WONDERS OF TECHNOLOGY

By Pam Eastlick

We truly live in a miraculous age so I thought a little trip through the technology files might be in order. There’ve been many articles about how the Internet is changing the face of scientific research because it makes sharing ideas and processes so much easier. But there are other technologies that are also having an impact on basic research as outlined in this first tale of science.

SMILE FOR THE CAMERA

When I was doing research for my master’s degree, I remember spending most of a short trip through Hawaii in the university library madly copying resources that weren’t available here on Guam. It took a chunk out of my limited budget and there were things that I wanted to buy in Hawaii that I had to forego because they would have put me over my weight limit. Paper is heavy, you know.

I did my research a little too early, it seems because Christopher Gennari, an Assistant Professor of History at Camden County College in Blackwood, New Jersey devised a marvelous scheme to avoid my dilemma. Read on.

Mr. Gennari was doing research on Swedish military history and the reign of the Swedish king Charles X who lived in the seventeenth century. He decided to visit the Riksarkivet in Stockholm, Sweden.

"As a US university student I was constrained by factors of time, space, income and, unexpectedly, source material," Gennari says, "I only had the income and free time to support living in Sweden for about a month. Travel space restrictions on transatlantic flights limited my ability to perform massive photocopying; the sheer bulk weight (not to mention cost) of hundreds of photocopied pages made for a daunting endeavor." (Hmmm. Sounds familiar!) With this in mind, he planned to make very specific use of the Riksarkivet materials, reading only highly relevant letters and documents in the archives.

Unfortunately, Mr. Gennari ran into an unexpected obstacle. The manuscripts were incredibly difficult to read. "The 17th century handwriting was difficult to read, it was narrow, close together, and in many cases nearly the entire page is filled with script making it difficult to know where a sentence finished or began." The curators in Stockholm offered Gennari a magnifying glass and a handwriting decoder photocopy and wished him luck.

"Suddenly, in leafing through a series of folios," he says, "I realized why very few Swedes and not a single English language historian had done large scale, archival level work on the reign of Charles X."

He couldn’t easily read the documents for the key words he was searching for, he only had a month in the country and he could see his research plans crumbling before his eyes. And photocopying the vast numbers of documents was out of the question both because of the cost and the weight. But Mr. Gennari had brought one personal piece of equipment with him that turned out to be the key to the whole affair. He had his digital camera.

An off-hand remark to one of the staff at the Riksarkivet revealed that they not only allowed non-flash photography of their collections, but they even had a camera stand setup for the occasional photographing of maps and images that could not be photocopied.

So, Mr. Gennari set about photographing 2,500 documents, producing some 25,000 images in total, which would have been the equivalent of $15,000 worth of photocopying. If he’d used a film camera, almost 700 rolls of film (about $4,000) would have been required with the attendant costs of converting those to photo CDs adding $30,000 to the total costs.

However, with the images safely stored on a handful of recordable DVDs Gennari was able to import the whole collection into Google’s free Picasa image library software for cataloguing and study on his return to the US.

"Digital photography and computer technology allowed me to capture, transport, and manipulate a previously inconceivable amount of document at a tremendous cost saving," he says, "Additionally, my need for frequent return trips and long, expensive, stays in a foreign country to continue my research has been eliminated. I have a lifetime worth of research documents at my fingers whenever I wish to conduct the research; 24 hours a day, 365 days a year."

"Digital photography allows for the collection of large amounts of archival documents in a short period of time," explains Mr. Gennari. But the intrepid researcher does have one very important piece of advice for all those who would follow in his footsteps: Take several sets of spare rechargeable batteries for your camera!

There’s no question, that the digital revolution is changing the language. Twitter used to be something birds did, Spam was something we all eat, and google referred exclusively to eyes (as in googly-eyes)! And the term ‘cement overcoat’ had a very specific meaning that conjures up visions of swarthy men dressed in fedoras, pinstriped suits and machine guns. Now thanks to researchers in England ‘cement overcoat’ may develop quite a different meaning.

NOT ‘SWIMMING WITH THE FISHES’

Engineers at the University of Leeds are working on a new type of body armor made from cement. The new vests combine super-strong cement with recycled carbon fiber to make a material tough enough to withstand most bullets.

The chief researcher says that using cement instead of aluminum will significantly reduce the costs of body armor production. At least for people like security guards, reporters and aid workers who are worried about the odd pot shot being taken at them.

He says that much of the body armor sold today is over-engineered for the threats faced by the people who wear it. The cement-based armor would not only create a whole new market but it would also reduce the demand for the high-end armor so that people like soldiers, who really need it, can get it.

Currently available advanced body armor is made from alumina plates – the raw material used to make aluminum – which is heated to 1600 degrees Celsius for up to two weeks in a process called ‘sintering’ in order to make them ultra hard.

Soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have faced shortages of enhanced combat body armor (ECBA) as production has struggled to keep up with soaring global demand.

Cement vests are just one of a range of novel uses for the 2000 year old material that the researchers are investigating in a three year project called ‘Cementing the Future’. Other ideas include cement based pump-less fridges, a new type of catalytic converter, and improved bone replacements.

Dr Philip Purnell with recycled carbon fibre. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Leeds)

Does give a whole new meaning to ‘cement overcoat’, doesn’t it?

There’s also news about the other material mentioned in the last item. It’s no secret that I’m a Trekkie who’s been out of the closet for a long time. Although this particular form of entertainment may have passed you by, there’s no question that Star Trek, both the TV series in its multiple manifestations and the movies have had a great impact on the general public.

Star Trek has also had a great impact on science. It seems that if you grow up believing that something is possible, in later life, you work to make it possible. Dr. McCoy’s medical tricorder already has working prototypes and though we’re still a long way from the transporter and warp drive, the science of Star Trek is a very real and viable thing.

One of the iconic materials casually mentioned by Mr. Scott
in the movie Star Trek IV was ‘transparent aluminum’. He was quite surprised that it hadn’t been invented yet. Well, perhaps at the time the movie was released it hadn’t been, but read on.

ONE STEP CLOSER

Scientists at the University of Oxford in England have created a transparent form of aluminum by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminum’ previously only existed in science fiction but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.

New states of matter don’t come along every day. Traditionally there are four: the three you’re familiar with; solid, liquid and gas and plasma, the most abundant state of matter in the universe because that’s what stars are made from.

The Oxford researchers report that a short pulse from the x-ray laser removed a core electron from every aluminum atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminum nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

”What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,’ said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. ‘Transparent aluminum is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of ‘miniature stars’ created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.’

The discovery was made possible with the development of the FLASH laser in Hamburg, Germany. The FLASH laser produces a stream of radiation that’s ten billion times more powerful than any other laser. It produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city. Although the transparency lasted for an extremely brief time, it demonstrates that exotic states of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.

Experimental set-up at the FLASH laser used to discover the new state of matter. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oxford)

We certainly do live in an amazing age!

LORDS OF THE EARTH

By Pam Eastlick

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

We truly live in a miraculous age so I thought a little trip through the technology files might be in order. There’ve been many articles about how the Internet is changing the face of scientific research because it makes sharing ideas and processes so much easier. But there are other technologies that are also having an impact on basic research as outlined in this first tale of science.

SMILE FOR THE CAMERA

When I was doing research for my master’s degree, I remember spending most of a short trip through Hawaii in the university library madly copying resources that weren’t available here on Guam. It took a chunk out of my limited budget and there were things that I wanted to buy in Hawaii that I had to forego because they would have put me over my weight limit. Paper is heavy, you know.

I did my research a little too early, it seems because Christopher Gennari, an Assistant Professor of History at Camden County College in Blackwood, New Jersey devised a marvelous scheme to avoid my dilemma. Read on.

Mr. Gennari was doing research on Swedish military history and the reign of the Swedish king Charles X who lived in the seventeenth century. He decided to visit the Riksarkivet in Stockholm, Sweden.

"As a US university student I was constrained by factors of time, space, income and, unexpectedly, source material," Gennari says, "I only had the income and free time to support living in Sweden for about a month. Travel space restrictions on transatlantic flights limited my ability to perform massive photocopying; the sheer bulk weight (not to mention cost) of hundreds of photocopied pages made for a daunting endeavor." (Hmmm. Sounds familiar!) With this in mind, he planned to make very specific use of the Riksarkivet materials, reading only highly relevant letters and documents in the archives.

Unfortunately, Mr. Gennari ran into an unexpected obstacle. The manuscripts were incredibly difficult to read. "The 17th century handwriting was difficult to read, it was narrow, close together, and in many cases nearly the entire page is filled with script making it difficult to know where a sentence finished or began." The curators in Stockholm offered Gennari a magnifying glass and a handwriting decoder photocopy and wished him luck.

"Suddenly, in leafing through a series of folios," he says, "I realized why very few Swedes and not a single English language historian had done large scale, archival level work on the reign of Charles X."

He couldn’t easily read the documents for the key words he was searching for, he only had a month in the country and he could see his research plans crumbling before his eyes. And photocopying the vast numbers of documents was out of the question both because of the cost and the weight. But Mr. Gennari had brought one personal piece of equipment with him that turned out to be the key to the whole affair. He had his digital camera.

An off-hand remark to one of the staff at the Riksarkivet revealed that they not only allowed non-flash photography of their collections, but they even had a camera stand setup for the occasional photographing of maps and images that could not be photocopied.

So, Mr. Gennari set about photographing 2,500 documents, producing some 25,000 images in total, which would have been the equivalent of $15,000 worth of photocopying. If he’d used a film camera, almost 700 rolls of film (about $4,000) would have been required with the attendant costs of converting those to photo CDs adding $30,000 to the total costs.

However, with the images safely stored on a handful of recordable DVDs Gennari was able to import the whole collection into Google’s free Picasa image library software for cataloguing and study on his return to the US.

"Digital photography and computer technology allowed me to capture, transport, and manipulate a previously inconceivable amount of document at a tremendous cost saving," he says, "Additionally, my need for frequent return trips and long, expensive, stays in a foreign country to continue my research has been eliminated. I have a lifetime worth of research documents at my fingers whenever I wish to conduct the research; 24 hours a day, 365 days a year."

"Digital photography allows for the collection of large amounts of archival documents in a short period of time," explains Mr. Gennari. But the intrepid researcher does have one very important piece of advice for all those who would follow in his footsteps: Take several sets of spare rechargeable batteries for your camera!

There’s no question, that the digital revolution is changing the language. Twitter used to be something birds did, Spam was something we all eat, and google referred exclusively to eyes (as in googly-eyes)! And the term ‘cement overcoat’ had a very specific meaning that conjures up visions of swarthy men dressed in fedoras, pinstriped suits and machine guns. Now thanks to researchers in England ‘cement overcoat’ may develop quite a different meaning.

NOT ‘SWIMMING WITH THE FISHES’

Engineers at the University of Leeds are working on a new type of body armor made from cement. The new vests combine super-strong cement with recycled carbon fiber to make a material tough enough to withstand most bullets.

The chief researcher says that using cement instead of aluminum will significantly reduce the costs of body armor production. At least for people like security guards, reporters and aid workers who are worried about the odd pot shot being taken at them.

He says that much of the body armor sold today is over-engineered for the threats faced by the people who wear it. The cement-based armor would not only create a whole new market but it would also reduce the demand for the high-end armor so that people like soldiers, who really need it, can get it.

Currently available advanced body armor is made from alumina plates – the raw material used to make aluminum – which is heated to 1600 degrees Celsius for up to two weeks in a process called ‘sintering’ in order to make them ultra hard.

Soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have faced shortages of enhanced combat body armor (ECBA) as production has struggled to keep up with soaring global demand.

Cement vests are just one of a range of novel uses for the 2000 year old material that the researchers are investigating in a three year project called ‘Cementing the Future’. Other ideas include cement based pump-less fridges, a new type of catalytic converter, and improved bone replacements.

Dr Philip Purnell with recycled carbon fibre. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Leeds)

Does give a whole new meaning to ‘cement overcoat’, doesn’t it?

There’s also news about the other material mentioned in the last item. It’s no secret that I’m a Trekkie who’s been out of the closet for a long time. Although this particular form of entertainment may have passed you by, there’s no question that Star Trek, both the TV series in its multiple manifestations and the movies have had a great impact on the general public.

Star Trek has also had a great impact on science. It seems that if you grow up believing that something is possible, in later life, you work to make it possible. Dr. McCoy’s medical tricorder already has working prototypes and though we’re
still a long way from the transporter and warp drive, the science of Star Trek is a very real and viable thing.

One of the iconic materials casually mentioned by Mr. Scott in the movie Star Trek IV was ‘transparent aluminum’. He was quite surprised that it hadn’t been invented yet. Well, perhaps at the time the movie was released it hadn’t been, but read on.

ONE STEP CLOSER

Scientists at the University of Oxford in England have created a transparent form of aluminum by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminum’ previously only existed in science fiction but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.

New states of matter don’t come along every day. Traditionally there are four: the three you’re familiar with; solid, liquid and gas and plasma, the most abundant state of matter in the universe because that’s what stars are made from.

The Oxford researchers report that a short pulse from the x-ray laser removed a core electron from every aluminum atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminum nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

”What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,’ said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. ‘Transparent aluminum is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of ‘miniature stars’ created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.’

The discovery was made possible with the development of the FLASH laser in Hamburg, Germany. The FLASH laser produces a stream of radiation that’s ten billion times more powerful than any other laser. It produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city. Although the transparency lasted for an extremely brief time, it demonstrates that exotic states of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.

Experimental set-up at the FLASH laser used to discover the new state of matter. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oxford)

We certainly do live in an amazing age!

THE GLOBAL CONSEQUENCES

By Pam Eastlick

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

After looking over some recent columns, I discovered that it’s been a while since I dipped into the Weather/Global Warming file and I’ve recently stumbled across some news that’s having an interesting effect on our own weather. More on that later.

It’s summer in North America and that means that the North Pole has been in perpetual daylight since last June. I’ve done articles about the opening of the Northwest Passage and the rising ocean level. Of course, the melting ice in the North Pole hasn’t been considered the problem that it presents at the South Pole because the ice at the North Pole is already in the water and shouldn’t contribute much to the rise in sea level. Recent research says that may not be true.

A GREEN LAND MELTS

The island of Greenland has probably the most inappropriate name for any location on Earth. Whiteland would have been a MUCH better name. But that’s all changing. The Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than expected, according to a new study led by a University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher.

The study conducted by Dr. Sebastian Mernild and colleagues from the United States, United Kingdom and Denmark, shows that the Greenland ice sheet may be responsible for nearly 25 percent of the global sea level rise over the past 13 years. Their study also shows that seas now are rising by more than an inch every four years. This is more than 50 percent faster than the average for the 20th century.

They discovered two things. First, it’s not snowing as much over Greenland in the winter to replace the snow that’s lost, and second that melting, evaporation and calving of icebergs from Greenland’s flanks has increased. Since 1995, the ice sheet has lost 100 cubic MILES of ice each year. To wrap your mind around that, just imagine an ice cube 10 miles on each side.

Researchers have kept a close eye on Greenland as one of the major indicators of climate change. Major glacier calving events in 2000 and 2007, sent up to 44 square miles of ice into the sea at a time. Researchers are studying these major events as well as the less dramatic ongoing melting of the ice sheet through runoff and surface processes.

Ice melt from a warming Arctic has two major effects on the ocean. First, increased water contributes to global sea-level rise, which in turn affects coastlines across the globe. Second, fresh water from melting ice changes the salinity of the world’s oceans, which can affect ocean ecosystems and deep water mixing.

Researchers are also afraid that the sudden influx of cold water into the northern Atlantic from Greenland and elsewhere in the Arctic could stop the Gulf Stream in its tracks causing profound climate change on the eastern coast of North America and in Europe.

Greenland could, indeed, become a ‘green land’ but at the risk of profound climate change for many of the world’s inhabitants.

Melting water from a glacier in Greenland runs into the ocean. (Credit: Photo by Sebastian Mernild)

Although the events of the previous story are unlikely to affect us directly here on Guam, except for that pesky sea level rise in the World Ocean, the events described in the following story are already affecting us here.

FIRE IN THE SKY

Have you noticed all the thunderbumpers lately? Does it seem to you that there’s a lot more thunder and lightning this year than there’s been for a while? While the weather reminiscences of older folks are usually laughed at, in this case, they’re probably right.

When I first came to Guam, more years ago than I care to remember, I taught first graders in Merizo. In the autumn of that long-ago year (OK, it was 1980), there was a lovely thunderstorm with lots of lightning. My six-year olds were absolutely terrified. When I began to question them, they told me they had NEVER heard noises like that or seen flashes of light like that in the sky.

I figured this was just a bid for attention from the kids, but when I talked to the teachers and other adults at the school, they assured me that the kids weren’t just playing up. The thunderstorm was extremely unusual and in fact, the kids were young enough that they might never have heard thunder or seen lightning.

Then I did a little research. In order to create the charge differences that cause thunderstorms with lightning, you must have particulate matter in the air. Summer thunderstorms are common over continents because there’s a lot of dust in the air. They’re much less common in winter (although I have seen a lightning snowstorm, surely one of the most bizarre of weather spectacles) and much less common over the open ocean because typically, there’s no dust in the air to cause the charge differences.

Windblown salt can cause the charge differences, which explains why thunderstorms were not completely unknown here, but I can say from personal experience that thunderstorms have certainly increased in frequency over the last 30 years. So . . . what changed? Read on!

Let’s take a little trip to China, home to most of the world’s human population. We’ll stop at the thriving metropolis of Shenzen and visit two large brown buildings owned by a private company. They’re the Longgang trash incinerators. They can be smelled a mile away and pour out so much dark smoke and hazardous chemicals that hundreds of local residents recently staged an all-day sit-in, demanding that the incinerators be cleaner and that a planned third incinerator not be built nearby.

If you think Guam has a landfill problem, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. China has now surpassed the United States as the world’s largest producer of household garbage and unlike our local legislators, China has embarked on a vast program to build incinerators as landfills run out of space. But the incinerators have become a growing source of toxic emissions, like dioxin and mercury, that don’t do a human body good.

But here’s the kicker. The pollutants emitted by the incinerators in China, particularly the long-lasting substances like dioxin and mercury, are dangerous not only in China. A growing body of atmospheric research based on satellite observations shows that air currents waft them out of China, across the Pacific (and over us) and beyond.

Chinese incinerators can be less polluting. At the other end of Shenzhen from Longgang, no smoke is visible from the towering smokestack of the Baoan incinerator, built by a company owned by the municipal government. Government tests show that it emits virtually no dioxin and other pollutants. Unfortunately, the Baoan incinerator cost 10 times as much as the Longgang incinerators to run.

The difference between the Baoan and Longgang incinerators lies at the center of a growing controversy in China. Incinerators are being built to wildly different standards across the country. For years, Chinese government regulators have discussed the need to impose tighter limits on emissions. But they have done nothing because of a bureaucratic turf war. (Hmmmm, does this sound familiar? Just how many sessions of the Guam legislature have done nothing about the dump?)

The Chinese government is struggling to cope with the rapidly rising mountains of trash generated as the world’s most populated country has raced from poverty to rampant consumerism. Beijing officials warned in June that all of the city’s landfills would run out of space within five years so the rush to build i
ncinerators is on.

The governments of several cities with especially affluent, well-educated citizens, including Beijing and Shanghai, are setting pollution standards as strict as Europe’s but incinerators in China’s interior are being built with virtually no pollution standards at all.

Recent scientific studies have estimated that a sixth of the mercury now falling on North American lakes comes from Asia, particularly China, mainly from coal-fired plants and smelters but also from incinerators. Pollution from incinerators also tends to be high in toxic metals like cadmium. Incinerators play the most important role in emissions of dioxin but little research has been done on dioxin crossing the Pacific. Analyses of similar chemicals have shown that they can travel very long distances.

Chinese agencies agree that tighter standards on dioxin emissions are needed. They just disagree on whether the environment ministry should have the power to stop incinerator projects that do not meet tighter standards. The planning agency wants to retain the power to decide which projects go ahead but other government officials oppose the idea. (Are you aware the Chinese invented bureaucracy?)

Yan Jianhua, the director of the solid waste treatment expert group in Zhejiang province, a center of incinerator equipment manufacturing in China, defended the industry’s record on dioxin, saying that households that burn their trash outdoors emit far more dioxin.

“Open burning is a bigger problem according to our research,” Professor Yan said, adding that what China really needs is better trash collection so that garbage can be disposed of more reliably.

Critics and admirers of incinerators alike call for more recycling and reduced use of packaging as ways to reduce the daily volume of municipal garbage. Even when not recycled, sorted trash is easier for incinerators to burn cleanly, because the temperature in the furnace can be adjusted more precisely to minimize the formation of dioxin.

Yet the Chinese public has shown little enthusiasm for recycling. As Mr. Zhong, the engineer at the Baoan incinerator, put it, “No one really cares.”

Hmmmm. That sounds sort of familiar, too, doesn’t it? Are you doing any recycling at all?

Yet, the Chinese failure to recycle is helping keep your children up at night and scaring your dog because there is absolutely no question that the increase of thunderstorms over your personal island is fueled by the dirty smokestacks in China. And the toxins coming out of those smokestacks could have a much longer effect on you and your children and your dog that the immediate trauma of bright lights and boomy noises.

The ocean level is rising because of melting half a world away and our weather is changing because of the activities of people who live thousands of miles away. It really is true that Earth is a global community and all of us must suffer the consequences of the fact that there are too many of us and “No one really cares”.

Cruise on over to the Deep Website at www.thedeepradioshow.com to learn more about our global ecosystem and many other topics. Enjoy!

A worker shovels trash at the Baoan incinerator in Shenzhen, which also generates power.

OF MICE AND BEER

By Pam Eastlick

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

Well, after looking over The Deep file folders, it looks like it’s time to do a column on medicine with some emphasis on how to avoid taking it. But our first article focuses on the research aspect of what ails us and why it’s bad that the research is primarily on something else besides us.

LEAVING THE MOUSE TRAP

Noted immunologist Dr. Mark Davis from the Stanford University School of Medicine says that the fabled laboratory mouse that has taught us many things about human disease can teach us only so much about how we humans get sick and what to do about it.

He says that the time has come for researchers to start weaning themselves from experimental rodents and to embark on a bold, industrial-scale assault on the causes and treatment of specifically human diseases. He proposes that the current mouse-centered, small-laboratory approach be supplemented by a broad, industrial-scale "systems biology" approach akin to the one that unraveled the human genome.

"We seem to be in a state of denial, where there is so much invested in the mouse model that it seems almost unthinkable to look elsewhere," Davis says. "The mouse has been incredibly valuable. That’s part of the problem."

Experiments that are common with lab mice, such as genetically engineering them to express a foreign protein or to be deficient in the expression of one of their own, would be unthinkable in a human. Because experimental mice can be used to get quick answers, Davis argues, researchers look to the mouse to tell them everything. "In humans it often takes years to find out anything. There are a lot more regulatory, financial and ethical hurdles," he said.

Unfortunately, researcher have discovered how to cure all kinds of infectious disease, cancers and autoimmune conditions in mice but when they try to adapt these cures for humans, the record isn’t very good. The vast majority of clinical trials designed to test these interventions in people end in failure.

There are probably some good reasons for this, said Davis. For starters, mice are rodents, separated from humans by some 65 million years of evolutionary divergence from our common ancestor.

That’s not all. While it takes about 20 years for a person to reach sexual maturity, a mouse gets there in three months. The roughly 100 years during which the furry, diminutive animals have been domesticated and bred in labs are, therefore, the mouse equivalent of 8,000 human years, during which they have been inbred and kept relatively disease-free. They would never survive in the wild.

"We can’t depend on the mouse for all the answers, because in some cases it’s not giving us the right answers," Davis said. "But think about what we can do with people. People come to hospitals, get vaccinations, give blood and tissue samples for routine lab tests and clinical trials. We’re not learning nearly as much as we could from these samples."

Davis sees the need for a national or even international infrastructure to capture information from blood and tissue samples. One example is Stanford’s Human Immune Monitoring Core. Researchers send human samples to this facility, where many assays of cell types and immune secretions in blood and tissues gather data about experimental subjects’ immune status, in a relatively short time.

The creation of these large country-scale labs could mean that tests could be quickly and cheaply conducted in a standardized fashion among very large groups of people, some in excellent health, others suffering from one or more diseases. This kind of database could establish normal ranges for many parameters and then see how those parameters are changed by infectious diseases or autoimmune disorders and even things like aging and vaccinations. This could allow medical scientists to see a developing problem very early and start applying remedies to restore the normal balance and prevent the disease’s progression.

These ‘experiments’ on humans make a lot more sense than the ongoing emphasis on learning about our diseases by studying another life form altogether.

I think that it is time to do more study on humans than on mice to learn about the diseases and conditions that kill us. But good health has always begun at home and now we present two cautionary tales about the things that make us sick that we do voluntarily!

A researcher holds a white laboratory mouse. (Credit: iStockphoto/Brandon Laufenberg)

THE SINGLE QUESTION

I have long said that if we really want to get out of the financial bind that periodically plagues us here on Guam, we don’t have to depend on the military or tourism or any of those things. All we have to do is charge a 50-cent sin tax on every can of beer sold on the island. Although beer sales would probably drop for a month or two, trust me, they would soon be back to normal levels and the government’s money problems would be gone.

But much more importantly, it’s time that we started making alcohol pay for the terrible toll it extracts on our islands. And don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. Too many car accidents, too many beatings, too many kids who don’t get enough to eat.

So, you say. I’m in total agreement with you. This won’t affect me at all, because I certainly don’t have a drinking problem. Are you sure?

Researchers at the Boston Medical Center have found that a single question accurately identifies anyone who has unhealthy alcohol usage.

Unhealthy alcohol use, which covers the spectrum from risky consumption to alcohol use disorders, alcohol abuse and dependence, is extremely common but under-diagnosed by doctors. Many commonly used questionnaires to detect problems with alcohol have too many questions, often don’t cover the full spectrum of unhealthy use, and can be time consuming to administer. Consequently, many patients are not screened.

In the current research, a single question was asked of 286 people. The test revealed unhealthy alcohol use in 31% of the participants. The single-question screen was 81.8% sensitive and 79.3% specific for the detection of unhealthy alcohol use. It was slightly more sensitive and less specific for the detection of a current alcohol use disorder.

So . . . what was the question? Do you have alcohol abuse problems? Here it is!

"How many times in the past year have you had five or more drinks in a day?" Too many times, you say? Well, there’s your answer!

And lest you think that you’re home free because you’re a tee-totaller and never drink beer, read on!

IT’S NOT JUST BEER

Doctors have recently issued a warning about excessive cola consumption after noticing an increase in the number of patients suffering from muscle problems. We’re consuming more soft drinks than ever before and a number of health problems have already been identified that include tooth decay (why do you think your six-year old nephew has silver teeth?), bone demineralization and diabetes.

Now, evidence is increasing that suggests that excessive cola consumption can also lead to hypokalaemia, in which blood potassium levels fall to the point that it affects vital muscle functions. (Don’t forget that your heart is also a muscle!)

A research review has shown that symptoms can range from mild weakness to profound paralysis. Luckily, all the patients studied made a rapid and
full recovery after they stopped drinking cola and took oral or intravenous potassium.

The case studies looked at patients whose consumption ranged from two to nine liters of cola a day. They included two pregnant women admitted to the hospital with low potassium levels.

The first, a 21 year-old woman, was consuming up to 3 liters of cola a day She complained of fatigue, appetite loss and persistent vomiting. Her blood tests showed she had extremely low potassium levels. The second woman also had low potassium levels and was suffering from increasing muscular weakness. She had been drinking up to 7 liters of cola a day for the previous 10 months.

Another example highlighted the strange case of the ostrich farmer who returned from the Australian outback with muscle weakness. He had been drinking 4 liters of cola a day for the past three years and drank up to 10 liters a day when he was in the outback, causing a rapid reduction in his potassium levels.

Another doctor solved the case of his patient’s muscle weakness when the patient turned up at his office with a two-liter bottle of cola in the basket of his electric scooter. It turned out he routinely drank up to 4 liters a day. He refused to stop drinking cola, but halved his consumption and the muscle weakness he had been complaining of improved.

In 2007, the worldwide annual consumption of soft drinks reached 552 billion liters, the equivalent of just under 83 liters per person per year. This is projected to increase to 95 liters per person per year by 2012. However, the figure for the United States is already 212 liters per person per year.

So why does cola cause this? Hypokalaemia is caused by excessive consumption of three of the most common ingredients in cola drinks – glucose, fructose and caffeine.

The researchers said that in most cases, caffeine intoxication was thought to play the most important role. This has been borne out by case studies that focus on other products that contain high levels of caffeine but no glucose or fructose. However, caffeine-free cola products can also cause hypokalaemia because the fructose they contain can cause diarrhea.

Although most patients recover when they stop drinking cola and take potassium supplements, cola-induced chronic hypokalaemia can make them more susceptible to potentially fatal complications, such as an irregular heartbeat. (What did I say about the heart?)

The researchers say that excessive consumption of any kind of cola can lead to a range of health problems including fatigue, loss of productivity and muscular symptoms that vary from mild weakness to profound paralysis. They believe that further studies are needed to establish how much is too much when it comes to the daily consumption of cola drinks.

So . . . .what are you drinking today?

ALIENS AMONG US!

By Pam Eastlick

I’ve peered into all the files and found that the animal file is bulging again. So off we go for another adventure in the animal kingdom but with an alien twist! For starters, have a look at the lovely fellow in the picture.

Okay, you say that could be an alien but it looks more like a fish, with a funny looking mouth and crossed eyes. But you’d be wrong. It’s a fish all right, with a funny looking mouth, but those aren’t crossed eyes. That’s the fish’s nose and his eyes are quite possible the strangest eyes in the animal kingdom.

LOOKING DOWN THE TUBES

That lovely fellow is Macropinna microstoma (which directly translates from the Latin as “big foot, small mouth”) also known as the barreleye fish because it has tubular eyes and a transparent head. Ever since barreleyes were described in 1939, marine biologists have known that its tubular eyes are very good at collecting light.

Barreleyes typically live near the depth where sunlight from the surface fades to complete blackness. They use their ultra-sensitive tubular eyes to search for the faint silhouettes of prey overhead. Although tubular eyes are very good at collecting light, they have a very narrow field of view. Most marine biologists believed that the fishes’ eyes were fixed in their heads, allowing them to only look upward. This would make it impossible for the fishes to see what was directly in front of them, and very difficult for them to capture prey with their small, pointed mouths.

New research shows that these unusual eyes can rotate within a transparent shield that covers the fish’s head. This allows the barreleye to peer up at potential prey or focus forward to see what it’s eating.

The researchers used video from remotely operated vehicles to study barreleyes in deep water just offshore of Central California. At depths of 2,000 to 2,600 feet, the ROV cameras typically showed these fish hanging motionless in the water, their eyes glowing a vivid green in the ROV’s bright lights. The ROV video also revealed a previously undescribed feature of these fish–the eyes are surrounded by a transparent, fluid-filled shield that covers the top of the fish’s head.

Most existing descriptions and illustrations of this fish don’t show the fluid-filled shield, because the fragile structure is destroyed when the fish are brought up from the deep in nets. The researchers brought their nets up slowly and were able to bring a live barreleye to the surface. They placed it in a shipboard aquarium, where it survived for several hours. Within this controlled environment, the researchers were able to confirm what they had seen in the ROV video–the fish rotated its tubular eyes as it turned its body from a horizontal to a vertical position.

In addition to their amazing "headgear," barreleyes have a variety of other interesting adaptations to deep-sea life. Their large, flat fins allow them to remain nearly motionless in the water, and to maneuver very precisely. Their small mouths suggest that they can be very precise and selective in capturing small prey.

The scientists have now developed a working hypothesis about how this animal makes a living. Most of the time, the fish hangs motionless in the water, with its body in a horizontal position and its eyes looking upward. The green pigments in its eyes may filter out sunlight coming directly from the sea surface, helping the barreleye spot the bioluminescent glow of jellies or other animals directly overhead. When it spots prey (such as a drifting jellyfish), the fish rotates its eyes forward and swims upward, in feeding mode.

The bizarre physiological adaptations of the barreleyes have puzzled oceanographers for generations. The use of modern underwater robots allows scientists to observe such animals in their native environment, and more fully understand how their physical adaptations help them survive.

A fish with tubular eyes certainly looks and sounds a bit alien, but now we’ll move on to two stories about possible real aliens!

FLOATING IN THE AIR

Indian scientists have discovered three new species of ultra-violet resistant bacteria in the upper stratosphere. These bacteria species are not found on Earth and have no known close Earth relatives.

The experiment was conducted using a very large balloon carrying a 1,000 pound scientific payload soaked in 100 pounds of liquid neon, flown from the National Balloon Facility in Hyderabad, India. The payload consisted of a cryosampler containing sixteen evacuated and sterilized stainless steel probes. Throughout the flight, the probes remained immersed in liquid neon to create a cryopump effect. These cylinders, after collecting air samples from different heights ranging from 12 to 24 miles were parachuted down and safely retrieved.

In all, 12 bacterial and six fungal colonies were found. The fungi and six of the bacteria specimens were known Earth species, but the other three bacteria samples were totally new species. All three newly identified species had significantly higher UV resistance compared to their nearest Earth relatives.

One of the new species has been named as Janibacter hoylei, after the distinguished astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, the second as Bacillus isronensis recognising the contribution of ISRO in the balloon experiments which led to its discovery and the third as Bacillus aryabhata after India’s celebrated ancient astronomer Aryabhata and also the first satellite of ISRO.

This was the second such experiment conducted by ISRO, the first one being in 2001. Even though the first experiment also yielded positive results, it was decided to repeat the experiment by exercising extra care to ensure that it was totally free from any terrestrial contamination.

Because of the precautions taken in the most recent experiment to prevent contamination, the researchers are confident that these new species came from the stratosphere. While the present study does not conclusively establish the extra-terrestrial origin of microorganisms, it does provide positive encouragement to continue the work in our quest to explore the origin of life.

The balloon carrying the scientific instrumentation that India launched into the stratosphere, where new UV-resistant bacteria were discovered. (Credit: Image courtesy of Indian Space Research Organization)

Hold on there Beany-Boy!! Are these people actually implying that these three new bacteria species came from outer space? That they are ALIEN in nature? Read on!

FROZEN IN THE ICE

So the alien crashed in his spaceship 120,000 years ago and was trapped beneath the ice. Sounds like a science-fiction story I should write, but although there’s no spaceship, the story just may be true.

A novel bacterium — trapped more than a mile under glacial ice in Greenland for over 120,000 years — may hold clues as to what life forms might exist on other planets. A team of scientists from Pennsylvania State University report finding the novel microbe, which they have called Herminiimonas glaciei. The team showed great patience in coaxing the dormant microbe back
to life; first incubating their samples at 2˚C for seven months and then at 5˚C for a further four and a half months, after which colonies of very small purple-brown bacteria were seen.

H. glaciei is small even by bacterial standards – it is 10 to 50 times smaller than E. coli. Its small size probably helped it to survive in the liquid veins among ice crystals and the thin liquid film on their surfaces. Small cell size is considered to be advantageous for more efficient nutrient uptake, protection against predators and occupation of micro-niches and it has been shown that very small bacteria dominate many soil and marine environments.

Most life on our planet has always consisted of microorganisms, so it is reasonable to consider that this might be true on other planets as well. Studying microorganisms living under extreme conditions on Earth may provide insight into what sorts of life forms could survive elsewhere in the solar system.

The extremely cold environments are the best analogues of possible extraterrestrial habitats such as those that exist on Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The exceptionally low temperatures can preserve cells and nucleic acids for millions of years. H. glaciei is one of just a handful of officially described ultra-small species and the only one so far from the Greenland ice sheet. Studying these bacteria can provide insights into how cells can survive and even grow under extremely harsh conditions, like temperatures down to -30˚F, little oxygen, low nutrients, high pressure and limited space.

H. glaciei isn’t a pathogen and isn’t harmful to humans, but it’s so small it can pass through a 0.2 micron filter, which is the filter pore size commonly used in sterilization of fluids in laboratories and hospitals. If there are other ultra-small bacteria that are pathogens, then they could be present in solutions presumed to be sterile. In a clear solution very tiny cells might grow but not create the density sufficient to make the solution cloudy.

Several years ago, a bacterial-like fossil was found in a meteorite from Mars that landed in Antarctica. The major objection to saying that it was, in fact a fossil bacterium, was that it was very small; much smaller than ‘standard’ bacteria. H. glaciei may tell us that there are indeed, aliens among us!

Trapped more than three kilometers under glacial ice in Greenland for over 120,000 years, a dormant bacterium — Herminiimonas glaciei — has been coaxed back to life by researchers. (Credit: Image courtesy of Society for General Microbiology)

Alien-looking fish and possible REAL aliens (although not the sort the conspiracy theorists dream of!).