Chatterboxes


Some of us, at one time or another, fancy having a parrot for a pet. Sulfur crested cockatoos are a popular choice. The first thing most of us do when we meet a pet parrot is try and talk to them. And we’re delighted when they talk back. Usually the conversation isn’t riveting with “Hello” and “Who’s a pretty boy?” being as far as we go. How we can keep saying that for minutes at a time is a wonder of nature.

In the wild, cockatoos stick together in a tight flock and are rather raucous, especially over breakfast. I can recall a stay in an apartment in Canberra where, outside my bedroom window, there was a rather nice tree. This was on the local flock’s daily peregrination and they had been brought up to have a very strict routine. They arrived precisely at six o’clock every morning and stayed for 30 minutes, no more, no less. 

The screeching from a large flock of cockatoos when it’s much too early to be shaking off the effects of the previous night’s wine tasting is a uniquely painful Australian experience. No one, and I mean no one, was a “pretty boy” during those 30 minutes.

There is a new development that has shown up around Sidney suburbia as the food supply has shifted north. Shears in his Daily Mail report (1) tells us that the locals at their barbies are staring in wonder at their tinny of the amber fluid as they hear “g’day darling” coming from the trees.

It seems that a significant number of escapees, who have learned to talk Strine, have joined up with the roving bands and taught their little ones to speak. Mr. Robinson of the Australian Museum has been documenting this new phenomenon, although he is a little concerned that no new ones turn up who have been taught to swear.

  1. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2037209/Gday-darling-Flocks-chattering-cockatoos-driving-Australias-crazy.html

New Parts For Old


The fabrication of complex objects took a big leap forward when 3-D printing became a practical possibility. The printer works rather like your conventional inkjet, but builds up an object layer by layer. The important bits of the object are polymerizable, that is their molecules can be encouraged to join with their neighbors to form a solid material.

The price of a printer is now down to about $10k, so still too expensive to have on our desks to print out unique toys for our kids, but maybe soon. There is a huge potential for customizable manufacturing.

A BBC report by Moskvitch (1) on the BioRap project at the Fraunhofer Institute, Stuttgart, brings some exciting news in the artificial organ domain (2). The idea is to print out the spare part with capillaries built in to provide blood flow through so that the plumbing job becomes a matter of connection.

Biocompatible materials are, of course, a must, but there is a big challenge in polymerizing these components with the accuracy and efficiency required on this small scale. The solution comes in the form of two-photon polymerization, a technique already showing great promise in micro-fabrication of bio-scaffolding materials that can be used to encourage regrowth of tissue (3).

Light initiated polymerization normally requires ultraviolet light, but two-photon polymerization uses light at twice the wavelength, which goes much deeper into a material. It can be focused very finely and so can work on the material printed to make the fine capillaries. High energy pulsed lasers are used, so the polymerization is complete.

The great thing about 3-D printing is the customizable aspect. The spare part can be built to fit exactly. With things like matched plumbing, one can imagine the day, with surgical techniques such as the Da Vinci robotic system, that the human input would be at the computer screen with just a drag and drop on a touch screen so that the freshly printed part would be slipped into place with the minimum of contact.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14946808
  2. http://www.igb.fraunhofer.de/de/kompetenzen/grenzflaechentechnik/komposite-biomaterialien/biorap.html
  3. http://www.asdn.net/asdn/nanotools/two-photon_polymerization.shtml

Taming The Beast


The old fogies whose job it is to advise, are still advising young men that they should settle down and raise a family. Mostly, we humans accept that raising kids has to be a cooperative process and get on and help as best they can. The whole process of falling in love and then raising a family involves a major change in activity.

But it is made easier for us guys to make the changes. We don’t have to fight the testosterone as much as we fear before we set about this sort of enterprise. Gettler et al in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (1) have followed the testosterone levels in a large number of young men in the Philippines and compared their levels before and after they’ve settled down to raise kids. They show that there is a large drop in testosterone by a quarter to a third on getting a partner and producing a child.

These authors put this taming of the beast down to fatherhood and this news has been bouncing around the blogosphere in the last couple of days, but an Italian team from the U of Pisa (2) pointed out that fatherhood is not required to lower a guy’s testosterone level. They showed that falling in love was all that is required for him to become as quiet as a lamb.

Their results were very interesting as the showed that the men’s T-level dropped while the women’s T-level rose. Yes, interesting, when one thinks about the action of testosterone on our social behavior.

The study showed that the effect of love (on their T-levels) had worn off after a year – just in time for the fatherhood lever to come into play to drop the level and keep him from risky behavior. This hormonal change on becoming a dad was originally identified as early as 2001 (3), but it’s nice to see it being confirmed again.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/09/02/1105403108.abstract
  2. D.Marazzati and D.Canale, Psychoneurendocrinology, 29, 931, (2004).
  3. S.J.Berg and K.E.Wynne-Edwards, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 76, 582, (2001).


All Fired Up


There is no doubt that smoking is not a good life-choice for a long and healthy life. Caring politicians, who of course always know what is best for us, are battling to make cigarette packs more and more disagreeable to look at in an effort to discourage us, at the same time as making full use of the tax revenue for their favorite projects.

Where one can smoke is more and more strictly controlled, but whether one gives up smoking or not is still a personal choice, usually. Not so with Shirley from Johor, however. Shirley is 20 years old and is going ‘cold turkey’ in Malacca. She took up the habit when she was somebody’s pet in Sarawak and has been a smoker ever since.

Shirley is an Orangutan and has been living in cruddy conditions, banged up in a second rate zoo in Johor according to the BBC reports (1) where she gets lit cigarettes tossed to her by passing smokers. Clearly, she is unable to go and buy her own. Once she’s finished with rehab, she and her partner, Abu, are off to a nice little place in Sarawak.

So far, she is taking her withdrawal from the habit well. Perhaps she never did really inhale. It could have been that cigars from Sumatra would have been more her ‘cup of tea,’ but we’ll never know now.

She is not the first great ape to be a smoker. Feili at Zengzhou took it up a few years ago when she was 13 years old. She was a chimp who was stuck with a 42 year old partner who left her wanting due to his lack of libido. She started to turn quite nasty until smoking steadied her nerves.

Ai Ai, at 27, took up the weed after her mate died, but gave up after 16 years of puffing away in 2005 and hasn’t smoked since. She was a chimp housed in a safari park in Shaanxi Province of China. She managed to get clean with the help of her minders who kept her busy, gave her lots of exciting foods and, occasionally, let her borrow their old Walkman so she could carry her music with her.

Not all smoking chimps are successful in giving up, though. Charlie from Bloemfontein lived at Mangaung Zoo and smoked till he died last year at the grand old age of 52 (2). That’s about 20% longer than the average life expectancy for a chimp and he was a much-loved character. Not all chimps have Charlie’s je ne sais quoi. The same report reminded us of a Russian chimp that got into trouble for demanding alcohol with his cigarettes early last year. He was packed of protesting to rehab without any discussion.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14880804
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/11484057

In The Dark, Some Cats Are Green!


Jellyfish, for reasons best known to themselves, a long time ago took to producing a protein which gave them a nice green glow when lit up with short wavelengths of light, that is at the blue to ultraviolet end of the spectrum. The isolation and use of this green fluorescent protein as a gene-tag was the basis of the 2008 Nobel Prize for chemistry.

It is often used as a marker to show the successful genetic modification of lab species that are genetically modified to study the susceptibility or resistance to disease. We now have a world that has green-glowing mosquitoes, butterflies, mice, rabbits, monkeys, pigs, and the latest is cats. They point out that this is the first glow-green carnivore. Pigs, being omnivores, don’t count as competition.

Your friendly little tabby can now come glowing into your lives just in time for Halloween. This, of course, isn’t why they have been produced, but it would certainly liven up most trick or treat visits. Other colors of protein are available, but somehow red doesn’t quite cut it for ghostly, does it?

The reason for producing glow-green cats by Poeschia et al was to study the cats’ ability to fight off the FIV that is a problem with feral cats but which can also be spread to your lap-cat if it gets it’s ear chewed by that moggie lurking in the undergrowth (1).

The team inserted a macaques antiviral gene into some feline eggs and added the fluorescent protein tag to show how effective the genetic modification had been. The next step is to see if they are resistant to the Feline Immunodeficiency Virus. It may be some time before you can purchase a GM cat, though.

The basic aim here is that the genetic restriction factor may help to show how humans can be protected. Just imagine. GM people with glow-green tags would give us little green men at last. Hollywood could have a whole new line of movies.

  1. http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmeth.1703.html