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New Flus, There Is Nothing Left To Fear But… Bacteria, Brains For Bots, Bee Business, Sea Slug Sex-capades, Fruit-Loving Crocs, Don’t Call It Junk, Big Brother Brain, Fungal Dangers, And Much More…
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This Week in Science… coming up next
Flu Update!
H6N1, a flu strain spreading in chickens is found in its first human victim. But, researchers are making headway on vaccines for other, more concerning flu strains.
Antibiotic Resistance Update
Is it the End?
People argue that antibiotics are over and done, and that we don’t have anything to replace them.
Bacteria Follow Power
Lab experiment finds no end to possible evolution of bacteria.
Healthy Resistors
Healthy kids have bacteria with antibiotic resistance genes.
Some Good News
Scientists develop antibiotic that gets bacteria to digest themselves, and find a way to clear up persistent infections.
Blair’s Animal Corner
Who doesn’t like to get stabbed during sex?
Not quite your average traumatic insemination in sea slugs – they make you want to be a bed bug…
Crocodiles may love fruit salad
It turns out that crocodiles may have been playing us all for chumps and eating fruit this whole time. Joke’s on us – they just wanted our fruit baskets!
Queen Bees are disturbingly honest
Queen bees give distinct clues as to how much action she’s gotten, and the males prefer her to be well-vetted.
Get a free audiobook at Audible.com!
Not So Junk DNA
Cancer Junk
Researchers at the UK Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute concluded that repeated mutations in stable sections of otherwise “junk” DNA are related to cancer.
What Makes You Human?
Gladstone Institute researchers combined gene sequencing, bioinformatics, and animal models to predict and confirm sequences of noncoding, rapidly mutating DNA, called HARs, that function differently during early embryonic development in humans versus chimps. Their results indicate that these sequences act to enhance certain coding portions of the DNA, and in doing so are probably essential to differentiating our species from other apes.
And, Other Things…
Parkinson’s From Fungus?
Mushroom alcohol, known to cause movement disorders in insects, led to gene-related malfunctions in dopaminergic neurons.
Bad Brainstems in SIDS Babies
Neurochemical abnormalities found in babies who died from SIDS.
Little Red Riding Hood Gets A Phylogeny
Scientific methodology applied to folklore tells us about the origins of Little Red Riding Hood.
Music For Lifelong Hearing
Make your kids take music lessons.
Single photon not destroyed
I would love to really understand this. Superpositioned rubidium atom sees, and does not see photons of light allowing physicists to create uninvolved observer for quantum experiments.
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While there is good reason to believe that modern antibiotic use, and mis-use, may contribute to increased incidence of antibiotic resistance in modern bacteria (selective pressure), it is interes ting to note that there is more to the story. Antibiotic resistance has been found in bacteria that pre-date human antibiotics by thousands of years…
Nature 477, 457–461 (22 September 2011):
” These results show conclusively that antibiotic resistance is a natural phenomenon that predates the modern selective pressure of clinical antibiotic use.”
The complete abstract:
“The discovery of antibiotics more than 70 years ago initiated a period of drug innovation and implementation in human and animal health and agriculture. These discoveries were tempered in all cases by the emergence of resistant microbes 1, 2 . This history has been interpreted to mean that antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria is a modern phenomenon; this view is reinforced by the fact that collections of microbes that predate the antibiotic era are highly susceptible to antibiotics 3 . Here we report targeted metagenomic analyses of rigorously authenticated ancient DNA from 30,000-year-old Beringian permafrost sediments and the identification of a highly diverse collection of genes encoding resistance to ?-lactam, tetracycline and glycopeptide antibiotics. Structure and function studies on the complete vancomycin resistance element VanA confirmed its similarity to modern variants. These results show conclusively that antibiotic resistance is a natural phenomenon that predates the modern selective pressure of clinical antibiotic use.”
Re Evolutionary arms race with bacteria as evidenced by Lenski’s 25-year old bacterial evolution experiment, still under way…
Dr Kiki mentioned the evolution following a power law that approaches an asymptote. It would be a relief if that were the case; if there were an upper limit to the ability of bacteria to evolve to increase their environmental fitness. But alas, Lenski has recanted his opimistic 5-year-old asymptote hypothesis, in light of new model fitting to new experimental evidence one of his grad students recently spearheaded. The new and improved data actually suggest that THERE IS NO UPPER LIMIT! Yep, still a power law best fit, but one with no asymptote. This means that while the recent generations are improving fitness at a slower improvement rate than the earlier generations, everything suggests that they will continue to improve fitness with every successive generation, FOR EVER!
See Carl Zimmer’s blog for links and nice elaboration:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/12815.Carl_Zimmer/blog
Since there was some debate on the half-life of caffeine, I decided to do a quick online search. The normal range seems to be between 3 and 7 hours, but situations can go as high as 10 hours.
Then I ran across the abstract “Serum caffeine half-lives. Healthy subjects vs. patients having alcoholic hepatic disease”. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7361718 which sites the mean as 5.7 hours and had examples of patients with impaired liver function with caffeine half-lifes of 60 hour and a 168 hours.