Category Archives: Life Science

Fishy Future?

Will seafood nets be empty? Grim outlook draws skeptics:

The researchers found that harvests of nearly 30 percent of commercial seafood species already have collapsed. Without major changes in fisheries management, they say, the trend will accelerate.

“It looks grim, and the projections into the future are even grimmer,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist and a lead author in the peer-reviewed study, which was published today in the journal Science.

But other scientists question that forecast. “It’s just mind-boggling stupid,” said Ray Hilborn, a University of Washington professor of aquatic and fishery sciences.

The evidence seems pretty convincing overfishing has created serious problems and if unchecked those problems threaten to become even more serious. It also seems a stretch to claim those problems will be unchecked (that the checks will be less than they should be I think is a reasonable position). It seems to me the original stories talking about the end of fishing stocks in the next 40 years are alarmist to the point of being counterproductive.
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Programing Bacteria

Duke Packard Fellow to Examine Processing Speed of “Reprogrammed” Bacteria:

research into the development of synthetic gene circuits, carefully designed combinations of genes that can be “loaded” into bacteria or other cells, directing their activity in much the same way that a basic computer program directs a computer. Such re-programmed bacteria might eventually serve in a wide variety of applications, including biocomputing, medical treatments, and environmental cleanup
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The research now, however, is in its very early stages, You said. So far, E. coli bacteria have been programmed to grow in numbers until a certain population size is reached. The bacteria then kill themselves off, growing again only after their numbers dwindle sufficiently.

The relatively simple program takes advantage of bacteria’s ability to communicate with one another, a process known as “quorum sensing,” and essential genetic pathways that control cell death.

Brain in a Dish

It’s Alive (ish) by Brandon Keim:

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology figured they could learn more from neuron clumps that acted more like real brains, so they’ve developed “neurally controlled animats” — a few thousand rat neurons grown atop a grid of electrodes and connected to a robot body or computer-simulated virtual environment.

In theory, animats seem to cross the line from mass of goo to autonomous brain. But Steve Potter, a neuroscientist and head of the Georgia Tech lab where the animats were created, said his brain clumps won’t be reciting French philosophy anytime soon.

“Our goal is not to get something as conscious as a person,” he said. “We’re studying basic mechanisms of learning and memory.” The researchers are focusing on how groups of individual cells interact and change when stimulated.

Two videos of growing brain cells in a dish. More from,
Human 2.0 by the BBC.

Laboratory for Neuroengineering (NeuroLab) at Georgia Tech

Medical Buckyballs

Secret’s in the stuffing – Researchers fill ‘buckyballs’ with metals in hopes they’ll have medical applications

Virginia Tech has been stuffing hollow buckyballs, or fullerenes, with metals in hopes they could someday be used as contrast agents for imaging or tracing cancer cells.

Nobel laureate and co-discoverer Harold Kroto of Florida State University, who worked out the structural rule that the buckyegg violates, learned of Virginia Tech’s pursuit of buckyballs for pharmaceutical and medical applications during a visit to Blacksburg this month.

“It’s very exciting,” he said, joking that he’d been about ready to give back his Nobel because no one had found humanitarian uses for buckyballs until now.

The buckyegg is the latest from Virginia Tech, where in 1999 Harry Dorn and a team of chemists created the first buckyballs made with a shell of 80 carbon atoms and three metal atoms stuffed inside.

Energy Efficiency of Digestion

Why is Fecal Matter Brown?

The complex digestion process ensures that almost no useful energy goes unused. The average bowel movement is three parts water to one part solid matter. Bacteria make up 30 percent of the solid stuff. The same goes for indigestible foods like cellulose and extra fiber. The remaining 40 percent contains various inorganic wastes, fats and used-up body substances like red blood cells

Scientists Examine 100 Trillion Microbes in Human Feces:

Aiding the large intestine in this task are trillions of microbes that reside in the gut, where they help digest foods we would otherwise have to avoid. In this way the bugs contribute to our overall health.

Some of these tiny settlers are with us from birth, imparted from our mothers, while others gradually colonize our bodies as we grow. This microbial community is as diverse as any found in Earth’s seas or soils, numbering up to 100 trillion individuals and representing more than 1,000 different species.

Virus may be eating your brain

Forgetful? Virus may be eating your brain

Viruses that cause a range of ills from the common cold to polio may be able to infect the brain and cause steady damage, a team at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota reports.

“Our study suggests that virus-induced memory loss could accumulate over the lifetime of an individual and eventually lead to clinical cognitive memory deficits,” says Dr Charles Howe, who reports the findings in the latest issue of the journal Neurobiology of Disease.

The viruses are called picornaviruses and infect more than 1 billion people worldwide each year.

They include the virus that causes polio, as well as colds and diarrhoea. People contract an average of two or three such infections a year.

Related: Viruses as Nanomachines (webcast) (excellent, John) – What Are Viruses? – More info on Picornaviruses from Tulane – Microbes

Bacteria in Food Increasingly Dangerous

Food-borne bacteria evolving, becoming more dangerous by Elizabeth Weise:

The evolution of ultra-dangerous versions of common food pathogens with which humans have coexisted for millennia. E. coli lives in the guts of most mammals. Almost all forms are harmless; some are actually necessary for health. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a deadly version — O157:H7 — emerged that causes kidney damage and death.

Two forms of the salmonella bacteria,Salmonella typhimurium and Salmonella newport, have evolved to resist most of the antibiotics that doctors are comfortable giving to children, says Patricia Griffin, who studies food-borne and diarrheal illnesses at the CDC.

Both are most common in cattle and other farm animals but are also turning up in fresh produce.

Educating Scientists and Engineers

Business Week has an articles discussing what business would like to see from graduates, Biotech’s Beef:

The problem is a disconnect between what universities are teaching and what biotech wants. “The focus of academia is getting basic and theoretical knowledge in place,”
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There are several weaknesses. First, recent grads lack the technical knowledge to carry out applied research in areas that straddle engineering, math, and computers. Second, job candidates have little awareness of what the Food & Drug Administration is looking for when it considers whether or not to approve a drug. Recent grads simply aren’t familiar with issues such as quality control and regulatory affairs.

This general idea is not new. But, as always (and probably more so if the nature of what is needed is changing faster today than in the past) the changing environment does require universities (and students, at least those that want to work in industry) to adapt.

But with H-1B quotas filling up earlier every year, Invitrogen has chosen to do more drug development in Japan, China, and India. It may also open facilities in Korea and Singapore, says Rodney Moses, Invitrogen’s vice-president of talent acquisition. Compensation in China and India is lower than in the U.S., but that’s not what motivates the move offshore, says Moses. “If the talent is located in Singapore, it’s just easier for us to go there.”

U.S. colleges take the problem seriously. State university systems in California, Wisconsin, and elsewhere are adding more industry-oriented classes.

60 Acre (24 hectare) Spider Web

Two interesting articles Millions of Tiny Spiders Spin Mystery in a British Columbia Clover Field, and Spiders weave huge natural wonder in B.C. cover a story from 2002:

A biology professor in northern British Columbia has spotted a clover field crawling with spiders.

Brian Thair of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George said he saw a silky, white web stretching 60 acres across a field.

Related: Another remarkable natural event, giant wasp nest. Also see a post on spider thread.

Sick spinach: Meet the killer E coli

Sick spinach: Meet the killer E coli:

O157 is unusually infectious, adds B. Brett Finlay, professor of microbiology at the University of British Columbia, who has studied the devious bug’s genetics and tactics. “Ten organisms can make you sick, while salmonella takes 10 million. And E. coli O157:H7 is resistant to acid in the stomach that normally kills most things.”

Read more in this detailed articles from the why files.