled “Test 123,” “farting robot,” or “My stuff.” Hopefully, Sourcemap will come up with way of rating and verifying the quality of ...

Weight of the World: The Ongoing Fight Over How to Define the Kilogram

Sarah Zhang — Wed, 02 May 2012 22:04:54 +0000

The meter is fixed to the speed of light and a second to the radiation of cesium, but the mass of one kilogram is still not defined by a universal constant. Instead, it’s still pegged to an old-fashioned cylinder of platinum iridium alloy kept under lock and key in Sèvres, France.

The method isn’t just old-fashioned, it’s imprecise, which has literal ramifications across the world when the point is to set the kilogram standard. The cylinder is weighed every few decades against official copies that had the same mass when they were all cast in 1899. When they were last weighed in 1988, however, their masses had drifted 70 micrograms apart.

Last October, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures met to determine a new strategy of defining the kilogram, this time using universal constants. IEEE Spectrum has a riveting feature on how this might happen. The kilogram is way more complicated than a supermarket scale would have you think:

Delegates from the bureau’s then 55 member countries unanimously agreed on a tentative plan to base the kilogram on a fundamental constant of quantum mechanics…This coup is largely the result, after decades of work, of steady ...

E. Coli That Cause Urinary Tract Infections are Now Resistant to Antibiotics

Veronique Greenwood — Wed, 02 May 2012 15:46:50 +0000

Thanks to antibiotics, we tend to think of urinary tract infections as no big deal. Pop some cipro, and you’re done. A good thing, too—if the E. coli that usually cause UTIs crawl up the urinary tract, they can cause kidney failure and fatal blood poisoning.

But antibiotics may not be saving us from UTIs for very much longer. Scientists tracking UTIs from 2000 to 2010 found a dramatic uptick in cases caused by E. coli that do not respond to the drugs that are our first line of defense. In examining more than 12 million urine analyses from that period, they found that cases caused by E. coli resistant to ciprofloxacin grew five-fold, from 3% to 17.1% of cases. And E. coli resistant to the drug trimethoprim-sulfame-thoxazole jumped from 17.9% to 24.2%. These are two of the most commonly prescribed antibiotics used to treat UTIs. When they are not effective, doctors must turn to more toxic drugs, and the more those drugs are used, the less effective they in turn become. When those drugs stop working, doctors will be left with a drastically reduced toolkit with which to fight infection.

Some of this growing resistance in ...