Alligators are fighters—and they’ve got the immune systems to prove it. For 80 million years ago, they’ve been violently battling each other, ripping off each others’ limbs in filthy, microbe-infested swamps. But there’s no point in winning a fight if you’re just going to die of a wound infection a week later, so alligators have evolved a fierce immune system to protect themselves against the nasty pathogens swimming in and out of their gaping wounds.
Why are the cute animals always the ones that suck at mating, while vermin like pigeons, rats, and bacteria are breeding their brains out? To rectify the situation, many eager citizens have illegally taken matters into their own hands. But in Australia, where the poisonous, invasive cane toads that plague the country have evolved longer legs to expedite their conquering of the outback—lawmakers themselves are getting into the spirit of things.
Given the massive amounts of antibiotics coursing through the bodies of our livestock—not to mention its use and misuse by humans—one would think soil would be teeming with the drugs. But this isn’t the case, and now scientists may know why: They’re being devoured by bacteria.
Amanda Gardner at HealthDay reports on a new study finding that female veterinarians face double the normal risk of miscarriage, due to their regular exposure to substances like radiation, anesthetic gases, and pesticides. While regular hospitals typically enforce strict use of lead screens, goggles, and other protective equipment to protect doctors, vets face less stringent regulations, if any, and so they wind up exposed to greater amounts of hazardous materials more often.
Given these lax safety measures, the study’s results come as no surprise to some doctors, including Richard Jones, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, who stated that the study “basically confirms and reminds us of what we already knew about exposures.” Still, given that current veterinary schools are made up of more than 80 percent women, it looks like a good time to start tightly regulating safety practices in the profession. It’s true that we place more value on the life of a human than we do an animal, but that equation shouldn’t include their doctors as well.
The last time you were in an airport, did you feel your heart rate jump at the sight of vigilant German Shepherds sniffing your bags? While your suitcase may have been entirely contraband-free, the idea that smells, often uncontrollable and undetectable to the human nose, can reveal secrets about you is enough to make even a seasoned traveler nervous.
Use of odor detection by law enforcement is on the rise, as defense attorney and surveillance expert Amber Marks writes in the Guardian. For police forces worldwide, smells are being increasingly relied on to detect drugs, weapons, and stolen goods. A smell alone, in the U.K. at least, can even be considered sufficient evidence to convict someone of a crime. Meanwhile, the technology of smell detection is rushing to meet tightened security needs: canine trainers are teaching dogs to sniff out emotions such as guilt and fear, while electronic noses can now be programmed to identify the “odor signature” of different races or ethnic groups. (more…)
You might not have heard this from other Web sites out there, but today has been the biggest science news day in history. Truly, the events that have befallen our planet—and our universe—over the past 17 hours have been remarkable. So we here at DiscoBlog have rounded up the most important headlines from around the Internet. Here they are:
— Fungus with a Sweet Tooth Breathes Nectar of the Gods
— German Doc Prescribes Arsenic for Scare “Down There”
— Physicist’s Creepy Photos Show Wife’s Wedding Ring—and Skeleton!
— Animal-Lover Adopts Gaggle of Geese, Leads Them on Walks and Swims
— Cryptic Poetry Book Reveals Greater Truth About … Nothing
— Biology Lab Invaded by Unidentified Pest; Valuable Bacteria Sample Destroyed
— Physicist’s Cat Is Stuck in a Tree—and Not Stuck in a Tree
— Living Blob Devours Bystanders, Transforms Into New Form of Life
— Cyclist Becomes Possessed by Demons As Furniture Explodes into Colored Fountains
— Bicycle Maker Makes Apparent Suicide Leap on North Carolina Beach; Brother, Friends Bring Him Back to Earth
— Stuff Now Exists! (But What Came Before?)
— Shy Professor Injured by Falling Apple; Says He Knows Why
Hat tip to Overcoming Bias for pointing out the impressive magnitude of what’s going on.
The microscopic bdelloid rotifer—best known as an all-females species that hasn’t had sex for 100 million years—has thwarted the attempts of Eugene Gladyshev and Matthew Meselson to mutate their genes with blasts of gamma radiation. Although the radiation shattered their genomes—it was a far higher dose than had ever been tolerated by an animal to date—the plucky, resourceful gals sewed their chromosomes back together and not only survived the blasts but continued to reproduce.
As a former bench scientist who sips a beer on occasion, I was intrigued by an article that ran in The New York Times science section yesterday about the inverse relationship between a scientist’s success and the amount of beer he or she consumes. Dr. Tomás Grim, an ornithologist from Palacký University in the Czech Republic, surveyed the beer-consumption habits of 18 Czech scientists in 2002 and 34 in 2006 (some of whom were the same as those surveyed before), and found that the more beer a scientist drinks, the fewer papers she publishes, and the lower the quality of those papers. In short, less successful scientists drink beer. (more…)
Henry Marsh, a British neurosurgeon, became a star of today’s news by performing major brain surgery on Marian Dolishny—with a cordless $60 hand drill. And the drill ran out of batteries about halfway through, so Doc MacGyver finished the procedure by hand. And there was no anesthesiologist, so the patient only got a local painkiller. Oh, and there happened to be a television crew present—filming a documentary on Marsh and his hand-drill surgeries.
Picture the last chimpanzee you saw on television… There’s a high probability that it was wearing suspenders and a hat or was smoking a cigar. Of course, it could also have been playing pranks in an ad for CareerBuilder.com (video), or dancing in a commercial for Arby’s (video) or ETrade (video), or giving a high five to Matt LeBlanc from Friends. We’re habituated to seeing chimps anthropomorphized on television, but are there any downsides to all this alleged fun besides hackneyed, mediocre humor?
Apparently so. Last week, a group of primatologists, including the distinguished Jane Goodall, wrote a letter to Science magazine (subscription required) that criticized the entertainment and media industry for their portrayal of chimpanzees, stating that “such inappropriate portrayals are viewed by millions of people annually,” leading people to mistakenly perceive “chimpanzees as frivolous subhumans that are not in danger of extinction.”
Dolphins always seem to find the most bizarre ways to make the headlines. In their most recent adventure, it appears that a dolphin named Moko has come to the rescue of two beached pygmy whales—by “communicating with the whales and leading them to safety,” according to the BBC.
According to conservation officer Malcolm Smith, who was at the scene, “there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea,” as quoted by the BBC. This extraordinary tale of cetacean correspondence was also covered by CNN, The LA Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, and various Australian papers.
So what happened out there between Moko and the whales? Did she really communicate with them? If so, do these animals share a language—dolphinese perhaps?
The original seven deadly sins laid out by the Catholic Church—pride, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath, and sloth—are the classics of immorality, the same basic flaws humans have evinced since coming out of the trees (and, perhaps, even before). But in our booming, globalized, highly networked world, there are some new and very harmful errors at our disposal. And while the Vatican doesn’t have a Facebook page yet (unlike Discover), they do recognize that modern times call for modern vices.
In an interview headlined “New Forms of Social Sin,” Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Vatican’s Apostolic Penitentiary, insisted that “new sins have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalization.” The list of “mortal sins,” as they have now been classified, came at the end of a week-long seminar in Rome that intended to deal with the dismal turnout at recent confessions. Seems logical: If a wider range of souls are in danger of eternal damnation, more will seek absolution. So, what are the new ways to fall from grace?
Girotti devotes some space to a familiar type of don’t-treat-your-brother-poorly admonitions—like social injustice that causes poverty or “the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few”—but many of the new rules concern modern science, stuff that the sixth-century pope Gregory the Great never dreamed of.
The Wellcome Image Awards for 2008 have been announced, “recognising the achievements of scientists who have created bold and groundbreaking images as part of their own research and made them available for public use through the Wellcome Library’s image repository, Wellcome Images.”
The 22 winning images include red blood cells leaking from a ruptured blood vessel, the trachea of a silkworm, decrepit-looking breast cancer cells, and a fly posing on sugar crystals.
Have you ever wondered what ovulation looks like from the viewpoint of the egg? Or wished you could cruise along the lymphatic system through a tangled web of capillaries? Now, your childhood dreams of having Ms. Frizzle for a teacher can be (practically) fulfilled: A new interactive Web site called Visible Body is the Magic School Bus of the 21st century. The psychedelic site just launched on Tuesday, and is the first free (with registration), Web-based, 3D interactive model of the human body. The site includes eye-popping videos and images, including the screenshots posted here.
One of the great scientific questions has finally been answered: Can grizzly bears dance? Yes—and rather well, thank you very much. Researchers from the USGS have released video footage taken during the past two years of grizzly and black bears shimmying against tree trunks in Northwest Montana as if the very soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever was playing in the background.
Okay, these beasts are not really dancing. The bears (males primarily) are leaving their chemical “signature” behind on so-called rub trees to communicate with other males and avoid turf wars while searching for breeding females. Investigators recorded at 16 different sites in Glacier National Park and plan to use the footage to better understand bear behavior and improve experimental methods. Dance-off, anyone?
When Montana State University plant pathologist David Sands first proposed that some bacteria that infect plants could spread over great distances through falling precipitation, some thought his idea was crazy. But new research says Sands’ idea actually holds water.
Bacteria, including one species known to infect tomato and bean plants, are found in greater abundance in freshly fallen snow than previously thought, says Brent Christner at Louisiana State University, who led the new research. Christner examined snow from sites with lots of vegetation nearby (France) and places with no vegetation (like Antarctica). He found bacteria in snow no matter where he looked. In some samples, 85 percent of the particles found in the snow were bacterial.
Tuna has been getting a lot of attention lately, but for all the wrong reasons. In January, a popular front-page article in the New York Times found frighteningly high levels of mercury in tuna from Manhattan sushi restaurants. The consumer’s response? It still tastes good (and it’s not like we’re eating thermometers). New Yorkers were wise to detect an element of sensationalist scaremongering in the Times article, but now there’s a genuine, urgent reason to avoid that succulent sushi: Tuna is facing regional extinction. Thanks to worldwide demand for “the chicken of the sea,” tuna populations have been plummeting despite efforts at sustainable fishing.
As sharks face intense fishing–with over a million killed each year for their prized fins and for meat–shark researchers sketched out the state of the ocean’s top predators and wondered about their future.
Julia Baum studies the great sharks: large top predators including hammerheads, tiger sharks, great whites, bull and dusky sharks, oceanic whitetips, blues, threshers, and mako. All of these species have declined more than 80% in just the last 20 years, and many species have been cut down by 90% or more. Many are already listed as vulnerable or endangered by the IUCN.
For all their mystery, we know two things about the world’s oceans pretty well: One, they’re huge, and two, they do a lot for human beings (producing food, storing carbon, allowing travel and shipping, and scads of other good stuff). But just how much is a particular patch of healthy, functioning ocean real estate worth to humanity? And how can we decide on the places that are most important to protect, and how to balance the dozens of competing demands on the waters around us? This morning’s Marine Symposium saw a line-up of top marine ecologists grappling with how to start quantifying and valuing the “ecosystem services” performed by ocean environments. (more…)
It may not be long before sharks invade Antarctic waters. Due to global warming the Antarctic seas are changing and becoming an inviting ground for sharks that will soon turn to the prey-rich southern waters, says Cheryl Wilga of the University of Rhode Island.
