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May 08 2012
Thick, 1,000-Year-Old Dental Plaque Is Gross, Useful to Archaeologists
What big plaque deposits you have!
A dentist will tell you to floss everyday, but an archeologist might, well, have different priorities. Turns out the nitrogen and carbon isotopes in dental plaque can give archeologists a look at 1,000-year-old diets.
The buildup of plaque on this set of teeth is, um, impressive. (Cut the skull some slack though, this was before we had dentists to chide us about daily flossing.) Without the benefit of modern dental hygiene, the plaque built up over a lifetime, layer upon layer like a stalagmite. In a paper recently published in the Journal of Archeological Science researchers exhumed 58 medieval Spanish skeletons and scraped off their dental plaque to test carbon and nitrogen isotopes. When they compared the isotope profiles of the Spaniards to that of plaque from an Alaskan Inuit, the scientists found the ratio of nitrogen-15 to be quite different. That makes sense, as the Intuit ate a predominantly marine diet, and there is more nitrogen-15 in the protein molecules of organisms living in sea than on land.
Another benefit of plaque is that it’s easier to test than bone, which has to be dissolved in acid to extract from ...
April 27 2012
This Scientist Endures 15,000 Mosquito Bites a Year
The things we do for science.
Researchers who study mosquitoes and other blood-sucking insects sometimes use themselves as skeeter chow. In some cases, it’s because certain species of mosquitoes seem to prefer human blood to animal blood. In others, though, it’s a cheap, convenient alternative to keeping animals around for the insects to feed on or buying blood. And as it turns out, once you’ve been bitten a certain number of times you develop a tolerance to mosquito saliva.
Entomologist Steve Schutz, seen above paging through a magazine while the bloodsuckers go to work on his arm, feeds his mosquito colony once a week. He has welts for about an hour, but after that the bites fade, occasionally leaving a few red spots. That’s good, because at 300 bites a week, he averages about 15,000 a year. That’s dedication.
April 16 2012
Dog Ate My Experiment—And Now Dog Is My Experiment
Please don’t make me eat thallium.
If you’re an average normal person and your dog eats thallium-tainted agar plates from the trash, you’d probably take Rover to the vet. If you’re a vet and your dog eats thallium-tainted agar plates, you start taking notes—and blood and hair samples too.
That’s the backstory to a recent paper published in the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation. A poor, overly curious one-year-old shepherd mix broke into the laboratory trash and gobbled up 15 agar plates containing thallium. The poisonous compound is used in labs to isolate Mycoplasma fungi because it pretty much kills everything else that could grow on agar. Known as “the poisoner’s poison,” thallium has also been implicated in a number of famous murders and was a favorite of Saddam Hussein. (So if you are a non-scientist with thallium in your trash, it is kind of suspect…)
The dog’s owner, a vet, knew immediately the thallium was bad news. At the onset, the dog refused to eat and lost weight. And then things only got worse over several weeks as she lost control of her muscles, seized, caught pneumonia twice, and lost a ...
March 12 2012
Can a Limb That Never Existed Become a Phantom Limb?
Our brains sometimes just refuse to believe the truth. No, we’re talking not deniers or conspiracy theorists today—just phantom limbs.
If you ask RN, a 57-year-old woman, she would agree that she does not have a right hand: it was amputated after a bad car crash when she was 18. She would also tell you that she has never had a right index finger: she was born with a congenital deformity that gave her only the rudiment of a thumb, immobile ring and middle fingers, and no index finger at at all. More than 35 years after the amputation, she feels pain in a phantom right hand, which has five—not four—fully mobile fingers.
This latest case study recently published by Paul McGeoch and V.S. Ramachandran, leading brain scientists who study phantom limb syndrome, suggests the brain have an innate, hard-wired template for body image that is independent of what we see and feel. The authors say that most people born with congenitally missing limbs do not experience phantom ones, but a small subset do. Why that’s so is unclear, as is the origin of phantom limbs in general.
RN’s phantom phantom finger is similar to the supernumerary phantom ...
Daylight Saving Time–And More Car Accidents And More Cyberloafing–Is Upon Us
It’s that time of year again: Everyone’s groggily getting themselves to work an hour earlier than normal and trying to join in the collective delusion of Daylight Saving Time (as for why we do this to ourselves, see the video above). But as a statistician can tell you, get enough people all tired and confused at the same time and you will start to see some population-wide effects. Some studies, though not all, have found that at this time every year the number of traffic accidents spikes and that there are higher numbers of heart attacks and suicides. People also appear to waste more time on the Internet on the Monday when the clocks spring forward—researchers call it “cyberloafing“—perhaps because we have less will power when we are tired, and the Net is a sea of temptations.
To all our Sleepy Monday cyberloafers coming to the site for the first time, welcome! We hope you’ll stick around even when your circadian rhythm has reestablished itself. And while you wait: here are some videos of kittens we found while we were supposed to be doing something else.
January 27 2012
“Nasal Tampon” Made of Cured Pork Is a Great Cure for Nosebleeds
Bacon gets all the internet glory, but its more old-fashioned cousin salt pork may actually be good for you—for your nosebleeds, if not your waistline. Doctors recently used strips of cured salt pork to stop a life-threatening nosebleed. One of the doctors remembered the unconventional treatment from a field manual he saw in his military days, after exhausting all medical treatments short of risky surgeries.
The patient was a four-year-old girl with Glanzmann thrombasthenia, a rare blood disorder where her platelets are unable to do their normal job of blood clotting. Surgery and injection of blood coagulation proteins didn’t stop her bleeding after more than a week, so the doctors turned to something untested and low tech: “Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively, and without sequelae,” they wrote in a paper about the episode. While “nasal tampon” may sound distinctly undelicious as a pork product, it worked—not once, but twice, as a cure. When the girl re-injured herself four weeks later, the doctors stuffed salt pork up her nose again and she was home in less than 72 hours.
Now we all ...
January 03 2012
The Suit That Makes You Feel 75 Years Old
And reeeach for the shredded wheat…
Pregnancy suit, meet age suit. Just as scientists in Japan made a suit full of balloons, warm water, and accelerometers to give men a sense of what pregnancy feels like, scientists at MIT have put together a suit that simulates being in one’s mid-70s. But it’s a little easier to see the applications with this one. By 2030, 20% of the American population will be over the age of 65, and if you think these folks are going to willingly weather a world designed by and for hyperactive 26-year-old yoga enthusiasts, well, you’ve got another think coming. By putting on this suit, architects, store designers, and other professionals preoccupied the how people interact with the physical world with can get a sense of old age is like, and design accordingly.
And what does old age feel like? According the folks at MIT’s Age Lab, where the suit was developed, like having giant rubber bands keeping your limbs from fully extending, braces that make your arms stiff, a helmet that makes your spine curve uncomfortably, and glasses that make small print hard to read, among other impairments. Just ...
December 14 2011
Got Wrinkles? Smear on the Hottest New Fashion Toxin…Snake Venom!
Worried about wrinkles, laugh lines, or crow’s-feet adding years to your wizened countenance? Worry no longer, friend—now you can apply synthetic viper venom to your face… for a price. The product, called Syn-Ake, contains a peptide that mimics the effects of Waglerin-1, a toxin found in the venom of the temple pit viper. It works by temporarily paralyzing facial muscles, binding to receptors (called nicotinic acetylcholine receptors) on the muscles and preventing them from being stimulated and contracting. This has the effect of reducing certain small wrinkles in the short term, according to the sole available study on Syn-Ake, performed by the company that markets it, Switzerland-based Pentapharm. And now, according to the Daily Mail, you can buy a tiny bottle of it for only $60 to gingerly bless your wrinkly visage.
It’s the same basic principle as Botox, except that Botox usually involves injection, lasts longer, and is generally more invasive. Both products work by incapacitating a few of the muscles you use to smile, frown, and laugh, which after years of use and tightening create wrinkles by drawing your skin together into folds the way drapes gather along a ...
November 30 2011
The App That Looks Both Ways for You
The average city street these days sports quite a number of people gazing down into their phones as they walk, unable to tear their eyes from a text or email, or gabbing away to their second cousin while checking their manicure. If you are among those who prefer to walk upright, watching for oncoming semis, you may have noticed that these people don’t look at walk signals to tell when to cross; instead, they wait until their peripheral vision picks up a phoneless pedestrian making a move for it. I am frequently in that pedestrian, and am not above making occasional false starts to watch people jerk like fish on a line. Sorry, folks.
But! A day is coming when these phone addicts may no longer need to watch you from the corner of their eyes to gauge when it’s safe to cross. Scientists at Dartmouth and University of Bologna have built an app that will alert these pedestrians when collision with an oncoming vehicle is imminent with a helpful series of vibrations and chirrups.
The app, called WalkSafe, uses the phone’s built-in camera to watch traffic and apply vision learning algorithms to identify car-like objects, going on to identify the ...
November 18 2011
What Batman’s Medical Case History Would Look Like
Ouch.
When you watch Batman plummet 20 stories and somehow drag himself upright, you know there’s going to be a doozy of a doctor’s visit later. And what, the curious fan might wonder, would the doctor say in the face of the massive, persistent injuries of billionaire industrialist Bruce Wayne? If some GPs want to test for weird genetic diseases just on the strength of mouth dryness and occasional fatigue, who knows what they’d say to frostbite in August or bizarre allergic reactions to plants. Or rather, now we know, thanks to a physician’s case history of Patient BW over at Ordinary Gentlemen:
By far the greatest contributor to patient’s ongoing morbidity are his multiple and seemingly ceaseless musculoskeletal injuries…Patient explained most of these (and most subsequent) injuries as being the result of membership in a private and apparently quite intense mixed martial arts club. Patient has denied being the victim of domestic abuse by Mr. Grayson following indirect and direct questioning on numerous occasions.
Patient was advised to consider recreational activities that carry less risk of ongoing physical injury, or at very least allow himself to heal fully from previous trauma before returning to participation. Given ...
November 08 2011
Say No to Chicken Pops—Buying Infected Lollipops Online Is Most Likely a Bad Idea
Don’t lie. Don’t steal. And don’t buy lollipops allegedly mouthed by infected children peddled over the internets. Apparently the third piece of advice doesn’t go without saying; parents who don’t want to give their kids vaccines in several states have turned to Facebook to find lollipops, spit, or rags from chickenpox-ridden youngsters, according to the Associated Press. Federal prosecutor Jerry Martin warns that the practice is dangerous and illegal—it’s a federal crime to ship known pathogens across state lines. It’s also likely to fail at spreading the virus since chicken pox needs to be inhaled to infect children, according to doctors, and is dangerous, since it could spread other diseases that more readily persist in saliva like hepatitis.
One post from a Facebook group called “Find a Pox Party in Your Area” (a closed group, but with pictures of its hundreds of members) reads, ”I got a Pox Package in mail just moments ago. I have two lollipops and a wet rag and spit.” Another woman warns, “This is a federal offense to intentionally mail a contagion.” Another woman answers, “Tuck it inside a zip lock baggy and then put the baggy in the envelope : ) Don’t put anything identifying it as pox.” Very clever.
“Pox parties” are nothing new—although they’ve become less common since the chicken pox vaccine was introduced in 1995. But the ability to easily connect with like-minded, vaccine-wary parents around the country is. These parents, skeptical about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, would probably do well to ditch their credulity regarding the diseased bodily fluids of complete strangers.
[Via The Associated Press]
Image: jelene / Flickr
October 28 2011
From “Freedom!” to “Brains!”: Shift In Zombie Narrative Reflects Zombie-fication of Society
Life is pretty simple for a zombie. You just wander around and try to eat people’s brains. But it wasn’t always so. In the uncorrupted early years of zombie narratives, zombies were typically the undead slaves of voodoo priests, and their primary motivation was to cast off the yolk of dark magic and rebel against their leaders. For example, the first feature-length zombie film, White Zombie (1932), features a heroine who’s bewitched by a voodoo master (ominously named Murder). When she finally triumphs over him and he is pushed off a cliff, she reverts to her normal, non-zombie self.
No longer. Nowadays zombies have no real motivation. (When polled as to their life purpose, nine out of 10 zombies replied, “Braaaaaiiiiinnnns!!!”)
At least one researcher thinks the shift in the zombie story, beginning in the late 1960s, reflects a greater change in society. ”With no voodoo master, today’s zombies have no clear controller to turn against and free themselves from,” says researcher Nick Pearce. “That means there are no effective plans for resistance and no hope for the future. Zombies may well be popular today because they speak to a similar feeling of powerlessness shared by many members of our society.” Whoa. Maybe we’re all zombies!
Pearce thinks the key question is why we as a society are, like zombies, unwilling to take a stand against the powers-that-be, and are overwhelmed by a lack of political interest. It’s in the interest of these powers, he says, to have a zombified society that wanders about consuming the latest advertised goods. Pearce will present his findings at the Festival of Social Science in Newcastle, England, next week.
Interesting enough—and raises the possibility that Occupy Wall Street is actually a mass zombie exorcism—but this also sounds a lot like Dawn of The Dead, a famous zombie flick released over 30 years ago. (If you haven’t seen it, it involves a group of humans seeking shelter from a zombie epidemic in a suburban shopping mall, and is an overt send-up of consumerist culture.) But perhaps I’ve just got Hollywood voodoo magic on the brain.
Image: moggs oceanlane / Flickr
October 21 2011
Why Men Get Sick And Must Lie On The Couch Whenever The Game Is On
He may be smiling, but it’s no laughing matter: he’s got the man-flu the game is on.
Either British women are, uh, kind of slow, or English guys are more persuasive than we realized. According to Reuters, a survey found that one in five British ladies believe that “man-flu” is real, a condition which leaves afflicted gentlemen laid up on the couch watching sports. If I had known this could work, I would have caught this fictional bug long ago. This silly survey of 2,000 British adults found that many believed in a surprising amount of myths and old wive’s tales—although perhaps the “man-flu” would be better describes as an “old husband’s tale.”
The survey also found that almost half of the people agreed that men exaggerate their symptoms to get attention. Apparently, though, this doesn’t apply to imaginary diseases, in which they prefer to bask in the curative radiation of sports television.
One in 10 Brits supposedly believe that eating more carrots can improve your night vision. This myth allegedly comes from World War II British propaganda that said as much to explain the increased numbers of German fighters being shot down. The borderline-plausible explanation was meant to prevent the Nazis from finding out about their new radar technology, which was the real secret to the British successes.
According to “study leader” Mike Smith, a “large majority” of the population also believes that your eyes can become square-shaped from watching too much television. Really, English people? I’m going to guess that most Brits don’t actually believe this, since that’s not the only eyebrow-raising tidbit. Apparently the survey was “specially commissioned to mark the release of Hollywood thriller ‘Contagion.’” Multiple searches for more about Mike Smith or the survey turned up nothing, nor did a Twitter message or an email to the Reuters editor.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t have fun with this story, or slide a little science your way while I’m at it. The most common misconception, prescribed to by 37 percent of the population, is that we lose most heat through our heads. While that isn’t true, it isn’t that far off. According to University of Thessaly researcher Andreas Flouris (interviewed for an unrelated story several months ago), people in the cold lose about one-third of their body heat through the head. And covering up any body part is not equally as effective as covering the head, as the Reuters story incorrectly states. Blood flow to extremities becomes limited during cold exposure via vasoconstriction, in order to keep the vital organs and brain warm. Obviously blood flow to the head/brain cannot be limited, since it, uh, is kind of important. Come on, Reuters. Use your head!
But maybe I’m just taking this too seriously. As one of the Reuters commenters pointed out, 50 percent of people do have below average intelligence.
[Via Reuters]
Image: Furryscaly / Flickr
September 12 2011
Green, Glowing Kittens Contribute to HIV Research, Look Adorable
These wee green kittens not only glow, they’re resistant to the feline version of HIV.
Scientists exploring possible treatments for HIV have, purely as a byproduct of their methods, earned themselves a spot in today’s science blog postings: They’ve made glowing kittens.
When these green kitties were still twinkles in their parents’ eyes, scientists investigating a macaque gene thought to protect monkeys against feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) inserted it into cat eggs with a lab-grown virus, intending to test whether cats carrying the gene were resistant to FIV as well. Researchers are interested in seeing how the macaque gene guards against FIV, which is the feline version of HIV, in hopes of transferring their insights to combating HIV.
But here’s where things get wacky: The team also included in the virus a jellyfish gene that makes a glowing green protein, to act as a signal. The virus does not always succeed in transferring the genes entrusted to it, but by including the jellyfish gene, the team gave themselves an easy way to tell when the transfer took place: kittens that glow green under fluorescent light, showing that they carry the jellyfish gene, almost certainly carry the macaque gene as well.
The green kittens grew up into green cats, whose claws,
in particular, show high levels of green protein.
The eggs were fertilized with sperm from a non-fluorescent tomcat and implanted in female cats, and five fluorescent green kittens were born, out of a total of eleven embryos (three now survive, as one was stillborn and another died during birth). That overall 23% success rate is surprisingly large, since the only other proven way to make transgenic cats, adding new genes to a nucleus from a non-egg cell and then swapping it into an egg, has a success rate of only 3%.
What’s more, when the kittens with the macaque gene were infected with FIV, the virus had trouble replicating, suggesting that whatever the gene is doing, it can do it in cats as well as monkeys. Next on the agenda: finding out what, exactly, the mechanism is.
Fluorescent reporter genes are a fairly common way to make sure that your gene transfer “took”—we’ve seen glowing pigs, monkeys, and mice before. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t an amazing effect. If someone offered us a glowing, FIV-resistant kitten for our office, we wouldn’t say no.
Images courtesy of Nature Methods, Wongsrikeao, et al., and Mayo Clinic
September 06 2011
150 Kids, Anyone? US Sperm Banks Overdoing It
Sperm banks are a pretty great idea: women who don’t have a male partner or whose partners aren’t fertile can choose a genetic father with characteristics they like, such as a certain height, eye color, hair color, hobbies, and so on. Thousands of children are born each year in the United States to mothers who like the sound of “tall, dark, enjoys astrophysics and Shostakovich” or “blond surfer, Ivy-League educated, great sense of humor.”
But something very strange has been going on over the last couple decades, and the New York Times covers it in a recent piece: some donors’ sperm has been used many, many times—so many times, in fact, that people are starting to get alarmed.
Up to 150 children each have been born from the sperm of popular donors, far more than donors and mothers had anticipated. American sperm banks don’t keep rigorous records of children born from donor sperm, nor do they limit the number of children born from a particular donor (a chance, some might say, for sexual selection to run out of control—those green-eyed geniuses can be mighty sought-after). Parents only find out that their child has dozens of half-siblings when they look up their ...
September 01 2011
Forget the Beer Cooler! Keep Your Still-Pumping Heart in a Box
The practice of rush-shipping organs for transplants on ice is fertile ground for slapstick comedy. It’s almost too easy—think of five things that could go wrong! Go!
So next time you have a heart that needs transporting, you might consider joining a clinical study currently underway with this little gadget: a cozy box on wheels that recreates the heart’s natural environment, complete with donated blood and tubes to pump that blood through. The study, which is funded and designed by TransMedics, the company that makes the box, is investigating whether keeping the heart going means it can be transported farther and increase the success of transplants by giving doctors more time to test for immune factors that could cause a rejection. The current system, of course, involves shutting the heart down, partaking in crazed race-against-time hijinks, and then jump-starting it once it’s in the recipient’s chest. The whole process can take no more than six hours, chest to chest, or the heart fails.
How long could a heart survive in a box? Perhaps…forever? That’s an iiiinteresting question…for another, madder group of scientists. In the meantime, if you’re anything like us, reading this has given you an urge to revisit this ...
August 10 2011
Success! Functioning Anal Sphincter Grown in a Petri Dish
Eyes, sperm, you name it: these days, chances are someone’s cooking it up on a little slab of agar and gearing up to graft/sew/implant it in anything that comes near. Today’s body part is the anal sphincter, that handy little ring of muscle that maintains the separation between your insides and your outsides. Researchers grew them from cells, implanted them in mice, and compared the new sphincters’ function with the animals’, ah, native orifices. And apparently, they were quite satisfactory.
You young whippersnappers out there might not realize it, of course. But malfunctioning sphincters are a big, messy problem as you get older, and a lot of people suffering from fecal incontinence (including women recovering from births, which can put everything down there out of whack) could benefit from this research. Right now, Depends or surgery with high rates of complication are what people with damaged sphincters have to choose from, and the possibility of replacing the muscle is intriguing.
The major step forward made here is that these sphincters, which were grown in a circular mold from human muscle biopsy cells and mouse nerve cells, could, by virtue of those nerve ...
August 05 2011
Scientists Solve Switzerland’s Biggest Problem: Upset Stomachs on Tilting Trains
If you’re turning green, it’s not the scenery’s fault.
As you may or may not know, Switzerland, land of chocolate, cheese, and cuckoo clocks, is also the land of trains. More than 1,800 miles of track crisscross the quaint alpine utopia, carrying 347 million passengers per year and maintaining the punctuality of a Stepford wife. That’s some serious trainage.
Some of those trains, unfortunately, are making people trainsick. And the Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, the Swiss train authorities, just wouldn’t stand for that. They asked some scientists to get to the bottom of it.
The problem trains are a class of vehicles that tilt by 8 degrees as they go around curves, preserving their speed by compensating for centripetal force. Something about those tilts was putting passengers off-kilter, so a team of Swiss and American neurologists attached accelerometers and gyroscopes to a test train and to the heads of passengers, whom, one hopes, were compensated for consenting to their unusual headgear.
A tilting train in action.
Usually, the tilt starts with the first train car that hits the curve, then propagates through the later cars. It’s also rather slow, so passengers’ heads get tipped ...
July 01 2011
Coming to a Dental School Near You: The Dental Robot With the Sex-Doll Face
Good news dental students: soon you will no longer have to approach your first victim patient with shaky, unsure hands. Researchers at Showa University in Japan have unveiled a new dental dummy, a realistic robot for dental students to practice on before taking the drill to real, human mouths.
I use the term “dummy” here loosely. Showa Tanako 2, as the researchers call her, has a wide range of human-like features. She can engage in simple conversations, flinch, roll her eyes, cough, and close her mouth like a real patient suffering from jaw fatigue. Oh, and she has a gag reflex.
So how did a group of dental researchers build such a realistic—albeit slightly scary—looking robot? Naturally, they sought help from Japanese sex doll maker, Orient Industry, who helped fashion the robot’s skin, tongue, and mouth. If the doll’s face didn’t look realistic, it wouldn’t “have the same effect on users psychologically,” Showa University professor Koutaro Maki said in the video released by DigInfo. “How doctors and students actually feel in the presence of a patient is a really big factor.”
On top of her movements, speech, and look, Showa Tanako 2 has one final similarity to human patients: she judges. ...
May 25 2011
Vuvuzelas Spray Millions of Spit Particles, Reaching A New Level of Annoying (& Virulent?)
Vexing. Also, gross.
The vuvuzela, that ear-splitting horn beloved by soccer fans and despised by everyone else, now has another count against it: it spews aerosolized spit like no other. And you know what travels in aerosolized spit? Germs.
An enterprising researcher wondered whether the technicolor trumpets had contributed to the spread of flu in South Africa during the World Cup. To see if vuvuzelas sprayed more of the tiny particles that carry germs than just plain yelling, she had some people holler into a paper megaphone and others hoot through vuvuzelas. Tracking the particles with a wind speed detector and a laser counter, she made a telling discovery: each second, yellers spewed 7,000 particles…and vuvuzelas spewed about 4 million. That’s more than four times more than a sneeze.
The next step, the researcher says, is to have sick people blow into vuvuzelas and analyze the spray see whether microorganisms are actually in the particles. But we have a deeper question.
Should we be avoiding kazoos? Penny whistles? Mellophones? What else is secretly coating us in a thin layer of possibly germ-bearing spit?
(via Wired)
Image credit: Phillie Casablanca
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