Category Archives: Life Science

Cancer Killing Ideas From Honeybees

No, researchers haven’t found a beehive-based cure (though major royal jelly, the wondrous protein concoction that turns lowly workers into queens, may have anti-cancer properties.) But bee colonies experience their own type of cancer, and maybe human researchers can learn from their victories.
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Like Amdam said, it’s not clear how the honeybees won. Perhaps the successful colonies produced bees adapted to noticing the intruder; perhaps it produced individual bees whose interactions caused some sort of superorganism-wide shift. And maybe when we figure that out, we’ll have some fresh ideas for fighting cancer — maybe not for tweaking our own cells, but for customized nanomolecule cancer hunters.

Nature Recreation Declining

Glacier National Park photo by John Hunter

Photo looking north across Lake McDonald from my Village Inn balcony in Glacier National Park, by John Hunter.

Do people still care about nature

Nature recreation worldwide — from camping, hunting and fishing to park visitation — has declined sharply since the 1980s
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The study examines data from the United States, Japan and Spain on everything from backpacking to duck hunting…that correlated a decline in visits to U.S. National Parks with an increase in television, video game and Internet use.
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The decline in some nature use seems to be accelerating, such as U.S. state park and national forest visits, as well as fishing. Others show a more steady decline, such as U.S. and Japanese national park visits and U.S. Bureau of Public Lands visits. Most reliable long-term per capita visitation measures of nature recreation peaked between 1981 and 1991. They’ve declined about 1.2 percent per year since then, and have declined a total of between 18 percent and 25 percent.
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Other research shows that the time children spend in nature — particularly the activities we looked at in this study – determines their environmental awareness as adults. We recently wrote a review paper looking at this phenomenon as well as at the effects of videophilia on childhood development. These effects are substantial and include obesity, attentional disorders, lack of socialization and poor academic performance.

I must say I am surprised by this. My visits to national parks have led me to believe the attendance was increasing but that seems to be wrong. The National Parks Service has a simple web tool to view visits to US national parks by year. Go visit great parks, here are some photos from my trips: Grand Teton National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, Shenandoah National Park and Grand Canyon National Park.

The World’s Hottest Chili

The World’s Hottest Chili:

The standard measure for such things is the Scoville Heat Unit, or SHU, named after Wilbur Lincoln Scoville, a chemist who in 1912 developed a method of assessing the heat given off by capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili peppers. JalapeÃ±o peppers measure about 5,000 SHUs. The bhut jolokia tops a million.
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Food scientists speculate that hot chilies have an unexpected side effect that boosts their popularity. A publication of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in New York described it this way: “When capsaicin comes into contact with the nerve endings in the tongue and mouth, pain messengers, called neurotransmitters, are sent to the brain in a panic. The brain, mistakenly perceiving that the body is in big trouble, responds by turning on the waterworks to douse the flames. The mouth salivates, the nose runs and the upper body breaks into a sweat. The heart beats faster and the natural painkiller endorphin is secreted. In other words, you get a buzz.”

Genetic Research Suggests Cats ‘Domesticated Themselves’

Why Do Cats Hang Around Us? (Hint: They Can’t Open Cans), Washington Post

The findings, drawn from an analysis of nearly 1,000 cats around the world, suggest that the ancestors of today’s tabbies, Persians and Siamese wandered into Near Eastern settlements at the dawn of agriculture. They were looking for food, not friendship.

They found what they were seeking in the form of rodents feeding on stored grain. They stayed for 12 millennia, although not without wandering off now and again to consort with their wild cousins. The story is quite different from that of other domesticated animals: cattle, sheep, goats, horses

Rainforests

John Hunter in Costa Rica

Facts about Rainforests by The Nature Conservancy

Covering less than 2 percent of the Earth’s total surface area, the world’s rainforests are home to 50 percent of the Earth’s plants and animals.
Seventy percent of the plants identified by the U.S. National Cancer Institute as useful in the treatment of cancer are found only in rainforests.
Less than one percent of the tropical rainforest species have been analyzed for their medicinal value.
Originally, 6 million square miles of tropical rainforest existed worldwide. But as a result of deforestation, only 2.6 million square miles remain.
At the current rate of tropical forest loss, 5-10 percent of tropical rainforest species will be lost per decade.
Every second, a slice of rainforest the size of a football field is mowed down. That’s 86,400 football fields of rainforest per day, or over 31 million football fields of rainforest each year.

Photo of John Hunter in Costa Rican rain forest, by Justin Hunter.

Jumping Savannah Cat

The Savannah cat breed is from the mating of a male African serval cat to a female domestic cat. The serval grows to from 9 to 20 kg (20-44 lbs) and lives 12-20 years in the wild. It is closely related to the African Golden Cat and the Caracal. The cats in the webcast are Savannahs.

Swimmers’ Sunscreen Killing Off Coral

Swimmers’ Sunscreen Killing Off Coral Ker Than for National Geographic News:

Four commonly found sunscreen ingredients can awaken dormant viruses in the symbiotic algae called zooxanthellae that live inside reef-building coral species. The chemicals cause the viruses to replicate until their algae hosts explode, spilling viruses into the surrounding seawater, where they can infect neighboring coral communities.

Zooxanthellae provide coral with food energy through photosynthesis and contribute to the organisms’ vibrant color. Without them, the coral “bleaches”—turns white—and dies. “The algae that live in the coral tissue and feed these animals explode or are just released by the tissue, thus leaving naked the skeleton of the coral,” said study leader Roberto Danovaro of the Polytechnic University of Marche in Italy.

The researchers estimate that 4,000 to 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen wash off swimmers annually in oceans worldwide, and that up to 10 percent of coral reefs are threatened by sunscreen-induced bleaching.

Fight to curtail antibiotics in animal feed

Consumer advocates have been campaigning for years to curb the use of antibiotics in agriculture, citing studies that show that 70 percent of all U.S. antibiotics are administered in low doses – not to treat disease, but to promote the growth of pigs, sheep, chicken and cattle.
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But as early as 1963, British researchers tied the emergence of drug-resistant strains of salmonella in humans to antibiotics fed to cattle.

Weird Creatures

EDGE Amphibians – the world’s weirdest creatures just got weirder

This year ZSL [Zoological Society of London] scientists have assessed all amphibian species according to how Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) they are. “The EDGE amphibians are amongst the most remarkable and unusual species on the planet and yet an alarming 85% of the top 100 are receiving little or no conservation attention and will become extinct if action is not taken now.”
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1) Chinese giant salamander (salamander that can grow up to 1.8m in length and evolved independently from all other amphibians over one hundred million years before Tyrannosaurus rex)

2) Sagalla caecilian (limbless amphibian with sensory tentacles on the sides of its head)

3) Purple frog (purple-pigmented frog that was only discovered in 2003 because it spends most of the year buried up to 4m underground)

Thinking Slime Moulds

Those amazing slime moulds

In other words, science has shown how unicellular organisms like the slime mould have the ability to learn and remember. Memory and learning seem to not be limited to us humans and can be found, as expected from an evolutionary perspective across organisms.

The amoeba Physarum polycephalum is quite a performer as it has been able to navigate mazes and solve simple puzzles.
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Nakagaki, T., Yamada, H. & A. TÃ³th. “Intelligence: Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism” Nature 407, 470 (2000).

The plasmodium of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum is a large amoeba-like cell consisting of a dendritic network of tube-like structures (pseudopodia). It changes its shape as it crawls over a plain agar gel and, if food is placed at two different points, it will put out pseudopodia that connect the two food sources. Here we show that this simple organism has the ability to find the minimum-length solution between two points in a labyrinth.

What Are Slime Moulds

Members of this class are commonly referred to as slime moulds. These have thought to belong to both animal and fungi kingdoms at one time or another. It’s now known that they are quite unrelated to animals and fungi and now are classified in the Kingdom Protista.

However slime moulds do exhibit characteristics of both fungi and animals. In the feeding stage, the slime moulds moves about as a mass of protoplasm (the plasmodium) feeding on bacteria, spores, and other organic matter much like an amoeba. When the food supply is exhausted or other unfavourable conditions occur, the plasmodium changes, taking on the appearance of a fungus.