Blogs / Discoblog

Despite all the amazing advances in recent medicine, there are still plenty of simple problems lacking a clear solution. For one, we still haven’t found a great way to heal fractures in the top of joint bones—any mistake in alignment when the bone is being repaired, and you wind up with a useless joint—not to mention terrible arthritis.

Enter a team of bioengineers at the University of Utah, who had an ingenious idea: If sandcastle worms can produce natural glue strong enough to hold together a tiny sand-home against the intertidal surf, why not copy that glue and use it on broken knees?

Now, the first generation prototype of the so-called worm glue has been tested on cow bone pieces (from groceries, meaning the cows were already deceased) and has performed 37 percent as well as commercial superglue. The results will be published online in next week’s edition of Macromolecular Biosciences. Lead author Russell Stewart projects that they’ll be testing the glue on live animals within a year or two, and on humans within the next five to 10 years. While the glue won’t be able to fix your broken femur, it could be very useful for small bone fragments in fractured knees, wrists, elbows, and ankles, as well as the face and skull.

(more…)

Moles can eat their own weight in worms each day. But they’re no match for human worm grunters—also known as worm snorers, fiddlers, or charmers— who can collect thousands of worms each day, selling them for bait. Worm grunting involves thrusting a stick into the soil and rubbing it with a piece of steel to generate vibrations that send earthworms fleeing to the surface. It’s quite popular in the southeastern U.S.— but until now, no one really understood why it worked.

Ken Catania, a mole expert at Vanderbilt University and MacArthur genius award winner, made the connection between moles, worms, and human grunters. The humans are fooling the worms by unknowingly imitating the sound of a burrowing mole. The worms instinctively surface (faster than you’d think) because moles generally stay underground when foraging.

(more…)

Earthworms don’t appear to be the most astute observers—they have no eyes, they wander foolishly onto heavily trafficked sidewalks whenever it rains, and they have simple pairs of cell clusters for brains. But when it comes to sex, these hermaphroditic critters can detect something that many humans can’t: whether or not their partner is a virgin. And they compensate the sperm load accordingly.

(more…)