Zombie Worms


Deep in the ocean members of the Osedax family are scraping a living from the bones of the dead, whether they are fish or mammals like whales. When we say bones we mean bones. They drill into the bones and extract any nutrient that’s left.

Davies for BBC Nature reports on this pretty clever trick this week (1), and it is a clever trick because these zombie worms have no mouth, let alone a GI tract. They’ve been around for a long time and have been doing well without the inconvenience of a GI tract, munching away quietly in depths of the ocean, but we have only been aware of them for the past ten years.

How does this worm work it’s magic?  At the business end, which attaches to the bone, I guess we could call it the head, but that might be going too far, there are lots of bumps that secrete acid that dissolves the calcium and gives the worm access to the lipids (the fats) in the bones.

 Sucking without a mouth or GI tract is not an option so the business end is where the transfer into the worm proper takes place aided by little bacterial farms, which the enterprising worm sets up to process the fats. The non-business end splits into feathery plumes that allow oxygen to diffuse into the body to keep things ticking over.

The next big question that I can hear in the distance is if it has one end buried in a bone and the other waving about in feathery splendor, how does it set about breeding, especially as it’s not mobile? Well, all the worms that you see are female and they carry a large harem of male worms inside their bodies. These harems are quite large consisting of 30 – 100 little male worms up to a millimeter long. They don’t get to share in the food though – they have to live off their yolk sac doing their duty as best they can.

With all these little males working hard, the egg production is also quite large and it’s just as well as the parent worm will die when the nutrient in the bone is exhausted, leaving it to the youngsters to go forth and colonize.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18594493


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School Can Be Damaging To Your Health


When some of us were young, we were told that ‘schooldays are the happiest days of our lives’ and none of us believed it. Maybe we wished it was true, but the phrase was always trotted out when we were teed-off with the system and would have happily torched the school if our matches hadn’t got wet through those hours of running around the playing fields in the rain.

To an honored few, the phrase may have struck a chord. To many of us nondescripts, it just added to our confusion as we wandered from class to class to find we’d never seem to bring the right books or correct assignment. Some too, will tell you that they had a really bad time.

The net result, as I recall, was that most of us heaved a sigh of relief as we left the cloistered discipline of school for all the excitement of the adult world.  We may look back and think maybe it wasn’t so bad, but I’ve met very few who would rush back in their time machine to the terror of the red pen on your essay. But it is really peer relations that we remember as a general background, and the question arises as to how these set you up for later in life.

If we neglect the privileged few who will join the Wall Street mafia and concentrate on the 99% the question arises how did our school experiences effect our lives in middle age? A Swedish group from Umeå U have pulled the records of 881 43-year olds and compared them to how well they got on with their peers at age 16.

The analysis had to have lots of adjustments, weightings and other statistician’s legerdemains before it was allowed into the light of day. The results are clear, though. Having a bad time with your peer group in your teen age years at school is not only damaging to your health then, but sets you up for the dreaded state of metabolic syndrome in middle age.

Metabolic syndrome isn’t just a euphemism for middle-aged spread, but it includes diabetes, heart disease as well as obesity, so this is really bad news. So next time you’re struggling in the gym to reduce your waist size, just picture that class bully and what you are going to say to them at your next high school reunion. Perhaps we should warn our kids that like smoking, school can be damaging to your health.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0039385


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First In Line – Winners Or Losers?


Now that summer’s here and we are knee deep in strawberries and tennis at Wimbledon, our senses for individual’s primacy are being honed as the London Olympics are rushing towards us with the excitement for our expectations building like the anticipation of an English thunderstorm.

Long past is the ideal that what matters is how we competed, not who won. Now first is critical for health, wealth, and happiness. This is even more the case for the Tour de France which starts this weekend. First is where it’s at, last is nowhere.

So where do we stand if we are devotees of Mathew (specifically 20:16 in the King James version) or Bob Dylan with the “last being first and the first being last”? Well in these ‘me first’ times, we don’t buy it. Carni and Banji have worried about this and got down to doing some experiments that are reported out this week (1).

 The question was is the first thing that comes along the winner in our choice. Most of us will say but buying a car is not choosing the first one we’re shown, we want to see several and then we will give the matter the benefit of our grey matter working overtime. Well, maybe not.

The first experiment was carried out by asking 123 participants to make choices of which team they would like to join, which male salesperson they would buy their car from and which female salesperson the would buy their car from. In each case the choices were offered sequentially with strictly equal timing. Participants went for the first ones offered.

The next experiment was carried out in a rail stain in Boston where 207 lone travellers were importuned to make a choice between two pieces of bubble gum that looked similar except for the name. This wasn’t a considered decision which you could give some thought to as in the first experiment. Well, at 2:1, the first was popped into the mouth.

The elephant in the room here is that in both experiments either first or second choice would have been fine, so maybe the first in line was the no-brainer decision. Things now went into a deeper mode. Thirty one participants were shown picture of two criminals convicted of violent crimes in Florida and asked who they would keep incarcerated and who they would parole. Of course, photos were switched around, but again the first in line was chosen for parole, even if he looked to be the most threatening.

So it seems that the first in line is our choice whether they get there by competitive advantage or random chance. Apply this to political hopefuls who we have a healthy skepticism for their promises, the first to speak in a debate, the first name at the top of the ballot, the first to kiss our baby – need I go on, they are likely to be our first choice. I seem to recall that recently a theory was put forward that a coin toss would give us all more effective governments – could they be right?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0035088


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Ouch!


 For many among us, a visit to the dentist is something that is at the bottom of our “to do” list and, if we are lucky, will disappear from the bottom as if by magic. We are deluged in adverts with smiling faces (of course, with perfect teeth) promising an unbelievably gentle experience, but though we may buy all sorts of rubbish offered in ads on our Facebook pages, pain-free dentistry is, to most of us, an oxymoron.

The problem is not that the dentist is on vacation from performing in “The Little Shop Of Horrors,” and looks like Steve Martin to boot, but rather that we are expecting pain and our minds do their best to honor our expectations.

 This focus on expected pain is the subject of a paper by Johnston et al in the current week's issue of the Public Library of Science (1). The question is can we keep our thoughts elsewhere and not feel much pain, or if we have our mind concentrating on our bodies, will our fears be rewarded?

There were no dentists with big, chromium plated pliers or other fearsome instruments in this study. Instead warm irons up to 50 °C were applied to the forearms of 16 young women and 7 young men. Temperatures were varied at the same time as warning signals were given, but these were psychologists so sometimes the signals lied.

The matrix of information includes results from the participants focusing on their body, thinking about something outside their body (to take their mind off it – as we are so often told), correct warning info and surprise, surprise here is the pain.

The results that we need to memorize for our trip to the dentist are 1. Concentrate on what your body is feeling and that nasty pain is just one more thing and might not feel too bad; 2. put earplugs in so you don’t hear the warning that this may hurt – that phrase is a recipe for a painful time and you’re guaranteed to squeak ouch.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0038854



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Ginger Us Up


Ginger root is a widely used herb in cooking and adds a sparkle to many dishes. It is ugly to contemplate and cheap to acquire, which keeps it at the top of my shopping list. Culinary attributes apart, it has a strong reputation as one of the good things of life.

A quick scan of the cyber world brings up a huge array of benefits for consuming ginger. These can be as simple as a digestive aid, perhaps a cure for motion sickness, through the gamut to a preventative for cancer – of more than one type as well.

But its Achilles heel is its low price as an off the shelf material, so large double blind clinical studies are still lacking. However, I like it and will keep using it even if it’s just for the flavor.

There is a new bit of excitement to ginger us up in the literature. Ferri-Lagneau et al from the depths of North Carolina have been testing ginger in the context of anemia (1). Anemia is quite a serious condition and drug treatments are expensive, require things like intravenous addition, and aren’t free of unpleasant side effects. Thus if ginger can be useful, it would be a very attractive alternative.

Genetically modified zebra fish were volunteered to act as a model and showed a lack of red blood cells. In adult vertebrates, blood cells are produced from stem cells in the bone marrow. A group of proteins with the acronym Bmp’s control this process (along with others).

When you grind up and extract the good stuff from ginger root you have a plethora of chemicals. These researchers were able to home in on one in particular called Gingerol-10 that ginger up the Bmp’s to increase the production of red blood cells in their zebra fish.

You or I may not look much like zebra fish, but along with mice, they are a common model in the start of research which will finally move in our direction. Apart from potentially helping with anemia, anything that will ginger us up in the BMP department is good for our bone building ability.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0039327



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A Slow Eater


We should always eat slowly, chew our food well and then, hopefully, we won’t overeat, or so the story goes. But in recent times the Slow Food movement has been gaining ground – slowly.

It would seem that the two activities should go well together slowly cooked, tasty food should be eaten slowly so that it can be savored fully. Nature however, (red in tooth and claw, of course) doesn’t normally work slowly when it comes to lunch.

When you get cold, you slow down and that seems to be particularly true of the Greenland Shark which Watanabe et al have clocked swimming around at ¾ mph (1,2). This would seem to leave this species of shark with a bit of a problem as it likes to lunch on seals.

With seals swimming around at 2¼ mph, things don’t look promising for the sharks, as even flat out, they are only able to reach 1½ mph. But nature has her ways and the seal have a weakness for naps.

Sleeping underwater would seem to be an extreme sport, but with sharks swimming around propelled by tails that take 7 seconds to sweep from one side to the other, it is even more dangerous. So these slow swimming sharks glide gently up to a snoozing seal to become a slow eater.

It’s not just a quick snap of the jaws that occurs. The BBC report indicates that a deal of sucking goes on to bring the seal in (2), rather like that tail end of pasta that is trying to escape as you dig into your pasta and meat balls.

I guess we can conclude that to be a slow eater, you have to be a sucker too.

  1. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022098112001657
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18531924



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