Ragged Nerves


The clear chilly night last night has frozen the peripheral regions of the large pond and the whole of the shallower ones. The ice is thick enough to hold the weight of a tentative goose. As a result, the geese have retired once more to the grass, leaving a just few holdouts honking in derision at their wimpy ex-neighbors. 

By the time I reach the car lots, the nerves in my extremities have ceased sending desperate messages for relief in the form of pain signals and have gone into hibernation mode as the numbness indicates. I have to admire the humor of the car vendors though, as they have moved a red ragtop, with it's roof down, to the front of the display and have a prominent sign shouting "Sporty". Indeed, It should be "Extreme Sporty". If my outer limits are numb when traveling at a speed of 3.5 mph, I can't imagine what bits would be numb dashing about at 20 times that velocity.

The numbness reminds me that the nerve axons carrying signals can be very long and are pretty delicate. My attention was drawn to a paper by Radtke et al, which was published yesterday (1) which described the successful repair of a 6 cm length of axons using a bundle of spider silk as a guide template. A section of nerve in the femur of a sheep was chosen. This is a very interesting development leading to a functional length of remyelinated nerve fiber, which builds on the earlier work of Alimeling et al (2). Spider web has an old use as a clotting aid in wound management.  The structure of spider silk is the result of a couple of simple amino acids (glycine and alanine) joining together and forming sheets, which then form a crystalline structure that is extremely strong. It is kept moist by a small amount of pyrrolidine and acidic by some potassium salts. The latter act as a bactericide and a fungicide.

So don’t stomp or spray those beasties hiding in your drapes and guarding your premises against numerous flying pests. They are more valuable than you think.


1.                 1.   http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016990

2. Alimeling et al, J. Cell. Mol. Med. (2006), 10(3):770–77

At Loggerheads With Nature


Wandering around in the brisk morning sunshine and watching the visiting ducks and geese, started me wondering about migration and sense of direction. Having got used to my car’s GPS system telling me to turn around as soon as it is convenient after my strong sense of direction overrode its instructions, I know more is involved than just the position of the sun and what street signs say. Clearly with the sun, a wristwatch and a compass, we should be all set to go anywhere, and like all guys, no need to ask for directions.

Even our goose friends’ travels seem to pale against those of swallows and Monarch butterflies. So what do they use? An internal compass as a directional aid has long been suggested but they are all short of a wristwatch and sextant. It took us a very long time to tame the problem of longitude.

Now, baby loggerheads emerge from their sand nest and rush down to the sea, eager for the wild Atlantic, and knowing exactly where the action is regardless of which side of the Atlantic they start from. Lohmann et al (1) have demonstrated that they work using the Earth’s magnetic field as their direction finder. The mechanism is that they detect both the local intensity as well as the inclination, so they have a 3-D map of magnetic hills and valleys in their mind and, continuing the visual simile, their magnetic sensor, like a magnetic eye, ‘sees’ where they are on the map.

Wonderful as this is, even more remarkable is the fact that they hatch with the map already in place. Learned direction finding seems logical, so salmon tasting their way back to their original river seems plausible but a magnetic map of the North Atlantic carefully packed away by your Mom in a pocket of your genes is something else indeed.

It leads one to wonder what potential latent ability to detect and know our surroundings are being ignored as we turn on our GPS. Clearly the artifice, beloved of authors and screen writers, of people wondering around in circles in the desert or snowy waste, as shown by finding their own footprints, is a fiction. We all have a better idea of where we’re heading than that. But we can still go badly awry, as shown by Mao with his Long March, or Moses with his even longer one. Could we learn to be turtles if we get in closer touch with our inner selves?


1. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(11)00113-8#ResultsandDiscussion

Random Flurries


With winter having a new flurry here in the Pacific North West and meaning that some hours of hunkering down are required, it is interesting to scan the news feeds for cheerful excitement occurring elsewhere in the world. 

The tale of “Vstone and the Five Robodwarves” was the first to catch my eye.  These little chappies are running a marathon in Osaka as I hunt and peck. It will be a very boring race for them, as they have to trot around the 100-meter track a total of four hundred and twenty two times in all. The rules of the Rob Mara Full are harsh though. If one green robot should accidently fall, he has to get up and continue without help from sympathetic supporters. But they’ll tough it out, and the winner is expected to cross the finish line sometime on Sunday, if the race officials haven’t gone to sleep and lost count. It'll be 5 full days of sport that the robodwarves won't forget.

As a fan of Test Match Cricket with its matches lasting 5 action-packed days, I felt a new sporting enthusiasm stirring and within a few seconds of surfing I discovered the RoboCup. Last year 500 teams from 40 countries played robodwarf football in Singapore. This years Robot Soccer World Cup will be in Istanbul. At this time, I am uncertain if the marathoneers can be re-programmed to play soccer or if the swearing and foul play require a different build.

Back to my window on the real world and the steely-grey sky and driving snow force me back to longingly view the warmth of the Sun Drop diamond that is vacationing in the warm depths of the National History Museum in London. Pear-shaped (aren’t we all) perfection in a one-inch, yellow, refracting, one hundred and ten carat crystal, it is sitting there smugly making our Valentine Day’s gifts look puny. Ah well, I am comforted by the fact that the yellow is due to a small percentage of nitrogen atoms inveigling their way into the perfect tetrahedral diamond lattice and making it imperfect as nitrogen is a cheapskate and is only prepared to make three bonds to carbons four, thus short changing the gem.

Dragging myself away from pear-shape perfection, I see that Taylor, Wedell and Ciffelli (1) had done some rummaging in a box of very old bones and spotted a new sauropod with big hips, well big all over really standing about four meters high, who they’ve called ‘Thunderthighs’ or ‘Brontomerus to those lovers of the Greek amongst us. The kicker was that it would kick the hell out of the competition. Maybe the engineers working on this year’s teams for the RoboCup could get some design tips from the Early Cretaceous.



1. http://www.app.pan.pl/archive/published/app56/app20100073.pdf

Monkey Business


Another interesting paper from the AAAs meeting was given by Dr. Smith, SUNY at Buffalo. In this case the subjects were monkeys, both Old World and New World, namely Macaques and Capuchins respectively. They were playing a computer game for goodies. The task was simple enough for me to carry out. It consisted of assessing the density of a screen image as either sparse and clicking ‘S’ or dense and clicking ‘D’. Easy!

 The kicker was if they got it wrong, the computer hung and they were wasting gaming time. Now in this day and age, instant gratification taking to long, a fact that we are made maddeningly aware every time we reboot our computers. Well, in true game show fashion, Dr. Smith gave our primate friends a pass option button, ‘?’. Hitting this moved the game rapidly forward with no loss in goodie-getting time.

The Macaques made good use of this option indicating that they were sometimes victims of self doubt and unable to make a choice, reminiscent of most of us as we stare at our tax forms and wondering where to start. Wouldn’t we all welcome a pass option on those questions? Capuchins, however, never doubted their choice. In their case, there were only known knowns, that they knew they knew even when they didn’t, unlike the Macaques who also had known unknowns when they knew they didn’t know. I guess worrying about unknown unknowns is something reserved for other primate species.

It isn’t only monkeys that rival us in decision-making. Prof. Morton of U of Cambridge has been watching sheep which were visiting from the Welsh mountains, make executive decisions. Food was used as the training tool, just as it is used for monkeys, mice and us men. Colored buckets and colored shapes were used in the sheep’s mid-term tests.

Other exciting sheep information noted was that sheep can find their way home as they know where they’ve been and that they can recognize other sheep just by looking at mug shots. Not only do sheep not all look the same to each other, but neither do humans all look the same. They know who they’re looking at and if your expression is nice or nasty. We would be in trouble if they were enfranchised.

A Day-Off Day


A beautiful, spring-like sunny day for the Big Man’s birthday. Dandelions and periwinkle are recklessly displaying themselves in an attempt to snag an insect visitor or two. An azalea with tiny flowers is much more discrete but is still trying to flaunt with dignity. A small fungus with aspirations to grow up to be a mushroom was staring at me like a second grader before a softball game, waving and saying ‘Pick me, pick me’.

With an urgent quest for a humanizing latte, I can’t stop to smell the flowers. Anyway, getting my nose two inches off the ground would result in an unacceptable energy penalty. However, the weather is gorgeous, so much so that I go as far as unbuttoning my jacket. I won’t go as far as one guy I spot going in the opposite direction, and stripped down to shoes, shorts and a dog.

The flush cycle for the Ponds is now at low, leaving clear water, and more shoreline property has come back onto the market. The geese are returning from the grassland and sailing sedately around and occasionally upending to moon at their potential neighbors or simply squatting in an initial attempt to stake their claim.

Goose Island
Even the car lots are quiet, except for the guy wheeling around a resurrection cart to shock the hearts of the trucks back into working. Nobody seems to be in a buying mood though.

Singing Mice


With the speculation and rumors around the Oscars at their peak and, indeed, becoming a tad monotonous, we lessor mortals should have foreseen that the American Association for the Advancement of Science would have dedicated a symposium at its Annual Meeting to the subject of stuttering, with three lectures this morning.  The subtitle of the symposium was ‘Untangling the Mystery of Stuttering’ (1)and it is an interesting change from the past in that these newer multidisciplinary approaches are breaking new ground. The Guardian UK gives a detailed account of Dr. Drayna’s presentation (2).

Apparently, there are three genes with particular mutations involved. Mutations in these can result in a deficit of the correct products from the cell metabolism. To test this theory, a set of GM mice have been produced with these three genes inactive. Mr. Mouse bursts into song at the drop of the right pheromone. They sing for minutes and prefer to write their own music. The music is too high pitched for us being just into the ultrasonic but just fine for cats and dogs. If the theory is on target, they will have some very frustrated mice as I don’t expect that the females will come rushing if the singers of the love songs are having difficulty in getting the words out. Drayna’s objective is to design an anti-stutter pill.

The work of du Nil was on a different tack. Using imaging techniques, he has shown that several areas of the brain are involved through differences in activation. This would seem to suggest a fairly complex interaction is at the root cause of a stutter and a pill may be a long way off.

Going up in brain size from mice to rats, a recent neuronal protein study by Dr. Bossert (3) indicated that specific regions of the front part of the brain are involved in drug addiction. Some rat subjects were taught to self medicate with heroin until they were nicely addicted and then they were sent to a rehab unit to clean up. Apart from being a drug-free zone, the quarters became nice and bright and the rats cleaned up their act. However, when back with the sleazy environment, they fell off the wagon. They could get drug help them though by injections of drugs that inhibited the part of the brain wound up by their heroin addiction. I guess you can take the rat out of the street but not the street out of the rat.


1.      http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2011/webprogram/Session2789.html

2.      http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/feb/20/scientists-create-gm-mice-stuttering

3.      http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2758.html