Spaced Out Worms – Clues To A Longer Life?


Life can be hard for a young nematode, even if you are one of the spaced out worms. They are frequently to be found on space missions, doing their best to go about their own wormy business in spite of strange surroundings, high G-forces and weightlessness, but these metazoans haven’t been seeking accolades or showing pride at being the first multicellular species to be genetically decoded.

In the current issue of Nature’s Scientific Reports, Honda et al report that their transgenic nematodes aged less when spaced out and zooming around the earth (1). The work is also the subject of a BBC report (2).

The team of scientists hatched a group of transgenic eggs and split them into two teams – one team were to get spaced out and the other to act as the control group. Note the transgenic bit was the addition of yellow fluorescent protein to act as a body-age indicator, and 40 days is a good old age for a nematode of the Caenorhabditis Elegans persuasion.

The experimental teams were busy doing their thing for 11 days and then they were peremptorily flash frozen – both in orbit and on terra firma. This allowed them to be stored and deconstructed at leisure.

Firstly, old worms have aggregates of a 35 molecule long polymer of the amino acid glutamine building up in their muscles. Our space team had less. But the second finding was at least as exciting after checking out their genes. Seven of them had been down regulated (suppressed) and these seven are intimately involved in life and death. So space travel had slowed the ageing process by changing the endocrine signaling.

Clearly the good news for the metazoan community is to line up for space patrol. For the rest of us simple creatures the outlook isn’t quite so good. We have things like bones that don’t do well in microgravity environs.

  1. http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120705/srep00487/full/srep00487.html
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18727012


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A Multi-Beam Smart Solution To Driving At Night In A Snow Storm


Sitting outside under a clear blue sky with rather too large an area of pink collectors of solar UV laid out to supply energy for my vitamin D manufactories and aiding my digestion of sugars, starch and a smidge of protein with sufficient ethanol to aid the solubilization of lipids, I noticed how one could see for ever. At least until the horizon haze introduces ambiguity.

 All this is very different from the winter scene with large rain drops or giant snow flakes leisurely falling and limiting your vision as drive to the late night pharmacy for a cold cure.

The problem with driving at night is that things in the air scatter the valuable light from your beams sending a lot back to you and preventing the remainder backscattering from objects in your path. The amount of light scattered is the product of the size and number density of those pesky things in the air in front of you. Large drifting snowflakes, for example, shut you off in a small visual cocoon.

Now Discovery News reviews a promising attack plan published by Carnegie-Mellon (1,2). The work is from Narasimhan’s group and is providing a multi-beam smart solution. The essence is that the headlight projects light beams and receives images of backscattering from pesky things like snowflakes. This is a smart solution remember, so a computer assesses the rate of fall of the flake and projects other beams above or below it.

This works fine with one or a few drops and simulation of higher numbers look very promising for extending the range of vision when the skies are falling.  Currently the response time is 13 milliseconds and that has to be speeded up as the larger number of bits falling from the sky, the closer they are together and the shorter the time available to process and flip the beam.

Hey, who knows, maybe we’ll have smart flashlights connected to our smartphones.

  1. http://news.discovery.com/autos/smart-headlights-120705.html
  2. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7EILIM/projects/IL/smartHeadlight/


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Parkour, The Name Of the Game for Orangutans


Free-running or its official name Parkour is moving through the urban jungle rather as our ancestors would in the heavily wooded areas bordering on the veldt. Perhaps these days there is a bigger running component in the swinging, climbing, and jumping that goes into Parkour.

 The BBC Nature group had a good time at the Society for Experimental Biology’s gig in Salzburg as they produced an other eye-catching article on the work of Coward from U Birmingham (1). The focus was initially on orangutans whose habitat is disappearing and becoming dispersed as the greed of the loggers rule the world.

Orangs have to eat a lot and keep eating as they don’t get too much nutritional value out of each mouthful. Left undisturbed in large areas, they cope as they have been doing for a very long time. But now things are tougher. They have to move more and Parkouring around their decimated habitat takes a lot of energy. How do they do it on a poor diet? That is the question delved into at U of Birmingham.

Not being able to sign up any orangs for their experiments, they had to sign up Parkour athletes as substitutes. In addition, grants don’t stretch to Parkour expeditions in the jungles of Borneo, so they had to make do with a modified gym, simulated to be like the orang habitat.

Being experimental biologists, the team wanted quantitative measurements of the energy expenditure and so oxygen masks were mandatory. Well, it turned out that the orangs knew a thing or two as they swing bendy trees back and forth to cross gaps rather than climb down, run and climb up again. When our Parkouring  orang subs tried both methods, they used up to ten times less oxygen by swinging back and forth on bendy poles to cross gaps.

Perhaps we could have these for crossing busy roads rather than having pedestrian bridges. Parkouring our way to work each morning should definitely keep the weight off.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18686671


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Charging Ahead With Electric Cars


 Over a century ago Thomas Edison was charging ahead with electric cars. Not for him, the noisy, smelly complicated engines burning gasoline in controlled explosions running around twenty times a second. He had a vision of quiet humming efficiency, as we would be whisked around the streets on Edison Batteries.

Hard to argue these days with this utopian dream (putting aside looming monopoly issues at that time) as today we are rushing to embrace electric cars, in part or in full, but no longer with Edison’s batteries.

Today, our high tech vehicles are run using lithium ion batteries and we are seeing charging stations springing up in nice places like restaurant parking lots so we can put on weight while our electric car gets charged enough to take us home after we have been charged enough to purchase the road.

The BBC News/Technology section reports on new versions of the Edison Nickel/Iron battery (1). One of the problems a century ago was the length of time those batteries took to charge and the current length of time for us to go in and eat a meal would be much too short. But nanotech comes to the rescue with a large team led by Dai at Stanford U (2).

Not only is the Nickel and Iron very finely divided, but the carbon, which used to be in chunky rod-form, is down to one molecular layer thick of hexagonally arranged carbon atoms which can be pulled off a chunk of graphite using adhesive tape (3) with iron oxide nano crystals on it and using carbon nanotubes with nickel hydroxide nano crystals decorating them prettily.

 In the lab, these are only small batteries, but they charge up 1,000 times faster than the original Edison units – just right for today’s fast foods and indigestion pills. So if this works out, we can look forward to the freedom of the road as we charge ahead with electric cars.


  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18674240
  2. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n6/full/ncomms1921.html
  3. http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200910/physicshistory.cfm



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High Flyers – More Extreme Sports


Bar Headed Goose but with feet on the ground.
Image Diliff – Creative Commons, Wikipedia


Extreme sports seem to have a growing fascination for our fellow humans. As I’m getting in training for an event of extreme couch potatoing starting next month with my Olympic program pinned up on the wall, I have a limited interest in high flyers at low oxygen levels. But, of course, it takes all sorts of interests to make good news reading.

The latest on extreme sports is Victoria Gill's piece for BBC Nature reporting on Meir’s work at UBC on the bar headed geese who are natural high flyers (1). It’s not surprising as the live up on the Tibetan Plateau so it’s just a hop, skip and a flip to Everest.

The question of the moment in this Olympic year, is how high can these high flyers fly? No experimental biologist is going to be stumped with that one, especially as UBC’s engineering department has a wind tunnel and if you toss a goose in a wind tunnel it must do what a goose has to do and spread its wings and fly.

The problem then becomes how little oxygen can it cope with and still fly? Those chest muscles, which make delicious eating when roasted, require a lot of oxygen to keep those wings functioning. The answer was to hatch out goslings and train them to wear facemasks that could be connected up to an oxygen line.

They regularly migrate through the Himalayas and hit heights of up to 20,000 feet where the oxygen level in the atmosphere is about 50% of the sea level value and these high flyers managed to cope with 33% of sea-level oxygen levels which would mean that they could fly over the top of Everest should they wish.

So those breast muscles with an extreme oxygen demand are still working fine, we would like to know how they manage it. An unanswered question with the wind tunnel though is what about the low air temperatures?  The video appeared to be at normal temperatures (1). Maybe this question is on the next grant proposal.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18641726

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Seeing Clearly By Smartphone


We all want to have a clear picture of important events and see things sharply in focus, but we aren’t always lucky enough for that to be the case. Also as we get older, our arms have to get longer to read the small print. So it’s off to the optometrist that we have to go and out comes that array of expensive kit to gives a few numbers that are the key to our future clarity of vision.

That process is becoming so last century now that Pamplona et al from MIT have launched a start-up using a smartphone app with some cheap optics. $2 for the optics puts this device in the offer you can’t refuse category – if your eye-care specialist has a smartphone, which they will allow you to play with the buttons to align green and red lines (1).

The big expense then comes in choosing the designer frames to go with the lenses. I have a dream of cheap accurate lenses being printed out while you wait using a 3-D printer. Perhaps they could printout the frames at the same time. Soon we’ll all be seeing clearly by smartphone.

But that’s not all! There is more. A sister app uses a similar system which scans the eye to measure the extent and progression of cataracts (2). Of course, the elimination of cataracts can’t be remedied by buying the right pair of reading glasses, but the quick, simple and cheap quantitative diagnosis is a great advance.

  1. http://web.media.mit.edu/~pamplona/NETRA/ 
  2. http://web.media.mit.edu/~pamplona/CATRA/ 


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