Coffee Shopper


Sitting in the coffee shop corner of my local bookstore, my web ramblings turned up a couple of new and encouraging publications. The first one is the report of a metagenomic study from Caparoso et al from NIH, Bethesda (1) on a large number of  habitual caffeine consumers. The latter term is maybe more polite than addicts but I do need my early morning shot. It turns out that there are two spots on our genome that seem to be the culprits. It's always nice to be able to blame someone else for your habits and even better when it's a previous generation. 

Now, the discovery that one part of our genome sequence is helping us metabolize caffeine, whilst another part regulates the first part, is very encouraging. Since caffeine does good things for our health, apart from waking me up in the morning, understanding how we're programmed is important. It also can do bad things and maybe tracking the source of that response would be even more valuable. Some of us seem to be very intolerant to venti lattes, and maybe there is an opportunity there for some medical entrepreneur to offer some high priced genetic engineering service to those so afflicted.

Perhaps even more exciting for someone how is sitting in a store full of books to lust after, is the paper from Chang et al of NHRI in Taiwan (2). Retail therapy is now recognized as being a way towards longer and fuller life. Like all therapy, it has to be undertaken on a regular basis for it to be effective. Just once a week won’t do. Little and often is definitely the way to go.

We are left with the question of why does regular retail therapy improve your wellbeing and help you live longer? Note that it is an especially valuable therapy for the over 65s. My first thought, unworthy maybe, but first nevertheless, was that if we buy a lot, we owe a lot and we have to stay around to pay off the credit cards. But no, that’s not it. It’s the old physical activity and social interaction that does it. Scampering across the streets with loaded shopping bags will keep us nimble, and our vocabulary up to date.




  1. http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1002033
  2. http://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2011/03/17/jech.2010.126698.short?q=w_jech_ahead_tab

Toothless


When I read that there has been a decline in the numbers of plants that indulge in meat-eating, I wondered if they had turned to a vegan diet out of necessity, green awareness or just because they were tired of a rich diet. If they had gone vegan, they would be unpopular with their neighbors, as they would have become parasites. Better that I suppose than choosing to eat each other.

Reading, rather than glancing at the paper by Jennings and Rohr the U of South Florida (J Bio Con), I see that it is not a change of habit but of habitat that is the lever for the decline. They are getting fewer because we are bad neighbors. We keep exercising our right of eminent domain to take away the land from under their roots.

As plants become rare, a parallel with our animal neighbors becomes evident. Just as we (well most of us) no longer hang parts of endangered dead animals on our walls to show how testosterone charged we are, most of us don't pick rare plants and press them in scrapbooks. But just as we go for exotic pets, we go out and buy or collect exotic plants from the wild. This has now become a significant threat to our plant friends of the carnivorous persuasion. 

Empathetically Yours


We all have a group of friends or relatives who make up our social circus and keep us entertained and happy. Our ingroup in psychological terminology, the members of which we feel empathy for and we laugh or cry with them. Other groups that we don’t know are out groups and here our empathy can be pretty thin.Empathy makes actions like laughing or crying a great deal more infectious. Hence, if we are a stand-up comedian or a politician – sorry for repeating myself just then– it is wise to stack the audience with some friends. 

Yawning too is infectious, as I have found to my cost when lecturing. The student classmates are an ingroup, and yawns can spread through my audience like wildfire. However, the yawning contagion isn’t confined to familiars with humans, strangers can catch it too.

So it is with dogs. The infectiousness of yawning goes wider than the ingroup. Dog empathy goes wider that just their friends. But then many dogs seem to be optimists and expect me to make a fuss of them without us having been formally introduced.

So what about Chimpanzees? Well Campbell and de Waal of Emory U have just published a study (1). Here a group of chimpanzees were shown videos of familiars and unfamiliars yawning. Although they were very interested in the unfamiliar chimps and trying to see if they checked with someone in a rogues gallery, they didn’t catch as many yawns as when they saw videos of their friends and relations yawning.

Note though that yawns from any of the chimp body were infectious. In an earlier paper (2) Campbell et al reported that chimps also caught yawns from 3-D chimp avatars. Must have been a pretty bad movie if even the avatars were yawning.



1.    http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0018283
2.   Campbell et al.,Proc. of the Roy. Soc., Biological Sciences 276: 4255–4259

Rodentia Down Under


Deep in the Australian outback things are stirring. Being in the middle of an arid region, Alice Springs is a popular place to head for if you’re looking for a cool beer. Days are hot and nights are cool and flies are plentiful (except in September and October). But this year the rainfall has been a bit higher than usual. Not this past week though, it has been the normal hot ’n’ dry.

There is an influx of tourists predicted (1) due to the wetter than usual weather. These longhaired tourists are not welcome however. They are rodentia, and 12 inch long ones at that. The name on their documents is Rattus villosissimus. They are Australian natives and not recent immigrants, but they do have an unfortunate habit. That is, they can produce 12 babies every 3 weeks if left to entertain themselves.

Their home turf is in the Barkly Tableland in the Northern Territory, where rolling grasslands feed lots of beef cattle, and are watched over by Spencer’s Goanna, Ingram’s Brown Snake and Collet’s Snake. This year these guys have been asleep on the job, so the rodentia irrupted and have now gone walkabout.

The tourist mob doesn’t appear to have much interest in the Simpson Desert as they are heading west. Maybe for Alice’s Blatherskite Park to get settled in and ready for the 42nd Imparja Camel Cup race that will be held in early July. It is unlikely though, that the good citizens of Alice will be happy with that situation. If they were palatable, the barbies would be getting fired up now.

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12994713

Stealth Strategy


When we look around, the decrease in biodiversity becomes a concern as we realize that we are in the midst of another great extinction. This has an increased poignancy when we think how long these species have been around. Even more so when we think about the long low evolutionary process that we learned about some years ago. Things are not quite as settled as they seem though. Le Page (1) has put together a wide range of examples of very rapid speciation into one general article.

Evolutionary adaption can go in spurts in one direction and sometimes back again. A drought on one of the Galapagos Islands in 1977 wiped out plants that produced small seeds putting great pressure on large beak size that could tackle larger seeds. In a few years the average beak size was 4% larger, until 1983 when the weather went back to a wet cycle. Beak sizes went smaller again as small seeds became available and the food abundance pressure was reversed.

Small islands are good places to observe changes. A nice example comes from Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands when in the ‘90s a parasitic fly that targets crickets was introduced. Crickets get ultra noisy when looking for girlfriends and the loud chirps gave their location away to the fly, which would then pounce and lay an egg on the romantic cricket. The hatched larva would get stuck into it meal-ready-to-eat and munch its way through the live cricket.

The Kauai crickets went into evolutionary overdrive. Now nearly all the males have different shaped wings that don’t make chirping sounds. The parasitic fly population has dropped. The corollary is that the large number of stealth male crickets could have a particularly arid love life. But they developed a strategy. Now the stealth males cluster around the few chirpers that are still around. The females crowd in to attend the raves and nature has found a way to maintain romance on the island.

A chirping cricket is still a target for the fly, but the numbers are small and the few genetic stick-in-the-muds can hold the line. Would that the building environmental pressures could give us an evolutionary spurt in the brain department.


1. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028061.300

The First Social Network


Walking through the woods, we look up and admire the silent stalwarts competing for the sun, standing around apparently ignoring each other, trying to be a loner amongst the crowd. But under our feet, the underground network is active (1). No fiber optic-cables stuck in defined trenches here. Fungal threads stretch out in all directions to form a dense web, which can transfer water and nutrients. Young saplings that are well connected are healthier than those denied access to the web, as was demonstrated by Teste et al (2). But the most important thing that is sent along the underground is chemical information. Chemicals are the Lingua Franca, of our plant friends.

Bad news travels fast along the underground network. Zeng et al (3) poisoned a tomato plant by injection of a pathogen and stuffed its top in a plastic bag to keep it quiet. The underground was buzzing though, and the neighbors quickly rallied and activated 6 defensive genes. They weren’t going down without a fight!

Nepotism has a tendency to occur everywhere and plants are not immune to it. Dudley and File (4) watched while American sea rocket helped its younger brothers and sisters to a place in the sun. But it was a ruthless empire builder if planted among different species. Then its roots rushed out to grab the lion’s share of food and water. Some plants can also work harder in their defense against insect attack if backed up by their family. Being surrounded by their kinfolk stiffens their backbone.

Not all plants have a “family first” make up and companion plants are out there to be cherished. Peas and beans, for example, in a fit of global generosity, employ micro-factories manned by bacterial workers busily fixing nitrogen for the enjoyment and delectation of others.



1.    http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928051.500
2.    http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/08-1884.1
3.   http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0013324
4.   http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/4/435.abstract

Spaced Out


“The Final Frontier” is becoming closer to us all. For your entrepreneur with everything, you can now fill in an online booking form (1) for a Virgin Galactic flight for his or her birthday. Currently, this is only for a short trip, as is appropriate when we realize that such successful entrepreneurs will need to get back to their gadgets and minions fairly quickly if they are to stay ahead.

Man is not very well designed for space and we suffer worrying side effects if we are out there too long, such as calcium loss from our bones and our muscle atrophying. Certainly in space, 70 is not the new 50 but more like the new 90. The problem is lack of gravity and not knowing which way is up. To shed further light on the 'which way is up' problem, a joint US and Russian program (2) has been going on in a rather slow fashion by sending snails up to wait in a space station for the next vehicle to come along.

Snails are good at telling which way is up. The have a chunk of calcium carbonate inside them that dangles and pushes on tiny hairs. This organ is called a statocyst and doesn’t seem to cause motion sickness as our ears can.

In fact when we return from an extensive trip to the frontier, we fall about rather as though the celebration was excessive. Our snail friends do not have this problem. They have a heightened awareness of the proprieties of being upright and respond to slopes and tilts faster than their earthbound brethren.

There is a strong suggestion that snails might make a good model system for the further investigation of gravitational modification to organisms. In addition they can be away from their desks for longer than any of the passengers of Virgin Galactic, who are living life at a slight faster pace than the snails.


1.    http://www.virgingalactic.com/booking/
2.    http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017710

To Fly, Or Not To Fly?


With the coming of Spring, it is traditional to turn our attention to the more romantic side of nature. I see that Cremer et al from the U of Regensburg reported on an interesting study (1) of the tactics of males of the ant species Cardiocondyla obscurior, which Seifert describes as a “cosmopolitan tramp species”. There are two types males in the colony. Those wingless guys who duke it out and laid back docile guys with large wings.

Of course all the guys are competitive, but if you have wings, you have more options. The wingless guys have no choice but to stay and find mates on their home turf. They are not good at tolerating those namby-pamby flyboys around their girls. For their part the flyboys use female perfumery to disguise their presence in the dark recesses of the nest.

This works less well as they grow older and eventually, they kick the dust off their feet and fly away to pastures new with virgin queens who are easier to win. If there are few or no wingless guys about at home, the emigration is not necessary and they can make hay with the young lady ants at home. We learn that those flyboys are very flexible in their behavior, one might even say opportunistic in their mating tactics.

Thinking about the mass migration of youngsters during Spring Break in the US or for summer vacation in the EU we should be pleased that, unlike the ants, this has not been a dispersal process.

1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017323 

Dissonant Notes


If someone said that you looked pale or pasty, it was usually meant to indicate that they were worried about your state of health. If it was your mom, then perhaps it was good news and meant a day off school. But it seems that the same observation applies to Gallic pigeons in Paris parks. Jacquin et al (1,2) have published a study showing that paler pigeons have a weaker immune system and are more prone to pigeon parasites.

Melanin seems to be the key to pigeon prosperity. There is apparently a genetic link between melanin production and the strength of their immune systems. More melanin means darker feathers and healthier birds.

Being French and in Paris parks, the inevitable questions arise about the romantic consequences. Well pigeon moms have taught their daughters not to participate in parades in Paris parks with pale pasty pigeon potential paramours.

On an entirely different matter, there is news of the protest at the Bronx Zoo. This was a one-snake protest by an Egyptian Cobra. She went on the slither for several days. Whilst she was on the Downlow, there was a Tweet or two from her, but they proved to be fictitious. Nevertheless there were hundreds of thousands of followers eager for news.

A week later, she is no longer on the Downlow but is back inside doing time. The “Found” Tweet went chirping round the Tweetisphere on Friday.



1. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600048X.2010.05120.x/abstract
2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9442000/9442210.stm

Goodpasture Island Spring



Spring has brought a warm sunny morning to the ponds. The lone cormorant is being forced to share its log with a plethora of the local turtle tykes. The weather, which is ideal for wing drying, is also good for warming. Hence, the aggregates of turtles on logs, and car salesmen on steps, are all hauled out to bask in the morning sun. 


Thirty minutes later and the cormorant has yielded to manifest destiny and her log is covered with 10 turtles. The two-bird log has fewer, but it is also the preferred spot for Mr. Big, who is at least three times the size of any of his minions.


The catkins on the willows are almost mature and the buds on the maples have burst. Cherry blossom is past its best now due to the wind and rain as spring struggled to be reborn this year. The plum is looking good, though and maybe will last a while. More and more of the Oregon grape is in blossom and the dandelions are rushing to join the coming flurry of golden yellow.


Geese and ducks have settled their territorial arguments for the moment as they are getting into the planning mode for egg delivery. The herons have settled into their heronry and are winging backwards and forwards to the ponds to feed. They start off looking like storks until they fold their neck into that characteristic rudder which improves their aerodynamic design with the center of lift back inside their wing chord. The ospreys are not in residence so far and their old nest has got an unkempt look. Grass has started to grow on the twigs and any debris from last year.  Maybe they have joined the rich and famous at a more upmarket location and are even now, building their version of an osprey MacMansion.


Whether Man or Mouse


When left to our own devices, with no job demanding our attention or irate supervisors working themselves into a lather at our timekeeping, we have a tendency to burn the candle late into the night, chasing one pleasure or another or sometimes even both. Then in the morning, we luxuriate with the drapes closed as the sun smiles and starts to fade. Food finally calls us from our torpor and the cycle starts over.

It maybe that as one of our very early ancestors was a mouse-like mammal, we share with our current crop of highly developed rodentia a tendency towards nocturnal behavior – at least in our teenage years.

Yesterday’s crop of scientific publications came up with a study by Hut et al from the U of Groningen (1) in which they treated a group of mice like the typical workingman. No free handouts for them in this brave new existence. They had to work for a living. To earn their food, they had to get on their treadmills and get the turns in. So many turns per pellet was demanded. As they got efficient, their turn rate requirement was increased in line with the standard Harvard MBA training. Of course, they had to clock in early in the morning and the shop was shut in the late afternoon. The mice soon got used to the early shift and got to their treadmills on time, before breakfast.

Were they turned into model workers? No. As soon as they were given a vacation with plenty of food handouts, what did they do but revert to their bad old ways, sleeping the day away and cavorting in the mouse fleshpots all night in their mouse version of Las Vegas. How long before your next trip to Vegas? Too long maybe?


1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0017527

A Numbers Game


What is the numerical competence of monkeys? This is a matter that we must all wonder about from time to time. As I miscount the change that I’m proffering when purchasing a non-fat latte with one raw sugar, and not forgetting the cinnamon sprinkle, I sometimes wish that I had a numerically competent one handy, when feeling embarrassed as I get the extra coins back. One would prove even more useful when there are several of us trying to work out shares of a lunch bill.

Some primates, such as Lowland Gorillas have been shown to perform well at low levels, as would be appropriate to the species. Along with cats, dogs, chicks and mosquitofish as it turns out. However, Schmitt and Fischer of U of Göttingen have given a bunch of baboons and macaques their final term papers and have published the results yesterday (1).

If offered a choice of plates with different numbers of peanuts, or in other experiments, raisins, there was a little ambivalence, and their eagerness to eat overcame their abstract reasoning abilities. The baboons soon tired of peanuts and had to be tempted just with raisins. The real tests came when black pebbles were substituted for raisins. One raisin per pebble was given on their choice.

The results? The two types of monkeys did very well in working out if there were more pebbles in one dish that the other. They did care if there was only one pebble difference but cared a lot more if there was two or more different. With scores of 84%, they received a B+ grade. They did not like to be short changed any more than the rest of us.
  

1 . Schmitt V., & Fischer J., Nat. Commun. 2:257 doi: 10.1038/ncomms1262 (2011).

Sweet Success


Honey has found utility as a wound dressing for hundreds of years, but fell out of favor as modern medicine became sophisticated. It made a brief return during the First World War but modern antibiotics put it into the alternative therapy camp. However, it is now having a resurgence of interest. An FDA approved honey dressing was approved in 2007.

The favored source of honey for putting on burns and open wounds is from New Zealand and Australia. In a paper published yesterday, by Dr. Carter and her Colleagues from U of Sydney (1) surveyed a wide range of floral sources for activity and confirmed that the Tea Tree nectar (Leptospermum species) was the best source, (that’s Jelly bush honey in Australia or Manuka honey in New Zealand).

All honey works though, fresh samples are best – so cozy up to your nearest beekeeper. Best not to take a knife and spread on the wound though. Spread it on the dressing first. The honey sucks the liquid up, and fresh honey has hydrogen peroxide from enzymatic activity that makes bacteria curl up their toes. But the best, the Tea tree stuff, has the phytochemical content that slay the bacterial dragons.

It is ironic that the honey bee is having a hard time in many countries. Colony losses coming out of the winter can be as high as 70%. Why? Well we work them vey hard, but they also have to cope with viruses and mites as well as lots of chemical cocktails and are not allowed any sick time let alone vacations.

1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0018229

Exploding Black Holes


For some years now we have had fun reading about black holes. Those things in the firmament, which suck everything in if you get too close, rather like a huge whale guzzling plankton or the taxman with your wallet. More recently we learn that every good galaxy needs one to dance around, and we see beautiful pictures of plumes of radiation being ejected from either end of the axis around which it is spinning.

The fun part is that we can’t see the hole itself as even light is held captive. Hawking predicted that black holes would slowly evaporate through loss of thermal radiation. That would seem to be okay as they have immense mass and I’m in no hurry for the Milky Way to take off in all directions after our black hole evaporates, instead of quietly spinning around it as it does now.

Things are not so well organized out there, though. Visser and his colleagues (1) from Victoria U in New Zealand and in Italy and Spain have been doing a lot of calculations that show that black holes come to a bad end, by exploding far more often than any of us imagined. This makes space a much scarier place than we thought, as you could come face to face with a huge explosion where you had just thought that there was nothing there. The SciFi writers should be hitting the keys as we speak.


1. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/article.cfm?c_id=82&objectid=10714191

Getting Over It


Aggressive conflict is something that we, and most other species on the planet, know something about. Some much more than others of course, and such conflict usually entails risks of injury and costs in terms of energy at the very least. Mammals and primates in particular show signs of post conflict distress and in groups where valuable cooperative relationships exist, the costs of the conflict can be high.

We all know the solution don’t we? We try to teach it to our children. Reconciliation is the next best thing to no aggressive conflict to begin with. Ignoring the human primate species as a possible outlier, most primates will get over it and rebuild relationships if there was an existing value to those relationships.

Birds on the other hand don’t just get over it. They can hold grudges and pass that grudge along to their friends, as is the case with crows for example. It is interesting to read the new paper by Fraser and Bugnyar (1) of U of Vienna on a study with a group of adolescent ravens.

Before they get round to serious dating, ravens hang around in gangs and the gang culture is strong. Rules and relationships in gangs are important. Of course, with any gang of young hooligans, squabbles and fights will break out from time to time. But then it is important not to lose the valuable advantages of being in the gang, so reconciliation will follow and the relationships repaired if they are judged to be of sufficient value. Ravens can be more pragmatic than people at times. Perhaps we should sit close to those we’ve been squabbling with and do a bit of cooperative preening now and again.



1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0018118