OFFICER CHIMP AND DOCTOR FROG

By Pam Eastlick

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

I was flipping through all the files this morning and came upon two stories in two separate files that had a marvelous symmetry. They concern animals in more than slightly strange situations.

Our first story has to do with our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. We know that chimps tend to live in social groups and that they have various strategies to guarantee the stability of their groups. But primatologists from the University of Zurich have discovered that chimps mediate conflicts between other group members, not for their own direct benefit, but rather to preserve the peace within the group. This impartial intervention in a conflict that doesn’t directly concern them can be regarded as an early evolutionary form of moral behavior and it can also be regarded as ‘policing’.

Close contact inevitably leads to conflict and this is true whether you’re talking about chimps or your own family. But the impartial intervention of a third party in a conflict had only been documented anecdotally in chimpanzees. The Zurich researchers observed and compared the behavior of four different captive chimpanzee groups. At Walter Zoo in Gossau, they encountered special circumstances. New females had recently been introduced to the group and the ranking of the males was also being redefined. This led to instability in the group. New members joining a group also happens in wild populations.

Not every chimp makes a suitable policeman. It’s usually high-ranking males or females or highly respected chimps that intervene in a conflict. Lower ranking chimps were less likely to stop an argument. Chimps, it seems have their own policemen!

Mostly high-ranking males or females intervene in a conflict. (Credit: Claudia Rudolf von Rohr)

Now we’ll turn to another animal that plays an unlikely role. This one is a bit-stomach churning so be warned!

It seems that according to ancient Russian folklore, there’s a sure-fire way of keeping milk from going sour. You put a frog in the bucket with the milk. Now, this is definitely one tale that makes you wonder “How did they come up with THAT one?”

But you know scientists. Instead of simply laughing at such a bizarre notion, A. T. Lebedev and his colleagues have identified a wealth of new antibiotic substances in the skin of the Russian Brown frog.

The scientists discovered that the Russian Brown frog secretes antimicrobial substances called peptides through its skin. These compounds make up the majority of their skin secretions and act as a first line of defense against bacteria and other microorganisms that thrive in the wet places frogs, toads, salamanders and other amphibians live. A previous study identified 21 substances with antibiotic and other potential medical activity on the skin of the Brown frog.

Lebedev’s team used a sensitive laboratory technique to identify 76 additional antibiotics on the frog’s skin. They describe lab tests in which some of the substances performed as well against Salmonella and Staphylococcus bacteria as some prescription antibiotic medicines.

Putting a frog in a bucket of milk may be comical, but as more and more bacteria become drug-resistant, new antibiotics are no laughing matter.

Although Officer Chimp won’t be writing any tickets any time soon and Doctor Frog won’t be writing any prescriptions, their contributions are most welcome!

SEEING ATOMS

By Pam Eastlick

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

Greetings everyone! Welcome to the future! Did you imagine it would be like this when you were a kid? While I was surfing the Internet the other day, I saw that Arthur C. Clarke had predicted the Internet thirty years ago.

Predicting the future is full of pitfalls however. When I was young, one of the absolute givens was that humans would never be able to actually see an atom or for that matter, even be able to observe chemical interactions at the molecular level. Guess what?

Scientists at the Max Born Institute in Germany have directly measured the spatial positions of electrons and protons during a chemical reaction using ultrashort X-ray flashes.

The ultimate dream has always been a “reaction microscope” that can actually follow the course of molecules during a reaction but the technological challenges of such an ultrafast “molecular movie” have only recently been overcome.

The researchers used an advanced femtosecond laser system to take X-ray snapshots of the phase transitions of ammonium sulfate at various times during the reaction to create a molecular movie using the stroboscope effect.

Surprisingly, they observed a reversible chemical reaction that’s fundamentally different from the more widely known thermal phasing. First, the reaction caused a release of both a proton (positive charge) from the ammonium ion (NH₄)⁺ and an electron (negative charge) from the sulfate ion (SO₄)^-. The two elementary particles merged to a hydrogen atom which jumped back and forth between two distant spatial positions.

So now we can see chemical reactions at the molecular level, but how about those atoms? In an international scientific breakthrough, a Griffith University research team has been able to photograph the shadow of a single atom for the first time.

Professor Dave Kielpinski of Griffith University’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics in Brisbane, Australia says “We’ve reached the extreme limit of microscopy; you can’t see anything smaller than an atom using visible light. We wanted to investigate how few atoms are required to cast a shadow and we proved it takes just one.”

Professor Kielpinski and his colleagues trapped single atoms of the element ytterbium and exposed them to a specific frequency of light that cast the atom’s shadow onto a detector and then used a digital camera to capture the image.

The ultra hi-res microscope concentrated the atom’s image to a smaller area that created a darker image that was easier to see, but getting that image wasn’t easy. If the light frequency was changed by just one part in a billion, the image vanished.

Since the researchers can now predict how dark the shadow of a single atom should be, they can determine if the microscope is achieving the maximum contrast allowed by physics. This allows scientists to predict how much light is needed to observe processes within cells, under optimum microscopy conditions, without crossing the threshold and destroying the samples. They think that only a small amount of light could light up an atom!

When I was a child, we could not conceive of seeing atoms. Now, the smallest things that can be seen with visible light are coming into view!

News from your Planetarium

By Pam Eastlick

Greetings Everyone!

Today (20 March) is the vernal equinox or the first day of spring for the northern hemisphere. Equinox means ‘equal night’ and traditionally the days and nights are both 12 hours long on this day. Here on Guam, the ‘square days’ were actually last Monday and Tuesday when the Sun rose and set at 6:31.

Although the day and night length won’t be equal today, you can do something useful. You can find out where due west is from your favorite sky viewing location. Just watch the Sun set tonight and you’ll know where due west is because the Sun rises due east and sets due west on the equinoxes.

Line up a palm tree or a building with the exact spot and note where you’re sitting or standing. If you return to that spot and look at the palm tree or the building, you’ll be looking due west, no matter where the Sun is.

So find due west in your personal sky tonight (assuming the clouds don’t completely hide the Sun) and then do a little star-gazing if it’s clear.

We’re coming up on the best star gazing season on Earth and I’ll tell you all about it in next month’s Planetarium show. Don’t miss it! (11, 12 and 13 April. Mark your calendars now!)

Pam

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WARM AND WET

By Pam Eastlick

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

Greetings all! Well, in light of the recent announcement that 2012 was the warmest year on record by a full degree, I thought it might be time to have a look at some of the research into global warming and what I found isn’t pretty.

The first story concerns Greenland. According to researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder, the Greenland Ice Sheet may be sliding into the ocean faster than anticipated because of massive releases of meltwater from surface lakes. These lake drainages may affect sea-level rise.

During summer, meltwater pools into lakes on the ice sheet’s surface. When the water pressure gets high enough, the ice fractures beneath the lake, forming a vertical drainpipe and a huge burst of water quickly pulses through to the bed of the ice sheet.

The researchers used satellite images along with innovative feature-recognition software to monitor nearly 1,000 lakes on a Connecticut-sized portion of the Greenland ice sheet over a 10-year period. They discovered that as the climate warms, such catastrophic lake drainages are increasing in frequency and are 3.5 times more likely to occur during the warmest years than the coldest years.

During a typical catastrophic lake drainage, the equivalent of volume of about 4,000 Olympic swimming pools funnels to the ice sheet’s underside within a day or two. Once the water reaches the underlying rock it apparently lubricates the ice sheet’s glide into the ocean thus accelerating sea-level rise.

Of course, the really frightening part of this scenario isn’t Greenland but Antarctica. There, the gigantic Ross Ice Shelf is perched on the side of a mountain range and if it slips into the sea, it would have immediate and dramatic consequences. And apparently similar scenarios have happened in the past.

This is a surface or "supraglacial" lake on the Greenland Ice Sheet. (Credit: Konrad Steffen, University of Colorado)

Sea levels have risen over 400 feet since the end of the last ice age 21,000 years ago. That increase wasn’t constant, however but was punctuated by rapid accelerations that have been linked to massive outburst floods from the ice caps. A study recently published in Nature by a team from the CEREGE laboratory in collaboration with the universities of Tokyo and Oxford has now revealed just what happened to cause this massive rise.

According to the researchers, it began 14,650 years ago and coincides with the start of the warm period known as the ‘Bolling oscillation’, which marked the end of the last ice age. The sea level rose almost 50 feet in less than 350 years. This corresponds to an annual rate of over a foot a year as compared to the quarter inch per year we’re currently experiencing.

The scientists analyzed cores taken from the coral reef surrounding Tahiti to quantify the rapid rise. The corals that built the reefs and atolls are excellent indicators of sea level variation and also provide a virtual archive of previous climates. The researchers say that the Antarctic ice cap was responsible for up to 50% of these increases.

These results are very important with regard to the current rise in sea levels, which is one of the most worrying effects of global warming. Current studies have estimated that the sea will rise between 9 inches and 2 feet by the year 2100. But these models didn’t include the dynamic response of the polar ice caps to global warming. If you add in that little scenario, scientists estimate that sea levels will rise between 2 and 6 feet by 2100.

Goodbye Agana. Goodbye Port Authority. Goodbye every atoll in the Pacific. Goodbye Bangladesh. Goodbye virtually every port city on the planet. It’s certainly going to be a wetter world.

SIX-LEGGED KILLER

By Pam Eastlick

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

Since the end of the world is tomorrow (and if you actually believe that, I have this bridge I would LOVE to sell you!) my thoughts have turned to demise and how it happens. And since the animal file is bulging I thought I’d talk about the deadliest creature on the planet.

So, which one is it? You can certainly make a case for “other humans”, but if you’re talking about other beasts, what animal kills the most humans on an annual basis? Sharks? Hippos? Poisonous snakes? And of course, the answer is an animal you are very familiar with. The mosquito. Mosquito-borne diseases kill over TWO MILLION PEOPLE A YEAR! And there’s research news on that front. Some good, some very bad.

There is now evidence that the most deadly species of malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, is becoming resistant to the front line treatment for malaria on the border of Thailand and Myanmar. Health officials are concerned that the resistance may spread to India and then Africa as resistance to other antimalarial drugs has done before. Eliminating malaria might then prove impossible because Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for nine out of ten malaria deaths.

The disease is becoming resistant to artemisinin, the drug of choice for treating malaria. According to the World Malaria Report 2011, malaria killed an estimated 655,000 people in 2010, mainly young children and pregnant women (Other mosquito-borne diseases contribute to the 2 million figure quoted earlier.)

The researchers examined the genetic make-up of the parasites and provided compelling evidence that the increase in drug resistance is due to genetic changes in the parasites. This is bad news indeed, when you live in the tropics and the major mosquito species that carries malaria lives in your own front yard.

There’s some good news however about another nasty mosquito-borne disease: dengue fever. A team of scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt University have pinpointed the region on the dengue virus that’s neutralized in people who survive dengue infections.

The global incidence of dengue has grown dramatically in recent decades, putting about half of the world’s population at risk. Creation of a vaccine is complicated by the fact that there are four distinct, but closely related forms of the dengue virus. Once people have recovered from infection with one form of the virus, they have lifelong immunity against that form.

But if they become infected with one of the other three forms of the virus, they increase their chances of developing the severe bleeding and sometimes fatal form of dengue called hemorrhagic fever. The leading theory to explain why some people develop hemorrhagic fever is that under some conditions the human immune response can actually enhance the virus and disease during a second infection.

The UNC investigators identified 7 local individuals who had contracted dengue during travel to a region where it’s endemic. They were able to isolate dengue antibodies from their blood and discovered that human antibodies neutralize the virus by binding to a complex structure that’s only present on a completely assembled dengue virus.

This discovery will help researchers develop new vaccines to combat this deadly disease. And yes, in case you’re wondering, there have been fatal outbreaks of dengue fever on Guam in the living memory of many of the people who live here. A vaccine is a really good idea.

I have a suggestion for you. For a Christmas present for your family (and the entire island), go around your property and empty EVERY container that’s holding water and turn it upside down. Convince your neighbors to do the same thing. You may notice that very soon there aren’t as many mosquitoes buzzing around your head as there used to be. And that’s a very good thing, indeed!

The most deadly killer on the face of the planet! (Credit: © yxowert / Fotolia)