Attack of the killer tomato fungus driven by mobile weapons package [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
In Robert Louis Stevenson's classic story, Dr Henry Jekyll drinks a mysterious potion that transforms him from an upstanding citizen into the violent, murderous Edward Hyde. We might think that such an easy transformation would be confined to the pages of fiction, but a similar fate regularly befalls a common fungus called Fusarium oxysporum.
A team of scientists led by Li-Jun Ma and Charlotte van der Does have found that the fungus can swap four entire chromosomes form one individual to another. This package is the genetic equivalent of Stevenson's potion. It has everything a humble, Jekyll-like fungus needs to transform from a version that coexists harmlessly with plants into a Hyde-like agent of disease. In this guise, it infects so many plant species so virulently that it has earned the nickname of Agent Green and has been considered for use as a biological weapon. It can even infect humans.
These disease-making chromosomes came to light after Ma and van der Does sequenced the genome of a variety of F.oxysporum called lycopersici (or 'Fol'), which infects tomatoes. Its genome was unexpectedly massive, 44% bigger than its closest relative, the cereal-infecting F.verticillioides. Looking closer, Ma and van der Does found that most of this excess DNA lies within four extra chromosomes, which Fol has and its relative lacks. Together, they make up a quarter of Fol's genome.
Ma and van der Does demonstrated the power of this extraneous quartet by incubating a harmless strain of Fol with one that causes tomato wilt. Just by sharing the same space, the inoffensive strain managed to acquire two of the extra chromosomes found in the virulent one. And, suddenly, it too could infect tomatoes. In a single event, the fungus had been loaded with a mobile armoury and changed into a killer. It seems that the fungus needs just two of the four chromosomes to cause disease; the others probably act as accessories, boosting its new pestilent powers.
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Pregnant male pipefish abort babies from unattractive females [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
For most men, the thought of taking on the burden of pregnancy from their partners would seem like a nightmare, but it's all part and parcel of seahorse life. After mating, female seahorses and pipefish lay their eggs into a special pouch in the male's belly and he carries the developing babies to term. They may seem like a shoe-in for a Dad-of-the-year award but this apparent display of paternal perfection has several macabre twists.
A recent study showed that pregnant pipefishes can also become vampiric cannibals, absorbing some of their brood for nutrition if their own food supplies are running low. Now, Kimberley Paczolt and Adam Jones from Texas A&M University have found that male pipefishes are also selective abortionists. They'll kill off some of the youngsters in their pouches if they've mated with an unattractive female, or if they've already raised a large group of young in an earlier pregnancy.
The pouch isn't just an incubator for the next generation. It's a battleground where male and female pipefish fight a war of the sexes, and where foetal pipefish pay for this conflict with their lives.
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The USA Science and Engineering Festival’s Pie made Top 10 on Pi day!! [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]
It was announced today that the pie entered for pi day from the USA Science and Engineering Blog,
Joanna Pool's Irrationally Good Chocolate Basil pie, made it to the top 10! But we need your votes!!
How to vote:
1) Go to seriouseats.com
2) Register on the site
3) Vote!
USA Science & Engineering Festival volunteer Stacy Janis wins NSF 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]
Stacy Jannis, who has been working tirelessly for the Festival to get the Kavli Science Video Contest up and running, was recently honored by AAAS and the National Science Foundation 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge for her video "Inside the Brain: Unraveling the Mystery of Alzheimer's Disease", which she produced for the National Institute on Aging. See her video here. Learn more about the annual challenge here.
Congratulations to Stacy! Check out more of her amazing work .
~~written by Ruth Kiefer
Flags Don’t Wave in a Vacuum; Or: NASA Reboot [Universe]
Last November, in Florida, I had the opportunity to see my first Space Shuttle launch. For the hundreds of millions of people who don't pay more than a passing notice to the fact that human beings still go into space on a regular basis, this is a fairly banal thing. But to those who camp out all day, plan trips around Cape Canaveral launch windows, and scrupulously follow the ins and outs of NASA politics, this is the bread and butter.
Unless you score tickets to the Kennedy Space Center, which has the official ambiance and a giant countdown clock, the best place to watch a NASA Shuttle launch is from the nearby burg of Titusville, Florida. Titusville is a small town dubbed "Space City, USA," by its largely aerospace-employed locals; it boasts both an Astronaut High School and a Spaceview Park, the latter of which is overrun by hardcore space-heads on a launch day. It takes the wild rumbling sound of the shuttle's 1,300,000 pound solid rocket boosters several seconds to reach Titusville, twelve miles away across the Indian River -- but it's still loud as hell. And powerful, too, in a way I didn't entirely expect. There was the Shuttle, which looked so small from a distance, one of six in a fleet so often criticized as "penguins" (y'know, flightless black and white birds) holding six people, worth untold billions (approximately 1.5 billion just to launch one), and stocked with 534,900 gallons of fuel. The real surprise was how fast it happened; within seconds of liftoff, STS Atlantis was just a blip going 15,000 miles an hour and the sky was torn in half by a ragged cloud of exhaust that later diffused in a lovely, thoughtful way. Check out a video of the launch here.
In any case, the experience revived my interest in the goals and operations of our bloated ol' space agency. It's been a few years since Universe took on the beast in a comprehensive way, and as we're on the cusp of a new era for space -- what with the now imminent retirement of the Shuttles, NASA's success with unmanned missions, the much-debated "bombing of the moon," and, most importantly, the Obama administration's recent nix of Bush-era manned moon mission plans -- it seems a fitting moment to revisit. Where are we, after all? Should we be laughing or crying? Should we cheer or lament the end of the Shuttle era?
Well, the answer is: it depends. Yes, this is the brink of a new era for space exploration, but it won't be the anything like the "New Vision" envisioned by the Bush Administration six years ago. Gone may be plans of a return to the moon in the next two decades. Gone, too, may be the Ares rockets, the ostensible replacement for the dying Shuttle program. If Obama's exclusion of Project Constellation from the 2011 United States federal budget goes uncontested by congress, gone will be all of NASA's seemingly arbitrary, high-profile manned space mission plans.
What does this mean? Well, in my opinion, it's good news. Project Constellation seemed crazy to me from the beginning; even former NASA administrator Mike Griffin once called "Apollo on steroids." While other space agencies and the booming commercial space sector busied themselves with innovative new rockets, single-stage to orbit vehicles, and space planes, NASA planned on stepping back to the kinds of rockets it had been successful with in the 1960s. Ever since being announced by the Bush Administration, the project has been perpetually underfunded and generally unpopular with scientists, who see the recent successes of NASA's many unmanned missions as proof that sending people into space is risky and totally not cost-effective.
Says Obama of the new, stripped-down NASA budget: it's a "bold new approach to human space flight that embraces commercial industry, forges international partnerships, and invests in the building blocks of a more capable approach to space exploration." This means, simply, that the Obama administration believes encouraging the burgeoning private sector to pick up the space administration's flack will lead to new industry as well faster, smarter, and cheaper rockets. It's no secret that the commercial space industry has been flourishing in recent years -- companies like Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, Scaled Composites, Blue Origin, and SpaceX are making huge strides in research, development, and design of rockets, all on tighter budgets and way less administrative overhead than NASA could dream of having. Commercial rocket systems will almost certainly be a lot cheaper, and could potentially have us back riding rockets to the Space Station by 2015 rather than by the Ares 1 rocket's proposed completion date of 2018 (which leaves us rocketless and dependent on the Russians for less time). They will also, hopefully, be safer than the Shuttle, whose track record inspires little confidence.
By axing NASA's budget for manned space missions, the government is implicitly endorsing a more flexible path, one which puts the pressure on small entrepreneurial firms to build rockets for human spaceflight.
Let's be clear on one thing, however. NASA's never built their own rockets; they've always depended on commercial aerospace contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Now that the government is openly talking about moving space travel into the commercial realm, what they really mean is that they're handing the baton over to the underdogs -- companies like the aforementioned SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Scaled Composites -- who are flexible, innovative, and able to manufacture rockets without operating on a cost plus basis. This is a major shift from how the agency's been running things for decades: NASA now intends to put its money back into R&D for long-term projects and research, allowing the private sector, for now, to take on the brass-tacks operations of low-Earth orbit and Space Station missions.
How do people feel about this? Well, there's bound to be some congressional opposition, especially with politicians who represent districts with traditionally massive aerospace industry dependence. In these economic times, however, cutting millions out of government spending is more than likely to pass through uncontested. And even NASA, as a whole, supports this sea change. In an interview with the excellent video series, This Week In Space (see above), NASA's deputy administrator Lori Beth Garver points out that, "NASA's been trying to relive Appolo for the last 40 years. We do not have, nor do we hope to, the same kind of political situation that we did at that time that would cause something like a [space] race. Without that, just choosing an arbitrary destination and time doesn't really make sense."
Garver is right. NASA's been trying to rally passionate public engagement in recent years the only way it knows how, the only way it's worked in the past: with manned space missions. However, this is a different age. There's definitely still a space race going on, but it's far more diffuse; as China, India, Europe, and the many commercial space enterprises get into the game, we no longer have one common competitor, but dozens. And I don't think it's helpful to think of any of these as "competitors," too; this isn't the Cold War. This is an era of lateral, collective space development, collaboration, an inevitable zeitgeist. It's surprisingly reasonable for NASA to be aware of the milieu of space in 2010, adapt to it, and allow those people into the process that would undoubtedly have beaten them to the punch anyways.
We will still go to space. But the way we go will doubtlessly surprise us.
Four Stone Hearth #88 at Ad Hominin [The Primate Diaries]
The monthly anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth has just been posted. Ciarán was kind enough to include two of my recent posts and there is a wealth of information for those interested in all aspects of anthropology.
Maryn McKenna on MRSA, a very troublesome bug [Neuron Culture]
Neither plane crashes nor anti-aircraft fire could kill my namesake uncle, but MRSA did, and it wasn't pretty. Accordingly I take a particular in this nasty bacteria, and am looking forward to reading Maryn McKenna's new book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, which I just ordered from Amazon, and which comes out next week.
While you're waiting to order yours, you can see hear from McKenna about MRSA, and the new strain's emergence in the daughter of a Dutch pig farmer, in this short video clip:
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Notables from Out-n-About 03/17/2010 (a.m.) [Neuron Culture]
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The Science of Reading is the Harvard library's nice new site about reading. Lots of great old texts and some history of reading science.
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BBC News - Man assaulted female police officer with penis. The court heard he had been drinking heavily and could not remember committing the offence at his home in Aberdeen
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2010 pi day Pie Bake off: Dont forget to vote [Tomorrow's Table]
Tomorrow's Table's Swiss-Gruyere pie made it to the pi day Pie Bake off finals.
If you have time to peruse the entries, please do. Vote here.
The Illinois Poison Control Center Shows Us Why Poison Control Centers are Important [The Questionable Authority]
Via GeekDad, I just discovered the blog of the Illinois Poison Control Center. More specifically, I discovered the "Day in the Life of a Poison Center" feature they did last month. As medical blogging goes, this was brilliant. They posted very brief descriptions of each of the calls that came into their center in a 24 hour period. The Tweetable little descriptions capture the stress, fear, and humor that is an integral part of providing emergency health care.
Some of the calls were scary to read, even in two-sentence bursts. These were ones that contained the phrase "child got into" - or words to that effect. It's easy to forget just how much poison every home contains, and just how easy it is for even the most well-attended toddler to eat some of it when a parent turns away for just a second.
These are the calls that make me glad we've got poison control centers.
Unfortunately, the budget crunch that is facing governments all over the country is hurting the Illinois Poison Center. They've lost a million dollars of their State funding - 25% of their total budget - and are slated to lose more next year.
Fortunately, there's something you can do to help them out a little bit. They've been pledged a contribution for everyone who becomes a facebook fan of theirs in the month of March.
If you want a little encouragement to click the link, I'm excerpting a few of the calls that came in to their hotline below the fold. I'm steering away from the more serious and tragic of the calls, and focusing on some that I found memorable for other reasons.
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