7x7

alpha quadrant: astronomers spy more terrestrial exoplanets in our corner of the Milky Way

glymphatic node: new anatomical system discovered charged with cleansing the brain and spinal cord

 twitterpated: applying artificial intelligence to group and identify bird song

sub-space: a helpful, accessible explanation of that Chinese satellite network’s quantum entanglement experiment, disabusing our expectations of instantaneous communication

kalkül: images from a vintage East Germany children’s maths text book—site tip from Everlasting Blört

lacquer: Australian researchers are making advances with “solar paint” that pulls hydrogen from the atmosphere like a photosynthesising plant

tame: in depth genetics study suggest cats self-domesticated—or maybe it’s their humans that are house-broken

epoch and era

Via Kottke, we learn of Professor Olivia P Judson’s proposal to parse the history of life on Earth into ages not typified by geology or the complexity of biology per se but rather into energetic revolutions.
Evolution of life from its earliest forms, which populated the planet not long after inception, up to the present day can be framed within the context of five energy expansions, beginning with the geochemical processes that break down nutrients into usable forms (exobiologists expect to find alien life on distant, cold worlds that similarly exploit background processes like radiation or environmental—rather than internal—chemistry as a food source). Solar power comes next followed by the great Oxidation Event once the terraforming archaea of earlier stages had crossed a threshold that allowed respirating life to emerge. Each stage exhibits a higher level energy-efficiency with flesh (carnivorous behaviour) being developed before finally harnessing fire.

taxia or great chain of being

While it may seem a bit early in the year for annual superlatives, the state university of Syracuse, New York’s International Institute of Species Exploration of the campus’ College of Environmental Science and Forestry releases its list of top ten candidates of the most unexpected, unique finds of the animal and plant kingdoms to roughly coincide with the 23 May (1707) birthday of Carl Linnaeus, the founder of the discipline of taxonomy.
Inscribed to this year’s rolls include a sort of wild spicy tomato that appears to bleed when cut from Australia that’s propagated by bush fires, a spider whose camouflage resembles the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter matriculation ceremonies and a new species of Xenoturbella, a primitive marine worm that either resembles the missing half of an orphaned purple sock or fried churro pastry, depending who you ask. At a time when biodiversity is in grave peril and we have no idea about the natural innovation and wonders that we are losing without even the most superficial acquaintance, the institute wants to showcase the bizarre as a reminder that less than an estimated twenty percent of all species on Earth have yet been discovered and described and fewer still with any detail.

one million b.c.

Like forensics experts working on a case that went cold hundreds of thousands of years ago, archæologists are discovering that equipped with the next generation of genetic sequencers that there able to find bits of ancient hominid DNA when sifting through the sediment of practically any old cave.
No fossil evidence nor artefacts, though surely that’s pretty exciting to uncover, is required to trace how our direct ancestors and Neanderthal cousins spread across the continents and perhaps interacted. Surely this can be expanded to the whole of the plant and animal kingdoms, as well.  I wasn’t expecting that our machines were so finely calibrated to detect biochemical markers as so faint a trace, but this is sure to be revolutionary as palæontologists have already managed to extrapolate and reconstruct whole monstrous dinosaurs and more modest primogenitors of our kind out of just a fragment of a tooth or a little toe bone.

back-up copy

Adjacent to the World Arctic Seed Vault on the island Spitsbergen Norway has just opened a new doomsday archive for civilisation’s data, calling for submissions considered especially culturally significant.
Volume of course is not infinite and something to be discounted as a negotiable commodity as the information is transferred on to multi-layered film and stored in a format that isn’t dependent on a given operating system or media format, in case the worst case scenario comes to pass and all of the underlying support structure crumbles. At the time of publication, the two countries have submitted caches of data, Brazil and Mexico.

pleistocene park

Having seen the full documentary on German television over the weekend with H, I was pleased to see the coverage of enormous and complex conservation project reproduced by The Atlantic. Reaching back to the dawn of human civilisation and the retreat of the glaciers that spawned the shared myths and memories of the great deluge and Atlantis (we’ve no tales of advancing sheets of ice and winters that span æons) the Pleistocene Age ushers in human society, perhaps developed as a way to cope with the cold and privation.
The success of humans upset the balance of that Nature had cultivated for far longer than the fifty thousand years since the Age of Man, hunting most of the megafauna of the plains to extinction. The grazing of huge beasts adapted to the climate, corralled by predators, ensured that the tundra maintained its character and did not give up its permafrost in an uncontrolled catastrophic fashion. Some determined residents of Siberia have begun a massive land-management project that aims to restore the grasslands and the integrity of their local biome by reintroducing elk, bison, and maybe even mammoths in the near future. Similar conservation efforts are beating back the advance of the desert on the plains of Africa and have even allowed cattle ranchers and elephants to coexist. It seems a bit counter-intuitive at first but if committed and managed correctly could save heath and prairie and keep sequestered carbon out of the atmosphere.

sorry gina

As a cruel corollary to taking away affordable health insurance from not just the millions who benefited directly from Obama Care but also the general population of America—everyone besides those in the ruling caste and the independently wealthy—the Republican party have sponsored another resolution, as Boing Boing informs, that seems impossible to halt that would enable employers to coerce their employees to submit to DNA screenings or face stiff consequences. Privacy and right to refuse disclosure was previously protected by a 2008 expansion of civil liberties protections called the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) that helped to protect those who might be predisposed to being a bad insurance-risk in the eyes of underwriters.
A company, just because it contributes to its employees’ health coverage, could not force employees to undergo any testing against their will or own up to any future problem that a doctor had discussed with them in confidence, but now all those safeguards are undermined, since the government will allow DNA screenings to be incorporated into workplace wellness programmes, something completely voluntary but something that companies can also accentuate and incentivise however they choose. This is state-based eugenics—even if an individual benefited by participation by discovering some ticking time-bomb in time to diffuse it, no company would insure them and probably none would employ them either. What do you think? Let’s hope this is quickly remedied in America and never has the chance to be exported. It’s far more fraught with peril than the algorithms that pass judgement on our spending-power and is another hallmark of inward-turning ignorance that rejects scientific literacy and exploits an opportunity for profit without considering the repercussions. With workers surrendering their genes and traits that they could potentially pass along, business (with the government’s consent) are not far from instituting breeding programmes and sterilise those of us of inferior or subversive stock.

doping or spider-sense

Via Marginal Revolution, we are invited to entertain the notion that we could—and are currently, could tune our bodies not just with exercise or fad diets or self-medication but with more sophisticated forms of gene therapy, whose advocates and early-adopters encourage one to try at home.
One experimental method that smacks a little of Frankenstein involves temporarily stimulating cells to produce certain proteins through electro-currents purported to stimulate longevity and overall health—but not anchored in one’s chromosomes and genetic makeup permanently and the effects only last weeks to months before a re-charge is needed. This sort of gene-regulation is radical enough in itself—especially as a DIY project, but as the technology behind gene and DNA editing called CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), think of the potential for individuals to understand and successful tweak their biochemistry and mutate themselves to attain super-human abilities.

eye-spy

The uncanny visual acuity of our friend the Mantis Shrimp (who’ve been blessed with a whole range of super powers including battle claws whose joust can create a sonic boom) could teach scientists how to make more advanced polarised lenses that could discriminate between the signatures of diseased and healthy tissue. Their compound eyes, described as hexnocular, allow the shrimp to communicate and flirt at a spectrum that no other creatures are privy to are inspiring engineers to replicate the optics which may lead to remarkable early detection of cancer and dementia, able to study what goes on in organs and neurons just with a superficial glance.

landmark and legacy

Though probably more out of oversight (which can be just as cruel) rather than any sense of institutionalised prejudice—unlike that town in Alabama that choice to honour a pest rather than the individual whose advice against monoculture stopped it—there’s been no monument created for the inestimable contribution to medical science and genetics called Henrietta Lacks, not at least as a tangible destination, until now with this pop-up tribute from artist Elisabeth Smolarz.
Without Mrs Lacks’ knowledge or consent, her cells—deemed uniquely immortal (see previous link)—became the subject countless trials and propagated directly played the main role in almost every study and therapy from the polio vaccine onward. This appreciation comes to us as part of the annual Art in Odd Places “intervention” in Manhattan that confronts different themes each year. Emphasising that art and message can be anywhere, the focus of AiOP this time was on race, and also included a poignant installation of an interactive bubble-blowing frame, that recalled the rather ironic kaon “how many bubbles in a bar of soap” that appeared among the list of questions on the Jim Crow-era voter literacy tests in the US.

spock is not impressed with your handheld genetic sequencer

I am nonetheless with this achievement of miniaturisation that The Atlantic expertly presents first through the driver of much innovation, pushing our envelop out of necessity, positing how residents of the International Space Station could properly diagnose their ailments and turn to an effective treatment. Many have a weakness for antibiotics to remedy those bouts that masquerade in all those unremarkable symptoms that could be bacterial or viral.
Given the limits of the dispensary, it would be unwise to pursue the wrong plan, so enter the hand-held DNA sequencer dubbed MinION from Oxford Nanopore Technologies. Within the laboratory bulky and delicate, such a device had heretofore been impractical in orbit but could now provide vital information about how pathogens and contagious agents function in microgravity and in close-quarters. The article ponders then the perhaps apocryphal, the stuff of urban-legend, scanning might reveal whose dog is despoiling one’s garden or the walkers who fail to attend to their charges’ business properly might become a civic duty. Beyond forensics, the potential, however, for crowd-sourced research is beyond all bounds—equipped with tricorders, we become minions, legion, and like medicine men or witch-doctors examining our surroundings and finding unique organic compounds and novel interactions.

gene-pool

Once considered lost with just a few male members observed who’d not yet been informed that their species had gone extinct, the kakapo (though with many challenges still ahead) are slowly making a recovery, the population having been sequestered on a remote island off the coast of New Zealand. The turkey-sized flightless and fearless parrots, having evolved over the millennia with no natural predators suffered terribly with the arrival of Europeans, who brought with them hitchhiking pests like cats and rats, that hunted the birds to the brink of extinction, like many other charismatic creatures.
The rescue scheme of the New Zealanders, involving the eradication of invasive species on otherwise inaccessible islands and transplanting threatened populations there to recover, has been a successful one for this and other feathered friends, but what’s really remarkable in the case of the kakapos is that a consortium of researchers have taken advantage of this success-story, with the total number of individuals having grown to a meagre but manageable one hundred and twenty-five, to sequence the DNA of an entire species, and not just some select exemplars. Of course, this sampling is not characteristic of a normally viable and genetically diverse population, but the significance and what knowing all the subtle differences in health, vitality, mutations and foibles that make each of the subjects (and us as well) unique is something heretofore unexplored—and suggests potential for further understanding about the mechanics of evolution and perhaps gives the conservators the chance to play match-maker.

allele, alelo or progressive trait

While neither condemning nor condoning the practise of tinkering with genetics, the science desk of Buzzfeed (ironically, as it is the males who buzz and annoy but only the silent females that bite and suck blood) presents a really solidly comprehensive article that at least exculpates and explains the methodologies from a community health standpoint behind releasing hundreds of thousands of genetically-compromised males into the wild breeding population to keep it under control. The problematic mosquito that is the vector of dread disease in Brazil and is spreading to neighbouring regions is an invasive species—an import from the Nile region—and although very much still a scourge in its native habitat, the humans, living lived with them for generations, are less prone to outbreaks.
Getting rid of this unwelcome invaded might allow indigenous insect populations to return and bring further natural regulation to the ecology. It is unlikely there’s any correlation between the trials, conducted in 2012 and the present emergence of viral infections—due to time and distance with the incubation period of the Zika virus and the other diseases it transmits being mere weeks. The surge in cases most likely indicates that the testing produced victims of its own success, in much the same way as a concerted campaign in South America to eradicate disease-carrying mosquitoes decades earlier worked just well enough to shove off public notice and eventually caused a relapse. What strikes me as really surprising, however (and again, the mutated males could not spread the virus as they don’t bite), is that the male mosquitoes are not engineered to have woefully short life-spans in a straightforward manner: the mutants, programmed to self-destruct, will live out their normal adult lives provided they are given an antidote, an antibiotic, once every four days. Outside of the laboratory, this substance cannot be found and after mating, the males die and pass along this trait to their offspring. Maybe it was that little detour for sterilisation management gives the conspiracy-theorists ample purchase.

the island of doctor moreau or domestic-partnerships

Though I am no advocate for animal-testing nor place any stock on the pharmaceutical industry to regulate itself, perhaps the fear that a governing counsel in the UK might grant geneticists a purchase to explore hybridisation of beast and man may be misguided. The notion that animals might be breed as spare-parts or we might find ourselves in an awful transmigatory situation where a human soul might be trapped in the body of another species—or an animal’s mind in a person’s form.
It might be—however, a necessity that a single panel is convened to review proposals on a case-by-case basis and issue a verdict, as any codex would be insufficient to cover all the possibilities that are quickly growing and escape the peerage of science and ethics altogether. Proponents and sceptics alike concede life-saving advances have been won from animal-testing, though important questions remain regarding the efficacy and alternative routes that might have yielded the same benefits for mankind. Not to equate genetic-modification and the creation of chimera to the practise of husbandry, crop-cultivation or even natural selection (I think this argument is a thin and perhaps a lazy one), but our domestic familiars have been with us for a long time. Farming is an incubator for some of our most dire diseases but has also led to some redemptive advances, and it would behove one frightened by the headlines to remember that it was by the observation that milkmaids—having acquired a mild case of cow-pox, were somehow resistant to small-pox, and thus poising physicians for formulating the Germ Theory and the concept of vaccination (from the Latin for cow, vaca) and immunisation with antibodies eventually culled in chicken eggs. Insulin to treat diabetes was first isolated when doctors extracted a certain hormone that calves produced and tried injecting it in themselves and observed the effects on blood-sugar. What do you think? Is a counsel of experts superior to reactionary legislation or by this legal breach, are we just conceding any control in the face of progress?

gestalting or pinky and the brain

Via the always engaging The Browser comes a fascinating investigation into the ethics of genetic experimentation and hybridisation. Such husbandry is just about marrying up the right DNA—which does present technical hurdles though brute technology is quick to obtain and accommodate pathways that are penitentially advantageous to humans as organ farms, a repository of spare-parts, but from some fronts bodes caution, lest these chimera achieve an animal-singularity.
Personally, I couldn’t say that there was some enduring uniqueness to modes of human consciousness that make us special or so horrifyingly privileged. Some ethically-minded individuals are expressing concern that a human mind trapped in a laboratory rat’s body (reading gestating as gestalting) would elicit outrage. I’d dare to submit that an unadulterated rat probably is thinking along those very lines without some imagined vital spark. What do you think? Perhaps humans ought to be spliced with some humanity.

hey mister tally man

Via the inestimable The Browser comes a really fascinating piece on the supply chain logistics of the banana trade and the demands it manufactured to satisfy. Like the Egg Council, Juan Valdez and the California Raisins, who really can be bullies and not just advocates for farmers, Big Fruit created various banana republics in the process of perfecting its delivery techniques, inciting coups throughout Central America and even precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis and enduring tensions, all in the name of ripeness and minimal flecking.

The other aspect to this drama lies in the monoculture of the produce—at least as it’s presented to shoppers in the West. Whereas we might have an embarrassment of choice when it comes to apples and oranges, exotic bananas are all clones of one cultivar—threatened with extinction with the irreversible march of one fungal disease. The way bananas are marketed and grown make them especially susceptible to being wiped out by pandemics, and interestingly the type of banana consumed just one human generations had vastly different characteristics—fruitier and creamier and with a much slicker peel, and hence all those jokes about slipping on a discarded skin that seems physically impossible in the supermarkets of today.

gorgon ou au revoir, ruby tuesday

The French edition of the English language daily, the Local, is tragically reporting that Ruby the Lamb, whose genes were spliced with those of a jellyfish in order to express proteins that would result in transparent florescent skin, was apparently inadvertently slaughtered and served to some hapless diner.

The poor little lamb was created, rather gruesomely, for research purposes (in order to better study organ transplants by allowing doctors to observe them directly) and local authorities are prosecuting the matter as a contravention of environmental regulations against genetically modified foodstuffs, though Ruby was probably safe to eat, chimera-experts opine. The vampire lamb pictured is still at large.

5x5

viewer-discretion advised: graphic and unsettling no-nukes animation from 1956

how can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat: 90% of food-crops in the USA are genetically modified

this just in: how the hammering in of the Golden Spike for America’s transcontinental railroad marked the beginning of breaking news

purl 2.0: artist incorporates chunky stitches for maximum comfort

figleaf: the cyber attack on US government workers is bigger than anyone is letting on, having targeted security clearance questionnaires

senescence

A truly inconceivable debt of gratitude is owed to young woman by the name of Henrietta Lacks and to the team of physicians and technicians who tried to care for her at Johns-Hopkins. After a difficult pregnancy brought to term in late 1950, Lacks was tragically found to have a form of cervical cancer. Though afforded the best treatment of the day at the university research hospital (the illustrious Johns Hopkins being the only medical facility in segregated Maryland that would accept African-American patients), she eventually succumbed to the malady. A biopsy was performed on the tumour, unbeknownst to Lacks and her family—though it was not custom to provide consent for medical release at the time, and samples were retained for study.

The culture of cells, however, exhibited a surprising resiliency, and given the right environmental conditions will propagate without end—a property that not even the most cancerous or healthy cells demonstrate outside the human body—which led researchers to declare the unique line to be immortal. Prior to this discovery, medical studies on human cell cultures was very labourous as lines did not survive more than a couple of divisions (generations) and were not conducive of any longer term research into the impact of chemical compounds and potential toxic-affects. Lacks’ line (known as HeLa from her initials) was radically different and was almost immediately recognised by the scientific and medical community for its hitherto unimagined potential. The cultivation of HeLa cell lines coincided with the work of virologist Jonas Salk and enabled him to develop a safe vaccine that’s all but eradicated the plague of polio. By 1955, these cells became the first to be cloned and have been propagated to laboratories worldwide for countless applications. Over six decades later, the same deathless cells (which has prompted some to suggest that the mutation is actually an emerging speciation—the chromosomes of these cells don’t shed telomeres when they replicate, unlike normal cells, and biologists believe that this degradation causes ageing and dotage) are still pioneering research into gerontology, cancer AIDS and countless other infectious diseases as well as environmental pollutants and contaminants. Without Lacks’ contribution, the sequencing and mapping of the human genome—and associated insights, probably would still be a work in progress. Lacks’ family had no idea of Henrietta’s legacy until the 1970s, and after her contribution received due recognition, two members of the family were invited to sit on an ethics panel that has oversight on the use of the line’s DNA—not to hinder important medical research, but rather to help guide and monitor experimentation on HeLa itself.

print-lab

Reports are emerging that organic chemists from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have collaborated with engineers to produce their discipline’s own version of the 3D printer, which can transcribe small molecules and building-blocks for study and discovery. An established line of known chemicals can of course be synthesised in laboratories but usually at a great cost and with limited access which makes experimentation and distributed research prohibitively expense.

Most of such facilities are under contract to the pharmaceutical industry and it’s much more profitable for a lab to try to tease out an extension on some proprietary drug, a patent-medicine, that to devote time and effort on, say, an exotic jungle plant’s interesting, intriguing but uncertain anti-microbial properties brought to them by some unknown and uncredentialed scientist. Perhaps now, instead of supplicating and then queueing up—or trying to gather more samples from the field—researchers could just isolate the target compound, its structure and composition, and submit a print request to have batch of the chemical custom-made, which could be dispatched to several test centres or research facilities at one time. Democratising the studies, the important concepts of peer-review and vetting could perhaps become to mean teamwork, discovering novel and safe treatments and other substances (better culinary preservatives, glues, inks, textiles, etc.) more efficiently.