Clouds and the Life of Microbes

The New York Times has a very interesting story about clouds! Read lots more from Olivia Judson.

"But clouds present an extra difficulty. Most of the environments that we consider extreme — the icy, the acidic, the salty, the boiling, and so on — are fairly easy for microbes to adapt to, because the conditions remain relatively constant for long periods. The greater challenge comes when the environment contains extreme swings in conditions, as in a tide pool. Creatures that live here must be able to endure changes from wet to dry, cold to hot, as well as rapid fluctuations in how salty it is."

And:

"Mostly, the cloudy residents are bacteria of various kinds. Samples of clouds taken from a meteorological station at the summit of Puy de Dôme, a mountain in central France with an elevation of more than 1,400 meters (almost 5,000 feet), turned up more than 71 strains of bacteria, as well as a variety of fungi; owing to the way the sampling was done, this is a massive underestimate of who’s up there. Of the bacteria detected, many appear to have come from the oceans. More than half have shown themselves capable of growing in cold temperatures, and some are even officially psychrophiles — lovers of cold. Which is to say, they grow when it’s cold, and not when it’s a bit warmer — unlike the bacteria on your food, which slow down when you put them in the fridge. One of the bacteria most often detected was Pseudomonas syringae; intriguingly, this critter has the ability to make ice crystals form around it at relatively warm (-2C, or 28.4F) temperatures.

As to their metabolism — the question of what such microbes “eat” — clouds are, apparently, more nutritious than they look. More nutritious, even, than some freshwater lakes. Cloud water contains a slew of compounds, from different types of organic acids and alcohols, to elements such as nitrogen and sulfur. Laboratory experiments have shown that for a growing bacterium or fungus, cloud water contains plenty of potential food."

Only 5,000 Light-Years Away

I love to learn what scientists are saying about what they find in the universe - today, reported in Scientific American: Astronomers have discovered a pair of planets around a star 5,000 light-years away that resemble smaller versions of Jupiter and Saturn, hinting that solar systems like ours may be unexpectedly common. As in our own solar system, the closer of the two planets to their star is the larger one, 70 percent as massive as Jupiter; the more distant planet has 90 percent the mass of Saturn.

Let's face it, in universe terms this is very close. Now I am wondering for real if other intelligent beings are out there!

Looking at the way we think about others

I am interested in this study presented in Scientific American, but particularly in this part of the study mentioned below. Also, I could not resist using this image to illustrate the study, so I may as well be stereotyping groups just as the participants in this study.

"The experimenters used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of Harvard and other Boston-area students while showing them pictures of other college-age people whom the researchers randomly described as either liberal northeastern students or conservative Midwest fundamentalist Christian students.

The categories were a ruse. The pictures were actually downloaded from an online dating website and randomly assigned to the two groups (which were an invention of the researchers), with each group holding similar racial and gender mixes.

The experimental participants, however, thought each person pictured really was from one group or the other because the experimenters contrived demographic information about each photo; this information was randomly reassigned to different pictures with each new experimental subject. The participants, then, were confronted with pictures of people who had randomly generated but coherent cultural and political identities already attached to them."

What's Next in Physics - The Wait for the New Collider is Over

I like to read Scientific American for its coverage of physics - it does it better for a non-physicist like me than any other publication... visit the web site for a special issue and some excellent graphics.

They call it the tera­scale. It is the realm of physics that comes into view when two elementary particles smash together with a combined energy of around a trillion electron volts, or one tera-electron-volt. The machine that will take us to the terascale—the ring-shaped Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN—is now nearing completion.

To ascend through the energy scales from electron volts to the tera­scale is to travel from the familiar world through a series of distinct landscapes: from the domains of chemistry and solid-state electronics (electron volts) to nuclear reactions (millions of electron volts) to the territory that particle physicists have been investigating for the past half a century (billions of electron volts).

What lies in wait for us at the tera­scale? No one knows.

But radically new phenomena of one kind or another are just about guaranteed to occur. Scientists hope to detect long-sought particles that could help complete our understanding of the nature of matter. More bizarre discoveries, such as signs of additional dimensions, may unfold as well.

Physicists are also drawing up plans for a machine intended to succeed and complement the LHC more than a decade hence, adding precision to the rough maps that will be deciphered from the LHC’s data.

At the end of this “journey” to the tera­scale and beyond, we will for the first time know what we are made of and how the place where we briefly live operates at bottom. Like the completed LHC itself, we will have come full circle.

Judah Folkman's Contribution to Medicine

Today's news says that Judah Folkman dies at 74. His story is important in many ways, including how a scientist can be caught up in cancer politics. He remained steady and respected through it all.

Read more at The New York Times: says Folkman was a path-breaking cancer researcher who faced years of skepticism before his ideas led to successful treatments. Dr. Folkman, a professor at Harvard and director of the vascular biology program at Children’s Hospital Boston, is considered the father of the idea that tumors can be kept in check by choking off the supply of blood they need to grow. The approach is now embodied in several successful cancer drugs, most notably Avastin, by Genentech.

“His vision and ideas literally changed the course of modern medicine,” said Dr. William Li, a former student of Dr. Folkman’s, who is president of the Angiogenesis Foundation, an organization that promotes the promise of Dr. Folkman’s approach. Angiogenesis refers to the formation of new blood vessels.

Dr. Folkman’s work created a frenzy in 1998 when a front-page article in The New York Times reported how two drugs he had developed had eradicated tumors in mice. The article quoted Dr. James Watson, a Nobel laureate for discovery of the structure of DNA, as saying, “Judah is going to cure cancer in two years.”

But some other scientists had trouble replicating Dr. Folkman’s results, and the biotechnology company with rights to the drugs gave up on them to save money after the drugs did not seem to work as well in people as in mice.

For a Few Bucks: Your Genome

I am intrigued by the new companies that will read your DNA for $1,000. I was first interested in 23andme - a web-based place that describes the process in a very user friendly way. A company just covered in Scientific American is deCODE's deCODEme. The story says: deCODE Genetics has launched a new service that, for a mere $985, will take your FedExed cheek swab and scan the enclosed DNA for a sprinkling of genetic variations linked with 20 or so diseases, as well as ancestry and physical traits such as eye color (in case you don't have a mirror handy). Not quite ushering in the eagerly awaited era of the $1,000 personal genome, the new service, called deCODEme, will cover less than 0.1 percent of the three billion units of the full genome, which remains a bit too pricey for most people to have sequenced—unless they are geneticist-entrepreneur J. Craig Venter. (See News Bytes of the Week—Popcorn lung leaves the factory.) An era it is, though. Hot on deCODE's heels came the Google-backed 23andMe, which offers a similar service for $999 that would cover 35 percent less of the genome, and a third company, Navigenics, is expected to launch a disease-focused scan.

Clarke Legacy: Space Elevators?

I noticed the news today that Arthur C. Clarke is 90, and celebrated his birthday at his home in Sri Lanka. He listed three wishes: for the world to embrace cleaner energy resources, for a lasting peace in his adopted home, Sri Lanka, and for evidence of extraterrestrial beings.

I decided to check out Clarke's best-known accomplishments and was intrigued by a concept called space elevators. His novel The Fountains of Paradise, in which he first described a space elevator, he believes, ultimately will be his legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete.

Wikipedia says that a space elevator is a proposed megastructure designed to transport material from a celestial body's surface into space. The term most often refers to a structure that reaches from the surface of the Earth to geosynchronous orbit (and beyond). The concept of a structure reaching to geosynchronous orbit was first conceived by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who proposed a compression structure, or "Tsiolkovsky tower." Most recent discussions focus on tensile structures (tethers) reaching from geosynchrous orbit to the ground. Space elevators have also sometimes been referred to as beanstalks, space bridges, space lifts, space ladders, skyhooks, orbital towers, or orbital elevators.

The most common proposal is a tether, usually in the form of a cable or ribbon, spanning from the surface near the equator to a point beyond geosynchronous orbit. As the planet rotates, the inertia at the end of the tether counteracts gravity, and also keeps the cable taut. Vehicles can then climb the tether and get in orbit without the use of rocket propulsion. Such a structure could theoretically permit delivery of cargo and people to orbit at a fraction of the cost of launching a payload into orbit, and without the substantial environmental harm caused by some rocket fuels.

Recent proposals for a space elevator are notable in their plans to incorporate carbon nanotubes into the tether design, thus providing a link between space exploration and nanotechnology.
Actual cable-scale technology is currently inadequate to build space elevators, but research is ongoing, and some people believe that technology to do this may soon exist.

Biodiesel: Hope for the Alternative

The story in Scientific American points to work taking place to look at alternative fuels...let's see how easy it could be to switch from an oil economy!

Biodiesel may not become the airplane fuel of the future but it did prove effective enough to recently power a 1968 L-29 Czechoslovakian jet—dubbed BioJet 1—up to 17,000 feet (5,180 meters) over 37 minutes. A three minute, 15-second test the day before was the world's first flight entirely fueled by cooking oil.

"She flew and she flew just fine," says physicist Rudi Wiedemann, president and CEO of Biodiesel Solutions, Inc., whose company provided the fuel for the historic October flight: fresh canola oil refined into biodiesel. "We wanted to show that it was doable by just going out and doing it."

BBC Looks at Science of the Future

I was intrigued by this series by the BBC, so I am sharing an excerpt and a link.

The reporter says, "To get the most authentic, authoritative view of the future, I spent several months travelling with a BBC film crew to visit the labs of the most influential scientists in the world. We began by flying down to North Carolina to drive the computerised "driverless car" that can actually travel on the highway without anyone behind the wheel. We flew to Tokyo and visited Asimo, one of the world's most advanced robots. We travelled to Silicon Valley, and met the gurus of the computer revolution, who envision a future with three-dimensional TV, fantastic virtual worlds, and the internet in our glasses.

Driverless cars: Some science fiction will soon become everyday factWe visited the laboratory in Vienna where physicists are "teleporting" photons and atoms, like in science fiction. We travelled to Dallas, Texas, and met with ranchers who routinely create herds of cloned cattle.
We went to Boston University and saw the "smart mice" which are genetically engineered to have better memory. This could help in the care of patients with Alzheimer's.
But one highlight of the trip was a visit to Dr Anthony Atala's lab in Wake Forest University, North Carolina, where he is unleashing a revolution in medicine: growing entire organs of the body from your own cells.

In the future, we might very well have a "human body shop" that can replace ageing and diseased organs at will.

Scientific American looks at neurotheology

This is from Scientific American - again - but you cannot beat the topics and writing in this publication.

Searching for God in the Brain
Researchers are unearthing the roots of religious feeling in the neural commotion that accompanies the spiritual epiphanies of nuns, Buddhists and other people of faith
By David Biello

Such efforts to reveal the neural correlates of the divine—a new discipline with the warring titles “neurotheology” and “spiritual neuroscience”—not only might reconcile religion and science but also might help point to ways of eliciting pleasurable otherworldly feelings in people who do not have them or who cannot summon them at will. Because of the positive effect of such experiences on those who have them, some researchers speculate that the ability to induce them artificially could transform people’s lives by making them happier, healthier and better able to concentrate. Ultimately, however, neuroscientists study this question because they want to better understand the neural basis of a phenomenon that plays a central role in the lives of so many.

Perfect pitch: you got it or you don't

This story caught my eye - so I am giving you a few details because a Scientific American story reports that you don't have to be Mozart to correctly identify a tone as A-sharp or D-flat. In fact, says a new report, perfect pitch may be genetic.

Says reporter Nikhil Swaminathan, "In the midst of recruiting subjects for a genetic study on perfect (absolute) pitch—the ability to discern a note from nearly any sort of sound without a reference tone—scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, discovered several interesting patterns among people who have the skill.

"Among the findings of the study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA : 'Either you've got it or you don't," says senior report author Jane Gitschier, a professor of medicine and pediatrics at U.C.S.F. She says that data collected from more than 2,000 people aged eight to 70 years old during the study indicates that there is likely a genetic basis to perfect pitch—one she believes is activated by early music training "Absolute pitch almost certainly requires exposure to music at a young age," Gitschier notes. "You need to have some idea of the nomenclature.'"

Facebook shares photos from the unborn

I was taken with this story, so I am sharing it - let's say social networking, new technology and communications makes it right for WendSight.

Says FOX News, "It already has its own Facebook page and more than 100 people want to be its friend — but Bubba Waring, described by its mother as "the world's most famous fetus," hasn't actually been born yet. Sydney couple Claire Gillis and Luke Waring, who are expecting their first child in three months, initially turned to the social networking site to keep their family and friends updated on the pregnancy. But instead of creating a profile under her own name, Gillis said she thought it would be better to do it from her unborn child's perspective.

Global warming - come on people wake up!

Back to the same ol' same ol' - does global warming exist - you would think we were talking about extraterrestrial life or ET sightings.

SCIAM OBSERVATIONS Opinions, arguments and analyses from the editors of Scientific American: Newsweek denies the existence of global warming covers this this week.

Maybe it's because I don't have the faith in people that I should, but I find this Newsweek cover really irresponsible. Actually, it's due to the polls cited in the article--and those I have seen elsewhere--that suggest that the American public thinks, among other things, that scientists are still trying to determine if global warming is for real and that it's a major issue in the upcoming Presidential election.

Sure, the cover is provocative and gripping, but it also may be doing a disservice to the general public and the people working hard to develop new ways to combat what is realistically the greatest threat to our livelihood: climate change. In fact, global warming isn't just a threat. Combating it will require us to dramatically change the way we live. (But, you've heard this all before.)

Anyway, as a journalist and magazine junkie, I spend a lot of time combing newsstands for new reads, eye-catching designs and little bites of information that can be gleaned from a cover line, a headline or a quick turn through a publication. So, if I am scanning a magazine rack--assuming I am not a science writer--what am I going to think when I see this Newsweek cover.

Probably not much. The Internet hasn't killed all journalism, but it certainly has deeply wounded news-weeklies like Time, US News and Newsweek. Am I going to take the time to read what the asterisk is referencing? Maybe. Another plausible scenario could be: I just read the big print, forget about it and then three weeks later--while I am talking to someone about politics or energy policy or compact fluorescent light bulbs--blurt out, "I read somewhere that global warming is a hoax."

I know I am being a little dramatic, but I think this cover would better serve readers (or, more importantly, casual observers), if it said something like: "Minority Report: The Global Warming Deniers".

Hat tip to Charlie Petit over at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker for bringing this to my attention.

Science reporter seeks solar bomb experts

Sometimes you just have to read a story because of its headline: "Does anyone know how to restart the sun with a bomb?"

On July 20, reporter Philip Yam of Scientific American said: Last month, I caught a preview screening of Sunshine, Danny Boyle's sci-fi psycho thriller flick that opens today. After watching the film, I couldn't help but wonder about the premise. The sun's about to die--but not the way conventional astronomy dictates, in which the sun consumes its supply of hydrogen in its core, swells out as a red giant (and boils away the earth's atmosphere), blows off its outer layer and turns into a white dwarf. Sunshine makes no attempt to say how the bomb would restart the sun's thermonuclear engine.

So I pose this question to all you who know more astrophysics than I: can you envision just how the sun's output might start declining suddenly and precipitously? And how a "solar bomb" might actually work to restart it? The moviemakers do say that the bomb has the mass of Manhattan, but I don't know if that helps or hurts.

Reading minds - scientists get closer

You may have seen the movie Minority Report - think about the special people that the police used to read their minds about past experiences and memories. With today's science closing in on witnessing memories and reading the minds of mice, maybe we are not so far away from this becoming a reality - and you won't need special powers.

Scientific American says: Researchers are closing in on the rules that the brain uses to lay down memories. Discovery of this memory code could lead to the design of smarter computers and robots and even to new ways to peer into the human mind. For decades, neuroscientists have attempted to unravel how the brain makes memories. Now, by combining a set of novel experiments with powerful mathematical analyses and an ability to record simultaneously the activity of more than 200 neurons in awake mice researchers have the basic mechanism the brain uses to draw vital information from experiences and turn that information into memories.

Okay so far this sounds fine. Now think about this: Such understanding could allow investigators to develop more seamless brain-machine interfaces, design a whole new generation of smart computers and robots, and perhaps even assemble a codebook of the mind that would make it possible to decipher--by monitoring neural activity--what someone remembers and thinks.

Read more at Scientific American.

Capillary image opens computer system

From the TechDirt blog - this is interesting so I am pointing you to the web site:

In brief: TechDirt says it's becoming less unusual for devices like laptops, and even mobile phones, to feature fingerprint scanners for secure access.

The idea is that only the owner's fingerprint can unlock the device, so if it's stolen, it will be useless to a thief. This tends to help with most of your garden-variety theft, but as anybody who's watched a few action movies knows, fingerprint-based systems don't pose a problem for the really motivated thief, who can simply cut off their victim's finger and use it to access the device or secret lair or whatever.

Sony has a system that doesn't use fingerprints, but rather an image of the capillaries (via Network Computing) beneath the skin of a person's finger. The pattern in the image can only be captured when blood is pumping through the finger in question, so severing it from the rest of the victim would render it useless.

Scientific American's Best Photos

I am a big fan of the Scientific American web site - check out the photo gallery there for the most awesome photos! The message at the bottom of the page says I cannot provide the photo here - so go to the link and check it out!!

Scientific American looks at baseball

In a Q&A by SA:

Does the length of a baseball player's arm affect the distance of his throw? If so, how?

Mike Marshall, the 1974 National League Cy Young Award winner and an associate professor of physical education, most recently at West Texas A&M University, winds up and delivers an answer to this one.

When baseball pitchers with various length pitching arms apply the same amount of force, the ones with shorter arms actually achieve higher release velocities. The muscles of players with shorter pitching arms apply their force with greater leverage—so, in order for pitchers with longer arms to achieve the same release velocity, they have to apply a greater force.

To understand how this happens requires knowledge of how muscles move the bones to which they are attached.

As with any human movement, an athlete creates a desired motion by first using some muscles to stabilize the position of one of the bones involved in the action. Then when muscles contract, he or she moves the bone, which is to be put in motion, closer to the one that is stabilized in relation to the body.

In baseball pitching, to achieve their maximum release velocity, a baseball pitcher "locks"—or, stabilizes—the bone in his upper pitching arm (the humerus) to the bones in his shoulder. Then, after rotating his hips, shoulders and upper pitching arm as far as possible toward home plate, he contracts the muscles that move the bones in his pitching forearm, wrist, hand and fingers straight toward home as powerfully as he can.

How fast these bones move toward home plate then determines the release velocity of the baseball. Because shorter forearm, wrist, hand and finger bones have less inertia to overcome, a baseball pitcher can move them faster through release. As a result, with the same amount of force applied, a baseball pitcher with shorter bones in his lower pitching arm can achieve higher release velocities.

Bats in flight - two vortices

I have always been facinated with bats ever since I saw a large gray bat hanging on a stone wall next to my grandparents' house in Harrodsburg, Ky. This is very interesting from Scientific American:

Bats seem to be adapted for slow speed and high maneuverability in the same way as hummingbirds whereas most flying birds are optimized for high speed. As birds swing their wings upward, the feathers separate like window blinds to let air through, which prevents the lift-reducing currents that the bats experienced. The two creatures also leave different wakes: A bat's stretchy wings churn up two separate vortices—one behind each wing—but a pair of relatively rigid bird wings produces one vortex for the whole bird.

Scientists are advising people who build small flying machines to see if the wind tunnel results can help out, giving detailed information about how a small autonomous flying system works. More here.

Experiemental Biology 2007 - Final Coverage

This is my last update from Experimental Biology 2007 - a meeting too vast to cover all, but here are some last snippets getting news coverage:

* Dr. Martha Payne reported as part of the American Society for Nutritionthat elderly men and women who consumed higher levels of calcium and vitamin D are significantly more likely to have greater volumes of brain lesions, regions of damage that can increase risk of cognitive impairment, dementia, depression and stroke.

Dr. Payne and her co-investigators from Duke and the University of North Carolina examined magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from 232 men and women (79 men, 153 women) between the ages of 60 and 86 (average age 71). All the subjects had at least some brain lesions of varying sizes, including the extremely miniscule ones often seen in even healthy older persons, but those who reported consuming more calcium and vitamin D were markedly more likely to have higher total volume of brain lesions as measured across numerous MRI scans.

“At this point,” says Dr. Payne, “we do not know if high calcium and vitamin D intake are involved with the causation of brain lesions, but the study provides support to the growing number of researchers who are concerned about the effects of too much calcium, particularly among older adults, given the current emphasis on promoting high intakes of calcium and vitamin D.”

* By giving ordinary adult mice a drug - a synthetic designed to mimic fat - Salk Institute scientist Dr. Ronald M. Evans is now able to chemically switch on PPAR-d, the master regulator that controls the ability of cells to burn fat. Even when the mice are not active, turning on the chemical switch activates the same fat-burning process that occurs during exercise. The resulting shift in energy balance (calories in, calories burned) makes the mice resistant to weight gain on a high fat diet.

The hope is that such metabolic trickery will lead to a new approach to new treatment and prevention of human metabolic syndrome. Sometimes called syndrome X, this consists of obesity and the often dire health consequences of obesity: high blood pressure, high levels of fat in the blood, heart disease, and resistance to insulin and diabetes. Dr. Evan’s presentation was part of the scientific program of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

* Being obese increases the risk of breast cancer in post-menopausal women, shortens the time between return of the disease and lowers overall survival rates. Researchers now report evidence on how leptin, a hormone found in fat cells, significantly influences breast cancer development and progression in mice. This new understanding, says Dr. Sebastiano Ando, establishes a new mechanism for the link between obesity and breast cancer and suggests new targets for drugs that could intervene in that mechanism.

Dr. Ando’s presentation was part of the scientific program of the American Society of Investigative Pathology.

* Recent findings that the widely-used herbal supplement Saint John’s wort could dramatically affect the absorption and metabolism of many prescription and non-prescription drugs raised concerns that other popular herbal supplements might cause similar changes, thus significantly altering drugs’ therapeutic or toxic effects. What, for example, about ginseng and ginkgo biloba, two of the most widely used herbal supplements in this and other countries?

Speaking at Experimental Biology 2007 in Washington, DC, Dr. Gregory Reed reported a study that found daily use of ginseng or ginkgo biloba supplements at the recommended doses, or the combination of both supplements, are unlikely to alter the pharmacokinetics - by which drugs are absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and eliminated by the body - of the majority of prescription or over-the counter drugs. Dr. Reed’s presentation was part of the scientific program of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.