our cannibal ancestors?

Posted on April 15, 2003 by agnieszka

Our prehistoric ancestors may well have eaten human flesh regularly, John Collinge of University College London and his colleagues state in the April 11 Science. They say cannibalism is the most likely explanation for their discovery that genes protecting against prion diseases are common in the human population today. Prion diseases, such as kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human version of mad cow), are caused by eating prion-contaminated flesh. The prions, which are misshapen proteins, cause healthy proteins to clump together fatally in the brain. According to the researchers, the protective genes could have provided early humans a better chance of surviving epidemics of diseases caused by the eating of human flesh. The researchers base their theory on the fact that the safeguarding genes are most common among the Fore people of Papua, New Guinea, who had a custom of eating their dead during funeral feasts. The researchers looked at the DNA of Africans, Asians, and Europeans, and all carried some form of the protective genes, suggesting prion disease epidemics were widespread among our ancestors. Natural selection would have favored people with the safeguarding genes, allowing them to survive these types of diseases. Other scientists remain unconvinced, arguing that the genes may have arisen as a defense against prion diseases carried by animals.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 4/15/2003.
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goodbye, dolly

Posted on April 15, 2003 by agnieszka

What becomes a legend most? How about getting stuffed and placed in a museum? Dolly, the poster-sheep of cloning, has found a final resting place at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland. Dolly, the most famous sheep since Mary’s little lamb, was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell. When her existence was revealed in 1997, it made headlines all over the world. She was euthanized in February, at the age of 6, when it was discovered that she had a progressive lung disease. Her body was donated to the museum by the Roslin Institute, the Edinburgh research center that created her. Ian Wilmut, who led the cloning team, told BBC News that his pride at seeing her on display was tinged with sadness: “It’s not so many weeks since she was alive and in the barn, but we’re very proud that she’s in here.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 4/15/2003.
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bright-beaked birds get all the chicks

Posted on April 15, 2003 by agnieszka

In the animal kingdom, females usually prefer to mate with the most elaborately ornamented males — the peacock with the showiest tail or the songbird with the most complex song. It’s long been speculated that these showy sexual displays give honest information about the male’s vitality – only the healthiest males could afford such extravagances – and now a pair of studies in the April 4 Science give direct evidence that this is indeed the case. Reseachers from the University of Glasgow focused on beak color in male zebra finches, while a team from the University of Bourgogne in France studied beak color in male blackbirds. Birds with very bright orange beaks were found to have very high levels of carotenoids, a nutrient that boosts the immune system (and that makes carrots — and bird beaks — orange). Birds with stressed immune systems had dull-colored beaks because disease drained the color-giving carotenoids. Males with the brightest-colored beaks – the ones with the most robust immune systems — were the most sexually attractive to the females, and the drab-beaked males were ignored. “This result shows that sexual advertisement honestly signals health,” write the authors of the French study. Left unexplained is why all vertebrates — birds included — find Carrot Top so unappealing.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 4/15/2003.
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finding fault in los angeles

Posted on April 8, 2003 by agnieszka

As if smog, endless traffic, and Joan Rivers weren’t bad enough, you’ve got major earthquakes to worry about in LA, too. Researchers from the University of California have found a new fault buried under Los Angeles that may have been responsible for at least four large-magnitude earthquakes in the past 11,000 years, they report in the April 4 issue of Science. The Puente Hills Blind Thrust fault is about two miles deep and extends from Orange County to Beverly Hills. Using data from the oil industry and research bore holes, the scientists studied sediment layers over the hidden fault and found evidence of four earthquakes with a magnitude greater than seven on the Richter scale. The authors note that the 6.0 magnitude 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake appeared along a segment of the fault, “demonstrating that the fault system is active and capable of generating damaging earthquakes.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 4/08/2003.
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oldest egyptian mummy found

Posted on April 8, 2003 by agnieszka

Egyptian archeologists discovered human remains covered in resin and fragments of linen at Sakkara near Cairo last week, and claim the bones provide the oldest evidence of purposeful mummification in Egypt yet found. The remains, thought to be some 5000 years old, were inside a cedar-wood coffin, which was found inside a mud-brick tomb, amid some 20 other tombs, thought to date from 3100 to 2890 BC, during Egypt’s First Dynasty. If this was an early attempt at mummification, it wasn’t completely successful: the remains look more like a pile of bones than the well-preserved mummies of later dynasties we’re used to seeing in museums. Practice obviously made preservation perfect.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 4/08/2003.
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coots count their eggs before they’re hatched

Posted on April 8, 2003 by agnieszka

The coot, a common water bird, can recognize and “count” its own eggs, according to a study published in the April 3 Nature by biologist Bruce E. Lyon of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Coots often lay their eggs in another coot’s nest, hoping the stranger will take up the heavy burden of raising and feeding its young. If the host bird thinks the foreign eggs are her own, she’ll reduce her clutch size by the number of foreign eggs. Until now, many researchers had speculated the host adjusted the number of eggs she lays based on sense of touch — when the female feels like she’s sitting on the right number of eggs, the development of new eggs stops. But after studying hundreds of coot nests in British Columbia, Lyon has found that coots use an elementary form of counting to help them keep track of their eggs. The eggs can vary by color and speckle pattern, and the more dissimilar in appearance the foreign eggs are to the host’s eggs, the more likely the mother is to shunt the foreign eggs aside — to a likely death — and lay her normal number of eggs. Since the birds are using visual clues to decide how many eggs to lay, Lyon claims this is an example of counting. “These birds are looking at their nests and counting only those eggs they recognize as their own to make a clutch-size decision,” he said in a press release. “That’s pretty amazing for a ‘stupid’ bird like a coot,” Lyon added. “It’s very satisfying to rescue a study animal from a bad rap.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 4/08/2003.
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book review: these are not your ordinary college pranks

Posted on April 1, 2003 by agnieszka

When you get to a certain age, let’s say 8, April Fools’ Day loses much of its charm. The pranks of your childhood — hey, your shoe’s untied; made you look — just begin to seem, well, childish. There’s no wit, no creativity involved. So, you may find it comforting to know that some of the best and brightest young minds at MIT work hard to raise pranks to an art form. You can read about some of their triumphs in Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT by T. F. Peterson. Continue reading →

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shooting the frass

Posted on April 1, 2003 by agnieszka

As a not particularly attractive job description, evolutionary faecologist would probably rank right up there with, oh, just regular old faecologist. But the often-ignored study of excrement can lead to strange discoveries. For example, the skipper caterpillar can shoot its feces — known as frass — more than 5 feet away, a phenomenal distance — on a caterpillar scale. Why would an animal evolve such a bizarre talent? Biologist Martha Weiss of Georgetown University addresses this question in the April issue of Ecology Letters. The caterpillars construct shelters out of the leaves of their host plants, and forcefully eject their feces great distances away from where they live. Weiss tested a variety of hypotheses, from hygiene to space preservation within the shelter, but found that being surrounded by great quantities of frass didn’t seem to have much effect on the health of the caterpillars. What Weiss did find, however, is that excrement attracted predators. Caterpillars whose shelters were decorated with frass were easily found and eaten, whereas the caterpillars that ejected their excrement remained relatively untouched. (And please, kids, don’t try this at home.)

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 4/01/2003.
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neanderthals handier than previously thought

Posted on April 1, 2003 by agnieszka

Do you think of Neanderthals as lumbering, slow, and clumsy? Think again, at least in regard to their hands. According to a report in the March 27 Nature, Neanderthals were as manually dextrous as modern humans. Neanderthals were previously thought unable to form the “precision grip” — where the tips of the thumb and index finger touch — necessary for fine manipulation. Researchers from California State University in San Bernardino created a 3-D computer simulation based on scans of Neanderthal hand bones to investigate their range of motion. Even allowing for a small range of joint movement by modern human standards, the simulation showed that Neanderthals could easily achieve the precision grip. Whatever reason the Neanderthals went extinct some 30,000 years ago, it “cannot be attributed to any physical inability to use or manufacture” the stone tools of that era, say the study’s authors.

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 4/01/2003.
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mysterious light show in space

Posted on April 1, 2003 by agnieszka

In January 2002, a star named V838 Monocerotis suddenly became 600,000 times brighter than the sun, briefly becoming the brightest star in the Milky Way. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured the explosion in all its glory, showing the reverberation of light — the “light echo” — spreading into space and reflecting off layers of dust surrounding the star itself. (See the images at http://hubblesite.org/news/2003/10.) V838 Mon’s outburst is extraordinary. Unlike a nova, an exploding star that ejects its outer layers and heats up to hundreds of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, V838 Mon has ballooned enormously in size, and cooled to light-bulb temperature levels. Howard E. Bond of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and his colleagues describe the star’s mysterious eruption in the March 27 Nature. Their assessment says it all: “V383 Mon represents a hitherto unknown type of stellar outburst, for which we have no completely satisfactory physical explanation.”

This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the Boston Globe’s Health/Science section on 4/01/2003.
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