Being Useful In Old Age By Exploding Into Action


Being useful in old age by exploding into action is a tack taken by the worker caste of termites of the Neocarpritermes taracua persuasion. Termites are social insects and have a soldier caste of big girls with big mandibles to ward off invaders and keep the colony safe and allow the workers go about their business collecting food, bringing up larvae, and keeping the place tidy.

In the end, we all get old and termite workers do too.  Šobotnik et al have just published a study of N taracua from their work in French Guiana. They noticed that the old workers were showing their age not by wrinkles or gravity taking over, but by little blue pouches showing up on their backs. These aren’t just age spots, though. They are copper-protein crystals forming in little backpacks.

Blue backpacks have a purpose. These oldies march to the fore to help the soldiers deter invaders. When they reach the front line, the grab an invader and become a suicide bomber by exploding. Other termite species explode too, but these are special.
 
The explosions mix the contents of the backpacks with the contents of the salivary glands. Now this two-part mix doesn’t just produce a sticky goo, but turns it into a deadly toxic killer goo.

The older they get, the more deadly they become. Need to watch out for those oldies, especially if you plan a hostile takeover of an adjacent termite enterprise.

  1. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6093/436
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19001083



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Good News For Couch Potatoes?


The latest news may be good, at least for optimists. Well, maybe not in general, but good news for couch potatoes. You see as we originated from hunter-gatherers, we have a metabolism that harkens back to our roots.

 A large group with Pontzer et al in the current issue of PLoS ONE has made a study of current girth problems and compared our every day energy consumption to that of a regular hunter-gather group. They had to go to Tanzania for their hunter-gathers and chose 30 members of the Hazda. These were compared to US data from 68 people and published Western world stats.

The experimental program got pretty intense with GPS trackers strapped onto the Hazda and breathing analysis carried out with portable system to give accurate measurement of energy consumption. Meta data were available for comparison for almost 5,000 people worldwide.

The results of all these people were compared for the classifications of hunter-gatherer, farmers, and market economy exploiters. After all the necessary statistical juggling went on to give a level playing field, the result for the total energy expenditure per day was remarkably similar amongst all the groups.

This result seems to indicate that the difference in daily exercise is not controlling our growing obesity problem.

So what do we need to ‘Live Long And Prosper’? The authors decide that we in the Western world should eat less. So even hiding the fast food places and having to fetch our own pizzas isn’t the answer; we’re back to the hunger games.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040503
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18985141



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Good Flocking Behavior Is An Answer To The Big Bad Wolf


Good flocking behavior is the herd animal’s answer to the predator out there, whether it is wildebeests and a lion, or homeowners and a banker. Sticking together won’t fight off the threat, but you have a better chance of being available for appointments tomorrow.

King et al in the current issue of Current Biology tried to quantify good flocking behavior using an unsuspecting group of 46 sheep with an Australian sheep dog standing in for the big bad wolf (1,2). This was going to be a set of quantitative experiments so each sheep was fitted with a gps system so that its precise position could be plotted as a function of time. The sheep dog was also fitted up with a gps system so any sneaking moves would be fully recorded.

The result was that as the dog appeared in its role of the villain, the individual sheep made haste to find the center of the flock. Of course, each sheep could not be at the center simultaneously, so there was a deal of milling around as they showed good flocking behavior with the idea that inside the group meant that you were less likely to feel sharp teeth than if you were outside.

With eager mathematicians amongst the observers, and a plethora of numerical data showing sheep coordinates as a function of time, meant that the apparent chaos of such flocking behavior could be reduced to the simplicity of a first order differential equation. This wonder of simplicity expresses the rate that the cohesion of the flock changes with time once the dog gets within a critical distance.

With these sheep and this Australian with gnashing teeth, 60 meters was felt to be close enough to move into good flocking behavior. By the third trial, the sheep were pretty close together before the dog appeared.  I guess that they had a suspicion that it hadn’t left for the Heathrow to Sydney flight.


  1. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(12)00529-5 
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18959633 



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Party Pooper –A Medusoid Swimming Around In Your Pool?


You’re not likely to see a medusoid swimming around in your favorite rock pool for a while, but there is one out there doing its thing to best of its ability. Don’t panic just yet, this one hasn’t a sting like a real jelly fish. It does however, swim around with that relentless pulsing motion, and in doing that it has become the buzz of the of the media, internet, print and air waves.

The perpetrators of this biomimetic frankenfish are a large group of engineers from Caltech and Harvard who hit the screens this past weekend with an article in Nature Biotechnology (1).

The group are drawn to the sea as the salt water is a nice conducting medium in which lots of live action goes on. They built a silicone elastomer eight-legged star shape, about a centimeter in diameter. Rather like a flattened jellyfish. Being keen engineers, they got out their CAD programs  to print a protein pattern on one side of the rubber.

Now the second clever bit – they encouraged muscle cells to grow onto the protein pattern. Where did they get the cells? Well some rats helped out here and donated their hearts and souls to the project. The rat heart muscles were chemically disassembled and coaxed to grow on the protein template.

Then came the big day. They popped their medusoid into their lab rock pool and, in the classic movie manner, threw the switch to hit it with an electrical pulse.

Lo and behold the muscle cells contract and the medusoid starts it first swim like a regular jellyfish.  The pulsing swimming motion is beautifully captured in a movie (2). No dramatic background music I’m afraid.

The BBC has some stills, which go with some interviews (3). This is just the start. So far it doesn’t eat, sting or commune with other jellyfish, but no one could say a medusoid is a fish out of water at a rock pool party and all the guests would get a charge from its presence.

  1.  
  2. http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.2269.html
  3. http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/nbt.2269-S4.mov
  4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18953034


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Medication Could Be Printed On Demand With A 3-D Printer.


Your medication could be printed on demand with a 3-D printer if the brainchild of Lee Cronin comes to fruition. In an interview with the Guardian, he lays out one of his plans for your personalized medication that he is working on in the depths of Glasgow (1).

With a cheap 3-D printer using bathroom sealant, he is printing out interconnected reaction chambers with feed tubes for reactants to combine molecules into different ones. His reported vision is to have reaction chambers with catalyst embedded in the printing with dimensions and inputs designed around reaction conditions and rates so that the computer would feed in the appropriate inputs as the system flowed through to give an output of the desired chemical.

Definitely blue skies, but a gorgeous bright blue if he can pull it off. You might not need one in your kitchen, but in your local pharmacy, clinic, or doctor’s office, you would just need your smartphone with a Bluetooth connection to print out your prescription in chemical format from a pharmaceutical company defined protocol with no delay, no chance of counterfeit or material damaged in transit across the globe.

Although 3-D printing has the buzz currently, 2-D printing opportunities haven’t been exhausted. When are we going to see a printer for tattoo studios that would allow more elaborate art work to be designed, scanned into a computer and then printed out on the appropriate body part. The contours would have to be scanned first so the printer knew your shape, but that’s just a minor engineering task. Imagine if you will, the possibility of having an accurate copy of the Mona Lisa smiling from your chest at the passers-by as you languish casually on the beach.


  1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/21/chemputer-that-prints-out-drugs


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Singing Like A Bird


Singing like a bird is a phrase used to describe the dulcet tones of a favorite performer or the confession of an arrested felon depending on which movie one is watching. But singing like a bird is not an easy feat. Birdsong is various and unique among varieties of birds. It is learnt and perfected as our avian friends grow up.

The complexities and subtleties are remarkable, as is human speech and both bird and human have to learn. The question grabbing Moorman et al’s attention in last weeks Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was are we just bird brains when it comes down to learning to chat (1)?

Young babies babble and coo before they learn to talk and whilst they are learning to do this the activity takes place in the left side of the brain in a couple of specific places – one at the front and one at the rear. These spots are where the memory builds on the meaningless babbling to progress into colorful language by the time late teenage is achieved.

What about our birdbrain friends, do they have equivalent areas?  A group of zebra finches were raised and fed pre-recorded songs in hour-long concerts. By the time of the tests, the youngsters were just beginning to learn from their dad’s song, so they were on their way by the time they had a choice of repertoire.

After trying to learn, their brains were examined and the neuronal activation recorded in different regions of the brain. The results were rather like the human result. It all happened on the left side mainly in a couple of regions.

It seems that we humans have a lot in common when we’re learning to speak with birds learning to sing. In this respect we are different from the other non-human primates. So singing like a bird is not something that a Bonobo will do.


  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/12/1207207109.full.pdf


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